Lilou wakes up covered in blood. It splatters her cheeks like paint, dripping down her neck like heavy tears.
Her tongue tastes like copper and smoke. That’s the only part she remembers most about it—the taste. Not the wounds she woke up with one day, the scars that hold no space and weight that they should in her head.
She is always somewhere else.
When a path gets too monotonous, she is on a train drifting pass fields of cows and endless green. Her bare legs scratch on top of rocks, the cold tide nearly missing her outstretched arms. She smells blood and smoke and metal, hears the quickening pound of feet. She turns around and there is nothing there. That’s how it starts.
Now she’s here, gravel burning onto her cheek. When she sits up, blood takes her place. Her fingers come back red and wet when she touches her mouth and neck. Her yellow shirt is stained on the neckline.
Lilou takes a deep breath of summer air. Copper and smoke and salt.
The weight of her bag remains on her back, but she touches her pocket and feels it empty. Lilou believes she was reading her letter before…
Her days are worth so little now that nothing holds no purchase. She uses that as an excuse. Walk, kill, barely sleep, barely eat, repeat. These gaps are nothing.
In the red-tinged grass, she notices the small piece of paper. Lilou scrambles off the road to grab it, as if it will run away with legs and feet.
To Lilou,
If you read this after I leave, I hope the stars deliver this to you.
The letter is years old, the paper long crumpled from Lilou’s hands, the constant folding and unfolding making it feel soft as she holds it in front her.
She nearly trips on the small hill between the shift of terrain, feet scraping back onto the road. Her brown boots didn’t quite fit, the laces as tight as they could possibly go, not stopping them from dragging. They never really were hers.
The words past these have never been read. They stay stuck on this paper, stuck in her sister’s memory when she wrote them. She stays cruel like that. Her ghost forever stopping Lilou from finishing the letter, reading her last words. That is what she chooses to believe. Fate.
A long two-lane road greets her as she finally looks up. Despite the endlessness of it, she feels more trapped than she did a few hours prior. There are tall walls of rocks and leaves on her right, the hint of brown roofs peeking out as she cranes her neck. The left is not any less stifling, with rows and rows of trees. It’s hard to tell how long it goes.
Lilou looks up at the sky. She remembers going north, the sun starting to tip east a few hours ago. There are only clouds now.
As if waking up from a dream, she notices the wind, the rustling of trees, short wisps of hair on her cheek. She starts to walk faster in speed with the wind. It will probably rain soon. She hasn’t encountered infected in too long, her grumbling stomach the same volume as her racing thoughts.
One time her sister found her in the middle of the night in the kitchen with glass clutched in her hand. She told her Lilou looked straight at her as she licked the blood off her arm. She doesn’t remember doing any of that, but she tries to imagine the taste as it is now. Lilou only tasted mint when she woke up in the hospital.
The rocky hill starts to slope down, and a big white building comes into view. Lilou turns her head facing the road behind her, her left ear facing the building. And there it is. The soft growls that accompany skinny, bloodied bodies with a hunger that will always be stronger than hers.
Her mom always told her if she constantly thought something was going to happen, it would happen. Lilou hopes she didn’t conjure this. That in drifting into her own world, with her sister’s letter, she was protected somehow. Invincible. Lilou looks to the left. The trees still go on and on. She runs for the woods as the infected close the distance.
She should leave a trail. Run and run until she gets lost, and they get lost too. Follow it back to the building, scavenge for food, for supplies. Her bag suddenly feels quite empty on her back. She grabs her hatchet out of the sheath on her side.
Thick braids pound against her backpack as she runs faster. She did the both of them maybe three, four days ago. The summer heat lets loose her curls along her neck and forehead. They stick to her now as she starts to get lost.
Lilou only remembers the letter in her hand as the weight leaves it. She turns her head again once more to listen before she veers right to chase it.
The trees become shorter, the dirt becoming rockier as sticks occasionally scrape against her face. Where is her sister taking her?
The letter lays between two bushes, larger tree branches hanging low behind them. Lilou grabs the crumpled paper, opens it up. Her hands mindlessly grab the branches; she must keep going. To Lilou, If you read this after I-
Lilou doesn’t scream when she falls. It’s a tight, strangled sound when her footing fails beneath her. Her left foot lands on air for a second, before it reaches a rock and twists.
The water. She didn’t smell the water before.
The smell of rain and rot battle for dominance in her nose. Lilou crashes a few feet down. Her head bounces against another rock as the rest of her body lands in a loud splash into the ravine. She tries to open her eyes, a task that feels suddenly impossible, as she rolls onto her stomach.
She presses her face into the water and it quickly turns red before being swept away. With the hand not buried beneath her, she scrubs at the last of it. If she washes it away before it dries, it never happened.
The first time she woke up in blood was after. She separates the gap in her memory as before and after. Though she wonders if that makes sense considering she doesn’t remember the during. All she knows from that after was finding her friend with a bite mark in her neck.
The paper leads her deeper into the forest, the words to a ravine. The letter. She raises her pounding head to search for it, but a rough hand grabs her ankle. She looks behind her as she lifts her other leg to smash into his head.
A sharp stab of pain radiates through her ankle as she turns around again to her back. The kick momentarily staggered him, but he soon began to climb up her other leg.
In the last few years, Lilou really started to notice where they like to feast the most. Watching them eat, they often go for the neck if the victim is unable to fight back or is temporarily stunned. When the victim can fight back, they go anywhere they find a perfect place for their teeth to dig in. When she can watch safely from a distance, there is often large wounds in their neck and stomach. Sometimes she sees a poor soul with a map of bites on their arms and legs.
As this one reaches eye to eye with Lilou and she instinctively pushes against his shoulders, she can see a few bites in his neck and shoulder. So they took him out from behind, she supposes. She regularly plays scenarios in her mind where she dies similarly. She is too busy writing in her journal that one is just upon her in an instant, that she incidentally faces the wrong way and cannot hear one running toward her. Or she is just simply too busy in the past or future to notice the danger right in front of her.
Her hatchet is somewhere in the water; she has no way to grab any kind of defense. Not that she thought too hard about wanting to fight back in the past few weeks, or months.
Lilou believes she is more of an optimist. Everyone who has ever known her would probably describe her as such. It’s so easy to be negative in this world and she coincidentally surrounded herself by many pessimists. Someone had to say no, that wilting flower is just a reminder of the beauty it once had. But all those people are dead. The one who knew her the most was burned miles and miles away and forever lives in the singular letter Lilou refuses to finish. The letter that is probably deep in the ravine by now, completely ineligible and floating away wherever it wants to go.
The growling grows closer, the majority she thought she outrun tumbling down the same hill she tumbled down. Except they don’t care about stupid ankles and letters.
An arrow whizzes past her left side, making its home in one of them. She had one bite on her wrist. As quick as a gun, another lands right between the eyes of the one on top of her. Just shy of her cheek, she can see each individual groove etched into the arrowhead.
Lilou barely has the energy to push him off her. She reaches up to touch the back of her head, and her hand comes back bloody. She tries to blink away the drowsiness as arrow after arrow finishes off the last few infected that fell down the hill.
She stares up at the sky. The clouds are starting to clear up. The splashing of feet in water gets nearer as she counts them. She thought it was going to rain. She can’t help the small kernel of sadness despite knowing it would only make this all worse. A knife enters a skull, followed by the crash of the body hitting the rocks. The feet splashing get closer.
With her vision closing, she imagines her savior. She hears a grunt as their knife enters another skull. Sounds like a girl. Her feet don’t sound too heavy. She could be lithe, with the speed and accuracy in which the arrows flew.
This girl could kill her. Use that same knife to end her life too. Lilou doesn’t think she looks that bad to pass off as infected, but she hasn’t seen herself in weeks.
The growling has stopped. She sees a blur of freckles surrounded by red hair before they scatter into nothing.
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