He lay on the bed, breathing lightly, afraid of waking her, as he watched Olivia sleeping on his chest. She was dressed lightly, in the kind of clothes that you would wear for a Miami summer. Not the dead of winter in New York.
She had a lock of hair in her face, and Robin gently moved his hand over, brushed it out, and very gently, stroked one hand down her cheek. He doesn't know if she knew yet what he’d do for her. The lengths he’d be willing to go to save her. To protect her.
And then from one moment to the next, she was looking at Robin. It wasn’t as if she’d been sleeping, and woke up, she’d simply been sleeping, and now she was watching him. She yawned, stretching her hands into the air, over his head, and inadvertently smacking him.
He smiled softly, and she asked, “What time is it?”
“About two thirty. You’ve been asleep for an hour and a half.”
She groaned. “Where were you in that book? I have a test…” She yawned, closing her eyes for a moment, and then she opened them again. “I have a test tomorrow on that…”
He smiled and opened the book. “Right…” he flipped through the pages and then stopped on one with the number 119 on it. “Here.”
Olivia laughed incredulously. “I don’t know how you do that Robin, how you just memorize stuff on a whim.”
He laughed. “What makes you think I know?”
She laughed, bringing her hands up to my face, and kissing me slowly, gently. “If you don’t know Robin, then I doubt anyone will.” She sat up fully then said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Keep reading.”
“Yes ma’am.” Robin laughed, lifting his hand in a salute.
----------------------------------------
I said the words with a tone of finality, and I smiled at the fairly shocked expression on Muramasa’s face, and then I turned back down the hallway towards the door that held the entrance to the staircase.
Behind me the boy followed, and I asked him, as the door shut, “What’s your name?”
“Will.” He met my eyes and smiled. I smiled back. Something about this kid was infectious. His quiet meek personality in a world where the most likely men to survive were the strong. He seemed weak, but if he was still alive, I assumed he would be strong. He would be powerful.
And he did not disappoint. As soon as we opened the door to the eleventh floor, a Bleeder was upon us, and even before I had time to react, the Bleeder was falling backward, Will's knife had left a hole in the side of its head.
I looked at Will and nodded my thanks. He nodded back, and then we both walked in. I immediately drew an arrow and fired, following up with a second before the first had even hit its target. As always, they both hit through the eye, to preserve my arrow tips.
I can always make more. I’ve got a whole duffle bag upstairs filled up with arrows, but if I ever have to fight a horde I can’t defeat, and I have to leave arrows behind, I’d rather have plenty of spares.
The mentality that's served me well for ten years, is hope for the best, prepare for the worst. That’s what I’ve been doing for ten years. That’s why my base is packed with explosives. That’s why I have an entire bag filled with non-perishable food, clothes, spare bullets, arrows, and a second pistol. In case I ever need to run.
That’s why I have the second staircase boarded up in a way that it seems as though it doesn’t exist, even though it does. I have been able to live here, survive here for ten years. It has served me well. But I don’t need attachments to this place. Attachments can get you killed in this world, and I have no intention of dying.
Despite that of course, I still grabbed the two arrows that pinned the Bleeders to the wall by their heads. It was two more shots. I am not going to waste two more shots. By that time I had decided to put my bow down, leaving it resting on the floor, and now I was holding my two arrows, point facing down, and walking forward, Will and I shoulder to shoulder.
He saw the two arrows in my hand and nodded his respect, then asked, “Mind if I take one?”
I tossed the one in my left hand to him, and he caught it, and as we drew up onto the Bleeders, I grabbed another arrow, and threw it like a knife, spinning end over end, and smacking again into the eye of another Bleeder. I grunted in surprise at the pretty good throw and then grabbed another arrow, planted my hand on the back of it, and drove it downwards, into the closest Bleeder's skull, through it, and into another’s.
I pushed back the two bodies, not bothering to grab the arrow out of its head, and instead, I kicked the nearest Bleeder in the stomach, smashing it into the wall, and I think breaking its back. I’m not entirely sure. Whatever happened it stopped moving its legs and instead grabbed at me with its arms, raspy moans filling the air.
I mercilessly drove the heel of my shoe onto its head and watched with some satisfaction as the blood squirted out of its head. And then I picked up the body, and hurled it over Will’s head, directly into the now growing horde.
It pushed them all to the floor, and backward, giving Will a bit of breathing room from the absolute crap ton that had been swarming him. He looked at me and smiled, then flipped his knife around so that it was facing downwards.
He did the same with the arrow, and then ran right back into the fray, now jabbing and stabbing instead of slicing and slashing. The Bleeders that fell around him were starting to make a pile of sorts, the kind of thing that made it hard for us to fight them.
So I picked up my bow again and began shooting them. Within moments the about twenty Bleeders that had been out here were dead, and there was once again, blessed lovely silence. We then went through the apartments finding most of them empty. One of the apartments was a studio so five people were living in it. Five Bleeders fell.
Those were the only ones living in the apartments. I quickly went over to one of the balconies and tossed the Bleeder’s bodies off of it. They hit the ground below with a rather sickening squelching thud, and very quickly, the bleeders that had come there from John’s gunshots were investigating the bodies of their brethren.
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I went over to the kitchen in one of the houses and wiped my hands off with one of the towels they had hanging off of their stove. I looked around the apartment, slightly put off by the normalcy of how it all was, no blood, no bodies, just a layer of dust over everything.
On one of the counters though was a little knife block, designed mostly for holding kitchen knives, not really the kind that I used, the ones for fighting, for killing. But I still checked all of the knives, finding a wickedly sharp fileting knife, and a small tiny knife, also incredibly sharp.
I had tested it on the wood of the knife block. The two knives that I took from here had sunken almost an inch into the block when I tested them out, and it had been quite the effort to take them out.
Also interestingly, the knives were incredibly well made. They were built so that it wasn’t just a piece of metal bolted to a handle, no the metal of the blade was integrated into the handle. It was the kind of knife that was unlikely to break. Or the handle was unlikely to break. When I tried out the fileting knife on a wall, it just snapped in half.
With my looting done, or done for now, I went ahead and headed upstairs, to where I had made my home. It was about fifteen minutes later, and surprisingly, several of them had already unloaded the small amount of supplies they had into one of the guest rooms.
One thing I noticed was that Muramasa didn’t have a gun, the only weapon he carried with him was his sword and a knife. Very quickly though, I found Olivia. She was sitting on one of the beds, flipping absentmindedly through one of the books I recognized as mine.
It was some fantasy thing. Classic scenario. A powerful warrior takes on an apprentice and fights an evil wizard. Apprentice discovers that they have a power greater than they knew, and yay! Everyone gets a happy ending.
If only the real world was like that. If only there was a cure like the books I heard about stuff like this. It was ironic, how many people wrote their novels about the dead rising, and how they laughed about it at the end. I’d read everyone's books and in general, the philosophy I’d gotten from them was to not be dumb.
Be smart about where you go, how you fight, and who you make friends with. It was generally the safest way to survive. According to those books of course. I didn’t trust them. I’d done plenty of stupid stuff and survived.
I walked over to my bookshelf grabbed one such book, and sat down on the bed right next to her, falling onto my back, and crossing my legs over each other. My quiver dug into my back uncomfortably, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
Olivia sighed, and then turned her back to me, and lay down, her head on my chest. I stiffened for a moment and then relaxed, awkwardly putting my hands down on my chest, flipping through the book I’d grabbed and reading the first chapter beginning I came to, Olivia presumably reading hers.
We stayed like that for a solid maybe half an hour, until Olivia sighed and said quietly, “You remember when we used to do this without looking around, waiting for the dead to show up at our door?”
I chuckled, and breathed out, “Yeah. When I was helping you read one of those boring doctor textbooks you carried with you everywhere. I would read it out loud for you, and inevitably you’d fall asleep.” I paused for a moment, then muttered, “I would watch you for hours until you woke up. I’d just sit there, afraid of moving, of scaring you away. I was always afraid I’d end up doing that. Who would’ve thought that you’d be the one who scared me away?”
Olivia sighed and sat up. “Did you and Will clear the floor?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’ve got some supplies that I’d like for you to help me move down into one of the rooms. Big heavy stuff.” She winked at me, a look of mischief in her eyes, and I smiled.
“I’ll help you.” We both stood up, and I walked out, grabbing the door for her and holding it open. She smiled softly, a remnant of better days. We both started walking towards the room with her doctor tools in it and the second I entered, I realized I probably made a mistake.
There were half a dozen bags filled with things like sterilized water, thread, and scissors. There were six bags of this stuff. I groaned, and then walked towards one of them, and picked it up testing the weight of the bag.
It wasn’t too heavy, so I grabbed a second one in my other hand, and hoisted them up holding the straps over my shoulder, making them even less heavy. This time she opened the door for me, and I nodded my gratitude, then began walking over to the staircase, kicking open the door with a single motion.
I pushed the door open wider and winced as it clanged into the wall, and the Bleeder moans began to fill the air. We took about five seconds to get one story further down, and then we were in the hallway.
Olivia looked around quickly, and I jerked my head towards one of the apartments. “That one is a studio. We could clear out some stuff, get some tables from the other apartments, set up a somewhat decent bed area?”
Olivia nodded, surprised at the rationality of my decision, and I grinned. “What? You still think I’m not the smartest fellow in this town?”
Olivia smiled sadly, and then she opened the door and started to look around. I plopped the stuff down on the table, and then I turned around and started to climb up the stairs again. I’d made it into the room with all of the doctor’s supplies we had yet to move.
I grimaced slightly when I found that the bag I had chosen was the heaviest of all of them. It looked like it held a bunch of gas tanks or something along that vein, so I just shrugged and picked it up.
And then I heard a scream. Olivia was the only one in this building with a voice that could go up that high, and I immediately dropped the bag, pulled out my revolver, and I started to run. At first, I was going to run down the stairs, but that took too much time. So I just vaulted over the railing, onto the eleventh floor.
That saved about five seconds. Immediately I ran into the apartment, and saw Olivia on the floor, holding a small child in her arms. For a second I faltered, and then I saw the blood on the child's face.
Quickly I fired two shots into the glass sliding door separating the apartment from its balcony. The fractures from the bullet hole spread across the window, and I ran into motion. I could see Olivia’s arms beginning to shake from the effort of trying to hold the Bleeder child off of her, and I doubled my speed, pushing off of the ground hard enough to presumably put a mark on the floor.
I grabbed the child by the neck, jerking her off of Olivia, and I grimaced at the foul stench emanating from the body. I noticed one or two things after I started running, namely, there was a couch and a glass table in between me and the window.
The couch was easy. I planted my hand on the couch, and jumped into the air, pushing myself forward at the same time, feet pointed directly at the window. My jump carried me over the table, and I collided with the glass door, shattering it, and sending both me and the child toppling onto the balcony. I landed on my back dazed, while the girl that was in my hands hit the fence designed to stop people from falling off of the balcony.
It wasn’t very well designed, because the instant the girl hit it, it broke off, and she went tumbling off of the balcony. She didn’t scream, just groaned in that strange unnatural voice of hers. The whole sequence of events hadn’t even taken one minute.
I stood up, not making any noise, or for that matter feeling any pain. Despite that, I rubbed my hands down my chest, and my back searching for any pieces of glass I could find. I found one, embedded directly into my shoulder blade, and I pulled it out.
Olivia for her part had now stood up and was walking towards me when she saw the inch and a half piece of glass that had gotten itself embedded into my back. She groaned, walked forward, and said, “Why didn’t you just shoot it, Robin?”
I froze. “This way was cooler. And a lot more fun.” I grinned, then sobered almost instantly, walking over to the edge of the balcony, and seeing the little girl's twisted broken body, still squirming, biting, and moaning.
And then she was obscured by the dozens of other ones just like her, swarming, to get to the noise. I sighed and turned back, muttering something under my breath. “Timere mortous. Timere mortous. Timere mortous.”
Fear the dead.