Fic: after, part one.
After (1/2)
MCR, Frank/Gerard, AU. R for some sex, lots of cursing, and the end of the world. [Feedback and concrit appreciated.]
12 months
He finds pebbles. A bullet casing, or two, or fifteen, depending on the spot he's searching. This time there's a quarter, a twenty-dollar bill, and two bullets. He skips the quarter out on the muddy river, holds the bill up in the sluggish wind and lets it blow away. He leaves the bullets behind.
He shuffles over on his knees, past the half-circle his hands have traced in the dirt, and bends down again.
He's been at it for a while now, maybe two hours. His palms are black with dirt. Before, he thinks, before he wouldn't have wanted to do this, he would have gotten bored. But after, there wasn't anything else to do. Scavenging is his job now. It's the thing he does to earn his keep.
No bullets, no money. A small pebble shaped like a kidney bean that he rolls between his hands and drops. He shuffles over.
His biology teacher used to take them out for trips to this river, before. On the bus, the girls in the back giggled with their heads tilted together, and the brown plastic bus seats squeaked whenever anyone moved. Cool air blew through the few windows that would open. Ms. Reed moved down the aisle often enough that no one bothered him; he could leave his headphones on and think about being a rockstar.
At the river they knelt at the edge, dipping test tubes down and bringing them dripping back up. "Don't fall in, Frank," Ms. Reed always said, nudging his foot with hers, a joke from their first trip. She smiled, every time. The light passed golden through her hair and through her plain mud-streaked dress, outlining her legs through the fabric. He'd had such a crush on her.
Ms. Reed is dead.
Nothing but pebbles. He shuffles over, sweeps out his hands. One bullet, a cheap necklace (half a heart: be-/fri-/for-), and something with a sharp edge. He wipes cautiously at the dirt that covers it, gets his fingernails under a dull side, and pries it up. He can’t believe what he sees, at first. It’s a kitchen knife, short but still sharp, the black plastic handle scratched but still intact. He grins and sits back on his heels. There are so many things he can do. Even open cans, maybe. The thought sends a stupid thrill through him. He giggles, then slaps a hand over his mouth and glances around. There's no one to hear him, though. The trees are still. He looks back at the knife.
He'd been using a pair of scissors, but one blade had snapped from going through metal too many times, and the other half he'd left buried in that guy's thigh back in Belleville. A knife is better than scissors, anyway. He stares at it, smiling, and then tucks it between his belt and his waistband.
There's a tree in his path, so he gets to his feet, shucks off his pack and scratches his back against it, grunting in satisfaction. It's the same deep-seated itch he's had for weeks, maybe months. The scratching doesn't seem to help, but it feels so good that he can't bring himself to resist the urge. A scab catches on the rough bark and rips off; he can feel blood spreading over his t-shirt. He bares his teeth, but he stops.
He's just gotten himself back down onto his knees when he hears a noise overhead, leaves against leaves. He looks up sharply and scans the branches above him. It could be a storm; it could be a warning. He keeps his eyes on the branches overhead for a long moment, then bends back down to sweep his hands over the dirt.
Two bullets, a shred of fabric.
"Hey."
"Fuck!" Frank scrambles back into a crouch and puts his hand on the knife. His heart goes off-tempo, speeding past his breath.
"Hey, hey," the voice repeats, and Frank follows it up. There's a boy perched in the next tree over, feet steady on a branch, one hand keeping him anchored. He looks wild. An untamed mane of curls fans out around his face. "It's cool, okay?"
"What the fuck," Frank spits. He can't outfight this guy. He can maybe outrun him. If he moves diagonally right, he'll gain about three seconds. Maybe five. Frank shifts his weight onto his toes.
"Dude, I'm not--" the guy says, and Frank makes his move. He thinks that maybe the guy has the drop on him, when his thighs tense and the branch shakes, but Frank speeds up and sprints past him; he pumps his arms, drives his toes down into the ground, breathes with his footfalls. He looks back every five steps, then every ten, then every fifteen. His breath comes hard. He spits without breaking stride.
When he sees a low concrete building, Frank slows down. He would usually look for way in that's sheltered by trees, but now even that seems unsafe. He cuts straight up the front walkway instead.
Frank stumbles in the courtyard of the building and nearly falls, fighting the drag of his breath in his chest. He drops into a squat, coughs thick white spittle onto the concrete. Something clatters against the floor inside the building, and he crawls into the shadow of a doorway to hide.
A tiny choked noise leaks from his mouth, the sound his lungs make when they won't let go. He wants to panic. He wants to cry, but he won't. He can't. He tips his head back against the door instead, puts his arms over his head, and tries to wheeze as quietly as he can. He thinks about chord progressions from "TV Party" and stares at the tattered flag drooping against the flagpole. By the time he reaches "we got nothing better to do" (F C Bb - fuck, what was it. G? yeah - G F G) he's better, enough that he can escape the danger of the open courtyard.
The glass in the front doors is smashed out, and the doorframes hang drunkenly on their hinges, but Frank knows better than to take an entrance that a big guy can use. He goes around the outside, moving along the wall until he finds a busted window. He finds a rock nearby and tosses it through. It skitters across the linoleum and bangs into something inside, loud in the quiet. When no one comes to investigate, he throws in his pack and boosts himself in after it.
The room is a science classroom, full of heavy, black-topped tables with silver spigots for long-dead gas lines. There's a desk at the front that's been overturned, but the bottoms of the lab tables are merged with the floor, and it looks like they've already survived a fire. Frank drags his pack to the desk in the corner farthest from the door, to hide in the space underneath.
Once he's safely under the desk, Frank curls up on the floor with his face on his pack. He thinks about chord progressions F C Bb G F G, about how lucky he is to be here. Then he thinks mom. He mouths the word against the rough fabric of his pack; he doesn't even trust himself to breathe it out. Mom. Mom. His breath shortens again. His fingers tremble.
His eyes are dry.
7 days
Shaun gives him a cup of warm, flat orange soda. A bubble floats up when he sets the cup on the table.
"They're gone," Frank says. "Everyone."
Shaun grunts his agreement. He tips his chair back to balance on two legs, looking out the back door. Frank looks over his shoulder, out the kitchen window.
There are gunshots in the distance. Neither of them move. No sirens follow.
12 months
Frank dozes for a while, then sits up and digs through his bag for food. He opens the jar of pickles he's been saving and slowly eats five of them. He gets out his vitamins, shakes the bottle to hear how much he has left, and then fishes one out. He needs to find more.
He needs:
vitamins
water
boots
socks
thread
a needle
storage
scissors
a can opener
a crowbar
a saw
clothes
a toothbrush
plastic bags
soap
antibiotic cream
a guitar
more paper
more pens
mom--
He unscrews the top of the jar, eats another pickle, and drinks some of the brine. He screws the lid back on and tucks the jar and the vitamins back in his bag.
He needs:
to find water
to avoid the boy in the tree
to keep the knife for as long as he can.
Everything else will come, or it won't.
Eventually Frank ducks his head out from underneath the table, peers around the room, and crawls out. He puts his pack on again and tightens the straps. His back still itches, a moldy feeling that crawls across his skin. He scratches his neck.
Frank spends the rest of the day poking cautiously around the school, digging through cupboards and closets. Broken glass crackles and splinters under his feet. Papers shift restlessly around on the floor when he walks into a room. Solid work, Dwayne! B+, he reads on one paper, loopy red cursive on the top of a carefully printed worksheet. Jessica refuses to do her homework, which undermines her obvious potential as a student. Please contact me to schedule a conference.
Dwayne is dead. Jessica is dead.
Frank nudges the papers with his toe, pushing them towards one corner, and walks over to the teacher's desk at the front of the room. The side drawers pull out easily, and in the third one down he discovers a wealth of things, post-its, paperclips, pencils. He grabs fistfuls of the stuff, making it look messy, and then puts what he's taken into his pack. His pack is neat and organized, and the post-its fit perfectly. It calms him, how ordered they are, how near.
Right after it happened, Frank remembers chaos. The survivors roamed everywhere, mobbing the streets in some places, fighting and cursing. Everyone shouted over everyone else, claiming they had lost the most. They came out at night and looted enormous televisions and washer/dryer sets, when there was no electricity to run them. Everyone had a gun, or guns.
The guns didn't last long, though. Not like knives. Eventually everyone runs out of bullets.
Not that Frank was much better at first; he'd abandoned an electric guitar and a rifle at his house when he'd left. But he's survived the guns. Now he knows what's necessary.
There's barely any room in his pack when he's done, and he stares at a permanent marker for a long time before sighing and putting it back. He already has two.
There's a soft sound in the next room over, and Frank tucks himself under the desk and shoves his pack into the corner. Someone comes to the door, stands at the threshold, then moves on. Their shoes -- boots, heavy feet, Frank could outrun them -- scatter glass as they walk. Frank stays, watching the shadows on the blackboard stretch out, then crawls out and ducks his head into the hallway. The person is long gone, but their footsteps mark a trail through the debris on the floor. He minces along the clean spaces, goes back to the science classroom, slips in and shuts the door noiselessly. He'll sleep here tonight. It's a lucky place.
3 months 3 days
"Fuck this shit," John snarls, takes a left down the alley, and leaves.
They've been walking around Belleville for hours. There's protection in numbers, but it also means they can't make a damn decision. Frank just wants for everyone to agree on a place to squat.
John hops a chain link fence at the back of the alleyway. He doesn't look back. Frank shifts his weight.
Shaun finally pauses in his umpteenth repetition of we should just stay here to say "hey, what--" but then Kendra barrels on with her umpteenth repetition of we should totally take off for California, and Shaun turns back to respond.
Frank lights a cigarette and legs it after John.
12 months 1 day
The sun is hot on Frank's face. He stretches up towards it, curling his fingers around the vines that have twined around his hands.
Frank wakes up under the table, pack clutched to his chest. His mouth is sticky and dry. When he straightens his legs out from under the desk, they crack loudly, and he barely has to twist at all to crack his back. He rubs his shoulders against the corner of the desk, scratching the ever-present itch, then puts his shirt back on and scoots out from under the desk.
It looks like early morning outside; the sky is a deep green, but there's a broad smudge of red at the horizon. He can see the trees clearly. Frank climbs out the window and takes a piss a few feet away. He picks an inconspicuous spot, digs a hole with his hands, and squats with his back to the wall. He only pulls his pants down to the tops of his thighs. Frank doesn't like to shit in the open like this, but he won't do it in bathrooms if he can avoid it. The toilets don't flush anymore, and usually there's shit caked on the bowl from squatters. Outside, at least, he can be neat, and there are plenty of exits.
He wipes himself with a leaf, pulls his pants back up, and kicks dirt back over the hole. He taps the loose dirt down with his toe. He looks down, thinking, and then goes and gets a small stone to put over the spot, a marker to remind himself not to dig there again. He might be able to stay here for a while.
He goes back inside through the window. It's already easier than the first time.
3 months 3 days
"John?"
It's scary, wandering on his own, without Shaun and Kendra's constant bickering to keep him company. He's hungry. He has almost nothing: stale-tasting cigarettes, a couple of candy bars, two nearly-dead pens and a notebook.
He knows Belleville. He knows its streets. He's lived here for his whole life. In the dark, though, the familiar strip malls and rows of one-story houses look strange. He turns down a block, and it looks the same as the one before. He doesn't recognize the street name on the sign.
A car is stranded in the middle of the street, surrounded by a halo of broken glass. He walks a wide circle around it.
It is silent.
The windows of the houses on either side are open mouths. They strain towards him.
He walks in the center of the street, glancing quick down the spaces between the houses and the stores. He keeps expecting to catch John's familiar hunched shoulders, his beanie cap, his storky walk.
There's a break in the unremitting concrete and postage stamp lawns up ahead of him; a playground, and a stand of trees. Frank heads towards them, thinking vaguely of climbing up, trying to find where John is, or where he's come from.
12 months 1 day
Frank spends most of the day wandering around the school. The concrete walls are smeared with things he can't identify, and the industrial gray carpet is covered in glass and trash and irregularly shaped stains, but it's not bad. No bodies, not too much shit or piss or rotting garbage. Some of the bulletin boards are still up, maps of the solar system and 12th grade history projects. He looks at the pictures of dead people in period costume, awkwardly smiling at the teacher's camera; there's a boy he recognizes from shows before, his mohawk smashed flat under a cap and tattoos covered by a ruffled shirt. Frank snorts and pulls that one down, tucks it in his pocket.
The school hasn't been properly ransacked yet, either, and he keeps making discoveries. The library has books on Batman. There are two enormous SYSCO cans of peanut butter in the storage room of the cafeteria. A small half-finished painting of a woman sits on an easel in the art room, pale grey-peach face emerging from thin pencil lines and flat gesso.
He's been all over, and he hasn't run into anyone. It's nice to be alone in the place. He sits in the library, sucks peanut butter off a plastic knife and reads Batman: The Sunday Classics. He dances in one of the rooms with no windows, humming the melody from "Side Kick" and air guitaring Frederiksen's part. Frank whips his head around, jumps up on a chair and takes a dive off, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. It's still dangerous even if no one's really there, but for once he can't be bothered. When he finishes the song he's panting, and his hair sticks to his face. He listens at the door for noise, then picks his pack back up and goes out into the hallway, feeling awkward and conspicuous, but grinning to himself all the same.
He makes the best discovery right after that, in one of the other science classrooms. The deep closet in the back of the room is unlocked, but the shelves are still full. Frank peers into the dusty empty aquariums, pokes at the microscopes lined on the top shelf. A jar with a fetal pig in formaldehyde sits forgotten in a corner, still perfectly preserved; it spins in a slow circle when Frank picks the jar up.
He finds the water under moldy boxes, sitting in the back of the closet. He sits down, his knees weak, and looks at them again. Three gallons of distilled water. That gives him-- if he rations-- Frank picks up one of the jugs and rocks it back and forth in his hands, just feeling the sloshing beneath the plastic. It's almost too lucky. He thinks of poison, but he can’t imagine a person who would do that to water they could use.
He scrambles to his feet, still cradling the jug. There's still some soap in a few of the bathroom dispensers. He can shave. He can wash his shirt. Hell, he can wash himself.
He giggles gleefully, and doesn't bother to cover his mouth.
4 months
A man turns down an alley, a block away, and the set of his shoulders is so like Frank's grandpa that Frank almost yells his name.
There's a girl squatting in a looted convenience store down the street. One time, through the cracked glass by the registers, she looks enough like Jamia that he knocks on the window. She pulls a gun, automatically bringing her hand up and squeezing out two shots, and he barely ducks in time.
He sees John everywhere. He's not sure why; John is no more important than anyone else that's gone, and Frank's not even sure he wants to find him. But he sees his shape everywhere, crouched in doorways and hidden in piles of garbage. Every dead boy's crooked limbs look like his, just for a moment.
12 months 2 days
It's nice enough to be inside, safer, but he can't stay for long. He starts to get antsy, wants to be out by the river again, digging his hands into the soil.
He goes back to the trees.
The walk back to where he was when he saw the boy is long. Frank doesn't go back to the same exact spot, though he wants to; he doesn't like the idea of leaving that patch incomplete. He looks for a break in the trees along the river, a space where someone wouldn't be able to swing across.
His knife presses awkwardly into his hip when Frank drops down to his knees, but he just wiggles it into a slightly less uncomfortable place. He sweeps his hands over the dirt, the familiar action calming him automatically. Two pennies, the crimped lid of a can. He sits back on his heels, skips the pennies out, shuffles over.
There's a noise above him, and Frank startles, hand going to his belt.
Another boy sits above him, straddling a branch that looks like it shouldn't be able to hold his weight. He swings one calf in an easy rhythm. Frank could outfight him and outrun him. If he wanted to, he could jump up and yank the boy down by his ankle, kill him fast and roll the body in the river.
He takes a step back instead, pulls the knife out. "Are you the same as the other guy?"
The boy laughs, a weird scratchy sound, and taps his fingers against the branch. His foot doesn't stop swinging. "No. Well, I mean, we're the same," and the boy waves vaguely, palm open. "But we're not the same person."
"I know that, dumbass," Frank says. He means to sound annoyed, but it comes out charmed. The guy is kind of disarming. His black hair is long and tangled, not dirty but not neatly kept. It swings around his round face, and his skin by contrast is delicate-looking and very pale.
Frank realizes he's staring. He glances away and rubs at his neck.
"I saw you scratching," the boy says, conversationally, "against the tree." Frank jerks his eyes back up to the boy's face, takes another step back, then checks the branches above his head. "You should let Ray look."
Frank almost asks how long he's been watching, but he doesn't really want to know. He thinks about running. "Who's Ray?"
"The guy you ran away from."
"Oh."
"Yeah," the boy says. "What's your name?"
"What's yours?"
"Gerard," the boy says, "Gerard Way. I live here with my brother and Matt and Ray."
"I'm. I'm Frank," he says, thrown by the ready answer.
"Wanna come up?" Gerard asks. His face is open, stupidly sincere. There's sweat beading on his lip. Frank hesitates, then says,
"I've got a knife, okay?"
"I saw."
"I could take you. Even up there. I don't care what kind of monkeyman you are."
"I know," Gerard says, and smiles. His smile is beautiful, lopsided lips showing small, even teeth. He stops swinging his leg. "You wanna come up?"
"Okay," Frank says. "Are-- is that other guy up there?"
Gerard licks his lip and tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. "He thought he would scare you off. Not there," he says, when Frank walks up to the tree, "put your foot on that--yeah, there. And your hand on the--hey, you're a natural."
Frank sticks the knife back in his belt, feeling uneasy, and pulls himself up using the knots of the tree. There's a tiny divot in the trunk by the branch where Gerard sits, and he's trying to decide if he can put his weight on it when he sees that Gerard's got his hand stretched out towards him. "Don't be a show-off," Gerard says, and Frank takes his hand, pushes off with his left leg and manages to get himself on the branch. It's awkward as hell, but then he settles his pack and shifts his ass and he's solid again, looking down at the ground. Gerard's knees almost touch his. His smile is even better up close.
"Can you take off your backpack?" Gerard says, still smiling.
"No." Frank presses back against the trunk of the tree.
"I'll scratch your back for you."
"What do you want for it?"
Gerard laughs, the same strange sound. "What, for your bag? I don't want it."
"No, for the scratching."
"Nothing."
"Bullshit," Frank says, but Gerard just tilts his head and looks at him. Frank fidgets. His back itches so bad, maybe. Maybe he can. Maybe he doesn't care what Gerard wants from him.
"I could hold it in front of me," he says, and Gerard nods. "Move back a little."
"I can climb over you."
"No," Frank says, too sharply, "it's okay." It's difficult to turn around, but he steadies himself on the trunk, gets his feet on the branch and swivels around in a crouch. After he settles, Frank swings his pack around by one strap and puts it in his lap. "Okay," he says. He still startles when he feels Gerard's hands settle at his lower back.
"Hey there, Flinchy," Gerard teases. Frank just shrugs, holding his pack tighter against his chest. Gerard puts his hands underneath Frank's shirt, and oh--
Frank groans and leans forward to press the side of his face against the tree as Gerard scrapes his nails in slow figure eights over his skin. It feels so good to have someone touching him, to have the sharp specific sensation of nails on his back. Gerard runs one hand up his spine, and Frank arches under it, pressing his chest against his pack and panting out "oh God," against the tree trunk.
"Gerard, you mean."
"Gerard," he breathes, stupid with sensation, and when Gerard's hands still on his back Frank whines and hitches back until he moves his hands again. "Feels good."
"I got that," Gerard laughs, and scratches hard at the worst spot on Frank's back, between his shoulders. Frank almost chokes on his tongue, and he has to check the urge to cup his hand over his half-hard dick.
Frank's aware of how ridiculous he must look. He can feel the bark of the tree digging into the skin of his face when he twists. He still doesn't pull away. He can't put into words how good it feels to have someone finally scratching him, so he grunts and writhes.
Gerard's hands eventually slow. Frank barely has the energy to whine. "You're bleeding," Gerard says, and Frank can feel everything on his skin, the air, Gerard's breath, the whorls of Gerard's fingertips. "Sorry."
"Felt good," Frank says. "It feels better." His voice is rough, like he's been moaning. Gerard runs his thumbs over the worst spots, a half-hearted massage, and lets his palms rest against Frank's skin. "What did you do, before?" He's surprised Gerard didn't ask him when he first climbed up. It seems to be the thing survivors ask each other, the new hey, how are you.
"I went to art school. Drawing," he says, when Frank glances back, "pen and ink," like it took him a while to remember the specifics.
"I was getting out of high school," Frank offers. "And I was in a band." It's the first time he's ever told anyone about his band. He wishes both that Gerard will ask and that he'll forget Frank said anything.
All Gerard says, though, is "Music, huh."
"Guitarist and singer," Frank says. "Well, screamer, but they called me the singer." Gerard laughs and slips his hands from under Frank's shirt. Frank remembers that his feet are dangling and his weight is resting on a branch, that he just let some guy touch him. He sits up.
"You should stay here," Gerard says, but Frank's already shaking his head.
"No, I--" Frank shrugs his pack back on and squirms sideways off the branch. He reaches with his left foot for a knot, wedges his fingers in the divot he'd been reaching for before and finds that it holds his weight just fine. "I have to--"
"Yeah, no," Gerard says, "it's okay."
Frank climbs down. When he looks back up, Gerard is gone.
He looks down. There's a glint of something in the dirt, and he walks over to it, kneels and sweeps his hand over the ground.
A bottle cap. He skips it out on the river. Shuffles over.
5 months 17 days
Two guys try to ambush him one night while he's staying in the shopping cart corral at the Kroeger's. He's been bunking down between the two rows of carts, sleeping folded up between them, and the guys jump him when he crawls out in the middle of the night to take a piss. He's been fucked with before, though, and he sees their feet before he gets too far out.
He gets a lucky punch to the little guy's throat, kicks his foot back into the big guy's balls and thrashes free of his grip. He has no hope of outrunning them, but he thinks he does, or at least he tries. He gets halfway across the parking lot before one of them tackles him.
Frank's face slams into the concrete, ripping open his lip and sending a bright flare through his jaw, his shoulders, his hands. He screams without thinking. His teeth scrape against the asphalt. His shoulder twists in its socket as the guy yanks on his pack, and splinters of pain shove up into his neck. Frank tears at his cargo pockets with his other hand and manages to close his fingers around his one-legged scissors; he swings his hand up and brings it back hard, blind.
The man bellows, but he lets go of Frank's head, and Frank kicks free of his weight and stumbles away from him. The guy is clutching his leg, making stuttered, wordless sounds. His hands frame the blue plastic handle where it juts up out of his thigh.
The little guy is hovering back, first taking a step towards Frank, then a step towards his friend, then scuttling back again.
Frank laughs.
The littler guy jerks his head up and stares at him. Frank can feel blood dripping off his lips. He spits, and the guy standing jerks back. "I'll fucking gut you if you follow me," Frank says, putting his hand in his pocket like he's got something else in there. The guy bobs his head. His eyes are wide and scared. The big guy won't stop making those noises. Frank manages to walk away.
He pukes next to a tree a block away, clutching its trunk. The vomit burns his split lip and his gums, and he wants to cry. Someone walks by, then doubles back. "What're you looking at, asshole?" Frank says to their shoes, unable to lift his head and look them in the eye. Spit drips out of his mouth. Their shoes move away again.
He leaves Belleville two nights later.
12 months 3 days
He goes back the next day, to the same tree. Gerard isn't there.
He works his way along the river, scavenging. He finds a doll. More money, more bullets. A pacifier, an old Huey Lewis & the News CD, a few rocks of crack in a dirty plastic baggie. Endless pebbles.
12 months 4 days
He goes back. He looks up at the trees every time he shuffles over, imagining that he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but no one's there.
5 months 30 days
His lip scars where it split open on the asphalt. His knees ache when he wakes up in the morning. Two fingernails on his left hand turn black and fall off, and one is split straight down the middle. He has to find a new shirt. He's mostly pissed about losing the scissors.
The road isn't so bad. He's exposed, walking through the scrub brush by the highways and sleeping under bridges, but he gets better at fighting dirty. Even better, he starts to be able to tell who he can run from, who he can fight, and who he should just find a way to avoid.
12 months 10 days
There are more trees along the river edge, and then more; they begin to press in and crowd together until there is no empty ground, and Frank is feeling around in the spaces between their overlapping roots.
Their branches lace together, vying for space, and the light that filters through their leaves is dark and green. It is cooler underneath, and very quiet. There's something soothing about the only horizon being up above him, about being surrounded by the solid weight of their trunks.
Frank spends all day there, from when light first filters through the leaves until it burns off into a deep, hazy darkness. He trudges back to the high school every night, sleeping uneasily in his science classroom, curled up with his head on his pack and his knife in his hand. In the morning he comes back. It's easy to fall into, and the trees never seem to end.
He finds stranger and stranger things as he moves deeper into what must be a forest. Today it is two small teacups, a trowel, the clawed foot from a bathtub, and a rotting book of love poetry with a neatly stamped Milwaukee Public Library lending card. He reads and clarity of you -- warm brown tea -- we held, shuts the book, and wedges it back into its place under the dirt.
"Hello," Gerard says.
"Hi," Frank says back, startled. He tugs at one strap of his pack and stands up. "I thought you'd left."
"No." He says this like Frank's being unreasonable. Frank looks down and kicks at the dirt, feeling a blush rising on his cheeks. He wants to talk to Gerard, for some reason he doesn't understand. He isn't scared. He doesn't want to back away or turn and run. It doesn't make any sense. After a while, Frank fumbles for his pack, tries to think of something to give him. His hand closes around his water bottle. He hesitates, then pulls it out.
"I found some water. Do you want some?"
"No, save it. It's going to rain soon." Frank's skepticism must show, because Gerard continues, "tomorrow. It's going to rain tomorrow."
"Okay," Frank says. "How do you know?"
"I can feel it. I guess it's weird."
"Convenient, though."
"Yeah."
Neither of them says anything. Frank digs his toe into the ground, feeling like he's bumped into a date after they hadn't called. "Where are you from?" he decides on, finally. "I mean, before."
"Here. New Jersey."
"No shit? Me too!" Frank reaches out and raps his hand against Gerard's toe, which swings just within his reach. "I mean. We're in Jersey, so it makes sense, but--" He can feel a flush rising to his cheeks, and he laughs to cover it up. "You never know. But good people come from Jersey."
"That's what they say." Gerard grins at him, his hair coming down around his face. "I didn't want to interrupt you. Just wanted to say hello."
"Do you live around here?"
"I guess so." Gerard makes the same gesture he made last time, a loose wave, aiming somewhere behind him. "Around. You're staying in the school." He doesn't ask, just states it as fact, but Frank nods anyway. "You like it?"
"It's all right. Quiet. Nobody bothers me."
"I'm not bothering you, right?"
"No, no," Frank says, quick, and the strange thing is that it's true. He touches Gerard's foot again, before he can think about it. "I'm-- it's nice to see you. You should come by tomorrow."
"You're going to be out in the rain?"
"Oh, yeah. Right. The day after, then," Frank says. He sounds desperate. "If you want, whatever. I'll be out here anyway."
"Okay, yeah," Gerard says, smiling easily, and stands up on the branch. "I'll see you."
"Bye," Frank says. Watching Gerard run along his branch and jump to the next tree is more weird than suddenly having him gone, and he has to look away. He goes heavily to his knees and feels between the roots of the tree Gerard was sitting on.
There's a doorknob half-embedded in the soil, but he doesn't bother digging it up.
12 months 11 days
It rains, all day long, a steady drumming on the windows and the roof of the school. The sky is an innocent-looking lavender, but streaks of white flash through every once in a while, and the thunder is a warning grumble that keeps him inside. Frank goes out once to set every container he can find outside to catch the water, in case it's drinkable.
By mid-day, there's a foot of water flooding the cafeteria. Frank takes off his shoes and rolls up the legs of his damp jeans to wade into the back room for food. He sits cross-legged on top of one of the cafeteria tables to eat his canned vegetable soup. Water puddles around his feet on the plastic tabletop. The soup is bland. He wonders where Gerard is.
The water he collects is brackish and sour tasting, but he doesn't get sick after a few sips. He stockpiles his containers in the corner, behind his desk. He sits in the space underneath and looks at it all, his neat pile of dented cans of food and dirty water in old bottles. He can't remember ever being this happy.
He still wishes he could go outside.
That night he dreams that his legs are buried to the knee in the ground, locked into place by packed dirt. His arms are splayed out into their individual parts -- bone, muscle, veins -- spreading like a diagram from an anatomy atlas. The sun and he reach for each other.
4 months 17 days
"Hello?" he calls. Still, even now, he expects someone to answer.
The walls in the living room are a deep mossy green. The tall windows are shattered, and they let in muggy air and tree branches. A leather recliner is toppled over in the center of the room.
He picks up the photo frames that have fallen to the floor. A laughing woman with a large, pock-marked nose, a terrier wagging its tail, a plain-faced family turned to the camera at Christmas, wrapping paper crumpled around them. He puts them back on the mantle and arranges them neatly. He walks into the kitchen.
Clean frying pans hang in a row by the sink; the sink holds dishes from the night before, thick now with mold. There's some food in the pantry, and he digs through for something to eat, finds stale crackers and a Snack Pack pudding. He eats the crackers while he wanders around the apartment, looking at the books and the CDs, the messy desk, the bedroom with its rumpled duvet. There are a pair of slacks on the floor, one leg scrunched up like they were taken off in a hurry. The bathroom mirror has a piece of blue notepaper taped to it, with "See you Thurs.! Love you xoxoxo PS: drycleaning!!!" written on it in green pen.
When he's finished the crackers, he sits on the floor and leans against the bed. Dust rises thickly around him and settles again.
"Honey, I'm home," he says, into the silence.
12 months 12 days
The crooked row of rocks by the wall seem to be off, too few of them for the number of days he thinks he's been at the school. He doesn't feel constipated, though. He feels empty. Not hungry, really, and not bad or sick, just lighter. Not weighed down. He tries to think of the last time he took a shit, but he can't remember for sure. It doesn't matter anyway.
That morning he doesn't bother with scavenging. He watches the ground as he walks, and occasionally stops to feel at the mud with the tips of his fingers, but he never kneels down. The dirt smears on his skin and clings to his sneakers in clumps. The trees are all weighted down with water, and when he ducks under their branches their leaves slap wetly against his face and drip water onto his shirt.
He goes back to the tree Gerard was in the last time. He stands there for a bit before he realizes that he doesn't know when Gerard will come back. He squats down, balances his weight on his toes and searches, idly picking through the mud. He finds a shaving brush, the bristles soaked a deep brown, and a few feet to the left a laminated picture of Justin Timberlake and a pair of headphones. He pulls up the wire of the headphones and rubs his fingers over the muddy coils.
"Did you wait long?"
"Not really," Frank says, and looks up. Gerard is a few trees away, standing on one branch with his hands resting against another, over his head. In the dark light of the forest, his black clothing is difficult to distinguish from the trees; his face seems like it's floating in mid-air before he shifts and crouches down on the branch. Frank drops the headphones, stands up slowly, and walks over.
"I'm so glad you're here," Gerard says. His honesty is baffling. It's a holdover from before, somehow preserved. Frank wants to return it, but his tongue seems to stall in his mouth, and he just jerks a mute nod and tries to smile. "Do you want to come up? Are you busy?"
"No," Frank says, "I think I can clear my schedule." When Gerard laughs, he's proud of himself. Frank climbs up and half-falls onto the branch next to Gerard. When he takes off his pack and puts it in his lap, Gerard doesn't make him ask; he slides his hand up underneath Frank's shirt and starts scratching his back.
Frank asks, "Do you live up here, in the trees?" Gerard's hand pauses, then drags hard, all the way down his back. Frank arches and hisses out a breath.
"Yeah," Gerard says, quiet. Frank tips his head forward, then gives into temptation and slumps to the side, against Gerard's shoulder. Gerard huffs out a laugh, but he adjusts so he can keep scratching. The contact between his face and Gerard's shoulder is strange, even more so than Gerard's nails on his back, but he keeps his head there anyway. Gerard's shoulder smells like sweat and wet leaves, but it is warm and damp under his cheek, reassuringly solid.
"Why'd you leave home?"
"It was too hard," Gerard says, "living with all the stuff from before."
"I couldn't keep people out," Frank mutters. "It wasn't safe." They sit in silence, and he says, "I miss it, but I--" He's not sure what he means to say, so he just drops it. Gerard's hand slows, until he's just rubbing gently. Frank’s back is lumpy, and it feels oddly numb, burning only where Gerard's hand rests against his skin.
"I guess I miss home," Gerard says finally, "I liked it. I just." He shrugs, his shoulder rising and falling under Frank's cheek. "It reminded me of who I was. I didn't like me, not then."
"I guess we were different before," Frank says, "which is dumb, but."
"No, you're right," Gerard says softly. "I was so depressed, before. An artist, you know, drawing pictures of vampires and living in my parents' basement. Doing drugs and drinking too much, I mean." He stops, and the hand in his lap twitches like he's ashing a cigarette. "When it happened, I woke up. I snapped out of it."
"And you aren't anything like that now," Frank says, because he isn't, Frank can tell. Gerard takes his hand out from under Frank's shirt and curves it around his shoulder. He strokes his thumb over Frank's neck, and Frank swallows. Warmth prickles along his skin.
"Yeah," Gerard says meditatively, "that's this." He waves vaguely at the trees around them. "I just. I wanted to die, before, sometimes. I would sit in my bedroom. It smelled, like, so bad in there, I can't even--it was a mess." Frank laughs and looks up at Gerard's embarrassed smile. "I was always thinking, like, we're all born, we do shit, we all die. And there was no point to it. I mean, what purpose did all the money or any of it serve? Human beings were making shit for other human beings. We were like rats," he says, and his face twists. "But rats that were destroying where they lived, too. Worse than rats."
He falls silent. Frank says, "but then--"
"But then," he agrees, "And I snapped out of it. I thought, it's a clean start. We can-- we can do it right. We don't have to live in the wreckage of the old; we can live here, with nature, in something like harmony." He laughs, pulling at the tangled hair around his face. "It's cheesy."
"No," Frank says. Their eyes lock, and Frank sits up. "No, it makes sense."
"I want to save people," Gerard says, and laughs again. "This," he says, gesturing at the trees, at Frank, "this matters to me, more than anything before did. I think this is our chance. The survivors, I mean. We have to live like this is a gift."
"I think I get it," Frank says, slowly. Gerard ducks his head and smiles down at the ground below them. He takes his hand away from Frank's shoulder, but when he puts his hand back down on the branch, their fingers overlap.
3 days
Her family's front door is locked, and he has to climb up a tree by the porch to get onto the roof. The glass in Jamia's window is busted, but he jimmies it open with a piece of wood instead of trying to climb through the empty frame.
In the house next door, someone twitches open the curtains of a second floor window. When he waves, the curtains sway shut again. He shrugs and slides in.
He knew, somehow. He knew. He still searches the house, hoping for someone to be left. He even goes into the attic, crawling up the rickety ladder and braving clouds of dust.
No, no, I don't wanna go up there, it's too weird. We lost my hamster up there, I swear to God, it was horrible--
The doors to the outside are locked. The window frames are down. The fridge is full, and the kitchen smells like rotting fruit and spoiled milk. A book sits forgotten on the kitchen table, propped open upside-down on the table.
He climbs the stairs to her bedroom after he finishes with the basement. He stands in the middle of the room, uselessly. His hands gesture at nothing, twitching open and closing into fists.
This is sexy, right? I'm nervous. Don't tell anyone, okay?
"Fuck you," he says. "You fucking cunt." Frank kicks the bed, hard, and the springs squeak like they always do. "You dumb bitch," he says, and means it. He feels feverish. If she were here, he would hit her. "You stupid slutty bitch," he yells, and kicks the bed again, "you--" He switches to punching. "You stupid bitch, I hate you, I hate you--" Frank’s eyes water, his tongue feels thick in his mouth, his throat is raw. His fingers hook into claws and tear at the mattress. His hand flies out and bangs into the table next to the bed, and the pain cuts through his rage. Frank sits back, shocked, and puts his mouth against the gash.
He's busted his knuckles open, he realizes, and ripped a hole in the sheets. His breath is heaving in his chest.
"Fuck you," he finally says, against his wounded hand. He sinks down to his knees on the carpet and rests his head against the side of the bed. His mouth tastes like blood. "Fuck."
Eventually the bleeding stops. Frank starts to feel ridiculous, and he gets to his feet. The house is silent around him. There ought to be something that attacks him, something that drives him from the house, but nothing comes.
When he leaves, he looks to the neighbor's house, but the curtains don't move.
12 months 12 days
"Slow down!" Behind him, Gerard is breathless with laughter, and Frank looks over his shoulder at him before he leaps for the next branch. He slams into it chest-first, but manages to get his arms wrapped around it and struggles onto his feet.
"C'mon, monkeyman," he says back, breathless himself. Gerard rolls his eyes and shoves his hair back, then jumps, landing a lot more gracefully than Frank did.
"You're a maniac. I take back my invitation." Frank just giggles. "Don't you have any respect for your body?"
"You sound like my sex ed teacher," he tells Gerard, and drops down to catch his breath. "Anyway, isn't your body for using?"
Gerard just looks at him for a moment, his head tilted to the side. Finally he says, "just don't use it up."
"Yes sir," Frank says. "Where are we?"
"I thought you were leading the way," Gerard says, raising one eyebrow. "We're close. You see the guys?" Gerard points, and hey, there are guys sitting there, watching them. Frank stands up and stops grinning. He has to reach out to balance himself against the tree trunk. Next to him, Gerard coils down and springs forward, landing neatly on the next branch, and after a pause Frank follows, crashing down hard enough to make the whole thing shake.
"Mikey," Gerard says, after they've stopped wobbling. He points at the narrow one. Mikey waves, and then shoves his glasses up with the back of one hand. "And Matt," Gerard says, pointing to the glowering guy, who jerks his head in a nod. "This is Frank," Gerard says, and strikes a Vanna White pose. Frank sticks his chest out and puts his fists on his hips, and Mikey solemnly applauds. Matt looks down at his hands.
Neither of the boys are wearing shoes, Frank notes, which is kind of weird. Mikey's feet look like a sloth's, toes curled around the branch to keep him steady. Matt is cross-legged, and the soles of his feet are thick and golden brown with calluses.
"Don't run," he hears, and before he can look up the curly-haired one has dropped down next to him on the branch. Frank doesn't twitch, but it takes some effort.
"Ray," Gerard says. "Meet Frank."
"Hi," Ray says, and smiles. The expression is a lot more reassuring than it was the first time Frank saw him; it somehow has to do with Gerard standing next to Frank, like he's been rendered harmless by proximity.
"Hi," he says back. "I can't run, not really."
"True," Ray says, "but why would you want to? I'm less dangerous than Gerard, and you didn't run from him."
"Gerard is so less dangerous," he says, and Gerard makes an affronted noise. "I could fight him off, really easy. You have. um."
"What?"
"Muscular thighs," he says, and feels incredibly, incredibly gay. Ray turns red and bursts out laughing.
"What's in your pack?" Matt asks, voice cutting through their laughter.
Frank shrugs, giggling into his fist. "The stuff I need. Food, water."
"See," Matt says, "this guy knows how to survive."
Ray's face goes from bright to stormy before Frank can really register what Matt said, and he snaps his head around to glare at Matt. His hair follows a second later, bouncing around his head. "If you--" he begins. Gerard makes a warning noise, and Ray stops.
Matt snorts. "Fuck this," he mutters, and swings down off of the branch to the one below, then off through the forest. His movements seem odd, off-tempo. When Frank looks back up, Gerard and Mikey are having a complicated conversation with their eyebrows and shoulders; at the end of it, Mikey sighs and follows after Matt.
"What," Frank begins, and then swallows his question. "Gerard says you should look at my back," he says, instead.
"Yeah," Ray says, after he has his own silent conversation with Gerard over Frank's head. "Take off your shirt?"
"I never should have said that about your thighs," Frank says, but he turns to straddle the branch. He takes off his pack and his shirt and puts them in his lap.
"Holy shit," Ray breathes. Gerard's hands go around his wrists like loose cuffs. "Frank, what have you been doing?"
"It itches," he says, "What's wrong with it? What's--" he cranes his head back, trying to see. "Don't--"
"This might hurt," Ray says. Gerard pulls Frank's wrists up against his stomach, and Frank leans forward, still trying to turn his head around to see. He can't.
"What is it?" he says to Gerard, but Gerard just shushes him.
At first it's just a weird pressure; it feels like Ray is popping pimples on his back. Something trickles down, and Ray wipes it up with his sleeve. "I'm gonna start digging now," Ray says, under his breath, and Gerard nods.
"What?" Frank says again, and then "Fuck!"
It's a searing pain, deeper than the skin, bleeding down into his flesh. He can't get away from it, can't get loose from Gerard's grasp or Ray's thighs bracketing his. He tries. He throws his shoulders. His spine curves and snaps straight like a whip. He's distantly aware of the noises he's making, the crack of his forehead against Gerard's when he tries to surge forward, Ray's cursing. He's ashamed, in the parts of him that are above the hurt, he wants to hold still, but when Ray drags up on whatever it is it feels like he's pulling something out of the bone, and Frank's in pain and he has to get away.
It won't stop. It has been going on forever. It will never end. Frank eventually slumps forward, pressing his face against one of Gerard's thighs. Spit seeps out of his mouth and dampens the fabric, and he keeps shuddering in spite of himself. Gerard doesn't pull away. Ray doesn't stop digging.
"There," Ray says breathlessly, finally. "Jesus, that's intense."
Frank doesn't sit up. At first he doesn't believe that it's over, and after he realizes that it is, he decides he doesn't want to move. Gerard lets go of Frank's wrists slowly, but Frank keeps his hands there, curled up in Gerard's shirt, against the soft curve of his stomach.
"Do you have any water?" Ray says, and Frank mumbles something about the bottle in his pack. Gerard reaches under Frank's arms, blindly searching, and eventually pulls out the bottle. When the water splashes on his back, even though it's lukewarm, Frank gasps and arches up, yanking on Gerard's shirt. His mouth glances off of Gerard's cheek. Gerard makes a soft sound and puts his hand on Frank's face. Their mouths slide together, almost like an accident. Ray wipes something over Frank's back that makes his skin quiver, and Gerard swallows his second gasp.
When they part, Frank can't read Gerard's expression. His feet are dangling. Ray's thighs are on either side of him. Gerard's knees touch his. His back hurts.
His fingers don't want to uncurl from Gerard's shirt, so Frank shakes him instead, pushing forward and yanking sharply back. Gerard's eyes widen, and his hands come back up to Frank's wrists.
"What the fuck," Frank says, "did you do?"
"I didn't--"
"What did you do?"
"Frank," Gerard says, and then pinches his lips together in a line. Frank shakes him again, choking on a frustrated sound.
"Hey," Ray says. Frank jerks away from Ray's hand on his shoulder and shoves at Gerard’s chest again. Gerard barely gets his hands off of Frank's wrists fast enough to catch himself. They stare at each other. Frank grabs his pack and his shirt and drops off of the branch. He lands with more luck than skill on the branch below them.
"Frank," Gerard says, "look," and tugs up the hem of his shirt.
It doesn't register at first, because they aren't supposed to be there. "No," he says, but he sees them anyway.
There are things growing out of Gerard. They are separate from him somehow, like someone pierced him and stuck the stems in the wounds, or like somewhere inside of him there is a tree shoving its skinny branches out.
Frank can just make out the skin beneath the stems, the ragged circles of scar tissue. He reaches over his own shoulder. He doesn't believe, even when his fingers bump against a shriveled, wet, soft something. It's not part of him, but when it moves he feels it, outside of himself. He feels it throb under his fingertips.
"No," Frank says again, and his voice sounds strange, frantic. Ray says his name, and Frank says "no" one more time, like it means anything, like he can refuse.
"It's a gift," Gerard says, "the trees gave you--"
"Shut the fuck up," Frank shouts, and Gerard stops. His mouth pinches shut again. Ray is frowning. They are both still straddling the branch, looking down at him; Gerard's shirt is still rucked up over his-- over the leaves.
Frank runs.
[ part 2.]
MCR, Frank/Gerard, AU. R for some sex, lots of cursing, and the end of the world. [Feedback and concrit appreciated.]
12 months
He finds pebbles. A bullet casing, or two, or fifteen, depending on the spot he's searching. This time there's a quarter, a twenty-dollar bill, and two bullets. He skips the quarter out on the muddy river, holds the bill up in the sluggish wind and lets it blow away. He leaves the bullets behind.
He shuffles over on his knees, past the half-circle his hands have traced in the dirt, and bends down again.
He's been at it for a while now, maybe two hours. His palms are black with dirt. Before, he thinks, before he wouldn't have wanted to do this, he would have gotten bored. But after, there wasn't anything else to do. Scavenging is his job now. It's the thing he does to earn his keep.
No bullets, no money. A small pebble shaped like a kidney bean that he rolls between his hands and drops. He shuffles over.
His biology teacher used to take them out for trips to this river, before. On the bus, the girls in the back giggled with their heads tilted together, and the brown plastic bus seats squeaked whenever anyone moved. Cool air blew through the few windows that would open. Ms. Reed moved down the aisle often enough that no one bothered him; he could leave his headphones on and think about being a rockstar.
At the river they knelt at the edge, dipping test tubes down and bringing them dripping back up. "Don't fall in, Frank," Ms. Reed always said, nudging his foot with hers, a joke from their first trip. She smiled, every time. The light passed golden through her hair and through her plain mud-streaked dress, outlining her legs through the fabric. He'd had such a crush on her.
Ms. Reed is dead.
Nothing but pebbles. He shuffles over, sweeps out his hands. One bullet, a cheap necklace (half a heart: be-/fri-/for-), and something with a sharp edge. He wipes cautiously at the dirt that covers it, gets his fingernails under a dull side, and pries it up. He can’t believe what he sees, at first. It’s a kitchen knife, short but still sharp, the black plastic handle scratched but still intact. He grins and sits back on his heels. There are so many things he can do. Even open cans, maybe. The thought sends a stupid thrill through him. He giggles, then slaps a hand over his mouth and glances around. There's no one to hear him, though. The trees are still. He looks back at the knife.
He'd been using a pair of scissors, but one blade had snapped from going through metal too many times, and the other half he'd left buried in that guy's thigh back in Belleville. A knife is better than scissors, anyway. He stares at it, smiling, and then tucks it between his belt and his waistband.
There's a tree in his path, so he gets to his feet, shucks off his pack and scratches his back against it, grunting in satisfaction. It's the same deep-seated itch he's had for weeks, maybe months. The scratching doesn't seem to help, but it feels so good that he can't bring himself to resist the urge. A scab catches on the rough bark and rips off; he can feel blood spreading over his t-shirt. He bares his teeth, but he stops.
He's just gotten himself back down onto his knees when he hears a noise overhead, leaves against leaves. He looks up sharply and scans the branches above him. It could be a storm; it could be a warning. He keeps his eyes on the branches overhead for a long moment, then bends back down to sweep his hands over the dirt.
Two bullets, a shred of fabric.
"Hey."
"Fuck!" Frank scrambles back into a crouch and puts his hand on the knife. His heart goes off-tempo, speeding past his breath.
"Hey, hey," the voice repeats, and Frank follows it up. There's a boy perched in the next tree over, feet steady on a branch, one hand keeping him anchored. He looks wild. An untamed mane of curls fans out around his face. "It's cool, okay?"
"What the fuck," Frank spits. He can't outfight this guy. He can maybe outrun him. If he moves diagonally right, he'll gain about three seconds. Maybe five. Frank shifts his weight onto his toes.
"Dude, I'm not--" the guy says, and Frank makes his move. He thinks that maybe the guy has the drop on him, when his thighs tense and the branch shakes, but Frank speeds up and sprints past him; he pumps his arms, drives his toes down into the ground, breathes with his footfalls. He looks back every five steps, then every ten, then every fifteen. His breath comes hard. He spits without breaking stride.
When he sees a low concrete building, Frank slows down. He would usually look for way in that's sheltered by trees, but now even that seems unsafe. He cuts straight up the front walkway instead.
Frank stumbles in the courtyard of the building and nearly falls, fighting the drag of his breath in his chest. He drops into a squat, coughs thick white spittle onto the concrete. Something clatters against the floor inside the building, and he crawls into the shadow of a doorway to hide.
A tiny choked noise leaks from his mouth, the sound his lungs make when they won't let go. He wants to panic. He wants to cry, but he won't. He can't. He tips his head back against the door instead, puts his arms over his head, and tries to wheeze as quietly as he can. He thinks about chord progressions from "TV Party" and stares at the tattered flag drooping against the flagpole. By the time he reaches "we got nothing better to do" (F C Bb - fuck, what was it. G? yeah - G F G) he's better, enough that he can escape the danger of the open courtyard.
The glass in the front doors is smashed out, and the doorframes hang drunkenly on their hinges, but Frank knows better than to take an entrance that a big guy can use. He goes around the outside, moving along the wall until he finds a busted window. He finds a rock nearby and tosses it through. It skitters across the linoleum and bangs into something inside, loud in the quiet. When no one comes to investigate, he throws in his pack and boosts himself in after it.
The room is a science classroom, full of heavy, black-topped tables with silver spigots for long-dead gas lines. There's a desk at the front that's been overturned, but the bottoms of the lab tables are merged with the floor, and it looks like they've already survived a fire. Frank drags his pack to the desk in the corner farthest from the door, to hide in the space underneath.
Once he's safely under the desk, Frank curls up on the floor with his face on his pack. He thinks about chord progressions F C Bb G F G, about how lucky he is to be here. Then he thinks mom. He mouths the word against the rough fabric of his pack; he doesn't even trust himself to breathe it out. Mom. Mom. His breath shortens again. His fingers tremble.
His eyes are dry.
7 days
Shaun gives him a cup of warm, flat orange soda. A bubble floats up when he sets the cup on the table.
"They're gone," Frank says. "Everyone."
Shaun grunts his agreement. He tips his chair back to balance on two legs, looking out the back door. Frank looks over his shoulder, out the kitchen window.
There are gunshots in the distance. Neither of them move. No sirens follow.
12 months
Frank dozes for a while, then sits up and digs through his bag for food. He opens the jar of pickles he's been saving and slowly eats five of them. He gets out his vitamins, shakes the bottle to hear how much he has left, and then fishes one out. He needs to find more.
He needs:
vitamins
water
boots
socks
thread
a needle
storage
scissors
a can opener
a crowbar
a saw
clothes
a toothbrush
plastic bags
soap
antibiotic cream
a guitar
more paper
more pens
mom--
He unscrews the top of the jar, eats another pickle, and drinks some of the brine. He screws the lid back on and tucks the jar and the vitamins back in his bag.
He needs:
to find water
to avoid the boy in the tree
to keep the knife for as long as he can.
Everything else will come, or it won't.
Eventually Frank ducks his head out from underneath the table, peers around the room, and crawls out. He puts his pack on again and tightens the straps. His back still itches, a moldy feeling that crawls across his skin. He scratches his neck.
Frank spends the rest of the day poking cautiously around the school, digging through cupboards and closets. Broken glass crackles and splinters under his feet. Papers shift restlessly around on the floor when he walks into a room. Solid work, Dwayne! B+, he reads on one paper, loopy red cursive on the top of a carefully printed worksheet. Jessica refuses to do her homework, which undermines her obvious potential as a student. Please contact me to schedule a conference.
Dwayne is dead. Jessica is dead.
Frank nudges the papers with his toe, pushing them towards one corner, and walks over to the teacher's desk at the front of the room. The side drawers pull out easily, and in the third one down he discovers a wealth of things, post-its, paperclips, pencils. He grabs fistfuls of the stuff, making it look messy, and then puts what he's taken into his pack. His pack is neat and organized, and the post-its fit perfectly. It calms him, how ordered they are, how near.
Right after it happened, Frank remembers chaos. The survivors roamed everywhere, mobbing the streets in some places, fighting and cursing. Everyone shouted over everyone else, claiming they had lost the most. They came out at night and looted enormous televisions and washer/dryer sets, when there was no electricity to run them. Everyone had a gun, or guns.
The guns didn't last long, though. Not like knives. Eventually everyone runs out of bullets.
Not that Frank was much better at first; he'd abandoned an electric guitar and a rifle at his house when he'd left. But he's survived the guns. Now he knows what's necessary.
There's barely any room in his pack when he's done, and he stares at a permanent marker for a long time before sighing and putting it back. He already has two.
There's a soft sound in the next room over, and Frank tucks himself under the desk and shoves his pack into the corner. Someone comes to the door, stands at the threshold, then moves on. Their shoes -- boots, heavy feet, Frank could outrun them -- scatter glass as they walk. Frank stays, watching the shadows on the blackboard stretch out, then crawls out and ducks his head into the hallway. The person is long gone, but their footsteps mark a trail through the debris on the floor. He minces along the clean spaces, goes back to the science classroom, slips in and shuts the door noiselessly. He'll sleep here tonight. It's a lucky place.
3 months 3 days
"Fuck this shit," John snarls, takes a left down the alley, and leaves.
They've been walking around Belleville for hours. There's protection in numbers, but it also means they can't make a damn decision. Frank just wants for everyone to agree on a place to squat.
John hops a chain link fence at the back of the alleyway. He doesn't look back. Frank shifts his weight.
Shaun finally pauses in his umpteenth repetition of we should just stay here to say "hey, what--" but then Kendra barrels on with her umpteenth repetition of we should totally take off for California, and Shaun turns back to respond.
Frank lights a cigarette and legs it after John.
12 months 1 day
The sun is hot on Frank's face. He stretches up towards it, curling his fingers around the vines that have twined around his hands.
Frank wakes up under the table, pack clutched to his chest. His mouth is sticky and dry. When he straightens his legs out from under the desk, they crack loudly, and he barely has to twist at all to crack his back. He rubs his shoulders against the corner of the desk, scratching the ever-present itch, then puts his shirt back on and scoots out from under the desk.
It looks like early morning outside; the sky is a deep green, but there's a broad smudge of red at the horizon. He can see the trees clearly. Frank climbs out the window and takes a piss a few feet away. He picks an inconspicuous spot, digs a hole with his hands, and squats with his back to the wall. He only pulls his pants down to the tops of his thighs. Frank doesn't like to shit in the open like this, but he won't do it in bathrooms if he can avoid it. The toilets don't flush anymore, and usually there's shit caked on the bowl from squatters. Outside, at least, he can be neat, and there are plenty of exits.
He wipes himself with a leaf, pulls his pants back up, and kicks dirt back over the hole. He taps the loose dirt down with his toe. He looks down, thinking, and then goes and gets a small stone to put over the spot, a marker to remind himself not to dig there again. He might be able to stay here for a while.
He goes back inside through the window. It's already easier than the first time.
3 months 3 days
"John?"
It's scary, wandering on his own, without Shaun and Kendra's constant bickering to keep him company. He's hungry. He has almost nothing: stale-tasting cigarettes, a couple of candy bars, two nearly-dead pens and a notebook.
He knows Belleville. He knows its streets. He's lived here for his whole life. In the dark, though, the familiar strip malls and rows of one-story houses look strange. He turns down a block, and it looks the same as the one before. He doesn't recognize the street name on the sign.
A car is stranded in the middle of the street, surrounded by a halo of broken glass. He walks a wide circle around it.
It is silent.
The windows of the houses on either side are open mouths. They strain towards him.
He walks in the center of the street, glancing quick down the spaces between the houses and the stores. He keeps expecting to catch John's familiar hunched shoulders, his beanie cap, his storky walk.
There's a break in the unremitting concrete and postage stamp lawns up ahead of him; a playground, and a stand of trees. Frank heads towards them, thinking vaguely of climbing up, trying to find where John is, or where he's come from.
12 months 1 day
Frank spends most of the day wandering around the school. The concrete walls are smeared with things he can't identify, and the industrial gray carpet is covered in glass and trash and irregularly shaped stains, but it's not bad. No bodies, not too much shit or piss or rotting garbage. Some of the bulletin boards are still up, maps of the solar system and 12th grade history projects. He looks at the pictures of dead people in period costume, awkwardly smiling at the teacher's camera; there's a boy he recognizes from shows before, his mohawk smashed flat under a cap and tattoos covered by a ruffled shirt. Frank snorts and pulls that one down, tucks it in his pocket.
The school hasn't been properly ransacked yet, either, and he keeps making discoveries. The library has books on Batman. There are two enormous SYSCO cans of peanut butter in the storage room of the cafeteria. A small half-finished painting of a woman sits on an easel in the art room, pale grey-peach face emerging from thin pencil lines and flat gesso.
He's been all over, and he hasn't run into anyone. It's nice to be alone in the place. He sits in the library, sucks peanut butter off a plastic knife and reads Batman: The Sunday Classics. He dances in one of the rooms with no windows, humming the melody from "Side Kick" and air guitaring Frederiksen's part. Frank whips his head around, jumps up on a chair and takes a dive off, his shoes squeaking on the linoleum. It's still dangerous even if no one's really there, but for once he can't be bothered. When he finishes the song he's panting, and his hair sticks to his face. He listens at the door for noise, then picks his pack back up and goes out into the hallway, feeling awkward and conspicuous, but grinning to himself all the same.
He makes the best discovery right after that, in one of the other science classrooms. The deep closet in the back of the room is unlocked, but the shelves are still full. Frank peers into the dusty empty aquariums, pokes at the microscopes lined on the top shelf. A jar with a fetal pig in formaldehyde sits forgotten in a corner, still perfectly preserved; it spins in a slow circle when Frank picks the jar up.
He finds the water under moldy boxes, sitting in the back of the closet. He sits down, his knees weak, and looks at them again. Three gallons of distilled water. That gives him-- if he rations-- Frank picks up one of the jugs and rocks it back and forth in his hands, just feeling the sloshing beneath the plastic. It's almost too lucky. He thinks of poison, but he can’t imagine a person who would do that to water they could use.
He scrambles to his feet, still cradling the jug. There's still some soap in a few of the bathroom dispensers. He can shave. He can wash his shirt. Hell, he can wash himself.
He giggles gleefully, and doesn't bother to cover his mouth.
4 months
A man turns down an alley, a block away, and the set of his shoulders is so like Frank's grandpa that Frank almost yells his name.
There's a girl squatting in a looted convenience store down the street. One time, through the cracked glass by the registers, she looks enough like Jamia that he knocks on the window. She pulls a gun, automatically bringing her hand up and squeezing out two shots, and he barely ducks in time.
He sees John everywhere. He's not sure why; John is no more important than anyone else that's gone, and Frank's not even sure he wants to find him. But he sees his shape everywhere, crouched in doorways and hidden in piles of garbage. Every dead boy's crooked limbs look like his, just for a moment.
12 months 2 days
It's nice enough to be inside, safer, but he can't stay for long. He starts to get antsy, wants to be out by the river again, digging his hands into the soil.
He goes back to the trees.
The walk back to where he was when he saw the boy is long. Frank doesn't go back to the same exact spot, though he wants to; he doesn't like the idea of leaving that patch incomplete. He looks for a break in the trees along the river, a space where someone wouldn't be able to swing across.
His knife presses awkwardly into his hip when Frank drops down to his knees, but he just wiggles it into a slightly less uncomfortable place. He sweeps his hands over the dirt, the familiar action calming him automatically. Two pennies, the crimped lid of a can. He sits back on his heels, skips the pennies out, shuffles over.
There's a noise above him, and Frank startles, hand going to his belt.
Another boy sits above him, straddling a branch that looks like it shouldn't be able to hold his weight. He swings one calf in an easy rhythm. Frank could outfight him and outrun him. If he wanted to, he could jump up and yank the boy down by his ankle, kill him fast and roll the body in the river.
He takes a step back instead, pulls the knife out. "Are you the same as the other guy?"
The boy laughs, a weird scratchy sound, and taps his fingers against the branch. His foot doesn't stop swinging. "No. Well, I mean, we're the same," and the boy waves vaguely, palm open. "But we're not the same person."
"I know that, dumbass," Frank says. He means to sound annoyed, but it comes out charmed. The guy is kind of disarming. His black hair is long and tangled, not dirty but not neatly kept. It swings around his round face, and his skin by contrast is delicate-looking and very pale.
Frank realizes he's staring. He glances away and rubs at his neck.
"I saw you scratching," the boy says, conversationally, "against the tree." Frank jerks his eyes back up to the boy's face, takes another step back, then checks the branches above his head. "You should let Ray look."
Frank almost asks how long he's been watching, but he doesn't really want to know. He thinks about running. "Who's Ray?"
"The guy you ran away from."
"Oh."
"Yeah," the boy says. "What's your name?"
"What's yours?"
"Gerard," the boy says, "Gerard Way. I live here with my brother and Matt and Ray."
"I'm. I'm Frank," he says, thrown by the ready answer.
"Wanna come up?" Gerard asks. His face is open, stupidly sincere. There's sweat beading on his lip. Frank hesitates, then says,
"I've got a knife, okay?"
"I saw."
"I could take you. Even up there. I don't care what kind of monkeyman you are."
"I know," Gerard says, and smiles. His smile is beautiful, lopsided lips showing small, even teeth. He stops swinging his leg. "You wanna come up?"
"Okay," Frank says. "Are-- is that other guy up there?"
Gerard licks his lip and tucks a lock of hair behind his ear. "He thought he would scare you off. Not there," he says, when Frank walks up to the tree, "put your foot on that--yeah, there. And your hand on the--hey, you're a natural."
Frank sticks the knife back in his belt, feeling uneasy, and pulls himself up using the knots of the tree. There's a tiny divot in the trunk by the branch where Gerard sits, and he's trying to decide if he can put his weight on it when he sees that Gerard's got his hand stretched out towards him. "Don't be a show-off," Gerard says, and Frank takes his hand, pushes off with his left leg and manages to get himself on the branch. It's awkward as hell, but then he settles his pack and shifts his ass and he's solid again, looking down at the ground. Gerard's knees almost touch his. His smile is even better up close.
"Can you take off your backpack?" Gerard says, still smiling.
"No." Frank presses back against the trunk of the tree.
"I'll scratch your back for you."
"What do you want for it?"
Gerard laughs, the same strange sound. "What, for your bag? I don't want it."
"No, for the scratching."
"Nothing."
"Bullshit," Frank says, but Gerard just tilts his head and looks at him. Frank fidgets. His back itches so bad, maybe. Maybe he can. Maybe he doesn't care what Gerard wants from him.
"I could hold it in front of me," he says, and Gerard nods. "Move back a little."
"I can climb over you."
"No," Frank says, too sharply, "it's okay." It's difficult to turn around, but he steadies himself on the trunk, gets his feet on the branch and swivels around in a crouch. After he settles, Frank swings his pack around by one strap and puts it in his lap. "Okay," he says. He still startles when he feels Gerard's hands settle at his lower back.
"Hey there, Flinchy," Gerard teases. Frank just shrugs, holding his pack tighter against his chest. Gerard puts his hands underneath Frank's shirt, and oh--
Frank groans and leans forward to press the side of his face against the tree as Gerard scrapes his nails in slow figure eights over his skin. It feels so good to have someone touching him, to have the sharp specific sensation of nails on his back. Gerard runs one hand up his spine, and Frank arches under it, pressing his chest against his pack and panting out "oh God," against the tree trunk.
"Gerard, you mean."
"Gerard," he breathes, stupid with sensation, and when Gerard's hands still on his back Frank whines and hitches back until he moves his hands again. "Feels good."
"I got that," Gerard laughs, and scratches hard at the worst spot on Frank's back, between his shoulders. Frank almost chokes on his tongue, and he has to check the urge to cup his hand over his half-hard dick.
Frank's aware of how ridiculous he must look. He can feel the bark of the tree digging into the skin of his face when he twists. He still doesn't pull away. He can't put into words how good it feels to have someone finally scratching him, so he grunts and writhes.
Gerard's hands eventually slow. Frank barely has the energy to whine. "You're bleeding," Gerard says, and Frank can feel everything on his skin, the air, Gerard's breath, the whorls of Gerard's fingertips. "Sorry."
"Felt good," Frank says. "It feels better." His voice is rough, like he's been moaning. Gerard runs his thumbs over the worst spots, a half-hearted massage, and lets his palms rest against Frank's skin. "What did you do, before?" He's surprised Gerard didn't ask him when he first climbed up. It seems to be the thing survivors ask each other, the new hey, how are you.
"I went to art school. Drawing," he says, when Frank glances back, "pen and ink," like it took him a while to remember the specifics.
"I was getting out of high school," Frank offers. "And I was in a band." It's the first time he's ever told anyone about his band. He wishes both that Gerard will ask and that he'll forget Frank said anything.
All Gerard says, though, is "Music, huh."
"Guitarist and singer," Frank says. "Well, screamer, but they called me the singer." Gerard laughs and slips his hands from under Frank's shirt. Frank remembers that his feet are dangling and his weight is resting on a branch, that he just let some guy touch him. He sits up.
"You should stay here," Gerard says, but Frank's already shaking his head.
"No, I--" Frank shrugs his pack back on and squirms sideways off the branch. He reaches with his left foot for a knot, wedges his fingers in the divot he'd been reaching for before and finds that it holds his weight just fine. "I have to--"
"Yeah, no," Gerard says, "it's okay."
Frank climbs down. When he looks back up, Gerard is gone.
He looks down. There's a glint of something in the dirt, and he walks over to it, kneels and sweeps his hand over the ground.
A bottle cap. He skips it out on the river. Shuffles over.
5 months 17 days
Two guys try to ambush him one night while he's staying in the shopping cart corral at the Kroeger's. He's been bunking down between the two rows of carts, sleeping folded up between them, and the guys jump him when he crawls out in the middle of the night to take a piss. He's been fucked with before, though, and he sees their feet before he gets too far out.
He gets a lucky punch to the little guy's throat, kicks his foot back into the big guy's balls and thrashes free of his grip. He has no hope of outrunning them, but he thinks he does, or at least he tries. He gets halfway across the parking lot before one of them tackles him.
Frank's face slams into the concrete, ripping open his lip and sending a bright flare through his jaw, his shoulders, his hands. He screams without thinking. His teeth scrape against the asphalt. His shoulder twists in its socket as the guy yanks on his pack, and splinters of pain shove up into his neck. Frank tears at his cargo pockets with his other hand and manages to close his fingers around his one-legged scissors; he swings his hand up and brings it back hard, blind.
The man bellows, but he lets go of Frank's head, and Frank kicks free of his weight and stumbles away from him. The guy is clutching his leg, making stuttered, wordless sounds. His hands frame the blue plastic handle where it juts up out of his thigh.
The little guy is hovering back, first taking a step towards Frank, then a step towards his friend, then scuttling back again.
Frank laughs.
The littler guy jerks his head up and stares at him. Frank can feel blood dripping off his lips. He spits, and the guy standing jerks back. "I'll fucking gut you if you follow me," Frank says, putting his hand in his pocket like he's got something else in there. The guy bobs his head. His eyes are wide and scared. The big guy won't stop making those noises. Frank manages to walk away.
He pukes next to a tree a block away, clutching its trunk. The vomit burns his split lip and his gums, and he wants to cry. Someone walks by, then doubles back. "What're you looking at, asshole?" Frank says to their shoes, unable to lift his head and look them in the eye. Spit drips out of his mouth. Their shoes move away again.
He leaves Belleville two nights later.
12 months 3 days
He goes back the next day, to the same tree. Gerard isn't there.
He works his way along the river, scavenging. He finds a doll. More money, more bullets. A pacifier, an old Huey Lewis & the News CD, a few rocks of crack in a dirty plastic baggie. Endless pebbles.
12 months 4 days
He goes back. He looks up at the trees every time he shuffles over, imagining that he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but no one's there.
5 months 30 days
His lip scars where it split open on the asphalt. His knees ache when he wakes up in the morning. Two fingernails on his left hand turn black and fall off, and one is split straight down the middle. He has to find a new shirt. He's mostly pissed about losing the scissors.
The road isn't so bad. He's exposed, walking through the scrub brush by the highways and sleeping under bridges, but he gets better at fighting dirty. Even better, he starts to be able to tell who he can run from, who he can fight, and who he should just find a way to avoid.
12 months 10 days
There are more trees along the river edge, and then more; they begin to press in and crowd together until there is no empty ground, and Frank is feeling around in the spaces between their overlapping roots.
Their branches lace together, vying for space, and the light that filters through their leaves is dark and green. It is cooler underneath, and very quiet. There's something soothing about the only horizon being up above him, about being surrounded by the solid weight of their trunks.
Frank spends all day there, from when light first filters through the leaves until it burns off into a deep, hazy darkness. He trudges back to the high school every night, sleeping uneasily in his science classroom, curled up with his head on his pack and his knife in his hand. In the morning he comes back. It's easy to fall into, and the trees never seem to end.
He finds stranger and stranger things as he moves deeper into what must be a forest. Today it is two small teacups, a trowel, the clawed foot from a bathtub, and a rotting book of love poetry with a neatly stamped Milwaukee Public Library lending card. He reads and clarity of you -- warm brown tea -- we held, shuts the book, and wedges it back into its place under the dirt.
"Hello," Gerard says.
"Hi," Frank says back, startled. He tugs at one strap of his pack and stands up. "I thought you'd left."
"No." He says this like Frank's being unreasonable. Frank looks down and kicks at the dirt, feeling a blush rising on his cheeks. He wants to talk to Gerard, for some reason he doesn't understand. He isn't scared. He doesn't want to back away or turn and run. It doesn't make any sense. After a while, Frank fumbles for his pack, tries to think of something to give him. His hand closes around his water bottle. He hesitates, then pulls it out.
"I found some water. Do you want some?"
"No, save it. It's going to rain soon." Frank's skepticism must show, because Gerard continues, "tomorrow. It's going to rain tomorrow."
"Okay," Frank says. "How do you know?"
"I can feel it. I guess it's weird."
"Convenient, though."
"Yeah."
Neither of them says anything. Frank digs his toe into the ground, feeling like he's bumped into a date after they hadn't called. "Where are you from?" he decides on, finally. "I mean, before."
"Here. New Jersey."
"No shit? Me too!" Frank reaches out and raps his hand against Gerard's toe, which swings just within his reach. "I mean. We're in Jersey, so it makes sense, but--" He can feel a flush rising to his cheeks, and he laughs to cover it up. "You never know. But good people come from Jersey."
"That's what they say." Gerard grins at him, his hair coming down around his face. "I didn't want to interrupt you. Just wanted to say hello."
"Do you live around here?"
"I guess so." Gerard makes the same gesture he made last time, a loose wave, aiming somewhere behind him. "Around. You're staying in the school." He doesn't ask, just states it as fact, but Frank nods anyway. "You like it?"
"It's all right. Quiet. Nobody bothers me."
"I'm not bothering you, right?"
"No, no," Frank says, quick, and the strange thing is that it's true. He touches Gerard's foot again, before he can think about it. "I'm-- it's nice to see you. You should come by tomorrow."
"You're going to be out in the rain?"
"Oh, yeah. Right. The day after, then," Frank says. He sounds desperate. "If you want, whatever. I'll be out here anyway."
"Okay, yeah," Gerard says, smiling easily, and stands up on the branch. "I'll see you."
"Bye," Frank says. Watching Gerard run along his branch and jump to the next tree is more weird than suddenly having him gone, and he has to look away. He goes heavily to his knees and feels between the roots of the tree Gerard was sitting on.
There's a doorknob half-embedded in the soil, but he doesn't bother digging it up.
12 months 11 days
It rains, all day long, a steady drumming on the windows and the roof of the school. The sky is an innocent-looking lavender, but streaks of white flash through every once in a while, and the thunder is a warning grumble that keeps him inside. Frank goes out once to set every container he can find outside to catch the water, in case it's drinkable.
By mid-day, there's a foot of water flooding the cafeteria. Frank takes off his shoes and rolls up the legs of his damp jeans to wade into the back room for food. He sits cross-legged on top of one of the cafeteria tables to eat his canned vegetable soup. Water puddles around his feet on the plastic tabletop. The soup is bland. He wonders where Gerard is.
The water he collects is brackish and sour tasting, but he doesn't get sick after a few sips. He stockpiles his containers in the corner, behind his desk. He sits in the space underneath and looks at it all, his neat pile of dented cans of food and dirty water in old bottles. He can't remember ever being this happy.
He still wishes he could go outside.
That night he dreams that his legs are buried to the knee in the ground, locked into place by packed dirt. His arms are splayed out into their individual parts -- bone, muscle, veins -- spreading like a diagram from an anatomy atlas. The sun and he reach for each other.
4 months 17 days
"Hello?" he calls. Still, even now, he expects someone to answer.
The walls in the living room are a deep mossy green. The tall windows are shattered, and they let in muggy air and tree branches. A leather recliner is toppled over in the center of the room.
He picks up the photo frames that have fallen to the floor. A laughing woman with a large, pock-marked nose, a terrier wagging its tail, a plain-faced family turned to the camera at Christmas, wrapping paper crumpled around them. He puts them back on the mantle and arranges them neatly. He walks into the kitchen.
Clean frying pans hang in a row by the sink; the sink holds dishes from the night before, thick now with mold. There's some food in the pantry, and he digs through for something to eat, finds stale crackers and a Snack Pack pudding. He eats the crackers while he wanders around the apartment, looking at the books and the CDs, the messy desk, the bedroom with its rumpled duvet. There are a pair of slacks on the floor, one leg scrunched up like they were taken off in a hurry. The bathroom mirror has a piece of blue notepaper taped to it, with "See you Thurs.! Love you xoxoxo PS: drycleaning!!!" written on it in green pen.
When he's finished the crackers, he sits on the floor and leans against the bed. Dust rises thickly around him and settles again.
"Honey, I'm home," he says, into the silence.
12 months 12 days
The crooked row of rocks by the wall seem to be off, too few of them for the number of days he thinks he's been at the school. He doesn't feel constipated, though. He feels empty. Not hungry, really, and not bad or sick, just lighter. Not weighed down. He tries to think of the last time he took a shit, but he can't remember for sure. It doesn't matter anyway.
That morning he doesn't bother with scavenging. He watches the ground as he walks, and occasionally stops to feel at the mud with the tips of his fingers, but he never kneels down. The dirt smears on his skin and clings to his sneakers in clumps. The trees are all weighted down with water, and when he ducks under their branches their leaves slap wetly against his face and drip water onto his shirt.
He goes back to the tree Gerard was in the last time. He stands there for a bit before he realizes that he doesn't know when Gerard will come back. He squats down, balances his weight on his toes and searches, idly picking through the mud. He finds a shaving brush, the bristles soaked a deep brown, and a few feet to the left a laminated picture of Justin Timberlake and a pair of headphones. He pulls up the wire of the headphones and rubs his fingers over the muddy coils.
"Did you wait long?"
"Not really," Frank says, and looks up. Gerard is a few trees away, standing on one branch with his hands resting against another, over his head. In the dark light of the forest, his black clothing is difficult to distinguish from the trees; his face seems like it's floating in mid-air before he shifts and crouches down on the branch. Frank drops the headphones, stands up slowly, and walks over.
"I'm so glad you're here," Gerard says. His honesty is baffling. It's a holdover from before, somehow preserved. Frank wants to return it, but his tongue seems to stall in his mouth, and he just jerks a mute nod and tries to smile. "Do you want to come up? Are you busy?"
"No," Frank says, "I think I can clear my schedule." When Gerard laughs, he's proud of himself. Frank climbs up and half-falls onto the branch next to Gerard. When he takes off his pack and puts it in his lap, Gerard doesn't make him ask; he slides his hand up underneath Frank's shirt and starts scratching his back.
Frank asks, "Do you live up here, in the trees?" Gerard's hand pauses, then drags hard, all the way down his back. Frank arches and hisses out a breath.
"Yeah," Gerard says, quiet. Frank tips his head forward, then gives into temptation and slumps to the side, against Gerard's shoulder. Gerard huffs out a laugh, but he adjusts so he can keep scratching. The contact between his face and Gerard's shoulder is strange, even more so than Gerard's nails on his back, but he keeps his head there anyway. Gerard's shoulder smells like sweat and wet leaves, but it is warm and damp under his cheek, reassuringly solid.
"Why'd you leave home?"
"It was too hard," Gerard says, "living with all the stuff from before."
"I couldn't keep people out," Frank mutters. "It wasn't safe." They sit in silence, and he says, "I miss it, but I--" He's not sure what he means to say, so he just drops it. Gerard's hand slows, until he's just rubbing gently. Frank’s back is lumpy, and it feels oddly numb, burning only where Gerard's hand rests against his skin.
"I guess I miss home," Gerard says finally, "I liked it. I just." He shrugs, his shoulder rising and falling under Frank's cheek. "It reminded me of who I was. I didn't like me, not then."
"I guess we were different before," Frank says, "which is dumb, but."
"No, you're right," Gerard says softly. "I was so depressed, before. An artist, you know, drawing pictures of vampires and living in my parents' basement. Doing drugs and drinking too much, I mean." He stops, and the hand in his lap twitches like he's ashing a cigarette. "When it happened, I woke up. I snapped out of it."
"And you aren't anything like that now," Frank says, because he isn't, Frank can tell. Gerard takes his hand out from under Frank's shirt and curves it around his shoulder. He strokes his thumb over Frank's neck, and Frank swallows. Warmth prickles along his skin.
"Yeah," Gerard says meditatively, "that's this." He waves vaguely at the trees around them. "I just. I wanted to die, before, sometimes. I would sit in my bedroom. It smelled, like, so bad in there, I can't even--it was a mess." Frank laughs and looks up at Gerard's embarrassed smile. "I was always thinking, like, we're all born, we do shit, we all die. And there was no point to it. I mean, what purpose did all the money or any of it serve? Human beings were making shit for other human beings. We were like rats," he says, and his face twists. "But rats that were destroying where they lived, too. Worse than rats."
He falls silent. Frank says, "but then--"
"But then," he agrees, "And I snapped out of it. I thought, it's a clean start. We can-- we can do it right. We don't have to live in the wreckage of the old; we can live here, with nature, in something like harmony." He laughs, pulling at the tangled hair around his face. "It's cheesy."
"No," Frank says. Their eyes lock, and Frank sits up. "No, it makes sense."
"I want to save people," Gerard says, and laughs again. "This," he says, gesturing at the trees, at Frank, "this matters to me, more than anything before did. I think this is our chance. The survivors, I mean. We have to live like this is a gift."
"I think I get it," Frank says, slowly. Gerard ducks his head and smiles down at the ground below them. He takes his hand away from Frank's shoulder, but when he puts his hand back down on the branch, their fingers overlap.
3 days
Her family's front door is locked, and he has to climb up a tree by the porch to get onto the roof. The glass in Jamia's window is busted, but he jimmies it open with a piece of wood instead of trying to climb through the empty frame.
In the house next door, someone twitches open the curtains of a second floor window. When he waves, the curtains sway shut again. He shrugs and slides in.
He knew, somehow. He knew. He still searches the house, hoping for someone to be left. He even goes into the attic, crawling up the rickety ladder and braving clouds of dust.
No, no, I don't wanna go up there, it's too weird. We lost my hamster up there, I swear to God, it was horrible--
The doors to the outside are locked. The window frames are down. The fridge is full, and the kitchen smells like rotting fruit and spoiled milk. A book sits forgotten on the kitchen table, propped open upside-down on the table.
He climbs the stairs to her bedroom after he finishes with the basement. He stands in the middle of the room, uselessly. His hands gesture at nothing, twitching open and closing into fists.
This is sexy, right? I'm nervous. Don't tell anyone, okay?
"Fuck you," he says. "You fucking cunt." Frank kicks the bed, hard, and the springs squeak like they always do. "You dumb bitch," he says, and means it. He feels feverish. If she were here, he would hit her. "You stupid slutty bitch," he yells, and kicks the bed again, "you--" He switches to punching. "You stupid bitch, I hate you, I hate you--" Frank’s eyes water, his tongue feels thick in his mouth, his throat is raw. His fingers hook into claws and tear at the mattress. His hand flies out and bangs into the table next to the bed, and the pain cuts through his rage. Frank sits back, shocked, and puts his mouth against the gash.
He's busted his knuckles open, he realizes, and ripped a hole in the sheets. His breath is heaving in his chest.
"Fuck you," he finally says, against his wounded hand. He sinks down to his knees on the carpet and rests his head against the side of the bed. His mouth tastes like blood. "Fuck."
Eventually the bleeding stops. Frank starts to feel ridiculous, and he gets to his feet. The house is silent around him. There ought to be something that attacks him, something that drives him from the house, but nothing comes.
When he leaves, he looks to the neighbor's house, but the curtains don't move.
12 months 12 days
"Slow down!" Behind him, Gerard is breathless with laughter, and Frank looks over his shoulder at him before he leaps for the next branch. He slams into it chest-first, but manages to get his arms wrapped around it and struggles onto his feet.
"C'mon, monkeyman," he says back, breathless himself. Gerard rolls his eyes and shoves his hair back, then jumps, landing a lot more gracefully than Frank did.
"You're a maniac. I take back my invitation." Frank just giggles. "Don't you have any respect for your body?"
"You sound like my sex ed teacher," he tells Gerard, and drops down to catch his breath. "Anyway, isn't your body for using?"
Gerard just looks at him for a moment, his head tilted to the side. Finally he says, "just don't use it up."
"Yes sir," Frank says. "Where are we?"
"I thought you were leading the way," Gerard says, raising one eyebrow. "We're close. You see the guys?" Gerard points, and hey, there are guys sitting there, watching them. Frank stands up and stops grinning. He has to reach out to balance himself against the tree trunk. Next to him, Gerard coils down and springs forward, landing neatly on the next branch, and after a pause Frank follows, crashing down hard enough to make the whole thing shake.
"Mikey," Gerard says, after they've stopped wobbling. He points at the narrow one. Mikey waves, and then shoves his glasses up with the back of one hand. "And Matt," Gerard says, pointing to the glowering guy, who jerks his head in a nod. "This is Frank," Gerard says, and strikes a Vanna White pose. Frank sticks his chest out and puts his fists on his hips, and Mikey solemnly applauds. Matt looks down at his hands.
Neither of the boys are wearing shoes, Frank notes, which is kind of weird. Mikey's feet look like a sloth's, toes curled around the branch to keep him steady. Matt is cross-legged, and the soles of his feet are thick and golden brown with calluses.
"Don't run," he hears, and before he can look up the curly-haired one has dropped down next to him on the branch. Frank doesn't twitch, but it takes some effort.
"Ray," Gerard says. "Meet Frank."
"Hi," Ray says, and smiles. The expression is a lot more reassuring than it was the first time Frank saw him; it somehow has to do with Gerard standing next to Frank, like he's been rendered harmless by proximity.
"Hi," he says back. "I can't run, not really."
"True," Ray says, "but why would you want to? I'm less dangerous than Gerard, and you didn't run from him."
"Gerard is so less dangerous," he says, and Gerard makes an affronted noise. "I could fight him off, really easy. You have. um."
"What?"
"Muscular thighs," he says, and feels incredibly, incredibly gay. Ray turns red and bursts out laughing.
"What's in your pack?" Matt asks, voice cutting through their laughter.
Frank shrugs, giggling into his fist. "The stuff I need. Food, water."
"See," Matt says, "this guy knows how to survive."
Ray's face goes from bright to stormy before Frank can really register what Matt said, and he snaps his head around to glare at Matt. His hair follows a second later, bouncing around his head. "If you--" he begins. Gerard makes a warning noise, and Ray stops.
Matt snorts. "Fuck this," he mutters, and swings down off of the branch to the one below, then off through the forest. His movements seem odd, off-tempo. When Frank looks back up, Gerard and Mikey are having a complicated conversation with their eyebrows and shoulders; at the end of it, Mikey sighs and follows after Matt.
"What," Frank begins, and then swallows his question. "Gerard says you should look at my back," he says, instead.
"Yeah," Ray says, after he has his own silent conversation with Gerard over Frank's head. "Take off your shirt?"
"I never should have said that about your thighs," Frank says, but he turns to straddle the branch. He takes off his pack and his shirt and puts them in his lap.
"Holy shit," Ray breathes. Gerard's hands go around his wrists like loose cuffs. "Frank, what have you been doing?"
"It itches," he says, "What's wrong with it? What's--" he cranes his head back, trying to see. "Don't--"
"This might hurt," Ray says. Gerard pulls Frank's wrists up against his stomach, and Frank leans forward, still trying to turn his head around to see. He can't.
"What is it?" he says to Gerard, but Gerard just shushes him.
At first it's just a weird pressure; it feels like Ray is popping pimples on his back. Something trickles down, and Ray wipes it up with his sleeve. "I'm gonna start digging now," Ray says, under his breath, and Gerard nods.
"What?" Frank says again, and then "Fuck!"
It's a searing pain, deeper than the skin, bleeding down into his flesh. He can't get away from it, can't get loose from Gerard's grasp or Ray's thighs bracketing his. He tries. He throws his shoulders. His spine curves and snaps straight like a whip. He's distantly aware of the noises he's making, the crack of his forehead against Gerard's when he tries to surge forward, Ray's cursing. He's ashamed, in the parts of him that are above the hurt, he wants to hold still, but when Ray drags up on whatever it is it feels like he's pulling something out of the bone, and Frank's in pain and he has to get away.
It won't stop. It has been going on forever. It will never end. Frank eventually slumps forward, pressing his face against one of Gerard's thighs. Spit seeps out of his mouth and dampens the fabric, and he keeps shuddering in spite of himself. Gerard doesn't pull away. Ray doesn't stop digging.
"There," Ray says breathlessly, finally. "Jesus, that's intense."
Frank doesn't sit up. At first he doesn't believe that it's over, and after he realizes that it is, he decides he doesn't want to move. Gerard lets go of Frank's wrists slowly, but Frank keeps his hands there, curled up in Gerard's shirt, against the soft curve of his stomach.
"Do you have any water?" Ray says, and Frank mumbles something about the bottle in his pack. Gerard reaches under Frank's arms, blindly searching, and eventually pulls out the bottle. When the water splashes on his back, even though it's lukewarm, Frank gasps and arches up, yanking on Gerard's shirt. His mouth glances off of Gerard's cheek. Gerard makes a soft sound and puts his hand on Frank's face. Their mouths slide together, almost like an accident. Ray wipes something over Frank's back that makes his skin quiver, and Gerard swallows his second gasp.
When they part, Frank can't read Gerard's expression. His feet are dangling. Ray's thighs are on either side of him. Gerard's knees touch his. His back hurts.
His fingers don't want to uncurl from Gerard's shirt, so Frank shakes him instead, pushing forward and yanking sharply back. Gerard's eyes widen, and his hands come back up to Frank's wrists.
"What the fuck," Frank says, "did you do?"
"I didn't--"
"What did you do?"
"Frank," Gerard says, and then pinches his lips together in a line. Frank shakes him again, choking on a frustrated sound.
"Hey," Ray says. Frank jerks away from Ray's hand on his shoulder and shoves at Gerard’s chest again. Gerard barely gets his hands off of Frank's wrists fast enough to catch himself. They stare at each other. Frank grabs his pack and his shirt and drops off of the branch. He lands with more luck than skill on the branch below them.
"Frank," Gerard says, "look," and tugs up the hem of his shirt.
It doesn't register at first, because they aren't supposed to be there. "No," he says, but he sees them anyway.
There are things growing out of Gerard. They are separate from him somehow, like someone pierced him and stuck the stems in the wounds, or like somewhere inside of him there is a tree shoving its skinny branches out.
Frank can just make out the skin beneath the stems, the ragged circles of scar tissue. He reaches over his own shoulder. He doesn't believe, even when his fingers bump against a shriveled, wet, soft something. It's not part of him, but when it moves he feels it, outside of himself. He feels it throb under his fingertips.
"No," Frank says again, and his voice sounds strange, frantic. Ray says his name, and Frank says "no" one more time, like it means anything, like he can refuse.
"It's a gift," Gerard says, "the trees gave you--"
"Shut the fuck up," Frank shouts, and Gerard stops. His mouth pinches shut again. Ray is frowning. They are both still straddling the branch, looking down at him; Gerard's shirt is still rucked up over his-- over the leaves.
Frank runs.
[ part 2.]