Don't Whistle Past the Graveyard

Ch. Sixty-Five

One thing you can really say about Tennessee? It is green as all get out in the spring. And there are only like twelve million and fifty two flowers. On the ground, in the trees, damn near everywhere.

And at least half of us were miserable with pollen allergies.

Cas, Kyle and Shane were all fine. Bunch of country mice. The rest of us had grown up in the city. Our bodies didn't know what to do with this overwhelming attack on our immune systems; this was way more pollen than you could possibly get from the scant vegetation in most urban places. Blurry eyes, scratchy throats, stuffy noses, the whole nine yards.

Thankfully Shane was really good at being able to gauge how long it would take us to get from town to town, so we didn't end up sleeping outside in the stuff a ton of the time. When we did though, we woke up about as miserable as you could imagine.

We eventually found some allergy pills, but you really have to get that stuff into your system before you're exposed to the allergens. Otherwise it takes a while to really work, unless you get the immediate relief stuff. And that was a little hard to find.

Why? I don't know. I guess we weren't the only ones wandering around out here who were slowly being suffocated.

Anyway, so we survived the gauntlet of swollen sinuses and were between towns. The places we'd found had been picked pretty clean, only giving us enough to keep going. But we were running on fumes and it had been a few days without any of us having a proper meal.

Cassidy had wanted to see what the forests around here could provide. Naturally, we had decided to divide and conquer. We weren't overly worried about running into anyone out here and there had been negligible numbers of zombies. No one was crazy about it, but we couldn't all go hunting wabbits.

Sorry, I can't ever leave that one alone.

Since apparently Shane was the quietest, he got to go with Cas toward the north to see if they couldn't find something with a little protein. We had been seeing small groups of deer every now and then, which Cas found promising, but she said she was also going to set a few snares.

She had also sketched out a few of the edible plants that she thought might be around here. Danny, Sacha and Kyle had decided to sweep west, so that left Sam, Viktoria and myself with the east.

Shane had told us all to keep fairly close to our campsite. We left before them as Cassidy gave him a crash course on where it was best to hit a deer or whatever she had in mind for this particular area.

It didn't take long for us to get out of sight of the camp, the spring leaves and flowers rapidly hiding everything with their thick colors. I had no intention to go wandering very far, though. By this time, we were all at that stage of getting used to being hungry. It was uncomfortable, but not unbearable. I preferred to keep in orbit with the others and not get a ton of food, than get food and have wandered too far away from them.

By that point, we were all pretty gun shy about getting separated.

Mostly because it generally ends poorly. And by poorly, I just mean horrifically.

We were walking around a small stand of a low, leafy bush or small trees of some sort. Honestly, I was always better with fauna than I was with flora.

Sam tripped over an exposed root, right into a spider web, which resulted in more flailing. Vik and I—though he had my sympathy—both laughed, and she grabbed his elbow to keep him from crashing into the trees.

"Get it off! Get it off!" Sam hissed, hands flapping at where the spider web had stuck to his cheeks and nose.

Still giggling, she started plucking the sticky substance off while I peered dubiously at a plant that looked a little like one of the things Cas had told us to look for. I was nervy about the prospect of eating anything I wasn't absolutely sure of since I'd actually seen what toxic plants could do to a person.