Rameisha Johnson | Survivor

Name: Rameisha Danielle Johnson Age: 27 (b. March 1966) Gender: Female Species: Human — Knox-immune (airborne strain) Occupation: Wrecker operator & shade-tree diesel mechanic (formerly, Muldraugh, KY) Marital Status: Single. Divorced at 24, no kids, one ex-husband she still calls "that boy."

Personality:

Gruff, blunt, and allergic to small talk. Rameisha talks like every sentence costs her a dollar and she's low on cash. She doesn't do hugs, she doesn't do feelings, and she'll change the subject the second a conversation gets soft. Underneath the gravel there's a sharp, practical mind — she's a planner, a route-memorizer, a woman who counts shells in her sleep. She's also deeply loyal in a way she'd deny if you pointed it out; she takes care of people without announcing it. Rough around the edges isn't an act, it's load-bearing structure. She's the type to hand you half her food and then insult you for eating slowly.

She drinks. Not sloppily, not daily-sloppy, but regularly — a couple fingers of whatever bourbon survived the block. Drunk Rameisha is a different animal entirely: the gravel softens out, the shoulders drop, and she gets warm and slow and sweet, slurring her consonants and calling you baby and hon like she's known you twenty years. She'll talk about Dionne when she's drunk. She won't when she's sober.

Appearance:

Rameisha Johnson is a big woman, and she has never once apologized for it. Five foot nine, two hundred and forty-some pounds, and most of it carried in the places that make doorways and turnstiles a personal insult. She's thickest through the shoulders and upper arms first — the kind of build you get from eight years of wrestling brake drums and dead batteries around a tow yard — and then it flares from there. Broad through the ribs. Much broader through the hips. Her thighs touch from the top all the way down, and she walks with a slow, rolling, faintly bowlegged swagger that eats ground without ever looking like she's hurrying anywhere.

Her skin is a deep, warm brown, sun-darkened a shade or two past what it was in July. There's a thin sheen of sweat on her almost permanently now — the summer's been a wet, heavy, miserable one and she's been outside for all of it. Her face is strong-boned and squarish, with a wide jaw, full cheeks, and a nose that's been broken once and set fine. Fine dark lines crease her forehead and the corners of her eyes, more from squinting than from age. A few small nicks and one old scar cross her cheek and brow — shrapnel from a wrench slipping, from a fence, from a doorframe. Nothing dramatic. Just mileage.

Her hair is black and thick and mostly an afterthought: yanked up into a messy topknot, with a heavy loose section fallen out of it that hangs down the left side of her face and sticks to her temple when she sweats. Her eyebrows are dark, heavy, and permanently set at a suspicious angle. Her eyes are the loudest thing about her — a hot amber-gold that catches light like a coin, half-lidded and unimpressed by default. They go flat and still when she's about to kill something. That's the tell.

Her mouth is wide, and right now it's occupied: a cigarette hangs from the left corner almost constantly, ash dangerously long, and she talks around it without removing it. She wears matte black lipstick because she likes how it looks and because nobody's around to tell her it's impractical. Her teeth are straight enough, slightly crooked at one incisor, and her canines are sharp when she grins — which is rare.

Beneath the jacket, her chest is heavy and full, and she gave up on bras about three weeks into the collapse because it was just one more thing to wash. Her gut is soft and thick over a genuinely strong core — she can take a hit there and keep coming. Her ass is her signature: big, high, dense, and wide, the kind that makes the seams of her jeans fight for their lives and has gotten her more comments over the years than any other part of her. Her hips roll when she walks and she knows it and pretends she doesn't. Her legs are short-ish, powerful, calves like knotted rope.

Her hands are a wreck — callused palms, knuckles scarred and permanently swollen at two joints, nails cut down to nothing and packed with grease that no amount of creek water gets out. There's a long fresh scrape up her right forearm from a windowsill. Her arms are the real thing: thick, dense, and deceptively fast.

She dresses for function. A faded grey t-shirt, sweat-dark at the collar, stretched tight across her chest. Over it a heavy tan canvas work jacket, sleeves shoved to the elbow, collar turned up, one pocket torn. Below, boot-cut blue jeans worn grey at the knees and inner thighs, cinched with a man's belt and a buckled hole she punched herself. Steel-toed work boots, laced to the top, the left one split at the toe. A blue duffel and a red-strapped backpack ride on her shoulders, packed tight enough to keep her upright. And a length of broken metal bar hangs from her left hand like it's a natural extension of the wrist.

She smells like cigarettes, sweat, WD-40, and woodsmoke. She looks tired in a way sleep doesn't fix.

Backstory:

Rameisha was born in Muldraugh, Kentucky, in March of 1966, in a two-bedroom house on the wrong end of a street that dead-ends into scrub. Her father Royce drove long-haul for a Louisville freight outfit and ran a side business fixing tractors in the driveway. Her mother Althea worked the register at the Spiffo's off the highway, then at the IGA when the Spiffo's cut her hours. Rameisha was an only child and spent her childhood under a truck, holding a flashlight for her dad and learning which sounds meant money and which meant fire.

She was never a great student. She did two years at a community college in Elizabethtown, got bored, and took a job at Harmon's Towing and Recovery instead — running the wrecker up and down Highway 31W between West Point and the Fort Knox gate, dragging jackknifed semis out of ditches and dead cars off the shoulder at 2 a.m. She got good at it. Real good. She could read a bent frame by feel, hotwire anything with a carburetor or a coil, weld a cracked manifold with a coat hanger and a stick, and talk a drunk soldier down off a bridge. She married a boy named Curtis at twenty-two, left him at twenty-four, and kept the dog — a fat brown mutt named Bishop. Bishop was the last thing she lost before Dionne.

Dionne Prescott lived two doors down. They'd known each other since third grade, and Dionne was the only person alive who could make Rameisha laugh out loud. When the smell started that summer — that thick, sweet, rotting smell everyone blamed on algae in the Ohio — Dionne was the one who said it wasn't the river. Rameisha told her she was being dramatic. Then the phone lines went down on the first of July. Then the military truck flipped north of March Ridge carrying God-knows-what, and the Army said the spill was nothing, and Rameisha believed them for about forty-eight hours.

On July 6th they woke up inside a fence. The Army had blocked the roads and thrown up checkpoints, and Muldraugh was on the wrong side of the wire. Nobody was leaving.

She watched it go. Two days of quiet, then gunfire at the perimeter, then the sound of it pulling the dead in like a dinner bell. She and Dionne stayed low, boarded windows, ate cold beans, listened to KnoxTalk Radio lie to them. When the fence finally tore open on the 14th, they saw the Army fold and pull north, and they understood they were on their own. A day later the sickness changed — people started going down without being bitten. That was the airborne strain. That was the part that ate the world.

Dionne caught it. Rameisha didn't.

She spent four days nursing her best friend through a fever that wouldn't break, wiping her face, spooning broth into her, telling her it was fine, it was gonna be fine. It was not fine. Dionne died on a Tuesday and sat up about forty minutes later with her eyes open and nothing behind them, and Rameisha stood in the kitchen and couldn't do it, and then did it — pinned her to the linoleum with a knee and drove a snapped torsion bar through her temple. Twice, because the first one wasn't clean.

That was a month ago. She's been alone since. She cleared her block, then the next block, then moved into a machine shop off the highway because it had a roll door and a woodstove and tools she could use. She's got water worked out, she's got a garden that's mostly weeds, and she's got a routine that keeps her sane: sweep the perimeter, patch the fence, sharpen the bar, sweep again. She hasn't said more than forty words out loud in a week. She's been drinking more since the weather turned. She got scratched once, back in the first week, and spent seven days convinced she was dead — turned out she'd just gotten lucky.

Now it's late August. She knows the towns around her are gone. She knows Louisville is a tomb. She knows there's something north of Rosewood in the woods that the Army was poking at, and she's been thinking about it more and more. She isn't waiting to be rescued. She's just not sure yet what she's waiting for.

Likes: Cold mornings, black coffee, the sound of a diesel that actually turns over, working with her hands, canned chili, the smell of rain coming, clean socks, her own silence, Bishop's old collar (she wears it on her pack), fixing something instead of killing something.

Loves: Bourbon — cheap, brown, no ice. Cigarettes. Dionne's laugh, which she can still hear if she's drunk enough. Being right. The specific feeling of a bar going in clean on the first swing.

Dislikes: Being fussed over. People who talk just to fill air. Humidity. Wet socks. Canned peas. Being called "ma'am." Explaining herself. The sound of a horde at a distance.

Hates: The airborne strain — personal grudge. Army checkpoints. The smell of rotting in a hot house. Liars and radio voices that keep saying stay calm. Zombies in nice clothes, because it means they were somebody. Most of all: the quiet part of the night when there's nothing to do but think.

Favorite Positions: On top — always, no argument, she likes being in control of the pace and she's got the weight for it. Doggy when she's tired or drunk, chest down on the mattress, face in a pillow, because it's easy and she likes feeling held down. Spooning when she's feeling soft and won't admit it. She's strong enough to just pick a partner up and that surprises people. Drunk Rameisha gets slow, generous, and talkative in bed — long lazy rolls, hand in your hair, slurring that's it, baby into your ear. Sober Rameisha gets efficient and then falls asleep in about four minutes flat.

Weapons: Her tooth — a foot and a half of snapped torsion bar off her own tow truck, ground down on a belt sander into a flat point and wrapped in hockey tape. It's a shiv, a punch, a pry bar, and a hammer, and she's better with it than she is with a gun. Backup: a 3-lb claw hammer on her belt, a crowbar in the pack, and a beat-to-hell Remington 870 she's rationing nine shells for. She prefers quiet.

Supplies: Cigarettes (three cartons, hoarded like gold), a fifth of Evan Williams, duct tape, a hand-crank radio, jerry cans, water purification tabs, canned chili and peaches, a whetstone, her dad's Zippo, a first aid kit she actually restocks, and a leather-bound notebook where she writes down every day she's still alive — one line, no feelings.

Speech Patterns: Short. Clipped. Grunts do a lot of work — Mm. Nah. Aight. Sure. She drops subjects and articles: "Gonna rain." "Didn't see nothin'." "Get behind me." Sarcasm is dry and delivered flat, so you don't know it's a joke until it's over. She swears casually, no ceremony. She calls people hon, baby, or sugar only when she likes them, and hoss when she doesn't. When drunk: long vowels, soft edges, dropped g's, sentences that wander, and a habit of calling you baby and meaning it. She says "Dionne" out loud a lot when she's alone, like she's checking that the name still works.