Connor sat beside Val and the two looked out over the face of the water silently for a time. Slowly bringing his hands down to his side, he produced a bottle of wine. She smiled and laughed at him and his sneaky plans.
“It’s been a long time since we’ve had any wine,” Connor said.
“Too long!” she replied. “Pour me a glass!”
“How do you feel about drinking out of the bottle?”
“Fine by me!”
“Good because glasses were too much to carry.”
He popped out the cork and handed her the bottle. The smooth gold liquid slid down her throat.
“You’re a beautiful woman, Val.”
She pulled the bottle from her lips and looked at him. “Connor,” she began but he spoke again.
“I’m sorry. Is it still too soon?”
“Connor, you have a lot to answer for.”
“I know but I’m ready. I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. For how I treated you.”
“I don’t think I’m ready for this. I thought I was, but I’m not. It hurts too much.” Val started to stand.
“But Val,” Connor said reaching for her but stopping himself. “We’ve got to figure this stuff out. I have to talk to you at some point. It’s been months. When will you let me back in?”
“I need to check on Sara.”
Val felt her emotions rising inside her and moved away quickly. Deep inside she wanted to trust him. But something inside always warned her against it.
Val looked up as she moved towards Sara and found clear skies. For the first time in months, she gazed upon the unveiled stars. As a book casts magic upon its readers so the heavens poured down their majesty on her. The night sky had changed drastically. No longer did a black sky dotted with white stars fill her eyes. She perceived firsthand the mystery of the heavens. Deep colors flashed before her accompanied by shooting embers streaking across the universe. Val couldn’t help being wooed by its beauty.
“I’m weary of war,” Sara confessed to Val as she approached Sara and sat down next to her.
“As am I.”
“Why us? Of all humanity, why are we the ones who see the end? At the time we pitied them, but the ones who died in their beds were lucky. Sometimes I wish I died a zombie or better yet died from the virus and never woke. This afterlife has been hell.”
“This isn’t anything like what I imagined it would be. Ever since that nuke went off everything changed. And it’s not all for the worse. I probably would have killed Connor by now if something hadn’t changed,” Val laughed. “But no matter what anybody says, I miss Brady. The old Brady. I know things didn’t always make sense when he was around, but he always gave us all such a sense of purpose.”
Sara glared at Val. “Do you not remember him at all? Have you already forgotten? He’s why we’re here and hunted. You may not feel it, but he’s brought the weight of the world like an arrow against my head. We’re better off without him.” She stood up tall in the firelight. “I’m ready to use my gift for us. I’ll focus all my thoughts on the immediate future. I’ve been practicing. I can protect us! I’ll tell us everything. Where so and so should stand to not die. Where you should fire to get a direct hit. We’ll be ok!”
“Sara, I’m afraid of what that would do to you. If you could do this, why couldn’t you save Chuck?”
Sara turned to Val and cast a burning gaze towards her. “Don’t you ever talk to me about him. You don’t know anything! Val, I can see the future in a way you could never understand! I’m not like you anymore. I see things.”
“You see us die?”
Sara became solemn. “I see things few mortals have ever seen. I know things I wish I didn’t.”
“Sara, I don’t want to add the stress of you constantly watching over us,” Val said. “You’re not responsible for us. You should think of your baby.”
“Don’t push me out of the group. I’m already an outsider! I just want to help. Let me help you!”
“You are part of the group. Why do you think you’re not?”
At this point, Val realized something was terribly wrong with Sara. As if unseen bugs attacked her, Sara began swatting the air as she stood staggering backwards. “Get away from me!” Val rose and tried to comfort her but Sara grew worse with her attempts. Sara backed away from Val as if she were a zombie. “I see blood in your mouth rotting your teeth!”
The bizarre spectacle drew Connor’s attention and he quickly hobbled over to them.
“And you,” Sara yelled at Connor as he approached, “I am repulsed by the blood on your hands! It cries to me although none of you have ears to hear it!” Sara fell to her knees and her eyes rolled back inside her head. “I see the breaking of the world. Like a board, it splinters. And the spirits of the earth,” at this her voice changed to a higher tone, “try to fly away!” In a deeper tone she finished, “but they eat them whole.”
Sara opened her eyes to find everyone staring at her wildly. “When I put it into words, I realize just how alone I am.” With tears in her eyes she stood and ran frantically to another part of the beach.
Val relentlessly pursued her and stood at a distance until Sara finally calmed down and let her approach.
“I’m like them now,” Sara whispered as Val held her. “With skeletons and weird voices. Maybe I’ll go start my own hotel too.” Sara whimpered softly. “You have no idea what it’s like to watch your friends die over and over.”
“Sara, I don’t know if you’ve seen me die.” She quickly raised her hands and yelled, “And I don’t want to know! But when my end comes I’ll embrace it fully. I know it’s an insane thing to say, but-” Val smiled and looked Sara in the eye. “I’ve been through a lot. I’ve been experimented on and was twisted into this barely human monster. I’ve killed and eaten people, dealt with the fallout of a failed marriage, and been hunted by an army of zombies in the wilderness. And that’s just what I remember! But after all that, I can honestly say I’m happy.
“I don’t know the life I had before, but I’ve appreciated your, Connor’s, and Moses’ friendship more than I could ever say. I don’t know if Connor and I are ever going to fix the shit-go-round that is our relationship-”
“Connor’s going to die.”
Val’s expression melted as she looked at Sara shocked. After a long pause she said, “Why would you tell me that?”
“I had to tell someone. It’s been eating me alive.” Sara tried to say more, but Val got up and walked into the sea. Val waded to one of the farthest sandbars and sat alone in the crimson moonlight.
After a while, Connor realized Val moved and went out to join her on the sandbar.
“Hi,” she greeted him softly.
He sat next to her and looked out across the light dancing on the waves. “Is Sara ok?”
“She’ll be fine. She’s just able to see through time now. How can that not affect her strongly?” She took his hand and moved over to lean against him. Together they watched the red waves.
Val let her hand move to his handcuffs. Gently, she ran her finger between its inner ring and Connor’s wrist. “These seem stupid now,” Val said. “You’ve changed so much.”
“I deserved them.”
“Well, we should take them off. You’re going to need your hands free,” she said softly and threw him an unmistakable look.
His heart pounded in his chest.
“Are you sure? Because if you’re not-”
“Shhh,” she whispered as she began to rise. She took his hand and led him back to the beach and up the stairs to the street. Like young lovers running from their parents, the couple dashed into the shadows as quickly as Connor could hobble.
“There,” Val pointed to a fire station. Connor thought it an odd place to make love but went along with it. Val threw open the door and flipped on her flashlight.
Val’s searching confused Connor. So he said, “The beds are probably upstairs.”
Val looked at him. “Ha ha, very funny.
” She took something from the nearby wall and turned to face Connor. He was startled when the object turned out to be a fireman’s axe.
“What’s going on?” He said in a slow, confused tone.
“Just put your hands on the floor here,” she replied nonchalantly.
Connor very slowly complied. But when Val raised the axe above her head, he quickly withdrew his hands.
“What are you doing?”
“Cutting the handcuffs!”
“Just use the key!”
“I don’t have the key!”
At this Connor was speechless. His mouth just hung open. “Well what did you do with it?”
“I never had it!”
“All this time, you’ve never had the key?”
“No. Do you not remember how mad I was when I put these on you? I didn’t care if you ever got out.”
“You sent me limping into the zombie apocalypse with my hands tied together and no way to get out? It’s amazing I haven’t been eaten!”
“At the time, I was ok with that!”
“You!” Connor laughed. “You are a piece of work!”
She smiled at him. “I know.”
“Come here,” he said welcoming her into his shackled embrace. Together they sat on the floor for a moment. Her body felt warm in his arms. “What am I going to do with you?”
“I don’t know but don’t handcuff me. I don’t want to die out there!”
“Nice, babes.”
Val rested against him silently. He looked, for the first time in months, at her smooth skin. “I forget how much of a beautiful woman you are. You’ve been a leader for so long I usually just see you as that. The wastelands have made you tough.”
“I’m tired of being tough, Connor. I want to open up to you again and let you in. But I’m scared. Afraid. Can I trust you?”
“Val, I meant to hurt you. I lost my family and was in a rage. I just didn’t know that until I was close to another woman again. I have grieved over how I treated you. I am so sorry! If you give me your heart again, I will be good to it. I will steward it like I should have in the first place. I can’t believe I had something so precious and treated it so poorly. I want to be good to you. I also want to share with you some of the realizations I’ve had about my family. But that’s probably for another time.”
“Because the sooner we stop talking, the sooner you get lucky?”
Connor laughed. “You always had a way with words.”
Connor knelt down and put his hands on the concrete floor stretching out the chain of his handcuffs.
“I trust you,” Connor said.
“Then why are you closing your eyes and have that look on your face?”
“Just remember,” he said looking up at her, “if you chop off my hand, you’re not getting any tonight!”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Val raised the axe and swung. Sparks flew as the axe head impacted the chain.
Connor looked to find it still intact. He breathed in deeply and closed his eyes again.
It took several hits, but Val managed to cut one of the links. For the first time in months, Connor spread his hands apart.
Val threw the axe to the floor and they both laughed at his new freedom. Connor rose and kissed her as he wrapped his arms around her.
“I saw a beautiful house a block back,” Val said. “Want to check it out?”
He put his hand in hers and they dashed down the empty streets and came to a small house nestled between two taller buildings. Once inside, they found what appeared to be a teenage girl’s bedroom. Val stood for a moment to admire the work of art it was. The previous resident had covered the walls with poetry beautifully written on pages of notebook paper. With pages falling down around them, Val embraced him with a wild and desperate love mingled with forgiveness.
When Connor woke, he found Val’s face on a pillow next to him. Her eyes softly stared into his.
“Good morning,” she whispered.
“Hey,” he replied in a loving tone that two days ago he only dreamed of using with her. “I love you.” They stared at each other for a moment until the dim sunlight caught Connor’s eye. ”We should probably get back. Everyone must be wondering where we are.”
“They’ll be fine, Connor. They can wait an hour for us.” She smiled and added, “It’s not the end of the world! What were you going to tell me about your family? You know, I don’t even know their names.”
“Some of that was my fault. I never really wanted to talk about them. It’s kind of like you and your past life. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring up that stuff anymore.” Connor sighed. “My wife’s name was Rachel. She was a beautiful woman. Red hair. Fiery. She would have liked you. My two kids were Aiden and Britney.”
“They died in the infection right?”
“Yes, all three of them never woke. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I’m not sure I could have handled any of them becoming zombies. Although I envied Brady after he’d saved Sara, I was never jealous of him having to watch his wife in her madness. It was a miserable time for him.
“When the virus hit, I was on my way home from work. I couldn’t have known that morning would be the last time I’d see them. I’d left work a little early and arrived home probably around 5:30. So they’d been dead maybe fifteen or twenty minutes when I arrived. I knew something had happened because of the chaos outside but I didn’t know what yet. I’d tried to call but she didn’t answer and then the phones were busy or disconnected.
“I thought it was World War III. So I boarded up the house and prepared for an invasion. I lived there for three days with my family’s dead bodies lying in the living room. I didn’t dare go outside. I just watched from the windows as the zombies ran around attacking and devouring people. Looking back, I was so stupid to stay in the house. I didn’t even have any guns! I don’t know what I would have done if the zombies tried to get in. After those three days, I knew I couldn’t leave their bodies in the city to be eaten. So I loaded them up in our caravan. I still remember the feeling of having my dead family in the back and waiting to press the garage door opener to the chaos outside. It was the worst moment of my life.
“I drove out of our neighborhood and came across a pack of zombies down by the main street. They charged me and I had no choice other than ramming them. I can still remember the sound of their bodies impacting the caravan and being crushed under the wheels. I almost threw up. If I had time to pull over, I probably would have. It all seemed so barbaric.
“I finally made it outside the city and into the eastern plain. I just drove for what seemed like hours under the weight of it all. I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t because then I’d have to bury them. Then it would be over and they would really be gone. But finally the gas tank convinced me that I had to stop.
“I grabbed the shovel and started digging. I bore into the ground relentlessly until my arms gave out. And then I sat there weeping in the earth unwilling to rise because I knew I’d have to see their faces. So when it started to get dark, I opened the back of the caravan and unwrapped them. I couldn’t help looking! My babies stared off into nothing. Lifeless. I couldn’t even give them caskets or separate graves. I know I’ve been desensitized to death now, but back then it stung me to the core to see such horror. It was the most dreadful thing I’d ever experienced.
“About half way through covering them, a zombie approached out of the darkness. Where it came from, I still don’t know. It caught me unaware and I barely managed to break its grasp. I beat it into a heap with the shovel. Again and again I wailed against it until I’d broken its skull into chunks. I hacked off all its appendages and separated them. I was afraid the arms might come back to life on their own so I chopped everything into pieces. I remember being so mad that it wouldn’t bleed. It sounds so weird but I wanted a satisfying blood-spurting experience. I wanted justice!
“When I came back to my house, Brady soon met me. He stood outside screaming my name until I
opened the door. He stood there almost nonchalantly with an arsenal of weaponry in his car. It was good to see a friendly face. In the days after, I started killing zombies like crazy. Brady got frustrated with me when I’d purposefully engage them when we could have avoided them. I probably killed hundreds of the undead those first couple months.
“I didn’t even realize it until lately, but I’ve tried several times to fill the void of my family. First, I used killing. When that didn’t satisfy me, I threw myself into researching a cure. But when I figured that out, it just made me even angrier. Brady got his Sara back. But what did I get? Nothing. Every time someone was cured and knew someone else that had been cured, I hated it. I hated watching people be reunited.
“I was so miserable inside. You of all people knew this, Val. I raped you out of desperate anger. I was filled with hate at everything! So lost. Everything I grasped onto slipped away from me. So I held on tighter and tighter. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t lose you. I couldn’t see that the tighter I held you the more I drove you away from me. I was such an idiot!
“About that time, we started rebuilding Colorado Springs. It was my perfect opportunity! I became convinced this would satisfy me. That’s why I was so obsessed with it. I hated Brady for his secrets and his reunion with Sara. I hated seeing them happy together.
“But then came the nuke. And all my dreams went up in flames. I was wholly lost. Broken. You hated me. I was cast out of leadership. I had nothing! It was in this despair that I finally started to process what had happened to me over the last several years. We were at the hotel in the wilderness when I wrote a letter to my family. I didn’t realize I’d taken the grief of losing them and spread it all over my life.
“Only then did I know that I wanted to salvage whatever you and I had, Val. That became my top priority. I’d already lost so much and stood at the brink of losing you as well. If there were any way you’d still have me, I wanted you back.”
Connor brushed her hair from her face as he said, “And here you are.”
Val waited to see if he finished. When he did not speak again, she said, “Thank you for telling me all that. It makes me glad I didn’t let you go completely. I almost did. I wasn’t joking when I said I was fine with you getting eaten by zombies.”
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