Don't Feed Me, I Will Come Back

two

Sixteen Months Later

  Just as birds do, Zeppelin and Benji migrated in the winter, but instead of flocking to warmer weather, they chose to move north. Sixteen months of scavenging, avoiding large cities and main highways, fighting off the dead the best they could manage.

They longest they spent in one place was a week at a cabin in the mountains. The little home sat high up on the steepest side of the mountain, surrounded by a thick line of evergreen trees. They were wary for the first day or two, but began to settle and make plans for the long run. She sketched out a garden space, and every morning as they prepared to hunt, Benji prayed to find a golden retriever out in the woods.

  They were happy there.

  And then a horde of corpses forced their limp bodies up the mountain, tearing through the thin picket fence surrounding the land. Benji had been awake, sipping on an ancient bottle of scotch he found in the basement. He tossed it to the porch floor when he heard them, and darted inside to shake Z awake.

  They fled in the middle of the night, and learned to never trust a safe space after that.

It's been longer than she could remember since she'd spoken to another human apart from her brother. Any group they'd come across these past few months, they mostly tended to avoid. They ran with a band of men that called themselves the Claimers for a few days. Z despised them, and they all learned quickly to stay the fuck away from her unless they were prepared to take a dagger to their throats.

Benji fit in with them well enough, they lived by a sense of code that he thought simple men could understand, and therefore could easily be controlled by that code. Have to keep brain dead shit-heads like them in check somehow, he had reasoned. He grew close with the leader Joe, who took him under his wing as they scavenged neighborhoods and department stores.

Then one afternoon, just when their small group had begun to claim different rooms in an old colonial style house, a stranger killed one of their own. Wether he'd been in the house already, or snuck in purely to take one of them out, she didn't know. The man managed to escape before any of them could catch him.

That was the moment Benji decided to leave the group, no longer trusting their ability to keep his sister safe. One constant over all this time on the road; no matter where the Bloom siblings found themselves, the very second Z's safety was put into jeopardy, he wouldn't hesitate to pull her out of the situation. No questions asked.

They took off without a goodbye, slipping out the back door and into the forest beyond.

  Since then, they'd generally stuck with the idea of heading to Washington, but Benji didn't seem to be in any hurry to get there. At every abandoned building, run down farmhouse, or even a secluded clearing they came across, he'd want to search the property, clear it of any walkers and do a perimeter check.

  That's how Z wound up in this god damn situation to begin with.

  Four days earlier, they'd found a couple of horses that had been forgotten long ago, the only gate to their acre or so of land still locked. Benji got it in his head that they just had to capture them. So two hours, three fights, and a few rough shoves later, they both sat astride a pair of worn out and grumpy mares as they scouted the woods.

  Death had overtaken their world, but it would be stupid of one to forget that death had always been a part of it. A copperhead slithered through those trees, it's russet and umber scales indistinguishable from the dry summer brush. It wasn't until it leaped from the undergrowth that they knew it was there.