“Goddamn, baby, that is so fucking hot.” He swerves around something in the road. “Fuck, we’re gonna die.”
“Not yet.” I tug at his earlobe with my teeth. “This is too much fun.”
“It is.” He moans. “I’m not sure if I’ll be able to come, though. Coke does that to me.” He kisses my neck. “But that also means I get to fuck you a few more times tonight.”
“Promise?”
“Hell yeah, I do.”
I dismount him carefully with a kiss to the cheek, and move back to my seat, trembling and wet. After that, and we’re still alive, I’m positive we’re both invincible. We may even be immortal.
“You ever done that before?” Gideon asks me as I dress.
“Never.”
He does a double take. “You’ve got skills, girl, holy shit. I can’t wait to defile every inch of this church with our dirty love.”
“That sounds like a fun way to spend an eight-ball.”
“I’d have to agree.”
Seventeen
“The church is coming up. I see the big-ass thing from here.” Gideon nods toward the enormous, white building towering over everything else in the surrounding area.
“It was one of those televised churches.” I take a drag off my cigarette. “Eileen and Henry went once or twice, but I refused to go with them. Now I wish I had, so at least I’d have the internal layout . . .” And another bittersweet memory to heal me as it cuts deeper.
“True, that would’ve been helpful,” Gideon says. “But unnecessary. We’ll get in.”
He creeps through the lot dotted with hastily parked cars, past the huge fountain and faux pearly gates, to the front of the House of Zion Praise and Worship Center.
“There aren’t that many cars.” He counts them. “Thirteen. If they’re corpses, we can take them. Then we’ll have the whole place to ourselves.”
“You have a plan?” I dump more coke onto the CD case and close up the baggie, tucking it away in my pocket.
“Yep.” He parks beneath a drive-through awning at the front door. “Snort more coke, then get out and case the place. We’ve gotta find our way in, and we have to make sure it’s not inhabited.”
“And then?” I fix up two more lines and hand him the tooter, holding the case steady beneath his chin.
“And then we re-assess.” He snorts the line, plugs his nose to get it all up there. “Depending on how many people there are—if any—and if they’re alive, will tell us what to do next. If it’s too overrun, we may have to find somewhere else.”
“What if there’s a group here? Or an individual?”
“We start by being civil, trying to negotiate. But we stay vigilant, and at the slightest tilt south, we either run, fire, or both.”
After careful consideration, and a five-second bath fantasy where Gideon lathers me with bubbles then fucks me from behind whilst listening to Nine Inch Nails, his reasoning sounds more . . . reasonable. “Okay, I’m in.” I pick up my katana.
“That’s my sexy girl.” He leans over and kisses me, giving my breasts a sensual grope.
I return it with my own grope of his abs and pecs. “I’ll let you be in charge tonight.”
“Oh, yeah?” He rubs my pussy through my pants.
“Yeah.” I kiss his lips, then tug at the bottom one with my teeth until he squirms. “So, what’s the plan, big man?”
He adjusts himself, then checks our vicinity with a sniff. “We’re all clear. We’ll get out, walk around it, check doors and windows first. See if anything’s open or broken, then go from there.”
“What weapons are we bringing?”
“A rifle and katana each to start. Logan gave me something we can use to get in, if there are thick, glass pane windows.”
“What is it?”
He reaches into the console beneath the cup holders, picks up a rectangle wrapped in duct tape.
“What is it?”
“A small bomb. The blast would be enough to blow out an internal wall or window.”
“What did he use to make it?”
“No clue. But he told me how to detonate it, and what to expect.”
“How do you detonate it?”
From a small pocket made of tape on the side, he unrolls a section of rope, which goes inside of the box. “Rope doused with lighter fluid. Gives you more time to get away because it’s a slower burn.”
“Gotcha. He sure knows a lot of shit.”
“No kidding. Don’t go falling for him now, okay? I see how he looks at you with those bedroom eyes.”
“In which seconds of him looking up from his contraption?” I say, feeling more than a little guilty.
“I’m not joking. But I can’t blame him. You’re hot. You’re a sexy, beautiful woman. Even in ‘grandma’ sweats.”
“Oh, don’t you dare bring the goddamned grandma sweats into this.”
We laugh again, and I realize how fucking high I am. It’s been a while since I’ve done uppers, and I have to say, the juxtaposition of the ultra-bliss-and-paradise in my body against the fucked-and-devastated backdrop of our world is perfect in this moment with Gideon.
A body slams against my window, and I scream. But the stupid thing must’ve run into the car by accident, because it pivots, then goes the other way. There’s fire in me as I grip the katana and go for the door handle. Without a sound, I sneak up on the thing in its ratty suit and missing an arm, and I pierce its skull. Before it hits the ground, I spin to make sure none are coming up behind me, and I find Gideon coming toward me, grinning like crazy. “Goddamn, that made me hard.” He grips my hips and guides me to him, pressing his rock-hard digit against me.
“You into voyeurism?” I tease.
“Am now.”
He leads me to the hood of the Lincoln while unzipping his pants. He takes my two weapons and sets them on the ground, along with his, then traces the contour of my silhouette on his way up. With a firm, yet gentle hand, he bends me over the car, and I slide my pants over my ass.
“I love the way you touch me,” I say.
“I love touching you.”
As I watch the dead streets, clear of bodies, cool air meets Gideon’s heat at my bare skin. After some rubbing between my legs to get me wet, he spreads me open wide with the thrust of his swollen cock inside me. Slow and steady at first before he picks up the pace, pulsating into me with vigor. His hand grips my throat, cutting off my air at intervals, and it drives me wild. He could hurt me . . . but he never would. He loves the tease of danger as much as I do.
We’re twisted as fuck.
I stifle my moans, biting my lower lip, as every vein on his member caresses my insides, but I can’t fully relax. My eyes still search for danger. He’s probably watching for it, too.
A silhouette appears across the street. Gideon pulls out of me and we duck until it passes. By the time it does, our moment has also passed, and we look to each other and chuckle.
“We’d better get inside,” he says.
“Should we bring our bags?”
“Uh . . . we don’t really need the extra weight. We don’t know what we’re up against—”
“Which is why we should bring the bags, I think. What if we get stuck somewhere? This place is enormous. Who knows how many of them are in there.”
After a moment’s contemplation, he nods. “All right.”
Eighteen
We gather the katanas, the AR-17 and an AK-47, and two extra magazines each, and I load my CD player into my backpack, along with a handful of CDs. We have enough clothing, food, water, and smokes for about twenty-four hours.
“Lead the way, hot stuff.” I adjust my load, then pick up my rifle and katana from the ground. We slip through the shadows along the building toward the walkway, to the front door of the church. It has to be at least seven feet tall, with two narrow windows I wouldn’t be able to fit even my head through.
Gideon tries the doors and finds them locked. “Might be a good sign.” He signals for
me to follow, and I descend the five steps into the grass on the other side of the porch, sliding along the gray brick wall. The windows are still intact, but probably because they’re the same as with the doors—too narrow to fit into anyway.
“They started building them with windows like this because of all the break-ins and vandalisms,” Gideon says. “My br—” He cuts himself off, plays like he’s distracted by something in the bushes.
“Your what?” I pry. “Your brother?”
“Yeah.” He surveys the side of the building and the windows above us. “But never mind.”
“Of course.” My snark is red-hot, but he ignores it, caught in a moment of vigilance and conflict. It hurts my feelings that he keeps things from me when I’ve told him every goddamned thing about myself. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t starting to get to me. But with cocaine pumping through me, and my body and mind in survival mode, now’s not the time to push—I know that much.
The church is three stories, but it must have vaulted ceilings, because it looms overhead, bending to a high point in the middle. The windows are regular-sized starting at the second floor, and Gideon scopes them out, too. We pass an Azalea bush and an enormous playground, and find the lower half of a woman’s body dressed in turquoise Levi’s plastered to the walkway. What’s left of her skin is rotted, picked-at. Bits and pieces of her top half lead us around the corner, to an even grislier scene.
“Fucking corpses had a barbecue,” Gideon mumbles.
The back door to the church stands wide open to an eerie, foreboding lobby. The porch, steps, walkway, and surrounding area are all splattered with parts, picked bones, and belongings, as though a group had tried to escape and were cornered. A child’s teddy bear lies on a dirt mound, reminding me of the one Eileen and Henry gave me the day they adopted me. Who knows where it is now . . . Moved on to its next life, too.
Gideon sweeps the perimeter with the rifle barrel, holds a finger to his lips, and waves me on behind him. He takes the front, and I protect our rear a few feet away. We hug the wall, and my heart pumps molten lava. We’ve practiced these tactics inside the safe walls of Wipeouts, but this is real, and it’s terrifying.
My hands tremble around the grip of my katana as we pass a set of white double doors to our left. A blink from Gideon’s wristlight illuminates a blood red carpet splattered in the real thing, which has dried crusty and black. The stench is there, but the door standing open has cleared out a lot of it, I’m sure.
There’s the whip of metal slicing through air behind me, then a thud against the wall. Gideon gives the hand signal for H Form as we step into a large lobby area. I position myself horizontally beside him, back against the wall, facing outward, as practiced. In the narrow strips of moonlight from three windows on either side of the giant lobby, silhouettes pass through. Hard to tell how many there are; enough to be concerned.
There’s stumbling to my right. I take a swift step forward and swing my katana, meeting a hint of resistance at impact, and again at the spinal cord before it pulls through clean to the other side, and both pieces fall to the ground. I retreat against the wall as Gideon springs into the darkness, followed by a body hitting the ground.
“I’m guessing three more in this room,” he says in my ear. “Want me to take them?”
“Yeah,” I whisper, because I’m too petrified to move, and he leaps into silent battle again. In less than a minute, after the scattering of blood and parts around the lobby, Gideon returns, breathing heavily. “Come on.”
I follow him into a dark, quiet hallway. For a second, I have the crazy thought that we may have gotten them all, but when Gideon clicks on his wristlight and shines it across the room, a head snaps in our direction. The cadaver springs from its stillness, and charges, as does Gideon, katana raised, before impaling the middle-aged, dead bastard through the skull. Putrid blood spurts from the head wound, splattering the wall, before he slips from the extracted blade to the ground.
In the sporadic winks of light from Gideon’s wrist, we pass men’s and women’s restrooms, a pair of water fountains, and walls adorned with painted bible quotes. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
Fitting. Especially if thy rod and thy staff are sharpened to a point. Almost as if those assholes knew this was going to happen.
We get to another foyer, even larger than the last, but thankfully this one seems less inhabited. Gideon illuminates a pair of them in front of a set of ornate, wooden double doors. He nudges me with an elbow, then leans in. “I bet that’s the main sanctuary with the teleprompters and everything. Those doors might be locked, so we need to clear this room. I’m guessing at least five, but could be more. You ready for this?”
I nod, though all of the voices in my head scream “No!” in unison. In harmony, even.
Gideon pecks me on the lips. “I believe in you. Just like we practiced, baby. You got this. Go.”
They aren’t my feet that move into the darkness, prey hunting predator. That small, scared child retreats inside of someone I hardly recognize: a vicious, cold-blooded killer. I must be high as fuck.
With a slow, deep inhale, followed by a steady exhale, I channel my rage, as Gideon suggested, to blanket my fear. They killed my Evie, and my little brother, and now they’re going to pay. I grip the katana handle, following the death rattle of the one nearest me. My eyes have become trained to outline shadows in the dark; to measure height and distance by sound and strength of stench. When the stench grows stronger—like when you smell brownies cooking in the oven and know they’re done—you’re about to be within striking distance. For a whole month at Wipeouts, Gideon taught me with rotten chicken and an egg timer on a rope, a blindfold, and a mop handle—one of my least favorite parts of Gideon’s “boot camp.” But I’m seeing the benefit now . . .
Unlike our own hearing, which has heightened because of our new nocturnal life and reduced reliability on sight, it seems the infected hear the same. Soft noises, footsteps, whispering, etcetera, can go undetected. They may be ravaging, carnivorous beasts, but they do have their weaknesses.
The stench of rot ripens and the gurgling draws nearer, pegging my next victim at about five-foot-eight. I clip what could be a shoulder (five-foot-nine or ten, apparently), sever the head, and stumble over its body, dropping my katana. It thuds to the hard carpet, and I crouch on all fours, pawing at the ground around me until I’ve regained it.
When I stand again, there’s a snarl behind me, and a fingertip brushes my cheek. I swing, severing the arm, then jab, piercing the skull. Gideon’s wristlight blinks on me from the wooden doors, illuminating my path to him. The foyer is empty except for the dozen or so mangled bodies that now litter it.
I jog to him, heart thumping, and when I get to him, he French kisses me, hard and fast, his bulge against my pelvis. “You’re such a badass,” he pants. “That fucking turns me on so much.”
“I know what you mean.” And I give his dick a good rub.
“You’ve got what it takes to survive. That, right there, turns me on more than anything you could ever do.”
“I feel the same way about you.”
We fall onto each other’s mouths again, a victory dance, before Gideon pulls away. “We gotta get in this sanctuary.” He goes for the handle, pauses. “But . . .”
“We don’t know if anyone’s in there,” I finish for him.
“Right.”
“Only one way to find out.” I grab the handle and pull, expecting to find it locked, but the door opens, wafting a stale, but non-rot odor and a silence that is reassuring. “Stand guard.”
He keeps watch behind me while I blink my light around the giant room. There’s a stage front and center, and above it, a mammoth cube of screens, I assume so the audience on all sides could see everything. The stadium-style rows of pews pan upwards, two stories. Behind the stage is a towering, crucified Jesus hanging on a cross.
Below him, our beams of light reflect the rippling of water behind a glass partition, while behind him, the stars of a clearing night shine dimly through a gigantic, intricate stained glass window. It’s all eerily beautiful. And to add to my astonishment, the room is empty.
“All clear.” I open the door.
“No way.” He brushes past me, checking for himself. “Well, fuck me runnin’.”
“That might be another fun challenge,” I tease.
We enter the sanctuary and close the doors behind us. Gideon shines a full beam around the room, up and down each row. We’re alone. I jerk the door latch until it slides upwards, then check the handle. Locked. We’re safe.
Nineteen
“Hot damn,” Gideon says. “Let’s check the entire area to make sure.”
We walk the main aisle to the end where it meets Jesus, the wading pool, and the glittering rainbow window. My adrenaline has died enough to join the dive from my coke high, too, and I’m itching to check out the pool and snort some more. But I follow Gideon up the left-side aisle, sweeping the entire area. Once we’re positive we’re alone, we head to the little staircase behind Jesus and the pool.
We have to readjust our loads and walk sideways up the narrow staircase to the baptismal. At the top, we step out into a little dressing space with a shower, sink, toilet, and a shelf with towels. A white bathrobe hangs by a peg on the wall. On the other side is the entrance to the pool, which glimmers from the moonlight shining through the stained glass window.
Gideon motions toward the towering Jesus. “Feel safer already.”
We drop our bags and weapons in the room, and take a seat on the carpeted floor. I remove my new favorite object on the entire planet from my bag and push the power button. The red light comes on, and I light up, too, like a Christmas tree. I couldn’t ask for anything more.
Murray's Law: Urban Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (The Night Blind Saga Book 2) Page 10