Nathan tucked me under his arm with a grin. “We’re going to go hunt while we can.”
I waved bye to my family, and we left the clearing and went into the woods by a small path. The smell of rot still hung in the air, but it wasn’t as potent as before. The ground still crunchedunderneath our feet, but it wasn’t as frozen as it was this morning now that the sun had a chance to heat it up.
“Do you ever run out of ammo?” I asked, stepping over a log.
“We found crates of ammo for both the crossbow and my sniper rifle about a year ago, and we’re not even halfway through it,” Nathan said as we walked further away from the treehouses. “We only try to use it when we need it. We gather the arrows shot and soak them in bleach when we have enough of them, and Calix will reuse them that way. We do the same for Micah’s longbow, but he prefers to axe things down.”
Calix groaned, gripping his bow tighter. “Don’t remind me of the state of the arrows before they were disinfected.”
“Sorry, man. You know there are some good germs out there, right?”
“I know, but I can’t get past thegermspart.” He made a disgusted face, and I giggled.
A snap of a limb sounded further down the trail, and a decaying deer stopped in the middle of it, staring at us with milky eyes.
A chill shot down my spine at the look of it, but before I could completely process what I was seeing, Nathan shot it between the eyes.
“Fuck,” he muttered, sharing a dark look with Calix. “Hopefully there’s some wildlife still around that’snotinfected.That was a huge horde. No telling how far it spread.”
“There’s not many places for animals to wait it out like we did either.” Calix frowned.
“If there’s a lack of animals, we’ll just have to bring our livestock here with us. That’s the plan anyway, right? We’ve been breeding rabbits for meat so we have those,” I suggested as we moved around the dead deer and continued until we stopped abruptly, and Nathan raised his gun.
A smaller bear stood on its hind legs to the side of the trail, blinking with milky white eyes that made it clear it was infected, and Nathan’s bullet embedded into its brain.
“Good idea, killer.” He glanced around before tugging me off the trail a few feet with Calix. “We’ll wait here and see what we can find passing through.”
“Hopefully it won’t be too long until something shows up,” Calix sighed, glancing up at the trees. The sun made his green eyes look so bright outside, and he squinted them before bringing the crossbow up. “There. A non-infected squirrel.”
“A squirrel isn’t going to feed our group,” Nathan muttered. “If anything, it’ll just make the rest of us hungrier.”
“A squirrel is better than nothing,” he bit back, but before he could shoot it, it darted away. He groaned and shot an accusatory stare at Nathan.
Nathan held his hands up in defense. “Sorry.”
Several branches breaking sounded up the trail before two deers rushed down it, one infected chasing a non-infected. The first deer’s eyes widened before it ran, and the second had been missing an eye, and half of its face looked to be melted off as it hit another stage of decay.
My stomach churned at the sight.
“I’ll take out the infected.” Nathan brought up his gun and took the shot when it was a good distance away, shooting clear through the deer’s skull, and the head seemed to explode from it—brain matter going everywhere.
Calix waited until the other deer was rushing past us before putting an arrow through the top of its chest, dropping the deer that hadn’t seen it coming. He was a good shot with zombies, but to see how good he was with hunting deer was refreshing.
“Great shot, man!” Nathan grinned. “Can you go back and get Micah to help me carry it back?”
“Happily,” he replied, reloading the crossbow and winking at me. “See you two in a few.”
“Be safe,” I murmured, and he nodded.
“You too, honey.”
Calix headed back the way we came, and I stepped closer to Nathan, seeking his body warmth.
“I can help, you know. I handled the rabbit and cow meat on the farm with my dad.”
His strong arms wrapped around me, shielding me from the bitter cold. “You’re really something, killer.”
“You think?” I hummed.
