Free Hissers II: Death March by Ryan C. Thomas

wanted to tell her to hold on, that things would be okay. He should have, even if he didn’t believe it.
    She’ s a strong girl, though, he thought, she’s probably fine.
    It was as good a pep talk as he could muster.
    He rolled over in the bale of hay that was doubling as his bed and tried to get comfortable. This sucks, he thought. Despite what the movies had led him to believe, sleeping on hay was not conducive to sleep. For one, it was very hard, a condensed packed-up square. And two, it was sticking him in all manner of places. But it was better than sleeping in the car, which was down on the ground in this barn, below the hay loft.
    Olive had spotted the farm from the state road a couple hours ago. The barn’s doors had been open and some kind of large farm vehicle, a tiller of sorts, was exposed. Olive had said she was too tired to continue for the night and she didn’t trust a fourteen year old to drive the roads while she slept, least not with the roads as they currently were, all bottled up with abandoned cars and corpses.
    So she’d driven the car into the barn and shut the doors, which were corrugate d metal, not some kind of red clap board like in a bad TV show, and locked it from inside with a bunch of levers that slid into the metal frame. She also found a chain which she jury rigged with some tools to form a latch. If nothing else, Olive was proving to be a handy person to have around. So much for people thinking women couldn’t hold their own in a war. Women like Olive would probably win the war.
    Connor pulled a sharp bit of hay out from under his leg and tossed it down to the car. He could see moonlight coming in through the dus ty skylight above him. The farmhouse was just up the hill a ways, but they hadn’t bothered to check it out for people. Times were changing now, and asking permission for a safe haven was put aside in favor of not waking up any possible undead that might be wandering around inside. Besides, so far no one had come out to investigate, and there were no lights on at the house, not even candles, and so it was most likely that whoever lived in it was dead or running around trying to eat people.
    Next to him, almost touching him, lay Olive. Her breathing was somehow soothing to hear, but her frame was like foreign land to him. He had never slept so close to a girl before. It was weird. And not just because she was older and attractive and a stripper—which his sexually maturing brain still couldn’t let go of—but actually, yes, that was exactly why it was weird. She was a real girl. A woman, he guessed, if you wanted to look at it that way. Young but mature. Sexy but scary. And so close, lying next to him, her warm body like a little heat lamp against his side.
    As if reading his thoughts, she rolled over and put her arm around him. He gulped. His face flushed and he felt heat waves race up and down his flesh.
    “Um, Olive?”
    “Mmmm.” She lifted her head, realized what she was doing. “Oh, sorry, thought I was home. I keep a teddy bear in that spot, usually.” She withdrew her arm and lay on her back, looking up through the skylight.
    “You have a teddy bear?”
    “Yeah, why?”
    “I don’t know. You don’t seem like a girl who would have one.”
    “Because I’m not a kid or because I know how to shoot a gun?”
    He gulped again. “Both. Sort of.”
    “Even a girl who can fire a .12 gauge gets lonely. But don’t worry, kid, you’re still too young for me. Whatcha thinking about?”
    “I was thinking about my friends. The ones who died while we were getting out of Castor. I miss them. I miss everyone. My parents, my friends. I—”
    “Shh!” She put her hand over his mouth, put her other finger to her own lips. With her eyes, she motioned for him to listen outside.
    It took a second, but then he heard it, the sound of the ground rumbling, the high, multi sibilant hiss that accompanied the spider monsters. One of them was close, outside on the farm land.