"Are you okay, Oliver?" I ask him anxiously as he speeds down the road. "You're driving a bit...erratically."
He doesn't even wince as he slams yet another dead one from the front of his vehicle to God knows where. Blood and guts cover the windshield but he merely flicks the windscreen wiper on with water to wash it away.
Grime from the undead is harder to wipe away than the usual dirt covering a car so it doesn't go easily, but even that doesn't bother Oliver. He's got a one-track mind at the moment.
"I'm fine, I just need to get away from there." he growls, pointing backwards.
"Do you have a plan where we're going?"
"Well, the guys said that they've cleaned out the nearby places, so we need to go quite far."
I nod silently, knowing this is much more about him escaping the situation with Ryan than supplies. I'll go wherever the hell he needs to go, just to keep an eye on him. I can't let anything bad happen to him. Just because he's becoming ever so slightly unhinged, doesn't mean he was always this way. When I met him, he was the strongest, best man I've ever known. Even from before.
"There have to be shops somewhere that haven't been ransacked yet. It's just finding stuff that's still edible. Over a year into this apocalypse and things are going downhill."
"It's lucky they grow things back at camp," I comment idly. "That's the only way to keep surviving."
"Especially since Gas goes out of date eventually. I don't know what we'll do then. We won't be able to get around as easily then."
Every time he reminds me of things like this I get a painful bolt in my stomach. The world isn't going back to how it was. I don't know how to deal with that. Admittedly, I didn't have much going for me back then. I lived alone, worked the lonely night shift in a gas station, didn't do too much outside of work...it wasn't the best life, but it wasn't this.
This is anger, fear, struggle, survival every single day and it's horrible.
The camp might be a glimpse of normality, but nothing lasts forever. The infected always win out. Either that or we, as humans, self-destruct in some way.
"It'll be back to horse and cart then," I laugh as I make a feeble joke. "Like the good ol' days."
"Except...there aren't many animals left either."
"Hmm, yeah that's true. I guess we'll have to find some way to reinvent the wheel..."
I don't manage to finish the sentence because something sucks all the air out of my body. I don't even know what it is at first, it's one of those quietly shocking moments. Everything rushes at the speed of light around me and it takes a moment for my brain to catch up.
Spinning, tumbling, falling...
Ignorance is preferable, because when the realization comes it isn't a pleasant one. We're flying through the air, twisting and turning as we go, our ragdoll bodies being tossed about as if we weight nothing, no idea how or when we're going to land...
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