He wraps his arm over me and pulls me close to his strong, warm chest. The man is like a heater that never stops. I love it. Whenever I’m cold, all I ever have to do is snuggle up next to him. He pulls me close and I can feel him and remember the feeling of comfort that he has always inspired inside of me. I close my eyes and wish I hadn’t exploded on him. I wish I hadn’t yelled at him and made him feel like he wasn’t important to me. It’s the exact opposite, actually. He means the world to me and I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. I suppose in a different life, we might have gotten married, lived happily ever after, that sort of thing. I suppose I could cry about what I don’t have anymore, but what’s the point? Life doesn’t give you second chances like that. It doesn’t roll back the clock.
“I’m sorry,” Greg whispers to me. I think I’ve heard Greg say that he’s sorry more times than I’ve ever said that I’m sorry in my entire life. Most of the time, he deserves it, but other times, he doesn’t. I’m just too stubborn to apologize or justify what I do. I keep my eyes closed, not willing to open them. “Me and the others were talking after you and Lexi left.”
I hate him. I’m giving chase after the bait. “What about?”
“That I’m going with you,” he says to me, and I’m afraid that if I open my eyes, I’m going to start crying. I was so afraid that he’d want to stay, that the mystery of the world beyond was too much for him. Part of me knew that he was going to try to come with me and I had run through a thousand scenarios where I tell him no or that I’m not going to let him go with me. He’s too valuable to me for me to see him lose an arm or get shot. I don’t want to have to witness that. I want him to remain intact, alive and living somewhere until he dies of old age, not out on the road, bleeding to death in my arms. But at the same time, I’m selfish. He’s my man. He’s the person that I’ve spent my entire collegiate career with. I can’t just sacrifice him now that I’m running off to chase my father’s dying message. Besides, if Jason has found a cure to the world or salvation of some kind, I want Greg there with me.
I roll over and face him, making out the contours of his face in the pale moonlight bleeding in through the window. He’s so handsome. I’ve never seen a man who is as handsome as he is. I’m so happy that he got the nerve up to ask me out all those months ago. I was afraid that he wouldn’t. “Why?” I ask him, still trying to hold back the urge to cry.
“Because you’re my girlfriend,” Greg says, the right answer. “And I saw your father, babe. I saw what the world out there did to him and if he was alone and that happened to him, I’m not willing to send you out there without me watching your back. I can’t just let you go out there unprotected against the unknown. That’s not what a man does to his girlfriend. And if you want to do this, then I’m going to stick with you ’til the end.”
I lean in and kiss him softly on the lips, feeling him push against me, softly kissing me back, passionately and lovingly. That’s the right answer. I can’t help but kiss him. My entire body wills me to kiss him, to reward him for his love and loyalty. He kisses me back and our lips lock, his arms pulling me close. My great, warm Titan. I love him more than I could ever hope to convey to him.
“But that’s not all,” he says to me, slowly pulling away so he can look me in the eyes. “Noah wanted to come too. I think he’s trying to be a white knight for Lexi or something. One day he’s going to wake up and realize that she’s not into him, but whatever. Once Noah decided that he was going, Devon got angry and said that too many people were leaving. So we took a vote to figure out who wants to go and who wants to stay. A debate ensued and everyone spoke their piece. Marko said that if there was a possibility of a better life out there, then he wanted to come with us. Since he knows the most about cars, if anyone can get us there, it’s him. Katrina freaked out and refuses to go. She says that there’s too much out there that we don’t know about. Skye said nothing, as usual. Devon clearly stated that he wasn’t going.”
He’s forgetting someone. I feel a sinking sensation in my gut. “What did Henry say?” I ask him, hoping that he’s smarter than the average sink sponge. If he wants to go with us, I don’t know what Lexi is going to do with him. He’s going to end up shot or burned alive by her laser vision or something.
“He wants to go,” Greg answers. Before I can say anything he cuts me off. “I know that it’ll be up to you and Lexi in the end, but I think you should let him come. He wants to redeem himself somehow and he thinks that getting us to the place your father wanted you at would be a way of making things a little better.”
“And what do you think?” I ask him, suspicious of what he might say to me.
“I say we take him with us,” Greg answers without a moment of hesitation. I am aghast that he thinks that’s the kind of answer that I want to hear. But I’m fairly certain that he’s reading my mind right now. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but let me tell you why I think you should let him come with us. The guy is fucking useless here. He doesn’t do anything and if we leave him with Devon, I’m fairly certain that he’s going to die without doing anything worthwhile. All of them are. But if he comes with us and those Zombie people are real, then maybe we can use him in a time of need. I know that sounds cold or heartless, but if the guy sacrifices himself so that we can all escape, then isn’t that a benefit for all of us and a chance for him to redeem himself in the end? That’s all he’s looking for right now. Let the old guy die getting eaten alive or something. Then we can all live in peace.”
“He killed my father,” I remind him.
“And it looked like a lot of other people tried killing him on the way here too,” he answers callously. “Val, there’s a lot of distance between us and Dayton. Noah, Henry, and I went over it on the map. He’s got all of these strange markings and these little notes that don’t mean much to us, but it looks dangerous. It’s like he avoided every town on the way here that he could. Every time he did go into a town, he left marks and I don’t think that they stand for frozen yogurt shops and shoe stores. Getting to Dayton might end up as a numbers game.”
“Lexi is going to kill him in his sleep,” I tell him.
“Then there will only be five of us,” Greg shrugs. “It’ll be our little secret.”
“I don’t want her to kill him,” I whisper to him cautiously. “Part of me wants to kill him for her. But another part of me understands that if it was anyone else standing in my father’s shoes, we would have commended him for his caution and his trigger finger being itchy. I’m not sure of what to do with him.”
“Well, maybe it’s not for you to decide,” Greg answers. “Let fate decide what happens to him.”
Fate, what a childish notion, but I’m beginning to believe in it more and more with every passing day. Was it fate that brought my father to our doorstep and fate that helped Henry pull the trigger and end him? If so, I’m not sure I like being a victim of fate. I’m not sure I like being a victim at all, but that’s how the world is now. We’re all victims, survivors. What right did I have to decide Henry’s fate? What right did Lexi have? He killed our father so I think that gives us more of a right than anyone else to kill him. Passing judgment would be so easy. It wouldn’t even be difficult to pull the trigger. I could rationalize all of it after the shot rang out.
“How do you propose we get there?” I ask him. “I think Lexi was planning on walking.”
“I don’t know,” Greg shrugs. “Devon doesn’t want us taking most of the stores. He wants to divide everything evenly and then for us to only take what we can carry. He says that there’s no sense in letting us take the lion’s share of the food and supplies. He’s got a point. We can scavenge and gather things along the way, they’re stuck here.”
“But what if we can’t?” I throw at him. “It’s been a year since all of the world went to shit and over a year people have been wandering around, gathering and scavenging what they can from the ruins. There might not be anything left for us out there.”
/>
“That’s something that we’ll have to take up with him tomorrow,” Greg tells me. “Whatever we do, we need to figure it out in the morning. I think the longer we stick around, the more fodder we’re going to be giving Devon to keep most of the supplies. Noah said that he was going to tell Lexi tonight that he’s coming with us, but I’m not sure that’s going to go over very well. I know that Lexi isn’t going to want Henry, so God help him. I swear that he doesn’t know how to talk to your sister.”
“I don’t think anyone does,” I smile softly.
Chapter Seven
When my eyes close, I picture the world as it once was. A verdant, living expanse that stretches across the globe, confined only by the cerulean waters sloshing at the shore. I remember going up into the mountains with my father, making my way along the wooded trails and grassy meadows hidden back in the mountains. I remember the deep blue of the Great Lakes and the way the birds would hide in the foliage and the leaves, chirping and singing to us. I remember snow and how it would fall and make the entire world look like the music video to Christmas songs. My father was there with me, in a meadow lined with flowers, dotted with butterflies that glide from flower to flower, flapping their soft wings as they went on their way.
He stands there with me, holding my hand as we walk. I’m a child again and everything is so wild and mysterious to me. I don’t know why I’m so scared. It’s beautiful here, serene and peaceful. As we walk, I look over to my father who is focusing on the path ahead of us. Beneath our feet, the rocks and dirt crunch and grind with each step. As I look at him, I realize that I’m not holding his hand anymore. In fact, when I look at him, his hand is missing entirely. I want to scream, but that’s when I notice the leaf falling between us.
It’s brown and yellow, sickly to look at and I follow the leaf’s trail back up to the vast, sprawling canopy. As I look up, more leaves drift down to the floor of the forest, twirling and gliding, wafting back and forth as they descend. They’re all pale yellow with dark brown spots speckled all across them, like they’ve turned leprous. Soon, the entire canopy is wilting before my eyes, losing all of their leaves. The bark begins to fall off of the branches of the trees, plummeting to the ground with loud crashes as the bark shatters into rotten shards. Like great, oozing sores, the decaying white flesh of the tree is naked before my eyes, quickly turning gray and hardening as the leaves swirl around us in a whirlwind of death.
“Keep moving,” my father calls back to me. I look over to him and see that he’s left back on the trail. He’s no longer clean-shaven like I remember him when I was a child, and I’m no longer a child. The grass on the banks of the trail has shriveled up into brittle tufts of golden blades that snap in the soft breeze. The ferns and bushes are all dead. The trees look like enormous frozen tentacles sticking up from the ground. When the first tree falls, it crashes to the ground with a loud boom that makes me jump in surprise, screaming at the sound.
“Keep moving,” my father patiently calls back to me.
I look up at him and see that he’s bleeding through his shirt as he’s walking. I can hear footsteps in the woods, people shuffling along, groaning and wheezing in the shadows. The verdant world has washed away into a dismal gray that surrounds me everywhere. The sky is a slate of shifting hues and nothing more. I run to catch up with my father, but with every step I take, my lungs burn with the smell of smoke and when I realize that it’s snowing, I stop and hold out my hand. As the snowflakes land on the palm of my hand, they don’t melt. Taking my finger, I poke the little white snowflake and it smears across my palm. Ash. As I look up to my dad, embers and ash drifts between us. Behind him, the forest is burning and I hear an explosion in the distance, gunfire cracks through the sky.
My father drops to his knees, the wound in his stomach growing as he reaches up with his one good hand to feel the wound. His entire abdomen is a bloody circle on his shirt and as he takes his hand away, he stares at his crimson palm and fingers. As he looks up at me with those warm, caring eyes, I know that he’s dying. “Keep moving,” he says to me, clear as a bell.
When he falls over, my eyes open.
The room is cold and I’m sweating. The darkness of the room is comforting, reminding me that it was all a dream. Well, most of it was. The fact that my father is dead and the world has withered away was essentially true. I blink, running my hand over my eyes, trying to wipe away the bad feeling the dream has tattooed me with. It was true. There was more truth in it than there were fantasies. The world has become one enormous nightmare.
Rolling over, I look at Greg and wonder how I got so lucky that he’s here with me. I remember when word got out that students were being advised to head home to their families. The number of students coming to class dwindled to nothing. But getting home became the problem. As the quarantine zones grew larger and larger, driving home was no longer an option. Air traffic was becoming too much and the prices kept skyrocketing, even though no one had money to pay for anything. Greg came from Washington and there was nothing he could do to get home. I remember when he told his mom that he wasn’t going to be able to make it back. She said that they’d find a way to get the money to him, but it was all a pipe dream. There was no way of getting money to him. I remember him looking at the only picture he had framed of his mother, the understanding painted clearly on his face that he’d never see her again.
The last he heard of his mom was that the refugee camp in Olympia rose up and violence swarmed the city. It was one of the first West Coast cities to fall victim to the refugee camps and the growing violence. He tried getting ahold of her, but all the lines to Olympia were dead and cellphone coverage had been suspended. When the casualties were listed online, we all looked in horror when we saw that his mom had died in the uprising. His entire block had fallen victim to someone who had rigged up a propane truck. Before they could get it to the capital building, it exploded near his house. She died in the blast.
When Greg found out that his mom was dead, he didn’t say much. We all still tried to convince ourselves to get up and go to class. Some of the professors were still sticking around for moral support rather than to teach class, trying to maintain the façade of normalcy. I went with him to several of his classes. I think they said that sixty percent of the student body remained on campus, but less than twenty percent actually showed up to classes. Dormitories and student houses were great ways to keep large quantities of people in check without locking them into a compound or refugee camp. I still don’t think he has ever taken a moment to actually process it.
In my own way, I had been mourning the moment I heard that his mom had died. I’d met her several times, even had Christmas with them that last year. She was a good person and when she died, I assumed that my own father was dead. Ann Arbor was a war zone and people on the radio and news were talking about how U of M’s campus exploded into riots and violence. I assumed my father was gone in that moment and I cried for days. Lexi always held onto hope, but while Greg was struggling, I was struggling too.
I look at his handsome features in the darkness. Gently, I reach out and kiss him on the tip of his nose, checking to see if he’s awake. He doesn’t stir as my soft lips touch his. I’m okay with that. I put a hand on his chest and kiss his forehead. He slowly begins to stir with every kiss and touch I offer him. When his eyes open, I can see the dreamy fog slowly start to clear away with every blink, like the windshield wipers on a muddy car. I look into his eyes and kiss him, his body stirring, comprehending what’s happening. As I kiss him, his hands come to me, finding me under the sheets as I draw closer to him, taking another kiss from him, stealing more and more love and attention. As he finally begins to awaken, I feel his grip on my waist tightening, feeling stronger.
With a strong whip of his arm, the sheets fly off of us and I can feel the cold evening air all around me. It grabs me and embraces me, freezing me as I’ve been hurled from my warm little nest. I look at him as he climbs on top of me, peering down on me li
ke some sort of lion readying to feast. I look at him, more than willing to have him. If there’s one thing that the end of the world doesn’t have enough of, it’s sex. Everyone right now is having sex as much as they can, but the pull out method makes everyone nervous, uncomfortable. No one wants to bring a child into this.
Leaning down, he kisses me with such tenderness and desire that I feel like my heart might explode. I love my man. I just want him to be happy, even if that is a tall order these days. As he pulls my tank top off and ravages my chest, licking my nipples and squeezing my breasts, I feel his warm cock in his pants, stroking it and encouraging it to become harder and harder. As he takes me, I try to remain as quiet and muffled as I can, but it’s so hard not to give in to ecstasy. I look up at him, letting out my breathy sighs as we make love, wishing that we might have a different future than the one that’s been given to us. I would have loved to marry him and have children with him in some small town where he could commute to some nearby lab and I’d work at the local veterinarian. That life was stolen from us, but at least we still have each other. At least there’s still a future there for us. It’s not much, but it’ll work for me.
As I draw closer to climaxing, the euphoria is too much and I begin to arch my back, letting out a loud moan that I know we’ll get crap about tomorrow. He clamps down on my breasts as he pumps harder and harder, refusing to give me a chance to recover; as I moan, he throws back his head and lets out a grunt. Twisting my head and running my arms up to twist my fingers into the bed sheets so I have something to grab onto, I open my eyes for a second and see an eye staring straight back at me.
I’m not looking at Greg. I’m staring the wall where Tony put a bullet through it months ago while I bounce back and forth. It’s the size of a child’s fist, but I can see the eye in the pale moonlight, the catch of the glimmer in it that is unmistakable. I look at it and I feel sick. I feel naked and violated as it stares at me, ravenously taking in my naked breasts, my body being thoroughly pleasured, and everything in between. I can picture a shadowy figure jerking off to the sight of me having my orgasm. The eye blinks and I let out a scream, pushing Greg off of me and pointing at the wall. The eye blinks again and vanishes, leaving only a dark hole in the wall, a gaping mouth of shadows.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 54