Ground Zero

by Jessica Meigs

  “I’ll see you guys in the morning,” Brandt said to Theo and Avi before heading to the stairs. Gray was nowhere to be seen; he vaguely remembered the younger man saying he was going to keep watch from the roof. He didn’t understand why he felt he was in the middle of a battlefield, but his heart raced as he reached the top of the stairs and looked around. He was concerned about what he’d find as he searched for the room Cade had staked out.

  The hallway was dark—they’d quickly decided to leave off whatever lights weren’t necessary—and Brandt could make out a faint line of light coming from underneath a door. He moved in that direction, pausing just outside of it, dropped his rifle to his side, and hesitated before tapping his knuckles on the door.

  “Who is it?” Cade called out, her voice sounding weary. He frowned and stepped closer to the door.

  “It’s just me. Can I come in?”

  A rustle and a couple of thuds on the other side of the door greeted his request, and he stepped back as Cade pulled the door open. She was framed by the soft yellow light from the lone lamp she’d turned on, and she’d stripped down to her jeans and the white tank top she always wore under her shirts. She was, unusually, barefoot. “Hey,” she greeted, motioning for him to enter. “You need something.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you were okay,” he said lamely, stepping inside. She’d claimed what appeared to be a very tastefully decorated master bedroom. He was impressed; it was obvious the man who’d lived there had a decent amount of money. He took Cade’s rifle off his shoulder and set it carefully on the table by the bed before he turned to look at her. She moved back across the room to the connected bathroom without looking back at him in return.

  “Yeah, I’m okay. I just…I don’t know.” She let out a heavy sigh that echoed off the bathroom’s tiles. “Stressed, I guess.” The sound of running water accompanied her words, and he hesitated before going to the bathroom door. She stood at the sink, water running over the flannel shirt she held under the faucet; she rubbed the fabric against itself in an attempt to scrub off the dried dirt and mud.

  “I thought we didn’t have any water pressure,” he commented, leaning against the doorframe and watching her for a moment.

  “I think you were right about the air in the pipes,” she replied. “I turned the sink on full for a while, and water started coming out like it’s supposed to. Might not be anything I’d be willing to drink, but it’ll do for cleaning up with. Maybe even for a shower later.”

  Brandt gave her a smile and crossed his arms, watching as she washed her shirt in the sink, the water running darkly into the basin. “You’re going to have a problem if we have to move suddenly,” he warned her. “Especially if your clothes are all wet.”

  Cade laughed and shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I’ll just steal some of yours,” she joked, giving Brandt a smile and motioning to her shoulder bag. It sat on the counter nearby, a few damp spots still showing on the canvas. “I’ve got a couple of other shirts in my bag anyway. I always keep a couple of extras in it just in case.”

  Silence fell as Cade continued cleaning her shirt. She finally wrung it out and shook it loose before draping it over the shower curtain rod. He watched the movement of the lean muscles in her arms as she stretched to hang the shirt over the bar, and he sighed softly.

  “Do you think we’d have ever met if the virus hadn’t broken out?” he asked suddenly, shifting his eyes from her arms to her face. Cade glanced at him before returning her attention to her bag. Her dark hair blocked his view of half her face, and his fingers itched with the need to push it out of the way.

  “I doubt it,” she said, speaking into the bag as she rummaged inside it. “I mean, I was in Memphis, and you were in Atlanta. I doubt I’d have left Memphis if I didn’t have to, you know?”

  Brandt let out a soft breath. “True,” he agreed. “That’s at least the one little thing I have to thank it for, I suppose. Though it’s probably the only good thing to ever come out of this mess.”

  Cade nodded and looked up at him for a few moments. He stared back at her, trying to decide if he should do what his gut demanded and step forward to take her into his arms. But then she turned her eyes away and spoke again, casually. “So what’s the plan for tomorrow? Or did you and Ethan ever agree on one?”

  And just like that, the moment between them was broken.

  He cleared his throat. “We’re going whatever way I say we’re going,” he said confidently. “I think I managed to convince him to let me handle this part of the trip. I know this area better than he does.”

  “Do you think we’ll get there soon?”

  “Maybe. Probably late tomorrow or the day after,” he said, moving back into the bedroom. He picked his rifle back up and sat on the bench at the end of the bed, resting the rifle across his thighs. “Assuming we don’t run into any trouble, anyway,” he added.

  Cade followed him into the room and flopped onto the bed, sprawling out with a heavy sigh. “And if we do?”

  “Then we send up a prayer and pull the trigger,” he said simply. Cade let out a soft sound, and he twisted around to look at her. His eyebrows went up as he saw her lying on her back, her feet braced flat on the bed, both hands covering her face. Her elbows jutted into the air. He frowned and tugged gently at her ankle. “Hey, hey, are you okay?” he asked, keeping his voice low as he sat up straighter, watching her closely.

  “Yeah,” Cade said, her voice hushed. “Yeah. No. I don’t know.” She fell silent, and he continued holding her ankle, loosely, feeling the small bones underneath her skin. He rubbed his thumb over the knot on the outside of her ankle, tracing circles over the soft skin. “I feel like shit,” she admitted, sliding her legs to lie flat on the bed. “Like absolute, total shit.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he offered, shifting to his knees on the small padded bench and watching her in concern. “I’m willing to listen, if you want to talk about it. You know I will.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. She didn’t lower her hands from her face, and he frowned, crawling up onto the bed, making his way on his hands and knees to kneel beside her instead. He gently touched one of her elbows, running his fingers along her skin again, down to her shoulder.

  “Talk to me,” he requested, massaging her shoulder. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Why?” she asked. She shook her head and dug her fingers into her thick hair, twisting the strands around her fingers.

  “Because I want to help. Because I care.” He slid his hand to her wrist and tried to pull her hand from her face. “Come on. Don’t hide from me, okay? You promised you’d be honest with me, remember? You can tell me this kind of shit.”

  Cade shook her head again, the motion just barely perceptible, but she allowed him to pull her hands away from her face. He wasn’t surprised to see her face was flushed and her eyes watery with tears; she blinked rapidly in the light from the lamp by the bed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just…I’m really…I think it’s all starting to hit me.”

  “What is, Cade?” Brandt asked, taking both of her hands in his. He rubbed his thumbs over her knuckles, trying to reassure and comfort her.

  Cade dislodged a hand long enough to wave it vaguely at the ceiling before she pressed it back into his grip. “All of this. All of the bad shit that’s happened.”

  “You mean with Nikola?”

  “Nikola. Josie. Andrew. Anna. The whole fucking world. All of it.” She let out a sad, shaky laugh, though there was absolutely no mirth in it, and shifted her eyes from Brandt to stare blankly at the wall. “It’s all just too fucking much to deal with. I’ve spent too much time bottling all this up. I haven’t been able to sleep much in the past year, and I’m just…I’m tired of it all.” A soft, choked sob escaped her throat, and she murmured, “Why do we have to live like this, Brandt?”

  He processed her words with the utmost care and consideration, trying to decide the best thing to say. But he came up empty. Ther
e wasn’t anything to be said to make Cade feel better. The whole world was shit, and there was no way to explain that away or make her feel better about it. “I don’t know, Cade,” he finally admitted, feeling helpless. “I really don’t. I wish I did. I wish I knew what to say, but I don’t.”

  “You’ve lost people, too, right?” Cade asked. “You know how much it hurts. How awful it feels knowing what you have to do and that you have no way out of it.”

  “But I didn’t lose them the way you did,” he admitted. “I didn’t have to face the prospect of killing them myself.” Not all of them, anyway, he thought. “Fuck, I got off easy compared to the rest of you. Theo and Gray haven’t had to deal with it, and I don’t know about Avi, but you and Remy and Ethan? God, I wouldn’t want to do what you had to do. I don’t know that I could. I don’t know if I’d be able to put one of you guys down, not if it came to that. I care too fucking much. I’ve let myself get too close and personal with all of you. That’ll just make it harder when the time comes.”

  They both fell silent for a long while. Cade spent the time simply lying still, her hands in his, clutching his fingers desperately as if she were about to fall off a cliff and he was her only salvation. He held hers just as tightly in return, lifting them to his mouth and pressing soft kisses to her skin, first to the backs of her hands, then to her palms, and finally to the insides of her wrists. It was only after he lowered her hands again that she spoke once more.

  “I just miss her. So much,” Cade murmured. “God, she was just a little girl, Brandt. Four years old. She didn’t even really get a chance to live before it all went to shit. I don’t even know if her mother knows she’s dead. I don’t even know if her mother, if my sister, is even still alive or, if she is, where she might be.”

  “What does your heart tell you?” Brandt asked, sliding down to lie beside her. He rested a palm against her flat stomach, feeling his hand rise and fall with each breath. “What’s it say down here in your gut?” he asked.

  “It tells me that, if Lindsey was anywhere near the epicenter of this, the chances of her being alive is slim to none,” she admitted. “It tells me I shouldn’t get my hopes up for her survival, because she doesn’t have the skillset I do to live in a world like this. That if she did survive, I’ll probably never get the chance to talk to her again, never mind see her, so she might as well be dead.”

  He shook his head. “Cade, that’s what your head is telling you. What does your heart say?”

  She hesitated and dropped a hand to rest on top of his, slipping her fingers between his. “My heart tells me there’s always hope,” she said quietly.

  “Exactly,” Brandt said. He slid farther up the bed to put his face on level with hers, brushing his fingers against her cheek. “There is always hope. There’s always hope for us to make it out of this alive, for your sister to make it out alive. Maybe even one day for you two to see each other again.” He smiled and twisted his fingers into her dark hair. “And if not, then hell, you’ve got me, right? I’ll take care of you.”

  Cade snorted, suppressing a laugh. “Oh, fuck that. If either of us is going to need taking care of, it’s you, not me. I can take care of myself just fine.”

  “And you know what? I totally believe that,” he agreed with a laugh of his own. He pulled her close then, wrapping his arm firmly around her slender waist and pressing a light kiss against the corner of her mouth. “You feel any better?”

  “A little,” she admitted. She shifted against him and gave him a slight smile, clearly a bit uncomfortable at his closeness, but she didn’t seem inclined to push him away, either. “You know what would make me feel so much better, though?”

  “What?”

  Cade nodded toward the bathroom door. “A shower? Even a cold one will make me feel that much more human again.”

  Brandt grinned. “You know, I bet I can arrange that,” he said, pleased that he’d finally found something he could do to help her. “Hell, give me a few, and I bet I could arrange a hot shower for you.”

  “A man after my heart,” she said with a luxurious sigh.

  “Oh, you better believe it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The seven remaining members of the group set out an hour after sunrise the next morning. All were reluctant to leave the house right away; it’d been a pleasant night for most of them, especially when electricity and hot water were added into the equation, and many had slept better than they had in a long time. Ethan was in a surprisingly decent mood, though he hadn’t gotten as much sleep as the others likely had. He had Remy to thank for that. They’d both needed their rest, but the young woman had opted to stay with him for the night, blatantly flaunting their relationship to the others after spending three months struggling to keep it a secret. Perhaps it was their proximity to Atlanta and possible death that lifted her insistence on secrecy. Emotionally, the night did Ethan a world of good, and he wasn’t going to complain. Even the fact that they were now headed toward a city that had become synonymous with “danger” did nothing to truly dampen his spirits.

  They walked for four hours before stopping at noon to eat and rest. As the others ate from cans of food scavenged from their bags and the home they’d left that morning, Brandt and Ethan leaned against a beat-up car, poring over the map of Georgia spread out on its hood. They were trying, without absolute success, to pinpoint the group’s exact location.

  “I think we’re somewhere in here,” Brandt said. He ran his finger along a stretch of highway. The wind tried to blow the paper off the hood, and he let out an impatient sigh and flattened the map again. “I’m not positive exactly where, though.”

  “That doesn’t do me much good,” Ethan said. He drank a swallow of soup from the can in his hand and leaned against the car, studying the landscape around them and trying to match it to the map. “I need to know how much farther we’ve got until we get there. As close an estimate as you can give me.”

  “About all I can guarantee you is we haven’t passed through Villa Rica yet,” Brandt said, pushing his dark hair from his eyes. “I do know we’re closer to the interstate than I’m comfortable with. When we hit the intersection of 8 and 101, we’ll be maybe a mile, maximum two, away from it. It might get rough there. The congestion of vehicles alone will make travel difficult.”

  “And then we have to worry about what’s in the vehicles,” Ethan added. He looked at where the others sat several yards away, eating their own lunches. He watched as Theo moved among the group, passing out some sort of pill. Vitamins, he realized. Leave it to Theo to think of all the little things that never crossed his mind. He turned to Remy and watched as she ate a peach slice out of the can with her fingers, laughing at something Cade said.

  Ethan turned back to Brandt. “Okay, lay it on me. What are our chances?” he finally asked quietly. It was a question he’d avoided since they’d left Maplesville, and it was one he really needed the answer to.

  Brandt stood silently and stared at the map beneath his hands as if trying to decide what to say and how to say it. He ran a hand through his hair and let out a slow breath before he spoke. “Honestly? I’m not sure,” he admitted. “It was pretty hard moving around in Atlanta on my own, when the virus initially began to spread. I don’t know how a group of seven could manage. I don’t know what the conditions in the city are like anymore. They could be bad, or they could be somewhat improved. By now, a lot of the infected could have died off or simply spread farther out, looking for more food sources. There are too many variables that I just don’t know.”

  Ethan stared at the map. “The only thing I can think of is just for us to travel quickly, leave everything we don’t need behind, and once we get inside the city, move fast.”

  It wasn’t long before they got the others to their feet and moving once more. The idea they’d come up with was to get everyone through Villa Rica as fast as they could, to move everyone for at least three more hours before stopping for the rest of the day. By tomorrow, they’
d reach Atlanta.

  Their arrival in the city wasn’t something he was particularly looking forward to.

  The group passed through Villa Rica unmolested, despite Brandt’s initial fears of attack so close to the interstate. But it was as they neared Douglasville that everything began to fall apart.

  The road had become more congested as they neared the city of Douglasville. The obstructions had become so plentiful that the group was forced to slow to a near crawl as they tried to pass among the cars. Cade had given up trying to wade through the cars and had moved to the road’s shoulder, where the vehicles were fewer in number and spread farther apart. Brandt had followed her lead and moved to the shoulder on the opposite side, and the rest of them were interspersed among the cars as they made their way toward the city.

  It happened so fast Ethan didn’t have time to register the events, never mind react to them.

  One moment, Cade walked along the side of the road, her rifle in her hands. The next moment, she let out a shout of alarm as something darted from the trees lining the side of the highway and grabbed her arm. Cade jerked back instinctively, trying to free herself, and stumbled into a car that blocked her progress. Ethan realized Cade’s assailant was an infected woman, and he started to run through the cars, weaving among them as quickly as he could. The infected woman had her tightly in her grip and was attempting to drag her down to the ground.

  “Cade!” a desperate shout rang out from Ethan’s left. He turned to see Brandt sliding across the hoods of cars and climbing over vehicles and other debris, moving quickly in her direction. The man raised his rifle and tried to aim, even as he moved.

  Ethan knew Brandt wouldn’t be able to get a clear shot from that range, not without hitting Cade, too. It was too dangerous, and she and the infected woman were moving too much in their desperate struggle.

  Theo was the closest to Cade, and he reached her first. He grabbed her around the waist and attempted to pull her back from the infected woman that had her fingers wrapped around Cade’s arm in a bruising grip. Theo ripped the knife from the sheath on Cade’s belt and plunged it into the infected woman’s chest.