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A flurry of crisp autumn leaves sprinkled down like earth-toned confetti over the makeshift observation post. Eric froze mid movement and held his breath. Tucked high on a main branch point in an oak tree for the past hour in an awkward crouch, he had sworn that he could feel the texture of the bark imprinted into the surface of his nicely padded gluteals.
He had carelessly shifted his weight to relieve the pressure on his blunted and embossed cheeks without considering the fragility of the barely attached desiccated foliage that surrounded his position. He closed his saucered brown eyes and stretched his hearing further over the surrounding area including the thick tree growth behind him. The motionless redhead silently tracked the sound of the crunchy cascade of leaves to landfall and beyond until all was quiet.
Satisfied that the only thing around to hear the tiny shouting noises of his stupidity was the forest, he opened his eyes and, breathing cautiously, tried again. He gingerly repositioned himself on his perch and successfully managed to recenter his weight without rattling the tree again. Eric frowned in self castigation. He had to do better than that. He was on duty with a partner out in the field that was his responsibility to track and keep safe.
Grumbling quietly behind a sour face, he reprimanded himself silently, Come on, stupid. Pay attention! He'll be okay as long as you don't fall out of the tree and ring the dinner bell for those butt ugly roamers.' Those horror flick/undead reality show rejects had a way of popping up out of thin air. He had no idea how they could hear so well when so many of them barely had ears anymore. Was it echo-location, like bats?
'Oh for the love of... What did I just say? Just shut up already,' he mentally slapped himself back into focus. Forcefully dragging his mind out of its nonsensical spiral of random thoughts, he resumed intently keeping watch over his partner Aaron. Today was the day they were going to reveal themselves to the nomadic group of survivors they had observed surreptitiously over the past three weeks.
This particular group was large, suspicious and hostile. Heavily armed as well. Every last one of them had shown the skill and apathy to use those weapons without hesitation. Just like every still-living human that they encountered out in the wild. With one big difference, these people actually cared about each other. They fought for each other. They were a family and that made it worth the risk of offering them safety and the chance to live while surviving.
Eric watched Aaron slip through the field of overgrown grass like an ersatz puma on the stalk. He was the one that was supposed to have the man's back. That was his job when they hunted hope together. However, this time the pale skin on the back of his neck prickled from an ominous change in the electrified air. The feeling had nothing to do with anxiety or the ions left in the air from last night's rain. It was from this being so not like any other hunt.
It was more than the aggressive instinct for self preservation that crackled off this group of survivors. The entire feel of reality was... different, wrong.
Hang calls for reason and scientific debunk, this wasn't the world to trust to logic. Following his instincts had kept his sexy ass safe more times than reason alone ever had. There was extra danger in the wind this time. And his boyfriend was in the thick of it.
He noiselessly lowered the high powered, light weight field glasses from his face and rubbed at his bark-brown eyes with slender fingers. The binoculars were perfect for keeping tabs on Aaron as he approached hostile people to charm. But, they were hell on the eyes when you didn't put them down regularly.
He had caught a break and scored those babies stuck behind an empty steel shelf in a gutted military surplus. He frowned realizing that was the last bit of good luck that he'd had, and that was months ago. Although women weren't his thing, he'd gladly let Lady Luck and all of her local representatives in the area have their way with him if only Aaron came out of this one safely.
The two of them had been running around back and forth without a break for months looking for survivors to bring into the fold of their barricaded community. All they had found were a few small and ultimately disappointing groups of people. Then they found this group.
Eric checked the watch on his bony wrist and his pale head twitched sideways. Angry with disbelief, he shook the time piece vigorously along with its attached fist. He roughly cleared a lock of fiery hair back and held the watch to his ear. 'Dammit!' He forgot to wind the thing last night.
Irritated on so many fronts, Eric frowned that his fox-red hair was too damned long. He wordlessly vilified this group for causing it to happen. There had been no time for anything that wasn't hunting because of them. He scowled. He didn't really give a damn about his stupid hair or his borderline exhaustion. He was worried about Aaron.
He was always worried about Aaron. The pace the lambswool brunette had set for them recently only made that worse. As a team, both partners and Partners, they usually took at least a couple of days between hunts to decompress. That hadn't been the case for months. Things had finally begun to take their toll.
For his part, Eric's mind was severely worn and frayed. He was drained, sloppy and mercilessly distracted... and worst of all, making mistakes. It was only the need to protect Aaron, their love for each other, that gave him the strength to pull together what energy he had left and push forward. The effort paid off in allowing him to keep up enthusiastic appearances for Aaron’s sake.
It was his boyfriend that showed signs of needing more than just time to rest. Riding adrenaline in lieu of recharging was gambling with the integrity of Aaron's mission today and, more importantly, his life expectancy. Today the man needed more than the regular-Joe charm of his wholesome face and pretty mist colored eyes. Even the ethereal charisma promising trust which he wore around his flannel cloaked woodsman's body like plaid armor wouldn't be enough. The brunette needed to be sharp and clear when dealing with this caliber of survivor.
The bigger danger to Aaron's safety was that his blinding momentum was driven by pure obsession. He kept up the breakneck pace searching for survivors for a very good reason. He still woke up nights unable to breath from the weight of his guilt about what he had to do to the last group he brought in that didn't pan out.
At the time, Eric had kept his mouth shut. He was ashamed and hated how callous he had become in these situations. And he knew it scared Aaron. But, the new world was constantly chipping away at Eric's regard for humanity and his sense of mercy had hardened. He couldn't help but think that it would have been more merciful to put those three down with a .45 to the forehead instead of dumping them in the forest with supplies for two weeks, no maps, no weapons and no future. They were as good as dead.
It brought him a modicum of peace to realize that, despite what he himself had come to think of what humane meant, he could still feel hopeful and care about others. He agreed with Aaron on that. There werestill good people that needed compassion, that still weren't lost to humanity. Sadly, they were getting harder to find.
Still, the town leader forced Aaron to throw those people away as punishment. She wanted to teach Aaron the lesson that he would not be allowed another mistake in judgment. Eric couldn't bear seeing how Aaron suffered over having to do that. Nor could he agree with the cruelty of the town's policy on fitting in through unquestioned subservience. That draconian attitude was responsible for what had cut Aaron so deeply. Despite the town's lack of respect for Aaron’s work, Eric kept at the hunt. For Aaron's sake of course, but also for the survival of whatever humanity still existed out there.
They came across the trail of this new group three weeks ago. Not by luck or skill but from an odd gap in their paranoia. More than a dozen exhausted, angry and suspicious people stomping their way through the countryside was better than an emergency flare to indicate their presence and mark their movements. To Eric, that lapse was troublesome. Aaron though, was convinced this was a gift of the forest and pushed their nonstop pace further beyond safe limits to monitor them.
Eric acknowledged that bringing home this many capable people was too tempting to pass up. The knowledge that they still showed signs of compassion and love just made the decision to help them irrefutable. So despite riding out an adrenaline rush to combat his fatigue, Aaron was off surrendering to a pair of female sentries and Eric was up a tree keeping watch, prepared to take whatever action was needed to ensure his partner's life.
Officially declaring his watch useless, he squinted at the sky and mouthed to himself, 'What is taking so damn long?' He picked up the binoculars with hands trembling from the stress of his rapidly escalating worry.
'It's introduce yourself, invite to the neighborhood, signal me, get the hell out of Dodge. That's the system. It works, dammit. It always works. Where's my signal?'
Barely breathing as it was, Eric sucked in a shallow breath. Through the field glasses he saw the group leader approach Aaron and he did not like the looks of that. He itched to interfere, to station himself in front of Aaron and take the brunt of anything harmful coming his way. He bit his lip knowing that he couldn't reveal himself yet, not without the call for extraction. Aaron was better positioned to judge the need for rescue, but Eric was the one that had to suffer the torture of worrying in uncertainty.
'Come on, Babe. Where's the signal ?' He scrolled the magnified view across to Aaron. He saw his partner's lips moving in that steady 'don't spook the prey' cadence of his.
'What the hell, man! Are you still trying to talk your way through this. Stop talking! These people are dangerous. Keep your eye on that guy.' Forget the signal, it was time to run over with gun blazing.
Eric let the streamlined binoculars drop against his chest and rapidly prepped his gear. He fluidly checked the pull off his military surplus knife against its scabbard before he left it unclipped in place. The homemade flash bang canister was still a comforting weight in his pocket. Pulling back the hammer on his scrupulously maintained Beretta M9, he hefted the military grade weapon in his hand,
'Nine left in the clip. Another sixteen in the one in my pocket. Hope that's enough. Some of them look like they'd need more than a couple of shots to take down.'
He tucked the Berreta back onto his hip, freeing his hands for the climb out of the tree.
Completing the gear check with the blinding speed born of and finely honed through life in undead hell, he grabbed an overhead branch and slowly stood up out of his crouch. Taking a half second to carefully shake the blood back into his legs one at a time, his Aaron-Sense pinged. He checked on his burly forester of a man at high power just as the bearded jerk that lead this group punched Aaron in the face.
'What the.... Oh hell no! You did not just, Caveman'. He felt the hit himself against his heart and reflexively pushed the wrist of his free hand hard against his sternum. He watched Aaron fall in a dead drop to the floor and flew into a tightly controlled rage at the sight. Aaron wasn't a glass jawed punk. That had to be a solid blow to knock him out like that.
'Screw this!' His lean tight muscles tensed as he climbed down to a distance where he could safely jump out of the old growth tree. Last thing he needed was a broken ankle from too high a drop. Hanging there like a red on white gibbon, the need to look back reverberated in his head again. He raised the binoculars checking the situation again and saw the Sasquatchian psychopath walk away as a couple of his people knelt by Aaron and tended to him. The situation was precarious, but it no longer had the feel that they were going to hurt him again. Apparently the guy was capable of listening to his people's opinions, including the call for not ending Aaron’s life. For the first time in what seemed like ages, Eric felt like good luck was finally remembering they existed.
Before he risked completely abandoning cover, he watched in rapt tunnel vision. Reading the lips of the walking sweat stain of a leader was somewhat hampered by the squirrel fight thing on his face, but Eric still managed to successfully read the order to tie up his plaid reason for living.
Although the parabolic mic was easier to use, lugging that thing around just impeded the speed of his movements. Fortunately he had another way to “hear”. Reading lips was another of the hodge-podge set of skills that Aaron found truly baffling. If they got out of this he was going to give him a smug pile of crap over laughing at his oddities.
'Stop it!' He screamed to himself as he savagely tore his focus up out of its distracted fear spiral and glared through the binoculars. Breathing in strangled fits and stops, he stared, waiting, on instinct. He needed to see Aaron move before he could gauge how hard to hit these people when he got there.
Eric saw his beloved curly top stir and his own breathing ran freely once more. He caught site of Aaron smiling at the realization that he had been floored with one blow. Eric grimaced fondly,
'That's my Aaron.' He sighed quietly. Shaking his head and smiling, he waxed in affection,
'Of course he finds it funny. Trussed up, outnumbered and still being all nice and diplomatic.' He flattened his lips,
'If they don't kill him, I just might.' There was no way he would let this largely unstable group take Aaron from him. Ironically, however, his own exquisite hands were metaphorically tied while they still had his exasperating man. He kept reading and took in everything.
'Panic signal, Babe. Pa-nic-sig-nal.' He was grateful that they hadn't gagged his boyfriend so that at least he could follow the conversation. He chewed at his lip again, worried, but not surprised that the optimistically hopeful man of his hadn't panicked yet. Aaron was a do-gooder of epic proportion. He wouldn't call for the cavalry until he was half eviscerated. He wasn't, yet, and things had calmed down.
Eric resisted storming the barn out of trust. The situation had improved and he needed to give Aaron time to work his magic. Eyes on him like a hawk, Eric climbed back up into his tree fork fort. Breathing tightly, he grew frustrated that he was still losing focus to his worry. The sassy crinkle of the properly dead leaves beneath him was a reminder to keep his hearing tuned for roamers.
At least the paranoid idiot in the beard, had some brains and knew his shit. Reading the fur rimmed lips of the creature who was more dust and sweat than man, Eric saw the guy send a team to check out the vehicles and by extension Aaron's story. That was smart. Knocking Aaron on his ass and trussing him up like a turkey at Thanksgiving wasn't. He cringed in guilt as he watched Aaron struggle with revealing how many people were with him. They would recognize a lie even in the truth. 'I'm so sorry, Babe. I'll be fine. Your safety is all that matters. Please, just tell him.'
Eric knew he would endanger Aaron if he stormed the group in the middle of their agitated sorting of personnel. Anyway, he'd never get past the newly posted perimeter guards while his focus was so compromised by his worry for Aaron in this unpredictable and dangerous situation.
Deciding not to play his hand while they were still scrambling into a search party, he kept close watch. The subgroup set out, but Eric stood his ground, monitoring. He watched the leader guy, Rick, threaten to perforate Aaron's head with a knife through those beautiful closed cropped curls.
Eric fumed. 'Strike two, jerk!'' It was just the Amazing Beardzo and Aaron down there now. And the baby? Safer is safer he guessed. The walking beard moved away from Aaron to tend to the little pink tot. She was so adorable. Sweet and well behaved. Eric was convinced she couldn't possibly be that Rick guy's daughter. His mouth twisted suddenly,
'Pay a -freakin-tention' he yelled to himself. Forcibly donning an aura of dispassionate intensity, he quickly assessed the scope of the situation.
Aaron was okay for now. At least until the party got back. Otherwise, Eric never would have considered leaving him there with that powder keg in a beard. That beard that just really annoyed Eric. Rick's body language had changed into a slightly less hostile stance. Begrudgingly set to wait on passing judgment until his people checked on Aaron's story.
He'd do Aaron better service following the search team and making sure they didn't do something stupid or meet something evil on the road. They were going to get back on time, so help him. If he got back to Aaron and he had that knife through his skull, good people or not, he was going to frag them all.
Shoving the field glasses into his backpack, he silently exited the tree and sprinted quietly through the mostly dried field of yellow grass to catch up with the search party. He pulled up short when he realized he was ahead of them and dove behind a rusted out piece of farm equipment to wait. After what seemed like a week, they finally came into view walking slowly down the center of the hard packed dirt road.
The hot Asian guy walking point holding the big ass gun had his eyes actively scanning the sides of the road while easily maintaining a full on conversation with the beautifully dangerous black woman carrying the katana. He was surprised that they could be this vigilant considering that, as paranoid and cautious as this group could be, they hadn't spotted him on their trail. Not while tracking them earlier in the day. Not while getting ahead of them just now. Not even when spying on them with Aaron as they traveled.
They were so surprised to see Aaron. 'I guess it was pretty inevitable that he got attacked. Even managing to get himself tied up yet again.' It suddenly dawned on him why Aaron never wanted to play that at home, even if Eric was the bundled up li'l dogie.
The group finally moved past his position. Growling silently to himself over being distracted again, he harshly snapped his attention back into focus. He kept them in site from a distance as they forward observed along the road. Their progress was slow and Eric had an easy job following them. Although he was prepared for a stealthier track, so far he had cause to use only one of his more clandestine skills.
Thanks to his borderline misdemeanor strewn youth on the farm, Eric knew how to slip easily through tall grass without disturbing any of it. Without lawnmowers or undead herbivore cows, there was plenty of tall grass to sneak through.
His worry over Aaron’s captivity had him nervously twitching his fingers in the air. The sun was strong after the darkness of the storm. Lingering rain water caught in various hollow spaces was burning off into steam. A heat filled ray of light sliced across Eric's face. He wondered if the newly aggressive sun shine might light up his already brilliant red hair. It had been muggy this morning and he forgot the 'do rag in the car.
'Mistakes. So many mistakes. Got to do better,' he thought to himself in panic. His priority right now was making sure the search party didn't stumble into a sinkhole or something else that would keep them from getting back to the barn in time, or at all. Finally reaching the vehicles exactly where Aaron told them they would be, Eric followed every movement they made with quick darts of his eyes. He watched for what seemed like forever.
'Now what's taking them so long?' Checking his watch out of habit, he scowled and rolled his eyes. Squinting back up at the sky,
'Take your damn sweet time by all means!' He took a deep, quiet breath.
'Gotta calm down before I get spotted or do something stupid myself.'
Body slamming his attention back into place on the search team, he mouthed,
'Oh, come on!' Close enough not to need the binoculars but wanting a clearer view, Eric used manual zoom to risk a better vantage point. He scooched carefully a few inches down along another rusted out vehicle that was currently his cover. Taking in all the activity, he assessed their general attitude toward swifter progress. He found their leisurely movements unsatisfactory… and just plain irritating.
'Yeah, yeah. It's a car. Goes vroom. Ooo yeah, there's a lot of food in the RV. Jeez.' Without altering the position of his eyes, he slowly rubbed at the tension cramped muscles at the back of his neck. He couldn't remember the last time he had been so unkind with such unrestrained name calling and general bitchiness. He sighed quietly to himself, 'If only it didn't make me feel so much better when I'm worried.' He half grinned at the idea before retuning his thoughts outward.
'Put someone in the seats, turn the keys and get the hell back to the barn before Aaron gets stabbed in the head and I have to kill you all.' He dropped his hand in disbelief. Through the RVs fairly large windows, he caught site of the big red-headed military looking guy leaning in toward a tiny by comparison but quite indomitable Hispanic woman.
'Oh, for the love of Tom, Dick and Harry! Save the interpersonal dynamics crap for the barn.' Eric stared harder at them, trying to will them into moving faster and was happily dumbfounded but relieved when it worked.
'Finally!' Both of the selected drivers showed experience with mechanical travel in the time of undead road hazards. That was a welcome bonus. They drove slowly, getting a feel for the vehicles while cautiously staying alert for nasty groaning surprises.
Eric sneaked away carefully from his post and, making it to the field's edge unnoticed, broke into a sprint. Traveling fast and steady through the trees, crunching new fallen leaves beneath his feet, Eric panted like a maniac. He beat the vehicles back to the barn and scrambled up his watch tower tree faster than a North American Red Squirrel and checked on his partner. Aaron hadn't been turned into a knife impaled pass-around hors d'eouvre. Eric exhaled and closed his eyes, nodding 'Thank God.'
The vehicles rumbled into ear shot and he popped open his eyes. His brow furrowed in concentration. Binoculars out of his pack and back in place, he started reading. Rick - “This food is ours now. Aaron - “There's plenty for everyone”.' Eric scoffed, 'Big change from not taking the water, eh?' He watched Rick open Aaron’s map and petulantly decide to do the opposite of anything Aaron said.
'What!? You are freakin' kidding me! Leaving at night? What is it with that neanderthal?' It was obvious that Rick's people trusted and mostly respected him but they weren't sheep. They tried to convince him to think about what Aaron had tried to warn them about. But the man was vehemently sure that Aaron was lying. Eric could understand that. Aaron's overly calm, slightly goofy openness looked too good to be true. Understandable, but not acceptable.
Moving this big a group at night was stupid enough, but that crazy P-rick wanted his own route through the darkness. His paranoia was going to get them all killed and, always more importantly, Aaron as well.
This was killing Eric ...metaphorically. His bones ached from wanting to be at Aaron’s side. He'd gladly throw himself in front of any bullets, bolts or knives for his boyfriend, but he still couldn't reveal himself without endangering him. This group was too wary and skiddish to trust and Aaron was too tightly bound to risk taking a run at them.
'Damn! I need to find a way to keep up.' Fortunately, he had plenty of practice at improvising on the fly. His eyes blanked as he raked his memory.
'Where'd I leave that junker I took the plate from this morning?'
While Aaron was back at the RV mentally preparing himself, Eric had futzed with the car long enough to know it ran and even had enough gas to be viable in case they needed to take it back to town with them. He had even lifted the present for Aaron from the rear bumper.
'Where was it? Wheeere where where? Oh yeah, that mill!'
He made mach running and crashing through desiccated leaves and brittle undergrowth, quickly covering the few miles back to the mill. He smiled at seeing the hideous P.O.S with the multicolored primer finish between two corrugated steel buildings. Exactly where he remembered.
He had originally found the car at the end of the driveway of some suburban house that was creepily abandoned with the property reeking of human effluence and left overs.
'Why do people always ignore the car and run on foot? Red line the thing until you're out of gas, then try to run for it.'
He hadn't even needed to hot wire the thing. Keys were in the ignition. That was pretty odd. Eric knew that in the days of before, people tended to keep their keys on them out of habit. He guessed that getting it stolen wasn't an issue at the time of abandonment. After all, who would steal such a hideous looking thing, right? His eyes widened, 'God help us if roamers remember how to drive.'
Of course, the car could simply be some sick form of bait. Making sure it hadn't been booby trapped, Eric looked the car over. It didn't needed oil, and everything that was supposed to move did. So he gave it a short test drive. He ran the engine quietly not wanting any revving noises to attract roamers. He ended his short test drive by parking the car as if someone had lost control and ran it into the corrugated walls before it conked out. Imagination and story telling were his trusted friends.
Mechanics, on the other hand, wasn't originally in his boyhood life plans. Their relationship changed when the farm life of his youth became filled with tinkering around with mechanical objects with his dad; cars, trucks, farm equipment, you name it. It was the only thing that the hard scrabbled fourth generation farmer could bond over with his definitely gay son. Eric had deeply appreciated his father's effort and took to the repair work with surprising ease and pride. He advanced those skills with a string of jalopies he found and repaired while in high school. It was a very handy ability in college too. He skillfully kept the rust bucket of the semester running through careful automotive resuscitation and basic life support. Poverty is the mother of all odd skills.
Back in front of the ugly mechanical heap again, Eric popped the hood carefully from a branches-as-chopsticks/crowbar distance. He breathed a soft sigh that the car was still trap free, so far. He quickly reinspected the fine points of the engine. There were a lot of sadistic technically still-humans out here, and the last thing he wanted to deal with was some random sabotage. It was worth spending the time on another quick run through.'Battery present, connectors connected, bands stretchy and oil... still good enough.'
He hurriedly lowered the hood. Clicking it quietly into place he looked up directly into a stumbling group of roamers coming up fast, for roamers. Shaking his head, he swallowed hard and wordlessly rubbed it in, 'Just one too many distracted fits, eh, smart guy! '
“Oh, crap!” He took out his gun and fired repeatedly, exploding undead heads with each shot. But there were more roamers than bullets and the barrel shot out of the automatic, empty. That was already his spare clip. Pocketing the gun, he pulled his knife from its scabbard and sliced through another head or two. Their numbers never seemed to decrease and he knew he was screwed. As much as he hated it, he needed help.
'The bag. Where's.. the car!' Eric made a mad dash through a phalanx of grabby decaying arms. In one motion, he snagged his pack off the driver seat via the door he had thankfully left open before neatly leaping up onto the roof. Although the car was an ugly beast, it was just wide enough to keep him temporarily beyond the reach of the many gooey reaching hands.
Taking advantage of the brief moment it would take the roamers to realize they needed to climb the POS to get at him, Eric pulled the flare gun from his bag. He shot the bright hot flare upward into the sky and jumped down off the car. Scrambling sideways like a crab, he effortlessly scooted under the car on his back. Sometimes it paid to be genetically slender.
Panting harshly from the tenuous safety of the exact center beneath the car, Eric assessed his enemy. These things were dead, not stupid. He knew that the basic animal instinct to feed would soon let them figure out why they couldn't get at the snowy white candy they so craved. He could almost hear the dull click of the mass undead light bulb as the roamers started violently pushing against the car.
There weren't enough of them to overcome the inertia created by the set brakes. Mad for food, the things kept mindlessly trying to get at the juicy center of this rusty sucker pop by rolling the machine the inch and a half that physics allowed. Pretty soon they would figure out that they weren't going to get at the fleshy nut underneath by pushing the car out of the way. That they would have to turn it over and there were plenty of them for that. Luckily even primal instinct took a while to chug its way through undead nervous systems.
Eric had a reflex driven death grip on the hilt of his knife. He quickly drew the razor sharp old school bayonet with the extended blade from the scabbard on his belt. He repositioned himself to slash out a few ankles catching a head or two on their way down. Adjusting himself to slice at them better, his legs moved involuntarily for counter-balance and his left ankle fell into an awkward and vulnerable position behind the left rear tire. The roamers blindly stumbled onto incapacitating Eric on the next roll back when they unceremoniously rolled the tire over his ankle.
The pain was beyond imagination, but Eric clamped his lips tightly cutting off any sound that would scream “wounded prey”. He stayed as far in the center of the rust-omatic cruiser as he could and tore at the earth around him with his hands. He had lost track of his knife. Fortunately this batch of roamers weren't the sharpest machetes in the head and they didn't try to flip the car after all and his cover was secure. Then, of course, the dead things proved that their instincts were still sharp enough to reach under the machine for him instead.
Face to face with rotting feral corpses, Eric fished the empty Baretta out of his pocket and started hammering heads in with the butt of the gun. Suddenly, he heard gun fire. A lot of it. He also thought he heard the thwipping of arrow bolts. The roamers piled up around the car, unmoving and finally completely dead, extra dead, most sincerely dead.
He slid out from under the car and rambled a panicky adrenaline fueled cascade of words, "Aaron! Thank God. I'm sorry. I had to. Thought I was... yeow!" A rough greasy hand unceremoniously grabbed him by the arm and aggressively pulled him the rest of the way out into the night.
He dangled there, feet not quite touching the ground while he stared down into the angry face of a muscular, greasy, scary guy with the most amazing eyes. 'Cut it out! This isn't a bar.'
He looked around into several other mean and suspicious faces; male, female, younger, older. Each one scourged half dead and hollowed out by fear, anger and loss, but human still.
'Who the... ?'
He felt the hold on his arm tighten and remembered that he should be paying attention to his predicament.
'Shit!.' He swallowed audibly before smiling with all his teeth, his pale wide lips pulled all the way up to the hinges of his jaw. He said, in his brightest and most charming voice, "OK. So, not Aaron."
His thoughts raced behind his sweating forehead, 'What now, genius?'
Fudge brown eyes darting around the immediate area, he caught site of the RV. The Recruitmobile!
'The group from the barn, of course. Uh, duh.' He was relieved to finally recognize them through his blinding, throbbing pain. Known threats are better than unknown ones any day.
His brows tightened suddenly. The RV was there alright, but the car was nowhere in sight. The car with Aaron in the back seat, arms bound behind him like a co-ed in a squad car at Mardi Gras. The car that also carried the dangerously unpredictable paranoid caveman, Rick.
"Where's Aaron!?“, Eric demanded, his face set hard in suspicion and distrust. His heart beat visibly against his slender chest.
"Don't know. Think mebbe you're gonna tell us." Scruffy blue eyes drawled lethally at him.
"I don't know!” he spat in irritated frustration.
“Why the hell do you think I asked?!” Angry and in a panic over Aaron, Eric forgot himself and snarled, “They were following you!”
That little outburst got him wrenched higher up off the ground. His shoulder burned as the additional force painfully stretched the ligaments around the fulcrum of his captivity. It felt like he was fast on his way toward a nasty dislocation.
He subdued the wordless grimace on his face and forced himself to calm down. Lightening his expression, he tried falling back on the good manners his parents had tattooed onto his brain.
“Uh. Sooo. Hi. I'm Eric. You're probably wondering..." the “nice” was working and Greasy Blue Eyes loosened his grip. Eric put his full weight on his feet for the first time since being out from under the car. He nearly threw up from pain as he crumpled to the ground little a used paper coffee cup before Oily Blue savagely pulled him back up off the ground to dandle awkwardly. Then, amazingly, the man lowered Eric surprisingly gently until he just touched the earth. Brows knit, Eric thought to himself, 'This is one confusing guy. I wonder what's going on in that head?'
Balancing all his weight on his good leg he fixed an agonized smile onto his sweating face. Breathing hard but quiet he saw his human arm vice tick a nod of acknowledgement. Although the thin ginger looked like a screamer, to his credit he hadn't once cried out from the pain in anything above a whisper. You could tell he wanted to, but he knew better than to scream the walker dinner bell. Bluey apparently approved.
A bold young brunette, still girl-next-door-cute in the hygiene-free zone of the Apocalypse, stepped forward. Panic draining, Eric remembered her as the one named Maggie. She shifted her weight onto her hip and shot Muscle Boy an annoyed look. "Jeez Daryl. He's obviously hurt."
"So's everybody", Daryl shot back in an oddly sweet gravely voice that was dispassionate but not cruel.
With a huff, she added, “At least lemme check him.”