"If we don't find some more fucking ammo soon I swear i'm going to kill someone," Kade grumbled as we all walked along a broad gravelly road. He bit into the last of his dried meat with anger, ripping the flesh apart aggressively with his teeth. His arm nearly hit me as it swung back. I always stayed behind the four of them. Kade, Ryan, Sarah and Cole. When they found me, and agreed to pick me up along with them I thought I could find solidarity in Sarah. A girl. Or a woman I should say, because she is a lot more woman than me.
Her shoulders were as broad as the mens, her figure sturdy and hardened like her face. No solidarity was to be found in those eyes. She met me like the men did; looking down at me with clenched jaws, demanding I fix us all food and making mean jokes when I try to brush and fix my hair.
"That ain't going to fix nothing sweetheart- how about a trip to the salon instead? It'll be on me," Kade would say with a nasty grin and they would all belt out laughter while they tended to their guns like I tend to my hair, with the same kind of care. The kind you should never use on weapons.
"But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue," I always quote, biting my tongue until metal melts in my mouth.
"You have to calm down, we're almost at the next town. If there isn't any ammo, we'll butcher someone that has some." Cole replies, walking with fast, tough steps. They were always so hard, so violent. I watched intensely as my feet kicked the gravel. My gun didn't have a lot of ammo left either but I would rather not have to hurt someone to get more. I'd run if I had to, but I really didn't.
The rest of the walk was silent, until old suburban houses started appearing. No one spoke to me. Wordlessly everyone divided to ransack the houses. Cole and Kade went together, so did Ryan and Sarah. Sarah, a dainty, feminine name for a woman with cold, rejecting eyes. No solace. I walked on my own, shoulders slumping.
The house was a pale blue, the door was off the hinges completely, and I stepped over the rotten wood. Dust swirled in the beams of light that were pushing through barred windows. Someone had stayed here for a while, it looked like. Empty cans of food were piled on the dirty kitchen tiles. When I glanced back at the broken down door, I noticed the beating it had taken. The blood stains that the wood had absorbed. Scratch marks. I didn't want to think of what had happened here, and instead I filtered through the flashes of sunlight, the warmth pulsing on my cheek. The air smelled like rotten wood too, as well as flowers. They bloomed in the corners of the walls, through broken tapestry they unfolded like nothing had ever bothered them. Like the whole world wasn't dying. Untouched by the destruction, pretty and blooming. I wished to be like the flower.
There was no ammo, but in the back cabinets I found old cans of beans that must've been forgotten in whatever hurry had happened here. Between the wooden beams that barred the window I saw the others gathering in the middle of the road. Soldiers, they looked like. Machines. They made my skin crawl and every soft thing inside me hardened. I solidified, when everything I fought for everyday was to be soft. Free, fresh and blooming like a flower. A war between me and the world to preserve the delicate human I was, but I felt like throwing it all up when Kade looked at me. He made me feel like he wanted to rape me. His eyes were wide like a drug addict, and his stare a direct look into the most damaged soul I had ever met in my life. I had no clue what his story was and I was terrified to find out. He wanted to hurt the world like it had hurt him and I didn't want to be here to see it but I had nowhere else to go.
They talked aggressively to each other, heads bent close together even though there probably wasn't anyone around for miles. I still never got used to seeing people standing in the middle of the roads. The cars were supposed to be there. And now all the cars were flipped upside down and stripped for parts. Sarah crushed a spiring dandelion under her foot. Her black, greasy hair flipped around her head when she talked. The day was beautiful but the people were not.
We decided to camp there, in the house I found. I found a broken family photo in a bedroom upstairs. I was frozen, sitting on a four poster bed with a family full of strangers in my hand. This room was a memory in time. A photo in itself. If not for the barricaded window, where the sunlight slowly turned red, you wouldn't be able to tell that life had died everywhere around it. So I stayed there all night. I went downstairs silently, like a child who'd awoken from a nightmare. But there were no parents downstairs, and I crept silently around them to grab a can of beans. Kades big hand squeezed my fragile wrist harshly and the can dropped from my hand. "You're not taking all of that," he spoke harshly before opening the can and pouring almost all of the content into an empty one. The rest he gave to me. "Sit down," he stroked my wrist where he'd hurt me and I coiled away, sitting down reluctantly. I never joined their talk. Ryan was the nicest of them all, though the difference in their behaviors were minimal. They had been just them for so long that Sarah was Ryan and Ryan was Cole and all of them were Kade. Not one authentic trait that wasn't given to them by the apocalypse. None of their own selves left from before. I pitied it, sort of. When they dozed off in their sleeping bags I snuck back up and crawled under the cold comforter in the bedroom with the photo on the pillow next to me. I tried to imagine living here. With my family, when they were still here. Sleeping next to my parents in their bed even though i probably was a bit too old for it. We wouldn't tell anyone. Tomorrow we'd make breakfast together, maybe?
Those thoughts put me to sleep.
Bang. I woke with such a violent start that my hand flung the photo to the carpeted floor. It was already broken, but now the glass had fallen out of the frame in pieces completely. I had ruined the last memory of this family. Another bang. It was gunshots and the crashes that followed rumbled the old flooring beneath me. Impulsively I ripped the photo from the frame and stuck it in my pocket. I didn't know how to move. We had never been in this situation. I had never been apart from the group when we were attacked. They were always there and always merciless. I had to fend for myself still, because they prioritized each other over me anytime. Sometimes it was as if they would purposefully let me fight on my own despite them being fully capable of helping me. I swung my backpack on, in case I had to run again. My hands trembled and the gun nearly slipped from my grasp. I creaked open the bedroom door, right at the top of the stairs. "Fucking get him!" I heard Ryan yell. More crashes, grunts. The stairs creaked as I took a step but another noise covered it. Blood sprayed on the wall next to the broken front door. Greasy black hair, fell with a thud to the ground. Blood started to pool around Sarah's head, which was all of her I could see from this angle. I breathed in. It smelled like being on summer camp. Sunlight, fresh air but a metallic, wooden scent interfered with the peaceful memory. Kane roared and I heard him surge towards whoever the perpetrator was. I closed my eyes harshly until it hurt, then I opened them and ran down the stairs as the spots faded away from my sight. My gun was stretched in front of me. Everything after that happened so fast I barely caught it. An elbow to Ryan's face who stumbled backwards. To clean shots through Cole's stomach. Bang, bang, thud. Bile rose in my throat. My gun was still in front of me. I didn't move. I didn't know what I felt.
A loud grunt, a missed shot but a punch to the gut from Kade to the stranger. He was hardened too, but not in the cold, menacing way of the others. He looked human, I thought, right before he twisted Kades arm around in a nasty crack, pushing his back into the man's chest before firing a bullet right through his temples. Kade looked at me then, and for the first and only time I saw something else in his eyes. He looked scared. Like a little boy who'd been told off. Who'd been left alone and scolded and shown no love, who now pleaded for it for the last time ever. And then my eyes turned sympathetic. I did everything I could to give him that last piece of whatever feeling closest to affection I had for him and a peace fell over his eyes right as the bullet tore through him. My mouth was sour, and I leaned down, throwing up right next to Sarah's body.
The stranger let Kade fall to his knees, discarded him and stalked towards me with a reaction time that seemed inhuman. I expected the harsh, calloused hands of a man piercing my skin. Like Kade's used to. I dropped the gun. It landed in my own puke. The man stopped between me and the mess. We both looked down. Then we looked up. My eyes were filled with hot, stingy tears from throwing up. Maybe fear. He breathed harshly, quickly and his nostrils flared. His eyes were dark as he looked demandingly underneath his furrowed brows. He had a handsome face, salt and pepper scruff, a hooked nose and sloped lips. But he also was hardened from this world.
His shoulders fell, quickly aware that I probably wasn't the biggest threat around. That irritated me, and I squared up, fisting my hands. "Get away or I'll punch you." I said. There was volume in my voice that I didn't expect. He didn't move, but looked down on my petty gun again. Then he turned around, and started searching the bodies of my old crew. He took their guns, searched them. I stood still. I was shaking like a leaf and tears rolled down my cheeks now silently. I wasn't sad for these people. I was sad for the last time this happened. When it was the people I cared for that lay still while I stood up. I cried for them, tightly fisting the photo of the family I found in my pocket. The man stopped, and looked at me. "I'll leave some stuff for you," he said. His voice was gruff. And it hit me like bricks, so hard I nearly folded into two again. I was going to be left alone. The man was looking done, about to leave again. Then there would be silence, like when snow falls. Nothing.
"Take me with you," I said, too desperate for my liking but suddenly he felt like the last thing I had in the world even though I didn't even know his name.
"No," he said, and walked out the backdoor without looking back. I wiped my gun off in Sarah's shirt, with a little regret but not so much that i felt guilty and followed the man out. He had a horse that was tied to a tree.
"You have to." i stated, my breathing quick and shallow. I would not let him leave.
"I don't, actually."
Did he not feel any remorse? What if that was my family he just killed, and then left me for myself. Not even so merciful as to put me in the grave with them? But they weren't my family and I would not go with them into death, but this man didn't know.
"You just killed everything around me." It wasn't the first time that had happened and I felt like I was grasping at water, trying to hold it in my hand. I heaved in a gasp of shock and sorrow and it was what finally made him look at me. His brows furrowed even more, if possible. His face softened, and I swore I saw guilt flash across his still-new features. He was listening.
"I'm silent. You won't even know i'm here. And as soon, I promise, as soon as we come across somewhere else I can stay, I'll leave. But you owe me a ride." I wasn't used to selling myself, to making me sound like someone you'd want along on your travels and even though my face heated with embarrassment and the words I spoke, it was all the hope I had not to curl up in that four poster bed until I withered into nothing.
He said nothing for a while, looking somewhere behind me in thought. I mustered my most desperate eyes. I tried baring my soul through them for him to see that I needed this. He already seemed ways better than any of the four people that had taken me upon since the tragic incident.
"As soon as we find something.. livable, you're gone." he grumbled. The relief made my knees weak, air seeped out of me uncontrollably and I had to hold onto the tree so as to not fall in on myself.
"Thank you, thank you, thank you," I whispered, testing tears on my lips that I wiped profusely. I was not to be a burden to this man before I had even gotten onto his horse.
"Just follow me and stay quiet," he said, pulling the horse along with him. We walked, and I didn't look back. The blue house I swore to leave forever behind me. The photo I held onto. The sun was only just rising, cold and bright as it stretched over the abandoned houses. We walked in the middle of the road, on each side of the horse. I felt warmth on my skin, on my hair and I combed it down with my fingers and braided it down my back. And no one laughed, or said anything. I realized this might have been my rescue as I looked up at the pine trees ahead, instead of down at the gravel. I looked anywhere I liked and made my hair look nice and I stroked the now curled up photo with my thumb, looking over at the man.
"What's your name?"
I had already broken one of three rules: stay silent, follow me, leave me alone as soon as possible.
He sighed, "you're not very good at this."
Even his scolding, and his glare was everything Kades wasn't. There was no malice, no intention to hurt. I didn't feel fear in my gut.
"I'm Belle. Like the princess" I peaked over the horse's moving body.
"Like bellflowers," he said, glancing at me for barely a second. Like a bellflower, blooming, delicate and untouched by the world. I wish it was so.
"Joel. My name is Joel"