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Title: Iris: Time
Series: Heroes of the Zombie Apocalypse
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: 959
Summary: They have to keep moving. They're always falling.
Notes: Written second in the HZA series. From 2009.
The injuries that our hero sustained at work today are trivial compared to what’s become usual. A scraped knees and a sore back, the latter likely from lifting something heavy, like a corpse. The former – who knows? She’s probably fallen. She’s always falling.
At her side is Amelia, still, strong and solid and half-blind until her glasses are handed back, finally freed of their crust of mud.
“Thanks, Iris.”
Our hero nods to her. Amelia fell face first into the sticky ground, just beyond the cemetery as they were running for their lives. (Cemeteries are generally a safe place to be. The dead there stay dead.) It’s a miracle of elastic sport bands and good fortune that the glasses weren’t lost entirely, but running blind through the forest had been no fun at all. Amelia thought that that felt more like falling than her stumble had. She’s always falling.
Now, they’ve made it back to the safe house, such as it is – a rusted white Winnebago, situated someplace high and lonely. Amelia once wondered who had lived there. Our hero told her, “Somebody smart.”
That was last week, and today they are packing up and leaving. Their location has become less than secure and they need to keep moving. They’re always moving. They have to. A month ago someone said that to them, after he crushed his mother’s head in with a shovel.
“You’ve got to keep moving,” through tense lips in a face caked with gore.
It wasn’t a scream or a plea or a statement of fact. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be, anything but an order from a general they didn’t recognize in an army they hadn’t known that they were a part of. But there was no mistaking his uniform of tailored tatters and blood stained silks, especially when his shotgun blast blew away another man’s head.
“You’ve got to keep moving.”
The hero had a black eye, then. It’s healed, today, and they leave the safe house as they found it, high and lonely in the middle of nowhere and they keep moving.
The hill is steep and they keep tripping on the way down. It’s not pleasant.
Amelia says, “Hey, Iris. Where do you think we are?”
Our hero hesitates over her answer. A month ago, on the street with their silver-haired savior-commander, she could have easily said, “New York.”
Last week, standing in front of the failing Winnebago that had, at the time, been their last best hope, she would have said, “Hell.”
Today, because she’s always falling, she trips in this moment of distraction and tumbles down onto the solid ground under her feet. And then she turns, lying on her back and seeing the sky, and it feels like she’s moving, again, towards it. It feels like she’s falling, again, into it. There are horror movie monsters everywhere they might someday go and the world is ending, or has already. Where are they? Where is there left for them to be?
“Nowhere special,” she says, and thinks about how that isn’t exactly true, because the sky is a very special shade of blue that she would like to taste, some day. Would it smell of paint when she got her face in close to it? She wonders.
Amelia follows her gaze and looks up at the sky, too. She’s always falling and this time she goes to her knees, controlled. Not all falls are involuntary.
“I guess so,” she says.
Soon, they will get up and move because the general said they had to keep moving, and even though they never meant to be, these days they are very good little soldiers. They will keep moving and someday Amelia will have to put a bullet in our hero’s zombie brain and then on that day, and for every day thereafter, Amelia will have to keep moving alone. But on this day, in this moment, they are choosing this movement, of staring into the deep blue sky and falling into that. All movement, these days, is falling, falling hard and falling fast and falling into nothingness.
It’s worth wondering, our hero thinks, if the general is still moving, if he is following the orders he gave to our hero and Amelia a month ago in New York, if maybe he has his own Amelia, strong and solid at his side as he walks through the underbrush and stares at the sky. It’s worth wondering if he ever falls or if he thinks that moving is surviving rather than just one more way to die.
Amelia will meet him again, one day, and that will be one of the ones after she has killed our newly dead hero. The general will still have his Amelia, but he could always use another. And our hero will have been wrong, because he will know that moving is falling and she will have been right because he will think falling is another way of surviving. He will hold his Amelia’s hand as they stand on a mountain that overlooks a dead city and Amelia will stand at his other side and see nothing but another hero turned at last to blood in the dust. That will be all she can see for a very long time.
But that place is a place that is not here and a time that is far – but not quite far enough – from now. In the here and now Amelia holds our hero’s hand as they stare up into the living sky and fall, head over heels, for the very last time, in love with the feeling of being alive.
Series: Heroes of the Zombie Apocalypse
Rating: PG13ish
Word Count: 959
Summary: They have to keep moving. They're always falling.
Notes: Written second in the HZA series. From 2009.
The injuries that our hero sustained at work today are trivial compared to what’s become usual. A scraped knees and a sore back, the latter likely from lifting something heavy, like a corpse. The former – who knows? She’s probably fallen. She’s always falling.
At her side is Amelia, still, strong and solid and half-blind until her glasses are handed back, finally freed of their crust of mud.
“Thanks, Iris.”
Our hero nods to her. Amelia fell face first into the sticky ground, just beyond the cemetery as they were running for their lives. (Cemeteries are generally a safe place to be. The dead there stay dead.) It’s a miracle of elastic sport bands and good fortune that the glasses weren’t lost entirely, but running blind through the forest had been no fun at all. Amelia thought that that felt more like falling than her stumble had. She’s always falling.
Now, they’ve made it back to the safe house, such as it is – a rusted white Winnebago, situated someplace high and lonely. Amelia once wondered who had lived there. Our hero told her, “Somebody smart.”
That was last week, and today they are packing up and leaving. Their location has become less than secure and they need to keep moving. They’re always moving. They have to. A month ago someone said that to them, after he crushed his mother’s head in with a shovel.
“You’ve got to keep moving,” through tense lips in a face caked with gore.
It wasn’t a scream or a plea or a statement of fact. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be, anything but an order from a general they didn’t recognize in an army they hadn’t known that they were a part of. But there was no mistaking his uniform of tailored tatters and blood stained silks, especially when his shotgun blast blew away another man’s head.
“You’ve got to keep moving.”
The hero had a black eye, then. It’s healed, today, and they leave the safe house as they found it, high and lonely in the middle of nowhere and they keep moving.
The hill is steep and they keep tripping on the way down. It’s not pleasant.
Amelia says, “Hey, Iris. Where do you think we are?”
Our hero hesitates over her answer. A month ago, on the street with their silver-haired savior-commander, she could have easily said, “New York.”
Last week, standing in front of the failing Winnebago that had, at the time, been their last best hope, she would have said, “Hell.”
Today, because she’s always falling, she trips in this moment of distraction and tumbles down onto the solid ground under her feet. And then she turns, lying on her back and seeing the sky, and it feels like she’s moving, again, towards it. It feels like she’s falling, again, into it. There are horror movie monsters everywhere they might someday go and the world is ending, or has already. Where are they? Where is there left for them to be?
“Nowhere special,” she says, and thinks about how that isn’t exactly true, because the sky is a very special shade of blue that she would like to taste, some day. Would it smell of paint when she got her face in close to it? She wonders.
Amelia follows her gaze and looks up at the sky, too. She’s always falling and this time she goes to her knees, controlled. Not all falls are involuntary.
“I guess so,” she says.
Soon, they will get up and move because the general said they had to keep moving, and even though they never meant to be, these days they are very good little soldiers. They will keep moving and someday Amelia will have to put a bullet in our hero’s zombie brain and then on that day, and for every day thereafter, Amelia will have to keep moving alone. But on this day, in this moment, they are choosing this movement, of staring into the deep blue sky and falling into that. All movement, these days, is falling, falling hard and falling fast and falling into nothingness.
It’s worth wondering, our hero thinks, if the general is still moving, if he is following the orders he gave to our hero and Amelia a month ago in New York, if maybe he has his own Amelia, strong and solid at his side as he walks through the underbrush and stares at the sky. It’s worth wondering if he ever falls or if he thinks that moving is surviving rather than just one more way to die.
Amelia will meet him again, one day, and that will be one of the ones after she has killed our newly dead hero. The general will still have his Amelia, but he could always use another. And our hero will have been wrong, because he will know that moving is falling and she will have been right because he will think falling is another way of surviving. He will hold his Amelia’s hand as they stand on a mountain that overlooks a dead city and Amelia will stand at his other side and see nothing but another hero turned at last to blood in the dust. That will be all she can see for a very long time.
But that place is a place that is not here and a time that is far – but not quite far enough – from now. In the here and now Amelia holds our hero’s hand as they stare up into the living sky and fall, head over heels, for the very last time, in love with the feeling of being alive.
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