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[1.]
The infected went to the train yard to die. Once a week, Ponyboy walked through piles of rigor mortis, bodies twisted where they were gunned down, and looked for his brothers.
The scent of scorched earth burned his nose. Smoke hung listlessly in the sky, thick with ash. The military torched the place when too many bodies piled up to shoot, when the deadheads crowded against the barricade and threatened to breach it. Ponyboy had never seen a firebomb in person, but he walked through the aftermath. Charred bone and melted fat smeared his shoes.
The barricade loomed where the West Side used to be. Pin prick figures dotted the top, silhouetted against the hazy sky. They wouldn’t shoot. From this distance, they couldn’t tell if he was infected or not, but as long as he didn’t approach the cement walls, they'd leave him alone.
He used to play here when he was younger, and could run across the tracks without rib cages splintering under his feet. Sometimes he tried to remember how it looked back then, but the memory blurred, like a picture out of focus. Remembering things was hard these days. If he went too far back in his mind, he was in danger of getting stuck there forever, lost in a world where flesh didn't rot off living creatures, and no barricade loomed over the railroad.
Back then, if someone yelled "Curtis!" Ponyboy asked which one. He didn’t ask anymore. He didn’t need to.
Something rustled behind him. He swung around, knife clutched tight. A vulture stared back, unblinking, where it perched on someone's skull. A patch of filthy blond hair peaked beneath the bird's talons.
Soda —
He stumbled toward the body. The bird flapped away with an indignant screech, the only sound to pierce the stillness as Ponyboy turned the corpse over, looking for the place where a face used to be. The disease had taken most of its skin, the skull peeking through in oily patches. There was nothing to look at, let alone recognize, except—the eyes were all wrong, blue instead of golden brown, bulbous even without the disfiguring. The eyes weren’t familiar, and Ponyboy could breathe again.
Just as quickly as relief washed over him, guilt replaced it. This was someone's family, even if not his own. The barrenness of the train yard overwhelmed him. So many people, with lives and families and love and heartbreak, so much loss, so much death. The smog above the barricade bled crimson.
That's what he missed most, Ponyboy thought. With all that smoke, he hadn’t seen a sunset in years.
[2.]
Despite popular opinion, the worst thing about the world going to hell wasn’t the fear—or corpses roaming the streets, or being chased by death every waking second. Nope, not for Two-Bit Matthews. All that stuff, he got used to it in a week, maybe two. At least the fuzz weren’t breathing down his neck!
No, the worst thing about the apocalypse was the lack of booze.
Buck Merril's place got raided within the first month. Nothing left behind except broken glass and Buck's brains, splattered on the counter top. Tulsa had other bars, but they were in Packer territory, and even Two-Bit wasn’t crazy enough to cross gang lines—not now, at least, when those James boys roamed with the half-deads. Even if he could find alcohol, drinking under the current circumstances would likely end with a deadhead chewing on his intestines.
Two-Bit would risk it all for a drop of whiskey.
The bunker door slammed open, so hard Two-Bit felt it in his teeth. "Droppers," Mark Jennings yelled. "Coming up the road."
Sure enough, a helicopter's insect humming grew louder as Two-Bit listened. He groaned. "Can't those guys take a hint?"
Mark dropped the satchel from his shoulder and replaced it with a rifle. "Guess they like us." Blood spattered the side of his face, but where it came from was anyone's guess. These days, Mark was more likely to be covered in someone else's blood than his own.
The door banged open again and Tim Shepard shoved past Two-Bit. "Is my face that interestin’? Let’s move , Mathews.”
"Can’t blame me for hopin’ a deadhead finally ripped a piece outta you," he sniped.
“I didn’t know drunks were daydreamers.”
Another thing Two-Bit hated about the apocalypse: Tim Shepard.
Tim slammed the door and ground the makeshift bar into place. Of all the digs they squatted—ravaged grocery stores and burned-out gas station shells, abandoned family homes, office buildings—this was the longest they'd stayed in one place. Nothing fancy, just one of those drug houses where the beatniks used to smoke grass. Remnants of their tenancy still haunted the building—crushed bottles in the closets and dirty sheets left on the bed, fringe curtains that Steve cursed at every morning but never bothered to tear down. Giant spray-painted letters spelled PEACE across the living room wall, though it was hard to read beneath all the blood stains.
(Curly snickered the first time they came here, gesturing at the red-smeared word— "Really worked out for them, huh? " before Tim turned around and belted him. You didn’t laugh at the dead. You didn’t cry, neither.)
Tim did some remodeling, of course. Now boards covered the windows and bars crossed the doors. The house, already dark and smoky, might as well be stuck in midnight with the amount of light that escaped through the cracks. Two-Bit ain't like Ponyboy, he didn’t mind where he laid his head as long as a rotter ain't nibbling on his toes, but sometimes even he felt the darkness cozying up to him at night, weighing down his chest.
Dallas loved it, because of course he did. "It's like a cave," he said gleefully, despite having never been in a cave.
Two-Bit wondered what happened to Dally. These days, that's all he seemed to do; crave beer, and wonder where his buddies went.
Tim Shepard banged on the wall, jolting Two-Bit from his sober misery as he yelled for some of the buddies yet to be lost. "Time’s wasting, boys! I ain’t gonna say please."
A moment later Steve and Curly clattered down the stairs, arms full of weapons, with little Johnny Cade a shadow at their heels. "Knives or heaters?" Steve asked.
Tim shook his head. "Knives. No noise."
When you took out a dropper quietly, his buddies didn’t come looking; no loyalty with those West Side bastards. But if they heard guns, they thought their guy was shooting at deadheads—and nothing attracted droppers quicker than a hive of deadheads. Two-Bit took his post by one of the boarded-up windows and put his eye to the crack. The row of neighboring houses leered, dark and silent, over a deserted street.
Two-Bit grinned. "I gotta say, boys, you weren't first pick on the list of people I'd like to die with—” he paused, waiting for Curly's braying laugh— "’cept you, Johnnycakes, you're alright."
Steve snorted. "Bet you weren't expecting to go out sober."
"Rather sober than with a face like yours."
Tim yelled at them to shut up, and Two-Bit went back to watching the road. He felt, more than saw, the presence at his elbow. Johnny radiated fear the way a sewer radiated stink; you could smell it on him.
"Hey, man." Two-Bit elbowed him, ever easy. "Where's Ponyboy?"
Johnny shrugged, gaze skittering from the window, to the room, to the knife in his hands. "Military bombed the train yard last night. We could see the fire from upstairs."
Two-Bit's smile twitched. "He snuck out again?"
Johnny shrugged. His eyes flickered back and forth like a candle flame, never resting. "Thinks he might find 'em this time. He's been having dreams ."
Johnny said it with weight, like Ponyboy having dreams about his brothers was some whoop-dee-doo affair signaling the end of the world, and not a nightly occurrence. For the thousandth time, Two-Bit wished Sodapop were there to interpret the kids for him—but then, if Soda were there, Two-Bit wouldn't need an interpreter in the first place, because Ponyboy wouldn't be at the train yard looking for him.
It was the kind of thing you ain’t supposed to think with death nipping at your heels every day, and Two-Bit forced his mind to veer from Sodapop Curtis's sunshine smile. Don't think about the buddies who didn't make it out. Don't think about how their little brother was all you got left of them (but you're losing him too, just in a different way). Don't think at all.
Don't think.
Oh, the things he'd do for a shot of whiskey.
"They're coming," Johnny whispered, and Two-Bit’s attention snapped back into focus. Footsteps echoed through the abandoned road. A moment later, a group of men turned the corner, dressed in bulletproof black, with combat boots and automatic rifles. They swept the street, guns trained on every broken window and busted door.
Droppers . Some West Side soc cooked up the idea in a pointless attempt to wipe Tulsa of the infected. The military sent soldiers over the barricade in helicopters and dropped them at random, gave 'em guns and pointed them towards the worst parts of town.
By the time the helicopters returned, most droppers were decaying from the inside out.
Two-Bit slid his knife from his belt and held it ready, eyes trained on the street. West Side soldiers didn’t stop for conversation. They didn’t look to see if your skin rotted off, or if you were one of the luckies who escaped the infection. Droppers shot anything that moved.
"How many?" Tim asked.
"Eight."
"We could take 'em," Mark said.
Blood pulsed in Two-Bits ears as the thrill of a fight took hold, tingling in his fingertips and rushing down his spine. "Your call, man," he said to Tim.
"Are they sweeping houses?"
Two-Bit pressed his face to the crack. The group in the street skittered away from the rows of houses like spooked cats, only pointing their guns up at porches and windows. Two-Bit pulled away. "Nah."
"If they ain't coming in, I ain't going out. No use givin’ up the base."
Steve and Curly groaned in disappointment, at the same time Johnny audibly released his breath. With the world going to hell, you'd think death wouldn’t bug him no more, but the apocalypse only made Johnny more scared of violence. Two-Bit should be thankful; the kid ain't jaded, like Tim or Dally. ( Like you , a little voice whispered.) Two-Bit should be thankful, but keeping the kid from dying was a lot harder when he wouldn’t get his hands dirty.
The droppers passed their house. Two-Bit pocketed his knife as they got further away, but a sudden noise made him pause, grip tightening. A teenage girl staggered into the middle of the street. Young—maybe Ponyboy’s age—with so much dirt caked into her skin and hair, he might've mistaken her for a tumbleweed if it weren't for the yelling. Nobody yelled anymore. Nobody was stupid enough for that.
"Are you the military?" she choked, stumbling toward the droppers. They took a collective step back and raised their guns, but she kept coming, her eyes wide with terror "Please, help me— the infected— they're gonna kill me—"
"Idiot," Steve muttered. "She thinks the deadheads will kill her but the military won't ?"
Two-Bit sighed. What a shame, really. She didn’t look infected, a rare miracle these days. She looked kinda nice. One of them preppy schoolgirl types, beneath all that dirt.
The girl sank to her knees. Tears made tracks through the mud on her face. She keened like a wounded animal, a noise of total desperation and loss, a noise Two-Bit only heard one other time in his life when Ponyboy first went home and his brothers weren't there. Two-Bit wanted to cover his ears then, like shutting out the sound could shut out the pain. He wanted to cover his ears now.
"Please help me," the girl sobbed, as the droppers took aim. "I can't keep running from them."
And the bunker door slammed open.
The world fractured into a blur of violence. Tim spit curses, and Steve too, and somehow Johnny disappeared from his place at Two-Bit's side. The droppers scattered as a small body flew toward them. The girl never stopped keening, the sound of her terror filling the street as little Johnny Cade attacked a group of West Side soldiers, eight to one.
Then they all burst in the street, Two-Bit and Steve and Mark, Tim and Curly, knives out, voices hoarse with shouting. Johnny had no weapon, but he didn’t need one; he came from grease, and skin fighting was their game.
Steve slammed his knife into a dropper's head with a wet crunch. Two-Bit hauled a guy off Johnny's back and socked him in the throat. Mark laughed, a crazed, hysterical melody, with red-soaked hair plastered his forehead. Blood ran in rivulets on the pavement.
Just as quickly as it began, the fight ended. Eight bodies littered the pavement in varying states of mutilation. Mark's were the worst, barely human where they lay twisted together. Two-Bit ain't a sissy—he'd seen folks with faces rotting off from the infection, and never flinched—but the sight of Mark’s kills made his stomach turn.
The apocalypse did things to people. Some, like Johnny, got jumpier, and some, like Steve, got angry. Ponyboy retreated so far into his head, no one, not even Johnny, could fish him out, and Two-Bit—well, Two-Bit got sober.
But people like Mark Jennings stayed exactly the same. And somehow, that was worse.
"What kinda stunt was that?" Tim snapped, whirling on Johnny, who’d frozen with bloody fists, stuck staring at the bodies. "This street was clean! Now that helicopter’s gonna go back empty, and this place’ll be crawlin’ with every dropper in the West Side, thinkin’ we’re a deadhead nest!"
Johnny ignored him, turning to Two-Bit instead. His voice tumbled in shaky gasps off his lips, gaze still glued to a dead dropper at his feet. "Did I kill that guy?"
"Nah, man, you just messed him up a bit. I killed him." Two-Bit nudged his shoulder. "Hey, what was that? Ain't like you to go feral."
"I dunno." Johnny looked away with distant eyes. He gingerly passed the body, careful to skirt the red soaked tarmac, and approached the girl still sobbing on her knees.
"Johnnycakes," Steve muttered, body going tense, "that ain't safe."
"Hey." Johnny knelt in front of her. "You're okay now."
She gasped like there was no air left in her body, like she swallowed too much pain and it stuck in her throat. Wide, red-rimmed eyes met Johnny's. "I'm scared," she whispered. Her voice bled.
Johnny nodded. "What's your name?"
"Cathy."
"We're gonna help you, Cathy."
For a moment, her eyes changed, as the lines of tension in her face softened. Johnny was so brokenly earnest, you couldn’t help but believe him, even if he were telling the fattest lie in the world. Like right now, when he said, "It's gonna be okay." For a moment, even Two-Bit believed him.
Then the girl choked again, blood exploding from her mouth, and lunged at Johnny with a gurgling scream.
No time to move. No time to call out or pull a knife or breathe. Two-Bit watched, frozen, as Johnny fell backward with the girl on top, her teeth bared, blood dripping from the infection in her mouth. A milky film covered eyes that were normal only seconds before.
Johnny would die before he hit the pavement.
—except he didn’t.
For a moment, Ponyboy Curtis stood silhouetted against the smokey sky, holding the deadhead by the throat. He kept the creature at arm's length, inspecting it. Then he pushed it away.
"Get outta here," he said, simple as shooing a pesky child.
The deadhead obeyed.
Seconds passed. No one moved, waiting and watching while she shuffled away. When she turned the corner out of sight, Curly’s braying laugh filled the road. "Curtis, how did you get here?"
Ponyboy frowned. "I walked, idiot."
"Thanks, man," Johnny said from the ground, voice unsteady, his hands tightened into trembling white fists. Ponyboy helped him up. "Thought I was a goner."
They shared one of those looks , the kind that Two-Bit wished Soda were around to interpret. Ponyboy squeezed Johnny's shoulder. "Nah, you're too tough for that."
At sixteen, Ponyboy Curtis grew taller than anyone ever expected, and weirder than a nursing home full of grannies. Nobody held it against the kid; the apocalypse ain't exactly prime conditions for a healthy adolescence. He had this way with the deadheads, something about him that didn’t freak ‘em out. Every now and again they'd try for a piece of him, but usually, they shuffled right on past.
It gave Two-Bit the creeps. Sooner or later Ponyboy was gonna slip up and stop paying attention, and that's when one would lunge for the throat.
He's always thinkin’, but about all the wrong stuff. That's what Darry used to say. At the time, Two-Bit laughed it off and called him a stiff.
He ain't laughing now.
"Pony, you can't keep going off by yourself," he said. "It wasn’t safe before the zombies, and it sure as hell ain't safe now."
Pony directed that cold, sightless stare toward Two-Bit. "You ain't Darry," he said. "I don't gotta listen to you."
(And ain't that hilarious, considering Ponyboy never listened to Darry, either.)
"Let's get back inside," Tim said. "We're making too much noise."
They picked themselves up. Steve, Curly, and Mark stripped the droppers of weapons, Pony led a still shaking Johnny back to the house, and Two-Bit watched while a familiar craving burned like acid in his veins. The smoke blotted out the sky, thickening as darkness approached—just a whiff of soot haunting the breeze. Johnny said the West Side firebombed the train yard again, and he could smell it now, the faint stink of flesh and ashes carried over the rooftops. Tulsa burned. Her people rotted.
Two-Bit sank down on the porch steps. Risky business, staying outside, especially with the commotion they just caused—all that noise would surely flush out a few deadheads, maybe a hoard—but he wasn’t quite ready to surrender himself to the darkness of the house. Not with Ponyboy in there cleaning blood off Johnny's face, and this insatiable jitter under Two-Bit’s skin. The sight of them might finally make him hurl.
Two-Bit ain't made for responsibility. His mama knew it, always sighing and fussing at him when he came staggering home, but never really trying to stop him. His sister called him a drunk bum. It never hurt his feelings, 'cause it was true, and Two-Bit didn't particularly care so long as he was having fun.
Two-Bit couldn’t recall what his sister looked like anymore. Oh, he remembered the idea of her—smart eyes and sharp mouth, always spitting, always swearing, her mama's voice laid over top of her father's temperament. But when he thought real hard about her face, it hid in hazy shadows.
Funnily enough, he remembered Darry better. Forgetting a Curtis was like forgetting the sun. They burned too bright, leaving scorch marks wherever they went. Darry, strong as stone, twice as unforgiving, and Soda, golden right down to the roots of his hair and the seams of his soul. Even Ponyboy, shy and weird and spaced out half the time, had that look in his eyes, like he could raise hell and be hell. Two-Bit thought it would be easier to die than lose the memory of those faces.
The porch creaked as Tim Shepard sat down heavily beside him and rolled a cigarette. Tim lit it and let the ember tip burn, a tiny spark between his fingers.
"We gotta move on," He said between drags. "Military might come sniffing, and I didn't like that infected chick hanging around. This street has been clean so far, but when one shows up, more are coming."
"Yeah yeah, I get it." Two-Bit shifted, scratching the back of his neck. "Maybe we can wait for a spell, y' know? Just to see."
He didn’t like the way Tim glanced at him, sharp as a rusted nail but trying not to cut. Sympathy didn’t look good on Tim Shepard. It only highlighted how little he had.
"Dallas is smart," Tim said. "He'll find us."
Like Darry was supposed to find us, Two-Bit thought. Like Soda was supposed to find us . Like his mom, or his sister, or—
Nope. No point going there. A week came and went since Dally walked out of the bunker door with a cocky grin and a rifle slung over his shoulder. Either death found him, or it didn’t. Nothing Two-Bit could do except hope, and keep the boys safe in his absence.
Two-Bit didn’t have Darry's discipline, or Soda's empathy. He didn’t even have Dallas Winston's rage. He was nothing but a drunk bum doing his best to survive, with the pressure of the Curtis family ghosts hanging over him and a couple of kids in tow.
Raise a glass to Mr. and Mrs: they never could have guessed who'd get eventually custody of their boy.
"I can't do this," Two-Bit groaned, dropping his head into his hands. "I ain't mature enough to be a parent. I ain't even mature enough to be the fun uncle."
Wordlessly, Tim passed him the cigarette.
[3.]
When Johnny Cade was sixteen, he ran away from home.
It was a long time ago, years separating him from that moment, but he still remembered how the sky looked, stretched out like an oily tarp. Every single star hung in perfect suspension. No smoke. No ash sticking to his tongue and throat until he couldn’t remember the taste of anything else. Back when it was just him and Pony, feet slapping the tarmac, wind in their eyes and a hazy dream clutched in sweaty fists, like a promise made to the world.
When Johnny Cade was sixteen, the infection started, and the last time he saw Darrel or Soda Curtis was the day before. There'd been a fight with some socs, and Soda had blood staining the spaces between his teeth, all pearls and roses. They were the same age but sometimes Johnny felt a million years lay between them—jumpy, paranoid little Johnnycakes, and fierce, golden Sodapop. He would be eighteen now, same as Johnny, but Soda’s birthday came and went without him. The gang celebrated by wetting their knives on some deadheads who attacked them on Anderson St.
Johnny didn’t like it, the fighting and killing, the way he scrubbed and scrubbed but couldn’t get the blood from under his nails. He killed a guy once, stuck a blade right between his ribs, easy as carving wax. Now, he was older than Bob Sheldon, and it messed with his head. He couldn’t think about it without seeing Bob as a kid, seeing Ponyboy under his knife, blood seeping out like a leaking gas tank, Bob's and Ponyboy's and every deadhead Johnny ever watched die, skin sliding off their bodies in reams. Tulsa ain't what it used to be. Johnny saw the ghosts of people he once knew in faceless corpses.
Dallas was different. There were people who couldn't take it, like Johnny and Pony. There were people who got used to it, like Steve and Two-Bit. And there were people who liked it, people who came alive with chaos crawling under their skin, who didn't see a difference between punching socs and killing deadheads. People who thought it was just another adrenaline rush, just another thrill.
If Darry were here, or Soda, Johnny wondered if Dally would be different—sandwiched between the older Curtis's stability and the middle Curtis's hope. If they were here, Johnny wondered if Dally wouldn't have left the bunker alone, nothing but a rifle on his shoulder and a grin that could take the world, violent to the point of desperation, confident to the point of depravity.
"See ya, Johnnycakes ," he said, and never came back.
Mark Jennings thought it was premeditated, Dally not coming back. Mark Jennings thought he did it on purpose.
Mark, who wasn't part of their gang anyway, who bummed around with the Shepard outfit until necessity drove Tim and Two-Bit to combine forces. Mark—who wore his own brother's treachery like a bullet hole in the forehead—had no concept of loyalty. But Johnny saw Dally fight in rumbles, saw the soft edge when he spoke to Ponyboy, heard the hesitation in his voice when he said Johnnycakes . Dally would single-handedly take on a hoard of dead heads if it meant keeping the gang safe. That’s what loyalty meant.
Wherever he went that day, for whatever reason, Dallas Winston meant to come back. He had a string tied ‘round his ribs, like a leashed dog, pulling him back when he strayed too far. It was Dally who helped Pony and Johnny when Bob's blood polluted the fountain. And it was Dally who kept Johnny's secret all these years, even after the droppers starting coming around and Tim tried to dig it out of him.
See, when Johnny Cade was sixteen, he ran away from home, nothing but a switchblade in his pocket and his best friend's hand clasped tightly in his own. They were gonna take Tulsa, they were gonna take the world, and for a moment, with the inky sky overhead and Ponyboy's laughter in his ears, Johnny thought, we're gonna be okay.
Instead, he killed a boy. A boy named Bob Sheldon, whose father was a scientist. A boy so angry at life, so poisoned by his family, so drunk to the brim on hate, that he kept a grudge against the world and a glass phial, stolen from his father's lab, in his pocket.
See, here’s the thing: when Johnny Cade was sixteen, he started the apocalypse.