Sisters

"Do you remember one of the first Christmas presents you picked out for me?" Misha asked.

"Do we really have to do this now?" Esther moaned. "There are walkers in the area."

They were holed up in a house for the night, waiting out the most dangerous hours in relative safety. Not that anything was particularly safe anymore.

Misha picked at the loose threads around a hole in her jeans. "No, I know. I just—"

"We're still seven miles out from the checkpoint and we didn't manage to find much on this run. Surely there are better things to talk about right now."

Misha swallowed the disappointment attempting to settle in her gut. She knew Esther wasn't upset with her, just the situation, but sometimes it still felt like it was her fault.

And this one might be her fault after all.

"Okay," she said instead.

It wasn't like it was easy making their way through open territory. They had made a name for themselves doing it, which was why they were sent out for supplies so much, but no one would mistake skill for ease. And all those zombie apocalypse movies and books and games weren't as good of a primer for the real thing as people thought.

The streets and buildings weren't as ruined and overgrown, for one. It was still technically early in the whole end of the world thing, but the stories always made it seem like the earth started reclaiming everything immediately. Some places were abandoned because they were too open and too risky to secure and maintain, but a lot of things were okay. And the abandoned buildings along the way were usually left mostly intact as living stragglers needed somewhere secure to sleep, too. If they could loot and secure themselves a place for the night, they usually didn't break windows or locks if they could help it.

The whole zombie thing spread about as fast as any disease, slowed down by attempts to self-quarantine. But really, how good could isolation be when the disease could literally walk up to your house and break down your doors and windows? And even if someone managed to protect against that, it might still get you because it was highly effective at infecting through water transmission. A couple of infected water sanitation workers who hadn't been showing symptoms at the time managed to turn most of New York City before anyone knew what was happening.

Sometimes people didn't even look infected long past when they should because they've found a source of food and aren't deteriorating as much as those who let themselves starve. The zombies who look healthy are still technically alive, and they couldn’t be trusted because they would have had to eat other people to survive.

Before they made it to the compound, she and Esther had run into a group led by a living walker—not that anyone knew that at the time. Misha couldn’t shake the bad feeling she got around him, but he was charismatic and driven, promising to create a haven to protect people. Esther had wanted to buy into it, but then she saw him kill and eat one of the people who pushed back against him. Apparently, all he'd really wanted to do was create a convenient food source for himself.

After Xavier, Misha learned to trust her instincts about people. They had never actually led her wrong.

"It was a little stuffed snowman plush," she whispered, peeking out at the street in front of the house. "It was soft and squished so nicely, and I liked rubbing it against my cheek. I'm pretty sure I slept with it almost every night for a while."

"What?"

She turned away from the window to look at where Esther was sitting at the table, carefully cleaning her gun. "The first Christmas present you gave me."

Esther sighed. "You're still on that?"

"I loved it," Misha admitted. "I don't think I told you that."

"Great. You loved it. Thank you for telling me this wildly vital information while we're trying not to die in the middle of the night while miles away from the compound." She finished her cleaning aggressively, frowning the whole time. "Glad to know I completed my sisterly duty when we were kids, before all this shit went down."

"Es—"

"And there you go, reducing my name to a single sound again. Do you have a point to this?" When Misha didn't say anything for a bit, Esther looked up, her frown deepening in response to whatever expression she saw there. "What?"

Misha shrugged and looked away. "I know it's stupid and not important, but I just thought of it and I can't remember what happened to it. It could be at the bottom of the toy tub back at home, or maybe it was collected in one of the clutter purges. I just... I kind of wish I had it right now."

Esther just looked at her for a bit as though she was trying to read the reasons for the conversation without having the conversation itself. "Why?"

"To give it back to you."

Esther reeled back as if she'd been slapped. "Why would you do that? You just spent however long trying to convince me that you loved it. And, like you said, it was a gift. You don't take those back!"

"I did love it." Misha moved into the kitchen just to have something to lean on that put a bit of distance between the two of them. "I loved it so much because you gave it to me, and I thought that proved you liked me."

"Misha, you're my baby sister. Of course I like you, when you don't annoy the hell out of me."

"See, that's what I didn't understand as a kid." Misha traced patterns in the marble countertop just to have an excuse to avoid Esther's eyes. "It was stupid, but I thought all of your love for me was tied up in that little snowman. I thought it was the most important thing between us. So, whenever you would get mad, I'd try to give it back to you so you wouldn't hate me as much. Even though I loved it, I loved you more, and what you thought of me was more important than having it."

"It was a gift."

"And I was a kid. I didn't say it was logical to anyone who isn't a kid, but that's what I thought. Every time I handed it back to you, I was asking you not to hate me."

"What are you saying?" Esther's words were carefully measured, cautious in a way they almost never were with each other.

Only now did Misha dare to look up and see the fear in her sister's eyes. "Esther, I know."

They stared at one another for a few minutes, neither saying anything, neither daring to move. Misha had exploded a bomb between them by bringing the unspoken thing to light, and the pain was twisting in her chest like pieces of shrapnel. But Esther hadn't eaten in three days, not even when Misha offered some of her rations. She was starting to lose color in her skin, except around the eyes, which had become slightly sunken and dark.

The human appetite was always the first thing to go. It seemed like a stomach flu because turned walkers couldn't keep down regular food.

"Don't hate me," Misha whispered into the silence. "Please don't hate me."

"No." Esther's voice was as hard as steel, as sharp as gunfire. "That's not the plan. I won't let you do it. You were supposed to go back to the compound without me. I was going to lose you, and everything would be fine because you'd be safe. And then I'd just..."

Misha just shook her head. "You and I have been out here long enough to know it doesn't work like that. Especially not with how long you've had it. You believe you would, I know you do, but part of you wants to live, and it won't let you kill yourself."

Finally, Esther broke. "It's not supposed to be you! I promised when all of this started that you'd never have to do that for me, that I'd never make you carry something like that!"

"You aren't making me do anything." Misha was the only one who knew the steadiness in her voice was a lie. "But I'm not leaving here just to come back out later and come face to face with a corpse that doesn't recognize me." She shuddered as reality settled on her shoulders, thick and heavy. "If that happened, I'd let you take me."

"The checkpoint—"

"They would kill us both at the checkpoint. You know this."

"Misha, you're my little sister," Esther whispered. But she didn't move. She had never moved from where she was sitting. "I won't let you do this."

"You aren't letting me do anything." Misha raised her gun, but Esther still didn't move. Deep down, they both understood why. "I just... Don't hate me?"

She squeezed the trigger.

*

Misha walked toward the first checkpoint on the way into the compound. As was procedure, she stepped into the spray-painted square on the ground for the guards to evaluate her for symptoms of zombieness before they revealed themselves.

After a few moments, one of the guards she was familiar with, Kyle, stepped out from behind the concrete hunting blind disguised in the sparse tree line.

"Nice to have you back, Misha," he said. Then frowned, looking past her down the road. "Where's Esther?"

Misha just shook her head.

"Ah. I'm sorry for your loss."

She ruthlessly crushed the swell of guilt attempting to swallow her whole because this was not where she was going to break down. "Yeah," she said instead, her voice hoarse. "Me too."