by Jeff Strand
Jimmy looked equally baffled. “Right. I saw you pull out of the parking lot early. Wondered where you were off to.”
Controlling freak.
That incident had been too close. She hadn’t seen or heard from C.J. in months. Now he was nearly scraping his fingernails off trying to claw at the tree. It looked like he had been shot several times: a smattering of bloody holes covered his chest.
Lisa swallowed again and really wished she had brought more water. Her head felt foggy, like her brain was sucking up all the moisture in her body. The shamblers were still snarling and moaning, which was a horrible auditory assault on Lisa’s ears. She shut her eyes to distance herself until the moans subsided some.
A strange thunk noise roused her. One of the zombies fell over on its face. She looked around.
Thunk.
Another one fell backwards. She steadied herself and looked closely. It had some kind of arrow through its head!
“Who’s out there?” She tried to keep her voice hushed.
The thunking noise continued until every shambler’s head was speared. Lisa’s heart was pounding.
“Who the fuck is out there?”
“It’s me.”
A figure emerged from the depths of the woods. As it got closer, Lisa felt she had to hold on to the tree branch in a death-grip.
“Jimmy?”
“Come down from there. You’re safe.”
She slowly clamored down the branches, hands trembling. I’m hallucinating, she thought. I’ve been up there too long, and I’m imagining all this.
Jimmy came closer to the tree and Lisa got a better look at him. She had to squint a little; daylight was quickly fading.
“It’s really you.”
It scared her a little when he didn’t say anything. But it was really him. Same cold blue eyes, same square jaw line. He looked pale and wiry, not bulked up and muscular like she’d last seen him.
“You’ve lost weight.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him to make sure he was really real.
“What the fuck happened to you?”
His voice was gruff, different, and had a little too much edge to it. “I’ll explain everything at camp. Come on. You’re probably hungry and thirsty.”
Thirsty. She gulped at the prospect of water.
Camp turned out to be at the other edge of the woods, still near town. Jimmy had a damned military bunker set up out there, tent and everything. It surprised her that he was set up in the woods so close to a town, but apparently, it had been working for him.
She gulped water as he explained.
“When I saw that refugee bus, I ran over to help out.”
“I saw. I was covering for you, remember?”
He nodded, his jaw tightening. Lisa knew that look. He usually ground his teeth when he was really pissed off. Lisa kinda liked it. She wanted to throw him to the ground and whip his cock out right then and there. A good old-fashioned wrestling match for power.
“I opened the door to the bus. It was just the driver and some kid in there. I could already tell. The kid had been bitten. He’d already died and was just barely starting to stir again. The bus driver was hysterical. I guess that was his kid, but there was nothing I could do. Shit, best I could do was shoot him.”
“Did you?”
“No. It was chaos. They were coming at me from behind and there were too many. I was yelling at the guy to move his ass, but he was totally freaking out. Telling me to help the poor boy. The driver, he grabbed me by the shirt collar,” Jimmy said, grabbing his own shirt for emphasis, “and he said, ‘you need to help us, save us!’ But there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t get him to drive and I couldn’t get him to move and that kid was about to wake up and become Eddy freakin’ Munster, so I went out the emergency exit.”
Lisa’s mouth fell open. “You have to be fucking kidding me. You left me there?”
“What was I supposed to do? Run back through that crowd of crazed cannibals? Shoot the driver and take off with the bus? Come on. I only had one choice.”
He looked at her in that way. Silence fell on the camp as Lisa considered it.
“I knew I’d find you.” His voice was barely a whisper.
She hated admitting it, but he did find her and he did save her. She hated being the damsel in distress. And she did the first thing that came to mind to counter it. She put down the water jug, slipped her shoelaces out from her boots, and pushed Jimmy to the ground.
It agitated her to hear him chuckle, almost mockingly. “No, no, my dear. I saved you, isn’t that right? We do it my way.” He grabbed her wrists and flipped her over onto her back and into the mesh-like folds of the sleeping bags.
That’s about when Lisa began to realize she was better off alone. Much better off alone. Why even be pissed about him leaving me there?
Jimmy drove his cock into her and grunted in her ear—she could tell he was pleased she was so wet. The helplessness she felt was immense. Jimmy had gotten lean and tough out here in the wilderness. His arms bulged around her neck as he plunged into her from behind. She could not get him off of her, no matter how hard she tried to buck her hips or thrust her knees around under him. He held her in a chokehold and she gasped greedily for air.
“You just wait, you fucker!”
She barely managed to choke it out, but she had to say it. Part of her missed Jimmy and missed the power struggle games and messing with his head, and part of her wanted to kill him.
Jimmy rammed his cock into her much harder now. She could feel her own walls pulling around him, no matter how hard she tried to fight it. It just felt too good and she could no longer hold on to her climax. Jimmy closed in fast, too—he gave her a final thrust and she could feel every detail, every vein and every ridge inside her.
When she finally caught her breath and Jimmy was limp, she shoved him off. She hated that it was amazing, but that didn’t really matter.
“What if you get me pregnant? Asshole,” she spat. Little waves of defeat coursed through her—it was akin to humiliation. She wished he had left her alone up in that tree. If she tied herself up there she might have been able to leave the next morning.
She thought she’d maybe said it aloud, because Jimmy jerked awake in the middle of his deep dozy state and looked around in a panic.
She looked around too, worried.
“Nothing’s here. Chill.” She looked at his creased brow, the veins protruding from underneath his skin, a blue and green web-work of real, pulsing, uninfected blood. But he looked terrible. “You must have been through a lot …”
“I haven’t been sleeping. I kept thinking about leaving you there,” Jimmy said as he rubbed his eyes. “Even after all the shit you did. I didn’t want to just leave you there alone. I knew there wouldn’t be enough food and you’d have to venture out of there and—”
“Look,” she cut in, almost offended. “I was handling my own out there. You taught me well. You did what you had to do.”
He sighed.
“What are you talking about, ‘after all the shit you did.’ What the hell?”
“You cheated on me, you bitch!” He was looking squarely at her now, that same intimidating bite in his voice. Now she really noticed how his eyes looked heavy and red-rimmed.
Well, she certainly couldn’t deny it. She hung her head, but did not feel the slightest bit guilty. She wondered what the fuck was wrong with her, but she didn’t forget. She held his eye contact.
“I was trying to get away from you. You were controlling and demeaning, and you even hit me!” She was getting pissed off now. And that was a good thing. She gritted her teeth and spat the rest out. “I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do. I want to do things my way. And that includes sex.”
He grinned in that ‘aw baby, come on!’ way, working his dimples, but she got in a good nose pop before it even worked. Blood immediately gushed under her knuckles and Jimmy made some kind of weird hrmph sound. She reached around for th
e shoelaces and deftly tied his wrists. It was taking a few moments for him to come to—his head bobbed back and forth like one of those car bobble-head dolls, so she snatched her rope from her pants pocket and tied his ankles together while she was at it.
When she was done, she found him blinking rapidly in an attempt to come to. She slapped him so he’d wake the hell up. When he finally did, he groaned a little too loudly. She bit back a smile.
I knocked his ass out!
Lisa slapped him again. “Shut the fuck up!” She said, trying to keep her voice hushed. “We don’t want any of those things hearing you. Not with you all tied up, right?” She stuffed her panties into his mouth and wrapped more rope around his head to keep it in place. She backed away from him and admired her work. Yes indeed, she’d gotten plenty of practice tying up half of the town of Walker, and that had come in handy. Jimmy scowled at her. He’d just have to stay like that for a little while, at least until she was able to get her anger under control and figure out what to do with him next.
They were both still naked, exposed in the cooling night air. It struck her how good it felt to be naked in the woods, the darkness of the night unfolding overhead. And Jimmy looked pretty good with his wrists and ankles bound.
“Look at you, tied up and sucking on my panties. You like that?” Lisa sneered as she kicked him teasingly. She was amused to see that he was getting hard again.
“It’s been a long time for both of us,” she purred as she stood over him. “I’m going to fuck you while you’re bound and gagged, and you can’t do anything about it.” She lowered herself down onto him and enveloped his rigidness.
“I have a right mind to just leave you here and let those freaks eat you alive,” she growled, digging her fingernails into his bare chest. Jimmy moaned and struggled, but Lisa just squeezed her thighs around him and held him in place with her razor-sharp nails. “No need to struggle. You’re obviously enjoying it. Be still.”
Jimmy emitted a loud screech and his eyes bugged. It took her a second to realize he was looking behind her. She stopped and twisted around to see.
Lots of zombies. Maybe thirty or so—but they were barely shuffling. Still, with that many of them, Lisa and Jimmy were as good as fucked, and they were too close—500 feet away and gaining.
Isn’t this some shit, she thought. I finally have him in the perfect position, and now this is happening.
Lisa had to work quickly to get Jimmy out of his bindings. She clawed at her clothes to find her pocketknife, cut through the rope and stuffed her feet into her boots. She scrambled to pick up the rest of her clothes—she would just have to put them on later. She bolted away from the pack and ran a few hundred yards before she realized Jimmy wasn’t behind her. And she had left the .38 and the rifle behind.
She stopped and peered through the dark blanket of the night, her breath coming in huge gasps. She could see him off in the distance, untangling himself from the ropes. “Dammit, you motherfucker! Stand up and run!” Screaming might bring on more, but that was the furthest thing from her mind. I can’t watch him get torn to pieces.
One of the undead quickened its shuffling when it realized hot, fresh meat was on the ground and helpless. It was a nasty looking thing—as Lisa ran closer, she could see its eye dangling from the socket, and a trail of pus had dried and crystallized on its face and boney chest. Jimmy finally stood and twisted around, but it was too late. The fetid thing reached out its decayed hand and swiped …
Time slowed down as Lisa watched the events unfold. The zombie snapped its jaws and its overgrown fingernails ripped into Jimmy’s shoulder. He winced but kept moving towards Lisa, and she just reacted: her arm came down on the thing’s head, and suddenly it had a knife impaled in its other eye.
“Come on, run!” She said. Her voice was shaking. She knew what would happen next.
Jimmy was blubbering now and Lisa grabbed his arm to lead him through the woods. “I’m fucked, I’m fucked, I’m fucked,” he kept saying over and over in a high keening voice, and Lisa wanted to slap him again.
“We’re going down into the town. I recognized a few that were wandering around there today. We must have drawn them out of there with all your whining and screaming.”
Jimmy stopped and yanked his arm away from hers. “You’re going to have to pile drive that knife through my skull. I’m not suffering through this and I’m not gonna become one of them!” His brows were furrowed in that way, and she knew it would be an Act of Congress to get him to follow her.
She knew it was true. Once you were scratched or bitten, it was over. The fever came next, then the chills, then death. Then you came back as one of them. And it happened rather quickly—she’d seen it before.
She stayed in the library and barricaded herself inside well after the outbreak first hit, knowing that heading back home meant doom. Weeks after Jimmy darted out of the building in an attempt to help the bus of refuges, a lone man, his face hardened by the horrors of the outside world, woke her up one morning by banging on the library’s glass windows. She let him in only to discover he’d been bitten, and it wasn’t long before she watched him progress and had to put him out of his misery. She knew she’d have to do the same with Jimmy now.
She sighed, noting the hoard of undead just over the dark horizon. “If you stay here, they’ll eat you alive. Is that how you want to go down? If we go down there, we can at least find a comfortable place. Then we can talk about pile driving this into your head.” She held up the knife and dark, vile blood dripped off of it.
She could see him considering this beyond the cold blue veil of his eyes. His bare muscles twitched in the moonlight, and she could just make out the angry red scratches on his shoulder. The sores were already festering and swelling. He gave her a curt nod and off they went, both still nude except for Lisa in just her boots. Once they gained ground and Walker was near, she stopped and pulled her clothes on.
“We’ll get you something once we reach town,” she muttered.
Walker was just down the slope and across the highway. They proceeded carefully, but were only greeted by abandoned cars, some burned and some with doors completely ripped off. The smell of death and gasoline was thick in the air, and Lisa could just make out silhouettes of dead bodies slumped in several of the cars. This was as far as she’d ever gone since the outbreak, and she was surprised to see that this many people had tried to escape. Where did they think they would go?
They were closing in on the outskirts of town, which stood beyond the highway like a quiet grey maze of tombstones. The only noise was crickets chirping behind them. No shuffling or moaning.
Lisa led Jimmy through the labyrinth of abandoned cars, through the tree line and on into Walker. She knew there was a drugstore close by. If I could just get him inside and comfortable, maybe I can find something to take his pain away, she thought as she searched for the drugstore storefront in the darkness.
The undead, if they were around, were unaware of their presence. Now that they were getting close to the drugstore, Lisa wondered how they would get inside without attracting attention. Breaking a window would cause them to come in swarms, but she couldn’t think of another way in.
She walked around the entire building, looking for a way in, Jimmy following her all the while with a hopeless look on his face. She wanted to slap it right off of him, and she wanted to slap herself for being so angry at him. He saved your life. Even if he always was such an asshole.
Finally she tried the front door out of sheer last minute frustration, not thinking that it would swing right open. It did. Fucking hell. All that worrying and the damn front door was unlocked. She whirled around to look at Jimmy and he just shrugged half-heartedly. She could barely make out his features in the minimal light, but it seemed as though they were fading. His face looked thinner and sallow, and bags were forming underneath his eyes. He’s changing. She felt her heart lurch and tasted a strong surge of adrenaline on her tongue.
“What are we do
ing here?” He murmured. He was hugging himself tightly, but the night air was as warm and wet as a sloppy kiss.
“Come inside,” she whispered. She let her eyes adjust to the darker interior. Grabbed a blanket for him. Hopped the pharmacy counter. Hoped she was grabbing the right thing—she was pretty sure the labels said Oxycontin, but it was hard to tell in the dark.
She hopped back over the counter, grabbed a warm, expired orange juice out of the mini fridge by the register, and sat next to Jimmy, who was huddled in his blanket in the corner by the reading glasses rack.
She dumped the pills out on the floor. “Start taking these. They’ll make you sleepy.”
He didn’t argue. She supposed he guessed what they were. She shut her eyes. She didn’t want to know how many he took. Hopefully it was enough to help him drift far enough away.
Almost as an afterthought, she stood again and headed to the aisle where the ace bandages were located, yanked a few plastic packages off the rack, and sat back beside Jimmy.
“Lie down,” she whispered. She couldn’t tell if the drugs were already working or if he had just resigned himself to do as he was told, but he spread out on the floor and lay still.
Carefully, almost lovingly, she bound his wrists and ankles with the ace bandage. His eyelids fluttered, but his dick responded well, almost as if it was saying goodbye to her.
The pharmacy was quiet. She climbed on top of him and rode him slowly, enjoying the feel of him, enjoying the control. She could feel an orgasm building from this, a real one, the kind of orgasm she could control. It ripped through her like a languid wave, satisfying and slow. She collapsed with her head on his chest.
His breathing slowed. Stopped. The world was still again.
Quiet.
She wasn’t sure if she dozed or not, but when she opened her eyes, the morning light was just beginning to rear its ugly head.
She let her eyes adjust to her surroundings. For now, they were safe and the ace bandages bound Jimmy securely. She heaved herself off of him and pulled her clothes back on, being careful not to make too much noise. Now that the morning light was seeping into the drugstore, she could see the place was a goldmine: blister relief stuff for her feet, water, school backpacks, and even energy bars. She greedily stuffed a child’s school backpack with as many supplies as she could fit in there and even smiled to herself a little.