Ryan Westfield - Fighting Rough

“I’ve never seen you like this,” said Cynthia. “Why don’t you take a couple deep breaths. You need to calm down.”

“I don’t need to do anything!” shouted John, screaming right in her face.

“What the hell?” said Cynthia. “Don’t scream at me, damnit.”

“Why don’t you just head back to camp?” said John, his eyes burning with anger. “I can do this on my own. I don’t need you, or anyone else. I don’t need Max.”

“Look, I’m sorry, I guess I touched some nerve about your childhood… I thought…”

“You’ve said all you need to. I’m doing this alone.”

John picked up his pace, nearly breaking into a run.

Cynthia tried to keep up, but his legs were longer than hers. And she was already having trouble walking through the snow.

“John, wait up!”

John didn’t look back. He was already many paces ahead of her.

“We’re supposed to go together! There are dangerous people out here!”

“There’s no one out here,” shouted John, without turning around.

It was the last thing he said to her.

She couldn’t keep up. Her legs were already burning, trying to run through the snow. The rifle felt heavy in her hands, impossibly heavy.

It wasn’t just the physical sensation that slowed her down. It was the knowledge that since she’d known John, he’d never once abandoned her. It wasn’t like him to leave her on her own out in the woods, out in the dangerous wilds, where anyone could come along at any moment.

She was all alone. John had disappeared into the trees.

“Shit,” muttered Cynthia, sitting down in the snow.

It had all happened so fast. She felt hurt and betrayed. John had never run off like that before, leaving her there on her own. Not if he could help it. No, before he’d done everything in his power to be there for her, to protect her as best he could, even when they were compete strangers and he’d had no reason to.

It was that childhood stuff. Old wounds and all that. Maybe he had his reason to be upset.

But he should be upset with Max, not Cynthia. She didn’t have anything to do with it. And even on the Max front, it didn’t really make sense. From what Cynthia could tell, Max was a good guy. He was always helping the rest of them. He was always going out of his way to push himself trying to protect the others. And for what? For nothing. He didn’t ask for anything in return, except that the others be vigilant and cautious. Not to mention smart about what they were doing.

Max certainly wouldn’t have approved of John going off on his own, leaving Cynthia there.

An eerie feeling crept over Cynthia. She looked around at the snow and the snow-covered trees, shivering in the cold, and realized quite viscerally that she was completely alone.

Or so she hoped.

Max had been convinced there were others out there. John didn’t think so, but maybe whatever problem he had with his brother was blinding him to the truth.

Cynthia felt not just alone, but exposed. Despite all her practice with firearms, she didn’t feel confident. Sure, she’d fought before. She’d survived. But that was then. Each new situation brought new dangers.

What was she supposed to do? Should she head back to camp, finding protection among the others there?

But what about John? He was out on his own, apparently confident that there was no danger now, that everything was fine.

It just didn’t make sense. If there was anything John and Cynthia had learned together, it was that nothing was ever fine, and that new dangers lurked around every corner, every tree. Each passing minute and hour had always, so far, meant new threats on their life.

John might need her. Cynthia wasn’t mad at him. Sure, he’d blown up at her. But that could be forgiven. She had to remember all the other times, the times he’d saved her from certain death, the times he’d been kind to her when he hadn’t needed to. These were stressful situations of the worst kind. People could be excused for having a blow up now and again.

But what couldn’t be forgiven was leaving her. Striking out on his own. Potentially it meant as much danger as it did for her as it did for him.

Cynthia made her up her mind. She wasn’t going to leave John out there on his own. He couldn’t keep up that pace for long, running through the snow like that. He’d have to slow down.

All she had to do was follow his tracks.

Cynthia stood up, took a deep breath, and headed in the direction John had disappeared in.

“Do you think this is ever going to end, Mom?” said Sadie.

“What’s going to end?”

“All this. The violence. Everything that’s happened…” Sadie didn’t quite know how to express what she was trying to say. It felt like they had been going and going, with hardly any breaks, any time to think. This was one of the few moments of peace they’d had over the last weeks.

And it wasn’t even really peace. After all, Jake and Rose were missing. Max and the others were out looking for them. Max was convinced there were other bad guys out there. And if Sadie had learned anything since the EMP, it was that Max was often right. Not always. But a lot of the time.

Her mother was silent for a long time, continuing to scan the surroundings, her rifle by her side.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” continued Sadie. “I feel like I should have learned this in English class or something. But I don’t…”

“Sadie,” said her mother, speaking slowly and with sadness in her voice. “This is too much for someone your age to have to go through. It’s not surprising that you don’t have the words to say what you’re trying to say.”

Sadie thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t think anyone should have to go through this. No matter how old.”

Her mother chuckled. “Maybe you’re right, Sadie. But I guess this is what we get.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know if we deserve it. I wouldn’t go that far. But our whole society… it was foolish in a lot of ways.”

“Like everyone not knowing how to shoot, use a gun, hunt deer like you do?”

“That’s part of it. But think about this… where did all our food come from when we were living in the suburbs?”

“Well, you shot a lot of deer.”

Georgia chuckled again. “Yes, but that’s not all we ate. In fact, I bet it didn’t make up more than 10% of our calories. Where’d the rest come from?”

“The grocery store.”

“Yeah, but where’d it come from before that?”

Sadie shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“It came from all over. On trucks, right? You’ve seen them behind the store, unloading.”

Sadie nodded her head.

“Food came from all over. Damn, it’s weird to talk about this in the past tense. Anyway, they’d ship food to us from all over the world. And the whole country was run like that. Think about it, Sadie, it could have come from ten minutes away, if the infrastructure had been set up like that.”

“But where would people have grown it? It’s not like there are any farms around or anything. None that I’ve seen.”

“Well, you remember out by Valley Forge? That whole area used to be farmland. Gradually, the farmers sold it off to developers. That’s where all those houses came from. Just a way for someone to get really rich. Not that I blame them, necessarily. They were just looking out for their own families. Maybe I would have done the same thing, but it didn’t work out too well for us.”

“But Mom,” said Sadie. “How would that have helped us? We had to get out. We had to leave. Max said we would have been killed if we’d stayed.”