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There are times when Alice sat and planned her next step. She would figure out exactly where she needed to go and what she needed to do and how she was going to get there.
This was not one of those times, but God, Alice wished it had been.
She looked down at her father, his head cradled in her lap as she sat cross-legged on the hard wooden floor. Usually, she would have at least taken the time to brush away some of the dirt and leaves that had blown in, even though this was the second story. It’s a wonder what the apocalypse did to her standards of housekeeping.
She could hear the screams echo around her and for the second time that night, she briefly wondered if maybe, just maybe, her father had been wrong.
2 hours earlier
“Come on, Alice. We need the supplies and Sherman’s Camp is ripe for the picking. What could go wrong?” Kenneth Watson added the last question to the conversation with a light punch to his daughter’s shoulder as they walked into Sherman’s Camp. Alice merely rolled her eyes and picked up her pace a bit so she could get a step ahead of her dad. Sure it was petty, but it felt like a solid choice in the moment as a smiled spread across her face.
“Yeah, what could go wrong in Sherman’s fucking Camp? Gee, I wonder?” The sarcasm was not lost of Kenneth as Alice sneered our her retort.
“Hey, language. And we’ll be fine. We’ve been camped on the outskirts here for how long? Two weeks? And we’ve seen nothing more than a few freaks and drifters here and there. Everything will be fine. Besides, even if we do run into trouble, I’ve got my lucky shot here with me.”
Alice knew her dad was referring to her skill with the sling shot, but she wasn’t exactly feeling over-confident in her skills at the moment.
Alice was jolted from her daydream by a piercing scream that sounded a little too close for comfort. She winced, the horde was getting closer and instead of them getting father away, they were stuck here in this crumbling house surrounded by freaks. Instead of her father driving away with her riding on the back of his bike, she was holding his bleeding head as his breaths were getting more and more shallow.
She had already put pressure on the scrap that now donned his temple, she had cleaned it and bandaged it with the cleanest fabric she could find, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding. Her teeth chattered as now, without the comfort of sliding into her memories, the gravity of her situation was starting to take hold. Alice clenched her jaw tight because damn if she was going to die because some bitch freak heard her panic-induced teeth chattering and got curious.
“Screeeech!” Another scream, closer than before. At least one freak was getting closer to them, and if there was one that found them, the entire horde of hundreds would be upon them within the minute. That’s how horde’s worked. That’s why so many had died last year when this whole fucking fiasco started. The horde’s swarm and destroy everything in their path, and right now, Alice and her father were about to be in their path.
She had to make a run for it.
The lost lake camp wasn’t too far from Sherman’s Camp by bike, if she could get her dad onto the back and strap him on she could make it there and beg Addy, the camp’s doctor, to take a look at him.
They could make it.
They could do it.
They had to do it now.
So without a plan in sight, Alice grabbed her father under the shoulder and hoisted his not-quite dead weight onto her back. She thanked whatever God allowed this shit to happen that he was still coherent enough to understand that she was trying to get him to move forward and lend what help he could.
She got to the top of the stairs and started to slowly make her way down the first few steps, eyes constantly on the front door that remained closed to the monsters outside. Step by step she walked down, Kenneth more so helping her not drop him than actually walking on his own. Their pace was agonizingly slow compared to the quick darting movements that characterized most people who had survived this long in the shit.
“Al… ice…” Alice shifted her father as she heard him start to speak.
“Save your strength, Dad. We got a long ride a head of us to Lost Lake where Addy will take good care of you.”
“Alice… leave… me…” He got the words out along with a slow dribble of blood that ran down Alice’s shoulder. “Leave…me… Ack!” This time his words were cut short by a sharp cough, a splatter of more blood, and the sudden growl of several freaks that had just pinpointed their location to be in the house.
“Dad, we have to move. Now!” Alice started shuffling down the starts faster, not caring about her own safety anymore.
“No. Leave… me… and live.” Kenneth was shaking against her shoulder and back. She shifted him again to help keep his weight centered on her back, but he took the opportunity to roll off of her and hit the stairs had.
“Ah! Go!” He roared. Eyes half-lidded and mouth still dripping blood. If Alice didn’t know better, she would have thought that he was a freak laying there on the stairs.
“No. Dad, please. No. Daddy.” The words spilled out of Alice’s mouth like water; but even she knew that they meant nothing in this situation. Her father was right. He was grazed by a bullet near his temple, that was already a death-sentence, not to mention the fucking horde now trying to break down the front door.
“I love you.” And with that, Alice turned and ran up the stairs. She could get out of the house by climbing out of one of the windows and jumping down from the porch roof. She just had to hope that she wasn’t going to be landing in a pile of the living dead. As she made her way towards the window, she stopped for just a moment, turned around, and lit one of her Molotov’s. No way in hell was she going to leave her father for the freaks. She climbed out the window and just as she braced herself to jump and hit the dirt running for the bike, she through the flaming bottle back into the window.
She didn’t even wait to hear the tell-tale sign of the glass bottle breaking before she was hauling ass towards her fathe… her bike.
By some miracle, she was able to run and stay low enough that the horde didn’t notice her peel away from the house and by the time that she started the bike’s engine it would have been too late to catch her anyway.
As she sped down the dirt road she chuckled through her sobs, taking her favorite red handkerchief, and wiping her eyes and cheeks so she could still see the road ahead of her. After years of not listening to her father, she had no plans of disregarding his last instruction to her.
She was going to live. Alice tucked the red handkerchief into the back pocket of her jeans, letting a tail fly behind her in the wind.
Damn it, she was going to fucking live.