Don't Whistle Past the Graveyard

Ch. Forty-Eight

We were there less than a week before I needed to get outside of the fences, no matter how flimsy they seemed to be.

Though, thanks to Shane's leadership and Kyle's weird but not unexpected knowledge of how to build shit, that was slowly being improved.

I woke up the third or fourth morning there to find Shane already gone, and an aching need to be somewhere that felt real.

His words had engraved themselves on my brain. This place wasn't real.

I think that's probably Rule #29, which is kind of a buy one, get one free deal. This rule is kinda weird. It's certainly the most fluid.

What was real, isn't real now. It's all subjective.

The thing that makes this rule so changeable is that I'm not just talking about how the world before is different from the world now. That's too set in stone and our situation changes on the regular.

Now is what matters. Everything is subjective in the moment it's presented, and while Ashley's settlement might have felt real to us three months ago, it didn't feel real now, with everything we had seen.

Maybe if we had found this place earlier, it would have been a smoother transition. But the fact of the matter was that Shane wasn't the only one hard-wired for a problem to show its ugly, potentially undead face.

Let me give you a little idea: We had been told it was safe. Even Lauren had admitted that nothing serious had happened and that things stayed pretty quiet. It didn't matter.

The house would creak and Shane and I would both sit bolt upright, hands reaching for knives on bedside tables or guns under pillows.

We all still spoke in near whispers. I can't tell you how many times I was told to speak up.

Cas about killed someone who placed a hand on her shoulder when she wasn't expecting it, grabbing her wrist and throwing her to the ground. That had been awkward.

There were other kids, some pretty young, but most around Sam and Sach and Vik's ages. The comparison between our kids and theirs was... intense. Distressing almost, if I hadn't understood that my kids would survive anything because of the way they were.

We all heard the whispers. Savage. Cold. Stand-offish. Blunt. Messed up was popular. I heard crazy once or twice.

One woman told me that she had been a psychologist before this. Go figure, right? You meet all kinds even though there aren't that many left. Anyway, she led with that and... offered her services to help us deal with our issues.

I had asked her what issues. Apparently that had been the wrong answer.

It probably didn't help when one of the oldest teenagers wouldn't leave Vik alone and Sacha damn near killed him.

It certainly didn't help when Shane ranted for close to five minutes, shouting at a guy who had told him a regular watch wasn't necessary.

The truth of the matter was that we just didn't fit. And we couldn't, or wouldn't, find a way to coexist easily with these people who wanted to... I don't know, hold hands and sing kumbaya until the sun stopped rising.

Anyway, so I woke up, positively itching to do... something. It took me forever to put my finger on it, but I eventually realized that all I wanted was to make sure that I could still fight. That I hadn't been sucked into this twilight zone of a settlement and turned into a pod person.

So I just put on my boots, because we still slept in our clothes, and grabbed my machete, not even bothering with a gun and headed to the gate.

We were still staying in the main house. Ashley thought it best if we had a separate "adjustment period", where we wouldn't accidentally kill someone who bumped into our tent in the middle of the night.