"Live," he said

We never saw it coming. At first, it was just a news report on CNN from somewhere in China. Then warnings came from Russia, Africa and eventually, Mexico. But it was always somewhere else. We thought we were safe. Then stories about outbreaks on the coast came in from California. Still, we refused to listen. It wasn’t until the first walking-dead stumbled into our backyard that we believed it. And by then, it was too late.

The radio was our only link to the outside world. It gave us reports and kept us informed on the movement of the walking dead, Zombies, the announcer called them. I only saw a zombie once, the day before we went into the cellar. It’s whole body looked eroded and it made a strange moaning sound at me. The radio said they looked like their skin was falling off and were very dangerous. Zombies ate humans and didn’t have emotions or feel pain. The radio would tell us all kinds of things about how the military was fighting to keep New York and how the zombies came from a virus that infected a person‘s blood. The radio said it was transferable by body fluids and that people were getting infected. This was all because of a virus called Dimortuus some explorers caught in the Jinggang Mountains. We used to get messages all the time about zombie physiology and origin when we first went into the cellar. But over time, the messages grew further and further apart.

One of the transmissions said zombies would eventually decay because they were dead but the process took three to five years. Zombies could also hear really well. They spent all of their time wondering around and eating who ever they got close to. I liked listening to the radio.

The last transmission came when I was thirteen and it said that the military was losing more men everyday and that they would try to maintain the coast, but the middle of the Continent was overrun and completely lost. We were in Oklahoma. That last broadcast was three years ago. Since the first hint of our supplies running low, Daddy has been going out, looking for food. No matter how much he went out, our supplies were minimal at best. Over the years, he had to keep going out more often every month, then every week. Then, a week ago, Daddy left the bunker and never came back. Mom did the same thing when she couldn’t wait any longer..

Jamie and I were all alone and splitting the last bottle of water. “We have to move,” I said. “This is it.”

“We can’t leave yet,” Jamie countered. “What if they come back and we’re gone? Mom’ll freak. It’s dangerous out there, Abbey.”

“I don’t want to starve to death.” I told her. “Besides, what if they’re trapped somewhere and they can’t get to us? They would want us to find a way to survive.” I would have said anything to get Jamie to come with me. For four days we’d been listening at the bunker entrance for zombies, or any thing for that matter. Everything was silent. Sometimes we couldn’t even hear the wind.

“I say we go for it,” I encouraged her. It wasn’t just our lack of supplies that urged me on. We had been trapped in this little hole in the wall with no windows and no privacy for nine years. No matter what was out there, I at least wanted to see it.

We packed what few things we possessed and left a note for our parents. Jamie approached the door first. The radio once said to always knock on a door and listen before you open it. If a zombie was on the other side it would start to attack the door and you would know not to go that way.

She knocked and listened, nothing. She knocked again, just to be safe, nothing. With a deep breath, she unlatched the three deadbolts and turned the large knob and the first breath of fresh air rushed into my face. The inside of the house didn’t look all that different except that it was caked over with dust. We ventured outside and took our first look at the sun in a decade. It was bright. I didn’t remember any of the houses in the neighborhood. How could I, it had been so long since I saw any of them. But they were not in the best shape. Most of the doors were broken in and the windows were all shattered. A car or two loitered in the street but nothing was moving. There were still birds chirping and the sky was still blue. The world hadn’t ended while we were locked away. But it was … empty.

Looking back at our house, a big antenna was constructed half way up the house and then bent right before it hit the second story windows.

“Maybe that’s why we lost radio signal,” Jamie mumbled beside me.

We didn’t linger for long. Jamie pointed toward the neighborhood entrance and said we should go that way. So we started walking. Jamie had a golf club and I had a bat. The sun was so warm on my face. I could have bathed in it all day if we didn’t have to move. Another hour of walking, and that warm comfort turned into perspiration and aggravation. My hand-me-down jeans were clinging to my inner thigh and sweat drops raced down my forehead. Mom’s old jeans were doing the same to Jamie.

“Where are we going?” I asked for the tenth time.

“I remember a Wal-Mart or Target, something down the highway. There could still be supplies for us there.”

Jamie was so resourceful. She was my sister and my best friend. She liked to look out for me and make me happy. I new if I pushed hard enough she would leave with me and take me somewhere more exciting then our little cellar. I’m sixteen after all. I want some excitement in my life. Nobody wants to waste away in a smelly, old bunker until they’re old and wrinkly without ever living a day. I wanted to be like the people in the stories Mom use to tell me about. When I was younger, she told me about going to college, flying in an airplane and meeting people who weren’t family.

We got to the Target but now it was too quiet. I didn’t like it. Even the birds weren’t singing out here. Cars were scattered sporadically across the pavement and left us with a labyrinth of metal to cross through. Suddenly we heard a low gurgle. It could have been the wind but Jamie was alert. She pushed me along the cement faster. Then we heard another bone chilling call like the wail of a ghost.

She pushed me into the door of a mini van by accident and got ahead.

Jamie turned to corner of the van. Suddenly she fell backward with a brownish blur grabbing her

“Abbey, get back!” Jamie screamed, wrestling the monster on top of her. “It’s a zombie, Abbey! Run!”

Jamie screamed and kicked as hard as she could. “RUN!!!” her dog-whistle scream filled the air. Then it plunged its mouth into her face. Like a rabid dog, it ripped open her cheek then her neck and then started on her shoulder. The zombie’s body was withered. It’s hair all but gone, the zombie was missing one of its arms. It used to be a man.

The air escaped me. “Jamie?” I tried to call out. It sounded like a whisper. “Jamie?” I called again, a little louder. I started shacking. “JAMIE!” The shaking worked its way into my throat and came out of my mouth as a cry. All it did was get its attention. He stopped digging into Jamie’s stomach and came over to me in his wobble. He reached out his hands again and that wail returned.

I recognized it now. “Daddy?” I called out weakly. It use to be my father; now it was trying to kill me.

“NO!” I swung the bat with my eyes closed when it got to close. It knocked him to the ground but he started crawling at me. “GAW!” I smacked his right hand away. He kept coming at me. His bloody, broken hand reached for me.

“STOP!” I took my left foot as hard as I could and smashed it into my father’s head. I heard a pop or a snap and I lifted my foot and smashed it again. This time, the force drove my foot straight through his skull and crashed into his brain. The impact sent a vibration up my whole body and my left ankle felt a sharp sting slice into it.

He let go of my leg. The brain was a soup of goo and mush. The whole body smelled of decay.

When I pulled out my leg the denim all the way up my shin was drenched in dark maroon and black.

“Jamie?” I asked in a quivering voice, looking around.

I was standing in the middle of a parking lot with my father under my foot, my dead sister beside me. Then I heard a noise from the Target. A man men and a woman come out with a black bag. They both had guns at their side. One of them spotted me. He instantly pointed his gun.

Then they slowly came towards me. The whole time, I just stood there. When they were closer one of them yelled at me. “Are you alive?”

I looked him in the eye but I didn’t say anything. Everything was a blur now. My legs were cemented in place and I couldn’t think.

“Are you alone?” The girl asked.

When I looked over at Jamie the woman walked my line of sight. I didn’t hear the gunshot but I saw the body twitch.

Before I could think of anything, the guy was pulling up my jean pant. He dabbed my ankle with a cue-tip and dumped it into a beaker of clear liquid. It turned purple. “It’s punctured. She’s infected,” he said.

That snapped me out of my trance. “But I didn’t get bitten,” I suddenly spoke. The radio always said the zombies bite you when you got infected. It was a mistake. “I didn’t get bitten,” I repeated. They weren’t listening. “I didn’t get bitten!” The world started spinning. Everything went foggy. The last thing I felt was the taste of vomit climbing up my throat. Then I fainted.

I woke up in a decent sized room on a fold out cot. An old fashioned lamp burning in the corner was the only light in the room. There were no windows. Beside the cot were a clean shirt and a skirt. They looked like they would fit me. Currently all I was wearing was a big T-shirt and my undies. My head was pounding as if my brain was doing somersaults inside my skull. The room was occupied by six other cots besides my own, all-empty save the last one by the door. A little girl lay in a deep slumber. Her arm was wrapped in a cast and a bandage covered her forehead. Her rhythmic breath was deep and echoed off the wall. The sound was soothing and could lull you back to sleep.

At the door was a man leaning against the frame; a guard, I guess. He wasn’t the same as the guy in the Target. His arms were covered in long sleeves and he had a handgun at his waist. His brown hair stuck out of an old Yankee’s ball cap. He glanced at me but then returned to the girl. When I stood I noticed my ankle bandaged and set to a brace.

“Where am I?” I asked, shaking inside.

“Haven,” he answered, never looking away from the girl.

“How did I get here?”

“They found you on a hunt.”

This guard wasn’t telling me anything. Putting on the skirt, I walked past the guard, watching for any movements.

Behind me, I heard him comment, “I’ll be seeing you later.”

I ended up finding a hallway that lead to a big window with a balcony. Outside, the sun was low on the horizon, painting a pastel red across the sky. The moon, almost transparent, was rising in the east. A low hum filled the area.

“A generator?”

Daddy used to have a machine that made that noise. It gave use electricity. Daddy. The view was so different then anything I had seen before. Looking over the rail, I saw a solid, cement wall stretching around the whole building. The first floor had no windows or doors. Other balconies lined the second level. The building was in the center of an open field and trees lined the end of the clearing. Where was I?

The last thing I remembered was … Jamie. It all started to sink in. I could recall everything that happened but it still didn’t feel real. My ankle ached when I put too much weight on it, but the pain was a haunting reminder of my inevitable fate. “Infected,” he had said. Despite the throbbing, I continued to teeter weight on it, holding on to some lost hope that I could make it all go away. Then I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I was going to …

“You’re the girl we picked up, right?” a voice from behind startled me. I turned to find a young man, maybe in his early twenties, with jet-black hair in a buzz cut. He had soft, Asian eyes and a narrow face. I recognized him. He was the guy at the Target.

“I’m Quine,” he held out his hand.

“Abbey,” I replied, weakly. I then shifted my body around and looked back to the outside world.

“Nice place, isn’t it?” Quine leaned against the rail beside me, facing out. “It’s one of the safest places in the entire state from what I hear.”

I wasn’t listening. I think he knew it but it didn’t stop him from carrying on. “They picked me up a few years ago. One of the teams found me out past the city limits. They saved my life. What about you?”

My eyes started to burn and I knew that meant I was crying. I didn’t want to think about everything so soon. “Excuse me,” I stormed away without a glance back and ended circling the facility. The entire structure was built from the second story. The ground level was just a giant block that supported the upper levels. The only way in or out was retractable ladders secured along the edges of walls and balconies. There were people everywhere. Some were socializing; others were acting as lookouts along the wall. But there was nowhere to be alone.

My ankle started hurting again. At the next possible place, I sat down regardless of if anybody was around. I tried calming myself but my head was still pounding and I was alone. The panic inside of me was growing again and I felt the blood boiling in my veins.

“You have to breath.” Quine was by my side again. He didn’t sound sure of himself. “It’s going to be okay.”

All of my fear and pain mutated. In a burst of energy I didn’t think I had, I pushed him away, jumped up and screamed at him, “Nothing’s okay! I’m a monster!” The people around us were staring but keeping their respectable distance. The tears kept streaming down but there was no chance of stopping them now. All I could do now was let my eyes run dry.

“I watched my father kill my sister today and then turn on me! I had to look my father in the eye and bash his skull in! Now I‘m turning into one of them! What’s so okay about that!?” The strength leapt out of me with those last words and I collapsed to the ground. Quine’s arms cushioned my fall and we sat there together while everything spun around in my chaotic head.

“It’s all my fault.” I cried in a defeated and broken voice.

There was no denying it. There was no way around it. I was infected. What was I suppose to do now? What else could a sixteen-year-old girl infected with the zombie virus do? I ran away. Not that there was anywhere to run, I ended up on another balcony overlooking the field. Images of my father rushed back into my head. I was going to turn into something that ate limbs for breakfast. Was someone going to crush my head in? What if I infected them when they did that? I could start a chain of zombies that could end the rest of the human race.

Looking over the edge I realized just how high it was. A thought came over me. If someone fell off this rail their neck would probably snap. They would probably die instantly. I could jump. Why wait around for another week and slowly fade away? I could end it all now. What reason did I have to live anyway?

“It’s not like I have anyone else here,” I said out loud, taking a step closer to the ledge.

“You know, there’s a chance that fall won’t kill you,” a strange, deep-pitched voice called out to me. I looked up and almost directly overhead there was a man in a dark leather vest leaning out a window. He disappeared and then came out on the balcony.

“Who are you?” I asked a little defensive and embarrassed. Not many people had an audience when they tried to commit suicide.

“Consider me your warden.”

“My warden?” I asked, still defensive. It was the man standing guard earlier. I didn’t recognize him without the baseball cap.

“If you’re going to do it, at least do it right,” he revealed a small handgun with a silencer on the end of the barrel. “I’m done with it if you need it.”

“What’s this?” I asked, suddenly very naïve and shy.

“Insurance,” he replied. “If you wanna kill yourself, then do it. But make sure you do it so you won’t turn into one of them.” He motioned out towards one of the piles of rotting corpses. “You’re infected. Anything but a trauma to the brain is just gonna make you get back up, undead or alive.

He handed me the gun and I held it out like an offering in the cups of my hands. Slowly I pulled it up and placed the barrel under my chin with a finger flirting with the trigger. All the while he watched me intently. I balanced my shaking hand with the other and jabbed it further into my jawbone. I breathed in and closed my eyes.

Something in me hesitated. I tried again. In my head I counted, “One, two … three.” My finger didn’t budge. I tried taking a deep breathe and counting at the same time. Nothing.

I jerked the gun away from my neck. In a last ditch effort I pulled it up to my ear but only flung it back down almost instantly. “I can’t!” I couldn’t do it.

My whole body was shaking like I had a fever. The headache was back and all the while, that guy was just staring at me.

“You do it!” I ordered him, holding the gun out. My fingers were now avoiding the trigger like it would bite them.

He took the gun back but put it in the holster around his waist. “Not now.”

“What!? But somebody has to.” I was frustrated again. There were more emotions swimming around my head then before. “It’s going to happen eventually. Why won’t you just shot me now and get it over with?!”

“Because I’m human. If you’re too weak to do it yourself you’re just going to have to wait,” he said, very plainly.

His laid back tone and the subtle caress of his voice calmed me; but I still couldn’t stop shaking.

“You wanna know something,” he started, “When we first got here, there were a lot of people who had scars or bite marks on them. They were all infected, some worse then others. At first, we put someone in charge of taking care of all of them. Some people said to let them go and die out in the woods but others thought there were enough zombies out there and we didn’t need to add to their population. “Everybody voted and we decided to shoot infected people the second we found out they were hurt. I was in charge of pulling the trigger.”

He walked over to the ledge and leaned on it. “Then my little sister got infected.” His voice lowered a little. “She had her arm practically ripped off. When the people brought her up to be executed I couldn’t do it. It was her eyes. They were so sweet and innocent. I eventually closed my eyes and put her down, but every single time after that, whenever I looked a victim in the eye, all I could see was Denisse.”

There was a silence between us for a moment. Was I supposed to say I was sorry for him? He continued shortly after. “I’m not a killer. None of us are. Yet there we were, killing good people left and right. It wasn’t just me. Others started to do my job when I couldn’t but they had the same problems I did. We decided that day that we weren’t barbarians. We were civil and would not lose our humanity. We decided we would wait.”

On that line he stood straight up and looked me right in the eye. “Do you know what happens when the virus takes you?”

I knew the basics; they bite you, you get infected and then you died and woke back up one of them, but I shook my head, no.

He explained. “Before you die, you fall into this coma. That’s when the virus has pretty much eaten at everything inside you. That’s when we’ll get you. You won’t feel a thing.”

“You’re going to shoot me in my sleep? What happens if you don’t catch it in time? I could just turn in the middle of the night and kill you all.” I said.

“There’ll be signs. Before the coma you’re going to get really sick and be on bed rest. That’s why I’m in charge of looking over the sleeping room when you get that bad. We’ve been doing this a while now. It’ll be four years soon.”

“So what am I suppose to do?” I asked, getting back to my problems.

“I don’t know, live.” he started to walk away. “But if you ever change your mind, let me know. Someone has to confirm you went through with it.”

As quickly as he was here, he was gone. “Live,” he said. How was I supposed to do that?

“There you are,” Quine found me and had a hint of concern on his face. “You ran off so fast I thought you were going to do something stupid.”

“No,” I sulked as I said flinging my head into my arms on the railing. “I’m too much of a coward.”

My mood did not improve the next day either. While I was walking the fortress people kept staring at me. It was like they all knew a secret I wasn’t aloud in on. Nobody talked to me, except for Quine. While I was watching the clouds a little kid came up to me. Quine had gone somewhere and I was alone on the wall.

“Excuse me,” he tugged on my. He couldn’t have been more than four. “What’cha doin’?”

“Nothing,” I told him. He wasn’t even alive before the outbreak. I wonder if his family was all dead too.

“Wanna play?” he asked. A little soldier doll was in his arm. He held a car in his other hand. “You can be the car.”

Before I could even reach for the little toy, a woman ran up and grabbed him by the arm. She scolded him profusely then shot a nasty glance at me. They walked off as Quine returned. People were staring again.

“What’s her problem?” I asked, insulted.

“They try to keep a safe distance between the kids and the infected.” Quine explained. “They don’t want to risk accidental infection.”

It made since now, looking at all of the people. They never came with in three feet of me. They were afraid of me; of all the nerve. “What? They think I’m going to bleed on all of them?”

“Abbey,”

“Am I going to walk around in the middle of the night and bite every last one of them?” I started shaking. It was another violent fit. I was getting a lot of them. When Quine tried to comfort me I pushed him away.

“Why can’t you just leave me alone?!” I immediately attacked him. “I might infect you, too!”

It was a lot easier to storm off this time. I knew where I wanted to go.

“Look,” he came up behind me. “I know what you’re going through. You don’t have to do this all alone.”

“I AM ALONE!” I suddenly burst out, louder then before. “I don’t know you! I don’t know this place! I don’t know anything about anything!” Then the aggression in my voice suddenly switched off again. “I just wanna go home,” I murmured, sliding to the ground. My mood swings were worse than any morning of PMS. It was exhausting just to breath sometimes.

“Come here,” Quine pulled me to his torso and tucked me into the crook of his arm. “Right now everything seems crazy and uncertain but it’ll pass.”

“I’m not uncertain, Quine. I’m angry, all the time. And I’m … I’m …” I didn’t know how to explain it. “I don’t know … frustrated,” I blurted out. “These strangers keep staring at me and judging me like some freak in a zoo. I’m still a human being, aren’t I? I have feelings. Those people think they know me? All they see is a walking corpse. I’m not a monster. I’m not dangerous. I’m not …”

My second wind was gone. Quine never looked away from me once. Without realizing it, I let him walk me around a few more times. Then we sat down and ate as he told me about himself.

“I grew up in a gated community, literally. There were walls and fences everywhere.” He smiled when he told me. It was a fun smile and one that made you want to giggle, if you were in a giggling mood.

“My mom and I moved in there when we first heard about the outbreaks. She was paranoid like that.”

His story was interrupted by a sudden outburst of uncontrollable coughs. His wheezing was gargled and horse. It was like his throat was closing in around a golf ball. As he tried to catch himself, he clutched his right arm. He looked like he was in real pain so I pulled up his sleeve. The whole upper arm was gray and looked like all the moisture was sucked out of it. It looked almost mummifies. The damage all circled around a break in the skin that looked like a bite mark.

“Oh my God, you’re infected!” I was taken back. “Why didn’t you say anything?” I put some distance between us. I don’t know why, since it really didn’t matter. “Is that why you’ve been so nice to me? You liar!”

Even while I was yelling at his deception and he continued to cough only one thought was running through my mind. Was that what my leg was going to look like in a few days?

He reached for a bottle of water and tried to drown the cough back down. After a few deep breaths and a couple more sips of water, Quine cleared his throat and leaned back. We sat there for a second and just took in the scene.

“You looked so lost when we found you. It’s scary to be in a new place all alone.” He didn’t apologize and I didn’t really blame him but I liked having something I could focus all my negative energy on. But that wasn’t fair to Quine and he had helped me out. Jamie would have liked him.

“So what happened?” I finally asked him. “With your home?”

“The community was breached. The place turned into a panic pretty fast. Only thing anyone could do was get out. My mom didn’t make it.”

He stopped talking then and stared off into space.

“I’m sorry,” I found myself say to him.

“It was three years ago.”

“How did you get through that? I feel like I’m going to explode just standing here.”

“It was hard. At first I didn’t want to go on either. But it was something the community taught us. Everyone dies. Whether it’s sooner or later makes no difference. In the end, everyone dies. The trick is to live every single day as much as you can so the end doesn’t matter.”

He looked at me and that smile was back on his face. “I got bit on the hunt when we found you. There was another zombie we didn’t see and it got me.”

“Because of me?” I started to ask.

“No,” he rebutted quickly. “I was careless.”

“So that’s why you talk to me when no one else does. Do you feel sorry for me?”

“Maybe I don’t want to die alone either,” Quine smiled at me as he spoke. Changing the mood, his voice became light. “Besides, we’re not aloud to leave the compound now that we’re infected. They won’t let us.”

“What? Why?” I stood up, suddenly feeling trapped.

“It’s too dangerous. The rules are that the infected are to remain under supervision until we turn. If they let us wander freely we could die out in the woods and then there’d be one more monster out there.” Quine was a lot calmer about this then I was.

“Who make all of these rules?”

“An ex military general. You’ll never meet her. She’s always planning hunts and running the place from the tower. It’s off limits to us.” The fortress had three accessible stories and then a narrow cylinder column. It looked like a lighthouse to me. That must be the tower.

“Don’t let our strolls fool you. We’re prisoners here. We just have to try and make the best of it.”

Quine was so reserved and calm. It was like none of this even bothered him.

“Don’t you get angry?” I asked, “Doesn’t it feel like there’s something inside you that you just want to ripe off all your skin and dig it out?”

“Yeah, it does,” he scratched his arm then looked like he was thinking. “I want to show you something.”

Quine took me down to the storage unites near the mess hall and opened the door to a closet. “This is where we keep none essential items,” he said. Old toys, sporting equipment and yards of fabric stacked all the way up to the ceiling. It was like the walls of the place were made of plastered together odds-and-ins.

“Here,” Quine pointed at a something big, red and flat. “It’s a floor mate someone found awhile back. Punch it,” he told me.

I tapped it with my knuckle and pulled back.

“No, you got to really go at it,” he came up behind me and cradled my two hands into fists. He then moved my fists into the matt, left, right, left, right. Imprints cratered the mat. Quine must have come down here a lot. He seemed so calm around me; I never suspected he was in so much pain too.

“I may not be able to pound the infection out of my body but I can beat it out of this mat,” Quine commented as he smiled at me, letting go of my wrist.

“When I got so bad that I wanted to pop, I took out all my aggression in here. Eventually you get too tired to be angry. You can come here whenever you want, too.”

I wasn’t as strong as Quine. I didn’t have his confidence or his optimism. On the way back to the room, all I could think about, or say was, “Why me? Why did this have to happen? I’d give anything to wake up and it all be a bad dream. When I’d wake up I’d see my Mom and my Dad making breakfast and Jamie would be reading a book in the corner.”

Quine moved to the cot beside mine. When I felt like I wanted to scream he sat up with me and let me lean against him until I finally drifted off. All I could focus on the next morning when I woke up was the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. My leg didn’t look so good, and it felt even worse. I could walk on my foot, but I couldn’t feel the ground or anything from my toes to my thigh.

I still felt like I was going to burst but I tried to be constructive. I wasn’t aloud to help out in the kitchen or with the children but there were little things I could try my hand at. I retreated to the punching mat a couple of times. Eventually I took up biting my fingernails. It didn’t work very well, as I ran out of nails long before frustration and Quine made me stop when my cuticles started to bleed. I had to do something so Quine kept me occupied. Mostly he showed me how to do little tasks around the place and gave me lots of Chinese finger traps.

It was easy enough to find distractions until the sirens went off. They signaled a hoard in the field. Zombies hearing us would surround the fort and one by one die off as snipers shot them down. When that happened I would sit at one of the window and watch my fate. Quine would watch them with me and held me when I would shake.

Quine was great at keeping me distracted but everyday I felt myself slip a little further into death’s grip. I moved slower and the crawling feeling was getting worse and worse. The virus was eating away at my brain and despite all the sleep I got I was weak. The punctured skin around my ankle peeled back, exposing degraded muscle. The blue veins climbed up my leg and bulged out like they could jump out of my skin.

When I ran my finger down them they were solid, like lead almost. Would these veins eventually climb all the way up my body and into my skull? It wasn’t a comforting thought, but I decided not to talk about it around Quine. He looked worse then I did and I bet he didn’t want to spend his last few days listening to me whine. Instead, we talked more about ourselves and took several walks along the wall and balconies.

“See that?” He pointed towards the trees. “There use to be a fence surrounding the area but after so many zombie attacks, it finally collapsed. This whole base was actually built by the military before the country was overrun. It’s sort of like a government issued tree-house.”

My manic episodes didn’t pop up as much when we were talking. Quine even managed to get me to eat occasionally. I tried to be good for him. I figured I could save the crying for while I was sleeping. The only time Quine left me alone was in my dreams but those were filled with nightmares of Jamie and Daddy. Whenever my dreams got too bad, Quine would hold me until I felt better.

I felt bad for taking up so much of Quine’s time but he said he liked hanging out with me. I didn’t mind it either. Quine’s arms were safe. They protected me from my pain and my fears. We ended up watching the sunset the next day and it was fun, almost. The sky was a deep red and it looked like the clouds were bleeding, but I guess sunsets looked like that when you’re dying. Quine said it was beautiful. Even though the sunset offered me no peace, the stars did. I can‘t say that I‘ve ever looked at them before, being locked up indoors all those years. All of the little dots in the eternal darkness were so calm and gentle. They relaxed me when I saw them sitting there, ever observant.

I didn’t tell Quine about what I was thinking because I wanted him to see that I could be strong like him. We were both alone and only steps around from death’s door. At least we could do it together now. While we were on the balcony, Quine pointed out different patterns in the stars and called them constellations. He said there was an Ol’ Ryan, and some dipper bears but I couldn’t see them.

“Do you regret anything?” I suddenly asked one night when we were stargazing..”

He pondered for a second. “I use to want to travel,” he said after a while. “You ever hear about the sites and wonders of Europe? I always thought that one day, when this whole thing was over, I’d celebrate with a trip around the world.”

“That sounds nice,” I tried to imagine what Europe would be like. I bet there were cities and people everywhere and food that smelled funny that I couldn’t pronounce.

“ … about you?”

“Huh?” I asked coming out of my daydreams.

“What about you?” He repeated, “Any regrets?”

I paused for a moment and it took me a minute to think of my biggest one. “I guess … dying without love.”

Quine was awkwardly quiet at that. Only his coughs gave away his presence.

He reached out and pulled me close.

“Thank you for being here, Quine.”

His body was cold. His hug was weak.

I noticed he looked at me from the corner of his eye and then leaned in. Then he started coughing uncontrollably.

“Quine?” I let him lean on me. His cough escalated as his grip loosened. He couldn’t stop. “Wait here, I’ll get some water.”

The next morning, Quine didn’t get up. Slightly before dawn he started coughing again. He reminded me of the little girl I saw the first day I woke up here. He was in the coma now. I stayed with him through the whole thing. The guard with the Yankee’s cap and two men came in and said a small prayer for his soul. Then they carried him to a secluded part of the fortress and put a bullet in his forehead. Even though it hurt to watch, I was determined to be there for him until the end. They burned his body and scattered the ashes over the wall into a patch of weeds and tall grass. A few flowers were popping up around were the ash settled.

I started coughing that day and my vision started to blur. The bright lights of the sun hurt my eyes and I couldn’t smell anything. The end was near now. I wonder if I would see Jamie again, or Dad. Then I thought about my mom for the first time. She could very well still be out there. Wouldn’t it be ironic if she was somewhere looking for me? I took comfort in not knowing.

Then I woke up and my entire body felt numb. I couldn’t move my foot at all and the pigment on my skin all the way up my body was a washed out gray. It hurt to breath and no amount of water could quench my thirst. The man in the Yankee’s cap loomed over my cot lie the reaper with his sickle waiting. I wished I had someone there to hold my hand, but nobody did. Even though my body was numb, I could still feel pain in my chest and organs. The stinging sensation was so much that I passed out several times under the pressure. I was ready for it to be over but I couldn’t tell anyone because my voice was dried up.

I wonder what things would have been like if Jamie had told me “no” a little over a week ago, what seems like an eternity now. I wonder what would have happened if Daddy had gotten me and not her in the parking lot. Would Jamie have fallen in love with Quine too? Not that I regret anything, but I wanted to see if I would grow into my ears or develop that twitch like Mom had.

Time meant nothing to me anymore. I use to think people on their deathbeds would suddenly be endowed with some great wisdom or something, but all I could think about was the collapse of my lungs and the coughing of my heart as it slowed bit by bit. Then everything faded to black.