by Emma Shortt
“I did, and you’re gonna need to keep your voice down.”
Both his erection and his musings subsided in an instant. “What’s happened?”
Jackson leaned in closer to him so that her mouth was right next to his ear. “I heard noises out there about a half hour ago. Faint, but there all the same. I’m guessing zombies are close by, but they haven’t found us yet.”
“We need to move then.”
“No, we’re fine for the moment. Wake up properly first and let your eyes adjust to the dark.”
“They’ll smell us, Jackson, and I’m good. I can make out your shape now.”
She waved a hand in front of his face, as if checking to see if he was telling the truth. When he reached out to grab it she nodded and pushed off his lap. Though Luke was sure the lack of weight should have felt like a relief, it didn’t. She was so slight that her extra pounds had barely made a dent. He could just about see her reaching out a hand to steady herself and guilt swamped him. How many hours sleep had she managed?
“You should have woken me sooner,” he whispered.
She stretched against the wall, miniature squat thrusts, limbering herself up for movement. “Why? We were safe enough and out here you have to take advantage of those moments. Besides if I get tired you can give me a piggyback.”
The image of her legs wrapped around his waist filled his head and Luke had to take a deep breath. Now was not the time for such thoughts. Hell, there was hardly ever a time anymore. The zombies were everywhere. Intimate moments were going to be few and far between—if ever—he suspected.
“It’s four in the morning,” Jackson said. “If we leave now, we’ll have a couple of hours of darkness to cover our tracks.”
“Zombies and darkness.” Luke sighed. “The perfect combination.”
Jackson bent down and picked up the sweater and sweats before folding them and placing them in her small backpack. “I know, but it makes sense to take advantage of the cover. If we leave when it’s day, they could be out there waiting for us, and they’ll see us immediately. The dark gives us a chance to sneak away. Besides it’s never completely dark. The human eye adjusts pretty well to the smallest light source.”
“I know. So what are you thinking, about a million years to make it down the interstate on foot?”
“Down the interstate?” She paused while swinging her backpack on and gave him a look he probably couldn’t have deciphered even with lots of light. “You’re coming with me? To Texas?”
Luke took a deep breath and nodded. His mind had been made up really the moment he’d seen the Lily zombie waiting to get into his bunker and realized it wasn’t a safe haven anymore. No, that wasn’t right. More like when he’d spotted Jackson’s purple panty-clad ass sprinting down the road. It just took Lily in his home to make him see it. The loss of his safe house to clarify his mind. The thought of leaving Jackson to make her way to Texas alone seemed wrong somehow. Sure there was no doubt that the girl could take care of herself, damn, could she. But the border must be a couple of thousand of miles or so, and that meant a whole lot of dead things—all wanting to eat her—all of them starving. It just made sense for the two of them to stick together. The fact he was attracted to her was an added bonus. He wanted to explore the possibility of something happening between them, and he wanted to see if her dream had any chance of being made a reality.
“Yeah. I am,” he said. “We’ll do this together, Jackson. We’ll try to find your friend and then we’ll carry on. See what, if anything, is left.”
“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” she whispered. “I really can’t.”
A peculiar judder occurred in Luke’s chest and he smiled at the feeling. “So then on foot? We’ll make it when we’re about a hundred?”
She shrugged. “We’ll be eighty at most.”
“Well then it’s a good job we won’t be on foot, huh?”
She stepped closer so that they were mere inches from one another. “You mean…”
Despite himself, Luke savored the look he could now see on her shadowed face, finally feeling as though he was doing his part. Jackson had probably protected him while he slept but now it was his turn to protect her. He’d get them to Laredo, Texas if it was the last fucking thing he did. He’d apply the same single-mindedness to this as he had to killing the dead, and he’d be damned if anything stopped him.
“Luke?” she prompted.
“Why do you think I brought us here?” he asked, pointing to the back of the building. “It’s where the Batmobile’s stashed.”
Chapter Fourteen
They pulled into the deserted garage midafternoon. Luke had driven past several but every time Jackson pointed one out as a possible extra supply source he’d shook his head and driven on. Eventually she’d closed her eyes and gotten some much-needed sleep.
She could see why now. McGraw’s “stick and spit,” was on a deserted road, plenty of open space for them to look around and be sure they were dead-free. It was a good choice for their first stop.
“Can you see anything?” Luke asked as he slowed the car to a crawl.
Jackson wound down her window, shivering a little from the chill on her exposed face, and craned her head out. The garage was an old-style structure. Painted in fading red, it was surrounded by a few bare tree trunks on the side of the road, with a couple of abandoned cars completing the picture. The weak sun shone dully on the surrounding asphalt and for once Jackson couldn’t see even a single blood splatter. “We’re good. Nothing but clear space. Unless they’re hiding inside.”
“I wouldn’t put it past them right now,” Luke muttered. “So listen, I’ll pull up in front of that pump and check for gas. I don’t reckon they’ll be any in there, though. We’re probably going to have to siphon it out of those cars. I have some tubing but we should probably look for supplies while we’re here. Unlikely they’ll be any, but you never know.”
Jackson waited until Luke pulled to a stop in front of the first pump before jumping out of the car and stretching her legs. “I’ll go inside. You get started on the gas.” It crossed her mind that she might get lucky and find a stash of chocolate or candy. Jackson missed chocolate—badly. She’d give just about anything for a Hershey’s Kiss. “See if I can find anything useful.”
Luke undid his seat belt and followed her out of the car, his brow scrunched up. “You’re going in there by yourself?”
Jackson snorted. “What because I’m so fragile?”
“No, just…well, it’s sensible for us to go in together.”
“Don’t be stupid, Luke. What’s sensible is you cracking on getting our fuel while I try and find whatever in there,” she hiked a thumb in the direction of the garage, “might be of use to us. We don’t want to be hanging out in the open for too long. First rule when on the road: do whatever you have to do quickly and move on as soon as possible.”
“I thought the first rule was to ensure your exits? That’s what you said at the swimming pool.”
Jackson sighed and hefted Mandy. “I’m talking about open-road rules here, not hiding rules. There’s a distinct difference. Open road it’s all about keeping moving. Interiors, all about making sure you have a way to be able to move.”
“Rules aside, we’ll go in together,” he insisted, his brow doing the scrunchy thing again.
A nasty suspicion arose in Jackson’s mind then and she rubbed her fingers along Mandy’s hilt. “Are you going all me-man-I-will-protect-woman on me? Please tell me you’re not, because the whole Batman and Robin thing is not going to work. I don’t want to be Batman, or Robin, for that matter.”
Luke frowned. “No, and the comic-book analogy was stupid. I don’t know why I said it.”
She shrugged. “Guy thing. But, Luke, serious, you know I can take care of myself, right?”
He frowned some more. “I know you’re tough but we need to stick together. It’s just stupid us splitting up and putting ourselves at risk. In fact it’s the w
hole reason we’re going to have to haunt the interstate for a few days.”
“Low blow,” she said.
“I didn’t mean it to be,” Luke sighed. “But we should stick together.”
“It’s a few yards away.”
“Yes…”
She ran her thumb up and down Mandy’s hilt again. The familiar motion made her feel grounded and right. “We’re working together here.”
“Yeah”
“Which means being efficient and getting things done as quickly as possible. So you do your thing, I’ll do mine, and then we can hit the road again.”
“Jack…”
He didn’t sound convinced but she shot him a smile and left him frowning at the Batmobile before he could voice any more objections. The door to the small building was, of course, unlocked and the room itself, because it was just one room with some sort of add-on, musty in an I-haven’t-been-opened-in-ages kind of way. But someone had opened it at some point because the walls and now-silent fridges were picked completely clean. Jackson held Mandy tightly as she checked the aisles, and around the counter, but as well as a lack of anything edible, there were no zombies. She doubted they’d ever been in here. The lack of droppings and pus was a clear indication. She checked through cupboards and drawers, just in case.
Mild exasperation ran through Jackson’s mind as she thought about Luke’s reaction to her idea of splitting the work. She got that he was naturally protective. If the world hadn’t ended he’d probably have a wife, a passel of kids, and be doing the total man-of-the-house thing. He was clearly the type to want to look after the women in his life and the idea made Jackson smile, chasing the slight irritation aside. Pre-zombie she probably would have let him look after of her. Her brothers had bossed her around constantly and it had been easier to go along with their plans than put up a fight. Two years was a long time though. Two years changed a person. Two years in the land of the waking dead could change them almost beyond recognition, and she knew she had. Jackson was not the same easygoing girl she had been. She’d never be that girl again. She’d learned to take care of herself. To train her mouth not to scream when something horrific happened, or her mind not to freeze when a dead person tried to eat her. It hadn’t been easy, not at all. She’d had to become someone completely different than the person she once was, not just physically but mentally too.
She frowned and stood on her tiptoes to look out of the dusty window to see Luke bent over an abandoned car. That right there was enough to show her the difference. Two years ago she’d have looked out of this same window and given a little sigh, mooning over Luke’s hotness, and wondering how she could get him to notice her slightly overlarge ass. Now? Well, now she was more concerned about how exposed he was looking and the fact that his ax was a shade too far away from his hand. And her ass? He’d have trouble finding it these days. She shook her head, fell back to the balls of her feet, and pulled open another cupboard. Nothing. Not a goddamn thing. She kicked it shut with a growl and circled the store.
Jackson heard him long before he popped his head around the door, and resolved to have a long conversation with him that was so going to feature the word stealth. God, he reminded her of Tye.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
She straightened from where she’d been checking under the counter. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because the world is overrun with zombies.”
“Since when?”
Luke grinned and gestured to the back of the store. “Are you all done?”
“Give me two more minutes. I want to check that add-on back there.”
He nodded and backed out of the doorway, though Jackson could see it was an effort for him. It was sweet in a goofy kind of way, even endearing, but as she watched him make his way back over to a beat up truck and pop the fuel cap, she knew it simply wasn’t going to fly.
He was hot.
He was sweet.
“But you can’t let it make a difference,” she said, tearing her gaze away from the window and edging around the shelving units to the back of the store. “Got to keep yourself tough. Stay strong. Stay independent.”
The mantra played through her mind and it was no surprise that she thought of Tye. He’d never tried to look after her, not really, but then he’d been more interested in someone he could kill the zombies with than anything else, and he simply did as he pleased, ignoring her thoughts completely. She’d often ignored his thoughts too. In that, at least, they had complemented each other. And though they’d shared their journey for more than a month Jackson hadn’t once relaxed her usual guard.
Why did she think it was going to be more difficult with Luke? Even if they managed to find her erstwhile friend.
A few minutes later, after using the skanky toilet inside the add-on, she joined Luke outside. The morning light illuminated his masculine features and she swallowed unsteadily. There was no getting around the hotness. Maybe that had something to do with her worries over what she suspected was going to be a tendency on his part to try and be the Giles to her Buffy.
“No chocolate to be found. Nothing to be found, actually, place is bare. There is a toilet though, but it doesn’t flush.”
He looked up and shot her a smile, the relief in it was obvious—relief no doubt that she was still in one piece. “There’s gas in these cars,” he said, pointing to a tube sticking out of the nozzle of one. “So that’s something, and I found this tube. Just need to suck it out.”
“What are you waiting for?”
He shrugged and smiled again. “Pathetic, I know, but I hate the taste. You’d think as a mechanic I’d be used to it. The smell is fine, but the taste always makes me gag.”
“I don’t mind it,” she said, slightly endeared by his honesty, and the smiles too. “I can do it if you don’t want to.”
He pulled on the tube and shook his head. “No. I’m good.”
Jackson watched as he took a deep breath and popped the tube in his mouth. She rubbed Mandy again and looked around, scanning the buildings, the trees, everywhere. No sign of zombies anywhere. They were okay for the moment. She could let her mind wander for a moment couldn’t she? It wandered to Luke’s lap.
She grinned. It had most certainly not escaped her notice that when he’d awoken he’d had a raging hard-on. She’d felt it through his jeans a good few minutes before he’d actually opened his eyes. Their positioning meant that it had prodded her ass and she’d sort of squirmed a little on his lap as she had tried to work out what to do.
He’d woken before she could make a decision and Jackson had thought the best thing to do was just ignore it. Luke was no doubt embarrassed and she hadn’t wanted to draw attention to something that was a purely physical reaction. Men always got hard-ons in the morning. And while she suspected he was attracted to her, now was so not the time to be thinking of anything along those lines. Anticipation aside, Jackson wasn’t sure there would ever be such a time. How could there be when zombies shadowed their every move?
“Urgh…” Luke’s exclamation pulled her back on track and her grin widened as he removed the tube and spat gas on the ground, before pushing the tube into the canister in front of him. “What did I say? Tastes like shit. What I wouldn’t give for some gum.”
“Dream on, sweetheart.”
He looked up, pushed a few strands of hair out of his eyes and smiled. Jackson felt little butterflies fluttering in her stomach—though it may have been due to hunger.
“How much do you think is in there?” she asked, and even she could hear the slight catch in her voice, so maybe not hunger after all.
“A few gallons, I hope.”
The canister he’d found filled up long before the tube stopped giving them their gas, and Jackson pushed another one across to take the remaining liquid. She placed the top on the first canister, then got ready to do the same with the next.
“We should get another to see us through for a few days,” Luke continued. “I want to get as much
here, where I know we’ll find it, before we’re somewhere I’m unfamiliar with.”
Jackson nodded and secured the second canister. She pushed it across to Luke and stood up to do another security sweep. Still nothing. They were okay for a little longer.
“We’ve got a fair bit already.”
They’d lucked out with these cars. Sure there was plenty of gas around but it was a question of it being contaminated in the fuel lines or some such shit, or worse getting to it. It seemed Luke knew the whereabouts of pretty much every garage in the state—he’d visited most of them in his old job—and she suspected he could tell if it was good to use, so maybe it wasn’t so much luck but the company.
Jackson was very pleased, protective tendencies aside, that he’d agreed to come with her. In truth she was almost thankful to the zombie for infiltrating his bunker, even though she felt guilty just thinking it. It had been Luke’s home, after all. But she knew they stood a much better chance of making it to the border together. Plus there was the whole car situation.
Luke stood then and stretched. His sweater and the tees underneath rode up showing her his washboard abs again and Jackson sighed before remembering the wound below his rib cage.
“How’s the hole? No infection?”
He lifted his sweater and smiled. “Nah. It’s all good. A few more days and it should be healed up nicely. Good job too. I’m out of Johnny Walker.”
“Couple of weeks, I reckon, whiskey or not. Hopefully it’ll be healed long before we hit the south. We don’t want it festering in the heat.”
He laughed. “I never fester.”
“There’s no showers out here, Luke. Believe me, in a week or two, you will indeed be festering.”
He laughed and made a show of sniffing his armpit. “All good, so far.”