Love at the End of Days

by Tera Shanley

  He was using that affection to trick Jerry. Gah, she had to get it under control and quick. Her life depended on recovering from whatever Sean had done to shock her system. Kissing Mitchell last year had been fun, but it hadn’t been like this.

  Her heart pounded as Sean walked away, and she bit her lip in hopes that the pain would evoke some of the inner strength that had vanished since she’d climbed that rope.

  The door shutting behind her team was the most desolate sound in the world.

  Vanessa swallowed a sob as she ran down another hallway only to realize she’d gotten herself turned around yet again. What if the team had already given up on her? It had been hours. What if they decided they couldn’t wait for her any longer and left her alone in this city of Deads?

  There. A map decorated a wall by a nurse’s stand, and she ran a sleeve over the front of it to clear the dust. Coughing as quietly as she could, she tried to figure out where the front exit was. It had been years since she’d read a map, and her brain function seemed to be working at approximately thirteen percent capacity. Too much had happened over the past several hours for her to be able to focus on the here and now.

  A shadow shuffled across the wall of a turn at the end of the hallway. Hang the map! She bolted in the opposite direction.

  Just as she recognized where she was, it was too late to slow down. Knife and light in hand, she sprinted past the room they’d been trapped in, now filled with Deads still drawn to their lingering scent. The sound of running and moaning echoed down the hall behind her, but she didn’t stop to look. Her nightmares would never let her live it down if she did. What if they’d shut the front door again? She’d be trapped, running these halls forever!

  Skidding across the dirty floors, she slammed into a wall and took off for the front check-in. Light filtered in through the front glass, and she nearly cried in relief when she was able to run straight through the still-opened doors. Deads would be on her in fifteen seconds if she slipped, so she carefully thrust one foot in front of the other and booked it.

  A hundred yards. Surely they hadn’t left yet.

  Fifty yards. Surely she’d be able to see them from here!

  Twenty-five yards. The iron woven gate was open, but all was black inside.

  They weren’t there.

  Not only that, but she was barreling toward a tunnel she didn’t know how to navigate. And a little moisture fear wasn’t going to keep the hungry monsters running after her from following her straight inside. She was leading them right into the dark where she’d be lost.

  Something as solid as a stone wall caught her the moment she stepped into the pitch, and with a thunderous clang, the iron gate slammed behind her. She filled her lungs to scream, but Sean’s face flashed in the dim light, and she nearly melted into him.

  Her breathing was shaky and labored and seemed to fill every inch of the tunnel space as the Deads reached the gate and stretched their hands through the bars in desperation.

  “I thought you’d left,” she gasped. “I thought you’d left me here.”

  Sean cradled the sides of her face and pressed his forehead against hers. “Never. I knew you’d get back to us.”

  “To be fair, we did almost die waiting here for you,” Brandon said matter-of-factly.

  The black rage Brandon’s treachery filled her with was more than she could handle. How could he even think of whining about the inconvenience she’d caused while trying to escape a psychopath and horde of Deads? One which the little twit had happily thrown her to. With a screech, she launched herself at Brandon’s stupid face.

  “Ow, you’re hurting me!” he said as his back hit the tunnel wall.

  “I think that’s the point,” Finn offered as she got her first good fist across his jaw.

  Punching someone sounded awesome in theory, but in actuality, it hurt like hell. The possibility that she’d broken her fist right in half seemed likely, which only added fuel to the fire that was burning her up. “You gave me to that man! Just traded me like I was nothing!” Her voice was becoming shrill, but so what? She hoped she burst his eardrums.

  He held his mouth as if it would flop onto the floor if he let it go, and he glared at her with shocked disapproval. “You just hit a guy with glasses.”

  “Well, looks like we’re both going to the fiery place after we die, now doesn’t it? Maybe we can share a room.” With that, she shoved him out of her way with her good hand and stomped through the slush down the tunnel. And damn those boys with their echoing chuckles. She could hear every wisp of their obnoxious amusement, which only enraged her more.

  Sean had been slowly gutted as they’d waited for her. He’d sworn to have faith in people more, but battling his protective instincts to go back in there to save her, which would get every one of his team members killed, sat heavy in his stomach.

  He’d imagined every morbid thing that could be happening to Vanessa in that hospital, and the ache went from a mild dullness to an acute pain.

  “She’ll make it back to us,” Finn chanted on a loop. “She’s tough. She’s proven herself today. She can do this.”

  And then she’d been there, running for her life and doing exactly as he’d asked her. She’d run straight to the tunnel even though she likely couldn’t see them in the shadows. From the way she barreled into him, she probably hadn’t known they were waiting just at the lip of the entrance.

  And then she’d let him hold her. That ferocious woman let him comfort her. Some senseless pride arose in him that he’d somehow touched a jungle cat and been rewarded with a purr instead of death.

  Even if it was just for a moment, that touch relieved a discomfort he hadn’t known he’d been shouldering. She’d been a warrior in there. Unblinking, no hesitation, had gone above and beyond for the team and sacrificed her own safety not once, but twice for them. She was fierce and brave, and watching her closed fist sock that dillhole Brandon in his deserving jaw was just about the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

  Shoving past Brandon and his perpetual pout, he caught up to Vanessa just as she came to the first fork in the tunnel. “This way,” he said. The words echoed off the moisture laden walls and sent a trio of rodents scurrying. He couldn’t even name a less romantic destination for their first almost-moment.

  He leaned closer, but she pulled into herself and crossed her arms over her chest. Whatever had happened in that room up there still sat, heavy and suffocating, on her. He swallowed the cold lump that threatened to choke off his air. He didn’t even want to know. She was safe, and that had to be enough. Any more and he’d go mad hunting down the thing that had hurt her.

  Stepping in front of her, he led the team through the tunnels and back to the basement of the house. The Deads had dispersed from the truck with the lack of food, and Finn took the wheel as Sean slid into the backseat next to Vanessa. There was more room to stretch because of the fall of Keeter.

  Keeter.

  The loss was fire on a soul that had already borne too much. Keeter’s death was on him. No matter that he’d barely made it out himself. He led them. Every mistake fell on him.

  Leaning his head back against the seat, he closed his eyes against the pain of what was to come. Of telling Keeter’s wife she’d never see her husband again. Telling her she’d be raising their young son alone in a world already rich with unfairness.

  Vanessa’s breathing hitched beside him as Finn turned the engine. She faced away, toward the window, with her forehead against it as if the cool pane was her salvation. For a long time, he watched her struggle to control whatever emotions were overflowing from her body. Tensed muscles, clenched hands, a tightly controlled sniffle. She was a dam in a flood, barely hanging on, and he was adrift on the current of her sadness.

  Words wouldn’t fix what happened. They would only chip away at her walls until she was lost in front of the team. She couldn’t show weakness in front of them. From the way she held it in, she likely knew that already.

  Her hands were
so soft-looking, clamped together in her lap. Impulsively, he placed his over hers, praying it would give her some of his strength—some of his warmth.

  In a move that shocked him into stillness, she turned one petite hand over and brushed her palm against his as she held on. Dragging his gaze away from their intertwined fingers, he searched the side of her jaw, wishing desperately that her hair wasn’t hiding her face. If she’d only look at him, he could see the thoughts in her expressive eyes.

  She squeezed his hand once and let him go, and just like that, the moment was over and done. His palm still looked the same as it had the minute before, but it had changed somehow. Buzzing with something he couldn’t understand, he held it up and clenched it a couple of times to see if the tingling sensation was just in his imagination.

  Steven watched him with a thoughtful expression from the seat beside him.

  “Finn,” he clipped, in charge of himself once again. “Enough hospitals for today. We’ll hit the pharmacy and urgent care off the highway and be done for the day. After Keeter—everyone could use some time to process.”

  “Yep,” Finn said, making a right turn at a dangling, unlit streetlight.

  If there was even the hint of something amiss, he was calling off these last two stops. They couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes, or none of them would make it back to Dead Run River alive. And their ability to gather Dr. Mackey’s medical supplies was a mission much more important than any of their lives. The fate of the world hung on their ability to complete the job Mel had asked of them.

  The deserted streets were eerily quiet, and Sean leaned forward against the seat in front of him. The further they drove, the more Finn twitched his gaze around to each window and back. Sean wasn’t the only one spooked.

  “Where are they?”

  Finn shook his head and turned down a side road. “Maybe the ones on this side of town were the big herd that migrated into the mountains that Vanessa and I ran into.”

  “Maybe. Let’s go,” he said as the truck pulled to a stop in front of a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and general store.

  “Vanessa and Finn, you’ll be serving as watch-out this time. Radio if there is any activity we need to know about. Jackson, you take the entrance, and Steven and Brandon, you’re with me.”

  Vanessa’s vibrant blue eyes held his gaze. Her eyes looked so much brighter with the little bloody cuts that covered her face from the broken window glass. She looked as if she wanted to say something, but instead she slid another magazine into her Glock with a metallic click and followed him out. She needed first aid, but there wasn’t time now. The longer they stayed in one area, the bigger the risk.

  And he’d be damned if he was putting her at such risk ever again.

  Chapter Nine

  THE LAST TWELVE HOURS had been the longest of Vanessa’s entire twenty-four years.

  The hospital seemed like days ago, and it had only been this morning. She was dead on her feet by the time evening struck and Finn pulled up to a gated park. Sean hopped out of the front seat and stood in the dull light, entering a lock combination and yanking the chains off to let them pass.

  “What is this place?” she asked.

  “A sanctuary,” Finn offered. “This is where we try to stay on supply runs because it’s safer. This place was private land someone had fenced in as a type of game preserve. From what we can tell, he ran controlled hunts for elk and mule deer, and since the property is completely fenced, it’s relatively safe from Deads. This will be the only time on this run we’re close enough to it to make a night of it.”

  After Sean pulled the wire gates closed, Finn hit the gas in a slow build. The dirt road had long ago washed out and served as no more than a guideline. A trio of deer with giant antlers bounded in front of the headlights, and the truck jerked as it hit another pothole.

  Already, just a couple hundred yards inside the gate, relief filled her veins until she sighed, expelling some of the tension she’d held tightly in check. Existing outside of the safety of Dead Run River gates was more difficult than she ever could’ve imagined.

  A tiny, log hunting cabin came into view, and from the new boards and patched roof, it was obvious someone had been keeping it viable since the outbreak.

  Sean hadn’t looked at her since he’d held her hand in the truck earlier today. Not really. Other than the occasional glance to make sure she understood a command, the intensity of his knowing gaze had been denied her. He was just like the rest. Guilted into some emotion when a woman gave a little, and then back to a mask of indifference when the moment passed.

  Snatching her pack from the floor boards, she hopped from the cab of the Terminator and followed Steven to a fire pit. Finn pulled tinder from his bag, lit it with a fire starter, and fed big dry logs that sat under the sagging porch to the newborn flame.

  Vanessa sagged onto a log beside the warmth of the fire. Even the racket of Jackson shooing a couple of raccoons that had taken up residence in the cabin out the front door and right past her couldn’t revive her energy. She was exhausted to her very bones. Every tendon and ligament screamed in protest if she moved even a little.

  “Give me a minute?” Sean said from behind her.

  She thought he was talking to her, but Steven nodded and disappeared into the cabin with the others.

  An oversized first-aid kit dangled from Sean’s hands as he took a large sitting stone beside her. He didn’t ask permission, or if she even needed the attention—he just began picking and choosing supplies for her. Thank goodness, because she hadn’t the brain energy to come up with a snarky rejection at the moment.

  As he cleaned dried blood and scrapes on her face, he was so close that she could feel the warmth of his strong body seeping through her jacket. Or maybe it was just the heat from the crackling fire and an overactive imagination. One side of his face was in shadow, and the other was illuminated from the flickering glow of the flames. The light bounced off a scar down the side of his face.

  Unthinking, she touched it with the tip of her finger, and he froze. “What happened there,” she asked, too tired to care about which boundaries she crossed.

  His shoulders sank in a sigh. “Supply run a couple years back. We’d gone to this construction site looking for building materials for the cabins in my colony when we were attacked. I was pressed against a wall under this Dead who was a foot taller than me, and to escape his teeth, I had to press my face into a nail sticking out. And when I kicked him off me to save myself, the nail caught me all the way down. No big exciting story—it was just something that happened. It’ll happen to you too if you decide to continue a life as a guard. You won’t live with an unblemished body anymore.” He frowned against the light and gently wiped a stinging cut across the bridge of her nose.

  Her pride said she didn’t need anyone, least of all a man with fickle attentions, but she swallowed it down. Out there among the Deads, ego could get you killed. “My back could use first aid too. I’d do it myself, but I can’t reach it very well, and I don’t have a mirror to see what I’m doing.”

  Worry flitted across the tiny creases in the corners of his eyes for just an instant before it was replaced by a somber mask once again. He finished cleaning a cut at her temple and turned her hips until she faced the cabin. The breeze was chilly as the hem of her shirt was lifted to expose her skin.

  “Shit,” he murmured. “I didn’t know I cut you. I tried not to.”

  She smiled at their shadows as they danced across the face of the ramshackle cottage. “I keep my knives extra sharp.”

  “Everything about you is as sharp as your blades, Vanessa,” he said in a voice so quiet, she could’ve imagined it.

  Arching against the burning pain as he pressed an alcohol swab over the slice her own knife had taken out of her back, she bit her lip against crying out.

  “This is pretty deep. At the very least it needs butterfly bandages and to stay clean. It really needs stitches if you want me to.”

  W
ith hands clasped against the fear at imagining a needle in her skin, she asked, “What would you do if you were me?”

  “Stitches,” he said without hesitation. “It’ll heal faster and maybe it won’t scar as badly. The way it looks wouldn’t matter as much to me, but for you it’ll be different.”

  “Why? Because I’m a girl?”

  “Maybe. I saw what having scars from Dr. Mackey’s tests did to Laney last year, and I don’t want the same for you. I don’t want you ever wondering if your man will see you differently with scars.”

  “There’s a simple solution for that.” She turned and leveled him with a rare seriousness. “I’ll never make myself vulnerable enough where a man who didn’t appreciate my scars would have the power to hurt me.”

  The corner of his lip turned up, and he lowered his gaze to the bandages in his hands. “Good girl.”

  “I still want stitches though. Not because of vanity, but because the faster I heal, the faster I’m at one hundred percent again. I’d like to survive this little road trip.”

  He led her into the cabin, and when he opened the door said, “Everyone but Finn out. Get started on something to eat while we stitch up Vanessa.”

  “Why do I have to get out?” Brandon said. “I have more medical experience than both of you combined.”

  Sean offered the little troll a patient glare. “Vanessa, do you want Brandon to stitch you up instead?”

  “Hell no. Get out.”

  “Whatever,” he muttered as he grabbed his pack. “It’s your funeral.”

  “It’s stitches, not an appendectomy, and Sean was the one trying not to get me eaten by a cannibal today. Plus, he’d feel guiltier if he killed me and plan a much prettier funeral. Also, nice face,” she said, pointing her middle finger at his swollen jaw.

  He bumped her shoulder on the way out, and Sean excused himself while Finn gathered the lanterns. Whispers of angry words filtered through the window, too low for her to understand, but from the tone in Sean’s voice, she’d do best not to piss him off in the future.