Our Life (Sequel to "Remnants")

Vendetta

(2 hours later)

-Carl-

Aiden's dead.

His death hit me quite hard. Not in a mournful way - he was an arrogant, self-righteous cretin most of the time - but he was Deanna's son, and to watch her loose the last of her relatives in another brutal way was painful.

Not to mention the fact that it was the first time ever that someone had been murdered inside Alexandria.

Riley was also notably more quiet than usual, and I suspected that he had similar thoughts to mine on his mind.

Unwilling to stay around and watch Deanna sob over her son's body any longer, I opted to begin the run earlier than usual, and once Riley and I had gathered our supplies, we exited the zone and entered the constant peril of the outside world.

We had been traipsing down a small country lane for about 10 minutes now, having left the Alexandria zone an hour ago.

Our plan was to scour any nearby communities - either villages and hamlets, or small camps that were established after the apocalypse began; anywhere with a low population, for minimal chance of encountering a herd.

Today, the sun floated brightly in the sky, casting a welcome light and warmth upon the ground.

If only our moods were as optimistic...

But they weren't. There was either a traitor in our community - one of us - assassinating their friends at night, or someone out there was sneaking inside our walls to pick us off one by one. I didn't know which possibility was more terrifying.

"You okay?" I turned to Riley, who walked silently alongside me, staring up at a small cluster of birds that flew freely in the sky.

I often envied their freedom - how they didn't even need to care about the chaos and terror that ensued on the ground below them.

Riley was most likely doing the same, having been watching this particular family of gulls for the last five minutes.

"Y-Yeah, I'm fine," he responded unconvincingly.

"Aiden's death was... quite a shock, huh?" I sighed, voicing my boyfriend's obvious thoughts, and he now took his eyes off the sky and lowered them to the crisp mud of the ground, nodding in agreement.

"Yeah," he replied eventually, "I mean, he was a prick but... Deanna, she shouldn't have had to go through that."

"None of us should," I smiled somberly, but I had known Riley for long enough to know when there was more to something than he was telling me, and this was one such situation.

"It's not just that, is it?" I inquired carefully, "it's not just that he's dead. There's more."

Riley shifted his gaze to me, and I knew by the softness in his eyes that I was correct, and that he was about to tell me something bad.

"Last night," he began, breathing deeply, "last night, Aiden... He tried to kill me."

My eyes widened at Riley's revelation - I didn't know what he would respond with, but I certainly didn't anticipate that.

"He what?" I asked in shock, stopped in my tracks.

"I went for a walk," Riley began to explain, "I couldn't sleep. Then a bullet went past my head - it missed by... literally a few millimeters, at the most. I suspected Aiden was in the tower, and this morning he winds up dead at the bottom, so I'm pretty sure it was him."

"But, it wasn't... You know, you, who killed him, right?" I inquired nervously, and Riley gave me a 'you've got to be joking' expression in response, settling my concerns that he was responsible for Aiden's death.

"No," Riley put his reply into words, "it wasn't me, but... Who was it?"

I didn't know the answer, and I don't think any of us wanted to find out. Counting the list of people who would have a vendetta against Riley and I, I could only narrow it down to two people.

Simon's cousins.

They were the only people since the beginning of the apocalypse who had attacked us and hadn't been killed yet, and since Riley smashed their cousin's head against a chest of drawers, this sort of retaliation would be understandable.

But it had been 14 months since anything had been seen of the two psychos, and surely it would not have took them this long to find us.

Whoever it is, they were able to sneak inside Alexandria, kill one of us, and then leave without us knowing anything about them. We had the right to be worried, to say the least.

God knows who these people are, but if they do have something against Riley and I, then going out on a run alone was not the best idea...