Reawakening

by Stein, Charlotte

  But there had also been a lot of talking about how safe and comfortable they wanted her to feel, too. Yeah, there’d also been that. As it turned out, they made plans and plots and all sorts of things, just as she’d suspected.

  Only the plans and plots were all about being nice. Being kind. They were so kind it was almost unbearable, and she found herself floundering in the middle of it, suddenly.

  She flicked through all the people who hadn’t been nice, in her mind. That guy at the gas station who’d tried to blow her head off even though she’d formed complete sentences and proved she was still human. Those men who’d been…who’d been doing stuff to Kelsey, when she’d found her. The little girl that fat guy and his girlfriend had been using as bait—just chained her and put her out there so the zombies would get her instead of them…

  Lord, kindness almost seemed like an illness here. Or at least it had seemed like an illness out there, in the empty world.

  In their cabin it was different. In their cabin, Blake laid her down on the bed. He didn’t take her clothes off—because of course without the blood, he didn’t have to—and when she faked some stirring in order to hide her suddenly wet face in the pillow, he said, “You okay, June-bug?”

  Probably because it was obvious that a tear had found its way down her cheek. Stupid tear! She hadn’t even cried when that zombie had ripped Pat’s arm off, never mind this.

  Whatever this was.

  She cleared her throat. Thought about Kelsey, Kelsey. One of them had carved his name into her back and she’d worn it until the day she died. And she’d died such a short time ago, too—so it seemed weird and wrong that she could say yes. The word sounded alien in her mouth, like something she should puke up or deny—but there it was, all the same.

  “Yeah.”

  And it was true, too. Nothing pierced it or tried to make it waver. The word came out strong and good, and there were more words to follow it.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay…now.”

  That final now, so glorious it needed saying twice.

  “Now…I’m okay.”

  * * * *

  She didn’t want to move, at first. If she moved, she’d have to find out if they’d slept in the same bed as her or if they’d been nervous about doing it. She didn’t want to find out that they’d been nervous about doing it.

  And she didn’t have to because when she finally dared to reach out one blind hand, she encountered the smooth slab of Blake’s back. On the others side—the narrower curve of Jamie’s.

  Then she winced at herself and pulled her hands away, too quickly. Barely a week, and she’d already flipped things around. From trying to ease out from beneath an arm burglar alarm, to wanting a burglar alarm of her own.

  Just in case, you know. Just in case something happened to them in the night. Just in case they magically became zombies, then…

  She shifted under the covers, suddenly too hot. They’d left her in her clothes all night, and they weren’t airy and designed for a woman in the first place. The fit said female, but it looked as though they’d searched for the bulkiest thing they could find from the Outdoorsy Gals collection.

  The wad of … material wedged in her armpit made turning hard. But she had to do it, just to check that Jamie was still breathing normally. Irrational, true, but better than being suddenly eaten.

  Thankfully, he was easy enough to check. He’d turned on his side but when she got close she could hear his breathing, gentle and even. No death rattle. No weird hacking sounds. Normal breathing and nothing else from either of them.

  Though she did notice one strange thing. They’d both turned on their sides, with their backs to her—so that the pair of them formed weird man-shaped breakwater posts around her body.

  As though the tide was about to come in at any second and they wanted to make sure it didn’t wash her away.

  It made her feel the same way the black pen line had, though this time there was a soupcon of something else. A little niggle of that leftover worry, about whether or not they’d been nervous about sleeping next to her. Was that why they’d moved to the outskirts of the bed and put their backs to her?

  They needn’t have. She’d slept like the dead for the first time in a long time. No interrupted little snatches and no nightmares, either. Plus—and here was the real bonus—when she got close to Jamie, he smelled like cinnamon.

  Or at least, the jersey he was still wearing did. He’d worn an apron while cooking the curry—a stupid one, naturally, with a hairy chest on the front—but the smell had still gotten itself all over him and, dear Lord, it was divine. It was in his hair too, and she knew it was because when he snored and she felt sure he was asleep, she dared to shift on the bed and put her face up close to the nape of his neck.

  Ah, heaven. She was lying on a bed with a man who liked cooking. What was better than that?

  Apart from turning and discovering that the man on the other side of her smelled like the trees outside. She’d caught a whiff of it the night before when he’d actually, honest to God, carried her, but it was stronger and sharper and delicious close to his hair. Which she was sniffing, embarrassingly.

  Of course she only turned to do his hair because she’d done Jamie’s, and doing both of them felt much more like normal behavior than sticking to just one. But even so, even so.

  Had she just thought the words doing both of them? Boy, that was mortifying and weird. And even more so when Blake came within a second of catching her sniffing his hair, while she tried to cool down her suddenly heated cheeks with surreptitious hand movements.

  After all, explaining why she was suddenly embarrassed involved a whole mess of Freudian slips and awkward phrasing and just stuff that she didn’t really think about. She hadn’t thought about stuff like that since the whole “people eating other people” thing had begun.

  It just wasn’t…it was weird. Everything had passed briefly into weird. Fuck—why had she sniffed their hair?

  “Bad dream?” he asked. He was rubbing his eyes and kind of stretching, so she’d thought herself safe. But clearly the pair of them had a sixth sense when it came to her odd moments of weird discomfort.

  “More like an uncomfortable dream.”

  He put a hand on her back suddenly and stuff got worse. They were very careful about touching her, usually, but…well. Things had definitely gotten a little laxer, last night. She hadn’t flinched when he’d touched her and, in turn, he’d relaxed about it.

  But then, that was what friends did. They touched each other, casually. They ran their blind hands over each other’s backs. It was cool. It was cool.

  “You wanna come for a run, shake it off?”

  She paused then and thought about the basketball. They had a little court behind the cabin and she’d seen them playing a couple of times through the window in the back door. Blake was good—he could bounce the ball between his legs and dunk with very little effort at all, whereas Jamie…yeah. Jamie didn’t play by any distinguishable rules she could make out. She’d seen him dribble the ball off the court and into the woods a couple of times, with Blake hollering after him that doing so wasn’t how you played.

  Before he’d glanced back at her, framed in that small window. And he’d glanced back as though he knew she’d been watching the whole time. He knew, and Jamie knew, and they argued in a silly macho way and tried to outdo each other. Then Jamie would do something ridiculous just out of her sightline…

  Like they were just waiting. Just waiting for her to come outside and watch or play with them.

  Was that what Blake was doing, now? Trying to get her to casually come outside? It seemed like it, because he didn’t look at her when he said the words. And the words themselves were cool and almost nothing.

  Plus he added, “I’ve seen you doing reps up and down the stairs. It’s really much easier when you’ve got some space to run in.”

  Her face streaked red, again. The man was all fucking eyeballs! There was just no possible way he
could have seen her doing apocalypse exercises. She’d specifically waited until he and Jamie were in the middle of a heated debate about what constituted a dunk.

  Jamie felt that it was acceptable to stand on a chair to do it. Unsurprisingly, Blake had not felt the same way.

  “I…uh…”

  Her brain screamed at her. Just ask! Just force the muteness out of your body and ask.

  “It’s okay if you don’t want to, June.”

  Man alive, he was nice. He looked at her, then, and his eyes suddenly seemed far bluer than they ever had before. Electric blue almost, and full of earnestness. His face was sly but his eyes gave him away.

  “No, no—it’s just…how long have you been here?”

  He grinned at that. Again, it changed the whole tenor of his features. Made him more handsome, more relaxed, less…empty than he sometimes seemed. Then there was the fact that he desperately needed a shave, which only added to all of that stuff—all the handsomeness or relaxedness or whatever other nonsense she hadn’t wanted to think about.

  “A year and a half.”

  He paused, stood. Went to take his t-shirt off then stopped himself with the hem halfway over his belly. Of course, her mind immediately went to what he’d said the night before, about frightening her. Did he think his half-nakedness had been the trigger?

  Possibly. Probably. Either way he started toward the bathroom, to finish getting out of his sleep clothes.

  “You don’t need to worry, June. They won’t cross the water—you know they won’t. I know you know they won’t.”

  “Yeah,” she said, as he disappeared inside. She closed her eyes on the thought of something being in there, waiting for him—though recognized that these little flashes…these little shuttering snaps of panic…they were getting less intense. They didn’t quite draw her up short the way they used to. “Yeah, I do. And yeah, I think I’ll come for a run.”

  She slid off the bed to the tune of his great and got a different sort of flashback on hearing the word. Not a flashback to her life, of course—because she’d never had a husband. But she knew it sounded like that when he said it. It was the kind of thing husbands did, when their wives said hey, I think I’ll join you at the marina.

  Brisk and kind of casually happy. Everything familiar and good.

  God, how weird.

  “Do you think Jamie will mind if I take something of his, to wear? It’s just…I’m not sure I can run in so much…wool.”

  It was a good way of broaching that strange subject, but it was Jamie who answered. And he didn’t mention anything about why they’d gone with enormous fleeces for any possible female companion they might one day have.

  “No, Jamie won’t mind. In fact, Jamie is pleased you want to wear his stupid, pointed, straight out of Star Trek boots.”

  She turned to see why his voice was muffled. Head in the pillow, obviously. Ass in the air. She couldn’t for the life in her tell why he’d decided to take up that position, and not for the first time she found herself wondering if the apocalypse had turned him strange.

  Or if he’d just always been this way.

  She was guessing the latter, if his ultra faded and obviously long loved t-shirt collection was anything to go by. They kept all of their clothes in the two drawers under the bed, and his side was largely comprised of weirdly silk-screened scraps of silliness.

  She picked one with a goat jumping over the moon on the front. Slipped the monolith of wool over her head real quick then shoved it on before Jamie could stop snogging the pillow and Blake could return from the bathroom.

  Of course she could have gone to the guestroom to change. But something made her not want to. If she went, they might think she was still frightened. And if she didn’t and undressed really slowly, they might think…well. She didn’t know what they’d think, then.

  Best just to do it all quick right here. Then realized too late that Jamie was actually quite a bit slimmer than her around the chest and hips.

  She cursed herself once the t-shirt and sweatpants were on. They were snugger than fuck, and now somehow she’d done the opposite of what the wool had probably been all about. She’d drawn a big circle around the word woman over her head, without really intending to.

  Plus her boobs looked much bigger now because the rest of her had shrunk. Oh wasn’t that a thing to realize, in a bedroom filled with men! She’d turned into Booberella somewhere in between cutting someone’s face off and running seventeen miles to escape that one zombie that just. Wouldn’t. Quit.

  If the shopping channel had still been in existence she was betting they’d have paid good money for that particular exercise and diet regime. Get a semi-flat stomach and giant norks with these three easy apocalyptic steps!

  “You ready?”

  His eyes didn’t even flick to the boobs when he came out of the bathroom. Lord, she didn’t know what she was thinking. She’d probably noticed his boobs more than he’d noticed hers. His t-shirt was skintight and she could see just about everything—even the outline of something vague and shadowy between his legs.

  And it was on that disturbing thought that she realized something, for the first time. It stuck out with a splendid clarity above all the silly thoughts about them raping her or wanting her or any of that other stuff.

  They didn’t find her sexually attractive. They were nice guys who’d never do that sort of thing, but still the fact remained that even if they hadn’t been nice they probably wouldn’t have done anything, anyway.

  Because they didn’t want her. She was a Eunuch to them. A sexual cul-de-sac. Things didn’t mysteriously change because of the apocalypse. If you were nothing before, you remained so.

  And she was definitely nothing to them.

  Chapter Three

  The woods really weren’t as scary as they had at first seemed, from the inside. For a start, the trees were very widely spaced. There wasn’t much opportunity for things to hide or lurk between them. And even better—the ground underfoot wasn’t overly littered with mulch or branches.

  They were sturdy evergreen things, after all. They didn’t leave stuff all over the place for her to run on and make some awful, zombie-alerting racket. She could safely pound away and not have to worry about tripping over loads of things.

  Plus, Blake was there. He was right there, by her side. She could hear him breathing even when she didn’t look—slow and steady, in and out. He breathed the way she did, though she figured he’d probably properly learned the technique. Rather than just picking it up due to absolute necessity.

  However, she had to say it was kind of gratifying to see his obviously fit-all-his-life moves replicated by her own body, exactly. The way he pumped his arms. The way he kept focused on the terrain ahead. There was really nothing worse, after all, than constantly checking behind yourself for…anything that might be after you.

  She’d seen firsthand what checking behind yourself in a blind panic could do. It made you slow even though you might not have thought so. It made you unaware of the obstacles ahead, then suddenly, suddenly…

  She drew herself back together and focused on her own breathing. That good burn that was starting, low down in the muscles of her lower legs. Blake probably knew the names of those muscles, but she didn’t. She only knew they burned and burned, and after a while her lungs would start burning—especially in the freezing cold air.

  Though she’d learned the hard way that it was better to run in cold conditions than hot. It was one of the reasons they’d made their way North—well, that and the stench. Heat made everything smell bad faster.

  The cold kept everything…manageable. Why, the air was almost sweet, here. In fact—it was sweet. She could smell the scent that had been all over Blake, fresh and clean and sharp. And when he clapped her on the back and did this little exhausted sounding laugh, it got stronger.

  It made her ease up, just a little. He was starting to really drop behind her and that was apparently another thing that kicked her instin
cts up—though this was of a different sort entirely. This was the one she’d had for Kelsey, the one that had said, if she drops behind you, find out what’s wrong immediately. Be prepared to fight with her if she can’t run anymore.

  Of course, there had been people she could have left. That psycho from the trailer park who thought he was Rambo. The old couple who’d left their neighbors out to die. A whole assortment of assholes and jerks and outright murderous bastards.

  But she would have died before she left Kelsey. Only the bullet had stopped her from going back. And she knew with a sudden jerk that only a bullet would stop her from going back for Blake and Jamie. Only zombie hands on her, zombie hands holding her back, clawing and dragging her down, down into the maze of their hungry mouths…

  She stopped dead and turned, just so she could see him and know he was still there. Though rationally she knew he had to be. He wasn’t the type to play hide and seek—hell, Jamie was the type, but even he wouldn’t have done it to her—and he couldn’t have fallen or been eaten or any of that awful shit. So she knew she was being silly.

  Which only made it worse when he just. Wasn’t. There.

  All the hairs on her arms went up the moment she saw the empty forest. It was a familiar feeling—an old friend, in fact—but it seemed more intense in that moment. Everything around her looked still and gray and strange. Suddenly the trees seemed closer together, and when she scanned between them there was an ominous quality to the emptiness.

  As though it was just waiting to be filled up. And not by Blake.

  She resisted saying his name for a long while—probably longer than she should have. But then if she said his name it meant only one thing. She’d been fooled. Or even worse than that, she’d accepted that something was wrong.

  He was missing from view even when he should have been right there, right in front of her. Maybe with his hands on his knees and a rush of harsh breath coming out of him. He could have said something like you’re fast or maybe wagged his finger at her for pushing so hard, but instead there was just this crawling silence.