F*** You, I Really Don't Care Anymore

1. And I'm back

  "Bang Bang." I mimed firing the gun with each bang, pretended to appreciate the resounding noise that echoed throughout the area and how well I could hear it. On some days, everything became crystal clear and I could hear as if I didn't have an issue. And on other days, I couldn't even hear Michelle calling my name from the next room. 

  Speaking of Michelle, I looked back to the parked car to see her sitting on its hood, watching me with a strict look on her face. A look I'd seen far too often nowadays, whenever we would drive down into the city from the farmhouse. Of course, a nine year old girl like her would protest to leaving the relatively safe farmhouse for the certainly dangerous city but I saw it as a necessity. Not just for scavenging but also for a chance to learn.

  "Now you try." I told her and took a few steps back to allow her free range to focus on the Flesh-eater that slowly crawled on the floor towards us. It looked horrible, with green teeth that mashed together in desperate hunger as it clawed its way towards us along the street. Its skin had sloughed off in places to reveal the putrefying muscles beneath that curled and lengthened. Of course, I didn't help it look better when I sliced its Achilles heels and smashed its kneecaps but hey, how else is Michelle supposed to train?

  I could see the disgust in her face and could hear it in her voice as she said, "I can't."

  Of course, there was also the fear I could see and hear, the fear that perpetuated her every action every time we would leave the farmhouse. A fear that I was all too used to.

  "Don't be afraid." I told her. "This Flesh-eater can't do anything to you. Look at this." I walked up to it, where it focused its attention on my and tried to grab at me. I skipped past its reaching arms and swung my foot in a perfect arc that cracked the thing's skull. "See? As long as I'm here no Flesh-eater can hurt you. So take the shot. This will be good practice for you."

  "Why do I need to? Can't you just keep me safe?"

  I sighed and shook my head. "Thing is, I'm not always going to be here to keep you safe. That's why you need to learn to run, and hide, and shoot. So shoot." I made that last part sound like a demand and Michelle nodded, despite her lower lip that trembled. 

  A part of me wanted to call a stop to this. It was clear I was pushing her too far. It was clear she wasn't going to shoot it. I just wanted to walk up to her, squeeze her tight, and then live out the rest of our days together in the farmhouse. 

  But a bigger, louder, more savage part of me beat that other side down into submission. She needed to do this. She had to learn to kill these things as soon as possible. After three months of training, I was worried she would never be able to pull the trigger. (At least not until she had no other choice and was forced to pull it. Forced to kill when she wouldn't have had to. When it could've been avoided.)

  I walked away from the Flesh-eater and sat next to Michelle on the hood of the car. She still held the gun at the Flesh-eater but still she didn't pull it. I carefully plucked the gun from her hands – Make it stop, Theodore – and pointed it at the Flesh-eater. I pulled the trigger and a paintball fired out of the barrel, hitting the thing directly on its forehead and giving it a blue spot.

  "I know how hard it is." I whispered to Michelle, who still stared at the Flesh-eater. "But you can't afford to be weak. If you're weak, people die, including you. And I could never live with myself if you died."

  "Is that how you feel?" She faintly asked me. "Weak?"

  My heart constricted and I looked away for a moment. "That's how I felt. Not anymore."

  I hopped off the car and helped Michelle down. She stood next to me and played with her thumbs as she looked down. Such a cute little thing. She shouldn't have to do this. She shouldn't have to learn how to kill. She should be at home. She should be – I closed my eyes and heard distant screams in the past. Blood and pain. I remembered back to three months ago. I couldn't let that happen again. I wouldn't! 

  "Let's go scavenging." I told her. I walked up to the struggling Flesh-eater, knelt next to it, and swiftly pulled out my knife, stabbing it in the head. "Did you bring the list?"

  She nodded and reached into her pocket, pulling out a crumpled piece of paper that she carefully folded open to reveal the list of supplies we needed. She held it close to her face and slowly read off the first thing on the list.

  "Screwdrivers."

  I looked around at the area we were in. Some beauty parlour signs were faded out but I could still recognise by the beautiful women they all seemed to have.

  "Where's your knife?" I asked her.

  Michelle reached for the sheath by her side and held the knife handle, not pulling it out like I'd advised her. Sure I wanted Michelle to be safe but I wasn't going to let her run around with a knife. I pulled out my own, trusting myself more to not accidentally stab any of us, and I led her down the street.

  Now the city looked like the landscape of all those zombie games and films I saw. The buildings looked far more lifeless than the actual dead people that walked around with faded signs and the paint stripped away to reveal their drab greys or ugly reds. There were vehicles and rubble strewn all over the place, multiple signs of skirmishes that had taken place with bullet holes in the walls and floor and burn marks on the vehicles. Some vehicles were just charred remains that had blown up with hopefully no one inside. There were dead bodies strewn all over the place, haphazardly placed in awkward and disturbing positions. Half-eaten people, Flesh-eaters with their heads blown off, and people who had just died of numerous other reasons. A game I liked to play in my head was to guess how somebody had died exactly. Like flattened paste of meat and bones that had once been a human. I was certain that suicide was the best guess there. The man with with his stomach open? Definitely got gutted with a knife. The lady with her head facing the sky while her body lay on its stomach? To say someone broke her neck would be an understatement. And all of this was immortalised in the greenery and plant life that had grown from the cracks of the buildings and the floors and even from the bodies of the people.

  I saw a dog eating from a corpse that I hoped at least died recently, and it growled when it saw us. Michelle squeezed up next to me and I put a hand over her shoulder, watching the dog with my knife raised. Yet all it did was glare at us before it went back to its human casserole.

  An important part of scavenging, I had realised, was to check everything. Every store we passed, we thoroughly investigated its contents, ticking off everything we found that was on our list and putting them into the backpack I carried.

  After three hours of searching through the lonely streets of this dead city, we eventually found ourselves sitting at the foot of a building to hide from the sun. We were sharing a bottle of water and I constantly had to chastise Michelle for drinking too much. A Flesh-eater walked past but we didn't pay it much attention and neither did it us. The clothes we wore had been smeared with the blood of those things, which we kept a jar of back home. It wasn't a bad way to sneak past a few Flesh-eaters but it was slowly getting less reliable as the days passed. We'd have to end up using more blood just to hide from them, which meant using up more of our supply. Now, refilling it wasn't that big of a deal with a seemingly limitless supply shuffling around us but Michelle absolutely hated having to do it and putting more on her, especially her hair, would only worsen her mood.

  "What else do we still need to get?" I asked her as she passed the bottle to me.

  She pulled the list out again while I took a sip of the water and brought it up to her eyes again. "Just screwdrivers."

  "Really? The first thing on this list is the one we haven't gotten? Well, let's do it."

  "Can't we just go home?" Michelle whined as she got to her feet along with me.

  "As soon as we've gotten it, we'll go straight home and then you can play by the river."

  "Really?" Michelle asked and smiled, lighting up her whole face.

  "Pinkie promise." I said and held out my pinkie that she clung onto with hers.

  And so, of course, to perpetuate the idea that God never liked me from the beginning, we could hear the distant shots of bullets flying through the air.