《After Z》Chapter Nine
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Nature, it turned out, was complicated. The scouts were gathered around the campfire, sitting on stumps and a mossy log, nobody speaking for a long time until Noah broached the topic they’d been avoiding since breakfast. “You think it was bees?”
“What?” Mason asked, the interrogative higher pitched than normal for his ten-year-old voice.
“Bees?” Noah repeated. He hoped Mason wouldn’t start crying again, because then HE’d start crying again, and soon enough the whole troop would be crying, and nobody had time for that. “Up in the trees. You think it was bees? He got stung, he fell?”
“I don’t know,” Mason seemed offended, somehow.
“Maybe,” Aiden said. “Or a squirrel.”
“Squirrels don’t bite.” Ethan sounded confident. Ethan always sounded confident, even when he was full of shit. Especially when he was full of shit. And this time, Noah knew he was full of shit because he had, last year, been bitten by a squirrel.
“No, it might have just startled him,” Aiden clarified.
“Yeah. Or a crow.” Jackson pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Crows are smart. And they travel in murders.”
The dozen scouts all privately considered the implication of the term.
“It’s just a name,” Ethan sniffed. Noah was inclined to agree.
Jackson sat back on his tree stump and stretched his spine. “Or is it?”
“Yes.” The response was nearly unanimous, like at last night’s dinner when Jackson had suggested that marshmallows were made out of marshes, only this time nobody giggled.
The silence returned. Noah looked towards Scoutmaster Dale’s tent, then towards the path out of the youth camping area to the parking lot. “We should do something.”
“Hold a Jamboree?”
“No, I mean about… about what happened. Find a police officer. Or… I don’t know, that forest ranger.”
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There was a moment’s chill. Nobody liked that ranger. He was intimidating.
Finally, Aiden spoke up. “You remember what Scoutmaster Dale said. There’s nothing to go back to.”
Noah stood up and balled his fists. “We can’t just stay here forever! I want to go find my mom.”
"We all want to find your mom." It was an old joke, ha ha, Noah's mom was hot, Ethan never shut up about it. He slipped off of the log he’d been sitting on and rounded on Noah, his voice turning serious. “You saw the video.”
Noah looked down at his hiking boots. “Yeah.”
Ethan turned to the others. “We all saw it. What’s happening. All over the world.”
“Like the Walking Dead,” Jackson said.
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “But we’re not going to call them Walkers."
"Oh, yeah, it's probably a trademark or something." Jackson brightened. "What about Chompers?"
"No."
"Because they like to bite-"
"Yeah, no, I get it. We're not going to call them anything cutesy." Ethan crossed his arms. "That’s dumb. They’re frickin’ zombies.”
“So what do we do?” Noah asked.
“We stay out here.” Ethan stood up on the stump Noah had vacated. “We’re trained wilderness scouts. We have gear. We can trap game. Forage. Find water and shelter. We can stay out here indefinitely, on our own, until help comes.”
“Like Lord of the Flies,” Jackson said.
Ethan paused, and slowly turned towards Jackson. “Uh, maybe not exactly like Lord of the Flies.”
“Why not?” Jackson asked.
“Why not?” Noah echoed. “Because of how it ended?”
“I didn’t finish it,” Jackson admitted. “I’m going to guess it didn’t go well?”
“No,” Ethan said. “It did not.”
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