Guide to Surviving, chapter 7 (Patreon)

Stella followed Geoff into the boarded up department store. She was surprised to find something that resembled a campsite. Rather than having separate rooms, tents were set up around a central area with worn couches and a cacophony of rugs. Each of the tents was decorated—some with quilts over the central ridge or chairs set up next to work tables or children’s drawings done in crayon. It looked less like the zombie apocalypse than an out-of-control summer camp.

Of course the long slats of light that came in through the boarded up windows ruined the bucolic atmosphere. It was also hard to miss the suspicious looks that came from the group. The obnoxious kid—Chris—stood with two other kids who were slightly younger, one boy and one girl. Stella had never been a fan of children in general, but she'd already decided that this kid was on the lower half of the tolerability scale.

A young man who look like he should be getting ready to take his SATs stood next to the farthest tent and two women whispered over a huge tub of water that was probably washing given the clothes already hung on the line. The one with short blonde hair was pregnant and looked about ready to push a kid out. No kid deserved to be born into a zombie apocalypse, but it wasn’t her place to call the woman a bitch for doing that to a baby.

Stella had always known the Scrappy family was doing better than most, but she hadn't expected this bizarre sense of domestic normality. She’d assumed normal had been burned out of the world.

Her boot came down on an uneven patch of concrete and she hissed as the angle made her leg throb. Alicia got an arm around her waist and then proceeded to glare at everyone in the room as though they were to blame for Stella's injury. When the nearest woman took a step closer, Alicia growled at her.

“I should keep an eye on the perimeter,” Geoff said. He walked over to a rack that held a huge range of bladed weapons. None of them looked like the sort of weapons a person would've been able to pick up easily—fantasy swords or farm instruments. These blades didn't have decorative polished edges and fancy carvings. They were raw and asymmetrical and slightly lumpy, but they had sharp polished edges and a deadly grace in the curves. Maybe the family had raided a museum before they came up here. That would explain the medieval weaponry.

Funny, people had raided the luxury stores first, and then when everyone started realizing the situation was more dire than the government handling a pandemic particularly poorly, people had started raiding grocery stores and sporting good stores. Museums weren’t on the list of raiding targets, but looking at that rack, Stella suspected they should have been. She was a little surprised her parents hadn’t suggested it, but they had focused on the non-perishable foods and the drug store. Her mother had wanted to get as many diabetes pills as she could get her hands on.

Unfortunately, the junkies had already hit the pharmacies, and they scattered the pills they didn't want. Hundreds of pills and vials had ended up on the floor with broken glass. What Stella wouldn't give for just a few of those drugs now.

A much older woman with thinning white hair came out of the largest tent situated near the center of the enormous space. It'd been a long time since Stella had seen an elderly person. She'd forgotten how strange they looked with skin that wrinkled around their eyes and a certain softness to their features. The city librarian had been an older woman and Stella used to spend her summers hanging out in the air conditioned space, but her memories had grown dull and polished like sea glass that had eroded into something unrecognizable.

“Welcome,” the woman said. “I'm Sally Hawkins. You've already met my son Geoff and those three troublemakers are my grandchildren. The oldest is Chris and the two younger ones are Elizabeth and Alexander.”

Beside Stella, Alicia rumbling. Or she growled. That might be a growl. Stella planted her elbow in Alicia’s side.

“I’m Stella Ledger, and this is Alicia,” Stella offered.

“Come sit down on the cot here,” Sally said as she tapped her cane against one of the legs of a camp cot covered in colorful quilts. Stella limped towards it, ignoring the way Alicia continued to glare at everyone in the room, even if the elbow to her side had stifled the growling.

“What sort of trouble did you find?” Sally asked.

“It's more what trouble found me. I took down a deer yesterday, and when I went back to lay out the meat for jerky, someone had found my kill.”

“I assume this was not a zombie.” Sally pulled a stool over and perched next to the cot.

“I know how to deal with zombies.” Stella was offended at the idea that a zombie would get the best of her. “Humans are a little bit more trouble.” She sat and swung her legs up onto the cot so that her injured leg was close to Sally. “I thought your grandson said your name was Oma.”

“Oma means grandmother in German. I am his Oma, and if you're more comfortable calling me that, I certainly have no problem with it.” She pulled up the bottom hem of Stella's pants and made a disapproving clucking noise that reminded Stella of the city library and who made the exact same noise every time the boys who came into use the computers got too loud over their video games.

“This is a problem,” Sally said as she peeled back the bandage. Stella look down and blanched at the reddened edges of the wound and the swelling that reached nearly to her ankle. It looked far worse than she had expected. She caught Alicia’s gaze, and there was some righteous anger and tacit I told you so in her eyes.

Sally rested her hand on the leg right above the wound. “This is not a natural injury.”

“Meaning?” Alicia demanded. Her body was all angles and anger and curled fists. A young healthy werewolf versus a woman in her eighties—that didn't seem like a fair fight and Stella wished that she could get up long enough to drag Alicia into a corner and remind her that the zombie apocalypse was no reason to be impolite.

Sally seemed unbothered. “Whoever caught up with you, they have a magic user.”

One of the two women abandoned her tub of water and came over, wiping her hands on her apron. “Is that why the injury looks so infected?” She was old enough that she might be the children’s mother, but if so, none of them had inherited her black hair or her sharp features. She reminded Stella of a bird.

“It is,” Sally said. “It appears to be a spell that magnifies what already exists. So it's not causing an infection or poisoning the wound, but it sped up how fast the infection could gain hold.”

“What can you tell about their magic user?” The woman asked, a sharper edge to her voice.

“They’re young.” Sally ghosted her hand over the injury. “This doesn't have the complexity of a spell I would expect from someone who was more experienced. However, there is power here. Something as small as an arrowhead would not hold a spell easily, so it would take someone young, someone with a wealth of magic, to maintain a spell like this over any length of time.”

“I have been having a run of shitty luck lately,” Stella said with a rough laugh. “I should stay home and hide in bed for a while.”

Sally chuckled. “As I get older, I rather appreciate the boring days.”

“I don't have to be older to appreciate those days,” Stella said darkly. The dark-haired woman moved closer, and Alicia physically stepped into her path and glared her into taking a step back. Stella ignored their weirdness. “I can’t believe how many supernaturals are wandering these woods.”

Alicia turned her glare on Stella.

Stella raised her hands in surrender. “Or perfectly natural, not human-type people.”

“No doubt.” Sally didn’t laugh, but her voice was edged with merriment. “The zombie apocalypse does make it rather difficult for humans to thrive and the technology which has provided humans with such an advantage for so many centuries is now complex enough that without some sort of infrastructure it broke down quickly. As the purely human groups die off, I would imagine that a higher percentage of survivors will be natural, not-human type people.”

“Not all the touched have survived this apocalypse,” Alicia said with something close to fury rolling under her skin. Stella reached for her, but Alicia stepped away.

“You're right,” Sally said. “Too many survivors, whether touched by magic or not, have fallen. But I’m not going to lose another patient. Lily, let the others know to keep quiet. I'm going to need my energy for this healing, so I'm not going to be able to maintain the silence spell, and you know how Geoff reacts when we attract a crowd.

The dark-haired woman nodded. “Right away.” She hurried off toward a rough cut opening in the side of the department store. Either the family had done a little redecorating or looters had cut from one store into the next to try and get access.

“Do you mean to say that you keep a silence spell on this whole compound?” Alicia asked. That should have been impressive, but Alicia looked more wary than ever.

“It's a complex spell, but the advantage of age is the ability to handle complexity. The disadvantage is that I no longer have the physical strength to channel energy in every direction at once willy-nilly the way young people can. Can't even imagine spelling arrows.” She shook her head slowly. “The one who spelled the weapon that did this wound… I can't deny the effectiveness of the spell but it lacks complexity.”

“Will she be okay?” Alicia demanded.

“Most likely,” Sally said. That wasn’t the most comforting statement, but given that Stella’s leg looked like it might fall off, she didn’t have a choice about trusting her. Alicia moved to the side of the camp cot and crossed her arms before looming.

“I’ve got work to do. Why did you pull me off the forge?” a man asked as he walked into the room. He wore a leather apron and a middle-aged woman with soot on her face followed.

“I don’t have magic to spare,” Sally said. “Everyone, I’m dropping the spell now.” The whole room went silent. The dark-haired woman Sally had called Lily came back into the room, and she stood near the crude doorway with the guy who had been pulled away from his forge and the middle aged woman. The woman who had been washing stepped in front of the tub and watched, and the young man in back drifted a little closer. In contrast, the three children ran out of the room. Stella assumed they were trained to retreat to a safe space when the spell dropped.

Sally pulled a wooden chest closer and opened it to reveal a wide range of dried herbs and jars of powders. “I used to hide my magic. The times when people could burn witches might have ended, but people still didn’t accept real magic. They want to believe magic is nothing more than the power of affirmation and self love.” She scoffed. After sorting through a number of supplies, she came up with a jar. “The reality is that the world is about power. Every part of the universe stores energy of some sort and some of us are born with the talent to coax that power out.”

“What power do the zombies have?” Stella asked.

“That is an interesting question,” Sally said. “And one that I don’t have an answer to. But I do know how to urge infection and poison to leave the body.” She sprinkled herbs over the wound the way Stella’s mother used to overuse salt. Putting her hands on either side of the leg, Sally started to chant, and heat built in the flesh. Stella gritted her teeth and forced each breath as the pain climbed up her body. She grabbed Alicia’s shirt, fisting the fabric before Alicia caught her hand in her own.

“You’re hurting her.”

Sally paused in her chant, and the fire retreated until only Stella’s lower leg was swallowed by pain. “I’m burning out the infection. Hurting her is an unfortunate side effect. But given that I’m within range of your claws, I am doing my best to minimize the harm while I save her life.” She returned to her chant, and agony speared up into Stella’s groin. The muscles on the inner side of her leg started to cramp, and Stella swallowed a scream as she forced her leg straight as the muscle tried to curl in on itself. The pain was horrific, and she fought against the instinct to cry out. Then Alicia knelt down next to the cot and threw her arms around Stella. Stella hung on to her, sobbing as the fire consumed her. But then the pain lessened. Stella panted as she realized her face was wet with tears and smushed against Alicia’s shoulder. Alicia patted her on the back.

Something thumped to the floor, and Stella looked over to see Sally fall off her stool and to the ground. All the adults jumped toward her. The pregnant woman got there first. “Sally!” She went to her knees at Sally’s side, and the guy with the leather apron, the dark-haired Lily and the middle aged-woman all followed.

Alicia pulled Stella away and stood between her and the small crowd.

“Get her water.”

“Someone grab a blanket.”

“Get Geoff.”

All of them were whisper yelling at once. The middle-aged woman dashed for the door. The whole time, Alicia was backing away, keeping Stella behind her. “How is your leg?” Alicia asked.

“Fine.” Stella looked down, and all that was left was a pink, puckered scar.

Lily squared off against them. “What did you do to Sally?” She kept her voice zombie quiet, but the fury was evident.

“No,” Sally whispered. The man helped her off the floor as the woman returned with Geoff. “Let them be. I pushed too hard to heal her. It isn’t her fault.”

Geoff glanced at them before hurrying past. “Mother. Are you alright?” He knelt next to the camp cot where she was sitting.

“I’m fine. I just need to rest before I can put the silence spell back. Escort our friends. Make sure they’re safe.” She pushed at him. He looked over, but before Stella could say anything, Alicia was hurrying them out the door.

Stella didn’t even get time to thank them. The next time she raided town, she would have to fix that, but she found it hard to argue with werewolf strength as Alicia shoved her out into the mid-day sun.