Damsel Undaunted

2

Sara and I ended up staying at that abandoned Walmart store for more than a week. There were no Disceased, since the store was right beside a park, which was a huge free space. The Disceased have probably long since moved to find more prey.

Open space, like the park, can be both good and bad in post-apocalyptic times. On one hand, you could see everything, and could make sure that there were no Disceased in the area. On the other hand, it also meant that you could be seen in plain sight, which made you an easy target for both Disceased and other humans.

In cases like these, humans were sometimes more dangerous than Disceased. The Disceased have poor eyesight, which gave you an advantage in open spaces since you could see them clearly and they don't. They also had poor hearing and a slow gait, which meant that you had a huge advantage over them. Plus, their brains don't work, so you could outwit them and win in a fight with the Disceased.

With humans, however, you should be cautious. They have intelligence, better hearing, and most of them have good eyesight. They'd be willing to kill you to get resources, and trust was hard to come by. The human you see begging for your help could just be pretending, when in truth, they're just waiting yo pounce upon your kindness. In a world where only the strong and the smart survived, you learn very quickly to trust no one but yourself.

It was trickier with humans. They could hold grudges, they could decide to kill you specifically.  In short, they have toxic feelings that may decide to make you an enemy and they have the brains to be able to take you down, while all the Disceased want is to eat and kill, not necessarily in that order.

After our week-long stay inside the store, Sara and I decided to get more food and clothes and water before packing up and moving on. I made sure to list the location down on a notepad for future reference if I ever needed a place to stay that had a healthy stock of food and water and was relatively safe from the Disceased.

"Where to next, Eli?" Sara asked as we drove away, her eyes on the store from her place in the passenger seat beside mine as we drove away. I felt sad for Sara sometimes. She'd never actually know a place to call home, never know what it would have been like to grow up in a world without the Disceased she'll never know what it felt like to have a leisurely walk in the park, or go shopping on weekends with your friends, or going to school, even with all it's drama and unnecessary algebra lessons.

She was still seven years old when I found her, which meant she'd have more memories of this messed up world than she'd have of the way it was before. I didn't know which was better: to have tasted the feeling of a world where you could chat with your friends  wihout being in danger of being killed or infected every second of the day, and to know you could never have that kind of life again; or to have never experienced that world so you wouldn't know how heaven felt like before you were dropped down to hell, and to grow up knowing nothing but a world where you could do nothing but survive, survive, survive.

"West, to Aubrey," I replied. "Aubrey's a pretty neat name for a place, don't you think? Because it's easy to pronounce and you could use it as the name of a person."

"Yeah, not like the names of other places. Like, um," Sara scrunched up her brows to remember the names of a few places. After all, if your main goal was to be able to live another hellish day without being eaten, you didn't really have time to study geography. But heavens knew I tried my hardest to teach her as much as I could. Right now, we were working on her addition before moving on to subtraction, then multiplication and division.

"Well, can't you think of any of the places we've been through? Or any countries?" I coaxed.

"Um, what about India? Or Alaska? Or Philippines? Or America?" She answered eagerly eyes bright. I laughed at her enthusiasm, shaking my head slightly. "I don't know, Sara. Alaska and Philippines, maybe. But I think it would be pretty cool to meet a person named India. Besides, I'm pretty sure I read a book once where the girl's name was America."