Allard

Allard pulls his eyes away from the perfect little tomatoes and looks back at Momo. Her eyes are closed and her mouth is forming words but no sounds are coming out. He looks back to the tomatoes again. Maybe she’s chanting a spell to make things grow, he thinks, reaching out to touch the vibrant green leaves again.

“With an ability like this,” he says quietly, “you could feed many people.”

“No,” she says firmly.

“The mayor would treat you like a queen, you could have anything you wanted-”

“No,” she interrupts, her tone final. He can’t blame her. With the things he has seen over the last couple of months, he wouldn’t trust the words he just said if someone said them to him.

He settles onto his rear end and runs his fingers through the patch of grass surrounding him. “I won’t tell anyone.” She doesn’t speak, and he looks around nervously. “Even if you make me leave, I don’t tell anyone what I saw or what you can do.”

Momo sighs and opens her eyes. She smiles at him tiredly. “I won’t make you leave, Allard. And you shouldn’t leave if that was your plan. You need at least a few more days to recover before you try to walk anywhere.” She pulls herself up to her feet, patting the dirt off of her butt. “And on that note, we should get you back to bed. Some sun is good but too much will just dehydrate you more.”

Allard lets her help him to his feet and looks longingly at the plants around him. Momo chuckles and pats him on the back lightly. “I’ll bring some around for you in a bit. Today I am harvesting what is ready so new things can grow. I’ve never canned anything before so it will all need to be eaten anyway before it goes bad.”

“Can I help with something? I don’t know how to can either, but I used to work the fields here and sometimes I would help build things.”

“Let me think on that a little. Thank you for offering, Allard. For now, just concentrate on getting better.”

He nods even though she can’t see him and follows her to the well. The shimmer of small magic is obvious when he looks for it. He tries to take the bucket from her to carry but she waves him off and starts toward the house he woke up in. He feels guilty when he asks if he can move into his own house again, but she nods and follows him to the house two doors down from the Chief’s. A warning to be careful when leaving the building, then he is alone in the dark.

Everything is cleaner than it should be. He runs his fingers across his little dining table. He knocked over his porridge bowl when Mikel pounded on the door, and the bowl tipped its contents on the table before falling to the floor. Nothing was going right, and he left it there while he went to see if any of the wheat in the fields could be used. Then, things happened, and he never made it back inside to clean up. The bowl sits tidy on the side, with a clean spoon next to it. No trace of the porridge, not even a crusty stain is left behind.

Momo must have cleaned in here.

Allard tugs his hair back, tying it at the back of his head with a leather strip still hanging from the corner post on his bed. Then, with nothing else to do, he sits and waits for Momo to return.

image [https://i.imgur.com/js4cqrN.png]

The next days go by at a crawl. Allard spends all his time in his home, laying on his bed or sitting far enough from the open window to be able to react if something reaches through, but close enough that he can feel the warmth of the sun on his skin. Momo comes by every few hours to check on him. The first couple of days with his hair up she stares at his ears often. Allard wonders where she came from. What areas do elves not live in that might have been spared from the curse?

Messenger birds still traveled periodically between the largest towns, but they were growing rarer as even their food became scarce. Animals seemed to be unaffected by the virus, even fish swimming in the waters were not changed, but if the animals that ate the green growing things of the world died off then it wouldn’t be long for everything higher on the food chain to be affected. Fewer birds flew in the skies over the town, but whether that was because they were dying from lack of food or too many desperate things eating them he didn’t know.

The last messages that were shared with the people within the walls said that all other major population centers were affected. None of them, that he knows of, call the biters ‘zombies’. He considers that she might be a real traveler, like in the stories, but nobody had fallen between the worlds for a thousand years. She would have had to have angered some god greatly to be sent through at a time like this.

When Momo deems him healthy enough to be able to leave, Allard doesn’t hesitate to declare his desire to stay. Part of it is self-preservation. What was once called Spring Village has food and water, and nobody fighting over either. The only problem is the lack of protection from desperate people and the biting dead.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“We need to make a wall or something like it,” he says over dinner one night in Momo’s home. He has stopped thinking of it as the Chief’s home. The Chief died during the attack, and there is nobody in his mind more worthy of living there anyway. “I’ve made mud bricks before, but they take a long time to dry, and we would have to move them inside every time it rains until they do. We need something to keep things out until then.”

Momo finished chewing her mouth full of roasted sweet potato, nodding slightly. “I’ve thought of that too. Now that I have the yard set up and a good variety of things growing for the two of us I can start paying attention to the other areas around us. I have a few ideas, but it could take weeks before they are ready and five biters have wandered through here just since you woke up.”

Allard shivers. The room is overly warm thanks to the fire burning in the hearth and the late summer sun beating down on the roof, but he feels cold inside. “I’m sorry I didn’t help-”

“You stop that,” she interrupts, patting his shoulder. “Everyone has things they are good at. Yours isn’t killing zombie goblins and orcs and…what was that last one?”

“A kobold.”

“Oh, that’s right. I haven’t seen one of those before.” She sets aside her half-eaten tuber and takes a long drink of water. “Anyway, you are good at other things. I may not want to be, but I can handle the things that wander in while we figure something out. It would be easier if I had something that I could use from a distance, but we’ll get by.”

Allard rubs his belly and sits back in his chair. He almost feels full, and a tiny bit of guilt swims around in his belly at the idea that he could be eating fresh food while others, including his dad, have next to nothing. He pushes the thought aside yet again. It was pure luck that helped him get back home the last time, he doubts he could make it back to Yanniston to fetch his dad. The old man didn’t want to go with him the last time just for a few days, he wouldn’t be eager to leave permanently. He still thought the town would figure things out.

“My old friend Mikel was one of our hunters. I bet his bows are still in his cold room. He said they needed to be kept somewhere cool and dry, and his family didn’t…they didn’t make it to Yanniston. I bet his stuff is still there.”

“I didn’t see anything when I went through cleaning things up. Which house was his?”

“He was two houses to the west of here. I’ll go check, just to make sure. He might have stashed them behind something.” Allard makes to stand up, but Momo waves him back down.

“It’s not anything that can’t wait until we’re finished. There is still plenty of light, eat your food and we’ll go together.” She glances at the empty plate in front of him and offers the second half of her sweet potato but he shakes his head emphatically.

“I’m full, thank you. Those orange potatoes are really good.”

“They’re called sweet potatoes. I was always a sucker for a roasted sweet potato, didn’t matter what time of year it was. I’m glad I could make them grow.”

He watches as she finishes her food, then helps her tidy up. The scraps go out into a bucket outside that Momo calls her ‘composting bucket’, and he wipes down their table with a dry cloth that he shakes outside next to the bucket. When they have both washed off their hands with a little water they head outside, Momo leading the way with her ever-ready board. She walks to the center and stands next to the well, turning in a circle and watching for any movement before nodding at him and walking to the door of Mikel’s house. She calls them by numbers, but he can’t remember which direction she counts so it could be House Two or House Twelve, he isn’t sure.

They close the door behind them, and Momo pauses, staring at the floor just inside the house with a frown before shaking her head and meeting his eyes. Allard steps around the spot she was staring at before, certain it is the place where she found his friend’s family, and walks to the little fireplace against the wall. He presses on a jutting stone, releasing the mechanism that holds the cold room doors in place. A section of floor pops up between them. He slides the trap door to the side and looks down into the dark recess.

“Well, I’ll be,” Momo exclaims, not explaining what she would ‘be’ before continuing. “I had no idea that room was there! Do all the houses have one?”

“Some are smaller, but we all do. Did. The Chief’s wife was in a group that did protection for traveling merchants. She had a lot of run-ins with thieves and the like and was always afraid that the village would be hit someday.” Allard lit the lantern sitting on the fireplace mantle and lowered himself down the ladder with the lantern in hand. “We were talking about making cold cellars anyway to help keep meats and things cool, and she worked together with Sally who is an engineer and they came up with the hidden doors. They can be closed from the inside in case people need to hide.”

He stops at the bottom of the ladder and steps aside to give Momo room to come down. “It didn’t matter. Things happened so fast I heard.” He hangs the lantern on a hook attached to the boards making up the floor overhead and looks around the room.

The space is a square about three-quarters of the total space above. Shelves line the two walls to the side of the ladder, some with jars containing spring fruits in syrups, the others empty. Two crates sit on the ground with empty jars waiting to be filled with summer fruits and vegetables. Momo peers at the jars of food while Allard walks to the back wall and begins opening chests. He makes it through two before spotting the bows and two quivers full of arrows propped in shadow in the corner.

“Here they are. They look okay, but I don’t know much about shooting with them.” He hands them to Momo, who plucks at the strings and purses her lips. “There are some arrows here too. Mikel tried to repair them when he could, so anything in the quivers should be okay.”

“This is really good, Allard. Is there anything else useful in those crates?” She grasped the bows in one hand and took the quivers from him with the other.

“Just some extra clothes in the top one, but I didn’t look through the others.”

“Well, we still have a couple of hours till nightfall. Let’s see what we can find here, and tomorrow we can search the other houses.”

Allard nods enthusiastically and turns back to the crates while Momo carries the weapons up the ladder and places them out of sight above. It isn’t much, but his chest puffs up a bit because he is finally able to help.