We With Daisies Lie

Team Work

"Rock paper scissors?" I asked as we knelt behind a mound of fall-orange leaves.

"No way, it's my turn," Emily said and jumped up. I turned to Oliver who still had the 'are they for real' expression frozen on his face and said, "You have to get to know her."

"You guys actually have fun doing this?" he asked, not taking his eyes off Emily or the dead man she rushed. "We're just as surprised as you are," I told him and watched as Emily slipped the man's advance and rammed the spear through his head.

"How long have you been together?" he asked, Emily waved, I waved back. "We're not. Why do you think she likes me?"

"I meant just together."

"Oh. A few months," I said, a little embarrassed.

"Yeah, she likes you," he smiled. It had been ninety seven days since Spencer and Ryan. We found Oliver fighting for his life in the woods two days before, a group of five dead managed to surround him.

"He can't take five?" Emily had asked as we watched the chubby man try to outrun the mini horde. "How'd he survive this long?""Let's ask him," I said and with that we took off, in the months since we had been alone, we had learned that guns were a last resort. With time on our hands and no distractions like Spencer's fury, we had made all sorts of weapons from materials we found in our environment. Emily liked long spears and things she could throw, getting too close meant getting the stench of death on your clothes. It was the only thing neither of us were quite used to yet.        

I liked smaller, more intimate weapons- maybe it was because I used a pen for my first kill, or the deer bone that saved my life, or the pocket knife I used to slay Spencer. There was something about being that close and making sure- something about the vibration of a knife crunching a skull... of course I wouldn't tell Oliver any of this, he was an engineer, a homebody- not the kind to survive an apocalypse by being violent, and yet here he was. To be honest, my thrill of killing them did give me pause. It wasn't even a year ago that I couldn't muster the courage to walk to a girl in a bar. But now most of those girls were dead and I was left to make sure they weren't walking too. But I knew the dead weren't people. The people who lived behind those pale, soulless eyes were long since departed.        

Emily and I had stuck by the river, following it north towards Massachusetts. My grandparents owned a farm in Amherst. Grandad had a few guns we could use but that wasn't the prize. He had grew up in the time of nuclear threat, he was a young man during the Cuban Missile Crisis and told me on more than one occasion that he would never feel that fear again. Against my grandma's wishes he installed a fallout bunker in their basement where he kept enough canned food and water to last six months, maybe a year. That was the prize.        

I had told him to survive nuclear fallout, a year's worth of food and water probably wasn't enough."Well, it's better than nothing," he had said, and you just can't argue with that, I was sure glad I hadn't tried. I told Emily all of this on the first days we were alone and she agreed it was our best bet, no one outside my family knew about the shelter and even if they did, they couldn't get into it without the key, the location of which was also only known to family members. I didn't want to get my hopes up but it wasn't exactly out of the question to think my grandparents were there now, sitting and enjoying their bunker without worry of the dead or even starvation.        

So we set out first moving east, it was hard to get your bearings right away but eventually we hit the Housatonic State Forest in Connecticut and from there we put the sunrise to our right and trekked more or less straight north. Every day we would hunt and one of us would rest while the other filled the bottles with water from the river. Keeping just one of us strong at all times was the only way to keep the team strong all the time. By the time we crossed the state border we were proficient killers and it started getting fun. There was a routine to the way we moved, the way we stalked our prey be it dead people or animals.        

When we picked up Oliver we were only about a week from Amherst. Since we did most of the killing and hunting during the day, he always volunteered to check places first such as cabins or abandoned farmhouse along the way to make sure they were safe. When we did find a safe place to spend the night, he would sing us the folk songs he used to play at open mics. He said he had lost his guitar along the way so we would have to forgive the roughness of it but the truth is he was a great singer. He would teach me and Emily lyrics, though I never sang. I much preferred to watch and listen to Em. She would have to close her eyes when trying to hit the high notes. He even gave her a notepad and pen he found when we were raiding a pharmacy and told her if she could write lyrics, he would make up a melody."I'm not the writer of the group," she told him pointing to me.

"Have you ever tried?" I asked her.

"I used to write poetry, when I was little."

"Poetry's just music without the melody," Oliver said and gave her a smile. She asked him about his life before, about the music, the open mics, about who his own songs were about. He looked up to the stars and with a soft and sad smile, he never did answer that last one. The next few nights I would pretend to be asleep when she got up in the middle of the night and tried her hand at writing. Some nights the pen would scratch that pad so fiercely I thought she would rip the paper to pieces. Other nights she just sat tapping and tapping until finally giving up and going to sleep, only to wake up a few minutes later and trying again.

* * * *

I studied the map Oliver had provided us with and made my best guess at where we might be. I was beginning to be good at that. By my calculations, we were no more than a day or two from the farm, but we had run out of food and the animals had all but disappeared from the forest. There is nothing scarier than getting a twinge of hunger and knowing there's nothing to eat. We all sat down to discuss a course of action and before long it seemed obvious we only had one choice. Go to the nearest town and try our luck there before moving on to the farm. But the towns here were still teeming with hungry dead. In the end we decided to try it, we didn't have a choice at this point and the dead were becoming less and less of a problem as we learned to defend ourselves better. 

We taught Oliver everything we knew about killing them but still he hesitated each time. We were always there to back him up, but I told him someday we wouldn't be and his hesitation would cost him. He agreed and said he would try his best.        

I circled the nearest town on the map- the next day, Oliver would scout ahead and report back what he saw. We told him we could go but he insisted, saying if he couldn't do this much than he was just holding us back. We relented and got ready to go to sleep but Emily stood awkward in the center of the room."Em?" I cocked my head at her.

"I was wondering..." she started and took a piece of paper from her pocket. "Could I...?"

Oliver came back and sat down next to me, "Go on," he encouraged her. She looked at me, her hands shaking,"Please," I said.

She cleared her throat and put the paper up to block her face, "...I'm not gonna sing it," she said, and began to read. 

"The worlds fell away and night came once and forever to stay. For a time, starlight shuddered at the truth of it, and I, in the middle, was lost. A happy child with missing teeth, a pig-tailed girl in dry dirty leaves. And mother who was kind, left on a Saturday and simply died. And father who loved me, sat at home and forgot. My brother, my watcher, my caretaker, never saw the thing that killed him. And the girl was taken off, never to be seen again. The worlds fell away, but night was ending, and light gave way."

She folded the paper and put it back in her pocket. Her hands were clammy and white, she had never been so scared. Oliver got up and gave her a big bear hug. He said he was so proud, not only that she wrote something so well but that it was personal and hard to share but she did it anyway. I almost didn't say anything, I didn't know how to express what I was feeling. I wrapped my arms around her and held them there. "You are so much more than you realize," I whispered in her ear, and then I kissed her. She leaned softly into me and took my hand. We lay down together, our stomachs empty but our hearts a little fuller than before. We went to sleep. 

Outside, the wind blew cold and uncertain.