AFTERLIFE :: Riverdale

VII: The Evil Dead

Author's Note: If you're enjoying this, I'd love it if you guys could nominate this story for the Riverdale Awards by the RiverdaleSociety! And I'm just gonna start updating daily because the story's finished anyway.

•••••

Two weeks.

It had been merely two weeks and already tensions were getting high and relationships were being strained.

We didn't notice it at first, but the internet and phone lines to Riverdale had been cut. No one thought to check because we were always too busy running for our lives or trying to find shelter. It was as if the outside world was completely disowning us.

Occasionally we all had a sort of family dinner where we talked about the crazy stuff that had happened in our past lives—the good times. They all had an ending which was sort of sour as we slowly came to the realization that we would never get those times back.

In our shelter at Pop's, Archie was pretty much going stir crazy. He often went out just to take his mind off of things or try to find Betty, but came back with nasty bruises and cuts where he came across the dead one too many times. Luckily, he was never bitten or anything like that. You could tell in the bottomless ocean of his blue-green eyes that he was still hurt by Betty's disappearance and his father's death, but not bringing it up was an unspoken rule. Letting him stay happy in his own little world contented us.

Veronica wasn't faring much better. Without her phone, she had no way to contact her mother. She had no idea if she was okay or not, and the thought alone was eating away at her slowly. There were times when she'd just mutter to herself. A lot of the time, we'd just wake up in the middle of the night to hear her talking to herself in an assuring way. It sounded paranoid to the others, but I had sense enough to realize that this was her coping mechanism.

And ever since Reggie's horrible break-in, every time Archie walked in the door, she straight-up attacked(that was another reason for Archie's bruises and cuts). So thank god that Archie took Kevin's shotgun and had disposed of his own handgun, or else she'd be nursing a gunshot wound by now. Though, to be fair, he did give the gun to Veronica. Sometimes I wondered how neither had been filled with bullet holes. They broke up eventually. Somehow, I don't think all this was the reason why. I think she had been wanting to break up for a while now, but I couldn't put my finger on why exactly.

Personally, I tried to stay in my corner, eating or drinking whatever I could find to take or warm up from the storage room. It was kind of like being back at Pop's in the old days; I even had my laptop to write on. The only exception was that I was now allowed to smoke inside which, admittedly, caused my eyes to turn bloodshot and my chest and neck area to become somewhat veiny. I didn't care; who was I supposed to be impressing? I found some stashes hidden underneath the chairs. Pop's was a daily hangout for Serpents, after all.

We all noticed the drop in pill counts. When Archie and Kevin went to the pharmacy, they cleaned it out. There were piles of bottles, and for some of them to be missing was absurd because no one really needed to take anything except for Betty for her various mental issues who wasn't even there at the time. All I needed was the stash under my hat. There was a rumor that spread without the use of the mouth. We all just thought that it was Joaquin as none of us really knew him and knew nothing of his medical needs.

Kevin and Joaquin mostly kept to themselves. We all knew they were doing dirty deeds in the storage room, but there was no need to point it out. It was their business and we stayed out of it. However, we couldn't help but notice and inquire when their romance suddenly took a downfall.

One night, I spotted Kevin rummaging through the cabinets in the storage room. He was muttering something about alcohol, and quite frankly, I would've stayed out of his business if it weren't for the fact that I just had a smoke and was craving something to drink for my dry mouth.