Chapter 2
Cain
It was a good day to die alone.
The sun was out, birds were singing in the trees, the leaves were a gorgeous array of reds and browns and oranges.
I wasn’t going to get a better day than this.
“Should I do it today?”
Every day I contemplated doing it. And every day, I’d decide to do it the next day.
“What do you think, Bernard?”
I looked over at the tree near the bank of the river, but Bernard didn’t answer because he was just a face I’d carved into the bark.
“Yeah, you’re right. I should just do it tomorrow.”
Always tomorrow.
But Luna needed me. I couldn’t leave her behind.
Dad might not be here anymore, but Luna was, and I couldn’t leave her.
Sure, she could probably take care of herself on her own, but I was all she knew.
This was the only home she’d ever had. I’d found her when she was just a puppy, and to leave her like that would be…
Wrong. The worst thing I could do.
But the emptiness was going to swallow me whole at this point, and it felt like there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.
After Dad died, the loneliness came.
It was like a living being, slinking in the shadows at first. Always there at the edge of my vision, in the corner of my eye, but never front and center, never clear.
And it would whisper to me at night, when the day was done and there was nothing left to do. Where sleep often eluded me, as if it was working in tandem with the loneliness, cornering me in a state of in-between where my thoughts could race freely but my body was too exhausted.
Whispers became doubts. Fears. Regrets. What ifs and maybes and should haves.
They sank into my pores, slid into my bloodstream and flowed with the beat of my heart. They hummed and fizzed and pumped life into those doubts and fears and regrets. Gave them a home. Made them beat louder than anything else.
The loneliness was a parasite, climbing into me and taking control.
No, it was a virus. Like the one that plagued mankind. It burrowed into veins and vessels and cells and destroyed them from the inside out.
But unlike the virus, it was a slow death. A necrosis of the spirit.
Worse than that, it was my determination to pretend the loneliness didn’t exist that contributed most to my decay. If it was just a specter that haunted me, it wasn’t real. If it wasn’t real, I was fine.
I needed to be fine. I didn’t have a reason why, just the simple words that had been given to me since I was a child. Those final words he’d left me in his letter.
Life is a precious gift. Protect it.
I stepped under the waterfall and let the cold water wash over me in a soothing, rhythmic flow.
I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for, why I kept putting it off. It wasn’t like there was anything worth living for. Not anymore. But it felt like it would be the most awful betrayal to cast aside a life that had only been possible because of Dad.
I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him, but…he was gone now, and the loneliness was slowly destroying me from the inside. One day I would wake up and there’d be nothing left of me.
I carved faces in the trees and pretended they were people. I’d have conversations with them but get bored after a while because they never responded.
I was drowning in this solitude, but I had no reason to care. No one to grab my hand and pull me out.
“You’d save me, right?”
I turned toward the simple carving of the smiling face I’d done a few hours ago, then sighed when it didn’t say anything. “Asshole.”
My stomach grumbled with hunger because the apples I’d eaten earlier hadn’t been nearly enough. The small orchard my great-grandpa had planted decades ago produced tons, and it was a reliable source of food, but god was I sick of apples.
Sick of talking to no one.
Sick of sitting on top of this mountain and waiting for something to happen when it never did.
This entire day felt like a waste. All I’d done was sit in a tree and wait, hoping I’d missed something, but no matter how hard I strained my eyes, big animals with lots of meat on their bones weren’t magically appearing.
I hadn’t seen a deer in ten days and was starting to think maybe I’d killed them all off. Or the dead had. Or something else. Maybe something even worse than the dead had spawned in this hellscape.
It seemed plausible. I didn’t really have any way of knowing, either. I never really ventured past the nearby towns.
It was safe here. Familiar. I had everything I needed, and I had sufficient protection from anyone who wandered this way, dead or not.
Nobody ever wandered this way.
Only animals.
I tipped my head back, raked my hands through my hair, letting the water soak it, and thought about all the potatoes and carrots growing in my garden.
Root vegetables for dinner it was, then.
With a heavy sigh, I turned around—and everything in my body shifted immediately to high alert when I saw him.
I was imagining things.
I’d finally lost it.
I was so lonely that I’d conjured up a very real—very dirty—human being.
Was that even a person?
I paused, staring at the creature that had stumbled out of the woods and was just standing frozen across the pit, watching me.
The longer I looked, the stranger my hallucination became. Because it was a boy…a man?…with tattered clothes and raggedy hair. He was wearing something on his face, something else around his neck. Was that a chain?
There was a person here—the first person I’d seen in five years—and I was just standing here with my cock out.
But who gave a shit about that? There was an actual person here.
A tremendous joy burst in my chest, quickly expanding outward.
I couldn’t believe it. There was really someone here. What was a person doing all the way up here, though? How had he gotten here?
His hair covered most of his face, and the clothes he was wearing were frayed and thin and filled with holes. He was barefoot, too. Covered in…blood? Dirt? Hard to tell from here.
Where the hell had he come from?
Something crashed through the bushes behind him, and he startled, jerking around and taking a step back, and my heart stopped.
“Don’t—”
The brush and sticks and leaves of my pit trap fell away beneath his feet and he disappeared into the hole like he’d been sucked inside.
He cried out, and the terror in that sound pierced my heart.
“No!” I ran forward with my hand outstretched, like I could’ve saved him when I was too far away to do anything.
His cry ended abruptly, and my heart jolted in my chest.
One of the infected burst through the foliage, and I was out of the water in two seconds flat.
The most visceral panic ran through me like an electric shock, and I sprinted to the edge of the pit. The infected that were chasing him fell in after him, one by one.
I almost jumped down there before I remembered I wouldn’t be able to get back out if I did that. Not easily, at least.
“Fuck.” I rushed back to my pack where I had some rope, all the while cursing myself for not warning him about the pit as soon as I’d seen him. That should have been the very first thing I’d done—the very first thing—but I was so stunned to see another person. I honestly didn’t think he was real.
He could still be just a figment of my imagination. My lonely self finally snapping and conjuring what I desired most in the world. This might all be some vivid hallucination, but it really didn’t feel like one.
“Please be okay,” I said, grabbing the rope and running back to the pit. “Please, please, please.”
I was tying the rope to the nearest tree when a weak voice drifted up from the depths.
“No!”
That one word contained so much desperate anguish that it raised goosebumps on my arms.
I tightened the rope, held it with one hand and looked down. My heart pounded wildly in my chest, then began to race when I saw him move.
He was alive.
He was alive!
He’d fallen in between the spikes on the edge; he was so small that he’d avoided all the spikes around him.
His entire body was shaking as he shifted slowly in the dirt. Blood soaked through his shirt and was spreading across the thin material.
Blood? Why was he bleeding? Had he hit one of the spikes after all?
Gripping the rope in one hand, I jumped down into the pit. The impact sent a jarring pain up my shins that I ignored.
The boy growled in frustration and tried to crawl forward, but even if he had the strength to move, there was nowhere for him to go. His arms gave out and his face dropped into the dirt. The sound of soft crying made my heart feel like it was being split open.
“Hold on,” I told him.
Please hold on.
I edged around the spikes, reached down, and carefully lifted him. He’d stopped crying, stopped making any kind of sounds. The sight of him in my arms, so small and broken, ripped into my chest and squeezed my lungs.
Life is precious. Protect it.
“You’re gonna be okay,” I promised him.
There couldn’t be any other outcome. There wouldn’t be.
I put him over my shoulder, about to start climbing when snarls from above made me still.
I quickly slid him off my shoulder and curled my body around his as four more infected fell over the edge into the pit.
One of them missed every spike and landed on top of the others, then rose and started toward us.
One of its ankles was bent the wrong way, which slowed it down, but it was still moving faster than I liked.
At least they couldn’t climb ropes.
When I didn’t hear any more infected, I put him over my shoulder again and hoisted us up and out.
He was so damn light; I thought Luna might be heavier than him.
I glanced down when something tugged on the rope.
“No fucking way,” I whispered. One of the infected was grabbing the rope like it was about to climb up after me. “You gotta be kidding me.”
It held the rope in one hand and swiped at us with the other, its rotting skin flapping with every movement. Almost all of its skull was exposed, a few strands of hair hanging in its eyes.