by Bryan Smith
He pulled the door shut and looked at Jasmine. “Okay.”
Jasmine nodded.
She put the car in gear again and drove on down the road.
Warren sighed. “Do you have a gun?”
Jasmine looked at him. “Forget that. I won’t let you kill yourself over this.”
Warren grunted. “And why the hell not? What the fuck is the point of living anymore? You saw what happened to Amanda. That could happen to me. Or you. At any goddamn minute.”
Jasmine’s gaze went back to the road. “The point,” she said, “is I don’t want to be alone.” Her voice thickened with some emotion. “Okay?”
Warren’s brow furrowed.
He didn’t know what to say to that.
Not yet anyway.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nashville, TN
September 29
Noon
The apartment was in a complex in a suburb of Nashville called Antioch. Mountain High Apartments. Funny name, because there didn’t seem to be any mountains in the vicinity. Antioch was as desolate as any of the other communities they’d passed through on the way up from Alabama. And as tainted by the evidence of decay as those other communities. The sky above them was as cloudless, but there was something…not quite right about it. The brilliant blue Zeke knew they should be seeing just wasn’t there. The daytime sky had a washed-out look, as if they were viewing it through a vast and filthy expanse of gauze. He’d initially attributed this to fallout from the nuclear exchanges, but now he wasn’t so sure.
He had a theory. He believed the sky’s dull hue was just a fresh wrinkle in an ongoing process, another way in which the fabric of reality was changing. And, yes, decaying. A rot of some sort had set in, some infection brought into this world by the inhabitants of that other place. The evidence of that rot was all around them. In the countryside, where verdant stretches of forest seemed to wither before their eyes, the leaves of trees turning black even as ripe and sturdy limbs sagged and turned bone-dry. And in the cities, those empty amalgamations of concrete and steel and glittering glass, where buildings that must have been very new were nonetheless beginning to crumble, towering monuments to capitalism that suddenly were looking as shabby as rickety backwater shacks.
And then there were the dead people. Not just the ones killed by the flying demons on that nightmarish day, but others, people who had dropped dead in the intervening time. Old people, sure, but also young, apparently healthy people. Zeke was certain that something in the shifting nature of existence was killing them, some poison from that other place. He could only assume that he and Mary Lou were immune to whatever it was. That, or they had yet to come into contact with the gas or germ responsible. If some percentage of the world’s human population truly was immune to the effects of the rot, Zeke reckoned it must be a very tiny number. One percent, maybe. Or less.
But there’d been one family living at Mountain High when they arrived, a young mother and father and a boy of about ten. Zeke’s spirits soared at the sight of them. They’d come running up to his Lexus when—at Mary Lou’s direction—he’d driven into the complex. He remembered the way their eyes had glimmered with relief, an emotion that mirrored his own feelings.
That relief was short-lived.
Because Mary Lou, still as stark naked as she’d been when Zeke first laid eyes on her, got out of the car and blew them away with her shotgun.
That was yesterday. And the bloody images would not stop replaying in Zeke’s head. Mary Lou’s unrestrained savagery so intimidated Zeke that he was unable to make an attempt to flee, not even when she returned to the car to reload the shotgun from a box of shells she’d swiped from a Wal-Mart the day before. That had been his opportunity, his one big chance to put an end to this insanity. He was bigger than her. Stronger than her. He could have ripped the unloaded gun from her hands. Probably should have beaten her senseless with weapon’s butt end.
But he’d done no such thing. He just sat there, hands locked on the steering wheel, eyes staring straight ahead. Afraid to move. Afraid to even breathe. Then she had the gun loaded again and it was too late. She made him get out of the car and he’d done so immediately. Never in his life had he been so thoroughly cowed by another human being. He knew in that moment there was nothing he wouldn’t do if she so instructed. At her command, he’d drop to his knees and lick the still-warm blood of the murdered innocents off the ground. He’d piss in their wounds, defecate on them, or perform any other humiliating act that crossed her fancy.
He had no doubt she would’ve made him do those things if she had thought of them. There had been ample proof of that in the days since she’d abducted him on that lonely stretch of Alabama highway. Like the time yesterday when she’d forced him to kiss and fondle the days-old corpse of a fat woman in the Wal-Mart’s bathroom. She took pictures of the morbid clinch with a Polaroid camera, laughing hysterically all the while. She later glued the snapshots to the dash of his car, and the sickening images had taunted him the rest of the way to Nashville.
Coming to Nashville was Mary Lou’s idea, of course. She was a big country music fan and wanted to see all the sights. It didn’t seem to matter to her that all her favorite country performers were probably dead. She wanted to see the Country Music Hall of Fame and maybe pillage some of the souvenir shops. She planned to enter the city tomorrow. He would accompany her, of course. He was duty-bound to do so as her ‘significant other’, or so she’d told him. That was another thing. He wasn’t just her prisoner anymore. Nope, as far as Mary Lou was concerned, he was her boyfriend—same as Billy had been until she’d blown his brains out.
She was completely out of her fucking mind.
Zeke strained against the lengths of black electrical cord she’d used to tie him to the headboard. He thought he detected a bit of give around his left wrist and was pretty sure he could get himself free if he had enough time to work at it. Mary Lou was gone for now. Out foraging or looking for other innocent people to slaughter for kicks. He gave his left wrist a hard twist. The cord loosened a bit more. The lower portion of his thumb was on the verge of being able to pass through the loop.
Then Mary Lou walked into the bedroom and all hope of escape fled. She leaned the shotgun against a wall and plopped down on the edge of the bed. “Trying to get away, Zeke?”
Zeke sighed. “Sort of. I guess.”
Mary Lou smirked. “I really oughta punish you for that. Give you a good thrashing. Put you in your fucking place again.”
Zeke grimaced. He’d endured several ‘thrashings’ at her hands already. They were not pleasant experiences. “Why don’t you just kill me and be done with it?”
Mary Lou rolled her eyes. “’Cause then I’d get real fuckin’ bored real fuckin’ fast.” She dragged the long nails of her right hand down his bare chest. “Anyway, I ain’t gonna thrash ya today. Just don’t feel like it.”
Zeke felt an immense wave of gratitude wash over him, but he didn’t want her to see how relieved he was. He looked away from her and said, “Whatever.”
She gripped his penis. “Wanna fuck?”
Zeke grew hard in her hand.
Amazing.
He loathed this woman. She was a monster. She had no more regard for human life than she did for the life of a fly or mosquito. The memory of what the shotgun’s blast did to that boy’s face jabbed at his psyche like an icepick to the brain. Yet some helpless, primal part of his brain wanted what Mary Lou was offering. She climbed atop him and guided his cock into her already very wet pussy. She rode him for a while, bucking and whooping as enthusiastically as a drunken secretary riding a mechanical bull on nickel beer night. After he shot his load up inside her, she climbed off him, jumped off the bed, and disappeared through a door adjacent to the bedroom. A sound of running water came from the bathroom. Zeke felt a fresh surge of revulsion—directed both at Mary Lou and at himself.
Because he’d enjoyed it.
So now he felt lower than dirt. He thought o
f the bodies of his sex partner’s victims decaying on the ground outside, and felt a tickle of bile at the back of his throat. An ache flared behind his eyes. So he closed them and tried to focus on anything other than the sex smell permeating the room. Like how he might get himself free of this nightmare his life had become. Since the night of his abduction, the death of civilization had become a secondary concern. He was at the mercy of a deranged person, and every moment that elapsed with his heart still beating seemed like a miracle.
She came out of the bathroom some twenty minutes or so later, still dripping wet from the shower. Her hair, which he was accustomed to seeing in a big, poofy style that had last been in vogue in the mid 1980’s, was plastered to her scalp and hung halfway down her back. She moved to the foot of the bed, where she dried off—very slowly and methodically—with a fluffy white tail. She propped each leg on the bed as she dried them, giving him long looks at the glistening spot between them.
She winked. “Enjoying the show?”
Zeke forced himself to look at the ceiling. He tried to rid his head of the taunting images. He thought of disgusting things. Piles of shit and raw sewage. He recalled images of all the dead and mutilated people he’d seen in the last few days. So much death. So much misery. The word ‘tragedy’ didn’t seem adequate to describe it all. Catastrophe, he thought. Yes, that was closer. He imagined the pain suffered by the victims of those airborne monsters. Tears stung his eyes. He realized the sublimation tactic had worked when he saw Mary Lou standing again at the foot of the bed, her pretty face twisted by a frown.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Zeke?”
Tears spilled down Zeke’s cheeks. His chest hitched, and a moment later he was sobbing uncontrollably. He was vaguely aware of Mary Lou yelling at him, ordering him to “stop acting like a fuckin’ baby.” But the stream of tears just wouldn’t dry up. Then Mary Lou did a strange, unexpected thing. She curled up next to him on the bed and buried her face in the crook of his neck. She made shushing noises and stroked his hair. The notion of being comforted by the likes of Mary Lou struck him as obscene, but he was surprised to find something within him responding to her ministrations anyway. When his tears at last began to subside, he felt her mouth on his. He lay frozen for a moment, feeling again that reflexive flush of revulsion—but then he was kissing her back, drawing her tongue into his mouth and feeling a shudder of pleasure at its warmth.
It was the first time they’d kissed. She’d used him to get herself off a number of times, but never had there been any actual intimacy in the acts. A wave of heat suffused his body, made him ache with desire. Nothing other than that desire mattered now. Not the death of the world. Not Mary Lou’s monstrous acts of murder. She was alive, and he was alive, and for now that was good enough. He gave himself over to her completely then. And she to him. It felt good to get lost in sensation, to forget everything but the pleasure of flesh. Maybe this was how they could keep that monumental sense of loss at bay—by literally fucking the pain away.
Mary Lou pushed away from him, smiled, and began to undo the lengths of black cord. When she was through, she tossed them to the floor. She sat next to him, smiling, waiting to see what he would do.
Zeke rubbed at the sore spots on his wrists. He looked at Mary Lou, who regarded him expectantly.
This is it, he thought. My big chance.
He could get out of here. Or he could get to the shotgun, turn it on Mary Lou and make her pay for her crimes. Instead, he put a hand at the back of her neck. Again, here was a chance. He could get both hands around that slender throat, push her to the bed, and choke the life out of her.
Part of him figured he should do it, after all she’d done.
But he didn’t choke her to death either. He kissed her again instead, more fiercely even than before. When their lips parted, she made a low sound in her throat that was almost a growl. He took her then, parting her legs and driving his hardness deep inside her. In the midst of it an image of the boy’s face blowing apart flickered through his mind. Then it scattered, like ashes in a breeze.
Nothing else matters, he told himself.
Nothing but this.
Not anymore.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nashville
September 29
12:39 p.m.
The image on the monitor went fuzzy again. Emily snarled and smacked the side of it with her palm. “Goddammit!”
Jake came into the bedroom and took a seat in the folding chair next to her. “Whoa, what’s happening here?”
Emily sighed. “What’s happening here is that Laura Brandner’s stone-age computer is pissing me off. I’m about to chuck it out the window.”
Jake looked haggard. His eyes were bloodshot, and his face had a gaunt, haunted cast. He hadn’t slept much since that first night, when he’d awakened to the sound of an intruder in the apartment. He chased off whoever it was, the intruder zipping down the stairwell and out the building before Jake could get a good look at him. Not that a visual verification was really necessary. They both were sure it’d been Aaron.
Emily had slept through the whole thing, but when Jake told her about it the next day, her first impulse was to move to another location. They couldn’t be safe with Aaron lurking about. She didn’t want to always have to be looking over her shoulder, worried that he might jump her at any moment. Plus, there was Abby to worry about.
But Jake convinced her to stay. His reasoning was that a confrontation was inevitable. Aaron was clearly a sick, obsessed fuck who would not give up until he had what he wanted. Moving would only slightly delay a showdown. Jake believed they should remain where psycho-boy could easily find them.
Sooner or later, he’d come after them again.
And Jake would be ready for him.
Emily’s gaze went to the Glock pistol resting in Jake’s lap. He’d taken it from Phil’s safe at the Villager Pub. She frowned. “Do you really mean to shoot Aaron with that thing?”
Jake nodded. “I do.”
Emily was again surprised to see grim determination evident in his eyes. “I just never would have imagined you’d have that in you. To be able to kill a man, I mean.”
Jake held her gaze a moment, then looked at the computer monitor. “I’ve changed, Em. I can’t be a pacifist in this new world.” He looked at Emily. “It’s depressing, I guess, especially in light of all we’ve lost. But surviving—and I know we mean to survive—means we have to adapt. It means we have to…”
“Become savages.”
Jake shrugged. “Yeah. That’s about the size of it.”
“Well, it sucks.”
Jake’s smile then was small and sad. “I know, Em. But I’m going to kill that man. I’m going to put this gun to his head and blow his fucking brains out. It’s the only way. You can threaten him a million times, but he’ll just keep coming back. And if we fuck around and don’t exterminate him like the fucking pest he is, one day he’ll come back better armed than we are.”
Emily sighed. “Unless we just leave town.”
“Right.” Jake ran a hand through hair grown greasy over the last two days. “Which you said you’d never do.”
Emily grunted. “Yeah. Well, maybe it’s time I adapt to this fucked-up new paradigm, too. I mean, this town has been my home forever, but…”
Jake nodded but didn’t say anything. There was a simple decision to be made. Leave, or make a conscious choice to have a man killed. And Emily knew it was her decision to make. Jake would abide by whatever choice she made. Emily supposed it was a tougher decision than it ought to be. The pragmatic and obvious choice was flight. But her heart was anchored to this town. She had been born here. Had grown up and lived here. Nashville was home. And, broken though it was, the city was all that was left to her of the world she’d known. So it made her furious to think she might have to leave it forever because of Aaron Harris.
“There’s Abby to think of, too. We’re her guardians by default. Doesn’t matter that we didn’
t ask for the responsibility. It’s just the way it is. We have to think of her safety first.”
Jake nodded again—and again said nothing. He was clearly waiting for Emily to steer herself toward the inevitable conclusion by talking it out. He knew what had to happen and so did she.
So she jumped ahead to it: “We have to leave. Today. As soon as we can.”
Jake smiled. “I’m ready whenever you are.” He looked at the computer monitor. “Any luck with that thing yet?”
Emily shook her head. “Laura’s ISP is still up-and-running, amazingly. She’s got cable internet, at least. Otherwise we’d have been fucked from the beginning, what with the phones being out. Turns out, though, that’s been our only lucky break.”
Jake arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”
Emily indicated the fuzzy monitor with a nod. “On top of everything else, this thing looks ready to die. Not that it matters. There’s been next to nothing to see anyway. I’ve gone into chatrooms, posted messages all across the internet, mostly BBS’s with a southern regional focus. The newest messages I’ve seen were posted the morning after those things attacked. A fair smattering of them, too. So there were other survivors, even some who identified themselves as being in Tennessee. That got my hopes up. There was this one sort of oddball guy right here in town. Called himself Captain Flash Wheeler. Posted a slew of messages claiming to have experienced some sort of religious epiphany. Claims that he was a car mechanic before doomsday, but a vision told him he’s the One True God.”
Jake smirked. “Sounds like a nut. We’re better off not hooking up with anyone like that.”
Emily shrugged. “Maybe. He hasn’t posted anything in over a day, either. I posted replies to other people who seemed to be nearby, suggested everyone still alive in the area hook up at a central location.” The deep frustration she felt was evident in the way she slumped further in her chair and stared blankly at the monitor. “But no one’s responded. Everyone still alive the day after is either dead now, on the move, or they’ve stopped paying attention to their computers.”