Seeking Daylight

by Becky Poirier

  He took my kissing him back as a green light. Next thing I knew he was lifting my legs up off the ground and wrapping them around his waist. My robe fell to the side of my hips exposing my bare legs. The whole time my body felt like it was on fire. There was no way I could stop. And why should I? I loved him and he loved me. We should be together. In the world we lived in, there were so few opportunities to just live and love. We should do this. We deserved this.

  My back landed on the mattress, my head on the pillow. Seth was on top of me my legs still wrapped around his waist pulling him in closer. It wasn’t like the first time. The first time he kept asking me if I was sure. He’d been so nervous. This time, he was completely confident. I liked it. He acted like he knew what he was doing, though I knew that wasn’t the case. The way he held me; it was like he never wanted to let me go.

  I’d been waiting all my life to feel like this, to be loved like this. His hand slid in the top of my robe. He gently caressed my breast as his lips moved back to my neck causing me to moan. I pulled him in closer with my legs. “I love that sound,” he sighed into my neck. I giggled. It was a ridiculous noise, but it felt more like me than I’d ever been before. With Seth, it was like I was becoming the person I would have been if the world hadn’t been so screwed up my whole life. And I liked the way I was with him.

  “Well it’s your fault,” I replied back with a smile.

  He looked into my eyes and I knew what he was going to say before he even said it. My heartbeat loudly against my chest in a way that was almost painful. He said the words I’d heard before in this very room, “You’re so beautiful. I love you.” Suddenly my reality shifted as Seth’s image wavered for a moment. For a second, he was Alex, the way he had been the first time we’d made love. He’d said those very same words to me, just before we consummated our relationship.

  In an instant Alex’s image was gone and I was with Seth again. He was staring at me with worry in his eyes. His voice sounded hollow as he asked me if I was alright. I freaked out pushing Seth away from me. He looked both stunned and hurt and I felt absolutely ridiculous for what I did and for what happened next. The tears burst out without any warning as I sobbed. It was absurd, pathetic, humiliating. There was no reason for me to react like that. If it had been at all possible, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d run from the room. I was acting like an absolute lunatic.

  “I’m sorry Paige. I thought it was what you wanted.”

  “It was…it is,” I said still crying uncontrollably. The harder I tried to gain control the more out of control I felt.

  He looked more confused than ever. Just a moment before I’d been experiencing the most pleasure and excitement I’d ever had in my entire life. Now I was crying for no apparent reason. He sat there staring at me for a moment trying to figure out what to say. I was trying desperately to avoid looking at him.

  He cautiously moved over to sit beside me, making sure that I didn’t flinch from the proximity. He stared at the door. I could tell from his body language that he was hurt. “It’s because of Alex isn’t it?”

  “No,” I burst out, “I mean yes, sort of.” I grunted in frustration pulling my hair so hard that I made my head hurt.

  “Are you still in love with him? It’s okay if you are. You thought he was gone and now he’s back. And Doc has found a treatment. Maybe it will be possible to be with him again someday. I’m sorry I didn’t see it before. I was such an idiot to do this. You loved him first. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  He was getting it all wrong. I forced the tears back and took a deep breath trying to calm myself. “You have it all wrong. I’m not in love with him anymore and I’m not sure that I was really ever in love with him.” Seth looked at me like he was only growing more confused. “It’s hard to explain. When I was with him, I thought I was in love with him. And I did love him, but I don’t think I was in love with him. I was in love with the idea of being in love, as cliché as that sounds.”

  “So, you don’t love him?” I shook my head. “Then why did you freak out at me. Was it because I said I loved you? You don’t have to say it back if you’re not ready.” I wanted to strangle him. He still wasn’t getting it.

  “Can you just shut-up and let me try to explain this.” He almost smiled. “He was my friend. He made me believe that I could love and be loved, that it was still possible to have that in this world. If it weren’t for him, then I don’t know that I would have been able to open my heart.” He was still looking at me with this annoying look on his face that made me want to smack it off. “I’m in love with you, you idiot.” Now he was really smiling.

  “You love me?” I nodded as I rolled my eyes. “Then why did you throw me off of you, when I told you I loved you?”

  I fought the tears that were threatening to bubble up to the surface again. “Because, he said those same words to me just three days before we met. And maybe I didn’t love him, but he really did love me, so much so that he gave his life for me and my sister. This was where…” I couldn’t finish my sentence. But Seth was smart enough to clue into what I was eluding to. “I can’t do it here. I want to be with you, but not here.” There was silence for way too long for my comfort. “Are you mad?” I asked sincerely worried. After all I’d given him all the signs that tonight was going to be the night and for that I really felt guilty.

  “No, not mad. Disappointed, but not mad. I get it. I should have picked up on that when you called this place the Love Shack. It makes sense now. And it’s okay.”

  I leaned my head against his shoulder releasing a sigh of relief. “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “Get some sleep, I guess. It’s been a long day, and tomorrow we’ll have to figure out a safe way to test whether the infected have gone or not.” We slipped under the covers and I took my usual position with my head on his chest. He wrapped his arm around me pulling me in close. I slowly closed my eyes. “Just one more question.”

  “What’s that?” I asked opening my eyes back up and looking into his.

  “When we get back…?”

  I smiled. “All night long,” I whispered as I kissed his cheek.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  That night I should have had nightmares. I’d come face to face with the new Alex, been chased down by infected and trapped in room with no real way to figure out when it would be safe to leave. But I slept peacefully. I must have had dreams, but when I woke, I couldn’t remember anything I’d dreamt about.

  When I opened my eyes, I reached out for Seth, but he was no longer in the bed. Panic set in as I sat up searching the dimly lit room for him. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I called out for him, terrified that he’d decided to test out the safety of our escape without me. To my relief he came rushing out of the washroom with a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth.

  “Is everything okay?” He asked in garbled speech. The toothpaste was foaming out of his mouth which made me laugh.

  “I’m fine now, after the heart attack you gave me. I thought you’d left.”

  He pulled the toothbrush out of his mouth. “Not yet. They’re still out there.” I looked at him confused and then listened closely trying to hear if there were any sounds to indicate whether or not the infected were still outside the room, but I heard nothing.

  “How do you know?” I asked. I looked over at the clock and it was eight in the morning. The sun should have been up by now.

  He put up his finger and then ran back into the bathroom. I heard him gargling some water before he emerged again. And when he came back, he was holding something I didn’t recognize. It was a thin black rectangular device with a screen on it. It looked a lot like what my mother used to call computer pad. She said they were normally used as time wasters back in her childhood. I didn’t see how that could help Seth figure out where the infected were.

  He pushed a couple of buttons on the screen and the thing came to life. On the screen was a black and white image, with four squares each showing a differen
t section of the building. There was the office outside the panic room, the front door area, the roof, and one more area I didn’t recognize. I watched for a moment not sure what I should be looking for. I didn’t see anything obvious until a pair of bright eyes rushed up towards one of the sections on the screen. I jumped back trying not to scream.

  “It’s okay,” Seth reassured me taking the device back. “I don’t think they understand what the cameras are or that we’re watching them.”

  “Where did you find that, and how is it still working?”

  Our group didn’t have solar panels like his. We didn’t have electricity of any sort. And I’d spent a fair amount of time in the panic room and never found that device.

  “After you fell asleep, I was up most of the night. It was kind of hard…I mean difficult to get what you said out of my mind.” My cheeks burned as I laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” I immediately apologized. It wasn’t funny. It was never my intent to be a tease.

  “I’ll forgive you later,” he teased me back. “Anyways, I gave up on sleep around three and decided to snoop around this place. Mostly what you see here is what you get. But in the bathroom behind the painting on the wall was a small safe. I remembered the combination you used to get into the room and decided to give it a go with the wall safe and sure enough it worked. Mostly there was a lot of cash in there, but there was also this device. It appears to run off of some sort of highly efficient batteries that are connected to the cameras. I guess because neither of them was used in years the power reserves are still there. I pushed a couple of buttons and then I was able to figure out that we weren’t alone.

  “Even if the infected were the type to give up on their prey, they wouldn’t have been able to leave. The storm is still raging.” He zoomed in on the roof top image and this time I saw the sleet raining down hard against the camera. Given what little we knew about the infected, they must have really wanted to sink their teeth into us, in order risk getting stuck in the storm. We were already soaked by the time we reached the building. They must have been too…unless they had underground access. The thought made me shiver. There were way too many places for them to hide.

  I sighed as I rubbed my eyes. “What do we do?” We couldn’t just stay here. Yes, we had some food and water, but I felt like if I stayed here much longer, I was going to lose it. Last night I’d been lucky enough that the exhaustion was enough to help me sleep. Now that daytime was here, I was faced with the reality that I was back in my old home, with the old memories that I’d spent so much time trying to avoid. The memories were threatening to rise to the surface the longer we stuck around this place.

  “There’s not much we can do,” Seth replied saying the last thing I wanted to hear.

  I rested my head against my knees trying to push away the overwhelming fear that was rising in me. The longer we were stuck here the longer the others would have to worry about us and us about them. And then there was Doc who was completely cut off and alone with Alex. His treatment clearly had short term success, but there was no telling if its effects would wear off over time.

  Seth sat down beside me gently rubbing my back. “Trust me I want to get out of here just as much as you do…probably more especially after what you said last night.” I smacked him lightly as I tried to hide the grin on my face. “Hey, at least I made you laugh.” I rolled my eyes.

  I stood up being careful to keep the weight off my weak ankle as I headed towards the bathroom. “Where are you going?” He asked.

  “I’m going to see if our clothes are dry. I don’t need your one-track mind being tempted by my half naked state,” I replied from the bathroom doorway.

  The door was barely closed when I heard him shout back, “They’re still soaked. I poured out one of those large containers of water on them while you were sleeping. I think it might take them a couple more days to dry.” I laughed quietly. I was very grateful for his ability to make me laugh in times of crisis.

  In the dimly lit light of the bathroom, I could make out the three large containers of water that were still very much full. Unfortunately, he’d been right about our clothes still being wet. They weren’t soaked but putting them back on now wouldn’t be comfortable. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of staying in the robes. Last night the temptation to give in to everything I felt, was overwhelming. The current wardrobe we were forced to endure, wasn’t helping matters. He said he was okay with waiting, but I knew he was just as tempted as I was. And I didn’t want a repeat incident.

  Even now I was fighting off the memories I shared with Alex in this room. Staring in the mirror, I remembered Alex sneaking up behind me wrapping his arms around me as he kissed my neck. I remembered looking at our reflection in the mirror. It was like I was in that moment again. Alex’s image suddenly shifted. His hair grew long and wild, as his eyes became blood red. He barred his teeth… “Are you alright in there?” Seth asked shaking the image from my mind.

  “Fine,” I lied. I hurried to brush my teeth as quickly as I could, making sure to avoid eye contact with the mirror. The whole time I felt like I wasn’t alone. It was like the shadows were threatening to leap out and attack at any moment.

  Seth was waiting for me when I came back out. The way he was looking at me made me uncomfortable. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he said. What else was new? I’d been seeing them for two months, but I really didn’t feel like discussing it.

  “I’m just tired,” I said pushing the subject off. He looked disappointed. I may have been ready for the physical part of our relationship, but there was still so much I wasn’t ready to share with him. It wasn’t because I didn’t trust him. I did. He was the only one I’d ever really trusted, besides my sister. I’d shared more of my history with him, than I ever did Alex. But telling him would mean reliving the past and I didn’t know when, if ever, I’d be ready for that.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed staring at the door. We hadn’t heard a peep since last night. From what we could see from the cameras, they weren’t in the room. What were they up to? I didn’t think I wanted to know.

  Seth sat down beside me looking very bored. “So,” he said after a couple minutes of silence. “I don’t suppose you want to play a game?”

  “What? Like eye spy? I think that game would get very old, very fast.” It wasn’t like there was a lot in the room to spy.

  “I was thinking more along the lines of truth or dare…only we could leave the dare part out and just go for the truth.”

  I rolled my eyes again.

  “Come on, I’ll go first. Ask me anything you want to know, and I have to answer with complete honesty.” I knew exactly what he was doing. He raised his one eyebrow a couple of times and he had this incredibly goofy smile on his face. I couldn’t help but smile at him. He was ridiculously cute at the moment and somehow, he knew just how to turn that on when he needed it.

  “Fine,” I said shaking my head, “so long as you can agree to follow some guidelines.”

  “Like what?”

  “No questions about my family. I…I just can’t.” I was expecting him to push the subject but to my surprise he simply shrugged his shoulders and agreed.

  What started out as us asking little questions back and forth quickly led to him telling me all about himself. I learned more about him in thirty minutes, then I ever had about anyone else I’d lived with. I felt guilty for not reciprocating, though he didn’t appear to mind. He volunteered to tell me about his family. His dad moved the family, to what used to be called Canada, for his job. He worked at one of the nuclear plants that had been targeted by an extremist cult called The New Order.

  I knew very little about the group. My parents didn’t like to talk about the third world war or what had started it. All I knew was that the cult used suicide bombers to destroy several of the world’s largest nuclear plants, setting off a chain of events that led to countries scrapping over resources and eventually they turned to using biological warfare, which l
ed to the virus that had completely ravaged our world.

  His dad had died in the explosion at his plant. Luckily, his mom had decided to take him and his brother on vacation just two days before, otherwise they would have been killed by the blast. “It was the worst thing that had ever happened to my family. My mom was a wreck though she tried to hold it together for me and for Scott.”

  “Your brother’s name was Scott?” I asked interrupting him. It was the first time he’d mentioned his name. He’d talked about him before but never said his name.

  “Yes,” he smiled weakly. “You’re not the only one who struggles to talk about the past. I don’t think I’ve said his name out loud in years.” I could see the emotions building up in him, just like they did in me anytime I thought about Molly.

  “How old was he?”

  “He was only eight.” That wasn’t much older than Matthew. His brotherly relationship with the boy made a lot more sense now. It wasn’t just Seth’s character than made him look after the boy. He saw his brother in him, just like I saw Molly in him. Seth and I were becoming more alike by the moment. When Seth had claimed to understand me, he was telling the truth. He saw me more clearly than I saw myself.

  “Anyways,” he continued, “after our dad died, we were basically homeless. There was a military base a couple of towns past the radiation zone and we were sent to live just outside it in a little town, while they figured out what to do with the survivors. That’s where my mom met my stepdad, Craig. He was an officer there and he’d lost his wife in the blast. She’d gone up for the day, to visit her sister. He had two sons, Billy was a few years older than me and Jack was less than a year older than me. It started out as a friendship, but it quickly turned into more. Less than a year later they married.”

  “How did you get separated from them?” He looked at me curiously. “You said before that you were separated when the plague broke out.”