“Eve,” he said as he followed me, his voice becoming more insistent. “Eve! Look at me!”
“Seriously West, leave me alone.”
His hand grabbed my wrist, pulling me to a stop. I whipped around to face him, my hand rising, the cybernetic parts gleaming in the light. I barely registered the shock in West’s face before I stopped myself. I’d been about to connect my fist with his jaw.
“What’s going on, Eve?” he asked, his brow furrowing, his eyes searching mine. “What did I do?”
That’s when I finally erupted.
“I can’t be around you like this!” I cried, not even looking around to make sure no one else was listening. “Yes, you make me feel things, but you also distract me so much I can’t even do my job! It was my fault Graye got hurt. He was looking for me and where was I? Up a tree kissing you! He could have been killed! If I had been five seconds later getting to him, he would have been infected!
“I can’t do this, West. I can’t keep getting distracted. I can’t feel things that the rest of you are supposed to feel. People will get killed if I do.”
He stared at me, hurt and anger creeping into his eyes. When he didn’t say anything, I looked away. A few people had stopped what they were doing to watch us. My stomach dropped out as I realized Avian had stepped out of his tent and was watching our heated scene.
“That goes for you too, Avian,” I said just loud enough he would be able to hear. Looking back at the rest of the people who had been watching, I felt my skin boil again. “What are you all looking at?” I snapped. Before anyone could say anything, I took off in the direction of my tent.
I shut it all off and kept away from everyone.
After talking to Gabriel, I got myself on scouting duty every day, trading out my gardening hours. He didn’t fight me like I had expected but then again, he had heard my outburst and he knew what I had said was true. I couldn’t afford to be distracted.
I also took over all of Graye’s night watch duties. Without Gabriel’s knowledge, I took over everyone else’s as well. There were two reasons. One, it made it possible to avoid Avian and West even more, and two, I didn’t really trust anyone to guard as well as I could. Given recent events, we had to be more careful than ever.
Between scouting duty in the morning and watch at night, I simply slept the rest of the time. I blocked out the noise and light around me and shut myself down. It wasn’t hard, with everything I was doing I was actually feeling exhausted. I was finally finding my limits.
Gabriel had thought about moving Eden again after what had happened with Graye but Avian and I had talked him out of it. It was the only time I let myself be around him since that ugly day. It was obvious the Hunters were getting more aggressive. There wasn’t far for us to go without getting too far away from water and the gardens. We were just going to have to fight them off if they continued to come. Plus, we were never going to find a better location than the one we were already at.
I couldn’t always avoid everyone though. There were too few of us left for that.
Everyone short of two people on scouting duty were gathered together for a light dinner. We had been trying to be careful lately with our provisions. We were in the lull of time between the leftovers of last year’s harvest and this year’s pickings. The light was just starting to fade behind the mountain, the sky a mix of orange and purple.
Some of us peeled off, settling into our nightly activities. I found myself with my eyes glued to the fire, watching as the flames danced in the night air. Gabriel, Bill, Graye, Avian, and a mix of others stayed as well. We were all quiet, lost in thoughts of mixed memories and fears, the flow of all our lives. The same thing ran through our minds though. Life, our world, what was going to happen to it.
“I can’t believe how fast it happened,” Gabriel said suddenly as he stared into the flames, seated only a few feet away from me. “Civilization took thousands of years to build up to where we were. And it was destroyed in just four months.”
None of us said anything for a while, each reminiscing on how we had gotten here. I didn’t have much to reminisce on. My life started when everything ended for the rest of them.
“My aunt was one of the first to get the technology,” Bill surprised me when he spoke up. Bill usually wasn’t one for many words. “She’d been waiting for four years for a new heart. All the money in the world at her disposal and it couldn’t buy her a new organ. Until the infection was created. The week after the technology was approved, her husband had her transported to the facility and she was fine the next month. Cured. Until she choked the life out of Uncle Rich twelve weeks after the operation.”
A log popped in the fire, sending a billow of red hot ash into the darkening sky.
“Fifteen hundred had the implants. Fifteen hundred was all it took to wipe out six billion and a half,” Avian said. I glanced up at him, watching as the flames danced in his eyes. They were always so serious. I wondered how they would look if none of this had ever happened.
“Everything collapsed so quickly,” Gabriel said quietly. “The entire senate was gone within two weeks, the rest of the government within a week of that. All the Army, Navy, and Marines couldn’t fight it off. All the weapons and technology we did have and they couldn’t destroy this. And then there was the war. They waited too long.”
“It was so fast,” I said. Eyes jumped to my face as I said it. I supposed I should have felt embarrassed for speaking up, considering I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I hadn’t been a part of that world. I’d just been the means to creating their hell.
As the eyes dropped away from my face, I glanced around at all of them. Gabriel looked so sad and I felt a twinge of pain for him. He’d been in the normal world the longest. How things used to be had been so engrained in him. The world was nothing how it used to be. My eyes moved to Bill. Bill had very little family as far as I knew. He’d never been married, never had any children even though he had to be in his early forties. I didn’t think he had even had any parents left. I sensed that in a way, he almost liked this way of living. Because even though everything was so complicated, life was simpler now. You didn’t have to worry about having a nice car, a job, or whatever else people used to worry about. You just had to survive. Bill was good at that.
Graye sat silent, staring into the fire, just like the rest of us. He was a person I could never fully figure out. There was a history to him that he never talked about, that he kept locked up and buried in a deep place. I knew he had been married before, had a daughter. How had he escaped the infection? Had he had to leave them and get to a safe place? Somehow I didn’t think he could just up and leave them. Out of everyone in our circle, I had a feeling he was the one who had been hurt the most. He was the most angry at our Fallen world.
“Did you ever run into any marauders?” Gabriel asked Bill, nothing more than a small glance in his direction.
“Just once,” he answered as he cleared his throat. “I walked a long ways. There were two of them in a truck, scavenging for food. They had guns but they were desperate.”
“What happened?” I asked through the dark.
“I walked away with what I had walked into there with.” He left it at that. I knew what that meant. Bill would fight till he had no fight left in him.
“They killed each other off pretty quick,” Gabriel said, not directing his recollections at anyone. “They fought over food, open territory. Eventually there was no one left who would fight them over it.”
The stars winked into view overhead, burning with intensity. I was going to have to head up to my post soon.
“How did any of us survive it?” Avian said as he rubbed two fingers over his lips.