July 5th, 2025, Day 701
"Where is everyone?"
Bad and Skeppy both looked around the house, checking everything and everywhere. Twice. But there was nothing, no one. Bad felt anxiety building up inside him. They were gone for two days and disaster had struck. Now every possibility was rampaging through his mind: what if they got killed by a group of raiders?
What if they saw the flare and left the weaker unguarded and were killed by the zombies?
Had they been abducted by aliens?!
Bad wouldn't know, unless he somehow found them. Then he remembered he wasn't completely alone. He still had Skeppy.
Skeppy stood next to him, also looking worried. He was silently scanning the area, as if their friends would just pop up out of nowhere and everything would be fine. This had to be a cruel joke, right?
"Bad, no one's here... why aren't they here?!" Skeppy was blatantly in distress, but Bad couldn't do anything to calm him. He finally took the diamond hybrid's hand and led him to the corner Skeppy grew roses in.
To Skeppy's horror, only two roses were left standing tall and proud. The rest were all wilting or dead.
"Great. Just great! The rest of the Islanders disappeared, I'm stuck with you of all people, and my roses are all dead! Great!" Skeppy threw his arms up in exasperation, then put his hands over his eyes with a groan.
Bad looked at the roses and sighed. He hoped that wasn't an sign. "Skeppy, they're just flowers. We have potentially dead people to worry about right now." Bad reminded Skeppy. Skeppy whipped around and glared.
"Just flowers?! You've never cared for anything since this started! Of course you'd say they're just flowers." Skeppy looked upset and hurt. He was making a bigger deal out of this than there needed be, but he was scared.
His family was gone. They were gone, and he couldn't do a damn thing about it.
Bad was silent, just standing there in the darkness. The moon cast eerie shadows over the island, and it streamed through the leaves of the maple tree above them, speckling the little rose garden with it's sliver light, and showing clearly each of their expressions.
Bad felt hurt after Skeppy's outburst, like the diamond hybrid had dug a knife into his heart and twisted it. His comrade was his only friend left now that the other Islanders had disappeared into thin air, seemingly spirited away by some force beyond their comprehension.
Skeppy, on the other hand, was still seeing red. The flame of anger and fear burned brightly in his eyes and even more so in his heart.
His hand was curled into a fist, as he stood next to the roses, the moonlight on his face giving the bright red of anger a bit of a mellower look, which was good for poor Bad, who knew that those words held some sort of truth to them.
"Skeppy, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sound insensitive-"
"Save it. You just don't want me to be mad."
Skeppy cut him off, walking briskly past Bad and down to the docks. The demon felt a spark of anger. Why wouldn't Skeppy take his apology? He followed Skeppy down the hill and to the dock, and reached out to put his hand on Skeppy's shoulder.
The diamond hybrid shrugged him off, glaring. The whole interaction was bathed in red anger and fear, swirling together into a terrible combination of two of the worst emotions to have when you're in the zombie apocalypse.
Skeppy and Bad looked at eachother for a moment, deciding how to deal with this. "We should get to bed," Bad finally spoke in a defeated voice. "We need our rest."
"Bad, how can you want to sleep when our friends have disappeared to god knows where? Don't you want to find them?" Skeppy threw his hands in the air, his anger boiling up again, ready to overflow.
Bad sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Skeppy was dancing on his nerves right now with a knife, and he was this close to falling and snapping Bad's last shreds of patience.
"I never said we weren't looking for them, Skeppy," Bad said, mumbling something under his breath. "I meant that we need to rest so we can look for them at our best, not when we're still have soaked, exhausted, and at eachother's throats."
Skeppy calmed down a bit, taking a deep breath. "Okay, let's do that." The diamond hybrid walked into the house, leaving Bad outside in the cold moonlight.
Bad sighed, walking inside after Skeppy. He found the other boy laying on the floor in a sleeping bag, fast asleep. Bad smiled slightly, happy that his friend was asleep and hopefully not worrying about anything.
Bad pulled out his own sleeping bag and laying down and closing his eyes.
July 6th, 2025, Day 702
Skeppy woke up a few hours before Bad. It was only just now dawn, and the greyish purple light was shining through the windows and onto the hardwood floor, although it brought little warmth to the room.
The diamond hybrid stood up and rolled up his sleeping bag with a sigh that turned to fog before his eyes, making him feel colder than before.
Bad was still in the sweet, warm comfort of sleep, unbothered by the cold or the problem of their missing friends. Skeppy sighed yet again, shaking his head, as if so simple an action would offer him any relief.
He walked down to the docks, his hands in the pockets of his dirty, bright blue hoodie, twirling a throwing knife in his hand. A bird was singing somewhere in the distance, and Skeppy recognized the tone; a Goldfinch.
"Bad! Bad get your ass out of bed, that goddamn Goldfinch is back!" Skeppy yelled, knowing it was unlikely Bad would actually get up. 'I thought I'd never have to hear your dumb song again.' Skeppy thought.
That Goldfinch, no, any Goldfinch, was unwelcome to Skeppy. He had a bit of a traumatic association of the day the apocalypse started and Goldfinch. He'd heard one at the school, almost right before the first scream. He knew Bad had heard it, and wondered how he still fed those harbingers of doom.
Every time he heard one, disaster stuck.
And this time was no different, he suspected. He went inside and grabbed his pistol and some bullets from his bag, and sat on the docks, ready to shoot any threat that reared its ugly head at him.
.
.
.
.
Bad awoke to the sound of a gun firing. He stood up almost instantly, tripping up on his sleeping back and falling face down on the floor.
"Owww... That's gonna bruise..." He groaned, sitting up and rubbing his nose, which was the source of the red color blurring the edges of his vision. He saw a trace of blood on his hand when he moved it away from his nose, and then wiped off the last little bit and laughed dryly.
"Skeppy, you okay?!" Bad called, walking outside to see Skeppy on the docks, his pistol aimed at a Drowned, which was currently headless and smoldering slightly in the sunlight. Bad gagged at the Drowned. "Skeppy, why? Why?!" Bad almost threw up at the smell as he came closer to his diamond friend.
"It attacked me, and I'll kill any zombie, or Drowned, that i get the chance to." Skeppy said, cleaning off his machete from the Drowned's guck, also seeming a bit appaled about the smell. Drowned always smelled and looked grosser than land zombies.
"Ugh! Let's just get out of here!" Bad grabbed Skeppy's arm and dragged him away from the foul-smelling dock. Skeppy nodded aggressively and followed.
Back inside the house was much better smelling, and both boys breathed a sigh of releif.
"Remind me not to kill those things anymore, yeah?" Skeppy said with a glimmer of humor in his tone. "Yeah, good idea." Bad said with a nod.
.
.
.
.
After a few hours of getting ready to depart and finding something to float across the lake on, the duo finally found a log they could push into the water and float across on, and they swung their bags onto their backs and set off, using sticks to paddle.
Bad was a little afraid of the Drowned as they floated slowly across the lake. And the tension left over from last night's rose argument fiasco made this all the more uncomfortable. Bad wanted desperately to reach forward and hug his comrade right now.
In the old days, the two of them would never give a second thought about hugging eachother. Now, a hug was rare. Their friendship was a shell of what it used to be, a distant song from over the hills, barely an echo now.
Bad looked back at the roses. They were rather pretty, no wonder Skeppy liked them so much. Through the haze of his thoughts, the demon could see that the two standing roses looked a little wilted. 'Poor roses. They'll be gone by the time we get back...'
Bad sighed and tore his gaze away from the roses and wiped his mildly teary eyes.
"Skeppy, can I-" "Bad, be quiet. I'm not in a talking mood." Skeppy said coldly, not looking away from the water ahead of them. Bad huffed, going from sad to angry. "All I was gonna say was that I-" Bad got cut off by Skeppy again.
"Bad! Not. Now!" Skeppy moved his oar a bit more roughly so the water splashed Bad, although it looked like an accident, so Skeppy got away with it.
Bad went silent and just rowed his oar.
Skeppy was sad, angry, and afraid, all rolled in one. He was angry with bad just for the heck of it, he was sad his freinds had disappeared, and he was afraid that he was never going to see them again.
"... hey Bad?"
"Not now."
'I guess I deserved that.' Skeppy thought, thoughtfully rowing forward. Fleeting minutes passed, and they were across the lake.
The sun was higher up in the sky, making the lake sparkle like diamonds, although to Bad, the lake couldn't compare to the sparkles of the diamonds Skeppy had. He couldn't help but admire how Skeppy looked, no matter what ther relationship was.
"You done?" Skeppy's cold voice cut into his dreamy moment, and he instantly felt his cheeks warm up in embarrassment. "Wha- yeah! I was, um, waiting for you. Yeah! You were taking forever to move."
Skeppy looked skeptical about this statement, but just rolled his eyes in annoyance. "Well, I'm ready now," Skeppy said, shrugging to get Bad's attention. "And there's some tracks that lead off into the forest. We should follow those. One looks small enough to be Fundy or Foolish."
"You found tracks?!" Bad instantly ran over to where they were, and looked at the faded tracks. "Yeah, that's what I said."
Bad then nodded. "Let's find our friends."
A/N: Sorry for the short chapter, I just wanted to get something posted so I can feel like I'm doing something with my life. The next one will be longer. Thanks for reading, cya in the next chapter.