Chapter Text
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Mike’s breath was strained. It fogged the air in front of him, faint but noticeable enough that it was difficult to see through. He remembers when he and Garrett had been younger, days spent on the porch at night trying to make the bigger cloud in each others faces. Garrett taking a deep breath, leaning in like he was going to finally beat Mike’s biggest record, and then blowing a raspberry that had Mike reeling back in disgust.
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
Abby had always been tall for her age. It was something both brothers had joked about- how she’d stolen the height meant for them. It means nothing, now. Abby was small in this moment. Shrunk into Mike’s arms, choked sobs pulled from her shaking body as she hid her face into his chest. She was trying to be quiet, but it was so, so hard.
“Mike.”
Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip.
They need to leave. Those monsters were coming, and Abby was still warm and breathing and alive in his arms. Even if Mike could barely register the world around them, he could feel her, and hear the faint buzzing of a helicopter passing overhead and the sound of groaning in the distance.
He’d failed Garrett. Each drop of his blood felt like gunshots in his ears- falling from the table that he was strewn over, and down his arm that dangled off the wooden edge. Abby shook harder in his arms, her hands covering her mouth to keep from crying out and drawing attention of the creatures outside.
“It’s okay, Abs.” Mike promised, voice weak as he shakily stood. Abby stumbled to her own feet, clinging to keep pressed against him. “It’s okay. Just hold around my neck, I’ll get us out of here.”
Mike struggled to lift Abby into his arms. Not because she was particularly heavy, but because he felt like he was going to collapse under just his own weight, and the added body only made it harder to stand upright. But he had too. He had to hold Abby, and be sure she was safe.
He still couldn’t tear his eyes off Garrett. The monster at his feet, where Mike had buried the hatchet into his skull, lay motionless. It had only taken a single swing- but Mike had been too late.
He tears the hatchet out, attaching it to the belt at his hip. Abby lets out a strangled cry at the noise, unable to hold it back, and buries her face into his neck. The cold press of her small nose is enough to wake Mike just a little bit more from his stupor.
What had he missed? What room had he failed to clear? Were the windows not covered like he thought?
Why hadn’t he heard him screaming sooner?
Mike stumbles towards the door of the house they thought had been safe, his feet dragging against the chipped wood.
There was something to be said about the determination to survive so deeply engraved in one’s psyche even when they didn’t want to go on.
Even though Mike wanted nothing more than to lay down and give up, even though the exhaustion in his limbs made them shake like the dying leaves on the trees around them each time he raised his arm and swung it down on another poor soul who’d been lost to the outbreak- it pushed him onwards.
Maybe it was fueled by Abby, who’d take aim from whatever safe place Mike stowed her away while he fought. Both of her small hands holding the small handgun she’d found, taking shaky aim. Maybe it was fueled by Vanessa, who he meets in a ruined restaurant, her hair a tangled blonde mess stained with blood as she pulls the crowbar out of the monster who’d almost gotten Abby. She’d seemed so strong and tall, berating Mike for his recklessness, and it’d lended him some strength of his own. Maybe it was Jeremy, who grabbed Mike and tucked his body beneath him when a car had exploded only few feet away from them- their bodies sent to the ground in a tangled, burned pile- but alive, and surviving. Jeremy had smiled at him, even as the ringing was loudest in their ears, and pulled Mike up to start running.
Maybe it was all of them, as they patched each other up. Laughed quietly around the fire they made. Talked about their lives from before. It was nice to be reminded of the problems they used to have.
Mike didn’t talk about Garrett, and Abby didn’t either. Maybe they would, one day, when they could think about it and not have to worry about their next meal or if it was safe to sit for a minute.
That was okay. Jeremy and Vanessa didn’t talk about their families either. It was an unspoken taboo, and whatever had happened to them wasn’t something any of them could afford to talk about right now.
But there was still a sort of comfort in it all. That they had all lost something, and were broken, but they were broken together and fit against each other like something new.
That something new gave like rotting wood under the weight of their horrible reality when he began showing up.
He wasn’t the first they’d seen of his kind. Plenty of monsters in the outbreak were stronger than the others- some unnervingly fast. Some strong, flipping cars over to get to them. Some spat, some screamed, some cried and some shook on the floor before bursting into sludgy parts all over- rancid and rotting and burned if you got too close.
He was fast, sure, but not unnervingly so. Fast enough that he dodged when Mike swung at him. He could scream, but he didn’t do it often- only when they had begun settling in for the night, thinking they were alone and safe- like he was messing with them, reminding them he was near. He was always near. He was smart. And he’d laugh.
Vanessa had told them when they first saw him that he was her brother. That she thinks that’s why he’s following them, just at the edges of their vision, far enough they could miss if they tried to shoot him but close enough to raise the hairs on the back of their neck.
Mike had wanted to tell her to leave. To go somewhere else, so he and Abby wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. But then he’d hear the laughing in the distance, a sound that was too stilted to be human- like something trying on their voice- and he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t leave Vanessa to a monster like that, and wonder if she’d come back too, and find them.
Abby asked him one night, while they tucked against each other for warmth, her head held in the crook of his arm.
“Will Garrett come back like that?”
“I hope not,” Mike had whispered.
“Maybe it would be better.” Abby murmured, closing her eyes. “Maybe they could be friends, and they wouldn’t be so lonely.”