Heaven in the Honeysuckle

“I think I spent at least a quarter of my life here.”

“Pfft, that’s not a lot, Axel.”

“Twenty-two years old? You bet your ass a quarter of my life is a long time.”

Jo chuckled and looked out onto the field. It was history, overgrown with weeds, the towering wire fences thick with honeysuckle and spidery green vines. Sad to look at really, like an abandoned building. But, she knew that it meant much more to Axel than it ever did to her. 

“Dad would bring me down here to practice even if we didn’t have a game coming up.”

He snorted and brushed a hand through his scraggly mane of honey blonde hair.

“Fuckin’ little league,” he sighed, pausing to press the green beer bottle against his lips and take a long sip, “I wasn’t even old enough to know if I liked the sport yet.”

“But you did,” Jo pressed, “you really liked it, mister baseball scholarship.”

Jo locked eyes with her older brother and the two of them smiled, hearts full of warmth and remembrance.

The cozy, safe moment dissipated quickly as the fence behind them, past the bleachers and the remains of the concession stand, shook. It crashed like thunder, sending a cloud of leaves and petals into the air. Groaning, the same guttural sound that had slowly consumed the Earth over the previous three years, filled the air. It grew louder every second. And, by the sound of the creaking fence, those who were doing the groaning were getting angrier and hungrier every second too.

Axel’s smile faded and he looked at his feet.

“Yeah…like that means anything now.”

Jo swallowed and reached down. She had a carton of boxed peach moscato from their last gas station raid. It was thick, sickly sweet stuff—she planned on drinking the entire thing within the next hour.

After all, it might just be her last night alive.

As if melting ice-caps, a mental-health crisis, and general impending doom weren’t enough for young people to deal with back in the year 2022, The Change had settled in the February of that year. The Change—what the modern world had dubbed the disease that swept in and pulled the dead from where they slept beneath the soil. It seemed fitting; it sounded ominous, but also fairly mundane. Jo’s generation was used to living through major historical events at that point, so a zombie apocalypse didn’t seem like anything too crazy.

She and Axel had reunited as soon as they got word of the first outbreak. He drove down from school and met her at their childhood home, setting up a fortress there. They held up for a while, lucky enough to have stocked up at their local grocery store before the shelves were completely picked off. They had a basement and running water and boarded windows. Their wifi even worked for a while. 

It was like before Axel graduated high school; movie nights and drinks and laughter with the two of them—doing their constant best to not pay attention to the crashing and clattering and crippling of the outside world.

But when the supplies ran out and the boards grew weak, they ran. Three years of it and they’d found a rhythm to surviving together. 

They interacted with other survivors as little as possible. Trust outside of their sibling bond was fickle, and so they didn’t lean on it. They spent a month in an underground compound once. It was nice, providing some fun and interaction…before the matriarch kicked the bucket and sent the entire place into widespread Change. 

“Axel and Jo: kicking ass and taking names” was a more dependable model.

Or, it always had been. Their car had finally died, and both her and Axel had taken on more sprained ankles and bruised bones than should be allowed. They were tired, and the human-zombie ratio was now heavy in the favor of their ghoulish adversaries.

So, when they ended up losing steam back where they started in their hometown, they filled a shopping cart and two duffle bags with as much crap as they could and locked themselves in Potter’s Field, the old baseball diamond where their dad had coached when they were both little. 

No longer a place of fun and childhood though. It was their Hell.

Axel watched his little sister gulp down the wine and finished his beer in solidarity.

“I try not to think about it because it just makes it harder but shit…why did this have to happen?”

“…I don’t know.”

Jo took another sip and set the box down back between her feet. She soaked in silence for a moment and tugged at the elastic that held her braided hair together, as if the adjustment would help her brain work better.

“I think…I think at the beginning of this I was convinced it was some kind of punishment. Like a reckoning from the Heavens for destroying the planet.”

“And now?”

“Now…” Jo shrugged. “I just think it’s something really shitty that happened. Nothing we can do but keep living. We’ve been lucky enough most of our lives to only have a few big catastrophes. Mom and Dad…stuff like that. So yeah, this is earth-shattering—literally. But…”

Jo blinked and paused. She took another sip from her box of peach in an attempt to distract herself from the tears that had begun falling down her face.

“I don’t know. All I do know is that I uh…I love you. I really love you.”

Axel’s eyes glistened and he let out a breathy laugh. He tossed the empty beer bottle down into the dirt and wrapped his little sister up in his bruised and bloodied arms, kissing the top of her head.

“I love you too.”

Jo shut her eyes and let herself cry. It had been a long time since she’d done that, or at least a long time since she’d let Axel see. It felt fitting that they were at Potter’s Field. Axel was right, they’d spent summer afternoon after summer afternoon in that exact spot, years and years before everything went to hell. Even with the demonic sounds pressing against all sides of the field, it was like an oasis.

Warm. Perfect.

And Jo thought to herself, with complete calm, that maybe they weren’t in Hell at all. 

Wrapped in a hug and the honeysuckle and soft buzz from the candy wine, they’d donut a little piece of Heaven.

Not too shitty after all.