Rolly | The Broken Mind Sagas

Chapter 1

In the days before the grid went down, Rolly had taken control.

Her eyes narrowed. Her thoughts muting as the dead man stalked toward her in the faint light, closing the distance between them.

Some people had 'it.' A piece that was holding out, waiting for the world to go to hell.

When he lunged for her she was quick, catching him under the chin, her grip forcing his jaw shut while he tugged mindlessly at her jacket.

She'd been Molly once, a home schooled teenager raised by suburban hippies. That was back when having labels mattered. When there was still a world that needed her to fit an easily digestible set of designations. 

Molly had been great at navigating that world.

She placed her free hand on the zombie's shoulder, felt the broken clavicle sticking out of the skin.

The difference--Molly would have broken down at this point. She was too fragile to have her hand knuckles deep in a dead man's rotting flesh. Meanwhile, Rolly found the broken shoulder bone provided her a solid grip.

Her head tilted as she studied the thing struggling to reach her. He wore a blue collared jumpsuit. She could read the white name tag on his chest. He had been a Charles.

Molly had gone to sleep early on--was taking an extended vacation within their mind. There had been no discussion about it, not really, more of an implicit agreement. The change was more like a glance they had shared  walking passed one another in a subway station. 

Molly could come back, run the show when the time came, when they needed to play nice. Rolly had no qualms over this arrangement. It was a simple sort of math. The hardness of this world was not enough to tarnish her; wasn't going to change her. Molly on the other hand...

"Sorry, Charlie," she said, a half smile cracking her lips. "Picked the wrong meal."

A violent fluid motion followed. The hand holding the clavicle pulled undead Charlie toward her while the one locking his jaw wrenched in the opposite direction. There was a click and a crunch as Charlie's neck snapped. 

Spinal cord severed from brain stem, and his body dropped to the floor. Charlie was now an undead paraplegic.

Rolly wiped the dead man's rotted flesh off on his jumpsuit. Undead Charlie's eye, the one still able to see her from the floor watched from the edge of his eye socket. He never blinked. His jaw opened up slowly and shut again. It was all that Charlie's body could do now, and so it did what it could. 

It reminded Rolly of a goldfish.

She tilted her head, her eyes starring into his as she raised the heel of her boot. She only looked away when her foot broke through the skull and hit the floor. Charlie stopped twitching.

Is it a bad day, or the best day, Charlie? She wondered.

The better question was how Charles here had happened upon her. She'd been quiet; camped in an abandoned REI that she'd cleared of undead the day before. Molly used to work at one of these places part time, Recreational Equipment Inc. A fitting match for the girl hiding away inside their mind. A way to blow ridiculous sums of money while feeling like a park ranger, an adventurer in the land of camp grounds and trails hiked a thousand times before.

When Rolly imagined that girl hibernating inside of her, unwilling to deal with the colossal amount of crap she carried their body through, she pictured a girl in an REI brand tent, surrounded by REI camping gear, food packets--functional footwear. Sleeping beauty, hair perfectly combed, nails manicured, tucked into her six degree Fahrenheit rated sleeping bag. She was off in some snowy white forest oblivious to all the things trying to eat her back here in reality.