In the Snow Dusted Forest

The Alister twins sit in the forest.

They are waiting -- there is so much waiting, these days. Azzie is glaring at the map she holds, location scrawled on it in ballpoint pen. She seems to hold the belief that if she gives the map one of her patented looks, it will suddenly begin to make sense.

Jesse is leaning against the same boulder as his sister, shoulder pressed against hers. They look almost the same, as if any onlooker (gods help them, the unlucky onlooker who stumbled into that forest) is seeing double, but Jesse is faded like an old photograph. His skin is pale, almost ashen, and his once-blond hair has turned silvery white.

His scarf covers the lower half of his face, dark blue fabric tucked neatly over his nose. He watches his surroundings, scouring each inch of the forest, of the forsaken land.

Snow is beginning to fall, slowly, like the ashes of the burned towns from years ago. It looks peaceful, serene. He hates it.

Any shreds of serenity in their world are long gone, gone with the towns. Gone with all the people who were turned, turned to monsters and horrors. They ceased to be human, ceased to be anything but shambling husks of the people they had been.

Those turned go from being people, with memories and lives and loves, to being less than anything, in the blink of an eye, twitching and crumbling until they are so hollow they no longer look human.

Lucas will be back soon. He had wandered off the night before, the third of their travelling party, claiming he was out in search of provisions. They sit in the forest, snow falling into their hair, and they wait.

They are silent. They cannot risk being found. The turned walk the forests, wandering aimlessly, too addled to understand their actions, to have intent.

It does not matter. They are dangerous, a horrible threat. They must be eliminated before they can act.

They feel bad about it, sometimes. In the late nights, when they are resting, when they are remembering. The turned -- staggerers, Lucas calls them -- were human once as well.

They’ve killed people before, when they needed to. Their lives are staked on survival, kill or be killed, be turned, be destroyed. They are survivors in a world that was not meant for them.

The snow lands on Azzie’s face and hands, a harsh, biting cold that she readily accepts. It is nice to feel something.

Jesse feels nothing. His skin is nearly as cold as the snow. She cards her fingers through his long hair as they wait.

“I’m going to kill Lucas when he returns,” she announces, dropping the map to the ground. She is quiet enough for them to remain unnoticed, but her words, accompanied by white puffs of breath, are loud in the snowy quiet. Jesse chuckles, a faint breathy laugh, and no pale smoke accompanies his exhales.

“If you live that long,” he mumbles morosely, because he has always maintained that there is no better time for morbid jokes than when death is constantly looming just over your shoulder, waiting for you to slip up. Azzie smiles.

She is skilled at deciphering his mumbling, after all these years. He cannot form words particularly well, but she knows him. She has always known him. Lucas is getting better at it, but not entirely. Azzie likes laughing at his misinterpretations.

They’ve been walking for years. They never split up. Lucas should not have left. Nothing good has ever come of separating. They should have stopped him, gone with him.

They did not.

Now, all they can do is wait. It is futile.

Lucas does not return.

The others find them. They are dressed in black, dark uniforms and wicked weapons that the twins recognize all too well.

They are not staggerers, not survivors. They call themselves military, but that is not the truth. They are killers, ruthless and unflinching. They approach.

Any hope that they were merely a passing patrol is dashed when two of them stop -- there are six in total, too many for a simple patrol -- and hang back, weapons at the ready.

They know.

They catch the arms of the twins before they can move for weapons. Jesse’s arms are pinned back, the men carefully avoiding his head, staying as far out of his reach as they possibly can.

Azzie is screaming. She isn’t scared -- no, Azzie doesn’t get scared. She is angry, rage boiling over and bubbling out of her in a stream of incoherent yelling and long chains of expletives braided neatly together.

She tells them to let go of her brother, thrashing wildly, screaming until her throat burns and the winter air sears her lungs.

One of them pulls down Jesse’s scarf. Eyes go wide, the air suddenly filled with muttered curses and noises of terrified disbelief. One of them -- one of the ones holding Jesse’s arm, the one that pulled down his scarf -- makes an aborted gesture, signaling to the others.

The ones who stayed back are watching, eyes are big as the pale moon where it hangs low and heavy in the sky overhead. One of them is trembling, unable to do anything.

The other raises his gun.

Jesse stares into his eyes. He narrows his own, silver irises glinting with something like twisted bravery.

He says something mumbled and inaudible. He does not grin, though he wants to. He can’t. Half his face is gone, a gaping and endlessly unhealing wound torn by ravaging teeth of addled wanderers.

His hand frees itself, finding its way to his sister’s. She is silent. Azzie is loud and sarcastic and brash. Azzie is not silent. 

A perfect bullet wound is carved into Jesse’s forehead in the flash of a second. He falls.

The crack of the gun is so loud in the quiet forest, the deafening boom sharply breaking the serenity.

Azzie is screaming again. Her babbling is filled with grief and scorching rage, but her eyes hold a worse truth.

Jesse was turned. Jesse is dead.

Azzie is scared.