Chapter 4 #2
She struggles against him, eyes flaring. “Let me go! Emma!”
“We can’t help her if we’re dead!”
There’s too much space and too many rotters between them and the kid, so he makes a ruckus to distract them from her trail.
He doesn’t have to drag Addison with him once they become the new targets.
At that point, it’s nothing but survival, and she follows him into the shed where he barricades the door.
There’s a thump a moment later that rattles the whole building and makes them both jump sky high. Then another and another as rotters pile up outside.
“We’ll get her,” he whispers. “We will, but we can’t if they kill us first.
She shoots him a glare that would shrivel him on the spot if he weren’t otherwise occupied with trying to think of a way out of this mess.
She’s angry that he pulled her away, and maybe she’d got a right to be.
If she wanted to throw herself into oncoming rotter teeth to give her kid a chance, who is he to say no?
He acted on reflex, picking the one he could physically grab when he wasn’t able to protect them both.
Her anger doesn’t last long, though, before something else takes over that has her breathing hard in a brand new way. She slumps against the wall, and her face creases with emotion.
“I hesitated,” she whispers sadly.
There’s hardly enough room to turn around among all the junk, and only three steps from side to side if it were clear. He stumbles over a box before fixing her with a glare.
“Save the guilt for later. There’s always time for that, trust me. We’ll be out soon. Can you hold this?” He shoves a window shutter at her.
She nods, gripping it hard enough to whiten her knuckles.
“Use it to block them if you need to. I have to break the window.”
“What?” she half yells, as if he’s lost his mind.
“They won’t leave. Even if they do, they’ll be stuck on this property. Gonna break the window and take them out with the axe.”
“There’s at least seven of them, maybe more.”
“Or we can live here in this box,” he deadpans, grabbing a firewood axe off the wall.
“Do it. Do it.”
It’s not difficult to dispatch them once he breaks the glass.
They clog the opening, trying to spill over each other, and he drives that axe right through their skulls one by one until they’ve dropped in a pile.
Even the fast one, who shoved the others out of the way to get the first chance at the blade, goes down easily enough.
It’s not difficult, but it takes a while. Longer than he expected when they won’t stop squirming around. A few start leaving to chase a new brown cat who peeks out of the woods. He has to call them back again more than once, and that wastes precious time.
When it’s finally clear, they rush out to the place they last saw Emma, only to be met with nothing but silence. No crying or screaming, no response when they call her name.
“I froze,” Addison says suddenly.
“What?”
“I stood there, and I froze. I didn’t help her. I didn’t do anything.”
“What you’re doing right now won’t help either. Can’t get hung up on that. It wasn’t just you. I dragged your ass into that shed.”
Her tears come fast and hard, her whole body shaking so clearly he can almost feel the vibrations.
“Get your knife out. She can’t be far,” he continues, leading her deeper into the treeline. “What the hell was she doing out here?”
“The cat,” Addison replies, in between bellowing out Emma’s name. “I bet she saw the cat again, and I wasn’t there to keep her inside.”
Emma knows better, he’s sure of that, but she’s still a kid. Been obsessed with that animal since it showed up. Without anyone to stop her, she couldn’t resist.
They aren’t five minutes into the search before a slow rotter appears with a pack of its friends. There’s no choice but to sprint back the way they came and into the house, shove the door shut behind them, and push a chair under the handle for good measure.
“Where do you think they’re all coming from?” Her words tremble like her lower lip.
“Has to be the fence line in the woods. I saw it around the back on my way down here. Nothing but wire. It looked okay when I checked it the other day, but that doesn’t mean anything if a few of them were pushing on it. I’m surprised they aren’t going for the goats.”
“They probably fainted already.”
He snorts. “Forgot they play dead like possums.”
That whole line of fence needs reinforcing. He knew that from the start, but the panels actually on the ground took priority. Now, he wishes he had started there instead.
“If there’s a fence in the back of the property, that’s good, right? Could it be keeping her in? How far is it?”
“About five miles in, give or take.”
Her face drops. “Five miles of woods between here and there. Okay, okay, that’s not bad. It’s doable, we can find her.”
“It is doable. We will find her.”
“But? You’re making a face, Wyatt.”
“I’m not making a face,” he lies.
“Tell me.”
He sighs, wondering if he’ll be dashing her hopes in one go. “The fence is only three feet high. After that, there are miles of woods in all directions and then…”
“And then?”
“The freeway, if she goes west. A forest if she goes east.”
He’s not especially familiar with this area, but he flew over it twice, circling for a place to land, and spent a good half day on foot getting here. He remembers enough to know that Emma will end up in the middle of nowhere if she hops that fence.
“So you’re saying my daughter could be heading straight for the freeway or a forest right now, and there’s not a thing I can do about it? That’s what you’re telling me?”
“We don’t know that. There’s a lotta woods between here and there. She can’t hike it all in a flash. We’ve got some time.”
Addison’s back meets the wall, and she slides down, head in her hands, though no sobs come out.
He joins her, the two of them side by side on the cold floor while the dead wander outside.
He wishes he knew what to say, but he’s never been good at offering comfort.
Instead, he reaches for a memory that might give her hope.
“I got lost once when I was younger than her,” he says quietly.
“It was a field trip to the mountains outside Seattle. I got separated and kept going in circles. Everything looked the same. I’d never been out that far, and once I lost sight of the group, I couldn’t remember which direction I came from. ”
Her head lifts, eyes wet. “Someone found you?”
“They set up a search party not long after, but there’s a reason so many people have disappeared in national parks. It’s a maze out there. I spent two nights alone before I finally found the trailhead.”
He remembers being out there in the cold like it was yesterday. How disoriented he got in what should have been his own backyard until he was too far out to recognize anything. Never seemed so big until he was alone and the days bled together.
He imagines Emma in his place now, with the added terror of rotters chasing her, and fears the worst.
Addison frowns.
“The point is I made it, and she can too. We’ll find her long before that. She probably climbed up a tree somewhere for the night.”
“She does like climbing trees.”
“See, she’ll be fine.”
“She isn’t equipped for this world, Wyatt. She’s been so sheltered her whole life. Her father saw everything as a threat long before it actually was. She had no friends. We never left the community. She has no skills to survive out there.”
“She knows how to run and climb a tree. Right now, that’s enough.”
“What’s the plan?”
Addison’s looking at him like he has all the answers, and that’s never happened to him before. She’s trusting him with something important. That’s more than a little terrifying when the stakes are so high, but there’s a small part of him that greedily reaches toward any hint of validation.
“Get rid of the herd first, then we go back out and find your girl. That’s the plan.”
“How do we get rid of them?” she asks.
“I haven’t gotten that far.” He gets up, holding out his hand to help her to her feet. Her palm slips into his without hesitation, lingering a beat after she stands, though it happens so fast that it could all be in his head.
“There’s an old clock in the bedroom. It runs on batteries. We can set an alarm.” She wipes her tears away with a sniffle. “It’ll get them all in the same place, and then you can…do what you do.”
“What I do?” he replies with a faint smirk.
“Yeah, with the…you know…” She makes a vague stabbing motion with her hands that comes off unintentionally obscene.
There’s a dirty joke there waiting to be called out, but now ain’t the time, so he keeps his mouth shut. They’ve got rotters to kill and a kid to find. If they’re lucky, Emma will be home before dark. He doesn’t want to think about what might happen if they’re not.