Born 01 - Born

see them. It feels as though they're watching me. As the barn door swings open and shut, a pair of eyes watch from inside. Stains of bloody tears streak the gaunt cheeks below.
    My stomach twists and turns.
    I back up but Will puts his arms on me to stop me from running away.
    "Stay still."
    His words make my skin shiver, as his hot breath lands on the back of my neck.
    I don’t move. The barn door opens and closes several more times. Then suddenly it opens and the eyes are gone.
    I look up at the loft window to see the thin figure pass by it. The window overlooks the field perfectly. We will be seen. Suddenly, I'm on the ground, in the hay and wrapped up in Will's long body. He holds me close to him.
    The wind plays with the hay around us. It whispers to us.
    I can feel his heart beating against my chest. We are face to face but my eyes dart around us. I hear footsteps. I hear something else; it’s the way an exhale sounds when your throat is a ragged mess.
    The infected are near us. I want to pull my shirt up over my face. I want to run. I need my mask but I've left it behind. Another rule I've broken.
    Will strokes his thumb along the back of my neck, where his left hand lays. He's trying to calm my nerves before I give away our location.
    In the gusts of warm wind and the calm silence of the ragged exhales, I hear a sound I don’t expect. It's the hollering of men and the high moans of the infected.
    The footsteps leave the hay around us. The moaning and ragged breath becomes harder to hear as distance is put between us and them. It's always us and them.
    Will whispers into my forehead, "Oh my God." We lay in silence for a moment.
    He peeks his head up to look around, but I pull him back down. "One more minute."
    He frowns but as I speak it, the barn door closes several times hard. A raucous noise fills the air as different types of commotion begin after it.
    "We need to leave now," I whisper into his throat.
    His jaw nods against the top of my head.
    He pulls back a bit and looks at me, almost through me with his intensely blue eyes. He tilts my chin with his free hand and lightly feathers his lips against mine. His kiss isn’t intense like Jake's was or soft and uncertain like Mary's. It's somewhere in the middle and filled with more of everything. He kisses beside my mouth and whispers into my cheeks, "We're going to crawl from here and then make our way to the forest on the other side from where we came. We don’t want to lead them to the camp."
    He kisses once more just alongside my lips and lets me out of his firm grip. He moves away from me and slithers backwards, away from the farmhouse. I follow him. The hay slices along my skin, giving me small cuts. When we get to the halfway point between the forest and farmhouse, he stands and walks hunched right over. I do the same, listening intently to every sound.
    We make our way into the forest where he breaks into a run. I follow him until we reach the bigger trees. He climbs one of them quickly. I look around and start to feel uncomfortable. I don’t like being on the ground without Leo. I climb the next largest tree. I scramble up the branches until I'm as high as he is.
    The farmhouse, my farmhouse, is nearly the entire view. I can see the field I've crossed too many times to count. Pain creeps around inside of me as I imagine my bunker and my rations and my clean little spaces, all torn apart by the infected.
    "So Jake and Anna were here with you?" His voice betrays his lack of hope.
    I nod.
    I see a small cluster of men fighting the infected like fools. They will get sick. They will become infected and maybe they will die because not everyone is able to live with running sores and bloody tears.
    "God, they should have run."
    I recognize one of the men. He is the man who shouted the loudest when the man with the evil grin peed on the fire. The man named John who pulled down my pants.
    I point. "Those men held me captive. They're the others."
    "Do you know where their camp is?"
    I nod. "Yup. I'd like to avoid it."
    "What if they have Jake and Anna?"
    The pain in his eyes hurts me somehow. "I never said I was going to avoid it. I said I'd like to. I'm betting they have Jake and Anna."
    I take one last look and know it will be a long time before I ever come back, if I ever do. I take my last look at the white siding and the small windmill in the front yard waves goodbye to me.
    As my feet make their way back down the tree, I see something that makes me