Life After Death

chapter 4

We stayed in the house three nights in total.

We travelled a week more without drama, there was an old treehouse we found and decided that seemed like our next best place.

It rained that night. Apparently, the ceiling had a few more holes in it than we had first imagined.

So, the next morning we moved on, clothes still damp and dripping. And the next few days we did not see a thing. Not an Infected, a human, or even an animal.

About a week and a half after our stay at the mansion, I was beginning to really consider him a friend. For the first while I had assumed he was just staying with me because things were easier with an extra pair of hands, and maybe he was at the beginning, but I knew now neither one of us was staying just for that reason now.

We would often talk about our pre-apocalypse lives, but mainly we used sarcasm to compare it too now. Not often did we talk about our family. They weren't memories we wished to bring up whilst we were happy, they were reserved for if we felt the urge to cry. And he was always getting on my nerves, making comments deliberatley to enrage me, and I still managed to let them, yet he seemed to find them hilarious.

Other times we would play football- well in our case more kicking a can we found at each other and tallying up who could get the most hits- in an open field somewhere. Usually, I won. The company was nice, it felt like there wasn't dead men lurking around the trees and bushes around us.

Don't get me wrong, he was still annoying as hell, and I believed we would both throw each other under the bus if we got to live on ourselves.

Well, I used to believe that. I was wrong.

He always had a habit of stealing my things, hiding them somewhere just to get on my nerves because he had no other source of entertainment- no matter how many times I told him to read one of the few books I carried along with me.

We made it to another river somewhere along one of our treks and took that as a good opportunity to wash ourselves as best we could. There never was much telling when the next opportunity would be, though these days I wasn't sure you'd really notice if someone had gone a few days without a rinse, everything seemed to smell anyway, you were used to it.

"Well, that's freezing."

"Yeah, rivers don't tend to come with boilers these days."

I pushed him in, mainly because it was funny more than anything else, but I insisted it was for his own good that he went straight in and got on with it, it would warm up quicker then.

"Hey!" He cried, "No, no you don't."

He grabbed my own arm, yanked me in with him too. My plan had somehow backfired on myself, it was terrible.

"Prick," I said, wiping the hair wet strands of hair out my eyes.

It must've been about twenty minutes later we got out, the water eventually warming up for us and we both seemed to enjoy dunking the other under the water.  And as we got out, we dripped onto the grass, making it muddier more than anything, but the trees surrounding us provided good shade from the sunlight as it moved through the day- suncream was hardly on the necessary things to loot for, so I was thankful the trees stood high.

But when we got to our bags, I suddenly noticed something missing. Amalie's teddy bear. It was gone. I had carried it round with me every day since she died, even though most days I couldn't look at it, I knew it was there, and I knew it had been when we left the treehouse a few days ago.

"Nathaniel," I panicked, going through all my bag and under the clothes strewn around, "Nathaniel!"

"What? What's up?"