by Tyler Lahey
“How’s the fuel?”
“We’ve got enough.” Tessa carefully packaged the filer, and twisted the key. The ATV’s engine coughed and roared in response. “Wilder, with me. Get on.”
Wilder’s blemished, youthful skin stretched into a sheepish grin as he mounted behind her, manhandling his bulky rifle. Tessa suggested that he sling it over his back, and handed him a pistol.
Adira took the Minivan with the sliding door. Duke and Elvis entered and left it ajar, weapons at the ready. She grasped the wheel, feeling her heart pounding. She had never been on a food run. But she couldn’t fall behind. “Past the factory. Through the cathedral. Hit three or four houses in the Backwoods. In and out,” she whispered to herself. She heard hooting from the others. Unable to contain herself, she whooped in nervous excitement and dropped the steel to the floorboard.
…
“He doesn’t say much, does he?”
Tessa peered across the field at the stalking figure, as the wind whipped the wheat grass.
Adira nodded agreement. “He used to.”
“I heard he froze up. With Bennett and the others at the bridge. That kid got killed cause of him,” Wilder eyed her with rueful eyes.
Elvis stalked through the waist-high grass like a predator a stone’s throw away, with bloodshot eyes and his small hands clutching a shotgun. “I heard that too…” Tessa responded quietly.
“Luckily I’m here. So there’s no real need to worry,” Wilder tossed Tessa a casual wink and gave her a grope.
She shooed him away. “Have some respect! Why don’t you?”
Tessa felt she didn’t need anyone, but it sure felt nice. She had surrendered to the cocky boy’s juvenile but good-hearted attempts at courtship a few days before. She had know him, what, a month? Tessa shrugged to herself. “I was a bad girl. I slept with you and the only name I know you have is Wilder. What kinda name is that anyways? Did your parents give you that?”
Adira chuckled from up front as they approached as stand of barren, grey trees. “You really don’t hold back do you?” She muttered.
“I mean, I don’t blame her. It is an odd name. So is Duke. This is the Wild West. We gave ourselves Wild West names.” Duke shrugged, his pudgy arms shifting under a camouflaged sweatshirt. “It’s also why its ok for me to look like a total redneck now.”
Adira turned, her sultry eyes narrowing. “Wait, you two aren’t from the country?”
“We’re from Brooklyn. Went to school in Manhattan.”
“Well I like the façade. It suits you both.”
Duke hawked a wad of spit and put his hands on his hips. “Don’t mention it.”
“Elvis! We’re goin’ this way!” Adira strained her voice to reach the stalking figure. Elvis turned, his distant face a mask of stone. She indicated the dark tree-line ahead. Elvis nodded fiercely, and took off at a trot towards the wall of shadows. Adira looked back at the others in surprise before scampering to catch up.
“There ain’t gonna be nothing here,” Duke said, reaching out to let the waves of tall grass tickle his extended fingertips. The grass was dead, and the wind, cold.
“You don’t know that.” Tessa kicked him in the buttocks.
“I do too! When’s the last time you saw an infected anyways?”
“A week ago, we shot one outside the church while we were lookin’ for more cars to siphon gasoline from. And the food runners always find em, stalking around the town.”
Wilder worked to pull a bramble from Tessa’s long, curly black hair. “Have no fear dear. The valley protects us. And the Lord has deemed that I shall lead humanity after the fall, so I know I’m safe.”
She let him pull it out. “You weren’t so confident the other night, buddy.”
He grimaced dramatically. “Harsh! It had been a while.”
Tessa laughed, closing her eyes and trying to snatch some warmth from the greedy sun. It eluded her.
“Been a while, my ass…” Duke muttered from behind them.
“He was probably beating girls off with a stick in New York. Ain’t that right Wilder?” Tessa crooned.
Wilder frowned, pursing his thin lips in elaborate fashion as he scratched his peach fuzz. He had a pretty face, Tessa thought, almost feminine, but not quite.
“Something like that.”
“Ha! She doesn’t know,” Duke cackled.
“I don’t know what?”
Wilder groaned, adjusting the cap that sat on his greasy head. “Duke, you’ve done it again friend.”
Duke cackled, checking the scope on his sniper rifle as he walked. “You swiped his v-card! I fucking love it. That’s a beauty.”
“Huh?” Tessa started…but then the revelation came to her in all its awkward glory. “OH. So the name is fake, and so is the smooth-talkin’. Hmm.”
“Look, I’ll be the first to tell you. I was literally the most awkward kid on the block,” Wilder pleaded earnestly.
“Got that right,” Duke agreed.
“Ok wait-how were you a virgin till last week?” Tessa laughed, feeling good on her feet, with the rifle in her hands, with friends to talk to.
“I wasn’t particularly this outgoing, this smooth, this desirable, thi-“
“We get the fucking point,” she interrupted him with a wave of her hand.
“As I was saying, I was all caught up in how I was supposed to act to girls, how I was supposed to talk, all that. My sexual history pretty much involved me cranking it in my room a few nights a week.”
“OH my god. Too much detail. Just too…too much detail.” Tessa grimaced lightheartedly.
“What he’s tryin to say…is he never brought them down to his level. They sat on the pedestal. The big mystery. They weren’t just humans, they were more! And the compulsive self-pleasure couldn’t have helped his mindset.” Duke joined in, with zest.
Wilder muscled his way back into the conversation. “So I suppose what happened was that it never happened. And then it became a thing. A thing to lose. And the pressure mounts, month after month, all the while the other students are banging like jackrabbits. And then it seems like some insurmountable task.”
“A heart to heart from the one and only Wilder!” Tessa couldn’t help but respond with gaiety. How could this kid ever judge her? He was too busy judging himself. Was that selfish? Whatever. “Well I’m glad I could be of service.”
“Much obliged.” Wilder adjusted his cap, awkwardly.
“So what changed?”
“All this.” He gestured grandiosely to the fields and approaching woods, filled with little rusted trailer homes. He looked straight at her. “Like, who gives a fuck about that shit anymore? It’s liberating.”
They saw Adira and Elvis, little figures ahead, motioning them into the darker trees.
Tessa chuckled lightly. “I see your point. Was it all you expected?”
“It was…not that great. Great to finally do it for the sake of doing it, but not for the act itself.”
“Well thanks, that’s generally what I look to hear from a guy after I fuck him.”
“So crude! Have some manners!” Wilder exclaimed.
“Ooops! Was I supposed to say it some other ambiguous way? Dear me.”
They neared the shadows of the forest, which was decidedly dark, Tessa thought. The wind rustled in the leaves. There were no bugs making music, anymore. For a moment her heart surged back to the summer nights she knew as a kid.
Wilder laughed. “I’m sorry though. I was too nervous, just focusing on not finishing too soon.”
She touched him on the arm, and felt goosebumps. “Don’t do that. Lets worry about that later on.”
He smiled at her, and she felt the corners of her mouth rising. But the wind was cold. It pulled her back to reality. “It’s dark in there, isn’t it.” The trees rose ominously above the group as they reunited. Single leaves drifted down from their beams, lazily floating across the shifting brown grass.
Adira peered into the gloom. “Loo
k. There are a few houses.”
“Those aren’t exactly houses, are they…”
“They’re trailer homes. It’s on the last places we need to search in the valley.”
“What is this place?” Wilder asked.
Adira cleared her throat. “Jaxton said it’s where all the coal miners used to live. After that dried up and the money left, it became a community for a different kind of people…poor, white, and mean.”
Elvis stepped into the trees beside them, his once-fancy black leather boots crunching.
“I like what they did with the place. Art-Decco. Modern. Chic,” Duke indicated the rusted piles of lawn ornaments that lay haphazardly in the thick brown undergrowth. No one laughed. The survivors stalked forward, struggling as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Thick overgrowth crowded the spaces between the rusted homes. Adira looked back over her shoulder. The sun was sneaking behind the wall of the valley, its bleak light faltering. She cursed to herself. She had already fucked up the timing. Why hadn’t they brought the vehicles around the other side?
There was a ring of metal. Duke leapt into the air. Elvis shrugged nervously, indicating a rusted oil drum at his feet. “Jesus man, have some care,” Duke exhaled.
Adira blew a loose tendril of black hair out of her vision and forced herself to speak.
“Alright, let’s do this one by one. Canned food in the backpacks, and anything else useful. No gadgets, we’re all out of batteries and we save the fuel for the trucks…not the generators.” Her voice didn’t carry far on the wind, which had picked up. Against her instinct, she forced herself to take a step forward, past an iron weathervane. Elvis followed immediately, his eyes searching the gloom around the trailer. Their vision was restricted, so thick was the dying undergrowth.
“What is it?”
Wilder had stopped, and laid a hand on Tessa’s arm. His jaw was clenched.
“Elvis wanna take this house with me? You three take that one to the left.” Adira stepped up the rotten wooden steps to the white door, continuing to berate herself in her mind. The wind began to howl.
“Wait.” Wilder whispered. Tessa’s heart was pounding, though she couldn’t say why.
Adira slung her rifle across her back, and reached for the door handle.
“Wait!” Wilder shouted. Adira’s slender hand clutched the cold metal. Elvis snapped his head around in the dusky gloom.
Tessa felt like she couldn’t breathe. She craned her eyes to search the undergrowth, hoping with every fiber of her body that she would see nothing staring back at her in the snarling and twisted bushes.
There was a woman. She was standing twenty feet from them in the dense undergrowth, staring with un-moving and pale, vacant eyes. She was wearing, of all things, a thin white dress that ended at her calves. Her thin hair was sickeningly long; a hundred scattered tendrils four feet in length floated lazily on the late October wind. Those few tendrils that remained still ran down next to the sickly flesh of her long arms, to her upper thighs. Tessa could see a bite mark on her arm.
“Don’t fucking move,” Wilder forced out, his shaky voice a hoarse whisper.
Tessa felt her own heart hammering, hammering so hard she could barely breath. Why was the woman’s hair so long? It was intoxicating, sickening, horrifying. She couldn’t bring herself to look away. Without knowing it she dug her own long fingernails, long since un-painted, into Wilder’s forearm.
“Is she infected?” Duke whispered.
Adira took a step back with quaking limbs. She wanted to scream and run, but she was too frightened to move. She remembered what Jaxton had told her, about how he had always frozen in fear in the halls of high school. Do something!
Elvis was staring at the woman with a level gaze, unmoving in the last vestiges of sunlight. It would be dark soon.
“Hello?” Adira heard herself speak, and was ashamed. Her voice shook like the fluttering leaves above. “Are you ok?”
The woman remained motionless, regarding them evenly from a distance.
“We should leave.” Elvis spoke for the first time, his eyes never leaving the woman. “Now.”
“I second that.” Duke said in a rush, his panic evident.
Adira nodded, and slowly stepped back onto the bed of crunchy leaves.
Painstakingly, they walked backwards. The woman never stopped staring with that hunched, obsessed gaze. As they were about to clear the tree-line they turned their backs on her. “C’mon. I have no fucking idea what that was but lets get to the car,” Adira croaked, her mouth dry.
The only sound was of the wind, which now howled in the darkness. The sun burned on the horizon, a shimmering sliver that offered them their last prayer.
“Oh, my god.” Duke pointed backwards, into the trees.
There were dozens of them. Huge men with unkempt beards, ghastly women that looked like death, all staring at them with that obsessed, threatening, gaze that one couldn’t be sure indicated intelligence. There was something animalistic in those eyes. They stood at seemingly random intervals on the roofs, in the bushes, and among the trees. Rusted scythes and shovels hung from limp hands. Their pale eyes shone as the sun disappeared behind the ridge. And in that darkness, they charged.
Chapter Six
Jaxton racked the heavy weight in the old gym, breathing in musty air in disgust. He had lost strength. Looking in the mirror, he frowned. And he looked thinner.
“Don’t think about it too much. You can still put up more than me, bud.” Liam eased onto the bench press, his bulky form looking natural under the bar.
“So says the beefcake. The kid who would have pita and hummus and put on six pounds of muscle before the next workout.”
Liam repped out the weight with ease. “Hush, you. I’ll be fat as hell when my metabolism slows down. And you’ll be… silver fox status? Something like that.”
Jaxton laughed heartily. “What was that thing Troy used to do- said he used to lift before going out at night? So that he would have a pump on when he wore his fratty tank-top?”
Liam cackled. “Yes he did. Yes he did. Typical frat-star move.”
Jaxton grinned broadly. “We had some good times, no?”
“The best times were at the pump-house. The pump palace.”
“I feel like that terminology sounds so homo-erotic. But so hilarious.” Jaxton surveyed the faded paint on the concrete wall detailing the weightlifting achievements of some particularly beastly athletes in years past. The room’s faded leather pads still stank with ingrained sweat, and all the iron was rusting lightly.
“Sometimes I feel like there’s no point to doing this, staying strong like this.”
Liam indicated the bruise on his face. “I know why I do it now.”
Jaxton sighed, scratching his beard again. “I should have been there at the start.”
Liam shook his head vigorously. “No. Fuck no. I should have handled him myself. And Terrence took it to me. Do you know how that feels, man?”
Jaxton sighed. “You know how it was when I went to school here. Shame is worse than fear. It’s more powerful than fear. At least for me. And apparently for you too.”
“I need to get back at him. In front of the others.”
Jaxton nodded, “That doesn’t sound like you. But I know. I remember shame. I fucking hate it. I hated carrying that fear. That I would fail in front of others, that others would see me backing down, or letting someone walk on top of me.” He ran his callused hands over the rough iron bar, and raised fierce steely eyes. “But we’re in a new world. We’re strong, you and I. Never let anyone shame us. Hit first, think later. Better to have others see you act, than freeze. Better people think you’re crazy, or think you’re stupid, than think you’re a coward.”
Liam opened his mouth, considering his old friend’s words, when the hand-held crackled.
Adira.
Jaxton snatched it from the musty rubber mat. “Adira, Adira try again. I didn’t understand you.” He nodded at Liam, conc
erned but confident. But in an instant the confidence was gone.
“Being chased! We need help! Th-“ The girl’s voice was broken up with static. But they had both heard it. Her voice was laced with panic. “Through the Cathedral!” More static. Jaxton was motionless. “Help me!” Jaxton’s eyes burned bright. “JAXTON!” Her voice sounded powerfully, on that single word.
“Adira! Adira!” There was nothing. “Fuck. Oh no. No. I need to go.”
Liam grasped his shoulder. Jaxton’s eyes were blazing and twitching with a possession. He would stop at nothing to save the girl, and until that was achieved he would heed no advice, take no precautions, and not allow anything to get in his way. Fear steered him. Liam opened his mouth, “I’m with you. Guns first.”
“Guns.” Jaxton nodded ferociously, licking his lips. They left the musty tomb of iron to the growing darkness.
Jaxton barreled through the double doors of the gymnasium, past a group playing badminton next to the four horses, blissfully unaware. Into the next room he charged, and past several barricaded entrances. Two men on guard duty shouted out in the hallways, but he didn’t hear them. Liam summoned them at once. Without question they followed. They had been cooped up in the school too long. And all knew Jaxton held Adira close. She was a muse to all the others, in her sultry mystique. They would fight for her, and for Jax.
They ran past Harley helping a girl with a fever eat cubed ham for the third time today, on a soiled cot in the cafeteria. Liam motioned to her, and she came.
The small band burst out above the fields of cold-weather vegetables and across from the dam stocked with new tiny fish. There were several ATVs still in the parking lot, and several old Jeeps and SUVs without digital chips. Jax slammed on the hood of one. “We’ll take this! Let’s move! Gas! GAS!”