"Feea betta now?" He slurred, a long tendril of bloody spit stretching from a wedge-shaped slice in his lip. Poke's mouth moved as if he were chewing a wad of gum, and then he spat a crimson mass of jelly onto the floor. Two broken, bloodied teeth skittered across the dirty wood like dice.
"Not really, no," Emmit mumbled, squeezing his throbbing wrist. His hand felt like a pouch of broken glass. "You're still alive."
Poke chortled wetly, rolling over onto his back in front of the fire. He swallowed blood repeatedly, his Adam's apple sliding back and forth as if it were pacing the hallway of his throat. He folded his hands behind his head and crossed his feet, smiling even as fresh blood trickled down his cheek and pattered on the floor.
"Roy should be back any time," Poke said, and something about his tone, the smugness and arrogance of it, made Emmit look up from his swelling wrist and blackened palms. His belly filled with ice water. He felt the way he always did when a cop pulled him over, inundated with the blood chilling dread that spread like frost on a windowpane all throughout his abdomen. The feeling that he would soon be in deep trouble. Deep shit, as the cool kids liked to say.
Christ, what have I done?
* * *
Emmit stood in front of the cabin door, tiny wisps of steam curling off his head and shoulders like trailing ribbons. He wasn't even cold. He knew that this was a great way to get himself sick, but he had no shits left to give on that particular evening. The cold air felt like firefighting helicopters dousing a raging wildfire with cool, clear lake water.
He stooped and grabbed a handful of snow from the ground, packed it into a loose ball, and pressed his throbbing hand against it. His fingers wiggled feebly, one by one. He didn't think it was broken, but he would be feeling the beat down he had given Poke for days to come.
Emmit knuckled his foggy glasses up onto the bridge of his nose and squinted into the trees, cocking his head slightly to listen. As the sky faded into a bruised purple, lined with streaks of gold like veins of ore in a cave wall, a different array of stars began to twinkle like a multitude of eyes opening from their day's slumber. The wind gusted here and there, moaning through the branches and birthing more of the tiny whirling tornadoes. They chased each other in haphazard zig zags before being obliterated by stronger wind gusts, only to be reborn a few feet further away.
Everyone is dead.
The thought stalked out of his subconscious and didn't feel like it was his own. If they had run across the same horde his team had, or maybe an even bigger one, it wasn't too far-fetched. It was hard to fathom the thought of big, powerful, terrifying Roy being brought down by anything so simple and weak as a zombie. But it was classic zombie knowledge, wasn't it? They were never a threat, in the movies anyway, unless you got swarmed.
That got him to thinking, and he froze in the process of reaching for more snow for his bruised knuckles.
If I go at night, and if I'm careful... really careful, there's no way they could catch me. They don't run. They're slow as hell. If they're spread apart, I could just walk right between them...
He gazed into the foreboding twilight shadows of the tree line, trying to imagine himself traipsing through it in the dead of a moonless winter night. Looking at it from the safety of the cabin gave him the queer sensation of standing on a half-sunken ship or maybe a small rock, a tiny safe zone, while sharks circled and waited patiently for him to slip. It was strange to him to think of the woods beyond the cabin as enemy territory. In his old life, his old time, the woods were something to casually admire in the fall, or a place to take Deek for a hike when the weather was warm, and the forecast didn't call for storms. But here, in this place, everything that wasn't the safety of Roy's cabin had to be treated like shark-infested waters. A no man's land.
He thought, with a satisfied smile, of Poke rolling around in front of the fire, nursing his freshly rearranged face.
Maybe the cabin isn't such a safe place after all, E.
He shrugged in response to himself. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't, but until he saw the mysterious light for himself and had proof that it was real, the cabin and its motley crew of survivors were the best hope he had of surviving long enough to ever hug his son again.
A lump rose in his throat as he imagined hugging his boy close to his body, feeling his small muscles and bones constricting gently in his arms, smelling the blue raspberry scent of his hair. Shampoo that only a child could appreciate bathing in, and only a parent could appreciate smelling. The world around him responded to his fresh round of tears in its usual uncaring fashion; a gust of wind that whistled and moaned, the crack and rattle of dead branches, the whisper of snow devils living their short lives around him.
"I'm coming back," he muttered, his throat clicking. "I'm coming back or I'm going to die trying, Deacon."
The cold was finally catching up to him as his
