“Jesus, Remy,” an exasperated voice said from the dim interior. Remy let out a breath of relief and lowered her gun. “I almost shot you.”
“I was just looking for you,” she replied, giving Ethan a smile that was so falsely cheerful that it probably bordered on manic. “You weren’t in the back of the truck.”
“I needed some time to myself,” Ethan said. He set the gun on the dashboard and relaxed back onto the long bench seat again, a leg on the seat, knee bent, his other foot resting on the floor. Remy eyed him for a moment then grabbed the doorframe and hoisted herself up. “Come on, let me in here with you,” she urged, batting lightly at the foot on the seat and balancing precariously on the doorframe. “It’s fucking cold in the back.”
Ethan nodded and sat up, backing against the driver’s door. He dropped both feet to the floor and patted the cracked seat beside him. “Yeah, sure. Come on in. You cold?”
“Just a bit chilly,” she admitted. She pulled herself into the cab and settled beside Ethan, closing the door behind her. She relaxed against the seat with a sigh, grateful for having something besides hard metal underneath her, and watched Ethan for a minute before speaking again. “You okay?”
“As good as can be expected,” Ethan said with a shrug. He let out a heavy sigh of his own and added, “Thinking and shit, you know?” He reached down to the floorboard, groping about and pulling free a bottle of water. “Drink?”
She accepted the bottle and took a long swallow. The water was warm, but it went down easily and helped with the dry throat she’d developed while tramping around in the biting cold air outside. “Thanks.” She paused and offered the bottle back to him. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. It’s just…I don’t know. This whole situation is getting really shitty. I don’t want to deal with any of this anymore.”
She reached over and wrapped her fingers around his forearm, giving it a gentle squeeze. “I know. It’s always harder to deal with the bad shit that happens when you’re the one in charge.” She slid her hand down to his wrist, feeling the thin bones there, then laced her fingers with his.
“I didn’t want to take any of you into this place to begin with,” Ethan said, his voice heavy with despair. Remy swallowed hard as the sound hit her ears. “And now, because I couldn’t stand up to you, because I wasn’t willing to stand up to you, Nikola is dead.”
“That isn’t your fault,” she said. She gripped his hand tighter and lifted it to her lips, pressing a soft kiss to the back of it. “It’s not your fault, Ethan. Shit just happens sometimes.”
He leaned forward and thumped his head gently against the steering wheel. “It is my fault, Remy. It is. I should have just…I don’t know. Found someplace else to take Nikola when we left Maplesville. She shouldn’t have been here with us. This mission is too dangerous for a fifteen-year-old.”
Remy tried desperately to think of something to say to comfort him, but her mind came up with nothing. She was miserable at this kind of thing. Comforting people had never been her forte. Instead of trying to come up with the words, she slid across the seat and wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tightly. “It’s not your fault,” she tried, pressing a gentle kiss to his temple. “There’s no way she’d have let you leave her behind. You know how she was. Stubborn as a fucking mule.”
Ethan chuckled softly, despite his sadness. “Yeah, that she was.” He paused for a long moment, leaning into her and staring vacantly out the windshield. “Did you know her father was a state trooper? I think that’s why she stuck to me like she did. Not long after we first met in Memphis, she said I reminded her of her dad, and that was apparently the best compliment she could have given anyone.”
“What happened to her father?” Remy asked curiously. She dropped her head against Ethan’s shoulder, breathing in his scent deeply. Nikola had never really talked about her past, just like the rest of them. Reliving those experiences was too painful. The downside was that none of them knew a whole lot about how the others had gotten where they were, except for what was deemed necessary according to their need-to-know basis.
“He died a couple of days into the outbreak in Memphis,” Ethan explained. “He was out responding to calls for help and never showed back up at home. He left Nikki to fend for herself. As best she could guess, he might have been attacked by a group of infected once he got to the call. Whoever had called for help was probably already long gone by the time he arrived.”
“Poor Nikki,” she murmured sadly. “No wonder she was so attached to you. She didn’t have a soul in the world.”
They both fell silent as their minds settled onto their deceased friend. Remy lay against Ethan, shifting to rest her head against his chest, and listened to his steady breathing as he relaxed. It sounded almost as if he were close to sleep. She was beginning to feel drowsy herself when Ethan broke the silence again.
“So what’s your story, Remy?” he asked. “You’re the only one who never told me. Everybody else has at least given me a summary of their lives at the outbreak, but not you. Considering how close we are now, this is kind of…well, weird.”
Remy sat quietly and tried to decide what to tell Ethan and what to keep in her heart. She knew the question of her past would come up eventually, especially now that she and Ethan had been sleeping together for the past three months. Thus far, she’d managed to keep it to herself. It was hers to hold, hers to keep close, to carry the weight of. The others knew some gist of what had gone down—that she’d killed a bunch of infected with a hunting rifle and the bolo knife that even now lay in the back of the truck. That she’d killed her own sister because she hadn’t been able to see any other way out for them both. She’d sworn the year before never to tell anyone the details of what she’d done. But she wanted to confide in someone. She couldn’t think of a better person to trust with the truth than Ethan.
Remy swallowed and closed her eyes. She weighed her options for a moment, trying to decide exactly what to say, before she began talking quietly. “I lived in Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans, before the virus outbreak there,” she started. She began to trace her fingers lightly over the hem of her t-shirt both to distract herself and to keep her hands busy as painful memories surfaced in her brain. “It was me, my stepfather and my mother, and my little sister Maddie. My…my mom got sick. I wasn’t home when it happened. I’d been…well, I’d been out doing some stuff that I shouldn’t have been doing, getting in trouble, running into the long arm of the law, so to speak. I got home, and they attacked. My stepfather sacrificed himself to save me. My mom attacked my sister, and I managed to fight her off.”
“What happened to your sister?” Ethan asked gently.
“She…I…” Her words caught in her throat, and just like that, she couldn’t bring herself to say it, couldn’t bring herself to tell Ethan the truth of the matter, the truth about what had happened to Maddie. “She didn’t make it.”
Ethan wrapped his arms more tightly around her, and she relaxed against him, going nearly limp in his embrace. “I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“There were more in the woods behind the house,” she continued, “and the sounds of my escape only brought them all down on me. I escaped in a cop car, believe it or not. Then I started to run. I spent an entire month working my way to Biloxi before I got hurt and Brandt and Cade got me out of there.” Remy squeezed her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms. “I promised myself I’d kill as many of those bastards as I could before one took me down,” she added, her voice bitter and heavy with barely suppressed anger. “That’s why I wanted to go to Atlanta so badly. What better place to kill them than in the place where all this shit started?”
Ethan nodded, rubbing a soothing hand down her back and over her side. She hissed and reflexively jerked away from him, and he withdrew his hand in alarm. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, it’s just a cut,” she assured him. “I scraped my side when I w
as climbing out of the van earlier.”
“Let me see,” he demanded. She had no good excuse to say no, so she allowed him to push her onto her uninjured side. He shoved her jacket aside and eased her shirt up her torso. She could just make out the expression on his face in the dim light as she saw the bloodied cut on her side and the red stain on her shirt. “Why didn’t you tell Theo about this?”
She shrugged, looking down and feeling sheepish as she let out a soft huff. “I don’t know. It’s not a big deal. Theo had more important things to deal with at the time.”
“You’re important, too, Remy,” Ethan argued. He sat up again and pushed his hair out of his face. “You’re just as important as every other person in the back of this truck. No more and no less. This cut could get infected. We need to get it cleaned and bandaged.” He reached for the passenger door, and she sat up with another wince.
“Where are you going?” Remy asked.
“I’m going to get Theo,” he replied, sliding out of the cab.
“Don’t. Don’t get Theo,” she said quickly. She didn’t care how pitiful she sounded or how blatantly she begged. “I really don’t want or need another lecture tonight.”
He stood just outside the door, watching her for a long moment, like he was trying to read whatever was going on in her head. Finally, he nodded slowly. “Okay. I’ll just steal his first aid bag and do it myself,” he offered. “Is that okay with you?”
Remy sighed again and nodded, flopping back flat on the seat as he disappeared, leaving the door open for his return. She hated being babied. It made her feel like a weak, pathetic woman whenever someone treated her like she was made of glass just because she’d gotten injured. She’d spent the better part of the past year struggling to make herself seem anything but weak and pathetic—especially since the first time she’d met the others was in a particularly vulnerable moment—and she didn’t want to alter their perception of her in a single moment of weakness.
Remy heard footsteps and looked up from her quiet contemplation of the steering wheel. Ethan reappeared in the doorway and climbed into the cab, pulling the door shut and setting a small white first aid kit on the dashboard. “Let’s see about getting this fixed up,” he said, pushing her onto her back and sliding her shirt up with one hand, opening the box with the other. He shone a small penlight over the cut, examining it closely, then stuck the penlight between his teeth to free both of his hands.
“Is it bad?” she asked. She silently cursed as she heard the slight tremor in her voice. She wrinkled her nose at the roof of the cab.
“It isn’t deep, but it’s pretty nasty,” Ethan admitted, his words muffled by the penlight. He looked up to give her a reassuring smile and shined the light into her eyes in the process. He ducked his head with a little laugh and added, “Sorry. There’s a bit of glass in it that I’ll need to get out before I bandage it up.”
Remy nodded and relaxed as much as the pain in her side would allow. She closed her eyes tightly and let out a slow breath as Ethan gently tended to her wounds.
Chapter Twelve
The next morning dawned overcast but free of rain. Brandt was exhausted, his head heavy and clogged with sleep, his neck stiff from sleeping upright all night. He massaged the sore muscles in his neck and arched his back slightly in an attempt to stretch. The movement brought his attention to an odd pressure against his thigh, and he glanced down, smiling when he saw Cade using his leg as a pillow, curled on her side on the unforgivingly hard truck bed, her eyes closed, still asleep.
Brandt smiled and ran his fingers slowly through her thick hair. The dark locks were disheveled, mostly pulled free from the ponytail she’d put them in the day before; the way the strands fell around her sleeping face made her appear incredibly young. He brushed his knuckles over the side of her face before he sensed eyes on him. He looked up to see Gray staring at him.
“Morning,” Brandt greeted, keeping his voice low so as not to disturb Cade.
“Yeah, morning,” Gray replied. His voice was still hoarse with sleep, and he rubbed at his face tiredly, grimacing as he scrubbed his hand over his stubbled cheek. “Where are Remy and Ethan?”
Brandt looked around the truck curiously. He’d only given the interior a cursory scan when he’d woken up and hadn’t noticed their absence. “I don’t know,” he said, sitting up straighter. “Maybe they needed some fresh air? Or maybe they got out to keep watch since we all passed out.”
“Maybe,” Gray said doubtfully, obviously not thrilled at the idea of the two off together, presumably alone. Brandt wasn’t comfortable with the idea, either, though probably not for the same reasons that Gray had; while Ethan and Remy were damn good at handling a small group of infected, their survival instincts sometimes seemed to be mostly absent.
“I’ll go find them,” he offered. He gently nudged Cade awake, and after she sat up and pushed her hair out of her face, he grabbed his gun and climbed down from the truck.
The early morning air had a chilly bite to it, and he shivered, rubbing a hand over his bare arm vigorously. He wondered what possessed him to leave his jacket in the back of the truck. Cars lined the highway, bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. Many more were jammed at odd angles along the sides of the road, shoved there by desperate drivers looking to escape the inevitable by any means possible. It was a veritable sea of vehicles. He wondered how many infected were trapped in their cars when the virus took hold of their bodies. The makeshift car lot was a potential minefield of infection.
He contemplated the different directions his two companions could have gone and discarded each of them just as quickly. Ethan and Remy, despite their questionable survival choices, were too smart to venture into the traffic jam with just each other for protection, and he doubted Ethan would go anywhere near the van. He glanced around again, checking out the cars and trucks in their immediate vicinity, and decided to start at the front of the vehicle they’d taken shelter in. He figured the cab was the best place to begin.
As Brandt approached the cab, he paused in mid-step as he noticed the doors and windows were firmly shut. That in itself wasn’t necessarily odd. The way the windows were fogged was, though. Brandt frowned, looking toward one of the cars parked nearby. Its windows were crystal clear. His eyebrows darted up as his mind leaped to the most obvious possibility. No, that couldn’t have been it. Could it?
As he stared at the fogged windows, trying to decide on the best course of action that wouldn’t result in anyone entering into a horribly embarrassing situation, footsteps approached behind him. He turned in time to see Gray striding toward the cab of the truck, a frown gracing his face and his forehead wrinkled in consternation.
“Have you found them yet?” Gray asked. His eyes flitted to the windows that Brandt had been staring at.
“I…uh, maybe?” Brandt hazarded. He had a feeling Gray suspected the same thing he did, and he knew he wouldn’t like that possibility one bit. Gray’s face screwed up into an ugly grimace, and he stormed forward, pushing Brandt aside hard enough to make him stumble. “Gray, I’m not sure you should do that,” he hurried to say as Gray’s hand landed on the door handle. He could just imagine what was on the other side of the door, and the last thing he wanted was to see Remy or Ethan—or both of them together—in a compromising position.
“Shut the fuck up, Brandt,” Gray snarled. Brandt rolled his eyes and took a step back, holding up his hands as if to say, Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Gray wrenched the truck’s door open, exposing the inside of the cab to the cool morning air and their prying eyes.
The scene inside the cab was, thankfully, a lot more innocent than Brandt had imagined, which probably said a whole hell of a lot about him. Ethan and Remy lay curled up together on the bench seat, and they’d apparently been asleep, if their tousled hair and bleary eyes were any indication. Ethan’s arms were still around Remy as she sat up straight, snatched a gun off the dashboard, and pointed it at both of them. The embrace in which Ethan he
ld her likely meant nothing—the bench seat was only so wide, after all-but Brandt had a feeling Gray wouldn’t see it that way.
And, as usual, he was right.
“What the fuck?” Gray snapped. He glared at the scene in the truck, completely disregarding the weapon in Remy’s hand. Brandt fought not to back away and let the situation handle itself. Knowing all parties involved, he knew it would be better to stick close in case blood was spilled.
Remy shifted her gun to point it right at Gray’s head, her arm straight and extended; it didn’t waver a fraction as she glared at Gray. “You got a problem with something?” she snarled. Brandt blinked and raised an eyebrow. Gray, for his part, was completely unfazed by Remy’s threat. He stepped forward and shoved her arm to the side, pressing it firmly into the back of the cab’s bench seat.
“What the fuck is going on in here?” he pressed.
“Why the fuck is it any of your business what’s going on in here?” Ethan bit out, speaking up for the first time.
Brandt drew in a slow breath and took an involuntary step back without realizing he’d done it. His instincts screamed that this fight would be uglier than usual and therefore more likely to draw the attention of any infected in the vicinity. He could almost see the fabled green-eyed monster on Gray’s shoulders, gearing up to pounce on Ethan with all the force in his skinny, asthmatic body.
“Who the fuck asked you?” Gray shot back. He grabbed Remy’s arm and pulled on it, nearly dragging the young woman bodily from the cab to the cracked pavement. Remy barely managed to keep her feet, stumbling awkwardly as she landed hard on her weak ankle.
“Guys, I don’t think now is the time or the place to have this fight,” Brandt tried. He glanced toward the back of the truck and wondered if he should get Cade. She was far and away better at diffusing these sorts of situations; he was sure she could shut it down with a wave of her rifle and a stern word or two.
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