Fighting Rough

29

There was someone off in the distance, waving at her. He was wearing a parka, just like the one she was wearing.

It didn’t look like John. But it was hard to tell. For years now, her eyesight had always gotten significantly worse when she’d been tired, even though she didn’t wear glasses. Her doctor had told her it was normal.

She was definitely tired now. Exhausted beyond the point she’d thought she could stand.

Looking through the scope of her rifle, she saw his face. It wasn’t John.

Cynthia moved the gun. There was something on the ground.

A body.

Was it John?

He must have come this way. This was where his footprints led.

Max had been right. There’d been more out there.

Cynthia felt the panic rising through her.

Was John dead?

The man in the parka was furiously waving his arms in the air, signaling for help. He didn’t seem to have a gun.

Maybe he was someone else. Maybe he wasn’t an enemy. Maybe something had happened to John, and this man was trying to help.

She shouldn’t take any chances. She couldn’t afford to. It was life and death out here.

The feelings she had for John suddenly came to the surface, only causing her to panic more. She cared about him. Deeply. If he was still alive, she needed to do something.

“Don’t move!” shouted Cynthia, as loudly as she could.

The man kept waving his hands.

The man was shouting something. Very loudly. But they were far away. She could only make out some of the words. It sounded like he was saying “hurt!” or something similar.

Maybe the safest thing to do was just shoot the man dead. Maybe that’d be the best thing not just for herself, but for John’s chances of survival as well.

Then again, if John was hurt and not dead, the situation was completely different. There was no one else around. There was no way to contact anyone at the camp for help. Max and Mandy had gone in the opposite direction.

Cynthia crept forward, using her scope to keep an eye on the situation.

She realized that she might not have been thinking clearly due to exhaustion, due to fatigue, due to extreme stress. Her emotions were running wild, and she couldn’t keep them in check. Deep breaths were doing nothing. Her pulse was skyrocketing. She felt like she was hyperventilating.

She and John had been through so much. She’d seen so many deaths. She’d seen her husband gunned down in front of her. She’d seen more bodies than she’d ever thought possible. More blood. More guts. Even brains. Dead animals. She lived now in the woods, carried a gun daily, and hadn’t showered in who knew how long. Her body had tightened up. She’d lost weight and some muscle. She thought she’d toughened up. She thought she could deal with a situation like this.

She’d seen John injured before, when she hadn’t known if he’d make it. She’d seen him on the brink of death.

In those situations, she’d kept as calm a head as she could.

What was different now?

Maybe nothing. Maybe it was just hard, if not impossible, to remember what she’d really been feeling in those situations. Maybe her memory had tricked her, telling her that she’d dealt with those situations fine. It could be a sort of survival mechanism.

But it wasn’t doing her any good now. This felt like the first time she was experiencing all this.

Her boots crunched in the snow as she slowly inched forward.

The man standing didn’t move except to wave his hands.

“He’s hurt!” he was shouting. His words were becoming more clear the closer Cynthia got.

They were close enough now to have a conversation by shouting at each other. Cynthia used the scope on her rifle to scan the area, looking for weapons. There were none, except for John’s gun, which lay partially buried in the snow. The stranger didn’t make a move for it. He didn’t look threatening. There was an honest expression on his face. Not that his expression meant anything.

“What happened?” shouted Cynthia.

“He fell. Must have slipped. He’s unconscious. I just found him like this.”

Cynthia was frozen, gun in her hands, eye pressed to the scope. She didn’t know what to do.

“Come on! I need help. I’m not going to hurt you.”

There was a genuine quality to the stranger’s voice. It made her want to trust him.

Every part of her wanted to trust him. It would be easier that way. After all, everyone couldn’t be bad. Right? Just because the EMP had hit and society had collapsed, it didn’t mean that everyone suddenly turned into some kind of monster. Right? That’d be impossible.

Cynthia remembered that not that long ago, John had been a stranger himself. And he wasn’t a monster. He wasn’t a cold-hearted killer. He was a good man. And so was Max. And there was Georgia, Mandy, and many others. They’d been good people. Surely there were other good people out there.

“I was going to try to drag him to my camp,” the man was shouting. “That’s why I’ve got him tied up like this. I couldn’t wake him up no matter what I tried. I didn’t know what to do.”

That part of the story checked out. There was a rope trailing from John’s body, just the way Cynthia would have done it if she’d needed to drag an unconscious person across the snow.

“Come on! We don’t have much time. He looks really hurt. Do you have any medical training?”

Cynthia wanted to believe. She was dying to believe the stranger. And maybe she’d die for it.

She walked towards him, slowly. She slung the gun over her shoulder, and drew her handgun. She felt more comfortable with it. She kept it aimed at the stranger, who kept his hands in the air.

Finally, after what had felt like an eternity, she was there, standing mere feet away from John and the stranger.

The stranger had a kind face, flooded with concern. There was something odd about it. But she couldn’t place what it was. Something incredibly minor. Something that didn’t matter. Not now.

She could feel herself making up her mind. John looked like he was in bad shape. She needed to help him. She needed to trust this stranger. It might be the only way that John would survive.

It wasn’t until Cynthia was very close that she noticed something strange about the way John was tied up. His legs were bound together, as if he was a prisoner.

Cynthia acted rather than spoke.

But the stranger was already moving towards her. He was fast and strong, moving like lightning, quickly closing the gap between them.

Cynthia squeezed the trigger. There wasn’t time to aim properly. She did the best she could.

The stranger grunted in pain. She’d hit him.

But he kept coming. He was simply too fast.

He was tall, appearing massive in his white parka. His expression seemed to have changed. The last thing Cynthia registered was the realization that the stranger had been acting. The whole thing had been a ruse, from his voice right down to his facial expression.

His face now only showed intensity and cruelty. His face was so close to hers. Everything happened so fast.

He was swinging something at her, right at her head.

The gunshot hadn’t seemed to affect him. It hadn’t slowed him down.

Something hard collided with Cynthia’s head. It knocked her out cold immediately.