Nolan dragged his hands through his hair. “I’m serious, Barrett.”
“You think I’m not?” Barrett glared. He stood up, his matchstick hanging out the side of his mouth. “I don’t answer to you, or anybody else. Truth be known, I’ll throw you all to the wolves if it means I survive. Ain’t never answered to anyone before and don’t plan on starting to now, so get that in your head.”
A huge lump had filled my throat at the intensity of Barrett’s words. I had no doubt whatsoever he was telling us the truth. Every word spoken was his gospel, and he wouldn’t lose any sleep if any of us died. I hadn’t expected any less from him, and yet I couldn’t deny the hurt feeling that burned in my stomach.
Nolan stood up, taking a step toward Barrett, and the two men stood toe to toe, their hard gazes boring into one another like they could kill each other with just those stares. I almost believed it.
I quickly stepped forwards and pushed in between the two of them. “All right, calm down, you two. At least we know where we all stand,” I sighed, the sick feeling rising inside of me. I looked up at Nolan. “It’s not like we expected any more from him, right?” I shrugged.
The truth was, though, that I had. I had stupidly thought that because he had a little crush on Sam, we were all under his protection. That perhaps with Barrett and Nolan on our side we stood half a chance of surviving this nightmare. The reality was, though, that I was likely going to die.
I felt dizzy, the realization making my head spin, and I stumbled forwards. Nolan’s strong arms caught me around the waist and he pulled me to him.
“Rose?” his voice rumbled out.
“I’m okay, I’m good,” I mumbled, the world still spinning. “I just got a little light-headed.”
Nolan held me tight to his chest, and despite wanting to be strong and pull away, I found my arms going up around his back and holding him close, needing to leech off his strength to feed my own. Because whatever happened next, I had no doubt would be hard. Hard, scary, and dangerous.
“I’m okay,” I mumbled to myself.
“I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone,” Barrett said, and then I heard the tent flap move as he went inside.
I stayed in Nolan’s arms for several moments, just breathing and allowing myself to calm down, to settle the confused and worrying thoughts that were rattling around in my head. Finally, I pulled away from him, though he put up a little resistance.
Nolan reached down, and in a somewhat tender move he took my hand in his, his gaze looking down at our hands.
“I don’t know what the future holds, Rose,” he said, looking back up, his gaze moving to the dark tents in front of us, “but if we stick together, I think we can make it.”
“And what about Sam?” I asked, wondering if the we he referred to included her. I hoped so.
He was silent a moment before turning to look at me. “Like I said, if we stick together, we’ll be all right.”
His eyes were dark, empty pools and I found myself staring a beat too long, getting lost in them. It had only been several days ago that I’d stumbled upon this man and hated him and his cocky arrogance. Yet between then and now, something had changed. Maybe he had, or maybe it was me. But I knew that neither of us were quite the same people with each other.
He didn’t see me as a young girl likely to get him killed, and I didn’t see him as a pig-headed, obnoxious man who thought I was weak. No, somewhere between then and now, things had changed.
I squeezed his hand tighter and let my mouth turn up in a small smile. “I think so too.”
Chapter Seven
~ Sam ~
I could have hurt that kid.
Maybe what everyone is thinking is right. I mean, I know they’re thinking it. Even Rose. She might hate that she’s thinking it, but she still is. She has to be. I’m dangerous. They all know I’m dangerous.
Eventually I’m going to snap.
***
We’d been at the camp two days.
My companions moved around me like they were walking across glass shards. Except for Barrett. While the others seemed to pull further away from me—even Sam—he pulled ever closer. It would be suffocating to me in other circumstances, but now?
I needed the human connection to keep me from going full killer. Though…perhaps Barrett wasn’t the most shining example of a human connection.
I’d seen red half a dozen times since the little boy in the tent with the nosebleed. Rose yanked me out of the dark zone once, but the other times it was Barrett, with a touch or a kiss. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d always balanced my stability on a man’s influence. First my dad, then my fiancé. The advancements of feminism took a nosedive the day puberty hit me.
Rose had approached me twice today, her mouth opening as if she wanted to talk, but then she’d sort of clamped her lips closed and walked away toward Nolan. They whispered together, standing in a corner of the tent. Then they disappeared for a while, usually with Andy in tow. They came back with food, a few additional supplies, anything we could shove into packs. They were preparing to leave. We couldn’t stay, I knew that keener than anyone. There, with so many bodies and smells packed into so tight a space, it was all I could do to hold on to the humanity that felt only like a tiny seed within my belly sometimes at that point.
“You hungry?” Rose plopped down beside me.
I was sitting just inside the tent flaps, watching the world move past me. I was so disconnected, so utterly separated. As if sensing my thoughts, Rose put an arm around my shoulders and placed a shrink-wrapped cereal bar in front of me.
“I hate those. They taste like chalk.”
“Well, meat’s not on the menu.” Rose took her arm back and opened the bottle of water sitting against her lap. She lifted it to her mouth and dribbled a little in, swallowed slowly and ran her tongue over her lips afterwards, before re-closing the bottle and setting it back down.
“Why are you doing that?” I questioned, genuinely curious. In the past two days, I’d watched Rose become more…methodical, like she was thinking over every action, debating over every possible reaction. But not just with situations and with our dealings with people around the safe camp. She was doing it with food. Singular, slow bites. And beverages. Singular, slow sips.
“Doing what?” She looked at me, quirking an eyebrow. Her accent weaved through the two words in such a way that I think she honestly didn’t know what she’d been doing.
“You’re…savoring everything.” It wasn’t exactly what I meant to say, but it got my main point of curiosity across.
“Oh.” Her mouth stayed in a small O shape for a few moments. It made her face almost dainty. “I hadn’t realized. I guess…we don’t know what’s coming next, do we? I want to enjoy what I can whilst I can.”
“I understand that,” I said. And I did. I was on a precipice—standing without a parachute on the cliff of an impending, inevitable change.
I was going to die. One way or another. By monster virus or human bullet.
Because those things, those monstrous things, were not alive.
“I think we should sign up for the evac list.” Nolan’s voice came to life behind Rose and me. We both turned to find his face in the dim lighting of the tent. “The way I figure it, it moves us away from here. The choppers won’t be packed. There’ll be less…” His voice trailed off and his eyes found my face. “…temptation,” he finished, with a hard edge to his voice.
Andy perked up at that, sitting up from where he’d been lying down on his sleeping bag. “What do you mean temptation? I mean, like, they give us food and shit, but it’s not like they’re housing a gold mine somewhere in this luxury hotel.” He casually indicated our surroundings with his hands. “Las Vegas might be tight though.” Andy grinned.
“Slow down your daydreams, kid,” Barrett’s deep voice chimed in. “You wouldn’t make it a day in Vegas. Shit,” he looked at each of us in turn, “some of you wouldn’t last an hour. Signing up for
that list is a one-way ticket to your goddamn funeral. I should know. The city of sin is my stomping ground. I know it like the back of my hand. And it’s a damned stupid place to send a shitload of people who only know anything about surviving from what they’ve seen on the television.”
“You’re fucking determined to disagree with everything I say, aren’t you?” Nolan spat out, a bit of his Barrett-directed rage slipping through the cracks of his collected personality. I wanted to ask Rose about him, see if she’d found out more about his background. There was something there, with the way he held himself and seemed used to making decisions.
“It’s not that I’m determined to disagree”—Barrett’s mouth quirked up, and I knew what was coming: something snarky that would make everyone in the tent want to punch his lights out—“but when you’re consistently wrong and headed towards Dumbass-ville, I think it’s my duty as the level-headed, rational one to chime in and keep everyone from a one-way ticket to dead.”
“You?” Nolan snorted, the short-lived rage already gone and replaced with a calm certainty that was more his style. “I can’t imagine anyone in your entire life has called you the level-headed, rational one.”
“Well…” Barrett’s smile hadn’t wavered one iota. “I’ve never sent my soldiers into battle without a helmet. I’d say I deserve a medal in level-headedness.” He rocked his hips forward, hands shoved in his pockets, for effect. And then he turned, he actually turned, and he winked at me. Beside me, I heard Rose scoff in disgust. “You might not like me, Nolan, but believe me when I say that the only way you’ll survive Vegas is if I’m leading the pack. And my crew? If you think you’ve seen humanity’s dark side, think the fuck again.”
Nolan took a deep breath, obviously rethinking anything that involved following Barrett’s lead. “I’d think you’d be in a rush to get home, Barrett.” He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “All right, let’s think this through then.” He slowly looked at all of us, that time not lingering on my face any longer than the others. “What should we do? Where should we go? What’s safest?”
“Well, for starters”—Rose got up, swiping at the butt of her pants to make sure they weren’t dusty from sitting on the ground—“we can’t stay here. Like Nolan said—too many temptations.”
“Again with the temptations.” Andy gave another anxious laugh, his confusion growing. “What am I missing here?”
“Nothing for you to be worried about, kid,” Barrett said. “Let the grownups talk.”
“Hey, I’m a part of this too.” Andy stood now, his face going red. “You said I could stay with you guys. That makes me part of whatever fucked-up functional family you’ve got going.”
When he said the word family I could feel that word meant something to him—something hurtful and emotionally cutting. But more than that, I could almost… God, I could taste on my tongue the way his heart started beating faster. The way his pulse quickened.
It throbbed in my mouth.
“Can we just focus on the here and now, please,” Rose barked, walking closer to the three men who were basically at a standoff. So much for discussing things like grownups. “What are we doing now? Where are we going to go?”
Nolan nodded. “She’s right. Who lives the closest to this area? Does anyone know of somewhere we can go? Some relative’s place that’s vacant right now? Anything like that. Preferably somewhere secluded.”
Everyone sort of shrugged. I mean, Nolan should have figured that would be the response. The only person who hadn’t been caught in the apocalypse while trying to catch a plane exchange was Andy, and he was an orphan.
I turned away from the conversation to watch the world passing again. Only this time it was a bit louder than it once was—voices raised in the distance threading together with increased movement…and smells. I breathed in deeply. Sweat soaking through uniforms. Blood pulsing beneath skin. The levels of adrenaline outside the tent were high and intoxicating. There were so many people at the compound now.
So very many people I could hurt…
Shouting sounded nearby. I couldn’t tell if they were yelling in happiness or anger or fear. It was just another hum of human existence. My companions droned on behind me, oblivious to me and to the world outside the tent. I pulled my knees up against my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs loosely. I wished I could pull myself closer and closer until I finally collapsed inward. That’d be an easier way to fade from living.
I closed my eyes, trying to focus on the sounds as the hum got even louder. The voices didn’t sound happy. I could tell that now. Untangling myself, I finally stood and took a single step outside the barrier of the tent walls. When I did, it was like the fishbowl of my senses exploded into clarity. The hum was a cacophony now. Screams jetted to life. And I jumped as a gun fired somewhere in the near distance, making me flinch in fear.
Hands yanked me back in. I knew instantly that they were Rose’s. The grip was too small and kind. Lately, Barrett had taken to being a bit more forceful. Maybe he had to, though, to get me back to myself and away from the desires I was feeling. The hunger.
“Shit. You okay?” Rose gave me a quick squeeze from behind before whirling me around and checking me over. “That was close!”
“I’m fine. It wasn’t that close. God, it was loud though. What’s happening?” My eyes looked for Barrett. He wasn’t in the tent though. “Where’s Barrett?”
“He raced out of here as soon as we heard those gunshots. Finding out what’s happening, I’m sure.” Rose led me a little further away from the tent exit, to where Andy was standing looking pale and anxious. Nolan, for his part, was hurriedly picking up the packs on the ground that he and Rose had been filling with various supplies while whispering and plotting the past days.
A bag was shoved at me. Nolan, moving fast and furious. He barely gave me a chance to grab proper hold of the bag before he was moving on to Andy. “We’ve gotta go,” he snapped when I glared.
I shrugged into the pack. It wasn’t the heaviest and largest backpack. In fact, I wondered why it was so light. Maybe they didn’t trust me with important cargo. That made heat rise in my face, anger in my stomach bubbling away like molten lava. It wasn’t me—the quick-trigger to fury. I knew it and I squashed the feeling down. It wasn’t the time. I couldn’t rage out right then.
Andy had his pack on. Rose and Nolan now carried bags too. There was one more on the floor. Barrett’s…but he wasn’t back and the noise from outside our tent was growing. Just like my anger was fast-draw now, so were my other emotions. I felt a fissure in my heart, a crack of fear for this man that I was attracted to. I barely knew him, and what I did know about him didn’t make him the sort of man a woman should want to cleave to. Nonetheless, I felt my eyes water at the prospect that he might not come back. He could die. He could abandon me…us. He could abandon us. And, setting my feelings aside, I was certain we needed him to survive. Barrett and his wise-cracking criminal ways.
I thought about his pack on the ground again. It likely had the drugs in it, the ones he had retrieved from the airport. A man that prioritized grabbing illicit substances in the middle of a zombie Armageddon probably wouldn’t leave them there, in a military installation. I settled a little, comforted by the fact that his contraband would bring him back.
It didn’t completely escape me that my fear for the man I liked was calmed because I figured he’d come back for his stardust, speedball, blow, or whatever the hell it was.
Ten minutes passed. They were painful. The loud hum and gunfire had turned to screams and helicopter drones. Nolan, Andy, and Rose kept watch at the doorway, their backpacks on, their muscles tensing with every passing shadow.
“We can’t wait for Barrett. We’ve got to get out of here,” Nolan said, sparing a glance my way. “He’ll find us. Or he won’t, but I can’t risk all of our lives waiting for him.” He took Rose’s hand and started moving toward the tent flaps.
“I’m scared.” Andy’s voice quavered
.
“It’s okay. Everything’s fine,” I tried to soothe him, though my own voice shook and—if I was honest with myself—I was beginning to smell blood. Blood. Flesh. Exposed bone. People were dying out there. And it didn’t make my fear rise. Instead, it drowned out my terror to be replaced with saliva filling my mouth.
Which was infinitely more terrible than crippling dread.
Rose and Nolan were outside the tent. Andy and I followed. The kid’s face was ghostly pale. I smelled something else. Looking down quickly, I found the acrid scent on Andy’s clothes that was mingling with the blood. Urine. I avoided his eyes as I focused on the panic around us.
“Leaving so soon?” A brusque, welcomed voice spoke loudly behind me.
I half-spun, finding Barrett. Relief flooded me. He’d found me. He’d found me first. I saw the pack then. No, he’d gotten his drugs first, then he’d tracked us down. That figured. He went to the tent first to find you—that’s why, idiot. It wasn’t the time, though, to worry about whether a criminal valued me over his coke payday.
Nolan, hearing Barrett’s return, turned slightly as he moved. “What did you find out?”
“Breach near where they process the newcomers,” Barrett breathed out, moving up a bit and keeping pace with me.
“How bad is it?” Rose asked now, breathing a little heavily as her head moved back and forth scanning the area with all of its chaotically moving residents. “I mean, it looks bad, but is it bad-bad?” She was desperate, hoping against the odds that this would work out. But just like every other dream we’d had that this would blow over, Barrett squashed it.
“Bad enough that this place ain’t coming back from it.” Barrett shoved in front of me just as a body careened into my path. He kicked the person hard, a boot to the chest that made them gasp. It was a man. Human. Someone just trying to survive and find shelter. But I couldn’t judge. I wouldn’t. He was keeping me safe; choosing a half-monster over a human.
Red Eye | Season 2 | Episode 1 Page 7