August Burning (Book 2): Survival (7 page)

Adira chuckled from up front as they approached as stand of barren, grey trees. “You really don’t hold back do you?” She muttered.

“I mean, I don’t blame her. It is an odd name. So is Duke. This is the Wild West. We gave ourselves Wild West names.” Duke shrugged, his pudgy arms shifting under a camouflaged sweatshirt. “It’s also why its ok for me to look like a total redneck now.”

Adira turned, her sultry eyes narrowing. “Wait, you two aren’t from the country?”

“We’re from Brooklyn. Went to school in Manhattan.”

“Well I like the façade. It suits you both.”

Duke hawked a wad of spit and put his hands on his hips. “Don’t mention it.”

“Elvis! We’re goin’ this way!” Adira strained her voice to reach the stalking figure. Elvis turned, his distant face a mask of stone. She indicated the dark tree-line ahead. Elvis nodded fiercely, and took off at a trot towards the wall of shadows. Adira looked back at the others in surprise before scampering to catch up.

“There ain’t gonna be nothing here,” Duke said, reaching out to let the waves of tall grass tickle his extended fingertips. The grass was dead, and the wind, cold.

“You don’t know that.” Tessa kicked him in the buttocks.

“I do too! When’s the last time you saw an infected anyways?”

“A week ago, we shot one outside the church while we were lookin’ for more cars to siphon gasoline from. And the food runners always find em, stalking around the town.”

Wilder worked to pull a bramble from Tessa’s long, curly black hair. “Have no fear dear. The valley protects us. And the Lord has deemed that I shall lead humanity after the fall, so I know I’m safe.”

She let him pull it out. “You weren’t so confident the other night, buddy.”

He grimaced dramatically. “Harsh! It had been a while.”

Tessa laughed, closing her eyes and trying to snatch some warmth from the greedy sun. It eluded her.

“Been a while, my ass…” Duke muttered from behind them.

“He was probably beating girls off with a stick in New York. Ain’t that right Wilder?” Tessa crooned.

Wilder frowned, pursing his thin lips in elaborate fashion as he scratched his peach fuzz. He had a pretty face, Tessa thought, almost feminine, but not quite.

“Something like that.”

“Ha! She doesn’t know,” Duke cackled.

“I don’t know what?”

Wilder groaned, adjusting the cap that sat on his greasy head. “Duke, you’ve done it again friend.”

Duke cackled, checking the scope on his sniper rifle as he walked. “You swiped his v-card! I fucking love it. That’s a beauty.”

“Huh?” Tessa started…but then the revelation came to her in all its awkward glory. “OH. So the name is fake, and so is the smooth-talkin’. Hmm.”

“Look, I’ll be the first to tell you. I was literally the most awkward kid on the block,” Wilder pleaded earnestly.

“Got that right,” Duke agreed.

“Ok wait-how were you a virgin till last
week
?” Tessa laughed, feeling good on her feet, with the rifle in her hands, with friends to talk to.

“I wasn’t particularly this outgoing, this smooth, this desirable, thi-“

“We get the fucking point,” she interrupted him with a wave of her hand.

“As I was saying, I was all caught up in how I was supposed to act to girls, how I was supposed to talk, all that. My sexual history pretty much involved me cranking it in my room a few nights a week.”

“OH my god. Too much detail. Just too…too much detail.” Tessa grimaced lightheartedly.

“What he’s
tryin
to say…is he never brought them down to his level. They sat on the pedestal. The big mystery. They weren’t just humans, they were
more!
And the compulsive self-pleasure couldn’t have helped his mindset.” Duke joined in, with zest.

Wilder muscled his way back into the conversation. “So I suppose what happened was that it never happened. And then it became a thing. A thing to lose. And the pressure mounts, month after month, all the while the other students are banging like jackrabbits. And then it seems like some insurmountable task.”

“A heart to heart from the one and only Wilder!” Tessa couldn’t help but respond with gaiety. How could this kid ever judge her? He was too busy judging himself. Was that selfish? Whatever. “Well I’m glad I could be of service.”

“Much obliged.” Wilder adjusted his cap, awkwardly.

“So what changed?”

“All this.” He gestured grandiosely to the fields and approaching woods, filled with little rusted trailer homes. He looked straight at her. “Like, who gives a fuck about that shit anymore? It’s liberating.”

They saw Adira and Elvis, little figures ahead, motioning them into the darker trees.

Tessa chuckled lightly. “I see your point. Was it all you expected?”

“It was…not that great. Great to finally do it for the sake of doing it, but not for the act itself.”

“Well thanks, that’s generally what I look to hear from a guy after I fuck him.”

“So crude! Have some manners!” Wilder exclaimed.

“Ooops! Was I supposed to say it some other ambiguous way? Dear me.”

They neared the shadows of the forest, which was decidedly dark, Tessa thought. The wind rustled in the leaves. There were no bugs making music, anymore. For a moment her heart surged back to the summer nights she knew as a kid.

Wilder laughed. “I’m sorry though. I was too nervous, just focusing on not finishing too soon.”

She touched him on the arm, and felt goosebumps. “Don’t do that. Lets worry about that later on.”

He smiled at her, and she felt the corners of her mouth rising. But the wind was cold. It pulled her back to reality. “It’s dark in there, isn’t it.” The trees rose ominously above the group as they reunited. Single leaves drifted down from their beams, lazily floating across the shifting brown grass.

Adira peered into the gloom. “Look. There are a few houses.”

“Those aren’t exactly houses, are they…”

“They’re trailer homes. It’s on the last places we need to search in the valley.”

“What is this place?” Wilder asked.

Adira cleared her throat. “Jaxton said it’s where all the coal miners used to live. After that dried up and the money left, it became a community for a different kind of people…poor, white, and mean.”

Elvis stepped into the trees beside them, his once-fancy black leather boots crunching.

“I like what they did with the place. Art-Decco. Modern. Chic,” Duke indicated the rusted piles of lawn ornaments that lay haphazardly in the thick brown undergrowth. No one laughed. The survivors stalked forward, struggling as their eyes adjusted to the darkness. Thick overgrowth crowded the spaces between the rusted homes. Adira looked back over her shoulder. The sun was sneaking behind the wall of the valley, its bleak light faltering. She cursed to herself. She had already fucked up the timing. Why hadn’t they brought the vehicles around the other side?

There was a ring of metal. Duke leapt into the air. Elvis shrugged nervously, indicating a rusted oil drum at his feet. “Jesus man, have some care,” Duke exhaled.

Adira blew a loose tendril of black hair out of her vision and forced herself to speak.

“Alright, let’s do this one by one. Canned food in the backpacks, and anything else useful. No gadgets, we’re all out of batteries and we save the fuel for the trucks…not the generators.” Her voice didn’t carry far on the wind, which had picked up. Against her instinct, she forced herself to take a step forward, past an iron weathervane. Elvis followed immediately, his eyes searching the gloom around the trailer. Their vision was restricted, so thick was the dying undergrowth.

“What is it?”

Wilder had stopped, and laid a hand on Tessa’s arm. His jaw was clenched.

“Elvis wanna take this house with me? You three take that one to the left.” Adira stepped up the rotten wooden steps to the white door, continuing to berate herself in her mind. The wind began to howl.

“Wait.” Wilder whispered. Tessa’s heart was pounding, though she couldn’t say why.

Adira slung her rifle across her back, and reached for the door handle.
“Wait!” Wilder shouted. Adira’s slender hand clutched the cold metal. Elvis snapped his head around in the dusky gloom.

Tessa felt like she couldn’t breathe. She craned her eyes to search the undergrowth, hoping with every fiber of her body that she would see nothing staring back at her in the snarling and twisted bushes.

There was a woman. She was standing twenty feet from them in the dense undergrowth, staring with un-moving and pale, vacant eyes. She was wearing, of all things, a thin white dress that ended at her calves. Her thin hair was sickeningly long; a hundred scattered tendrils four feet in length floated lazily on the late October wind. Those few tendrils that remained still ran down next to the sickly flesh of her long arms, to her upper thighs. Tessa could see a bite mark on her arm.

“Don’t fucking move,” Wilder forced out, his shaky voice a hoarse whisper.

Tessa felt her own heart hammering, hammering so hard she could barely breath. Why was the woman’s hair so long? It was intoxicating, sickening, horrifying. She couldn’t bring herself to look away. Without knowing it she dug her own long fingernails, long since un-painted, into Wilder’s forearm.

“Is she infected?” Duke whispered.

Adira took a step back with quaking limbs. She wanted to scream and run, but she was too frightened to move. She remembered what Jaxton had told her, about how he had always frozen in fear in the halls of high school.
Do something!

Elvis was staring at the woman with a level gaze, unmoving in the last vestiges of sunlight. It would be dark soon.

“Hello?” Adira heard herself speak, and was ashamed. Her voice shook like the fluttering leaves above. “Are you ok?”

The woman remained motionless, regarding them evenly from a distance.

“We should leave.” Elvis spoke for the first time, his eyes never leaving the woman. “Now.”

“I second that.” Duke said in a rush, his panic evident.

Adira nodded, and slowly stepped back onto the bed of crunchy leaves.

Painstakingly, they walked backwards. The woman never stopped staring with that hunched, obsessed gaze. As they were about to clear the tree-line they turned their backs on her. “C’mon. I have no fucking idea what that was but lets get to the car,” Adira croaked, her mouth dry.

The only sound was of the wind, which now howled in the darkness. The sun burned on the horizon, a shimmering sliver that offered them their last prayer.

“Oh, my god.” Duke pointed backwards, into the trees.

There were dozens of them. Huge men with unkempt beards, ghastly women that looked like death, all staring at them with that obsessed, threatening, gaze that one couldn’t be sure indicated intelligence. There was something animalistic in those eyes. They stood at seemingly random intervals on the roofs, in the bushes, and among the trees. Rusted scythes and shovels hung from limp hands. Their pale eyes shone as the sun disappeared behind the ridge. And in that darkness, they charged.

Chapter Six

Jaxton racked the heavy weight in the old gym, breathing in musty air in disgust. He had lost strength. Looking in the mirror, he frowned. And he looked thinner.

“Don’t think about it too much. You can still put up more than me, bud.” Liam eased onto the bench press, his bulky form looking natural under the bar.

“So says the beefcake. The kid who would have pita and hummus and put on six pounds of muscle before the next workout.”

Liam repped out the weight with ease. “Hush, you. I’ll be fat as hell when my metabolism slows down. And you’ll be… silver fox status? Something like that.”

Jaxton laughed heartily. “What was that thing Troy used to do- said he used to lift before going out at night? So that he would have a pump on when he wore his fratty tank-top?”