one
Hazel
Eighteenhoursofwalking,and I still smell their blood.
The shoulder wound stopped bleeding sometime in the night. Now it just throbs, hot and swollen beneath the makeshift bandage I tore from Susan's flannel shirt. Susan won't need it anymore. Susan's body is rotting on a mountain road two miles back, alongside Reggy and Tommy and four others who trusted me to keep watch.
I trusted myself to keep watch.
The medical supply packs weigh more with every step. Twenty pounds of antibiotics, sutures, painkillers—everything Old Pines Settlement ordered six months ago. Everything their families are waiting for. The families who don't know yet that their loved ones are dead. The families who are probably checking the horizon right now, wondering why we're late, telling themselves that delays happen, that convoys get held up by weather or zombie herds or washed-out roads.
They're not wrong. Delays happen all the time.
But not like this. Never like this.
My boot catches on a root, and I stumble, catching myself against a pine tree rough with sap. The movement sends fire through my shoulder, and I have to press my forehead against the bark until the dizziness passes, breathing through my nose until the world stops spinning. The bark smells like home somehow, like the forests around the settlement where I trained, where Reggy first put a rifle in my hands and told me I had a good eye.
Just keep moving. One foot, then the other.
That's all survival is now: a series of small decisions that add up to staying alive when everything in you wants to lie down and stop.
I should drop the packs. Logic says drop them. My legs are shaking, muscles screaming with an exhaustion I can feel all the way to the bone. Fever's setting in from the infection spreading through my shoulder, making my skin feel too tight, too hot, even as the mountain air raises goosebumps on my arms. I can feel my body failing, each step more unsteady than the last. The pack straps are cutting into my skin, rubbing raw patches that sting with sweat, the weight pulling me backward when every inch forward already feels impossible.
But Tommy was sixteen. Sixteen years old, and he died protecting these supplies because I told him they mattered. That delivering them would save lives. How can I drop them now?
I keep seeing his face in my mind. That eager expression he always wore, the one that made him look even younger than he was. He wanted to be a medic like me. Wanted to help people. "Show me how to do sutures," he'd say, watching my hands with intense focus while I stitched up minor wounds. "Show me how to set a bone. Show me how to tell if an infection is going septic."
I taught him everything I knew. Poured years of training into him because he reminded me of myself at that age—desperate tobe useful, to matter, to save people instead of just watching them die.
The last thing he did was throw himself between me and a raider's gun. Because I'd trained him to protect the people he cared about, and apparently that included me. The sound he made when the bullets hit—that wet, surprised exhale—I can't stop hearing it. Can't stop seeing the look on his face, the confusion, like he couldn't understand why it hurt so much.
He was sixteen. He should have been worried about crushes and chores and whether his voice would ever stop cracking. Instead, he bled out in my arms on a mountain road while I screamed for help that wasn't coming.
The road blurs. Trees on either side swim in my vision like underwater things, pines and aspens bleeding together into a green-gold smear. I think I see movement in the treeline—zombies maybe, or raiders circling back to finish what they started. I reach for the pistol at my hip, but my fingers won't close properly around the grip.
Doesn't matter. Four bullets left. Not enough for a herd. Not enough for raiders.
Enough for me, if it comes to that.
Reggy would tell me to stop being dramatic. Reggy, with his gap-toothed grin and his endless optimism, the way he could find something to laugh about even in the worst situations. "You take the good days when they come," he always said. "Don't waste time feeling sorry for yourself on the bad ones."
He'd been a carpenter before the outbreak. Built houses, raised three kids, buried a wife to cancer two years before the world ended. When I asked him once how he stayed so positive after everything he'd lost, he just shrugged and said, "What's the alternative? Being miserable doesn't bring anyone back. Might as well find reasons to smile while I'm still breathing."
Reggy took two bullets to the chest before he could even reach for his weapon. So much for his good days. So much for his smile.
The ground tilts suddenly, and I realize too late that I'm falling. My knees hit gravel, pain shooting up my thighs. Then my palms, skin tearing on sharp rocks. The supply packs drag me sideways, and I land hard on my bad shoulder, a scream tearing from my throat before I can stop it.
Noise attracts them. I know this. I bite down on my lip until I taste blood, forcing myself silent even as white-hot agony radiates through my entire left side.
Get up. Get up, Hazel.
I can't.
The sky above me is impossibly blue. Clear and cloudless, the kind of sky that makes you forget the world ended. The kind of sky that used to make Susan stop whatever she was doing and just stare, with a small smile on her face. "Nature doesn't care that everything's broken," she'd say. "It just keeps being beautiful."
Susan braided my hair every morning. Said it helped her feel normal, having a routine. She'd hum while she worked, old songs from before, and for those few minutes, I could pretend we were just two friends getting ready for a regular day.
Susan's dead because I didn't see the ambush coming.
