Lying unconscious on the ground, having just fainted from the shock of such shifting emotions and realizations, Jackson dreamed.  He wouldn’t remember when he awoke, but that was okay; he didn’t need to.  He just needed to dream and escape for a couple hours.  He needed to be somewhere else for a moment.

He saw himself in his old apartment, shuffling through junk mail.  The stamps were gleaming and his bare feet were digging under the carpet childishly.  He leaned back into the couch and sighed, throwing aside the pile after finding nothing of interest.

Still aiming for higher degrees that his parents wanted him to get, college was difficult and reminded him of being back at home, where his life still wasn’t quite his own.  Even here, his apartment fees were paid by his parents, simply because they didn’t want for him to stay in a dorm, but didn’t want to keep him at home; at least they had understood that he couldn’t make the money to stay anywhere else.  His life had once been dictated by adults, but now by adults with degrees; like the ones he was going to have to get.

At least he did well; good grades and a positive personality got him farther than the pessimistic kids got.  He knew that to give up his cheerful attitude was to give up on being himself, but he wasn’t worried.  There wasn’t a thing that could do that to him.

A breakup he could get over; a bad exam he could come to surpass; he was set.  He was happy, despite the work overload.

The phone rang and he got up to get it, ruffling his messy locks and thinking about his upcoming paper.  He answered, tired and lethargic.  “Hello?”

“Hello.  Is this Jackson Wang?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Hi, I’m Mark; I’m calling because I’m bored and scared and I don’t know what else to do now that you’ve fainted.  Honestly, it’s surprising; I thought that if anyone collapsed in fear, it’d be me.”  He frowned.

“Excuse me?  Who are you?”

“Mark Tuan.”

“Do I know you?”

“Sure you do!  Don’t you remember me?  You’ve only been out cold for a minute; how could you forget me so fast?  I’m hurt, Jackson.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to hang up now.”

“You can’t hang up.”  Jackson frowned and shifted his weight from one side to the other uncomfortably.

“You’re obviously a stalker, or a telecomm marketer that’s gone too far, so leave me alone.”

“You can’t hang up.”

“And why not?”

“Because we’re not on the phone.”

Jackson paused, taken aback, and looked down to see a broken landline in his hand, its cord twisted off at the base.  The receiver was across the room, across the room of cracked vanity pieces and dusty, crusty furniture.  He didn’t understand what was happening, but he could hear a breathing coming from the walls, and it unnerved him.

“What did you do?  I’ll just use my cell phone to call the police if you blew up the other one.”

“You can’t do that either.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because, Jackson, there aren’t any police anymore.”

With that, he turned to face his window, and felt the wind knocked out of him.  Outside, the buildings were crumbling and the shops were rotting.  He could hear the cries of a billion people as they burned, and he stumbled to the sill only to lean heavily on the wall.

“When it’s over, I want to travel places, see the world.”  Jackson couldn’t tell where the voice was coming from.  Maybe the walls, maybe outside, maybe his head.  Regardless, it just kept talking.  “I want to be more adventurous.”

“Where are you!”

“I thought Paris might be a good place to start.  Then I’d try Greece.  Maybe China.  When I say I wanna travel, I mean everywhere.”

“What the is this!”

“Maybe when you’re awake, when we get closer, I’ll ask what you want to do.”

Jackson felt the loneliness creep into his heart and he spun around the room, found it destroyed, bloody, and lurched for the door.

“Once, I almost saved enough for a trip to Japan, but I got into a car crash and had to pay off all of it, ‘cause my parents were mad at me.  Now, the idea of my parents yelling at me seems stupid, being that I’m almost thirty, but still, I miss them.  They chose the worst time to go on vacation, I mean, the luck they had was terrible.  If they had stayed two more days, them and my siblings wouldn’t have been out of the country when the airlines shut down.”

Jackson yanked the door open only to flee from the oncoming horde of undead bodies.  He cried out, disbelief and pure terror coming up in his throat and spilling past his lips in a mumbled exhale of curses.  He looked for anything to protect him, but couldn’t find a single thing unbroken.  Then someone walked into the room, someone who he couldn’t recall ever meeting, but looked familiar nonetheless.  Then he spoke.

“I really want a grapefruit right now.”

Help me! Jackson screamed, and the other stepped forward, but shrugged before he did anything.  The monsters were walking past him like he was invisible.

“You have to say it out loud.  I can’t help you if you’re silent.”  It was then that Jackson realized he had only shouted in his head.  He opened his mouth to scream it again, for real, but the footsteps of the beasts approaching scared him into silence again.

“I had a girlfriend before this.  Her name was Madelyn.”  The mystery man went back to talking to both of them about stupid useless things, sounding sadder than before, while Jackson tried to work his mouth open to speak.  “She fell, a really long way down.”

MARK!

“Out loud,” the other clucked, mother-like.

“HELP ME MARK!”  Mark’s face lit up with his name, and he maneuvered in between the dead with a delicacy that didn’t seem natural, tapping each in the back of the head once, making them collapse at the slightest touch.

“All you had to do was ask,” he said, laying a hand on the other’s arm.  “Of course I’d help.”

“What is this?” Jackson huffed, shaking from top to bottom.  He fell into his couch again, holding a palm to his forehead.  He was scared, no, terrified.  He could hear more coming from outside, and rushed to slam the door shut, sliding to the floor when he did and burying his face into his knees.  The stained rug beneath him scratched his feet.

A gentle hand came to rest on his head, fingers ruffling his hair, and Jackson looked up to see Mark smiling, feel his hand running down to his cheek and patting it softly.  “You’re gonna be okay.”  Jackson knew that tears were running down his face, but he couldn’t feel them.

“What is this?” he whispered, biting his lips to stop the sniffling.  Mark was kind as ever, and pulled him to his feet slowly, tucking him against him when he stood, and whispering back as he embraced him.

“This is what’s left, Jackson.”  Outside the wind was whistling, but inside, the silence engulfed them both.  “This is what we are now.”

“My name is Youngjae!  How are you?”  Both of them stared into the window, confused and speechless.

“What?” Jackson said, crossing his arms across his chest.  Mark squinted harder, as if he couldn’t believe that the man in front of them had just said something so unrelated and weird.

“My name’s Youngjae.  How are y-”

“No, I got that just fine.  I meant, what are you doing, singing and attracting attention?”  Youngjae smiled wide and leaned back, gesturing to the door.

“Twenty-seven bumblers behind that door, and here, in my pocket, one empty gun.  I’m pretty useless right about now.”

“Why didn’t you break the glass,” Mark asked, hands in his pockets and eyes occasionally looking back for signs of danger.  “There are plenty of desks in your room.”

“I tried that, but then some showed up outside, and like I said, I have no weapons, so I figured breaking the window was a death sentence anyways.  I decided to die in here, myself, instead of out there, as a bumbler.”

“Bumbler’s a really stupid name, you know,” Jackson interjected, a stony expression on his face in comparison to what he’d been wearing for the past handful of days.  Youngjae, though, didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah, well…  That’s what-”  He stopped mid-sentence and gasped, bringing a hand to his mouth.  “That’s what BamBam calls them!  Oh my God, BamBam’s waiting for me!”

With that utterance and the most vigorous flailing of arms either had ever seen, followed by a quick succession of frenzied, shouting Mark and Jackson came to learn of the existence of Bhuwakul, commonly called BamBam, and his unknown position somewhere up the highway.

“He said he was going to wait for me up by the old sawmill!  I was just going to come back and grab some things from the school, and he couldn’t go so I went and oh my god he’s still waiting for me!”  He grabbed his hair and Jackson couldn’t quite grasp the situation, or the man in it.  Mark, however, was the one to speak up first.

“Why couldn’t he come along?”  Youngjae looked up like a sick puppy, eyes wide and tearful and lip quivering.  He spoke with a cracked, urgent tone.

“Because he’s sick; he’s like, really sick.  I barely got him into the sawmill before he collapsed.”  He sniffled, the sound nearly muted by the barrier in between them.  “I thought there might be something in the school nurse’s office, but I never got the chance to get in before this happened.”

“How did you forget about him?” Jackson asked, and got a droopy, guilty frown for an answer.

“I just, I tried to let go of things while accepting the fact that I was going to die.  I guess I didn’t want to dwell on him, how he was gonna die if I didn’t get him medicine.  I got so wrapped up in letting go, and the bumblers distracted me day in and day out, and then you two show up and I’m saved, and I just… didn’t think about it…”  He wiped his eyes dry.  “But you guys are gonna help me out, and we’re gonna go get BamBam!”  Mark looked over and Jackson could see a certain pleading look, like he was asking for permission, asking to help Youngjae, asking to keep Youngjae, like a child who just found a stray.

“How long have you been in there?” he asked, worried that the ‘day in and day out’ wasn’t an exaggeration.

“Six days.”  Ouch…

“How much food do you have?”

“I finished my cans four days ago, and tipped over my water bottle on accident two days ago.  I’m really hungry right now, and I think that at this point I’m about ready to drink my own pi...”

Jackson held his tongue and glanced at the trapped boy, who was already gathering together his supplies and humming all the while after he’d explained just how desperate he was.  He already assumed they were taking him, and Jackson got the impression that it had something to do with the fact that he seemed too nice, too positive to envision them doing anything else.  In the apocalypse, though, not everyone was nice.

But Mark was, and Jackson was trying to be, and he stepped closer to his friend to grab the gun from his waist, and stepped back from the window.  He dragged Mark with him, and the two eventually stood ten yards away, Youngjae ducking beneath a desk, hugging his backpack close.

“Try to aim higher than my face!” he screamed, and Jackson could feel Mark shift behind him, turning around to look for any rotters.  God, Youngjae was loud.

Youngjae was huddled close to the floor, tucking his head in his arms and his pack underneath him.  He couldn’t believe his luck; two guys with a gun and a machete and some knives, both willing to help.  He couldn’t believe he was gonna make it outta this.

He couldn’t believe he forgot about BamBam, regardless of however short it had lasted.  What he hadn’t told them was that his partner had haunted him for days, and that he’d remembered him up ‘till the point that they showed up, at which point all he could think about was himself; how he was going to be set free.

Don’t worry BamBam, I got you.  I’m going to protect you this time.  Don’t worry.

“Don’t move!” someone shouted from outside, and he couldn’t tell whether it was the taller, softer-looking one (the one that resembled a gummy vampire with his sharp canines and pink smile) or the shorter, kind-looking one.  He liked the aura coming from the shorter one; it reminded him of a butterfly, cocooned up inside a shell, breaking free at last.  He could see the good in its wings.

He’d always been able to see the good in people, and the bad, but the bad in these two was trailing behind, being out of them, and Youngjae liked that; maybe because he felt like his own bad had finally been drained out after so long, and he knew just how good it felt.

BamBam was working his way toward that as well, despite his tendency to keep everything in, everything away from everybody else, even Youngjae.  It’d taken a while for him to be able to open up about himself, but Youngjae had been patient, and this was how he repaid his partner, by forgetting him.

How terrible of a person did that make him?

BANG!  CRACK!

He jumped and hit his head on the underbelly of the desk as Butterfly shot the first window into oblivion.  The bullet hit the bulletin board hard and papers went flying.  The bumblers behind the door raged and he scrambled to crawl out from under the desk and out the window, careful to avoid the glass.

The moment he stepped onto grass, he felt his knees wobble; in the excitement he’d been able to momentarily overlook his intense thirst and ravenous hunger, but now that he was out and free, it came again in waves of abdominal cramps.  Crazy as it sounded, he could smell the food in Gummy Vampire’s pack, and lurched forward unintentionally.

He caught himself by grabbing the other’s shoulders, and could see Butterfly frowning in the corner of his eye.  Gummy Vampire, however, gave him a kind, nervous grin before using one arm to support him and using the other to dig a yogurt granola bar out of his pocket.

Youngjae tried to restrain his fingers from snatching it away immediately, tried to be polite, but all he managed was a twitching nab, an apologetic look directed at Gummy, and the willpower to unwrap the bar before stuffing the entire thing in his mouth.

It was stale and hard and possibly the best-tasting hunk of old granola he’d ever eaten.

It was gone in moments and before he could say thanks and pretend that it was enough, he felt a bottle being forced into his hand, and looked up to see Butterfly try and smile, only to fail and glance away, to Vamp.

Youngjae chugged that water like it was all he was ever gonna get, downed a second bar, and felt better with his stomach being somewhat fuller.  He stuffed the canteen into his backpack side pocket and clapped hands that shook from delight and nourishment.

“Now we head for the sawmill.  There’s no way we’re gonna get into that nurse’s office, but there’s gotta be something we’ll pass after we get BamBam and keep on going towards Raven’s Nest.”  Their heads turned at once, and he raised his eyebrows, suddenly feeling bare without anything to defend himself.

“What’s Raven’s Nest?” Gummy Vampire asked softly, like he seemed to always speak.  Butterfly also looked curious, but more suspicious if anything.  Youngjae didn’t really want to waste time talking about the settlement up the highway, so he began to walk and he talked, shakily at first but gaining confidence in his footsteps.

“It’s a compound that’s about two-three weeks away on foot; we were headed for it when he got sick and I had to backtrack.  It’s supposed to have high walls and a farm plot somewhere inside; wells, houses, armory, a hospital.  It’s rumored to have everything.”  He looked back to see the two hurrying to catch up to him, disbelief across their faces.  “I even heard they’ve got a weekly movie night, where they set up a big projector every Friday and watch an old tape.”

“Wait, the compound up seventeen?  That one?” Butterfly asked, jogging into place by Youngjae’s side, soon followed by Gummy Vampire.  Youngjae nodded and continued at a faster pace, feeling anxious to get to BamBam; at least the mill wasn’t more than ten minutes away.  “We’re going to try and start over with humanity, you know?  Try something new.  Drifting around doesn’t work in anyone’s favor anymore.”  He glanced to the both of them, taking note of the bumbler behind them and calculating whether it was close enough to prove worthy of taking out.  “You guys don’t have to stick with us after we get back on track.”  He decided it wasn’t.

“We’re actually going the same way,” Butterfly mentioned, and Youngjae felt a surge of something good in his chest.  “We’re actually going to the same compound.”

“That’s great!  You guys can help me find some medicine then, ‘cause I didn’t get back in that school.”  He frowned momentarily.  “Well, actually, I did have to deal with some , I guess.”  Both Gummy and Butterfly chuckled; he felt accomplished.  He felt like the two were gonna be a good addition to his duo, once he got everything back together.

He felt worried as they approached the mill, knowing that he had made sure to lock the door behind him when he left, lest anyone, anything, pose a threat to BamBam.  The double doors were wide open.

“BamBam?” he called nervously, sprinting ahead and hearing the footsteps of the pair behind him, trying to keep up.  If he had been paying attention to their voices, he’d have been able to hear them exchange tiny whispers under each other’s breath.  But he wasn’t really paying attention; not to them anyways; not as he stepped into the room.

Because the bloody blots and blemishes freckling the floor had his full attention clutched in its bruised fist.

Oooooo....  Am I sorry?  I don't really think so.  Should I be sorry?  I guess the only way I'll know is if all y'all readers comment...

:)