Chapter Text
Michael didn’t have a way to know what time of year it was, but it was getting cooler, and he could feel the heel of Fall barreling towards him. He wasn’t sure what his plan was for when winter arrived, he hoped to find a group that would take him in.
His hopes at that point in time, were not high.
As he walked suringly, feet aching, down the route 67, he thought about where he would sleep during the night. The thick woods he had taken refuge in those past nights were long gone, replaced by barren open fields. It reminded him of those educational videos they would be forced to watch in school, particularly the ones about the killing fields in Cambodia during the Cambodian civil war. That had been one of the things that he had learned about that scarred him particularly. He would have nightmares about being gunned down in those same fields.
Now, he was a different person than that naive teenager who cried over long dead war victims. You couldn’t shed tears for the dead when you fight every day to stay alive. He didn’t really feel any strong emotions looking back on those men who died. In the end, they were just more dead people, and Michael was used to people being dead. That was most of the world at that point.
Michael realized he was thinking in simple and circular logic. Life wasn’t that simple, even if it was easier for him if it was. It was easy to push all your emotions to the very back of your head when you’re exhausted and close to starving. It was easy to feel nothing when you’re barely surviving.
Michael has tried to ration his food to make it last, but that left him with only slightly more. He knew that in about 3 days time, he would be completely void of food.
In the state he was in, Michael thought it was a little funny. The world was ravaged by disease, a disease that killed 95% of all humanity, but the thing that was killing him slowly was simple hunger. Hunger. Something he never even considered in his past normal life, but something so basic that he felt like a complete moron for not anticipating better.
As thoughts of food, war and mistakes swirled around in his brain, Michael’s mind was interrupted by the distant sight of a blue camping tent.
Michael stopped in his tracks and observed the tent. There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Michael watched the tent for any movement, but after a few minutes, he saw nothing.
He silently walked closer to the tent, hoping that it was abandoned and he could raid it for supplies. Michael started to feel that nauseous and tight feeling in his stomach that accompanied uncertainty and danger. Dizziness overtook him, which he wasn’t sure if it was due to hunger or fear, or some unholy combination of both.
Michael could see that it was a fully set up campsite, and the fire a few feet from the tent was still smoking. He believed that meant there was most likely people very close by, and that the best thing to do would have been to leave. But Michael couldn’t force his legs to move, he only stood there, looking at the fire.
The zipper of the tent quickly whipped open, the sound startled Michael and he backed away from the fire, almost tripping on the ground.
The face that emerged from the tent opening was a girl, probably the same age or slightly younger than Michael, with pain skin and a thin wired face. She didn’t look startled by Michael, and gazed at him quizzically.
Michael felt less scared seeing that the only other person there was a young girl. He didn’t think she would be a threat, but her calmness did unnerve him. If the roles were reversed, he would think it would be logical for her to be scared of him.
The girl opened the tent wider and stepped out, “Hi, oh gosh. I didn’t mean to scare you. I heard you coming a bit up the road.”
Her tone was friendly and lightly apologetic. Michael felt strangely calmed down by the girl’s casual nature.
“Um, it’s okay. I just... I didn’t know if someone was in there.”
The girl nodded and zipped up the tent behind her. Michael could see she was fairly short and a little stocky, she was wearing a navy blue puffer jacket vest with a grey sweater underneath it and her dark brown hair was tied into a loose ponytail. She looked healthy, and that meant she probably had food with her.
She walked closer to Michael and asked bluntly, “Were you planning on robbing me?”
Michael didn’t know how to respond, so he lied, “No, I just wanted to see if anyone was still alive around here.”
It wasn't a complete lie, Michael thought to himself. He was only planning on taking stuff from the campsite if no one was around, and someone was, so he wasn't planning to rob her anymore.
The girl’s eyes flashed quickly to sadness, she tried to keep the casual tone in her voice, “It sure doesn’t seem like it, huh?”
Michael responded, “No, it doesn’t seem like it. I haven’t seen another person in, I don’t know how long. At least a week or two.”
The girl smiled sullenly with tears in her eyes, and quickly lunged to wrap her arms around Michael.
Michael was startled and thought it was an aggressive attack at first, but the girl had wrapped her arms tightly around his midsection and placed her head on his chest in a hug.
He didn’t really know how to take that. It made him uncomfortable that a stranger was touching him, but it also made him feel warm and comforted inside. He felt a pleasant emotion for the first time in weeks.
The girl pulled away, grinning through her tears, “I’m sorry, I’m just so glad to see another person.”
Michael put his arms on her shoulders and pulled her lightly into him again, “It’s alright, I wasn’t expecting you to hug me. I thought you were gonna attack me.”
The girl gladly reciprocated the embrace, but also sternly said, “I won’t attack you unless you force me to. I’ll kill you if you get any smart ideas.”
Michael wasn’t expecting her to threaten him, even if it was an understandable sentiment she was displaying. She didn’t seem angry, she just told him it as a fact.
As she pulled away from Michael, she told him, “I don’t think you’re gonna do anything though. If you were gonna rape or kill me, you would have done it by now.”
Michael was extremely off-put by how friendly and affectionate she was being while also talking so bluntly about awful things. Michael wanted to tell her that he would never do that, but he didn’t blame her for being suspicious.
“I’m Lola, by the way.”
She put her hand out formally, and stared at it for a moment before grabbing her hand and cupping it, “Michael.”
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Michael and Lola sat quietly in the tent, eating cold lentil soup from that Lola had made a couple days before. Michael found himself eating it ravenously, but stopped himself in an attempt not to seem uncivilized to Lola.
She had stared at Michael almost the entire time, and it made him feel extremely self-conscious. He didn’t know what she was thinking and that fact unnerved him.
“Hungry, huh?” She said, while taking a sip of her own soup.
Michael responded, “Yeah, I wasn’t starving to death or anything, but I had to ration what I had. I wasn’t eating a lot every day.”
Lola nodded sympathetically, “I imagine that will become more of a problem in general as time goes on. People running out of food, rationing, and then eventually starving. Canned food can only last so long.”
Lola stared into the thin air as if deep in thought, and in those thoughts, something very awful was happening.
Her expression snapped back to Michael and she smiled, “We don’t have to worry about that for a while though.”
Michael found himself caught off guard by Lola once again, “We?”
She didn’t seem to understand, “Yeah, like you and me. Unless you plan on leaving?”
Lola’s expression dropped when she said the latter part of her sentence.
Michael responded, “Well, it’s just... it’s your food. I don’t have any rights to it. And I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
Lola looked away from Michael, “Yeah, it’s my food, of course, but it’s not like I wouldn’t share it with you. Whether you chose to leave or not.”
The mood of the room got significantly more uncomfortable, and they ate the remainder of their meal in silence. Lola would glance sideways at him, seemingly trying to interrogate his very existence, then back to her soup.
Michael didn’t want to leave the campsite, but he also didn’t want to stay. He had a mission he knew he needed to fulfill, to get to Boulder Colorado and meet the matronly old black woman he had spoke to in his dreams. Michael couldn’t see a future in the world where he didn’t do that.
To go on a life-threatening journey to facilitate a dream, that wasn't logical. That wasn’t something he could tell to Lola. He couldn’t explain his reasoning to her, because at the end of the day, there was no reason with his actions. They were the result of total blind faith. The only thing in his life left was faith. Everything and everyone else was long dead.
But Lola wasn’t dead, she was a flesh and blood person, alive right in front of him. On the road, it was easy to forget how lonely and desolate he was while he was starving. It was easy to forget what life was like with someone you can talk to, with someone who acknowledges your existence. What it was like to drown out of echoes of your past that rung out throughout your mind by speaking to another person. At that moment, he realized that his fate was sealed.
“I don’t want to leave.”
Lola took the empty bowl from Michael’s hands, “I knew that.”
She said that with a sly smugness.
Lola took the bowls out of the tent and put them in an old looking tin pan that was filled with water. Michael followed her apprehensively. That action made him feel like a puppy following it's owner around.
As Lola started washing the bowls, she said, “My mom always said that cliche about the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I guess that goes double for a man who’s starving to death.”
Michael thought that was pretty funny, but it also made him anxious. He wished he wasn’t so dreadful of everything that Lola said.
She giggled quietly to herself, “Too bad my dad died of a heart attack at 52. My mom had found her way to his heart a lot.”
Michael’s expression faded, “I’m sorry.”
Lola rinsed a bowl out with water, “Oh, it’s okay. I loved him and all but he was a bastard. I’m sure if he lived to see the superflu, he would have just bitched about it. He was always bitching.”
Her expression shifted into a thoughtful gaze once again, “There’s a lot to bitch about in this situation, but I’m grateful to be alive. How much he bitched when things were normal, I can’t imagine how much he would have now. I would have killed him before the flu did.”
Lola said the last line light heartedly, but Michael could feel the seething venom in her words.
“I see.” Michael said awkwardly, not knowing how to respond.
Lola finished cleaning the bowls and dried her hands with a small blue cloth. She curiously asked, “Did your whole family die from it?”
Michael felt frozen in place for a moment, he was able to push his grief down into himself for a long time when he was alone, but it made his entire body hurt to think about it.
He didn’t want to start crying, and kept those emotions in, “Yeah, as far as I know. My close family died. I don’t know about more distant ones.”
Lola stood up and put her wet hand on her hip attempting to dry it after the small blue cloth didn’t seem to work, “It’s strange, you know? You would think more whole families would be immune, if it’s genetic. I don’t really know how genes work but that sounds right.”
She looked at Michael for the first time in a while, and could see he was suppressing his emotions, “It just seems so random. Is this God’s plan? Are we alive for a reason, or is it just the luck of the draw?”
“I have no idea.”
Michael said those words and then immediately burst into tears. The weight of the entire situation was pressing down on him harder than he could ever imagine. Every moment with his family, both good and bad, ran through his mind at rapid paste, including their brutal and painful deaths. He could never forgot his mother's bloated, marcus covered corpse. He could never forget finding his dad with a hole in the top of his mouth where he had placed the shotgun and pulled the trigger, leaving Michael completely and utterly alone in a world falling to pieces. He could never forgot walking through the familiar sites of his hometown covered in the dead bodies of the people he once knew.
As sobs racked through him and tears ran down his face, Lola walked over to him and gingerly put her arm over his shoulder and her hand to his chest, “It’s okay to cry. You’ve been through a lot. The living bare the burden of the dead.”
Michael pulled Lola close to him once again and buried his face in her shoulder. He wept and felt pathetic, as he always did in one way or another.
Lola stroked his hair gently and listened to Michael cry. A grin slowly crept onto her lips, a grin that was drowned out by Michael’s suffering. A grin of both joyful memories and seething, rotting pain.
Michael and Lola held each other until Michael stopped crying and was able to gain some amount of composure.
He let go of Lola, “Sorry, I just... I haven’t really dealt with it all yet.”
She nodded, “Its okay, I think it’s gonna be a long time before anyone really deals with what happened.”
Michael wiped his face of tears with a towel he had in his backpack, and quietly tried to blow his nose. He was starting to develop a dull headache.
He could feel Lola’s eyes burned into him, as they had been the entire time, and he wished he could tell her to stop watching him so intently, but Michael didn’t want to piss her off. He didn’t want to make an enemy out of the only other person around.
Because for better or worse, Lola was his only ally. She was his only hope of actually making it out of the situation alive. That thought had made him both grin and wince, almost at the same time. Michael wished he didn't have to rely on the kindness of a stranger, but he was also appreciative of what she had done for him in the short time they knew each other.
Michael watched Lola take the now clean bowls and place them into the large hiking backpack she had with her. Her back was turned as she did this, and Michael wondered how much she must have trusted him to feel comfortable enough turning her back, leaving herself exposed to any kind of attack. Lola trusted him to not hurt her, and he should be able to return the favor.
But no matter how hard Michael tried, he found himself not trusting her. Deep in his gut feeling, he could see something about her was so hideously wrong. Something he couldn't quite put into words, but nonetheless, it ate at him every time he looked at her. No matter how nice or kind she was to him. Michael wondered to himself that maybe, she only trusted him because Lola was well aware she was the dangerous one.
Michael considered the possibility that the situation and hunger had driven him to paranoia.
Lola finished putting the bowls away huffily and turned towards him again, "These bowls are always annoying to fit into this thing. If we come across another town, I really hope there are bigger backpacks there."
The mundane nature of her words broke Michael out of his thoughts, "Yeah, that would probably be really useful. Wherever the next town is."
Lola walked over to Michael once again and said, "I'm sure we will find one, sometimes you just have to work towards something, even if you don't know exactly what or where it is."
"Blind faith?", Michael asked. It seemed like Lola was running on that too at this point.
Lola giggled quietly again, as if she heard a joke no one else did, "All faith is blind, silly."
All faith is blind. Michael wasn't sure if he agreed.
He looked down at Lola, as he did so because of the height difference between them, he wondered why this girl he had to look down on physically made him feel weak. Made him feel like he was the person who had to be on guard.
Michael decided to put his blind faith into her. Her blind faith had gotten Lola this far. And if Lola was indeed the dangerous one, he wanted to be on her good side.