After sleeping in a tent for weeks, an RV should have been a step up but there were six people in it and even driving along with the windows open, the air was stifling and you could taste the sweat in the air. Shane and T-Dog were big men too. Big sweaty men… The idea of getting out and walking almost seemed appealing.
Andrea and Shane were comparing guns. T-Dog was laying down in the back. Dale was doing his wise mentor thing to Glenn as he drove. I was sat on the floor of the bathroom which probably wasn't helping with the heat but it gave the illusion of isolation. Not being stuck in a box with wheels with five strangers. It actually made me miss T-Dog's box with wheels. …As I sat on the floor of a box…
"Oh Jeez…" I heard Dale say, followed by Glenn saying something was lost in the rumble as we began to slow down. T-Dog looked like a big lazy guy but the moment he felt us slow he was up and past me as we ground to a complete halt. Much more slowly, I picked myself up.
Traffic jam. It was familiarly mundane except for the state of the jammed vehicles. An entire truck lying on its side… The redneck pulled up alongside on his bike.
"See a way through?" Dale asked.
I couldn't see his response but he drew off and Dale followed while Glenn checked his map. I was still amazed to see an actual paper map. He suggested we go back and Dale cut him off. "We can't spare the fuel." He said and they all grimaced. I looked back and saw the Grimes-Peletier station wagon close by.
Glenn was oddly shook up by the carnage, even though if he had been to Atlanta and back so many times, he should have seen worse. Maybe he didn't desensitize easily. The abandoned cars, the ones on their sides or upturned, the ones with bodies… They were all nothing new to any of us.
The sudden crack made me flinch but it wasn't a gunshot. Dale issued a whole stream of curses without opening his mouth while his radiator hose blew out and the RV came to another halt. Dale had left his seat almost before we actually stopped and the door smacked hard on the vehicle as he imitated it, and vented.
"I said it. Didn't I say it? A thousand times… Dead in the water…"
"Problem, Dale?" The cop asked in a voice that made it clear the old man was not his favourite person. No one else seemed to notice.
Dale continued with his complaining old man routine. "Oh just the small matter of being stuck in the middle of nowhere with no hope of…" He trailed off, realising where we were. He was man enough to admit it. "Okay, that was dumb."
Daryl was already skinning the cat; picking through the trunk of the nearest car without hesitation as Shane seemed to pose for the cameras in his big boots with his big shotgun. "Can't find a radiator hose here." He declared with dry sarcasm.
"Whole buncha stuff we can find." The redneck growled to himself, like they were all dumb for not realising it sooner.
T-Dog was sharper on the take. "Siphon more fuel from the cars for a start." He was already moving. A practical man.
"Maybe some water?" Carol asked from behind me, making it sound like a daring request.
"Food?" Glenn still seemed on edge.
"This is a graveyard."
I looked around at Lori. So did everyone else. I thought she was an idiot.
"I don't know how I feel about this."
Daryl and T-Dog did. Daryl went right back to picking through the trunk of the car while T-Dog went to work with his jerry can. The cop was the same. "C'mon, y'all. Just look around. Gather what you can."
It was a chance to get away from the sweatbox even though the road was baking and I took it. I saw Dale take his usual perch and he was relaxed so no company then. We really were in the middle of nowhere.
Even though I had seen it before, it was still amazing to see the kind of crap people had packed into and onto their cars when they had told only to take the bare essentials. A 4x4 was crammed with what had to be every electronic device the owner had possessed at home. A Honda's roof was covered in cases that I found contained nothing but clothes. Not even designer labels. Just their entire wardrobe, and all their shoes. Why? A Ford pick-up was weighed down with fishing gear. Enough to equip a whole club. Rods. Reel. Nets. No knives.
I heard some cheering and whooping and looked around to see Shane taking a shower from a truck full of water cooler bottles. Who had been fleeing in one of those? Still, good for us. Great for us.
I wandered back to where Carol and Lori were picking out clothes. I needed a new shirt and underwear more than anything. Between not having a shower since the CDC and sweating in that box, I had pretty much destroyed both. Everyone else was the same. We all stank. We all wordlessly agreed not to mention how gross we all were. Some of us more than others. They hadn't found anything I could wear though. The two women eyed me warily for a moment and then ignored me. I didn't remember ever saying a word to Carol and Lori had asked me the same question she had asked everyone else at some point. 'Have you seen Carl?'
The kid was close. Sophia was close to him. She was still clutching that doll the Morales girl had given her. I felt a sudden tense pain in my chest. I wished I had something to clutch. Sophia had the doll. Shane had his shotgun. My knife wasn't the same. It didn't have any reassuring weight, unlike the hammer. Lost now.
Christ, it was hot. I looked up at the sky and then looked down, wiping away sweat from my eyes, to see if the mothers had found any hats. People had made fun of Dale and Glenn's headwear… Now I would have killed for it.
"Lori!" The voice was Rick's. "Under the cars!" He had his rifle in his right hand and waved us down with his left. He immediately looked for the kids. "Carl, Sophia, get down! Now!" He didn't shout but instead called in a stage whisper that immediately sent a cold rush through my body. It meant only one thing.
The road burnt as my bare arms touched it and I rolled beneath the nearest vehicle and looked ahead and saw a forest of legs.
The dead had ragged pants. Their pants fell low and then they tread the material away underfoot. Sometimes the rags tripped them. They also stepped in anything and everything. Some of them were barefoot and the scorching road had burnt their lifeless flesh so they carried the smell of cooked meat with their usual rot.
And the noise… I heard a whimper and couldn't tell which kid it had come from. The legs were unnerving but the gurgling… That sound terrified the sheriff and he had been shot.
I tried counting the feet as they passed by to distract myself from the noise. Like I was counting sheep. Sheep that ate people kicking and screaming. I counted and kept counting and had to stop because they kept on coming and coming. Stumbling. Shambling. Walking. A broken ankle passed me by and the bone cracked on the road each time, grated and then lifted again.
I had hidden in a crawlspace for sixteen hours once. Hot and sweltering, waiting to be found… But if they had found me, it would have just meant being hauled off to jail. The experiences didn't compare. Nothing compared to this.
And then suddenly, the sound of falling feet trailed off. They had passed us by. I bit my hand as the release made me start breathing heavily. Every single time the danger passed was when I was most scared.
I heard a squeal and cracked my head on the metal above looking around. A walker was on the ground and reaching for the girl under the truck and as that grey hand clawed for her, she cried out without thought. The mothers were too far away and so was the sheriff. The boy and I were closest. Shit.
I scrambled out and grabbed hold of the walker's legs, hauling it away from the girl but she was already scrabbling away to the other side of the vehicle and out from under it. I heard a snarl and looked up to see another walker coming straight for me, its bald head making it look utterly skeletal and the other growled as it tried to twist around to discover the source of the attack. I pressed my knee down on its ass and launched myself up and away from the other as it came with outstretched hands. It stepped on the one on the ground which shrieked with rage and I had a glimpse of Sophia going under the barrier and down the embankment. I didn't hesitate to follow her.
The kid ran like the wind. She didn't think, she only ran and her kid legs had already taken her a good way when I reached the bottom of the embankment. I heard the gnashing of teeth overhead and took off after her, and heard the bald walker come crashing down the embankment behind me. I didn't hear the other one as I ran which meant it was either slower, or it had gotten distracted on the road by the others.
Sophia was small so she ran under branches that I had to slow for or risk being snagged or losing an eye. It gave her a good head start and I only caught her after a bad long distance. And I did catch her; she thought I was one of them and would have screamed the woods down if I hadn't clamped a hand over her mouth first. She was not exactly calmed when she realised it was me. I had never spoken to her.
"Shhh!" I could hear the walker crashing after us. It had no concerns about the perils of eye-gouging branches and blundered through all of them. It was coming straight from the road and all I had was a little knife. Screw that. I took my hand off her mouth so I could pick her up and I ran with her, parallel with the road and quickly realising that carrying a twelve year old was not something my lean frame was built for. I wasn't putting her down though, not until we were well away. She was actually shaking with her fear as she clung to me like a monkey.
The bald walker didn't seem to be directly following. It had charged after me and then lost sight, which meant it had only a vague notion of following my noise as I ran heavily with the girl. I did not need to run so far and I put her down with some effort as she clung to me and then pushed her down onto the ground, joining her. She clutched her doll tight and I listened to the approaching walker. It seemed to snap every possible twig it could underfoot and to snag every tree branch which made it snarl as the impediments slowed its pursuit of its meal. Did they get angry? They seemed to when obstacles got in their way or when food was out of reach. All riled up.
She was hugging her doll and grasping the dirt and doing her very best not to whimper. Even without dead people walking around, this was not a friendly place. It was dark under the trees and there were bugs buzzing and squeaking and it was hot. Very hot. When the dead man came stumbling by a good distance away, it was the icing on a very grim cake.
It shambled mindlessly by, chasing shadows and then lurched about suddenly. In our direction. It was drawn by a noise. Not me. Not Sophia. I twisted around and saw there were more walkers and they were coming from the direction of the highway. They must have been following in the wake of the others and something had broken them away. Maybe us and the bald one crashing along. They hadn't seen us, yet, but they were going to lurch right on us. If we went back the way we had come, we would lead them straight to the others.
Fuck.
"Come on." I picked her up again and carried her away from the road. I ran with her until I reached a stream where I had to put her down to make it down the steep bank without dropping us both in it. The bank offered some cover but they were coming in our direction and it would not be enough, especially as I didn't know how many of them there were. It would only take one to bring them all down on us. "Come on." I said and led her along the creek. I tried to keep the splashing to a minimum for the noise but it would leave a trail. If the redneck came looking, he would have no trouble finding us. We couldn't stay in it though; it became too deep for that and I didn't want to get caught in deep water. I could still hear them on the wrong side…
I could find my way around backstreets and alleys with no trouble. But trees? How could you tell one tree from another? I couldn't even use the sun because the canopy was too thick. I could however sense that we were still moving away the road. The woods ahead were quiet. Behind us however, they seemed to be alive with walkers. If I had a decent weapon that wouldn't have mattered but all I had was a knife and there was no convenient stick that would make a good club.
I almost leapt out of my skin as Sophia took hold of my arm. She was terrified and fear was infectious. There was a reason that fairy tales were full of stories of children getting lost in the woods. Bad things lurked in the woods. Even before.
We didn't encounter any more but now I knew we were lost. Turning back and trying to retrace our steps would only lead us back to the walkers and if we tried to circle around… I was certain that we were headed away and the trees couldn't last forever. We just had to find a spot with good visuals and then wait. They would find us. Two cops, a hunter and a mother would ensure that.
There was no sense of time in this place beyond the soreness of my feet. It was bad for me. It was worse for her. I picked her up again when she almost fell and she was heavy. Not so much as when I was running but still heavy.
"We'll be okay." I said.
When we finally emerged from the trees, it was to leave their darkness and enter dusk. Not much of an improvement. Except for the part where like a temperate mirage; I could see suburbia.
I put her down and she spoke for the first time. "What is that?"
"Somewhere to hide." I answered. "Come on." I said yet again.
There must have been a town nearby and this housing development was a little island in the middle of the empty countryside. A little island just like the big cities; littered with debris and abandoned vehicles. It had hit here as hard as anywhere else. Wherever there were people, it had struck.
I listened carefully and heard nothing but I knew that meant little. They could stand still and silent for days until something drew their attention. What drew my attention was an odour. I had smelt it earlier today but this was stronger. The smell of cooked meat. Smokey. It was best not to think about.
She kept close beside me as I kept low. I knew what I was looking for but finding it in the growing dark while trying not to draw attention to us was the hard part. One or more of these houses was empty and safe while others were dangerous. It was in the details. A house with a broken window was an obvious red flag. One that looked pristine was no better; it could mean that something had happened inside. I found one that gave me a good vibe.
Sophia had big eyes and a round face with freckles. Fear was an expression that suited her face. So was shock as I pulled out my picks. She seemed to know what they were, even before I stuck them in the lock and got to work. "Look around." I said as I focused.
It was not a challenging lock. It was not high end and it was old. The only difficulty was that after a couple of months, I was rusty. But that was no trouble in the end.
I drew my knife and opened the door. Nothing came howling out at me. I stepped in and Sophia instinctively stepped in behind me. It was not ideal but how did you tell a scared kid to keep back and give you space, in case something came at you in the dark? I wouldn't have closed the door so that we could make a quick and easy exit but after her day, she pushed it shut behind her.
She was small and made hardly any noise. I made none. I crept forward and knelt down so I could look into the first room from below eye level to anything standing in there. Nothing. I slipped in and a quick scan told me that no one had been here for weeks. There was a neat layer of dust over everything and that everything was neat.
It was the same in the other rooms. This place hadn't been evacuated, it had been left the way you would leave a place when you were coming back from work later in the day. Breakfast bowls and spoons were in the sink. The previous meal's dishes were still in the dryer. A jacket hung off a chair.
I was still cautious though, picking through each room with Sophia as my shadow, closing curtains as I went until the only space I hadn't checked was the garage and with no power, that wasn't an option now. I made sure the door to it was locked and certain that the space around me was clear, I ventured for the stairs.
Creeping about was not new to me. The threat of death if I was caught was not new to me though a bullet or buckshot from a homeowner had to be a much better way to go than teeth. I had always tried to avoid doing this when people were home but sometimes you had no choice. I certainly had never done it with a little kid and her doll in tow.
The place was empty. Secure. Ish.
"Alright… Let's find something to drink."
The fridge was full of rot and no convenient bottled water. They did however have canned vegetables and it provided an odd relief to open one for the girl and watch her face and see her gratitude for the drink turn to mild disgust at the taste of the carrot water. I drank, and ate, my peas without thought while she picked at the cold carrots first and then realised it was better to get it over with and wolfed them down.
I checked the taps with a saucepan but not a single drop came out. The water was off and the pressure was long gone; drained off somewhere else. That was a problem.
If I needed whiskey, they had plenty of that. And wine. That would only dehydrate me more. They had bottles of the stuff while a shopping trip must have been on the books because the cupboards were at low ebb. There were a couple more cans of peas, one of potatoes and two fruit cocktail. For no reason other than to cheer her up, I gave her one as a makeshift dessert. That left four cans of fruit and veg. No soup. No meat. No fish. All there was in abundance was dry cereal kept in large sealed plastic containers. I tried some and it was beginning to go stale though the containers had stopped the worst of it. It was something though.
"I need to use the bathroom." She said quietly.
So did I and I had needed to do so for some time. "Use the one downstairs."
She hesitated. She didn't want to be alone, even for a moment, but needs won out and she slipped away, leaving me to contemplate the doll she had left on the table.
I had pursued a frightened kid, kept her safe from the monsters and now I was lost with her. We were miles from the road by now and darkness was falling fast. What were the others doing? Were they hot on our trail and any minute I would hear the redneck's growling voice? Or had he been unable to find our trail and was back at the road, waiting for first light to show him the way? I knew the cops wouldn't want to be blundering about in the woods at night. Their instincts may have been to find the girl, and me, but their common sense wouldn't let them put everyone else at risk. That would be very hard on her mother.
Yet, funnily enough, in this house we were far more secure than they would be in that RV on the highway.
She returned after quite a while and though I hadn't heard her cry, her red eyes gave it away. Besides the redness however, she had done a great job tidying herself so it wasn't readily apparent she had been weeping. No doubt something she had learned to protect herself from her asshole father.
"What are we going to do?"
"They'll find us." I said immediately because it was what she needed to hear. "If Daryl can track deer and opossums through the woods, he can find us. But he can't do it tonight. It's too dark now. They'll find us tomorrow, maybe the day after that, so we have to stay here. I'll put a sign up outside that we're here that they can see." I had considered a smoky fire but that would certainly draw the dead long before the living. "I can't be sure how to get back to the road and I don't want to end up going in circles in the woods-"
"I don't want to go back out there!" The note of fright carried far. She was a city person, like me. A world of trees was scary even without the walking corpses infesting it.
"We're not. We're staying here. It's easier to find someone if they stay put." I hoped I was remembering that right. "We're safe here, so long as we stay quiet. And we can stay quiet. And dark." I didn't have a flashlight and I hadn't seen any candles. "We'll be okay." I hadn't seen anything that would make a better weapon yet either, but tomorrow I could check the garage. There had to be something that would serve as a bludgeon. "They'll find us."
Again with the big eyes. But she nodded, being somewhere near to reassured. Somewhere.
I sent her upstairs before using the bathroom myself. With no water pressure, I made do refilling the cistern with wine. It was cheap stuff which was disappointing. It would have been satisfying using something that cost a small fortune.
She was confused when I told her to gather up bedlinen and put it in the bathroom but she complied; grateful for the distraction. After sleeping on the ground in a tent for so long, the beds at the CDC had kept me awake. Was that really just two days ago? I had slept briefly there and then woken to a different kind of nightmare. That night I had slept on the nursing home floor and then the RV floor the following night. Now I was going to sleep on a bathroom floor.
"Because the door locks." I explained to her. "I can't stay up all night keeping watch so this is the most secure room in the house. The doors and windows are all shut and locked and we'll have this door as well." It was a good speech to give a child, even though I knew that a glass window was easily broken by a creature that didn't feel pain and these interior doors weren't particularly tough. The lock was for privacy, not security, but she didn't need to know that. Besides, they had no reason to want to get in here so the concealment sufficed over actual security.
A bathroom floor wasn't the worst place to rest. She had the tub which was far more comfortable. In many ways, I was better off than I would have been in the RV or the tent. Now there was a worrying thought; I was trying to look for the positives to this situation. There really weren't any. I was sure they would look for us, and find us. But a piece of my brain had to ask the question 'What if they don't?' What did I do then? Find a vehicle and get it running and hope they were still headed for Fort Benning and hope our paths crossed? That would have been difficult, even before. Was I going to be on my own and responsible for a kid? That was not a bright future for either of us.
Through sheer weariness I was about to drift off when I heard her gasp and jerk before her eyes appeared over the rim. In the fading light, it took her a moment to see me on the floor. It was a long moment as she battled panic. "I thought I was alone!"
"I'm not going anywhere." I said.
This was not enough for her. She climbed out of the tub and lay down beside me. Right beside me. I was going to say something when I realised she hadn't slept alone for the better part of two months. Her mom had always been right there. And her dad, piece of shit that he was, had died five days ago when walkers had overrun the camp. She didn't seem to care overmuch about the man but that experience had stuck with everyone who had survived it. After all, there had been around thirty of us and after the walkers had gone through; just fourteen. Then it had been unlucky thirteen after Jim had succumbed. After the CDC, it had fallen to twelve. Now with us here, only ten. She had rarely gone out of sight of her mother before the attack and afterwards they had been practically joined at the hip.
Didn't mean I wasn't extremely uncomfortable having a twelve year old girl lying next to me. And it wasn't enough for her. She dozed and then jerked into full consciousness as the strange dark place alarmed her and twisted around to check I was still there. She did this three times until I finally placed a hand on her arm. She was a skinny girl and living off the meagre food available at the camp and whatever the Dixon brothers had brought back from hunting hadn't helped. Even my small hand enveloped her tiny limb. It put her on edge at first, being touched by a stranger but then she relaxed, weighing up the difference between a stranger and everything else. I hadn't let her down so far.
I kept my hand on her arm long after she fell asleep just to be sure that she stayed asleep. When it finally felt safe to take it away, sleep hit me hard.
[][][][][][]
I had woken on a bathroom floor before. This time it wasn't next to a puddle of puke with a hangover. Instead it was with a strawberry blonde twelve year old girl who was curled up in a foetal position. Facing me. She didn't seem like a twelve year old. Younger. But also older somehow. It was a strange combination. Natural innocence combined with an abusive father. She had been born soft and that upbringing hadn't hardened her. I had seen her with the other kids in camp and she had been happy enough. I knew, or had known anyway, people who had grown up in the same situation and they hadn't been well-adjusted enough to make friends the way she did. Although, they had had equally terrible parents. Sophia's mother seemed good, though scared of the light where she might be seen…
I shook her awake and for a moment she was groggy and calm and then she was alarmed as she registered the unfamiliar surroundings. "You're alright, kid."
It all came back to her and frightened her a second time around before she was reassured by the locked door, knowing she was on the second floor and by the 'adult' presence. I wished it was that easy for me.
Breakfast was dry cereal with canned pea water to drink. We could eat the peas later. It was not much of a meal and I knew she was hungry. I was hungrier. We needed more and the only way to get it was to go outside. For me to go outside.
First I checked the garage. There was a sliver of light under the main door and the light inside the house offered enough for me to see there was nothing much in there. If they had tools, they weren't here. That was irritating. I closed the door and went back to the kitchen where Sophia sat with a worried look.
"I don't know your name." She said, her eyes huge and apologetic.
"Bas." I replied and she was confused. "It's Dutch." I explained. It was true, but really it was a joke. Bas was short for Sebastian, and Bastard. I had learnt the Dutch pronounced it to sound like 'Boss' which no one here ever did. Boss might have been worse than having people calling you half of Bastard. I was no boss. "Yours is Greek."
"How do you know that?"
"It was a hobby." When you had to kill time while learning someone's routine and the only thing you had to read was a book of baby names and florid descriptions of their origin and meaning. Invaluable information I had learned for this situation. "I need to go outside now." I said. "You need to stay here while I go look for water."
She immediately grew stricken at the thought of being alone so I pushed on.
"I'm just going next door and I'll be right back. You look around and see if you can find something to make a sign we can put in the window. Okay?"
She still didn't want to be left alone but she wanted to be found more. The latter won out.
"Keep the curtains closed." I had looked outside before going downstairs and everything had seemed still and quiet out there, but that could change. "I'll be fifteen minutes."
"You promise?"
"Fifteen minutes. I promise."
It was an easy promise to make. She didn't have a watch and there were no clocks. She couldn't count the seconds until I returned. I slipped carefully out of the door.
The morning air was cool but the day promised to deliver another scorcher. Some people said the dead were more active at night. Others said during the day. I couldn't see any. Some wandered about following any noise or movement they detected. Others didn't react to anything unless you got too close. Neither seemed to be around.
It went against my nature to break into a house neighbouring one I had already broken into. It was an insane feeling to have. One of many. What would the cops think when they saw my collection of picks? That would challenge their instincts.
I checked the house was clear first. Every room. Top to bottom. The people here had packed their bags and fled, taking most of their wardrobes and their photo albums. The important family memories but not the holiday snaps. Awareness that they needed to prioritise just a little.
I remembered Glenn and Shane's whoops when they had found water on the road. What I found wasn't quite as whoop-worthy but was good regardless; a couple of bottles of spring water. Big ones. Enough for two people to drink for a day. Why they hadn't taken them with them… Or maybe there had been more. Water was heavy after all. They had cleared out every can from their cupboards so they had probably run out of space in their car, or had decided they had enough and gotten the hell out.
Water but no food. My fifteen minutes had to be up but I needed to check the garage. Another place without tools.
When I returned, Sophia had actually listened to me and she had had the idea of pulling the headboard off one of the beds. A ready-made sign even before she had gotten to work with a marker pen. The message was straight-forward; it said 'WE ARE HERE!' and she had signed her name so it could stand out from the many other similar signs we had seen.
"You don't have to drink any more vegetable water today." I said and put the two bottles on the table with the cans.
"Will this work?" She asked, meaning her sign.
"Brilliantly." I said and she almost smiled out of instinct. Almost. "I'll put it outside. I need to check the other house on the other side."
She nodded. While I might have been more than fifteen minutes, it was near enough that she hadn't worried more than she would have and it reassured her that I would return a second time.
I leaned the headboard against the wall beside the front door and it was secure and obvious to anyone passing. I certainly wasn't going to try hammering it into the ground on the lawn to attract every hungry monster for a mile around.
The third house was a little trickier to get into. They had replaced the original door in the past year and the lock was more sophisticated but it was still nothing really. Nothing compared to alarms and deadbolts. I didn't have to worry about either.
Another empty house with no drama. And plenty of cans of dog food. I ignored them in favour of something that was a slight step up; corned beef. Corn. Tomatoes. Beans. Peaches. And a can of chicken soup that had been in there a long, long time; it was close to its use-by date.
It was a good haul, enough for us to eat for a couple of days which was the time frame I had given Sophia for them finding us. There was also a spade in the garage which would serve either as a club or an axe. That was good. Things were good.
Now we just had to wait.
My instinct was for high ground so we set up in the largest bedroom. She found a book to read or at least tried to. She was distracted every minute or so as she remembered she was lost and her mom was out there. I couldn't hope to read so I set myself up with a puzzle instead. It was just enough to serve as a distraction and make me forget that I was just killing time until we were rescued. Rescued… I knew I was doing the right thing holing up here but that didn't mean part of me wasn't thinking I should be being more proactive. But everything I thought of just exposed us to more danger. Exposed her to danger. With the spade, I could take care of one or two of them by myself. A whole bunch though and all we could do was run away and they didn't get winded but we did. I could run as long as I needed to, but not if I had to carry her. She could run but not far. Anything I could think of to draw attention to us here would draw the dead here too. Noise of any kind was out of the question. Smoke would be no different. The most I could think of was a kite trailing some light-glinting metal but that might also serve to lure the dead. And where would I get a kite from and how would I keep it airborne? It was an insane thought.
Around midday Sophia gave up trying to read her book and joined me at the puzzle. Fifteen hundred pieces and I had only made the frame. I was every bit as distracted as her.
"Are they looked for us?" She addressed the floor.
"Of course they're looking for us."
"What if they think-"
"They wouldn't think that." This was a lie; I knew which ones would be thinking we were already dead. "They're out there looking for us. They'll have found our trail to the creek, followed it, and… Probably got muddled trying to follow our tracks amongst all the dead. But they're looking and we're not so far away." Well, we were but that wasn't important.
"My mom, she…" The girl swallowed. "How do you think she is?"
I decided to be honest with her. "Right now your mom is exhausted because last night she didn't sleep at all worrying about you and now she's trekking through those woods looking for you." It made her look hopeful before she felt guilty for having slept. "She knows you aren't alone. She's got that."
Sophia looked up at me and her eyes were critical. She had seen the adults fending off the lone walker at the quarry when Daryl had brought back the deer, the day after Rick had shown up. She had seen those same adults fighting off the pack that had attacked the camp the night her dad had died. Before that, she had seen Glenn come and go to the city, she had seen Dale on watch with his rifle and she had seen big men like Morales, Shane and T-Dog around with their reassuring presence. She had not seen me. "You don't talk much." She said.
"No… I was dealing with… Stuff."
She didn't need to have what 'stuff' meant explained to her. She had seen enough of it to know. "You never talk to anyone."
"Stuff." I repeated. "Anyway, they all seemed to have it in hand. Daryl and Dale, Rick and Shane… They don't ask us kids for ideas."
"How old are you?"
"Nineteen." I lied, giving myself an extra year and a half. She didn't need to know just how few years I had on her.
"You don't look nineteen."
"How old do I look?"
She shrugged. "Older."
"Rough childhood."
Sophia nodded and gravely and didn't quite suppress a shudder. We had something in common. "My mom's looking for me. My dad's dead…" She looked at the floor. "Carl thought his dad was dead, and he came back. My dad is dead, and I don't want him to come back." She looked up at me and there were no tears in her eyes nor guilt. It was something else. "Does that make me a bad person?"
It was a morbid thing to hear from a twelve year old who looked as innocent as her but appearances were deceptive. Everything I had observed of Ed Peletier told me this girl was as damaged as anyone else I had known. "My dad is dead, and…" I shook my head. "I'm just disappointed I didn't kill him."
She wasn't shocked or horrified. Instead this time she shuddered uncontrollably. "I know I'm supposed to feel bad-"
"Why are you supposed to?" I cut her off. "Because he's your dad? Even though he's the asshole who treated you and your mom like dirt? I was in that camp from the start; I saw those bruises. On both of you." She was looking at the floor again, ashamed. "What Shane did to him; that made you feel good didn't it?"
She said nothing. She wasn't sad that her dad was dead but she also took no satisfaction or pleasure from it. It wasn't in her.
"You're a good person. Better than me." I said. "If there is a Hell, my dad is rotting there. And my mom's probably there with him now." This got her attention. "But you have your mom and she's a great person. She loves you. She'll find you. And you'll keep going."
Sophia did not reply. She only took a puzzle piece and put it in place. Just fourteen hundred more to go.
[][][][][][]
We were eating a curious salad of beans, corn, tomatoes and peas when we heard the rifle shot. It was impossible to tell how far off it was considering how the trees muffled sound and the way it rolled over the countryside. We listened but there was nothing else to hear.
"Just one shot…" I thought aloud. "That's good, I guess."
"Good?" She asked.
"They wouldn't fire a gun for just one of them. Not Dale or Rick. No one would, unless they were an idiot…" Shane I had noticed was rather eager to start blasting but even he was disciplined enough to stay his hand for just one. "That was probably someone hunting."
"Hunting?"
"Deer, maybe… Not our lot. Daryl would use his crossbow. There's someone else out there."
"That's good, isn't it?"
I thought of the Vatos' grim fate. "It's good to know there's other people out there." I said carefully.
There were no more shots. No more disturbances. Nothing. She wasn't the only one who found that unsettling. We had spent the past week in constant danger with the only respite being the night spent in the CDC… Where we had almost been killed by a suicidal doctor. I knew she was thinking about that as she considered this peaceful day. What was the nasty twist that would come as the price?
I gave her the other fruit cocktail to eat and then had one of the cans of peaches for myself. The cereal we had had for breakfast was the most substantial thing we had eaten since we had arrived and the canned fruit and vegetable diet was rough on both our stomachs. She almost smiled again when I said I missed the Dixon brothers and their squirrels. Squirrel appealed more than corned beef. Again, the reminder that we had last eaten well at the CDC. And before that, the fish-fry…
We could have set up in a bedroom. Barricaded the door as a safety measure just as effective as a locked bathroom door. Instead we stuck with the previous night's set up. This time she fell asleep properly in the bath but thirty minutes later, she woke up again and once again we lay side by side. She didn't need my hand on her arm to reassure her this time though. That was good because this arrangement was making me feel very uncomfortable and it took me some time to fall asleep.
[][][][][][]
There was a walker out on the road. It looked like the most country son of a bitch I could have imagined. There was blood on its arm. Lots of it. Bitten. Bled out. Came back.
I knew how to move silently so it didn't see me coming. It only knew of my existence just before I ended its own with a very nasty blow to the back of the head with the spade. Home Alone didn't prepare you for what actually happened when you hit a person in the head with a shovel. It went down, but still moved, so a second blow left it splattered. I covered it up so that if Sophia looked out the window, she didn't have to see the grim details.
I picked through three houses and the only thing I could find was a can of sardines and some soda. These people it seemed were cooking enthusiasts; nothing but fresh ingredients. Which were all compost in the refrigerators now.
Sophia was a little more comfortable with me slipping out a few more times so I went along the street, finding a few cans of soup, one coconut milk and more corn and tomatoes. There were other things but they needed cooking and that wasn't an option. Most of the cupboards had been stripped by the owners and the ones that weren't were hardly groaning. I could have opened a coffeehouse with all the beans and instant I found. Sugar too. Flour… Could you eat flour raw? Maybe we would find out.
I abandoned the search when I came upon a house where the owners hadn't left and had barricaded the place. I didn't enter because upon looking under the partially opened garage door, I saw a heap of charred remains and there was nothing that would get me into a place like that.
She didn't like the idea of cold chicken soup so I had it while she braved cold tomato soup. Cold soup was gloop, even when you were hungry. It was not a cheerful experience for either of us.
Sophia wasn't one to complain though. God knows what complaining would have earned her from her dad. Her only concern seemed to be me brooding over my as yet incomplete puzzle.
"They're still looking for us." I said.
She nodded meekly. It was impossible to tell if she was reassured.
"Either that or they're lost too and we'll have to find them." I laughed humourlessly to myself. "I lived in a city my whole life and never saw the countryside until six weeks ago. I could find my way around the city blindfolded but out here… It's all just trees… They said Atlanta would be safer than Savannah though, so I came out here… In time to see them dropping napalm on the place… Jesus…"
"Why did the lady stay behind with the doctor?"
I hadn't realised she had been paying attention. She had thoughts of her own to get out in the open. "Jacqui gave up."
"Opted out." She used Jenner's euphemism.
"Yes."
"Why?"
I gazed at her. "She lost her family. Then she saw all those people die at the camp. She saw Jim dying… Too many people dying. That's why Andrea was going to stay. She lost Amy. And Dale, he was going to stay because he couldn't face losing Andrea… I guess she changed her mind as they're still here."
"Why give up though?"
"Some people do." How did you explain depression to a twelve year old who despite everything hadn't been ground down by the world? "It's harder for people who haven't had any bad things happen to them before. They're not used to it."
She nodded. She understood this. "They're not used to being scared."
"No."
"I wish I was brave."
"I don't even know what brave is. Was Glenn brave going into the city by himself all those times, or just stupid? I knew guys who did 'brave' things, and most of them ended up in jail for it. Sometimes being brave isn't the smart thing to do. Sometimes you're better off running away."
"I shouldn't have run away."
"You think you should have stood your ground? Tried to fight one of those things with your bare hands? Shane and T-Dog are big guys but even they couldn't do that."
"I shouldn't have run into the trees."
"If you had run back up the road, you would have been completely exposed and any other stragglers would have seen you and you'd still be running all the way back to Atlanta. And if you had run the other way…"
The kid was determined to blame herself but didn't say anything else on that topic. She had other thoughts though. "Do you think Fort Benning is a safe place to go?"
I had been honest with her so far and I didn't see a reason not to continue. "I think that everybody else would have had the same idea. Tens of thousands of people all going to the same place, just like Atlanta… No, I don't think it's a safe place to go. Just like the CDC."
"So why were we going there?"
"Where else?" I asked. "We never know what we might find. I don't think we'll find some safe haven but maybe we'll find other people and maybe… Maybe we can make a haven… I don't know. None of us know. We're all just guessing." And Rick and Shane were in charge because they were confident making guesses when no one else was. "What would you do?"
"Me?"
"Yeah. What would you do? Where would you go?"
She thought about it and her face knotted as she struggled with it. I could tell she hadn't been asked her opinion much, if ever, about anything. I knew the feeling. "I would go somewhere no one else would."
"And where's that?"
"Here."
"Here?"
"The middle of nowhere."
"Why?"
"Everyone was told to go to the cities, and even if the dead are leaving them now, there's fewer of them out here. So we find a place, put a fence around it and then if we see a lot of them coming, we just have to stay quiet."
It wasn't a bad idea. Obviously, it had its flaws but still, it was better than simply looking for ready-made salvation. "It would have to be somewhere with water. And I don't know what we would do for food."
"Grow it."
"Do you know anything about farming?"
"We grew beans at school." She shrugged.
I laughed. I had to. It was optimistic but it was still a better plan than any I had heard so far. Sophia gave me the big eyes. "I'm not laughing at you." I said quickly. "I think in a few minutes you've come up with a better plan than the adults and that's what's funny."
Her eyes got bigger. "You think it's a good idea?"
"Better than driving across the state hoping for the best." Now I shrugged. "It could work."
"Oh." She didn't know what to do with praise; faint as it was. That was sad.
[][][][][][]
She couldn't sleep. A twelve year old doing nothing for two days straight wasn't going to fall asleep just because it was dark. I had expended a little more energy but I still hadn't done much. I was as much awake as her. Worse even, as it still felt very wrong sleeping next to a child.
"My stomach hurts."
"I know." Our diet was not good. If we had been cooking our meals rather than just eating straight from the can, it might have been better but as it was, we had eaten nothing but cereal, fruit and vegetables for two days. That was a lot of fibre. Tomorrow we would have to brave the corned beef. I had never eaten sardines so perhaps it was time to try.
"I miss bread." She said.
"I would kill for a good cheeseburger."
"They always gave me stomach aches too."
"What did you like eating?"
"I always liked fish… Or I did." She was thinking of the fish-fry.
"You can have the sardines then."
I wasn't sure when we drifted off to sleep but she was the one who woke up first and woke me by shaking my arm vigorously. First I was too groggy to even understand her and then I heard what she had heard. Growling. Gurgling. Snarling. I knew it was outside but she didn't and that was why she was clinging to my arm.
"Sounds like it's stuck." I said, shaking away the fog from my head. I stood up and she didn't let go of my arm. "I'll have to get rid of it before it draws any of its friends. If it hasn't already."
As she didn't release me, I had to go to the window with her in tow and I recalled her earlier comment about bravery. I didn't feel brave myself looking out into the dark because even with a clear sky and moonlight, it was still inky dark. Even all the time in the Atlanta camp hadn't gotten me used to that pitch blackness.
We could however see the walker. It had blundered into a mound of garbage bags and now it was floundering about in them like a toddler in a deep ball pit. Every time it managed to pick itself up, it fell again, tearing bags and getting itself even deeper into a swamp of garbage. It seemed to confirm my theory that they did feel anger because it was getting more and more riled up in the trap.
"One good hit." I mused. "I need to take care of it." I told her.
She gave me the look. The frightened look that she wore almost every day at some point. But it was tempered by the knowledge that I did have to do something. She let go of my arm and I did feel more than a little regret that she didn't stop me. I didn't want to go brawling in the dark. But I had to.
"Go back to the bathroom. Don't watch."
At least I was used to creeping about in the dark. I didn't have that disadvantage, even if it was a different kind of darkness to in the city when you were never that far from a street light. I crept out and looked every which way for other walkers and saw none. I heard none. It didn't mean anything though. Until they saw a living person, they could be silent. As a grave.
It remained silent though, except for our friend in the garbage pile.
I saw no reason to take chances. I snuck around behind it or at least tried to as it kept changing direction as it flailed. It didn't see me though, focusing all its aggression on the ensnaring trash until I was close enough to take a swing at it with the shovel.
The first blow flattened it. The second blow caved in its skull. The third blow pulped it. And then as I stood over it, a second walker buried under the pile of trash lunged up and sank its teeth into my left fingers.
I instinctively pulled back my hand and it bit deeper. Harder. With a crack, it tore away two fingers. They stuck out of its lipless mouth as I swung the spade and buried the edge in its forehead. It could only have been fifteen seconds.
It hadn't bitten the whole fingers off. The tip of my little finger and half of my ring finger were gone. Gone. Bloody stumps left behind with the tips of the bones sticking out.
"Are you okay?" She called down as I came in.
"Stay up there."
People always kept their medkits on a top shelf in a cupboard in the kitchen if they didn't keep it in a bathroom cabinet. They kept theirs in the kitchen and that was good. Ideal.
I bit my right arm as the shock wore off and I really began to feel it. I knew what I had to do. I had seen so many bites and the only people who had survived where the ones who had cut away the bitten area. So in a sick, sick way, I was lucky to only have lost part of my fingers. But I had to lose more or I would go just like Jim and so many others.
I was in a kitchen. I had just what I needed. But who in their right mind ever considered amputating two of their fingers with a meat cleaver? To take their belt and wrap it around the wrist. Holding what remained of the fingers flat on the kitchen table with my other fingers curled in with the knuckles pressed against the table's edge. It was a small target and they were bleeding all over that table. So I couldn't close my eyes. I had to look.
The strange thought that passed through my brain in the instant before I brought the cleaver down was that I would be able to know which was more painful; being bitten or being cleaved. The answer… I wasn't able to give one. When the cleaver came down, I saw a blinding white light and no thoughts could possibly make it through the pain I felt. Being bitten was a shock. Cutting two of my fingers off was not.
It didn't seem possible but it could be worse. Sophia was stood there in the dark doorway into the kitchen and her face said she had watched what I had done.
"You weren't supposed to see that." I said and only through sheer will I didn't black out. I still had work to do. I couldn't just bandage it, I had to hold a pad of dressing in place to staunch the bleeding. I thought of cauterisation and remembered hearing on some med show I had watched on my stolen TV that usually that gave the patient a nasty burn that just became easily infected. It wasn't an option anyway; what would I burn myself with? I couldn't even heat soup.
"What did you do?!"
"I got bit."
"It bit you?!"
"No. The one I didn't see under the trash bit me." The dressing was becoming thick with blood. It would have looked so much worse in the light so I was grateful for the dark.
"You were bit."
"That's why I cut them off. There's nothing left of what it bit." Well, nothing attached. The pieces of bitten finger were on the table and Sophia stared at them. She figured it out. She was a smart kid.
"Will that work?"
"We'll find out." I pressed the pad harder which made it hurt more which made me lightheaded which made it hurt less. "Fuck!" I snapped. "Sorry." I said.
She moved suddenly across the kitchen and I was baffled. Even more when she took one of the whiskey bottles and brought it to me.
"You don't put alcohol in wounds." Something I had learned from medical shows.
"They drink it in the movies. It helps! I think…"
"Sure, why not?" I knew that I would need to be blind drunk to even remotely take the edge off of this but a bit wouldn't hurt. Or a lot as it turned out. I only stopped drinking because she stopped me.
I held the pad, which became thicker as I added to it as I bled, in place for twenty minutes before I had definitely stopped bleeding. I didn't know if it was blood loss or the third of a bottle of whiskey I had drunk that made the pain subside a bit but I peeled the pad away and then applied a new one and I couldn't stop Sophia from helping me bandage it. She wanted to help. She needed to help. Between it all, I could barely stand upright and the girl steered me up the stairs and into one of the bedrooms we hadn't used. At that point, I don't know…
[][][][][][]
I remembered my first hangover. It had been mild; just a sore head and mouth full of gravel. My second hangover, I had clung to the bed because the world around me had been spinning and if I hadn't held tight to the bed, I would have been ripped away and sent flying into the void.
This was worse than that. I had a blinding headache and my hand hurt. A lot. I didn't know why it hadn't woken me. Except, maybe that it had hurt so much that I had been unconscious rather than asleep.
"How do you feel?"
She had dark bags under her eyes. Her eyes were red. She had been awake all night, watching me. And she had my knife.
"You don't need that." I would have reached for it but I couldn't move. My head hurt too much. "How much water do we have left?"
She left to go look and in the time she was gone, I managed to roll from my front to my back. It punished my head and I pulled my left hand onto my chest. A hand with two fingers and a thumb looked very off, especially when you compared it to the other. The bandage seemed clean enough but that meant nothing.
She returned with one of the water bottles and I fought hard to only take a sip and not to drain it. I shouldn't have drunk the whiskey when we had so little to drink.
"How do you feel?"
"Hungover."
Sophia lunged forward suddenly and put her left hand on my forehead. "You don't feel hot. They all said Jim was hot when he was bit. They all said that. You don't feel hot." She spoke fast. Reassuring herself.
"Okay." I pried her hand away and then took my knife from her other hand. She lunged again and I tensed up as the girl hugged me.
"I thought you were going to die."
And she had sat awake all night terrified I was going to turn, holding a knife in her hand wondering if she was going to have to use it. If she could use it. "Not yet." I said awkwardly. I had never been hugged by a kid before. A crying kid. I gave her a pat on the back. Her skinny back. I thought the hug was lasting a worryingly long time when I realised she had fallen asleep in utter exhaustion.
[][][][][][]
I let Sophia sleep while I went to the kitchen. The pieces of my fingers were still on the table and I could see where the cleaver had gouged its surface after slicing through them. There was a lot of blood. Blood on the table. Blood on the floor. A trail of it from the door to the table.
I put the fingers in one of the empty cans. There was no way of getting rid of the blood without water to clean with. That was a lost cause.
Unwrapping my hand took time as every small movement sent stabbing pain up my arm. When it was unwrapped, it was not pretty. The only reason I wasn't sick at the sight of it was because I had seen far worse these past few weeks. I knew you didn't put alcohol on a fresh wound but I thought I was safe dabbing at it with some whiskey soaked cotton wool; though each dab made me want to scream. I knew if it got infected, it was pretty much game over for me. Without antibiotics or a doctor who knew what to do… So dabbing it with alcohol was the most I could do for it.
After cleaning it, I gave it a new pad and bandaged it before taking in my remaining eight fingers. My middle finger looked obscenely long without my ring finger accompanying it. My whole hand looked blunt even though more than half of it was still there. It hurt, though the sting of the alcohol had changed how that pain felt.
I had a headache and my hand hurt but I didn't feel feverish. Everyone who had been bitten had gotten feverish but I felt fine in that one respect. Perhaps I had done the right thing and gotten it in time. Or maybe I had a couple of days because of the relatively small bite rather than the chunk other people had had torn out of them.
I replayed the previous night in my head and then looked outside at the two downed walkers. Had I been reckless? I didn't think so. I just hadn't anticipated that as one walker loudly flailed about in a pile of trash, another was lurking silently beneath it. Why would I? These things… They just kept being unpredictable and now I was missing digits.
I began to shake and sat down on the floor. I had lost two fingers when I could easily have lost the whole hand or my life; one way or another. There was no reason I was still alive except sheer dumb luck.
[][][][][][]
Sipping coconut milk and watching a twelve year old sleep was… Strange. I didn't think it could possibly be stranger. The hangover was better but I had still lost blood and it was hot during the day. No AC. I lay on the bed with Sophia and I was definitely woozy. I knew people, I had known people, who lived every day like this and I hadn't seen the appeal then. I didn't now. I had seen a whole bunch of horrific things on the journey to bring me here and as I lay there, dozing but not falling asleep, I got to relive them. The first time I saw someone bitten… Losing a piece of their face… A writhing, snarling lump under a blanket in a back seat. Fire falling in the streets of Atlanta and figures writhing in the flames like the best descriptions of Hell from a Southern Baptist preacher. I had never been a believer but you couldn't live here without carrying the imagery with you and when you saw thousands of people it seemed engulfed in fire and not dying… Well, how you could not start to believe the eternal fires were real?
That was why I had been a ghost in the camp. Faces being bitten off, people trying to keep their dead loved ones restrained and Hellfire. That had been my limit. My breaking point. Then walkers had been all over the camp and I had snapped out of it as jaws snapped at me. What if I hadn't? I wouldn't be here… Missing a couple of fingers. I would be dead.
[][][][][][]
I heard walkers moving about during the day and I ignored them. I wasn't going out there today. I hardly moved from the bed and though Sophia did wake up, she didn't move either. She just lay there. She was tired, hungry, she missed her mother and she could hear the walkers too. The ever present danger gnawed at her because her mind was alert while mine was foggy.
It was dark when she moved to go and use the bathroom. It had gone quiet outside so there was no risk of the wine flushing toilet drawing unwelcome attention. When Sophia returned, she stared at me. At me, not my hand. How did I look? Someone who had had nothing but a sip of water and coconut milk all day? I was hungry, which was a good sign. But I didn't feel like eating. Given I had spent two days mostly sitting or lying around. I hadn't burnt a lot of calories so my body wasn't crying out for them. It seemed to be crying for morphine or Vicodin though.
"You don't look good." She said and then checked my temperature again. "You should eat something."
"So should you."
She took me at my word and returned with a can of soup and soda for both of us. I had to drink it because I couldn't take her guilt-tripping eyes. I did need to eat, even though cold vegetable soup was gross. I would have killed for a hot meal. And a cold soda.
"You said they would have found us by now." She was only stating a fact but her young voice made it sound reproachful.
"I thought so." It had seemed likely to me, given the distance. However, the world had become a much bigger place. A walk down the street was now an ordeal.
"What are we going to do?"
"Keep waiting." I was definitely not going to try and find them. "They're not going to give up."
She did find this reassuring. A bit. I knew she was thinking that some of them would think we were already dead. They would. And others wouldn't accept the possibility. Not Carol's little girl. With her freckles and light hair, Sophia really was the epitome of the Missing White Woman. "We're going to run out of water."
"We have soda."
"Not much."
"Let me worry about that."
"You're sick."
"I'm getting better." I had a vague recollection that it took weeks to completely replenish lost blood but I was no doctor.
"But what if-"
"Don't worry about it." I insisted. "Go to sleep."
"I slept all day."
"So did I. But it's dark and there's nothing else to do."
"We could talk."
"About what?"
I listened to the sound of a twelve year old trying to think of what she could talk to a teenager about and in these circumstances. She decided that the only to talk about was these circumstances.
"Where are you from?"
"Savannah."
"Why did you come to Atlanta?"
"Because they told us to. They said it was safer."
"Was Savannah bad?"
"Everyone with a boat took off."
"But you came to Atlanta?"
"I didn't have a boat and neither did anyone I knew."
"Do you think you should have stayed?"
"It wasn't a safe place to live before…"
I sensed her nod. "Where did you learn to use the… Things? The lock thingies?"
"Lock picks? Taught myself."
"Why?"
"So I could get into places without breaking anything to get in."
"You were a thief?!" Her child voice was hard not to laugh at, especially as it was the first time I had anyone react this way. Since leaving Savannah, I had been around nothing but far more respectable folks. Even the Dixon brothers.
"Yeah."
"So you… Like… You robbed people?"
"Yeah." In a nutshell. My criminal career was a bit more nuanced than that but essentially, that was it.
Sophia didn't know what else to say about this. Except for the obvious. "Mr Grimes and Mr Walsh are cops."
"I noticed." I said wryly.
[][][][][][]
Dawn came and I felt grotty from dehydration and too much dozing. I picked myself up and we forced down dry cereal with a small ration of water and a can of soda. There was too much sugar in the drink when you weren't getting enough water. But it was still better than nothing.
I cleaned my stumps and I didn't know a polite way to tell Sophia to go away. She became a very young child as she took in the spaces where fingers had been; clutching her doll tight. Even though she had watched me cut them off, hack them off… It was still a disturbing sight for her. But she wanted to see. She wanted to get used to the sight. That was admirable in its way.
The strangest thing was that I could still feel my fingers. The parts I had cut off. The tips that had been bitten off were gone but the pieces I had chopped off were still there. They itched. Not scratching my hand was tough. After rewrapping my hand, I had no clean bandages left. Compared to the first set of bandages though, the second were relatively clean.
I flexed my hand a few times and then tested my grip. Your little finger never really did much and the position of your middle and ring fingers was where the real strength of your hand was. With my ring finger gone, my left hand had lost half its strength.
It was a good thing I was right-handed.
Even though we needed more water, I didn't feel like going outside and being stupid. I was in no fit state. It was another day to spend sitting around doing very little and hoping for the best. Fortunately, or unfortunately, there were still more puzzles to kill time on. We both pointedly focused on the puzzle when we heard the snarling outside, drawing closer with every second until it was all around us, and then moving away. There were probably only four or five of them but the imagination played tricks. I saw the forest of legs passing by on the road and could smell the burnt feet.
Besides that, it was quiet enough. Very quiet. I was used to the city where even in the middle of night there was plenty of noise. Out here in the country, it was painfully quiet except for sounds that seemed almost intended to scare the shit out of you. The ever-present bugs and the occasional call of birds that I couldn't hope to identify but no dogs. Nothing like the normal sounds of a neighbourhood.
"I wish there was some clean clothes." Sophia seemed to speak just to say something.
"Have you looked?"
"There's nothing for me."
I took a moment and then had a realisation. "I've worn the same clothes for a month." I said and Sophia obviously wanted to say that it smelt that way. But she was either too meek or too polite. "I should take a look."
It was something to do for a few minutes though whoever had lived here were much bigger than me. The only thing I could find that was remotely wearable was a grey hoody. Baggy but wearable. It was not ideal for this weather but after peeling off my shirt, I actually felt much better. How long exactly had I worn that? How much sweat, dirt and blood had it soaked up? It was best not to think about.
I suddenly saw the girl. Since running after her on the road, my thought had been keeping her away from the dead and my own survival. And having lost fingers, I had good reason to have focused on myself. Now I saw her.
I found wet-wipes in the bathroom and she frowned as I brought a wad of them to her face. "You don't want to look a mess when you get back to your mom." I told her. After a day spent running in the woods, hugging the dirt and wading through a creek; she was filthy. There was a film of muck up to her knees from the water while her arms and face had a layer of grime over them that sweat had coursed trails into. On her face, those trails were from tears and now that I saw them, they were obvious. She had wept during the night when she thought I was going to die and carved two distinct paths down her freckled face. I obliterated the evidence with a dim thought about all the times the only kind of wash I had ever gotten was with wet-wipes from fast food joints. "Better." I said, suddenly feeling awkward. It probably wasn't the best thing for a stranger to have done.
Except that Sophia reciprocated and I held very still as she wiped at my face. Very, very still as she scrubbed vigorously at what I guessed was blood. Hopefully my blood and not the gunk off the walkers. I had likely gotten quite a bit of my blood on my face without realising it. What was blood on the face when you were missing pieces of yourself?
Sophia took longer to clean me and I suspected it wasn't because I was worse off than her but rather because it provided a distraction. When she was finally finished, we exchanged a shrug and sat there silently. Listening to a silent world. The lethargy was so strong that we didn't have the energy to resume working at the puzzle for maybe an hour. I had thought it would take them a day or two to find us. Maybe three. But here we were. Day four by ourselves. Perhaps I would have to take some drastic steps for us to be found or to start looking for the others myself. But my options were to go out there by myself and leave her alone for hours on end or to take her with me, and risk both of us out in the open. I only had a spade…
I did know that I would have to go out and continue scouring the neighbourhood for water. The weather was punishing and even with a slight breath of air from the open windows; it was sweltering in the house. We were going to sweat ourselves to death if I couldn't find more for us to drink.
Sophia watched the sunset with that melancholic expression she had perfected. She watched it sitting well back from the window so she couldn't be seen from outside. It was a neat touch that told me again that when she wasn't scared out of her wits; she was a smart girl.
She watched the sunset. I opened some cans for dinner. We could have just eaten out of the cans but using bowls gave us the pretence of civility. I knew how important that could be. When you were 'sleeping rough', you needed little reminders that you weren't an animal. It was the small things that mattered.
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I barely slept because I had a headache very much like a hangover. I was dehydrated; pure and simple. I had only found two bottles of water for us so most of what we had drunk had been the water from cans of vegetables and juices from fruit. It wasn't enough, especially after the whiskey I had downed. My head hurt more than my hand now.
She felt better than me though she was also in bad shape. She didn't complain though, besides pulling faces from the combination of bad food and lack of it. The dry cereal was probably the best part of our diet at the moment.
I was sick of this house that was decorated with my blood and also had a strong stink of wine to it from our improvised toilet. My fingers were in a can on my surgery table.
I checked my stumps. I didn't even know what it was I was looking at. It wasn't as if amputations were a common part of daily life, even for me. I had seen homeless people lose toes but many of them had been so far gone they hadn't even noticed. Though losing the toe usually led to an infection and the infection would generally kill them if they didn't visit some free clinic. They didn't look infected. But how did I know? There didn't seem to be any pus. No inflammation. At least I thought so.
Sophia wasn't comfortable with me going out but while I loathed this place, it had become familiar enough to her that she felt secure on her own. For a little while at least. I hoped she wasn't watching as I performed a rather disturbing errand.
I pulled apart the pile of garbage with the spade. Just in case. They were exactly how I had left them. Exactly. It was a stupid impulse and possibly insane. But I wanted my fingers back.
They were firmly in its teeth and I had to work them free, holding its head firm with my right hand and using my remaining left fingers to retrieve their lost… brothers.
It was only the tip of my little finger but almost half my ring finger. As much as it had been bitten off, I had cut off just as much. More even. I had no idea if that had been the right call. I probably never would. But after seeing other people burn out and die, it felt like better safe than sorry was the right thing to have done.
Didn't mean I wasn't pissed to have lost my fingers. I was a thief. Nimble fingers were kind of a requirement.
I went to search the houses I hadn't yet visited, staying well away from the burnt out garage, and paranoid of every leaf caught in the wind. It was hard to believe that despite the heat; it was autumn. Winter was just around the corner. What would the cold do to the dead? Would it affect them? If death didn't stop them, how could the cold?
I found cans. I drank the water from a can of beans just to take the edge off and thought about those huge water cooler jugs that Shane had found on the highway. That had been one hell of a lucky find. I didn't have the same luck. Expired juice. Expired milk. Enough whiskey to rival Al Capone. No water. Not a single tap with pressure. The only water I could find was in cisterns and that would probably poison us by the look of it. The only way to boil it was to start a fire and that would have to be done outdoors unless I wanted to burn a house down. And outdoors was not an option. Not with them roaming around.
One I encountered lost the top of its skull like taking the top off an egg. Just a humble spade. That was frightening. You really could use anything as a weapon. The second I bludgeoned to the ground and hacked apart with a few chops. Each jolt to my stumps hurt like bloody hell but I could still swing it with both hands. That was good.
I heard another. Beyond a fence and it moved sluggishly, like it was actually creeping up on me. I hung back, waiting, not quite lying in wait and by myself, I felt like any moment one was going to appear behind me and take a chunk out of my neck. Just like Amy… I hadn't seen it happen but I had seen the aftermath. Heard it talked about. Losing little pieces of my fingers, which I had wrapped in a napkin I had taken from a house, didn't compare to having a great chunk torn out of you.
It moved so slowly I almost called out to it to hurry up. But I was scared. I felt as if calling out would summon a whole swarm of them. I had to wait. Or run. I didn't feel like running though. Even though I wasn't particularly keen on standing my ground either. Did that mean I was just frozen on the spot with fear, listening to that slow, measured pace…
I brought the spade up slowly and then a boot appeared and I readied to bring it down.
"Jesus fuck!"
Daryl had a calmer reaction. He only grunted. And he didn't lower the crossbow until I put the spade down, which I did quick as my nerves shattered and I leaned against the fence. If his nerves had been as weak as mine, he would have put a bolt through my skull.
"Jesus fuck…" I could feel my heart beating in great thumps.
"Where's the girl?"
"She's safe. She's back there." I gestured vaguely, trying to get a hold of myself.
"You jus' left her alone?" He half-raised the crossbow in anger and looked ready to knock my teeth in after lowering it.
"She's fine. We needed water. That's…" He didn't need more than that. "Have you got any water?"
"What happened to your hand?"
"Bit."
"Bit?" This time he did raise the crossbow. "You been bit?"
"I'll explain later. Come on." I didn't care he still had it pointed at me. Daryl was here. We weren't alone. I took a few paces and my heart still seemed primed to explode and then I heard him follow. He didn't move softly now.
He was impatient and shot down a walker that came gurgling at us with the bolt passing a little too close to my head. I could feel his anticipation, and dread. He thought he had come this far and at the last minute something bad would happen. There was a massive strain in the man. Tension. Huge. He practically ripped the bolt free of the walker's head.
When he saw the sign and Sophia's name signed on it, he grunted again. A different kind of grunt, like he didn't quite believe it. I was breathing heavily and it had nothing to do with exhaustion. It was my tension.
The house was just as I had left it but he treated it as hostile territory; pointing his weapon every which way like he expected the dead to come crawling out of the walls.
"Sophia." I didn't yell it out. Just loud enough to carry upstairs. There was a pause and then the sound of footsteps. A pair of filthy white sneakers appeared on the top step. My tone of voice had scared her. "Look who I found."
Whose eyes were wider? Daryl or Sophia's? I had no idea. For a moment they stared at each other and then she crashed down the stairs and into him and the answer was definitely Daryl. I had found it awkward being on the receiving end of that hug but I hadn't been overwhelmed as he clearly was. He held the crossbow in one hand and gingerly patted her with the other while Sophia made noises that might have been words but could not be translated.
I took the opportunity to retrieve the other pieces of my fingers.
Daryl didn't miss a thing, taking in the blood stains and the slice in the table before finally the four pieces on the napkin. "You got bit." It wasn't a question this time.
"He cut them off." Sophia mumbled into his chest.
"Whut?"
I mimed it out. Biting the air where my fingertips had been and pointing at them on the table. Then I mimed chopping. The table told the rest of the story.
"Damn…" He said and then he knelt down so he could look Sophia over and she didn't let go of him, maybe thinking he was just a dream. She had been so scared that first night and day before becoming numb but now her emotions were back in full force. "Your mom she… She…" He struggled with words. "We'll get you back to her."
I wrapped up the fingers and pocketed them. "Lead the way." I said and pried Sophia off of him. She transferred her cling to me and he wordlessly passed me a canteen. I only took a sip before passing it to her. And then we left the house.