What Lasts in Us

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

It was hard to get some sleep after that, but somehow I managed. But before that, I scooped Charlotte off the ground and got her back into the Range Rover. I wiped away as much glass from the two broken windows as I could before I propped her up against her pack.

I could tell she was in a bad way, but not bad enough that warranted too much concern. I knew the blood that covered her wasn't all her own.

"Team work," she said weakly, and she raised a limp hand into the air. Her head was practically rolling off her shoulders.

I didn't take up the offer of a high five. Instead I searched her face, her body, for bite marks or any open wound for the virus to get into. "I think you're concussed," I said to her. "Again."

Her answering laugh was feeble. "At least this time it wasn't a tree."

Somehow, after all that, I managed to get some sleep. I didn't know how, but I did – even though I woke up covered in sweat, chest heaving, gasping for air. I couldn't remember the nightmare, but it left me lying wide awake for a couple or so hours, until I drifted off to sleep again. And when I woke up properly, dawn was peeking through the trees and into the broken window of the boot.

And I was alone. No rifle, no pack, no Charlotte, and to my chagrin, no Dog. She'd taken everything.

The scene outside the Range Rover was bloody murder – it looked worse in the daylight than it had this morning at two o'clock or whatever time it'd been. Bodies were everywhere, heads were missing, blood drenched everything. There were eight bodies in total. It felt like much more when I was fending them off.

My sound traps were ruined; they were ripped right off the trees as the zombies came charging at us. Now they were useless, lying on the ground in a heap. The squirrel bones didn't end up as well as the others, though – they looked like they'd been chewed on.

I moved around the Range Rover, taking in every aspect of what had happened last night – including myself. I was just as much a mess as what was on the ground before me. I was covered in blood – not quite head to toe – but close enough.

I had an inkling of where Charlotte was – but it was only confirmed when I heard Dog's yapping in the distance. It was small but insistent, like he was trying to get someone's attention. So I followed the sound, and I knew exactly where I was going, where I was going to end up.

The morning light was still trying to penetrate the trees. It was interesting to listen to the forest come to life with the coming day, the way birds called to others, the way small animals would clamber up trees. If I had my rifle, I could get something to eat.

It wasn't long before the river came into view. It shone liquid gold, a large streak of light to break up all the greens and browns. It was beautiful and distracting – just like the person who was sitting on the riverbank, her back to me.

Her dark brown hair cascaded down her back, a stark contrast to the water before her. Her posture was straight, almost perfect, even when she was leaning forward and focussing on something before her. Her skin was tanned from all the exposure she'd had to the sun – but right now, even as I was approaching her from behind, I could tell she was covered in blood.

Dog gave me away – he was tied to a nearby tree so he couldn't run away. First he was nibbling on a twig or something, and it was practically double his size – and once he saw me, he spat it out and came bolting in my direction. Until the leash caught and yanked him back. That didn't faze him, though; he barked at me, tail continually wagging, a constant barrage of tiny squeaks.

Charlotte told him to be quiet, even tried to shhh him, but he was having none of it. Then she turned and looked at me. Her face was covered in blood and marks but remarkably, her skin hadn't been broken. I probably looked no better.

She winced as she turned back around and continued with whatever she was doing. So when I sat down beside her, brought my knees up and rested my elbows on them, I glanced at her sidelong and saw that she was busy cleaning our weapons.

I struggled to find something to say to her. Everything I could possibly ask would be fucking stupid. I couldn't ask her if she was okay, because she most definitely wasn't. There was just no leeway into a conversation.

So I turned back to the river, listening to it bubble, watching it make its course. It was quiet and peaceful – beautiful in the scope of things. It was someone's private paradise before the world ended.

Charlotte handed me what I gathered to be a strip of an old t-shirt. "For your face," she said.

"And you?" I asked as I accepted the rag from her.

"I will soon," she replied. "I'd rather get our weapons sorted just in case."

Just in case we were ambushed. Just in case we didn't have time to do it later. Just in fucking case.

My face stung as I wiped the cloth over it. "You shouldn't be here by yourself."

"I wanted to be alone."

"Sick of me already?"

A small smile graced her lips as she turned to me. "Something like that."

Fuck me if that was a ghost of her real smile. "Thought I might've grown on you by now."

She held her finger and thumb maybe half an inch apart. "Maybe this much," she said. Her body was angled in my direction, so it was probably the first time she'd really had a look at me. "You don't look too flash."

"Neither do you," I answered. She had shallow cuts on her cheekbones, the bridge of her nose, the edge of her mouth. Her chin was scraped. A bruise looked to be forming over her right eye – that or she was extremely tired.

"I'm fine," she said, though it was easy to tell that she wasn't. She turned back to her handgun, slapped the magazine into it, and put the safety on.

I looked past her to what she'd been doing. All her clothes were spread out on the ground beside her, as were mine; everything else was packed up.

"Clean yourself up," I said, gesturing toward the river. "I'll finish the rest."

She partly ignored me as she picked up her knife. She toyed with it, gently poking her thumb with the blade. "You just want to get me naked again."

I'd appreciate it, sure, but at this moment, that was the last thing on my mind. "If only," I said to her, and the corner of her mouth twitched.

She put down her knife, climbed to her feet and promptly started to undress. I couldn't not watch as she waded into the river, gave a gasp of surprise at its coldness, before disappearing beneath its surface.

Despite the blood, despite the food shortages, despite everything, she was beautiful. I drank her in as she resurfaced, hair pulled back from her face. Her hazel eyes stood out like the sun against a cloudless sky. They were so expressive, it was a wonder she had the ability to keep secrets.

I still found it odd and disheartening that she was constantly rejecting companionship – that she preferred to be by herself than to open up to someone. I understood where she was coming from, and I was sure as hell plenty of other people did, too; everyone had lost someone along the way. It wasn't just her. But whatever had happened, it'd been traumatic enough to destroy her.

Not completely, because I still saw flashes of the real her, but enough that there was hardly any left. She was like an empty shell, with maybe a tiny little bit occupied by her former self, the part she refused to be again. I assumed she was an orphan of some kind, so the grief probably stemmed from the death of a family member, maybe a close friend. Boyfriend, even.

It made me wonder what she had been like before the end of the world, before the event that turned her into the person she was now. It was hard to tell how old she was – maybe around my age? – and that made it even harder to guess how old she'd been several years ago.

And it made me wonder what she'd done since then, what she'd done to survive. I didn't want to know what, exactly, but at the same time I did. When the zombies attacked us last night, she'd barely flinched. She took everything that came her way, like she'd done it plenty of times before. And I reckon she had. And probably by herself.

How long did it take before you lost your humanity completely?