Up on the Mountain

Lilly turns twenty six today. There will be no birthday cake with twenty six candles and no silly cards in the mail.  The time for clubbing and drinks with close friends has passed.  In fact, it never was a time of bars and fruity cocktails with names that no one really feels secure ordering.  Lilly lived up on the mountain since she was twenty one and then some.  At twenty five, she laughed to herself about being able to rent a car without a another adult.  That was about all that twenty five was good for in the old world.  Not worth much more in this one either.

The year before, Lilly rang in twenty four by tossing her cousin's freshly deceased body off of the Caulky ridge.  The Caulky ridge was named after Tom and Claire Caulky who took a leap off of the rocky drop-off to their deaths not two hours after watching the hillside elders toss the body of their only son, Tim, off the same cliff to the rocky outcroppings two hundred feet below.  The Caulkys plead for leniency.  They plead for the chance to take care of their son another way.  The elders refused.  The group had lived on the mountainside for eight years at the time of Tim's death.  They had dealt with death on the mountain in this way for the previous six years after the first family member passed quietly in the night and rose again because the family did not let on that their elderly mother had taken ill.  The Caulkys were denied and off the ridge they went.

At sixteen, Lilly was shoved into the back of the family's SUV with the barest of essentials before her parents plowed out of the garage barely clearing the still opening garage door.  Her father didn't stop for a moment.  Not after running down the cloying remains of Mr Farson from next door and her former best friend, Michelle Farson.  Lilly to this day is still not sure that Michelle was as dead as her father when they struck her with the car.  It didn't matter.  Her normal teenage life ended that day despite having hidden in their house for two weeks prior ever since the news of the infection spread to the suburbs.  It was startling how many people died on a daily basis before factoring in the new threat of infection from the newly raised.  The CB radio conversations she overheard while huddled in her room hating her parents for refusing to let her go out and check on her friend seemed like a hoax.  However, her family was greeted by thirteen other families on top of that mountain ten years ago.  Lucky thirteen they joked.  Lucky, indeed.  Saved from the constant threat of formerly beloved bodies dragging their decaying asses up and down the block attacking every man, woman, child, and family pet not secured behind reinforced doors and windows.

Ten years of learning to trap and share the meat of small animals with those she did not feel earned their keep.  A decade of scouring the trees and bushes for edible fruits, berries, and nuts to find out somebody didn't tell anyone about deathly allergies to be combined with the lacking of any anti-histamines or epinephrine to save them from the cliffs.  Over a third of her life spent cowering under ragged blankets in the cold and burying her own feces in the woods like an animal.  She was done with it.  Tomorrow, she would head down the mountainside to the main gate to judge the destruction of the old world.  She planned to break away during her morning trapping and scavenging to scout the dangers and, pending any insurmountable obstacles, return to the world she once knew.  God damn, zombies!