The first time she saw one, she didn’t scream. It was pitiful really; she had been too terrified to scream.

By the time she saw one, of course, she’d already known about the threat. The police (or the government or just smart locals, she still wasn’t sure) had come to their house and had herded them (her and her brothers and her mother, they had all been together then) all out into the street. They’d joined the crowd that flowed slowly-but-surely in the direction they needed to go. Huge black vans broke the stream, driving in the opposite direction. Men peered out of the drivers’ windows, with cold faces and colder eyes. A few had guns mounted at the tops, manned by people far too grim to be police. They appeared so infrequently that no one paid them any attention. Instead, the crowd focused on the reason they were being carted away. The word came from the friend of a friend who knew an officer who heard it from his boss, and it passed from lip to lip, from mind to mind, until the steady river became a raging hurricane that beat at buildings and small children and screamed one word to the sky with raw throats.

She saw humans kill humans long before she saw the zombies do it. She’d shielded her brothers’ eyes and screamed loud enough to drown out the gunshots, but she was sure that something broke within her at that moment. In her dreams she was always standing there, and it was just her alone, shielding her brother’s eyes, watching that body fall. After that first time, she stopped screaming.

By the time she finally saw one in the flesh, the bloodbath had ended. It was pure chance. Separated from their parents, she and her brothers shuffled through the line into what had been hastily repurposed into a government shelter. They were pushing them to go faster, there wasn’t much time, the sun was going down and they come at night.

She’d turned her head and by chance had seen it, a lone figure that walked with a terrifyingly deliberate gait. She knew it from her nightmares, and in her mind it was not down the road, a safe distance away, but just in front of her, and its hands were on her throat. It squeezed and squeezed until she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to run, but it would not release her, not until the officer came and put his hand on her shoulder and gently shoved her and her phantom assailant back into the line.

They looked much just like ordinary people at first. The fresh-dead had no rot or grime on them, not yet, only the gaping, bloodless holes that had felled them, or the pale, ragged gashes that had turned them. Or often both. Somehow, that made them so much more terrifying. They looked like normal humans, moved at first like normal humans.

Once she found her family, her broken, hostile family whose differences seemed so petty and stupid now, it all fell into place. She was volunteered to work for their food and shelter, to represent them in front of the officers. It was no different from usual, really. She worked all day, was so nervous she couldn’t eat, and came home to a house still close to falling apart.

One day after her duty, she found a corner far away from anyone, and she pulled the gun from her jacket. She’d gotten it a little over a year ago, a gift from a well-meaning relative who approved of her love of firearms and decided she needed one of her very own. She’d used to look at it and appreciate what it could have been for her, but until now she’d never truly considered it a viable option. Now, it seemed the only option she had. The metal on her skin, cool and heavy and unyielding, gave her more comfort than any embrace, promise, or wall ever could. It promised her the safety that nothing else could.

An officer walked by, and called for her to help carry these boxes to the square. She’d stashed the gun again in her jacket, but from that moment on, it was her constant companion.

The first week, the days and nights were deafening from the sounds of cowardice. Not many people could shoot themselves, but the human mind was extremely resourceful when it came to death. The shelter stank of corpses for a few days, until some poor soul turned inside the shelter and the officers took to burning the bodies as soon as they were found. Then it smelled of burnt meat and copper.

The opportunity for her never came. Disaster after miniature disaster demanded her immediate attention, and she told herself every time, “Next time we settle down, next time we settle down, next time we settle down, I’ll do it…”

After we get to the shelter, I’ll do it. After we get out of the shelter, I’ll do it. As soon as Thomas is safe...as soon as we find Miss Morton...as soon as Thomas is safe . . .

Seven months had passed, the scenery had changed drastically, and her every attempt at escape had either been put off until the immediate crisis had passed or interrupted by a problem that cropped up without warning.

Who knew suicide would be such a goddamned inconvenience.

It didn’t look like she’d be getting another chance anytime soon. David needed her to help wrangle the kids and manage the food. Ever since they’d found the bus, things had gotten simultaneously easier and harder. On one hand, they had more room, better protection, and all that good stuff. But on the other, they had more gas to find, more mouths to feed, and one of the tires looked worryingly frayed. If it went out, they were thoroughly fucked. They’d only grabbed a few extra tires before leaving the city, and those were used already.

As if all of that wasn’t bad enough, now they were chasing rumors. It wasn’t like she was against the idea of settling down somewhere; hell, she’d probably give her left leg to have a proper bed again, or even a proper bedroom. She jumped at the thought of a proper place to settle. It was just...the source was less than trustworthy and had them trekking through the second most nerve-wracking stretch of land she could imagine traversing.

They’d brought on a bunch of new faces a few towns back. She’d been against it at first, because of how low supplies were running, but David pointed out that they needed the extra guns, the manpower. Anyway, one of the new people, a woman with a five-year-old daughter and a voice like broken glass, had told them of a sanctuary up north, out in the middle of nowhere. That’s where she was going, she explained to them. She’d heard there were hundreds of people there already, but not nearly enough yet for them to turn anyone away. They had medicine and some kind of giant farm with animals and a whole lot of guns. And a wall. She had been very excited about the wall.

“Is it a government shelter?” David’d asked, and his grip on the wheel had tightened. She’d tried to stay nonchalant behind him, but she ended up glaring at the woman until she stuttered on her answer.

The woman insisted it was nothing like that, and after that it had only taken a few more minutes to convince Dave to turn the bus around and take the highway north. They’d gotten a map from an abandoned gas station, and after a full day of arguing and pointing and threatening and tension near to violence, they’d hit the road with a destination in mind. They’d been on the road for half a day already, and the mood of the bus was tense and anticipatory. No one really knew what to expect, but they all knew what to hope for.

Before shit had gone down, she’d loved looking out the window and watching the world go by. Now she couldn’t stand it. Unless she was driving she sat with her head between her knees and her gun clutched to her chest, finger on the trigger promising relief if the panic got too bad. It wasn’t as terrible as the first time she’d ever seen one, but she was far from the tough, unshakeable heroine the movies had promised she would be by this point.

The bus bounced terribly. She grimly entertained herself with the thought that they had run over another body. If Justine was driving, it was likely. Justine took her own terror and turned it into extreme caution, which in turn became a fanatical zeal for being thorough, which all culminated in her running over bodies with a joy that was two high-pitched giggles away from being dangerous.

She sat with her back to the emergency door, and just like she did every time, she told herself every few minutes that the door was thicker and stronger than the rest of the bus. Every now and then something like a rock would bounce against the door and she’d jerk so badly her head would spin. She told herself that it was just a rock, that they were probably miles from the nearest town and the survivors nearest them probably took care of all the walkers anyway. Hot tears splashed against her hand and ping!ed off the gun.

She wondered if water somehow made guns stop working. She hoped not.

“Why’d’ya sit like that?”

It took every ounce of her strength to pick her head up. It was partially fear, but it was also partially habit. The boy sitting across from her had only been with them a little over a week, plenty of time to prove he wasn’t infected or crazy. He’d been watching them all very closely, which she could hardly blame him for. This was the first time they’d spoken since she voted against letting him and his guardian join the group. He was too young to hold grudges...probably. He couldn’t have been older than nine. His eyes were light brown, but any similarities between them ended there. He was far darker than her, far younger than her, and a whole hell of a lot braver than her. He sat loosely with his limbs sprawled out, and he stared out the window without fear.

“You stupid?” he asked, and she tried to be offended. She failed spectacularly. It was hard to take offense at being called “stupid” when it came from a kid that was at least half her age. If anything, it was amusing.

“No.” She adjusted herself to look a bit more presentable, wrapping her arms around her knees and hugging them to her chest. “I’m not stupid.” On the contrary, she considered herself very smart. Very practical. She always had been, really.

His eyes darted immediately to the gun, and he didn’t relax when she waved it nonchalantly in an attempt to be comforting.

“Don’t worry, it’s not for you,” she said, her voice morbidly chipper. “The gun, I mean.”

He sneered, a cruel expression on his young face. “No crap,” he said. “It’s for them. Course.”

She wanted to contradict him, but she’d lived nineteen years in a world where suicide and cuss words and violence weren’t the kind of things you discussed with anyone under the age of thirteen. So instead she just rested her chin on her knees and tried not to look at the windows. There was nothing out there but tall yellow grass and occasionally a dilapidated building, abandoned years before. They were traveling through...probably Wyoming? Someone had mentioned it, when they passed the state line, but she hadn’t really listened. She was trying to block everything out. The silence bothered her almost as much as the noise did. They hadn’t passed any towns or buildings in a while, and they hadn’t run across any wanderers either. But the wide, motionless expanse of the field beside the road was almost more terrifying than the crowds.

She shivered. Unwanted, images came to her mind of her first terrified flight through the city, dragging her brother behind her and praying they just made it around the next corner. When she inhaled, she could smell it, fire and blood and rot, and her throat closed. The tremors in her legs began anew and it became a struggle to move her fingers. Her vision began blurred with tears she didn’t have the presence of mind to wipe away.

“You’re one of them that’s scared, right?” the boy said, with something like a sneer.

She used to imagine lying, when people asked her stuff like that, but she knew they saw through her. So she just nodded as best she could with her chin on her knees. He stared at her a moment, blank-faced. Awkwardly, then, he reached out and patted her hand.

“It’s okay,” he said seriously. “My daddy says any zombie comes close to the bus, he’ll chop their head right off.” When she didn’t look immediately pacified, he added, “You can hide behind him, if ya like. He won’t mind. He likes protecting pretty girls.”

She smiled shakily, though she imagined it looked more unhinged than grateful. She had never been in complete control of her facial features. “Thank you for the offer,” she said as seriously as she could. “Tell your dad I said thanks, too.”

He nodded, very serious, and wandered off again. He sat with the other children, who screamed and laughed and hung and climbed over the bus seats like this was a school field trip rather than a desperate bid for their lives. Their shrieking was like sandpaper rubbing at her skin, stabbing through her ears into her mind. She knew better by now than to think that covering her ears would help, but she did it anyway. She dug her fingers into her temples and tried to breathe.

She spent half of the trip in the fetal position, clawing at her head, and the other half pacing up and down the bus trying to shake off the cramps in her legs. When they stopped for a bathroom break, she was put on sentry duty atop the bus, with a few of the kids around with her. She spent half the time watching the horizon, terrified of what she’d see, and the other half watching the children, convinced one of them was going to fall at any moment. Every time she blinked, a different scenario played out in her mind, each more grisly and improbable than the last.

“Maybe we should settle down here,” David suggested, though it didn’t sound like he was giving that option much thought. He’d been intent on getting to the public shelter since he’d heard of it. She’d never seen such focus in his eyes.

He was sitting on the hood of the bus, looking to the horizon with his hand shielding his eyes...which was stupid, considering the sunglasses perched in his mess of blond hair. The squint of his eyes and the thoughtful frown on his face made him look a much grimmer man. He was the leader of the group, or at least of all the original group. He had been the one responsible for getting them out of the government shelter...and he’d personally helped her out a great deal more than that. He had that quiet assurance that he always knew what he was doing, and that inspired confidence in others. He had an impressive array of weapons too, which was probably the main reason they’d all survived this long. Seven months and only two deaths were not bad statistics.

“It’s so wide and open,” he said. “We’d see them coming for miles. Plenty of sunshine, but it’s not too hot. Not yet, anyhow. It’s only, what...March?”

She ignored him at first. She knew he wanted her to agree with him, but in truth the open space made her feel light-headed. She’d spent part of her life in a place a lot like this, but she’d spent most of those years inside. The open prairie had been terrifying at first, and then beautiful, and then terrifying again. “Maybe. There ain’t a way to get supplies though,” she pointed out. “I don’t think anyone of us are smart enough to know how to get anything to grow out here. Unless you like the taste of yucca and rattlesnake.”

Wait...could you eat rattlesnake?

“Also winters are, like...super bad out here. Without some shelter and a lot of heat, we’d probably freeze to death,” she added as an afterthought, thinking of a childhood of snow drifts as tall as houses.

“Ain’t?” David repeated. “Sounds like Lil’s rubbin’ off on ya.” He spoke in an exaggerated southern accent and chuckled at his own wit. He shot her a wink...and kept winking, alternating eyes until she broke into nervous giggles. He didn’t bring up the subject of settling after that, neither here nor at the shelter. When they got back in the bus, he sat behind her while she drove, making comments occasionally on their surroundings. She struggled to focus on both his voice and the road, feeling overwhelming guilt and anxiety when concentrating on one drowned out the other.

She was truly blessed for David’s presence. He was the most patient with her, even though he had absolutely no right to be. He let her keep her brother, and he let her keep her gun. That was a whole hell of a lot more than she’d expected from anyone, and it was definitely a whole hell of a lot more than she deserved.

“I spy...something...blue,” David drawled slowly.

She sighed. “The sky?” she ventured, only half-invested in this game. Putting her attention three places at once was next to impossible.

“Nah, nah...try again.” She could hear the grin in his voice, and if she wasn’t driving, she’d probably smack him. Prick.

“Um...your own eye,” she guessed again.

“Damn...got me again.” His eyes were on the rearview mirror, and though he had indeed been looking at himself a moment before, now his attention was focused on the horizon behind them. He looked behind them as intently as she looked ahead. The alert, half-crazed look in their eyes didn’t match the casual tone of their voices, and it hadn’t for half a year and more.

She rolled her eyes. “Fine. My turn then.” Her voice shook. When she blinked, she saw rapidfire images of their deaths, by car, by zombie, by each other. Her chest began to feel tight. “I spy…”

She was so focused on the sound of his voice and the tedium of their game that she almost missed the creepers. She saw them a fraction of a second before she heard David’s intake of breath, a full two seconds before she felt his hand drop onto her shoulder. He squeezed so hard her hand began to tingle...or that may just have been her.

She slammed on the brakes so hard the bus gave a shriek of protest before bending to her will. The whole bus rocked forward. Her chest collided with the steering wheel and David collided with the back of her chair. She knew there was some kind of signal she was supposed to say (after half a year of this, of course there was a signal), but all that came out of her mouth was a scream that abruptly died out into a whimper. All pretendings of higher thought fled from her mind. She was sure someone was probably yelling at her, but her world narrowed into a black tunnel with the walking corpses at its end. Her left hand gripped the wheel so tightly she couldn’t feel her fingers, and her right fumbled and shook as she grabbed and scratched at her seatbelt, belatedly remembering that she hadn’t actually put it on. All she could hear was short squawking squeaks she realized were her own sharp intakes of breath.

She didn’t really climb out of the bus. David shoved her out of the bus, and he practically threw her onto the hood. It was difficult to clamber up to the top with a gun and a bag strapped to her back, and after all this time it hadn’t gotten any easier. She almost slipped, and her knee hit the corner of the windshield. The pain shocked her just enough to get her the rest of the way up. She wanted to curl into a ball, to wait it out until they climbed atop the bus and began to devour her alive. But David was shouting at her, and she couldn’t disobey him.

As soon as she was stable atop the bus, David hoisted the kids up after her. The first up was Thomas and the last was the new kid. They gathered in a disturbingly calm circle away from the edge of the roof, holding each other and keeping quiet, sensing the severity of the situation. All except Thomas. He clung to her legs and started crying when she didn’t pick him up in lieu of holding her shotgun. An animal instinct deep within her screamed at her to smack him, to shove him, to do anything to keep him quiet. Noise attracted the predators. She smothered it in horror and settled for reaching down every now and then to stroke his head. Then, they were too close, and she had to hold her gun in earnest.

It took her a moment to get her guns situated: she had to stash the pistol in her jacket and find a comfortable position to hold the shotgun. She held her aim as steadily as she could, which wasn’t terribly steady. Being a good shot these days was a matter of life and death, and she was amazed she wasn’t dead. She tried to coach herself the way David did, firm and confident. Breathe in, aim. Breathe out, fire. Breathe in, aim. Breathe out, fire.

She tried to conjure up some sense of satisfaction when they fell, a good distance away, but all she could think was, “Shoot them again!” She didn’t trust the twice-dead corpses to stay that way. She was hyper-aware of David’s eye on her (she imagined it, actually), harsh and disapproving. She missed her first shot. Stupid girl. She tried not to cry, and she probably failed. Every time there was a pause in her fire, she had to resist the urge to pitch forward, anxiety hitting her like a bullet in the back. She could feel their hands around her ankles, could feel their teeth in her flesh. In her mind, they were sharp, like bits of broken glass.

They had this down to a science now. Most of them focused their fire out front, where they actually saw the zombies, and she and the others with better vision (or glasses) kept an eye around them for ambushes or looters. If any got too close, there was Justine with her giant stick and the new guy with his hatchet. She’d used to be on the ground with them, as part of the “firing squad,” but after her third panic attack, David’d banished her to the top of the bus with the children, no longer able to reason away her terror as rookie’s nerves. She’d actually done better up here anyway. There was nothing quite like a shotgun.

Just hearing them drove her almost to tears. When a few stragglers tried to attack from the left, she raised her gun so stiffly that she worried for a moment that her joints might break, snapping from sheer pressure. She tried to tell herself that she was a machine, a robot who felt nothing at all, but her heart was beating so hard that her chest had begun to burn and it broke the illusion. She had to hold her breath to keep her gun from shaking with every shot. All she could see was the shambling gait, all she could hear was the feral moaning, all she could feel was the painful shock of the recoil. Even the crying of the children faded to nonexistence. Even after the gunfire and the screaming stopped, she stayed there, kneeling with one hand around her shotgun and one tucked into her jacket. The cool metal of the gun was kind of comforting in the most morbid way.

She didn’t take up driving again after that. She was almost crawling by the time she made it to her spot by the emergency door. Her legs refused to obey her when she told them to curl up, to let her retreat into herself. She sat stiffly, her chest open and vulnerable, her front completely exposed, her legs twitching and spread open. Thomas, of course, took this as an invitation, and climbed into her lap almost the second she sat down. In her selfish and twisted way, she comforted herself by thinking of him as a shield between her and all the monsters who would hurt her. Immediately, she felt guilty, and wrapped her stiff arms around him. No. It was the other way around, she thought. Surely the only reason God had let her live this long this scared was so she could protect him.

She wished she had but she had yet to get past the shame of crying every time that happened. She tried to keep it quiet, but her panicked gasps were pretty much the only sound to be heard in the bus for at least an hour. She tried to muffle them against Thomas’s shoulder or back, but he squirmed and twisted so much it was a lost cause. When he finally climbed off, bored of her, she called forth the will to pull her knees to her chest and buried her face between them. It took her a few minutes to get herself calmed down enough to get back up and drive, but David sent her away.

“That wasn’t as bad as last time,” French commented that night over dinner, and he smiled at her. She reached over and wiped some chocolate off the corner of his mouth. His smile widened. “Thanks. I’m proud of you, though, ma bichie.”

He said that happy shit to everyone, no matter how small or insignificant their accomplishment, but that was as close to positive reinforcement as she was going to get. She squeezed his hand and thanked him silently with a smile. She hadn’t found her voice yet.

“And you’re eating tonight as well!” He grinned, a genuine, comforting expression. “The miracles shall never end!”

Her gratitude shriveled up a little bit. The sweet taste on her tongue turned sour, and suddenly she was eating sawdust. As soon as he turned away, she slid the bar over to Thomas.

They actually had some real food this month, but for tonight, they’d voted on granola bars nonetheless. They were a bit stale, but the bus got cold enough that they weren’t too bad. Most of the more perishable foods (very little of what they salvaged was perishable) were stored on top of the bus in big bags tethered down by more trustworthy individuals than she. The rest was stashed under the seats in big coolers or just cardboard boxes if they needed more space. The water was in the middle of the bus under the seats.

It was easier to sit in the seats when she was eating. It was also easier to eat when she was sitting in a seat. Each act distracted her from the other, and made the whole thing easier...or so she told herself in theory. In practice, her legs locked up when she sat and her mouth was dry. But she had no choice. Thomas refused to eat without her, so she had to sit with him in one of the actual seats. She took the window seat as a rule (she hadn’t un-convinced herself yet that one of them wasn’t going to leap at the window and break it), and when she was feeling particularly brave, she would actually sit with her back to the glass. Today, she sat with her back firmly against the seat, her knees pulled to her chest, keeping half an eye on the unmoving plain out the window. Thomas sat so close to her that she could smell the dirt in his hair. She took the first tiny bite of his dinner, like she had since he was a baby, and then passed it to him. Every now and then, he’d pull on her sleeve and she’d lean over and take another little bitty nibble. He needed the reminder, she guessed, that it was still safe. Or maybe he was just like everyone else, shoving food on her at every opportunity.

The newcomers sat across from them after a few minutes. The boy didn’t talk to Thomas or to her, but he kept looking at her strangely. After about ten minutes of it, the man beside him spoke up. When he did, it was the question she probably least wanted to answer.

“Why didn’t you use your gun?”

She knew what he was talking about, but she bought herself a few seconds to compose herself by stuttering out a, “What?”

He was a grim man at first glance and also in person; he was the kind of man you’d expect David to be, with no patience or tolerance for those who were obviously the weakest link (i.e., her). He already looked annoyed with the conversation, as if her apparent lack of preparation was a personal affront. Her lack of a prompt answer had his eyes narrowed and his mouth pinched like he’d licked a lemon. He was looking pointedly at her lap, at the gun that, unless someone pointed it out, she would easily forget was there. Its weight was so familiar to her that she swore she had little dips on the tops of her thighs.

“It would’ve taken you a few seconds to draw that gun,” he pointed out. “And I know you can’t be shit with it. Mr. Connor wouldn’t put you up to guard the kids if he didn’t trust your aim. Why’d you waste all that time taking out the shotgun? More power, sure, but...”

She took a few seconds to compose herself, putting extra effort into chewing the last bite of her granola bar. She licked her lips and her teeth and rubbed the chills off her arms. Then, she picked up the pistol. When she’d first gotten it, it had been awkward and unwieldy in her hands, another source of anxiety. Now it was as easy to hold as Thomas’s hand, and fit in hers much better. “It’s only got one bullet,” she explained. “And this bullet’s not for them.” Out of habit, she said it with a slight accent, a slight rasp in her voice, designed to entertain.

Beside her, Thomas brightened at the words and grabbed her arm tightly. “Pirates!” he exclaimed in delight, and she nodded at him, pasting the most radiant smile she could manage onto her face. He returned it before polishing off his own granola bar and setting to the very important task of licking the sticky from his fingers. She rubbed at the sticky residue he left on her arm until her skin was red and itchy.

“Yeah, baby, it’s Pirates!” she agreed and looked back at the man. She knew it was really rude not to remember his name, but she expected him to leave the second they got to the shelter, if they got there at all. It had started with a G, she was pretty sure...in her mind, he was Grim.

She hoped he...Grim...would just magically get the picture, because she really hated explaining this part. People always asked her to explain it, and it was so hard to explain an issue so nuanced and intricate. It was a concept she had spent literally years rationalizing and realizing, until it had become almost a person itself with such complexities. It wasn’t just a plan or a way out...it was an irrefutable fact, like gravity. It was like trying to explain to someone why you hated chocolate or why you liked the color blue. It was simply the truth of your being. This was just the truth of her. Her cowardice and her weakness, consolidated into one alleged act.

His expression, if it was possible, got even more sour. His eyes flashed with judgment or disapproval or some other emotion she was going to pretend she didn’t care about. “One bullet,” he stated blandly, “for the both of you.”

“Nooo.” She drummed her fingers on her lap. Out of habit, her voice dropped to a whisper and her eyes darted between the two children. She hated talking about this. She was grateful he was quick to take the hint, though. The word “suicide” was one she hated. “Just for me,” she admitted. “I’m not like...I’ll never abandon him, though. Thomas has to be taken care of.” She dipped her head. “That’s the rule. That’s the only way I can...do it.”

He looked from her to her brother with a special kind of disdain. Thomas was twelve years younger and ten shades lighter than she was, and the familial resemblance between them was minimal. They had their mother’s eyes, probably, if one was willing to ignore that hers were brown and his green. She was pretty used to getting strange looks when she claimed him by blood, and some part of her was annoyed that even in the goddamn aftermath of the goddamn zombie apocalypse, people still had the gall to judge her mother, and by extension her children, for choices that barely affected them at all. Or they assumed she had just adopted him after the whole collapse of civilisation thing, but she hated that even more.

“He’s my half-brother, technically,” she offered helpfully, in the tone of voice she hoped dared him to say something confrontational. “He’s the only other member of our family who made it out.”

“Out?” His expression shifted into something not quite as harsh. It was almost sympathetic...better than disdain, but she didn’t know what to do with it any more.

“Of the shelter.” She glanced back to David, who was sitting with Justine and Manning, talking about gas or food or something equally important. (She felt a bit guilty for not sitting with them and helping. She was an adult, after all. But days like today, she knew she was more hindrance than anything else. She could feel her voice trembling.) Their backstory was not precisely a secret, but David never really brought it up and some people, she knew, would respond less than favorably to the truth of their plight.

She decided hesitantly that a little information couldn’t possibly hurt. She wouldn’t tell him everything (she wasn’t stupid), but maybe...just enough to satisfy his curiosity.

He was still looking at her, expectant and obviously not used to being kept waiting. He had folded his arms across his chest.

“We, uh...me and Thomas and David and Manning and Lopez and all the rest,” she clarified, “...we all came from one of the government shelters in Texas.” She waited to see his reaction before telling him the next part, and her heart sank a little bit when his expression brightened, the lightest bit. Well, that left out telling the truth then. He was patriotic.

“Which one?” he asked, the hint of eagerness in his eyes crushing her spirit even more. Some people saw the shelters as nothing but good, a sign of a higher power looking out for them. Those people usually weren’t from government shelters.

“Houston.” She choked on the word.

“Ah. You guys leave because of overpopulation? Like too many mouths to feed?” he asked, nodding to himself. He took a bite of his granola bar, and she tried not to watch his mouth while he chewed. “I didn’t think they’d be heartless enough to kick out a bunch’a kids, though.” He spit when he talked. She winced and had to resist the urge to wipe imagined saliva from her front.

“It was kinda like that, I guess?” she offered, torn between her sense of self-preservation and her desire to tell the truth. “We all left together, but we’ve all got people we had to leave behind. Like, Manning left his little girl and Ghaliya left her wife and I left practically my whole damn family. The ones that...survived, anyway.” She hadn’t been intending to, but her voice had gotten higher, her words more rushed, the longer she talked. She couldn’t recall the events perfectly (even now her memory was poor), but she remembered distantly the terror, the constant hunger and paranoia and pain. She remembered why they’d left, and how much it’d hurt to do so. “We’re all sticking together, even if this shelter turns out to be alright. We, uh...we’ve seen some shit together, you know? We’re a family now.” Her gaze traveled unerringly to the gun in her lap, half-obscured now by Thomas, who had decided her lap made a really great pillow. Her fingers twitched, alternating between stroking his hip and stroking the barrel of the gun.

“I can respect that.” For the first time he didn’t sound completely disgusted with her. “Who knows I couldn’t leave my little boy.” He didn’t look at his son once when he said it. “Not even for all the trouble he is.” He laughed grimly and she smiled purely to be polite. Her mouth hurt.

“It’s been pretty rough with this one too.” She rested her chin briefly on Thomas’s head. She wished, not for the first time, that he was capable of sitting still. His weight and warmth was comforting when he wasn’t headbutting her or elbowing her in the stomach.

“I imagine so.” He stroked at his chin. “Can’t be easy keeping a kid...especially not when you’re a kid yourself.”

“Specially cause you’re one of them’s that’s scared!” his charge piped up helpfully.

She tried not to glare at the kid. She failed. “I’m nineteen,” she defended herself obstinately. “And I wasn’t much of a kid before anyways, I mean…” She trailed off, uncertain as always how to explain away her entire life and all its cruelties and unique circumstances. At the time, they’d consumed her; the petty abuses and mental defects she’d suffered had ruled her life. They hardly seemed relevant now, though. Months later, she still wasn’t sure how to consolidate it all into words, not in a way anyone understood. How did she explain that the fear had been inside her long before the dead rose?

She was saved from having to figure it all out by Willem, thrusting his presence as usual in the midst of them, all bravado and noise. He announced himself with a heavy stomping gait, developed, he claimed, specifically to warn her of his approach. He ruffled Thomas’s hair roughly and made a far-too-eager attempt to do the same to her. He sat down heavily on the seat next to her, slung his arm across the back of her seat, and grinned at the man across from her. He introduced himself and without further preamble dragged the man into a debate about...something disgustingly masculine. His voice, loud and high, grated on her nerves with every excited fluctuation. Its pitch set her heart pounding and the adrenaline in her system, with nowhere to go, manifested in the trembling of her fingers and the urge to commit acts of violence against everyone close.

Though he was annoying, Willem kept his hand hovering just behind her head. Every now and then he would stroke the top of her head or tug at her bun, reassuring himself (and her) that she was alright. He let Thomas crawl into his lap, and wrangled the boy far better with one arm than she could’ve done with eight. He spoke casually to their guest, conversing easily in that way she never could, even before.

“She says you all left the shelter together?”

Willem looked at her for a fraction of a second out of the corner of his eye. He nodded. “Yeah, yeah. We had a pretty shit time of it, too. We’ve been on the road since then. Hell, we’ve only had the bus what...a couple weeks?”

He looked to her for confirmation, but she just shrugged helplessly. Until his eyes found hers, she’d known the answer, but it fled her mind as soon as the spotlight fell on her. She recalled oral exams and pop quizzes she’d failed because the weight of eyes on her left her robbed of the ability to speak.

Luckily, Willem only dragged her into the conversation the one time. Every other time she was addressed, he answered for her, and she made a show of being offended.

They left her alone after a little while, and she was so relieved she wanted to cry. Willem even took Thomas away for a little bit, letting him play with the other kids while he kept half an eye on him. In this, at least, she had improved: she trusted other people with her brothers now.

She spent the next hour or so just calming down, letting the quiet soothe her as much as she could be soothed anymore. Even before everything’d gone to shit, she hadn’t been one for lots of noise and interaction. She got overwhelmed too easily. If she really thought about it, David was the only reason she was still alive. Weak as she was, she would’ve been offed by a guard or a walker months ago. It was a simultaneously depressing and uplifting thought.

She retreated to the emergency door seat again, stretching out with her head against the metal. It was impossible to find a comfortable position there, but fuck if she wasn’t going to try. After a good ten minutes of valiant effort, she sat up, pulling Thomas, who had begun to doze off, onto her lap. She bounced him gently on her knee (no small feat, considering), hoping the repetitive motion would lull him all the way to sleep. He fell hard on familiar bruises and bumps and bones, sending jolts of achy pain into her hips and spine. His head was a heavy weight on her chest, making breath even more difficult. She didn’t push him off until he slid down so that he was laying across her lap. She woke him up twice trying to find a comfortable for the two of them to lay down across the seat. She finally settled with her on her side and him in front. One arm was providing him a (bony) pillow, and the other was tucked against her chest. She was sure the gun wasn’t any more comfortable for him than for her, but he eventually got used to it and went back to sleep.

She stayed awake for hours afterwards. She hated laying down on the bus while it was moving. It made her slightly nauseous and the sound of the tires and the rocks hitting its belly were magnified in her ear, drowning out almost everything else. Her mind, unaware of what was going on outside, helpfully provided images of walkers watching them drive past, processing in their animalistic minds (she could not stomach the idea of them being anything less than feral) the pros and cons of chasing after them. She ran her fingers over the side of the gun. Eventually, they stopped, and her paranoia shot through the roof. Every time she closed her eyes, a walker lunged, and every time she opened them, she saw monsters in the shadows. Her mind raced, too tired to come up with plausible situations, but succeeding in terrifying her with implausible ones anyway.

The cries of crickets and wild animals seemed cacophonous at first, but barely any time seemed to have passed before they lulled her to sleep.

When she woke, she was upright again. The bus was again on the move. Thomas was sprawled across her lap and her foot was asleep. French was shaking her shoulder roughly, eyes red and blurry from a sleep he’d woken from just as harshly.

“Up, up, pretty girl!” he whispered urgently.

“Are we there y--already?” She tried to sit up without waking Thomas, pushing and pulling his limp form around in an amusing game of ragdoll.

His lips pursed briefly at her little humor, but the amusement fled his face before it could even take a proper hold. He nodded without speaking.

We made it...the shelter.

Her lack of excitement was reflected in his grim face. Neither of them knew what to expect, and without expectation, there was no hope. In her, there was only anxiety. And in he...well, she couldn’t judge anyone else’s emotions.

“We’ve stopped, and David’s talking to the guards...they’re askin’ all them with children to come out first.” He grimaced. “That’s you, pretty girl.”

She felt the blood leave her face as a million situations, each more dismal than the last, played out in her mind. French pulled at her shoulder one more time urgently. She nudged Thomas urgently, and he responded only with a grumpy groan and a slap.

“Just...get him out there,” Frenched urged, and his voice became slightly sharp with panic. This sign of distress magnified her own. “Don’t worry about him sleeping, I’m sure he’ll go back down. It’ll be alright. David will...he’ll protect us...he will. He’ll protect you.”

The only thing that could inspire that particular note of fear to enter French’s voice was guns, so she hauled Thomas up to her shoulder without further hesitation and half-staggered to the front door. Sleep pulled at her eyelids the first few steps, but when she caught sight of the tense situation outside, she was as alert as she could be. Her arms ached before she even got to the bottom step; only French holding onto her arm kept her from falling.

She was faced by twelve grim-faced guns. David stood before them, and behind him were the mothers, the fathers, and now the the sisters, all the protectors of all the children of their group. They looked like a colorful herd of sleepy sheep, herded into a straight line and standing vulnerable on display before the heavily armed shepherds. Behind them, a tall fence rose, and behind it a barricade of stone and wooden blocks. It cut right across the road, and the gate was several yards to the right, so that no one on the road could just drive through it.

David was speaking in low tones with one of the guards, but she was only half-listening to him, it seemed. She looked up and down the line of half-asleep, terrified families with a suspicious squint. Her dark lips were pulled into a frown and her chin puckered from it. She was dressed in dark, loose-fitting clothes, and she had a shotgun across her back.

“Is this all?” the guard asked, voice carrying to the horizon. It echoed across the plains, and sent a thrill of fear down her spine. She looked over her shoulder, holding Thomas tighter, imagining every rustling stalk of grass a walker. She almost lost it right there. Static filled her mind, white noise in her ears.

“All the children, yes,” David answered. He sounded slow and dreary. He must have been asleep too, when they arrived. He swayed in place and ran his hands through his hair every few seconds.

“How many more?” she demanded. “Not just children.”

When no one answered immediately (perhaps David lost his ability to perform basic math when he was tired), she found that it was her voice that spoke up and answered, “Twenty-four.” She shrank back when the guard’s stern face turned her way. “There’s twenty-four of us,” she repeated.

The first guard, who seemed to be in charge, projected her voice again, addressing not only them but the whole state. “My name is Samar. I’m in charge of the night guards here. You’ll submit and make things easy for us, and we’ll make things easy for you.” She gestured over her shoulder, and the guards advanced, guns dormant at their hips.

The next hour was an agonizingly long ordeal. They stood in line, guardians with children first, and submitted to thorough searches. The guards shoved their hands into every pocket, inspected every inch of skin to ensure there were no injuries that could potentially turn. They even ran fingers through her hair, as well as they could, tugging and twisting to make sure there was nothing hidden away. They didn’t seem to be looking for weapons; the woman searching her said nothing when her hands moved over the very obvious bulge in her jacket pocket. As they felt her up, they asked question after question after question, and she was grateful the others were there to check her. The first time she lied, the guards waved it off as nerves. The sixth time, David had to step up for her, explaining why she couldn’t help it. After that, they just deferred judgement to her companions. During the interrogations, more guards appeared from thin air and boarded the bus, carting out everyone’s belongings and laying them in organized rows on the road. They began to rifle through them, and no one was stupid enough to protest.

All the guards had the same grim and cool manner, like people carved out of rock. They seemed to empty themselves of all sympathy and compassion as they questioned them. Samar paced up and down, every now and then stopping to ask a question herself, but for the most part she was silent.

By the time they were finished, the sun had risen. The world looked less threatening in the daytime, but the lack of sleep made her more paranoid than usual. She fancied she might start hallucinating at some point.

Samar called someone from inside the gate to bring water for them. Her mood shifted immediately; she smiled at them, spoke in a soft and understanding tone, offered her hands to support. She assured them that in a few hours, they would be let inside. The other guards loosened up as well. French even got one of them laughing within minutes, and the two of them filled the early morning with their merriment.

Finally, they were let in. Samar had them line up, families together, and they shuffled in one by one. At the gate, she asked their names and ages (which they’d already given up), and gave them a piece of paper with a number written on it. Once they got inside, they would be assigned a guide and a home, and they could stay as long as they liked. If they wanted, they could still use their bus, though there was no promise that they would all be placed in homes close together. They wouldn’t be separated, they wouldn’t be shoved around. It would be nothing like the ordeal of the government shelter.

Familiarity made the hair on the back of her neck stand up, and she looked over her shoulder, expecting to see a lone figure coming slowly up the road. She felt its hands around her throat, cutting off her breath, and her grip on Thomas’s arm tightened until he squealed and pulled away. She wrestled him back up onto her hip, cheeks burning.

When her turn came, she slid Thomas down, holding onto his wrist tightly.

“Name?”

“Michaela and Thomas.”

“Age?”

“Nineteen and seven.”

Samar looked at them, managing not to look down despite sitting several inches above. “Do you want help with him?”

Her throat closed as she struggled to remember the years before, when she’d struggled with him alone, learning his habits and developing her own. The memories should’ve come in an overwhelming flood, but she had to drag them from the back of her head kicking and screaming. Her tongue was heavy, and pride and shame mixed up in her stomach.

“Yes, please.”

Samar smiled. “Wait just inside after you get through. I’ll call someone.” She handed her her number. “One thing, also...you’ll need to turn in your gun. We have a one gun per home policy, and the home I’m thinking of for you already has one.”

“Now?”

Samar considered. “For now, yes. It’ll put them at ease when they meet you.”

It was a struggle to give her the gun with one hand holding the paper and the other holding Thomas, but she managed. She waited inside the gate as she was told, watching the road behind, still seeing the phantom chasing her, hand up and reaching for her throat.