Chapter Text
The novelty of being on a yacht wears off more quickly than Alicia had expected.
At first, it had seemed a little like a vacation. Alicia had sat on the side of the dinghy as it approached the yacht, skimming her fingers across the water and admiring the way the sun glinted off the silver block letters that spelled out “Abigail” above the boat’s rear swimming deck.
Then they had actually set foot on the yacht, and Alicia realized it was much bigger than she had been expecting, and about three times as nice.
“Ever wonder how he got so filthy rich?” Chris whispers in her ear, nodding at Strand, who is standing in the corner watching everyone admire the boat with a small smile on his face. And yes, maybe she has, but the guy helped her brother escape containment so he can’t be that bad.
In those first few days, she and Ofelia explore the yacht together, laying out on the upper deck, dangling their feet in the water, playing cards in the main room at the heart of the boat, trying to forget the fact that the world seems to be ending and they are stuck on some rich stranger’s yacht in the middle of the Pacific. Sometimes Chris joins them, and they play blackjack until Chris loses too many times and leaves in a huff, complaining that they’re cheating.
During this time the adults mostly let them do as they please, too busy being caught up in their own thoughts. Daniel sits in a corner, by himself, humming and polishing and re-polishing the guns he had brought on board. Occasionally, he takes a creased photo of his dead wife out from his chest pocket and looks at it, muttering in Spanish under his breath. Her mom and Travis huddle together, whispering, and Alicia doesn’t miss the way Travis anxiously wrings his hands and washes them too much, knows he is still sick over having to put a bullet in his ex wife’s brain. And Strand just sits, dressed as always in his impeccable suits, reading a book or occasionally scanning the horizon with his binoculars.
After three days though, Alicia gets bored. There’s only so much to do to occupy yourself on a boat, even one as nice and big as the Abigail. So on the fourth day of being out at sea, she goes to the wheelhouse and sit’s in the captain’s chair, propping her feet up on the dashboard and listening for any signs of life over the ship’s radio. She stays there for hours, occasionally lifting a pair of binoculars to her eyes and looking towards the coast they had left behind, but all she ever sees is brown cliffs and all she ever hears is static. She is just beginning to nod off in the chair when she hears Nick scream.
In an instant, she is on her feet, running towards the sound, which had seemed to come from the rear of the boat. She bursts onto the swimming deck and sees Nick in the water, his arms raised, as Daniel reaches down and hooks him under the shoulders, lifting him up onto the deck and laying him on his back.
Nick sputters, water dribbling out of his mouth, and Madison and Travis kneel at his head.
“Are you hurt?” Madison asks.
“What were you thinking?” Travis asks at the exact same time, and Madison shoots him a hard glare.
“There was someone…something out there.” Nick coughs out and points towards the water behind him.
Alicia is the first to see it, a body floating in the ocean about 50 feet from the edge of the boat. It’s a man, clothes shredded, legs weakly kicking behind him, propelling him forward inch by inch. Alicia takes in the bloated green-tinged face, the vacant eyes and wide gaping mouth, and knows he is one of the infected, probably washed from the beach by the tide.
“Get us out of here,” Travis yells, and Strand runs from where he had been watching from the back. Minutes later, the boat’s engine turns on and they move forward, the spray forcing the body far away.
As the Travis and Madison carry Nick back into the boat, Chris turns to Alicia. “Your brother’s a fucking mess,” he says, and Alicia can’t even bring herself to disagree.
------
After that, they anchor again, because Daniel and Travis have decided that moving would make it harder for any other people to find them and Strand says that they need to conserve fuel. So they sit in place once again, the shore just barely viewable to the naked eye this time. Madison bans any of the kids from swimming, and tries to keep a sharper eye on them.
A week goes by, then two. Alicia’s tan gets darker, and her hair bleaches to a shade that is almost blonde. She tries to exercise, doing jumping jacks on the upper deck with Ofelia, but she still loses weight since all they eat is canned food.
At the beginning of the third week, Alicia and Ofelia sit in the wheelhouse, listening to the all too familiar sound of static, and Ofelia tries to teach her Spanish.
“Barco,” Ofelia says, “Boat.”
“Barco,” Alicia repeats.
“Ayuda. Help.”
“Ayuda.”
“Ayuda, estoy en un barco.”
“Ayuda…es…toy en un barco.” Alicia cringes at how bad she sounds, and Ofelia laughs lightly.
“We can work on pronunciation,” she says.
“Good,” Alicia smiles back at her.
“Ok,” Ofelia squints, trying to decide what to teach her next. “Necesita ir al bano.”
“What does that mean?” Alicia asked.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Necesita ir al bano.” Alicia drags each syllable out, trying to get it right.
“Great! But yeah I actually do.”
“Do what?”
“Have to go to the bathroom.” Ofelia stands up.
“Oh, right. The benefits of being surrounded by water 24/7.” Alicia jokes as Ofelia leaves.
With Ofelia gone, all Alicia can hear is the static from the radio. Then, suddenly, a garbled voice comes out of it.
“Hello. Hello is anyone..” the rest of the words are swallowed by a rush of static.
Alicia grabs the radio, her heart racing.
“Hello. I can hear you.” She says into it, hoping that it goes through.
“Hello!” The other voice, a man’s voice, comes through louder and clearer than before. “I can hear you too. We’re approaching from your port side.”
Alicia looks to her right and sees a tiny speck in the distance, moving in her direction.
“We have no infected.” The man says, and Alicia answers immediately.
“Neither do we.”
“How many in your party?”
“Eight.”
“Eight. Ok. It’s just me and my wife here. Permission to approach?”
For just a moment, Alicia hesitates, knowing she was supposed to have told someone as soon as she heard the radio go off.
Fuck it.
“Yes. You have permission.”
Alicia drops the radio then and runs. She sees Ofelia in the hallway and grabs her hand. “Someone is coming.”
Later, her mother yells at her for not telling someone sooner, and Travis yells at her that these people could be dangerous and Strand stares at her with his arm crossed and Daniel gets his guns ready. But it is too late for anyone to do anything about it. The boat, just a speck before, is closer now and fast approaching.
And in the end, it turns out to be ok. The boat contains a sad, tired looking man and his quiet wife. The man tells them that the pair are heading to San Diego because they heard it didn’t get hit as bad and the man’s sister lives there. They were living on the boat, just off the shoreline, when it had all gone to shit, and they had listened helplessly to the radio as the situation progressed. They had been too scared to go back, choosing to wait it out instead. And then they were making a final pass along the LA shorelines when they spotted the Abigail and they had decided on a whim to approach. “I mostly just wanted to see if anyone else had survived,” the man says heavily, and for a moment everyone is silent, acknowledging the cost of their mortality. But there are decisions to be made.
“So, do you want to come with us?” The man asks, after the groups have finished exchanging their stories.
“Can you give us a moment?” Travis asks, and the man nods.
The eight of them go out on the deck to talk, and Alicia stays completely silent as she listens to her mom argue that they should give it a shot, even if it is the barest glimmer of hope. Travis argues back, saying that they have no idea if Los Angeles is completely overtaken yet. And Strand agrees with him, as does Daniel. Alicia feels a loosening in her chest as she realizes that she too had not wanted to leave. Los Angeles is the only place she has ever known.
In the end, the group decides to stay, to at least make one last stop in Los Angeles and see what they find. They wave grimly and toss hollow wishes of good luck as the man and his wife get back on their boat.
When they are gone, Strand turns to Travis. “So, back to hell?”
And Madison turns away angrily but Travis just says, “Yes.”
------
They leave the next morning, the goal being to get supplies and evaluate just how bad the situation had become.
They dock at Venice beach and step on land with shaky legs that had almost forgotten what solid ground felt like. They walk through the deserted sidewalks of the once bustling beach, see abandoned buildings, some looted or destroyed, others relatively untouched. Bodies, mostly walkers, but some unmistakably human, lay littered around them, bullets through their heads, the product of one of the army’s raiding parties. Alicia tries not to stare as she walked by.
Chris walks a little ahead of the group, filming on his little handheld camera, a new obsession (“For documenting the end of humanity” he says) when he stops in front of a building. “Freak Show” it advertises in bright red letters. “Come see the bearded lady and the two headed turtles.”
Chris walks towards the double glass doors, trying to read whatever else is being advertised while keeping up his running commentary. “This is a freak show at the end of the world”. He leans forward to poke his camera through a hole in the window when it falls from his hand and crunches on the hard floor inside of the building. Before anyone can stop him, he runs to his left and pushes the double doors of the building open, his mind only on his camera and all the footage it held.
And all of a sudden it is chaos.
Because as soon as Chris nudges the door open, he is pushed flat on his back by a mass of walkers. The sounds of their shuffling feet and moaning, gaping mouths fill the air as they burst out in a mass of rotting, writhing human flesh.
Ophelia screams. Nick freezes. Daniel yells and pulls out a gun, blasting the first few walkers in front of him, allowing Chris to scramble to his feet and run back to the group. Travis and Madison pull out weapons and try to defend their children. Strand calmly stands at the back with a baseball bat resting against the shoulder of his expensive suit, waiting for the walkers to reach him.
But Alicia, who had been told by her mother when they were on the boat that she was not ready for weapons yet, was off to the side looking at a run down souvenir shop and was completely defenseless. So she runs, swiftly sprinting between two buildings, pursued by a handful of the swarm that can move faster, the fresher ones. She runs fast and far and further still until she turns a corner and, with a sickening thud, sprints into a burly walker who had just emerged from a doorway.
The last things Alicia remembers are the heavy thud of her body into the soft flesh of the walker’s, the rotten smell of his skin, the dirty gray of the pavement that rushes up to meet her face, and the unmistakable sound of a motorcycle revving somewhere nearby.
------
She regains consciousness a few minutes later, finds herself face down on the concrete and sees booted feet in her line of vision. She can hear the sound of rapid shots being fired above her head, one after the other after the other, followed by the sickening splatter of decaying bodies falling to the pavement. Hot blood drips over her eyes and down her chin, so she turns her head upward to try to stop its flow. Through bleary eyes she sees the cloudless blue of the Los Angeles sky, the sun’s rays blinding her momentarily. Then, out of nowhere, a flash of blonde hair leans over her, followed by a pale face and pink lips and blue eyes that match the sky exactly. The face moves closer, eclipsing the sun, and then all Alicia can see is the blue of those eyes and the inky blackness of the pupils which seem to grow bigger and bigger until all she sees is black.
------
When Alicia wakes again, she is being carried by a pair of strong arms until she is laid down onto a soft couch. A pillow is placed under her head, and footsteps walk away from her then back again. A glass of water and a bowl and rags and medical kit are deposited on the table in front of her. She feels a soft, damp cloth as it’s pressed to her forehead. When she opens her eyes, the edges of her vision are still black, so she blinks a few times, trying to get it to clear. After a little while, it works. She tests her hands, feels the steady pain of bruises on her arms, but nothing broken, then reaches up and touches her temple. When she brings her fingers back in front of her eyes they are coated with blood. “Fuck.” She hears rustling to her right and tries to sit up, but stops when a pair of hands come to rest on her shoulders. And then, kneeling before her, is a girl.
The girl looks relatively young, maybe a year or two older than Alicia. Her blonde hair hangs to her shoulders in loose waves, and there is a bandage under her left eye and a bruise that has almost faded completely on her jawbone. The girl’s eyes, sky blue, stare at her without expression.
“Don’t move.” The girl says, and leans her back down onto the couch cushions. She removes the cloth on Alicia’s forehead, then dips a rag in the bowl of water and presses it to Alicia’s temple. When she pulls the cloth back, it’s bright red and Alicia watches as the girl puts it back in the bowl, clouding the water red. The girl cleans the rest of her face, then presses a clean corner of the cloth to her lips. Alicia inhales harshly at the sudden sharp pain.
“You have a gash on your forehead, a black eye, a nose that you’re lucky isn’t broken, and a split lip,” the girl says, in a way that is both matter of fact and unsympathetic, though her pressure on Alicia’s mouth let’s up slightly.
By the time the girl is done, the water in the bowl is dark crimson, and Alicia feels nauseous looking at it.
Then, the girl pulls out a small flashlight. She shines it into one of Alicia’s eyes, then the other. She holds one finger up. “Follow it.” She moves the finger to Alicia’s right and then left, and nods to herself when Alicia does so.
“What’s your name?” She asks, and Alicia tries to answer but her mouth is so dry that she can’t seem to get her tongue to move.
“Here,” the girl reaches for the glass of water and brings it to her lips. “Sip it.”
Alicia takes some of the water and eases it past her chapped lips. She tries again. “Alicia,” she chokes out. “Alicia Clark.”
“Where are you from?”
“Pasadena.”
“When’s your birthday?”
“June fourteenth.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Do you have family? What are their names?”
At that Alicia hesitates, balking at this personal line of questioning, and she can tell the girl senses it. “I’m just trying to make sure you don’t have a concussion,” she says gruffly.
Alicia nods, “Ok. There’s my mom, Madison. Brother, Nick. My step dad Travis, and his kid Chris.” She thinks of the Salazars, Ofelia and Daniel, and of Strand and how close they all became out of necessity, and adds, “And there are a few others with them as well.”
The girl nods, apparently satisfied. She opens the medical kit and pulls out a tube of antiseptic and a bandage. She makes quick work of bandaging the gash on Alicia’s temple, her fingers deftly applying the balm and then wrapping and tucking until the gauze is held firmly in place. Alicia knows she probably looks ridiculous and almost makes a joke about it, but the hard set of the other girl’s mouth makes her think the humor would be wasted.
When the girl is done, Alicia lays back down, glad all of that is done with since the throbbing in her head, and the rest of her body for that matter, only feels like it’s getting worse. The girl sees her grimacing.
“Could have been worse. You could be a walker now if I hadn’t happened to be around there.” The girl turns and sits at a table next to the couch, where a pile of guns and ammo sits. She takes one and checks it, removing the bullets from their chamber.
Alicia wants to retort that she could have handled it herself, but her weakened state makes her feel unable to argue. “Yeah, thanks for that,” she says instead.
The girl nods in acknowledgment, but keeps her eyes trained on her guns. In a matter of moments, Alicia seems to have been forgotten.
With her rescuer occupied, Alicia takes a moment to take in her surroundings. From what she can see, they’re in someone’s home. The living room specifically. It’s large but cozy, tastefully decorated. There’s a tv hanging on the wall directly across from the couch, stationed above a fake fireplace. She sees picture frames on the walls, a happy family smiling for eternity, a dog playing fetch on a beach, a child’s drawing. If not for all the boarded up windows and the huge pile of guns on the table, Alicia could almost believe she was in the real world again and not the apocalypse. But then Alicia looks at the woman, at the injuries on her face, at her combat boots and no nonsense leather jacket and the empty shotgun holster strapped to her back, and she remembers that the living are at war with the dead.
She turns away from the sight and closes her eyes, tries to sleep because sometimes in her dreams she can pretend that none of this ever happened.
------
“So, does my savior have a name?” Alicia’s head has stopped throbbing for the moment and she is sitting up now, staring at the other girl, who appears to be looking at a map of Los Angeles. She doesn’t know how long she slept, but through the cracks in the boarded up windows she can see a dark, sunless sky.
“Elyza.”
“Elyza.” Alicia weighs the name in her mouth. “Elyza. Interesting.”
Elyza ducks her head in a nod.
“Big talker.” Alicia says with sarcasm, but the other girl’s eyes remain on the map. “So where are we? How did you find me? How did we get here?”
With a heavy sigh, Elyza pushes the map away, as if Alicia was interrupting something of the utmost importance. Alicia half expects to get a “shut up” in response, but Elyza surprises her by answering, albeit in the most disinterested voice she has ever heard.
“We’re still in Venice, not far from where I found you. I was close by, on my bike. Heard people yelling and went towards it, and then I came across you. Killed that fucking massive walker and the other ones who followed you and then brought you back here.” At this last part, a small smile plays over Elyza’s mouth, and Alicia thinks it makes her whole face soften, but it’s gone all too soon. “And then I brought you back here.” She gestures at the house. “Just some random place I found a few days ago.”
“And you didn’t see anyone else? I was with a group. My family.”
“No,” Elyza shakes her head. “I heard people, but they were a long way off and I didn’t know how many walkers I’d be facing so I bailed.”
Alicia accepts this, but rests her head in her hands, the guilt of being relatively fine while the rest of her group could be in danger making her chest feel tight. She thinks of Nick and her mother and feels a warm twinge in her chest. “You should have saved them instead,” she murmurs, “I would’ve found a way out.”
The girl snorts dismissively. “Like hell you would have. Don’t you remember? You were pretty much knocked out when I got there.”
It’s the second time the girl has said something with that underlying tone of mockery, and Alicia’s face burns with the urge to retort, but again she bites her tongue.
“Sure. And thank you again for that. And for all this,” she gestures at the bandages on her face. “But I should probably go try to find the others now.” She pushes off the couch and stands up, but a sudden wave of nausea hits her. She fights it for a moment, takes another step, but she knows a split second too late that this was probably a bad idea as her knees start to give out underneath her. For the second time that day, she watches the ground rise up to meet her, but this time Elyza catches her. For a moment, Alicia sees worry in the other girl’s eyes, but in an instant their blankness returns and Alicia thinks she must have imagined it.
“I told you not to move,” Elyza snaps as she none too gently slings Alicia’s arm over her shoulder.
“Fuck that,” Alicia says, but she allows herself to be led until she can fall gratefully back onto the couch. Elyza repeats her test with the flashlight from earlier, but this time she stays kneeling in front of Alicia.
“So I guess all it takes for me to get any reaction out of you is to almost pass out. Noted.” Alicia is teasing, sort of, but Elyza doesn’t laugh.
“Why were you out there by yourself?” She asks seriously. “You’re just a kid.”
Alicia narrows her eyes. “Can’t I say the same about you?”
Elyza shrugs but doesn’t take the bait. “But I’m prepared.” Alicia’s eyes flicker over the massive pile of guns on the table. She’s not lying. “You didn’t even have a weapon. Which, if you ask me, is sheer stupidity and recklessness.” Her tone, once again, is holier than thou, as if she can’t possibly fathom Alicia’s actions.
And Alicia has had enough. In the space of a day she has returned to her destroyed home town and lost the only family she has that she knows are still alive, and now she has to deal with this callous stranger. She snaps.
“Well I’m sorry we can’t all have a thousand guns and be weird killing machines like you. I was with people who cared about me and thought they could protect me and didn’t think I needed a fucking gun on a supply run. I’d rather be unprepared with a family that loves me than totally prepared but fucking alone, like you.” She spits out. She regrets it almost immediately, knows it was just the stress and the pain making her crazy, but she can’t take it back now.
She tenses for Elyza’s reaction, but is surprised by the steady gaze she is met with. Nothing about what she has just said seems to faze the other girl. Instead, Elyza’s eyes bore into her own, cool blue meeting blazing green, and finally Alicia has to look away. She lies down and curls her body into the couch cushions, as far away from the other girl as possible.
She hears Elyza stand up. When she speaks, her tone is level. “I’ll look for the rest of your group tomorrow. You’ll need to rest here, save your strength. I’ll find them.”
Elyza walks away then, flicking the light switch off as she leaves the room. Alicia can hear her walking through the house, presumably checking the windows and exits, making sure there are no surprise guests in the night. Eventually, she hears a door close upstairs, and the footsteps stop. Alicia presses her once again aching head back into the pillow and wishes she could rewind back to that morning. She would tell everyone that going to San Diego was the right choice, that there was nothing but pain for them in Los Angeles. But she can’t, and now she’s all alone. She feels her eyes well with tears and reaches up to wipe them away angrily. She is safe, and her family will be too. And tomorrow she will find them. She will be strong