by Siara Brandt
Law had left her to look for food. He said that he could get in and out of places faster and safer if he didn’t have to worry about dragging her along with him.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get back to the house. The sky’s about to open up. You find any duct tape?”
The rain came pouring down so hard and so suddenly that it drowned out her reply. Their clothes were soaking wet before they even reached the house. It was a cold rain that took her breath away. It had been raining for three days and three nights straight. Raining so hard that they had no choice but to “stay put” as Law put it, and wait it out. During brief lulls in the rain they were on the move again, but it was slow going at best. And the rain didn’t stop the deads in the least.
“What?” he asked, glancing over at her as he shrugged out of his pack. She had been staring at him intently from beneath her lashes.
“Nothing,” she replied with a hint of petulance in her voice. “You must be hungry. You always act like a bear when you’re hungry.”
His amused smile told her he wasn’t bothered in the least by her comment. “You’ll be glad I was gone so long when you see what I found.” He waved the candy bar in front of her face.
“Chocolate,” she gasped. “Where did you find that?”
“Hidden away in a drawer. That’s what took me so long. I had to go through about fifty drawers to find it.”
She had waited for him a long time. At least an hour. She always worried when he was gone. Having him back gave her a deep sense of relief. She didn’t want to admit how much she had come to rely on him. Even to herself. When he left her, even for brief periods, she was surprised at how alone she felt. How lost. He had saved her life many times, but he not only kept her safe from the scavs as he called them, but he made sure she had food to eat and dry, clean clothes to wear. Maybe even more valuable, he had taught her a great deal about how to stay alive in the short time they had been together.
The truth was that Lawton Quaid was probably one of the very best men to have to by your side if you were trying to survive a zombie apocalypse. He had taught her skills she could not have learned in any other way. Like how to open a can when you didn’t have a can opener, and how to quickly repair shoes and the best, safest ways to stop the undead. And what not to do. Like never, ever punch one in the mouth with your fist because their teeth would probably cut and possibly infect you.
“You don’t ever let yourself think about giving up,” he had told her. “If your gun gets lost or you run out of ammunition, you use your knife. And then, if you lose your knife, you use your hands. You have to learn how to think like a survivor and stay alert at all times because things change constantly. Most people,” he had said. “Aren’t even prepared for a bad storm let alone something like this. The truth is that most people would rather die than have to take care of themselves. But you’re not going to be one of them, Sidra.”
Sidra. She liked the way he said her name.
She glanced over at him again as he laid the food out before her. His black hair was damp with rain. His shirt was also dark with moisture. Once upon a time, in her past life, she would have noticed him in an entire crowd of people. And thought that he was a handsome man. A terribly handsome man. Of course, things like looks didn’t matter anymore. What was more important was that he was someone she could rely on. That she had grown comfortable with him. Even with his sometimes overbearing attitude. But even that didn’t bother her anymore. Sometimes it really did help keep them alive. She had definitely stopped being afraid of him. And even more amazingly, she had begun to trust him.
A big part of that was because Law made her feel safe. It was something she had not experienced for a very long time with a man. Maybe never. It wasn’t just his big, strong, blatant male presence that made her feel that way. He also had an easy laugh and, at times, a wicked sense of humor that could take the worst situation and make it almost bearable.
“I can’t believe it’s still raining,” he said as he sat across from her.
Outside the window, beyond him, water was pouring off the edge of the roof. A lightning bolt seared a path along the darkening sky. Thunder followed.
“I ran into a scav out there,” he was saying. “That was as big as a grizzly bear.”
Her eyes widened as she watched him. “Don’t you ever get scared?” she asked him.
“Sure I do. I just react in a different way.”
“Because you were trained for combat,” she remarked as she put a piece of chocolate into her mouth.
He shrugged and said, after a silence, “I saw signs of Mulada soldiers, too.”
She stopped eating and stared at him. “You think they’re still around?”
“I don’t think so. They take over towns then go through them like locusts. Purging, they call it. This town’s been picked clean.” She knew it was a subject he didn’t like to talk about with her, but he also knew that she had to realistically know what they were up against.
“Is that what they did at the bridge?”
“Oh, yeah. They purged it.”
Law’s lessons kept re-playing in her head. Bad people, he had told her, just make the next group have to be even badder and smarter. And those would be the ones who would survive. That had been his brief commentary on the new social structure. And astute one, perhaps, for he had lived his live in a harsh and dangerous world even before everything had fallen apart. He had told her that he had lost both his parents at a very young age. Years with an abusive uncle had made him run away to join the military as soon as he was able to do so.
She had grown up in a very different kind of world. He had been so hard on her, she knew, because he wanted her to survive. She had seen a lot these past days and she knew now why he was always on the alert. She knew why he never let his guard down and tried never to show vulnerability. She suspected he had seen a lot worse than she could ever imagine. During one argument, he had told her that he knew firsthand that some men were capable of while she didn’t have a clue. That she damnwell needed to learn.
As she continued to study the lean contours of his face, the strong jaw, the slashing dimples that deepened when he smiled, even the long scar that ran down his cheek, she realized she loved looking at his face. In fact, even though she knew it so well, she could have studied his face for hours, she found it so interesting. Lawton Quaid, she had already decided, was going to be a hard man to forget.
When Law glanced over at Sidra, she quickly broke eye contact. He frowned slightly when he saw the flush on her face. He didn’t know what had caused it, and wondered if he had said something wrong. He had already come to the conclusion that he had made the right decision to stay by her side, to protect her until she found her way home. Not that the woman couldn’t be impossible at times.
Lately, he admitted to himself that he felt emotions he wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
Watching her, he felt something even now. A slight breeze was blowing through the open window and stirring the ends of her hair. She was a beautiful woman. No denying that. He supposed that was the reason why he couldn’t help staring at her sometimes.
“They just keep wandering around, even in the rain,” she said absently, still avoiding eye contact and staring at the window. “I wonder how far they could travel in a day.”
“If there’s nothing to stop them, I imagine they could end up anywhere.”
Sidra wasn’t really thinking about the scavs. She wanted to ask him what he was going to do after they reached Lacombe. Of course she didn’t do that. She didn’t feel comfortable prying into his personal life. She tried to avoid it whenever possible. But then she heard herself asking, “Where do you think you’ll go after Lacombe?”
“It would be nice to find someplace safe. Someplace you don’t have to be on the alert every second of every day.”
“You think there is such a place?”
“A person would probably have to make it happen. Might take some doing.”
; “What do you think a safe place would be like?”
“In this world? There’d be enclosed towers so you could see from up above, but you couldn’t be seen or shot at. Tree stands that would give you places to escape to and spider holes so you could always immediately hide wherever you were from what, or whoever, was after you, since we’re the hunted now. Of course you’d have to have a good supply of food. Hopefully, eventually, you could grow your own again.”
“A garden,“ she mused. “That would be nice.” She started talking about the home-grown vegetables from her mother’s garden.
“And you need solid buildings,” he said, but he was secretly more intent on hearing the way she just sighed and watching how she tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear than he was on buildings. “Safe structures that would keep everything out. But where, if something did get in, they’d be contained and you’d have places to retreat to. And most of all, you’d want good people working together. That would probably be the hardest thing to accomplish.”
“It sounds like you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“I have. Haven’t you?”
“We took a lot of things for granted at the factory,” she said. “Most people never thought about too much beyond that. They just wanted to stay behind the fences.”
“I expect we all took things for granted. Right now we have a lower quality of life than most third world countries had before everything fell apart.”
Life had definitely been better in the past than it was in the present, Sidra agreed. Before civilization had come to a standstill. Before everything went backwards. But she was lucky. If she had to be with anyone, then Law would be the one she would choose. He was smart. He was strong. He was brave. What was that saying? He was a man to ride the river with.
“It’s been so long,” she said with her eyes closed as she savored the last bite of chocolate. “I’d forgotten what chocolate tasted like.”
Law froze with his own hand halfway to his mouth. He swallowed suddenly as his mouth went dry. Of course she hadn’t meant that in a suggestive way, but he couldn’t help taking it that way. Against his will, his body responded. To her words. To her. To his own imagination. In fact, lately his body’s reaction when she was anywhere near him went way beyond frustrating. Sidra could be distracting. Damned distracting. Obviously, he’d been without a woman for far too long. But that was no excuse. He no intention of acting on his baser male urges. Especially not with this woman.
“You think they have any kind of memories?”
He looked at her and tried to make sense out of what she’d just said. She was looking out the window behind him again.
“I was just thinking out loud,” she said. “Do you think they can remember anything about their old lives?”
“They’re always hungry,” Law said. “Maybe eating is some kind of memory. I don’t know.”
“Sometimes I worry that it will all fade into nothingness,” she went on in a quiet voice.
“What will?”
“That we’ll all forget what we were. And who we were. I always thought that our memories were a part of who we are, but so much has been wiped out- ” Her hand swept out slightly as she struggled for words. “It makes me wonder if we’ll just be eventually wiped out, too. Or at least our memories will.”
“There were good things. There still are,” he said quietly. “The good things will stay if we want them to.”
The look in her eyes changed as she stared down at her hands. “I can’t help but feel sad. For all of them.”
If she should see her mother, or her sister like that, she didn’t know how she was going to be able to bear it. Even worse, if she had to “put them to rest” as she preferred to think of it, she dreaded the thought with a pain that was like a knife blade in her chest. Still, she’d had a lot of time to think about it. She would do what needed to be done.
She stared at him for a moment, then asked very quietly, “Did you have anyone?”
She had wondered about that more than once. Maybe he had lost a wife or children. Even a girlfriend. Everybody had someone.
“Did you have a family? A wife? Kids?” There was no ring on his finger, but that didn’t mean anything. “Did you have to leave someone? Did you have to- ”
“I didn’t have anyone close like that,” he answered her. “So, no, I didn’t have to make any hard decisions.”
He knew that she was thinking about her own family. And he knew there was nothing he could say to make her feel any better. This world was unforgiving and full of heartache.
“What did you do before all this started?” she asked next.
“You mean before the shit hit the fan?”
“Yes, that,” she murmured quietly. But she was still thinking about his previous answer. Even if he hadn’t been married, certainly he had been in love sometime in his life. He must have had serious relationships. She didn’t dare ask, however. She couldn’t ask.
She didn’t know why it should matter to her anyway. He would take her home to Lacombe and then he would walk out of her life. Forever. But why that thought caused such a disturbance inside her, she didn’t know. Maybe because she didn’t like the thought of never knowing what had become of him. She would always wonder.
“You know what would go good with this?” she asked suddenly, attempting to lighten the mood. “Fries.”
“Fries, huh.”
“Yes. Hot salty fries. With ketchup.”
“That does sound good.” A trace of his very lethal, very sexy smile appeared. “But you don’t know good fries until you’ve tried my homemade ones.”
“What about tomorrow?” she asked, suddenly needing to distract herself from that smile. “No doubt you’ve given it some thought.”
“Tomorrow? I have a plan. And it looks like we just might have good weather for it. I think the rain’s about ended. With luck, we’ll be able to head out first thing in the morning.”
She looked over her shoulder, and saw through fragile lace, that the gray mantle that had been with them so long had finally yielded to hopeful blue.
She wanted to go home. More than anything. But why did the prospect also bring with it such a deep sense of sadness and loss?
She must have been a pretty young woman. Once. But she was too decomposed to be called pretty any more. They had found her early that morning when the sun was just coming up and the dew was still sparkling on the grass. The birds circling overhead had made them take notice of the body. Otherwise, they might have passed right by it. Not that there weren’t birds of prey everywhere nowadays. But the birds had found her first and they had already been pecking away at the body, tearing the flesh from her ribs and her belly cavity.
She’d had long blond hair but her throat had been ripped out so that the hair around it wasn’t blond anymore. It was a dark, tangled mess matted with dried blood. Her clothes, too, were darkly stained with blood. They had been ripped to shreds. But her face, surprisingly, had hardly been touched.
Ayden Cadby looked away from the body with a sick feeling in his own belly. He looked up, silently cursing the birds even though he knew it wasn’t really their fault. No telling what she had been doing out here or what kind of terror she had endured before she had died. But he didn’t like to think about that. He never did.
Webb Courtland looked more dispassionately at the body. It wasn’t Sidra, but they’d had to make sure.
Sidra.
Every time he thought about her, he got angry. Seething angry. For God sakes, the woman had been afraid of a tiny spider if it happened to crawl her way. He’d had to rescue her from enough of them. So what made her think she could make it out here all alone? And all for what? To find a mother and sister that were probably dead or turned already?
If he didn’t want her back so badly, he would let her take the consequences of her reckless behavior no matter what they might be. It would serve her right for running away from him. But he did want her back. And then, when he had her whe
re he wanted her, he was going to knock any further signs of rebellion right out of her. For daring to defy him. For putting them through all this. If she didn’t know what was for her own good, he would have to teach her.
He lifted the binoculars to his eyes, adjusted them and scanned the surrounding countryside. A few of the undead moved slowly in the distance but he saw no immediate threats. He inhaled deeply and released his breath slowly as he lowered the binoculars. His mouth thinned into a straight line as he glanced down at the body again. Maybe Sidra was out there right now regretting her decision to leave him. He hoped that was the case. He hoped she was scared shitless. That thought gave him an immense amount of satisfaction. Maybe she was scared out of her mind right now and hoping he would come rescue her. Maybe she was even calling out his name right now.
His gaze hardened. There was no guarantee that she had made it this far, or that she had even crossed the river. But he knew where she was headed. He would press on to Lacombe, and if she was still alive he would bring her back. Willing or not.
Webb Courtland was not the only one perusing a zombie-infested landscape. As a veiled sun rose steadily in the sky, they came like an army of shadows from the dark depths of the forest. They were silent. They were efficient. They did not question their orders or what they were about to do. They were like a swarm of ravening locusts, intent on devouring everything in their path.
Most of them had the lower halves of their faces covered with dark cloths. Above the masks, their eyes were ringed with black. Here and there tattoos showed. They bore the marks because they wanted to look as ferocious as possible, even more ferocious than the demons that they already shared the world with.
Mogue Hobson was with them. Not because that was his choice. He had been forced to be with them. He didn’t know, when he had turned traitor, that this would part of the deal. This forced recruitment. This compulsory servitude.
It wasn’t the scavs that he feared the most, however, or the violent, ruthless men who had become his masters. He knew that Lawton Quaid was still out here. Somewhere. Mogue knew he hadn’t died during the raid. And if Quaid had been the one who had done the shooting that night, then he also knew what he had done. Quaid wasn’t the type to forget. He would want retribution, just like he would want his victim to be aware of impending revenge. Mogue’s backside was a painful reminder every time he sat down that Quaid was a dangerous man to cross.