Tend Towards

Sadie had Mark shot and then the world ended again

She felt she'd done a rather commendable job of hauling the caches into the warehouse when Mark sauntered in with his entourage of rifle-wielding sociopaths dragging another prisoner in behind him.

His condescending grin at her stacked crates sparked the familiar fury in her bosom, and for moment she only saw red. Sadie had already challenged Mark to do the haul himself, but that kind of labour was evidently beneath him and he much preferred incapacitating stragglers in the streets while she dragged the metallic containers across the field because, once again, Mark et alibi had commandeered the jeep.

She had to remind herself that not all men were so detestable, but the self-satisfied mugs of the male party didn't do much to help their cause as they dumped the prisoner against the far wall.

The prisoner was unconscious - probably for the best, because even in the most desperate times Sadie didn't think anybody would enjoy the knowledge of being submerged in puddles of coagulated blood.

At least there weren't any more flies.

Nobody really knew what happened to them yet, and with the rapidly dwindling human population, she doubted anybody cared enough to really find out.

"You know the drill," Mark called at her, then turned on his heel and proceeded to continue his hunt.

Sadie had to marvel at the timid man. His frame was thin, his hair thin, the rims on his spectacles thin, and his lips thin when he sneered at her. He was stick compared to the butch neanderthals that followed him around like acolytes. She was tempted to yank her M-22 out of her belt and gun them all down right then and there.

"Aye aye, Captain," she mocked, and, after Mark and company were gone, kicked a crate in the arrangement she had established. The tip of her steel-capped boots connected with the metal, sending a resounding ring through the warehouse. It reminded Sadie of a church bell in some way.

It wasn't exactly the same though. The timbre was too low and the peal faded too quick, even in the mostly empty concrete building. There was no majesty behind it, or the soil and mud that covered the crates, or the stirring prisoner in pools of blood against the far wall.

Simply, the world was empty and quiet and dull.

Sadie pushed the thoughts of rising revolt from her mind and made her way over to the wakening body.

Her first task was to haul it out of the blood. Sadie had gotten good at hauling - a far cry from teaching kindergardeners in a previous life, granted, but excellent for her physique. She almost missed her own perhaps-too-plump frame as she got a closer look at the girl the boys had found.

She was thin, even thinner than Mark. Her bones threatened agaisnt her flesh, and her cheeks were sunken. Sadie lifted her gently, being careful not to simply toss her into the air.

She carried the girl over to quarters for cleaning, a luxury the clearly able-bodied men didn't seem to deem necessary if the scrapes and tears on her lower back, arms and knees were anything to go by.

The girl seemed only half-aware of what was happening, but clung to Sadie nonetheless. Her voice was so low when she spoke that Sadie almost completely missed it.

"My knight in shining armor," the girl whispered. "You came to save me."

Sadie had heard some strange things in all her years - she was used to regular conversation with toddlers, after all - but this was just a bit too left of center for her to comprehend immediately.

"Sure thing, Princess," she responded almost automatically, observing the girl for any signifier of coherency. She found no such indication. The girl couldn't focus her eyes or hold her head up. Delirium was probable.

Either malnutrition, dehydration, depravation, desperation, isolation or a combination had rendered her a bit mad. Sadie took comfort in the idea that the girl might not have been coherent enough to register her terrible situation.

The girl babbled on about wistful fairies dancing as lights in the night, and throngs of forgetful ghosts in the day while Sadie washed and clothed her.

"Cara with a K," the girl muttered before indulging in the grotesque food sadie offered her. Rice and minced donkey meat wasn't an ideal meal, nor nutritious enough to establish a long-term diet, but a starving girl had no qualms about quality or content.

"What's Cara with a K?" Sadie asked, but the girl didn't respond. She made the offhand comment between chewing about the tower she was trapped in, and the significance of it all was lost on Sadie.

The small ration she was allowed took a remarkable amount of time to finish off, so Sadie settled on plotting mutiny on Mark's ship of destruction while watching the girl eat and ramble out fairytales.

Sadie knew some secrets about Mark. Some secrets were less secret than she needed them to be, but in a tight knit cult like his, with desperately low membership, great scandal barely warranted dethronement. This wasn't a fantasy kingdom like the girl thought it was. There weren't politics or kings or queens or damsels in distress or knights in shining armour to rescue them.

This was a group of seven individuals who followed Mark's every command as if they were divine ordinances. Like any religion, they followed out of hope and faith, theoretically, though Sadie assumed they were as debased as Mark and enjoyed revelling in the hedonism, violence and bloodshed.

The knowledge that Mark was zombie himself was also not hidden well enough for her to turn his acolytes against him, and only aided in securing his position. The fact that he was a coherent, functioning human that still suffered from the infection was somehow a testament to his work on developing a cure.

Mark was playing God long before the spread started. In fact, he was the cause for it - something his acolytes didn't yet know and possible leverage in Sadie's cause. Mark had developed the virus from his own genetic material to use as a weapon against goverments.

Mark had initiated the spread long before his campaign, even before she married him, and the promise of providing a cure was his ticket to being a mortal god.

Only, is cure wasn't as effective as he hoped. The only test subject that had shown remarkable success was himself, and that was only because of his own genetic inclination not to reject his own DNA.

A simple flaw overlooked when blinded by the stars.

Sadie shuddered at the thought of having willingly married such a vile creature. To be fair, she didn't know at the time that he was a raging megalomaniac.

She had a plan.

"Girlie," she said, and the girl looked up from her food.

"Cara with a K," the girl responded.

Sadie ignored her. "I need you to do me a favour, alright. I'm going to leave you alone tonight in the hospital. You'll be safe there. When the evil man comes to steal you away, you must shoot him with this."

Sadie slid her M-22 onto the table, and the girl stared at it blankly.

"If the evil man dies, no more princesses will ever be harmed," Sadie iterated.

The girl nodded. "Cara with a K. That's my name I mean." The lucidity in her gaze as she looked up at Sadie quickly disappeared, and she stared blankly again.

"You know how all stories end, right?" Sadie asked.

"Happily Ever After," the girl chorused.

"Something like that," but Sadie knew her story was fated to end very differently altogether.

Simply, Sadie shot Mark and the world ended again.