━━Calamity¹

five.

chapter five
shore

When Simone dislodged her knife from one of the monster's heads and flicked away the brown blood that seeped down its blade, she didn't dare look at any of the five that gathered around the three now fully dead Crawlers that stumbled out of the woodland coverage.

She sighed. "Basic rules of survival. Remember them, I wouldn't like to see any of you die." She called the group over to the first Crawler, a rotting creature with its leg held to the rest of its body by bare sinews, with brown and black skin falling apart from the inside that smelled of hundred years old rot and spoiled food, black saliva collecting on its faded mouth and dead, brown eyes twitching like broken plastic in the wind. Ruined clothing hung on its frame, hair almost gone in bleeding patches.

She pointed her knife to its head, from where she had taken it upon killing the creature. "First. Aim for the head. Nothing else will kill them." She said. "Second. Know when to run and when to fight. Either you waste time fighting while more Crawlers come and overwhelm you or you run and disappear even before they come."

"Third." She added with a note of severity and a hardened look toward each member. "Nowhere is safe. Don't let your guard down." She stood at last, sheathing the knife into the scabbard on her leg and motioning for the group to follow back toward the house.

Alina surveyed the Crawler in front of her, perhaps sorry for the fate it had suffered, for the cruelty inflicted on it — to die a horrible death and come alive again as a mindless beast without reason or purpose, only to be killed again for means of safety without remorse. And though her legs shook from the sights she had seen moments ago when Simone had taken on three Crawlers, she stood and stumbled after Felix toward the house, still reeling upon the fact that she had come so close to those creatures she doubted she could forget that first encounter.

Her hands were sweaty, legs weak as she shouldered open the door, picked up her backpack and headed after the group into the glade, past the dead Crawlers and through the forest onto the road again.

So, their journey began once again, hours seeping by with nothing and nobody on their backs and by nightfall, when the birds silenced and the wild beasts went to sleep, they made their camp on the side of the road between the broken divider and the hull of a car overgrown with moss and vines.

There, they laid restless, for Dante paced the line of their small camp, Denise hugged her bow closer and Felix was alseep by her. Silent, Alina walked with Mikkael around the other side of their camp while Simone rested on the backseat of the car, eyes closed.

"They scare you?" Mikkael asked her finally, referring to the Crawlers from before and prompting a glare from Dante that he answered with a small laugh.

Alina thought for a moment, turning her gaze to the embers before letting it fall to Mikkael. "Maybe not yet. They scared me at first, but none of us know what they can do because Lee saved us from them."

"Kinda agree with you there." He stared at the night horizon. After a short pause, he asked. "You ever wonder why we're here?"

"Not like we had a choice."

"I meant why us specifically? Why not one of them from the prisons?"

Thinking of it, Mikkael was right to consider that there was something different about the whole group, something that made them stand out and for which they could easily make one of the better choices for a mission that required survival.