HE HAD CHOSEN TO IGNORE THEM. Both Tam and Caleb had gotten loud and tapped against his shoulder repeatedly when he sped past the street that led to their base. It’d been intentional but his mind had been whirring, spinning, spiraling – how many more people had gotten off the campus that day? How many of his friends had made it out alive? How many hadn’t? These were the thoughts that raced through his mind and so when Caleb and Tam yelled out his name and tapped him, he’d elected to ignore them.

Words only left his mouth after he brought the car to a stop inside the first gas station he spotted. “Grab three cans each, fill them up,” he spoke softly, grabbed his shotgun from the back, stepped out of the car and started to walk towards the gas station’s convenience store to go grab some cans, hoping the store hadn’t already been cleaned out.

Caleb and Tam climbed out of the car shortly after, Caleb sprinting past Leo to get to the convenience store first while Tam moved quickly till he was right next to Leo and cleared his throat. “You good?”

Leo frowned, keeping his eyes trained at the convenience store, watching as Caleb went past its glass doors. Without diverting his eyes to Tam, he responded, “Sure, I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Gotta be weird, hasn’t it?” Tam stretched his arms and groaned. “Trust me, I know what’s running through your mind. All the time that’s passed, you definitely didn’t think you’d be seeing anyone from Jefferson Uni again. Now, you’re wondering just how many people made it out and who didn’t.”

Leo sighed. “To be honest, I haven’t thought about anyone from Jefferson since all of this started. I don’t care who made it out or who turned to one of them, Tam. I don’t care about anyone.”

Tam snorted.

Leo glanced at him and arched an eyebrow over the other. “What’s that mean?”

“What’s what mean?”

Leo imitated Tam’s snorting. “That. What’s it mean?”

“It’s just something I do when someone around me is waffling away,” Tam shrugged. “Like when someone claims not to care about people moments after they just saved two lives. That kind of waffling.”

“When you’ve seen kids get devoured by their infected parents, and had to put a shell in the brains of the people you love, you kinda have to stop caring about people. The pain isn’t worth it.” It was only after the words had left Leo’s mouth that he’d spoken with a cracked voice. He cleared his throat.

“Pain just means we’re alive, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“The Fleshers don’t feel pain. Not physical, and certainly not emotional,” Tam spoke. “The pains that we’re capable of feeling, they’re one of the few things that set us apart from them. The world’s cruel, the world’s dead, but we aren’t. Shutting off what makes you human is ridiculous.”

Leo pushed open the doors to the convenience store and they both walked in and found Caleb stuffing his pockets full of candy and chocolate bars that had been left untouched. A smile crept onto Leo’s face.

“See?” Tam grinned. “That’s not the smile of someone who doesn’t care about anything anymore.”

“Guess an apocalypse couldn’t take the sociologist slash psychologist out of you.” Leo moved towards Caleb and rubbed his head. “Hey, that’s enough candy, buddy. We came for gasoline, remember?”

Caleb didn’t want to stop candy hunting and he made his displeasure known with a groan and narrowed eyes, but still moved with immense energy, sprinting across the convenience store to grab empty cans before surging out through the door, headed for one of the pumps.

“Kid’s got energy,” Leo murmured as his eyes darted around the convenience store, scanning for anything he might need. Despite the candy jars being filled, well, at least until Caleb had victimized them, the rest of the store was barren. Shelves were empty, the counter was tilted oddly, the cash register on the ground with notes of money sprawled across the ground.

There were four bodies in the store, all missing their heads. The weird thing was, their heads weren’t anywhere to be found. Leo shuddered at the thought of there being a survivor out there who was hunting Fleshers down for fun and keeping their body parts as souvenirs or trophies, almost like it was a crowning achievement. Sure, it’d be great if there was someone who’d taken it upon himself to kill as many of the bastards as he could, but Leo definitely wouldn’t want to be around someone like that. Someone unhinged, someone broken.

Deciding there was nothing inside the store that he needed, he grabbed a handful of candies, stuffed them into his pocket, then grabbed three cans and left the convenience store, Tam right behind him, holding three cans in his hands. They moved to separate pumps, Leo pleasantly surprised to find that there hadn’t been any survivors who’d decided to horde gasoline like he was currently doing.

As he filled up one of the cans, he cast a cautious glance around the gas station, an instinctive act that had long since become habit for him. Being aware of his surroundings, trying to detect any threats before the threats detected him. As far as he could tell, the only ones -living or undead- in this gas station were him, Tam, and Caleb. No groaning sounds, no rotten ex-humans trying to get a piece of him. Just the sound of the pumps as they filled their cans and Tam’s hilarious attempts at whistling It’s the Hard Knock Life.

Leo couldn’t bear to listen to Tam butcher the song with his whistling so he joined in with the whistling, a rescue attempt for a beloved childhood song. Tam grinned when Leo started whistling, and started to sing the song out loud, tapping his feet against each other. What Tam lacked in terms of whistling ability, he more than made up for with his beautiful singing.

Caleb grinned at the both of them, chuckling, getting so caught up in the little performance that he didn’t realize the can he was filling had started to overflow until Leo pointed it out. Caleb filled up his cans first and headed to the car to place them in the trunk and leaned against the side of the vehicle as he waited for Tam and Leo.

Leo was on the last can when he noticed sudden movement. He blinked repeatedly. The gas station was cluttered with dead bodies but Leo could have sworn he’d just seen one of them crawl forward. He shut off the pump immediately and clutched his shotgun tightly; Tam noticed something was wrong since he immediately stopped filling his can too and glanced around in search of what had Leo looking so startled.

“Are they here?” Tam asked.

Leo gestured in the direction of the body that had moved. “I know this might sound crazy, but I think that one’s playing dead.”

It did sound crazy, even to him. Fleshers had no measurable intelligence, they were was downright stupid as they came and in all the time since the world had gone to shit, he’d never encountered one that ‘played dead’. He was either hallucinating, or Fleshers were getting smarter. Both of those possibilities were sources of great concern for him.

“Are you sure?” Tam arched an eyebrow over the other. “If there’s Brainers this close to base then we’re going to have to get on the move again. We need to get out of here right now.”

“Brainers?” Leo repeated.

“The smart ones,” Tam explained. “Cale and I encountered a bunch of them back at the City Mall, Fleshers who’d played dead and caught us by surprise. One of them disarmed me. It was my first time encountering one. When Scott came back from a scavenging mission and said there were smart Fleshers, we didn’t believe him. But they’re real.”

Leo remembered when Caleb had labelled him one of the smart ones back at the mall. If the Fleshers were capable of pretending to be dead in order to lure in their prey then it meant they were evolving, becoming much more predatory. As if they weren’t high enough on the food chain, they were climbing even higher. Now, Leo felt ridiculously uncomfortable being at the gas station: for all he knew, every single one of the dead bodies around him could have been a Flesher playing dead.

“We need to burn them,” Leo murmured and stared at the gas pumps. “We need to burn them all.”

“Are you insane?!” Tam pointed at the pumps. “We set fire to his place, it’ll explode. An explosion like that, the noise it’ll cause, you’ll be sending an invitation to every single one of those bastards in hearing distance and trust me, they’re all going to RSVP and come with their plus ones.”

“You said they’re smart. They’re playing dead, that means they’re evolving, Tam. They’re becoming actual predators and do you know what predators like doing?”

“Predate?”

“Hunt. It was bad enough when they were just brainless carriers of the virus, but if they’re evolving and learning to hunt? That’s bad news. What happens if they follow us back to camp?”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“They can’t keep up with the car. We’re not blowing up the gas station, Lionel. No fucking way. Jo will have our heads if we do something this reckless and endanger everyone back at base.”

“We’re endangering them if we don’t burn this place down!”

“Leo, we need to go.”

Leo gritted his teeth, considering the situation at hand. Finally, he chose to back down and grabbed the cans he’d filled and rushed to the car where Caleb had now occupied the driver’s seat with a smile on his face.

“Get out,” Leo ordered after he and Tam had dropped the cans in the trunk had shut it. “Now, kid. We have to get out of here, there’s smart ones or whatever the hell you called them.”

“I’ll drive,” Caleb said calmly. “Get in.”

Leo looked bewildered. “Pardon?”

“He really can drive,” Tam vouched for Caleb. “Necessary skill for survival in this wasteland.”

“How old are you?” Leo stared at Caleb.

“Twelve.”

“Do you have a license?”

Caleb shook his head. “No one does. It’s an apocalypse, no one’s handing licenses out anymore. But I really can drive, dad taught me.”

“Leo, get in!” Tam exclaimed.

“I’m not letting a twelve-year old drive me to a fiery death,” Leo snapped. “Kid, I need you to scoot over right now.”

“Get in!” Caleb cried out, his eyes widening.

Leo swerved around and saw his life flash before his eyes. The bodies that had littered the gas station were rising, climbing onto their feet, arms outstretched as they headed towards Leo with wobbled movement. Leo aimed his shotgun at a gas pump.

“You’ll kill us all!” Tam yelled.

Leo growled and climbed into the front passenger’s seat, with incredible displeasure. He glared at Caleb. “Kid, drive. Now. You get me killed, I’ll kill you.”

Caleb stared at the wheel with a confused expression. “How do I start it?”

“Are you fucking serious?!” Tam and Leo cried out in unison.

Caleb chuckled evilly and brought the car’s engine to life and put the car into reverse, pulling out of the gas station with the kind of speed that caused Leo’s heart so skip a lot of beats. Death at the hands of a twelve-year old was not how he’d imagined he’d go out. His mind screamed at him to yank Caleb out of the driver’s seat and toss him to the back but he calmed himself and decided to let the kid drive. If it looked, at any point, like Caleb was going to drive them to fiery deaths, he’d leap out of the car through the door he’d left unlocked for good reason.

Once Caleb had put some distance between them and the gas station, Leo glanced out the window to be sure they weren’t dealing with Fleshers smart enough to track their prey. Once he was sure they weren’t being followed, he relaxed in his seat, took deep breaths then stared at Caleb. “Next time you hijack my car, I’ll feed you to them, do you understand?”

Caleb nodded and smiled.

The drive from the gas station to the supermarket that served as their base was a rather short one, especially since Caleb seemed to have no idea what a speed limit meant. He brought the car to an abrupt stop outside the supermarket, causing them all to lurch forward in their seats, Leo banging his head against the top of the car.

“We’re here,” Caleb said brightly and hurried out of the car, sprinting towards the supermarket’s entrance which appeared barricaded from here. Caleb knocked on the door in a weird manner that initially confused Leo till he realized it was some sort of code. Morse code or whatever the hell it was called.

A little over a minute later, the barricades behind the door were cleared and the door swung open, three people stepping out, one of whom was a dark-skinned girl with waist-length brown hair and thick-framed glasses on her face; a smile spread across her face when she saw Caleb and she knelt to hug him tightly. Leo couldn’t fully make out the girl’s facial features from the car but even from this distance, he could tell it wasn’t someone he’d met before. It wasn’t someone from Jefferson.

“Who’s the brown-haired girl?” Leo asked Tam as they climbed out of the car and started to haul out everything they’d gotten from the mall.

“Brianna,” Tam answered. “Just call her Bri. But be careful, she’s only ever nice with Caleb. Cold to everyone else.”

Leo grinned. “Challenge accepted, hombre.” Leo slung Caleb’s backpack across his shoulder, grunting at the immediate impact the weight had on his back, then pulled the cart out of the car with Tam’s help, some of its contents spilling out. Leo picked up everything that had fallen and put them back in the cart, except one flashlight which he chose to leave in the car. They made their way towards the supermarket where they were stopped at the door by Bri and the two other people next to her.

Now that he was up close, Leo found himself enthralled by Bri’s beauty. In an apocalypse, she’d somehow managed to keep her skin looking like porcelain, her ocean blue eyes glimmering behind her glasses, the freckles on her face somehow adding to what Leo viewed as perfection. She didn’t seem to be as admirable of Leo, shooting a look of disgust at him.

“Who’s the scrawny dude?” she queried, her voice cold.

“Scrawny?” Leo repeated, forgetting in that moment that he found her attractive, his temper starting to flare. “I beg your pardon?”

“He ain’t that scrawny,” the boy on Bri’s left grinned. He was much shorter than her, and a lot skinnier than everyone outside the supermarket. His skin was pale, his eyes brown and a scar ran along his left cheek, all the way down his neck, stopping at his shoulder. He wore a white shirt that had clearly not been white for a very long time, paired with ripped jeans and a pair of black sneakers. His black hair flowed to his shoulder and he rubbed the strands of hair on his chin as he eyed Leo curiously. “I say we take what he has and send him on his way.”

Leo snorted derisively and glanced away from the boy who’d proved to be an eyesore and glanced at the boy standing to Bri’s right. He was taller than Bri, had a similar physical frame to Leo, just slightly more muscular. His head was shaved and a thick, overgrown beard occupied the lower half of his face. His brown eyes stared blankly past Leo, and unlike the irritating midget, he wore clean clothes. “Not going to say anything,” he asked the boy.

The boy shrugged and remained silent.

“Wally doesn’t talk much,” Caleb explained. “He’s shy.”

Wally kicked at Caleb playfully, but remained quiet nonetheless, refusing to utter a single word.

“Now hand over your stuff and be on your way, string bean,” the shorter boy said, licking his lips evilly, withdrawing a blood-stained, somewhat rusty knife from his back pocket, keeping it pointed at Leo.

“Take a step towards me with that knife, I’ll surgically remove your eyes with it,” Leo threatened. He meant it.

“Think we should all calm down here,” Tam pleaded. “Look, Bri, let him in. Jo knows who he is.”

“I don’t think so,” the short boy snarled and lunged at Leo with the knife. Leo moved with speed, disarming his attacker and twisted his hand at an odd degree, a snapping sound signifying that something was either broken or dislocated. He grabbed the boy by his throat, lifted him off the ground and flung him aside.

Wally, despite his reluctance to speak, was not at all reluctant to pull out a pistol which he aimed at Leo’s head. There was a click sound as he took the safety off. Leo didn’t back down: he knocked the pistol out of Wally’s hand and caught it perfectly, pressing the muzzle right against Wally’s head. “Tch tch.”

Bri pulled out a gun too and pressed it against Leo’s head. “Drop the gun, or I’ll drop you.”

“Mexican standoff!” Caleb squealed excitedly. The kid clearly didn’t seem to realize that this was turning into a rather messy situation, one made even messier when Tam pulled out a gun and trained it at Bri.

“Put the gun down!” Tam yelled at Bri.

“Checkmate,” Leo sneered.

“Touché,” someone else stepped out of the supermarket. Taller than any of them and bigger, his black hair flowed to his shoulders, and he spotted a thick beard like Wally. He wore a blue long-sleeve V-neck beneath a vest, the sleeves rolled up just beneath his elbow, with black fingerless gloves on either hand. Black jeans and a pair of blue-and-black boots completed the ensemble.

Despite looking a lot different than the last time he’d seen him, Leo immediately recognized Jordan. “Hey, Jordan. Glad you could join the party. Or is it Big Jo?”

Jo nodded at Bri and she lowered her gun immediately, Tam and Leo following suit. Jo walked towards Leo, stared into his eyes for well over thirty seconds before smiling wildly and reeling Leo in for a tight hug.

“You son of a bitch, you’re alive!” Jo yelled.

“Not for much longer if you keep squeezing me like this,” Leo wheezed out. Jo broke the hug and patted Leo on the shoulder, a huge grin on his face.

“Bri, this is Lionel Walker. A very close friend,” Jo grinned, his eyes lit up with genuine happiness at seeing Leo again. “Leo, this is Brianna. A good friend and one of the few people in here that you really don’t want to piss off.”

Leo snorted. “I’m one of the people she shouldn’t piss off either.”

Bri extended a middle finger at Leo, turned around and headed inside. Leo glanced at Wally and returned his gun to him, earning an appreciative nod from him. Wally led Caleb into the supermarket and Tam went inside after them.

“Midge!” Jo called out. “Quit rolling around the floor and get inside. Arm’s dislocated not broken.”

“I can’t feel it anymore!” Midge cried out, clearly pretending.

“I’m barricading the doors as soon as I go inside,” Jo threatened. Immediately, Midge climbed onto his feet and sprinted towards the supermarket, brushing past Leo aggressively and flipping him the middle finger as soon as he was inside the supermarket.

“The midget’s name is Midge?” Leo queried.

“It’s a nickname,” Jo explained. “It’s short for midget.”

“Ah, fitting.”

“Come on in. The others are going to want to see you. Can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when they realize you made it out too.”

“Others?”

“Come on. You didn’t think this was everyone, did you?”