BITE ME ➼ C. G. 〖 #wattys2016 〗

EPILOGUE (200k special!!!)

I see the way you look at her. I hugged Kee close to me. Michonne's breaths were jerky and pained as she passed me to cleave through a walker's skull. I grit my teeth and pulled my feet forward.

I wanted to close my eyes, if only for an instant of peace, but my chest ached and my neck was tired of holding my head up. What was your dream about?

You. I broke the edge of the walker crowd, legs buckled and stumbling. Michonne rushed ahead of me, and I could hear the exhaustion in her footsteps. She flung open the door to Denise's house and I dashed inside.

Keeping two fingers on Kee's wrist, I laid her down on an operating table. My heart almost fell out of my chest when I lost her pulse, but then I caught it again, and my breathing returned to normal.

It was in the first two or so months of the apocalypse. A hunter accidentally shot me through a deer. Denise rolled a cart of medical supplies over to the operating table. She ripped open a pack of gauze pads and yelled at me to unbutton Kee's shirt. The buttons slipped clumsily between my numbed fingers. Kind of funny, now that I think about it. How did he not see me?

There was cloudy bruises curling along her stomach, and I felt my breath hitch in my throat as I exposed the gunshot. Inflamed to an angry red, blood immediately began tracing in drops down her skin. Lined up with her belly button like two mis-matched eyes. I imagined my eyes like that, one gorged and peeled out like a rotten fruit. It would hurt less than feeling this guilt.

Denise swept up into position, and I sullenly gazed back at the wound. It was nothing compared to the bite that defaced her shoulder. I imagined how Denise would react once discovering it, or a walker in Kee's place.

I imagine her seaglass eyes clouded over and dyed red with popped bloodlines, her fingernails chipped and with blood caked underneath. Her skin pallid and webbed over with veins, and cold. Death would take her smile too.

It'll all be okay, Carl. My death will mean nothing.

My grip tightened. I drew out my gun, kicked open the door. And I could hear Kee's voice chanting over again: give them hell.

p a u l    r i s h e r

He kept the memory of his children in photographs strewn across his office. A little flower scrawled on a post-it note from when his daughter was five and wide-eyed, a Hallmark stuffed elephant he never got the chance to give his son. He wrung his hands and played Guns and Roses in the car. November Rain. Sweet Child O' Mine. And maybe it was selfish, but sometimes he dreamed of going back home again. Saying a last goodbye.

He drowned himself in his work and kept a tight agenda. Wanted to make the world safer, so he went on a trip to Africa with nothing but his laptop covered in bumper stickers and a handful of syringes.

He crafted their salvation too late. Three more weeks and he could have the equipment to mass-produce it. So he welled up his hope and love and funneled it into the twin syringes.

One for Marshal. One for Keira.

Keira, the one who was bit and believed in three more weeks. Three more weeks that could've saved her the torment. This mistaken dread.

Such a shame she found that paper, or she would have assumed the truth.

Three weeks later, and the world had shriveled up into a rotten husk.

Three weeks later, and the medical supplies were sitting at the Atlanta post office, locked up tight by a security guard the night before. He drove with his family down I-96 and lost the keys somewhere in a Carolina gutter.