Райан Уэстфилд - Finding Shelter

“Sweet little Terry….” Olivia was singing. “Sweet little Terry, my dear…. My darling…”

It was a strange song. The sort of song that didn’t really have a tune.

And the blood provided a strange backdrop to the sound.

Sadie held the knife in her hand. She was ready to use it. She scanned the area for Lilly, but she was nowhere to be found. Probably she was cowering indoors.

Sadie knew that she’d use the knife if she had to.

But if she didn’t need to, then she wouldn’t.

She walked softly towards the gun, trying to make as little noise as possible.

There were a couple of tense moments, but Sadie got the gun. Her hand wrapped around the handle and she felt suddenly more confident. More secure.

“I love you, Terry,” Olivia was saying. She’d stopped her song.

Terry was making choking sounds. The grunts of pain had stopped. It sounded like Terry couldn’t breathe.

Sadie, meanwhile, was walking backwards. The gun was in her hand. She’d left the knife behind.

The noises Terry was making were fading. Then they stopped.

Olivia was sobbing now.

The door opened, and Sadie saw Lilly walk outside, heading towards her mother.

Lilly spotted Sadie. She turned her head.

Would Lilly give Sadie up?

No. Apparently not.

Lilly said nothing. She clearly saw Sadie, but she said nothing. Instead, she turned her head back towards her mother, and continued to walk towards her silently.

She was heading towards her dead father. About to pay her respects.

Sadie turned on her heel and started running away.

She ran until she was out of breath and her legs ached. It felt good to have her legs ache, after being immobile and unused for so long.

She would get back to the camp.

And if someone happened along the way, well, she was ready. She had her gun. It felt good in her hand, and she knew how to use it.

Georgia had killed the man.

Somehow she hadn’t died. Somehow John hadn’t died.

They’d lain there, the two of them, exhausted, completely spent, after the fight, among the bodies, laughing.

It had felt strange to laugh. Strangely freeing. It was all over. For the moment. Until the next fight. Until the next random encounter with strangers that turned to violence.

It wasn’t normal laughter. It wasn’t exactly nervous laughter. It was instead the type of laughter that happens when you don’t know what else to do, when there are no words, sayings, or facial expressions that can begin to sum up the absurdity of the situation.

Finally, Georgia had picked herself up off the ground.

John’s laughter, meanwhile, had shifted back to grimaces and grunts of pain. His leg was in a bad way.

“We’re going to set it when we get back to camp,” said Georgia, examining the injury. “I don’t want to wait around here any longer than we have to.”

“You think they’re all gone?”

“Only one way to find out.”

“What’s that?”

“Try to get on out of here. I’m going to make a sled… I’ll have to drag you back.”

“I can walk. Don’t worry about me.”

Georgia let out a little laugh. “There’s no way you’re walking out of here. Not on that leg.”

“I’ll use a stick… just get me something to walk with. I can do it. It’ll be just like when I had crutches back in junior high.”

“Be my guest,” said Georgia. “How about this? You try that, and I’ll work on my method for when yours fails.”

“It’s not going to fail.”

Before Georgia could start getting the sledge prepared, she had to take a tour of the surrounding area. She made her way back to where they’d seen the large truck.

There was no sign of it.

The only sign that it’d been there were the dead men that it’d left behind. Georgia wondered whether the driver alone had driven off, or if there’d been other men with him.

Georgia, as a matter of habit and practicality, went through the pockets and belongings of the dead men.

There was nothing to identify them by. No wallets. No dog tags. Nothing at all that identified them in any way.

What had happened to all their stuff from before the EMP? It seemed as if someone had arranged things so that these men would not be tracked to any kind of organization.

Whatever.

Georgia didn’t care.

She just wanted to get out of there. She just wanted to stay alive.

She gathered up their weapons, their knives, their ammunition, their guns. She gathered up what she could carry of their food and she took a couple pieces of clothing to use for the sled.

Georgia used her knife to cut down some small trees nearby. They were nothing more than saplings, really. She lashed them together in a clever way with the clothes, forming a sort of inverted triangle on which she’d drag John back to the camp.

It would take a while. And it would be hard. But she’d be able to do it.

“How’s that idea of yours working out, anyway?” called out Georgia, looking up from the sled she was constructing. “Those crutches going to get you back to camp?”

“Sure,” shouted John, as he tried to stand up on the sticks that Georgia had tossed over to him.

He cried out in pain as he fell down.

Georgia didn’t have it in her to laugh. She was too beaten down, and she was imagining the painful journey that they had back to camp in front of them.

What’s more, she was thinking of her daughter.

Now, after this encounter, she felt like she was only that much further away from finding Sadie.

“Here,” said Georgia, walking over to John. “Let’s get you onto this thing…”

It took a little while to get John situated properly, and when he was, Georgia didn’t waste any time.

It was, after all, a long way back to the camp.

It had been a relatively calm few months. Especially considering the period that they had all gone through not so long ago, when everything had seemed so intense, as if nothing was going right, as if everything that could go wrong had gone wrong.

A lot had happened in his absence.

It had taken Max about a week to get back to the camp. His leg had hurt him as he’d walked back, but he hadn’t encountered any trouble.

He’d returned to find that, in his absence, everything had apparently gone to hell.

He’d heard about how Sadie had gone missing, how Georgia had gone to look for her, and how Mandy had seemingly had pregnancy complications.

Max had felt this heart starting to skip a beat as his wife, Mandy, told him about what had happened.

“But you’re OK now?” he had said, trying to hide the anxiety in his voice.

“Yeah,” Mandy had said. “We don’t know what it was. But everything seems to be back to normal.”

Max hadn’t known what to think. But there was no way to know what had happened to Mandy. Had it just been some fluke? Had it been that the baby was turned the wrong way? Something else entirely?

Max had spent a lot of his limited free time poring over the midwifery books that they had, as well as the medical encyclopedias that they’d found recently. There were a few different conditions that seemed like they might fit, but nothing was definite.

So for the months until Mandy’s delivery, everyone, including Max, didn’t know what to expect. They hoped for a healthy, happy baby, but they had really no way to control what would happen, except to make sure that Mandy got plenty of rest and plenty to eat.

Now it was the day everyone had been waiting for.

The day that Mandy was likely to give birth.

She had gone into labor four hours earlier.