As I look at Lindsay’s feet, I can’t help but think of her as the babysitter. I think she’s crazy. First of all, why the hell was she following me? More and more, I can’t find the explanation that she was looking for a man with a purpose as a viable answer. She had to have seen me and thought that I was a hot guy worth traveling with. There’s no way she’s looking for some worthy crusade. Sorry, but this isn’t the fucking Carolingian era and I am not some fucking King Arthur for her to follow off into the sunset. There was a moment where I truly wanted to believe it, but it just doesn’t hold up anymore. Whenever I try to leave, she’s always intent on going with me or keeping me around just one more time.
The whole saving my life twice thing, I chalk that up to her simply being a genuinely good person. You can be a good person and still be a complete and utter psychopath. Right?
I’m not sure what to think. I think that she likes messing with me. I think she enjoys putting me in these awkward little jams where I’m left to squirm and over-think myself into an early grave. I think I like her, but the truth is, I’m not sure if that’s the smartest move for me to make.
After all, I can’t help but think of Jason and his fiancée. They were two wonderful, beautiful people hoping to make a genuine difference in a world full of harsh, cruel people and just a single misunderstanding left Jason dead in a pool of his own misunderstood blood and his gorgeous fiancée with her brains in the wrong spot. They were so in love with each other that one couldn’t survive in this world without the other. Sure, I don’t think that his fiancée stood a chance if she had survived and not gone with me, but the point remains. She was so overcome with the sorrow of losing Jason that she lost sight of what Jason’s dream was. That beautiful blonde was the only person in the world who knew exactly what it was Jason was trying to do to save our planet, and she would rather die than continue on. I would have helped her. I would have done it out of guilt and obligation, but she didn’t stick around and see that. She wanted to be with him and I can’t blame her for that. After all, I get suicide.
The only thing that I can honestly think of affording to be intimate with or dependent upon are my girls. There is a dangerous road ahead of me and a lot of distance to travel that is laden with horrors and nightmares that I had never dreamt of seeing, but they’re out there and they’re more than willing to rip me or whoever they find apart and eat them. So when I think about the capacity with which I might be able to find myself involved with Lindsay, I’m not entirely sure that it’s worth it. Lindsay has proven herself to be resourceful and skilled time and time again, but on the other hand, she has proven to also be reckless, careless, and emotional. I can’t count on Lindsay staying alive long enough to keep me stable if I get intimate with her. No just in a sexual way either, but in a full scale relationship.
I have needs and I have no doubt that she does too, but it’s too dangerous. It’s too dangerous because between here and Gainesville, Florida, Lindsay could be ripped apart by a mob of killers and I will be left in the position of Jason’s fiancée. I will be left broken, hurting and wondering what the hell happened and what the world still has left in it when the answer is glaringly obvious, but I’m too distraught to see it. This world has taken a lot of things from me, and my capacity for building new relationships is definitely one of them.
There is no doubt in my mind that Lindsay will come with me south as far as she wants to or as far as destiny will let her, but that’s the extent of the involvement I can have with her. When Lindsay inevitably dies, I will not cry and I will not feel torn up or betrayed by the powers that be. My own suffering and sorrows will be on my head and they will be the fault of none other than myself if I get too involved with her. That’s the cold hard reality of this. Everything from this point out is going to be laced with the truth of this new world that I live in. Anyone can die at any time and I have to be okay with that. I have to be willing to accept it.
I look back to the piercing booth in time to see her tossing out a handful of clothes. The curtain is pulled back just far enough for me to see her. Not aware of how open the curtain is, she goes back to sorting through her new clothes. I can’t help but stare. She has to know how open the curtain is. I can see everything. My eyes trace the length of her legs, hungrily taking in the tan, perfect legs. They’re flawless, strong legs that I follow all the way up to her immaculately sculpted ass. It looks like the kind of ass that belongs in a museum for future humans to study the form of women of this day and age. I look at it for what must be days. I can’t help but stare at it. I am mesmerized as she works, slowly freeing my eyes to look up. The small of her back and then her strong, bare back, my mind screaming for her to turn around, but I’m too terrified to move or look away. This might be the last woman I ever get to see naked and I’m not giving up this opportunity. This is the chance in my life that will most likely never come back.
As I watch her, I realize something. I’m not going to get serious with her. I am not going to make her my soul mate, and I’m going to spend the rest of my miserable life with her as I walk across America in search of my daughters. No. She’s going to be a traveling buddy and nothing more. But I have to admit something right in this moment as I look at her shoulders and look back down her ass and legs, praying that she would turn around or bend over. If I’m ever brought to that line and she’s standing there, begging for me to cross it, to step over that threshold and to take her, I’m going to have her. I’m going to make love to her for as long as I can. I want her and my primal, savage needs will have their way, one way or another.
She turns and sees me looking at her. I expect her to gasp and to pull the curtain shut in embarrassment and shame, but instead that smile reappears on her face. As if the powers that be once more heard my prayer, she slowly turns and I see the fullness of her left breast. I see the tantalizing breast and I fight against my compulsion to rush over there and to grab it. I look at her nipple that’s the size of a half dollar and want to run my thumb over it. It’s already standing alert and I can barely help myself. She winks at me as she slowly pulls the curtain shut and I am once more left in the silence and the darkness of the parlor, waiting for her.
I don’t think much in that time. The picture of her naked is frozen in my mind as I sit there on the counter with my pack ready to go. I close my eyes and fight to get control of myself. She’s a distraction at this point and I know that I’m going to fuck her. I know that I’m going to try—that is, if she doesn’t try first. When I open my eyes, she’s pulling back the curtain and is ready to go.
She’s dressed in a new pair of jeans that don’t have holes in them and is wearing a red tank top under a black button-up shirt that she’s knotted to fit tightly to her immaculate figure. I look at her for a moment, wondering if she’s going to say anything. When she doesn’t, I watch her gather her things into the pack.
“South?” she asks finally, when the silence is too much.
“South,” I answer.
She helps fit the knife into the harness that she built for me and I look at it one more time before she hands me a pair of sunglasses. “People go blind out there because of the sun,” she warns me before I put on the aviators she gives me. She smiles and I’m glad that I’m wearing them. My eyes have taken up the instinct of staring straight at her cleavage. “I forgot to tell you yesterday,” she says, as she takes the rope off the door and coils it up before slinging it over my shoulder. “I like the haircut. Nice to see that there’s someone handsome underneath all that hair.”
I don’t answer, mostly because she doesn’t give me a chance. She’s out into the predawn light of the coming day and I follow her, taking one last glance back at the tattoo parlor. I’m almost sad to see it go. If this town wasn’t so completely vacant of any kind of resources, I might have stayed here and set up a place to live with the girls. It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. I could think of very few places other than here that I would want to live. Honestly, the only other place would be Jason�
��s house. That is, if the Zombies didn’t overrun the place.
We head south out of town and before we make it to the far side, I stop and see exactly where it was I lost my hand. There is a violent, grotesque marker where Captain Bear Trap’s body had been. The Zombies have made a buffet of his corpse and there’s hardly anything left. His decaying bones are scattered all across the alleyway and the street beyond. There is nothing left of him that can be discerned as a human being. He’s just a scattering of bones. He had been a monster in his life and now in his death he isn’t even human. I look at him with complete and utter apathy as if the world was a better place now, completely washed clean of the filth this man had been.
How many others had he trapped there with his nasty, monstrous invention? I look at the trash bag with its empty cans everywhere and feel a hatred rising inside of me. I wish I hadn’t killed him. I wish I could have stuck his face in that bear trap. I wish that I could clamp it down on his balls. I want him to know the agony that I now have to live with. There are people everywhere—or at least there were—who don’t have both of their hands, but this is different for me. I did have both of my hands and I was completely deprived of one. The bastard took my hand and I want it back. God, I want my hand back, not some knife abomination built out of a sex toy.
I can feel Lindsay next to me and I don’t want her here. It’s like the grave of an old friend that she never knew. It feels unholy and blasphemous for her to be here, looking at the site where I lost my hand. She hadn’t been here while I was screaming for help and in agony. She hadn’t been there when he came out and beat me with his baseball bat. She hadn’t seen me reduce his head to pulp with his own trap. I am thankful she saved me, but God, why couldn’t she have been there sooner? Why couldn’t she make it in time for me to still have both of my hands? I slump my head forward and I look at the knife that has replaced my hand. Suddenly I realize something. That hand had been the hand Tiffany slipped my wedding ring on to. Of course, I hadn’t worn my wedding ring in years. It felt wrong to wear it after she died.
“You okay?” Lindsay asks me.
“Yeah,” I mutter. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Seven
“Why are your girls in Florida?” Lindsay asks after a half hour of silence and walking.
She’s not used to moving during the day and the sun is unforgiving of her lack of preparation. I’m a little rusty from all the injuries, but I’m making good progress. I have to stop and take breaks, which drives me insane. I get about ten minutes of solid travel before something begins to hurt and I have to take a moment to let the pain relax and subside into me. I’m standing, looking up into the sunlight while she’s talking to me, walking to keep up with me. Clearly, she isn’t used to distance travel.
“They were still going to class,” I answer. “They went to the University of Florida.”
“Gators,” Lindsay says after a moment.
“Go Gators,” I nod as I continue walking.
“Are they pretty?” she calls after me.
I stop and turn on her. “What kind of a question is that?”
“Lot of pretty girls in Florida,” Lindsay shrugs. “Do they fit the crowd?”
“I think so,” I answer, turning and picking up the pace.
“You know, when I was in Columbus,” Lindsay hurries to keep up, “Ohio State was probably the safest place before the refugees declared war on them. It was one hell of a fight when I left with Kelci. The whole place was full of gunshots and explosions in the distance. You could see the light of the burning city for miles after you left.”
I have no doubt that Lindsay lost a lot of friends to seriously violent and lethal ends in Columbus, but I lost people too. At least she knows that her friends are dead. She knows that they went down in a fight, doing what they loved, with the ones they loved. I have coworkers, friends from college, my agent, my publisher, my neighbors, and my family scattered to the wind with no way of ever getting ahold of them again. Unless I magically run into them while I’m wandering the wasteland of America now, I’m completely out of luck.
“I don’t think they stuck around on campus,” I answer. It was a lie. I know that they weren’t there. The last thing that Val said to me was that they were going to a beach house that one of their friends knew. If they were smart, they kept their heads down. The girls were beautiful in a girl next door sort of way. They were never vain or overly dedicated to being the most beautiful girls at school. I’m sure if they tried a little harder, they would be. They just had different interests. But there was never a difficulty for them finding friends. Val always latched on to the intellectuals that were driven to do the very best they could at everything. Lexi, on the other hand, was more of an adrenaline junkie, just like Lindsay in a way. She found those who were willing to go have adventures and do strange and terrifying things for the glory and pleasure of it. She had always been much braver than me.
“So how are you going to find them?” Lindsay prods.
“Need to find a radio,” I tell her. “We need to get some sort of idea of what’s going on ahead of us.”
“You think people are still broadcasting the top one hundred?” Lindsay chuckles.
I stop and turn to her. “No.” She looks at me, tilting her sunglasses down her nose as if she was trying to decipher if she’d done anything wrong. It was her naivety that bothered me. For such a trained killer and tracker and survivor, she didn’t know a thing about what was going on in the world. “There’s a whole network of people broadcasting out of cities across the country. They’ve got a few screws loose, but they give good information for the most part.”
“Like what?” Lindsay genuinely sounds curious.
“A guy out of Port Huron was reporting Zombies long before I ever saw one,” I say, continuing to walk across the scorched, ashen world. “I was too ignorant to believe him until I saw them for myself.” I pause and decide to give her everything else I know. “There was a sizeable force heading for Detroit just behind me, and when they hit the outskirts, the whole place went to hell. They burned the whole damn city. That’s when I lost my radio. They could be right behind us for all I know. Or they might have went west for Chicago. Who knows know?” I can tell Lindsay is looking over her shoulder behind her.
“Were they cannibals?” she asks.
“No clue,” I answer.
After about an hour of silence, I can hear her grunting and grumbling to herself. I look over my shoulder and see that she’s probably twenty yards behind me. I stop and take a drink of water, waiting for her to catch up. It’s hot. It’s always been hot though. Unless there is a storm, the sun usually shines bright as ever, though it looks diffused. She’s just not used to it. She’ll get better as time goes on, I have no doubt. But part of me thinks that this might not be the best way to go about the whole southern journey. I would have been in Florida by now if I had been smarter about which roads I took and when I decided to stop and what for. I need a car. I need something that will get me across more land. I would gladly take one car with a half a tank of gas over walking now. Walking used to be my last resort and now it has become my only option.
“We need a car,” I say as she stops next to me and takes a bottle of water.
“No shit,” she says. “Why the fuck are we walking during the day?”
“Because of that.” I point to the footprints behind us and the dust that shoots up with every step she takes. “You can see dust trails from a long ways off. Most people out during the day drive vehicles and I want to see them coming.”
“Well, where are we going to find a car?” she asks. “It’s nothing but burnt farmhouses out here.”
“We’ll start heading west,” I answer. “We need to get to Interstate 75. There will be plenty of cars there for us to pick through—if they’re not all wrecked or drained.”
“You know an awful lot about this shit,” Lindsay says as we start walking west across what feels like miles and miles of dead farms. There were
hardly any farmhouses left standing and those that were standing had signs that they’d already been thoroughly looted. Lindsay wanted to explore each of them, but I refused to take part. We didn’t need anything at the moment and there were probably no useful materials left for us to scavenge. Time was precious and I had already lost so much of it. I’m not wasting it now.
“We need something lightweight,” I call to her. She’s still behind me.
“No, we need something weighty,” Lindsay shouts. “There’s a lot of shit on the roads. We’ll need to barrel through it.”
“We’re not sticking to the roads,” I turn around and call to her as I keep walking. Keeping on the move was key with Lindsay. My breaks were coming less and less and my body was starting to get back into the normal routine of the endless miles ahead. “If we stick to roads, someone will spot us. We need a small truck or a SUV to keep us maneuvering across these fields.”
“What? We’re sticking to fields?” Lindsay moans. “Charlie, we need food. There ain’t shit in these rural areas. We need to stick to the towns and suburbs where we can find food to eat.”
“Everything has already been hoarded by now,” I reply.
“You’re not thinking hard enough,” Lindsay accuses me. “What about libraries? They always have food drives going on. What about semi-trucks? What about offices with vending machines? You know how many people have completely avoided those places? Why would they even go in there?”
“No,” I shake my head. “Every time I go near a town, something bad happens and it derails me for too long. I need to make my way south, as quickly as possible.”
“Fine,” Lindsay says with a grunt.
We don’t talk for much of the day. After an hour, we pass burnt farmhouse after burnt farmhouse. It’s looking more and more like someone around Cincinnati is propane-happy. I recall the burning farmhouse where I first caught sight of Cal and Denny tracking after me. There is someone out there and they are lighting farmhouses on fire. I don’t understand why anyone would do that, but the sanity of those still alive is very much in question these days. I look at Lindsay as we stand in front of the smoldering ruins of yet another house. If they lit the house on fire two days ago, that would make the most sense of what I’m seeing right now. Why would anyone do this?
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 23