You Can't Survive Alone

Part 14

That night...
Nick set the note out after we finished discussing. We have to wait for Ethan to come, because we have no other way to get a message to him. We just have to hope that he'll come soon.
It's my watch tonight, with Kat. We're sitting in the hallway, in the chairs, knowing that nothing will happen anyway. Knowing that nothing will happen, but also knowing that something might. I think back to the time when we found Ethan... I didn't think that anything would happen that night either.
I hear a small crash. "You still awake?" Kat asks me.
"Yeah. Did you hear that?" I say in a low voice.
"Kinda hard to miss... What do we do?" She sounds slightly panicked. I remember that she's never done anything like this before; she hasn't had any midnight chats with the enemy.
"Just relax, okay? I'm going to go look."
"Ash, you really sure you should do that?"
I unsheathe my sword slightly. "I'll be fine. I'll be back in a couple of minutes."
I walk down the hallway, toward the staircase leading down. I pause at the top, and listen. There's a low voice, male, talking at the bottom. If he's talking, that means that there must be others there.
I creep down the stairs silently, praying that they won't squeak. The voices stop, and I freeze. When they start up again, I continue.
I stop at the landing, and hide behind the small wall there. A flashlight beam zooms across the wall in the next hallway. It doesn't come near me, so I know that it's impossible for them to have seen me.
"H-hello? Is anybody there?" A female voice this time. She sounds nervous. The flashlight beam shakes. She must've hear me.
"It's okay, I won't hurt you," I say, making my voice reassuring. "We're friendly, if you are."
The flashlight beam moves some more. Her voice rattles a bit as she says, "Mark? Th-there's a person here. What do I do?"
The guy, who I assume must be Mark, says, "A person? Where?"
"I-i don't know where. She's in the shadows."
"I won't hurt you," I repeat. I'm starting to get worried that they might hurt me though.
The flashlight beam moves quickly and points at the other side of the wall I'm hiding behind.
"You're friendly? How can we be sure?" Mark asks.
"If you put your guns away, I'll put my sword away. Fair deal, okay?"
"Okay." He says. I sheathe my sword, and I hear the sound of a gun being slid onto someone's back. I peak my head out from behind my wall, and the flashlight moves onto my face. I stare into the inky blackness illuminated by the white dot, and make out human shapes. There's more than the two I originally thought there were. A female silhouette stands by the door. Mark and the girl stand closer to me. Looking at her, I realize she couldn't have been much more than thirteen. They put down the flashlight, so it shines at the white wall to my right. This allows enough light for me be able to see more clearly.
"So, why are you here?" I ask. Seems like a good conversation starter, after the 'put down your weapons' talk.
"Well, we, ah, wanted to start a medical checkpoint. This seemed like a natural place to gather," Mark says. "Why are you here?"
I almost laugh. "We chose this place because it was a great place to gather too. We plan to start a colony here, see if we can recruit people."
"You say, 'we'. How many of you are there?"
"Me, Aaron, Nick, Jess, Kat, and Zack. Six of us," I say. "How many of you are there?"
"Four. Me, Liz, Kyle, and Maya," Mark says.
I hear a bang, and look behind me. Kat is on the bottom step, having just fallen down the stairs. "Graceful," I tease her.
"Yeah, yeah. Who are these people?" She asks.
"We're friendly. You can put your gun down," says the girl. She looks to be about thirteen, with dark brown hair and chocolatey eyes.
"Okay," she says. I didn't even realize she had her gun out, but there it is, sliding onto her back.
"Maya, why don't you go outside and help Kyle get the supplies?" Mark asks. The girl, Maya, nods and heads toward the main door.
"I'll go get Nick," I say to Kat. "He's kind of in charge," I add for Mark's benefit. Kat nods, and I head upstairs and walk to Nick's room.
I knock on the door and call Nick's name.
"What?" He asks, still half asleep. "Is it morning already?"
"No, but there are people here," I say, walking through the doorway. He looks startled, so I add, "They're friendly, don't worry. We already checked."
"Sounds like you have the situation handled. Can I go back to sleep now?"
"No, because you need to talk to them. They want to set up a medical checkpoint here."
This interests him. He sits up in bed. "Really? Cool. How did they hear about us?"
"They didn't. Their plan was completely separate from ours, until I heard them downstairs."
He gets up slowly and winces. His burns must still hurt from a few weeks ago. Thinking about time makes me wonder... Exactly how long have I been here? I'll have to ask Aaron later.
We walk downstairs together. Mark looks up as we thud down the stairs, and says, "Hi."
"Hello," Nick says.
"You're Nick, I'm assuming? Nice to meet you. I'm Mark."
Nick nods. "So... I heard that you guys want to set up a medical checkpoint here. I want to say, it would actually be really great if you did."
You can tell this wasn't the reaction Mark was expecting. "Really? That'll, like, work? Cool!"
"Yeah. We've tried in the past to get people, but a few weeks ago we ran into a real nutjob. Completely insane, completely evil. Watch out for him; his name is Ethan."
Mark and Liz look at each other darkly. "We met Ethan too."
Nick is startled. "You've seen him? Where was he? How recently?"
"He tried to get us to join up with him a while back. Liz stole one of his journals, and read it. She's one of our doctors, so when she read it, she understood it. We got out of there fast."
"Ash here stole one of his journals too... That's how we found out how crazy he was."
Mark looks at me. "Nicely done. Do you know what kind of background he has? Seems like you've had more involvement with him than we have."
"I'm thinking medical. He's probably been in the field awhile."
He nods. "That sounds right. He did seem a very doctor-ish type. He also boasted about having the cure, but we think he was lying."
Nick, Kat and I look at each other, deciding whether to divulge this particular piece of knowledge. Nick nods, so I say, "He wasn't lying, actually."
Mark's eyes grow wide. "You mean... he actually has the cure? He could cure the infected?"
I rush to explain. "It's not really like a cure... If you get the cure before becoming a zombie, it will stop the disease from moving further. You'll survive, but, well, you'll still have some damage. However, some people are naturally more resistant to the disease. It won't work on us as much as other people."
"You said, 'us'," he observes. Crud. I didn't mean to say that.
"Ash is... a special case. She was bit, but the disease didn't affect her as it would most other people."
I cringe. Now, the more you say about yourself, the more trust you have to put in the people around you. I'm not sure I should be this trusting with these people; I remember what happened with Ethan. I blindly trusted him, and he was the one who indirectly killed my parents, along with millions -no, billions- of people.
Mark looks at me as a scientist would. "So, you can't get infected?"
"It doesn't work on me as much as it does other people. It... it still affects me." I feel uncomfortable, having to explain.
Luckily, Kat jumps in to the rescue. "She has panic attacks. She'll be fine for days, or a week, but she'll feel... scared. She feels like she's in danger, and will lash out at anybody who she perceives as a threat."
"So, you're, like, a smart zombie? With human characteristics?" He looks slightly afraid of me.
"No. Zombies don't feel emotion like we do. They only feel fear and anger. I can feel all of the emotions; fear and anger simply take over sometimes." He still looks slightly scared, so I say, "I won't bite. I promise."
He cracks a smile. "Good. Getting back to the discussion at hand; you guys don't mind if we use a wing of this building for our hospital?"
"No, you guys can use any stuff you need. There's far too much space in this building for just one group," Nick says. I agree- there is too much space here for only us.
The person I was before the apocalypse would have been distraught at the idea of another group moving in with us, with the amount of people I would be expected to know. But me, the present me, is happy that another group is moving in. This isn't an invasion of our space; it's our rebellion against what the world has given us to work with. It's our bonding together, to overcome the present, and to recieve our future.