[ COACH ] Hope
[ SONG | ARTIST ] Winter Wonderland | Pentatonix
[ WATTPAD WORD COUNT ] 1,446 words
The undead cannot feel - not pain, not sadness, not even this persistent cold. All they do is stagger around in their tattered clothes, tattered bodies and extremely tattered sanity. Lucky bastards. Sometimes, I do wonder what it's like to be in their place.
They do feel only one thing, though. Hunger. But in this wretched planet of the undead and near-dead people, aren't we all?
Pulling my knees closer to my chest, I blow warm air on the exposed fingers from my worn out gloves. The slight movement brings small stings on my cracked lips. They'll bleed anytime now. It always happens during cold season. Winter has brought a lot of discomforts to everyone and to be honest, mine were just pebbles on a beach compared to everyone else's problems. At least, I got gloves.
"When it snows, it ain't thrillin'. My runny nose gets a chillin'," I mumble in a mock singsong voice. It came out terrible. The words didn't even fit the melody. I scoff at my own little miseries.
A movement on the snow catches my attention. Looking through my rifle's scope, I see a two undeads mindlessly wandering around. They somehow managed to get through the huge minefield without setting off one. Now that's what I call lucky. I watch them move in circles, waiting for them to get shot by guards from the other towers. Call me a coward but as much as possible, I avoid blowing heads off, even if it's a zombie head.
And then, a gun goes off. Two explosions echoes and my ears hurt from the noise. Why wouldn't they? The shots were fired right beside me. The white snow is now grisly painted with an ugly shade of red as small clumps of flesh are scattered around the finally-dead corpses. Both head shots. Good aim.
My commanding officer, Carter Jenkins, straightened from his stance. He throws me a bland look as he puts down his rifle.
"That's rule number one, private," he says. "If there's an undead, kill on sight."
Forcing down a choke, I reason, "I-I was waiting for the nearer guard to open fire."
Carter waves my explanation away and I shut my mouth. A loud cracking noise suggests that the gate of the walled city is being pushed open. Beyond the high wall, a backhoe moves out. Carter and I watch it haul the carcass away. Or rather, Carter's watching it and I'm secretly watching him.
I quickly avert my gaze at the activity below when he looks back at me. Not so quick because I know he caught me staring. That split-second contact is rare since I always look down whenever he's talking to me. Nonetheless, I'm familiar with the look of his eyes. They're a puzzle that goes from gray to light blue, cloudy to dreamy, aloof to sad - it's so beautiful and heartbreaking to look at. I've been dying to uncover the secrets behind that grayness, the sadness behind that storm, the stories behind that troubled soul.
Unfortunately, answers are not that easy to ask for. It's not even possible due to the fact that I'm nothing but a fake hiding behind the identity of her deceased brother. Yeah, I know. Even I wasn't expecting this twist in my life. Why did I go for this Hana Kimi charade? Simple. To prevent my emotionally-ill father from participating in the war. So Mulan-ish.
A buzzing noise from the middle of the walled city snaps us away from the awkward situation. It marks the end of my shift at the tower I'm guarding. Few minutes later, a mint-chewing soldier appears at the stairs to relieve me.
Carter and I wordlessly walk the path leading to the central command center. This place was a former commercial part of Wichita that's converted into a secluded evacuation site for apocalypse survivors. We simply call the walled city. A handful of other sites are out there but in the stretch of three years since the virus killed billions, people learned to mistrust each other. Our leaders pertain to it as 'independence.' While most of us lost our ability to hope, some kept that annoying habit of using so-called politically correct terms. As if there's more offensive than rotting freaks trying to bite your face off.
