Fed

Two: Georgia

Rick was the one who actually closed the van doors. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move. Shaun’s back was to me, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to leave a story untold—I wanted to jump down and run to him, like one of those brainless heroines in Buffy’s stories, and go with him into the dark.

If she were still alive, I’d have to apologize to her for calling those characters unrealistic, I thought distantly. I didn’t move as Rick flipped the dead-bolts on the rear doors, and then pushed past me to do the same on the movable wall that shut the driver’s cabin off from the rest of the vehicle. With those latches thrown, we were effectively cut off from the rest of the world. Nothing could get in, and unless we opened the locks, nothing could get out. Barring heavy explosives, we were as safe as it was possible to be.

We were safe, and Shaun was outside with the dead, guaranteeing himself a place on the Wall. That was what he’d always claimed to want. I looked at the closed doors, and wondered whether he’d finally changed his mind.

“Georgia?” Rick’s voice intruded on my thoughts. I turned to face him, blinking as I realized that he was still there. Somehow, I’d already been starting to think of myself as alone. “When was the last security sweep?”

“I… I don’t know.” I took a seat at the main console, glad to be doing something as I brought up the security recordings for the last day. The scanner came up clean, showing no attempted break-ins or unauthorized contact with the van’s exterior during that time. “It looks like Shaun ran one while you were at the event. I don’t know whether it was successful or not.”

“He didn’t start swearing.”

“So we’re probably clean.” My fingers itched to turn on the exterior cameras. I wanted to see Shaun one more time.

I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing him convert. I wanted to remember him as Shaun, not as one more member of a mob of shambling undead. I put my hands in my lap, folding them tightly.

I sat there in silence for several minutes, waiting for something to change. It was Rick who forced my hand, asking the one question I most needed to hear:

“What do we do now?”

We. Me and Rick; we were what was left. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the seat, suddenly tired. “I don’t know what you do next, Rick. I wish I did. Maybe you should write something, or call Steve for an evac, or… I don’t know. But I need to post. I need to…”

I needed to write down what happened. I needed to make sure people understood what this cost us, what we paid, what we thought we would be paying. This wasn’t what we signed up for, but it was what we died for. It was what we felt we had to do.

We never asked to be heroes. I certainly didn’t. No one ever gave me the opportunity to say I didn’t want this, that I was sorry, but they had the wrong girl; I just wanted to take Shaun and go home. No. Wait. That wasn’t quite true.

I opened my eyes, sitting up, and pulled the keyboard toward me as Rick looked on.

I wanted to tell the truth, and let people draw their own conclusions from there. I wanted people to think, and to know, and to understand. I just wanted to tell the truth. In the van that had carried us across a country, and through the last months of my brother’s life, with all hell ready to break loose outside, my hands came down, and I wrote.

Was it worth it?

God, I hope so.