Cora sighed worryingly and tried the radio once more, “Kieran—If you can hear me, please, just radio in. I know you like to act all cool and mysterious but… We’re worried about you, man.” Cora confessed something which Kieran would’ve been delighted to hear.
“Has he still not checked in?” Sandra, having overheard Cora’s concerns, came over to her.
“I’m afraid not.” Cora verified dismayingly.
“We have to find him, Cora.” Sandra, having been rather close to Kieran, was adamant about locating her friend.
“We will, I promise.” Cora reassured her, “I’ll organise a search party and—”
“No!” Sandra refuted this notion, “Not a search party, everybody.”
Though she was reluctant to permit this request, Cora was also willing to pull out all of the stops in order to find Kieran, “Alright.” She activated her walkie-talkie again, “Everyone, listen to me. Whatever you’re doing, stop it. Right now, our priority is finding Kieran…”
Emile had made his way to the pizza place which Marianne was held up at.
Before he could enter, however, Marianne stepped outside and stood in his way.
“Marianne!” Emile was surprised to see her storm out so suddenly.
But Marianne wasn’t looking up at him. Instead, still firmly gripping her revolver at her side, she was staring dismayingly at the ground.
“Did you—You didn’t, right?” Emile, although wanting Cora gone, did not necessarily want her dead.
Marianne didn’t respond.
Sighing, Emile opted to comfort her nonetheless, “You did what you had to do… There would’ve been a far more peaceful approach to go about it, yes, but—I get it, Marianne. We’ve been friends for a long time now. Tia was a threat to everyone, so I understand why you did it. One more breakdown and the next bullet could have—”
‘BLAM!’
Abruptly ending his sentence, Emile felt the burning sensation a bullet rip directly through his heart. With a startled and petrified look on his face, he gawked down at the wound in his chest. As he slowly tilted his head back up, he was greeted by a sight that he had never thought he would’ve been on the wrong side of.
Marianne stood her ground, holding her Smith & Wesson revolver out in front of her with a firm grip, the 6-inch barrel emitting smoke following the gunshot.
“I only loaded one bullet into this revolver…” Marianne echoed the words that she had earlier spoken to Tia, thus confirming that she had spared the little girl’s life, and instead saved the bullet for her old friend whom she no longer recognised as such.
Blood began to leak from Emile’s mouth as he swayed back and forth for several seconds.
In these few seconds, Marianne listed off all of the reasons that she had for doing what she had just done, “You cheated on the man who would die for you, you got the girl with whom you cheated on him with pregnant, you asked me to separate that same girl’s little sister from her forevermore—Who even are you anymore, Emile?”
Then, Emile fell backwards. Finishing himself off, he bludgeoned his head on the scuffed stone pavement as he collapsed onto the ground.
As she heard Emile’s skull crack, it suddenly came over Marianne what she had really just done; she had now made herself no better than her victim.
“Did anybody else hear that?” A panicked Rob cried out over the open frequency.
“Hear what?” Gwen, presumably still tending to Adela in the hotel, answered back.
“I don’t know—It sounded like a gunshot.” Rob was evidently close enough by for him to have heard Marianne’s assassination of her own friend.
“I’m still in the watchtower,” Annabelle called in, “I didn’t see nor hear anything. Where are you, Rob?”
“Michelle and I were just checking out this old school in the rough part of the safe zone,” As he said this, Marianne quickly panicked, for it turned out that people were much closer by than she had anticipated.
After quickly switching her radio off, and taking a few deep breaths to keep her composure, she grabbed Emile’s corpse by the legs and dragged him into the restaurant behind her.
Mere minutes later, Michelle and Rob came trundling down the street where the murder had recently happened; though they had stopped only a quarter of the way in, which was quite far from the pizza restaurant.
“Crikey, that gives me the creeps.” Rob remarked as he looked down the street; it was even more decaying and dilapidated than the rest of the untreated areas within the safe zone.
“Let’s try this way,” Michelle nodded towards the perpendicular street, “Come on.”
As the two of them cluelessly ran off, they would never know that they were just ten seconds away from a large pool of blood that stretched out into a trail that led inside the seemingly innocent yet eerie-looking pizza place…
Interlude
Every survivor has a tale to tell.
For some of them, it’s a dark secret from their past. For others, it’s how desperate they became to stay alive in the depths of the apocalypse. For a few, it’s the conflict that arose after the exposal of several home truths.
Now, we take a look at what exactly these tales are some of our struggling survivors…
Chapter 21: Left Behind
EUROPE
OCTOBER 2029
“Dad! Taylor!” Natalie cried out in desperation; along with several others who had initially stayed behind at the refugee camp, she had decided to moved out in search of any sign of what had happened to Xavier and Taylor.
“Over here!” One of the survivors cried out, having made a rather unfortunate discovery.
“Oh please, please don’t be.” Natalie’s eyes were wide in fear and anticipation as she ran towards where the voice was calling out from.
There were three or four other survivors huddle around whatever their distressed ally had found.
“Move! Please!” Natalie barged them out of the way as she fought towards the front of the small crowd.
Then, her wide and frightful eyes quickly produced tears, the rest of her face depressing into remorse as they did so.
“I’m—Natalie, I’m so sorry.” A fellow survivor from the camp rubbed her back to comfort her as he expressed his condolences.
“Dad…” Natalie was absolutely heartbroken to see the decaying corpses of both her father, Xavier, and her friend, Taylor, decaying on the roadside with flies hovering around their rotten flesh.
“It appears there was a struggle,” the man comforting Natalie informed her, “They certainly didn’t go down without a fight, if that makes you feel any better.” He clearly did not understand sympathy, as this was of no consolation to Natalie whatsoever.
As she continued to stare at the bodies, she noticed that both of them had several stab wounds with dried out blood riddled up and down their torsos.
“Who would—Who would do—Such a thing?” Natalie stammered as her lips quivered with grief.
The survivor shrugged, “Somebody without a heart, I should imagine.”
But little did either of them know that the people responsible for these deaths were the same robed cultists that had erected the crucifixes outside of the refugee camp…
OCTOBER 2030
It had been a year since Elliot rallied a blood-thirsty group and left for Prague with nothing but vengeance on their minds; the same mission that resulted in the death of her father and her best friend.
In the year that had passed, poor Natalie had been left all alone.
The few survivors that were left at the refugee camp had all soon departed, feeling too sickened and depressed by the memories of the six crucifixes.
Not long after everybody else had taken their leave, however, Natalie herself had packed up and left the refugee camp behind; headed in the opposite direction from Prague, vowing to leave her old life behind instead.
Currently, she found herself making a long and perilous trek through the dead and desolate woods of Germany and
on her way towards France.
Occasionally, when the overgrowth was too much, she would have to use the roads to make progress with her journey. However, she tried to avoid doing this as much as she could, for every time she saw a roadside, she would remember the rotten corpse of her father lying down in front of her.
Natalie had spent the past year of her lonesome journey thinking, dreaming, and daydreaming about the same thing: What happened to everyone who headed for Prague? She had assumed the worst for all of them after the discovery of Xavier and Taylor’s bodies, but had also quickly gone back on this assumption, as no more of her allies had shown up dead in her path since that fateful day.
A part of her wondered if, perhaps, Elliot’s vendetta was actually successful, and the reason why he and the others never came back was because they, like Natalie, wanted to move on from the past.
Another part of her thought the opposite to be true; that Elliot’s vendetta had failed, and everybody had been killed, which seemed far more likely to her, though she refused to let his thought control her mind as best as she could.
There was even a small part of her that thought it possible her father was not actually dead, but rather, in her desperation to find him, her mind had just hallucinated the entire discovery. However, in her heart, she could feel that this just wasn’t true.
From up ahead in the woods, Natalie heard a twig snap.
After all she had been through, she wasn’t willing to take any chances. With quick reflexes, she dropped to the ground and flattened herself against it, glaring through the gently breezing past leaves like a predator ready to pounce.
Then, from in the same direction, another twig snapped.
Carefully, Natalie gripped her holstered knife.
And then, the source of the noise emerged from the bushes; it was a lonesome fox.
Slowly, Natalie released her grip from her knife. Instead, her face filled with awe and wonder as she looked up the mystical creature.
The fox had beautiful and silky red fur along with beady brown eyes and beguiling pointy ears; it was a rare yet beautiful sight that made all the hard times of this apocalyptic world worth living through.
Natalie, wanting to pet the creature, had absent-mindedly decided to jump up to her standing position.
Instantly noticing her, the fox darted back into the bushes.
“No, wait! Come back!” Natalie cried out as she gave chase to the animal. “Please don’t go! I’m sorry!” She was desperate to call the animal back to her, for she had not seen even the slightest signs of life since the last survivors departed from the refugee camp.
Flailing her arms about wildly, Natalie brushed all the leaves and bushes out of her path, desperate to catch up with the fox still.
But then…
‘PING!’
Something had been set off up ahead.
‘YELP! YELP!’
Moments later, the fox was desperately crying out for help.
“Oh my God!” Natalie proclaimed.
She had found the fox in a small opening deep within the forest; it had an arrow sticking out of its’ bleeding leg, as it desperately tried to scramble off of the ground and onto its’ feet.
“It’s alright! I’ve got you!” Natalie dropped to her knees at the foxes side, quickly examining the wound to see what she could do. “It would really help if you stopped flailing about like that.” She flippantly remarked to the animal.
Noticing the direction from which the arrow had been fired, Natalie traced her eyes across the opening; there was a loose tripwire skewed across the ground from where the fox had unknowingly stumbled over it.
Then, Natalie saw what the tripwire had been connected to; there was a makeshift contraption hidden within the bushes that strongly resembled the system of a basic bow & arrow.
“Bugger.” She commented to herself as she looked back over the poor animal’s wound.
The fox was continuing to mindlessly flail around, which in turn, was causing it to lose even more blood.
“No, don’t do that!” Natalie held the animal down firmly, causing it to wince even louder. Instinctively, she retracted her hands from it, “Sorry, sorry! I’m just trying to help!”
As a breeze came through the opening, the air had shifted the arrow ever so slightly – less than a quarter of an inch, in fact – which had enlarged the wound and caused the fox to lose even more blood.
“Oh God! Oh God!” Natalie cursed aloud in desperation as she hurried herself to think of a solution.
OCTOBER 2031
Natalie was growing up rather fast. When her father had left her to avenge her mother, she was deep within her teen years. Now, she would soon be old enough to go to university – In the old days, that is.
She had a large, sharp, and double-ended wooden spear slung over her back. She also had a utility belt strapped around her waist in order to carry a water canteen, a knife, a handgun, and a pouch of treats.
No longer haunted by her ghosts, Natalie fearlessly walked the roads of France. She didn’t live in one particular place, but rather, she would set up camp in a new location every night as she moved around the country in search of any lost souls who needed her assistance; but so far, she had not encountered anybody that needed saving.
A pitter-patter of footsteps came running out from an old and decaying building on the roadside; it was the fox.
“Find anything, Xavi?” Natalie asked the fox, whom she had named after her deceased father.
As Xavi came running over to her, the poor fox looked up at her with ‘puppy’ eyes as if to tell her that he had found nothing.
Natalie smiled down at her companion, “Well, you tried.” She told him with a smile as she reached into the treat pouch.
Instantly, Xavi darted around rather excitedly in circles.
“Here you go, buddy.” Natalie threw several strips of beef jerky onto the ground.
Not being a fussy eater for a single second, Xavi gobbled the treats up. As he ate them, Natalie crouched down and stroked him lightly.
OCTOBER 2032
Three years after the group had left for Prague, and by extension three years after her father’s death, Natalie had still not found out what exactly had happened to rest of her allies.
Currently, she was on her third lap around the entirety of France, still vowing to assist any lost souls whom she would encounter along the way.
But just as was the case in the previous year, Natalie had found nobody. The closest thing she had found to a person who may have needed help was an old coffee-stained note written by a poor sister to her deceased brother. Though given how old the note was, Natalie had assumed that the two had been reunited elsewhere by this point.
Xavi whined at Natalie’s feet.
Rolling her eyes, she reached into her treat pouch. “You’re gonna have to wait a while after this lot I’m afraid,” Natalie forewarned her companion, having now run out of treats for him, “Alright, here you go.” She threw him the last pile of bacon trimmings that she had left, which she had acquired from a mysterious butcher whilst he ventured around Europe, though obviously, this butcher was not someone who required Natalie’s help.
OCTOBER 2033
This year had presented Natalie with more luck. In recent months, she had encountered several survivors whom she had been delighted to help get back on their feet.
In his old age, Xavi was beginning to become rather slow, and would often lag behind Natalie a lot. At some points, she would even carry him just to make sure he didn’t fall too far back.
“You’re a big boy, aren’t you?” Natalie commented about Xavi’s weight, for now was one of those times when she was having to carry him in her arms.
Xavi was too lethargic to squeal or react in any noticeable way.
“Ah!” Natalie noticed a small farmhouse down the end of a gravel road in the distance. “What do you think, Xavi? Nice place to take a rest?”
Again, the fox did not respond.
D
eciding for both her and her companion, Natalie walked on down the road and into the sunset, headed for the nearby farmhouse.
As the months went on, however, Natalie and Xavi’s stay at the farmhouse had quickly becoming more than just a one-time place to rest. Instead, they had now turned this place into their residence.
Natalie had given up with touring France with the mission to save people, for she felt horrible forcing Xavi to do so much walking after all his years of service to her.
OCTOBER 2034
Near to the present day, things had turned bad for Natalie.
Xavi’s seizures were beginning to become more frequent, and he would now spend most of his days lying around not doing anything.
Knowing that the end was near for her friend, Natalie knew that there was only one thing she could do for her friend.
“It’s alright, Xavi. It’s alright.” She stroked his head lightly for the last time, before slowly taking several steps back from the haystack on which the fox was currently resting.
As if he knew what was about to happen, Xavi closed his eyes tightly.
“Just—Just go to sleep, Xavi.” With a jittery hand, Natalie slowly raised her pistol as she wiped a tear from her own eye.
‘BLAM!’
Just like that, the deed was done.
After the gunshot had finished ringing out through the farmhouse, everything was silent again. The loud bang had caused the few nearby birds that were still alive to flee into the sunrise.
After wrapping him up in a blanket, Natalie had taken her friend’s corpse outside. Respecting him as much as she would a human, she carefully lowered him into his shallow grave.
“Rest in peace… My friend.” Natalie solemnly declared as she held back an intense flurry of tears.
Grabbing the shovel, she slowly and respectfully piled the dirt over Xavi’s wrapped up corpse.
Human Nature (Book 4): Human Nature IV Page 20