Survival

Part 41: Anna

“Guys! Hold up! We’ll stop here.” Aris announced. He was kneeling beside Valerie’s crumpled form, holding her blank face centimetres from the ground in the tips of his long fingers. It looked as though he had only just managed to catch her at the last second.

“We’ve only been walking for a few hours, ya lazy little – Woah, what happened? Is she okay?” Aluna rushed to Valerie and took her head from Aris’ hands. From this angle I saw the prominent brown roots emerging from Aluna's scalp, standing in contrast to the faded purple of the rest of her hair. The rainforest humidity had also made her hair curl so it roiled like angry clouds in tight clumps just above her shoulders. The mix of brown and purple in her curls seemed to swim before my eyes. Trippy.

“She passed out. Might’ve been dehydration. She was sweating a hell of a lot, man. It’s pretty damn hot here.” Aris stammered, staring at the ground awkwardly. That was odd. In all the time I had known him, he had never seemed this awkward. Aris was always the confident one in every situation, lying or otherwise. Thankfully the others didn't seem to notice and fussed over Valerie, giving me clearance to silently scream at Aris.

Aristotle looked me right in the face. His eyes were wide and his cheeks were totally colourless. There was something wrong. There was something very very wrong.

I approached him and took his noticeably clammy hand in mine, helping Aris to his unsteady feet as the others set about pitching camp, chatting quietly and casting us strange looks. Well, darn. They had noticed.

As soon as he stood Aris seemed to snap out of his stunned mullet setting and quickly took the lead. Hris led me through the forest to a sheltered patch of tree ferns, out of eye and earshot of the group. I stepped forward to hug him but he shirked away, holding me at arms length from his body like I had some kind of contagious disease. Slightly offended, I crossed my arms over my chest and furrowed my brow, waiting for his next sentence.

“Listen. Valerie figured something out.” He whispered and took my face in his hands, rubbing his calloused fingertips over my cheeks softly. Aristotle had a big heart but was never this affectionate unless something very bad happened and he was trying to lessen the blow of deliverance. My heart raced in panic. What was he about to tell me? Proverbial butterflies began having an orgie in my stomach.

“What is it? Aris?” I asked him. He looked over my shoulder intently and pursed his lips. “Aristotle?” I whispered in frustration and tried to step into his line of sight, standing on my tiptoes but still not managing to get the top of my head past his nose. Darn tall boys.

Aris took the hammer from his belt and crept around me. I spun on my heels stiffly and followed him, burning with curiosity. Gritty, cool mud scratched my palms as I carefully made my way down the eroded face of an old waterway, making up in care what I lacked in speed. At the bottom I tested my footing and followed Aris down the muddy riverbed, creeping as quietly as possible in the squelching mud – which wasn’t very quietly.

Bubbles of air and god knows what else were forced to the surface by my weight and made a noise similar to that of a fart with my every step. Every now and then I would catch a snippet of sound; a voice or perhaps a bird. Either could be totally plausible.

Aris turned and pressed his forefinger over his lips, gesturing for me to be quiet after a particularly loud fart of air emerged from below my shoes. I waved my hands in annoyance. We can’t all be unrealistically stealthy. Aris parted the fronds of a low lying fern that bent over the riverbed and peeked through gingerly.

“Hello?”

--

We found the girl curled up in a cage of fig roots that protruded from the crumbling sides of the riverbed. She was singing Silverchair’s Across The Night quietly to herself. She had short hair in two stubby pigtails with a braid down the side of her fringe. Her locks looked like they were probably meant to be auburn under all that grit. She was a little short in stature but otherwise looked to be about our age. Why was it that the main survivors of the zombie apocalypse seemed to be teenagers? The blatant lack of empathy? Our youth giving us more natural ability to survive? Or maybe just luck. The girl wore a muddy pair of jeans and a ripped school blouse that might have once been blue. Over the top of the blouse she had a black cardigan reaching just to her elbows, the elastic long-dead and now loosely hanging and bunching, slack and manky. How could she bear any extra clothing in this heat? There was a sickly sweet, smoky smell hovering around her. I immediately recognized it from my family holiday in Byron Bay. Marijuana, mingling with the distinctive smell of strong spirits. Her eyes were red and her face a pale green. I guessed this girl may have been alone for a while.