[1034] Act II, Scene III, Tenten
Act II, Scene III clocks in at almost 4,000 words. Tenten had a lot of story to tell apparently. It's now time for me to pass out. Hope you enjoy!
Standard disclaimers apply™.
Original drabble by askerian
Act IAct II
Scene I, Sasuke
Scene I, Naruto
Scene II, Shikamaru
Scene II, Sasuke
Scene III, Neji
Scene III, Tenten
Scene IV, Tenten
Scene IV, Sakura
Scene V, Lee
They drove away. Away was the only direction that mattered now, with Sasuke behind the wheel and Shikamaru leafing through the map of the state. Away from people, as fast as they could go. Away from a hospital for Neji. Away from gas stations and familiar places and grocery stores and reliable radio reception.
Away was a lot harder than it sounded, since the very purpose of roads was to connect people with each other. With the road to Fairfield from the school crawling with zombies, and two of the other three heading toward her hometown or the third largest city in the state, they were forced to take the old Marion Road.
The problem with old Marion was that it wasn’t entirely free of towns. It’s true, few of them had over five hundred people, but that wasn’t of much help when there were cars choking the single-lane road and an untamed fire lighting up the darkening sky.
Sasuke swore and slowed down to pull a U-turn. He was getting good at those. Shikamaru muttered under his breath and bent his head over the map again.
“Where are we going?” It wasn’t the first time Neji had asked the question.
“Away from other people,” Tenten said, mustering up even more patience. But it was getting more and more difficult over the last hour. At least he had stopped throwing up, and his memory seemed to be improving, even if only slightly.
The fact that no one was talking over...over whatever it was that had happened between Sasuke and Lee didn’t help anything. She did not approve of giving that idiot his rifle back, but Lee evidently trusted him enough to do so. For now, she’d trust her friend, because he knew his teammate a lot better than she did.
Neji considered that momentarily. “We’re never going to get away from everybody.” His thumb ran along her hip absently, while he held her in place. She kept very still, grateful at least that he no longer had a death grip on her. She just hoped he wouldn’t remember, because she knew he would be mortified even with the extra layer of jacket between her and his hand.
“We know,” said Naruto. He ran a hand over his face and leaned his head back against the seat, closing his eyes. Perhaps he was closer to losing his patience than she had thought.
“It’s getting late.” That was Lee, piping up from behind Sakura. “We need to find somewhere to stay for the night soon.”
“We know.”
Tenten gave Naruto a sharp look. He glared right back at her. She tried to be charitable and remember that the baseball team had had to get up very early in the morning to catch the bus for the game, but the underclassmen was really starting to get on her nerves.
“I only meant,” Lee said, unruffled by his seatmate’s annoyance, “that we’re more likely to find someone to let us in the earlier it is. I can’t imagine anyone letting a group of strangers into their home in a few hours.”
His arms were around Sakura, holding her close in his lap, protectively. If it weren’t for the axe that seemed glued to her hands, they would have made a cute picture. As it was, Sakura was zoned out again, staring out the window. The younger girl had a pair of earphones on, the wire trailing away and into a pocket.
They had wanted more news if any came, but none of them were willing to listen to the Emergency Alert System over and over again on the car radio. Between the grating alarm and the mechanical voice, it drowned out everything else and made Neji’s fingers dig into her hips in a very uncomfortable way. But if anything besides an order to shelter in place ever came on the airwaves, they wanted to know about it.
Sasuke had come up with the solution: his brother’s mp3 player could get radio stations. And Sakura had volunteered straight away. When Sasuke dug out the device, she slipped the earphones on, leaned back against Lee, and stared out the window.
Only once in the last hour had she said anything, and that was about specific orders being given to shelter in place: lock all doors and windows, block any pet doors, barricade garage doors, etc. Then she had lapsed into silence again. How she could stand to listen to that endless noise, Tenten had no idea.
“He’s right,” Shikamaru admitted. “I should have thought of that earlier.”
He sounded genuinely upset with himself. Tenten thought he had done more than his fair share of thinking, at least according to what Neji had told her on the drive to the school, before he wrecked his car. Shikamaru had been the one to figure out how to kill the things, had gotten the survivors to the school, had organized the evacuation, had engineered a way to escape when Lee refused to leave him behind. He was even playing navigator despite the painkillers she had given him.
“Sasuke, take the next right,” Shikamaru said as he brusquely folded up the map. “And keep going for about five miles. After that, there will be a fork in the road. Take the left, and then we’ll start asking for help.”
After the third house--the first one where Sasuke and Naruto nearly got their heads blown off by a paranoid farmer--Tenten objected to their current strategy. Naruto was still swearing as they drove off, tires squealing. Of course, the swearing might have been from nearly impaling himself on Sakura’s axe when he dove into the back seat.
“This isn’t working,” Tenten pointed out.
“Really?” The righteous indignation in Naruto’s voice lost most of its impact since his head was currently buried against Lee’s shins.
“Yes, really.” Tenten gripped the door handle as the car took a sharp turn; Neji dug his fingers into her hips to keep her in place. “Two teenage boys showing up on their front steps, one with a baseball bat and the other with a rifle, claiming to have injured friends, in the middle of...of a zombie apocalypse? Would you open your door to them?”
“Yes.”
She ignored that. “At the next house Sakura and I will do the talking.”
“No way!” Naruto managed to pull himself out of the tangle of Lee and Sakura’s legs to face her directly. Or as directly as he could twisted around like he was. “You want to get shot at, too?”
“No.”
That was Neji’s voice in her ear, and Tenten froze in surprise.
Naruto looked relieved to have someone else backing him up, though the rest of the boys’ silence was conspicuous.
“Can’t take Sakura with you if she’s got her axe,” Neji pointed out, and Naruto’s relief vanished.
“It’s not safe!”
“So what is safe right now, moron?” asked Sasuke.
“If the girls are willing to give it a shot, I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it,” said Shikamaru. He still sounded like he was in pain. “We can’t drive forever, and if they’ll let us in because we have two girls as our front, so be it.”
Tenten bit back the urge to offer him another pill, but she didn’t dare. The painkillers she had were generic brand, but still required a prescription. One at a time was usually able to handle her migraines, but two had her incoherent and collapsing in bed within an hour of swallowing. Even though she wanted to help him, she knew they couldn’t risk having Shikamaru even more of a liability than he already was.
Liability?
Since when were other people liabilities?
She closed her eyes and tried to block out the thought.
“The alert has changed.”
Sakura’s voice got everyone’s attention. Tenten opened her eyes and glanced over to the younger girl.
Sakura was sitting upright again, her gaze pulled away from the falling shadows outside. She had pulled one of the earphones out and was twirling it in her fingers. “Homeland Security is telling everyone in secure shelters to deny entrance to people from outside.”
She paused, oblivious to the awful silence that fell, listening to what the voice in her ear was saying. “Especially anyone that looks sick or injured.”
Tenten knocked on the weather beaten door of the next house they saw, Sakura on her left and on the porch step below. The boys had finally agreed to stay in the car, which had taken surprisingly little persuasion after the announcement. Their only chance to get somewhere defensible was to find an empty home or to get in the door before the occupants heard about the new government instructions. With sunset rapidly approaching, their time was running out.
Sakura, surprisingly, had agreed to not bring her axe to the door. Instead, she placed it at the bottom of the steps, handle toward them, within easy reach if she were to bend down and grab. It was progress, though Tenten felt a bit of regret about leaving her crowbar with Neji. She was beginning to see why Sakura had been holding onto her weapon as if it were the most important thing left in this nightmarish world.
There were lights on inside the house, but no one was answering the door. Tenten couldn’t even hear any footsteps from inside. She pounded on the door, trying not to let her heart rate match the tempo. She really didn’t want to get shot at tonight, for all the confidence she had tried to project during the earlier argument.
“Do you think anyone’s here?”
“They’re here,” Sakura said quietly. “Upstairs.”
Tenten threw a glance upward to the windows on the second story and was just in time to catch the flutter of a curtain and a silhouette. Her throat tightened in fear, but her fist never faltered on the wooden door. She would make them answer, or she’d beat her knuckles bloody.
Nearly a minute later she heard footsteps, and a beat after that came a voice. A man’s tenor, steady save for a thread of fear. “Who’s there?”
She stopped her pounding. “My name is Tenten,” she said. “And this is my friend, Sakura. We need help. We need your help.”
“Who’s in the car?”
Of course he would have noticed the rest of them. “Our friends. There are five more of us.” Tenten hesitated, debating between honesty and lies that might get them kicked out--or shot--on closer inspection. Honesty won out. “One of them hurt his knee, and the other has a concussion. We have our own food, and we’ll be out of here by morning. We just need a safe place to stay for the night.”
There was a moment of silence on the other side while Tenten waivered between hope and disappointment. Finally, the man spoke. “You wait right there. I’ve got to talk to my wife.” Then the footsteps headed away from the door.
Not the most promising of starts, but at least there hadn’t been any threats of violence. Tenten rubbed at her sore hand, skirting around the blisters that had started to form. She wasn’t used to swinging metal around all day, and she didn’t have the proper calluses for it, unlike the guys.
She was in the midst of debating whether or not she should pop them when the footsteps came back.
“We can’t let you in,” the man said, sounding genuinely regretful, and Tenten’s hope plummeted. “The government’s saying not to let hurt folks in your house.”
They were too late. It was stupid to think people wouldn’t be glued to their radios, their tvs, their computers at times like this. Of course everyone would know about the directions, and their only hope for being let inside a house was to find people too stupid to be trusted to stay alive through this mess.
Maybe she could convince them to be that stupid.
“We really need your help.” She didn’t have to fake the anxiety that was bleeding into her words. “We can’t keep driving tonight, it’s too dangerous. We need a safe place to wrap up Shikamaru’s knee, and he and Neji aren’t going to be much good in a fight without some kind of safe place to be.”
No response.
She looked up at the peephole in the door and tried her best to look vulnerable. She hoped Sakura wasn’t glaring murder behind her. “We don’t have a lot, but we have some MREs we can give you, and we can help you keep a watch tonight.”
Still nothing.
Tenten clenched her hands into fists, and her composure cracked. “Don’t just let us die out here!”
Her words rang out in the dusk, but no sound came from the house.
The back of her throat burned, and she turned her face away. “Let’s go, Sakura,” she said quietly as she turned around and headed back down the stairs. They would find something else. They would have to.
But Sakura didn’t follow her. “My name is Haruno Sakura,” she said to the door. “I lived on Beech Street in Independence.”
As Tenten turned around to see what was going on, Sakura bent down to pick up her axe, slinging the massive thing over her shoulders. “When all this is over, find my parents. Tell them I was looking for my best friend. And don’t lie to them when they ask you how you know.”
Sakura turned away from the house and started down the stairs. Backlit as she was by the porch light, Tenten could not see the expression on her face. It sent a shiver through her nonetheless.
What had happened to Sakura?
Because, clearly, something had. Tenten knew little about her, and virtually all of it had been second-hand. She knew that Lee had a crush on her, that Neji was irritated by her enthusiastic fawning over Sasuke, that she was one of the smartest kids in her grade.
But what she knew was not adding up to what she had experienced, and the discrepancies made her uncomfortable.
“Wait!”
That was the man’s voice, and it sparked a tiny flicker of hope inside her. Tenten bounded back up the porch steps; Sakura kept on her path.
“You’ll help us?”
“I can’t let you inside our house.” His words were clipped and angry, but the anger didn’t seem to be directed at her at least. “But if you follow the lane north, the gravel will turn to a dirt road. We’ve got a hay barn in the back fields, and you can stay there until morning, if you’ll let the sheep out into the pasture.”
The barn was better than the car, but it was still far from ideal. It was a two-story building with narrow windows, three doors, and not enough walls.
On the western wall, four tall steps reached up to a narrow door obviously meant for people. That door opened into a single room which ran the whole side of that wall. In contrast, the northern wall had a five-foot-wide door that was flush with the ground. The room it opened into was filled with around a dozen restless sheep and about twice that many lambs. There was a ramp with a gate at the top that connected the western and northern rooms.
The southern door was the largest, and the one that made them the most nervous. At nearly twelve feet across, it was still easy to open and close. The design was obviously an asset when it came to unloading tools or bales of hay--the tower of hay was easily fifteen feet tall thanks to lack of a second floor directly above the room--but there was no lock, only a simple latch. The southern room was connected to the western room by a gate and two shallow steps.
There was a rackety flight of stairs leading from the southern room to the upper level which stored more bales of hay and an assortment of infrequently used tools, if the layer of dust on them was any indication. Bizarrely, the upper story also boasted a door on the western wall, one that opened into air. There was some sort of pulley system in the rafters right before it, but Tenten had no idea what it could be used for, unless it was how the hay had gotten upstairs in the first place.
“This is too exposed,” Neji muttered as the two of them shifted bales of hay upstairs to clear out a floor space large enough for the seven of them. He had enough balance and coordination now to help her lift and stack the bales, even if he couldn’t do it on his own.
She winced as the twine rubbed against her blisters. “It’s the best we’ve got.” But she privately agreed with him. The upper floor didn’t have proper internal walls--just posts, really, to help hold up the roof. They could jump from the second floor onto the mountain of hay reaching up from the southern room, and it wouldn’t be more than a five foot drop.
As she and Neji hefted another mound out of the way, Lee helped Shikamaru settle down on a deep pile of loose hay. Once he was certain Shikamaru was okay, he headed back down the stairs. The injured boy shifted a little to find a more comfortable position before lying back and shutting his eyes.
She and Neji worked in silence a while, the only noise coming from downstairs while the rest of their group talked about the night’s arrangements and hauled in supplies. Eventually she asked, “How are you feeling?”
“I think I understand what your migraines are like,” Neji answered without hesitation.
It was closer to a joke than she expected from him under the circumstances, and she couldn’t help her sympathetic smile. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“Still.” No one had thought giving him any pain medication was a good idea, thanks to his probable concussion. Luckily he didn’t remember she had them, couldn’t remember the conversation they’d had about whether or not to give him any, or he had come to the same conclusion without needing to talk to anyone about it. “Your memory’s gotten a lot better at least.”
He made a noise of agreement, and after that they lapsed into a familiar, if not entirely relaxed, silence.
The evening went surprisingly well, all things considered. They had a crash course in how to eat MREs--surprisingly complicated and surprisingly edible--and set up a watch rotation and what they could of a better defensive position. Sasuke managed to produce some ace bandages from a first aid kit and did his best to wrap up Shikamaru’s knee. Naruto and Lee unintentionally entertained them with their attempts to herd the sheep outside, and afterwards everyone but Shikamaru helped move more hay bales. They used the bales to barricade the doors as best they could and even set up a corner where everyone could pretend bodily functions could be taken care of privately.
Once they were satisfied that the barn was as safe as it could be, Neji and Lee took the first watch. Neji needed to stay up a few more hours anyway--no one knew whether or not it was true that someone with a concussion needed to stay awake for several hours afterwards, and they were equally unwilling to risk being wrong--and Lee was determined to see everyone else got rest before he did.
So Tenten curled up in a pile of hay and fell asleep before she fully realized what was happening. If she dreamed, she did not remember it.
She awoke to the touch of a hand on her shoulder and a familiar presence beside her.
“Tenten, it’s your turn.”
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and yawned. “Lee?”
“Yes, it’s me. Are you ready for your watch?”
“Ngggh. Ready enough.” She sat up slowly, opening her eyes to take a look around. They had left the second story door open so moonlight spilled through it and bleached away the color of the hay. The barn had a few scattered light bulbs and Sasuke had brought flashlights, but using either of them would be like lighting a beacon. For now, they would make due with what the heavens provided.
Across the little clearing, Neji was talking to Sasuke, her partner on the watch. She faked a yawn, shielding her mouth and pitching her voice for Lee’s ears only. “How is he?”
Lee’s eyes flicked toward Neji for a moment before looking back to her. “I think he’s doing better,” he murmured as he sat down beside her. “He still grimaces when he thinks I’m not looking, and I think his head is really hurting him still. But his memory’s getting a lot better. He got mad at me for asking him the same questions a couple times.”
Tenten tried to keep a tight grip on her relief, but she couldn’t help the smile that crossed her lips. They might actually have one less thing to worry about. She squeezed his hand in silent thanks before scooping up her crowbar and standing up to take her turn protecting them.
While Neji and Lee settled down to sleep, Tenten crept downstairs. The barn had high windows on each wall, but they were all grimy with weather and age and difficult to see out of. Nevertheless she picked her way from place to place, peering outside for any movement or disturbance. She saw nothing, and the only noises she heard came from people moving in their sleep and the buzz of nocturnal insects.
Her thoughts filled in the gaps of the night. Where were her parents now? Were they safe, eight hundred miles away from here? What about Katsuo’s family? Had she made the right choice to go with Neji? What were they going to do in the morning? Were they really going to head out into the middle of nowhere because Sasuke’s brother had told him to? What would they do when they ran out of the MREs?
After half an hour of peering through windows and running around in mental circles, Tenten made a decision and climbed back up the stairs.
Sasuke was on his stomach in front of the open door, his rifle and loaded ready beside him. He glanced back at her when he heard her approach and then turned back to watch the nighttime. But the line of his shoulders was stiff, his fingers spread out and ready to grab a weapon or push himself upright.
Tenten sat down on his empty side. “You need to teach someone else to use your rifle.”
That got his attention. He turned to her, shifting to put most of his weight on his right forearm. “What makes you say that?”
“If you die, we don’t only lose you, we lose your weapon, too.” She studied the way the moonlight cast shadows across his face. “It’s for the best of the group.”
“We only have four more days until Itachi calls me. There’s no point in teaching anyone. I can’t turn a novice into someone that can do headshots in that amount of time.”
She ignored his first objection. “You don’t have to teach a novice. I’ve been shooting before.” When he stayed quiet, Tenten awarded him some mental points for not dismissing her out of hand. “I’ve never used a rifle before, but I’m good with a .45.”
“How good?”
She smiled. “If I had made it to my family reunion, the trophy would be mine for the fourth year in a row.”
Standard disclaimers apply™.
Original drabble by askerian
Act IAct II
Scene I, Sasuke
Scene I, Naruto
Scene II, Shikamaru
Scene II, Sasuke
Scene III, Neji
Scene III, Tenten
Scene IV, Tenten
Scene IV, Sakura
Scene V, Lee
They drove away. Away was the only direction that mattered now, with Sasuke behind the wheel and Shikamaru leafing through the map of the state. Away from people, as fast as they could go. Away from a hospital for Neji. Away from gas stations and familiar places and grocery stores and reliable radio reception.
Away was a lot harder than it sounded, since the very purpose of roads was to connect people with each other. With the road to Fairfield from the school crawling with zombies, and two of the other three heading toward her hometown or the third largest city in the state, they were forced to take the old Marion Road.
The problem with old Marion was that it wasn’t entirely free of towns. It’s true, few of them had over five hundred people, but that wasn’t of much help when there were cars choking the single-lane road and an untamed fire lighting up the darkening sky.
Sasuke swore and slowed down to pull a U-turn. He was getting good at those. Shikamaru muttered under his breath and bent his head over the map again.
“Where are we going?” It wasn’t the first time Neji had asked the question.
“Away from other people,” Tenten said, mustering up even more patience. But it was getting more and more difficult over the last hour. At least he had stopped throwing up, and his memory seemed to be improving, even if only slightly.
The fact that no one was talking over...over whatever it was that had happened between Sasuke and Lee didn’t help anything. She did not approve of giving that idiot his rifle back, but Lee evidently trusted him enough to do so. For now, she’d trust her friend, because he knew his teammate a lot better than she did.
Neji considered that momentarily. “We’re never going to get away from everybody.” His thumb ran along her hip absently, while he held her in place. She kept very still, grateful at least that he no longer had a death grip on her. She just hoped he wouldn’t remember, because she knew he would be mortified even with the extra layer of jacket between her and his hand.
“We know,” said Naruto. He ran a hand over his face and leaned his head back against the seat, closing his eyes. Perhaps he was closer to losing his patience than she had thought.
“It’s getting late.” That was Lee, piping up from behind Sakura. “We need to find somewhere to stay for the night soon.”
“We know.”
Tenten gave Naruto a sharp look. He glared right back at her. She tried to be charitable and remember that the baseball team had had to get up very early in the morning to catch the bus for the game, but the underclassmen was really starting to get on her nerves.
“I only meant,” Lee said, unruffled by his seatmate’s annoyance, “that we’re more likely to find someone to let us in the earlier it is. I can’t imagine anyone letting a group of strangers into their home in a few hours.”
His arms were around Sakura, holding her close in his lap, protectively. If it weren’t for the axe that seemed glued to her hands, they would have made a cute picture. As it was, Sakura was zoned out again, staring out the window. The younger girl had a pair of earphones on, the wire trailing away and into a pocket.
They had wanted more news if any came, but none of them were willing to listen to the Emergency Alert System over and over again on the car radio. Between the grating alarm and the mechanical voice, it drowned out everything else and made Neji’s fingers dig into her hips in a very uncomfortable way. But if anything besides an order to shelter in place ever came on the airwaves, they wanted to know about it.
Sasuke had come up with the solution: his brother’s mp3 player could get radio stations. And Sakura had volunteered straight away. When Sasuke dug out the device, she slipped the earphones on, leaned back against Lee, and stared out the window.
Only once in the last hour had she said anything, and that was about specific orders being given to shelter in place: lock all doors and windows, block any pet doors, barricade garage doors, etc. Then she had lapsed into silence again. How she could stand to listen to that endless noise, Tenten had no idea.
“He’s right,” Shikamaru admitted. “I should have thought of that earlier.”
He sounded genuinely upset with himself. Tenten thought he had done more than his fair share of thinking, at least according to what Neji had told her on the drive to the school, before he wrecked his car. Shikamaru had been the one to figure out how to kill the things, had gotten the survivors to the school, had organized the evacuation, had engineered a way to escape when Lee refused to leave him behind. He was even playing navigator despite the painkillers she had given him.
“Sasuke, take the next right,” Shikamaru said as he brusquely folded up the map. “And keep going for about five miles. After that, there will be a fork in the road. Take the left, and then we’ll start asking for help.”
After the third house--the first one where Sasuke and Naruto nearly got their heads blown off by a paranoid farmer--Tenten objected to their current strategy. Naruto was still swearing as they drove off, tires squealing. Of course, the swearing might have been from nearly impaling himself on Sakura’s axe when he dove into the back seat.
“This isn’t working,” Tenten pointed out.
“Really?” The righteous indignation in Naruto’s voice lost most of its impact since his head was currently buried against Lee’s shins.
“Yes, really.” Tenten gripped the door handle as the car took a sharp turn; Neji dug his fingers into her hips to keep her in place. “Two teenage boys showing up on their front steps, one with a baseball bat and the other with a rifle, claiming to have injured friends, in the middle of...of a zombie apocalypse? Would you open your door to them?”
“Yes.”
She ignored that. “At the next house Sakura and I will do the talking.”
“No way!” Naruto managed to pull himself out of the tangle of Lee and Sakura’s legs to face her directly. Or as directly as he could twisted around like he was. “You want to get shot at, too?”
“No.”
That was Neji’s voice in her ear, and Tenten froze in surprise.
Naruto looked relieved to have someone else backing him up, though the rest of the boys’ silence was conspicuous.
“Can’t take Sakura with you if she’s got her axe,” Neji pointed out, and Naruto’s relief vanished.
“It’s not safe!”
“So what is safe right now, moron?” asked Sasuke.
“If the girls are willing to give it a shot, I don’t see why we shouldn’t use it,” said Shikamaru. He still sounded like he was in pain. “We can’t drive forever, and if they’ll let us in because we have two girls as our front, so be it.”
Tenten bit back the urge to offer him another pill, but she didn’t dare. The painkillers she had were generic brand, but still required a prescription. One at a time was usually able to handle her migraines, but two had her incoherent and collapsing in bed within an hour of swallowing. Even though she wanted to help him, she knew they couldn’t risk having Shikamaru even more of a liability than he already was.
Liability?
Since when were other people liabilities?
She closed her eyes and tried to block out the thought.
“The alert has changed.”
Sakura’s voice got everyone’s attention. Tenten opened her eyes and glanced over to the younger girl.
Sakura was sitting upright again, her gaze pulled away from the falling shadows outside. She had pulled one of the earphones out and was twirling it in her fingers. “Homeland Security is telling everyone in secure shelters to deny entrance to people from outside.”
She paused, oblivious to the awful silence that fell, listening to what the voice in her ear was saying. “Especially anyone that looks sick or injured.”
Tenten knocked on the weather beaten door of the next house they saw, Sakura on her left and on the porch step below. The boys had finally agreed to stay in the car, which had taken surprisingly little persuasion after the announcement. Their only chance to get somewhere defensible was to find an empty home or to get in the door before the occupants heard about the new government instructions. With sunset rapidly approaching, their time was running out.
Sakura, surprisingly, had agreed to not bring her axe to the door. Instead, she placed it at the bottom of the steps, handle toward them, within easy reach if she were to bend down and grab. It was progress, though Tenten felt a bit of regret about leaving her crowbar with Neji. She was beginning to see why Sakura had been holding onto her weapon as if it were the most important thing left in this nightmarish world.
There were lights on inside the house, but no one was answering the door. Tenten couldn’t even hear any footsteps from inside. She pounded on the door, trying not to let her heart rate match the tempo. She really didn’t want to get shot at tonight, for all the confidence she had tried to project during the earlier argument.
“Do you think anyone’s here?”
“They’re here,” Sakura said quietly. “Upstairs.”
Tenten threw a glance upward to the windows on the second story and was just in time to catch the flutter of a curtain and a silhouette. Her throat tightened in fear, but her fist never faltered on the wooden door. She would make them answer, or she’d beat her knuckles bloody.
Nearly a minute later she heard footsteps, and a beat after that came a voice. A man’s tenor, steady save for a thread of fear. “Who’s there?”
She stopped her pounding. “My name is Tenten,” she said. “And this is my friend, Sakura. We need help. We need your help.”
“Who’s in the car?”
Of course he would have noticed the rest of them. “Our friends. There are five more of us.” Tenten hesitated, debating between honesty and lies that might get them kicked out--or shot--on closer inspection. Honesty won out. “One of them hurt his knee, and the other has a concussion. We have our own food, and we’ll be out of here by morning. We just need a safe place to stay for the night.”
There was a moment of silence on the other side while Tenten waivered between hope and disappointment. Finally, the man spoke. “You wait right there. I’ve got to talk to my wife.” Then the footsteps headed away from the door.
Not the most promising of starts, but at least there hadn’t been any threats of violence. Tenten rubbed at her sore hand, skirting around the blisters that had started to form. She wasn’t used to swinging metal around all day, and she didn’t have the proper calluses for it, unlike the guys.
She was in the midst of debating whether or not she should pop them when the footsteps came back.
“We can’t let you in,” the man said, sounding genuinely regretful, and Tenten’s hope plummeted. “The government’s saying not to let hurt folks in your house.”
They were too late. It was stupid to think people wouldn’t be glued to their radios, their tvs, their computers at times like this. Of course everyone would know about the directions, and their only hope for being let inside a house was to find people too stupid to be trusted to stay alive through this mess.
Maybe she could convince them to be that stupid.
“We really need your help.” She didn’t have to fake the anxiety that was bleeding into her words. “We can’t keep driving tonight, it’s too dangerous. We need a safe place to wrap up Shikamaru’s knee, and he and Neji aren’t going to be much good in a fight without some kind of safe place to be.”
No response.
She looked up at the peephole in the door and tried her best to look vulnerable. She hoped Sakura wasn’t glaring murder behind her. “We don’t have a lot, but we have some MREs we can give you, and we can help you keep a watch tonight.”
Still nothing.
Tenten clenched her hands into fists, and her composure cracked. “Don’t just let us die out here!”
Her words rang out in the dusk, but no sound came from the house.
The back of her throat burned, and she turned her face away. “Let’s go, Sakura,” she said quietly as she turned around and headed back down the stairs. They would find something else. They would have to.
But Sakura didn’t follow her. “My name is Haruno Sakura,” she said to the door. “I lived on Beech Street in Independence.”
As Tenten turned around to see what was going on, Sakura bent down to pick up her axe, slinging the massive thing over her shoulders. “When all this is over, find my parents. Tell them I was looking for my best friend. And don’t lie to them when they ask you how you know.”
Sakura turned away from the house and started down the stairs. Backlit as she was by the porch light, Tenten could not see the expression on her face. It sent a shiver through her nonetheless.
What had happened to Sakura?
Because, clearly, something had. Tenten knew little about her, and virtually all of it had been second-hand. She knew that Lee had a crush on her, that Neji was irritated by her enthusiastic fawning over Sasuke, that she was one of the smartest kids in her grade.
But what she knew was not adding up to what she had experienced, and the discrepancies made her uncomfortable.
“Wait!”
That was the man’s voice, and it sparked a tiny flicker of hope inside her. Tenten bounded back up the porch steps; Sakura kept on her path.
“You’ll help us?”
“I can’t let you inside our house.” His words were clipped and angry, but the anger didn’t seem to be directed at her at least. “But if you follow the lane north, the gravel will turn to a dirt road. We’ve got a hay barn in the back fields, and you can stay there until morning, if you’ll let the sheep out into the pasture.”
The barn was better than the car, but it was still far from ideal. It was a two-story building with narrow windows, three doors, and not enough walls.
On the western wall, four tall steps reached up to a narrow door obviously meant for people. That door opened into a single room which ran the whole side of that wall. In contrast, the northern wall had a five-foot-wide door that was flush with the ground. The room it opened into was filled with around a dozen restless sheep and about twice that many lambs. There was a ramp with a gate at the top that connected the western and northern rooms.
The southern door was the largest, and the one that made them the most nervous. At nearly twelve feet across, it was still easy to open and close. The design was obviously an asset when it came to unloading tools or bales of hay--the tower of hay was easily fifteen feet tall thanks to lack of a second floor directly above the room--but there was no lock, only a simple latch. The southern room was connected to the western room by a gate and two shallow steps.
There was a rackety flight of stairs leading from the southern room to the upper level which stored more bales of hay and an assortment of infrequently used tools, if the layer of dust on them was any indication. Bizarrely, the upper story also boasted a door on the western wall, one that opened into air. There was some sort of pulley system in the rafters right before it, but Tenten had no idea what it could be used for, unless it was how the hay had gotten upstairs in the first place.
“This is too exposed,” Neji muttered as the two of them shifted bales of hay upstairs to clear out a floor space large enough for the seven of them. He had enough balance and coordination now to help her lift and stack the bales, even if he couldn’t do it on his own.
She winced as the twine rubbed against her blisters. “It’s the best we’ve got.” But she privately agreed with him. The upper floor didn’t have proper internal walls--just posts, really, to help hold up the roof. They could jump from the second floor onto the mountain of hay reaching up from the southern room, and it wouldn’t be more than a five foot drop.
As she and Neji hefted another mound out of the way, Lee helped Shikamaru settle down on a deep pile of loose hay. Once he was certain Shikamaru was okay, he headed back down the stairs. The injured boy shifted a little to find a more comfortable position before lying back and shutting his eyes.
She and Neji worked in silence a while, the only noise coming from downstairs while the rest of their group talked about the night’s arrangements and hauled in supplies. Eventually she asked, “How are you feeling?”
“I think I understand what your migraines are like,” Neji answered without hesitation.
It was closer to a joke than she expected from him under the circumstances, and she couldn’t help her sympathetic smile. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“Still.” No one had thought giving him any pain medication was a good idea, thanks to his probable concussion. Luckily he didn’t remember she had them, couldn’t remember the conversation they’d had about whether or not to give him any, or he had come to the same conclusion without needing to talk to anyone about it. “Your memory’s gotten a lot better at least.”
He made a noise of agreement, and after that they lapsed into a familiar, if not entirely relaxed, silence.
The evening went surprisingly well, all things considered. They had a crash course in how to eat MREs--surprisingly complicated and surprisingly edible--and set up a watch rotation and what they could of a better defensive position. Sasuke managed to produce some ace bandages from a first aid kit and did his best to wrap up Shikamaru’s knee. Naruto and Lee unintentionally entertained them with their attempts to herd the sheep outside, and afterwards everyone but Shikamaru helped move more hay bales. They used the bales to barricade the doors as best they could and even set up a corner where everyone could pretend bodily functions could be taken care of privately.
Once they were satisfied that the barn was as safe as it could be, Neji and Lee took the first watch. Neji needed to stay up a few more hours anyway--no one knew whether or not it was true that someone with a concussion needed to stay awake for several hours afterwards, and they were equally unwilling to risk being wrong--and Lee was determined to see everyone else got rest before he did.
So Tenten curled up in a pile of hay and fell asleep before she fully realized what was happening. If she dreamed, she did not remember it.
She awoke to the touch of a hand on her shoulder and a familiar presence beside her.
“Tenten, it’s your turn.”
She rubbed the sleep from her eyes and yawned. “Lee?”
“Yes, it’s me. Are you ready for your watch?”
“Ngggh. Ready enough.” She sat up slowly, opening her eyes to take a look around. They had left the second story door open so moonlight spilled through it and bleached away the color of the hay. The barn had a few scattered light bulbs and Sasuke had brought flashlights, but using either of them would be like lighting a beacon. For now, they would make due with what the heavens provided.
Across the little clearing, Neji was talking to Sasuke, her partner on the watch. She faked a yawn, shielding her mouth and pitching her voice for Lee’s ears only. “How is he?”
Lee’s eyes flicked toward Neji for a moment before looking back to her. “I think he’s doing better,” he murmured as he sat down beside her. “He still grimaces when he thinks I’m not looking, and I think his head is really hurting him still. But his memory’s getting a lot better. He got mad at me for asking him the same questions a couple times.”
Tenten tried to keep a tight grip on her relief, but she couldn’t help the smile that crossed her lips. They might actually have one less thing to worry about. She squeezed his hand in silent thanks before scooping up her crowbar and standing up to take her turn protecting them.
While Neji and Lee settled down to sleep, Tenten crept downstairs. The barn had high windows on each wall, but they were all grimy with weather and age and difficult to see out of. Nevertheless she picked her way from place to place, peering outside for any movement or disturbance. She saw nothing, and the only noises she heard came from people moving in their sleep and the buzz of nocturnal insects.
Her thoughts filled in the gaps of the night. Where were her parents now? Were they safe, eight hundred miles away from here? What about Katsuo’s family? Had she made the right choice to go with Neji? What were they going to do in the morning? Were they really going to head out into the middle of nowhere because Sasuke’s brother had told him to? What would they do when they ran out of the MREs?
After half an hour of peering through windows and running around in mental circles, Tenten made a decision and climbed back up the stairs.
Sasuke was on his stomach in front of the open door, his rifle and loaded ready beside him. He glanced back at her when he heard her approach and then turned back to watch the nighttime. But the line of his shoulders was stiff, his fingers spread out and ready to grab a weapon or push himself upright.
Tenten sat down on his empty side. “You need to teach someone else to use your rifle.”
That got his attention. He turned to her, shifting to put most of his weight on his right forearm. “What makes you say that?”
“If you die, we don’t only lose you, we lose your weapon, too.” She studied the way the moonlight cast shadows across his face. “It’s for the best of the group.”
“We only have four more days until Itachi calls me. There’s no point in teaching anyone. I can’t turn a novice into someone that can do headshots in that amount of time.”
She ignored his first objection. “You don’t have to teach a novice. I’ve been shooting before.” When he stayed quiet, Tenten awarded him some mental points for not dismissing her out of hand. “I’ve never used a rifle before, but I’m good with a .45.”
“How good?”
She smiled. “If I had made it to my family reunion, the trophy would be mine for the fourth year in a row.”