He looked at the porch swing with its brightly-colored cushions and the flower pots filled with only dirt and withered stalks. He saw the empty hummingbird feeder hanging forlornly in one corner, heard the faint, ghostly music of wind chimes. He took it all in, then he opened the front door and went inside the house.
Family photos adorned the walls and the mantle over the fireplace, legacies of a better time. There were pictures of kids at different ages. Silly pictures. Carefree pictures. Pictures of people hugging each other. No way of knowing where any of them were now. In the hallway, he passed one picture of a family smiling into the camera with the ocean behind them. It must have been a memorable day, one that was now captured forever behind glass.
He stepped into a room off the hallway, saw other people turn to look at him. There must have been something in his face because they didn’t stop him. They couldn’t have stopped him, because there she was, standing in the middle of the room. She turned her face at the sound of his footsteps and her eyes grew wide.
Yeah, she looked like hell. But at the same time she was also the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It was an emotional moment for him. A poignant moment.
He was so overcome at the sight of her at first that he couldn’t say anything. Then he crossed the room in several hurried strides, and, silent still, he wrapped his arms around her and just held her for a long, long time.
“Is it a safe place?” Hunter asked.
“About as safe as can be expected,” Bresh answered him without going into details yet. “We’ve checked it out from a distance, but we’re still being cautious. You’re welcome to come with us. I know you need to think this over, but we don’t have that much time.”
It was a big decision for them. Bresh understood that. Elan would go with him, of course. Ailie was waiting for him. And Dani and Hunter? He didn’t like thinking about them being out there on their own.
“The men who were after you, were they part of a big group?” Hunter asked Elan.
“Pretty big,” Elan replied. “I never knew how many there were for sure, but they seem to be everywhere now. They take what they want, no matter how they have to get it.”
“Doesn’t look like it’s about to rain anytime soon,” Bresh said. “And when they find their dead friends- ”
“They’ll be able to follow our tracks right to this house,” Elan finished. He looked at Bresh. “Right?”
“I could do it with my eyes closed,” Bresh told him. He couldn’t be anything less than honest with them.
After a sigh, Hunter said, “It’s been getting more and more dangerous every day. I’ve been wondering if there were any decent people left.”
“Yeah,” Elan added. “I was kind of hoping there would be safety in numbers.”
Hunter knew that wasn’t necessarily true. Not in all cases. But they could make it true, if they wanted it badly enough.
“There’s already nearly two dozen of us,” Bresh told them. “Everyone has been running scared. Everyone has lost a lot. They don’t want to lose any more. They have skills. We can learn from each other. We just have to decide that that’s the way we want to live. We can live not by our weaknesses, but by our strengths. Together we can be stronger. Together we can make our lives better. Even now.
“We can turn the armory at Cedar Ridge not only into a fortress, but into a community. We can make it a safe haven. Not just for us, but for others.”
Bresh didn’t want to pressure them, but he said, “The longer we wait, the more we’re pushing our luck.”
Hunter nodded at Dani and then he looked back at Bresh. “All right. We’ll go with you. But first, I have friends that I need to go back for.”
“There’s a dog out there.”
Aili joined Niah Lee at the window. “A dog?”
“Yes. It’s been running around in the field. See? Under the abandoned vehicles out there.”
Aili finally saw the dog. It was a tiny black dog, not much bigger than a rabbit. He was badly matted and half-starved looking.
“We have to let it in.” It was the only decision Aili could live with.
“I’ll go by myself,” she said. “We don’t want to scare him. You lock the gate after me.” She was already on her way out.
At the end of the field, Aili stopped to look for the dog who wasn’t anywhere to be seen. But at least there were no deads anywhere. There was just a bare, sloping field littered by discarded trash and a few abandoned cars. There were thick woods to her right and she wondered if the dog was hiding in there.
She gave a low whistle. Seconds later the dog appeared. Aili could see that he was shaking so badly that she knew he must be terrified. But the dog, she could see, wanted to come to her. He took a few tentative steps forward.
Aili got down on her knees and held out her hand. “Come here. I won’t hurt you.”
She was concentrating so hard on the dog, that she didn’t see another, bigger shadow come out of the woods. It was something that eventually made her fall backwards as she uttered a startled cry. She scrambled quickly to her feet and backed up a few steps. Her eyes were riveted on the man standing before her as a single, dreaded word passed her lips.
“Mead.”
Mead had let his beard grow out. It made him look positively villainous. He now had a long scar down one side of his face. He was wearing camouflage clothes and there was a bandana tied around his forehead. Two other men, dressed in similar clothes, stepped out of the woods and joined him. One of the men kicked the little dog, who yelped and ran for its life.
Ignoring the dog, Mead tilted his head as he eyed her. “Why don’t you say something?”
“There’s- nothing to say.”
“After all this time? Nothing?”
“I thought- ”
“Thought I was dead. I should have been, no thanks to you. You didn’t realize that when you ran away like that, that eater ran out of the house after you. I shut the door after that. So, truth is, you probably saved my ass. Where have you been all this time?”
“Trying to stay alive just like everyone else.”
“Elan here with you?”
“No.”
“I saw him once,” Mead informed her as he watched her face closely.
“Where?”
“Scavenging at the old garbage dump. Just about a week ago. He ran when he saw me. Hard to think the little shit could last this long.”
“Was he- all right?”
“He wasn’t an eater, if that’s what you mean.”
Mead looked at the stockade fence over her shoulder. “What is this place? I saw you coming out of there. Smelled smoke coming from there last night.”
She looked at the men behind him. She wasn’t about to give Mead, or any of them, any information.
Mead’s eyes narrowed on her face. “Why don’t you want to tell me?”
“There isn’t anything to tell.”
Mead lit a cigarette and puffed on it deeply before asking, “I know you’re not alone. How many people are inside?”
“A lot,” she lied. “A hundred or more.”
She hoped Mead would go away with the other men when they realized that they would be badly outnumbered. But her hope sank when Mead said, “Yeah? There must be a lot of food to feed that many people. We’re hungry, too.”
Like a snake striking, he suddenly grabbed hold of her wrist. “Get us inside.”
She shook her head.
“We’ve got guns. We can fight our way in. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“It’s not up to me,” she told him. “Everyone decides.”
“Oh, you mean like some kind of democracy.” Mead sneered and said, “Well, I’m your husband. Why wouldn’t they let me in? You would speak on my behalf, wouldn’t you?”
He gave her a shake when she didn’t answer him. “Wouldn’t you?” He looked at her more closely. “You’re my wife. Or have you forgotten that?”
“I want to forget that,” she told him th
rough clenched teeth. “Just like you forgot you were married when you cheated on me.”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. Clearly he didn’t know that she had found out about that.
“You’re not going to make a big deal out of that now, are you?”
“No, because I stopped caring what you did a long time ago.”
Mead’s face grew bloated as his anger flared. Aili knew he didn’t care what she thought about him. And the infidelity was nothing to Mead. What he did care about was what these men thought about him. And a rebellious wife? That was a problem. Or more importantly, what mattered was what he was going to do about that problem.
Aili remained silent, but her mind was racing as she wondered how she was going to get away from Mead. Even more importantly, she was thinking about Elan. Was he still at the dump site?
She felt Mead’s fingers tighten on her flesh. A sneer twisted his lips. “Seems like you forgot what for better or for worse really means. You need a lesson in what marriage vows are all about.”
How many men?” Bresh asked. No one failed to notice the lethal undertone in his voice.
“Three or four that we could see,” David Lee told him. “They dragged her away and disappeared before we could reach them. We thought they were gone, but there’s a new car parked in the tree line out there. It must be them watching us.”
“How long ago?”
“Not long. We were getting ready to go after her when you showed up.”
Bresh nodded grimly. Then he said to the people gathered around him, “This is how it’s going to work . . . ”
Chapter 20
Mead shoved her hard between her shoulder blades. “Move.”
Aili gritted her teeth against the rough treatment as she stumbled and barely managed to keep herself from falling headlong to the ground.
She had managed to escape from the car, but only briefly. It had been a desperate move on her part. She hadn’t gotten very far before she felt rough fingers closing around her arm and jerking her around to a standstill. Now she was being marched back to the car like a condemned prisoner being taken to the executioner.
Bresh had always insisted she be well armed. “You never know,” he had told her repeatedly. “What kind of a mess you might find yourself in. Always be prepared. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Anything can be used as a weapon if you are desperate enough.”
Was she prepared? Not remotely. She couldn’t even think straight because she was so scared. Fear, not preparation, was driving her at the moment. Stark, utter fear.
Maybe that could work to her advantage. Let him think I’m too scared to fight back, she told herself. Let him think I’m going to be an easy conquest. Let him get close enough, and when he was not expecting any kind of resistance, then she would make her move. She just didn’t know what that would be yet.
Bresh’s lessons kept playing and re-playing through her head. Bad people, he had told her, just make the next group have to be even badder. And those would be the ones who would survive. That had been his brief commentary on the current social structure. He had been so hard on her, she knew, because he wanted her to survive.
Mead shoved her again. Harder this time. And this time she tripped and went down to her hands and knees in the dirt.
“Get up.”
She didn’t move fast enough to suit Mead, so he grabbed the back of her hair and dragged her to her feet. She yelped in pain, twisted and fought the brutal hold he kept on her hair. His reaction was to twist his fist even more tightly in her unbound curls. He brought her face close to his and hissed, “I’m getting tired of this.” Without warning, he struck her. It was a vicious, back-handed blow across the side of her face. Her head swam and tears sprang into her eyes, blurring her vision. She tasted blood.
When Mead leaned closer to her, she instinctively turned her face and flinched from his nearness. He acted swiftly and without warning and grabbed her face roughly in one hand. “First lesson,” he gritted between clenched teeth. “You don’t pull away from me. Ever.”
“Keep it quiet,” one of the other men whined in a high-pitched, strained voice. “You’ll draw the damn things right down on top of us.”
Aili fully expected Mead to hit her again. He still maintained a tight grip on her hair. She could hear his slow, deep pants close beside her. And he was smiling. He’s enjoying this, she thought. He wants to see me afraid.
She heard more vile words from Mead. He promised to give her a second, lasting lesson about who was in control, promised to punish her if she even thought about trying to escape. But she had no intention of giving in easily. Not while she had breath left in her body. He gave her a brutal little shove backward. “I see you took your wedding ring off,” he went on angrily. “Doesn’t matter. We can find another one.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Till death do us part. Remember?”
Without warning, he reached forward and closed his hand around the front of her shirt. With a single, violent jerk, he tore shirt open, exposing her bare flesh to the night air.
Aili sucked in her breath and flinched away from the rough groping of his calloused fingers on her naked breast. Reacting instinctively she planted her boot where it counted. Two more gifts from Bresh. Combat boots and valuable lessons in street fighting.
Praying for accurate aim, she kicked the shin of one of the other men who was trying to grab her and caught him unaware as well. The man released her so suddenly that she staggered forward. The ground was uneven and deeply rutted. She fell. Not all the way. She quickly pushed herself back up to a standing position.
For a moment, as she faced all three men, she stood wavering, uncertain and terrified as they slowly recovered. Then she heard herself warning them in a voice that she barely recognized as her own. “Don’t touch me again.” Even though she was seething with raw emotion, she was amazed at how cool and deliberate her voice sounded.
Mead’s voice, was a broken whisper from between clenched teeth. He was still bent over. He was still holding his crotch with both hands. “We’re . . . going to make you . . . pay for that . . . ” His voice faded into a drawn-out groan.
But Aili didn’t see herself as he apparently did, as a helpless victim. She backed away from all of them, ready for the fight of her life.
“Don’t just stand there,” Mead growled as he staggered forward. “Give me a hand with her.”
As one of the other men made his move, Aili snatched the knife out of her boot. As he closed in on her, she struck out just like Bresh had taught her.
It took the man completely by surprise. She heard him cry out. There was blood, but she knew she hadn’t killed him outright. Howling in rage and in pain, he clapped his hand to his arm and stared as his fingers came away dark with blood. Then he looked up, fixed her with a murderous glare and uttered a string of profanities and oaths as he started for her again.
Part of her registered the growls and the snarls right away. She was already on high alert as something materialized out of the shadows. She saw the blue-grey, rotting flesh of the thin arms that separated from the darkness and reached wildly for her. Deads.
They seemed to appear out of nowhere and they were headed right for them.
But Bresh was suddenly there, too. She wasn’t alone anymore.
Epilogue
Aili stirred and stretched leisurely like a contented cat.
“I had good dreams last night,” she murmured as Bresh slid down under the sheets beside her.
“Did you.”
“Mm-hm. Of gardens and quiet dinners and sun-dried sheets,” she said wistfully as she touched his beard-roughened cheek. “Tell me again that this is different. Tell me this is going to be better.”
“It already is better.”
“For a long time I was afraid to dream. Or to plan. Or to hope,” she said. “But we survived the outside world. We should be thankful for that. And for what we have together.”
And that included Elan
being there with them.
“This can be a good place,” she said. “It’s the best place we’ve been so far. Other people will come. We have to give them hope. We have to decide who we are as human beings. We can’t just accept the darkness and let that determine where we’re headed.” She rolled onto her back, smiling contentedly up at the ceiling as the little black dog that Elan had named Macintosh wriggled his way in between them.
“Now more than ever- ” She stopped for a moment laughing as Macintosh licked Bresh’s chin. “We need to work together. All of us. In spite of everything that we’ve been through, I believe, here,” she said as she placed her hand over her heart. “That it is the good that lingers on. And there were good things.”
“There are good things,” Bresh corrected her softly.
“There are,” she agreed as she laid her hand on his bare chest. “Every morning when I open my eyes I want to see you smile. I want that to be the first thing I see.”
“That’s all you want?”
“No,” she admitted. “My stomach is telling me that I want breakfast. So what do you want?” she asked.
“What do I want?” There was only a slight hesitation before he finally answered her. “I want to marry you.”
She turned her face and looked at him as if she hadn’t heard him quite right. “Wh- What did you say?”
“I know that this might not be the best timing, but nothing is these days. I wouldn’t have picked a zombie apocalypse to fall in love if I’d had any say in it, but- ”
She sat up and stared down at him for the space of several heartbeats. “Well, maybe it is the best timing. Because Breshan Southwell, I happen to be in love with you, too. And- And I’m going to love this baby, too, when- ”
But she never finished, because when he wrapped his arms around her, as always, talk was the last thing on her mind.
Deadrise (Book 3): Savage Blood Page 18