THE DOZEN

ARTIFICIAL.

"Hi," she started again, struggling to maintain the smile. "My name is Adelaide and I am a woman. A woman that has to pee, and since I am not a man I can't just pull down my pants and try to make it out the window. I'd really appreciate it if you could stop the bus at the nearest building so I can pee in a bathroom like a proper lady, and not out in the forest."

Again, he didn't even glance at her when the bus came to an abrupt halt. She instinctively braced herself against the nearest seat to prevent a fall, as Four calmly stood to his feet. "Sorry about that," he spoke up, staring out at the other ten subjects, "Princess Adelaide has to pee." As the callous statement left his mouth, he slowly turned to meet Adelaide's sharp glare. All he did was force a smile, much like the one she forced when attempting politeness towards him.

With a diminutive glare, she stormed off the bus. He plopped back down in the leather seat, watching as the rest of the subjects trooped past and off the bus. The first chance he could, he closed the door behind them with just a simple push of a lever.

That didn't make the screams any less audible.

He immediately rose from the weathered seat, eyes darting back and forth across his field of vision for whomever the shriek erupted from. Just as quickly as the urgency of the situation progressed, it died down and he lowered himself back into the seat at the sight of eleven calm subjects.

An almost inaudible, "Son of a bitch..." was heard. Subject Six didn't even feel his lips shape the words, he just heard the quiet mutter of his own voice, wide eyes glued onto the corpse before he and the gasping girl. He sent a look to the shaken brunette, a look of pure worry and sympathy, but one that vanished at the faint growling of the dead one.

Its head rose with another sinister snarl, its rotting teeth displayed as its lips curled back. It sat up the best it could, its weight depending on the decaying bones beneath withered, discolored skin, but before it could fully rise it got knocked back down. Subject Two stood just in front of both Six and Nine, what looked to be a single plank of wood in his shaky hands.

Nine could only assume that he took it from one of the many pews surrounding them in the disheveled church, and she wasn't quite sure exactly how she felt about that. Never had she ever been in a church, but she knew that they were sacred. And to destroy it to take the life of one of the infected? She had to stop thinking about, but nonetheless, she was grateful that the dead one was being taken care of.

She just couldn't bear to watch. In the wake of her exit, the observing subjects dispersed and began doing other things. Nine watched the bus driver slowly lower back into his seat, her arms crossing over her chest as she stood at a loss of what to do. Some of the men were brooding together, some subjects were still lingering inside the church, and others were wandering into the woods just behind the old building.

Nine slowly sat down in the gravel just outside of the church, and could only stare at the bed of pebbles.

The outskirts of Boston were bleak. The abundance of snow palely blanketed everything to be seen, the grey skies shining a dim light on all that was beneath. Everything was just grey- grey and lifeless.

But out of the corner of her eye, Nine noticed color- color and life. A single bush, suffocated by more lively flowers than she could count, just beside a leafless tree in the front lawn of the church. The confusion as to why flowers were growing in the dead of winter was never prominent in her walk to the dead tree and its living partner.