Reality Check

By the time they arrived at the apartment building, it had partially collapsed from the damage done to it. The area where Hayley had sprayed was sodden, the odor of urine strong enough to overcome the other smells in the area. There were three other men down on hands and knees when they arrived, dirty plastic bottles in the deeper puddles of Hayley’s piss.

Crouching down, the kid slipped the cloth bundle of his back, quickly unwrapping it and pulling out three large plastic bottles of his own, unscrewing the caps and putting them into a puddle.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Daryl asked, screwing up his face.

“Quickly,” said the kid, pulling out a ragged looking sponge from his hobo tote.

Aghast, Daryl watched as all of the men seemed to be filling their bottles with Hayley’s piss. One of the guys, bottle full, stashed it in amongst his home made bag, nodded and sprinted off in a different direction.

The young man with Daryl, stood up one of his bottles, dropping the sponge into a shallow pool before bringing it over the bottle and wringing it out and draining the fluid into the bottle.

“Are you for real right now?” Daryl asked, watching another one of the men bend forward and drink from one of the puddles. “Hell no!” he said, shaking his head.

The kid laughed.

The drinking man leaned back and wiped his lips before getting to his feet and scurrying off.

The third man who had been there bundles up a couple of gallon jugs and looked over, “New guy?” he asked, getting up to his feet and motioning his head toward Daryl.

The kid nodded.

“New guy? My name is Daryl and maybe you can tell me what the fuck is going on here?” he demanded, an edge in his tone.

The man laughed, “Well, Daryl, here is here and if you don’t take steps to survive, one of giant cunts is going to devour you. That’s what is going on,” he said, pulling his sac over his shoulder. Turning to the kid, “Take it easy Dwight,” he said, grinning.

Daryl looked down at the kid as the youth capped two bottles full of honey colored liquid. Lifting the nearly three quarter full bottle to his lips he took a drink.

Daryl shook his head, frowning as he watched the other man slip away.

“Hey,” said the kid the other man had called Dwight, holding the bottle of piss toward Daryl.

“No way, that’s just fucking gross,” he commented sourly.

“Suit yourself,” Dwight said, screwing the cap on the bottle and setting it with the other on his piece of cloth before rolling it up and tying the ends to make a loop.

“Why would you do that?” Daryl asked, as the kid stood up and pulled the cloth loop over his head.

“What? The pee?”

“Yeah, the pee,” Daryl replied.

“Have you seen what passes for water coming out of the taps?” he asked.

Daryl frowned, remembering the liquid shit like substance that had dribbled out of the faucet.

“Not only is it horrid, it will give you cramps so bad you can’t even walk making it even easier for one of the girls to get you,” Dwight explained.

“So you drink piss? There’s a whole freaking ocean just over the rise,” Daryl said, pointing in the direction he though was west.

Dwight shook his head, “Nope, there’s nothing but barren wasteland in every direction, miles upon miles of empty space with nowhere even to hide. Some try to cross it, but they’re simple prey for the giantesses,” he said, shaking his head. “We should go,” he added, nodding back in the direction of the motel.

“No, I want some answers here kid,” Daryl said firmly.

Dwight laughed, “What answers? I don’t have any more answers than you already have. You move around and try to avoid getting killed. If you’re lucky, you find some food and water and quiet place to sleep. End of story. Now if you want to stand here and get all tough like you’re about something, go ahead. You had a sheet back at the motel, we can go there and get it and you can make your own roll, or you can wait here. Either way, I’m leaving,” he said before starting to walk.

Daryl scowled and shook his head.

Dwight paused, “Oh, and you should be on the hunt for some bottles or something to put your water in,” he said.

“You mean piss?” Daryl countered bitterly starting to follow. “Why don’t you drink your own piss?”

“Only as a last resort, I don’t know, something about filtering piss through your system make your own piss positively wretched, but if there’s nothing else, that’s what you do,” he said without bothering to look back

“That’s fucking gross,” groused Daryl, falling in beside Dwight.

“Go four or five days without water and see how you feel,” he countered.

“What do you do for food then? Eat their shit?” Daryl asked.

Dwight shook his head, “You scavenge, sometimes you’ll find stuff in vending machines or old cans of stuff in houses or stores,” he explained.

“But no bottles water?”

“There seems to be an endless supply of empties but never any water,” the kid answered.

“That’s fucked,” Daryl murmured.

“It’s insidious. It mean we are dependent on the ladies to survive, which means we have to stay close, making us easier to capture,” he said as they walked into the motel parking lot. “Get your sheet, you want to dirty it up as much as possible so that it blends in with the surrounding, otherwise , well, you know,” he said.

“Why don’t we just hide out in the motel?” Daryl asked, slipping in behind the bush to fetch the sheet from his bed.

“You saw what she did to the apartment building?” Dwight asked grinning. “Any one of those girls could ripped this little building apart easy.”

“What about reasoning with them, you know, trying to get some information or something?” Daryl asked, dropping down and smearing dirt all over the sheet in an effort to make it less conspicuous.

“You are welcome to try, though they don’t seemed to be particularly interested in conversation,” Dwight replied, leaning his back against the wall.

“Julianne took one guy away alive,” Daryl countered.

“To play with,” Dwight said ominously.

“Play with? That doesn’t sound particularly good,” Daryl replied.

Dwight shook his head. Seeing Daryl was finished camouflaging his sheet, “We need to press on,” he said.