for all we know Chapter 1: one, a walking dead fanfic

Note: hello guys! i received a pm recently from wintereveorchid (thank you again) who asked about a story i had very nearly forgotten about and which had six chapters by the time i took it down. i have those chapters but wanted to edit, add some stuff, generally just make it a little different. i would like to continue it and will add chapters whenever i can with no strict schedule but with the fun of just throwing out stuff when i can .i really liked season 10 and i especially love negan (duh) i will spoil nothing other than i wanted to make a character who knew him before he became THE negan we all know but who may witness that change up until a certain point...who might even...assist in that change... hehe...

anyway, i'm gonna post what i have up to chapter three and ill be editing the other chapters before posting, i think i can make a good storyline if i put my mind to it ;) all the best guys and please do stay safe.x

additional warning: i can't add tags like ao3 however this is rated mature, it will have all the warnings you would associate with the actual show - death (all ages), gore, violence (all kinds), cursing (because negan is here), generally just very difficult and sometimes upsetting themes so please consider this before reading. naturally if you're a fan of twd, i know my warning seems redundant, but i would rather put it out there!

one: the beginning

Between the shivering branches overhead, sunlight strained through in sparkling flashes of gold. I had never known beauty like those little hidden rivers dotted around Georgia until we pulled into some grassy spot and stepped through bristling meadows. We found a soft knoll and turned flush and red beneath that dense heat there, with flies pricking our legs and freckles blossoming across our cheeks. Dima often stripped off and leapt into the water, tucked into a ball. Vasya always followed him, but Alyosha liked to sit alongside me and leaf through his books before his stomach rumbled and we ate mushy sandwiches plucked from my bag.

Somewhere, someplace, I took a Polaroid of them alongside another river. Alyosha had brought the camera but never bothered with it. It had been bought impulsively in the airport and had sat unused in his bag until I came across it. Alyosha stood between the others, being the smallest and thinnest of the three, held between Dima and Vasya who had their arms slung around his sunburnt shoulders. Their noses were lathered in sunscreen.

Dima held a cloth against his left cheek and Vasya looked beyond the camera in my hands, his stare drawn toward something behind me, though his grin was still wide and pearly-white. The photograph had been taken on some Sunday afternoon, its date lost on the calendar, blurred into all the other days spent lounging on quiet fields.

In a gas station, Alyosha had finally found a signal. He flicked through articles on his phone, slurping at his soft drink while Vasya filled the tank. His eyebrows furrowed. He swiped away an article, and then another. He stuffed the phone into his pocket and bumped his shoulder against mine before he clambered into the backseat of our car, pushing aside suitcases just to fit. He had the best English of us all and liked to teach me little phrases and vocabulary between the signs and maps and stores. I learned quickly. I had always learned quickly.

There was a windchime on the cabin that Dima had rented and it sang in tinkling ripples, bumping lightly against the wooden doorframe. There was a wooden bench on chains outside that swung back and forth. I spent long nights out there with my legs stretched out, feet resting on the wooden railings of the porch, staring into the inky blackness of the woods around us. Moths fluttered toward the harsh, buzzing bluish lights dotted outside the cabin and sizzled into gnarled corpses, dropping onto the ground. I watched their wings twitch. I watched them curl up and twitch no more.

Tucked in the corner of the porch, there was a wicker-chair with some of its woven twigs snapped, so that holes poked through. Vasya had taken it for himself and smoked his cigarettes before bed, looking at the distant mountains behind the cabin. He tried to call our grandmother sometimes, but the signal cut off in a fiery spurt of static. But it was like that, in these rural places, Alyosha said.

He had bought chunky books full of facts about Georgia and its wildlife. He taught me the names for each bird, too, even the ones so high up in the trees that we never saw them. Alyosha always wore his socks pulled up around his calves and told us all about ticks, clucking the word out in his thick accent. He wanted us to practice our English even if ours was fine – not fluent but fine enough to handle trips to the store.

"Ticks," Vasya mused. "Well, the American dream had to come with some kind of catch."

In the morning, we watched the birds dance against the clouds, swirling in thick black lines until they separated and spun outward in twirls, grouping together, blooming outward. Vasya left for the gas station again, taking Alyosha with him. Dima found a board-game from a cupboard, his palm smoothing away a heavy sheet of dust from its front. I won a couple of rounds of checkers against him, turning dark wine in colour when he smiled at me; just for me, that smile, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look boyish beneath a fresh coat of dirt from hikes in the woods.

"I missed you while I studied here, Sasha," he said. "Did you miss me?"

He had always been handsome. His cheekbones were high and drawn down toward his mouth, and he had this warmth in him, so intense that it spread into me and made me feel it right in the gaps around my organs, like it cushioned there and softened me. I liked his hands, too, because of their paleness with the faintest threads of bluish veins beneath, and how they wrapped around mine and made them warm, too. I had such cold hands until he held them.

"Only sometimes," I told him.

I liked to tease him and catch that sly pull on lips like I held the strings and curled them tighter between my fingers and made him smirk like that. I tugged on those imagined strings a little harder and his mouth quirked even more, but maybe it was because I had moved a little closer to him on the bench and bumped my shoulder against his own. I never liked touch, before. I figured I still did not like it then, either. But it was all right with him. It was not the same as all those other touches that made me tense and turn away. It was something different. It had always been different, with him.

"Only sometimes," he repeated, smiling. "And yet more than a man like me could ever ask for."

There was a creek behind the cabin that had a delicate stream gushing over its beige rocks. I stalked ahead and told Dima to push his boots into the prints that I had left behind, because he had never hiked very much, never challenged himself to climb trees or swim through rivers in his childhood like Vasya and I had done. Sometimes, I would turn around and hold out my hand for him on a slope, haul him up and brush off clumps of dirt that scuffed his pants. I would wait for him atop little ridges in our journey and push a water-bottle into his hands once he made it.

Eventually, we would find a little crook along the creek that was dry. Often, we sat and watched small pebbles dislodge themselves from between the rocks underneath that trickling stream, swirled away in a riptide that turned them this way and that, until they settled on some faraway plot of mud. The rippling blanket of trees pulled over the creek like the rungs of a ribcage and the mossy roots stuck out from the wet brown soil like knotted ropes.

"I used to wonder why you liked to bring your rifle out to the meadows," Dima said. "How you could spend so much time out there, alone, until somebody came to find you. Vasya told me that he wanted to teach you to shoot rabbits, but you could never do it."

Another pebble was spat out from all the others. It bumped against the ridges of its old friends, shifting and turning and always moving until its jagged sides caught on the edges of another rock and it fell into its depths.

"I could do it," I told him quietly. "I hid in a tree all morning until I spotted little ears in the field. And I shot it."

Dima touched my cold hands and never flinched. "Why not tell your brother?"

"Because it was the first time that I had ever missed a shot with my sniper-rifle," I said. "After all our Grandmother had taught us, I missed. I watched this little rabbit bleed out in that field that I had always thought was mine, until I saw how its chest went down but never could quite fill up again, and how it looked at me – how it tried to look at me, because its eyes went 'round and 'round in fright. Even in its last moments – 'round and 'round. You know, I had wanted a rabbit, when I was a girl."

The green around his pupils resembled the moss that clung onto the rocks and broke away in petering tufts along the stream. I felt my hands thaw. I imagined myself as one of those pebbles, snapped from a peaceful existence cottoned between all the other pebbles, swallowed and spun into maddened currents, until some merciful clump of dirt caught me and held me close and then consumed me into its brownish sludge.

"I wanted to shoot old coins and tin-cans like we had done when we were kids," I told him. "But Vasya said it wasted a rifle if the shot did not end what stood on the other side of the scope. Well, the rabbit ended, and I thought it was the only waste that had come out of it all. It was never the point of the rifle, for me."

"What was the point, then?"

"The fun of shooting old coins and tin-cans with my brother and beating his score a thousand times over." I smiled at him and found myself struck by how much better I had felt just for telling him what I had never told another soul on this earth.

While we walked back toward the cabin, I caught sight of something pale between the trees; a powder-blue shirt and jeans, no heavy jacket for the cold that came with nightfall nor proper boots. I watched the stranger turn off into another trail far from ours and wondered if he was a hunter like Alyosha had learned about in his books on nature in Georgia.

He had described the deer around these parts as if he was native, though he never understood much about killing and skinning. It made his own skin bleach sour white to even imagine killing, like all the blood he imagined drained from an animal drained it from him, too.

"Sasha?" Dima called back. "Are you all right?"

"Fine."

I looked down at our footprints left behind in the mud and kicked some dirt across the last few prints closest to me. I felt a nipping chill lick at my throat and pulled my collar closer around me. Alyosha had told us it was usually quite cool in the late part of summertime around these woods, but it had become a little colder than expected. Vasya had chopped wood for the fireplace, scraping out its soot only the night beforehand.

I glanced once more at those shifting in the trees like tides in an ocean, its green waves overlapping so that only small holes appeared between the shrubs that showed us the pits of coal-black colour which awaited us beyond. The man had disappeared into that greenery. He had gone someplace where we could not yet find him.

Dima brought me a clump of wildflowers that poked from his clenched fist as if they had grown there. I took a Polaroid of him and slipped it into my pocket. I took the flowers and placed them in a transparent bag that was tucked into my pocket. I kept them there even though he thought that would make them wither sooner.

"Better off," I said. "Or it would be too slow, too drawn out for them, without sunlight, without air."

Stood in the clearing in front of the cabin, we heard a low, droning hum that stirred the dust and drew our eyes toward the clouds. There were small dots out there, like insects on a windscreen, their fat bodies scuttling forward in darting crawls. Dusk shrouded them well, but we soon glimpsed the beady, red lights that flashed from either side. The helicopters dipped low and skimmed the trees. I craned my neck to see their green underbellies.

Dima said, "We must look like little ants to them. Little specks of dirt atop more dirt."

That same night, we saw an orange glow beyond the treetops.

Around dawn, the earth rumbled like a sluggish creature stirred from sleep. The clouds had shifted into a rich blend of purple stirred into strokes of light blue. I stood on the porch and watched that strange orange light simmer over the trees until sunlight bled through and quietened its fury. But plumes of black rose in thick balls of smoke, bursting in the light and scattering outward into the wind. I tried to remember the map that Alyosha had, because I was not sure if that was Atlanta so many miles away.

I hiked with Vasya into the woods again. We were faster on our own, without the other two. I asked him, "What could burn so brightly that we would see it out here?"

He peeled a tangle of moss from a tree and tossed it onto the ground. "Probably some kind of parade that used fireworks. Watch for stray rocks, Sasha. You don't want to fall here."

We saw that smoke less and less the further that we walked. I fell into his footprints like Dima had stepped into mine and watched his shoulders as he walked.

Down the rolling slope ahead of us, there was another cabin that was a little more rickety than ours, with sheets of metal stapled to its slanted roof. Though no smoke billowed from its chimney, the sight of it reassured me too, like it meant that all that smoke from the other side of the woods came from distant cabins just like ours – from some parade, from something mundane and simple.

There were shreds of newspaper pasted to its windowpanes, I noticed, along with an old truck sheltered by a drooping canopy beside it. Grime had grown around the edges of its windscreen and blossomed into its rust until the whole truck seemed like it had been birthed by nature and had always been a part of the woodlands; like the flowers, like the leaves.

"I think I saw whoever lives there," I said. "Yesterday, I saw him. But he wasn't wearing the right gear. It was strange. I'm not sure why, but it felt strange."

Vasya was quiet. Then, he said, "I think we should try and visit that petrol station tomorrow. Get some signal and call back home."

There was a problem with the lights in the cabin, which flickered and buzzed in harsh pitches. Vasya fiddled with the small electrical box and pulled at wires while Dima held a torch for him. I lit candles, though Alyosha thought it was dangerous in a cabin as small as ours. He had taken to checking our visas and passports in his rucksack with great care. He kept the rucksack beneath his cot, and while the others worked on the lights, he asked me for a candle and looked around his things, as if he thought some thief might have stolen them while we slept.

"The wires are fine," Vasya said. He rocked back onto his heels and pursed his lips.

"Then why are the lights off?" Alyosha asked.

Vasya was quiet, though his eyes moved to the window closest to him, its curtains not fully closed. "I don't know." He sighed and scrubbed his hand over his face. "I don't know."

In the photograph that I had taken of him alongside the fireplace, Vasya looked older than he ever had before. Half of his features were cast in orange from the logs stoked in the fire beside him, the other shrouded in a cast of greyish shadows that made his features seem sharper, rougher. I shook the Polaroid and placed it in my diary with all the others that almost spilled out onto my lap.

Sunday afternoon rolled around. I wandered alongside Dima while Vasya and Alyosha marched ahead, their rucksacks slipping from their shoulders. Sometimes, Dima and I paused to gently pluck small bugs from fallen logs, then plopping them back into the lush, damp foliage, peering at their black shells before they disappeared into the dark spots where our eyes could not see them.

Dima carried around that nature book Alyosha had brought and tried to tell apart the bugs using the pictures inside. He turned their greenish bodies toward bright sunlight and then leafed through the book to find them while the little insect ran around his wrists or flew off.

I held what looked like a beetle in the palm of my hand and its spindly limbs tracked the lines of my skin like a map, its antennae made of what looked like tiny black beads strung together. I had crouched to pull him from between the narrow scratches in the bark of his tree and looked for someplace to place him that would be safe for him. I had slick strands of grass plastered around my boots.

While I peeled them off, I heard Dima speak through his heavy accent. He called out, "Hello? All you all right?"

And there was no answer from the other side. Only birdsong and the trembling branches trying to hide behind each other.

Dima had turned to look through the trees on our left and I followed his stare but saw nothing. Dima stepped forward. Though I had not realised it in that tiny and fleeting moment, a root had tangled around his ankle, like a bony hand had formed from the earth and caught him, hauled him down hard against its body and held him there. I never heard a snap or crunch like I had imagined a broken bone to sound. It had been silent, softened by the soil. There had been so scream, no sharp and racking signal that the world had changed. It had been quiet, muted. It had been gentle.

I rushed toward him and knelt beside him, placing his head against my lap for comfort. He had groaned in pain, but somewhere in that blend of worry for him, it dawned on me that those odd, grumbled moans had stopped and came from behind me instead.

Caught in the knotted string of branches, there was a man whose hands stupidly swung at those leaves around him. He had stepped into a shrub of thorns and nettles and I glanced down at his leg and blanched, because his foot was caught in a bear-trap of sorts, but he seemed unaware of it. I wondered if it was just shock that made him choke like he did, with a rasping wetness at the back of his throat.

He dressed like a hunter. If it had not been his boots and camouflaged clothing that told me, it was the rifle dropped onto the ground by his boots and the binoculars which bounced against his chest. There was a worn bag tossed just in front of him.

Alyosha stepped around us, stood closer to us. Shakily, he said, "Sir? We would like to help you – your leg – you must have lost a lot of blood already –…"

Vasya flicked on the flashlight that he had pulled from his rucksack and flicked it toward the stranger, because daylight had dimmed, and it was even harder now to make out the shape behind all those branches. I saw that beady light catch on the bark, then finally latch onto the stranger, whose pearl eyeballs reflected the yellowish hue of the flashlight, and then he smiled in some bizarre blend of black liquid spilling from his mouth, his jaw slanted as if it might slop from his face and splash into the soil beneath him, dripping into it. Blood wept from a blackened dot on his chest, too, and some dim part of me understood that it was a bullet wound.

"Oh, God," Alyosha whispered, reverting to Russian. He pushed back, gripping the tree beside him. It wobbled and sang, its leaves rustling.

Startled birds fled into the purplish sky overhead. I wished we could have done the same, but Dima was floppy and weak, his head rolled limply against my chest from the pain in his calf. I held him tighter. The stranger's mouth oozed and bled with that awful sound caught between a moan and a hoarse gargle. I had never heard a sound like it.

"Call somebody, Alyosha. Find a signal and call somebody."

I had never thought much about my own voice, but those words came out and I marvelled at the oddly calm tone that encased them. I had shaky hands and a dead heaviness on my neck like a weight had been placed there, but I spoke as if I was sat on the porch with a cool glass of lemonade in front of me. It disturbed me, that calmness.

"Vasya, do you think – do you think they were right about –…" Alyosha started faintly.

"Do what Sasha said. Call somebody," Vasya said.

Alyosha nodded and patted around his pockets. I realised that he struggled so much because his hands suffered the same spasms that ran through mine. He clutched his phone, typed and then held it against his ear, but his face scrunched in frustration and I felt my stomach hollow out even more. He tried again.

"Well?"

Alyosha looked at my brother. "I can't get anything out here."

"He must be sick," I mumbled, tilting my head at the stranger. "He has to be sick, right?"

Alyosha was quiet. His skin had flushed milky white. He was sweating like Dima, even though it had grown cool around us. Frogs croaked someplace nearby, and the crickets struck up their tune right along with them. Dima ignored what Alyosha said and tried to latch onto a root, but it broke off from the soil and drifted down the river.

I felt a throbbing pain in my skull, pointed right behind my forehead. It seemed that a crust had formed behind my eyes and made them crack around my sockets in an effort to think ahead – Dima was hurt and his bone protruded from his calf and, though he moved his leg, the bone stayed as it was, a white shard set in contrast against the dirt that streaked his skin.

I heard birdsong bleed over the groans of that stranger. I yanked my crusted eyes down to look at Dima and then pushed my palm flat against my forehead, kneading out that agony. I knew that our sunlight was quickly fading, and we had to decide fast on what we were supposed to do: help Dima or sit around with this stranger, unable to call anybody, unable to carry them both.

I also knew that that Alyosha would only dither around and Vasya would not be much better, not if the group was split on a decision. I dragged in a deep, shuddered breath and blew it out again and looked at the hunter scraping the chain of his trap against the tree behind him, arms reached out for us. My eyes fell on his rifle and bag.

"All right. Okay," I said. "Vasya, Alyosha, you carry Dima back to the cabin."

"What? But what are you going to do?" Alyosha asked.

"I'll be right behind you."

Vasya had already stepped forward and bent to catch Dima around the chest. Vasya was better if he was told what to do, he acted faster. Dima's head lolled back, and his mouth moved uselessly. I nodded at Vasya and dropped my rucksack from my back. I patted around, my hand brushing against a water-bottle and hair-ties before I touched crinkled paper and pulled it out. I had a pencil attached to my old diary and took that too, unfolding the map and smoothing it over my lap.

"W-What are you doing?"

"I'm going to mark off where we are right now," I told Alyosha. "That way, once we make it back to the cabin, we can contact the authorities and tell them exactly where this man is. They'd find him faster like that."

"There isn't any signal down there either." There was a frantic air about him. His tongue darted out to dampen his lower lip. "There isn't a signal –…"

I kept my tone light and direct. "But there are pills and more water and a cot for Dima to lay on. I can head for that gas station and ask for assistance. Look, Alyosha, we're going to go back to the cabin and figure this out, okay? We'd be a lot safer there than out in the woods in the dark, right?"

"But what about him?"

I looked at Alyosha, trailing along his arm until we saw that he pointed at that man. He was still held in the gnarled fingers of the tree with his leg caught in a trap, and the teeth of it sawed at the flesh of his ankle. Splinters of bone creaked and waned through the shifting flaps of skin that moved as he did.

I swallowed. "I told you, we'll contact somebody. We can't carry them both, you know that. I wouldn't be able to hold that man's weight by myself, and you wouldn't be able to hold Dima without Vasya. So, we're going to help Dima. And we'll contact somebody – like I said."

"Somebody?" Alyosha repeated.

"The police – an ambulance – the authorities –…"

"Shouldn't we leave the rifle and the bag? I mean, they belong to him."

"And we'll hand them right back. He's not in any state to use them. But Dima needs you. We need you, Alyosha. So, focus. Because we can't get both of them back to the cabin, not like this. We need to think about what we can do. Just – just please help Dima."

Disoriented, Alyosha looked at Dima as if he had forgotten he was even there. He reached to loop his arms around Dima's legs in an attempt to hold them straight, but Dima moaned in pain and twisted away from him. I helped Alyosha grip him a little lower, nearer to his ankles. I warned him to watch for stray roots and logs. I told Vasya to warm the cabin and bring Dima some of the painkillers we had bought.

"I'll be right behind you," I repeated.

Moving into the blackcurrant pool of woodlands around us, they never looked behind, but those groans echoed between every squish of mud beneath their boots and bled through the swaying branches. I stood with my boots sunken into the mud and felt that I had become another shred of trembling leaf or speckled insect crawling along bark. The trees seemed to ripple shut behind their retreating forms, Dima limp and swaying between them.

Only the stranger waited with me.

The bag had dipped into the shifting mud, pushed further down into its depths from the back-and-forth of the bear-trap grinding against the mud like a tide, pushing it and pushing it in waves. I lowered myself onto my haunches and moved forward slowly. There was something rabid about the man that made me wonder if it was shock that had induced some bizarre reaction from him, or trauma to his brain, or sickness.

I recalled a night spent slumped over the couch in the rundown apartment that belonged to my cousin in Moscow, staring blankly at the screen that bled saturated flashes of blue tones across the wallpaper while I watched a documentary about some kind of fungus.

It showed a small ant scuttling around in a forest almost identical to this one, and some fungus would burrow into its flesh and find the brain. Then, it sprouted there and started to control the ant, forced it to walk and climb trees. Eventually, it consumed the ant and burst through its skull like a spore.

It fell onto other ants until it wiped out whole colonies after it had consumed all of them exactly like it had done with the first ant. I had watched it with a muted sense of repulsion, eyes trailing along that fluffed spore that broke out from the ant and the whitish tufts that flowered over its body once it died, balanced on a tree in the middle of the woods, alone.

I imagined a small fungus lodged in the brain of this stranger that caused him to struggle like he did. I imagined his gargles like a muddled attempt to tell me that it was all just a fungus in his brain, making him scratch at me. It was stupid. But I imagined it, anyway, because it was too terrifying to look into his pearl eyeballs and think that there was nothing there behind them that could explain this behaviour any better.

Clearing my throat, I spoke in English. Alyosha liked to think he was the best at it, and while that was partly true, I was not too far behind. "I need your bag," I told him. "Please. Please."

I grasped the strap and had almost torn it back when his skin split away from the bear-trap and he seemed to crack the bone of his ankle in his fall, if it had not been broken already. He thumped against the ground without even trying to catch himself. He threw his head back and yawned with his gaping mouth, his fat tongue flopping out from his lips and sliding over his lips. He hauled himself through the mud toward me and I still could not bring myself to think that he wanted anything more than help.

But his fingers moved upward along the leather of my boots and the hold on my ankles was painful.

He started to haul me down toward him and his yawning mouth went to latch around that small patch of bare skin which poked from between my jeans and socks. I tore my other leg out to kick at him, my hands straining to catch onto anything more than clumps of mud that slipped through my fingers. I saw the rifle poking from beneath him and gripped his shoulders to turn him over, but he was much stronger than I had even realised. His strength seemed inhuman, like he could crush my bones in one clench of his hand.

So, I smashed my boot into his face and awaited some howl of pain, some sign that he had felt it.

"Stop," I said hoarsely. "Why are you doing this? Stop –…"

His nose had caved inward, spurting black trails of blood across his mouth, over his chin. And still his hands clawed at my ankles. His throat rippled like the thrashing body of an eel in the dim light, gasping. I kicked and kicked again, until blood smashed into bone and I heard my own shrieks between each crack of my boot into his skull. His head dropped against the mud. I breathed out in thick, heaving sobs.

He moaned and lifted his head again. His right eyeball bumped against his shattered cheekbone, dangling from a ropey line. It twirled and caught on his collar.

I felt bile fill my mouth, but quickly snatched the bag from him while he strained to find me with the wet roll of the other eyeball still secured in his skull. I took the chance to grip the rifle, though it was much more difficult to yank it out from beneath him. His hands weakly tried to hold it and pull it against him. I almost allowed it, too, thinking that he had come to his senses and realised he was hurt. But my legs had turned to lead, and he tried to grip me again.

"I will come back. I get help," I said. "I'll get help."

Pinkish bumps poked through his fractured skull. He spat out shards of bone, and I thought the roof of his mouth had collapsed, too. When he looked at me, his purple lips widened into that odd imitation of a smile, and his eyeball swayed with every movement.

Stumbling away from him, I tried to clean the rifle with the hem of my shirt rolled tight in my trembling fist. He had toppled onto a Ruger American rifle fitted with a Springfield cartridge, strapped around it with a rubber-band, which seemed odd enough.

I had expected the rifle to be loaded, but it had been completely empty, though its safety was off. I took another look at the hunter, my eyebrows knitted together. It was even more strange, on top of everything else, that he had wandered into the woods with his rifle, wearing the right gear but without his equipment prepared for a hunt and especially without any real supplies.

I assumed he had set the trap, too. But he walked right into it like he had forgotten it. I found the bag and nearly screamed in frustration. He had nothing more than a rolled-up newspaper and some rope. The last thing was a packet of gum zipped into a smaller pocket in its lining.

Yet I felt a bump beneath the gum, like he had stitched an extra pocket, and in there, I found he had a pistol, keys for another cabin, and a map of his own. It was marked, just like I had marked mine – a small, circular dot over a patch of light green.

The teeth of the bear-trap glinted and leered at me, licking at the last droplets of blood.

And though it seemed mad, I was sure that if I had not reacted like I did, that man would have killed me where we lay in the woods.

None of it made much sense, and maybe that was the reason for which I stood and slung the rifle over my shoulder and walked off into the woods like nothing had happened. Because it felt unreal, and I told myself, 'I am not really here. This is a dream, but I am on the cusp of reawakening and when I do, I'll settle into the comfort of that fuzzy forgetting that comes after a bad dream. No. None of it had happened. Because it was a dream, and those bear-trap teeth are clacking to laugh at me for believing it.'

Marching into the stale warmth of the cabin, I looked for Dima. He was stretched out on his cot with a warmer jumper pulled over his dirty shirt. Alyosha checked our suitcases frantically, counting our wads of cash still left in bundles, pulling open the passports and mumbling our names as he checked each one, then collecting our documents and needlessly shuffling them. I threw the rucksack I had taken onto the bed and scrubbed my hands over my face.

I pulled back the curtain to watch my brother in the clearing working on the car, though its engine was grinding and the headlights on the car cast a bluish glow around him. He glanced up as if he sensed me. He looked ghostly out there, like an apparition who floated through the dark toward our cabin, until his boots clapped against the porch as he returned to us and I knew that he was real.

"The car isn't working," Dima said. He settled back against his pillow and held his arm over his face.

"It will. It has to work," I murmured.

Vasya stepped inside and closed the door behind him. I wanted the door bolted. I only felt safe with the door shut and wandered to the window, arms crossed, my nails scratched madly at the tender flesh of my elbow. I wanted to pull out that tangy fear that lurked beneath its surface just to see it pool on the floorboards beneath me, dripping into the thin, scraggly gaps in the planks of wood, down and down until there was nothing more left in me.

"I'll walk," I said. "I'll walk to the gas station. It'll take an hour, maybe two. I'll take the rifle. You keep the pistol, just to be on the safe side."

"No. No, go tomorrow," Dima wheezed. "It's too late. Give me some painkillers and I'll be fine."

Alyosha dropped onto a chair in the corner by the single counter, a battered portable stove with a burnt pan still on top of it. He stared blankly ahead, his spine coiled, his curly hair slicked flat against his scalp from sweat.

"I'll take the rifle," I said again. "And I'll find somebody. I'll call an ambulance, have them take Dima, and from there – from there, we can figure this out."

"I don't think they'll let him into the hospital," Alyosha said suddenly.

"What?"

"Before we came to this cabin, I read some weird articles about a virus," he said. "About how some hospitals were going into quarantine. Nobody in, nobody out. They were burning clothes and trying to – trying to burn the infected, too. But they didn't call it that. They used another word. I don't remember. But I think if we bring him there, they won't take him."

"That's ridiculous. Of course they'll take him. Look at his leg," I scoffed. I scratched harder and harder at my elbow.

"They won't. They'll turn him away. I read about it."

"You read about it." My voice was tight and mean. "You didn't think to tell us?"

"I did," he mumbled. "I told Vasya."

Vasya looked strangely defeated. "Alyosha thought it was exaggerated or maybe even a joke. I mean, we thought it was just a joke, Sasha. Nothing more than a couple of odd cases on the East Coast about a virus that affected some people."

"What kind of people?" Dima asked.

Alyosha wavered. He wobbled on his chair, like a mirage floating from the floorboards, wispy and fading in tendrils.

"Dead people," he answered. "Just – Just people who died in accidents, at first. And then people who had already been placed in morgues. A-And they shut down some hospital – I can't remember the city. It started to – well, it wasn't just happening in one city. But it makes people – it makes them –…"

I swallowed thickly. "Makes them what?"

"Makes them like that man we saw in the woods," Vasya said.

"You think that man we found out there was a corpse? He was moving, Vasya!" I snapped. "Don't be so stupid."

"You saw him," Vasya replied. "You saw how he looked. It wasn't natural."

I gripped my hair in my hands and pulled tight. There was something terribly wrong with both of them. Perhaps if that man in the woods had been afflicted by some kind of illness, it had passed onto them and made them hallucinate about corpses. But I had seen how that man looked.

"Well, we have to try something," I said uselessly. "There'll be medical centres. Doctors."

Dima shuffled against his pillow. "I knew a Russian guy and his sister at my university. Arvo and Natasha, I think. He might still be here in Georgia, probably still in Atlanta. I could try to contact him. He might be able to help us, tell us what the city is like."

"We'll take the phones," Vasya muttered, rubbing at his cheeks tiredly. "We'll walk to that damn gas station and we'll get a signal. We'll call Dima's friends or – or we'll just call somebody."

"Somebody! Somebody!" Alyosha snapped. He laughed and laughed loudly, shaking his head. "Who will answer you? Vasya, I went to you about those articles and I told you it was strange – that I couldn't log into my account to see my flight information because the site kept crashing, that I couldn't log onto any other site after that, either. Don't you think that's a little weird, too?"

My eyes darted to my brother. "You never told us that."

"Because I thought it wasn't important. It was a story about a virus. A virus that was on the East Coast and with only a handful of cases," Vasya replied. "Like the flu. I never thought it could be that serious."

"I told you," Alyosha said bitterly. "I told you, Vasya."

I pulled more and more at my hair, wanting to peel off my scalp and pluck out that fungus which had planted itself into the soft, mushy lines of my brain and made all of this seem too real. But it had already spread into the rest of me, consumed me, and forced my limbs into movement.

While they bickered, I thought, if that man was out in the woods in Georgia, then that virus has already made it out of that hospital even if they tried to contain it.

I brought Dima water and held the glass against his lips. He was hot. His skin was lined in sweat. He rolled from the pain. I pushed my cot against his own and lay as close to him as I could, holding his hand and caressing his hair from his face. He slept fitfully. He mumbled words I could not quite make out, his lips chapped and sore. I had always thought that I had memorised his features, but I traced him there while he wept and choked on his agony. I followed his wrinkled forehead toward the arch of his light brows, his broad nose and his mouth pursed. He had a faint dimple in his chin, like a fingertip had been pressed there, a personal touch from God.

Moonlight poured a glossy silver over the room. I heard Dima mumble and assumed it was another bit of chatter drawn from fever, but he said my name more clearly and I lifted myself from my pillow to see him. My hand touched his arm. It was clammy and flat against his side, like the parts of a robot pulled off and left aside for repairs. His eyes opened and I saw the whites had been painted in a horrid yellowish tone like that man out in the woods.

"Sasha," he whispered again.

"I'm here."

"I don't think there are any hospitals either," he said. His eyes shut. He hid himself from me, from the horror of the cabin. "I think Alyosha was right. There was something really wrong with that man. You saw it. I don't think there are any hospitals, anymore."

"Don't be silly," I said. I had to say it. I was compelled to say it. "And if there aren't any hospitals here, we'll drive to the next state and the next. How many hospitals do you think there are in this country? Alyosha shouldn't upset you like this. I'll talk to him tomorrow, I'll tell him –…"

"Okay," he said. It had tired him out, all this talking. "But Sasha – I really did miss you. Sometimes."

I pulled myself closer to him. "Sometimes."

Early in the morning, Alyosha pointed out a budding line of pus that cushioned the corners of Dima's wound. Dima was still asleep, and none of us wanted him to hear it. But it was there. Once he had made me aware of it, I found it hard to draw my eyes away from it. Alyosha was squeamish, he always turned away anytime that I peeled apart the sticky folds of Dima's bandages. He never touched him, never tried to help me move him more comfortably against his pillow. He hovered behind and made little suggestions about what I should do. But he never touched Dima himself.

Patting a damp cloth at Dima's calf and cleaning out that bloodied gash, I took darting glances at Alyosha, who stood behind me with a rucksack held in his hands for me. He had prepared it, filling it with a bottle of fresh water, some granola bars and sunscreen, along with my passport tied around the map with a band held around it to keep them together. He had awful tremors in his hands and often dropped things without much thought, glancing down at whatever had fallen with a blankness in his stare that worried me.

Dima had worsened. He was hardly ever awake. It was something more than a broken bone, I was sure of it; an infection really had taken hold overnight, and it had made him sluggish and feeble.

"Vasya should walk to the gas station," Alyosha said.

"He's right. I can do it, Sasha," my brother said. "Stay with Dima and Alyosha."

I felt sluggish and feeble, too. "Can you use the rifle? It isn't anything like what we used to shoot with – it's lighter, newer."

He snorted and stood from his cot. "You keep the rifle. I'll take the pistol. Smaller, I can hide it."

Droplets of sweat prickled along Dima's hairline. I brushed them away. "All right. But you remember to take your own passport. They might need it, I don't know."

Vasya kissed my temple. He took the rucksack from Alyosha and then grabbed the pistol, tucking it into his waistband. He bent down beside Dima and whispered into his ear. Dima stirred only slightly, his eyelids tenderly pulled open and his washed-out eyes searching for the source of sound.

"Two hours," Vasya said. "No more than that. I told you – I'll be fast."

Nightfall just came faster.