Archive of Our Own ^beta

I

“Oh, there’s a house over there!” You say.

Robin—the name you’ve given the boy because he refuses to tell, and because he reminds you of the aggressive, scarlet-chested birds that used to frequent your garden—grunts in response. His baseball bat swings idly at his side as the two of you walk. “What, d’you want to go inside?”

The logical answer is yes, because there’s no reason to turn down potential resources. But the answer you end up going with is “no, nevermind,” because you’re still talking to someone who could’ve slit your throat on the spot. The scar is still there, a thin line above your Adam’s apple. Yet you’ve teamed with him. 

Watching him trudge along, face pinched by the glare of sunlight, he could not be more different than your old teammates. There are dust splotches on his hoodie that could easily be brushed off that haven’t been, mud caking his sneakers, a hole in his bag left unnoticed. He could camouflage well in a junkyard. 

Oh well. At least he swings that bat with frightening force. 

You realize that your lips are dry, your throat too, and remember that Robin’s dirty backpack is where all the water bottles are stored. Even if you contributed one of those bottles, you don’t own it anymore. 

Would Robin watch you slowly wilt of dehydration? You wouldn’t put it past him. 

He’s a few meters ahead of you now, but he stops and turns around. A little cloud of dust kicks up into the sky. It sticks to his backpack when he slings it off his shoulder, baseball bat leaning against his legs. In the still air, the sound of the zipper grates on your ears. 

His hand rifles around in the backpack, pulls out a Dasani water bottle that gleams like an Olympic torch, and you almost miss him tossing it to you like a relay runner passing a baton. You catch the bottle by your fingertips; your skin burns slightly with the friction of the bottle cap.

“Pass it back once you’re done,” Robin says. His bag sits open with a gaping maw, expectant. 

You don’t ask any questions, just crack open the bottle and take a few long sips. When you throw it to him, he swirls it around, looks at the amount of water you’ve drunk with an appraising eye, and drops it back into his bag. The zipper splits through the air again, sealing the bag shut. 

The two of you start to walk again. You hurry to catch up to Robin’s side—if only so the dust his ragged sneakers stir up doesn’t blow onto the cuffs of your pants. 

II

You come back to the house with a dead rabbit. The day is still young; the grass outside is still beaded with crystalline dewdrops. You got up early to check the snares you set. They’re clumsy, you know, but you learned them from someone whose patient voice and careful hands you still hold dear, and he in turn learned them from the worn pages of a survival manual dog-eared from multiple read-throughs, so you set them up. 

And now you’ve got a rabbit. Robin’s sitting at the table with a small fortress of canned goods before him. He stares at the rabbit first, at its limp head and broken neck, then at you, holding it by the rear legs. 

You left him a note, telling him you were going out to the forest. Maybe he thought you wouldn’t return, much less with a dead rabbit. His black hair, curly but weighed down with grease, hasn’t been wrangled into a bun yet. 

“You know how to trap?” Robin asks. 

“Yeah,” you say. “I’m going to take it apart now.” The house’s backyard has an old plastic bucket you can use. 

The butchering station isn’t hard to set up, even from memory. You weren’t the one who cut up any game your team’s snares caught, but you remember watching—watching the fur part from the precious meat underneath, watching a knife split the animal into sections, watching the blood and organs tumble out into a container so your teammate could carry it far away from your home. The first time your team caught game—a rabbit—you all cried as you culled it. The cuts were shaky and uncertain. You all almost couldn’t eat the cooked result. 

But necessity breeds acceptance, and from those dog-eared pages, your team’s hands stopped shaking in the process. Half the shit the snares caught was a mess of undead anyways. 

Robin has come out to watch you. His hair sits in a bun now with a few errant strands springing out like coiled wires. You keep him in the corner of your eye as you begin to part fur from skin. He doesn’t speak, just shifts from foot to foot and intermittently sticks his hands back into his pockets. 

You sever the head from the body along with all of the fur and let it drop into the bucket below with a splash. Robin doesn’t stir at the noise, just continues to track your hands with sharp eyes as you cut up the center of the rabbit. You go slowly, slower than you could, because you don’t want to puncture the organs inside. 

“Can you bring a bucket from the well?” You ask Robin. He twitches, like he’s waking from a trance, but goes to the well to draw water. While he’s doing that, you continue to cut. Organs fall out of the slit; they join the head and fur in the bucket. 

Robin passes you the bucket; you douse the rabbit in water. It turns pink, streaming down into the bucket, carrying traces of rabbit fur with it. For good measure, you douse the rabbit a few more times. 

“Organs aren’t edible?” Robin asks. He’s staring into the bucket, brows slightly furrowed. 

“No,” you reply. You’ve decided only to cut the feet off; the two of you can cook the rabbit whole. Saves trouble. “Cooking this is gonna take around half an hour, so the sooner we want to eat, the faster we need to get a fire going.”

That sends Robin into action, setting fresh firewood on the smeared black ash of another day’s fire and snapping a flame up from a struck match. You watch him hurry around with faint amusement, wondering if he’s eaten fresh meat since the end of the world happened. Then you wonder if your value as a teammate has just gone up in his eyes. 

You work a stake through the rabbit; in the time it takes you to do so, Robin has set up a contraption to hold the spit and gotten a fire going. His hands have splotches of dirt on them, and more curls of hair have escaped the clutches of his bun. He glances at you, holding the rabbit, and gestures at the fire. 

“We need to turn it once in a while,” you say after putting the rabbit down. Red-orange strips of flame lick at the pale rabbit meat, slowly but surely turning it brown. “Do you want to, or should I?”

Robin sticks his dirty hands in his hoodie pockets. “I can do it. You caught the rabbit.” He’s not looking at you. 

“Great! I’m going to go look for some salt.” It’s a partial truth—you do want to get salt, but you don’t think you can stand sitting outside with Robin and the gradually roasting rabbit in silence for the next half hour. 

“Wait! Hold on,” Robin calls. He’s taken a seat on the grass next to the rabbit, legs stretched out, but his stare is no less sharp as it pins you to the wall. You stop in your tracks. “Teach me how to make a snare.”

It’s not a question. You bob your head. “Sure! We can go set one up later today if you want, actually.”

Something like surprise darts across Robin’s face—a tiny lift of his eyebrows, the bladed line of his mouth softening ever-so-slightly. Maybe he didn’t expect you to agree so readily. Maybe there’s someone gentler under his exterior. 

Robin doesn’t say thank you. He just blinks, lets the half-surprised expression linger for a moment longer, and then goes back to watching the rabbit cook on the fire. 

You turn back to the door and let your eyes adjust to the dim rooms of the house. There’s salt to get. 

III

You’ve lost your hair tie. Somewhere between scrounging for firewood and fending off zombies, it disappeared. 

Robin doesn’t notice that you haven’t put your hair up when you pick up your bag and wait by the door. The two of you plan to hunt for more resources—bottles of water, sanitizing wipes and swabs, cans of fruit and vegetables. There’s a gas station that seems untouched relatively nearby: your destination. 

It’s not quite sunny today, with gray silk clouds draping over the sun. You zip your jacket up; the breeze is chilly, and it’s picking up your hair and waving it like a child with a toy. 

“Ready to go?” Robin asks. 

“Yeah.” You double-check that your dagger is strapped to your belt and your gun is holstered. “Let’s go.”

Not much conversation happens on the road. You’ve tried to strike it up, using basic icebreakers as flint and steel, but the replies Robin gave were short and terse. So you stopped. 

You take a break after a good half hour of walking. The breeze accelerates into a wind and sweeps your hair into your face when you try to take a drink of water. You swat your hair back, pinning as much of it as possible behind your ear and lamenting the loss of your hair tie. 

“Isn’t that really inconvenient?” Robin asks. Looks like he’s finally realized you don’t have your hair in a ponytail. 

You stash your water back in your bag. “Yeah, but I don’t have a hair tie.”

Robin shakes down his left hoodie sleeve, then huffs. “Damn. I don’t have any more.”

The fact that he bothered to look already surprises you. You give him a little smile. “It’s fine, I’ll deal with it.”

“Whatever,” Robin mutters. “Let’s keep going.” 

As you approach the gas station, a fog appears and crawls along the roads. Fortunately, Robin’s red hoodie makes him impossible to lose. He flicks on his flashlight, piercing the darkness inside the store, and looks around. 

“Clear so far,” he says. “Let’s split up.”

“Okay.” You wonder if this is how he entered the gas station where he found you and almost killed you—boldly, ready to bash in the skull of anything that moved. 

Robin heads off to the right side, so you go left. The floor is dusty but not disgusting. That means there haven’t been any zombies here recently…or they were really clean zombies. You’ve seen too many floors littered with bones and dark remains. 

The broken glass windows of the building let in a bit of light as you walk through an aisle. The placards have been ripped from their stands, but the wires separating different items still remain. You snip some of the wires off with your wire cutter. They could be useful later. 

You know from the sign hanging above this aisle that it’s supposed to be the snack aisle; the few bags of chips that remain second that. You tuck them all into your backpack, trying to keep the crinkling noises to a minimum.

Hopefully the canned food aisle will yield more returns, although you’re grateful for those chips. You listen for any danger before turning into the next aisle. Across the store, you hear Robin shuffling something on a shelf. 

Before you even have a full view of the aisle, you catch sight of silver. Your footsteps quicken, and your glimpse is proven right when you’re greeted by several, several cans of food. 

“Yes!” You whisper. 

“What?” Robin asks. 

“Canned food,” you reply, examining the labels. There are cans of various fruit, veggies, starches, even pastas; after checking the expiration dates, you confirm they’re still edible. You set your bag on a shelf and reorganize the contents inside to make space for your new treasures. 

This turns out to be the highlight of your search. The remaining isles provide some energy bars and two bottles of water that escaped whoever initially raided the store by rolling into the shadows. Not bad, but it could be better. 

You head over towards Robin. He’s stuffing a pack of AA batteries into his bag when you find him. He looks up when you stop in front of him, hand drifting towards his bat. 

“Oh,” he says. “It’s just you. Don’t appear in front of me like that, jeez.”

“Sorry.” You glance around at the shelves; they’ve been swept clean. “Did you find anything good besides the batteries?”

“A lighter, some cigarettes, some other stuff,” he replies. “We can take inventory when we get back. Let’s go.”

You’re used to his brusque nature by now, so all you do is fall in line behind him as the two of you exit. The wind has gotten stronger; your hair whips around you like white willow branches in a storm. 

The way back is almost identical to the way there. Robin keeps a slight lead. You pretend he doesn’t walk faster whenever you try to catch up. He turns from side to side only to look for threats. Neither of you talk. 

You find a ladybug halfway down the road and stop to look at it. Robin stops a few meters ahead of you, tugging impatiently at the straps of his backpack. You figure he’d leave you behind if you weren’t carrying important stuff on you. 

The ladybug is clean, so you pick it up. 

“My old teammate said they were good luck,” you tell Robin. 

He scowls at that. “How can such a little bug be good luck?”

“It saved an innocent man’s life once. It didn’t need to be big and strong to do that,” you insist.  Your teammate loved little creatures. On a stormy night where half of your team’s clothes had been drenched earlier, he’d told the story of the ladybug and the executioner, eyes brighter than the lightning flashing outside. 

The ladybug skitters to your fingertip. You hold it out towards Robin, who goes slightly cross-eyed squinting at it. “It’s pretty, right?”

Robin huffs. “Yeah, I guess.” You wonder if he thinks more about the delicate curve of the ladybug, the black-and-white pinpricks, or more about how easy it would be to crush the bug into a bloody splatter.

You start walking again; at your sudden movement, the ladybug soars away. Robin watches it spiral into the gray sky, but doubles down on his efforts to stay ahead of you immediately after. The trip concludes in silence, save for Robin asking you at the door if you see anything that’s been tampered with.

There’s enough natural light in the house to see properly, so you set down your backpack on the dinner table and take your haul out. Robin hands you a notebook. It’s actually one of yours, but he keeps it because it has the counts of every resource you two possess and he doesn’t trust you with it. He also took your other notebook. You don’t understand why; that one is your personal one. There’s nothing useful for him in it, unless he wants to learn about your old teammates. 

That thought makes you uneasy. It always has. Robin might already have read the whole thing and learned a lot more about you than you would want to share. He’s not the kind of person to ask you if you’re fine with that.

Nothing you can do about it, though. By some machination of the universe, you ended up teamed with Robin, and now you just have to deal with the possibility that he knows you too well and you know next to nothing about him. This is a Nash equilibrium; if you fight him over this, you’ll lose a teammate and most likely end up injured; if he gives you the notebooks of his own accord, he’s forced to place more of his own safety in your hands. 

So you let him hold your notebooks hostage, and he gives you the inventory one when you need it. 

With everything laid out, you start below the previous log. If there’s one thing that’s been constant throughout this whole mess, it’s that ballpoint pens still take forever to run out of ink. 

Robin hovers over your shoulder as you write. It used to make you uncomfortable, having him watch your every word and number, but you've grown accustomed to it now. You know that Robin’s handwriting is a scrawled mess and that’s why you’re the one doing this, even if your own writing isn’t that much better. 

Robin found more in the store than he let on. Besides the batteries, the lighter, and some cigarettes, there’s detergent, dish soap, a box of disposable gloves, two large bottles of hand sanitizer, lemon-scented disinfectant, a couple of stray cables Robin presumably yanked from their hiding places, and even a can of compressed air. 

“How did you fit all of this in your bag?” You ask. 

Robin shrugs. “I had to use my pockets too.”

At least he answered. You dutifully record every new item before giving Robin your notebook. Robin slides it into his backpack. 

Your hand drifts to brush your hair back behind your ears. Robin tracks your movement; meanwhile, his right hand goes to his left sleeve. The sleeve goes down, exposes bare skin.

He pulls something small and dark up and out. Dangles it like a fish on a hook, pinched between his index finger and his thumb. 

A hair tie.

You only realize he wants you to take it when he gives it an insistent shake. His mouth has flattened into a tense line, like he’s tried to turn himself to stone and didn’t quite succeed. 

He must have found one in the gas station. Or more. But one was all you needed. You take it from him and give him a smile. 

Briefly, you humor yourself with the idea that he found the hair tie specifically for you. He probably just wanted to stock up on extras. 

“Thank you,” you say out loud. With your hair tied up again, you feel so much more balanced. Regardless of Robin’s motivations, he’s helped you out, in his own strange way. 

“Wasn’t a big deal,” Robin mutters, but you can see the tips of his ears flushing the same color as his hoodie. He’s put his hands in his pockets without a slouch in his back, and his eyes have widened against his will. You’ve slowly been learning his tells, and you know that it was a big deal to him. He’s lying to the both of you and you’re going to let him get away with it. He’ll come to terms with it one day.

You decide to change the subject. Robin will fall into his usual terse silence if there’s too long of a lull, and you don’t want that right now. “So, what are you thinking for dinner today? Canned diced potatoes or canned diced carrots?” 

“Potatoes. If I eat another can of carrots within the next few days I’m gonna vomit. I’ll get the fire going.”

Robin leaves so fast you could mistake it for fleeing. You watch him go with great amusement, then turn to go grab two cans of potatoes from the stash of food upstairs. The hair tie keeps your hair from crowding out your vision. 

IV

The two of you have hit the city. 

It’s the closest city to your base, streets a no-man’s-land of car corpses and shambled belongings. You stay on the sidewalk, Robin in front of you, well aware that the concrete you walk on is only clear because the bodies that lay there have risen from their gritty tan graves to hunt for food. 

You two have already swept a few buildings—a mauled 7-Eleven, a Dunkin Donuts in disarray, an Italian restaurant that smelled so strongly of mold that neither of you could stand to be in there for more than ten minutes. In terms of food so far, you’ve collected coffee beans, a tin of SPAM, someone’s secret stash of dried cranberries and raisins, and a bottle of water. Needless to say, your future lunch doesn’t look very pleasant. Robin took the Ritz crackers. 

Robin stops in front of a Walgreens, turns to look at you. This is not new. You pass him, pulling on a glove to open the door. There are scattered wooden boards around your feet and cracks in the windows; this was someone else’s hideout before the zombies got to it. You swivel your flashlight inside. None of the shadows hunched in your glaring beam of light move. It’s silent inside. 

“Clear,” you say. It’s only then that Robin enters the store with his bat ready. 

“Split?” Robin asks. At least he’s asking instead of demanding that they follow his strategy this time. You almost nod, but stop right before you do. 

Instead, you shake your head. The Walgreens makes your shoulders tingle with wariness; you don’t want to separate. “No, this place is pretty big. Let's stay together.”

Robin narrows his eyes at you, looks around, and finally shrugs. “Okay. Left first, then?”

“Yeah.” The left aisles seem to be where the chips and snacks are, along with the pharmaceutical items. You catch the faint gleam of plastic that indicates their presence. Whoever was hiding out here wasn’t here for very long, if there are this many bags of food remaining. 

That unsettles you further. Robin strides over to a shelf and starts dropping bags into his bag. It’s a quiet procedure, despite how crinkly the chips are. You make yourself useful by turning into another aisle and puzzling out how to fit as many instant noodle cups and packages into your backpack as possible. 

Robin materializes next to you with your notebook. It’s only because you glimpse his red hoodie out of the corner of your eye that he remains unscathed by your knife. 

“Got you,” he says. You huff in response, but take the notebook and open it to the map page. The landmark of this city is the 7-Eleven next to a tree with bright red paint covering its base. Close to that, you add a star for this Walgreens. The two of you will need to return at a later date to collect all the supplies here. To make it harder for others to find the supplies, you slide the remaining ones under the racks. Robin does the same in a different aisle, although you see him pocketing baking soda and an entire bottle of vinegar. 

You follow Robin’s beat-up backpack to the right side of the Walgreens. He washed his hair the other day, and that made it cleaner, albeit wilder. Curls of hair snake out from his hair tie and bandanna, newly liberated from the weight of grease. 

Your shoe encounters a dull bone, clean save for the splotches of…something. There are two long construction nails next to it, along with a pair of scissors. Someone’s last stand, perhaps. Robin’s browsing the hygiene aisles, unaware of the bone. Or he noticed and simply didn’t care. 

You spray down the nails and scissors with isopropyl and retrieve them with a gloved hand. It would be arrogant to turn down sharp, pointy objects. They go in your pockets. 

Since Robin has the hygiene covered, you walk down the makeup aisle instead. There aren’t any bottle caps on the floor, which is a little strange for the open jars of nail polish with no cap. You pick up a face mask to see if it’s expired. The packaging creases smoothly under your fingers.

That’s when it happens, when you hear something. Just the soft sound of cloth being grabbed. 

You don’t call out for Robin. You don’t even have the time to think about doing that.

“I know you’re there,” a new voice says. It’s calm. “Come to aisle nine. Hands up.”

When you don’t move, the voice speaks again. “Ten seconds before your friend dies. Ten, nine…”

Your feet start walking. On the way, you slip one of the construction nails under your hair tie so it’s bound in with your ponytail. 

You turn around an empty row to come face-to-face with Robin and a stranger. Robin, standing far too still, frozen, because there’s a gun to his head, right up in his black hair. 

The stranger has him by the chest—an arm around him so his arms are stuck. 

You size up the stranger. They’ve got a little bit of stubble, a mass of brown hair, a red smear on their chin, and a dirty green jacket likely hiding more muscle than one would think. You can’t overtake them physically. 

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” the stranger says. “You’re gonna toss your weapons at my feet. Your gun, your knife. Then bring your bag to me. Your friend is gonna do the same. Then you’re both gonna leave and never come back. Do anything else and you’re dead before you can blink.”

To emphasize that, they push the gun harder against Robin’s skull. It’s a Glock, like your own gun. 

You look at Robin. His face displays nothing but silent fury, but then you catch the rapid rise and fall of his chest, the way he can’t look at you, the hands not clenched into fists but gripping at his hoodie cuffs. 

He’s terrified, and for good reason. For all he knows, you could shrug and turn away and he would be a corpse with a blown-up skull. 

You can’t do that. Yes, Robin is sharp and acidic and bitter and violent, but he hasn’t let you die yet. He looked for a hair tie for you and watched the ladybug you picked up fly away. He paid attention to you setting a snare with steady focus and showed you the first rabbit he caught with his own. He’s not a teammate you would’ve wished for, but he’s the one you have. He’s like you—still alive. You want the spitting fire in Robin’s eyes to keep burning. 

“Okay,” you say out loud. You think about trying to keep your voice level, but decide to go for a shaky one instead. You remove your gun from the holster with trembling hands; the stranger tightens his grip on Robin. “Please—please don’t hurt him. I’m just sliding this to you.” 

The Glock scratches on the tiles as it spins forward, bounces off the stranger’s shoes, stops. One weapon gone. 

The knife goes next. You hold it wrong, almost cut yourself with the blade, and send it towards the stranger with a timid push. It slips under the displays into the shadows. 

“Come here,” the stranger orders. 

You keep your eyes on their face, the gun held precariously in your peripheral vision. You let your legs shake more the closer you get; your eyes widen. 

Hopefully, you look like a scared kid who’s about to cry. And it’s not like you aren’t scared; you are, your heart like a rabbit squirming in a snare, but you have to keep it under control. You have to play whatever strings you can play, take whatever hesitation you can scrape out of this goddamned world. 

Standing right in front of Robin and the stranger, you realize you’re taller than them. There’s a moment here for something. 

The tears come easy. All you have to do is think about your old teammates and the day you lost one of them. Robin’s jaw slackens. 

“Please don’t hurt us,” you sniffle. 

“Like I said, put your bag down.” Their voice is still harsh, but you see the gun slide down a couple centimeters. 

You have to act now. After you put the bag down, they’ll raise their guard again. There is nothing else you could use in your surroundings, just the nail in your hair. With the stranger’s focus on you and what your hands are doing, the energy they’ve invested into holding Robin hostage has dropped. 

Hopefully that means you can take them by surprise. You have two aims—one, get the gun pointed away from Robin and you, and two, stop them from pulling the trigger. There’s reasons you avoid shooting your gun impulsively, and it’s not just because the noise attracts zombies.

You bob your head rapidly and slide the backpack off your shoulders. The stranger’s eyes follow it. 

The gun slackens further. 

Now. 

Your bag falls to the floor with a quiet thunk; by the time it’s gotten there, your hand is already on the barrel of the gun, wrenching it away from Robin’s head with as much force as you can, eyes glued to it. The stranger’s finger slips off the trigger, buying you just another moment before they undoubtedly try to pull it—

You reach back and snatch the construction nail from your hair. It comes down in a quick arc, embeds itself deep in the stranger’s hand. 

They scream. Their hand spasms; you’re the only one holding the gun now, and before you can think any better of it, you hurl the damned thing as far as it can go. 

Robin weasels out from under the stranger’s other arm, a task made easier when they take a swing at you and forget about Robin. 

You dive for your backpack and gun on the ground. Robin’s already halfway to the exit with his own stuff, somehow having recovered his baseball bat.

The stranger’s still trying to grab at you with a horrifying snarl on his face. “I’m gonna slit you from throat to gut, you little bitch—”

You retrieve the second nail from your pocket and send it spinning at them. It’s not too different from a throwing knife, and it lodges somewhere on their body that you don’t see because you’ve already turned to get the absolute fuck out of the Walgreens. 

The door slams behind you. 

“Go, go, go!” You yell at Robin. He obeys immediately. If the stranger doesn’t get you two, the zombies their blood has surely attracted will. 

Robin has the wits to navigate to the 7-Eleven. The two of you do a quick sweep of the area before making a hiding spot out of an alleyway’s dilapidated dumpsters. 

The adrenaline leaves you when your palms hit the ground. All you can think of are all the ways things could’ve gone wrong, all the ways this could have ended with a bullet through Robin’s head, through your back—

There’s a hand in front of your face. Robin snaps once, loud enough to demand your attention, but his eyebrows are furrowed together in a way that suggests he’s not angry. 

“Hey,” he says. You ignore the quiver in his voice. “We should get out of here before that guy shows up.”

Robin’s still got a pale face, still looks like a cornered animal, but he’s standing up and curling a fist around his baseball bat, and if he can do that after breathing in the metallic tang of death by Glock, you can get on your feet.

He doesn’t try to stay ahead of you on the way back. He matches pace with you, stops when you stop to glance behind you, doesn’t say anything but keeps his speed perfectly aligned with yours. Your shoulders never bump but Robin never drifts more than a good two feet away from you. 

 A few hundred meters from your base, he finally stops of his own accord. He’s hunched over the concrete poking at something, and when he stands back up, he holds out his hand to show you a ladybug. 

“Thank you,” you say. You hope he chooses to ignore the hoarseness in your voice that comes through like a beacon of weakness. 

“Just thought it was cool,” Robin mutters. He waves the ladybug into the sky and waits for you to keep walking.

It’s when you get through the door of the base that the last shreds of composure you have disappear. There’s the phantom sensation of a poised gun under your hand, smooth metal promising death, the stranger’s wretched screaming and threats you don’t remember hearing scrawled on the inside of your head, the way it felt like you couldn’t breathe properly the entire time that gun was on Robin’s skull—

How close you came to losing the closest thing you have right now to a teammate, maybe a friend—

The stranger’s probably dead, but you can’t help that; they tried to kill Robin, they tried to kill you, but the smell of their blood is clogging up your nostrils—

A pinprick of pain on your arm. Robin’s got his fingers ready to flick at you again. At least he looks mildly regretful when you stare at him through watery eyes. 

“Sorry,” you end up saying. “I’m fine.” You weren’t even the one who had a brush with death. Why are you cracking?

Robin scowls. “That’s bullshit. You’re not fine, and I’d be lying through my fucking teeth if I said I was fine.”

He’s staring at you. Not at the floor, not at your shoulder, at you. His mouth’s set in a stubborn frown crossed with a grimace, like he’s drinking vinegar but won’t stop because he’s too far in.

“You saved my ass back there,” Robin grits, dragging the words out like a dog with a forbidden carcass. “You managed to get both of us out there without getting shot. That’s insane. You’re insane. It’s just hitting you now.”

He might as well have just thanked you profusely for saving his life. You take a seat on the beat-up couch to center yourself. Robin drops himself down on the other side, still looking directly at you. 

You manage a hiccuped snort. “Thanks. I—don’t kill me for this, but—how are you able to not, I don’t know, break down right now?”

“I feel like I’m about to,” Robin replies, calmer than you thought he’d be. “I’m waiting for it to hit me again.” Then he sharpens his stare into a glare. “You want to make food, or should I?”

“I can do it,” you say. You can let Robin have his alone time on the couch. “Any suggestions?”

“Go crazy, I’ll eat anything at this point.” Robin slouches on the couch with his hands in his pockets. 

“Okay.” You know you have some tins of spaghetti upstairs. Spaghetti would be really good. 

“Wait,” Robin calls, voice jagged. You turn around. He grimaces, flips and fidgets with his hoodie cuffs, seems to reach a resolution. 

“Mapicc.” 

“What?” You ask. 

“Call me Mapicc,” Mapicc says. “That’s my name.”

“Nice name,” you tell him, and you mean it. “I’ll go get the food going.”

You wonder, upstairs with two cans of Spaghetti-Os in your hands, if Mapicc saw it as a transaction. You save his life, so he hands you his name.

You’re going to miss thinking about him as Robin, but Mapicc really does fit. It’s a short little word, sharp at the end. 

“Mapicc,” you whisper to yourself experimentally. “Yeah, I can work with that.”

V

You’re sitting at the table spinning a ballpoint pen; Mapicc’s sprawled out on the couch frowning at the ceiling. Both of you have just finished your cups of ramen. It’s a good lunch, compared to flavorless string beans or potatoes. 

You miss your notebook, the personal one. It’s been a while since you wrote in it. Right now, it lives in Mapicc’s backpack. You’re well aware that whatever you write will most likely be seen by Mapicc later, but you just want to go through the motions of putting thoughts to paper.

The ballpoint pen drops to the table. “Mapicc,” you say, watching him shift from an almost lazy mood to an alert one, “I need my notebook.” 

His name still feels strange to say. It cuts the inside of your mouth as it comes out, shiny with newness you haven’t worn away yet. 

“Which one?” 

“The non-inventory one.”

He scrutinizes you for a moment, but unzips his bag and sticks his arm in. Seconds later and he’s pulling out your turquoise notebook and tossing it to you. You try not to think about how fast he found it in his bag, like he was used to finding it and taking it out. 

“Thanks!” You are thankful, because Mapicc is unpredictable and pushy, and yet he hasn’t even asked why you want your notebook. 

Mapicc nods in response. He doesn’t go back to sprawling on the couch. You can feel his eyes on you as you open the notebook. 

Your heart pangs at the page-full of scribbled drawings one of your old teammates did. There’s doodles of pill bugs and beetles, a sparrow, ladybugs, your other teammates, a self portrait. He added color with a pack of highlighters. You remember how he wanted to do it in rainbow, but the blue and purple highlighters had gotten lost. 

You turn the page to a war zone of ultimate tic tac toe, with trenches of pen lines and little soldiers of X’s and O’s. You and your teammates would split into two teams of two and pass the notebook around, scheming how to take over a world of grids. 

After a few more pages of drawings the marks of your old teammates transition to your own. All of your journal entries have your name written in the top left corner and an estimated date. When you started doing this, you feared you’d forget your own name one day amongst the chaos, so you wrote it down. Some of the headers read Ro, some read Roshambo, a few read Ross. No one calls you Ross anymore, but you keep it like a bouquet of flowers mourning times long gone. 

You see a smudge of dirt on one of the pages you don’t remember being there last time. The uneasy feeling rises up again, makes you turn to look at Mapicc looking at you. Maybe he flipped through and accidentally got dirt on a random page. Maybe he didn’t read it slowly. 

Mapicc just keeps staring. You don’t know if this stare is a confirmation or a denial. You don’t know if you want to ask. 

So you turn your attention back to your notebook, flip to the next blank page and write Roshambo and the date, poise your pen on the first line. 

I know Robin’s real name now: Mapicc. I think it suits him really well, because it’s quick and sharp just like he is. 

Mapicc almost died the other day. This person held him at gunpoint and tried to steal our stuff, but we managed to get out safely. I still can’t believe we’re unharmed. The memory won’t leave my brain; I can smell the blood spurting from their hand after I got them with a construction nail, hear them screaming-cursing my name, feel the terror in my bones. It was fucking scary. 

I didn’t want Mapicc to die. He’s my teammate. Recently he’s been nicer. We’ve come a long way from him threatening me with a knife. 

I still miss the Poggies. My worst fear is that they're all dead, even though I know they’re brilliant, competent people. I hope I see them again one day. I’m still looking, every time Mapicc and I go out. I try to remember their faces as best as I can.

Actually, what would Mapicc think of them? He’d like them, right? I think Mapicc has a sense of humor somewhere in him; I just haven’t really seen it yet. 

Tomorrow we’re going out again, to the city. We need more sanitary products and the like. Toilet paper is a bit harder to come by, as always. 

Vale,

Roshambo

You move your pen to a different part of the page. You wanted to include a drawing of Mapicc in today’s entry because you don’t have one yet. 

Mapicc’s still staring at you, but not as intensely as before. You steal glances through your dangling bangs, trying to pin down the angles of his face, the way his nose is shaped, the sword-sharpness of his eyes. In contrast to that, you scribble his hair down in soft wavy lines. 

It’s not as good as your old teammate’s drawings, but you think it's still pretty good. You add some shadows with scratchy little lines and take another bird’s eye view of it. 

You’ve got his hair down correctly, but his eyes are still off. You can fix that if you draw him again in the future, though. 

Satisfied and a little mournful, you close your notebook. If Mapicc decides to go through it later, you hope he doesn’t feel insulted by the drawing. 

“Done?” Mapicc asks. 

“Yeah.” You let him take the notebook. You expect him to put it away immediately, but he opens it with the efficiency of a wolf gutting its prey, exposes slices of pale paper, and your heart shoots up into your windpipe. 

His hand lands on a page. The crunch of paper being adjusted is scorching to your ears in the silence. You try to figure out what he’s doing. Is he about to rip a page out? Read it? 

None of those things happen as he removes his hand. He’s flattened out a page that got folded somehow. That’s all. With a snap, he closes the notebook, then places it in his backpack. 

You manage to push your heart down into your rib cage; your muscles untense. At least if he snoops, it’ll be out of your sight. 

Mapicc slinks off the couch and up the stairs. You wouldn’t say he moves like a snake, though. It’s more like a coyote weaving carefully through brush. The swings and strikes he makes with his bat are not sleek, but brutal and loping and full of anger, with teeth and warm blood. 

There’s creaking and quick footsteps on the second floor. Whatever Mapicc is looking for, he’s having trouble finding. Could it be a specific type of food you two have stored? 

He searches around for a few more minutes. Then his ratty sneakers appear, followed by the rest of him. He’s slouching slightly as he comes to a stop before where you’re sitting. 

“Here,” he says, and palms a bright yellow cardboard box from his hoodie pocket. “Keep these somewhere if you want. It’s better than just plain old pen, right?”

They’re Crayola crayons, the 16-pack. The corners of the box are dented and you can see there’s one missing, but they’re crayons. Mapicc found them and gave them to you. He knew there were crayons in the base. 

You take the box carefully, an unconscious grin scribbled across your face. “Yeah, they’re way better. I can add color to stuff now.” 

“That’s good.”

“Thank you, Mapicc,” you tell him. It’s genuine. 

Mapicc picks at a microscopic piece of lint on his hoodie cuff, sticks his hands in those mysterious pockets, blinks at you wide-eyed and pretends he’s not looking at you anymore. His ears are bright red. It’s just like when he gave you the hair tie; he acts like he’s afraid of being thanked. 

“No problem,” he mutters. “No one was gonna use those besides you anyways.”

“I’ll put them to good use.” The crayons get placed securely in a small pocket of your backpack. You think you’ll try and draw Mapicc again some other day, with crayons for color. Maybe they’ll help.

Mapicc pads over to the back door with his baseball bat. “I’m gonna check on the snares.” He’s wearing a hole into the wall with his stare. 

“Can I come with?” 

Mapicc’s shoulders twitch, but he jerks his head in a nod. “Yeah, if you want to.”

You pat your hip to check that your knife is there. The door opens to a crack of daylight. Mapicc stands in the yard waiting for you. He’s gotten pretty good at snares and the two of you have made an invisible game out of checking on them; you cheer whenever one of his snares catches something edible, and he tramples the lukewarm happy look that sneaks onto his face at your reaction. 

A ladybug lands on Mapicc’s shoulder, barely distinguishable save for the black spots. His bat shimmers in the sun. You follow him through the grass into the forest; as the two of you walk, the ladybug peels away from his shoulder. Mapicc turns his head just so to see it go. 

VI

The weather sucks. Humidity seeps into your lungs and the bare sun beaming down isn’t helping. At least the alleyways have shadows. 

You and Mapicc are in the city, a new area of it, decorated with stinking trash bins and rusting fire escapes that climb up the walls. Both of you thought there was potential here, resources less likely to be plundered. 

The main problem is getting lost. The streets are sprawling, and you have no way of recording everything in your notebook. You’ll have to work with Mapicc to escape quickly if it comes down to it—not that you mind. You think he’s getting used to being teamed with you, slowly but surely. 

A crow swoops overhead. You admire the graceful sweep of its wings, the glossiness of its plumage even amidst the end of the world.

The leader of your old team loved birds, as much as your other teammate loved little creatures and bugs. It made perfect sense, you suppose, for someone who called himself Parrot to be a bird enthusiast. 

You remember there being quite a few bird drawings in your notebook from him. When you and Mapicc get back to your base, you want to look at them again. They kind of resemble footballs with two popsicle-stick legs, meticulously filled in with highlighters, but they’re full of love. 

“What’re you smiling about?” Mapicc asks. He twists the cap on his water bottle with a click and puts it away. 

“My old teammates,” you tell him. “One of them really liked birds.”

“Oh.” The dregs of a neutral expression drain from Mapicc’s face, replaced by something cold. “You must really care about them.”

“Yeah, I thought you knew. I’m still looking for them.”

“Okay.” Mapicc doesn’t say more than that, and you don’t ask. He’s all thorns now, roses retreating beneath that spiked defense. “C’mon, let’s keep going.”

You wonder what happened to him to make him react like that. Maybe you won’t bring up your teammates again, not for a while. 

Then you walk into Mapicc’s outstretched arm. You startle back at the sudden contact; Mapicc twitches, but remains in his half-hunched position. The two of you have reached a corner. You don’t ask why Mapicc stopped you; the reason is clear. There’s the faint rumble of zombies around the corner and the unmistakable noise of bones crunching. 

The two of you need out, right now. 

There’s a ledge near you that leads to the window of a building. It’s too high for you to climb on by yourself, but you could help Mapicc and vice versa. You look at Mapicc and then back at the ledge. His eyes narrow as he puts together the pieces of your plan.

He approves, because he darts over to the ledge to assess it in further detail. You watch him jump up and try to grab onto the top, failing because he’s too short. He curls his hands around the handle of a garbage bin and tries to move it. 

The wheels are broken. They screech on the hard ground and you hear the air go silent. The zombies pause their eating. 

“Shit,” Mapicc hisses. 

You know the zombies are heading your way now. The timer on your lives has begun to tick. 

Your palms sweat as you intertwine your fingers to create a platform. “Here, step here:”

Mapicc sets his foot on your hands, but doesn’t move to step up. His eyes trace your arms. 

“I’m strong enough,” you tell him. “Get up, quick!”

That spurs him to place more of his weight in your hands. His other foot leaves the ground; you strain upwards with all your muscles. Your fingers ache with the soles of Mapicc’s sneakers. You push, he pushes, and somehow the combined effort lets him clamber onto the ledge. 

You can hear the zombies getting closer, locked in on you two. “Mapicc, hurry up,” you urge. You can’t climb onto the ledge without his help. 

Mapicc extends his hand, kneeling down so you can reach it. You grab onto it. Your boots press against the vertical wall of the ledge, ready to help propel you up. 

Then he looks at whatever’s behind you and blanches. 

His hand slackens. He stands up. 

There is a premonition simmering in your veins. It comes to a boil at Mapicc’s stony face, the way he’s looking down at you, the unreadable line of his mouth (and doesn’t that scare you, after getting used to reading him so easily). 

“Sorry, Ro,” Mapicc says, all calm and slow. “It’s too late.”

He turns, sneakers stepping quick. In seconds he’s gone from your sight, disappeared into a building to escape. 

“Mapicc!” You yell it once, flinging the name like it’s a curse, a spell to bring him back, all the while knowing it won’t work. 

It doesn’t settle in immediately. A part of you keeps on saying he’ll be back. You’ve been teammates for a while. Another part berates you for not expecting this, for feeling like this is a betrayal when it should’ve been an inevitability. He’s held you at arm’s length this entire time, refused to let you learn practically anything about him, and it took saving his goddamn life for him to tell you his name. What were you going to do with it? Find out where he lived? Why did you put your trust in him when he never did the same for you? He couldn’t even say I’m sorry. No, it had to be cold, quick, efficient, impersonal; Sorry, Ro. You’re nothing but flesh and bone to me. Have fun getting dismembered while I save my own skin! 

You still want to believe that’s not true so bad your chest hurts. You want to believe it, but you know it to be true like you know that your ammunition is limited and you’re about to get eaten by zombies if you don’t fucking move.

This alley’s a dead end. Two zombies block your exit; you know there are more behind them. You have to get out before they all clog up the place.

There’s a heavy metal bar on the ground. It’s too heavy for you to wield for a long time, but it serves its purpose as you slam it into the zombies’ skulls and shove them to the side. The exit clears, you sprint, and the sight of a mass of rotting flesh and exposed bones turning their eyes towards you only makes you sprint faster. 

Briefly, you wonder why you agreed to go into this goddamned maze of streets in the first place.

You trusted Mapicc to help you if you had to escape, you remind yourself. And he didn’t come through. For good measure, you curse his name again. There’s no use in staying quiet when all the zombies are already locked onto you.

You skim past a few dead-ends, then see an alley that turns a corner. That could be a way out. There could be an open window above a dumpster, an emergency fire exit you could grab onto. 

The zombies are getting closer; it’s either go down this alley or risk going further to find another decent one. You pat your holster to make sure your gun is still there, shake down your pockets to confirm that you have at least one spare magazine, then make your decision. 

You go into the alley, head whipping around to look for any potential exit. There are none thus far—you can’t reach any of the windows, and the dumpsters are overflowing with trash and impossible to move. 

There’s still the corner. Your lungs start to burn by the time you reach the corner. You know the mouth of the alley is already filling with zombies; as you skid around the corner with enough friction to heat up the soles of your boots, eyes primed to latch onto any route out—

Walls. 

There are three walls, made of concrete. You’ve hit a dead end. 

Your hand brushes against one wall in disbelief, meets crusty neon graffiti. The first zombie comes into sight. It must be one of the fast ones. 

You take your gun and a full magazine out. There’s just enough time for you to load it into the gun and rack the slide before the zombie is dangerously close. This is an action you practiced hundreds of times; you’re glad you did. Now, you inhale and take aim, one foot forward, arms extended so the recoil can’t smack you in the face. 

The best spot to hit a zombie is the head. Whatever rotting brains are left in there behind an eggshell of a skull will be torn apart by a bullet, especially the kind you have. It’s just unfortunate that these bullets can only take out one zombie at a time.  

You squeeze the trigger. 

The air cracks in two, clean down the middle, sound zig-zagging around the concrete walls into the sky. A bullet explodes forward; the gun kicks back; the left side of the zombie’s face transforms instantaneously into an obliterated mess of dirty red and pink and brown and off-white; the zombie drops to the ground and doesn’t move again.

Six more round the corner. They flock to the sound of gunshots like crows to carrion, and you’ve just made it known that there is live prey down this alleyway—you.

The action of firing becomes automatic. Aim for the head, take a breath, squeeze the trigger. Pretend the whip-crack of the bullet firing doesn’t make your head spin. Watch out for the empty cartridges that drop at your feet. If you miss, aim again. 

Zombie carcasses pile up before you. You take down three, five, seven—

Click. Fifteen bullets gone, magazine empty, slide lock back. You only have one spare magazine. Fifteen more bullets and then you’re out completely.

Your palms gather sweat as you eject the empty magazine, let it fall to the ground with the spent cartridges, draw out your only spare magazine from your pocket and slide it in. The next zombie shambles closer. 

Rack the slide, one foot forward, arms out. Breath in, trigger squeeze. A gaping hole opens in the zombie’s neck.

You can’t stop shooting. There are too many zombies to fend off with just your knives. And yet you know that every whip-crack, every soundwave traitorously broadcasting your existence, is another stone upon your grave. 

You’re not going to die, you try to tell yourself. You can get out of this.  

“Bullshit.” Your arms are already starting to shake from the consecutive recoil. The smell of metal and something acrid burns your nostrils. 

You kill another zombie, and another, and another. You have a knife-sharp awareness that there are only two cartridges left. One loaded, one ready to be loaded into the chamber.

The second-to-last bullet shatters the skull of a zombie. Your heart slams at your rib bones.

One left. 

There is definitely more than one zombie approaching you. This one bullet is the last moment of safety you have left. 

You think about turning the gun around, pulling the trigger on yourself with the same methodical coolness you did with all those zombies. Not even getting the chance to blink before the bullet travels through your skull and blossoms into death. 

Wouldn’t it be quicker, be kinder than death at the hands of the zombies, teeth sinking into your flesh strips and decayed hands pulling you apart at the seams? Wouldn’t it would be more rational to put a hole in your skull yourself, because whatever the fuck animates the zombies would strongly prefer an intact brain? God fucking damn it, if you’re going to die shouldn’t you make your body useless to them? 

You wonder what Mapicc would think if he saw the rotting corpse that used to be you, somehow. If he came back to see zombies getting blood all over your hair. You wonder if he’d think differently of you if he saw that there was a crater in your skull. If he would think you were less of a coward or more.

Then a laugh burbles out of your throat, tumbles out like a fledgling bird that snaps its neck on the concrete. You’re on death’s driveway and all you can think about is the motherfucker who turned tail and left you here. 

But if you turned that gun around, you don’t know if you would forgive yourself. You don’t think your old teammates would forgive your ghost. And yes, you’d be a ghost, carrying all the never-dones and never-will-dos around with you. You haven’t even passed the age to graduate high school yet.

In the end, that's whimsy too. Would they even care? If they stumbled upon a shambling body wearing a familiar face, would they notice it was yours? Would they hesitate before they killed you again? Were you a person to them or an asset, a weapon? Were you a person to Mapicc? Were you just a knife he could carve his name on? 

You always believed that you got separated from your old team by accident. The explanation is simple like that; a chaotic attack, dust everywhere, gunshots and screaming, and you standing there alone. Now you examine that belief. Once, an outlier. Twice, with Mapicc’s sneakers vanishing deliberately, and the signs start to point to you being the reason you’re always left behind.

The gun shakes in your hands. You raise it, aim as best as you can, and pull the trigger. 

Fuck what anyone would think. You’re not going to die to yourself. Maybe it’s idealistic, maybe you’re staring death down with rose-colored glasses and starry eyes, but you’re not walking yourself to your execution. If the heavens want you dead, they need to stain their own hands with your blood.

Whip-crack, sound taking flight in the sky, a beacon. 

A zombie collapses with a bullet ballooning in its forehead. 

You don’t bother trying to pull the trigger again, knowing there will only be the empty click of the hammer dropping in futility. You put the gun back in your holster instead and retrieve the three throwing weapons you have—a pair of scissors, a construction nail, and a throwing knife. These are the last projectiles you have. 

The scissors go first. You manage to lodge them in the chest of a zombie; this doesn’t stop it from advancing, but it slows it down. Then the nail, which gets extremely lucky and impales another zombie in its left eye. You don’t have the skill to do that on purpose. 

Last, the knife. This one is built to be thrown, to whirl through the air and find its target. You aim for one of the faster zombies—its heart. A bigger and more reasonable target than the eye. If you do it right, it’ll disturb its movement enough to make it a significantly easier target. 

You throw. It does land near the heart, but not as close as you hoped, and not as deep. Now you have three slowed-down zombies and six more normal ones to fight off with just your combat knife. 

This is not a battle you will win. You know that. The high of using your gun is draining, leaving you with unsteady legs and a hummingbird heart. You have nothing but the knife in your slippery palm and aching fingers. Even the fury that thrummed in your blood is abandoning you. You have only an ugly, clawing feeling that makes a home in your ribcage. 

You can envision how easily you will die if you try to attack them all with the knife. How you’ll trip and they’ll pile on top of you and this alley will become your tomb. 

You’ve been standing still for too long. 

The frontmost zombies make a grab for you. You stumble out of the way, reach half-blind for the rim of a nearby dumpster, and manage to hoist yourself in. The lid comes down when you yank it down with your fingertips, a slam that seems almost silent compared to the gunshots of earlier, yet sounds like a casket closing. 

You’re submerged in garbage bags. The smell forces you to clap a hand to your mouth; if you throw up now, it’ll make it worse. Your back bumps into what might be a molding watermelon, the curve of the rind softened by time and rot. You don’t want to find out what’s in the bags your boots are up against. 

The dumpster rattles as the knuckles and palms of the zombies outside slam onto its metal surface. You hear shuffling from above you, then what sounds like fingernails on plastic. 

The zombies are trying to pry open the dumpster lid. They know their food is in there.

You can’t keep closing the lid from the inside. You’ll have to stick your fingers out to do it, and that risks a zombie biting them. You just shift the trash bags into a pathetic shield between you and the lid. 

Is this what it’s like to be buried alive? You squeeze your eyes shut, unable to stand looking at the nebulous shapes that surround you, not wanting their blank colorlessness to be the last thing you see before you die. Because you’re going to die. Even the putrid air around you knows it, shoves the fact into your lungs with every short breath you take. You’ll run out of oxygen eventually. Then the zombies will force the lid open, paw through the garbage, fish you out and sink their diseased teeth into you.

You’re drowning on land. All the air in the world isn’t enough to fill your lungs; your breaths turn into pants turn into gasps and you can’t stop gulping for oxygen that isn’t there, but you can’t move and you can’t do anything about it because your skin is crawling with skittering bugs of flame made into an inferno by the stuffiness, and your heart has thrown all notion of a steady rhythm away and wants to crawl out of your throat and you can still hear the zombies outside trying to get you and you hear more of them coming and you can’t feel your legs anymore you can’t feel your arms all you can feel is the painful staccato of your heart and your chest is tying itself into knots oh good god you’re going to die you’re going to die alone buried here you miss your family you miss your teammates you hope they’re doing alright you even miss Mapicc because at least you wouldn’t be alone and your throat has closed completely and you can’t you need air you need to breathe you can’t breathe you open your eyes but there’s nothing to see you’re so alone even the garbage bags around you are gone there is static in your ears in your veins you’re burning alive is this what it feels like to burn alive because everything is so so so hot and yet you still can’t breathe you need to breathe you can’t breathe your heart misses two beats and comes back with a baseball bat everything hurts you’re on fire you’re drowning you’re going to die you can’t breathe you’re going to die you can’t breathe you’re going to die you can’t breathe you’re going to die you can’t breathe—

…

—you could be dead already. You don’t know anymore. Your hand finds something tangible but you have no idea if it’s truly there or not. You always thought there would be a waiting room before the true afterlife, whatever that means, but now you’re just…here, wherever here is. Your head hurts. When you think about it, everything hurts, in a distant way. Even your chest hurts, though you think your heart has stopped seizing. And your face is dry. 

Okay. You take an experimental breath. Your throat is scratchy, but doesn’t stop the breath from going through. You hate how much you rattle as you take the breath, though. 

If you can breathe, that probably means you’re not dead. 

“—here? Are you dead?” The voice blurs as you pick it up, process it. It sounds like it’s coming from underwater. It should be familiar. You should know who this is. 

Your brain catches up soon enough, brings you an image of a boy in an offensively red hoodie and cold eyes. Mapicc.

The fury comes back, but you find that pain outweighs it. It’s hard to muster up the dregs of your rage when you’re still buried alive and your very bones hurt. 

“If he’s dead, I don’t see his body,” Mapicc mutters. “Goddamit, I came all the way here.” 

You manage to put a hand to the dumpster and knock weakly. Mapicc’s movement outside stops when you do that. 

“Fuck, fuck— ” The lid of the dumpster flies open; fresh air tumbles in like a gift from the heavens, and from beneath all the bags of garbage, you gasp it down greedily. “You’re in here? ”

You nod, not caring if he sees it or not. You just can’t bring yourself to feel anything about it. 

The weight of the garbage bags covering you disappears as he pulls them aside with a grunt. You close your eyes again; the light is far too bright. 

“C’mon, we have to get out of here,” he insists. “That pile of zombies is gonna attract more of them.” 

You know you’re supposed to move. You can’t. 

He sighs. You can’t tell if it’s out of annoyance or something else, but the next moment there’s a hand on your arm dragging you up. You twitch at the sudden contact, but do your best to be a sack of potatoes while he hauls you out of the dumpster. 

He tosses you unceremoniously over his shoulder and hops down from the makeshift pile you assume he built to reach you in the first place. You dangle for a second, then decide to finally try using your limbs again. 

The ground feels too steady to your shaky legs, but at least you don’t fall over. You continue taking huge gulps of air. 

“Hey, you—”

You get a sudden rush of energy as your fury breaks through to the surface at the sound of his voice. You fling your arm forward, palm meeting his face with all the force you can muster. 

The resounding smack cuts cleanly through the air. He yelps in pain as his head snaps to the side. “Fuck, what the fuck—”

“You fucking left me to die, you scumbag!” Your voice ricochets off the walls like the gunshots from earlier. “I saved your life and you—you—” You stop because there’s the searing sensation of tears building up in your throat and cheeks and goddamn it if you’re going to cry again in front of him. 

He doesn’t respond. He’s looking off to the side, head still turned from your slap, baseball bat dangling in his hand. His cheek is already red. 

As fast as the fury came, it goes, sliding under your fatigue. You hunch your shoulders and wait for him to unfreeze. 

“Let’s go back,” He says, quietly. “We’re both gonna die if we stay here.”

That sounds like the best option right now. If he came back for you, he wouldn’t leave you again on the way, right? 

“Give me your bag. I can carry it.” His voice is still that unusual quiet volume. 

The you from just a day ago would’ve been so incredibly happy that he offered. The current you holds on tighter to the straps because if he has your bag, there’ll be nothing valuable on you to stop him from abandoning you again. 

He sees you tightening your grip. “You can carry it if you want. Let’s just get out of here.”

You nod. The alleyway smells like death. 

He doesn’t walk in front of you or behind you, but right next to you. Never more than two feet away, and you can feel his eyes occasionally coming back around to check on you. He shows you a ladybug and all it makes you think about is how he let go of your hand to save himself.

Your hand hesitates before you open the door to the base. His base. You don’t know if you should still call it your base and his base. 

You sit down on the couch, remember how you did the same thing right after you saved his life. How it felt like you’d proven yourself to be valuable enough to keep alive, to be his teammate. You’ve caught fresh meat, fended off zombies, helped him with everything, saved him, and it wasn’t enough. 

Maybe you’re just not enough. No matter what. 

Something hot falls onto your clenched hand. You startle and try to wipe the tears away, only to realize that he has his back turned. 

He sighs again, long and drawn-out, then turns around to look you in the eyes. “Listen here,” he says. “I…I heard the gunshots. All thirty of them. And then there wasn’t any sound, and then I heard something slam closed. I never heard you scream or anything. I’m—I’m going to say…I didn’t give you enough credit. Most people would’ve screamed or something.” 

You think he’s trying to apologize. It’s not good enough. Not even close to being good enough. 

“Is it too hard for you to say two words?” You snap. “No, scratch that. I don’t want your shitty apology. I want you to fix whatever’s fucked up in your head. You’re—you’re cold, you know that? You left me to get fucking buried alive. What’s next? You’re going to kill me yourself?” Your voice starts to warble; you force it down with a vicious kick. “Fix. Your. Shit. Don’t give me your half-assed words. Give me a fucking change. ”

He opens his mouth to retort, but you refuse to let him get a single word in. “And if I’m—if I’m the problem here, then why’d you stay teamed with me? Why did you let me think we could be friends? Tell me, Mapicc. Am I even a person to you?”

“Yeah, of course you are!” He exclaims. “Why—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up. Show me that’s what you think. Because it sure doesn’t fucking feel like that right now. I’m going to sleep.”

You flee up the stairs and barricade yourself in the room you’ve been using. On the way, you see him through the gaps in the railings. He slumps onto the couch, hands tangled in his black hair like a man not quite hunched in prayer.