“Here’s how it is going to be. I’ll ask you questions and you answer,” Jessica took a chair and placed it in front of her, sitting down and stared at the other woman until she felt uncomfortable, “Tell me your name.”

“Let me go. Pl-please. Don’t hurt me. I didn’t do anything to you...!”

“Drop the bloody act, will you!?” Jessica boomed at her, “Don’t act like you’re all petrified. I can see it in your eyes that you’re seasoned. Now, let’s stop wasting each other’s time.”

“What- what do you want from me…?”

“Let’s start with your name.”

 “T-Tiffany.”

“Where are you from!?”

“Look please just let me go! Oh God…I don’t know you people! Please! Why are you doing this!?” she started ing her tied up arms hoping to squiggle free, “Let me go!”

“Great job, sis. Now we won’t be able to get anything from her,” Krystal rolled her eyes.

“Can I have a moment with her?” Jessica gritted her teeth with irritation, looking back at her younger sister, “Alone.”

Krystal glared at Jessica before strutting off without another word. As she left, the elder sister returned her gaze towards Tiffany. Jessica tried to decipher as to whether this woman was a threat to the three of them or otherwise. Nevertheless, she was not convinced of Tiffany’s aghasted response. There was something off about this woman that lured her naïve younger sister into protecting, exploiting her inexperienced but pure intent.

Jessica could feel it in her gut.

“What were you doing at the shop? What happened to you there?”

She only got stutters, squabbles and hyperventilation as a response.

This ticked her off.

Jessica drew her pistol and put it on her lap.

“I will not repeat again.”

“Are- are you going to kill me…? Please, no!”

“You deserve an Oscar for your acting, lady,” Jessica sneered, “No, I’ll pop one in your kneecap and you’ll never walk again. By that time, you won’t have to pretend to be this afraid.”

Somehow, the weapon seemed to knock some sense into Tiffany.

She slowly calmed down.

“My people will find me. If you hurt me, they will not let you off,” her tone altered drastically.

“Your people abandoned you at the shop, didn’t they? You would have died there if my sister had not found you.”

“I was on a supply run alone.”

“Where are you from!?”

“I won’t give my people up. I won’t, especially to brutes like you. Never.”

“So, your true colours finally flourished,” Jessica gave a sinister smile, “Finally.”

“You can kill me if you want, but if you do, you already sealed your fate. They will hunt you down.”

“Normally, the person being tied up doesn’t make threats.”

“I’m not threatening you. I’m just stating the truth. Torture me all you want, you’ll get nothing from me.”

“Then, we have no reason to keep you around,” Jessica stood up.

“You’ll let me go?”

“Oh we will, but I do not think you’ll like it.”

***

“Let’s figure out a place to dump her.”

“What are you crazy!? You’ll kill her! She won’t stand a chance!”

“Well I hope so. You just don’t get it, do you, sis? If we keep her, she is another mouth to feed. We let her go, she could wander back to whichever pit she came from, and the next thing we know, her goddamned crazy friends want our heads. I should just shoot her, right here, right now. I am sparing her the brutality.”

“And what you are doing is less brutal!? Condemning someone to their deaths!?”

Jessica held her sister’s shoulders tightly and deadlocked her eyes into the younger sibling’s.

“Listen to me carefully. I am protecting us. Maybe one day you’ll grow out of your shell of immaturity and finally learn. You should never have brought her back!”

Krystal pushed her sister’s hands away.

“You’re a murderer,” Krystal cursed.

“Think of me as you will. I don’t care!” she rebounded, “The decision has been made. During our next journey, we’ll dump her somewhere far off and hope she doesn’t reunite with her gang and hunt us down. Now get some rest. I’ll lookout with Yuri.”

Krystal stepped into the caravan and slammed the door behind her. This was the second time the door was slammed in Jessica’s face and her patience was stretched paper thin. She was an inch away from wrestling her sister to the ground. Jessica prayed silently that no walkers were attracted to the sound of Krystal’s obtuse and repeated slams. She never thought out her actions before she did them. She was just too impulsive.

Jessica climbed up to the roof of the caravan and joined Yuri in the lookout for the night. They were parked at an abandoned gas station further south from where they were yesterday. They parked in the shelter as it was drizzling out there. Soft platters of rain drops turned the air moist and damp, heavy too.

Even through the years, Jessica could smell a tinge of gasoline in the air. The station’s mini mart was ransacked through with nothing left to loot, but wads of useless cash and junk. Every time they went through a store, Jessica couldn’t help but reminiscing what it was like pre-Enigma. The nostalgia was welcoming and hurting. Sometimes, she would indulge so deep that she could apparitions of the people from before, like a projector; ghosts of the past.

“You okay?” Yuri asked, sipping her juice.

“What would you have me do?”

“You’re the leader for a reason. I’d stand by my leader, otherwise it’d be mutiny, wouldn’t it?”

“Well, your leader is at a loss right now.”

“We could extract information from this Tiffany. It could be of value.”

“She’s not going to tell us anything without torture. I can see that in her eyes, and I’m not going to resort to torture. There would be no turning back if I did, Yuri.”

“But you’d leave her to die?”

“I’m leaving her with a fighting chance. It’s not like I’m going to leave her helpless. I’m just not gonna kill her.”

“Indirectly then.”

“She’s experienced, Yuri. I can tell. People like her, they are not going to rat out their own tribe.”

“Maybe not to you, Jessica.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When one headstrong meets another, neither will budge,” Yuri shrugged, “Obviously she’s not going to tell you anything.”

“You’re suggesting Krystal to do the job of interrogating?”

“Interviewing. Interrogating is a strong word and tends to get people all rigid. Ever tried extracting information from a brick wall?”

“Tiffany’s very tricky… if that’s even her real name. I’m just apprehending that she’d manipulate Krystal easily. It won’t do her any good.”

“You have to stop protecting her or she would never come out of her shell. It’s Parenting 101.”

“I’m her elder sister…”

“…acting like her mother,” Yuri stated firmly.

Jessica took a bottle of beer and popped the cap off. She took a sip and stared at the sun setting at the west. Daylight was almost over. That meant that they had to keep their guard up. It wasn’t exactly paving a way for a worriless good night’s sleep.

“You want my two-cents, Jessica? Let Krystal talk to this Tiffany before you toss her out like garbage from a moving car,” Yuri sipped her juice bottle dry and tossed it on the road, “I gotta take a dump.”

“There should be washroom at the back of the convenience store. Or you could do it in the bushes over there.”

“I’ll do it in the washroom,” she shook her head, “I can feel it’s a stinky one.”

Yuri jumped off the caravan and landed on the road silently. She peeked into the caravan and saw Krystal sleeping inside. The poor girl must be exhausted, probably from all the arguing. Tiffany was still bound to her chair but even she seemed to be asleep as well. It was a quiet, cold and rainy night after all. Sleep was all there was to it.

Yuri paced slowly as she made her way around the store, walking past the diesel kiosk and the air-pumping station. A decade without maintenance had really worn them down. The caravan was not exactly economical on the petrol either. The trick was just to accelerate a little and shift the gear back to neutral, letting it glide along. She had already checked and there was not a single drop of petrol left in any of the kiosks. Either it had been looted dry or a decade of disuse had dried it all up. The only way was to siphon out petrol from abandoned cars. At least the air-pumping station still worked.

She arrived at the lavatories. The sun had already set and that casted a thick layer of darkness everywhere. She drew her flashlight as well as her meat cleaver.

It was creepy.

There was absolutely zero electricity so she was drowning in darkness as she approached the washroom, with only her flashlight to be her guidance. The door was also filthy; the white paint was heavily stained with a layer of dirt and mud, with green algae growing rampantly at the bottom corner from all the moisture.

The door opened with a soft creak and a loud smack against the wall. She took a bottle from the floor and shoved it beneath the door as a stopper. The moonlight gave a minimal illumination inside. The first thing that struck Yuri was the horrible stench. It smelt not only like rotten , but mixed that with the stench of a corpse.

There were three sinks to her right and three stalls ahead to match. The lavatory was of course, obscene. Ten years without being cleaned, no words were needed to describe it. Every step she took, she could hear the mushy footsteps her sneakers made against the moist, mouldy floor. She used her flashlight and knocked against the wall loudly, but it was clear. There were no walkers.

The first and second stalls were open but the third stall was locked shut from the inside. That was where the profound stench was coming from. What the hell was in here?

“Let it go, Yuri… let it go,” she tried to convince herself.

She walked to the second stall and stopped.

“Great,” she said before walking back to the locked stall and kicked it open.

She instantly regretted it.

There was a corpse of a woman with long hair, half rotten and infested with maggots, sitting on the toilet bowl. There was a splurge of blood on the wall behind the corpse, spurted upwards. The blood had completely dried up, becoming nothing more than old brownish-black splash against the dirty white tiles. From the decomposition, she was here for years. She must have shot herself in the head; the final act of desperation. She wasn’t wearing any pants or underwear, but when Yuri shone her flashlight down there, she found an even more shocking truth.

“Is that… an umbilical cord?” she monologued, stepping closer.

It was.

Her eyes traced the umbilical cord from within the corpse’s unmentionables all the way downwards into the toilet bowl itself, where she saw something floating inside.

It was a baby.

“Oh Jesus…” Yuri cringed in disgust, “…”

The newborn baby was bloated and soggy from being submerged in dirt water for years. It had soaked up so much water into its bodily tissues that it became completely deformed like a human puffer fish; the limbs were so swollen that even the fingers or toes looked like stumps. The face became so puffy that it looked like it was going to explode. There were some maggots busy eating away the baby’s lips, ever so slowly. They were already through with the baby’s cheeks until there was nothing left but two massive gaping holes, revealing the gums and tongue beneath. It was an extremely grotesque sight.

Was this a suicide?

Yuri scanned the bathroom stall but there was no gun in sight. She took a closer look at the door and saw a bullet hole penetrating the thin plastic door. She was shot. Maybe she asked someone to do it for her. Maybe she was just downright murdered during her childbirth. Yuri wanted out from here. The longer she stayed, the darker the truth that she uncovered.

“I hope you found peace wherever you are…”

***

“Krystal, Jess and I will go siphon some petrol nearby down south. You stay here on the lookout, alright?”

Krystal responded with a nod.

They took a couple of shotguns and machetes before they left.

It looked like two hours before sundown. Today was exceptionally humid and warm. Something about the wind that blew from the west, where the ocean was, that brought the saltiness of the sea with it, together with the heat and moisture. Krystal would have killed to have a cold shower just about now. She couldn’t recall when was the last time she had a proper bath. They were still parked at the petrol station, but the irony was suffocating. Petrol stations were as about the driest place to scavenge for petrol. They didn’t have enough fuel left to transport them around to the next town. The ‘empty’ light was already flashing on the speedometer.

Krystal knew she was supposed to look out for any walker threats but she couldn’t fight the feeling inside of her. She was edgy and couldn’t sit still. She paced around at the roof of the caravan anxiously. She had to know more. With mild hesitation, she succumbed and entered the caravan.

“Shut up and don’t scream,” Krystal warned before she took off the handkerchief.

“Please. Please. I didn’t do anything to you guys. Please just don’t kill me.”

“Keep quiet and calm down. I am here to talk.”

Tiffany bit her lip, trying to calm down. Her breaths were still fast and unsteady. Her heart was racing. It was excruciating to tell if she was indeed acting just as Jessica suspected.

“Tiffany, isn’t it? I just want to talk.”

“I already told your friend.”

“She’s my sister.”

“I’m not going to betray my people. You can ki- kill me if you w-want…”

“We’re not murderers,” Krystal snapped back, “We’re not the people you should be afraid of.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Three. The three of us are like family.”

“I see…”

“Look, we need an anchor in our lives. I know we do. If you came from a town or a community or something, please, please tell us. I don’t know how long I can take it any longer to be alone in this world with just the three of us. We have not seen a human for very long. Please, I’m begging you.”

Tiffany stared into Krystal’s eyes, as if trying to comprehend her.

“Trust me,” Krystal reassured, “Please.”

“Novak Town.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m from Novak Town.”

“Wait. Say that again? Novak?”

“Yes… We’re a tight community. There are shops, church, homes. We do not accept other people in easily. We have a code.”

“We’re willing to work. We can be of use to you, Tiffany. Three of us have been surviving on our own for years. I’m sure our experience here can be put to good use in the community. Please give us a chance.”

“It’s hard for me to do that to people who tie me up to a chair.”

“Can I trust you?”

“I should be asking that. Let me go now and I’ll bring you to Novak. It’s easier if I bring one person than three. I’ll tell them that you saved my life and they’ll let you in under my vouch.”  

Krystal peered