(no subject)

[forthedog]

In the Flying
2687 words


“Hold it steady.”

It bothers her, the way he talks to her. It’s been three days and she knows his name, knows that he’s a sellsword, knows that he’s been using his sword pretty much for himself since the dead started to walk, and not a lot else. He hasn’t told her. In fairness, she hasn’t really asked.

And he talks to her like she’s a child. Like she has no idea what she’s doing.

“Steadier than that.” He sighs and spits gristle from the salted meat he’s chewing into the grass by his feet, and when she shoots him a poisonous glance he meets her there, steady as he’s telling her to be. “You shoot, you can’t miss. They’ll have way more heads than you have arrows, witch.”

“Go to Hell. I’m an adept. Not a godsdamned witch.” She focuses on the targets again—a row of empty glass bottles taken from an abandoned tavern in the town in the valley below them, arrayed on a stone wall—crossbow slotted against her shoulder. She squints, and she knows she’s wavering as she fires an arrow, sure as the shot flies that it doesn’t fly true.

It hits the wall and bounces harmlessly into the grass. From behind her, she hears Mike let out an exasperated sigh.

“I said steady.”

“I don’t need to learn this anyway.” She turns, wants to hurl the crossbow to the ground, and all that stops her is the knowledge that she’d look supremely childish doing so, and he might actually laugh at her. Which might result in some part or other of him on fire. Which might end up being a problem. “You saw me back there. Did I or did I not take out something like twenty of them without a weapon on me?”

“And did you or did you not fall the fuck off your horse right after?” He crosses his arms over his chest, and while he doesn’t look particularly impressed with her, he also doesn’t look all that annoyed. “You’re an adept? You gotta be newly frocked, then, ‘cause you don’t have the juice for any kind of prolonged output. Until you work up to that, you’ll need the bow. You’ll need it to live. And you’ll need to be steady.”

She watches him warily. Suddenly she’s reminded of how little she really knows about him. “How do you know that? About the magics?”

Something in his blue eyes flickers. Something darker. “I know a lot. More since this all started. Now.” He steps away from the horse, which is placidly grazing as if nothing is wrong with the world at all, and moves over to her, gripping her shoulders and turning her back to face the stone wall again. “Nock another one. Quick as you can.”

She’s ready to protest, but there’s something about his voice that stops her, calm and patient where before he had seemed almost ready to give her up as hopeless. She reaches into the quiver, pulls out an arrow and fits it into the bow.

“All right. Relax.” His hands still on her shoulders, then on her hips, and while she stiffens slightly, she senses no lustful intent in the touch. She knows unflattering things about sellswords, men and women who carouse in taverns and gamble away their coin and patronize whores, who will bed anything that lies still enough, but it’s been three days and he hasn’t given her any indication that he wants anything like that from her. He’s barely showed any interest in her at all, aside from what they’ve needed to do to keep moving. “Focus on what you want to hit. You? You’re the arrow. You fly true, you’ll hit true. The trick of it is in the flying.”

He goes silent then, and they just stand there, his hands on her hips, all her attention focused on a wide blue bottle a dozen or so yards from her. And now she’s starting to feel it, the tension of the string, herself wound tight in it, her lethal point, the potentiality of killing in a way that involves no weaving of spells or chanted incantations.

It’s not better. But it’s different.

“When you’re ready, breathe in. Hold. Fire.”

She’s about to. And then from behind them she hears a thick, bubbling groan. Mike reels back and away from her, and as she turns with him she sees him reaching for his sword, but it’s on them, stinking, rotting hands outstretched and mouth open wide, and shit, how did they miss it, and Mike is not going to be fast enough.

“Andrea, ru—“

Everything freezes.

At some point she realizes that she’s breathing again, breathing hard. That Mike is breathing equally hard, staring at her. That the walker is crumpled on the ground between them, the shaft of her arrow protruding from its head.

For a long moment, Mike just stares, his expression unreadable. She starts to feel more awkward than anything else, lowers the crossbow and takes a step back.

But then Mike smiles.

“All right,” he says. “All right. We can work with this.”

* * *

She’s very good with the bow. It takes them only a few more days to figure that out.

They stick to the less traveled roads and open fields, places where the walkers are spaced out more thinly. She rides and he walks, at least most of the time, waving away her offers to switch with him. And after her pride recovers it becomes obvious that there are advantages in this. From horseback she can practice holding her aim even with the bouncing of the horse’s gait, she can practice making herself still. While at first Mike insists that she not waste the arrows, after the first three walkers fall with one shot each he gives way completely, and the day after that he’s openly encouraging her. When she clears the field ahead of them—six in seven shots—she catches him looking up at her with a grin of unmistakable pleasure stretching his mouth. She hasn’t ever seen him grin before. Not really. It feels good, knowing that she made him do that.

Two weeks and she hasn’t seen anyone alive but him.

At night they stop, in abandoned shacks and woodsheds, barns and grain silos. They stay out of the villages for the most part, and if they keep the noise down and the light to a minimum, nothing comes too near them. It’s still high summer and the nights are warm.

But they both know that won’t last.

“Where are we going, anyway?” he asks her one night five days after that week in the field, pulling the last of the meat off the bones of the skinny hare he’d managed to snare.

She looks up at the question, mildly surprised. But it’s true, she supposes. She’s been setting the direction. She just hasn’t put it into words. Maybe once it had been about trust, but she’s not sure that’s an issue anymore.

“A tower,” she says after a few more seconds of silence. “It’s… There are things there I need.”

She looks up from the dying remains of their fire. There’s a bright moon but his face is entirely thrown into shadow and she can’t read his expression. “Let me guess,” he says after another moment. She hears an edge of wry humor, but no real mocking. “Spellbooks? Gazing crystals? Mystic runes?”

“Actually, you’re not that far off.” She sucks grease off her thumb, brooding. “It’s… Let’s just say there’s something there that I think might help all this.”

She hears him take a slow breath. “Really.”

“Really.” And she’s damned—really, damned—if she’s going to tell him more. Because maybe trust isn’t an issue now but trust only goes so far.

“Well, then.” He shifts, unsheathes his sword and pulls his whetstone from his pack. The blade gleams. “We should hurry.”

* * *

Two days later they near a town—not one that she’s ever been to, but it’s there on the map in her head—and while normally they would give it and the dead wandering its streets a wide berth, Mike is subtly urging them toward it. Andrea puts up a token resistance and then, perhaps out of nothing more than curiosity, allows them to proceed.

There’s nothing unusual about the town, not that she can see. Thatched roofs, a few cobbled cross-streets, scattered houses and fields outside the periphery, an abandoned marketplace with its stalls overturned and rotting produce spilled over the cobbles. The remains of a cow, she sees, as they make their way cautiously into the place. It lies spilled across the street, in pieces, very little of it left at all. She’s seen the dead walk, seen people pulled apart by them, people devoured alive, but for some reason the cow makes her shiver and she looks away.

To the dead, walking. A few of them slump motionless against walls and overturned carts, looking deader than the rest, but she can see their intact skulls and knows it’s an illusion.

She picks off two that get too close. Mike has his sword in his hand, but he seems distracted, and for the first time in a long time she wonders about him. Whether he’s reliable here.

Then he whirls and cleaves the head of another one and she wonders a little less.

But he doesn’t speak to her at all, and his distraction grows as they draw near to the center of the town. With it, the ranks of the dead swell and stagger endlessly toward them, and the horse nickers and shifts her hooves nervously. The horse—Meadowsweet—has so far actually been the most level-headed of the three of them, but not so much now.

“Don’t let them surround us,” Mike mutters, and then turns toward a building—an inn, Andrea notices with faint puzzlement. “Keep ‘em off me. I’ll be back.”

“Mike, don’t—“ But he’s gone, pushing himself past the piled and broken furniture that seems to have been the last defense of whoever had been inside. Andrea curses and waits, arrow nocked. There are more of them all the time. What in the name of all the gods is he doing?

Meadowsweet screams.

Andrea whirls around, eyes wide, and puts an arrow into one that’s staggered up behind them with a bizarre lack of sound, but it’s too late, even for her power; Meadowsweet’s legs are giving out under her, and now more are grabbing for her mane, dragging her down. Andrea scrambles off and fumbles for another arrow, but her fingers are numb with horror and panic and it clatters onto the cobbles. Meadowsweet is screaming constantly now, a horrible sound, worse than a dying man, as chunks of her flesh are ripped away. Somehow past the shaking of her hands and the tears blurring the world away she gets the arrow back into her hands and into the bow, sights Meadowsweet’s head, and lets the arrow fly true.

Meadowsweet stops screaming.

“Mike!” She plunges into the dimness of the inn, stepping over a body without thinking, without the idea that it might sink its teeth into her leg. But it doesn’t, and she rushes toward the stairs. The whole place is rank with the smell of rotting meat, but then, so is everywhere, so it’s not like it much matters.

At the top of the stairs is a short stretch of corridor with lodging rooms on either side. Bloodstains paint the walls. Through one of the doorways she can see two more bodies piled on top of each other on the floor. They aren’t moving, but that doesn’t mean they won’t. “Mike, shit, we have to go! Now!”

But she skids to a halt in the doorway of the room at the end of the hall.

The room is empty and surprisingly unmarked. There’s a nightstand with a pitcher and basin, a chest of drawers, an unmade bed. Mike is standing in the center of the room, his head in his hands.

She’s never seen him like this. Never.

“We have to go,” she repeats softly, stepping toward him. “They’re all around us. We’ll have to fight our way out. Mike…” She reaches out for his leather-armored shoulder and he flinches away from her with a hiss.

“Fuck off.”

“All right.” Inside she’s a twisted mass of misery and terror, but she hears her voice go steely. “Fine. Now get out of my way so I can figure something out.”

Without waiting for a response, she pushes past him to the room’s single window, looking out. There have to be over fifty of them, maybe as many as a hundred, groaning and shuffling and thudding themselves against the walls of the inn. They’re stupid, she knows, but it’s only a matter of time before they all find their way past the barricade.

“Shit.” Mike at her elbow, sounding at least half there. “They got the horse, didn’t they.”

She gestures at the tangle of bloody flesh and gut that’s all that’s left of Meadowsweet and otherwise says nothing.

“All right.” He touches her elbow, points out the window to the slanting roof. “Rooftops. We go quiet, take it slow, they might not realize we got away. Might give us some time.”

Andrea nods. The window is long-since shattered, nothing left of the glass to speak of, and she clambers awkwardly out onto the roof, keeping herself low, Mike behind her with a hand at her shoulder.

When they reach the fields they run.

* * *

“It was the morning it all started.”

He hasn’t said anything else to her since they left the town. Now they’re sitting in the dark—no fire and no food tonight, the wood they’re in full of walkers, and he’s speaking barely above a whisper. She takes a breath. Somehow she already knows this story.

“You lost someone.”

“Looks that way.” There’s no light and she can’t see him, but she can hear his thin smile. “I wasn’t sure. I left. I know it was crazy, I know there’s no way I’d find anything either way, but I guess I thought… Fuck.”

“Who was it?” She asks it hesitantly, but he seems to want to talk. He lets out a dry laugh, barely a breath.

“Would you believe he was a whore?”

He. She feels a faint twinge of surprise. Well, that explains some things. “I would, actually.”

“I bet you would.” He doesn’t exactly sound accusatory, but all the same, she feels a little ashamed. He must know what she would assume about him. What she would think, even now. “Yeah, he was a whore. And it started that way, between us. Didn’t end like that. Gods. End.” There’s something choked in his voice now, and she realizes that he’s close to tears.

“I left him in that bed that morning. Told him I’d be back that afternoon. I had some business to take care of.” He pauses. “I never saw him again. I’ve been trying to get back there. I thought maybe… there might be something there to see. Anything.” He swipes both hands down his face and lets out a shuddering breath. “I just needed to know either way.”

“So you don’t actually know that he’s dead.”

He drops his hands away and this time he sounds irritated, and underneath it very tired. “Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

“But that means… He could be alive, Mike. You could still find him. You could—“

“No.” There’s a thud and she jumps before she realizes that he’s slammed a fist into the ground. “I’m not doing that. I’m not falling into that fucking trap. He’s gone. That’s all that matters. I can’t do anything about it. I won’t see him again. So let’s get to your fucking tower.”

He doesn’t say anything else to her for the rest of the night. When he takes watch, he ends up taking her shift too.

In the morning they move on again.