BITE ME ➼ C. G. 〖 #wattys2016 〗

Chapter 19

A/N: GUYS CAN I JUST SAY THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR 2K READS! I THOUGHT I WOULD NEVER GET PAST 100 AND OMG THIS IS AMAZING Y'ALL ARE THE BEST!!!! HAVE SOME COOKIES! 🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪

SOTC: Adventure of a Lifetime by Coldplay
• If we've only got this life, you can get me through •

The bark pressed into my skin on all sides and I felt my hands slink up to my arms. Enid tapped me on the shoulder and pointed at a conga line of walkers making their way through the forest.

"See the way they walk?" Her eyes met mine. "It's their world, but we're living in it."

I nodded. The cold nipped at my cheeks and I wanted to make a mad dash to the house for warmth. But I didn't get a chance to say anything.

The tips of Kee's chocolate hair poked down into my field of vision. Her face soon followed, and she gave an upside-down smile. Enid looked slightly disturbed at this turn of events. I guess she didn't know about Kee's affinity with vertical surfaces.

"That was magical," was all she said. Enid gave a slight smile in response, and Kee's head went back up to the top of the tree. She dropped to the ground, smiling even wider. "How often do you come here?"

"Oh," Enid said, coming out from the hole in the tree. "Well, whenever I feel like it, really. When nobody needs me." She looked up and smiled at Kee.

"Cool," she said, taking my hand and pulling me out of the tree. Her slate-green eyes penetrated mine. They looked like sea glass in the dimmed forest light. "Well, we'd better get back. You'd think that they'd be starting to worry about us."

"Yeah," I murmured, my gaze still latched onto hers. Her hair was frizzed up like wood splinters. "Yeah, let's head back."

•••

Once we stepped in the door, a smoky aroma was wafting around the house. It smelled like barbecue, and my suspicions were confirmed when Carol stepped into my line of sight, spatula in her hand. "Ready for lunch?"

Kee dashed over with a smile across her face, and I followed. Carol put several ribs on each of our plates, and a bag of potato chips.

I thanked her quickly and followed Kee outside. I couldn't help but think of how Mom would make ribs sometimes, and that she had always covered it in so much barbecue sauce that you could barely find the meat.

Kee beckoned over to a pond across the street, which had a few benches rimming the sides. I smiled and came over, though my mind was plagued with other memories that I would never get to repeat.

I remember the bus that took me to school every morning, and that the driver used to give us the stink eye if we left our backpacks in the aisle. I remember mine was an oceanic blue. They would slide towards the left whenever we reached the clover leaf ramp, and if it had been rainy the night before, everybody would get wet.

I sighed and sat down next to Kee. She popped her bag of chips and began to snack on them. She sunk down to the ground and leaned against the bench.

My legs didn't want to move. It was so cold that patches of the pond looked frozen. A pocket of steam bloomed out of my mouth.

"You've never really told me anything about your pre-apocalypse life," I stated, picking up a rib by the knob on one side.

Kee finished chewing and licked her fingers. "What would ya like to know?"

"I dunno. What did you want to be when you grew up?"

She smiled, and the barbecue sauce was shaped in a handlebar mustache on her face. She blew away a strand of hair. "Never really thought about that before. I guess I was just in it for the ride."

After a moment, she laughed. "That's so ironic now that I think about it. Nowadays, we are never in it for the ride. We have a weight to pull and a heart to keep beating, and if that isn't a job, then I don't know what to tell ya."

I took a bite out of the rib. The juices coated my tongue, and they might've been a little better than the ones that Mom made however many years ago.

"You said you had a dog" I put down the bone and looked at her.

She was kind of seized up, frozen with her mouth open and the rib poised to be eaten. Kee put it down and gulped. "Yeah," she said simply.

"What was his name?"

She took a breath and put the plate down onto the grass, along with the flimsy, corpse-like chip bag. "Rusty," she said with a tremor in her voice. I would have kept asking, but I knew that she wouldn't appreciate that.

But instead, she kept going. "He was the color of rust, so not a very surprising name." She smiled wearily. "Before the apocalypse I remember him curling up into the corner of our couch as we watched Star Wars. If we didn't keep a close enough watch, he would mooch off our popcorn." She laughed a bit, before taking a quiet breath and continuing. "My brother and I took him with us as we tried to survive. He... He was an animal. Terminus thought that they'd better eat him first."

Oh. "Well..." I trailed off, not really knowing what to say.

"It's okay. It's been a while. And anyway, it's hard to be dragged down by your dog's death when everybody around you is dropping down around you 24/7."

I didn't say anything. We'd both abandoned our lunch on our plates anyway. My chip bag was still half full but I held off.

"I'm so sorry, Kee." I said it with as many I'm-so-sorry vibes as I could fit in. She nodded in thanks. I imagined how she must feel right now, with the memories swirling through her head.

If I were her, I would probably be crying for a while now.

But she isn't. And she didn't.

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A/N: Boom! Carl chappie!

Sorry it's such a filler. I was going to do something at the end but I realized how mind-numbingly dumb that would be. So here yah go, my lil nuggets.

Some news:
1: I took down my Chandler fic.
2: I apologize for the longish wait for a new chappie. Carl chapters are a bit more complicated because he has a different voice than Keira.

If I had to estimate: there's about 5 or 6 chapters left in the book. It's a while left, but I can't believe I got this far in the first place! Wow!

QOTD: Coldplay, Bruno Mars or Beyoncé?

AOTD: Don't get me wrong, I love Beyoncé, but for me it would be a tie between Coldplay and Bruno.

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Word count:
1182

Created 2-10-16
Edited 3-7-16