Page 36 of Before Their After

The trees that lined the highway were dying. Teardrops of frost hung from their branches. Glass from the shattered windows of abandoned cars crunched under his boots as he passed me. Here we were, St. Cloud. This was our end goal. So why didn’t the ease of comfort overwhelm me as I stood before a sign telling us where to go?

“You go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

Tiago halted up ahead, a tease of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. It was the best he could do since Dahlia. Since Evander. “If I listened to every lie that came out of your mouth, we would have never become friends.”

“Who said we’re friends?” I asked, still not moving from where I’d come to a stop.

The pink lining the sky was misleading. A beautiful ending to a day filled with darkness. It felt like we took turns being the strong one, trying to keep the other going. Today was his turn.It had been mine the last week. I just couldn’t quite bring myself to care. Without Evander, I wasn’t sure what the hell I was doing this for. Tiago was strong. He didn’t need me to survive.

That wasn’t what friendship was. He was the first friend I’d ever had, but had taught me a lot during our time on the road. Friendship wasn’t built on need—it was built on want. Iwantedto be there for him. Wanted to make sure he would be okay. So I’d followed him to the only place we knew to go.

“If you want to be more than that, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to buy me dinner first.” He swooped in behind me, pushing on the back of the head and over toward the clear path on the road. “This is it. A new start.” Hope glistened in his eyes for the first time in months.

“Doesn’t seem like much,” I grumbled honestly. We needed to tamper our expectations, keep them realistic.

He sighed, irritated at the consistent negativity I’d been feeding into the ‘universe.’ The whole manifestation kick he was on was starting to get on my damn nerves. Where had hoping for food or shelter gotten us lately?

“Enough, Alexi. It’s getting colder, and it does not appear that it’s going to warm up anytime soon.” Tiago motioned to the barren tundra leading to the city. “Look around. It’s supposed to be nearing spring. Do you see anything other than trees? Any blooms,animals? We need food, a roof over our heads. Some sort of consistency. This could be the last stop for us. Don’t make me go in alone, man. Me and you. We’re in this together.”

I glanced toward my friend. He was right—we had nothing to lose but our lives. After the losses we suffered, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to either of us. Tiago had warmed up to me early on. It was easy for him to share the details of his personal life. Our first night together, the phone lines had cut on for a moment.

The raw, agonizing, pain filled yell that had escaped him when he realized his brother was gone was so familiar, yet foreign to me. I hadn’t ever felt that strongly about the death of a loved one. Even with my mother, her loss stung, sure, but she’d never really been a mother to me. It wasn’t until Evander until I’d recognized it for what it was; your soul shattering. Breaking. Tearing a wound irreparably deep.

What I’d come to appreciate about Tiago was his will to go on. He was relentless in his decision to keep going, to keep moving forward. Though he posed it as if he was doing me a favor, I knew when it came down to it, he himself wanted to survive. He wanted to live, no matter how much the guilt haunted him. It was a tough thing to process. But I feared that if he lost one more person, he may not see things that way anymore. As any good friend would, I followed him through the tangled maze of cars toward the new beginning he was hoping for.

We heard her first. The eerie sound of a woman singing. Her voice ricocheted off metal sculptures stacked with sharp objects meant to impale. She danced around the traps, her focus on angling glass near the base to reflect the sun.

The woman halted in her steps and pulled out a Walkman. Ducking behind the sculpture closest to us, our breathing hitched as we kept watch, scoping out the situation. There was no one else around. The walls up ahead were incomplete in most areas. Though a metal slab of a gate blocked the main road in, everything beyond it was absent of life. Her singing continued as we shifted back onto the path inside.

She tensed the moment she sensed our approach. Like idiots, we’d closed in on her unarmed. The consequences came quick as she drew her weapon from her holster in the blink of an eye. Blonde hair surrounded her pointed face resembling a goldenhalo. Ice-blue eyes met mine, creasing at the sides from her wicked grin.

“Woah,” Tiago said, taking a slow step forward with his arms out in front of him. “We aren’t zombies, relax.”

With all our layers, who knew what the fuck she saw us as. The only thing you could make out for certain was a small sliver of our faces. I’d stopped being able to feel my legs fifty miles and one week ago.

Her laugh was chirped, not quite a giggle yet sinister all the same. “I know.” She holstered her gun, tossing her hair back over her shoulders.

Tiago took a slow, deliberate look at our surroundings, his eyes finally settling on the woman. She was reading him too. The way her gaze lingered on every detail in an attempt to decode him. His eyes flickered over her face, narrowing at the slight tension in her shoulders.

“¿Qué te pasa?” I asked, wondering if he saw something that I did not.

“Este lugar,” he mumbled, his hands motioning to the deserted landscape. “Está mal. Algo no anda bien.”

Sure, it wasn’t what I expected of the so-called promise land we’d heard about on the road, but maybe it was just a front to keep those not wanted away. “¿Te gustaría explicar más?”

“Where is everyone?” Tiago asked her, cutting to the chase.

She shrugged, her pretty eyes wavered over to me, the whites around her iris slightly unsettling even at a distance. “Not here, obviously.”

“Look around, Alexiares,” Tiago tried to reason with me. “Debería haber gente. Todo parece abandonado.”

We’d kept to ourselves for the most part, but from what I’d seen during my time with my friend, hesitancy to accept a new face was out of character. The fear of attachment preventing him from seeing things clearly. This place wasn’t about sceniclandscapes or the buzz of society, it was about survival. For what purpose, hell if I knew. The only thing that I was certain of was that Tiago was set on living, and St. Cloud was the opportunity for him to do so.

“Si ella está aquí sola, supongo que es más seguro que cualquier otro lugar en el que estemos solos,” I said, seeing the logic in what he wanted to assume as a threat.

An objectively beautiful woman that felt safe enough to be alone meant there was little to fear. That was good, wasn’t it? Trying to read into the finer details had become a habit for the two of us. Missing those smaller signs had only led to life ending consequences before, but maybe there was a point when too much skepticism could produce the same damning results.

Tiago shook his head, not seeing things the same way. “Yes. Ella está aquí sola, ella es la amenaza.”

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