by Adrian Birch
“Let’s leave Aunt Ashley alone for a little while,” he said graciously, avoiding Danielle’s gaze. “She’s probably starving.”
He was right. I was famished. Other than the military rations that the Home Guard had delivered to the house, my parents seemed only to have an endless supply of freezer-burnt roast beef and white bread. While I was making a sandwich each for Ian, Bryce, and myself, I ate at least another sandwich’s worth of the meat with my fingers. I still had a strange, insatiable craving for a hamburger and a milkshake, but instead I poured a big glass of milk and gulped it down. I hadn’t craved milk like this since I was a kid, but I couldn’t get enough of it. I poured a second glass.
I brought Ian and Bryce their sandwiches. They thanked me effusively. Both of them looked guilty that they hadn’t helped me while they’d sat on the porch with beers.
But completing these little tasks kept my mind occupied. It prevented me from collapsing in a heap and totally breaking down, which I was afraid I might do now that I was relatively safe at the house.
Because Shawn was only a private, he had to bunk at the Home Guard Center, so the couch was free. I put sheets on the cushions for Bryce and laid out a blanket. I made myself another sandwich and took it upstairs to my old bedroom.
The internet had been shut down. When I tried to log on, the only accessible site was homeguard.gov, which automatically appeared after I opened the browser. The site had maps of each residential district, a ration distribution schedule, and an emergency hotline for “reporting individuals suspected of being infected with the TGV pathogen.” In big, red letters running across the top of the screen, it warned, “IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING” followed by a phone number.
The same thing happened when I tried to use the internet on my phone. The Home Guard website immediately appeared, and I couldn’t access any other page.
I showered. I put on a pair of threadbare sweats that I’d long ago discarded. I couldn’t believe how much weight I’d lost. I studied myself in the mirror for the first time in days. My cheeks had hollowed out, and I could actually see the contours of my abdominal muscles. I hadn’t looked like this since I was fourteen.
Good, I thought. I was looking hot, actually. All the better for tempting Jason.
I brushed my teeth and got into bed without saying good night to anyone. I fell asleep going over all the things I could say to Jason to make him believe I actually wanted to sleep with him.
* * *
Sometime late at night, Bryce came into my room.
He closed the door softly, then sat at the edge of my bed.
“Ashley,” he whispered.
I’d been in a deep sleep, and I tried not to be too annoyed that he’d woken me. I said, “If you’re looking for a late-night Lady Gaga dance party, sorry, but I’m little worn out.”
He laughed quietly. “I guess I’ll go ask your mom if she’s down, then.”
I smiled at the thought. “You’d probably have better luck with my dad.”
I hadn’t moved since Bryce had sat on my bed. I closed my eyes. I could feel his weight on my mattress. For a while he just sat there in the dark.
Finally I asked, “What’s up?”
The night was completely quiet. There was no wind. There were no crickets. Just a deep, dark silence.
“I just can’t stop thinking about it,” Bryce whispered. “When they locked us up in those U-Hauls, I kept dreaming we were back in the coffin. And when I woke up, it was so dark I thought maybe I really was in the coffin again. I kept spreading out my arms, trying to convince myself I was only in the back of a van.” He drew in a deep breath. I think he’d started to cry a little, but he was holding it back. “God, I really thought I was going to die in that fucking thing.”
When he stopped talking, the night’s silence rushed back in. It was almost like we were alone together in the coffin again.
“I thought I was going to die in there, too,” I whispered. What else could I say?
I sensed Bryce turning to look at me. I could just make out his profile. It seemed like he wanted to say more but couldn’t find the right words.
I felt myself start to nod off again. I was exhausted.
“I’m really tired.” I reached out and touched his knee for a moment, then pulled my hand back under my covers. “I have a big day tomorrow.”
“Right,” Bryce said. “Sorry.”
He stood and stepped softly from the room. I heard him make his way quietly back down the stairs.
But now that he’d left, I couldn’t sleep. I started regretting making him leave. I did want to talk about what we’d gone through together, at some point. I knew that no one else in the world would ever be able to understand what it was like to be trapped beneath the earth. No one else would ever be able to understand what we’d shared down there. No one.
I tried to go back to sleep.
I tried not to think about Bryce or how alone I’d started to feel.
Instead, I thought about Morgan, but that only made things worse. I missed talking to her so much. I just wanted to call her on the phone like I’d normally do if I were feeling shitty, but I couldn’t. It was hard to bear the idea that I may never be able to talk to her again.
I felt even more alone than before. It was like I was a tiny speck of dust floating out in the frozen, starry universe.
For a moment I thought about waking Ian and talking to him, but I couldn’t. It would be weird. Right now he was fast asleep in bed with Danielle, quietly keeping all of his secrets from her.
I lay awake for an hour, maybe two. I couldn’t go back to sleep.
* * *
Just before dawn, I crept downstairs.
I could tell right away that Bryce wasn’t asleep.
I lay down on the couch beside him and pulled the sheet over us both.
Bryce wrapped his arms around me.
I started to cry. I couldn’t help it. I just sobbed for a few minutes while he held on to me.
“It’s okay,” he whispered.
And then we were kissing. I wasn’t sure if I kissed him, or if he kissed me. We were just kissing.
Soon, somehow, I was on top of him. I took his shirt off and stripped my own as quickly as I could. I couldn’t think of anything but being as close to him as physically possible. I felt his bare chest against my breasts, and I put my arms around his neck. I pressed my body into his with all my weight.
Very suddenly, but quietly, he flipped us both over so that I was on my back.
He lay between my legs. He was still wearing jeans, but I could feel through my threadbare sweats how hard he was when he pressed into me.
I unbuckled his belt. As soon as I started, he tore off my sweats and underwear all at once. I couldn’t believe how wet I was. I unzipped his pants, reached into his underwear, and—I couldn’t help it—pulled him straight inside me.
Maybe I was falling in love with him. Ever since we’d been trapped alone together inside the coffin, Bryce and I had been linked together. Neither of us would ever see our lives in the same way afterward, and only the two of us could really understand what that meant. My marriage with Shawn was obviously over. A future inside the Muldoon quarantine zone living amid a devastating plague wasn’t much of a future, but it was the only future any of us had. Maybe Bryce and I could share it together.
As soon as I pulled him inside me, he pressed in even deeper.
The sex we had was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I knew there was some chance that he could be infected, and that I was responding to the pathogen’s pheromones. But the emotions felt so real and so human. Bryce was staggeringly tender with me and yet so irresistibly firm at the same time. He whispered how he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about me while we were locked away from one another, then grabbed my pelvis and pushed so deep inside me I thought I would explode with pleasure.
I started to come, and it was all I could do to keep from yelling out and waking everybody up. Bryce put his ha
nd over my mouth and I bit into his finger, which only made him drive deeper inside me.
But just before he came, that self-preserving part of me rose back up in my consciousness, and I pulled away from him. I grabbed his penis in both of my hands as he cried out, arching his back, and I felt his warm semen leap onto my belly and breasts.
Bryce heaved a huge sigh, collapsed beside me, cradled my head in his arms, and kissed my forehead.
He whispered something. “You and me,” he said. “We’re going to stick together.”
I kissed him softly.
It was so hard not to just fall asleep in his arms. I hadn’t felt such warm, satisfied peace since long before the plague.
But the morning sky was growing brighter. The sun was already about to rise. My family would be up soon. I had to get back to my bedroom.
I grabbed a tissue from the box on the side table.
It was just at that most vulnerable of moments, as I was wiping Bryce’s semen from my belly, that I saw someone standing in the living room window—a woman. And at her hip was a young boy, maybe two years old.
She was about my age. The first rays of morning sunlight were coming over the plains, illuminating one side of her face and her freshly straightened hair. She was beautiful, like she belonged on a TV show. And she was staring right at me.
I was completely naked. Bryce, asleep, had collapsed on one of my legs. His head rested on my breast. Morning sunlight was falling on his bare ass.
The woman screamed.
“You have got to be kidding me!” she yelled through the window. “Are you kidding me?”
She stomped across the porch and threw open the front door, oblivious that anyone was asleep in the house…or she just didn’t care.
Bryce looked at her, groaned, and then let his face fall onto the sofa pillow.
The woman stormed toward us.
“Seriously?!” she screamed, even louder than before.
The boy in her arms looked like he was on the verge of crying, but his face was frozen.
I scrambled to wrap the sheet around my shoulders, which left Bryce uncovered.
He tugged on his pants, taking his time to zip them. He left his belt unfastened.
“Lindsay,” was all he said.
I saw that the woman was wearing a wedding band and a huge engagement ring. Now it was my turn to yell at Bryce. “Are you kidding me?” I screamed. Everyone in the house had to be up by now anyway.
Bryce looked at me, defeated. He shrugged.
“Yeah,” the woman yelled at me. “I’m his wife. He’s fucking married. With—” she gestured silently at the boy in her arms, obviously Bryce’s son. She smiled acerbically. “Surprised? I fucking bet.”
“Lindsay,” Bryce repeated.
It was like he was capable only of repeating his wife’s name. He just sat back in the couch, shirtless, with a surprisingly unapologetic expression.
“I came all the way out here looking for you,” Lindsay screamed, nodding indignantly. “And then they tell me I can’t leave town? I spend a week in a shitty motel, then finally track you down, thinking these fucking Nazi robocops are after you, and here you are with—” she shook her head, finally whispering as she pointed at me, “her?”
“The phones were down.” Bryce stared at his wife with a strange confidence. “I tried to call. I couldn’t.”
Lindsay just stared at him, speechless, shocked at this response. Finally, his son started to cry.
Bryce looked slowly from Lindsay to me. Again, he just shrugged.
I slapped him. I slapped him really hard. I cuffed him across the jaw with the full weight of my arm. I couldn’t believe how he was acting. I didn’t even recognize him as the Bryce I’d known.
For a brief moment, he looked at me with an expression of shame and contrition.
“I just—” he began, but he couldn’t complete his sentence.
Suddenly, I understood. I backed away from him instinctively, horrified, gathering the sheet around my body.
When Bryce had just tried to speak, but couldn’t, he’d made this quivering jerk of the jaw just like Morgan did when she’d tried to speak in the silo.
Bryce was infected.
I had no doubt. He’d been so charmingly talkative before we’d gotten trapped in the coffin. But ever since then, he’d hardly said anything. I’d thought it was because of the trauma he’d gone through, but I’d been wrong. Bryce had been speaking in shorter and shorter sentences, until finally this morning he’d gone into this strange, sexually charged state of speaking only in very terse phrases. He wasn’t just infected. He was moving into stage two.
Even as I grew angrier—and more heartbroken—I felt a sudden, intense urge to fuck him again. What was I thinking?
I was still holding the tissue I’d used to wipe his semen. I held it to my nose.
It smelled like honey.
“That night?” I asked him. “In the hay loft?” I was crying now. “You slept with Morgan that night?”
He stared straight into my eyes. “Couldn’t help it.”
Somehow everything he said when he spoke this way sounded so reasonable and forgivable, even when it obviously wasn’t.
It had to be the effect the pheromones were having on me. And his beautiful blue eyes. I actually felt a little tingling between my legs again. My pulse picked up.
What was happening? It was like a spell. I was dizzy…
I forced my thoughts away from sex with Bryce. It was surprising how difficult it was, until finally I remembered what he’d done to me, and I snapped out of it.
“You slept with Morgan,” I said. “And you didn’t tell me about it, and then you slept with me?”
“Couldn’t help it,” he repeated, again as if this were the most reasonable response in the world.
I felt another wave of pheromone-induced dizziness in which I wanted to kiss him and slap him all at once.
Bryce just sat there on the couch staring unapologetically at his wife, his baby son, and me.
The sad thing was that when he said he couldn’t help it, he’d been telling the truth, in a way. The pathogen was affecting his consciousness. It was making him want to have sex with as many partners as possible in the shortest amount of time, no matter the cost.
And yet my feelings for him had felt so real. I’d even thought that maybe I was falling in love with him. Was that just an effect of the pheromones, too? How could I know for sure?
I backed away from Bryce, trying to distance myself from whatever strange effect his physical presence was having on my body.
As soon as I was more than a few feet away, my feelings changed. Suddenly, it seemed absolutely crazy that I’d had sex with him on the living room couch. My family must have heard us. What had I been thinking? I tried to remember the moment when Bryce came. Thank God I’d pulled away. But had I pulled away in time? Had some of his semen ended up inside me? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t be sure.
It was only now that I realized my entire family—all of them—was watching from the kitchen.
Even Tyler and Haley had appeared, but Danielle was trying to pull them away from the scene we were causing in the living room. My mom was speechlessly shaking her head, both at me and at the strange woman who had barged into her house with a toddler. My dad was averting his eyes. Ian was pacing around the kitchen, trying to decide whether or not to intervene.
I pulled the sheet more closely around my shoulders. Underneath, I was wearing nothing. I had no choice but to gather up my clothes and hurry away to the bathroom, horrified at what had I’d done.
* * *
After I washed up and dressed, I sat alone on the front porch steps.
I couldn’t face anyone.
Not yet, anyway. I’d never felt so mortified.
I’d lost control of myself with Bryce, my entire family knew I was cheating on my husband, and I couldn’t find out whether I was infected because I had no way of testing myself—Chris and Ian had used
their last test applicator on Morgan.
Someone opened the front door behind me. The screen door banged shut.
I still wasn’t ready to see anyone. I hoped slightly that the person approaching would turn out to be Ian, but I wasn’t sure if I felt like speaking even to him. I was so embarrassed.
“Your mom wanted me to give you this.”
It wasn’t Ian. It was the last person I expected: Bryce’s wife.
Lindsay sat beside me and handed me a cup of coffee. I took it tentatively.
“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry I barged in on all you guys.”
She was really strikingly attractive. Dark blue eyes, dark hair, sharp features, a perfect body…perfect everything. Why would Bryce have shown any interest in me, with a wife like this?
“You’re apologizing to me?” I asked.
I was ready for the woman to tear me to pieces now that she had me alone, but she didn’t even seem angry. She actually sounded like she felt sorry for me.
“Well, yeah,” she said. She didn’t have her son with her. My mom must have had him inside. “I just came screaming and yelling into a house full of total strangers. I’m lucky I didn’t get shot.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I imagined what Lindsay must have seen through the window: her husband sprawled out naked with a strange girl. “I’m so, so sorry. Bryce didn’t say anything about being married.”
“He never does.”
Lindsay blew on her own steaming coffee, wrapping her hands around the mug. It was a cold morning.