I got out and helped her put her things in the SUV. She nodded when I asked her if that was everything. When I asked her if there was anyone else in the building, she hesitated for a moment and then shook her head. I looked at the building. How many people had lived there before the outbreak? Now, it was only one. Soon, no one would. I tried not to think about it. Today was too good a day to think about it, so I started driving.
She was very quiet at first. She seemed afraid. I was quiet, too. I was nervous. The quiet was awkward, but I didn't want to turn the music on. I was almost entirely concentrated on her presence. The sound of her breathing carried peace with it. Her every move carried grace in it. It was like the branches of a willow swaying in the breeze, a doe lifting her head at a stranger's approach, or a cat walking along a rail the way we walk down a sidewalk. And the way she smelled was like...for some reason, it made me feel like the world wasn't the unforgiving hell I thought it was. With all of this to take in, music would have just been distracting noise. But, eventually the stillness and quiet, along with my own curiosity, came to be too much.
I asked her how long she'd been alone. I wondered if she'd been alone as long as I had. I wondered what toll it had taken. I wondered a bit more in the moment it took her to respond. I wished I hadn't asked when she started to answer.
She told me about a friend of hers who was immune as well. They'd found the fortified apartment building a week or so after the outbreak had hit the city. There were other people alive in there at that time. Everyone moved around like they were ghosts. Some people wore gloves and gas masks. Everyone was afraid. Slowly, the people just started disappearing. Finally, she and her friend were alone in the fortress with little to do except scrounge for food and refuel the generator. They found different ways to fill the long hours. Her friend had a camera and took pictures of the city. She said that if people survived, they'd want to remember. They'd want to know what happened. So she took hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of the city and its undead inhabitants. She had some close scrapes with the zombies, but learned pretty quickly how to sneak around and go unnoticed.
Her friend slipped in and out of the building, taking pictures. Charlotte stayed inside, working with a computer. She'd established a network of communication with other survivors. She said there were pockets of survivors scattered across the country and even more on other continents, where they'd had more time to respond to the plague before it reached their doors. She had been working with others in an effort to establish a reliable network to share ideas and information. It was brilliant, really. My hopes rose when I realized there were people from all over, working together to facilitate recovery. I wondered how much more was being done that I was unaware of.
She continued on with her story and I realized the telling of it was painful. She continued on anyway. Her friend became like a ghost. She would come in from taking her pictures looking more haunted each day. Charlotte would share with her the progress they were making to collaborate ideas and network. Her friend would just nod and give a smile that looked like it pained her. The two grew more and more distant. Each became more and more focused on their project. Then, one day, her friend didn't come back. Charlotte was a bit concerned, but didn't begin to panic until she saw her camera sitting on the table between their beds. Then the panic set in. It must have been there since morning, when she had left. Charlotte had been so busy with her own routine that she hadn't been paying attention.
There was a neatly written note folded beneath the camera. It explained what her friend had done and why. It apologized for the pain it would cause. Her friend had jumped off the building because living with everything she'd seen and felt had become too much to bear.
The sobs Charlotte had been holding back became too much when she reached this point in her story. She was in agony. I slowed to a stop, pulling over onto the side of the road. I reached out to her, putting my hand on her shoulder, wishing there was something I could do: some way I could make it go away. She leaned into me, burying her head in my chest. I put my arm around her as unrestrained sobs shook her whole body. She'd fought to maintain control for so long; fought to survive. Now she was finally able to let loose the pain that had been welling up inside her. She sobbed until her eyes ran dry and she was exhausted. All I could do was hold her, and maybe that comforted her some. She fell asleep and I laid her back in her seat, wondering how long it'd been since she'd slept so soundly. Then I pulled back onto the road, thinking about her story, silently crying tears of my own.
I managed to drive a few hours more before I needed to sleep. It was probably the first time on the trip that I drove with no music playing. The only sounds I heard were the noise of the tires on the pavement and Charlotte's slow breaths from the seat beside me. I felt calm. I nearly swerved off the road from the shock of the realization: I felt calm. It had been hours since my last massacre, and the madness wasn't even looming over me. I felt a lot of tension disappear as I relaxed further. Then I felt very tired. I pulled over to the side of the road and nodded off almost immediately.
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