Breadcrumbs For The Nasties (Book 1): Megan (18 page)

The thing I once called Mother wiggled her head free for the briefest of moments, long enough to growl. Her face was coated in filth, eyes wild, decaying fingers clawing at dirt. That’s when I noticed her cheeks, sunken and gray, skin blotched and peeling. Her features had changed so much. Her dimples were gone, swallowed by receding flesh, erased. She wasn’t my mother. My mother was dead. My mother died on the side of the road, shivering and alone with whatever disease had eaten her insides. My mother wasn’t coming back. 

Nothing ever comes back, even when it does.

“Megan…go.”
Blueeyes’
voice was softer than I’d ever heard it. “Grab your things and head for the road. Don’t turn around. Don’t look back. I’ll meet you there.”

I knew what he was going to do and why he wanted me to walk away. I knew it and I didn’t try to stop him. It was difficult to stand, more difficult to walk. My back was throbbing, shoulder on fire. Everything hurt. Everything was torn, ripped to pieces and scattered in the dirt. I was broken inside and out. I’d walked less than twenty feet when I heard the knife break her skull and pierce her brain. She stopped moaning. 

It was over. 

Blueeyes
stayed close to me for the remainder of the day. We didn’t speak. There wasn’t anything to say. I watched the sun and the clouds, staring through tear-soaked eyes. When the moon emerged, I watched it, too. The sky was clear that night, the clearest I’d seen in years, so clear I could see the stars. Mother once said the stars weren’t really there, that they were
light fifty years old, ghosts.
I hated when she told me that. I didn’t like that at all. 

Blueeyes
found a suitable shelter shortly after the sun disappeared and everything went black. It was a large building, high ceilings, with broken furniture littering the floor. Hanging in the center of the room was a massive glass structure, hundreds of delicately carved bits dangling from the underside and shimmering in the moonlight. The steel holding the whole thing together was weathered and bent, barely hanging on and coated in a layer of dust a decade thick. I imagined what it must have looked like before I was born, probably beautiful. I didn’t understand it. It didn’t make sense. It seemed silly for something so elaborate to exist without a purpose, to create something so lavish and let it rot away.  I hated it.

We settled into a much smaller room deeper into the structure and off the beaten path. The door was solid, the lock sturdy. We were safe there. I slid down a wall on the far end, pulled my knees to my chest, and buried my face between them. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to sleep so bad. Didn’t care if I woke. I was surprised when
Blueeyes
sat beside me, even more when he grabbed my hand. 

What happened next surprised me the most.

“I’m sorry, Megan.”

His thumb moved lightly over the top of my hand, back and forth, skin surprisingly soft. He sighed, working up the nerve to speak. “After those things…they did what they did to my little girl…after I realized I wasn’t dead and the moans died down…” His voice was a whisper, breathy and uneven. “I left my little hiding place…went back into the living room.”

He paused, squeezed my hand. “She was still there, still
alive.
Megan…my little Megan…” His voice cracked, snapped in two. “Those bastards…they ate everything but her head. They turned her into one of them and left her there…screaming.”

I lifted my head and looked at
Blueeyes.
He was staring at the ceiling, at the shadows and the black, expressionless. I heard him inhale, felt it in the air. When he closed his eyes, I shivered. When he squeezed my hand again, I squeezed back. 

“You don’t remember what it was like before all this bullshit, Megan. Be thankful for that. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t this. We were violent, and stupid, and silly, but we were something. We had a chance. There were possibilities. You were born here…nothing to hold on to. There’s nothing tethering you to all the wasted-
fucking
-potential.

At the time, I didn’t know what he meant. It didn’t matter. I liked having him next to me, talking the way he was talking. I liked listening to him, his voice. I liked the way his hand felt, liked holding it. We remained in that exact position, hand-in-hand, until morning. At some point during the night I drifted off. When I woke a few hours later,
Blueeyes
was still beside me, staring straight ahead. It was too dark to be certain, but his eyes seemed red and puffy, as if he’d been crying. When he felt me move he looked away. That night he never let go of my hand. Not once. Not for a minute. 

It was perfect, the last perfect moment of my life. 

16.

Morning arrived the same as always. We gathered our things, bandaged my hand, and took to the road. The clouds moved in quickly, dark and thick, blanketing the sky. By midday the sun was a memory. Despite my injuries we were making good time; hadn’t seen a
gimp
all day. It was quiet, chilly. The breeze felt good on my face, and the temperature numbed the ache in my hand.
Blueeyes
said it wasn’t broken, maybe fractured, maybe just sprained. He spent the morning apologizing to me anyway. There was something different about him, softer, more approachable. I made a joke about his terrible bandage job and I think he even smiled. As we walked, he would occasionally check on me.

“How you doing back there?”

“Feeling okay?”

“Doing alright, kiddo?”

He’d never called me
kiddo
before, no one had. I liked it. I started calling myself
kiddo
in my head, imagined other people saying it to me, shaking hands with someone and introducing myself as
kiddo.
It was silly. It felt good to be silly. 

The farther we walked, the larger the surrounding structures became. One-story houses transformed to two-story buildings. Two-story buildings turned into eight-floor apartments. The forest tapered off, replaced by cracked concrete and weathered blacktop. The road became congested, littered with husks of burnt vehicles, haphazardly constructed roadblocks older than I was.

I poked
Blueeyes
in the back. “Where are we going?”

“The city.”

I’m not sure why I asked him. I already knew the answer, I just couldn’t believe it. My entire life I’d avoided cities. Father said they were dangerous, overrun with
gimps
and
biters
and the sort of people that couldn’t be trusted. I didn’t want to go to the city or anywhere near the city. It felt wrong. 

I poked my friend again, tugged on his jacket. “Why?”

“I left something there. It’s important.  I need to get it back.”

“What is it?”

“Something important.”

“Why is it so important?”

Blueeyes
sighed. “It just is.”

“But why?”

He sighed again. “You ask way too many questions, Megan. Just trust me. I’m guessing Travis and his people don’t make their way into the city too often. The more distance we can put between us and that asshole the better.”

Bloodboots
. I kept forgetting about
Bloodboots. 

I waited a few minutes before bothering
Blueeyes
again. “I thought the cities were dangerous.”

“They are.”

“Then why...I mean…why are we…”

He turned to face me, dropped to one knee, and put his hands on my shoulders. Strangely, being eye level with him made me feel better. He probably knew it would. “We’ll be alright. Trust me. I spent more time in that city than I ever should have. I know my way around.” He squeezed my shoulder in a reassuring way, placed his hand on my cheek, and patted gently. He probably knew I would like that, too.

I stopped asking questions. 

A few hours later, buildings began to rise from the horizon, massive things, dark silhouettes against a sky of gray. I’d never seen anything like it, so many of them in one place, an ocean of steel and stone, burnt and crumbling. It seemed to go on forever. We were so close, just miles away. If we kept moving this way, we would reach it by nightfall. My feet stopped moving. My eyes stopped blinking. I really didn’t want to go to the city.

When
Blueeyes
realized I wasn’t keeping pace, he chuckled. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a city.”

I shook my head. “Not this close.”

My eyes moved to a single building rising above the rest, so impossibly tall the clouds swallowed the top. My lips felt dry, head heavy. I might have taken a step backward. 

“Listen, Megan, there’s no—” The sky roared, lightning flashed.
Blueeyes
looked up. “Damn it.”

He scanned the surrounding area, settled on a small row of buildings a few hundred yards in the opposite direction, and pointed. “Looks like you won’t have to worry about the city until tomorrow. We’ll wait out the storm over there, leave first thing in the morning.”

I didn’t argue. 

By the time we reached the buildings, the rain was falling: a soft drizzle, the calm before the storm. The area was a mess:
gimp
corpses everywhere, upturned cars, collapsed walls reduced to piles of rubble. The place looked different than it had from a distance. The closer we moved, the more I realized something was wrong. I’d seen rubble. I’d seen dead
gimps
and destroyed buildings before. I’d seen a lot of them. There was something very
fresh
about the way everything was laid out, as if the dust had just settled. 

Blueeyes
noticed it too. His hand fell to my chest. “Wait.”

He moved away from me, softly stepping up to a
gimp
corpse a few feet away. Once there, he dropped to one knee, reached forward, and rolled it onto its back. His finger instantly went to the hole in its head and to the spatter of bullets in its chest. He poked and pulled back blood. That’s when I smelled the smoke.

Blueeyes
smelled it, too. “We’re getting ou—“

I heard the gunshot before I saw his knee explode. Blood sprayed from his leg, erupting in every direction, chunks of bone sent skyward.
Blueeyes’
leg folded backward, cracked, and bent in a way legs aren’t meant to bend. When he hit the dirt, he snarled.

“Get down, Megan!” Screaming through his teeth, he lunged forward, snagged the fabric of my pants, and dragged me to the dirt. 

Another gunshot. The ground beside us split, stone and sand.
Blueeyes
crawled on top of me as the gunfire increased, pelting the surrounding area in rapid succession, ricocheting off steel, mauling earth. His back ruptured in two places. His arm tore open. With his arms around me, we rolled across the dirt and behind a nearby car. A volley of gunfire pelted the frame, shattered the windshield, and flattened a tire.
Blueeyes
was already reaching for his shotgun, struggling to load it, hands slippery with blood. 

“Fuckgoddamnitfucksostupidsostupid.”
He was talking to himself, growling under his breath, cursing through gritted teeth. 

His hand went to my head and shoved me face first to the dirt. “Stay down!”

He rose for a second, fired through the shattered windshield, ducked momentarily, and fired again. Everything was happening too fast, too loud, too much all at once.
Blueeyes
fired again. A spray of bullets crisscrossed the hood of the car, tearing it to pieces, gunfire ringing in my ears. Above me, a headlight exploded. Bits of glass scattered across my hair. Through half closed eyes I peeked at my friend; his chest was soaked in blood, his neck painted red. A chunk of his hand was missing. His fingers wouldn’t work. While trying to reload, he dropped his gun. I needed to help him, needed to do something more than what I was doing. Reaching over my shoulder, I grabbed
Pointycrunch,
tore him from my back, and loaded an arrow. 

Blueeyes
noticed what I was doing, knocked him from my hands, and shoved me to the ground. “Damn it! Stay down!” 

Something hit his chest, sprayed his face with blood, and tossed him backward violently. His eyes closed, face contorted. His hands went to his chest, crimson pouring through the cracks in his fingers. Without thinking I retrieved
Pointycrunch,
rose above the hood of the car, and let loose. It was a blind shot, a silly shot. I didn’t know what I was aiming at, maybe nothing. The gunfire continued, tore the bumper from the car, and lifted a section of steel from the side. It was everywhere, all at once. A cloud of dust and bits of shrapnel rose around us. I could taste it; I swallowed it. It coated my throat and wormed its way into the spaces between my eyes and up my nose. Instead of breathing, I coughed. Blindly, I grabbed another arrow, loaded, and fired again. I barely felt the bullet that tore open my shoulder, at least at first. The impact knocked me back and deposited me in the dirt beside
Blueeyes.
The pain came all at once, so much that I thought I was dead. I had to be dead. It spread quickly across my shoulder, down my side, and into my legs. When I tried to move, I couldn’t. My lower half locked, froze in place. Instinctively, my hand went to the wound and pressed into mushy flesh, warm blood trickling down my arm. I screamed and cursed louder than I’d ever screamed or cursed, so loud the words transformed into something guttural, animalistic. I wasn’t myself anymore. I was a wounded animal, target practice. 

When
Blueeyes
rolled toward me, a pair of arms wrapped around his neck, massive and muscular, skin like dark steel. Another set of hands snagged his arm. A third wrestled the shotgun from his hand. Suddenly, he was airborne, thrown to the dirt, pulled in the opposite direction, and slammed roughly. Someone stomped his leg and cracked the side of his face with the butt of a rifle.

“No!” When I reached for him someone else grabbed my arm. Fingers clutched my hair and tugged violently, tearing it from my scalp in clumps. Arms coiled around my waist, lifting. My feet left the ground and a shoe feel off. I kicked, wiggled, and reached behind me with my good arm, scratching at whoever had me. The more I struggled, the tighter he squeezed. I couldn’t breathe. Someone punched me in the stomach and laughed when I belched blood. A random hand emerged from nowhere and smacked my head so hard the world began to spin. Everything twisted and bent, blurred. I was surrounded. A sea of men converged, filthy hands grabbing my legs, pawing my chest, and pulling at my clothes. There were so many of them, so many angry faces and leering grins. When someone poked my wounded shoulder, I bit so hard I nearly swallowed my tongue.