Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She’s a city mouse by nature.

The way buildings loom overhead like watchful redwoods give her a strange kind of confined comfort, and truthfully, they’re the only things she’ll tolerate looking down on her. Rows upon rows of cracked windows like curious eyes, lopsided gutters like grinning maws, and the tangled strings of clotheslines between buildings the pulsing veins—maybe it might unsettle a person with less backbone, but cities were alive and to her, that was nothing but a comfort; especially when all the people meant to be living in it were dead. After that, the city was the only friend Molly had.

But she couldn’t stay. The geeks swarmed like mosquitoes in the summer, bloated and thriving and oh so hungry on the most desperate of dog days, and in a year’s time she’d swept the safest sections of the city clean. Clearing out the geeks from Crawford was a chore, but when she finally got into their stocks, she found enough to keep her for another year longer. It sounds like a faster depletion than it should have been, with a city’s worth of supplies all to one person, but really, she should be lucky it lasted that long. Food rots fast. Water gets guzzled. Things don’t last forever, and she knows she won’t survive if all she relies on is scavenging the same city. New cans of green beans won’t start magically reappearing in pantries. Pain killers won’t be magically restocked on the drugstore shelves.

Passing survivors come and go with increasingly less frequency. No one wants to walk through a city if they can help it, and a part of her is grateful she can keep her friend all to herself, but their reasons are valid. Then again, they don’t know it the way she does. They don’t have its body memorized in her mind like the lines of sonnet. They don’t know how to dance fluidly up brick walls like tiny spiders.

They rave of the North, and she can’t help but feel suspicious. Maybe the geeks will freeze, but so will you. A city mouse by nature, and a Southern mouse at that, the cold sounds about as appealing as a soggy geek ass sandwich—whatever the hell that even is.

But when she realizes her friend is running dry, it’s the North she thinks of first. She kissed her friend goodbye, her lips gentle against her own fingertips before waving one last salute to the road sign. It watched her back as she left, with nothing to say but “Welcome to the City of Savannah!” She wonders if hers will be the last human eyes to see it.

It hurts to leave. It hurts in a way she doesn’t realize until she tries to sleep. Curled up in the foot space of an abandoned truck, she hides her face between her knees and tries very hard not to sob. In all that time, she never had found her sister’s body. The nagging dissatisfaction of never seeing her, the building anxiety of when she finally might—it came and went in waves. She’s not sure how to feel about leaving without finding a tactile way to say goodbye. The picture she had snagged from Crawford, folded carefully in the most secure pouch of her backpack, should be enough, but it isn’t. They should be here together.

When burning tears squeeze past her shut eyelids, all Molly can tell herself is that the city is her sister’s grave, and it will take care of her. At least she’s buried at home. At least she’s being watched by a friend.

She’s a city mouse by nature, which is why it’s so goddamn hard to walk along empty stretches of road, flanked by nothing but expansive masses of trees. The watchful gaze of city buildings may have felt almost treelike, it was true—but real trees? Real trees were animal and unpredictable, a twisted mystery grown up from the earth. They were nothing like the streamlined, manmade familiarity of back home.

It’s a ridiculous thought, but she feels almost like Little Red Riding Hood along her trek, and she doesn’t like that. She’s not looking for any grandmothers, and she doesn’t want to be bothered by any wolves. Bright orange hoodie shadowing her face, she wanders the trees and deliberately tries to be as far from coquettish as she possibly can. Hilda swings by her side, her grip loose but vigilant.

The walk is mind-numbing, and it’s been a long march. She doesn’t fare well with this constant, looping action. Left foot right foot left foot right foot left foot right foot. It’s almost dizzying, and she mourns not having a watch. Even if not for the time, at least the ticking sound would be something to focus her mind on.

She briefly considers escaping the pavement and wandering into the surrounding trees, to explore the branches like a parkour transcendentalist, but she’s not sure if she’s ready for that. Shadows look like hungry claws, and she’s been done with grabbing hands for a long time now. The road is miserable, but at least it’s safe.

Safe when there aren’t geeks, of course.

It’s not that she can’t take them. Over two years since the end of the world, and she’s grown more than capable of dispatching threats. What makes her hesitant is simply the unfamiliarity of the environment. She misses kick-flipping up along the wall she’s used so many times her single right footprint is nearly ingrained on it. She misses the two blackened spots on the metal scaffolding, where she’s gripped the same bar over and over again until the sweat of her hands rubbed off the surface.

All she has now is the pavement—and she can deal with that, but it makes her itchy inside.

There’s a nasty sight in the middle of the road, but by this point all she could do is laugh. Its middle turned into nothing but a pink mush, some poor bastard had been crawling along the road when a large-wheeled truck tore straight through him. His head still intact, but his innards glued to the pavement by the sun, he flails uselessly where he lays, arms extended and mouth ajar.

It doesn’t even occur to her how sick it probably is to laugh at a horrifically mangled body in the middle of the street. Call it the result of overexposure to violence and underexposure to other humans, but then again, she’s always had a morbid sense of humor.

She doesn’t even bother using Hilda. After the fit of giggles dies down, a hard stamp of her boot suffices.

The Sunshine Village Mobile Home Park isn’t a city, but its windows and clotheslines and cars. It’s no friend, but an acquaintance can suffice for now, and her grumbling stomach is one hell of a biased consultant. She stands in the middle of the road, squinting at the faded sign and deliberately whether or not the venture would be worth it, when she hears something approaching.

It’s not a geek, even though it sure as hell looks like one from a distance. Geeks don’t run, and geeks don’t gasp, but the figure is smeared in dark viscera, like it climbed right out from the pit of a burst stomach. She can almost smell it from across the road, and the stench only gets more pungent as it comes closer. A pair of eyes, nut brown and alive and watering behind spectacles, lock with hers—but it’s as if the little stranger’s legs are on autopilot, dictating a direct path that her tiny body will bulldoze through no matter what, and Molly is no exception.

They collide, and the little monster squeaks, stumbling backwards. Molly’s not one to make assumptions, especially not about someone that’s covered in stale blood, but the mass of shoulder-length black hair and rose-colored glasses that slipped off her face and fell to the pavement tells her this is probably a little girl. Recoiling from the impact, the girl jerks back and quickly lifts her arms up out in front of herself with a shuddering sob.

“I—I’m sorry!” she cries out, blinking rapidly. The volume of her voice is dangerously shrill. Molly’s head snaps around nervously, searching for any geeks that might have been roused, before looking back to the child. For a moment, she isn’t even sure what to say. She’s certainly had her fair share of bizarre encounters—she’s not sure if she’ll forget that ranting old man with the mustache and the boat for as long as her she may briefly live—but it’s so strange, and so sudden, and it’s been so long since she’s seen another living being that she’s not sure what to even do.

The wordless gaping only lasts moments, though, because the girl casts a fearful glance behind her, towards the brush she emerged from, and Molly realizes that the chase hasn’t ended yet.

Her eyes follow, gaze narrowing when she hears the crackle of branches and hollering voices. Her fingers curl tightly around Hilda; she takes a careful step in front of the child as two men emerge from the wood.

They were painted in the same gory garb, as if the three of them had just escaped a Biblical rainstorm of geek guts. Swaying for a short moment by the edge of the street, they tried to catch their breath. It was difficult to see for sure, from the distance and from the bloody camouflage, but Molly was no stranger to the signs of exhaustion—and one of them appeared to be wounded. Yet as much as she’d like to be naïve enough to believe that would be enough for them to give up, she knew the nature of men better than that. Like starving wolves after a lone rabbit, they wouldn’t stop until their teeth were in her ankles.

When he caught sight of the girl, the shorter took a hand away from his gun to point in their direction.

“There she is!” he shouts, his voice cracking desperately and his eyes aflame. “Sarah! Sarah!”

The one hovering behind him, the taller one clutching a wounded shoulder, briefly locks eyes with her. His hollow stare reeked of some kind of nondescript guilt, straddling a line between pleading and apologetic.

A spark is lit with the first sound of boot hitting pavement. She grips Hilda so tightly that her knuckles whiten, and inside her burns a rage she hasn’t felt since she’d found a geek in familiar scrubs crawling pathetically across the ground in an alleyway in the ruins of Crawford.

There are wolves in the forest after all, and if she has to be the woodsman that keeps Little Red Riding Hood out of their bellies, then so be it. Molly doesn’t bend for strangers, not by a long shot, but she won’t deny the fact that she owes a debt to every little girl she meets.

Why he doesn’t just mow her down with the AK-47 he’s toting, she’ll never know, but she appreciates his incompetence. Maybe he’s so accustomed to the Bystander Effect of the apocalypse that she thinks she’ll actually let him get away with it. When he’s close enough to smell the blood and the body odor so much she can taste it, she swings Hilda down with one swift move, cracking her into his knee. It’s not enough to cause any damage—just to get him down. She likes to have them looking up at her when she’s finishing them off.

With a yelp and a curse, he’s down in a second, gun clattering to the asphalt.

In unison, Sarah and the other man both scream, “Luke!”—it’s a cry she expected from her victim’s companion, but not the kid she was trying to protect. With his friend down, the tall stranger recoils under her gaze with surprisingly fearful submissiveness. He expects to be attacked, too, and he’s not even trying to prevent it—like he thinks he might deserve it. There’s a horrible, dawning realization that maybe he doesn’t.

Molly turns to look back at the Sarah, and the fact that there’s nothing thankful in the bug-eyed terror staring up at her confirms her mistake. She’s frozen in fear, whatever semblance of trust she may have had for Molly completely gone. A frightened rabbit once again, she turns on her heel and takes off towards the bend. Her shoulder bumps into the mobile home sign as she passes.

Choosing to take after her wasn’t a difficult decision, but she casts a brief glance back at the other two men before she starts. Once wild and furious wolves, the two of them now seem nothing more than frightened and pathetic rabbits themselves. She stoops to snatch up the dropped glasses, one lens webbed with a nasty crack.

As Molly rounds the bend in pursuit of Sarah, she realizes she may have made a grave mistake.

Chapter Text

If Molly was any bit as smart as she liked to think she was, she would turn back now.

It’s still not too late. That girl bumping into her? An act of nature, completely out of her control. Cracking that guy in the knee? Simply reactionary. But her legs took off before her mind even had time to think, and she follows her like Alice follows the White Rabbit—right into the belly of trouble. But she’s not stopping.

Molly promised herself she was done with survivors; done with groups, done with deals, done with feelings of guilt and debt and worry. She’d convene with them if it was absolutely necessary, because you couldn’t go two years without at least meeting a few other souls. But If Crawford had put the nail in the coffin, then that meant Lee’s group was the shovel that buried it in the earth.

She’s not stopping, and she’d like to say she has no idea what for —but she knows exactly why. It’s those ridiculous Uggs, the same color as the ones her little sister Reese begged to get for Christmas, and Molly thought they were so damn ugly, but she saved up the cash to buy them for her anyway. It’s the pair of red frames she clutches in her fists now; the ones with the same shape as the glasses Reese would slip off and hide in her pocket whenever she posed for a picture. It’s the lost terror in her eyes, the kind of terror you have when you’ve spent your whole life being led and suddenly that leader is gone.

It’s a big sibling’s worst nightmare, and she’s not cold enough to pretend she can’t see it.

Every branch is a reaching claw, and they greedily rake their nails against Sarah’s shoulders, against Molly as she passes. She hacks her axe furiously against them as they try to hold her back. The extensions of brush that snatched at her were calloused hands of Crawford guards, holding her back, holding her back back back as they pull Reese away from her.

Had Reese ran like this, too? When they dragged her out of Crawford by the roots of her hair? After Molly had failed to protect her, even after all those nights she hugged her while she cried and promised she would never ever leave? Sobbing and terrified, had she took off in a chaotic spree, running as far as she could in search of something she’d never be allowed to have again?

Had anyone even been there to chase after her?

They approach the Sunshine Village Mobile Home Park—the first sign of civilization for miles. That is, of course, if the ransacked graveyard of trailers can even still be called civilization. Panic-fueled adrenaline having turned a tired little girl into a jackrabbit, Sarah darts past the lingering geeks that litter the grounds before they can so much as turn their heads to get a whiff. Molly tails just as swiftly, taking pause to bash Hilda against the skull of a geek that wanders just a little too close for comfort.

Sarah retreats into the nearest mobile home. It’s the closest thing to a burrow she can find short notice. The slam of the door behind her gives a rattle that shakes the park, and Molly doesn’t like the way the geeks lift their heads at the sound, rotting ears perked like starving jackals. Jaw clenched, she quickly follows the girl inside with the certainty that they can’t stay here for long—but when the door closes behind her, she realizes it’s not going to be that simple.

With her heart still thumping wildly in her rib cage, Molly takes a gulp and rakes an unruly clump of blonde hair out of her face. It occurs to her that maybe swinging her pickaxe into that guy’s leg back there might have put her on this kid’s shit list—a position she’s certainly used to by now, but not one that’s going to help this situation much. There’s not much use in helping Sarah out if she’ll be too afraid to even listen.

There’s quiet whimpering from the back room, a telltale giveaway to where she’s hiding. Just as if she were trying to wrangle a wounded stray, Molly knows she has to approach cautiously—especially after that possible strike. She takes a careful step forward, but pauses when she hears the girl suck in a gasp of anticipating breath. With the next step, the floor creaks, and Sarah starts whimpering again.

It’s a struggle, remembering how to deliberately be kind. It’s been so long since she’s really interacted with someone—let alone a child—that she needs a moment to remember what it means to be tender. In a conscious attempt to look more approachable, Molly tugs down her hood and mask. With the next step, she puts on her gentlest voice and calls out to the girl. “Sarah?”

The levee crumbles instantaneously. Molly stumbles back as a blood-curdling scream stabs her eardrums, ripping down right into the pit of her belly like a jagged blade.

“Fuck!” she gasps. Definitely on the shit list.

In the midst of the cacophony, the door bursts open again. Molly raises Hilda instinctively, anticipating the geeks she’d seen stirring earlier, but it’s just the two men from before. In her pursuit, she’d nearly forgotten they were right on her heels the entire time.

They stare at her breathlessly, nervous sweat dripping down the sides of their face in little red rivulets. The tension between the three of them is like a choked knot, tightening around Molly’s throat. She hates to be the first one to lower her weapon, but with Sarah shrieking in the background, it’s all she can do. Hilda falls limply to her side, and she takes a step back, scowling.

The one she cracked in the knee—Luke, if the name shouted earlier was anything to go by—lowers his gun as well, and with nothing but a quick glance and a nod of his head, he directs the taller to the other room. As his companion heads toward Sarah, Luke’s expression sours as he inspects her. Molly crosses her arms defensively, assessing him just the same.

Why they’re all smeared in guts is still a mystery to her, but it doesn’t surprise her he’s lasted this long. Thick-armed and barrel-chested, Luke looks like the type that can get back up after taking a beating. Hell, it’s confirmed, given the fact he’s still standing after the whack she gave to his knee. His eyes are shadowed with exhaustion, but he keeps his shoulders up, his aquiline nose high in the air—but he swallows nervously, and it breaks the façade of confidence just enough to show the tender doubt underneath.

“You mind tellin’ me what the fuck—where you even—Christ! Just who the hell are you?” It’s all he can manage to stumble past his lips, voice cracking with the demand.

Molly’s never in the mood to tell her life story, and luckily it’s a less than opportune time for her to start doing so. Ignoring his question, she glances towards the back room again. It’s gone quiet again, but it’s not a kind of silence she can trust. She almost wishes Sarah was screaming again—that way, at least she would know the girl was still alive. Maybe she’d made a mistake in suspecting them of anything malicious, but she wasn’t ready to fully trust them, either.

“How about you tell me what the fuck you’re chasing that little girl for.”

Luke’s brow furrows a moment, as if he doesn’t even realize what she’s saying, but he catches on soon enough. Eyes widening at her implication, his nostrils flare furiously.

“Now—now hold on a sec,” he argues, taking a step forward. “If you’re tryin’ to insinuate what I think you’re—”

“Back off,” she snaps through clenched teeth. The trailer might be a tight squeeze, but Molly likes her personal space. She draws in a sharp breath through her nose. “Look, asshole—all I saw was you and Lurch back there chasing after a screaming little girl. I don’t know you. I can’t read your mind. What the fuck would you do in a situation like that?”

Though clearly still shaken by the chase, and frustrated by the hiccup Molly’s presence put in it, Luke leans back and lets the gun hang down to his side. Squinting down at the stained carpet, he absorbs her words, letting out a low exhale.

“Yeah. I guess you’re right.” When he looks back up at her, those furious brown eyes just looked tired. “I just—shit. It’s a hell of a long story, but the fact of the matter is—” He lowers his voice, glancing towards the back room as well. “—she just saw her dad go. Got ripped to pieces right before her eyes. We all been in the same group a while now, and she’s—well—” He pauses again, this time struggling to find the right word. “She needs lookin’ after.”

Two years ago, those same words had been on the tip of Molly’s tongue when she and Reese were first herded into Crawford. With the hard eyes and heavy guns watching him pass, she knew she couldn’t dare say it. It might have been a safe haven from the geeks, but inside Crawford, there was no tolerance for people that needed looking after.

She swallows, shifting uncomfortably on her feet, before looking back to Luke.

“Alright,” she says solemnly. “What can I do to help?”

He stares back at her, briefly stunned, before turning away with one hand on his hip. He shakes his head, giving a short snort of disbelief. It’s clear he didn’t expect her to stick around. In truth, neither did Molly. But with her foot already sinking down into the quicksand, she might as well sit back and get comfortable.

Blinking rapidly, he turns back to her and rubs the back of his neck. He offers her a sheepish grin. “Well, uh… how ‘bout you start by tellin’ me your name.”

Molly’s solemn expression didn’t falter. She slowly exhales through her nose.

“Molly,” she answers gruffly. How her name had anything to do with helping Sarah out of this trailer park was beyond her. Personally, she’d rather not know anyone’s name right now. Names made everything too personal. She just wants to make sure the girl was safe. That was the plan. She’d make sure Sarah was out and safe, and then she’d split and keep going on her own again.

“Well—how d’you do, Molly. My name’s Luke.” Nothing she hadn’t already figured out. He extends his hand for her to shake, probably thinking of himself as a gentleman. She blinks silently at the offering, then turns away and heads toward the door. It’s been a long time since the other one slipped by them, and she doesn’t like how quiet it’s been since then.

 “Now—hold on, now, wait a minute—” Not discouraged yet, Luke scurries to her side and jumps in front of her just as she reaches from the doorknob. “Listen—like I said, Sarah, well—she needs lookin’ after. She gets real panicked. After what happened back there, she—well—she might not be so keen on seein’ you—that is, if she even can without her specs, but—”

“So? Just tell her I won’t hurt her.”

“It—it ain’t that easy.”  He combs a nervous hand through his tousled hair. “Look, let me go first, okay?”

“Fine.” Molly rolls her eyes and sweeps her hand out in exasperation. “Lead the way.”

Luke cracks the door cautiously, as if he fears waking a sleeping giant. But Sarah’s no giant. As she sits against the wall, curled up somberly, she looks like the smallest little thing in the world, so small that Molly could pick her up with her pinky finger.

Luke’s friend is crouched before her, his hands slicing through the air rapidly in a series of gestures too fast and foreign for Molly to follow. The wound on his shoulder is clotted, but nowhere near fully healed, and though he winces as he uses his left hand, the motions he makes don’t slow. Sarah carefully extends a tiny pair of hands to hover near his, fingertips brushing over his knuckles. The weight of her glasses burns in Molly’s hand, and it occurs to her that his hands must be nothing but a quick blur to the nearsighted girl.

Sarah pulls her hands back from his, and with small fingers deliberate and slow, she signs something back. Unable to translate sign language herself, Molly holds her breath in anticipation—but the way Sarah hides her head between her knees and begins to quietly cry tells her that whatever she said wasn’t something good.

“Nick,” Luke hisses, taking another step forward as soon as Sarah’s head is down.

At the sound of his name, Nick lowers his hands and turns to look back. His eyes—a gentle blue that seems unfitting against the hard angles of his dark face—hold none of the false confidence Luke’s had maintained so well. They were hollow and hopeless, already resigned to the horrors of the apocalypse. The lack of fight he carries almost makes Molly brush the man off as spineless the moment she sees him, but his expression darkens noticeably when they lock eyes. It’s strange, but she’s relieved to know he’s got enough fire left in him to be furious with her. Anger might be the very last strong emotion you could hold on to in a world like this, but it’s not shaken easily.

Nick jumps to his feet and juts his finger at Molly, taking an urgent step forward.

“Okay—no, fuck no—Goldilocks has gotta get out of here,” he demands, his voice a loud contrast to his swift, quiet hands.

And here she’d been worried she was Little Red Riding Hood. Maybe she was Goldilocks, bursting into someone else’s business and making it all her own. Regardless, the nickname wasn’t asked for.

She doesn’t even have a chance to bite back. Luke’s reaction is instantaneous and exasperated, like a stern master that’s tired of scolding the same incorrigible dog. “Jesus—Nick, man, keep your fuckin’ voice!” He throws a nervous glance towards Sarah, then pinches the bridge of his nose.  “Just—just calm down, alright? We talked it over, there was a misunderstanding. She wants to help, man.”

“Oh, yeah?” Nick holds his arms tightly at his sides, his hands balled into fists. “Like she helped back there out on the road? Like she helped you?”

“She has a name. And it’s not Goldilocks.” Molly tries to bitterly interject, but her voice was drowned between the two of them.

“Jesus Christ, Nick! I told you, it was a misunderstanding! You just—you can’t go around interrogatin’ every goddamn stranger we meet!” Luke throws his hands up and begins to pace. “This is exactly why that shit on the bridge happened—”

“Don’t—don’t you fuckin’ bring that up!”

Their bickering straddles the fuzzy line between petulant children and old married couple, and Molly’s just about to end the exchange herself with a stamp of her foot, but the undead intervene faster. The window behind them shatters, and a knobby gray elbow extends, its fingers arched and grasping the air wildly. Molly isn’t sure what was shriller—the sound of the glass breaking, or the shriek from Sarah that followed.

She quickly raises Hilda to hack at the offending appendage, but Luke beats her to the punch, riddling it with a panicked burst of bullets. His incompetence takes her by surprise. She can’t help but cast him a dirty look, eyeing the perfectly good machete strapped to his back. He should know better than to waste ammunition and draw geek attention when a clean slice from his blade would have sufficed.

Though she’s more inclined to blame the gunfire based on principle alone, Sarah’s screaming isn’t helping. The broken window is a breach in their defenses, and the guttural moans pick up volume like rolling thunder.

“Staying the night’s clearly not an option,” she mutters to herself sarcastically, eyes already darting around the room in search of ideas.

“Okay—shit—uh…” Luke steps back and runs a hand through his hair again. “We need—we gotta get out. We need a plan.”

“We carry her out.” The answer seemed simple enough to Molly. They were three grown, capable adults, weren’t they? And she was just one child.

“I don’t know—my ribs are busted from Carver, and Nick’s shoulder—”

“It ain’t gonna work anyway,” Nick interrupts flatly. He glares at Molly, as if the flaw in her suggestion was obvious. “Sarah don’t like bein’ touched when she’s like this. She’ll knock your fuckin’ teeth out ‘fore you get two feet.”

Luke gives a shaky sigh. “Okay. We need… we need everyone to know we’re alright, ‘cause they’re bound to head off without us if we don’t give ‘em some kinda sign. We need someone to get to Parker’s Run and—and get help, get someone to come back and—I don’t know. Nick, maybe you could—”

“Yeah. I’ll go.” Nick volunteers a little too quickly for someone with empty hands and bullet wound. His eagerness, dull in all respects but how fast he responds, doesn’t sit well with Molly.

“Yeah—yeah, okay, man.” The way his friend unquestioningly agrees sits even worse. “Alright, I think you can sneak out through—”

“Hold on.” While Molly’s not particularly concerned about either of their lives, it’s no coincidence that most plans are best executed when people don’t die along the way. “Look, I don’t know where you’re trying to get to, but he’s not the guy to do it. His shoulder’s busted and he’s got fuck-all to protect himself with. He’ll get the chomp before he’s even out of the park. Besides…” She glances back over at Sarah, who was gently rocking with her hairs glued over her ears. “He knows how to talk to her.”

Something told Molly that Luke wasn’t accustomed to his ideas being challenged—especially ideas that came to Nick. “Look, I was just—”

“Just what? Just trying to get him killed?”

Surprisingly childlike for someone of his size, Nick shrinks back as the two argued about him, making no effort to give any input on his own fate. He clutches his aching shoulder and bounces his gaze back and forth between them. The gusto to which he’d defended Sarah seemed completely lost when it came to defending himself.

“What? No! Christ, no! He’s my best friend! Why the fuck would you say something like that?”

Molly knows she’s goading him by this point—call it her argumentative nature, or blame it on the rising anxiety within her that wouldn’t be quelled until Sarah was out of the room, but the more Luke speaks, the more she needs to prove him wrong.

“Why would you march him out to die?” she continues.

“He agreed, Molly!”

“Yeah. He did. So maybe, instead of giving me shit, you should be wondering the fuck your friend would even agree to that in the first place.”

Luke’s lips pinch into a tight, sour line, and Molly realizes she’s probably on the shit list of everyone in this room by now. But just as she expects a heated rebuttal, he raises his gun and gives a short, determined exhale instead.

“Alright. I’ll go, then.” Called on his bluff again, or maybe just too exhausted to continue arguing, he’d given in. He squints at Molly for a moment, nostrils flared, before turning to Nick and softening his expression. Taking one hand off his gun, he claps it against Nick’s good arm with hesitant amiability. “Watch yourself, alright?”

Nick gives a solemn, wordless nod back, and doesn’t take his eyes off his friend until the door slams behind him. His gaze lingers on it, the outward signs of an inner debate that Molly would never know the details of. For a moment, it almost seems like he wanted to take off running and join Luke out the door. Instead, he turns back to Molly, brows furrowed in frustration.

He opens his mouth to speak, but whatever he meant to say was lost in a high-pitched scream from Sarah. Oblivious to the goings-on around her, she’d finally realized Molly was in the room. She stares at her now, scooting as back against the wall as she could manage, her shoes scraping against the carpet as whimpers and indecipherable words tumble past her lips.

It dawns on Molly that the two of them were right; after seeing her hit Luke, Sarah’s terrified of her.

It’s a big sibling’s worst nightmare, and she’s not cold enough to pretend it doesn’t hurt.

Her stomach sours, and for a moment she wants nothing more than to climb right out that broken window and run. If she was any bit as smart as she likes to think she is, she’d do it. But Molly knows she’d only hate herself more for turning her heel like a coward than anything else that could possibly happen here.

Curling her fingers tightly around Hilda, Molly gives a determined sniff and looks back to Nick. He may not be the ideal companion, but if they wanted to get Sarah out in one piece, they’d need to work together.

Chapter Text

There’d been a time like this before.

Not entirely the same, because it had been her sister, then, not Sarah. They’d been pretty young at the time—she recalled being somewhere in that frustrated late middle school range, and Reese was just old enough to start doubting herself. She couldn’t even remember what she’d said, and that alone bothered her. It had been something ridiculous, something unnecessarily mean and obnoxious. Little Reese—ever sensitive, ever troubled Reese—took every lost word to heart and locked herself in the bathroom.

Molly had tried to be stubborn, at first. When her parents told her off, she tried to argue against it and blame her sister for overreacting. But minutes turned into hours, and eventually she found herself propped up against the bathroom door with a pillow and blanket, slipping note after note of desperate apologies under the door. Bursts of panicked fantasies kept running through her mind, and when her father had to unscrew the entire doorknob the next morning, she was certain they’d find a Reese-sized skeleton on the floor.

Turns out she’d just fallen asleep in the bathtub, almost immediately after locking herself in there. Never saw a single note Molly slipped to her.

She’d like to think it was that simple now, but Reese didn’t have the threat of a geek bursting through the window and sinking its teeth into her throat. Not then, at least.

Sarah had scrambled back against the wall, sliding away until she found herself the closest crawlspace to hide in next; the adjoining bathroom. In her panic, she still managed to lock the door shut. The two of them sprung forward as fast as they could, though not fast enough. After the door slammed in their faces, Nick pounded his fist against the wall in frustration, but Molly couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief—it means the girl still has a sense of self-preservation, and that’s a good sign.

Luckily, it’s quiet now, miraculously so considering the screams earlier. The only thing coming in through the shattered window is a cool breeze. Sarah is still whimpering, quietly so, but how long that will last is uncertain.

They sit by the door now, and it all feels too familiar to that miserable night with Reese, but there are no scraps of paper to scribble apologies on.

Nick carefully holds the fragment of a broken mirror at the bottom of the door, trying to angle it so that they can see her. The light coming down from the skylight above them makes it glint in a way that’s almost blinding, and Molly can’t stare at it for too long. All they even really get is a glimpse of the top of her head, her eyes wide open and staring forward. She might be sitting on top of the toilet, by the sink. It’s difficult to see.

That dull terror remains in her stare, her big brown marbles glassy, shuddering at a horror that’s seen to no one but her.

Molly saw the same in her sister’s eyes, brilliant and terrified as she huddled on the floor of a handicap stall. She had torn through the congested high school halls, locker-to-locker with panicked teenagers screaming for their parents and trying to escape gnashing teeth still bound in braces. If she hadn’t burst her way into that bathroom Reese was hiding in, the dead would have eventually—and what would Reese have done, without Molly there? She doesn’t even want to imagine. But when she smashed the window and stooped on one knee underneath it, hands poised to boost her up and out—Reese was already on her feet.

She knows there’s still a chance for Sarah.

Nick tries to swap it to his left hand and crane that for a better view, but it’s too much on his bad shoulder. He promptly drops the shard, hissing in pain. The sharp edge nicks his fingertips, and fresh blood mixes into the stiff, dried brown crusted around the wound on his shoulder when he brings up a hand to clutch the sore spot.

Sitting back on her haunches, Molly squints at him. She knows what she can do, and she knows what she should do; not just morally-speaking, but survival-wise. This isn’t just about saving some guy’s life—she needs him if she wants to save the girl. It’s the most all-around beneficial option she has, but even in childhood she hated to play nurse.

She lets out a long sigh before biting the bullet.

“Hey. Um…” Shrugging her backpack off, she casts a quick glance back to the door, just to make sure they’re still alone. “You look like you’ve seen better days. And I’ve, uh… I’ve got some supplies. I can wrap that gunshot for you, if you want.”

Still gritting his teeth, Nick wasn’t in so much pain that he couldn’t send her a venomous glare.

“Why do you wanna help me? I thought I was Lurch.”

Given the fact he and Sarah had been talking with nothing but their hands, it came as no surprise that he’d overheard her saying that. Not that she particularly cared. If he wanted to hold a grudge over an off-handed nickname, when she was sitting here trying to save his life, then that was his problem.

“What—don’t like The Addams Family?” In spite of his standoffishness, she pulls out some necessities anyway; a roll of bandages, a bottle of water, a scrap of clean cloth, a little bottle of antiseptic spray. Molly takes pride in the makeshift first aid she’s acquired. After lasting this long on means even more meager, her current supply feels like a goldmine. She unscrews the water bottle cap. “Besides, you called me Goldilocks. I think we’re even.”

He recoils slightly, watching her splay out the supplies. It’s as if he suspects the water is poisoned. She’d like to roll her eyes, but she can’t really blame him. Molly had certainly run into her own fair share of friendly faces that hid not-so-friendly intentions. Patience wasn’t her strong suit, but she’d have a stab at it.

“Take your shirt off.”

He doesn’t, and that brief promise of patience is lost in seconds. Whatever stopping him isn’t her responsibility—she just needs to get this guy cleaned up and ready to go so they can focus back on Sarah.

“Look, guy, now’s really not the time to get modest. If you don’t take it off I’m gonna assume you’re trying to hide a bite or something—” She doesn’t suspect him of any such, seeing as his fatigue is pretty standard for someone who’s been shot. It’s a goading threat, maybe a bit too much of an overreaction, but it does the trick.

“I—I ain’t bit!” Nick snaps back, his voice cracking slightly in panic. “Christ!”

He bitterly obliges, tugging his shirt up. She’s sure he’d be ripping it off a lot more spitefully if his arm was in better condition, but he pauses in his own frenzy to gingerly ease his arm out of the sleeve. There’s a stomach-turning crackle as the clotted fabric peels away from his wound, bits of dried blood flaking off and dusting along his skin like ash.

“There.” He’s refused to pull the thing all the way off. The entire left side bunches up by his neck, only enough to bare his right arm, while his right side still remains fully covered. A part of her almost admires the audacity of it.

He’s thin. Thin enough to see his skin pull tight against his ribcage every time he draws in breath. He’s thinner than she expected, given how broad his shoulders are, but everyone’s thin these days. While it doesn’t faze her, she suspects it might be part of the reason he was so hesitant to pull his shirt off to begin with.

When she leans forward and squints at the wound, Nick turns his head, like he can’t bear to see her looking at him. With his right hand he grips his left forearm tightly in anxious anticipation. As he cranes his neck away, Molly gives a low whistle and blots the scrap of fabric with water.

“Shoulder’s a nasty place to get hit.” She begins to clean the blood away from the wound. Never been one that others would describe as gentle, she tries her best to be delicate. It’s still a relatively new wound, and even the slightest agitation could get it gushing blood again. But luckily for him, the bullet hadn’t hit any major arteries to begin with—otherwise he would have been geek meat by now. “How’d it happen, anyway? Your jackass friend playing pogo with that machine gun of his?”

She can tell she pressed a little too hard, because he gives a sudden, sharp exhale. Or maybe it’s just the dig at Luke. Either way, he needs to get himself a thicker skin.

“You know about Howe’s?” Nick asks, gritting his teeth again. “Or, uh—you ever heard about a guy named Carver?”

Molly shakes her head, but he can’t see it. Howe’s is completely lost on her, but she’ll humor a guess on the second. “Carver, like—George Washington Carver? The peanut guy?”

Nick snorts humorlessly, bowing his head. “Carver was this… monster.”

“That could be anyone these days,” she interrupts.

Something inside Nick sinks at her comment, and he blinks slowly, staring out at the wall as if he sees a scene beyond the hideous papering. “Yeah. Guess you’re right.”

She re-wets the stained fabric and continues to dab it around the gash. “Go on.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Whatever floated into his vision disappears with a few blinks, and he continues. “Uh… He ran a community at this old Howe’s Hardware they fixed up. Seemed like a pretty good deal when we first got there. Safe walls. Plenty of food. But the guy was—he was just… he was a monster. And everyone was terrified of him. They all did whatever the fuck he wanted, and it just got worse and worse till a few of us couldn’t take it anymore. We snuck out, but they found us again and brought us right back to square one, with even tighter security than before. But we figured out a way out again. Took the whole damn place down with us.”

“Jesus.”

A part of it seems more like a Greek myth than it does an apocalypse reality, but then again, she’s from Crawford. She’s in no position to question accounts of corruption in whatever community folks these days could scrape together. She shouldn’t even be surprised.

“He… did something bad, to one of the women with us,” Nick continues. He idly rubs his right hand up and down along his left forearm. “She’s been pregnant a while, now, and I always thought it was her husband’s, but—ow! Shit!”

Glassy-eyed, lost in Nick’s story, Molly swipes against the gash a little too hard. The delicate scab breaks, and beads of blood already begin to bubble up.

“Shit,” Molly echoes. Her voice feels small, rattling around aimlessly inside the hollow of her rib cage until it finally squeaks out. Her throat is tight, tight in the same way it was every time she pushed herself up from that stiff cot in the nurse’s station back in Crawford. She sets her jaw and presses down hard against the flowing blood, her locked knuckles white and steady against the sway in her mind.

She clears her throat.

“Sounds like a place I was in for a while, back in the beginning.” But at least they hadn’t hunted her down to drag her back. They were glad to see her go. One less mouth to feed. One less body to house. One less set of lungs to breathe in their precious air. “They went to shit, too. Good riddance, far as I’m concerned. Only thing I regret is not being able to bring marshmallows to roast while it burned.”

She won’t say it out loud, but she’s relieved to know she’s working with someone who probably would have hated Crawford just as much as she did.

Maybe his neck is just aching from the strain, but he turns his head back to look at her. He shrugs his right shoulder. “There were kids at Howe’s. Not just the ones with us. Other ones. Ones prob’ly too young to even get what was so wrong about that place.”

The youngest residents Crawford had allowed were fourteen—her sister’s age. Even then, there’d been some Dark Ages-era rule that they counted as adults. While Reese was wise, she was by no means grownup; and neither was Sarah over in the next room. To Molly, those were kids. If Howe’s was the same kind of hellhole Crawford had been, she hated to imagine anyone even younger being subjected to that.

“I doubt they made it out,” he continues. “Only reason we did was because we covered ourselves in lurker guts to sneak out in the herd, and even that went to shit.” So that explains the viscera they were all smeared in. “Don’t seem right. At the time I was just about as ready as everyone else to get the fuck out, y’know, like… screw the rest. But… the more I think about it, the more I wish we’d… I dunno. Done it a different way, I guess.”

He shakes his head uselessly, tugging the down the brim of his cap.

Molly pinches her lips together attentively, but can’t help but interrupt him again. She holds up the antiseptic spray. “I’m, uh… I’m gonna put this stuff on. Fair warning—it’s gonna hurt like a bitch.”

The distracted nod he gives her is proof that he’s still lost in thought, but he’s ripped right back into reality when the hydrogen peroxide hits his skin. His right hand swings up, balled into a fist, and for a moment she fears he might slam it against the bathroom door—but instead, he brings it to his mouth, biting down against his knuckles as he tries to suppress the whimper of pain crawling up his throat. The alcohol fizzes against the tattered flesh around his injury, and in spite of his distress, Molly watches nonchalantly.

“Okay, buddy.” She screws the cap back onto the spray. “Worst part’s over.”

“Jesus.” His head is turned away again, and he’s trying to vigorously wipe away the tears that pricked his eyes before she can see. She pretends she doesn’t notice, looking down instead at the roll of bandages in her hands.

“For what it’s worth,” she offers, sitting back to unravel a length of bandaging. “I find it a whole lot easier to just look out for yourself.” And your kin, if you had any left.

“Yeah. I know.” His voice is weak, and he says it like it’s a cruel lesson he doesn’t want to learn—like the world has already tried to punish him for caring about strangers too much, but he still can’t help himself. Whatever it means, it’s not an anecdote she wants to hear. He sniffs, swiping the heel of his hand under his nose. “Funny thing to say, though, comin’ from you.”

Her instinct is to argue the opposite, and generally, the opposite is true. Staying alone and keeping her neck clear of leashes that would drag her back into a group—that’s what keeps her alive. Company can be nice, but a leash could just as soon become a noose if you let them pull you in tight enough.

But here she is, huddled outside of a bathroom door, wasting supplies on strangers, when she could be going on her merry way right back down the road she was on before. She slowly winds the bandaging around him, knowing that every precious inch could have been saved for herself.

“I don’t usually do this,” she answers quickly. Wasn’t the fact she was alone to begin with proof enough of that? “I just—I don’t like seeing girls like her in trouble, alright?” It’s the most explanation she’ll give to him. “Maybe we’re having a nice chat now, but don’t think I won’t leave your ass behind when push comes to shove.”

Nick smirks, like he doesn’t believe her, and she’s tempted to give that newly-wrapped shoulder of his a spiteful pinch. She’s being honest—she’d leave him behind in a heartbeat if it came to that. The girl in the bathroom, however, is another story.

He’s halfway through tugging his shirt back down when a loud thump against the front door jolts them both. Molly quickly shoves her supplies into her backpack as they both stand, and a chorus of hungry gurgling bubbles around the trailer. She turns, and through a window on the other wall she catches the blank, white eyes of a geek peering back. There’s a blood-curdling screech as it drags its nails down along the glass pane.

“Fuck.” They both turn back to look at the bathroom door, still locked from the inside. Who knew what kind of easily-breakable window Sarah was unwittingly sitting beside? How much time did they still have? She could have kicked herself for chatting it up with this guy when they should have been focused on the girl from the very start.

Luke might have gone off to get help, but they couldn’t rely on that. Getting help and coming back could take hours, assuming he even made it out alive. They couldn’t dawdle like sitting ducks, banking on his heroics, when geeks were flanking them on all sides.

“Alright. No more pussy-footing around.” Hilda already in her grip, Molly scans the interior with narrowed eyes. “Luke’s a bust. We have to get out now.”

Nick stares at her hopelessly a moment before falling back against the bathroom door. He doesn’t like what he hears. He tips the brim of his baseball cap up to nervously rake his good hand through greasy bangs. “We’re fucked. We’re fucked. We’re gonna—”

The last thing they need right now is another person panicking. Even in all those years of living with a mother as nervous as they come, and a little sister that unfortunately inherited it, Molly still wasn’t quite accustomed to dealing with other people’s anxiety. “Christ, just—just shut up a second, okay?”

Luckily, the broken window still remains bare. Carefully creeping towards the opening, she peers through it for a good look at their surroundings.

There’s not much to be seen from this angle, but most of the geeks are swarming around the front door, banging robotically against it. Like sheep, they all flock towards that same spot, bumping against toppled lawn chairs and picnic tables as they crawl forward.

Two of them trip over each other in their pursuit, and one stumbles into the driver’s seat of an abandoned car. It hits the horn briefly as it struggles to get up, and the sharp honk jolts the group. They turn their heads curiously at the sound, but when it doesn’t repeat itself, they go back to banging at the door.

Molly smirks. They never did get smarter, in all these years.

Still grinning to herself, she thinks back to the bell tower in Savannah. It’s practically the same thing—just a little less scenic. If she can get the abandoned cars to make enough noise in one spot to lure them away, Nick and Sarah can escape in the opposite direction.

“I’ve got an idea,” she announces, turning back to Nick. “But I need you to get Sarah out and ready to go.”

Nick has his hand up to his mouth, now, and he’s chewing at a hangnail on his thumb, awaiting her orders with diligent apprehension. He glances back towards the bathroom door. “I mean, I’ll try—”

“Yeah—don’t try. Just do it.” Her eyes fix on the skylight above them. She points toward it. “Think you’re good to boost me up? Just long enough so I can get it open?”

His eyes follow her finger, and he hesitates, his hand touching his wounded shoulder. She can tell he’s tempted to repeat I’ll try, just out of habit, but he knows the answer he’ll get. Instead, he draws in a deep breath and gives her a determined nod. “Yeah.”

“Good. Let’s make this quick.”

There’s no time to dwell on his pain, but she feels briefly apologetic as she steps up on to his shaking hands. The curse he grunts when he heaves her up doesn’t fall on deaf ears, and she wouldn’t be surprised if the wound opened up again against her weight. Molly reaches up towards the skylight, her fingers brushing against the lock. She’s not religious by any means, especially not these days, but she secretly prays he’ll hold out long enough for her to get the window open.

Unfortunately, Nick might have overestimated his own ability, because in only a few seconds his hold gives out.

“Fuck!” He grabs his shoulder as they both tumble, and Molly can only be glad she’d fallen enough times to know how to land on her feet. “Fuck, Molly, I’m sorry—”

“No, no,” she huffs, steadying herself. “It’s fine. I got it open.”

Before the unceremonious fall, she’d managed to twist the lock and push it open with just enough space needed. Sweating from the strain, Nick stares up at it and shakes his head.

“It’s useless,” he argues breathlessly, looking back to her as she paces to the very end of the room. “If—if I can’t boost you up, then—”

His words are trampled in the dust, lost on his own tongue when she zooms past him. With a running start, Molly barrels into the opposite wall and kicks off from it at an angle. She’s airborne just long enough to hook Hilda through the skylight’s opening. Hanging on with one hand, she uses the other to push the window up further. In less than a minute, she’s dragged herself up and on to the roof.

Nick stares up at her wordlessly, his blue eyes like saucers and his ears a deep crimson.

Dusting her hands, she squats by the edge and stares down at him curiously. It doesn’t take long for a smug beam to pull her lips.

“Might wanna pick your jaw back up before you go and get Sarah.”

Chapter Text

The roof is a breath of fresh air, and not just because of the November breeze. It’s a relief to finally be back on top, again.

The wind picks up, bitingly so, and it whips against her ears. With chapped fingers, she buttons up her steel gray leather jacket. It’s belonged to her since she was seventeen, but it was the last thing she could bring herself to take back from Crawford. It’s strange, how connotations can cling to objects. Ultimately, the memory of wearing it at seventeen and in high school trumped the memory of wearing it at twenty and in Crawford, and in this nasty northern weather, she needs the extra layers.

Sometimes, when she’s wearing it, she can almost catch a whiff of that cleaning spray he’d wipe the cots down with—after every patients visit, after every time he’d finished with her. If bathing hadn’t been timed to the second back in Crawford, she would have sat in the shower for hours, trying to scrub that thick ammonia smell from her hair. Just the very taste on the back of her throat makes her elbows weak, and she tries to tell herself he’s dead he’s dead he’s dead, but it’s easier said than done.

She’s glad to not smell it, this time. She knows it’s just in her head, but that’s hard to remind herself of when the scent seems so strong. But she can’t smell it, so it’s okay.

Instead, she notes to herself she needs to find a sturdy pair of gloves soon.

There are geeks scattered around the entire grounds, as every flock will have its stragglers, but the majority have congested themselves against the front door of the trailer she stands atop. She can feel it rattle under her feet with every pound. A person less savvy might be frightened to have them swarming so furiously beneath, but to Molly, it’s nothing short of empowering.

Branching off from the trailer to her right is a makeshift wall, composed of abandoned cars and old furniture dragged from homes and haphazardly piled together. She’s sure at least some of those vehicles can be set off, but if she wants to do that without any undead interference, she needs to get on the other side of the blockade.

Molly takes another running start and leaps over to the next trailer’s rooftop. She lands against the side with a loud clang, Hilda’s sharp end sunk into the flimsy trailer tin. The sound rouses a few nearby undead, but she’s already scrambled back up top before they can start towards her. The rubber bottoms of her boots rub long black tire tracks with the friction as she pulls herself up—the only part of her left behind that the geeks can scrape their fingernails against.

The other side is considerably emptier, save for a lone geek weaving itself aimlessly through a maze of sandboxes and seesaws. There’s fresh blood staining its jaw, and it gives her a sinking feeling of realization even before she squints to the side and catches a hint of orange caught in the chain link fence.

Dispatching the geek is almost too simple, from up where she’s standing; she taps Hilda against the side of the mobile home until it wobbles towards her, arms outstretched. When the creature’s close enough, she smashes her axe against its skull. She likes to call it geek fishing in her head.

When she knows the thing is dead twice over—dead enough to stay down for good—she climbs down along the trailer’s drainpipe. Her boots squish in the damp mud when she jumps to the ground, and the patch of orange flinches—but from where she’s standing, it’s no longer allowed just a patch of orange. It’s Luke.

He’s tangled up in the fence like the Scarecrow up on his pole in The Wizard of Oz, but something tells Molly that he wouldn’t be skipping along to Emerald City the moment she lets him down. He hangs miserably from it in defeat, as if it’s the only thing keeping him still up. Grayed, solemn, and shattered, he resembles a gargoyle that had crumbled from its post. His eyes dull and slow-blinking, the life drained from him though a glistening chunk in his arm, delicately scalloped by tooth marks—no doubt the handiwork of her most recent geek fishing catch.

It’s no time to gloat, but she had been right. Waiting on Luke would have been useless after all, because he’d still been in the trailer park this whole time—dying.

She approaches cautiously, and it takes him a great amount of effort to lift his head and catch her eyes. In his deteriorating state, every muscle moved is like pushing a boulder up a hill, but Molly’s sure that it takes even more effort for her to look back.

“Please tell me you ain’t leavin’ them,” he whispers hoarsely, his voice crackling with something wet in the back of his throat. “You… you can’t. You gotta—”

“I’m not,” she answers quickly, her voice clipped. He’s staring at her, but she can’t bear to hold the gaze back. It isn’t her first experience with someone who was bitten and dying, but it never got any easier. Maybe it’s cruel of her, but she wishes desperately she could have found him already turned.

While she can’t look him in the eyes, she figures she at least owes him an explanation of her plan.

“I’m going to try and make some noise with the cars over on this side. Get them all over on one end, and then get Sarah and Nick out through the other.”

Beads of blood seep between Luke’s teeth when he offers her a weak grin. She can smell his breath. It stinks like he’s rotting from the inside.

“Shit. You’re clever as hell.” The compliment might have made her crack a grin any other time, but she’s disconcerted by his small talk, seeing as every word he utters is gasped from his deathbed—or deathfence, to be technical. “Wish we’d had you back at Howe’s when we were… when we were tryin’ to escape.”

A precious length of silence hung between them, thick as a pungent perfume. Every second they don’t speak is a second wasted, but what could Molly even say? She pinches her lips together and looks down at her boots, clearing her throat. They both know what’s going to have to happen soon. At least, she hopes Luke does.

“You—” 

“Look—”

Their words tumble over each other, and it culminates in another chunk of silence. Luke squeezes his eyes shut and gives a painful gulp.

“You go first,” he offers.

She can’t stand his insistence on maintaining courtesy at a time like this. It’s the same ridiculous gesture as the attempted handshake back in the trailer. What she blurts out isn’t so much a blunt observation, but a reality check. “You’re dying.”

It’s the truth, but it’s not what he wanted to hear. There was a fight in Luke, once—even if it had been hard for him to keep his fists up, there had been a fight. But now, when he tries to opens his mouth to protect, it just hangs slack and silence. Whatever semblance of fight that was left in him dies as he crumples into a deep, rattling cough. Flecks of blood sprinkle his bottom lip.

“Listen, Molly,” he wheezes pitifully. “I—I gotta ask you to promise me something.”

Molly doesn’t like owing debts, especially not debts to the dead. The one her sister left her with was a heavy cross to bear to begin with; the very fact she was in this situation to begin with was proof enough of that. She crosses her arms and bites the inside of her cheek.

He continues, his voice melting into a slow, sick molasses.

“I know what you gotta do. And—and I appreciate you doin’ it. Really. I do. But… you can’t tell them.” There’s something sickeningly puppy dog about his pleading gaze, even as his eyeballs are pink with popped blood vessels. She can’t bear to look at him. It turns her stomach. She just can’t bear it. “Sarah… she just lost her dad. If she hears about anything else, I mean… Christ. Who—who fuckin’ knows, if she learns someone else is gone? Even if it is just… just me.”

Molly swallows, staring down at her boots. Maybe the truth can be omitted from Sarah, but why not Nick? The mystery surrounding whatever fate Reese endured was torturous—even if it was as horrific and pathetic as dying alone in a fence, she’d rather know then be left in the dark. It’s what made leaving Savannah such a struggle to begin with. If the two of them were as close as she suspected, why wouldn’t he allow Nick that kind of closure?

“And what about Nick?”

Luke coughs again, and she can see blood splattering on the dirt. Staring at the ground isn’t safe anymore. She relents, looking back up at him, and sees guilt pulling Luke down as much as the virus tearing him apart inside.

“The guy thinks I’m his best friend,” he says hoarsely, offering a strange, weak smile to her. He swallows with a wince, as if his own saliva feels like corroding acid down his throat. “Guess that couldn’t go unpunished, huh?”

There’s something strangely condescending in his rasp, something dusted by years of a tumultuous friendship there was no time to explain in his last dying breaths. He talks about Nick like he’s less of a friend, and more of a little brother he’d been tasked with protecting. A task he wasn’t pleased with, but dutifully carried out anyway, simply because he felt he had to. She knows she should be sympathetic to a dying man, but his words don’t sit well with her.

“Imagine—imagine gettin’ saddled with two Sarahs,” Luke explains. His voice grows quieter, pausing to catch his breath after every clump of stumble words. “‘Cause that’s what’s gonna happen if you tell him I’m dead. I’m all the guy’s got left. When I’m gone, he’ll have nothing. If he knows that, he’s… he’s just gonna completely shut down.”

Molly’s grip around Hilda tightens. Her nails dig into her own palm.

“He has himself, doesn’t he?” Or was ‘himself’ considered nothing, too?

“Nick don’t think like that, Molly. He don’t think himself is worth spit.” Luke’s eyelids droop. They’re dampened at the corners. “Wish I—wish I coulda done more to let him know that he…” Whatever he means to say is cut off indefinitely, interrupted by another series of wet coughs rattling his insides. “Christ.”

His gaze flickers back up to her. The only part of him that isn’t suffocated by the illness is the pleading in his voice. “Please, Molly. Please… just promise me you ain’t gonna tell them. Please.”

He won’t say it, but she knows he wants her to just agree so he can finally die. But as much as she hates to see him suffering, it’s not something that sits well with her. Maybe he does know Nick better than she, but there’s something about his reasoning that seems like he never even tried to help the guy think any different. Maybe he realizes that, now, but there’s no time for him to reflect on it. He just wants that final relief.

“I promise.” It tastes bitter on her tongue.

The smile he gives her is genuine, even if he has to grit his teeth through the pain.

“Thank you. Th—”

There’s no sentiment in a mercy killing. It’s not a slow, bedside passing, loved ones huddled around and sniveling as the minutes tick by. Frankly, Molly’s glad of that. With the kin to survive him directed to be left in the dark, she anticipates no message to be passed on. Whatever last words he had plans will remain unspoken.

Violent deaths are strange. In a matter of seconds, that living, breathing person becomes a shattered puzzle—once a full image, now broken into messy, unfeeling fragments. To see someone’s insides might have been humbling if she hadn’t been the one letting them all hang out. With the weapon in her hand, she feels uncomfortably powerful. It’s something she’s not sure she’ll ever get used to, though she knows a lot already have.

Her axe pierces his skull with a crunch, and his neck jerks to an unnatural position with a loud snap. She wasn’t sure Hilda would do the trick to put him down instantly; it’s a lucky thing his neck broke with the force.

It’s over.

She places a boot up on to his slack hip and pulls hard to yank Hilda out.

“Guess that’s where ‘thick skull’ comes from,” she muses to herself. It’s not very funny, but jokes make it easier to swallow.

His brown eyes are glassy and unblinking as he hangs there, still suspended, like a marionette doll without its puppeteer. She stands back and gives him once last once over. A lot of people might say they’re sorry. She might have, at one point, too. But really, the only thing she should be saying you’re welcome. Thanks to her, he didn’t have to suffer for too long.

That machete strapped to his back catches her eye. While she’s in a committed, monogamous relationship with Hilda, she knows a weapon like that might come in handy—just in case. Hell, even if she didn’t use it, she might be able to pawn it off for food and medicine to another group of survivors.

Molly strips the sheathed weapon from his corpse and slips it into her backpack, but the handle pokes out too conspicuously. When she adjusts it so it’s hidden, she’s thinking of Luke’s request, but she tells herself it’s a safety precaution.

There’s nothing else to do.

Her attention turns back to the automobile barricade. Their horns aren’t exactly church bells, but they’ll serve the same purpose. Maybe not as loud, and maybe not for as long—but it would be something, wouldn’t it?

The nearest car is a green Ford Pinto, resting stripped and wheel-less under a heap of office chairs and side tables. There’s something about the way it sits under the clutter that almost resembles symbiosis, like a bunch of little critters latched on to one big one that’s so large and lethargic, it doesn’t even notice they’re there.

The window is rolled down, and an arm that’s long since stopped moving hangs over out the side. The person in the driver’s seat is dead—not geek-dead, but dead-dead. She doesn’t have that clammy, bloated flesh that the walking ones have. She’s just a shriveled corpse, her dried flesh tight against her bones. She looks a little bit like the mummies Molly saw on a field trip to a museum back in high school, in eleventh grade, those shriveled little beef jerky bits in glass cases. She remembered wondering if her dad might have looked like that by then, the one year anniversary of when they’d buried him only a few weeks prior.

“They look like Slim Jims,” she had told her friend as they squinted at the relics, her fingernails tapping nervously against the metal barrier. It wasn’t very funny, but jokes made it easier to swallow.

If this woman’s a Slim Jim at least two years, then her dad’s bound to be Bacon Bits by now. She wonders if his eyes are just empty sockets now, too—those deep blue eyes she and Reese inherited, just squeezed into dust. Stormy blue, her mom used to call them. Stormy blue, just like your Pop.

Molly reaches in and gives the corpse a hard tug by the front of her blouse. Whatever weight the brittle body has left slumps forward, face smacking right into the middle of the steering wheel. The car horn begins to wail on impact.

There’s stirring amongst the crowd by the trailer, the geeks perking their ears in curiosity. They’ll be heading over, soon enough, once the sound sinks into their bellies—but she needs to make sure they stay. Another horn should do the trick.

Molly jogs down the line, to the next car, but the window’s rolled up and the door is locked. She’s lucky the car isn’t so new, because that means she can shatter it with Hilda. What she wasn’t banking on, however, was the ear-piercing siren that screamed out into the daylight once she broke the glass.

It’s a cacophony even more obnoxious than the car horn, and its music to her ears.

In minutes, she’s back up on to the trailer and leaping over to the next. The geeks swarm underneath like rats, stumbling over themselves to reach the barricade and find the source of the sound. Her boots stomp against the rooftop of the trailer Nick and Sarah are in, and she crouches by the skylight to holler in, “Meet me by the broken window!” She doesn’t take the time to see if they’re actually below, waiting on her orders, but she’s certain the barrage of sound should be some kind of signal, regardless of where they’re huddled up in the trailer.

Molly slips down the side of the trailer. To the left, only a few stray geeks linger by the door, but they’re facing towards the noise. It’s a safe distraction, but they can’t afford to dawdle, regardless.

When she looks through the shattered window, Nick and Sarah are already making their way over. Sarah walks stiffly, like she was sitting down for days and only just got up and started moving again. Her hands are clamped over her ears as Nick ushers her forward, eyebrows knotted at the incessant wail of the sirens.

Molly braces herself, expecting the same kind of terror Sarah regarded her with before, but when the girl looks at her now, it’s with a hesitant trust. The fear undeniably remains—she’s a stranger, after all, and they’re still in the belly of geek-infested waters—but when Nick boosts her up through the window, there’s no uncertainty as she climbs through. The bottoms of her shoes grate against the crushed glass with a crunch, and Molly briefly worries about Sarah nicking herself against the jagged shards.

She helps the girl down, hooking her under the armpits as she wonders just what the hell Nick said to her that got her out and willing to look Molly in the eyes. She puts Sarah down with a huff, and the girl’s hand slips down and catches hers.

It catches her by surprise, but she doesn’t have time to dwell on it. There’s a soft shatter behind them, and the two snap their heads back to the window worriedly—but it’s just Nick using the curtain rod to clear off the rest of the shards sticking out from the frame. While he’s cleared an opening large enough to fit himself through comfortably, he isn’t as fazed by the bed of needle-sharp debris along the windowsill. He grips the edge tightly, heaving himself up and over in Sarah’s wake. The other two break their linked hands for Molly to help him down, as well. She hooks him under the armpits as well, and he halfheartedly mumbles something about not needing her help. Molly smirks to herself.

There’s a brief beat where the three of them catch their breath. Sarah grabs Molly’s hand again. Nick looks down at his own hands, smeared in fresh blood and dotted with tiny crystalline splinters of glass. He stares with a detached curiosity that makes Molly wonder if he can even feel the sting.

The siren comes to an abrupt stop, and what follows is a different kind of warning. It’s a choked rasp, bellowed like an undead battle cry—one solitary geek rallying the rest. It settles in Molly’s esophagus as easily as heartburn, and she tightens her grip on Sarah’s hand before tugging her towards the woods. Nick follows behind, his steps staggered as he holds his bleeding palms splayed out uselessly.

Eventually they’re back on the road, if it can even be called that. A city mouse by nature, Molly’s of the opinion that gravel roads should have been made illegal twenty years ago, at least. She hates the way her boots grumble against the ground so unsteadily.

Sarah walks besides her with her eyes to the ground, each step wobbled. There’s a layer of sweat slicked between their entwined fingers. Part of her wants to let go, but she knows she really shouldn’t.

Nick has picked the shards of glass out of his palms, and dried blood crusts around his fingernails. He sucks at his thumb like it’s covered in something sweet rather than rusty, and the slurping sound unnerves Molly a little bit.

Nobody’s said anything since they left the trailer park and that unnerves her too. She doesn’t expect Sarah to be particularly talkative, but Nick’s the adult here. Luke’s words left a bad taste in her mouth, but with Nick’s lack of action, here, she can’t help but think back on them.

She’s about to the first to break the silence, and it starts with a long, impatient inhale. “So… where are we going, exactly?”

Nick pulls his hand away from his mouth, letting it fall to his side. “Parker’s Run. It’s, like… half an hour’s walk, I guess. Fuck if I know. We got so off-track chasin’ Sarah, I don’t know where the fuck we are, now.”

Molly sneers and rolls her eyes a little too deliberately. And here, she’d been thinking she got stuck with the more competent one—though, really, she couldn’t blame him for having no clue how to navigate these woods. She couldn’t say she was much more adept at it, herself.

“Alright.” She combed her free hand through a chunk of blonde hair. “We’ll just… keep on this way, then. If nothing turns up by dark, we’ll… set up camp.”

She could only hope they found Parker’s Run soon—babysitting hadn’t been on the itinerary when she decided to tour up north, and if she’s being honest with herself, she doesn’t want to sleep in these woods… especially not with strangers.

Nick shrugs in agreement. He seems perfectly content to have her calling the shots. While Molly inherently loves to boss people around, it’s a position she didn’t ask for. She never signed up to be this strange, tiny little group’s de facto leader when she chased Sarah down into the trailer park. All she wanted to do was make sure the kid was safe.

Regardless, there’s nothing she can really do now but hope they find their group soon, and keep on walking down the gravel road. Her thoughts turn to the quiet girl clutching her hand, and she leans into Nick with a low voice.

“How did you get Sarah out?” And how the hell did she go from completely petrified of Molly, to walking beside her, hand-in-hand?

The way Nick’s eyebrows knot makes her stomach knot as well. He draws his thumb back to his mouth, sucks pensively at it for a few seconds, and then whispers back, “I told her you knew where her dad was.”

Her heart sinks. It’s technically not a lie. Molly does technically know where her dad is; geek chow. But clearly that’s not what Nick meant.

She clenches her jaw and stares forward. Next to her, Nick slumps with the same kind of shame. She remembers how long it took for her own father’s death to truly sink in. How she’d hidden in the bathroom, clutching her pillow to her chest, convincing herself he’d be on the other side of that door when she finally opened it, waiting with open arms. But on the other side was just her sister, just Reese, slipping her notes under the door through the entire night.

When she finally came out, she knew her dad wasn’t there. Maybe Sarah wasn’t there yet, but that didn’t mean she’d never get there. It feels sour in the same way Luke’s dying words did, and to be burdened with yet another secret makes her shoulders ache.

Or maybe it’s the weight of her backpack, suddenly feeling strangely heavy as they march forward.

She’d almost forgotten that she was carrying Luke’s lie with her.