“Come on.” April insists, standing over me.

I’m sprawled out on a white bed in the master bedroom, the dull sun is overpowered by the bright snow, shining in through the window. The snow also happens to overpower the sun in terms of temperature.

“I found a shortcut we can take that’ll get us there a lot sooner.”

“Good job.” I reach my hand out, in return she high-fives me.

“You don’t mind sewer water, right?”

“Like toilet water, underground?”

“It sounds gross, but there’s one that runs from a road not too far from here to a town next to Elmira. It’s better than walking straight from here to there.”

“How’d you figure all this out?”

“I checked close houses for supplies and I found a letter from the sewer system, it’s from a City close to Elmira. Down the road there’s a sewer drain, the one that was under man-ti-nance.”

“You didn’t check those houses alone?”

“Logan came with me.”

“He’s back?”

“He came here after you fell asleep.”

***

“Just let me do it, it’s my axe!”

“Fine, have it your way.” Ria says to April.

April jabs the metal end of her axe into the edge of the sewer.

“We need a screwdriver. See those screws?” I ask.

“Actually, I might-” Serafina bends down and unzips the bag we were given yesterday, she then takes out an orange screwdriver. She unscrews the sewer drain cap and slides it out of the way.

“So who’s going first?” Zander questions.

“I’ll do it.”

I climb down the ladder and jump down. As soon as I turn around, a groaning, tall, zombie latches onto me. I almost shoot it then realize that I can’t risk the noise so instead I slam my gun to the side of it’s head. Once it’s on the ground, yet still alive, I bash it’s head in with my shoe.

The others climb down the ladder, Ally has some trouble with her freshly wounded finger. Something new is that it’s now wrapped with a napkin and tape, she must have done that last night.

“Flashlights?” Eli asks.

Serafina reaches back into the bag and distributes four flashlights among us.

“We just walk straight, right?” She hesitates.

“Yep.” April nods.

But behind us zombies fall through the opening. “Fuck! This is not good.” Serafina calls out, shooting as they fall down.

“Make them back off then climb up there and close it!” Julia shouts.

April slashes a zombie’s head clean off, “We can’t, there’s too many. We have to just run.”

“I can do it, I’m already bit.” Ally says.

Zander interrupts her, “No, you were bit, we fixed that.

If no one’s going to do it then I might as well take the risk. All of us could die in here. I climb up the ladder, pushing them off me as they come, then as I’m at the top I shoot the ones closest to me then reach for the lid. Right when I close it, I lose my grip and fall all eight to nine feet down. The toilet water somewhat made the fall better, but not by much.

“Well, I closed it.” my voice strains.

“You did good.” April says.

***

“Holy crap.” Serafina says, “I haven’t been here since I was… ten.”

“Your neighborhood?” Ria asks.

“My old one, yeah. Nitro’s house is just a few blocks down from here.”

“I’d be so surprised if my mom wasn’t rotting or feeding off flesh right now.”

“Do you think my mom came back?” Serafina asks.

“That happened kind of long ago, I doubt it.”

“The morgue picked up her body anyway, I even visited her grave. Still, if it’s possible, it’s possible.”

“She’d be worse than dead, no one wants that.”

Not after long we reach my house, with that stupid metal door boarded shut. I have a sick feeling in my stomach, a feeling she’s still in there, or someone else is.

“How are you gonna get in there?” Eli asks.

“I’ll just knock, I guess?”

“Well good luck.”

The group retrieves to the sidewalk where they can’t be seen. I knock on the door, someone slides open the peephole then rushes to open the window, “Come in, son.”

The house is messier than the last time I saw it, you’d sure as hell go insane living in the same place for two years, alone, inside almost all day, every day.

“Sit down, are you thirsty?”

“Sure.” I sit down at the table that wasn’t made to be indoors and is rusting, the white paint, likely older than me, chipping off. There’s two, wooden, folding chairs, one is knocked over.

She sets a glass of water down in front of me, when I can finally get a good look at her face. She has scabs and red bumps all over her face, her green eyes are surrounded by red and her brown hair is matted, pulled into a ponytail. She’s smiling at me, it took her the end of the world to do that. She sets up the knocked over chair and sits in front of me. I look behind her at the nightstand, holding pills and needles then back at her face. “You’ve been doing drugs?”

She tightens her lips then says, “I never thought you would come back. You look so much older.”

“. . .You too.” I go to take a sip of the water and when my lips make contact I put the glass down, “This is vodka, mom.”

“It’s all I have. I missed you.” She shrugs.

“You’re a worse liar than me.”

“I wish I could’ve taken care of you, I got you baby food and clothes, a crib, everything, and I paid for it with my hard earned money. You see me as a monster because of what your father did to this family.”

“What did happen to him? No bullshit.”

“We almost got married, my mother kicked me out so I stayed with his family, then he wouldn’t come home some nights and admitted to cheating on me. We stayed together to raise you. He still cheated, eventually I did too. I asked my boyfriend to fight him after I got so fed up. Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight, fuckhead brought a knife to an unannounced fistfight. I didn’t want to be the instigator and accomplice of my fiance’s murder so I left.”

“You killed my dad?”

“I swear, I really tried to be a better mom.”

“You didn’t try hard enough!”

“Nikolas. That was your name.”

“You hated me.”

“I hated your father, not you.”

“Looks like your group is worried about you.”

“What?” I turn around to see April peeking through the open window.

“Friends will come and go but I’ll always be here. I’ll stay here until I die, and they’ll just keep leaving.”

“You know, mom. You never said you loved me. And with all those drugs it won’t be soon before you leave too.” I say, standing up.

“I do love you. I can quit, just don’t leave me.”

“No. I’m sorry, Marissa.” I exit through the window.

“Are you okay?” Serafina asks.

“Yeah.”

"We should go towards the city, can you see those buildings?" Ally points at a tall, glass, blue building in the distance.

"Why should we?" I ask the wide, brown eyed girl.

"Because if we keep going south from where we are right now it's almost certain a good portion of us won't make it too far." She swallows, "There may be more people but at least they're living."

***

"Six of them." I say, bowing my head back down into cover behind a wooden crate that smells like pine trees, below a blue tarp.

We're hidden by different objects established a short span from a tall building next to a machine with a big ladder. From what I've seen, six adults – three women and three men most likely in their thirties are pacing the area, they must live here, or are on good terms with someone who does.

Eli and Logan are behind a sheet of metal, only maybe three feet to the left of me. Logan stands up, "This is a construction site, that building was never finished."

"Woah" Eli, still crouched, reaches his hand out and asks, "Where are you going?"

"I'm going to look for a way in there." He barely tries to make it far enough until he gets seen by a bald man holding a very sharp, fancy-looking knife. Zander uses his crossbow to shoot the man in his thigh, alerting the bald guard and his five friends to our presence. I separate from the others, directly towards the unfinished building. A woman wielding a steak knife attempts to stab my neck. I pull the trigger on my gun but nothing happens so I duck. How convenient, I don't even remember using my last bullet. I use the pistol to block her strikes and struggle to hit the woman with it. Serafina yells, "Nitro!" When her thrown blade falls toward me, in the act of catching it the lady digs her knife into my thigh, the same way Zander's arrow impaled that bald guy's leg. "An eye for an eye." She coughs. I slice her forearm then her stomach, but she continues to tower above me, swinging left and right. Ultimately I puncture her chest, blood leaks out her open mouth, down her chin, to travel across her throat.

Relieved I back away, expecting her to fall but instead, she covers her wound and whispers, "Bastard." Then attacks me. I grab a hold of her shoulders and slam her through the glass window, this time she's really gone. I feel something behind me brush my back, a metal stack of bars on top of one another with slabs of metal with holes between and stairs that repeat so high it hurts to seek the top. "Up here!" I shout to the others, I myself climb up the thing, not before long Serafina follows, everyone runs up the icy stairs and grabs the metal attachments in panic as the other four guards chase us to the top.

"The scaffolding ends here!" Ria, multiple feet across from me, calls out in fear.

The 'scaffolding' stops in front of planks of wood, creating a bridge that zig-zags to the roof, the roof being scrap metal, wielded together to form a platform. Next to that platform is the machine with the ladder. Snow disrupts my view as I take out four bullets and reload my gun, after I’ve finished, just in time the adults are inches away. “Use the boards!” I shout. We run across the wobbly, makeshift, bridge. Julia is the first to reach the top, the other woman runs after her, grunting and grabbing at everything in sight, I chase after her in a hurry. All I have to do is jump from one plank to another in time, I leap across but the distance was longer than I expected, I fall and immediately grasp onto the cold, semi-wet, bridge that the guard is making her way off of. April reaches her hand down, “Get up, Nitro.”

“I can’t, not without pulling you down.” April is too much lighter than me to pull me up, especially regarding her injured leg.

I try lifting myself up but the board is too narrow. Serafina jogs toward me and assists me onto the board, seconds before BANG! A gun goes off, April nearly slips, I pull her back, steadily and climb on the roof. Julia was shot, she’s holding her shoulder, leaned up against a large, blue, toolbox with wheels. The woman who shot her is nowhere to be seen. I along with Ally rush to her and I ask, “What happened?”

“I pushed that slut off. She shot me, I think it hit an artery.” She groans.

“Julia…” Ally says.

“I’m so sorry for being an asshole to you, Ally. I should’ve treated you better.”

“Hey, hey, don’t say that, once we get out of here you can do just that.”

I turn around to the sound of metal clanking against each other and run at a tall, long haired man who’s swinging at Eli with the bald guard’s knife. After shooting him, his friend’s knife that appears as a small sword crashes on the metal flooring. However I don’t have time to focus on it as another man shoots at me, luckily after I noticed him, giving me time to dodge my head downward. He keeps walking toward me and I keep backing away until I come into contact with the machine. With nowhere to run I turn around and ascend higher and higher. The moment I aim at the guy his bullet ricochets off the step below me. He has to be playing with me at this point. Behind him I see Eli, fancy knife in hand. Not before long the knife is no longer in Eli’s hand, but the man’s head. Everyone is by Julia’s side and safe now. I get off the freezing cold machine, Eli helps me down then asks, “Hey do you wanna talk?”

I furrow my eyebrows.

“About your mom…”

“I figured.”

“If you don’t want to then it’s fine but I-”

“Actually. Thank you. She uh, she told me that my name was meant to be Nikolas and she told me about how my dad died. She arranged a fight that led to his death.”

Eli clears his throat then says, “You know how Ria was bugging me about my name?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Elias. From my grandfather or something.”

“Ellie-us? Sounds nothing like Eli.”

“And Nitro sounds nothing like Nikolas.”

I say, “Oh and thank you… Elias, for killing that guy.”

He reaches into his jacket pocket and holds out the knife, “It’s a dagger. Take it.”

“I don’t need it, I have my gun.” I insist.

“The same gun that ran out of bullets back there. I’d feel a lot better if you had extra protection, backup.”

“You’d feel better?” I grin.

“I really want you to be safe. Take it, Stray.”

I take hold of the dagger from Eli’s cold hands then look him in his eyes, “I want you to be safe too, so worry about yourself more.”

“Not that easy. You barely worry about yourself anyway.”

April walks over, “Julia’s arguing with us saying we need to go or she’s gonna die even though she isn’t bleeding.”

“She isn’t bleeding?” Eli asks.

April, open mouthed, shakes her head.

“Fuck.” He scurries to Julia.

I match his pace and ask, “How is that bad?”

“It’s internal.”

“She’s bleeding inside?!”