Sophie Geremia

“If all goes well, we’ll meet up again in a few days further upstate.”

“If,” Amy replies, stoking the fire with her wood-scavenged stick. Dial her down a few years and

take her out of this zombie-infested world, she would have called it the perfect marshmallow

roasting stick, and this campfire would have been the perfect setting for a campfire horror story

or a singalong, or that game where everyone builds a story together by saying one sentence at a

time. With reality beaten into her shoulders, however, she doesn’t feel like playing games or

eating s’mores. She feels like delegating nightwatch duties and catching her usual three hours

before dawn’s early light descends and tells them to move again. “Since when are you one for

positivity, anyways?”

“Since you’ve seemed to have lost all of yours,” Elias is quick to respond.

“I haven’t lost anything.” She wrinkles her nose but doesn’t dare lift her gaze. Orange flickers

satisfy her plenty, more than the empty glimmer in her brother’s eyes ever could. “I just learned

how to be realistic.”

“That’s what they all say.”

Amy continues to poke at the flames, wordless.

Long after Elias’ eye roll tonality has been processed and stored away, the younger pulls her stick

from the fire and shoves the flaming edge – briefly like a candle on the first of advent – into the

dirt.

“I’ll keep watch. Why don’t you turn in early tonight?” she suggests. “You have the harder task

ahead of you.”

Groaning, Elias shifts off the log he’s been sitting on. “We’re both doing hard things, just in

different ways,” he replies, then strides across the small ring of light so he can place a hand on

her shoulder before leaving. “I’m coming back to you, you know that, right?”

Her adopted brother is so sincere, so adamant, that Amy feels guilty for not feeling anything at

all. It’s not that she doesn’t believe him– she can’t. If history taught her anything it was to expect

nothing but grey weather ahead.

She lifts her hand to touch his, but she can only graze his skin before pulling it back.

This is it, her brain wants her to know. This is goodbye.

How she doesn’t want to even acknowledge that truth...

—

Standing there, across the room – across the emptiness of the second floor of this

decrepit, old factory building – is him. Is Elias. Even from this distance, she can see the

blood smeared across his cheeks and splattering his clothes brown, but he’s standing.

He’s standing upright and on his own. All his muscles still work. All of his skeleton

holds intact. He’s alright!

Her fingers freeze in the space where they were teaching the youngest of her crew, a girl

of only five, how to tie her sneakers. This new crew of hers is a nomadic bunch with a

population of ten, bouncing from suburbs to suburbs in hopes of extending life by one

day at a time, just like she and her old crew had done before they split up eight months

prior. The group with her and her brother split apart for a myriad of reasons – limited

food, hoards of zombies hot on their tail, personality clashes – until the young

warrior-types branched off from the lay-low, survivalist ones. When her brother Elias

and she travelled down different forks in the road. Every day ever since, she missed him,

and living by his last words grew harder as time rolled on. I’m coming back to you, he’d

said. She forced herself to think it was possible, but her realism prattled on with far

more stamina and the fact that maybe she shouldn’t– or couldn’t– hold on so tightly

loosened her grip on the words.

But here he stands again. Elias. Best friend. Brother. Guiding light. Holding a

crudely-shaped bow instead of his usual machete and bleeding from several cuts on his

cheeks, arms, and torso. Still breathing. Still standing. Alive.

She spins around and upward, ratty old nikes slapping the concrete floor until she’s two

feet away. Sunshine graces her cheeks for a second, until her nearer vicinity causes her

to assess deeper damage embedded across his skin.

“None of those are– are infected, right?” she asks, back on edge.

He shakes his head. His forehead, which is beaded in sweat and smeared with grime,

dips.

The sunshine turns back on. Hope floods her chest like helium would a balloon, lifting

it to the ceiling.

It’s not the right time, and it’s not the right place; undead hordes could be closing in on

their location any minute now, but for a glorious second, Amy forgets about the

apocalypse. For a glorious second, she shoves herself all the way into Elias and wraps

her arms around his shoulders. Thank you, the squeeze of the hug seems to say, thank you

for being right all that time ago.