“You seem…Better now.”
Jace shrugged. “On the surface maybe, I suppose it’s bad enough to deal with this craziness sober. Try doing it when you can’t make heads or tails of anything going around you.”
He noticed her unease which made him feel ill at ease as well. He opted to smooth things over.
“Look, I am sorry about earlier. I was not myself. Don’t get me wrong. I think I am still a long way lost from myself, but I am on my way back. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t. Just put me on my guard. You’re forgiven. Just don’t do it again.” She smiled, trying to reinforce her words. Her voice was a low whisper, but fell heavenly and heavy to his ears none the less. Her timbre soothed his mind which was still darting in several different directions. Something about her had shifted the atmosphere around them, reminding him of times long past. It was the first time he remembered feeling normal in months. No, that was not the pure truth of it. It was more like years. He had actually forgotten what normal could feel like. He was a polished steel ball rolling on a teeter-totter christened ‘The Status-Quo’.
Charlie closed her eyes and smiled behind her coffee mug. This was not just any coffee. It had been her favorite go-to cup of Joe. She wrapped herself inside of the steam and the aromas coming off of it like a heavy blanket. It was the most comforting thing she had experienced since the outbreak. For a moment, she was home.
“How did you learn to make coffee like this?”
Now it was Jace’s turn to smile. “My mom. I was her little chef when I was a kid. I wanted to learn how to make her coffee the way she made her own. So she taught me. I would make her coffee every morning. I would measure out everything. Even smacked the cup with the spoon at the end like a chef does to soup.” He allowed himself a chuckle. His mouth quickly dropped to form a line of no emotion.
“She’s probably gone. Isn’t she?”
Charlie felt that even her coffee was not going to protect her from the onslaught of sadness coming off into the air then. She looked into her mug and decided that pulling punches was a wasted effort here.
“Yeah. She’s probably gone.”
“Ellie won’t tell me much. She refuses to talk about it. I have a feeling she was there in the middle of it. Maybe she was just waiting until she thought I was coherent enough to deal with it.” He stared sadly into the pilot light on the grill.
“You going to be okay?”
Jace exhaled as he collected his words. “I have no choice. I have to be. For her. My sister needs me to be strong. She is all I have left now.”
Charlie felt the overwhelming need to comfort this man, even though she barely knew him at all. Something about him gnawed at her, but not in the selfsame intrusive way she had been accustomed. She could almost forget their first encounter when she was threatened by him. That wasn’t him. He wasn’t himself, she kept telling herself.
“Well, you can stay with us as long as you want. I must admit. I like the company. I was by myself for so long, I was beginning to think I was the last one.”
“How’s that for irony. Those couple of months I was away, I was cut off from the whole world. None of us got word of what was going on. I just thought the world was still spinning on without me. Full of people and their drama. Should have realized something was going on when I noticed there was fewer doctors and shrinks roaming the halls.”
“But you were just in rehab right? Surely, they weren’t as strict as that.”
Jace rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Well this rehab wasn’t the happy, sunny place that they pictured on the brochure. Those guys were monsters. They teased us. Tortured us. Turning into zombies didn’t make them much different.”
He began pulling off his shirt and Charlie had to give herself pause at the definition in Jace’s pectoral muscles. There was obviously much more to this man hiding beneath the disguise of his clothes. Despite this, she refused to give him the satisfaction of her appraisal. He pulled his shirt down over his head and onto his wrists and then carefully turned around. Lines of scars like misaligned quotation marks marred the entirety of his back. The dim light shined on wounds only very recently in the last stages of healing. Charlie stifled her gasp, not wanting to wake the others. Instead, she felt herself already walking over to him. His head turned, only ever slightly bringing her into the fringe of his gaze. Almost unconsciously she reached up and touched his back where the wounds were healed over completely. Jace cringed for a moment at her touch, but then relaxed. He wanted her to know why he was the way he was. He wanted her to know that there was more to him than his vice. He felt he owed her an explanation and this was the best and only way.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered.
He turned to her and pulled his shirt back over his head. “You didn’t do this to me Charlie.”
“I know but . . .”
“I didn’t show you to make you feel sorry for me. I just wanted you to know why.” He clumsily went back to his seat and resumed his vigil with his coffee cup.
Charlie eased herself back after awkwardly pouring herself another cup and teasing it up with more cream and sugar. This was damn good stuff. She made a mental note to put coffee on her packing list, and a great deal of it. She did not know when she might get another chance to stock up.
She stared at the cup, still swirling with her little plastic spoon caught in the tidal whirlpool. She realized in that moment that they each were not that different from one another.
“I was in my room when the virus hit.” She smiled even as the tears started to well. She brought up the last pictures in her memory of when her parents were alive and kicking. “I was mad at them for something so stupid. Well, it seems so stupid to me now.” Jace looked up at Charlie, expressing his interest.
Charlie continued. “I was so full of rage. I boarded up my room. Windows and all. I plugged in my headphones and buried myself in sound. Tucked myself in away from the world, ya know.” Jace nodded.
“Self-induced exile,” he replied.
“Yeah.” She took a moment to turn and wipe a break in her stream of tears before he could see them flow.
“I woke up later hearing my parents arguing. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing actually. It wasn’t like the usual spats they would have. So I pulled the boards down blocking my door and went into the hallway. I didn’t realize until that moment, that all of the power had gone out. I called out to my mom. And then to my dad. But no one answered. I only heard the same sounds I was hearing from outside the house. Coming through the walls. It was like someone having a hard time breathing. It was so raspy and creepy sounding. Like someone in desperate need of an asthma inhaler. I turned the corner and that is when my world stopped.”
Charlie sat her cup down. Her hands had begun shaking, and she felt their strength leaving as she approached the climax of her story.
She looked back up at Jace, but her gaze remained in the past, stuck in time at the scene of all of her broken dreams.
“There was a body lying on the floor and someone was kneeling over it. I recognized my mother’s heels. She wore those things where ever she went. She was always kinda prissy like that. Not me, I was always the tennis shoe and no-dress girl. I could only assume the person standing over her was my dad. At first I thought maybe she had fallen in the dark when the power had gone out, and that my father was trying to help her up. I went to run to her side, but this sound stopped me dead in my tracks. It was this ripping sound. It sounded wet. That is when I smelled the blood. It was so loud in the air, then it made me choke and vomit on the spot. My dad must have heard me. He stood up in the dark and turned around. I felt him. It was so surreal that I knew something had to be wrong. The lights of a passing car shined through the house and hit our living room mirror above our fire place. I didn’t even realize that the front door had been left wide open. The light from the car only lit my father up for a brief second, But that was all I really needed. He was covered from head to toe in my mother’s blood.
His eyes were black and split. And he had pieces of my mother dangling from his mouth.”
Jace shook his head in dismay. “Then what happened?”
“For a moment, I thought that this was some strange prank. Some crazy wild idea of my parents to scare me out of my rebel nature. Yeah. Then my father jumped on me. He gave me a nice little souvenir. And that is when I knew that this was all real.” She did two of the top buttons on her shirt and showed Jace her own scar. The ragged marks of teeth clamped on to her shoulder looked like they had once been deep and deliberate.
Jace absorbed all of this slack-jawed. “How did you get away?” He was not sure he really wanted the answer to this.
Charlie’s eyes locked straight ahead. Jace could almost feel like he was not even in the same dimension as her anymore. She was seeing right through him, lost in that moment in time.
“He had knocked over some of my trophies off the table. It was the closest thing I could grab with him on top of me.” She was there again in that moment. In that house. The monster in the suit and tie, clamped down hard onto her shoulder. The searing white hot pain that surged into her neck would have translated into a scream of terror were it not for the shock. She panicked while the monster gnawed up and closed in for the next bite. Charlie slid her hands under the topper of the closest trophies. She gripped it tight, squeezing her eyes shut as she swung and its marble base followed and struck her attacker square in the head. He slumped and toppled over, still panting, but unable to move from the paralytic blow.
“I stepped back. And I just stared at him. That couldn’t have been my father. It just couldn’t. But there he was, wearing his uniform. I think I must have broken his neck. He just laid there. Still biting at the air.” Jace closed his eyes. Charlie paused, her tale stuck in her throat. It was still too real. Too fresh. Jace sat there, resisting the urge to walk over and embrace her. He knew that he was powerless to make this better. His hands opened and closed into fists, marking his only other response. His face remained deadpan.
Charlie hesitated, but she wanted to get this out. She wanted someone to know the dark things she had seen. This kind boy was kind enough to bend his ear. She would have it. He could sense the steam boiling just beneath the surface. The darkest part of her story was saved for last. She took a deep breath.
“I turned around and moved toward the center of the living room. That is where found my mom,” Charlie sobbed. She gritted her teeth through it, refusing to reach up and kill the tears. Her dams broke through, and a few stray tears raced down her cheeks and neck.
Jace sat his cup down and walked slowly to her. He just could not listen to any more.
“Charlie, you don’t have to . . .” He reached out touched her arm and gave her a small stroke on her arm. In that instant, she was disarmed. She sobbed and threw her arms around him and bawled into his shoulder. Jace embraced her lightly, not wanting to offend, but happy in that moment that he had something to offer. She calmed down after a few minutes, with only the occasional tender sob to remind him of why she was there in his arms in the first place. She felt safe there. For the first time ever. She felt safe. She released him though, feeling awkward in that moment for having selfishly grabbed him up like that. He smiled, disarming her yet again.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You probably needed that.”
“Yeah.” She sniffed.
“Don’t worry. I will probably be cashing that in soon. So you owe me one. Okay?”
Charlie giggled. “Deal,” she said, thankful to be let off the hook, for now at least.
Jace nodded over to his tent. “Well, I’m gonna turn in now. My batteries run out pretty fast these days.” He scooped up his journal and made his way to his tent. “Goodnight, Charlie.”
“Goodnight Jace,” she whispered. Her eyes followed him all the way inside the tent. She sighed and decided to entertain herself with one more cup of coffee.
Six aisles over, a roughly dressed beer-bellied man was laid up on the shelves. A line of boxes of various odds and ends were stacked up in front of him. He dared not sleep, and kept his breathing as silent as he could muster. He listened intently in the dark, and he waited.
Ellie awoke in the middle of the night. The call of nature had struck her eyes open, her nervous bladder getting the best of her. She recalled that Charlie had cleared the whole store, to include the bathrooms. She quietly made her way out of the tent, giving Jace a cursory look. His eyes were closed and his breathing was even. It was probably the soundest sleep he had had in weeks. She envied him. As she passed through the partition, his eyes opened briefly. He took a second to note her absence and tried to close his eyes again.
Charlie looked up from her coffee, and soundlessly acknowledged her presence with a nod. Ellie motioned with her chin toward the bathrooms.
“Just keep your eyes open. Us girls can never be too careful,” Charlie whispered.
Charlie realized she was going to have take a turn herself pretty soon. She had forgotten how quickly coffee ran through her. Sigh.
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“I think it’ll be OK.”
Ellie pulled out her mini L.E.D. flashlight. She allowed herself to get a good bit down the aisle in the dark before turning the little torch on. Shadows jumped and gave illusion that all the shelves were full, even though clearly they were not. Despite the fact that Charlie had cleared the whole store, there was no way to keep the goosebumps from filling her arms. Apparently she had dragged the bodies away as well. I guess she didn’t want Fayte to see them. Nice of her. She was glad for herself too. Seeing zombies, even dispatched ones, was not something she necessarily wanted to repeat either.
She continued walking toward her goal. Occasionally she would put her hands out and touch a passing shelf to keep her balance in the encroaching dark. Who am I kidding? I’m so clumsy, I could trip and fall with the lights on. Her imagination ran wild. Flashes of zombies she had seen on her way to rescue Jace appeared and danced before her eyes. One was so vivid and close. It seemed all too real. She stopped before the bathroom doors.
A noise behind her made the breath in her chest catch, like a fabric on a rose’s thorn. She slowly stepped to turn around, bringing the flashlight to bear down the aisle.
Nothing.
Her internal voice started to piece it all together. It was probably just the store settling. The outside pressure working on the store. If the store had power and lights she probably would not even had heard it. It amazed her how quiet and dead the store was. She never realized all of the ambient sounds that used to surround this place: the central air, the bustling of people to and fro. Truly you do not know what you have until its all gone.
She smiled. Surely this place was safe from those monsters.
She turned and went to put her hand on the door to push it open.
Another hand that was not her own came up from behind and clamped her mouth shut before she could even muster a fraction of a scream.
“Sh…Sh…Shh. Button it girlie. Or here is where you die,” a masculine voice whispered right against her ear. His free hand quickly displaced the air that was in front of her neck and took hold. He pressed her up against the door, pushing his crotch against her rear. The front of her hips pressed painfully against the entrance. Her arms and hands were at his mercy, splayed up against the door she was about to push herself through. He dug his chin deep into her neck, forcing her face to smash indelicately against the cold wood. She gritted her teeth at the pain he caused, but did nothing to move against him. She began to shake as he inhaled deeply at her hair and neck. The rapist smiled as if he had discovered Fort Knox. It was the crooked smile of a madman.
“Move. And if you make one sound, I’ll snap your neck.” He took a frenzied breath. “And then I’ll do what I want anyway.”
He pushed her forward into the bathroom. As the door closed, it was like the air was sucked out of it. It was a black box, closed inside of
a black box. With no ventilation here, the heat that had built up was overwhelming.
The man reached up and grabbed one of her hands, twisting it back painfully behind her. He added insult to injury, by twisting his own elbow up into her arm. She arched her back in pain, straining her chest outward uncontrollably.
“Oh, you make me wish I had a third hand,” he whispered greedily.” Make a peep. Just one.” He slid his hand down from her mouth. He groped greedily at her right breast. He grabbed up into his fist and dug his fingers in deep. Ellie let out a coarse moan. She wished she could be thankful that she could breathe again. His hands were rough, calloused. They smelled of oil and gas.
He had picked up Ellie’s flashlight and laid it up on the sink facing her against the wall. The light showed off her slim physique and her yellow dress.
“What? You some kinda school girl? I guess I musta hit the jackpot with you then, eh, girlie?” His breath on the air smelled of hard whiskey, not that she would have recognized it. He took a breath and planted his tongue on the back of her neck, scraping it rough against her innocent skin. She cringed, and he pulled her arm up tighter.
“You and me. We are going to have some fun. I ain’t had me girl since the shit hit the fan. I’m due what’s coming to me.” She could feel his dirty smile from behind her neck. At these words she started shaking uncontrollably. To lose what she had been saving. Like this? Better to go ahead and kill her now. But she could not find the strength to provoke him.
Petrified, she waited. Her soul was crumbling in the horror of it all.
In that, he felt that he had broken her. He let go of her arm and pushed both of her hands up on the wall. She felt like she was under arrest. She had wronged the world terribly somehow. Karma was stepping in to settle the score.
He grabbed her hips and pulled her buttocks out from against the wall, pooching them up and out. He rapped the inside of her ankles hard, and she let out a little stifled cry. He hammered them out with the sides of his fists. Her legs slid into a wide stance before him. He reached up at the dresses back, and tossed the excess up and over her rear. With his oil stained hands he pulled her panties away from the back of her. He nodded appreciatively.
Zombies Don't Ride Motorcycles Page 20