Chapter 5 – Popularity Contest
"Nice ride," Stevie greeted, a little shocked that Glenn was picking her up in a wailing red Challenger rather than the van he and the others had left in… and that none of the others were with him. It was kind of late in the day, so something had obviously gone sideways. "Get sick of carpooling with the deadweight? Or did the morons just get themselves killed, like I fucking told you they would?"
Too elated with the car to react to the blatant hostility, Glenn joked, "Get in, loser. We're going shopping."
Stevie rolled her eyes but chuckled, and after squeezing Bruno as well as the day's haul into the back seat and trunk, respectively, she took the passenger seat and didn't have to wait long for Glenn to once again slide behind the wheel. She spent the first few minutes just laughing deliriously at the burst of speed. Then, she prodded Glenn to spill.
And spill he did.
By the time they made it back to the quarry, she was pissed. Merle was an asshole, but leaving him to die like that was just… Fuck, as if the camp needed another inept cop who thought he could do no wrong and would happily sacrifice others for his own convenience and/or agenda. She'd thought better of Rick (who was surprisingly alive), but she'd clearly been wrong—either that or the coma had scrambled his brain.
Still, she didn't complain. She didn't tell the moron what a disgrace he was to that uniform he wore. No, not a uniform: a costume. If the man wearing it doesn't act with integrity, she thought to herself, watching the joyous family reunion that once again proved the universe wasn't fair, Then the uniform becomes a costume, just a stupid little symbol to trick idiots into handing over authority and accountability.
Quickly, quietly, Stevie packed an overnight bag and walked out of camp.
xxXxx
Shortly after setting up at the quarry and losing her Humvee and trailer to Mama's doormat nature and Shane's foolish, arrogant mismanagement, Stevie had moved a newish Prius off the nearest highway and hidden it at the bottom of the trailhead. Since then, she'd kept the vehicle stocked and in working condition, just in case. She was prepared for shit to go bad, as always, which included making Glenn mark his intended route on a map each morning before they headed out. She'd told him it was so that if he didn't come back, someone would know where to look for him and hopefully help him; she hadn't told him that if said day ever arrived, she'd probably be the only one who cared enough to even try. The people in the camp were stupid and selfish and wouldn't bother to stick a toe out of their "safe" little bubble to save anyone else's skin, especially some random Korean kid with no family present to make a fuss about missing him.
But Stevie would. Stevie was loyal, and someone who risked his own ass to keep her and her mama and her sister fed and healthy and comfortable and even marginally "safe" deserved equal consideration in return.
The teen didn't understand why she seemed to be the only one who felt that way or why she was the only one who saw the Dixon brothers in the same light. Although they were offensive and unfriendly assholes, they were still better protectors and providers than the rest of the "adults" combined. Regardless of everyone else's blind idiocy, she owed both brothers more than writing one of them off for dead just because he couldn't win a popularity contest in a whorehouse with a hundred-dollar bill hanging out of his fly and because rescuing him might be difficult.
But in the end, said rescuing was almost easy, embarrassingly and shamefully so for the bumbling twits who'd scampered like rats off a sinking ship. All she had to do was recreate but slightly improve upon their strategy: set off a car alarm on another block to send the already diminished herd (which barely still deserved the name) stumbling in a different direction (away from the getaway vehicle, obviously), don a walker onesie (aka coveralls saturated with rotting human slime, plus an umbrella in case of inclement weather), and then stroll right into the building. At that point, the light was fading, but she still had enough to work with as long as she worked fast. Merle's condition would be the deciding factor on whether she risked a nighttime exit or waited until the first hint of dawn. She'd made Bruno stay to guard the car (decorated with the remnants of the walker killed for her onesie), so an immediate retreat was definitely her preference. Leaving him overnight was doable but not ideal, for many reasons.
Navigating the poorly lit interior of the department store was an exercise in not getting jump-scared, but only the stairway up to the roof actually required any geek-killing. Even then, they were so fixated on trying to get through the door at the top that barely any turned toward her before she dispatched them all in quick succession, having long since discovered that attaching a blade, screwdriver, or other spike to the handle of a hockey stick improved upon both weapons. She cursed slightly when she remembered that she needed something to cut the padlock. That required another jaunt into the department store, which was luckily more like a Sears than a Macy's and thus had a tool section. After helping herself to a set of bolt cutters, a hatchet, and a pair of coveralls that looked to be roughly Merle's size, Stevie returned to the roof-access door and set about opening it. She made a vague mental note that lockpicking would be a good skill to learn. Would it be rude to ask if the Dixons knew how and would teach her? Probably, but she'd ask anyway.
"Merle?" the teen whispered as she pushed her way outside and sighed in relief at the fresh air, muggy as it was. "Hey, meth-mouth? You still alive?"
For several long moments, there was silence… but it was soon followed by a weak groan, shifting fabric, clinking metal, and "Jailbait?"
Stevie grinned, her eyes zeroing in on the slumped figure moving sluggishly in the late-twilight gloom. Once she'd dragged up a freshly killed walker and secured the door behind her as much as she could without an intact lock to apply, she ventured onward and snipped the handcuff chain; she'd entertained the notion of trying to fetch the key but couldn't justify the delay. It wasn't like she had any personal use for handcuffs (not when she'd already scored some plastic zipcuffs to carry around), and she sure as hell wasn't going to return them to the asshole who'd done the handcuffing. "Can you walk?" the teen wondered, stuffing a Gatorade and a protein bar into the bewildered redneck's hands and then gathering Dale's dropped tools. "If we hurry, we can be out of the city before full dark." The height of summer had worked in their favor for that at least, providing several extra hours of daylight.
Merle grunted something in the affirmative and scarfed the snack in mere seconds. He lumbered to his feet but seemed dazed, not putting up any fuss about preparing or wearing his very own walker onesie. If anything, hacking apart a body had him looking close to normal again and maybe a bit chipper.
And then they just waltzed back to the car, stripping off the onesies before they got in but tying the putrid garments to the side mirrors to add to her experiment in camouflaging a vehicle. It was lucky they did, because that was around when their luck started to ebb.
Merle guzzled another two Gatorades and then promptly passed out, leaving Stevie to navigate back in the dark, which was certainly not an easy or speedy process. She had to run with the lights off and keep the Prius under five miles per hour as she searched for the highway on-ramp, and she still managed to miss it. She didn't realize she'd done so until nearly the next one. That wouldn't have been a big deal, but that ramp as well as the following four she passed were blocked by wreckage. By the time she decided to turn around and go for her original choice, she found herself faced with a herd. Or, well, what might've been a herd; judging the size was impossible when she could barely see where it started and couldn't see past the first handful of corpses. The hazard might've been ten zombies or ten thousand, and regardless of experimental car camouflage, she wasn't about to risk trying to drive through. So, she quickly turned onto a side street, away from the highway, and attempted to loop back around.
She got lost.
Because of course she did.
No good deed goes unpunished.
No feat of heroic bad-assery comes without a price.
No adventure is worth the effort without a little detour.
Eventually, after almost an hour of aimlessly circling at a snail's pace in an attempt to get back to her preferred route or just a route she could confidently say would lead to where she wanted to be, Stevie managed to find a deserted spot to pull over and a street sign she could actually read in the scant moonlight. She grabbed a map and poured over it with the help of a tiny keychain flashlight.
She was still on the outskirts of what could be considered the city but clear on the opposite side of it, somehow.
Because of course she was.
Unwilling to waste more time or fuel or battery on navigating in the dark, Stevie hunkered down with the intention of dozing until the first hint of sunrise. She was confident that Bruno, her patient and long-suffering bestie, would alert her to any incoming threats, and she made a mental note to ensure he got a few lazy days and some kind of treat. Maybe a whole woodland critter carcass all to himself.
However, after an hour or so of breathing slowly with her eyes closed, more meditating than sleeping, she heard a scream… and then another and another… and then an entire chorus. It became obvious that there were people nearby and that those people were under attack, whether from the dead or from the living was impossible to tell.
Options jostled for position in her stressed, tired brain, but none presented a safe way for her to help. Rescuing a single idiot out of a mostly quiet building was one thing; wading into a chaotic unknown situation with an unknown number of living people, some or all of whom might be hostiles, was quite another. Speaking of, Merle was still knocked out and shouldn't be unguarded in his vulnerable state (whether he was in that state from exposure or drugs or a combination, the point was the same). Plus, she liked the guy, but leaving him alone with her dog and her getaway vehicle (which was decently stuffed with supplies) wouldn't be smart. (The fable of The Scorpion and the Frog leapt to mind.) Also, she had no desire to insert herself into a fight, as that would probably mean getting shot and/or stabbed and/or bludgeoned and/or robbed and/or worse by the attackers or the defenders, at best on accident because she was an unfamiliar face. Even if it was just a feeding frenzy, she couldn't risk wading in. Her walker onesie had dried to a crusted mass of viscera that she doubted would be effective even if she could unstick it from itself enough to actually put on, which she probably couldn't. The time it would take her to find and kill and mash up a fresh walker and resoak the suit or something else was prohibitive to providing timely aid. In the future, she'd have to store the foul garment in a bucket of gore, but that didn't help her at the moment.
Regardless, she couldn't do nothing. Well, she could, but she didn't want to. She wanted to help.
Four out of five shrinks had agreed that Stevie's drive to protect was one of her strongest personality traits.
(And fuck that fifth bitch anyway; Stevie was not a budding psychopath.)
(And even if she was, that would be an asset in the apocalypse. Dr. Traeger and her stupid hippie-dippie peace-love-and-nonviolent-conflict-resolution bullshit were probably dead by now, and Stevie was alive to loot and shoot and have the last laugh.)
The addition of children's screams to the dark o'clock chorus pushed her to act.
xxxxxxxxxx
A wild cliffhanger appeared. The most effective attack against a wild cliffhanger is review.
Spot the pop culture references. There are at least two. And if you don't know The Scorpion and the Frog, look it up. And then, look up the Robot Chicken version.
You're welcome.