“Haaaver?” I sang.
The incompetent dunce tried not to glance my way, something that is surprisingly hard when you keep calling people’s names in every tone you can manage for minutes on end.
“Hay~ver?”
“Haver … Haver … Haver?”
“Havvy dearest?”
He looked. Success again!
“What am I thinking of?” I blurted out before he could look away.
He returned to staring at the wall; so stubborn. I wasn’t worried. He would relent eventually. He was every bit as bored out of his mind as I was. The thunderstorm was unending, the steady drip of rain leaking in through the roof was maddening, and we’d been stuck in this dilapidated shed for the better part of a day now.
I was trying to get Haver to play ‘I spy’ with me. I had actually succeeded for a little bit. This place was a dump though. We’d run out of words after rain, wall, and floor. I had tried to get him to guess ‘peeling paint’, ‘rotting wood’, and ‘mote of dust’, but the nit lacked the imagination.
With nothing else to occupy me with I turned my attention to the Zee girl sitting in the other corner. She had insisted on sheltering with us, not that we had a lot of recourse besides stepping out when she walked in. Apparently, smart Zee’s didn’t like the rain every bit as much as we did.
The first hour had been uncomfortable. We had basically fought back to back with her, yet peacefully sitting in the same room as she was still awkward. There was simply nothing to occupy the mind here. We only had all the things that could go wrong and all the ways that she could kill and eat us haunting our thoughts.
“So…” I pulled my knees in, laid my elbows on them, and rested my chin on the palm of my hands while looking at the girl. “I spy what?”
I only got a dull stare in response. Was this too hard for her or was she in plant-mode? It was honestly hard to tell, so hard that I had only recently begun to notice. She looked like she was smart and capable, but in reality, it was only fragmentary.
All of the humanity she showed was only ever there for the shortest of intervals. A couple of minutes of understanding and reacting was all she appeared capable of before she reverted to what I’d begun to call plant-mode. Then it was back to moaning, drooling, and shuffling.
She hid it well. She tailed us in plant mode. If we rested, she rested in plant-mode. If we did not involve her in a conversation for even a couple of seconds she reverted to plant-mode, only to snap out of it when we addressed her.
Conversation, I made it sound so fancy. The closest thing we have had resembling a conversation was still just the argument over the map and which way to go. That had been nearly a week ago now. Mostly all we got out of her were glares, shrugs, coarse uncoordinated gestures, and moans. I was hoping to change that now.
“Wall.” I patted the wall. Still no reaction.
“Floor.” Nothing.
“Ava.” I pointed at myself. Equally nada.
“Maybe you want to try?” I asked, hoping she would respond better to a question.
“Will you leave her alone Ava!” Haver interrupted our exchange by snapping at me.
Her? Did I hear that right? This was possibly the first time Haver had acknowledged her with a gender. I hopped to my feet and gleefully drummed on his head. This earned me another of his glares.
“You called her he~er” I chanted to the beat of my drumming.
I darted back when he reached for my hands and made a little pirouette. Time to be daring. I deliberately fumbled my footwork, stumbled in the direction of the Zee girl, and slid down to the ground right next to where she was sitting. “Sooo–”
It happened in a blink. I had no time to react. Her head snapped my way, snarling. Teeth missed me by a hair as Haver dragged me out of harm’s way. Then we were both scooting back, away from the Zee.
“Hee– Hee– Hee–” I tried to still my breathing, to say something, anything. My thoughts raced madly, going everywhere and nowhere at once. All that came out of my mouth was furious panting.
Haver’s hand pressed on my forehead, pushing me close to his chest. I leaned into his embrace. He began stroking my shoulders. It was calming, soothing, so I let him.
“Fuck Ava!” he whispered after a couple of moments. “Oh fuck.”
His swearing was oddly comforting. “I’m sorry,” I sobbed into the crook of his arm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
There was a shuffling at the other end of the room. It was the Zee, slowly scooting closer to the door of the shed, wide-eyed gaze focused only on me. Those eyes that had always been dead, muted, now filled with utter dread. Then she was out the door, running.
“I’m sorry…” I whispered into the rain. The Zee that had nearly killed me had never looked more human.
