Jason Morrow - Anywhere but Here

There is only one bed in the room and a couch. Gilbert claimed the couch the moment he saw it and Ethan gave up the bed for me.

“There’s room for us both,” I say. “You shouldn’t have to sleep on the dirty floor.”

Ethan smiles at me as he looks over at Gilbert, his snores echoing off the empty walls. “This world may have gone to hell, Waverly,” he says as he lays out a blanket on the floor, “but my principles haven’t.”

“Your principles?” I ask.

“That’s right,” he says.

“Chivalry has no place in a world where the dead walk,” I say. “This bed is large and the floor is disgusting.”

“I’m not being chivalrous,” he says. “I just feel weird about sharing a bed is all.”

“In this world, you take what you can get, and I’m offering a spot next to me. That’s all.”

He sighs and shakes his head. “Goodnight, Waverly.”

I try to sleep, but nightmares consume my mind. All I see is Lucas’ head shattering from the bullet impact, his body falling to the ground next to me. I wake up crying out in my sleep, but I calm down when I feel a pair of strong arms wrap around me.

“Lucas,” I whisper.

“I know, I know,” a voice says to me. “It’s hard. I know it is.”

It’s Ethan.

“Cry as much as you need to,” he says as he rocks me, my head resting against his chest.

He sets his cheek on the top of my head. I don’t know if he kisses my hair or not, but his embrace is enough to make me feel safe. He somehow makes the pain lessen.

I feel for the chain at my neck and follow it down to the diamond ring at the end. I fall asleep in his arms, but even his warm embrace cannot keep me from the nightmares that fill my mind.

It was a month or two after Charles’ death when Hattie was infected by a greyskin. There was a deep bite in her shoulder and scratches all along her back. The hour was late and the three of us sat in an abandoned fast food restaurant, not knowing what to do.

She was beyond coherency and probably only a few minutes from dying. Her skin had already turned ashy, and her eyes looked like pieces of wet coal. I didn’t know what was more difficult to watch: the pain on Lucas’ face, or Hattie struggling to stay alive. We both knew she was suffering, but while she was still able to talk to us, she told us not to kill her. She told us just to leave her there in the building and run as far away as possible. But we had not been able to do the second part. It was easy for neither of us to kill her, but there was no way we could just leave her there. Neither one of us said it, but we knew we would never let her turn into a greyskin. She would die, and that would be it.

Lucas was confronting what I had already faced from the very beginning of the outbreak. Lucas was facing the death of his family.

The three of us had been traveling through the country for as long as we could. It was no small wonder that any of us were still alive. We had faced greyskins, bandits, murderers… this was the beginning of survival and people were nasty about it. No one trusted anyone else. Everyone held onto his or her possessions as if they were the only things that would keep a person alive. It was a struggle just to come across a canned good, much less shelter. Lucas had been somewhat of a good hunter but ammunition was hard to come by. He had once shot a deer only to have it stolen from him as he was bringing it to us. It seemed that ever since the outbreak, fate was dealing us blow after blow with no end in sight until we simply died. And then, with Hattie bitten and scratched as she was, there was only the two of us left.

“What are we going to do, Waverly? She’s my mother.” He bit at his fingernails incessantly, the occasional tear finding its way to the bottom of his cheeks before sliding off to his shirt.

“I know she’s your mother,” I said, but I didn’t know how to comfort him. I couldn’t tell him this, but I wanted to say that it affected me just as much. I loved Hattie more than my own mother. It was harder to see her suffer than it was to hear my father get ripped to pieces over the phone.

The worst part about it was knowing that she was going to die, and not being able to do anything about it. For a long while, she had just sat there and mumbled words that neither of us could understand, but for the last hour she had been asleep. Her breaths were shallow and the virus was quickly taking over her completely.

None of us had seen the news since the day we left their home when Charles died, so we didn’t know much more than we did the day it started. All we knew was what we had learned from others. One thing we knew was that the virus would kill within twenty-four hours, and Hattie was in her last hour.

I reached out and touched her forehead. She was burning hot. When she reached up and grabbed my arm, I nearly screamed because I thought she might have turned without us realizing it, but her touch was gentle.

“Waverly,” she said. “Lucas.”

Lucas jumped to the floor and was by her side in an instant. “What do you need, Mom?”

“Why are you two still here?” Her voice barely came out as a whisper.

“We’re scared,” I said. “We want to be with you.”

“It’s dangerous to be near me.”

“Not yet it isn’t,” I said, gripping her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have gone out. I’m sorry.” Her foggy, blackened eyes turned toward Lucas and then to me. “Neither of you deserve this. You were meant to grow up in a different life.” Her breaths became more labored with each word. “I wanted to see you grow up to be like your father.”

“He is still with me,” Lucas said. His lips were quivering and I knew he was trying to hold back the tears to seem strong for his dying mother. I felt so proud of him. “And so are you, Mom.”

A faint hint of a smile formed at the side of her mouth. “That’s good to hear.”

Her eyes turned to me and it was almost too much to look back at her. Those eyes didn’t belong to Hattie. “You two can never let go of each other,” she says. “You have to rely on each other. Watch over each other.”

“We will,” Lucas said, looking up at me.

“Always,” I said. “I will never leave his side.”

This made her smile again. “It does me good to hear that. Neither of you have family, but now you are family. Don’t give up. They will find a cure. The world will get better. You just have to survive to the end.”

Hattie closed her eyes with these words. No matter how hard we tried, Lucas and I could not stop weeping.

“Hattie,” I said, “do you feel pain? Are you suffering?”

She took a deep breath, her eyes still closed. “Go fish.”

A short laugh escaped my lips and Hattie’s grip on my hand squeezed tighter. We sat next to her for another twenty minutes before she finally took her last breath and her grip on my hand eased.

We were then faced with the grim reality that Hattie could wake as a greyskin at any moment and someone had to do something about it. Lucas got up from her side and walked out of the little restaurant and into the parking lot while I sat still holding Hattie’s hand. I pulled her fingers from mine and followed him out there.

He was shivering and the wind blew at his thick blonde hair. “I can’t be in there,” he said.

I walked up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, leaning my cheek against his shoulder. I wanted to tell him that I knew how he felt, but he already knew that. He didn’t need me to comfort him with words. He needed his mother to hold him and to tell him that everything would be all right.