“Nothing to see here,” I tell her.
And so we survived. Again. Our third such close-call together.
We seem to be good luck to each other.
I look into her eyes and she smiles back at me in relief. There’s no feeling more exhilarating than the feeling of being in no danger, immediately after escaping mortal danger.
I try to stand up, wanting to get dressed and go back inside and find my knife, but Alicia pulls me to her and kisses me, and whatever danger I just put myself in for her, this is worth it. If I had a large gash on my ankle in the shape of a bloody bite mark that meant I only had a matter of hours to keep living, this would still be worth it. She’s kissing me, I’m kissing her, and despite my instincts screaming for me to stop, we continue on, kissing faster and more passionately.
I can’t help but question her actions.
“Right here?” I ask.
She tells me to shut up.
Funny, that’s what I wanted to say to myself.
There are any number of things that could come up this road in one way or another. Once we were watching a gas station surrounded by walkers trying to figure out the safest way to get inside when a band of marauders arrived in a large truck. I remember a mean-looking woman with a sword who nearly single-handedly staved off the walkers while other members of her group broke in to clean out the place. I hate to think about what could have happened had they found us inside. They certainly didn’t look like the kind of people we’d want to get to know. That’s how things are now, running into another group of survivors is just as dangerous as finding a group of walkers. You never know how people are going to act. At least the walkers are predictable.
I don’t want to think about what would happen if anyone were to come walking up the street right now, so I don’t. Alicia and I lose ourselves in each other. I don’t know what brought this on—maybe it was her waking up to me stripping her down, seeing me labor and stress over her well-being, or the general excitement of the whole ordeal, but whatever it is, I don’t care.
It is only the second time we’ve made love.
Diane, please forgive me.
You may find yourself thinking about how uncomfortable it would be to have sex in the middle of an open road, next to a ransacked grocery store littered with shards of broken glass. Don’t dwell on it. This rural road already has large patches of weeds growing up through the cracked asphalt, soft little patches of lawn in the middle of harsh pavement. Between that and our discarded clothing, we do just fine.
When it’s over my mind is racing. The one thing we’ve never talked about is how she really feels about me. We spend every waking moment together, but we do that because we have to. If there was anyone else to talk to, maybe she would favor them instead. Maybe I would, too, but I doubt it.
No, this is real. The look in her eyes when she looks at me: that’s love. I may not know much, but I know what that looks like. She may not feel it for me as strongly as I do for her… but it’s there.
I can tell.
Alicia loves me.
She loves me! I think to myself, at first excited, and then burdened with the guilt of officially having a new relationship after losing Diane less than a year ago. My mind races as I return to the grocery store to retrieve my knife. That’s not something I can just leave behind.
I’d reconciled myself to never loving again after I lost Diane. I’ve learned to live with it. I remember her, and it makes me sad. That was my burden, the pain I carry inside me. Alicia, I thought, liked me and was with me because I was all that was available. She found comfort in my arms. I was fine with leaving it at that.
This is something else entirely. This makes the relationship real. She’s getting over James, I’m getting over Diane, and we have mutual feelings for each other. This isn’t something I can take lightly. This is something I have to treat with respect. That’s what Alicia deserves.
She deserves to know the truth.
There were a few houses in the area and a lot of daylight left. We decided to explore them, and see if we could find more supplies. Over the course of the day we found clothes, another bottle of shampoo, some soap, toothpaste, and a whole mess of food: canned soup, crackers, and various things that were either completely unspoiled or edible, but only if you were really hungry.
There were a few walkers milling about, in or around the houses but we saw them early and easily avoided them. This was a small miracle, as distracted as I was. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had to tell Alicia, what I was going to say to her tonight. By the time we returned to the apartment across the street from the grocery store, darkness had already come.
The thing that kept running through my head all day—the thing I had to tell Alicia—was how James really died.
The day James died, it had just been the three of us—James, Alicia, and I—for weeks. I missed Diane so much. My grief over losing her was still fresh in my mind. I like to think I wasn’t myself. I just wanted things to go back to the way they were before, and knowing that that would never be possible made me more angry than I’d ever been in my life.
They say people are capable of doing things when they’re grieving that they would never consider otherwise.
Seeing Diane die right in front of me scarred me. Watching those things tear into her, unable to do anything about it. Seeing the terror in her eyes as she screamed for help, only to see her life fade away moments later. There are things that we’re now forced to deal with on a daily basis that I don’t think we should have ever had to deal with.
I loved Diane. Alicia loved James. I didn’t want to see her go through that much pain. I didn’t want to kill James.
But I thought about it.
He and I were alone that day, all day. I knew that if he were to die, maybe I wouldn’t get Diane back, but at the very least, I wouldn’t have to see the two of them together anymore. I wouldn’t have to see, in them, exactly what I wanted for myself.
I had opportunities. My knife in hand, his back to me. I wouldn’t have even had to see his face. In the end, I couldn’t do it. It was too much, I could never go that far. I couldn’t kill him myself.
Luckily, it was a dangerous world we were living in.
The day was nearly over. We were talking, deciding whether or not to search one last house for medicine before starting our journey back.
I saw them coming.
He didn’t.
There was a moment, just after he saw them—too late!—that he looked at me, screaming for help. In that moment I could have stepped in and helped him fight them off. Instead, I stepped back. Everything I’d been thinking about that day affected that split-second decision.
Immediately, I realized what I’d done, and I suddenly wanted to help him but by then it was too late, there were too many of them.
James was dead.
It was only a second—a brief moment where the pain of seeing them together had reached a crescendo within me and made me do that awful thing.
People were dying every second of every day. Most everyone I’d ever known was probably dead. What’s one more? I thought. What’s one more if it means I’ll be happier?
What’s one more if she never has to know what I’ve done?
But now Alicia loves me, and I can’t keep this from her any longer.
Maybe we were meant to be together. Maybe Diane and James were meant to die. Maybe that was necessary to bring Alicia and me together to ensure our survival.
Standing in the apartment, moonlight filling the room from the open window, I embrace Alicia and tell her I love her. She responds in kind, like I knew she would. I take one final look at her, and take a mental snapshot of the Alicia who is unaware of the evil I have done.
Then I tell her everything.
I tell her because I love her. I tell her because I respect her. I tell her because I hope she’ll forgive me.
When I’m done, the look on her face surprises me. She looks at me not with anger, but w
ith sorrow. She looks at me as if I told her I’d killed myself, and maybe that’s what I just did. The man she’d fallen in love with was a lie. She starts crying, and before long is sobbing heavily.
I didn’t expect the screaming.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She begins pounding on my chest with her fists, hitting me repeatedly, but it’s all I can say: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
I weather the storm; it’s what I deserve. Before long her anger fades and she collapses. I embrace her and we cry together for a while.
All we have to lean on is each other. Neither of us can get through this alone.
She has forgiven me, I think, as we lie together in the darkness. I’m all she has. She can’t stay mad at me forever. The fact that I told her has to count for something, doesn’t it? She has to know this is something I regret, that it will haunt me for as long as I live.
I think it will be a long time before things will be back to normal between us. But we’ll get there and when we do our bond will be that much stronger now that there are no secrets between us.
We’re going to have to make the best of this world around us if we’re going to survive. Everything is going to be okay. That’s what I think as I drift off to sleep, Alicia sobbing in my arms.
The sun of a new morning shines through the open window, waking me. The bedding beside me is colder than it should be. I reach for Alicia but she’s not there. My eyes open, I look around.
Gone.
She’s gone. And she’s taken all our food, all our supplies, and all of our weapons.
Whether she’s meant to or not, she has killed me.
I won’t last more than five days alone.
Truth be told—without her, I don’t want to.
Danger Word
By Steven Barnes & Tananarive Due
Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due are frequent collaborators; in fiction, they’ve produced film scripts, this story, and three Tennyson Hardwick detective novels, the latest of which is From Cape Town with Love (written with actor Blair Underwood). In life, they’re married.
Barnes is the bestselling author of many novels, such as Lion’s Blood, Zulu Heart, Great Sky Woman, and Shadow Valley. He’s also worked on television shows such as The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Andromeda, and Stargate. Due is a two-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, and her novels include the My Soul to Keep series, The Between, The Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost.
Barnes’s short work has appeared in Analog and Asimov’s Science Fiction, while Due’s has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Dark Delicacies II, and Voices from the Other Side. Stories by both have been included in the anthologies Dark Dreams (where this story first appeared), Dark Matter, and Mojo: Conjure Stories.
It’s a universal human urge to leave the world a better place than you found it, and to pass on to your children a world where they can have a happier, more prosperous life than you had. This has mostly been the case throughout human history, as ever-expanding infrastructure and knowledge have generally made life more secure and comfortable generation after generation, through innovations such as fertilizers, vaccines, antibiotics, indoor plumbing, and electronics. But now adults are facing the despairing sense that today’s youth will experience significantly more hardship than the previous generation, as today’s young people confront a world of economic ruin and environmental catastrophe that they had no hand in creating.
Recent works have grappled with this generational guilt in different ways. One of the best-known examples is Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, a post-apocalyptic story in which a father attempts to guide his young son through a devastated landscape, all the while knowing that their situation is hopeless. The notion of enduring anything to protect your children is a primal one, and one of the worst things that most people can imagine is being helpless to aid their children. Our next story deals with this theme in a powerful way.
For a generation facing the prospect of bequeathing to their children a shattered world, one fear stands out even more than being helpless to protect your child: that you yourself might be the architect of your child’s undoing.
When Kendrick opened his eyes, Grandpa Joe was standing over his bed, a tall dark bulk dividing the morning light. Grandpa Joe’s beard covered his dark chin like a coat of snow. Mom used to say that guardian angels watched over you while you slept, and Grandpa Joe looked like he might have been guarding him all night with his shotgun. Kendrick didn’t believe in guardian angels anymore, but he was glad he could believe in Grandpa Joe.
Most mornings, Kendrick opened his eyes to only strangeness: dark, heavy curtains, wooden planks for walls, a brownish-gray stuffed owl mounted near the window, with glassy black eyes that twitched as the sun set—or seemed to. A rough pine bed. And that smell everywhere, like the smell in Mom and Dad’s closet. Cedar, Grandpa Joe told him. Grandpa Joe’s big, hard hands had made the whole cabin of it, one board and beam at a time.
For the last six months, this had been his room, but it still wasn’t, really. His Spider-Man bed sheets weren’t here. His G.I. Joes, Tonka trucks, and Matchbox racetracks weren’t here. His posters of Blade and Shaq weren’t on the walls. This was his bed, but it wasn’t his room.
“Up and at ’em, Little Soldier,” Grandpa Joe said, using the nickname Mom had never liked. Grandpa was dressed in his hickory shirt and blue jeans, the same clothes he wore every day. He leaned on his rifle like a cane, so his left knee must be hurting him like it always did in the mornings. He’d hurt it long ago, in Vietnam.
“I’m going trading down to Mike’s. You can come if you want, or I can leave you with the Dog-Girl. Up to you.” Grandpa’s voice was morning-rough. “Either way, it’s time to get out of bed, sleepyhead.”
Dog-Girl, the woman who lived in a house on a hill by herself fifteen minutes’ walk west, was their closest neighbor. Once upon a time she’d had six pit bulls that paraded up and down her fence. In the last month that number had dropped to three. Grandpa Joe said meat was getting scarce. Hard to keep six dogs fed, even if you needed them. The dogs wagged their tails when Kendrick came up to the fence, because Dog-Girl had introduced him to them, but Grandpa Joe said those dogs could tear a man’s arms off.
“Don’t you ever stick your hand in there,” Grandpa Joe always said. “Just because a dog looks friendly don’t mean he is. Especially when he’s hungry.”
“Can I have a Coke?” Kendrick said, surprised to hear his own voice again, so much smaller than Grandpa Joe’s, almost a little girl’s. Kendrick hadn’t planned to say anything today, but he wanted the Coke so bad he could almost taste the fizz; it would taste like a treat from Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
“If Mike’s got one, you’ll get one. For damn sure.” Grandpa Joe’s grin widened until Kendrick could see the hole where his tooth used to be: his straw-hole, Grandpa Joe called it. He mussed Kendrick’s hair with his big palm. “Good boy, Kendrick. You keep it up. I knew your tongue was in there somewhere. You better start using it, or you’ll forget how. Hear me? You start talking again, and I’ll whip you up a lumberjack breakfast, like before.”
It would be good to eat one of Grandpa Joe’s famous lumberjack breakfasts again, piled nearly to the ceiling: a bowl of fluffy eggs, a stack of pancakes, a plate full of bacon and sausage, and homemade biscuits to boot. Grandpa Joe had learned to cook in the Army.
But whenever Kendrick thought about talking, his stomach filled up like a balloon and he thought he would puke. Some things couldn’t be said out loud, and some things shouldn’t. There was more to talking than most people thought. A whole lot more.
Kendrick’s eye went to the bandage on Grandpa Joe’s left arm, just below his elbow, where the tip peeked out at the edge of his shirtsleeve. Grandpa Joe had said he’d hurt himself chopping wood yesterday, and Kendrick’s skin had hardened when he’d seen a spot of blood on the bandage. He hadn’t seen blood in a long time. He couldn’t see an
y blood now, but Kendrick still felt worried. Mom said Grandpa Joe didn’t heal as fast as other people, because of his diabetes. What if something happened to him? He was old. Something could.
“That six-point we brought down will bring a good haul at Mike’s. We’ll trade jerky for gas. Don’t like to be low on gas,” Grandpa said. His foot slid a little on the braided rug as he turned to leave the room, and Kendrick thought he heard him hiss with pain under his breath. “And we’ll get that Coke for you. Whaddya say, Little Soldier?”
Kendrick couldn’t make any words come out of this mouth this time, but at least he was smiling, and smiling felt good. They had something to smile about, for once.
Three days ago a buck had come to drink from the creek.
Through the kitchen window, Kendrick had seen something move—antlers, it turned out—and Grandpa Joe grabbed his rifle when Kendrick motioned. Before the shot exploded, Kendrick had seen the buck look up, and Kendrick thought, It knows. The buck’s black eyes reminded him of Dad’s eyes when he had listened to the news on the radio in the basement, hunched over his desk with a headset. Kendrick had guessed it was bad news from the trapped look in his father’s eyes.
Dad would be surprised at how good Kendrick was with a rifle now. He could blow away an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can from twenty yards. He’d learned how to aim on Max Payne and Medal of Honor, but Grandpa Joe had taught him how to shoot for real, a little every day. Grandpa Joe had a roomful of guns and ammunition—the back shed, which he kept locked—so they never ran low on bullets.
Kendrick supposed he would have to shoot a deer one day soon. Or an elk. Or something else. The time would come, Grandpa Joe said, when he would have to make a kill whether he wanted to or not. “You may have to kill to survive, Kendrick,” he said. “I know you’re only nine, but you need to be sure you can do it.”
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