Reawakening

by Stein, Charlotte

  It shoved through her just like before—too much, too much. Blake tried to hold on, but she could feel the wetness spilling inside her and his hands suddenly on her hips, scrabbling and scrabbling.

  It was so good. Too good, really. Because only after it was done did she realize she’d missed Jamie finding his pleasure—wasn’t even sure, in fact, if he had. Wished, beyond anything, that she could have seen his face when he got there or just something, something.

  Instead, he pulled out of her too quickly and it was a shocking and sudden absence. The fact that the evidence of his pleasure then trickled down her thigh…not really a comfort. Unsurprisingly, not really a comfort at all.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Jamie was sitting by the window when sleep slipped away from her in the night, though not in any sort of comfortable way. He didn’t look relaxed, half-bare like that with his head tilted against the glass. He looked like he could see something he was longing for, instead. Something as amazing as the great white moon that hung so heavy in the winter-dark sky.

  She could see it even from here, casting odd shadows on his shoulders and making his skin a silvery color in the dimness of the bedroom. He looked lovely, and lonely, though she couldn’t quite fathom why. Hadn’t they just done all of that stuff? Been together and formed that good glow?

  Though when she looked at him now, she couldn’t tell if all of that had really meant anything. He looked different, somehow, in a way that made her wonder if she’d ever really known him properly. Of course, he always had that look about him—of someone just crouched and ready to go, of someone lean and wired and ready for that terrible war in the future—but there was something more pronounced about it here, now.

  She thought of the words lone wolf and wanted to laugh at herself for doing so, but couldn’t. Wanted to call him back to her, but couldn’t.

  It was all right though, in the end. He didn’t need her to call him back to her, because after a moment of her careful watching he turned, as though he’d known she’d had her eyes on him all along. And he said—

  “I’m still here. I ain’t dead.”

  She wanted to tell him yeah, I can tell, in response to that. I can tell so hard it hurts. You’re so alive it’s frightening sometimes.

  But somehow she just went with come on, and patted the bed next to her. It was still raw in her, all the things they’d done, and she wanted him to come over. No—she needed him to come over and put his arms around her until that rawness went away or burned in deeper—whichever felt best, first.

  Only he just sort of hummed in reply, and after a minute said something that made her hackles go up—though she wasn’t sure why.

  “Do you think people ever really know when they’re happy?”

  He was facing her, but she could tell what he was doing—pushing his back against the window. She couldn’t even imagine how cold the glass must have been. “Or do you reckon most of the time, they just make do with satisfied?”

  “Is that what you’re doing?”

  It popped out before she meant it to. Felt kind of like vomit, coming up. Especially when his eyes went so dark like that—like water over slate—and his next words seemed so…bottomless.

  “No, baby,” he said. “I ain’t never satisfied when it comes to you. Even when I’m right there touching you, I want more of you.”

  She knew her voice was going to come out shaky, even before she managed to make the words. She could feel that tremulousness right down in her chest, threatening and threatening—even though she’d said the same thing to Blake easily enough. It had come out so easily with Blake.

  “I love you, Jamie, I love you.”

  She had to say it twice. The first one came out all weird and not like words at all. And he wasn’t saying anything back, either, which made the things he’d said even more elusive. Did he mean that she never gave him enough?

  She couldn’t tell, she couldn’t tell. He just regarded her with those water on slate eyes and seemed beyond words.

  Then, finally, he went with—

  “It’s okay, June-y. It’s okay. Go to sleep—everything’s okay.”

  Which seemed at best, complicated. Unfortunately, he also chose that moment to come over and run a hand through her hair. And after he’d done so he laid down next to her, and she forgot almost any worries she’d had. He was right, after all. Everything was okay, when he held her like that, and didn’t let her go.

  * * * *

  She heard it, and half-dreaming thought of birds, flying. A hundred black wings against the sky, beating and beating and leaving only good things behind—though that was the way dreams usually were. You woke up, only to find that the good thing had become bad and the bad thing had become good and everything was too late, too late.

  If the birds were already flying, she was too late.

  “Do you hear that, June?” Blake asked from beside her, and she thought of Jamie joking the other day. Jamie saying—hey, do you hear that big alarm going off?

  Only this wasn’t a big alarm and Blake wasn’t joking. He wasn’t the kind to joke in that way. She glanced over her shoulder at him and his face was drawn tight, the way people got when they knew they’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

  She wanted to tell him that it was okay—that the birds had gone now or some other leftover-from-her-dream thing—but most of her knew it wasn’t, already. The dream was fading and being replaced by the real reason for the noise. A helicopter—a helicopter taking off.

  “Where is he going?” she asked, but it was as though someone else had spoken the words. They sounded like the kind of thing a person would ask when they noticed a colleague taking the wrong elevator. When they saw their husband going out to get the paper, even though you’d already brought it in five minutes earlier.

  They just didn’t encompass everything her body was trying to feel, right at the moment. Her body was trying to feel it, but something cold had hold of her and it wasn’t letting go.

  “Did he tell you he was going somewhere?” she asked, and now she could hear it. That same coldness, creeping into her voice. Like an icy lockdown on everything she was.

  “I…I…” Blake said.

  She kind of hated him, for that. For being so lost. If Jamie had woken up and heard Blake flying away in a goddamned chopper, he would have known what to do immediately. He would have formulated answers and sprang into action.

  Though she couldn’t continue with the hate, after a moment. Because what was she doing? Nothing but looking at Blake, waiting and waiting for this to not be true.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything? He didn’t say—hey, think I’ll go for a stroll tomorrow in zombieland?”

  She could hear her own voice starting to rise, but felt helpless to stop it.

  “No, God no, June. He promised me he’d stop going alone—he swore to me, months and months ago.”

  She flung herself out of bed at that. Started putting on whatever clothes she could lay her hands on.

  “June, what are you doing? The chopper will be gone by the time you get out there, it’ll—”

  He just didn’t get it. Neither of them really did, despite all of the things she’d said.

  “Is there a boat?”

  “What?”

  “Is there a boat? Come on, answer me—because if there’s not I’m going to swim.”

  He got out of bed at that. Started pulling on his own clothes—though with his face as flat as anything and some intent in his body language. He was going to try to stop her, she knew it.

  He didn’t stand a chance.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I need a boat, Blake.”

  “You don’t even know where he’s going—he could fly hundreds of miles. Then what?”

  “Give me a best guess—that’s all I need.”

  “June…”

  “Best guess, Blake, best guess!”

  It cam
e out harsh and frantic. She didn’t mean it to, but oh God her heart was pounding now and everything seemed tilted and off-kilter. Didn’t he understand?

  “The…he always goes to the…this place, first. If he’s looking for survivors, which he always is.”

  She thought of the blonde woman on the ground. Her pleading eyes.

  “Which place? You said “the”. What “the”?”

  He pressed his lips together tight, suddenly. It was obvious what the expression meant, even after he’d explained. He didn’t want to say, and after she’d heard the name of the place Jamie always went first, she understood why.

  “The shooting gallery. We call it the shooting gallery. People always try to get down to the water but it’s like a fucking disaster there. All around the lake it’s just swarms of them like you wouldn’t believe—I tried to make him stop but sometimes you can see them running for the lake, you know? You can see them trying to make it to someplace safe. I had to throw away the binoculars because he was—”

  “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  She pushed past him so fiercely that he didn’t even try to stop her. She couldn’t blame him. It must have been clear that she’d take down anyone who got in her way. It must have been clear that her heart was beating behind her eyes like something red, red, red and all she could think was—I should have made you understand it harder. I should have said I love you more. That even though I might not be enough we have to try and make it so. We have to try and be enough for each other, God, don’t you want to try?

  She didn’t know, and now maybe she’d never get to ask. All because he’d put his arms around her and she’d let her worries slide away.

  “June, you can’t swim,” Blake was calling down the stairs after her. It made her mad, madder than hell, and that feeling didn’t subside until he was standing by the front door with her. Until he looked at her, as frantic as she felt, and said—

  “There’s a boat.”

  * * * *

  It was funny, how she didn’t feel anything this time. Well, at the very least she felt no fear. No clenching of her fists, no flashes of terrible memories. Just Jamie, Jamie, Jamie all over her mind and in her soul and oh if he was dead. If he was doing this because he wanted to be dead…

  He’d asked her if she felt suicidal. Why hadn’t she asked him? Why hadn’t she asked him a thousand times? And now Blake was with her on this little strip of bloodied land because he’d refused to let her go alone and God, what if he died too?

  She realized as they looked over what was left of a lovely waterfront vacation spot that he could die here just as easily as Jamie. Just because she was with him—that didn’t mean anything. They were both going to die for stupid reasons that no one had ever said.

  “Why’s it so quiet?” he asked, but his words—so sudden and too-loud—only served to emphasize the ghostly quality of the place around them. She’d expected sudden hordes, the way things got in populated areas, maybe. But there was just a red-streaked ramp down to the water and one of those little places that had bathrooms inside and areas for people to change and the like. Further off, she could make out a store of some kind, though even from here she could tell its roof had caved in.

  An explosion, maybe? Rioting? Sometimes things looked exactly the same when she came across them—as though the human race had never deserted it—but other times there was stuff like this. Stuff that had been destroyed for reasons unexplained. Fires that had raged with no one to turn off the gas.

  There were boats by the truncated pier, too, but most of them had half-sunk or been overturned. Tarpaulin spilling into the water like plastic hair.

  “Never seen it like this,” he said, and again she thought of how often their words seemed so banal. So like something from before—as though they’d just entered a popular nightclub and found it a little deader than they’d expected.

  Though the term deader applied in some interesting ways here, too. There were bodies, after all—of course there were. Always bodies. Kind of funny that her eye went to buildings and boats first, and barely saw the tangled grave piled by the pier. The mess of them spreading out into the fields and the trees beyond.

  “Everybody’s dead, aren’t they,” she said.

  Because that was true. Before, even when she’d been in empty areas with hardly any of them around, she had been able to hear them. Sense them, pressing on the outskirts of her consciousness. They were like bees buzzing all the time, something terrible always there and waiting.

  But here, now, she felt nothing. Could hear nothing. Nothing but the hollow silence at the end of the world.

  “Look there,” he said, and for a moment she thought he’d seen Jamie—so much so that it choked her up in a way she couldn’t deal with. That was how much Jamie meant to her. Just a hint of him made her swell with hope and pain and longing.

  But instead of Jamie there was just a man twisted on the ground by an overturned trash can. Or—what had once been a man. She could see even from all the way over by the water that his eyes had turned and his face was mottled the way they got and he hadn’t died as a human.

  He’d starved to death as a zombie.

  “Jamie was right,” he said. “They’ve run out of people to eat, and now they’re just…dying.”

  “I guess so,” she replied, but her voice came from very far away. It was such a different feeling to walk amongst the dead with nothing coming at you. No threats, no snarling, feral things.

  Just this—this emptiness.

  “Is it weird if that seems worse, somehow?” he asked.

  She understood what he meant. There was a hollowness at the center of her chest—for Jamie, mostly—but it spread as they walked amongst the quiet remains of the human race.

  They came across a park bench, and there was a man sitting on it. Just sitting there, as though he’d decided to take a rest in the middle of battling zombies. But when she drew her machete and poked at his lowered head—much to Blake’s consternation—he had the black, black eyes and the weird skin.

  He just didn’t jump up and try to kill them, the way they always did. He didn’t do anything, because he now had a different hallmark of being a zombie—hollowed out cheeks and skin stretched paper thin over bone. Something desiccated about him, as though all the moisture in his body had drained away and left behind…this.

  “God, God, June. Don’t,” Blake said, but she couldn’t stop looking. The tip of the machete was starting to cut into the thing’s forehead, only it wasn’t drawing blood. No blood at all.

  “Don’t worry. It’s gone, believe me.”

  However even after she’d spoken with such surety, she found herself picturing him jumping up suddenly. As though maybe he’d grown intelligence and decided to play possum, rather than what she knew this was.

  He’d just sat down on the park bench, exhausted—the way an ordinary person might have after a particularly arduous swim.

  She let his head drop. Something inside his neck cracked and whispered when she did, but only Blake jumped. He was dead, and there was nothing to be squeamish about, now. It had taken her this long to even realize there was a smell—that sickly sweet stench of death—and when said realization came she brushed it off.

  The smell of fresh blood and meat would always be worse than rot to her. Always. Plus, there were other things to consider. Like—where was Jamie? Was he here? She thought she could see something over by the tree line, but her heart was beating too hard and hopeful for her to look at it directly.

  Then Blake said, “I see the chopper!”

  And suddenly it was okay. She could look. It was comforting, in a way, that he sounded as joyful as she felt. She could see it all over his face, too—a real burst of feeling in a way Blake almost never let out. Strange, really, that he should allow it just as something awful pressed down on her and wouldn’t let go.

  He’s going to be dead, she thought. Because that was the way things were. She’d had a few months of happiness, and that was a
ll anyone got in this new world. Hell, it was all she could ever remember having before any of this happened, so God only knew what the score was here.

  Two seconds of happiness to ten years of misery, maybe.

  “Just be cool,” she found herself saying. “Be cool.”

  Which seemed like a really stupid thing to come out with until she thought of the ratio. Two seconds to ten years. Until she thought of all the ways she wasn’t deserving of Jamie just being alive and okay, and had to watch Blake jogging off in the direction of the field because she just couldn’t stand it.

  Hope was starting to kill her. She could see it. It was turning her into an insane person, because even when she could see him suddenly there, amongst the too-long grass, she couldn’t let herself believe it was really him.

  Then everything inside her broke and she ran to him—real fast, knees kicking up clumsily, eyes not seeing obstacles in the way she was supposed to. She was supposed to look, and it was only by some miracle that she didn’t trip over a stray body or land in a bear trap or some other dumb thing.

  Blake was even shouting after her—hey, be careful, be careful. As though she’d turned into a little kid, tumbling after a treat she couldn’t wait for.

  Only it wasn’t a treat. It was awful, it was awful. He just looked at her dumbfounded, like he wanted to ask her a million things and couldn’t think what to start with. Of course, she knew what one of them would have been—how did you get here?—but there was something else there, too. Something as empty as this place.

  She recognized that, too. It said—there’s no one left, is there?

  And that made her want to be sorry, to hold him and say that it was okay, everything was okay. That even though there was no one left, they still had each other. Couldn’t that be enough?

  But instead, every bit of rage welled up inside her. Her hands did things that her mind didn’t want them to—they shoved at him and got fistfuls of his shirt and she could hear herself yelling.