by Gen Griffin
I nodded. “Liam knows a lot more about the Cube than I do. He was a Scavenger for five years. He knows where they keep their dirty little secrets. I don't. I didn't even know the Cube had tunnels underneath it until Liam told me.”
“Well then, I suggest we all go to bed. We've got a long night ahead of us and a longer day still tomorrow. I'll take first watch. Angel can have second and Liam, you can pull third.”
“Good deal,” Liam nodded agreeably.
“What about me?” Dawn demanded.
“Get some sleep. You have a hard job to do tomorrow.” Gauge looked over at me and smirked tiredly. “We all have hard jobs to do tomorrow.”
“The hardest.” I walked over to my bedroll and laid down on the lumpy ground, thinking that I would never fall asleep and wondering whether Seth had found the person who had been screaming.
Chapter 3
I heard Seth and Vera returning to our camp well before I saw them. Their footsteps seemed too loud as they crunched through the leaves in the dead of night.
“You're letting her make a fool of you.” Vera wasn't speaking loudly but her voice carried well enough through the quiet night air. “The same way Jeremiah let Lola make a fool of him.”
“Watch your tongue,” Seth snapped. “I am nothing like Jeremiah and Pilar sure as hell isn't Lola.”
“Pilar's idealistic and you're the idiot whose determined to make all her rainbow colored dreams come true. I fail to see the difference.”
“Jeremiah should never have tried to overthrow the king,” Seth said. “This is different. If we don't deal with Bud Moon and his people, there's a damn good chance that he'll decide to come after us.”
“More like a slim chance. What would Bud Moon want with the Church of Chaos?”
Seth said something too quietly for me to make out his exact words. Vera laughed in response, but not like she was happy. The sound was as cold as the steel bars that had made up the walls of the prison cell apartment I'd grown up in.
Seth's voice came as a low growl in the night. I caught a few snatches of their conversation. Zombies and impossibly painful death. Their usual topics of conversation. Seth and Vera weren't exactly big on small talk.
There was a loud smacking sound and Seth cussed.
“You're a fool, Seth. You're a bloody damned fool.” Vera came stomping past my bedroll. I waited until the sound of her footfalls faded in the direction of Gauge's small tent. The two of them had developed a relationship that was almost as bizarre as mine and Seth's during the last few weeks.
I waited until she had laid down before I slipped off my thin, burlap cover and went to go find Seth.
Chapter 4
“You should be asleep.”
Seth was kneeling beside a small fire that he had built out of a handful of crispy brown and red autumn leaves. He kept picking up the burning leaves and holding them in front of his eyes until they burned down to ash against his fingers.
“I could say the same thing to you.” I hesitated and then sat down in the leaves a few feet to his left. “I couldn't sleep.”
“I'm still too pissed off to sleep,” Seth told me. “Vera can be such a damned-.” He cut himself off mid-sentence.
“Oh go on. Speak your mind. You're not saying anything I haven't already figured out on my own,” I said.
He let out a short laugh. “Vera's one of the toughest, strongest people I know. I trust her with my life. She's just...well, she's got a temper.”
“She also hates me.”
“She's jealous of you. There's a difference.”
“Jealous?” I blinked at him. “Why would Vera be jealous of me?”
“You're the High Priestess.”
“Vera would make a better High Priestess than I do,” I said.
“She agrees with you completely on that.” Seth shot me a vaguely amused smile. “She's spent her whole life trying to figure out the prophecies and protecting the Church. She leads more services than I do. She takes care of the followers. If the sheeple ever had a shepherdess, it's Vera.”
“Since when do you consider your own followers sheeple?” I asked.
“Everyone who is too dumb to think for themselves counts as sheeple in my book.”
“Oh. If that's the definition then you've got a lot more sheeple in your life than I originally thought. Who doesn't make the list?” I made no effort to keep the scorn out of my voice.
“You. Vera. Gauge. Liam. Angel. A couple of others.” Seth was playing with his fire-starter by tossing it from hand to hand. “When we were back at the Church, you asked me why I wasn't bringing more people with us. Why I would pick a fight with only a handful of people on my side? The truth is that I don't want anyone at my back who can't think on their own when everything goes bad.”
“I notice you're saying when and not if.”
“Zombies took over the world thirty years ago and humans are nowhere near getting it back. Every day is a battle. At first I thought that being Changed meant I could be free. I thought that I'd be able to enjoy my life if I didn't have to worry about being attacked by zombies. Instead I spend my days trying to keep people like Bud Moon from brutally murdering the very people he's supposed to be protecting. Trying to keep the king from profiting off of putting his citizens on plates as steaks. Sabotaging the buses that are bound for the meat market and hoping the people I've set free find a better life than I have.”
“You don't like being the High Priest of the Church of Chaos?”
“The pressure to perform gets a little intense for me. It gets old having so many prophecies to fulfill. Everybody expects me to be able to do the impossible. I'm not allowed to make mistakes. I'm not allowed to fail. Jeremiah, sure, he fucked up. Poor love-struck loser got himself killed in the name of everything that was holy and right. He died a martyr. Me though, I'm the fucking hero. The god among men. Jeremiah might have died, but me? Everyone expects me to save the world.”
The shadows from the fire were playing across the harsh angles of his face. Seth would have been a beautiful man if he hadn't been Changed. His nose was perfectly straight. His high cheekbones and square jaw were as nice as any I had ever seen in the old pre-apocalypse movies that the Powers That Be would show us every couple of months as an incentive for being good little captives. His eyes, well, the one that wasn't destroyed was stunning. His entire soul shone in that one pale blue iris.
I reached for him without meaning to. Against all of my better judgment, I put my hand on his arm. “I'm sorry.”
“For what?” Seth took hold of my wrist and used it to pull me into his side. I hadn't realized how cold I was until I felt the heat of his skin against my own. Seth tucked me under his arm. “You're shivering.”
“I'm cold.” I allowed myself to relax against his warmth. “And I'm sorry because I'm one of the people who has asked you to be the hero.”
Seth tightened his grip on my shoulder and squeezed me tight. “I don't mind being your hero.”
“Even though I'm asking you to save the world?” I asked.
“Have you ever seen the ocean?” Seth asked abruptly.
“The ocean?” I was baffled by the change in topics.
“The ocean. Large body of water that goes for miles. My father used to talk about how you could stand on the beach and see the edge of the world on the horizon.”
“I know what the ocean is. I've seen pictures of it. I just don't know where you're going with this.” I frowned up at him curiously.
“My parents used to live by the ocean. They talked about it a lot. They had pictures of themselves getting married on the beach.” He stirred his little pile of burning leaves. Between Seth's own warmth and the fire, I was pleased to realize that I had finally stopped shivering.
“Your parents were married before the zombie apocalypse?” I was surprised. It was almost unheard of.
Seth nodded. “They had been high school sweethearts. They moved to a little town on the beach for awhile right after they got m
arried. When the zombie virus began taking over they tried to get home to the town they'd grown up in. They made it to here and couldn't get any further, so they stayed.”
“Oh.” I still had no idea where he was going with this.
“They used to talk about the ocean all the time though. Said the water tastes like salt and goes on forever. My Dad worked on a fishing boat. He talked about catching fish that were as long as he was tall.”
“Fish get that big?”
Seth shrugged. “Dad said they did. I've always thought it would be something to see. The ocean, the fish, boats, all of it.”
“It might be pretty,” I mused.
“You've never wanted to see it?” Seth sounded almost disappointed.
“It's not that. I just-.” I had to figure out how to phrase my feelings. “I never thought I'd get to leave the Cube. We couldn't even talk about going outside because my Mom would have panic attacks. Going to the beach sounds just as feasible as going to the moon.”
“Humans went to the moon, you know. Before the apocalypse.”
“My parents didn't go to the moon,” I said with a small laugh. “I don't think we would have done much traveling even if there hadn't been a zombie apocalypse. Mom was a self-professed homebody and Dad said he'd never had the money to go much of anywhere. My parents lived their entire lives in this area right here.”
“Humph.” Seth prodded his fire and made the flames spike a little higher into the air. “How about you?”
“Me?”
“Do you want to travel?”
“I've never thought about it.” It was the absolute truth. “Would it even be possible? I mean, how would you travel?”
“Use the bikes or a Jeep. Take the roads when we could. Make our own roads when the old ones are blocked.”
“Just drive to the ocean?”
“Start with the ocean and then go from there. Just go. See what there is to be seen.”
“What about the zombies?” I asked.
“I'm immune.” Seth held out the arm he didn't have wrapped around my shoulders, displaying the cross shaped scar on his forearm. “Remember?”
“Not to the super zombies. Nothing works against the super zombies. I can't control them with my voice like I can the normal zombies.”
“We're going to kill all the super zombies,” Seth said.
“But what if we can't?” I barely dared whisper my worst thoughts out loud for fear of making them real. “What if you're right and they've already escaped. We know that some were set free when Bud was experimenting in the city.”
“They'll die off eventually,” he said. “Remember, the best survival rate Bud had was four months.”
“So, what? We just wait on them die off?”
“It's an option.” Seth put his chin on top of my head and rested it there. “You have no idea how tempted I am to let Bud and the king go to war against one another. Chances are high that the two things I've spent so long fighting against, the flesh brokers and the cannibals, would just tear one another to pieces. The worst of the monsters would be gone by the time the dust finally settled, torn apart by their own gluttony.”
I opened my mouth and then closed it, not sure what to say to him. I knew that he didn't want to go into the Cube, but I'd assumed it was pure selfishness and a general lack of compassion for his fellow human beings. “A lot of innocent people would die.”
“Why do you think I've agreed to help you try to stop the slaughter?” Seth asked. “If it weren't for how many casualties there would be, we could be back home at the Church warming our feet in front of a fireplace right now. Instead we're here, freezing our assess off and preparing for the very real possibility that we might die tomorrow.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat. “You really think we're going to die?”
“Something has happened to the Cube since the last time I was here. The generators aren't running. There aren't any lights coming from the windows.” He hesitated for a brief second. “And the screaming we heard earlier was coming from somewhere inside the brickyard.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. The brickyard was the yard in between the Cube's outermost wall and the building itself.
Seth nodded.
“Did you find the person who was doing the screaming?”
“No,” Seth said. “We narrowed down the area it was coming from but by the time we got up the wall, he or she was just a puddle of blood in the grass.”
I shuddered. He tightened his grip around me and rubbed my back with his palm. “I'm scared.”
“Me too,” he said.
“I never thought I'd hear you say that.”
Seth halfway smiled at me. “I'm not a god, Pilar. I'm human. I can feel pain. I can be hurt. I can die. I'm not ready to die.”
“You want to see the ocean,” I said, recalling our earlier bit of conversation.
“I want to see the ocean,” Seth confirmed. “Will you come with me?”
“Me?” I was startled.
He nodded. “Promise me that you'll come traveling with me, Pi. If we live through this nightmare, say you'll come to the ocean with me?”
“What about the Church of Chaos?” I asked him. “What about all of your obligations as the High Priest? What about the prophecies?”
“The prophecies show the city falling. There are no prophecies after the king falls from power. As for the Church, I think Gauge would make a lovely High Priest, don't you?”
“Gauge?” I did a double take. “You want to make Gauge the High Priest?”
“He's got a better temper for it than I do. Churches are supposed to help people, you know?”
“They are.”
“I'm not so good at that part. Not once we get past the fighting, anyways.” Seth pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Gauge is more of a humanitarian than I am.”
“I'm not arguing that part,” I said.
“But?”
“I'm surprised you want to hand all your power over to him.”
“I'd trade power for freedom any day of the week,” Seth said.
“Really?”
“Cross my heart,” he said.
Strangely enough, I believed him. “And what about me? As the High Priestess, would I be able to hand over my responsibilities as well?”
“I don't see why not.”
“Who would I hand them over to?” I was surprisingly comfortable, curled up against his side. The moon overhead was full and beautiful. The entire evening had a feeling of peace to it that I hadn't experienced in a long time.
“My suggestion would be Vera,” Seth said. “She likes running the Church. Believe it or not, she's actually pretty good at helping people.”
I considered his suggestions thoughtfully. “You want to leave the Church to Gauge and Vera and then go on a trip to see the ocean?”
“You have a better suggestion?” Seth asked. “A dream of your own that you want to chase?”
That gave me a moment's pause. “A dream of my own?”
“You don't have any dreams? Anything that you fantasize about doing or having? Some fantasy future that you'd like to live?”
My smile fell down into a thoughtful frown. I twirled several strands of my curls around my index finger. “I don't think I have any dreams.”
“Nothing?” The skepticism was clear on his handsome face.
“Well, I've dreamed about being reunited with my parents but we both know that isn't going to happen.” I stiffened slightly against him. His hand paused on my back.
“What did you dream about before your parents were taken?” Seth asked. “Before you knew about the Church of Chaos and the meat market in Ra Shet.”
“I..oh.” I frowned at that one, a fast blush burning in my cheeks. I was glad it was too dark for him to really see my face.
“Oh? Oh what?”
“Nothing. No.” I shook my head vigorously. “The ocean sounds beautiful, Seth. I've never had any dreams worth having.”
“Oh come on. Now
you have to tell me what your dream was.”
“I don't have to tell you anything.” I was still shaking my head.
“Come on, Pi. Tell me.”
“You'll...you won't like it. It was stupid. My childhood dream was stupid.” I pushed away from him enough so that I could clearly see his expression.
“How stupid could it have been?” He cajoled. “Tell me. I won't hassle you about it. I promise.”
I sighed, knowing he wouldn't drop the issue until I told him. Seth was stubborn to a fault. “When I was younger, my best friend and I used to fantasize about certain guys. We used to spend hours imagining our weddings and the families we would have.”
“That's not that embarrassing.”
“It is when you consider that the guy I was fantasizing about was Drake Bledsoe,” I said.
Seth pursed his lips at me and the silence stretched out for several long minutes. He grimaced and then shook his head. It took me a minute to realize that he was trying not to laugh.
“You can't laugh at me, Seth. I was a dumb kid. I didn't know any better. Drake was a hero. Everyone said so.” My cheeks were burning with embarrassment.
Seth pulled me back into his side. “We'll go see the ocean, Pi.”
I hesitated and then nodded, relieved that he had dropped the Drake issue so quickly. “I'd like to see the ocean.”
“Good.” Seth reached for my face, cupping my jaw in his palm. “One more thing, Pilar.”
“What?” My voice was a little shaky and my breath was coming a bit too fast.
He lowered his face until our lips were only inches apart. I knew he was going to kiss me before he did it. I had all the time in the universe to take in his ruined, dead white eye and the gaping quarter-size hole on the outside of his jaw. I had all the time in the world to think 'zombie' as our lips brushed.
I pulled back away from him, shaking my head. “Seth, I'm sorry. I can't.”
His expression darkened and he scowled at me. “It's because of this, isn't it?” He pointed at his ruined eye.
“No.” It was only a partial lie. “No, Seth. It's not because-.” He pulled away from me, leaving me exposed as a cold chill blew through the air.