Page 1

Annika was silent. Looking at her I could see that the dirt smudged on her little face was no match for the cleansing effect of her tears. I knew it wouldn’t take long for the pink streaks to grunge over again.  In the early morning light I could see her eyes – red-rimmed but alert and shifting back and forth between my face and the "bads" shuffling around in the street below us. I’m not sure when it had happened but at some point in the last two weeks she had learned to cry quietly. Sometimes I slept through her sobbing and it was only those clean patches or the puffiness that reminded me of what this new life was like for her. I’d learned to sleep through Amy’s thrashing and moaning because I needed to but I hated the thought of not being awake to help Annika whenever she needed it. Come to think of it, I hadn’t had to calm her at night for almost a week now but this morning’s tears reminded me that she would need comforting for a long time yet. I looked grimly at the empty can of green beans we had shared for breakfast - I needed to "hunt" again and soon.

The hunting itself wouldn’t be that hard, there was a dead Safeway nearby and a hundred little dead convenience stores and restaurants along Commercial Drive where we could definitely find food. Too many people panicked when the outbreak started and chose their cars and fridges over the non-perishables. Now there were huge stretches of zombie packed gridlock and virtually untouched pockets of food scattered across the city. The big problem was the trade-off you had to make on a supply run - between mobility and capacity in the face of medium-paced death. I knew the routes to three different caches of canned and powdered goods that wouldn’t take me much longer than a half hour to get to but you always, always had to mix in a little Murphy’s Law. That’s when it really got fun. Just thinking of it it tightened my eyes and heightened the tension in my shoulders.

Annika looked over at me, sensing the change in my mood and stared expectantly, recognizing it as a precursor to some kind of action. Still silent though. I looked into her brilliant blue eyes, trying to send thoughts of hope and possibility to her through mine but I wasn’t sure if I really felt it this morning. She had her mother’s eyes and every time I locked on to them I saw the light of the world. The only problem was that the world we were in made it awfully hard to appreciate that sometimes. That light had faded in Amy’s eyes exactly 14 days ago, after the soldiers destroyed her in a way that zombies never could ... or would.

I never knew for sure if the men we’d killed that day were actually soldiers or if that approach simply provided the most effective way of getting people’s guards down without a lot of noise. After six weeks of surviving on our own and having no contact with any other living soul, a group of armed men offering protection and food must have seemed like a miracle to Amy. I’d found her note on the talking-walls maybe half an hour after she’d left.

Soldiers! Gone with them to the port for food and weapons.

The talking-walls were the two cinderblock walls lining the alley beside the Super Happy Dollar store (best dollar store ever) and Kyle’s cafe at the end of the block. It seemed like every kid that had ever cracked open a can of spray paint got started by leaving their mark on the world somewhere along the talking-walls. I had often wondered how many zombies shuffling past the walls slowed to consider the tags they’d left behind...or if they remembered anything at all. Could they even see any of the marks up there on the wall – the fancy little swirls and big bubble letters – or did they only have eyes for me?

A couple of months ago the little Chinese guy that ran the dollar store would have painted over any graffiti that showed up with the cheapest (only an assumption because it was always so ugly) tan paint he could find. He had a little boy who was probably 8. Every time I saw the walls I wondered if they were still alive. His tan paint was probably rotting now; eventually it’ll leak out on to the floor of the dollar store when the can rusts through. So Amy and I use the walls as a personal message centre - leaving notes to each other, hidden in the graffiti, whenever we have to split up.

[ Continue to page 2 ]