Among the Living | Completed

Chapter Thirteen: A Changed World

***Edited version #1***

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It took fifteen hours for Brett to finish turning.  After his confession, Brett had let Colin and Abby secure him to the bed in the guest room with paracord they'd found in Colin's backpack.  Damien had then offered to take watch and implored the rest to try to get some sleep.  That was an impossible task at that moment, they'd all discovered, so the four of them instead congregated in the living room and nervously waited.  Several agonizing hours passed, and Ida eventually nodded off, although she had tried to fight it.  Abby and Colin followed suit an hour later.

Dawn slowly came and pink streaks of light peaked above the horizon line.  Although Dellan was exhausted and his eyes felt painfully heavy, he still had no luck with sleep.  His mind was filled with too many puzzling thoughts.  So, Dellan sought companionship and entered the room where Brett lay, tied down and asleep, to sit with Damien.

"How do you think it happened?" Dellan asked in a whisper.

"No fucking clue," Damien responded, his tone incredulous. "I didn't even believe him at first."

They sat in silence for the better part of the next hour, their postures tensing up whenever Brett's increasingly comatose form would convulse with severe bouts of coughing that left his chin and chest speckled with drops of blood.  After one particularly severe attack of coughing, Dellan apologized to Damien before taking his leave from the room.  He couldn't watch any longer.  It reminded him too much of his sister's passing, and those memories were more painful than he could bear at that moment.

A couple hours later, Dellan finally drifted into a light slumber on the living room floor despite the rays of sunshine that poured through the windows.  Too soon after, though, he was awoken by Damien with a gentle shake.  Dellan groggily looked into Damien's hardened eyes and knew without asking that it was over.  Dellan's heart sank in his chest.  Although he hadn't known Brett for very long, he had become quite fond of him even though their personalities had differed greatly.  Damien wordlessly continued to wake the rest of the group, who also understood what had happened without speaking.

"We should leave after breakfast," Damien said after some time passed, his voice betraying no emotion. "Best we keep moving."

"Are we not going to bury him?" Abby asked, choking back tears.

"No, I don't think it would be wise," Damien replied.

"Why not?" Ida asked, "we buried my sister."

"Brett's situation has shown me that we don't fully understand this disease," Damien explained, "I don't want any of you touching the body.  I don't want us taking any unnecessary risks from now on."  Dellan's heart winced at the phrase 'the body', surprised that Damien could so quickly erase Brett's identity and humanity from what remained of him in the next room.

They solemnly packed their supplies, picking through Brett's belongings for anything that would be useful and leaving behind the rest.  It felt notably heartless to be picking through a dead man's possessions so soon after his passing, Dellan had thought, but the world wasn't the same.  The world was changed, and the cruel demands of survival forced them to act in ways they never could have imagined they would.  Wordlessly, the group left the house and continued their gruesome march toward an unknown future, their hope significantly diminished by their recent loss.

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The remaining five traveled south on foot for two days before finally finding a set of car keys and respective car, which started without trouble.  The group's difficulty at finding a working car was due to several inconvenient factors.  First, finding the correct pair of keys for a car was a surprisingly challenging task.  Colin knew how to hotwire a car, but his knowledge unfortunately did not extend to modern models of cars that had push to start buttons.  Second, since most people's first instinct when the lockdowns failed was to flee by vehicle, this left nearly all the garages and driveways they encountered empty.  Then, most cars had been abandoned by their owners upon encountering traffic-jammed roads, making it impossible to drive a car out of the mass of vehicles, even if they found the correct car keys.  Lastly, many cars were left with the keys still in the ignition, allowing the batteries to burn out.