This is the End 2(695)

Hendrix broke out into a smile that looked partly deranged with his beard bloodied around his white teeth and his eyes wide and dilated from the fight. “Probably.”

“Y’all alright?” the man asked, glancing over us a bit suspiciously. He was probably their leader. He looked the oldest, but also the hardest. His graying hair was pulled back into a stringy ponytail at the nape of his neck and his salt and peppered beard hadn’t been trimmed long before he had the option of good personal hygiene. His leather jacket was soft and well-worn and the steel-toed boots he wore seemed to complete his motorcycle-man ensemble.

Except, he wasn’t part of a biker gang.

He was driving relatively new Suburbans and surrounded by people carrying a seemingly unlimited supply of weapons.

“We’re good,” Vaughan called out from the front of the van. “Nobody got bit, right?”

We responded with the negative and I sucked in another relieved breath.

“Thanks for the help,” Hendrix said sincerely.

“Not a problem,” the guy smiled and I could see three gold teeth mixed between his yellowing others. “We saw the trouble you were in. It was our pleasure. We want to take as many of those goddamn creatures out as we can.”

“We are of the same mind,” Hendrix grinned. “Where you headed?”

“Arkansas,” the man’s gaze narrowed and eyed Hendrix suspiciously. ”Y’all?”

“Not Arkansas,” Hendrix answered with a sense of humor.

This caused the other man to break out into another one of his multi-colored grins. He clasped Hendrix on the shoulder and declared, “We don’t run into to many scenarios in which anyone could have made it out of what y’all were facing. But I get this impression that if we hadn’t have showed up y’all would have been just fine.”

Hendrix was quiet for a moment and then shrugged. “Maybe.”

Not maybe. There was no maybe. We were so dead without these guys.

But I understood Hendrix’s reluctance to make it seem like we owed this guy.

The guy nodded back over his shoulder and then turned back to Hendrix, “We passed a bridge not five minutes that way. There was a nice sized creek running underneath. Why don’t y’all go get cleaned up and we’ll share a meal before we go our separate ways- Arkansas and not Arkansas.”

“We could use a creek,” Hendrix answered subtly. “And we could use a meal.”

We stood there kind of staring at each other for a few more minutes. I didn’t know if this was like a stand-off, should we trust each other thing? Or if we were making sure there were no more straggling Feeders.

I was doing both.

And probably so was everyone else.

Finally satisfied with trusting each other and not hearing another Zombie nearby, the guy with the ponytail said, “Welp, let’s roll.”

“Our van isn’t rolling anywhere,” Hendrix admitted.

“Ah, the old girl quit on you?” Ponytail asked. “I wondered why y’all showed up with a knife to a gunfight.”

“It wasn’t intentional,” Hendrix agreed.

“Well, it’s just over that hill. We’ll cover you if you want to make the walk over.”

So we did. We gathered Haley, Page, Tyler and Miller from the van and grabbed our backpacks and a few of the extra bags filled with supplies we had been collecting. Page was too frightened to even stand up, so Vaughan carried her while Miller and Tyler clung to each other.

We walked past the group standing around the nice Suburbans with their guns still raised. The nice cars reminded me of the Hummer we had once upon a time and how Gary the douche bag took it away from us.

The thought made me instantly mistrust these people. Not since the Parkers had I met a decent human being. And before them it had been even longer.

It was like all of humanity was infected with the same disease- sometimes they turned into Zombies, sometimes they turned into low life scum that were only capable of dominating and hurting.

The world before the infection wasn’t even close to perfect, there was still war, still hunger, still disease. But there had also been community and generosity and a sense of banding together simply because we were human and struggling through the same rough life.

Where did that go?

How did things get so bad, so quickly?

True to his word, while we walked along the highway and over the bridge, the Suburbans followed at a crawl behind us. I felt safe with so many guns nearby and not just amateur stuff, the real deal- heavy artillery.

Still, I was uneasy just because they were people- and in this day and age people meant bad things.

Our group was perfectly silent on the way over- apparently we were all having Stranger Danger thoughts. Without waiting for them to catch up we walked down the embankment and started rinsing in the creek. The water was cold but refreshing.