Guide to Surviving, chapter 8 (Patreon)

“That was incredibly rude. What is wrong with you?” Stella asked as soon as they had reached not only the safety of the trees but the invisible line in her head that marked where the town ended, and the wilderness began. Out here, the zombies wouldn't be able to hear the conversation and come running in the hopes of a meal.

“I didn't like them.” Alicia didn’t even feign an apologetic tone.

“No duh. I got that part. But Sally nearly killed herself trying to heal me.” Stella really hoped that was hyperbole. She didn't want Sally to suffer any long-term effects because of Stella's own stupidity in avoiding an arrow. She knew how dangerous injuries were. If it weren't for Alicia, she would have died of that wound. Of course, if it weren't for Alicia, she wouldn't have the wound because she wouldn't have drawn attention to herself. But then if it wasn't for Alicia, she might not have noticed that intruders were patrolling the area before one of them shot her in the back. Stella’s brain was starting to spin out of control.

“I didn't like how they smelled.”

“I'm pretty sure they smell less than I do.” Stella made a production out of sniffing her armpits. The second she did, she regretted the move. She really did need to wash. Living alone, she had let things slide too much. Books were not judgmental, but if she was going to spent time with actual living beings, she needed to dig out some soap. “At least they had facilities for washing up, and all I have is the stream. That is not that good at washing up.” And Stella hadn’t put much time into trying to stay clean.

“That's not what I mean.”

“Maybe you could explain it using smaller words then.”

Alicia glared at her as if Stella was the one being unreasonable. Werewolves. Stella wondered if they were all that weird.

“They wanted something,” Alicia finally said.

“I assumed. Most people do want something. They're probably going to ask for help finding some herbs that don't grow in town or an escort to some secret magic site.” Stella was really having trouble wrapping her mind around magic.

“You don't understand. There's a certain odor. It's like they want something, but they want it so much that it makes their scent turn sour. They want too much.”

Stella stopped and studied Alicia for a minute. “I'm pretty sure you're describing desperation, and I think most humans or even human plus individuals have a touch of desperation these days. Are you going to tell me you don't feel a little desperate? I mean, there are days I wake up and I am so desperate to find just one more reason to keep living that I can't even think straight. I keep raiding the fiction section of the city library because I am that desperate for some purpose in life, and novels are it right now.” Or they were it. Right now, she was more interested in figuring out the Scrappy family than reading about Jaime’s problems.

Alicia took a step closer. “You make it sound like you're suicidal.”

“Not suicidal,” Stella said, “just too tired to keep going on.”

Alicia's eyebrows went up. “That would be the definition of suicidal. And if you are that selfish, I will find a way to hunt down your soul and make you regret ever having lived.”

“Excuse me?”

Alicia crossed her arms. “You dragged me back out of the wolf’s mind. You reminded me to be human again, so if you leave me alone to be human in this shit storm, I will make you the sorriest human being who has ever stepped foot on this planet.”

Stella blinked at her, not sure how to react to this outburst. She was simultaneously flattered that Alicia was concerned about her and terrified because Alicia looked ready to tear out someone's throat with her teeth. Her eyes were flashing with a green color and fog gathered around her, hovering just off her skin. It reminded her of the shadow wolf she had seen earlier.

“I am not suicidal. If I was, I wouldn’t have tried so hard to get help with my leg.”

Alicia's gaze darted downward and for a second, she looked even more angry. “Would you have even gotten that checked if I hadn't been here?”

“Since I didn't know magic arrows were a thing, probably not.” And by the time Stella had figured out the injury was life-threatening, she would've been too weak.

“But the family helped us, and you were exceptionally rude just because they smelled a little desperate. Newsflash!” Stella did a jazz hands in Alicia’s face. “People smell desperate. That might have something to do with the zombie apocalypse.”

Alicia narrowed her eyes and the fog vanished. “You don't understand. That scent… it's more than just the quiet sort of desperation you carry every day. That scent means they're considering something stupid.”

Now Stella's eyebrows went up. Guessing what was in someone's mind was less the realm of sniffing and more telepathy. But nothing suggested wolves were telepathic. “Maybe they're mundane-type desperate. Maybe they’re desperate to find more people to join their group, you know, strength in numbers?” At one point, Stella's father had been the same. Boy that worked out well.

“Okay, let's talk about who has joined their little family.” Alicia put the word familyand air quotes. “Did you notice the witch only introduced her son and grandchildren?”

“And? But? So?”

“Andthat's weird. But there were a lot of other people in that room. So, that suggested maybe not everyone in that room is equally well respected. And, I could smell three more people had been in that room.”

“Okay.”

Alicia's glare grew deeper. “Two more women and a girl.”

“Okay…” Stella drew the word out longer, not sure what she was supposed to be inferring from that statement.

“There were four women in that room us, two more women that we didn't see, Sally's granddaughter and one more girl. That’s eight females.”

“Congratulations, you can count.”

“And when is the last time you saw a group that was mostly women?”

Stella blinked. Okay, it was rare, even among the travelling groups that would pass through on their way south. “I'm fairly sure that groups do have women, they just hide them because of what happens when other groups get close to their women.” The zombie apocalypse had not been good for gender equality. Her father had carefully kept her away from any of the others who joined their group. At the time, Stella had thought that he was being overprotective and keeping her from learning the skills she needed in this new world. It turns out that he had been right. He just hadn't been right about everything.

Alicia shook her head. “There's something not okay there. I don't trust them.”

“I would say maybe it's a you thing, and you don't trust easily, but you trusted me at first sight.”

Alicia started walking for the treehouse. “I didn’t trust you at first sight. I’ve been watching you for weeks. Besides, you put your life on the line to help me.”

“Maybe that was step one in a ploy to get you to trust me, have you considered that?”

Alicia turned and gave her an incredulous look. “What secret scheme could you have to save a wolf?”

“I didn't say my secret plan had to make sense. When you get to know me, you will find that lots of my plans don't make sense.”

“Are you saying that you are plotting to get me to trust you?”

“No.”

Alicia threw her hands up into the air. “Then what are we discussing?”

“The fact that you are so quick to trust me but then you turn around and assume the worst of the Scrappy family.” That was obvious from Stella’s point of view.

“I know how they smell. I’ve smelled that before, and that is the scent of people that will do terrible things. That is the scent of someone who will ask for refuge, who will shove their children up front and use them to gain access and then at night slaughter the whole family so they can keep all the resources for themselves. That is the sense of someone whose need for something has erased every moral and ethic they might have once owned.” Alicia's curled her hands into fists and blood dripped from them, so Stella assumed that she had driven werewolf claws into her own human palms.

“Alicia?” Stella reached for her, but Alicia shied away.

“I don't want to talk about it.” Alicia whirled around and stomped towards the treehouse.

Stella understood. Some memories were rotting lumps of meat in the mind. She had her own share of those, and if she poked them too hard, that stench would contaminate every thought she had. She got it.

She followed Alicia in silence, trying to formulate a response that would minimize any harm to their nascent relationship. It'd been a long time since Stella had anyone with her in her treehouse, but when she did been in trouble, Alicia had stuck with her. When she had been in pain and in the on the verge of screaming, Alicia had held her. And it had been too long since she had felt someone's arms around her, since she’d allowed herself to sink into the warmth of someone else's embrace. She wasn't ready to let that go.

But she couldn't let Alicia ruin any chance they might have for an alliance with someone as powerful as Sally. Magic arrows were not the only danger out here. If that tribe who’d shot her was the group she had known, they were smart. Well-trained. Dangerous. And she had her father to blame for that. Her anger toward him and her grief over losing him tangled in ways she couldn’t describe. Her mother’s death had been subsumed by her grief for the world. It was the sharpest loss from those early days, but her life before zombies had merged into a dreamlike fantasy that her mother had become a ghost character playing a part. She was a faceless specter coming home after a day of teaching, and Stella couldn’t afford to color in the details of her memories, or they would eat her alive.

But her father… the memories she had after civilization fell were real. Their fights, the nights hiding in basements, the fear and the knowledge that the three of them would watch each other’s backs carried her through the worst days. And when the three of them had become two, they’d been less father and daughter and more two best friends holding on to each other in a storm. And now…

Stella waited until they were back at the treehouse, and she climbed into the lower branches of her ladder tree before grabbing the short rope that would lead over her main house. Despite the fact that Stella had made this journey a hundred times, Alicia was twice as quick and three times as graceful as she followed.

Stella sat on the edge of her bed and played with the fraying edge of the blanket. “My dad was a lot like the Scrappy family,” she said quietly. It hurt to talk about him. She like to think about the times he had been right, the times he had saved her. She didn't like to think about the one time he had utterly failed.

Alicia watched, suspicion in her gaze. She had figured out that Stella was trying to manipulate her into reconsidering her position on the Scrappy family. And she was. Stella was manipulative; she could admit that.

“He had a policy of taking in anyone who had kids my age or younger. By that time, my mom was gone, and he threw himself into saving everyone else because he couldn't save her.” Stella swallowed. “I think.” AT the time, she’d been too caught up in her own grief and fear to see her father clearly.

Alicia edged a little farther into the treehouse, away from the door and a hasty exit. But she didn't comment. She just studied Stella.

“I'm pretty sure my father would have smelled of desperation. I think that's why he made mistakes.” The words stuck in her throat. She’d thought she’d gotten past the worst of the pain, and part of her wanted to drop this whole conversation and go read a book—a nice safe book where she knew the ending and everyone lived happily ever after.

“What mistakes?” Alicia asked softly.

Stella studied the line where the wall met the treehouse’s floor. She’d thrown down rugs she had scavenged from around town, but there was a sharp line of dirt and damp that suggested that the treehouse needed sealing from the outside.

Alicia sat next to her. “My family was betrayed.”

“A lot of survivors were teenagers. They were fast, and their parents… Sometimes they came through alone and sometimes with a single parent, but my father had this radio where he would offer safety for any kids who reached us. He had a compound deep in the woods. Isolated. No people; therefore, no zombies.” Younger kids rarely reached them. The survivors would tell stories… horrible stories. How many people would have survived if they could have cast a silence spell like Sally?

“My parents took in people from the city. They thought this would be limited to the big population centers, and we were a long way from town.”

Stella nodded. “There at the end, everyone wanted to get away from populated areas, but there just aren’t enough unpopulated areas for that to happen. My dad had taken in a lot of teenage boys, and I don't think he realized until too late that the boys grew to be more loyal to each other than to him. The first time they came back with a story about one of the younger kids falling and getting caught by zombies, he reassured them that it wasn't their fault.” Stella swallowed.

“Was it their fault?” Maybe it was the fact that Alicia had no emotion in her voice that made it easier to answer.

“Looking back, I think so. He was a kid of ten or twelve, but when the older boys did something stupid like intentionally target zombies to behead, he would always tell my dad. And then they came back without him.” Stella remembered her father crying late at night after everyone else had gone to bed.

“You think they went Lord of the Flies.”

Stella looked over at Alicia. “I know they did. I watched my brother help them kill my father.” Her mind skittered away from that memory. “So I understand desperation. I understand my father's desperation to save people he thought of as children. And I understand their desperation to feel like they were in power.” Stella cleared her throat. “So maybe you’re smelling desperation on the family, but can you tell why they’re feeling it? Maybe their like the people who betrayed your family, but maybe they’re like my father.”

Alicia looked down at the floor and stretched her hands several times. She had little scabbed half-moons in her palms and as Stella watched, they healed over.

“Desperate people are dangerous. They'll do things they shouldn't.”

“I know.”

Alicia grimaced. “The witch sent word to allow us in after she realized I was a werewolf.” Her voice had a tremble in it now, and for second, Stella didn't get it. Sally was old, and even she said that magic got weaker as a person aged. Young werewolf versus old woman wasn’t a contest.

But then she remembered what else Sally had said. Everything had magic, and a person who knew how to manipulate that energy could draw the magic out. How much magic did a werewolf carry? That fog that clung to Alicia’s skin, could Sally steal it? “Do you think she would hurt you?”

Alicia looked over and their gaze met. “Do you think a desperate person would hesitate to use whatever resource was available to survive this? To save their children and grandchildren?”

Stella didn’t answer.

“And why do they have more women than men in their group?”

“Given my history, I'm actually more comfortable with that part,” Stella confessed. She knew that not every teenage boy would turn to evil and murder her family, but her chest still ached when she saw boys that age.

“I just don't understand that part,” Alicia said, “and when I don't understand something, it makes me nervous.”

“And a nervous wolf is not a safe thing?” Stella asked. She grinned it to take the sting out of her suggestion that somehow Alicia would be a slave do animal instincts, but it was still a legitimate question.

Alicia just looked back at her.

Stella sighed. “Right. Let's make sure you and the Scrappy family are on opposite sides of the zombie apocalypse, shall we?”

Alicia didn't say anything, but it was clear she wasn't happy with that response. Well, tough shit. Stella had found a possible ally, and while she wouldn't put Alicia in the crosshairs of a witch who might want to use her to make potions, she also wasn't going to be rude. Stella reached down and scratched her leg where the almost healed scar was itching.