Reluctant Necromancer

I startled awake and found myself face to face with Mara grinning at me. “Tag, you’re it,” she whispered before sliding past the seat with John’s feet sticking out.

I groaned and rolled over to sit up. Ashley sat up beside me, looking deliciously rumpled and tousled. Her hair poking out at odd angle and tired eyes just made me want to pull her into my arms even more than normal. Which was already pretty well constantly.

Her eyes met mine and she gave me a sleepy smile while she stretched her arms overhead. Her shirt pulled up, revealing a few inches of bare skin. I must have made a face or a noise or something, because Ashley started snickering at me while she pulled her shirt down.

We quickly got sorted, put our boots back on, and climbed out of the van. Mara stood nearby with Junior beside her. He looked awkward and shy around her. And maybe a little blushy. Huh.

“W-well, nothing happened. I mean, everything’s been quiet,” Junior reported while Mara smirked.

“Thanks. You guys go get some sleep. We’ve got it,” Ashley shooed the two back to their vehicles. Mara moved with a little extra hip sway to her movements. Junior got caught looking, which caused Mara to smirk. Double huh.

“Let’s walk around the perimeter real quick and then find a place to sit and keep an eye on things,” Ashley offered. I agreed since I had no better ideas for what keeping watch should entail. This was the stuff that got skipped over in book, movies, and games. Even our tabletop games kind of skimmed over it.

I followed Ashley into the woods a ways before we began walking a big circle around the convoy. Nothing seemed out of place. All the woodland creatures were making woodland sounds. Nothing jumped out to eat our faces. In my inexpert opinion we were as safe as we could be. At least from monsters.

Ashley had us sit down on a log that had clearly been dragged over by one of the earlier shifts. At first we were quiet. It was dark, it was quiet, the others were sleeping, it seemed wrong to break the silence.

Which probably explained why I was the one to break it. “Pretty quiet out there.”

Ashley sighed exasperatedly, “Yes. Yes it was.”

“Hi,” I smiled shyly at her.

She chuckled, “What do you want, babe?”

“I’m bored.”

Another sigh, “That’s a good thing in these situations generally.”

“Baaaaaabe,” I whined. “I’m bored.” My feet quietly stomped.

“Oh my god, dork. What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. Anything,” I threw my hands into the air.

“Want to talk about how the color purple is a mass hallucination?” she asked deadpan.

I laughed before I caught myself. I threw a panicked hand over my mouth to muffle the noise and looked at Ashley nodding my head.

“Ok. So, you know about wavelengths and how they correspond to colors right?”

“I guess. It sounds vaguely familiar.”

“Well, there is no purple wavelength,” she said.

“Then how do we see it?”

“Well, when your eyes see blue and red wavelengths without another color like green present, your brain blends them into a new color. Purple! It’s literally your brain making things up, so a hallucination. Everyone agrees purple is something we experience, hence…purple is a mass hallucination,” she threw out her arms to indicate everyone.

I nodded my head thoughtfully, “What about Roy G Biv? Violet is purple, right?”

Ashley shook her head, “No, violet is technically the end of the blue spectrum. It’s more like a super dark blue, but it had its own wavelength. Purple is a composite color.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I just like collecting interesting facts,” she shrugged her shoulders. “I know lots of random shit about lots of random shit.”

“Ok, nerd.” I leaned over and kissed her cheek playfully. “It’s kind of cool though. So, what else do you know?”

Ashley’s eyes lit up, “Do you know what the closest living relative to the elephant is?”

I nodded my head and she proceeded to regale me with random trivia facts and things she knew the rest of our shift. It really made the time go by faster, and it was cool to see this new side to her. Before long I went in to wake up Sheryl and Ashley went to wake up John.

The next day we all got out and stretched the kinks out of our bodies, packed up our vehicles, and got back on the road. We still had several more hours of driving to go, maybe more as we planned on avoiding other towns if possible.

The landscape we passed became monotonous, trees followed by trees, with the occasional breakout path to someone’s property. Occasionally a small field of cows or some kind of crop. But mostly it was just forest as far as I could see.

Finally we turned down a paved road. We were about ten minutes outside of White River, which was apparently almost twice the size of Whitcomb. Stuck in the middle of a cleared field sat a large warehouse surrounded by a small parking lot and loading zones.

We cleared the last of the fence line and pulled up in front of the warehouse in question and immediately felt the entire van’s spirits drop. Someone had obviously been here already. And they had not been subtle in their entry.

The windows in front of what I presumed was the office area were shattered. The rollup doors for the warehouse itself were all rolled up. Just far enough to fit in a pick up or something similar. The bottoms of the doors hung down. The locks clearly broken.

Inside the warehouse stretched dark and shadowy. Maybe they hadn’t taken everything. I tried to stay positive. Surely someone couldn’t have taken everything. The warehouse wasn’t huge, but it wasn’t small either.

Oliver parked the van in front of one of the rollup doors. The rest of the convoy pulled in behind us. Everyone began jumping out of their vehicles. Dennis, who had been quiet and soft spoken the entire trip began screaming profanities at the top of his lungs, startling a flock of nearby birds into the air. It’s always the quiet ones.

His volume and the inventiveness of his swearing impressed the fuck out of me. Like, I made some notes for the future.

Oliver walked over and rested a hand on his shoulder and did his best to calm the man down. After a few minutes he was left panting, but spent.

“Alright, everyone just sit tight. We’re going to go in and check the safety of the warehouse. Especially with all the doors open we don’t know what could have climbed inside and be waiting for us,” Mara informed everyone. “As soon as we deem it safe we’ll come get you and we’ll all take stock of things together.”

The civvies nodded reluctantly and hopped back into their cars where it was a modicum safer. Hopefully.

“Alright, let’s lock and load people. Time to go see if anything jumps out to eat our faces,” Mara said with a grin as we formed up around her. We walked through one of the open doors and into the darkness. Then the growling started.