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GREY KINGSTON
"do the dead fly now?"
i'm pulled from the quiet thoughts in my brain to the voice beside me—drew, the guard i was assigned with for this excursion. he looks no older than me, probably is the same age as me. twenty four years of life lived differently, but we both ended up with calloused hands, as bait in this dead city.
"what?"
he cracks a grin, "you keep lookin' up." he juts his chin out to across the river where the tall buildings seem to scrape the underside of the sky.
i return my gaze to the deserted street we're walking down, "i've never been this close to new york before. never been anywhere outside of georgia ... before everything."
"you enjoying your time here so far?" another joke, and his grin is now a smirk.
we were deployed by the chopper that flew us in less than two hours ago and have been roaming the streets of our assigned locations, wiping out any walkers we come across. once the last bit of this state is bare enough for the colony to swoop in, they'll build walls around the perimeter and claim it as their property.
despite the fact that i enjoy the smirk on drew's face and his sense of humor, i don't answer with a joke of my own. i can't remember the last time i did make a joke. it must've been with daryl before the connection between our walkie talkies went dead.
i grip my gun tighter at the thought of him, how i miss him.
"why don't we just use the bullets from the planes to clear the city?" i ask, trying to think of something else. i've wondered about this before, the way the colony cleared alpha's herd she led through hilltop's fields years ago.
drew looks at me, a soft furrow in his brows.
and this is when i lie, because i haven't told anyone about the herd i saw them wipe out since that would hint to the location of my group back home, "i saw the fighter jets out in the lot the other day. you could use them to fly over the city and wipe out walkers, couldn't you? so why bother with these excursions?"
he looks at me for another heartbeat, then blinks away, "we don't want to ruin any viable living space. we use the bullets sparingly for large herds in rural areas."
"oh." i mouth silently.
"we'll loop around this block up here, then head back to base, get on our horses and do one last sweep."
i nod at his orders. we cleared a few dozen walkers off the streets in the first hour, our guns silenced to not draw any more to the area we're in.
a good, few hundred of us are part of the troops, men and women, and that's what made it hard to spot a certain head of curls i've been looking for. we lined up outside of the blocks this morning, separated into legions, and boarded the helicopters as the sun rose into the sky. now here, each legion is in a different location, each resident with their own guard.
