Trial and Error : Stay with Me

This is a story I wrote for a competition. Comment away... Happy reading!!

“I’m out.” I said to Joshua and held out my hand towards him. Shoving his hands down his pocket he extracted another magazine and pressed it into my hand. I reloaded with record speed and continued firing at the Weepers lumbering towards us.

“Goddamn Weepers!” Joshua shouted, kicking at the body of one which had fallen at his feet. “These were new shoes.” He huffed and smiling at me, continuing to shoot at each one that appeared out of the shadows. Soon there were none left.

“Well that’s a job well done, I’d say.” Joshua remarked. Looking around the abandoned factory, he came back carrying two bottles of gasoline. Handing me one, he started meticulously, covering what was left of the Weepers’ nest of human flesh and bones with gasoline, as I poured mine on the floor covering the bodies.

After this was done, we stepped back and he handed me a pack of matches.

“Do the honors, Miss Sherry.” He smiled bowing low. I laughed out loud and took the pack of matches from him and lit the gasoline. As the nest burned, we walked out of the factory and towards our car.

“You know, the next time you run out of ammo, why don’t you try singing them to death. Your shower voice is horrible.” Joshua smirked at me, wiggling his eyebrows. I just shoved him in return.

“As if yours is any better.” I retorted. “Besides, you like it too much.” I laughed as we got into the car.

---

“Do you ever think about it?” I asked Joshua after a while breaking the silence of the drive.

“Think about what?” he asked me not taking his eyes off the road.

“Do you ever think about, you know, life before all this?” I gestured around me as I rephrased the question. He stared quietly for a moment at the road and took a long drag from his cigarette.

“Let me put it this way, Sherry. About a year and a half ago, on august second, there was a sixteen year old guy, who went to bed dreaming about playing videogames, going out with his friends, and more importantly…” he looked at me with his brilliant blue eyes and grinned “…. Kissing the girl he had a crush on.”

Looking back at the road he exhaled slowly letting out the smoke. Plucking the cigarette out of his mouth he scowled at it and threw it out the window.

“That guy went to bed for the last time that night, because by the end of the next day, he had realized 

none of his dreams would ever come true. And now he is driving a beat up mustang, with an addiction to smoking cheap cigarettes and killing Weepers.” He said.

“But given a choice between this life and his old one, the guy would choose this one any day.” He muttered more to himself.

Contemplating his words silently, I turned and looked out the window at the abandoned skyscrapers of Los Angeles as we sped past them. As I stared at them, my thoughts drifted back to my old life and I mused about how quickly I had changed. One day I was a bubbly thirteen year old, and the next I wasn’t.

It all started a year and a half before when a new strand of the rabies virus hit Los Angeles. In just about two months more than half of the population had been affected, and Los Angeles became ground zero. People were being evacuated, but of the three point eight million souls in the city of Lost Angels, only seven hundred thousand were saved.

Quarantines were setup and walls were built at breakneck speed to cut off Los Angeles from the rest of the world in an attempt to curb the infection. From what they heard it had not worked. The infection had spread, but being Ground Zero, L.A. had the least chance of survival.

And then the deaths began….

More than Eighty five percent of the population of the city died, and not a single attempt was made to bring a cure to the city. They had given up all hopes of saving it. My parents were a part of the population who had died. If you ask me they got the better end of the stick. Those who didn’t die started developing a certain liking for the flavor of human flesh. Slowly their bodies changed and became rotten, to the point that they couldn’t even talk coherently. Only wail, and hence the term was coined.

Weepers.

I learned that I was a part of the few who had survived, due to a strand of DNA which rendered me immune to the airborne strain of the virus. But it didn’t make me immune to the virus itself. So if it was injected into my bloodstream by, say, a bite from a weeper I would become one myself. It was too similar to the plot of a post-apocalyptic zombie movie for my liking.

Orphaned at the age of thirteen, I tried my best to avoid Weepers and scourged food from houses and supermarkets. During one such raid for food, I met Joshua, a sixteen year old, with a cigarette in his mouth and a gun in his hand. He had killed more Weepers than I could count with two hands.

Joshua told me that I reminded him of his sister, and that I was welcome to come to his house, where he had supplies, as long as I didn’t steal anything and run away. And that was it. We practically became siblings. He taught me to kill Weepers, and I taught him how to make something other than peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

It is almost surprising how quickly you form a routine, when there is nothing to do except do nothing at all, all day long.

I read a lot and asked Joshua to teach me how to use a firearm. After learning to use one, I started accompanying Joshua on his ‘hunting trips’. We would set off every day at noon, kill Weepers and get back before nightfall. We called it cleansing the city.

Occasionally we would come across other survivors and hunters, but we would just nod our 

acknowledgements and go our separate ways. We always had each other’s backs and made sure none of us were bitten after a particularly rigorous hunt.

Sighing and pushing away thoughts of Weepers away, I thought about what Joshua said. Would I choose this life, where I knew what I had to do every day, over my old one? Or would I give it up over a second chance with my parents and friends? I didn’t know. Maybe I never would know.

”We’re here.” Joshua nudged me as he stopped near a dank old house.

“I tagged this place last week. From what I know there is a really big one in there, but I’m pretty sure there is only one.” I just nodded.

“What do you say, shall we finish this up or shall we get home?” he asked me glancing at his watch. I glanced at mine. Six thirty.

“Let's just finish this up.” I muttered, reaching behind me and grabbing a pair of flashlights and two handguns. Handing over Joshua’s gun and torch to him, I stepped out of the car and waited for him to get out.

We walked around the side of the house and came to a basement door. As Joshua opened the door a smell of rotten flesh filled the air.

“So much for wearing cologne.” Joshua muttered as he held his breath and made his way down into the basement. Doing the same, I followed him. Around halfway down the flight of stairs Joshua asked me to wait and switched on his flashlight. Ignoring him, I stepped into the basement and shone my flashlight in the farthest corner of the basement.

My first mistake.

Sitting on a pile of rotten flesh was a large Weeper. Its skin was pale white, full of infected cuts, and its body was bloated like a corpse. But unlike any other feature, its eyes were the one which filled me with dread. Its eye sockets were empty, and in the place of the irises there was just pus and blood. Letting out a blood curdling wail it lunged at me with surprising agility.

Almost as if tendrils of fear were wrapped around my legs, I stood rooted on the spot.

My second mistake.

As my heart beat faster, time slowed down. I watched as Joshua stepped in front of me, and unloaded his entire magazine into the body of the Weeper. It lumbered forward and fell on Joshua, screaming. As soon as it stopped wailing, life came back to my legs and I rushed to Joshua’s side, who was groaning in pain.

“Get this thing off me.” He wheezed, and I slowly pulled him from under the Weeper. I dragged him to the wall and collapsed down next to him.

“I’m sorry.” I muttered, placing my hand on his forearm. Instead of his usual witty retort at my stupidity, my apology was met with a scream of pain. I looked down at his forearm which was soaked in blood which, I had assumed, had come from the Weeper. I had assumed wrong.

The Weeper had bit him.

“That’s going to leave a mark.” Joshua winced, staring down at the wound.

Blind rage over took me. I screamed and trashed everything near me. It should have been me I cried. It shouldn’t have been Joshua. It wasn’t fair. And finally I ended up sobbing into Joshua’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry.” I wailed.

When I leant back, Joshua did the strangest thing ever. He looked into my eyes and smiled. His eyes started tearing up as he reached for my firearm. Picking it up from the floor, he pressed it into my hand.

“I don’t want to turn.” He said quietly, tears now falling freely. When I grabbed it from his hand, he pointed to his chest.

“Two shots right here.” He said looking into my eyes.

“I can’t.” I choked, tears streaking my face again.

“Please.” he grabbed my hand tighter. “I won’t kill myself. I want you to do it.” I understood why he wanted me to do it. I recalled Joshua telling me about how he had been the one who had killed his sister, to stop her from turning. Fate was cruel.

I slowly nodded wiping away my tears. I pulled his head onto my lap and placed the gun near his heart. Trying to stop the tears, I closed my eyes.

“Wait” he said weakly.

“What I said before… about your singing… I was joking.” He smiled. “Would you… sing to me? 

One last time?” He said looking up at me. And I sang. My voice sounded hoarse, but I sang for him. I would give him his last wish. When I neared the last verses of the song he closed his brilliant blue eyes for the last time.

”… stay with me.” I finished quietly, sobs racking my body.

When his eyes opened again, they were white and glossed over. None of the spark and wit that made Joshua special was left. Hugging him tightly I pulled the trigger.

I could barely hear the shots over my screaming.

---

Sometime in the night, between all the screaming and the sobbing over Joshua’s body, I fell asleep. But as dawn came, I was woken up by the sound of footsteps. Jolting awake, I held Joshua’s body close and raised my gun and pointed it at the bottom of the stairs. A fellow hunter stepped into my line of sight, his hands raised. He slowly looked at me, the Weeper and then Joshua’s lifeless body. I slowly got up, the gun in my hand and stepped over the Weeper’s body.

The other hunter must have realized what had happened. He said a small apology.

An apology that wouldn’t bring Joshua back, I mused. It wouldn’t remove the numbness which had settled over me after I had woken up. I just nodded at him, and walked past him, up the stairs. I stepped out of the basement and in to the sunlight. Walking past Joshua’s car, I stopped in the middle of the deserted road.

“He’s never coming back. He’s gone for better, or for worse. You could join him, you know. Who else do you have left anyway?” A small raspy voice in my head asked me.

I ignored it.

I would listen to it when the time came. Shoving my firearm down my waist band I began walking towards sun which was rising between the desolate skyscrapers, standing as monuments to long forgotten gods, in the city of the Lost Angels.

For now, I had Weepers to hunt.