Zombies and Werewolves, chapter 5 (Patreon)

“Come on, up you go,” the wolf girl said as she encouraged Stella to climb up into her tree house. Stella’s leg throbbed, and she wanted to protest that she couldn’t climb, but staying on the ground wasn’t an option. Besides, what medical supplies she had were in her house, so she had to go up.

She looked at the arrow sticking out of her leg.

“Hey, what’s that?” the girl asked, nodding toward the ravine. Stella whipped around, expecting to see zombies storming through the trees. Yeah, zombies were stupid, but the fact she was seriously injured meant that they were a much more serious threat. However, there was nothing. Fire burned through her leg, and she screamed and collapsed to her knees.

The girl threw her arms around Stella’s shoulders. “Breathe through the pain. Come on. It couldn’t hurt worse coming out than it did going in.”

“It fucking did,” Stella said with a gasp. The two parts of the broken arrow lay on the ground, so at least the idiot hadn’t dragged the arrowhead back through the flesh. Still. It fucking hurt. “If this is a hallucination, I definitely need therapy because at least sixty percent of the time I don’t think I deserve that sort of pain.”

The wolf girl blinked at her before her heavy brows lowered into a frown.

“We should get up there.” Stella waved toward her house. “You should grab the arrow. If someone comes walking through, that is sort of like putting out a welcome mat. I don’t want to welcome anyone to my house.” Stella tried to haul herself up to the first branch, but her injured leg failed, and wolf girl had to catch her.

“I meant to do that,” Stella protested weakly.

“Right.” Wolf girl didn’t hide her sarcasm. She gave Stella a shove, and Stella got her good leg under her. She intended to make her own way up, but wolf girl climbed with her, a strong hand on Stella’s back the whole time.

By the time Stella crawled up onto the platform, she was exhausted. She flopped onto her back, starfish style and stared at the leafy canopy. She should get off her balcony-style landing and get inside where her supplies were, but she was too tired to move. Now that her good friend adrenaline had abandoned her, her muscles had gone on strike. Everyone left her.

Wolf girl crouched next her, dark eyes watching with an eerie intensity. Stella tried very hard to focus on those eyes because other bits were on display. Ogling seemed both rude and likely to cause bloodshed. “I have clothes in there.” She poked a thumb toward the room. Wolf girl took a few more seconds to study Stella before she ghosted away.

“So, I’m going to move past psychotic hallucination and assume you’re real. Fae? Native wolf spirit? Werewolf? Shapeshifter?”

“Why would I be Native?” Wolf girl stuck her head back out the crude door Stella had hung. At least she had on a long shirt.

“Um. I don’t know. Magic wolf seems more Native than white.”

“Thanks for the racism,” wolf girl said. “Werewolf.”

“Werewolf. Great. And what a nicely judgmental werewolf you are. Will you help me to my bed or should I just throw myself off the platform so I break my neck and die quickly?”

Wolf girl snorted. “Dramatic much?”

“Yep,” Stella answered easily. Her mother always used to tell her that when God had handed out theatrical exaggeration, Stella had stood in line twice. Her brother had a less kind description of her less attractive personality traits. Wolf girl held out a hand, and Stella grabbed on. She tried to pull herself to her feet, but wolf-girl was doing the heavy lifting. She dropped Stella onto the bed before she went over to the washbasin with the almost clean water and started cleaning up. Stella noticed the water was already pink and wolf girl’s face lacked blood. That made it easier to look at her. “I’m Stella.”

“Alicia.”

Stella waiting for something more, but Alicia just started washing farther south, and Stella shifted her attention to the underside of her roof. A couple of the boards were warping. When snow hit and slowed down the zombies, she would have to get up there and make repairs. Frozen zombies weren’t as quick to run toward the sound of hammers. Of course, if her worse fears had come true with her new human neighbors, she had bigger problems than zombies.

“Rearranging your bones at will to change your species… that looks like it hurts. Does it?” Stella continued to focus on her roof.

“I don't change my species. I'm a werewolf no matter which form I'm in.” Something snapped through the air, and Stella looked to see Alicia snapping out a pair of jeans sharply before she put them on. She couldn’t button the jeans because she was much more muscled than Stella, but at least she wasn’t naked. Sure, Stella could still see a triangle of tanned skin, but most girls at the beach showed more.

“And your species is werewolf.”

“Is that stranger than zombies?”

Stella hummed. “Um, I’ve had way more time to get used to zombies, so kinda. I mean, if you stick around, I’m sure the idea of werewolves will be just as pedestrian eventually, but right now, werewolves is a big deal.”

Alicia didn’t answer. She came over and grabbed Stella’s foot and pulled it up into the air, tipping Stella onto her back. Stella gave an abortive yelp. Rule one of the zombie apocalypse was to avoid yelling. However, she wasn’t used to people and unpredictable people at that. Alicia grabbed a clean rag she’d scavenged from Stella’s storage box and started wrapping the wound. Gritting her teeth, Stella tried to imagine her father advising her to breath out the pain. In theory, breathing out pain was a great idea. In practice, it didn’t fucking work.

“Why did you take that kind of risk?”

“What?” Stella had to wrestle her brain back into gear. She missed emergency rooms. “What risk?”

“Out there. Today. That was a stupid risk.”

“Hunting?” Maybe the pain was making her loopy, but Stella was not following this conversation well.

“Distracting them.” Alicia ripped cloth and tied it into a neat field dressing. “You were safe. You could've waited until they left and come home without risking…” She gestured at the bloody bandage.

“Hey, I have been alone long enough that I was not going to let someone kill my wolf friend. Even if I was almost sure you were an actual wolf and not a person in wolf’s clothing. Given the way the behaviors didn't match a wild animal, I probably should've seen this coming.”

Alicia let go of Stella’s leg, and Stella tentatively lowered it to the bed. That was going to hurt.

“Do you live alone?” Alicia asked. As if to make a point, she sat on the other bed—the one that Stella had gone almost a year without looking at. So many details up here told a story—one that involved two people. Above each of the two beds stood a shelf. On the other wall, two shelves made by stacking crates stood on either side of a window. Two chests contained the most valuable supplies. Two, two, two. Stella swallowed past the lump in her throat and nodded.

Alisha's gaze skittered away like a nervous animal. “Me too,” she said softly. She was most likely agreeing that her family was a dead because there was no way she had the same fucked up family drama Stella did.

Silence filled the air between them until the need to talk made Stella squirm. “How long of you been alone?”

Alisha shrugged. “When you're in the wolf form, time doesn't have that much meaning. You live mostly in the now.”

“That sounds nice.”

Alisha shook her head. “It's cowardly. But I wasn't going to hide when you clearly needed help. Drawing attention to yourself to save an animal—it was stupid. If I had been a wild wolf, I would have run away and left you to die out there.”

“Death stopped being scary a few seasons back,” Stella said. Sometimes she wished death frightened her. Sometimes she felt like that lack of fear was more dangerous than a horde of zombies. “Besides, if those guys are who I think they are, I pretty much lived to make them miserable.”

“I’m pretty sure they were the ones who ended up miserable this time.”

“One did,” Stella said with a grim satisfaction. That lasted until Alicia stood and walked to the window. All Stella could see was her back, but it was stiff and her shoulders were hunching and that was not good body language. Sometimes Stella was oblivious, but even she couldn’t miss the misery. “Thank you for that, by the way.”

“Yeah, don’t mention it.” Alicia’s voice was flat.

Stella got it. Even when killing was necessary, it felt wrong. Nature was trying to wipe out the whole human race with a stupid zombie virus, and people killing each other felt like helping extinction along. It felt like giving up. Her parents had always believed that humanity could come back from this and rebuild. Turning on each other was like admitting that they were not just wrong but stupid for believing that people could overcome their own violent natures.

Stella shook her head to clear the cobwebs of old thoughts. “I have food in the crate. If you don't like what I have here, I actually have a storeroom in the platform that is slightly above us and that way,” she pointed towards the smallest of her treehouses. “Feel free to dig around and see if there is anything that sounds good.”

“I'm not going to eat your food stores.”

“I’m fine on food stores right now, so eat away.”

“Wolves don't need to be fed,” she said more firmly. “I would rather hunt, and with people disappearing, the hunting is good around here.”

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that. That's kind of handy given the grocery stores haven't restocked their shelves.”

Alicia shrugged. “There are a lot of advantages to being a werewolf. That’s a deep wound. You're going to need something like antibiotics. Do you have any?”

Stella laughed. “Good one. Antibiotics.”

“This isn't a joke.”

“No, but the idea of anyone having antibiotics is a joke. Pharmacies got stripped bare before the grocery stores.”

Alicia turned around. The body language that had screamed misery now shouted anger just as loudly. She had crossed her arms, and her jaw muscle bulged. She looked about two seconds away from wolfing out and biting someone, and as the only other someone in biting range, that didn’t make Stella feel safe. “Then that means that someone will have those antibiotics,” Alicia said darkly.

Stella wanted to fall back on Sunday school lessons about stealing, but they didn’t apply. She was still trying to craft a polite way of asking a werewolf to avoid murder and mayhem when Alicia sighed. “If you have food to spare, I can trade. So who would be likely to have antibiotics?”

“I have no idea. And even more importantly, I don't trust most people enough to trade with them. I'm sure it'll be fine.” Stella considered the bloodied bandage around her leg. She knew full well that injuries could turn septic and kill fairly easily, but it wasn't like she could do anything about her injury, and she wasn't one to dwell on possibilities.

Alecia rested her hand just north of the injury. “I can already feel the heat building. For the infection to set in this fast, it's going to be bad.”

Well shit.

“So, who can you trade with?”

Stella huffed and studied her ceiling for a second before focusing on Alicia again. “Even if you're right, that doesn't change anything. There are a few isolationists in town, but they will shoot you before you get anywhere near. We've had some manipulative assholes come through, so people are wary of anyone looking to talk. The few people who I would even consider talking to tend to point weapons my direction when I get too near.”

“Point me in the right direction, and I’ll convince them,” Alicia said.

“How? By threatening them? People caved to threats all died a long time ago. No one in town will talk to a stranger.” And Alicia was stranger than most people. Well, not most because most people these days were zombies, and they were high on the odd scale. However, she was stranger than most living humans.

“I’ll figure it out. I’m a werewolf?”

“So?” Stella threw her hands in the air. “Do you plan on walking up to them and announcing that you’re a werewolf and then asking them to trade? Because I assure you, that's not a great trade strategy.”

“I'm a lot tougher than humans. So tell me who's likely to be hoarding supplies, and I’ll go talk to them or challenge them or steal from them or do whatever I have to do. But I'm not going to let you die when you were trying to save me.”

“Whoa.” Stella grabbed for Alicia’s arm, holding on tightly when Alicia looked like she was ready to vibrate out of her skin. “You do not need to start feeling guilty about that. I have my own reasons for hating those people, and it has very little to do with you. So if you're doing this out of some weird sense of guilt, just stop it.”

Alicia growled. “I’m going to town. You can either give me the information I need to make this a quick trip so that I can come back here, or I will use my nose to sniff out every individual in that town and harass them about who might have medicine. So you can choose column a or column B, but you don't have other choices.”

“Are you always this stubborn?”

“Yes. Are you?”

Stella considered for a moment. “Pretty much, yes.”

“Great. Well given how fast infection is setting in, we are going to be much better off if you just tell me the name of someone who might have the medicine we need. So maybe you can put your stubbornness in the backseat and put self-preservation behind the driver’s wheel.”

That stung. Stella was too damn good and preserving her own hide. At night, she considered all the different choices she would have made if she hadn’t been so damn selfish. But she was. She wanted to live. That drove her even when a sane person would have stopped to consider whether they had the right to put other people’s lives in danger. “Can I ask you something and have you excuse it as delirium if its offensive?

“I ransacked your drawers looking for clothes after tearing out the throat of the man who was probably planning on raping and killing you. Is there anything in that situation that makes you think I take offense easily?”

“You have an uncomfortable ability to make a point, don't you?” Stella continued without giving her a chance to respond. “Do werewolves get infections?”

Alicia opened her mouth, frowned, and closed it. Apparently, Stella’s ability to confuse people crossed species lines. “I assume we don't get infections easily. I’ve never had one, but I we probably could get one if we were weakened or starved.”

“Okay, then I am potentially about to offend you, and I apologize ahead of time. However, instead of going off on some mythical search for antibiotics that I can promise you don't exist in town, could you just turn me into a werewolf?” From Stella's point of view, werewolfism sounded pretty damn cool. She would lose track of time, feed herself by hunting the way a wolf would, and avoid most major illnesses. Getting sick scared her far more than zombies.

Changing species sounded perfect.

Alisha shook her head. “I don't know how to make someone into a werewolf.”

“You don't know? Do you mean people can’t become them?” Maybe mythology had it all wrong.

“No, I know…” Alicia swallowed. “Knew. I knew plenty of people who started as human and became werewolves, but I don’t know how the adults made it happen. All I know is that we were told to always be careful with bodily fluids.”

“Bodily fluids? I thought werewolves bit people to change them.”

Alicia shrugged. “Biting, kissing, having sex, donating blood, doing stupid shit on skateboards that led to bleeding on the pavement—they were all taboo. If we had a nosebleed, Mom would come running to the school to take us home, and once we got there, she would have a complete meltdown. Well, to be honest, my dad melted down too, but he was quieter about it. My mom’s meltdowns were epic and loud and publicly humiliating.”

“My parents are the opposite. My dad was the loud one. My mom…” Stella was not ready to talk about her. Hell, she couldn’t talk about either of them. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “How can you know that bodily fluids are involved but not know how to make new werewolves? Shouldn’t you have had the werewolf version of the birds and the bees talk by now?” Alicia was old enough that she would have been high school at least when the quarantines and zombies started showing up.

She scowled. “I know where babies come from, but no one tells a werewolf under the age of thirty how to make new ones. Didn’t you read Romeo and Juliet in school? Young love is not exactly healthy love. Young werewolves are just as likely to be stupid as humans; therefore, werewolf parents don’t share that secret. Therefore, I can't make you one. So, unless you want to die by fever, we need to find antibiotics. I'm going to go into town and use my nose and figure out who the hoarders are.”

She turned to leave.

“Wait!” Stella grabbed a new pair of pants out of the pile. “I'm going with you.”

“What? No. You’re weak and you don’t need to get sicker. Stay here and rest.”

“Look, people around here don't like strangers. I don't think anyone will trade us medicine, but if there is any chance, any teeny-tiny little chance, they're going to trade it to me, not you.”

Alicia crossed her arms over her chest again. She had the angry glower down pat. “This is a terrible idea.”

Ignoring the pain in her leg, Stella shoved past her wolfy guest and headed for the rope. “Yeah, but it’s my idea, and there's nothing you can do to stop me. So, put on some pants and let’s go.” If they went to town with Alicia still naked, they were going to get attention, but it wasn't going to be the right sort. “I’ll meet you on the ground.”

Stella never liked going to town, but she wouldn’t sit safe in her house while someone else went out and tried to get supplies for her. She knew what could happen, and if she had one more death on her conscience, suicide was going to be a far bigger threat than infection. A person could fight an infection, but there was damage that went so deep into a psyche that a person had no hope of burning it out. Stella already carried that sort of wound, and she knew she couldn’t risk another.

At the base of the tree, she picked up the backpack she’d dropped and checked her weapons. Going to town was a dumb idea—for both of them—but if Stella couldn’t talk Alicia out of a case of rampant stupidity, then she was going to be there to point out that she had said it was a bad idea when everything blew up in their faces. And maybe if she was there, she could minimize the fallout. Hopefully.