by Laila Blake
Chapter Twenty
Moving into the large farmhouse was a process not unlike a slow, hesitant love affair: first a toothbrush, then a few socks and a piercing cleanser set. Annika and her house were like a calm port in a storm, and Emily wanted to fall into her arms, to sleep in the slow smile she gave Song and Lani when they raced through the kitchen, whooping with capes flapping behind them.
Nobody had spoken about leaving again since that very first breakfast, even though there was also no overt mention of staying. The days passed, first one and then another, and Emily was loathe to ask, chest tightening with every bit of food that Annika had picked or canned, mixed or slaughtered, there on the plates before them, took pains to help, to learn.
It was Aaron who took charge, and Emily was both grateful and a little embarrassed for her lack of initiative, her willingness to let him lead. It seemed to come more easily to him, he knew how to spot little things that needed fixing, while she sat in the kitchen, getting to know Annika and Lani. She waited for opportunities to prove herself helpful, rather than finding them herself, and she didn't know how to approach any other way.
As it went, plans were made and help was offered, and, when Emily directed her gaze now, outside the shabby farmhouse, she could see Aaron at the side, fixing the gutters. A little smile crept into her features and she unstuck herself from the porch and shuffled over to where he’d placed the ladder.
“Do you need anything? “ she called up, shielding her eyes against the sun.
“Naw, just comin’ down.” His face was smeared with dust and grit that turned muddy with sweat on his brow; despite his state, his smile was relaxed in a way Emily was acutely aware she’d never seen on his face.
He lowered himself down the ladder and hopped the last couple rungs to the uneven ground. Though he wore a hat, the back of his neck and the jut of his chin were bright red from the sun.
“You bringin’ things in?” he asked, nodding at the van.
“I got distracted,” she admitted with a chuckle and then walked around him, rolled onto her toes and chuckled. “You're going to become a real redneck if you’re not careful,” she grinned up at him. There was a simple, instinctual desire to touch, but she held herself back.
“You know that ain’t much of an insult the further south you get?” he replied, looking over his shoulder at her. “Might even be a point of pride, depending on who you ask.”
“What makes you think I was trying to insult you?” she shot back, scratching her own matted hair, “Was it the dulcet tones of my voice?”
“You English,” he replied, shaking his head, own hand wandering to the back of his neck as he looked up at the gutter. “Shouldn't take too much more work, but the roof needs patching. House maintenance is a full-time job.”
“I was going to help Annika put some seedlings into the ground later. She said it’s better when the sun’s going down,” Emily opened both her palms and raised her brows in a who knew? expression, smiled again, and shrugged.
“Did you need anything from the van?” she asked, still up on her toes.
He pulled his lips over his teeth and shrugged. They were not sharing a room—Emily and Song took up the larger one next to Lani’s, and Aaron was sleeping in the smallest just off the stairs. He found himself strangely unsettled, spending the nights alone for the first time in months.
“Ain’t got much left,” he said, finally. “Maybe stash my tools, I guess. See what we do and don’t have in the end.”
Nodding, Emily stuffed her hands into her pockets to have something for them to do and looked into the direction of their old faithful vehicle. From the house it was easy to spot even though Aaron had hidden it quite effectively from the road.
“It’s nice here,” she said softly and after a long pause. “I mean, you know, it’s nice.”
“I know.” His hand rubbed at the back of his neck again, that compulsive gesture. “Reminds me of my granddad's place, outside of Pavo.” He glanced down at her with an almost apologetic smile. “Southern Georgia. Almost in Florida.”
Moistening her lips, Emily smiled. She drew her shoulders up slowly, almost to her ears, and then dropped them again. She had only ever lived in cities, and there was something idyllic about the creaking shingles and the rotten shed, the trees and the garden.
“Maybe we can find some seeds for peaches...” she said, almost with a hint of embarrassment and quickly looked away.
“Maybe. Don’t know how many trees grow up here.” He didn’t sound sad, and his smile stayed, but he didn’t sound very happy, either, not entirely.
“Annika said these are coffee trees,” she said and then frowned and chuckled a little bit embarrassed, “sorry, in my mind there are exactly two climate zones: the ones that are like Britain, where you can’t grow coffee or peaches, and the ones that are hot and where you can.”
“Ain’t the kind of coffee tree you think it is,” he said, but his voice was instantly gentler, without a note of condescension.
“What other kind is there?” she asked, more hesitantly as though his comment made sense of Annika’s dejected look when she'd mentioned them.
“The ones you make coffee from are, uh, coffee trees?” He let out a small laugh. “These are Kentucky coffeetrees. The seeds in the pods look like coffee beans, and you can roast ‘em if you got no other choice. It’s more for the wood, though, it’s real strong.”
“Oh,” Emily sounded and scratched her head. She was given to intense moments of shame when she felt ignorant, always relating it back to the fact that she’d left high school without a diploma, but even she had to admit that she would have been hard-pressed to learn about Kentucky coffeetrees in her A Levels.
“That blows,” she all but whispered, fingers encircling the ladder. “I guess I’ll have to do a lot more listening about this gardening thing. Annika said she had some books.”
Aaron smiled, dropping his hand to his side. “This is just like where I’m from. Spent a lot of time climbin’ trees and being reminded not to eat this or that or not to touch one thing or another. Boy Scout, too, you know,” he added, unable to keep himself from winking.
Grinning wide, Emily raised her brows high. “Making fires and whittling and one good deed a day?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, in an exaggerated tone, tipping his hat slightly with his thumb and forefinger until Emily giggled, swayed and leaned against him for a moment. He smelled of sweat and sun.
“I always wanted to be Boy Scout,” she admitted, grinning up at him with her chin on his chest. “Not Girl Scouts, with cookies and skirts and stuff. Boy Scout, like in the movies.”
For a split second, there was a glimmer of something Emily could only read as heat in Aaron’s eyes, and then it was gone. His smile remained, though, and he tapped her nose, once, with his finger.
“I’ll teach ya, how’s that sound?”
“Sound pretty good...” she drawled in all too accurate mimicry of his accent and then laughed as she struggled towards the end. “What do you call guys, if you say ma’am to women?”
“Well, depends,” he said, drawing out the words just as she had, scratching his chin with his thumb and forefinger.
“On what?” she asked predictably, and carefully retreated again into her own space, missing the warmth of his body.
“Whether they’re worth it or not, bein’ treated polite.” He shrugged, the corners of his mouth, upturned, making him looking boyish and sweet.
“Let’s say that they are,” she chuckled, “you know, for the sake of education.” Her elbow rested against the ladder and she found her fingers playing her hair.
“Sir,” he said, calmly even as Emily was already snorting with delighted derision. “Just like you call a lady miss or ma'am. Sir’s a sign-a respect.”
“That’s just kinky,” she proclaimed easily, “you know, unless you’re like... a professor or 60 or something.”
“Just the way I was raised,” he said, with a nonchalance
so startling, she raised her eyebrows again.
He waved at the van. “Still lookin’ to unpack, ma’am?”
“Yes, sir!” She giggled again and made a vague military gesture. “You coming? I hear Boy Scouts help with carrying things and such.”
“That they do.” He gestured her forward. “After you,” he added, flattening his voice as much as he could manage, sounding as though he were speaking with an accent somewhere between middle-American and garbled Welsh.
Emily wasn’t quite aware of it yet, but laughter required a certain sense of freedom. It was a new addition to their lives, here where the constant worry about gas and food and destinations was less pronounced. It was difficult then, not to reach out and take his hand while they walked through the high grass towards the van.
“Maybe we can do something nice for Annika,” Emily said thoughtfully when they reached it. Her own voice flowed back to her native accent. “I don't know, find some seeds or help some other way.”
He nodded, finally lifting his cap from his head so that his sweaty hair fell lank over his ears and forehead. “Imma start workin’ on the roof next week, I think,” he said, rubbing his thumb over his part. “Summer’s a good time for that, and windows. Before it gets cold again.”
Emily smiled at him. The days were deceptively warm for a British girl who'd only ever lived in Northern climates. But real summer was still months away, and he had no intention of leaving. Like he promised. She gently cuffed his side though, grinning up at his profile.
“You’re just trying to be more popular... and you’re winning!”
“Naw.” The skin that wasn’t red before, flushed now and he slapped his cap back down on his head. “Just tryin’ to help out. Nice of her to take us in.”
Emily nodded, then she bit her lip. “You know I’m just... teasing right. I do that. Call it a British thing.”
“I know. I... know.” He wrenched the back door open and peered inside the dark van, blinking in an attempt to adjust his eyes to the sudden change.
Watching him, Emily shook her head. Aaron handed her the small box of their belongings. The Monsters Inc DVD glinted at the top and Emily gently rolled her eyes at the idea that Song still took it out all the time, just to look at the picture, as though contained in it was the key to unlocking the movie in his head.
“Thanks,” she said and bit her lip before she could add another teasing Sir.
His smile was sweet. “A’course,” he said, with another wink to stand in place of ma’am.
There was a moment of shared enjoyment, the pleasure of a joke that had gone so far as to not even require being spoken, and then the edges of the carton started to cut into her hand. Emily smiled, turned around and walked the rest of their belongings up to the house. They were both trying so hard, and Emily finally thought they were working through the constant awkwardness.
Annika met her in the doorway and smirked when she took a glance into the dilapidated box.
“Treasure?” she asked.
“Even better,” Emily returned and added their textbooks to the small pile on the table. Between the two of them, they had the sciences covered well: math, biology, chemistry. Emily raised her brows at the introduction to anatomy.
“That definitely wasn’t on my school curriculum,” she chuckled, picking up the heavy book.
“And it should have been,” Annika quipped, shaking her head. She wasn’t significantly taller than Emily, but sometimes seemed it, with her easy, confident voice and stance.
“It’s not nearly as hard to learn the basics as a kid,” she went on, opening the book and smoothing her fingertips over the slick pages. “It’s all building blocks.”
“Legos for people with scalpels?” Emily grinned and let her eyes roam over the hyper realistic drawings of muscles and bones.
“Legos for the entirety of the human race.” Though she was smiling, there was a seriousness about Annika, and she rested her hands on her hips as Emily looked down at the book.
“I was a pathologist,” she reminded her; it had been mentioned, in those first few days, but Emily still wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, or what it was that Annika had done in her former life. “I’m a little strict.”
“Maybe I’ll have to sit in class alongside Lani and Song,” she returned. Fingers on the pages, she pulled her shoulders up a bit higher.
“You can,” Annika said, and she had to glance up at her to ensure she was serious. “It helps, you know. Zombies were human once, too.”
“Blast them or axe ‘em,” she whispered, voice a little rough before she recovered her cool. “Or burn them, I suppose.”
“Should always burn them,” Annika said, bluntly; she didn’t go husky or even weary, just matter-of-fact. “Don’t know if the virus can survive, and, if it can, for how long. Burning’s usually the only permanent solution.”
Emily made a face. “I... I guess I always tried not to touch them after,” she admitted, but her attention was intensely focused on the woman.
Annika shrugged, fingers kneading her waist where her hands were still stationed. “Fair enough. At this point, the scattered pockets don’t make it as worthwhile. There's a sense, though, you know, if there’d been more of that in the beginning...” She paused, chuckled, and didn’t even sound totally humorless. “Sorry, I’m all theory, all ‘what we should have done.’”
“Knowing a way it could have been prevented…” It made her what-ifs about Sullivan seem hollow and tiny. “It must be hard.”
“I didn’t say know,” Annika replied, smiling, if a little bit painfully. “But I’ve got ideas. More than are likely plausible, my husband liked to point out.”
“He didn’t make it?” Emily asked after what felt like a long time, almost shyly, still unsure of herself with Annika, this stranger who had opened her doors to them.
“Few months back. Saved us, so I saved him.” Annika’s words were so simple, they actually almost went right past Emily.
“You…?” Her shoulders went up with the unfinished question.
“Shot him, burned him.” Annika breathed out, and Emily saw how tense her smile was, how much she was still shaken, even as she kept her spine straight and her breaths moving. “He was pretty far gone. Gored to the bone. I… didn’t have much choice in the end.”
Emily’s fingers moved to touch Annika’s arm, but only for a moment, in some mix of guilt and fear and awe.
“We were already out here, so...” Annika’s fingers tensed against her shirt, relaxed. “I wanted to wait. I wanted… to try something, but…” She breathed in and out, and the shine of tears came and went almost without a beat in between.
“Can’t really go back on it now.”
Emily sucked in a deep breath but her face stayed hardened and calm. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He did what he had to do, and so did I.” Truly, there had to have been hard nights, it was all over her face, but Emily had nothing to say, and neither did Annika.
It was bad timing when Aaron walked in, both of them stirred up in their own memories. He looked between them for a moment, arranged himself in that stance she’d come to recognize as at ease, and gave them both his politest smile—a world of a difference between the ones they’d shared outside. It occurred to Emily, that she'd never seen that side of him before. There had been tension of course: in these days it was harder to relax around people than it once had been, but it hadn't been like this. Emily could read Aaron now, in a way: she had been his charge, his to rescue in the end, but here he was the stranger, trying to prove his worth.
“Don’t mean to trouble you, but I’d like to get in the attic if you don’t mind. I think you got a leak in there that’s gonna bring down the whole ceiling upstairs soon.”
Annika sucked in a breath, her lips going thin. “I think I would have noticed a leak.”
He looked puzzled, but just for a moment. “Probably wouldn’t. With the spring storms, it’s real hard to tell. This house ain’t
what it used to be.”
Emily felt her shoulders tense, though, for a long moment, she wasn’t sure why. It seemed logical enough to her, and she knew she sure as hell couldn’t tell a leak until it was a waterfall, but Annika’s face went stony, and she felt the need to step between them, act as some kind of interpreter, a bomb expert to diffuse the moment.
“I’ve been doing fine taking care of the place this long.” The other woman’s voice was careful, calm, and was suddenly so formal, Emily could almost see her in a power suit and heels, hair slicked severely from her face.
“You have, ma’am.”
Emily drew her brows together and bared the bottom row of her teeth at the word. She felt her shoulders round further and reached out to touch his hand but, with the way he stood, she missed it.
“But a place like this needs some constant care.” His accent crept into his voice, coloring each word more deeply, something like the way he’d spoken to Emily outside, but there was none of the same teasing in his tone. “I’m pretty good at that kind of thing.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Annika drawled, and both Emily and Aaron flinched, she more than he.
“Don’t mean to overstep, ma’am.” Emily watched his Adam’s apple bob along his throat with the nervous swallow. “Just... just offering.”
“I know.” Annika was cool, and remote, and Emily stared at her hands as Aaron edged back, muttering to himself.
The rush of emotions was intense and, after a moment, she looked up at Annika, her eyes small.
“He’s not a bad guy,” she found herself saying. “He’s just…”
Annika breathed out her nose, and her hand went to her hair, smoothing the spiky locks against her skull. “I know the type,” she said, shrugging.
What could she say to that, really? Annika wasn’t totally wrong, but Emily's chest twisted up and, finally, she had to clear her throat.
“He saved us,” she said, softly, fingers going to the base of her throat, the hollow there, where she could feel her pulse. “We were going to die and he picked us up and put us in his van, took us to his shelter and gave us medicine and water and food. He’s…” She shrugged, a little helplessly. “I think he… he just needs to feel useful, or he thinks he’s imposing and so he forgets. He wants to take care of everything right away.”