Morning sun broke through the trees and woke me. Actually, the rain was what woke me—that and the nightmare of greedy hands tearing at my clothes to get to my warm skin underneath. I retched and sneezed as I woke, the feeling of thick fingers both imagined and not, still fresh in my mind. The rain pelted my face as it slipped between the leaves of the trees. It was icy cold and I gave a series of loud sneezes before I had even the chance to properly sit up.
“A-tissue, a-tissue, we all fall down!” Joan chirped next to me.
I righted myself. During the night that shall now only be called “The Night of Self-Loathing and Needing to Constantly Pee,”
Nova had come to sit with me. She still seemed like she had a fire up her ass, but she at least seemed calmer than she had all day. She’d sat with me and smoked for a while before I’d finally decided to get some sleep myself. But instead of retreating to the now-aired-out truck to get some shut-eye, I’d stayed by her side.
Maybe it was the way she had continued to glare at Deacon while he slept fitfully after exhaustion had finally sucked him under. Or maybe not. Because yeah, she was calmer, but her eyes still held their deadly intent. I trusted her less now than I had earlier. That realization made my heart hurt even more.
Joan sat down next to me, her expression sad and thoughtful, and I was brought back to the present.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, stretching out my back.
Joan shook her head miserably. “Sometimes it comes back to me.”
“What does?” I realized that this was Joan talking now, not Crazy Pants. I had come to the conclusion at some point yesterday that she wasn’t totally crazy, but she also wasn’t quite there anymore. I think trauma had taken a lot of her mind, which I couldn’t blame her for. I was only surprised more people weren’t like her. She was two people, and had purposefully fractured herself to cope with this world, and would flip from persona to persona depending on the desperation of the situation.
She was Crazy Pants who was stark raving bonkers and did whatever she pleased without worrying about the consequences. And then she was Joan, and this was the real her. She came in drips and drabs and mainly reminisced about the past, telling us tales of her husband and life before the infection. I somehow preferred Crazy Pants to Joan. At least Crazy Pants didn’t make me feel so depressed.
I leaned in closer, breaching her personal space and getting nearer to her than I really wanted to. That sounds heartless, but she still smelled of actual shit, so judge me all you want. But still, the more compassionate side of me wanted to offer her what little comfort I could.
“Everything.” She looked up at me, her expression distraught. “Everything comes back, Nina, and it hurts so much.”
It was the first time she had used my name, and it sounded strange coming from her. Her eyes twinkled with unshed tears and I knew she was going to lean in for a hug. I braced myself for it—for the snot I could see starting to dribble from her nose, for the way her scent of shit and dirt would cling to my clothes. I opened my arms and waited for it because I was trying my hardest to not be a total bitch these days, and this would be an un-bitchy thing to do. She continued to stare at me for several moments, and just as I was about to tell her to give me a hug because I was feeling like an asshole with my arms opened wide like I was replicating some kind of biblical image, she stuck her tongue out at me and blew a raspberry. Spittle splattered my face, and I gagged as she stood up and moved off to squat behind a tree without another word.
I blinked uncertainly until I heard her grunting loudly.
“Oh for God’s sake!” I hissed and stood up on shaky legs.
I looked around, not seeing Nova anywhere but finding Deacon sitting in the truck, his face looking down, still fixated on the baby in his arms. His mouth was a thin line of anger, frustration, and sadness. There was no way out of this shitty situation. I was trapped between a crazy woman who was endlessly shitting and a depressed man carrying around a zombie baby. I pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping for some relief, but the meaningless gesture brought me none.
A crack to the left of me had me drawing my katana and turning, only to find Nova coming out of the trees.
“Easy, tiger,” she said without emotion. She held up a snake and something furry that I couldn’t distinguish in her hands. “Breakfast.” She grinned.
I forced out a smile. “I was sleeping and you left.”
“I was close by. Besides, I gave Joan a signal to call me if there was trouble.” Nova squatted down and began to build a fire.
“A signal?”
“Yeah, a signal.”
“Dude, that’s not cool. She doesn’t even know what day it is—you can’t rely on her to give you a signal. You should have woken me.” I forced my voice to stay calm and not raise in anger. But it was hard.
Nova let out a frustrated breath. “You wanted meat, I brought you meat. Stop whining. Joan would have signaled me, trust her.”
As if on cue, Joan came back from around the tree. I was unimpressed to see that she was sniffing her fingers.
“Joan, what was the signal to call if there was danger?” Nova yelled to her while simultaneously looking at me obnoxiously.
Joan stopped sniffing and looked at the ground for a moment before looking up with a smile. “I had to slide to the left, slide to the right, cha-cha-cha!”
She even did the dance.
I blinked at Nova, waiting to see if this was the signal she had given, but after an awkward five seconds Nova burst out laughing.
“Okay, okay, point taken!” She laughed harder and turned back to the fire. “She fuckin’ cha-cha’d.” She shook her head, her long, greasy red hair, dangling down her back in a matted ponytail, swayed from side to side.
“It’s not funny,” I chuckled back. And it wasn’t funny. At all. I could have been eaten in my sleep! But hearing Nova laugh again, and seeing Joan cha-cha in the middle of the forest in this super tense weird ass situation was as bizarre as it was humorous, and I couldn’t help a small smile from slipping out. “Wake me up in future, okay?”
“Okay,” Nova replied, still laughing. “I promise.”
I walked over to the truck, stepping over the deader alert traps we had set and opened the door. The smell hit me like a brick to the face. The stench of death was getting stronger. Deacon’s eyes met mine with angry force, almost daring me to say something about the smell of death. His eyes were shadowed by dark rings underneath, and the whites of them were red from lack of sleep. A light sweat covered his pale brow, but he stared me down defiantly. I swallowed down the bile in my throat and tried to breathe through my mouth, but I knew it was no good. There was no way that Nova was getting in this truck with that thing. I blinked uneasily, not sure what to say. Luckily, he broke the tension first.
“We’ll get in the back,” he said calmly, pre-empting what I was going to say to him but was struggling to find the words for.
I nodded awkwardly. “I think that would be best.”
I held his gaze, trying not to let my eyes drift down to the wriggling bundle he held, but it was impossible. He looked away first, and together we looked upon the face of death in his arms.
The baby should have been a sweet, rosy-cheeked miracle, but instead its skin was gray and sallow, almost translucent in appearance, enabling us to see the dark lines of disease beneath its papery thin skin. Its hairless skull was misshapen, an odd angle to it, and its eyes stared back at me unblinking. Foggy and full of death, they were wide with hunger. It made the same noises it had been making all last night and yesterday, but upon seeing me it grew louder, as if it had grown accustomed to Deacon now, and knew that he was there to protect it. I, on the other hand, was food.
I gasped as it fought to free its arms from the tight blankets wrapped around it. Deacon stuck one of his dirty knuckles in its mouth, and it began to gnaw away at it with its rotting gums, much like a baby would do to a pacifier.
The messed-up thing was, Deacon was pacifying it, even though we both knew that the baby was actually trying to eat him. It was only for its lack of teeth that he was safe.
I shuddered, but forced myself to calm. “Are you hungry?” I asked quietly.
Deacon shook his head no, though I knew he must be hungry by now. “I’ll get in the back,” he mumbled again.
“Okay,” I replied tersely. I looked away. “You know this is wrong, right?” I looked back up and gestured toward the baby.
Deacon looked right back at me, his eyes full of fire. “This is my baby. The last part of my wife. There’s nothing wrong with that,” he growled.
“Deacon, that baby is—”
“Mine!” he cut me off. “This baby is mine. It didn’t want to be this, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, but it is what it is, and I love it just the same.”
We stared at one another for a moment—me feeling confused by my total understanding of his emotions, but not wanting to accept it, either, and him hating me for making him question his own sanity. Because that’s what it came down to: he had lost his damn mind, and the fact that I understood and sympathized with a murderer and someone that was carrying around a zombie baby was freaking me out.
“Stay away from my baby!” he yelled loudly, his voice gravelly with emotion, and I flinched from the force of his words.
Deacon opened his door, climbed out, and moved around the side of the truck to get in the back. It didn’t go unnoticed that he left the door open to air it out. I turned around and saw Nova marching over toward us, her gun in her hand, her expression one of pure hatred.
“Nova, no!” I yelled at her.
But she didn’t listen. Nova barged past me, though there was plenty of room for her to pass without nearly knocking me over.
“You’re an asshole!” I yelled and ran after her. I grabbed her before she made it around the back of the truck. “Stop.”
She shrugged out of my grip, but I grabbed her with my other hand and yanked her backwards, and she spun to meet me.
“What? He could have hurt you.”
“No, it wasn’t like that,” I pleaded.
“We have to end this now, Nina,” she yelled furiously back. “I won’t let him hurt you or anyone else.”
“Don’t use me as the bait. Don’t fucking do that.”
“I’m not,” she said with no conviction.
“Yes you are. It’s not up to you to decide if he dies,” I pleaded.
Nova pushed me and I stumbled backwards.
“And it’s not up to you if he lives!”
We stared at each other, both of us panting in anger. We had come to a stalemate, because she was right, but so was I. It wasn’t up to either of us to decide this.
“So then why don’t we let him go?” I said cautiously, the thought still forming. “He’s got his vengeance, and he has his punishment.”
Her mouth twitched as if to say something, but she didn’t speak. She put her gun in her waistband after flicking the safety back on. “What punishment? We can’t just let him go—not after what he did, Nina.”
Her words were raw and throaty while she spoke, and I knew she was right again, but then what? What was the point in dragging him across the state back to our base only for him to be killed there? I thought of the look in his eyes as he’d stared down at his little bundle of deathly joy. The smells and the sounds it emitted, the horror that he had to continually look upon. And for how long would he be able to do it? To keep it with him? To let it live this horrendous life?
“I think he’s paying for what he did. He’s been paying all along.” I pleaded with her to understand my meaning, and I wondered whether I was being even crueler by suggesting we let him go.
Nova looked at me and swallowed so loudly I could hear it. “Fine. Let him go. See if I care. He doesn’t get to take any of our gear, though. You send him on his way with the clothes on his back and that’s it.”
I thought about it for a moment. “We should at least give him a meal.”
“You’re pushing your luck,” she retorted, to which I rolled my eyes. “Fine. One meal and then you get him out of my sight. One meal. After that he better be long gone before I change my mind and blow his brains out—his and that disgusting thing!” she huffed and stormed back over to finish breakfast, leaving me with the happy news of telling Deacon that he was free to go.
The thing was, I wasn’t sure if he would want to leave. Sure, he was worried about what Nova would do, but let’s be honest: we had barely trained a gun on him since setting the compound on fire. He could realistically have left whenever he wanted to. Yet he had stayed.
“Shit,” I mumbled as I made my way to the back of the truck.
Deacon was making himself and the dead baby more comfortable in the back when I looked in. His eyes immediately sought out mine, his hands instantly curling into fists as he pulled the baby closer to his chest.
“What?” he barked out.
I shifted from foot to foot, feeling massively uncomfortable and wishing that I would have kept my mouth shut.
I cleared my throat before I spoke. “You can go,” I stated. This should have been good news to both him and us, yet I felt awful, and his glare did nothing to ease my guilt.
“Go?” he asked, sounding confused.
“Yes. I spoke to Nova and we agreed to let you go.” I stepped back to allow him some room to exit the truck. “You can have some breakfast before you go. We have meat, sort of. Nova caught a snake and something fuzzy.” I rambled on nervously, my words tumbling out faster and faster as I watched the confusion and hurt cross his face. “I thought it was a rabbit, but when I think about it, I actually think it might be squirrel. Who the hell knows? In fact, it’s probably best not to think about it and just eat it—”
“Where will we go?” he asked, cutting into my long ambling speech.
I stopped talking and took a deep breath. “I don’t know, but you can’t come back with us.”
“Why?” he asked softly, his words almost a plea to me.
I looked away, feeling guilty and angry all at the same time. “Because they’ll kill you and…and the baby if you come back with us.” I looked back up to him.
His eyes were still pinned on me, and I watched as his Adam's apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. “
You have to pay for killing all those people, Deacon. But this is your one chance. While I don’t agree in any way with what you did, I can understand the place you must have gotten to, to see that as your only option. I get it, but I can’t condone it, and neither will anyone else.”
A single tear dripped from the corner of his eye and he made no move to brush it away. “But look what they did to my family.” His large chest heaved, each breath painful to him as he looked down at the baby in his arms and then held it out for me to see. I couldn’t stop the painful pang in my chest as I looked at the dead baby’s sallow face.
I agreed with him in some respect: they
did
need to pay. At least, the ones who did this needed to pay. But Deacon had made everyone pay—innocent people—and for that there could be no mercy. However, I wasn’t going to be the one to dish out the punishment to this man, and I wasn’t sure I could be around anyone who did. He had been through so much already…God, my head was so messed up with indecision. I hated it. I was used to making a decision and sticking to it, knowing my mind and not having anyone sway me from it. But recently, I didn’t feel like myself. I felt…changed.
“Look, I’m just the messenger here. I’m just telling you how it is. If you come back with us, they will kill you. Of that I have no doubt. And after they kill you, they’ll kill your baby. I’m trying to help you here.”
He stared at me accusingly, as if he knew that only part of what I was saying was true. As if he knew that the other part of me wanted him and that thing far away from our truck, and my conscience. He would pay for his crime—by having to live. And I wouldn’t have to watch the consequences unfold. Yeah, I was a coward. I wasn’t ever going to deny that.
“And what if I won’t leave?” he rumbled out.
I raised an eyebrow—mainly because I was surprised by how much he clearly didn’t want to leave, but also because I hadn’t counted on him just refusing to leave.
“Well, you have to,” I snapped.
“But what if I won’t?”
I huffed out a heavy breath and glared at him. I was doing everything I could to not lose my temper—counting backwards from ten, taking steadying breaths, putting myself in his shoes—but his shoes sucked and my sinuses were stuffy so it hurt to take a deep breath.
“You don’t have a choice, Deacon. Nova will kill you and the baby if you don’t go. Now come eat, and then we’re leaving. Without you,” I snapped before turning away from him and heading back for some breakfast.
I needed more medicine and something to eat. And coffee. And cupcakes. And possibly a weekend spa break with a sexy male masseuse. But since I wasn’t likely to get any of those things in this lifetime, I guess I’d stick to snake meat and whatever the fuzzy thing was.
I stomped back over to the small fire, where Nova had speared the meat and was turning it above the flames. She glanced over at me questioningly.
“He doesn’t want to leave,” I stated. “He’s not going to go without a fight, I’m almost sure of it.” I rubbed a hand down my face.
Nova chuckled darkly. “You did good.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. “I did?”
I couldn’t quite figure out what she meant. Why had I done good? I’d just told her that Deacon had refused to leave and we were going to have to force him to. I couldn’t see the good in any of that. In fact, it felt like things were about to go to hell again, and truthfully, I was sick of hell. Sick of the fighting and clawing for existence. I just wanted to eat breakfast and have a cup of coffee.
“You did.” She grinned. “Did you tell him to come to breakfast?”
“Yeah.” I frowned, not liking the tone of her voice. My heart raced, telling me that something wasn’t quite right with her. “Nova?” I started to talk, but Deacon made his way over to the fire at that moment, closely followed by Joan, so I shut my trap and hoped for the best. Which really wasn’t saying very much, since my best had always been to just not die. But whatever.
We ate in silence, only the sound of our chewing to keep us company. The rain had stopped, but every once in a while a freezing cold fat raindrop would drip down from the leaves and they always seemed to get me. I grumbled as another one hit the back of my neck and trailed slowly down my spine.
I looked up, seeing Deacon taking small bites of his food. He looked deep in thought, and that couldn’t be a good thing. I looked across at Nova, seeing her eating a chunk of snake while she stared intently at Deacon. That also couldn’t be a good thing. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that things were about to get seriously messed up between these two.
The sound of moaning had me jumping to my feet, my hands instantly dropping the small bone I was holding and reaching for my katana. Movement off in the trees to the right had me on full alert, yet Nova barely glanced up from her snake.
“Dude, deaders,” I said in annoyance.
She gave a little shrug. “So go kill it.”
I looked away from the movement in the trees to scowl at Nova. “That’s your reply? Really?”
I wasn’t too bothered about going off and killing deaders on my own; that wasn’t really the point of my argument. I was more shocked by her lack of concern for them than anything else. For all she knew there was a horde.
Nova stopped snacking on the snake and looked up at me with a condescending grin. “Nina, do you want me to come kill the big bad scary zombie with you?” She punctuated each word and made me feel stupid. “I can hold your hand if it gets too dark. We could spoon tonight if you want.”
I stared at her silently, feeling my cheeks flame with both anger and embarrassment. All the while she stared right back with an overly large grin on her face.
“No, that’s not what I was saying. I meant maybe we could pack up before they reach us,” I snapped. The noises were getting closer and unnerving me, and this was getting me nowhere. But she was right: it sounded like there was only one—two at the most—and the trees were so tightly packed together that a herd would have no chance of moving as a collective—not without making one hell of a noise.
“They need killing,” Nova replied, sounding bored as she continued to eat. “I killed some this morning, these ones are yours. I’m not leaving until I’ve finished eating. Besides, it only sounds like one.”
“Fine, I’ll go kill it myself then, but if I get eaten, I’m blaming you.” I began marching away.
“Nina?” Nova called after me.
“What?” I replied without turning around.
“What about the spooning? Can we still spoon?” I heard Nova laugh wickedly as I stormed away.
The trees were thick and overgrown, and branches stuck out at odd angles and scratched at my skin. I could see movement up ahead and I tried to be quiet, but it was damn near impossible given my surroundings. I glanced back once, unable to see even the smoke from the fire, and wondered whether this was actually pointless. Would the deaders even be able to hear us? They certainly couldn’t have seen us, and I’m almost certain that the freaky zombie baby was masking our smell.
It was too late to back out now, though, as they had most certainly heard me.
I grumbled, taking note of my surroundings and realizing that there wasn’t an awful lot of space to swing a big-assed katana around.
“Crap,” I cursed under my breath.
I spied a deader heading my way and tried to focus on a way to kill it quickly, instead of focusing on what state of decomposition it was in. I kept on moving forward, hoping to find a small space to allow me some more room, and was greeted with a small opening in the thick of trees. There was a fresh deader kill already there, which must be the one Nova had said she had killed this morning. I was also surprised that I had actually doubted Nova’s honesty when it came to it, but decided to assess my newfound trust issues with her later, when I wasn’t about to kill a zombie.
A deader stepped into the clearing opposite me, its eyes wide and staring hungrily at me. I swallowed and tried to stem my fear as I always did. Because you never really stop fearing them. You would think that you would become immune to it after a while, that you would give up on the fear and just face the problem head-on with a stomach full of iron determination. And perhaps some people did. I certainly didn’t, though. I still got goose bumps at the sound of their growling—which didn’t say much when I still got scared of spiders, but whatever.
I stepped out from around the tree, careful about where I stood as I slashed out with my katana in the hopes of getting lucky. It didn’t happen, and I blindly swung three times before stepping further into the clearing so I could get a better swing. I knew my stance was sloppy, my grip tight—too tight—and Mikey would be having a fit if he saw how careless I was being, but I couldn’t seem to get it right as I stumbled around on the uneven ground, stepped over the dead zombie, and almost tripped. The deader was a gangly thing, with overly long arms and gnawed-down fingers, and its hair was styled into what was probably once an impressive fifties-style quaff. However, now it hung limply down the center of its forehead. Thankfully it didn’t smell anymore, but its papery-thin skin sounded painful as it rubbed against the rough fabric of its once pristine suit. We moved in a tight circle, it constantly lunging for me and me constantly moving out of its way. I needed a clean shot, but couldn’t quite get the arm reach. A quick jab to the stomach would send a normal man to his knees, but this wasn’t a normal man, and it would only make things more difficult.
A growl from behind had my gut clenching as I realized my mistake too late: I had come full circle as me and the deader had continued to reach for each other. I hadn’t bothered to check for more deaders after seeing the first one, and now, as I took a quick glance behind me, I saw at least two more coming up to take a bite.