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Chapter Text

I rolled a pair of dented bullet casings against the floor with the toe of my boot, feeling the scrape of metal on concrete like soothing scratches down my scalp. The casings kept my dancing feet in check as I finished cleaning my machete with an oil rag I’d found at the back of the safe house. It was doing the trick; at least, it managed to clean off more gunk than it left behind. Soon this sharp little fucker would be ready to swing again.

Once I’d finished grinding blood and dirt from the groove where the blade met the handle, I tossed down the rag and dunked my hands in the bucket of water I’d set near the corner. It was already brown from the clothes I’d washed an hour or so before. Still, I let my fingers soak for longer than necessary; any sensation besides aches and pains was welcome in my book. While I waited, I looked down across the narrow room to the red door, that single barrier keeping the rest of the world locked out. Where a window striped with rebar had once lain exposed to let in the breeze, there was now the remains of my old nylon coat, a padded barrier against winds that had turned kill-you-dead cold.

When the cold front had moved in with its screechy winds, it seemed like everything else had found a way to go silent. The rumbling echoes of gunfire that used to keep my eyes wide open in the night were lost under snowclouds, and even the dead had turned to huddling in tighter, slower packs, or sprawling alone in the streets, their days of murder and mayhem long behind them. Rare patches of blood from a lucky fresh kill were quick to freeze in weather so harsh, so chilled and gray that even the firelight from my cooking pit looked cold.

There was a shudder over my head: the familiar sound of metal sheets denting and undenting under muffled hands and feet. I knew right then that it was Jay Bird up there.

I had met Jay Bird just a month or so after moving into this safe house, named him for the “singing voice” sharp enough to shatter glass, and sanity too. He had crawled in through a half opened vent, growling and shrieking; he was a bona fide feral, just like every other Hunter I’d met. My guns had been unloaded for the sake of repairing them that day; if not, Jay’s life would have ended then and there. I chased him back into the vent with a machete instead, and did my best to board it up after. Only a day later, Jay’d come back to scratch his way in. For a while I found myself almost as wired and paranoid as I’d been when I was still on the run. But then the day came when Jay arrived with a dead Common, dragging it out by the neck with his teeth after breaking open my vent for the third time. He didn’t growl anymore, just slapped down the body in front of me and sat there like he expected I’d eat it.

Instead, I taught him to find cans.

It took time, of course. Once I was sure I wouldn’t be pounced or otherwise mauled, I had made a show of heating up some canned food and eating it, offering the leftovers for Jay to sniff. After coming back with more dead Commons, then pieces of metal pipe, and finally a tank of gas, I had thought he’d never get it. Again, Jay had surprised me. When he came down through that vent with pockets full of canned tomatoes on one of the coldest nights yet, I felt happy for the first time since maybe before the whole world had ended. Ever since, I let Jay come and go as he pleased.

It never made sense to me why he’d wanted in so bad. If he didn’t want to eat me, what could he want? Hunters like Jay only wanted one thing from survivors like myself, and that was a fresh meal. But he seemed content enough just scavenging the straggling Commons, the ones that had froze in the alleyways around the safe house. With ice hanging from the gutters and snowdrifts in the corners between buildings, he had no need for water, either. After a few days sharing the safe house with Jay Bird, I figured it out: he wanted warmth, body heat in particular, as well as the heat from my cooking pit. His instincts not to freeze had driven him to bargain for a place in my makeshift home.

As I pulled my hands out of the bucket, the metal vent cover creaked and out slid Jay. Crouched on his knees, he emptied the large pocket in his jacket onto the ground. Three cans of black beans – nicked and dented, with scraped labels from the grip of clawed fingers – rolled onto the concrete ground.

“G’boy, Jay Bird,” I said, inclining my head in Jay’s direction as he crawled towards me with quick, jerky steps, sniffing in my direction. For the first month of our “arrangement,” I would never have let him this close, but after so long without so much as a single bite from little Jay, I supposed he’d earned my trust. And, in some ways, he looked better up close, just a bit more like a human. By now, he felt like real company to me…probably because I’d been surviving alone for the better part of a year.

As Jay Bird sat next to me, legs bent upward like curled springs, I looked him over. His clothes were baggy on him, shown by the bony curve of his thin knees against the fabric of thick, brown pants, and the way his jacket folded inward on his side, deep, where his waist should have stopped it. He was by no means a runt, of course, but from a distance he had always looked much larger, and my big old frame made most people seem small in comparison.

His hands and face were gray, mottled with bits of black and red where dirt and gore had rubbed on him. I tried cleaning him off with a wet shirt sleeve once, but it seemed like every smear and stain I’d rubbed off him had been replaced with new ones by the time he came back. The sooty clumps of black hair beneath his hood were another story altogether.

Even if the colors weren’t right, Jay’s human shape was still sort of intact. He had a sharp jaw that sloped up high to his ears in a way that reminded me of my little cousin, a chronic picky eater in childhood who had always been bony as hell. His nose was sharp too, a bit hooked, and crooked on the right side, where it bled from time to time. It always looked sort of painful, but never as bad as his eyes. They were scratched to shit, one of them gone altogether, the other one dark and veiny around the edges, and ringed with scar tissue. Sometimes I could tell it hurt him by the way he would hold his brows with his finger pads, moaning with the back of his throat through clenched teeth when we would sit by the cooking pit together.

I may not have been able to fix Jay – hell, I could hardly repay his providing for me at all – but I could at least keep him warm, maybe even make him feel safe.

After I cooked one of the cans over my fire pit and had my meal, I grabbed my blankets and an old pair of sweatpants for a pillow, and settled down to sleep. Jay Bird laid down next to me, with his cold, skinny back against my chest. I’d learned to let him close to me; it was the only thing I could do for him. He liked it best when I'd wrap my arms over him, that way he was really sheltered from the drafts and his body finally warmed up. It was the one time he'd show his teeth to me in what I could only guess was a residual smile, but the charm was all lost by the way his teeth had changed, jagged and bent like bright shards of blood smeared crystal. Too bad for him, it was only a matter of time before he heated up to the point that his sharp little hands started to scratch at me, like I’m an itch that he was feeling somehow. When he got feisty I'd roll off him and the draft made him slow down again.

With my head at the back of his hood, I heard Jay Bird begin to purr. He’d made a habit of purring ever since I started holding him at night. It was one of the most contented sounds I’d ever heard. Sure, you could say it was like the noises a cat makes when it rubs against your leg, trying to get your attention, but to me it sounded more human than that. Sometimes when I was half asleep, I could hear my wife in his voice, the way she would sigh in happiness after stepping into a hot bath.

Jay Bird had a family too; he must have. A wife, or a cousin, or who knows what. It hurt my head to remind myself that this creature, this Hunter, was just another man like me, only that he’d gotten sick, so awful sick that he couldn’t even think straight.

Under the layers of blankets, I fell asleep with my hand on Jay Bird’s shoulder.

Chapter Text

When I woke up, I could see light from the rising sun under the safe house door. We hadn’t had a sunny day in what felt like weeks, so for a while I just stared, enjoying how the air seemed warmer than usual. At least for today, it felt like the cold was reigned in. Jay Bird felt warm against my chest, no longer a half-dead victim of the elements. I could hear his heartbeat: short, sharp pulses, each followed by a long pause.

Eventually, I began to sit up, rubbing the back of my neck where it hadn’t sat quite right against my pillow. I must have been sleeping differently, deeper, I guessed.

As I stretched and sat up further, the blankets slid away, and Jay Bird groaned through his teeth, curling up against the loss of heat. I rearranged the bedding so that he was still covered, then walked the length of the narrow floor to an adjoining bathroom, where my clean clothes had been hanging up to dry from the day before. I changed from my sweatshirt and flannel pants into a brown pair of jeans and a sleeveless shirt, with my old ranger jacket on top. Stooping over the sink in the corner of the room, I retrieved a handful of marbles – all shiny reds and blues – and stuffed them in my pocket. In the cracked mirror that poked out from behind the bathroom door, I checked my reflection. Why I still bothered to make sure that my shirts were right-side-out was beyond me; Jay Bird certainly wouldn’t care, and I hadn’t seen a soul in months. But I still found myself looking, wondering at how my wife would have shaken her head at the current state of my beard: bushy as a porcupine’s backside and grayer than ever. Big as it was, it did little to cover the scars on my cheeks and neck.

I leaned forward to the mirror, squinting my bloodshot eyes. I looked almost as feral as Jay Bird by now, with snarled brows making shadows down my face. I always wondered if I would have cried as a little kid, had I seen what I’d look like today.

From past the doorway, I could hear the scuffling noise of Jay Bird’s hands scratching the concrete as he crawled around. Once I turned to leave the bathroom, I found him sitting just outside with a couple blankets still tucked around his shoulders.

“Jay, what’re you doin’ draggin’ our blankets around on a dirty floor,” I muttered. “I gotta wash those.” I walked by him as I paced back through the safe house, towards the wooden ladder that led to a small loft above the door that led out. I had stashed a small pile of books at the top to keep them out of Jay’s immediate reach; he could easily shred the pages apart if he took too much interest in sniffing them. After retrieving a copy of Silent Spring from the top of the pile, I climbed down to the cooking pit, where I emptied a plastic jug of water into the pot above the pit and ignited a small flame to get it boiling. Lying down on the floor beside the light and warmth of the flame, I began to read. Jay Bird predictably settled next to me, purring again, and I fished out the handful of marbles from my pocket and let them drop and scatter on the concrete floor. Jay shook off the blankets in excitement as he bounced after them, batting and snatching at the harmless pieces with his clawed hands.

I read in relative peace, a far cry from my countless days on the run, living like animals with the people I had called survivors. Life now was even better than the days when I’d lived alone, foraging for food in old buildings that teemed with infected.

“’M lucky to have you, Jay Bird, y’know that?” I said while I turned to my bookmarked page. Jay glanced at me from under his hood, his mouth twitching a bit; it was the only response he’d ever seem to give me.

I turned back to my book. I was almost through reading it the second time. The first time I’d read Carson’s work, it made me really miss the past, made me want to go back to a world that was changing for the better and not the worse. This time, it made me wonder how Carson would have felt about life after the Green Flu. Maybe this sick parody of a world, this reality gone to hell, was just as much a case of “silent spring” as the world of pollution she’d feared was.

About five pages later, Jay Bird set down the marbles and went to work at the bindings on his arms and legs, tucking and tightening the coils of tape that kept his clothes in place with fast-moving hands, like it was all pure reflex. He checked the straps on his high top shoes, fingers moving even quicker with the flow of muscle memory. Then he pulled down his hood past his eyes and hopped to the vent with a leap that rattled the pot of water beside me. As he crawled into the ductwork and disappeared, I supposed that it was about time for Jay to catch himself a meal.

The water had come to a steady boil and I took the pot off the heat to cool as I finished reading. Later - as I snacked on leftover canned beans and sipped the clean, cooled water from a flask - I traced the messages that lined the safe house walls with my fingers, imagining how the survivors that had come and gone might have read them out loud.

It’d been so long since I’d heard another human voice.

How had my mother laughed when the family dog licked her face after a long shift? How had it sounded when my brother would guffaw at sitcoms, watching reruns over pizza late at night? For some reason I just couldn’t remember anymore, couldn’t let the memory flow back to me like it used to, back when I hadn’t needed it so bad. Instead, the creepy giggling of a Jockey started to play like a broken record in my head. I grunted to myself to make the noises on the inside stop.

It was getting darker, colder, faster than it should. What had been shaping up to be a nice afternoon was turning to shit instead, with wind gusts that sent curls of fine, dry snow under the crack in the door. I wedged my old sweatpants into the crack, but the cold was likely to get worse anyway. It always found a way to get worse.

By the time the wind was really picking up, I began to hear Jay Bird crawling back through the vents. When he climbed out onto the floor, I could see he was shivering. Even his eye was unsteady as it darted from side to side, as if keeping watch for something. But he still had managed to bring back some extra cans: corn this time, and carrots. The corn was badly dented, bad enough to suspect that it wasn’t air tight anymore, and probably spoiled. The carrots, however, were keepers.

As I set down the cans, muttering my thanks, Jay twitched more violently than normal, then snapped up his head to fix his eye at the red door. Something had caught his attention.

Only two seconds later, I heard the sound of gunfire, so close that not even howling wind had masked it.

Chapter Text

Before the gunfire had stopped, I dashed to the corner beside the red door, where my hunting rifle sat with a handful of loaded clips. I popped in one of the clips and held the rifle level with my hip as I turned back to the door, tearing down the cloth that covered the window so that I could peer between the bars. Behind me, Jay Bird growled, so loud and deep in his throat that I turned back on instinct to make sure he wasn’t about to jump me after all. As I’d hoped, I found his attention still fixed on the commotion outside; he was staring at the door like it was a Tank ready to bear down on us.

The gunfire started again, short bursts of automatic rifles that sounded like a giant’s teeth chattering. There were voices too, distant shouts and what sounded like a screaming woman, or a Witch. I looked back through door and down the alleyway directly past it. I could hardly see a thing, just faint, distant bursts of light from far away, down the alley and across the street, where guns were lighting up the roadway with fire.

Jay Bird growled again, making me jump. I was glad that at least he wasn’t climbing out through the vents to prey on whoever was shooting out there. Lucky for them, he had just gone hunting.

I considered whether I should open the door, sneak out and provide some fire support for whoever was shooting. With all that chaos I could hear out there, it would be all too easy to startle them and get shot at, wouldn’t even be the first time it happened to me. But I wanted to help, wanted to see someone like me again and give them a hand. It had been too long.

“Stay here, Jay,” I said, gesturing down with my hand so that the Hunter might just understand me. His growling died down, and it seemed like he would stay put. Of course, I could never be sure with Jay. Again, I heard a woman’s scream, even closer this time.

The gunfire had just stopped, and I unlatched the door. Just as I pushed it open, someone stumbled into the alleyway.

“Oh!” I slammed the door shut. The person – a woman, tall, skinny, and screaming – slammed against the bars, then crumpled.

Was she infected? Insane? I wasn’t sure. I looked down through the bars and saw her twitch. Then she was still. Her torn slacks and fur-trimmed jacket were riddled with bullet holes, oozing blood. I checked one more time for any sign of movement. Nothing except the hissing wind blowing puffs of snow off rooftops. With the rifle still in my hand, I gritted my teeth and opened the door.

She was dead: no pulse, no breath. That didn’t stop me from trying to save her. I dragged her inside and pulled the door closed again, keeping out the freezing drafts for good. Then I went to work pumping her chest with my hands, blowing air into her bleeding mouth.

“Dammit, dammit…come back…”

Even with the strongest, deepest puffs I could manage, her chest hardly rose. The bullets had left her lungs in tatters, and I had to give up. That rabid scream had been her last.

It had seemed like…seemed like she was going to be okay by the way she had run over here. No, I remembered. I couldn’t keep hoping like that, couldn’t expect a thing, not in these times. It was too easy for a “survivor” to die out here.

Jay Bird was pacing around us, sniffing at the fresh blood smearing the floor. I glared at him as I caught my breath. She was just another meal to him, wasn’t she? He didn’t even understand what was lost; to him this was something gained. I shook my head, checked one more time for a pulse that I knew wouldn’t be there.

It occurred to me just then that this wasn’t normal. None of this. This woman was still pink in the cheeks with what must have been a healthy life. Who could have shot her like this, and why? Even when I rolled her over, I couldn’t find a bite or scratch. There was no reason for her to die.

It occurred to me that, accident or no, someone was out here in the city shooting at uninfected. Maybe more than just one. Whatever happened just now could’ve quite easily been murder.

I pinned my old sweatshirt back up over the door after checking one last time for signs of people. The streets had gone quiet as all hell. Turning back around, I caught Jay Bird holding up the woman’s arm by the wrist. His long teeth were grinding on her palm.

“God, Jay, leave ‘er alone,” I groaned. When I stepped closer, he rose up to a hunched sort of stance and gathered the body under his arm. It only took him seconds to crawl back into the vent shaft, dragging her in along with him. I let her go, knowing that I had no place to bury the body. Between letting him eat her or letting her rot, I’d rather he have her, morbid as it seemed.

While Jay romped around in the vents, probably finding a corner to store the body, I re-latched the door, listening best I could for gunshots or shouts. I wanted to be ready – ready for what, I wasn’t sure. I just hoped that I wouldn’t be seeing any more human corpses, or hearing any screaming for that matter. Every glance outside proved the same: there wasn’t a single living soul in sight, and the air was turning sub-zero under heavy clouds.

I put my gun back and sat down by the cooking pit, warming my hands, trying to process what had happened. Strange as it sounded, I found myself wanting to think about her, the poor woman that had just died in front of me. It didn’t feel right being used to a thing like that. I should have been shaken, but on the inside I was just filing memories away. That woman had been no different from the friends and family before…no different. Part of my brain just wanted to stop caring already.

It was so quiet. When the world thawed again – if the world thawed again – would it be any different? Or by then would I be blowing air down cold, noiseless lungs for the hundredth time, not even caring what happened?

The cap on the vent clattered open and Jay Bird hopped onto the floor. There was blood on his lip from where he’d been chewing her hand, and possibly more. I let him sit next to me. Even with the gaps in the door all covered up, it was still beginning to feel like a freezer.

“You doin’ alright, Jay?” I asked. Jay looked at me with his discolored eye. His smeared lips pursed a bit and he grunted, quiet to the point that I barely heard him.

“What’s that supposed to mean, huh,” I muttered. Again he just grunted. Whether he understood a single word I said – even the name I had given him – was a mystery that I hadn’t solved yet. Jay had been smart enough in other ways, learning how to find food for me on command, something I could never have dreamed would work with a Hunter. I had to hope he might understand me besides just that.

As it grew darker, I cooked myself some more food, first pacing and then crouching over the cooking pit to keep myself warm. Jay Bird had curled up under some blankets as I ate, then sat with me by the pit some more as I let it burn a bit longer. Tonight was just too damn cold.

I got up from the pit to retrieve a pair of gloves from the loft, next to my books. I usually didn’t need them too bad – good genes and a life of exercise had blessed me with strong circulation – but my fingers had been getting numb. By the time I sat back down, I noticed Jay’s hands were holding his head again, fingertips around his eyes, where the old scratches had disfigured his skin. He was moaning again, with his spine bent forward like he was doubled over in pain. His one eye squeezed shut as he whined through stained teeth.

“Hey,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

I always asked. He never answered. As he continued griping I put a hand on his back. Every muscle on him felt tense, like tangles of strings pulled as tight as they’d go. To me, he felt human, not that I could well remember what humans were really like.

“I’ve got you,” I assured, hardly loud enough for anyone, even me, to hear. I had said it so many times before, on the run with loved ones in tow.

“I’ve got you.”

I had been wrong. Maybe I wasn’t wrong this time. Couldn’t help saying it just in case it’d actually mean something. Sometimes, I wanted so bad for Jay to be my family, like them….

No. He wasn’t family. He could never replace a thing, not my brother, not my wife, and never, never my son-

I shuddered. The one thing it hurt to think about, and I’d throw it in my own face, stupid, beyond stupid, as I comforted a Hunter with human blood on his teeth. Was I driving myself insane, thinking about these things?

That night, I tried to stop. I focused myself on the present time instead, listening to the deep, harsh beat of Jay Bird’s infected heart. The icy wind outside was starting to cover it up. Even with my face halfway under the blankets, my breath fogged, and for once I was glad to have a second body to hold onto, half-dead and lukewarm as it was. Jay Bird was purring with a quiet energy I’d gotten used to, although he’d shiver from time to time.

I knew that if those soft breaths became growls again, it’d be time to face down whoever killed that girl.

Chapter Text

When I had finally gone to sleep, I dreamed that I was back in the forest, sitting on the doorstep of the ranger lodge that had been my home for the last five months of peace. Green leaves covered the sky, glowing with warm sunlight. There were sparrows and chickadees perched in the branches, and little squirrels dashed between the tree trunks, kicking up bits of moss.

I was so lucky, too lucky. Back in the national parks, I was at home. My wife would be visiting soon, and maybe before the season was over I’d see him again – our son, back from college. It had been too long since I’d seen him, so long that it felt like a miracle I hadn’t yet cried over him.

Deep through layers of life, a blue jay with bright feathers was flying through the air, screeching as it dived. It didn’t sound quite the way I remembered. Come to think of it, nothing sounded right. The wind blowing through the leaves had lost its hushed tone, its warmth and softness. Every little noise in its path was distorted. Even the green hue of the forest was turning blue, darker, colder as the evening came.

It startled me just then: why was I still here? I should be back in the city, defending my family. They were only weeks away from being lost, beaten to death by rabid monsters. Those days were coming fast, and yet here I’d been sitting in the forest watching birds, selfish, no better than a runaway, a vagrant. I was looking after land that’d very soon have no people to visit it.

I would have stayed here too, stayed selfish, if not for….

“Curt!” Called a voice, familiar. That was David calling me, another ranger. I looked up to see him rounding the lodge, just a black figure covered in shadows. “That hunting party by Morgan Run is in trouble. I just phoned 911. Two of their guys got really sick out of nowhere. Really sick.”

A voice from inside the lodge called back. “I’ve got the T.V. on in here,” they said. “The news is talking about a virus spreading in the city.”

“It looks bad, David,” a third voice called.

“I told the party to stay put at their camp near the roadside,” David said. “Curt…you’ve got family in the city, don’t you?”

“You should probably make sure they’re okay.”

I looked down at myself, and up at the woods again. There were more dark figures between the trees, running towards the lodge, howling with all the sharpness of the wind. I had to get through them, get to my mother and brother through the black and blue, my wife and…and him….

“Curt?”

They would be dead – the rangers, and my family. Dead, dead, destroyed forever. Couldn’t college have waited just one more year?

I watched the sky get darker, withering the leaves on the trees. And like that, I woke up in the safe house. It was still dark. Jay was still with me, lying on his side, curled up with his soot-stained face and arms pressed tight against my ribs. His deep blue hood had fallen down a bit, and I could just make out the pale, skinny line of a scar on his scalp, where the hair didn’t grow anymore.

He was quiet. Suddenly, I realized I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. I couldn’t hear his heartbeat over the blood that rushed through my head. In that clingy, nonsensical panic of someone who’d just had a nightmare, I shook him awake.

“Jay, you there? Jay.”

His eye snapped open with a growl that quickly died in his throat. He stared up at me through the dark, squinting slightly. Why I had thought he was dead was beyond me. Why I had panicked over it…I turned on my back, shaking my head. Jay put his head down, pulled up his hood for warmth, and closed his bloodshot eye. Then he did the strangest thing: he grabbed my shoulder with the pads of his fingers and pressed, gently, like he was hugging me with just his hand. I felt his nose brush the side of my arm, and just like that, he stopped moving again. I didn’t stop thinking.

He felt so human. Scared as I was that my memory was failing me, that I was making things up in my own mind, Jay’s touch felt like human life against my skin. One moment, I was a boy again, coming home from school to the warmth of my mother’s hugs, my brother’s playful punches. The next, I was in bed with my wife, my worries melting beside her. And then, I was back in the park, deep in the forest with David, feeding seeds to a bright-feathered blue jay as it perched on my shoulder, squinting up at me.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you….”

Very, very faintly – like spiderwebs on the back of my brain – it occurred to me that I might just be losing my mind.

I was dreaming again before I knew it, before I could stop to tell myself that the hand on my shoulder was the hand of a killer, a zombie. Its claws simply hadn’t reached me yet, but I couldn’t think about that now. I was getting lost in a cocktail of past and present. Lost.

I woke up to a shift in the blankets, Jay Bird growling, and a sudden bang on the outside of my door.

“Hey, someone in there?”

The voice was deep, muffled, but distinct enough to be heard past Jay’s growls. I got to my feet as quick as I could, retrieving my rifle and walking to the door. I took down the cover, peered outside and saw a tall, broad-shouldered figure just past the bars, barely lit by the sunrise. Once I saw the M16 clasped in his hands, I shifted my rifle so that the barrel aimed up at the ceiling, keeping the door closed all the same. Another figure soon followed the first, puffing white steam past a scarf and jacket as he came to a stop in front of the safe house.

“Hey,” the first one called again. “Another survivor. You – who are you?”

His eyes were on me. Unclouded, intelligent eyes met my face, and for a while I could only blink in response.

I cleared my throat. It had certainly needed that.

“My name’s Curt,” I said. “Listen…I’ve got company right now and he’s, uh…he’s sick. Infected.”

“What?” It wasn’t a question, rather an exclamation.

“I don’t know if I can safely let you in here, you see.”

Jay began to growl again, rising up off his hands and knees to get a look at what I hoped wouldn’t be his prey.

“Oh, shit!” The other man said, “You’re fuckin’ serious! You’ve got to shoot that thing before it goes crazy!” He drew back, with his rifle pointed closer than I’d have liked.

“It’ll kill you!” His partner affirmed. “God, man, shoot it!”

“Listen,” I repeated. “He’s agitated ‘cause he don’t know you. But he knows me and he’s never gone after me, not once. Understand?”

“Why would you let that thing in a safe house?” The first man asked.

“I didn’t let him in. He comes and goes, brings me food. I taught ‘im to do it.”

Both men stayed silent for a few moments. Then the first one narrowed his eyes.

“You’re serious? You tamed it or something?”

“He’s not exactly tame,” I backtracked. “But he’s a far cry from all the rest. If you really want in I can’t promise you anythin’, just that I’ve kept him under control this far.” I licked my lips, adding, “I wanna help you. I’d hate to see you leave. But Jay here’s like family to me. I owe him a lot, an’ I can’t hurt him, if that’s what you’re expectin’of me. I won’t.”

“Fuck,” the second man muttered. “They said the safe houses housed humans, and humans only.”

“You gotta hear me out,” I persisted. “I haven’t seen another survivor in months. You dunno how long I’ve waited to find someone again.”

They said nothing, just continued puffing steam out in the cold. I tried to compose myself, worried that I would sound just as feral as Jay Bird, who was still growling a bit.

“D’you want in?” I finally asked. “I can’t fault you if you say no, but I’ve got food, and water. I’ll hold ‘im down if I have to, an’ he’ll get used to you, I’m sure he will. He got used to me.”

To my relief, Jay’d stopped growling as I spoke. The men glanced at each other from past the thick scarves that covered their faces.

“Alright,” the first one said. “If you can keep him in check, we’d like to come in. We’ve been looking for a safe house for days now.”

“But if that Hunter comes after us and you don’t stop him, we’ll be ready to shoot,” the other warned.

I nodded and turned away, setting down my rifle.

“Jay,” I said, looking my companion in the eye as he crouched, expectant, at the door. “Don’t move. Stay right there.” I gestured down with my hand as I’d done before. “Right there. Don’t move, don’t bite. Stay.”

Jay seemed rooted in place on the floor, promising. Looking down, I hoped that the smears of blood beside him – from yesterday’s events – wouldn’t startle our visitors.

I had known, in the back of my head, that a day like this was bound to come, even if I hadn’t believed I’d ever see another healthy person. I clenched my teeth, frustrated. I should have been prepared for this. Planned something out so that I didn’t risk getting anyone killed. Too late for that.

I took down the latch on the door, then sat behind Jay Bird and held is arms tight in my own. I couldn’t take the chance of him swiping at them. He sneered, squirming against me as I kept his arms pulled back.

“Stay.”

To my relief, he stopped moving. Maybe…maybe this would work.

“Alright,” I said. “You open the door, and I’ll keep him calm.”

It’d been a mistake, letting them in.

Chapter Text

Jay Bird had been almost motionless as the two men walked inside the safe house. Even as they shut the door behind them with a loud bang, looking straight down at us, he didn't move, didn't even growl, although I could tell by the shine in his eye that he was tempted. More than just tempted. His arm muscles flexed against my hands as he fought his instincts to shake me off and pounce.

"It's just the two of you, right?" The first man asked, pulling down his scarf to reveal a pale, bearded face.

"Yeah," I answered.

"Oh," the pale man said, scoffing sort of. "Good…good."

"Now why don't you put down those guns?"

It was the last thing I said before the second man opened fire.

D-D-D-D-D-D-D-DM!

I was knocked on my back, stunned from the impact somewhere on my left side. Jay Bird shrieked as he fell on the floor to my right, limp as an understuffed doll. Eight shots fired from an M16 had left us decimated.

"Fucking psycho," The pale man muttered, walking past us to my stash of cans across the room.

"And they call us crazy," the second muttered, stooping to reload his weapon. "Clearing safehouses isn't crazy when they're full of these fucking nutcases."

"Look at all the supplies he was hoarding. Food, ammo, blankets…"

"The boss is gonna love this."

I heaved for breath like a fish, feeling blood dripping down my face and a raging ache in the flesh just over my collarbone.

"Jay," I called, jerking towards the Hunter with weak, floppy arms. "No, no, no, Jay…"

The pale man circled back as he heard me yelling. His rifle moved to point at my head, and just then, I heard Jay Bird scream – really scream – lunging on top of him in a fury only Hunters could summon.

"Fuck!" The second man squealed, quickly returning the clip to his rifle for another attack. I rocked myself upright, forcing the pain in my body to push me further as I tackled into him. My hands found a grip on his gun and I twisted against his aim, keeping the barrel pointed back. Jay Bird was still shrieking behind me.

"Why the hell'd you shoot at us?" I roared, digging my forearm into the man's throat as he tried to wrench away his gun. I was having none of it; adrenaline was on my side here.

"This city's ours," the man said, showing his teeth as he strained to move. "Our boss, he owns it."

I bore down on him with all the force I had, reached in my pants pocket with one arm, and retrieved a switchblade. To think that I'd kept it there for Jay….

"He don't own shit."

The blade emerged and I stabbed, plunged until the thick spray of a carotid artery leaked down my face. The rifle fired in his hands as they spasmed, punching holes in the wall beside us. I kept up my attack until he was still. Even then, it was hard to let go of his corpse. That corpse…could have been someone. A friend. Why'd it have to be an enemy instead?

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a large pool of blood. Jay'd been going to town on our other intruder. Still was, striking in flailing bursts like a madman, with claws that had already torn the body to shreds. I could see the pale bones of his victim's ribcage, skinned alive. The arms that had been holding his gun were hardly in better shape.

"Jay," I huffed. "Stop."

Jay struck one last time, ripping up muscle and tendons as he pulled back his claws from the dead man's chest. Then he turned his head, watching me, and stopped, hunched forward and breathing hard. His throat rattled, and the front of his jacket was matted with blood.

"Jay, you alright?" I asked, turning to sit next to him. I could see a hole in his jacket – a spot of black and red where the blue should have been. Make that two, three.

"Oh God, Jay, they shot you, they shot you, didn't they!"

His head hung lower, lower. I caught him as he slid off the dead man's body. I panicked.

"No! No, oh God, fuck! Fuck!"

Why'd I have to feel this way? Three human deaths in two days and the only thing I could shed a tear over was this Hunter, my little Jay Bird who'd just now mauled a man to death. I scooped him up off the floor and carried him across the room, to an alcove where I'd stashed a pair of first aid kits. If there was a chance I could save him, I wouldn't waste a second.

Jay's raw, red eye was clouded over with pain, and he was breathing out heavy with his mouth open; panting, I guessed. I'd never seen him act that way before, and it scared the shit out of me. I glanced back at the door just to make sure the men weren't followed. When I saw nothing, I grabbed one of the kits and set it next to Jay, then took the end of his jacket and pushed it up past his chest. He shrieked, wild with pain, and kicked against the floor as his spine flexed back.

Underneath the jacket was the remains of a thin, black shirt, soaked in Jay Bird's blood. I grabbed the shirt too, rolling it up as careful as my fumbling hands could manage. Jay cried again. His whole body jerked.

"I know it hurts, Jay, I know." I was still hurting too, no doubt about that, but I was fighting to ignore it with everything I had, shoving the pain aside.

Jay's skin was just as gray down here as it was on his face and hands, charred by the Flu. All down his left side were smears of blood, deep grazes and – I cringed – bullet holes. Jay whined, baring his long, stained teeth as his eye squinted shut. I grabbed antiseptic from the first aid kit and began to rub it down his side, and he seized my wrist, gripping with his claws and forcing me back.

"Jay, I gotta do this," I said, my heart pounding blood to my trembling fingers. "C'mon, stop fightin' me."

He cried and kicked again as I held him down, cleaning his wounds best I could with the chemicals that must've stung like hell. After only a few seconds, his face stopped twisting up in pain and simply blanked. His eye drifted shut and he passed out then and there. I prayed he'd wake up again when this was over.

I checked his wounds, finding two deep grazes, one on his waist and the other one low on his left thigh. Another bullet had pierced his side just under the ribs and come out through his back. Maybe it was a miracle, but the shot hadn't caused any serious bleeding, nothing that couldn't be controlled.

At first I hadn't noticed one of the wounds under his pants. When I did find it – the bullet hole in his hip, just beside the ridge of his pelvic bone – I realized that there was no exit wound on the other side; he had a round lodged in there. I cursed again and again as I retrieved some scissors from the kit and undid his belt. As I shifted in my seat to get a better angle, I began cutting Jay's pants and underclothes from the waistband down to his knee. I set down the scissors, took a deep breath, and sorted through the kit until I found some tweezers long enough to do the job. Pain was shooting down my arm, and my hands were shaking.

"God, damn, why'd they have to shoot at us. Why…."

Jay was gonna hate this. I knew that he was gonna hate this. Through another fit of scratching and shrieking, I fished out the bullet anyway. Quick as I could, before his deep red blood could flow out all over the floor, I took some gauze, pressing a wad of padding tight against the bullet hole as I bound it in place with some bandages across his hips. It was the best I could do.

As I patched up the wounds on his leg and waist, as a well as a second empty bullet hole on his upper arm, Jay Bird started calming down at last. He was still breathing heavy, but his arms had gone limp, and I was thankful he'd stopped shredding my sleeves every time I made a move towards him. Relieved that I had managed to fix his injuries, I walked away to retrieve some water. Whether he was dehydrated or not, I wasn't sure, but the way he was panting still worried me.

"I'm sorry, Jay."

The water had been boiled the other night; by now it was a near-freezing room temperature. I opened the jug, poured a bit into a washed out can, and carried it to him. I looped my free hand under his shoulders to get him upright, and he squinted, grinding his teeth.

"I'm sorry."

I was thankful that he drank most of the water. I was thankful that he was even alive. His teeth clinked on the can as he bit down on the metal rim, chewing at it like he seemed to chew at everything. He was still Jay, alright. Still Jay…but I knew it'd be some time before we'd recover from this.

"Why'd they have to shoot at us."

Chapter Text

My life became his existence when the screaming keen-eyes stung me with their machines. I lived when he lived, slept when he slept, swallowed down chunks of dead meat off his stout, harmless claws. When he hurt, I hurt. When he paced the shelter cleaning red juices off the floor, my eye paced with him. Before, he was warmth and shelter, little else. Now I was wrapped in his white bindings, and my life was shaped with everything he did.

After I had stopped hurting so much, he dragged out the dead keen eyes, chopped them to pieces past the shelter with his one sharp-claw. When he came back, he huffed air, like he used to when he didn’t let me in. As I watched him, I started to think about old things again.

Stacey…Stacey used to jabber stop pouting like that, he’s just a friend, I promise! Pouting. Was he pouting? Why? Those keen-eyes weren’t even friends. They stung me, stung us both. In the meat between his neck and shoulder, I could still see red, where he’d tried to wrap himself. He made noises sometimes when he held it, noises like the ones I make when I want my other eye back.

The air still made me slow. Even with him and his fire warmth at night, it tried to freeze my blood. It slowed me down so much that I would think about the old things more. Stacey, Stacey…I tried to say it once, but I slashed my tongue on “T,” and stopped since then. In my head, the sound reminded me of light hair – blonde? Blonde, blonde blood, blood – and it reminded me of blood that tasted good. So good. Better than sex, hahaha. Why did those sounds make keen eyes chop their breath? Old things just popped in and out as I thought. It was hard to make sense of them. With nothing to do, I still tried.

It had hurt so bad when they stung me. He had made it worse at first, done things that made it feel like he was killing me – one of these days you’re gonna kill me, you know that, Mom had babbled when I was small – but now it felt much better. He had done those things to fix me, oh, I’ll fix you alright, hahaha, babbled the Drunk with tattoos on his knuckles, right before I tackled his legs. Mm, it felt good knocking down keen-eyes. It had been too long since I’d done it. I wished I wasn’t stuck in this shelter, even if he was here with me.

Moving still made me hurt, but staying here didn’t hurt at all. I had new covers on my legs, too big to hunt in but thick enough to stay warm. He brought me meat and water when it was light, and stayed next to me in the dark, making quiet noises as he looked at me. I always looked back at him and listened. Part of me could only hear noise while the other part would start thinking about old things while he talked…talked? You’re talking my ear off, hahaha…. I had jabbered that once, hadn’t I?

The noises were nice. Sometimes I’d open my mouth to make a noise back but in my head I couldn’t find anything to jabber at him, so I just blinked instead. When he’d see me try to make noise his lips would curve in a way that scrunched the hair on his chin. His hair was pale in a friendly kind of way, it reminded me of something – Santa Claus is coming to town….

He really did make me think about lots of old things. Before I found his shelter, I couldn’t listen to the familiar sounds that rattled in my head. It was drowned out with constant stalking, hunting, claws on concrete aiming for flesh, day and night. That was my life, but so much had changed, the only constant is change.

Outside the shelter it got dark, then light, then dark and light again. It was never bright the way it used to be anymore, and the air would freeze me the darker it got. Too much dark these days, too much freezing air. When it was light, he would leave me behind and come back when it was already dark again, pockets full of shiny foods and pellets for his machines. Once he brought back something glassy and full of dark water, and drank until his face was red, full of juice, drunk off his ass, hahaha, I had babbled to Stacey. He jabbered a lot that night, and brushed my hair with his stub-claws, getting fresh there, aren’t you, but he couldn’t even look at me straight, slouching like the cloud-eyes that puff smoke. The next morning, he didn’t move much.

Every couple of light phases he would put new wraps on me, throwing the red ones out the door once it was done. Each time it hurt less, and after a few times he gave me back my old leg covers that he had stitched, good as new. I tried to babble something that meant how happy I felt, how much I liked what he did for me. I couldn’t remember, so instead I curved my lips like he did. He was excited after that, made lots of noises that sounded like old things. This time, too, I just couldn’t remember.

When the dark phases began, his brows would press down on his face like the heavy layers in the air and he curled up in his own shadow, there’s a rain cloud over your head today. I knew he hated the freezing air just like I did, but even when we were warm under covers together, the meat in his arms and neck looked tight  and rigid, like he felt threatened. Maybe he didn’t think the dark phases would get  shorter again. Maybe he thought that once the dark came, it might never go away this time. I didn’t know.

There were so many things I didn’t know.

Chapter Text

Scavenging by myself wasn’t easy. With Jay Bird out of commission and the days being colder than ever, I came to realize how much I had been relying on his knack for finding supplies. But I at least hadn’t forgotten my lessons from time on the run. Combing through abandoned apartments and picking off Commons was still second nature to me. Only real problem with scavenging was how fast it got dark these days. As much as I hated how cold it became, I was thankful I had Jay’s company during the nights. I could have lost him to those men so easily. Every night, as we fell asleep next to each other, I’d think about how things could have been different, how I might have been by myself again if that fuckhead’s aim had been just a touch different. To think I had wanted his company. He would’ve made me more alone than ever.

There were traces of survivor activity all over the neighborhood right now. In particular, I found new tags – spray paint – on the walls and doors of the abandoned structures I visited. They were on the roads too, and the street signs, always the same initials in black paint: G.K. Whoever was making these tags was dead if they thought for a second they’d be able to shoot their way into my safe house, like the first two. If a storm was brewing – as I suspected – it would end at my doorstep.

As the days went by, I began realizing that either Jay Bird was becoming a lot more human, or I was becoming a lot more infected. Either way, we had started to communicate. When I nodded my head at him, he would nod back, same when I smiled, same when I shrugged. He said “no” with a short puff of breath through his nose and mouth that sounded almost like the word itself – a “no” that was often used when I wrapped his bandages too tight, or tried sharing my canned pineapple with him. His yes, on the other hand, was a wide grin where his tongue would show sometimes. So long as my questions were simple enough, usually three  words or less, he was starting to respond, in one way or the other.

“You like books? Books?” I had asked him one night, grabbing my copy of Silent Spring as I sat next to him by the pit. He blinked at me for a few seconds, and once I asked him a second time, he started grinning. I read to him that night, about how Rachel Carson feared for the fall of humankind. How she feared we’d kill ourselves with pesticides and bring the whole Earth down with us. Who knew that pesticides would be the least of our worries? And here I had knocked on so many doors in her name.

Late in the bone-chilling night, lying next to me as I read by the firelight, Jay Bird smiled again, just when I reached my favorite part:

“In nature nothing exists alone.”

By then I was tired – very tired; I had been out in the elements for hours that day – but I didn’t miss it, didn’t miss his smile…of recognition? Enlightenment, maybe? I didn’t know, couldn’t even say whether he understood a single sentence of that book. Jay had still smiled, and that was what mattered.

I could never forget that I wasn’t always this lucky. When family failed me – when I failed them – I had been completely alone, alone in my humanness, if nothing else. Then, I suppose, nature had found me. Now it was just like Rachel Carson said. Jay had adopted me into his primal world, and I would never be alone.

I wished I could adopt him back.

That night, I used every extra scrap of cloth as our bedding, and I could still see my breath between us. The way things were so dark out there, and so hazy through the day, I was beginning to think we had a nuclear winter on our hands. The thought had been dogging me for more than a month now. All it took was one country flying off the handle, unwilling to let infection march its way through towns and cities. By now, all those tons of soot that followed the bombs would be up in the sky, blocking the sun.

Maybe those men – fuckheads as they were – weren’t just selfish, but desperate. Nothing would grow in a world like this, so whatever food was left had to be worth its weight in gold. Priceless, even. They seemed to think it was worth our lives, at least.

It had been days since I chopped their bodies to bits out in the alleyways. I’d even shoveled them into a dumpster. That way, I hoped, no one would discover them, let alone recognize their faces. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be enough to keep people away from here.

“Jay,” I said, under the covers, “You cold? Freezing? Are you freezing?”

Jay Bird looked at me through the dark, then sighed through a brief smile that showed his tongue. His hot breath made steam in the dry, chilled air.

I pulled him close to me, careful not to hurt him under his bandages. He started purring, deep in his chest. For the first time, I kept my arms around him through the night. As he purred, I could feel the vibrations, so real and deep that as I drifted out, I began wondering if I was purring back.

The words I’d read – three times now, wasn’t it – were repeating themselves in my dreams.

--Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature – the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter--

Please may she be right, I hoped, as my dreaming eyes stared out on a dark, cold sky. I’ve looked to nature for answers my whole life. Cared for it, bled for it. Please, please, let it bring back the dawn.

As ice rained down on me from the black, black clouds, I prayed for spring.

The next morning, barely brighter than midnight, Jay Bird climbed into the old vent shaft and crawled away with barely a huff of goodbye. I smiled; it was good that he felt well enough to hunt again. I just hoped that he’d stay out of any serious trouble. Through my days of foraging in place of him, I couldn’t say I’d seen more than tags, but I knew that the danger was out there.

I lay in bed a bit longer. The idea that I’d get to stay inside for a change was like a relief that eased the tension in every muscle I had. Seeing the dim light grow a bit brighter outside as the clouds shifted felt even better.

When I finally shrugged off the laziness and sat up in bed, I saw the book beside the cooking pit: Silent Spring. The cover  was bent back in a way I didn’t recall doing myself. I straightened it, chuckled to myself.

My son liked reading this book-

Did he? My head snapped up from where I’d been looking down, as if the thought I’d just had could’ve summoned a ghost. There was nothing, of course, just dread, like wet sand clogged in my throat, draining to the pit of my stomach.

I got up, paced the room. The tension under my skin came back through shivers. I tried to forget the thoughts as I fetched a water jug and began boiling it over the cooking pit. There was nothing to think about; what had gone through my mind was normal, normal….

He should’ve been an environmental studies major, just like me, and I wished that college would’ve waited just one more year, one last year before the nature I knew and loved went wild and swallowed him whole. He could’ve lived a life like mine, for just those last few warm and precious months. He didn’t. Did he?

I was lost by this point and I knew it. Jay Bird was all I had left, the only thing that kept me coherent, even with myself. I’d read to him again tonight, I decided. He liked it.

The water had boiled. I set it aside to cool, expecting silence to set in as the bubbles faded out.

Instead, I heard the sound of a car engine, rumbling past the alleyway.

Chapter Text

My hunting rifle was the first thing I thought to grab. As I stood behind my door, I peered down the alleyway through the scope. It took only seconds before the sound of the car grew louder and I saw a large pickup truck drive past the alley, down the road beyond it. I had only seen it for a moment, but it hadn't slipped past me that there were men with guns sitting in the flatbed.

It also didn't slip past me that the engine had just gone silent.

Maybe I was too crazy for my own good by this point, but with my rifle in one hand, I unlatched the red door with the other and pushed it open. Crouched close to the pavement floor, I crawled in a zigzag down the alleyways, passing by the downed bodies of a couple dying Commons on my way to the road. Voices echoed on the concrete walls. I couldn't really understand them until I got to the edge of the road. By then, I could peek around the wall to my right and see the truck; it had stopped barely half a block away.

The driver appeared to have climbed out of his seat to stick half his body out the side window of his truck, and was giving orders to the men that clustered around the flatbed.

"Keller's expectin' his missin' men back by 5 A.M. tomorrow and I aim to deliver," the driver said. "But our first order of business, as you all know, is findin' that goddamn safe house. Keller promised 'big rewards' to the finder, and when Keller says 'big rewards,' you better fuckin' believe it's gonna be big. All 'a you unmarried gentlemen here best expect you'll get a pretty young wife outta this. Me, I'm expectin' wife number two."

As whoops and laughter followed the speech, I aimed to shoot. I had heard more than enough. Down the scope of my rifle, I zeroed in on the driver, still sitting out in the open. My crosshairs were on his chest when I noticed the thick padding beneath his winter coat – bulletproof, most likely. I raised my sights to his head instead, ready to pull the trigger as his scarred, ugly face mouthed "Move out!" To his men. He ducked away just a second too quick, safe behind the tinted windows of his vehicle.

"Damn," I muttered. As I moved my crosshairs away, I spotted two more of the men – tall, covered in scarves and padded winter coats – walking down the road in my direction. I aimed for the head of the closest man. He would be the first to go.

"Hey!" The other one shouted. He had seen me already. Had I really forgotten to stay hidden? I was so fixed on getting a good shot at them. I pulled the trigger. My fixation had paid off; the man I'd aimed for was downed, with a sloppy red mess in place of his forehead. His partner reeled and gasped like a fish, but quickly got back his breath to yell at me again. By that time, I was hidden around the corner, moving down the alley to flank them from behind a different building.

The shouts from the remaining man were quickly being joined by others from around the truck, and I could hear fast footsteps down the road behind me. I ducked down a narrower alley and waited for anyone to turn the corner and follow me.

A cluster of footsteps stopped at the end of the alley, and I scoped out three targets from around the corner of my new hiding place.

"Where'd he go, huh?" One of them yelled. "You tell me."

I zeroed in on the man with blood splatter on his clothes. He would soon join his partner.

"Hold on," I watched him say. "I don't know where he-"

It was the last thing he said before I shot him through the scarf that covered his face.

"Shit! Shit!"

As his buddies yelled and panicked, I sprinted down the narrow alley, came out on a side street at the other end, and turned the corner to run down the street. There was another pair of men on the other side, smashing the windows of an old cleaner's with the butts of their rifles. I walked until I had reached a covered bus stop on the sidewalk next to the road, and ducked behind the bench inside. Fast and quiet as I could, I reloaded my rifle with rounds from my pockets. The wind was picking up, and did a fair job muffling any noise I made.

From behind me, I heard more shouting as the first group had followed me out onto the side street. I had no time to lose, so I dashed from the bus stop to an open door on the nearest building. The sound of a gunshot jarred me and I stumbled as I ran inside, but shut the door behind me in time. Inside was an eye doctor's lobby. I barricaded the door with racks of sunglasses, happy to see that the front window had already been boarded up. Still, I could hear shouting from outside. It wouldn't take that many attackers very long to get in here.

I walked down the length of the lobby, through a hallway, and reached an emergency stairwell. I pushed open the metal door that led into it and was startled when the fire alarm began to sound. It was loud as fuck, so I ran up the stairs two at a time. I would've thought the power had gone off in here by now.

Then I heard it: a howl from hundreds of throats. The sound of the fire alarm was gonna draw out the horde.

I reached the top of the stairs and pushed open the busted door to the roof. The moment I stepped out, I slammed it behind me, grateful for some muffling on the alarm. Out in the open air, I could already feel the sweat on my face freezing up. The clouds were dark as ever, and it was so damn cold. Fighting against gusts of wind, I walked across the roof in the direction of the side street. The truck was parked down in front of the eye doctor's building by now, and I could see six men trying to pry open the door beneath me.

Again, I heard a howl, just barely loud enough to make noise over the blaring alarm. Commons began sprinting out into the open street from all directions, swarming the vehicle and its armed passengers nearby. I hadn't even believed that so many Commons managed to stay thawed. They must've come from underground, deep in all the basements and sewers under the city.

Right below me, flashes of gunfire lit up the struggle as my attackers fought with the horde. They were screaming and yelling loud enough to hear over their gunfire, caught up in a madness of flailing bodies. I took aim – for the humans. Deep in the chaos on the street, I picked out a figure in layered, armor-padded clothing and shot him in the back of the neck. I shot a second, then a third.

"That's for the girl with holes in her lungs…" I growled, reloading. "That's for me…that's for Jay…."

I scoped out a fourth man, but he was already down. The last of the Commons were beating him into paste. In his left hand, I saw him holding a receiver to his mouth, yelling something I could hardly hear. Then he took something from his pocket and threw it. The horde followed, seeking out a new sound, a new thing to hate.

Beep…beep…beep…beep-beep-bibibibibibi….

A pipe bomb. It detonated, blasting the horde's remains to bits. Without another thought, I reloaded the rifle and put the downed man out of his misery. As I watched him fall, I saw a plastic receiver fall out of his hand. He had called for backup.

I sneered. Any more of these fuckers showing up, and I might just go crazy trying to shoot them all down. I didn't want these people near me; from what I'd seen, they did nothing but killing and stealing.

By now, the alarm had finally died down. Whether the generator keeping it going had given out or what, I wasn't sure. Through my scope, I scanned the street, looking for any more survivors. Seemed like some of them had just disappeared in the fight. Had they been torn apart, eaten that fast?

Then I heard the door behind me swing open.

"Hold it right there!" I said, turning as fast as my freezing legs could manage. Two of the survivors had just stepped out on the roof, and had M-16s trained on me already.

"You're a fucking savage, I'll give you that, you piece of shit," the man on the left – tall, goggles on his face – retorted. "It seems like the moment we step foot in this neighborhood, something goes wrong. Well that shit ends here."

I recognized the man on the right as the truck driver, scarred like a road map, with snow in the folds of his jacket. He walked forward and I aimed from the hip, trained on his face.

"I said hold it," I warned. The driver huffed, stopping in his tracks nonetheless.

"You've got a safe house somewhere, don'cha?" He asked. "I know it. You don't look half-starved, in fact, those clothes of yours are lookin' pretty damn clean. Where the hell else would you find running water?"

"You got no right to know," I spat. "Last time I met a couple of guys like you, they tried t' kill us. I'm only returnin' the favor."

"Us?" His scarred face pulled tight in a toothy grin; the shadows down the stairs behind him only seemed to grow bigger. "Who else you hidin' in your little safe house? Women? Kids?"

"You-got-no-right-to-know."

"Aw, come on," he said. "I can respect a family man. You got family in that safe house? I've got some family too. We could all help each other out, if you just tell us where to find 'em."

The shadows shifted. All of a sudden, I could see someone crouched behind the men. That was no shadow, that was…that was….

"I've got a son," I said, holding back a grin of my own.

"A son?" The driver cocked his head, smiling with all the oblivion of a fawn.

"Yeah," I huffed. "A son. His name is Jay. Jay!"

I was yelling now, and the figure down the stairs came to life with a scream that I could never forget. I aimed for the driver and fired as his sidekick was pounced to the floor.

"Kill 'im, Jay!" I roared. "Kill 'im! Kill!"

The driver stumbled over onto his hands and knees. My shot had pierced his knee, right above the cap. I made to bash in his face with the hunting rifle and he grabbed it, pushing back at me with all the force he had. I struggled to twist my gun away but he was stronger than I thought, strong enough to back me up towards the edge of the roof. Not that it was easy for him; he was screaming and cursing as if in hell already. Jay was still on top of the other one, clawing out the flesh on the poor fucker's back and shoulders with violent swipes of his hands.

"Tell me where your fucking safe house is!" The driver shrieked. "Tell me, you fuck! Tell me!"

I dug in my heels and kept him from pushing me further. Just when he made to force me back again, I jammed my boot against his knee, crippling him further. As he howled in pain, I wrenched my gun around, carrying him with it. He staggered off the edge of the roof and lost his grip, falling to the street two stories down. I was brought to my knees, but not quite dragged down with him.

I turned back, watching as Jay ripped the meat from the remaining man's throat. He breathed his last as Jay tossed him aside, rising close to his full height.

"G'boy," I said, heaving in the icy air. "You got 'im, Jay, g'boy. Lord, 'm I glad to see you back."

Jay grinned and crawled to my side. He licked his hand, making a clean stripe where the blood had covered his skin. I sniffed at him, and he looked up at me.

"Let's go home, Jay. Quick, before any more arrive."

I had barely finished speaking when Jay looked away, down at the street below us.

"What is it?"

He snarled. Something was wrong. Then I heard it: another engine was rumbling in the distance, closer every second. Backup was coming.

"Quick!" I dashed for the door with Jay ahead of me. As we climbed down the stairs, I could still hear the engine – likely diesel, and large. Jay reached the bottom of the stairs and bounded to an open side door, and I picked up the pace to follow him home. We ran out into another street, turning corner after corner. As we grew closer to the safe house, the engine seemed closer too.

Just a block away from home, I followed Jay onto a small road and stopped in my tracks; more men had just rounded the corner a couple intersections down, sporting the same thick jackets and big guns as their comrades. I ducked down, and my eyes darted around from building to building, looking for a place where we could get out of sight. It was too little, too late.

"Over there!"

I doubled back and jerked on the handle of the nearest door. The old wood gave out and ripped open just as shots rang out from down the street, shattering a couple of nearby windows. Jay and I jumped inside, finding another stairwell. We climbed up until we reached an open doorway at the top. Jay leaped forward and had to catch himself before he fell. This was no roof; we had run out on a half-rotted balcony that was barely large enough to fit us both. Worse yet, the men down the street could see us from here, and they were closing in….

A gunshot sounded before I could gather my thoughts enough to run. I felt my body shake in a way I hadn't meant it to, and before I could stop myself, I was tipping, leaning past the wrought-iron railing that would do nothing to hold my weight, let alone keep back a falling body. Beside me, Jay shrieked and grabbed for my clothes. All I felt was my jacket shredding as I fell, fell…too far.

The last thing I saw before my head slammed on pavement was the grill of an eighteen-wheeler parked across the road. Its engine was still running.

Chapter Text

I laid flat when he hit the ground, as the keen eyes’ machines played fire in my ears. The fire hadn’t reached my skin, and I wanted to keep it that way. But he was down there…I didn’t know what to do. He was down with the keen eyes that would sting him until he was dead, kill you dead, hahaha….

I jumped back, away from the outside. The noisy fire stopped. Maybe they wouldn’t sting him any more. Was it just me that they wanted to hurt? I moved down the stairs and heard the rumble of big moving machines, out where the keen eyes were. The rumble was louder as I got to the bottom and looked out between boards on glass. The big moving machines were rolling away.

Where was he? I had been ready to pounce and kill for him again, but I saw no one. I searched the outside with my eye. Nothing, blank. No keen eyes at all. The ones with their machines had taken him away, so fast. My man, my person, taken.

So angry.

I screamed, banged the shelter wall with my fist, sunk my teeth into the board in front of me so I wouldn’t break my throat. I kept screaming until it splintered, snapped. I tore it back, smashed the glass and climbed into the cold. The whole outside was right here, and he was nowhere. Beneath where they stung him, I saw a stain of juice on the concrete, red like only fresh things are. The stain was all I had left. I sat in front of it and groaned. Cried. Gripped my head and scraped my heels against the ground, god, you’re hysterical. My person…

I sniffed at the stain and licked at it. That was him, and I had to remember. On the air, I smelled burning things, fumes from the machines. Somewhere mixed in was his smell. Hands on concrete, I sprang after it, down through the maze of the outside. I could hunt him down.

The shivers were hard to stop as I kept going, darker and darker in long shadows of old shelters. I still followed the smell of him, and the machines, with their distant noise and stink. Cloud eyes wandered in crumbling shelters all around, just warm enough to move. By the time it was black all over, I didn’t see any more. They were freezing again. I was freezing too. The ice air made every breath hurt, but his smell made me move. I wouldn’t stop until I was with him.

When I turned a corner and saw light, bright machine light, I jumped back. A big, tall barrier wrapped with gleaming metal barbs was standing just a few passages down. I crawled toward it until I noticed a keen eye standing behind the barbs, up high where he might see. I sprang to a narrow passage, climbing from shelter wall to shelter wall until I had reached a concrete top, and perched at the edge. When I looked out past the barrier, I saw even more light. Light, light, light-

“Hey!”

Panic, and I lunged from top to top as keen eyes yelled from the barrier. It had been too far for them to sting me, but close enough to see. Fast, before being seen again, I climbed down through broken glass on a wallside and fell onto tile. Through a different broken glass piece, I looked out at the light place again. He was there, I knew it, I finally knew something. The smells led me here. I felt good on that, trusted that.

The barrier seemed lower around here. I jumped through the window, into another narrow passage outside. I crawled closer, closer, watching the light. The passage was leading me right to the base of the barrier.

After a hundred steps on concrete, my hand caught something soft and snaggy – cloth? I hadn’t been thinking enough, too little, too late, and I felt myself pulled off the ground. I shrieked, clawed, kicked. There were strings all around me, tighter and tighter like a spider’s web, a net. Then it was too tight and it hurt, hurts like hell, hurts like a bitch! I shrieked again, thrashing just a body’s length from the ground. I had to tear it open. My claws caught on fibers, sawed through just bits of the strings before my hands stopped moving, tangled up so tight that I could feel my flesh rip. I gnawed the net, but it only made me wet with red juice on my mouth. I stretched my jaws to breathe, working ice air into my chest. Too many strings to count were pressing down hard. I couldn’t breathe enough to struggle, struggle all you want, sucker.

Hurts. Hurts! I stopped moving, fighting just for air. Arms were bound against me, legs twisted together. Freezing in  the black, I waited. My chest was pulsing like the footsteps of a giant cloud eye. It was so hard to get a breath!

I wanted to help him. My person. He was in there with the light somewhere, and now I was stuck. Now I need him again. Needed him, my….

Dad! My eye snapped wide open, I had jabbered that not long ago. Dad, I’m stuck! Dad, help!

That was me, back when the world was warm, when I could think and understand. I was trapped in a moving machine, all dented like one of his shiny metal foods. Stuck, I’m stuck against the door! Dad!

Where was Dad? He had been moving up while I was going down, down into…wet? Water? I had been sinking into water, down, down with the machine in a twisted mess. Help! I had called, called out to him, but it looked like his eyes were clouded already. Then there had been more than just water. Hands and teeth in my flesh. The horde had followed me under. By then I couldn’t breathe enough, no air was left to jabber.

Where was Dad now? I wanted to find him.

“Hey!” I heard it again, too close, too close. A pair of keen eyes walked into the passageway, babbling at each other. I screamed at them, thrashing until I had to stop for air. They didn’t run, didn’t even jump like prey is supposed to, just babbled some more and jabbed me with the tip of a machine. I waited for a sting that would kill me, breathing too fast, too weak. Then I was dropped to the ground, still tangled. No sting, just freezing. The keen eyes bent over me, and I kicked my twisted legs. I barely touched them. They held me flat on the concrete, and another one arrived, black covers all up his body and over the meat of his face. His eyes glared down at me like I was his food. He grabbed me through the net with his stub claws and pulled up the cover on my leg. In his other stubs, he had something. It was glassy, with liquid and a metal spike. As the other two held me down, he pushed the spike deep in my leg. I screamed and snapped my teeth, but then the pulses in my chest got warm. My throat slacked and I barely made noise as I felt my eyes rolling back, back.

Going to sleep on me already? I heard Stacey jabber.

Chapter Text

*Curt's viewpoint*

I could feel drips of things on my skin – my face mostly – sharp and cold where my jaw lay exposed in the air, and sort of thicker, warmer, where it was pressed on the ground.

What ground? Gritty, icy, besides that I wasn’t sure. Outside or inside? Couldn’t tell; would be dark either way. I let my lips grow slack and groaned. I was groaning? Why? Ah, I noticed: something was wrong with my lungs. Deep somewhere in there I was screaming at my half-dead brain to feel something. Pain? Sure, why not, because I’d been feeling pain all this time, hadn’t I? Ever since the world ended, yeah.

Ice liquid dripped on my teeth, and I squeezed my eyes further shut.

Later, I was moved around, sleeves pulled down to make my wrists cold as sticky thread bound them tight, like a plaster cast. Aching feelings bloomed all over my scalp and my eyes blinked open, open, until I realized what a dizzy mess my sight’d become. The whole world was fuzzy and flickery like static on a T.V. screen. It killed my head even more just to keep my eyes open. They shut.

What'd happened?

I got around to answering myself once my skull stopped hurting so much. I was bound; someone wanted to keep me in place. My lungs didn’t feel quite right, or my head. My head….

I waited, waited for a very long time. For now my brain didn’t want to keep up with heavy thinking. As my mind went slack, I dreamed. In my dreams, the world hadn’t ended just yet. I was back in the park, with Jay. Jay….

His jacket was blue, like feathers deep in the forest, and he sat with me on the lodge steps as we stared into the green. The forest was so deep. Somewhere, past it all, lived people that I was supposed to know. Not anymore. Jay was the only one left. By now he was the only one I knew.

“You’re glad that college’l wait for one more year, aren’t you Jay?” I asked.

He grinned at me. That was all I needed, all I needed to understand him. My boy was staying by my side, choosing walks in the wilderness and Rachel Carson over business and exams. He really was just like me. My perfect son….

Sure – I thought, still lost as I stared into darkening woods – we’re both a little sick now, in different ways, I guessed, but we’d stick together through anything. Jay’d never leave me, not like my wife, not like…who was that boy whose name I couldn’t quite remember anymore? I supposed it didn’t matter. Jay was the one that mattered.

We’d stick together through anything. Even when I started waking up, that’s what I thought: anything. Anything for my son.

Then the noise began.

“You there yet?”

I groaned. The voice was too loud, even for my old ears, ears that’d stomached .308 caliber gunshots. There was a grating echo around me, I realized. My eyes finally blinked open for good.

The walls were close but not quite cramped, made of tile patched with steel. An old nook in a factory, it looked like, or maybe a hospital. I was on the floor, staring up at a half-fallen ceiling, lined with stalagtites. My hands were bound behind me with thick layers of duct tape. My legs were the same, only thicker. Low on my ankle, just past the tape, was a handcuff. The other loop was locked around an exposed piece of rebar in the wall beside me.

“Where the fuck….”

I stopped when the voice began laughing, all wheezy and thick like it came from rotten lungs. “You’re there, alright,” I heard.

I shook my head and blinked to clear up my sight. When I turned my head right, I saw the source of the voice, a bald, chunky guy with a brown jacket and camouflage pants, clutching a handgun.

“You,” I looked down at myself and saw bandages under my open jacket, tanned with dirt and dust. “Why’d you fucker’s not kill me, huh?”

“Oh, you didn’t figure that out yet?” Another greasy laugh. “You must not be very smart, Mr. Sniper. Hey Roy!” He called, looking at a rusted door on the wall. “Come in here, your friend’s awake.”

“Don’t fuck around with me,” I growled. “Tell me what the hell I’m doin’ here.”

“Ah, shut up,” the guy with camo pants answered as the door jarred and swung open.

The first thing I saw poking out from behind the door was a single wooden crutch, homemade, by the looks of it. Then in swung the body, one leg bound in a sad little sling of torn cloth. I looked up to see a familiar face: scarred, ugly. It was the truck driver I’d thrown off the roof.

“Sniper bitch,” Roy spat, angry and low in his throat. “You called a fucking horde on our asses last night, and when that wasn’t enough you sicced your damn pet Hunter on my wingman. You slimy weasel fuck. He was gonna vouch for my promotion today!”

“So this is ‘bout revenge,” I said. “You patched me up just to skin me alive, or somethin’?”

“Wish it was,” Roy answered. “But it’s not. Our boss, Mr. Keller, wants to know where you came from, you see. If there’s a safehouse in that neighborhood of yours, he’s gonna take it.”

“There ain’t no safe house.” I said. Holy hell, I was lying already. I had no plan to deal with these men, I realized, as the words spilled out. This could very easily get me in trouble. Not that trouble was anything new.

“No safe house?” Roy repeated, shifting his hold on the crutch. “I’m no fucking retard. A lone survivor like you just isn’t gonna make it outside a safe house.”

“I wasn’t alone.”

“Oh yes that’s right,” Roy inclined his head. “The pet Hunter. You call that thing company, don’t you, you sad little fuck? Funny story, about that Hunter of yours….”

My whole mind went red. I jerked, panicked, praying to anything that this ‘story’ wasn’t going somewhere bad.

“What?” I asked, as the man in camo pants laughed some more. “What happened?”

“Well, while you were out, we caught ourselves a little visitor just outside the perimeter.”

“What did you do to my son?” I yelled.

“He’s just downstairs,” Roy said. “Sedated. Probably awake by now, but he won’t be movin’ around much.” He nudged the camo man, squinting. “Norman here’s good at makin’ chemical cocktails that really keep ‘em down.”

I didn’t hear much of his babbling. I was staring at the floor, fixed on black and brown spots of rust and calcium and mold. In my mind, I was screaming. Jay was in the last place I wanted him. With these devils calling the shots, he could be dead already. I had to break free somehow, rip them apart first chance I got.

“Listen, bitch,” Roy said, limping a step forward. “If I had my way, your little pet would be chopped into pig slop, you hear me? But Mr. Keller’s got a plan, you see. He’s givin’ you sad fucks a chance. Tell us where your fuckin’ safe house is, and then Norman here won’t have to do something bad.”

“Why ‘m I supposed to believe that?” I asked, cringing as I fought back the choking pressure in my throat, the hot wax of panic dripping down my brain. “You ain’t honest people. First time I saw a couple of your men, they tried t’ kill me for my supplies. Jay,” I gave up on composure as my voice cracked, “Jay, he’s the only one on this cold, bitter earth that hasn’t tried t’ kill me! He’s everythin’ t’ me! Everythin’, an’ I know he, he loves me back! His smile, when he hears me speak t’ him, his smile’s like the sky!”

I stopped. I knew I was delirious, that the thought of losing Jay to these monsters was making me even crazier than before. Exhausted, I squeezed my eyes shut.

“You fuckin’ lunatic,” I heard Roy say. “Y’know, if you hadn’t made me so fuckin’ furious, I might actually feel sorry for you. Funny thing.”

“So,” Norman said. “You ready to tell us where you’ve hid those supplies?”

I bared my teeth as my head leaned on the ground.

“No,” I said, through gritted jaws. “You’ll only hurt him anyway.”

“Pfft, you’re a poor sport,” Norman laughed. Roy only narrowed his eyes.

“I’ll let Mr. Keller know that the sad fuck won’t talk,” he said. “Maybe now he’ll heed my advice on this whole fuckin’ shitshow.”

“You do that,” Norman said, as he turned towards another door. “I’m gonna check on the Hunter boy. Who knows,” he laughed again, loud and grating as ever. “Maybe he’ll be the one to talk!”

“Don’t touch ‘im! Don’t!” I yelled as he left. There was no purpose to doing this, that I knew, but I couldn’t stop myself. My brain was falling to pieces.

As they left, bolting the doors shut with keys, I laid down my head and prayed.

Chapter Text

*Jay's viewpoint*

I was still stinging when I opened my eyes. Not as bad, just a little in places all over, where the strings had been slicing me. Where had they gone?

I looked down, but my head wouldn't lift up, only my eye was moving. I saw that the strings were gone. I was free, but I still felt weighed down.

Under me were soft things like covers for a sleeping place. Not mine though, not his. This was someone else's sleeping place. Larger and…nicer, softer. I still felt cold, with no covers over me, but it felt much nicer than before, when I was tied.

I wanted to look more, look around at where I was. My head was barely turning, even when inside I was telling it to move, move. Why was it acting different? Even my eye wasn't quite the same. It wanted to shut, like I wasn't done being asleep yet. It didn't make sense. Where I was didn't make sense either.

Around me I saw plain shelter walls, brown blocks on one side and gray on the other. Near the floor was a broken tunnel cap, like the one I would use to go in and out of his shelter. There were metal boxes, hinged so they could store things, and a glowy ball of bright machine light hanging from the white shelter top. Next to it was a door with a shiny handle, bright in the light from the ball, like how fire looks in the shelter I shared with him. Where was he now, I wondered? The keen eyes had taken him, and they…they had taken me too.

The door opened, and a hairless man in brown clothes stepped towards me. He shut the door again, clicked something on the handle. There was a machine strapped to his side. I still couldn't move.

It came into my head, just then, that we were both somewhere bad.

The man was babbling at me as he walked. My claws snagged in the sleeping place as I tried my hardest to move them. They could barely twitch. Now he was next to me, tugging me by my arm, my covers, hands off, you creep! Stacey had jabbered that at a man I used to know, hadn't she?

I growled, but it wasn't easy because my even throat felt slack. Slower than I'd ever moved them, my lips curled back to flash my teeth. He grabbed my leg, pressing down where machines had stung me before, and the pain made me move. I sunk in my claws through the cover on his other arm, aiming to pierce through the juice channels.

He jabbered louder, and his hand on my leg moved back to strike me on the ear. I reeled as he pulled me up. There was so much more I could have done to hurt him, make him pay, but I was so weak. Why couldn't I move?

He threw me down, on the floor this time. I folded over, fell on my knees and collapsed forward, half on my side. Everything ached and I groaned. Then I noticed the heat. In front of me were metal bars, painted white, flowing with warm air like I hadn't felt since before I sank in the water. I sighed, sighed again, breathing out easy as I lost all the stiffness of so many freezing lights and darks. It was so…good….

The hairless man babbled, but my thinking was lost in the heat. He paused, babbled again, paused as I shut my eye, thinking that if I could stay here forever I might, I was mesmerized, I had jabbered after the show. Only when his babbles got louder did I look up, moved my head the small bit that I could to see him.

I saw a flash instead. A metal rod swiped down, hit my face with a crack like breaking freezing branches, and then I was on my back, groaning again. Stinging fire spread beneath my skin. My jaw was too far across my face, I could feel it busted at the hinge. When I moved it to cry, the hurt brought sparks to my sight.

The hairless man bent over me. His breath was chopped into noisy, wheezing bursts as he watched me writhe on the floor. Then he grabbed my jaw so fast and hard that it made me heave a breath, gasping like a fish. As he pulled me off the floor by my face, I clamped my eye shut. It hurt too bad to think. He set down the rod to seize me around the brow with his extra stubs, and jammed my jaw into place. The crack it made was even louder than the one from when he hit me. At least now it was placed right again.

I wanted to bite, so bad, wanted to sink teeth into meat and rip it up, rip everything in my reach, rip, rip…but nothing would work right. It felt like moving through mud, sinking, trapped. I barely moved at all before the hairless man shoved me away. I sprawled on my side.

Every breath against the floor was a struggle. I looked back at the man as he tugged off the brown cover around his gut and let it hang down the side of the sleeping place. He walked in a curve, curving back towards me, the shark always circles its prey, the screen had babbled when I was small. I shuddered hard as I let go of air, and I fixed my eye on my hand next to me. I tried to curl my claws, make fighting possible again. Every little piece of motion came so slow.

He was back. I felt it when his stub claws ripped down my head cover. He gripped my hair and pushed me up with it until his face was looming in front of me again. I tried not to think of how much it hurt as I kept my sight on my arms, wanting to hold myself up with them. Too slow, too slow, I was moving through wet concrete, close to drying. He jabbered at me loud and on the inside I had panic. My mouth moved open, aching still, and I thought I should jabber something back, wanting him to stop, what could I jabber that would make him stop, stop, please, just let me go!

I moaned at him, a slurry mess that I knew sounded nothing like the old things I was thinking. But then his lips curved, a good thing, wasn't that a good thing? He must have liked that, must have understood, since he was babbling again. His hand jerked my hair and my head snapped back with it, but his lips were still curved, and then I thought maybe he had understood me after all, and if I just tried again he should let go….

Then with his stub claws, he reached in his covers and pulled another glassy tube. Its spike was capped, but he flicked it off, then aimed it towards my neck, straight for the jugular, hahaha. I made myself move back as much as I could, and tucked in my chin, twisted my head to keep things difficult for him. The spike came forward, and his stub claws passed under my mouth.

Bite! The urge tore through my thoughts as the man pushed towards my throat. Bite, bite, spear the meat, snap the bone! I focused on the hurt that still rang in my head and made it drive me to move. Straining everything at once, I dug in my teeth, slow for me but fast enough to make his skin rip. I was faster than he thought.

He swiped away his hand, jabbering loud things, and struck me. It stung, but with that instead of spikes inside my skin, I wanted it. I held my eye shut and breathed even, steady as I could. He stood up and let me drop, and grabbed the machine that was strapped to him. I watched as he held it, but didn't pull it free. He wouldn't kill me. Blood dripped from his stubs and I wanted there to be more. Wanted to bite and tear!

When he turned away, I looked at the rod he left on the floor. Maybe now I was moving just enough to take it, turn the tables. I tried as the man babbled, loud and sharp like bangs from the machines. My arm was moving. Slow, it moved so slow that I still felt pinned in mud, but it was moving. My claws came closer and closer to the metal.

The hairless man walked back before I grabbed it. There was something else in his hands. I growled, but by now it sounded more like groaning. He pushed me on my back and sat on my chest, grabbed me hard beneath my face and showed his teeth like he wanted to kill me. Part of me didn't care anymore if he did, because at least I'd die warm.

Then I saw the thing in his hand, a metal tool for snapping. He jammed it against my teeth, sorry kiddo, we're gonna have to pull this one out. No, he wouldn't kill me, only make things hurt more.

I gave up on the rod when I realized how close the machine on his side was. All his stub claws were working to keep me from biting as he tried to wrench out my teeth, but that meant I could move my hands. I gritted my jaws together hard to stop him as my arm began to move, slow and aching, but not lifeless, not yet.

Dad…Dad knew how to make those machines work. He used to teach me, son, if you don't learn how to shoot in this day and age, you're gonna end up somebody's dinner. And that was before, before the world even got cold. I knew that I had to remember. Keen eyes were dangerous things, and Dad never let me forget.

My fingers reached the straps, but I didn't think I could keep my arm lifted long enough to take the machine. I winced as he drove the tool between my teeth and clamped. There was no time left.

My fingers hung on the handle, just long enough to twist in the stinging end of his machine. I aimed in towards his flesh, towards the parts that would hurt the most. My fifth claw jammed the trigger, that's it! And the thing fired, lucky, lucky, bullet in the chamber.

Dad would be proud.

He squealed, like a pig, as juices spilled from his gut. He flopped against the floor and his tool clattered next to me as he let go of it, clutching his bulging body. I heaved myself onto my stomach, crawling towards the broken tunnel cap in the wall. It was exactly where I wanted to go, if only I could drag myself there. One arm after the other, I scraped across the floor, away from the heat and the squealing. I heard more voices out past the shelter walls, and then banging at the door. Slamming followed it, but whoever was out there couldn't get it open. It was the hairless man's fault, I thought. He had wanted to hurt me with no one to watch. Now he would die by himself.

I crawled the last bit forward to the tunnel and slid inside, as the hairless man babbled one more time, and stopped. I heard the door finally buckle, but by then I was deep in the dark, dragging my way out. I wanted to live. I wanted to see Dad again.

I would fight through anything to see him.

Chapter Text

*Curt's viewpoint*

I wasn't done praying when he walked in. The rusty hinges on the door beside me screamed before I had the chance to say "Amen," and I was hardly one to keep God waiting long when I had something to say.

My "visitor" had been eager to see me right away; that much I knew. His footsteps disturbed the makeshift peace around my aching, hanging head, and then he stood there, stood in front of me like a memorial statue, all straight knees and head held high.

If nothing else, I thought, I'd be the first to speak.

"You're him aren't you," I said, as I heard him draw a breath. "No need to introduce y'self like we're gonna be friends or somethin'. I know you. You're that boss they talk about."

He scoffed, making echoes off the walls. I looked up, up past designer shoes and a long, thick coat, and saw his face.

"'That boss,' huh?" He mimicked, cocking his thick, blonde brow. "Cute title, but it's just 'Gordon' to you. Gordon Keller." He smiled, square teeth stretched out along square jaws, shining like silver bullets. It was him, all right, the source of "G.K." sprayed on every city block.

"Well, Gordon," I huffed. "I only got one thing to ask of you. Let my son go right this instant, and then I'll tell you whatever the fuck you want."

He wasted no time crushing my hopes. "Oh, but that's not how this works, Mr. Sniper," he said, all smooth, well-placed words with ugly meanings behind them.

"Just let him go! What the hell do you want?" I growled. As he stared down at me, I found eye contact and clung to it. His eyes were green like Smoker breath, and I wanted to tear them out, squish them underfoot. He was the cause of all of this; his orders had torn me from my son.

"I would've let your people in," I said. "I did, in fact. But then they tried t' kill me an' my son. So what the hell d'you want? You just wanna kill us an' take everythin' we've got?"

"Just shut the fuck up and listen, will you?" Gordon said. There was hardly any edge to his voice, like he may as well've been commenting on the time of day. "See, when my boys told me they'd caught a survivor running around, I assumed I was getting a survivor. But the funny thing is, when I realized you had this Hunter pet of yours following you around, I began to have second thoughts. Turns out, I'm always right about shit like this."

"The hell're you talkin' about." I managed to sit upright, glaring straight at him. He glared back.

"Your shoulder. It's bitten."

"That was a long time ago!" I yelled. I didn't want him to talk about it. I just wanted him to give back Jay, didn't want to think about the past…about old things….

Gordon scoffed again, cocking his head. "At first I thought you were immune," he said. "I thought you smelled like death because of that animal you dragged in with you. Then I had Norman look over you, and guess what he noticed? That bite of yours, it's rotten."

"It's fine!"

"It's rotten and green as all hell, and you've been covering it with rags and jackets."

"I'm not infected!"

"Oh hell yeah you are. You just didn't change all the way."

I looked at the floor, watching the spots again. They seemed to grow as my eyes dilated. I didn't want to think, didn't want to hear what he said. It wasn't true; he was just jabbering at me.

"Don't look so sad, now," Gordon laughed, crouching forward to look me in the eye again. "You're not the only one who's like this. Norman is too, and Roy. You've met them both, haven't you? They're all half-sick, just like you are. Isn't that something?"

I shook my head. Didn't want to talk, not anymore.

"I bet, when you first got bit, you acted just like the ferals out in the streets. Maybe you forgot how to speak, how to drive a car or shoot a gun? I wonder if you killed anybody." He laughed again, quiet but sharp enough to hurt.

"Shut the hell up," I seethed. Failed them, that's right. I was seething on the inside when I failed them, my family, dragged them down with me, down, down….

"Quit feeling so sorry for yourself, Mr. Sniper," Gordon said. "Ninety-nine percent of Fairfield would've given anything to be as lucky as you. You've got your senses back, don't you? Some of them, at least. And you've got that Hunter, to boot. Funny, how the special ones sometimes know when you're not quite human." He shook his head, grinning. "It's the same with my boys. Most of them aren't immune, like I am. They're just infected enough to fight like beasts, and they're sure as hell good at their job, aren't they? Just that tad bit feral."

Gordon leaned closer, as if to tell me a secret. "Roy, you know," he said, "He eats the leftover women, the ones who don't assimilate and have to get chopped. Norman, on the other hand, well…he likes to 'play around' with the ferals that get caught in our traps. Everything serves a purpose here, at least when you've got these sorts of upstanding citizens running the show now, doesn't it?"

"Sick sons of bitches, is what you are." I ground my teeth, furious. I had to get free, save my son before that "half-infected" monster got to him. If Gordon didn't back away, I might just be ready to snap his nose off.

"You see, there's a reason I'm telling you all this, Mr. Sniper. Believe it or not, I'm not just here to torture you. I think," he stood up, finally, "That you might make a half-decent addition to our little community here. Once you let us know where your old safe house is, of course."

"Only if you free my son!" I answered.

"Ah, this again. Can't you just let it go already?" He complained, pacing from one wall to the other. "Fine, fine. Tell me where you've kept your supplies and we won't harm him. I'll give the order myself. Then you'll help us, won't you?"

I wasn't sure anymore. I just wanted Jay safe again.

"That Norman guy of yours went down to hurt 'im already. Tell 'im to stop first!"

"Hmm," Gordon paused, turning towards the door. "No, I don't think so. Tell me where the safe house is. Now."

"Please!"

"Tell me now, and then I'll stop him."

My mind broke just then, like a dam. The hope that Gordon would keep his word had buckled it, crumbled it down into dust.

"Near the corner of Avon an' Prospect Street," I told him. "Down the little brick alleyway on Avon an' around a couple turns…." The words tumbled out of me, not scrap of pride left to lose. Nothing, nothing but dust. I just prayed it was enough.

Gordon listened. When I was done, he laughed some more, tossing his thick, blond hair.

"That wasn't so hard, was it? And here Roy was complaining about what a 'tough guy' you were."

"Tell 'em t' leave my son alone!" I said.

"Pfft," Gordon rolled his eyes, and my stomach with it. "Tell what to who now? You seriously think I'm going to waltz in on Norman and tell him 'hold on, cowboy, I just made a deal with that lunatic who shot down half of your friends last night.' Nah-ah-ah, no way." He inclined his head, stared down at me with a gaze like hatred in the flesh.

"You're getting chopped tonight, you meddling fuck," he said. "And your 'son' is staying downstairs."

"Liar!" I yelled. Screamed. "Liar! LIAR! AAAIIIIIAAAAHHH-"

I was roaring now, raging with a pitch that'd rival the screech of infected Blue Jays, soaring for the kill. My mind was black and red with fevered hate. I wanted to rip up the world, eat it piece by shredded piece.

That was when I heard the gunshot from below. Someone was screaming downstairs, screaming with rotten lungs that I knew, remembered. He had remembered, my son, son, if you don't learn how to shoot in this day and age, you're gonna end up somebody's dinner. I was so proud. While I existed in madness, he was alive from the dead. Maybe I hadn't...failed him after all?

Gordon's skin was pale now. He babbled frightened words and ran out the door. Left it open, just for me? I was ready to break myself loose from this rusted cage. There was so much to rip apart.

College would have to wait one more year. My son and I had things to kill, a forest to return to. Only deep in the green, in the primal abyss, was a place where the world had permission to end.