S. Davis - 900 Miles

“Thank you. Thank you so much for saving my baby,” she whispered through a cracked voice as she looked up from my chest with those eyes.

They were soft; an almost transparent blue. The kind you’d see staring back at you from a magazine cover on one of those old celebrity magazines. I was taken aback by them at first. In the underground light, most people’s eyes looked hazel green. Not hers.

That is how I met Claire.

I’d later learn that Claire grew up just outside of Philadelphia. While her exterior was soft, you could tell she was a survivor. She’d have to be. After all, making the trek down to Avalon with a small child in tow must have been one hell of a journey. The kind of journey that only the most fierce, or lucky, of us would ever make—and she didn’t seem like the lucky type. A mother would do anything to protect her baby. I’m sure she had been pushed to her limits. We all had.

Maybe it was because I hadn’t held anyone in so long, or perhaps it was simply because I didn’t know what else to do, but I didn’t let go. There was a silence in that moment. The kind of calm that blocks out every noise around you. Neither of us budged, as if locked in time, using every second to replace so many others that had been missed. Sometimes a connection can be made without words, without text, without anything more than a touch. I felt it, and I want to say she did too. Perhaps we were both just replacing one another with the loved ones we’d lost. Perhaps not.

Jarvis spoke up. “Let’s get this place cleaned up. Richard, would you escort Claire and her daughter to their living quarters and get the child looked at?”

Unclenching my hands, as if they’d been pried open by the sudden request, I slowly lowered my arms while twisting my wedding ring between my fingers, as Claire turned toward Richard’s extended hand. “Let’s make sure this little sweetheart is right as rain,” he smiled. Standing there, watching them slowly walk away, I found myself blurting out, “Hey!”

Claire turned to look back. I hesitated with a flash of uncertainty, as my mind stuttered.

“What’s her name? Your little girl?” I managed to force out.

“Olivia,” she said, trying to pull off a smile, and then turned back toward Richard and kept walking.

“Olivia,” I whispered to myself. “We saved little Olivia.”

As they passed through the doorway, I noticed a number of people in the hallway. Each of them peering in with the hope that they had not lost any loved ones or friends.

Claire was lucky. There would be many others that were not.

Jarvis finally broke the silence. “That may be an issue,” he said while running a finger through the layer of ash atop the medicine cabinet.

This caught our attention, snapping Kyle away from watching Rodgers continue to thoughtfully clean his helmet visor on the dead man’s smock.

We’d all lost a little humanity.

“Can’t we replace it with what we have in storage?” I asked in a way that almost implied it wasn’t possible for this to be that big a problem.

“This was it, John. We’ve burned through the backup… we have nearly seventy people to take care of down here,” Jarvis said, remaining composed.

My mouth went dry, and my shoulders tensed, almost as if my body realized what this meant before my brain did. Not so much as a word slipped through my lips as my mind shot directly to the little boy back in my room that needed a daily dose of that liquid mist from the nebulizer.

Less than thirty minutes earlier, I’d administered the final dose that I had tucked away in our living quarters. When he was first diagnosed, the doc had instructed that Tyler was at risk of an attack at any time. Regular doses of the meds would mostly keep it at bay. Regular being every twenty-four hours or so…

However, again, that was ‘mostly,’ and mostly didn’t cut it. We needed the medication, and we needed it now.

It must have been obvious in my face. Kyle didn’t have to ask the question.

Stepping to the middle of the room, Kyle boldly stated, “John and I are heading out to find meds for his son. We’ll need to sort out where and how, but there’s no scenario where we don’t head out.” He said this while looking directly in my eyes. Something about how he said it made me feel like we’d actually be able to pull it off. After all, we had to, or my son would die.

“We’ll need to suit up and meet topside,” Kyle said, shifting his head toward where he thought the field was. “We’re heading outside the gates in an hour. We’ll need to get everything prepped right away.”

Looking around the room, Kyle then asked, “Who’s with us?”

You’re not turning all hippie on me, are you?

After saying my final goodbyes to Tyler and Deanna, I found myself climbing a set of stairs that led up to a part of the field above the bunker which was fortified and surrounded by a series of large cement walls. I stepped toward my good friend. The one man I could trust.

Wearing a pair of sunglasses that hid his eyes, Kyle had his head tilted toward the sun. His equipment was piled up nearby, and he was using the moment of peace to enjoy the outside, taking deep breaths and pulling the fresh air into his lungs. I didn’t think he noticed me walking up beside him.

“Nothing like the outdoors,” he said as he exhaled.

Glancing up at the sky, I watched as a set of rolling white clouds lazily drifted through a magnificent blue sky. There were moments where one could almost forget about where we were and what had happened. The clouds didn’t give a shit whether humans or Zs roamed the landscape. They moved along just the same. It was the same sky the dinosaurs had looked at, and it would be the same one long after man was extinct. I took comfort in the fact that not everything had changed in the seven months since the dead began to… well, not stay dead.

“Getting a little cabin fever, are we?” I said as I glanced at Kyle.

“I would be perfectly happy setting up a tent out here and never going back down into that catacomb,” he replied, emphasizing catacomb as he looked at his own black, soot-covered hands.

“You’re not turning all hippie on me, are you?”

Glancing to me, with a straight face, he said, “Don’t know. You’re not turning all Wookie on me, are you?”

Reaching my hand up to the patchy beard I had failed to shave off for weeks, I cracked a smile and replied, “Touché…”

Slowly panning my gaze across the Yard, I noticed people scurrying around, getting ready. It was a big deal every time we entered and exited Avalon, and it took time to get everything in order. Still, I found myself tapping my foot. I couldn’t help but feel like we weren’t moving fast enough.

Prodding him a bit, I asked about the time, knowing full well what the answer was.

Without moving his face away from the sun, Kyle lifted his wrist to my face, placing a rusted gold-plated watch with a scratched faceplate to my eyes. Barely glancing at the hand slowly ticking around, I muttered “Shit” under my breath. “We’re already losing daylight.”

Kyle remained calm, trying not to get worked up. I knew him well enough to understand that he needed time to get mentally ready before heading out beyond the wall.

This was just his way of doing it, and didn’t in any way mean he wasn’t fully aware of the sense of urgency at hand.

The Yard, as we called the land we had sealed off from the outside world, was our small patch of safety outside. We had some gardens where we grew seasonal vegetables on the far side, a garage where we did most of the vehicle repairs, and a parking lot filled with four-wheel drive trucks and pickups which the group used for recon work and scavenging outside the walls. We even had a solid supply of fuel-filled drums stockpiled near the garage, which we’d collected from nearby gas stations.