STRANGER DANGER - PART 1
Nick let the dead man's legs fall and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand, surveying the small town square in front of him. Abandoned cars looked like they had been here for a few decades instead of three years; the store's windows were dark and dusty. It was almost fully cleaned out except for a couple of beans cans that had rolled under the counter and thus had not been discovered before Alicia decided to check.
Nothing and no one was moving around here, but the eerie feeling of being watched refused to go away. The skin on the nape of his neck was crawling, and he couldn't shake it. Eventually, he forced himself to redirect attention to the corpse he had just dragged out of the church they had picked for the night.
The man didn't seem to have died too long ago. Huge chunks of flesh were ripped out of his neck and arms, which appeared to be the cause of death.
Was he sleeping when it happened? Were they all? Who sleeps without a watcher these days?
Perhaps they felt they were safe in that church. Perhaps they didn't lock the doors. Perhaps…
Nick had a strange kind of hunch. It was like a pearl in a pile of shit – a very unlikely discovery – and yet, it somehow clung to his mind. Wondering, he ventured to check the corpse's pockets. He could barely contain an amazed chortle when he fished a small baggy out of an inner hidey-hole of the dirty denim jacket. Nick stared at the brownish powder inside, both amused and a little scared of such an ominous call from the past. He didn't need to smell or taste it to know what the powder was.
So they got high and got unlucky. Exactly like Nick would have on the first day the apocalypse started. In a church, of all places. That's some huge-ass cosmic joke, indeed.
He pocketed the baggy and tried the body next to the junkie, but there was nothing but a used syringe.
Poor bastards.
"Found it."
Nick turned and looked at Alicia standing in the doorway brandishing a bunch of wires.
"No one needs the phone here," she said, and jerked her chin toward the bodies at his feet. "You done?"
"I think there's two more inside."
"Well, Troy's not gonna help." A small acidic smile tugged at her mouth. "He's not there."
"I know, he went to check the perimeter. It's fine. Just two more."
She turned and went inside, a half of the door creeping closed behind her when she wasn't propping it with her foot anymore. Nick sighed and glanced around again, displeased with still feeling someone's eyes on him.
Then he heard it. A walker shuffled from around the corner of a store next to the church, saw him, and picked up the pace, limping. Nick watched him with tired patience, pulling his knife from the sheath on his hip. As the dead got closer, he saw it wasn't dirt on his face. There were words. Someone wrote a message on the dead man's face with a black marker.
Frowning, Nick made a step closer. The sun had gone down, and it was getting dark rapidly; he had to strain to make out the message. When the dead approached, Nick stabbed the blade into his temple, bracing him by the neck, and as the corpse was slumping down, Nick read I FOUND GOD. The I was drawn between the eyebrows, FOUND and GOD – on the cheeks.
"What the…" Nick muttered, then started to turn around to see who approached from behind, but the world blacked out on him. He went down, not knowing what had hit him.
Troy hunted the foot-draggers around the church, taking them out one at a time with a piece of lead pipe he'd acquired from outside one of the stores, toying with them until he was spent and convinced that they'd be safe for the night. As much as he detested the nomad lifestyle Nick was determined to live, Troy enjoyed this part of it – the everyday fight – challenge that refined what abilities he'd obtained since the world broke apart, keeping things from spinning out of control when the need to find a place to hunker down in started to become too much.
When the last of the sun's light began to slope toward the horizon, he made his way back to church, cleaning the infected blood from his pipe with a part of the shirt he'd ripped off his last kill.
"Need a hand?" he asked brushing past Alicia and into the church. She'd tied a sequence of wires around one door's handle and was attempting to do the same on the other. Only they were different lengths and pulled free every time she tried to test her system. "Might be easier if you used two zip ties, one on each side and wound the wire through it as support."
"Very astute, Sherlock," she retorted, hardly turning to face him. "I'll just run down to the hardware store and grab some."
He dug around inside the bag he'd stuffed with goodies pilfered from a vending machine outside an abandoned vee's video and a couple of the adjoining supply stores. If there was one thing moving from place to place had taught him, it was that you could only take what you needed. No more, no less. Tonight had been a special occasion though and with all the buildings packed around the church it had made it even easier.
Troy removed a packet of loose zip ties and tossed it toward her feet. She stopped mid-alternate plan and looked down, brows furrowing as if he'd thrown something poisonous at her and then wordlessly picked them up.
He wasn't expecting a thank you and she didn't offer him one.
"Where's Nick?" he asked, looking around the inside of the darkening interior, listening for sound, having figured that he was in the restroom or looking for something with which to light the candles.
He'd found a torch in the hardware store but no batteries.
"You didn't see him on the way in?" Alicia asked, threading a zip tie onto the door handle, pulling it tight as she sharply moved to her feet. Troy gave a shake of his head and collided with her as they simultaneously attempted to exit the building, loosely holding onto one another to make sure they didn't land on their asses.
Neither apologized, neither said anything, alarm bells on high alert.
She descended the trifling set of stairs ahead of him, running to where he assumed she'd last seen Nick despite the darkness that had closed in around the town. Troy gave chase. No streetlights worked and the moon wasn't full, but they could see distinct outlines of what they knew were bodies.
"Alicia, wait!" Troy snapped, convinced that he'd eviscerated most of the threat they might have had to face tonight from the dead but unable to shake the feeling of instinctual dread that said otherwise.
"Nick!" she yelled, raising her voice as if she hadn't heard Troy at all. "Nick!"
Troy rushed up behind her and closed a hand around her mouth to shut her up, wincing when instantly her teeth sunk into the inside of his palm and forced him to remove it. She whirled around, eyes shiny in the dusk with a look of hatred he knew and didn't have to fully see to know was there.
"Yelling will wake the dead, you need to tone it down."
She shoved his chest and stumbled back a step, chastised and at once on guard.
'Good, she's back to thinking rationally.'
"We need light," Troy stated. He could feel her want to deny him and tell him to go to hell, but she knew he was right and arguing would only waste time.
"Fine," she hissed in a tone more worried than stubborn, deviating back in the direction of the church and toward the car they'd picked up a couple hundred miles back before hitting this Cracker Jack town.
He didn't move from the spot she'd left him and focused on his surroundings.
Where could Nick be? And why, if he'd gone deeper into town to dispose of the bodies, hadn't he told Alicia or at least made her aware of where he might be? As reckless as he could be, that wasn't like him.
A flood of orangey light cut through the thought and allowed Troy to see the faces on the bodies. They were everywhere, scattered erratically while some were piled together not too far outside of the building we intended to hole up in.
Those he recognized as he'd helped put them down inside the church.
Alicia joined him again, temporarily throwing a shadow across the stage show as she cut across a beam to get a closer look herself, a weapon now in hand. In unison, they jumped from examining one pulverized face to another in search of Nick. They didn't find him and nor did they come across anything other than his knife imbedded in the temple of a straggler with nonsensical graffiti on its rotting face.
It was the first time Troy had seen anything like that.
The one thing they had managed to get lucky with and acquire for themselves weeks prior was a set of hand radios. Devices they insisted to keep on them at all times in case of an emergency or if they'd strayed too far apart.
Only he hadn't called across the channel.
Maybe he couldn't?
Troy unhooked the receiver from his waistband, grip tightening on the pipe he was holding as he spoke: "Nick, where are you, man? Nick, answer me dammit." He didn't care for proper codes he already knew and repeated the communication, dreading the thought of hearing his own transmission crackling from a spot nearby. Thankfully, it didn't. When he eventually gave it a rest, Alicia took the wheel with her own zeal, desperate and fanatical. She'd come close to losing him before and the idea of going through that again was playing murder on her psyche. Troy's, too. Troy was only out here because of Nick.
She had no success, either.
"Kill the lights and save the battery, I'll take a look around town and see if I can find him. He might've just tripped and… hit his head."
Alicia internally debated the order and he could see she wanted to form her own search party, but if Nick was hurt, if there was a possibility that something terrible had happened to him, someone needed to be within a walking distance of the car. She agreed with a nod as Troy jogged away, her eyes automatically bouncing off the corpses they'd already inspected and then further as if he might be sitting in a corner somewhere playing hide and seek.
"Anything?" Alicia chimed after twenty minutes of radio silence, unable to contain herself.
Troy had wandered into clothing store after clothing store, aware—that in the last—there was a distinctly clumsy noise in the back as someone or something thumped around.
"Nothing," he responded, speaking quickly into the receiver, the noise faltering and then increasing.
He was moving with all the grace of a snail, feet sliding across the linoleum or wood floors, kicking aside debris as he tried to navigate in the dark and inch his way toward the source. He wished they'd hit the town sooner and when it was still light. He returned the radio to his hip and slapped a hand against the counter to draw out the dead, to see if it had a clear path to get to him, unsure if maybe Nick himself had snuck in here after being ambushed.
Not that Troy saw the troop of skin munchers or ran into anything that could have done that but he wanted to leave no stone unturned. As stupid as these dead fucks were, they could take your face off. He grimaced at the idea that that might have happened to Nick and that he could be bleeding out somewhere giving into the inevitable fate.
How long had he been out on his own? Forty minutes? Sixty?
If his previous calculations were correct and Troy could take to the bank his experiments, his estimation was that he had ten minutes – ten minutes and Nick could be gone forever.
"Nick?!" he called slapping his hand down harder on the counter, ignoring the accompanying sting he got for his fierce efforts. The noise in the back grew louder, filling his ears with a distinct series of groans that was unmistakable.
The bastard was trapped.
After Troy disposed of what had turned out to be a woman with long blonde hair that had come off his hand, he made his way up the main street and passed the same stores he had before.
Everything was as he'd left it and Troy was beginning to seriously doubt he'd find Nick here.
He circled the square and slowly made his way back toward the church when lights flooded the street again and Alicia rolled up beside him on the old Nissan.
"You should be at the church."
"Fuck you and fuck that. He isn't coming back there, okay?"
"How do you know that?"
"How do you know that he is? He's my brother. I just— I have a hunch."
"You're psychically connected now?"
Alicia rolled her eyes. "What if he does come back and we're not there?"
"You want to wait, then go wait, but I'm going to drive around and see if he's maybe around hanging a house or the library or heaven forbid a liquor store tucked away in the vodka aisle."
He braced a hand over the edge of the car door and gestured to the shop in question.
"He isn't?"
"I've been inside every one of these stores. This place is a practical ghost town aside from the few roamers."
Alicia cursed and pressed a foot to the gas, sending the car lurching forward and into a slow crawl. His hand bounced off the side of the frame with a crack. It wasn't hard but the hit and motion had been unexpected.
"Fuck," he gritted, scrambling alongside the moving vehicle on clumsy feet, smacking the frame to get her to stop.
She did and he got in without a word.
They drove through town, familiarizing themselves with more than the main street as best they could in their limited light, looking for anything that might have been a Nick signal, stopping only once to siphon gas from another car when they'd started to run dangerously low.
They'd tried the radio intermittently in-between with no luck.
"We should head back to the church, there is no way he got this far out."
Alicia didn't argue this time and the trek back to the church was agonizing. When they pulled up outside and Troy got out, she remained seated, her head tiredly tipped back and rested against the headrest. He didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that the night had taken its toll on her and that she was crying.
He headed into the church, hopeful that Nick was waiting there for them, apologetic and with explanation. Only he wasn't and the place appeared even darker.
"Nick, are you in here?"
No reply came. Troy shuffled toward a pew in the back and sat down, easing into a horizontal position, letting his eyes fall closed while he waited for Alicia to join him.
Alicia glanced across the driveway at the doors she'd been fiddling with a couple of hours ago, loathing the eerie quiet and helplessness that had assailed her. She was sick of this feeling, this everyday fear of loss.
She reached for her radio and forced the sadness out of her voice so she could attempt another call and be clear, "Nick? Do you hear me? Over. Nick! Please, respond. Nick."
When the world started to flicker back, there wasn't much to see. His vision was blurry, his head was busting. There was some poor orange light, probably from candles, but he couldn't assess the surroundings. Someone was hovering over him; something liquid pouring into his mouth.
"There, there," a female voice cooed. "You need to drink this."
Nick coughed, water spilling over his cheeks, but the woman held him firmly down by the jaw, forcing to drink the fill until she let go. She looked like some weird forest spirit, with a bulky body and a mane of dreadlocks.
She broke into a cackling laugh, standing over him, and showcased a half-full bottle.
"It's just water, honey. You need a lot of it. It will make you strong again."
She put the bottle down on the floor next to him and shuffled off.
Nick looked around. It was some abandoned diner's kitchen. A few candles flickered on the metal counters around him. His left wrist was locked in a handcuff, another bracelet – to a chain wrapped tightly around a pipe going from floor to ceiling. There was some caked blood around a laceration near his right temple. He took quite a hit, and his brain was buzzing with a nasty, nauseating migraine, the hurt temple throbbing like a rotten tooth.
With his free hand, he tried the chains and handcuffs and realized it wasn't going to snap for him. There was no divine intervention to expect. His radio was missing, so was his knife. He recalled sticking it into a walker's temple before the world went black. I FOUND GOD, the walker's face said.
The church. Alicia. Troy.
He dreaded to call out for the woman to ask about them. Maybe she didn't see them? Maybe they were not here. Without Nick, they would probably fight like rabid dogs, but at least, they were somewhat safe. Hopefully.
Hopefully…
"Hey!" he yelled at where the woman disappeared. "What the fuck you think you're doing?"
He remembered the baggie and checked the pocket.
It was gone.
He swallowed hard, just becoming aware of feeling strange. He shifted closer to the pipe, rolled up his left sleeve, strained to see the inside of his elbow and found nothing. Then checked the right one, and, although the light of three candles was too poor to see for sure, the skin was sore to the touch.
"I'm doing you a favor," the woman said.
Nick turned to see her bulk in the doorway leading from the kitchen into the diner's hall with tables.
"What the hell are you even rambling about?" he demanded, getting angrier by the second. And more scared for the two he left behind. He couldn't let himself ask. If she didn't know about them, she shouldn't.
"I know you," she said, making his blood turn cold. "I know your potential. You're so strong. But there's a flaw. I will take care of it, though. I will make you strong again."
Nick tried to understand, but drew a blank. Ire sunk its teeth in him harder. "What?!"
"Others make you weak – when you let them. We shall fix it." She bent and set another bottle next to the half-full one. Then straightened up and pointed. "Drink."
"Don't want to."
She smiled and produced a gun and pointed it at his leg. "You really do."
He considered how much deeper this shit would get with a hole in his knee, and took the half-full bottle.
She laughed and lowered the gun. "Good boy. Bottoms up."
He obeyed.
The radio crackled from somewhere outside the kitchen. "Nick? Do you hear me? Over. Nick! Please, respond. Nick."
Alicia.
"Don't worry," the woman said. "Drink. I'll get your call."
"Don't you—" he started.
"See, this is what we need to fix," she said, pointing the gun again, her smile disappearing like sun behind a storm cloud. "Drink."
He did. She left with two empty bottles, and he lay down on the floor, his mind reeling.
A faint high and nausea with raging headache didn't help him think at all. And then they started to abate. He could barely notice how it happened, but the familiar warmth was seeping in. Lulling him to relax and let go. Nick wasn't used to resisting it, so he didn't manage for long.
"Nick… Nick, please, please, if you're there, just… Say something. Anything. Nick."
Sobs. H could hear them, subtle sounds barely audible among the crackling radio distortions reaching him from the diner. He felt his heart shrivel and ache, thrashing against his ribs as if it wanted to dash out and to her. Knowing this wasn't much of his fault, he still felt every stab of remorse for making her suffer. She didn't deserve to be abandoned again. She didn't deserve any more pain because of some new whacko.
What was her problem, anyway?
Crazies didn't need much to get their crazy rolling, but this one didn't seem schizophrenic any more than he would. Hearing his sister cry in pain of utter, helpless agony of the unknown, he wished he could squeeze the life out of that loony with his bare hands. A part of him that was still sane and holding on by the skin of its teeth realized it wasn't all that simple, nor fair. No more violence – even if he had a chance to use it – would help him here. He needed to get in touch with his cunning, nurtured through all the years of addiction riding his car. He needed to manage to read that book.
The radio died out soon enough. Nick heard something in the background, like Troy attempting to find a common language, and then the transmission ended.
For the best, he'd say. If she was getting her kicks out of their distress, there wasn't going to be enough. Like for any junkie, no dose can be the last one. There's always a craving for more.
His headache was gone, he found with slight surprise. But then, it wasn't all that unexpected given she gave him a shot. What was alarming, however, was the overall discomfort and nausea that refused to go away. He remembered having read somewhere that one could die from drinking too much water. He couldn't recall how much was too much. Two small bottles were scarcely that, but somehow his mouth was getting dry again, and he could use a gulp. Something was off. Completely off. And not just the whole crazy stranger scenario.
He winced, rubbed his forehead as if it would make his thoughts any clearer, his eyes closing. It didn't. It was a strange high, a morbid high he couldn't remember experiencing before. Not like that. It could be the heroin – whatever quality that was – or it could be something else. It could be him, for all he knew. Maybe his body wasn't all into diving back into a rusty habit, and the cozy phase of high was passing too soon. All that water… Nick felt heavy, his whole body, his brain – everything felt heavy. He just wanted to check out for another hour. Or a day…
His thoughts stretched out as he started to doze off.
Alicia entered the church, dropping the bag Troy had walked in with earlier at her feet, busying herself with the door again as if it were her mission to finish the last task Nick had assigned her.
"Where are your cigarettes?" Troy asked without opening his eyes.
If there was one thing the world seemed in ample supply of at times, it was that, and the two siblings made consistent work of finding their guilty pleasure at every stop. Troy had read somewhere long ago that it staved off hunger and he suspected at times that's why they clung to it so desperately but he couldn't get past the taste.
"I don't want to bum one," he stated when he saw she had no intent of digging for them and continued to ignore him as if he were no more than an annoying ghost. "I want your lighter."
This made her pause, and although he couldn't see her face in the darkness, he knew she was considering whether or not to politely adhere to his request or tell him to fuck off and leave her alone.
Hostility was the only speed their relationship had, and with Nick out of the picture, it was more intense than ever.
The funny thing was that Troy had never known her to be so angry – not even when they first met. He presumed that losing Jake, losing Madison, and now losing Nick—at least temporarily, he hoped—was drawing that line of tolerance to near non-existent stretch.
She finished with the door, stepped over the bag and dumped the lighter onto the bench beside him. He slid a hand along the wood until he found it and walked to the front of the church to where he knew a stack of candles had been seen earlier.
He lit them one at a time, stopping only when he was satisfied they could see enough of one another and the room to feel safe. He tossed her the lighter when he was done, and she caught it. He collected the bag she'd dumped at the door, removing a candy bar for himself.
"You should eat," he stated, knowing Nick wouldn't appreciate his letting his sister die of starvation. She gave a hem and eased onto a pew on the opposite side of him, five chairs away as if she feared contamination.
Troy removed another chocolate and tossed it across the room. It landed on the bench in front of her but she made no effort or move to retrieve it, instead, she focused on the radio she was still clutching, holding onto it as if she were counting down the minutes to the next time she could try and summon a response again.
Something pushing into his side ended the somewhat pleasant floating in a pool of faded visions that meant no more than passing clouds to someone lying on a lawn gazing up. The woman stood over him, poking his side with a long stick. The end she used for it luckily wasn't pointed as the other was. It looked like a handle of a shovel or a fork with one end that had been sharpened. Anyone these days would have a clear idea what for.
She set a fresh bottle next to Nick. "You should drink more. Or you'll get weak."
Grunting, Nick sat up against the pipe she had chained him to, took the bottle, reluctant to obey at once, but the thirst was there, and he unscrewed the cap. She smiled a little as he took a gulp, then another before setting it back down on the floor.
They eyeballed each other for a long moment. He went through all the standard phrases in his head: why are you doing this; what is it exactly that you do; just stop fucking around and let me go; what the fuck is your problem – which led to the same Why are you doing this and thus closing the loop. None of it felt like it fit. Not to this one. If he was going to be frank with himself, it rarely fit to anyone. The world was made of people so unique they hated to respond to the same treatment in the same ways. They all saw themselves as protagonists of their own stories, and that meant Nick had to find a special key to decipher her.
"You wrote that on his face," he said, studying her serene face in the flickering lights. "You saw it happen?"
She canted her head sideways like an interested bird, her smile unchanging. Like some fucking weird Buddha statue accidentally came alive. "I did," she said. "It was beautiful."
"What was?"
"He was finally strong." Her eyes glistened with some strange admiration; it sent a comber of cold up his spine.
That explained a lot, and none of it was comforting.
Troy was on his third candy bar and starting in on a packet of chips when she finally reached for the chocolate he'd thrown. She still wasn't speaking – well not to him.
She was glued to the radio, intermittently speaking into it, relaying what sounded like childhood experiences they'd shared and what she longed to relive again now that they were closer.
For a moment, Troy envied their bond and the fact that he and Jake would never get that chance.
He waited until she took a break and then he, too, tried again, repeating the same phrase he had before. She turned in her seat and fixed him with an emotionless look.
"You want a soda?" he asked. He plucked one from the packet at his side, giving it a gentle shake in invitation.
She climbed to her feet, radio in hand and started toward him.
"Thank you," she mumbled as she took it, so much so that he wasn't entirely sure that's what she'd said. He retrieved another soda and popped the tab.
"Are you tired?"
"No," she said and sounded anything but.
"Me neither."
"Drink your water," she said, her stick shifting subtly to point. "You'll be stronger."
Nick squinted at her, his brain's gear turning sluggishly. Was that a hint or something? "What's in it?"
She laughed, like a witch would, he imagined. "What does it look like? What does it taste like?"
He considered it and allowed a small, knowing smile. "Not everything's what it seems. I've learned it a long time ago, the hard way. So now… I have to ask again, what's in it?"
She shrugged, amused. "You can ask. But asking doesn't change the answer."
"An answer and the truth are two different things. I ask for truth."
She kept looking at him with the same inscrutable smile and a faint interest. "Drink. And tell me what it is."
He saw she wouldn't let him refuse, so he took the bottle for another swig, sloshing it around his mouth this time as if it would help take it apart for components. It tasted like water. Nothing weird about it, just a faint sweet taste. But water could taste like that sometimes, when it was good or you were too thirsty. He wondered if he could truly feel a poison if it were there. Was it there?
He set the bottle down and looked at her. "You saw what happened in the church?"
"I did." She sat down on the floor, her legs crossed, like an Indian at the tribe bonfire. "They were weak. They couldn't protect themselves. This world has changed. It's done forgiving weakness. I made them strong."
"But we put them down. There was nothing strong about them. Not after they died and turned."
Her smile dimmed a tad. "They can't make anyone weak, anymore. They won't try to help anyone, anymore. They were all they were meant to be. Strong. Powerful in their truth." She smiled again leniently, like one smiles at a child who can't comprehend some simple truth yet due to age. "You will understand. You will see."
"How?"
"How do you explain the sky to a blind man?" she asked. "You have to see for yourself, Nick."
He drew in a deeper breath, considering her. She was a piece of work, and he unexplainably felt like he was running out of time to crack her. His nausea worsened, and to that added a strong urge to urinate. He tried to ignore it, groping for more words inside his mind that was a pitch-black room with no way to tell where the light switch was.
"You want me to find God, too?"
She threw her head back, cackling, then looked at him with surprised mirth. "Do you want to find God, Nick?"
He thought about it, then shook his head slowly. "Don't think I really feel that way yet."
"Then maybe you shall find your strength instead. And keep it this time."
"See, I felt I had it. I was clean for three years, and you forced me to use again. How does that play with your making people strong tune?"
She leaned forward confidingly. "You picked it, haven't you. With your own hands. I let you have it. Some people say that repetition is hell. But how else do we learn if not through walking through hell? We all want the easy way, so we could be weak. It's easy to be weak. But weak don't deserve to be. There is no place for weak, anymore."
She got back to her feet and turned to leave.
"I need to use the bathroom," Nick said. She turned to look at him, pondering. He smiled apologetically. "As much water never stays inside."
She shuffled past him deeper into the kitchen, made some metal-clanging noise and returned with a big casserole. She put it down by his side and left him alone. He heaved a sigh, took the lid off the offered pot and peeked inside. It was absolutely clean. He cast a glance at the doorway, then slowly got up onto his knees, undoing his pants.
Once that business was taken care of and he was sitting back down, a wave of nausea overwhelmed him out of the blue, and he barely managed to take the lid off and let the water make its other way out of his body. The process was quick, but painful. A pair of strong hands was wrenching out his guts so the pain was blinding. He pushed the closed casserole to the side and lay down on his back, trying to breathe deeper. It barely helped. There was a stabbing party in his stomach and a stampede of wild horses in his skull. He took two swigs of water, then tried to relax with his eyes closed. He felt like the floor beneath him was rocking on some invisible waves. It made him sick, but there was barely anything to heave out.
Gradually, his consciousness started to fade. As it did, he heard Alicia calling out his name, quieter each time.
Time ticked by listlessly and the radio silence continued. Alicia had moved to sit beside Troy and was making a sizeable dent in their snacks. Silence reigned and he steadily began to give into the deeply rooted tug of exhaustion, a descent interrupted by the not-so-gentle sound of distinct sobbing. Troy blinked, confused and startled, studying the crying girl beside him as if she were an alien beamed from the heavens. He hadn't dealt with a chick's feelings since his first year of high school, and even then the idea was stomach-turning and nerve-wracking. He ran from those situations, and if given half a chance, he'd do it again – he'd do it now.
This was Nick's sister, though, and considering what she was going through – what they were going through – she deserved more from him, more than the comfort a stale candy and an expired soda could provide.
Troy slid an arm onto the back of the pew and placed a hand upon her shoulder, patting awkwardly, squeezing in support here and there, half-expecting her to karate chop his touch away. She turned into it, into him, surprising him as she slouched closer, mushing the foodstuffs between them like a marshmallow between two cookies.
He was contemplating what he could say, rehearsing a couple of lines he'd seen in trite movies about how everything would be alright and how it was good to cry and get things off your chest.
He didn't believe any of it.
Thankfully, she saved him from the hassle of having to conjure up a half-decent lie.
"I can't lose him. I can't lose him again," she mumbled against his shoulder, her mouth oddly close to his neck now, her hot breath doing things to his groin that Troy was sure would be viewed as fairly inappropriate. If she wanted to go down that route he wouldn't object, it was pretty much the only form of care he was good at and with and had regularly indulged in with Marcy Strutter as therapy.
Loss changed people. It did things to the mind.
"This was supposed to be a new beginning for us. Just us. We were supposed to become our own people, to make our own rules and prove that we could be better than her. He promised me, he promised me he wouldn't leave and he did. He did. Again. He always leaves!"
Troy didn't mind that she'd conveniently left him out of that equation. It was what it was. Her crying and anger was border obnoxious, as if by some stroke of luck, he hit the jackpot and her emotional dams were breaking.
He wanted to kill himself and had been contemplating how to do so with the soda tab when suddenly the heat disappeared from the crook of his neck and her tearful gaze probed his own. She looked beautiful and vulnerable, and for the first time—aside from her looks—he could see what had struck Jake so fucking hard.
"Do you think he's dead?"
She was still leaning so close, unaware of her appeal and desperate for an assurance Troy couldn't give her. He took a hold of her chin, gently swiping at a stray tear with his thumb, and captured her lips in a quick kiss.
There was a second of sheer titillating pleasure and then pain. Agony he scarcely registered the first time until her fist smashed down on his semi a second time, harder and spiteful, soda spilling as she jumped from the bench and put space between them.
He cupped his crotch with both hands, doubling over in the pew, feeling nausea kick back in his throat with a vengeance that was taking more than a couple of seconds to pass and rattled by breathing.
"Fucking bitch!" he groaned, lightly massaging his bruised cock and its accompanying friends.
When the pain passes and he was able to sit up straight again, Troy immediately met her burning gaze and sheer spitting disgust. If she didn't rely on him in part to help find her brother, he'd probably be dead.
"I'm sorry," he muttered once he was able to speak again. "I just—I thought—"
"You thought that my spilling my guts like that equated to wanting a make-out session?!"
"No, of course not," he echoed, shaking his head lightly. "I thought you could do with sex."
Alicia stilled, and the way she observed him made him feel like a bug under a microscope. Troy smiled and shrugged. She scoffed and turned away, beginning to pace the aisle, leaving him to lick his wounds.
It wasn't long before he began to drift, slowly succumbing to the inevitable pull of exhaustion again.
"You're not seriously going to sleep while he is out there, are you?!" she hissed, emphasizing her question with a kick to his booted foot. Troy drew his leg up along the back of the chair and away from her inquisition.
"What else am I supposed to do?" he asked calmly, refraining from opening his eyes.
"God I hate you," she said, her voice firm and low, no longer a stitch of sadness in her tone.
"Likewise, honey," he murmured, offering up an acerbic smirk, her footsteps adding to the mellow lure of sleep as she began to pace again, pausing just long enough to speak into the radio.
Nick woke to something tightening around his right shoulder. Nausea hit with double effort, so did the twirling pain in his gut. He grunted, straining to open his eyes, and felt a prick of needle. His body reacted instinctually, trying to scramble away, but a firm hand closed around his neck squeezing and holding while the pricking pain in his vein turned to tugging one as she pushed the syringe.
"If you will fight me, I will hurt you," she said, meeting his eyes. Behind her, weak daylight was pouring from the diner. He would guess early morning had come.
Her hand released him; she pulled the empty syringe free and untied a belt from his shoulder.
Propped on his left elbow, Nick watched her.
"You are hurting me," he reasoned quietly.
"I'm making you stronger," she played back with her unwavering sick logic and stood up, taking the syringe and the belt with her.
"I don't understand," he confessed. "Or maybe you don't."
"Oh I do," she grinned from the doorway. "You will, too. Won't be too long now. Sleep."
She left; he heard her shuffling steps around the diner, then a door opened with a squeak, closed, and there was silence.
Was she gone for long? Maybe to find some food? That would take a while. It would be in his favor.
The down side was that with the way he felt, no time could help because it was getting pretty clear that his health was deteriorating. Time seemed to be killing him. Slowly or rapidly, there was no way to know.
Relieving himself in the casserole was harder this time. His stance on the knees was unsteady, and every sinew in his limbs was trembling as though he had been running from walkers all night.
He zipped his jeans and slumped on his haunches, leaning against the pipe behind him. His breath was ragged, his heart was thrashing like a spooked bird, there was sweat on his brow.
Something was seriously wrong. And who knew, he could even OD now - no way to know how many hours passed since her first injection. And who knew how she prepared them.
Trying to get his breathing under control, he inspected his cuffed wrist. His hands were slim enough, he could have a chance to slip out of the bracelet – he'd pulled it off a couple of times back in LA without thinking twice and in a rush of adrenaline and high. But here... he needed some help, something slippery, like soap. Or blood.
He read Gerald's Game once, and he wasn't going to repeat that on his own hand. He needed it to work.
Dammit. If only she left the syringe or any-fucking-thing to try at the lock.
Nick heaved a torn sigh and leaned his head back against the pipe, eyes closing.
He was so damn tired.
Another thing the apocalypse and his militia runs had taught Troy over the last year was that he could sleep just about anywhere and make it count – he had to. Life depended on it.
Alicia, on the other hand, hadn't learned that technique and was sitting upright on a bench on the opposite side of the room looking like a zombie. She was still clutching the radio, her bleary eyes glued to the narrow lines of plastic that made up the receiver as though she was willing it to come alive and snap at her.
That pity was back again.
He got up slowly, stretching the kinks from his neck and shoulders, and crossed the room, easing up behind her, her reaction time abysmally sluggish as he snatched the radio from her hands. She jerked around.
"You're no good to him like this," he stated, meeting her glare dead-on.
"What would you know about it?"
"A lot, actually."
She scoffed and attempted to snatch the radio back. Troy danced out of her way.
"Troy," she snapped, hissing his name as though it were diseased. "Give it back."
He inspected the case, observing that, unlike their standby actions before, she'd practically run the radio's battery down to nothing. He'd give it another three hours or so before it died completely.
She was on her feet now, beside him, hands extended like claws to make a second attempt at removing it from his grip. He sidestepped out of her way again, dipping between the pews, turning his back on her completely, making a point of attaching it to the waistband of his pants next to his own radio.
She'd stopped chasing him, probably too tired to keep up and unwilling to play what she assumed was a game.
"You should go freshen up."
"I don't have—"
"You look like shit, Alicia, and I need you on form. I'm not going to waste daylight."
She stared at him long and hard, a fist lashing out at the wood chair barricaded between them.
"Fuck you, Troy Otto. FUCK. YOU!"
He smirked. "I thought you weren't interested."
She expelled a growl bordering on animalistic rage, stomping toward the neighboring door that led off to a single lobby restroom. It wasn't pristine but it had water – running water. He gave it a minute and then trailed after her to relieve himself, as well.
