Night comes early in the middle of winter. And nighttime is dark, even when the sky is cloudless. I can’t seem to sleep. Something on the air sits wrong. So I, too, sit, staring out the small round window of my room in the cabin. The fireplace dying so slowly doesn’t help matters. I could seal it away to bring this temperature down to freezing levels if I wanted, and that might help me sleep, but it wouldn’t be worth the risk of irritating the others, Nick especially likes it warm. He often tries and fails to sneakily restoke the fire in the middle of the night. Besides, if it’s truly some old sense of wrongness driving me to remain awake, I really shouldn’t ignore it. For my new friend’s sake, at the very least.
I close my eyes. Breathe in and out. In. Feel the world. Out. I try to focus, to hone in on whatever is keeping me awake. It isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. After all, I’m not really an active practitioner anymore. Many of those key sense skills are dulled at best. I breathe and I try to relax. Breathe in. Reach my mind around me. And out. But it remains just a general unease. My eyes, my mind, drift towards the underside of my bed. To the darkness beneath that only I know houses a small wooden box. To the possibilities contained within. Then, abruptly, a noise helps me shake away those thoughts. The floorboards loudly creaking and cracking as someone sneaks through the house. I turn towards my door to look, opening it to see Nick fanning the fireplace and adding a new log, alongside some extra kindling. I relax slightly. While that isn’t what’s on the wind, perhaps it means that whatever is out there isn’t the same as what’s keeping me on edge. As I relax, I let out a tired sigh. Nick, unfortunately, does have pretty good hearing. He turns to look at me. “Alice?” he whispers, “Sorry, did I wake you?”
“It’s fine,” I reply in a whisper of my own, after a quick head shake, “I was already up.” Then, I add with a little smile, “But you insisting on keeping the cabin so warm might have something to do with that.”
He chuckles, then immediately stifles himself. “Listen,” he says with a grin, “I had to spend a full year during all that dead-people shenanigans sleeping out in the cold of the plain. I’m not about to do that again.”
I let out a quiet chuckle and shake my head. “It’s fine, really,” I insist, still making sure to keep quiet in case Cindy managed to sleep through Nick’s attempts at sneaking this time. “Other things are just on my mind.” My mind drifts down towards that darkness under my bed, where the box lies hidden. It wouldn’t be hard. I’m sure I could rest easy knowing whatever happens to be going on. I definitely could put it back away, right?
“Good, because I don’t plan on changing things any time soon,” Nick says, once more, just as earlier, pulling me away from those thoughts. He’s crouched beside the fire, using a poker to push the logs around. I’m not sure if it’s to help the fire, or because he isn’t warmed up enough to go back to sleep yet.
“Whatever you say,” I let slip alongside a sigh as I shake my head and begin to close my door. Before I can close the door and return to my bed to try to get some semblance of sleep, there’s a sharp wrapping on our cabin’s door.
Nick raises an eyebrow in my general direction, curious about the whole thing. Rather than provide him any sort of indication of an answer, I begin to run through our rationing in my head. Because we should have enough to make it through the rest of winter, assuming at least some of Cindy’s traps catching something once a week or so. But adding another person to the mix, we’ll need to start rationing, keeping careful track of our supplies. Which we can almost certainly do, we just haven’t yet. I slowly open my door back up, only to notice Nick not having any of the hesitation I do. Across the way, I see Cindy also waking up and opening her room’s door bleary eyed.
Nick is already at the front of our cabin. There is another knock, so he opens the door. On the other side, there’s a woman. Beautiful, though clearly not doing so hot in recent years. Some feeling in the back of my mind says we’ve met before. She smiles at Nick, a smile clearly meant to get something from him. Not that the naive man would recognize that. At least, not quickly. “Sorry to be a bother,” she began a sweet voice, kind but worn, like many since the end times. But this one in particular, I feel like I’ve heard before, though I can’t quite place where. “But I was just hoping for a place to stay.” Her eyes began to move around the space, like she was looking out for something, “Only for a few -” she cuts herself off as her gaze falls upon me. Her demeanor, her tone immediately changes. She stands up taller, her smile falls away entirely, and her voice loses that sweetness, leaving only the worn nature of someone who has seen some terrible things. “Goddamnit, another of you assholes?” she says clearly directed to me. Another?
“What?” Nick asks, confused by the sudden change in her attitude. Who is this woman who thinks she knows me?
The woman fully ignores him and easily pushes her way past into the cabin. “How many of you fuckers managed to drag your way out of the grave?” What could she mean by another?
Now out of the darkness and illuminated fully by the fireplace, I recognize her. We met in Paris years ago. She poured me and Jim drinks. Jim also brought her to the camp for the showdown in New Orleans. Which means she only knows me in relation to Jim and J-P. Could there be other wanderers who got out of the city alive? “Another?” I spit out in confusion, letting my thoughts bubble into words to see if it helps matters.
“Who is this?” Cindy asks, clearly the shouting helped in waking her up.
I shake my head. Floundering confused like a fish in a desert isn’t going to help anyone. Taking a moment to center myself, I turn towards Cindy, who is suddenly much less bleary eyed and much more ready to pop off. Knowing our intruder, that would be a very bad idea. “A friend of an old friend,” I answer my cabin mate, then to the intruder I add, “I thought you were dead, Alex.”
“I am,” she half-jokes, “Have been for a hot minute. How about you?”
I sigh. “Not dead, just retired,” I half-joke right back. “Now what do you mean another?”
She looks around at the three people clearly just trying to live their best lives in peace. “I can tell you if you really want, but I need a place to stay and recover. A week at most.”
I look, and she’s being serious. I also know what her recovery will almost certainly entail. “Fine, but you don’t bother either of them,” I say, opening the door to my room and gesturing for her to enter.
She obliges, walking into my room and adding a curt, “Fine.”
I turn to the others. “Sorry about that, you guys can go back to sleep. She won’t be too much of a problem, at least not for you guys.”
Nick and Cindy look at one another. “So, you and her, is she like…?” Cindy begins, her intonation leaving the implication therein obvious.
I shake my head. How do you tell your new friends that someone is a personal friend and close political ally of your former good-friend-slash-boss-slash-teacher (and one which you often thought was more when you watched them interact to boot, though you have no proof of such moreness). You lie, that’s how. Or at least, make the truth more palatable to normal people. “No, not like that. She and a, well, my brother were close,” I tell a sort of truth, “Very close. Closer than either of our families particularly appreciated.” Assuming you consider both the wanderers and whatever the fuck was up with Nikki and them as families, it was pretty much true. And it wouldn’t give anyone any reason to spy on us.
“Okay? And all that about crawling out of the grave?” Nick asked.
“Dragging, not crawling,” Alex helpfully chimed in from my bed. Not that many people could see the difference.
I shake my head. “We weren’t exactly in a great place when we last saw one another,” I again tell them a partial truth.
“Do you need any help?” Cindy asks. The question is kind, but the look in her eyes shows me she’s still ready to start some shit if need be.
I shake my head once more. “No. Really, it’s fine. Just go about our normal days and she’ll be out of our hair soon enough,” I tell them. It’s not like either of them could do anything. Even with her weak and tired, the only way any of us could stand the slightest chance in an outright conflict would be me opening back up my box. And with how much work went into putting it down, I really don’t want to see if I can manage to stop again if I have to start back up.
Nick nods, closes the cabin door, and stokes the fire. The flames blaze higher and he sighs. “Well, good luck with all that. And, you know, you can tell your friend that I wouldn’t really mind her bothering me.”
Cindy shakes her head at the idiot. I, too, sigh and shake my head. “Trust me, you really would mind,” I inform him.
“I bet she would, too,” Cindy says with a little smirk before closing her door. Nick feigns offense only as long as Cindy’s door is open, then immediately chuckles. I shake my head at the pair and close the door to my room, sliding the deadbolt into place. Alex would keep to her word, especially if the threat of our community remains, but I don’t want any of them bothering her. Because that could prove problematic for everyone.
I walk over to the woman as she lies on my bed, sprawled across the sheets. “So, Alex,” I say as I sit down on the bed beside her, “What did you mean by ‘Another’?”
The beautiful bartender turns her shoulder to look up at me and smiles. “You really didn’t realize? Only a few months ago, I ran into Ismael. He’s gone mad and seems to think he’s not all there, but he’s definitely still among the living. Mostly.”
“Ish made it out?” I hushedly spit out, unsure of how I feel. As I process this, I lie down beside her and extend my arm out across her, so that my hand hangs just past her face. If Nick was being an idiot and spying through the door, it’d almost seem like a normal cuddle. Just because he doesn’t know better.
Alex smiles as the wrist hangs there. She pulls my arm close, pulling me in tight against her back. “Thank you for keeping your word,” she whispers softly, almost sweetly as she kisses my hand, slowly moving her lips up it and towards my arm. The sweetness of her voice and lips almost helps with the pain as she bites into my wrist hard.
I grit my teeth and try my best to get comfortable. “Just keep yours,” I whisper back, into her ear. I nuzzle my head against the crook of her neck as I begin to go lightheaded.
Feeling that, she backs off, unlatching from my wrist. Two faint trickles of blood drip down onto my sheets. “Always,” she whispers, keeping our conversation quiet. Keeping me close, she repeats herself. “Always.”
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