Love in the Time of the Dead

by Tera Shanley

  “Great,” Guist whispered. “Then what are we waiting for?”

  “Colony members only check on it every once in a while to make sure it still runs and hasn’t been found by anyone else. Problem is, Finn and I haven’t ever actually been on the patrol to check on it. We’ve never actually seen it.”

  “Fantastic.” Mitchell’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “Why are we even discussing this as an option then?”

  “Because we know the landmarks to it, just not in the dark. We need to hole up somewhere close to here. I know where we are right now, but if we travel aimlessly I’m afraid we’ll never figure out where the vehicle is.”

  “Fine. Up a tree we go,” Guist said as he pulled his pack off.

  Sean frowned. “Why would we go up a tree? We need to find shelter for the night.”

  “It’s safer to sleep in trees,” Mitchell said with exaggerated patience. “You don’t wake up with a Dead gnawing on your leg bone.”

  “Yeah, but I thought she could smell if they’re coming,” Sean said, pointing toward Laney.

  “I think she’s earned a good night’s rest, don’t you?” Mitchell growled quietly.

  “Okay. I get that, but I have a child. Even if I was comfortable sleeping up there, Adrianna can’t climb a tree, much less sleep in one.”

  “Daddy, I’m scared,” Adrianna chimed in.

  “Shh. I know, baby. Everything’s going to be all right,” Sean crooned.

  Laney spoke up. “He’s right. We have to find some sort of shelter. Even if we rigged up harnesses for Sean and Finn, we don’t have anything that would work for a child.”

  “What if we compromised?” Finn offered. He pointed to the map. “There’s a gas station a couple of miles away if we are where I think we are. I know you like to get high up to avoid the night walkers. The gas station has a flat roof at a good height, and it’s only a few miles on foot to the truck from there.”

  “Let’s go,” she snapped. She needed action if she was going to successfully continue to avoid her own head.

  The gas station, as it turned out, was located in the middle of nowhere. Whoever had scouted out its location must not have been concerned with making profit. It had to have been a miracle that the small convenience store had been able to maintain enough traffic on the dirt road that snaked in front of it to stay open for any substantial length of time. But then again, maybe the old diner with the dilapidated Coca-Cola sign across the street had brought in some customers.

  Laney glared suspiciously at the ladder that was attached to the side of the building and led to the roof. A ladder couldn’t be trusted. Though Deads were terrible climbers at best and couldn’t make it far up a tree, she had seen a handful of determined zombies figure out a few of the bottom rungs of a ladder.

  She stifled her distrust and scaled up to the roof after Guist. He reached the top and raked his flashlight over the flat and slightly graveled floor of it. He cursed softly under his breath, and she looked around him to see what had stopped him in his advance.

  Two bodies lay in each other’s arms near the edge of the roof. They had died some time before. From the age of the sun leathered bodies, she would guess a couple of years at least. There wasn’t even any noticeable smell to them anymore.

  “They must have been treed by Deads,” Guist observed. “Doesn’t look like they had any provisions or weapons. Must have got stuck up here and the Deads waited them out.”

  Had they been as close in life as their loving embrace in death suggested? She sighed sadly. She should have been used to this. Death happened every day. She was drowning in it. So why, after years of being exposed to tragedy, did the sight of this sad couple etch another painful notch into her heart?

  “Hey, Mitchell,” Guist called down.

  “Yeah?”

  “Open that old Dumpster lid, will you?”

  “You got it.”

  The thud of the large metal trash bin sounded below them, but she spoke against it. “We can’t just throw them in the Dumpster.”

  The sigh that escaped Guist’s lips sounded exhausted. “Laney, burying someone? That’s for the living. These two are dead. They don’t care.”

  “They deserve better, and you know it.”

  He searched her face for a long moment. “Can we at least bury them in the morning?”

  “And store them in the Dumpster tonight?” She didn’t mean to be a pain, but the thought of the couple breaking their loving hold on each other to be thrown carelessly in the garbage seemed really tragic.

  “Laney!” Guist rubbed his face vigorously and whispered, “I lost him, too. I just want today to be over with. I don’t want to dig another grave tonight. Please.”

  “Okay,” Laney said, meeting his pleading eyes. “Can we just cover them up so the kid doesn’t see them? Then we’ll leave them as they are when we head out in the morning.”

  “Cover them with what?”

  “I’ll use my blanket.”

  “Laney, you are in a tank top and you are up a mountain in Colorado. You were supposed to trade for a jacket two colonies ago. Nights are too cold to go uncovered. I can see gooseflesh all over your arms from here. You can’t gift those corpses your blanket or you’ll be no better off than them by morning.”

  “You aren’t throwing them in the Dumpster, Guist,” she decided impatiently. “All clear. You guys can come on up,” she called down to the others while she pulled the light blanket roll from the elastic strings in the front of her pack.

  As she spread her bedroll over the two bodies, Guist growled in frustration from behind her. “Okay, but you should take my blanket so you don’t freeze to death tonight.”

  “No, thanks.” She stood and scoured the bodies to make sure no shrunken extremities were peeking out from the edges of her blanket.

  Guist’s logic often overrode any sensitivity he might have otherwise had, and it had been a long, horrible day. She knew she should cut him some slack, but she couldn’t help how much he was irritating her.

  “What’s going on, guys?” Mitchell asked, no doubt interrupting the death glare Guist was probably giving her back.

  “Laney’s being stubborn,” Guist gritted out.

  Mitchell shrugged like what else is new in the dim beams of their flashlights. Ignoring them, she claimed the furthest corner from everyone. She couldn’t explain it, but Guist giving her a hard time made her want to cry, a sure sign that her emotions were fried. Time by herself would be best.

  She set her pack behind her and pulled her knees to her chest, curling in on herself to preserve any heat her malnourished body could manage to provide. The group settled onto the roof for the night quietly. Her frayed attention was pulled time after time to Sean as he settled in with Adrianna. He pulled his little girl into his lap and covered them with Jarren’s bedroll.

  Exhausted past the normal need to sleep, her arms and legs felt heavy and drained but she still couldn’t manage to turn her thoughts away from the horror she had witnessed that day. The things she’d said and wished she had said to Jarren kept playing on a loop through her mind, her thoughts separated only by the resonating sound of the bullet she’d put through his head.

  “Laney?” Sean asked from directly in front of her.

  She had closed her eyes to try to find sleep and had utterly failed to hear his approach. Irritating. “What?” she asked, with little remorse for her short temper.

  Sean squatted down to her eye level and rested an elbow on his knee. “Were you asleep?”

  Thank the old world she hadn’t fallen to pieces in her own little private corner of the roof. “It seems my mind won’t let me.”

  “Yeah,” Sean sympathized. “Listen, I’m really sorry about your brother.”

  “You didn’t know him,” Mitchell said testily from a short distance off. He got up and walked over to start a quiet conversation with Guist.

  She glared back at Sean tiredly. She had stopped apologizing for Mitchell years ago.

&nbs
p; “I also wanted to say thank you for saving Adrianna. Twice. She wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’ll never forget what you did for us. I owe you. If you can think of anything, anything at all…” He waited, seemingly unable to think of what else to say.

  Laney resisted a lip quiver and a bring my brother back reply. She had to hold it together. She tried instead to keep it light because he was suffering loss too. “That homemade shampoo your colony made was nice. It wouldn’t suck if you found some of that.”

  Sean smiled in the dark. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry, too. About you losing your people,” she blurted.

  Mitchell stood over her, interrupting. “You need to eat something.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said.

  Sean got the hint and left to take his place by Adrianna.

  “It doesn’t smell like Deads around here, does it?”

  She didn’t respond. Arguing with Mitchell was a pointless endeavor.

  “No? Then you need to eat. Here.” Mitchell sat down beside her. “Guist got us some dried venison.” He handed her a good-sized piece wrapped in brown crackling paper.

  Laney’s stomach growled at the sight. “If I eat, will you leave me alone?”

  “Sure.”

  Mitchell pulled her pack from behind her back and rummaged through it until he came out with a tin of fresh grown carrots and a bag of biscuits. They shared the meal in silence. There was no point in talking about their heavy loss. Talking about sadness was too dangerous a pastime. If she let such potent agony in for even a second, it would consume her like the fires of hell.

  She reached for a drink, but her hand fell on emptiness. “Shoot, I think I lost my canteen.” She turned her pack around once more to find her thermos still missing. The saltiness of the dried meat made her thirst for a good swig of water.

  “No, you didn’t. Guist still had it from when he refilled them earlier. Here.” He handed her the canteen, and she took a long pull from it. She offered it back to Mitchell, but he declined.

  “It has a weird aftertaste,” she noted, taking another drink and swishing it around her mouth. “Kind of metallic tasting.”

  “Yeah, Guist said it all tastes like that. It’s from how they purify their water or something.”

  She leaned back into the cushion of her pack, and her body relaxed almost instantly. Her lips tingled, and her eyelids grew heavy. Mitchell solemnly poured the remaining contents of her canteen off the side of the building.

  “Son of a—” she slurred before drifting off into a deep slumber.

  Chapter Nine

  LANEY DREAMED OF A JUMBLED MASH-UP of events and people she had known and lost in her life. When she came to, however, all she could remember was Jarren, laughing uncontrollably at a game of Whovillopoly they had played one winter years ago with Adam, Mitchell, and Guist. The boys had always been so competitive, and Jarren always found great amusement in their insults and trash talk.

  She smiled sleepily and refused to open her eyes. Instead she held on to the remnants of that dream for as long as she could. A rough hand shook her, and the layers of overwhelming drowsiness peeled away. The smell of Deads made its way slowly from her nose to her groggy brain. The inconsiderate hand shook her again.

  “I’m not playing your games today, Jarren. Go bother Mitchell. He needs more practice than I do.” She smiled again, finding amusement in her jab. She tried to roll away from the offending hand, but it stopped her.

  “Laney. Wake up.”

  She froze mid-roll, muddled and confused. That definitely wasn’t Jarren’s voice, and the stench of Dead was growing stronger by the moment. She lurched forward, and her eyes flew open. The rough hand turned tender with a touch that steadied her. It was Mitchell’s, and she began to kick frantically at the blanket she had become entangled in. The blanket, like the hand, was also Mitchell’s.

  “It’s okay. We’re all right,” he murmured as he tried to help free her from the cloth cocoon.

  She kicked free and lumbered to her feet, swaying dangerously. She held her head in her hands in an attempt to stop the world from spinning. The memory of the horrible day before came crashing onto her, weighing her down until she felt she couldn’t stand. Jarren was gone, and that was the cruel reality of her life.

  “We are definitely not all right.” She rounded on Mitchell, desperately needing an outlet for her mental storm or she’d break. “You drugged me!”

  He shrugged unapologetically. “You said you couldn’t sleep.”

  “I smell Deads,” she whispered angrily. “You could’ve got me killed. I’d be useless in a fight.”

  “You’d be useless trying to make it to the next colony half-dead, too. Why don’t you just thank me and get it over with?”

  She rejected the urge to claw his face, but could not help the angry screech that burst from her throat. She turned from him furiously and leaned on the wall of the roof. She scouted for the Deads she smelled, but with no visual sign of them she began to hope fervently that they were just passing through. She tried to relax until she saw her arms. They were crisscrossed with tiny scratches. She shook her head and blinked hard. She had to be imagining them with the help of whatever leftover drugs were still in her system.

  Mitchell cleared his throat behind her. “I think you might have been hallucinating last night because you kept clawing at yourself and mumbling on and on about bugs under your skin.”

  “What did you give me?” She should have felt more embarrassed about how shrill her voice was becoming, but she was having trouble finding the energy to care.

  “An Ambien.”

  “An entire dose?” she asked.

  “And a few other surprise pills. Don’t worry, though. Guist traded fairly for them and was assured they were all sleeping pills.”

  The amused smirk on his face made her want to slap it right off. She looked away from him and scanned the roof. Finn was playing some sort of game quietly with Adrianna, and Guist was sitting by himself with a sad, faraway look in his eyes. Sean stood on the opposite side of the roof with his back to them. He had one leg propped up on the low wall of the roof and was leaning forward. He was watching something with undiluted concentration, and the hairs on the back of her neck prickled.

  Suspiciously, she asked, “What time is it?”

  “It’s just past ten.”

  “Why haven’t we left before now? Why didn’t you wake me earlier?”

  “We have a bit of a situation.”

  “Deads?”

  “Just one.”

  “So why didn’t you just shoot it so we can leave?”

  “That’s what I wanted to do, but Captain America over there wouldn’t let us. Said he’d shoot the person who killed her, and he seemed pretty sincere with his threat.”

  She eyed the gun in Sean’s hand. Not much rattled Mitchell enough to keep him from accomplishing something he intended to do, so if he was being cautious, she would be wise to do the same.

  “I’ll talk to him,” she said, snatching Mitchell’s canteen away from him and sniffing its contents suspiciously.

  “Wouldn’t drug myself, love.”

  She glared at him and then emptied the canteen into her mouth, leaving nary a drop for him. She handed him the empty thermos, but just as he reached for it, she let it drop with a clatter to the ground. She smiled wickedly and slunk away.

  She turned her head slightly to watch Mitchell pick up his canteen, but instead he was squatting down near it, rubbing his chin and watching her walk away. His liquid caramel eyes fell hungrily and unashamedly on her.

  She snapped her head back around. Why did that look make her heartbeat pick up? She had caught Mitchell looking at her like that before but was just as confused about it now as she was then. He wasn’t a safe man to give one’s heart to. She had seen it time and time again with the women he left after their brief stays at the different colonies. Women that fell at his feet became expend
able. And besides, she was not his type in any way. The women he preferred were mousy and sweet, two words that had never been said about Laney Landry. The revelation made his interest in her all the more confusing.

  She swung her gaze back to the gun in Sean’s hand. Nothing like a crazy man with a weapon to get her mind off of Mitchell’s confounding attitude. “Hey, Sean. What’s going on?” she asked as she approached the former Denver colony leader.

  He gave her a glance out of the corner of his cat-like eye but remained silent as he turned his attention back to the woods below. Movement below signaled the source of the stench. The Dead was a woman, with flowing and mangled black hair. Her feet were bare and cut, but she walked without a limp. Her simple, once white dress was bloodstained and tattered, and she wandered aimlessly, turning this way and that. Sean’s focus stayed riveted on the Dead like she was water and he hadn’t had a drink in days.

  “Who is she?” she asked him quietly.

  “She,” Sean admitted after a pause, “is my wife.”

  Laney dropped her head, unsure of what to say. The Dead turned to head in the direction it came from and then back again. Had the creature once been beautiful? She must have been to interest a man such as Sean Daniels.

  Watching Sean pine for this woman reminded her of the years without Adam, and the pain of remembrance pricked achingly. “When did it happen?”

  Sean sighed and rubbed his hands roughly through his hair. He looked exhausted. “Aria was pregnant when the outbreak happened. We were so happy. We had wanted a baby so badly, and when the outbreak came through I was desperate to protect my family. We found our way to Denver and had attracted a pretty large number of survivors. Safety in numbers and all.” Sean chuckled softly without humor and his face grew dark. “We found the colony and it already had half of the fence built. We took it as a sign to stay. We worked night and day building the rest of the outer fence, but it took a long time and we lost so many in the early days. We were all sitting ducks, like a damned buffet for the monsters. For every survivor we attracted, we lost just as many, just as fast. Aria had Adrianna in the middle of that chaos, and I grew even more frantic to keep them safe. I didn’t want them to leave the house we were living in. I didn’t want people visiting them because we didn’t know if there were other ways to spread the infection back then. Aria grew unhappy and lonely, but I kept pushing for her to stop living her life in exchange for safety. I knew she wouldn’t leave me. She loved me too much.” Sean turned his attention back to his undead wife. “One day we got into this huge, stupid fight. I went out to work on the fence with the rest of our able people and left her in the house alone again. She was so upset she asked Mona to watch Adrianna and then met a girlfriend who was working to set up the gardens. They were attacked. I didn’t even know what happened to her. She was just gone. And now, every morning at dawn she wanders over to the east side of the fence. The same time. Every morning. She goes to the part of the fence I was working on when she was attacked. I know because I watch her. Every morning.”