And Anna was right too. Whether I die from the virus, a zombie chomping on me, a human gang trying to own me or old age—I’m still dying. There was nothing to really lose anymore.
“Deal.”
“It’s late, you should head to bed,” I say to Anna as we sit in the mess, watching the others have breakfast.
We’d gotten out of the lab without being seen, but they were going to notice that things were missing or moved, so there was no telling how long we had. Luke was helping out in the kitchen again with Lily, who was still being cold to me after our conversation yesterday. It had been horrible trying to explain to her that I wasn’t interested. She’d tried to suggest that she could ‘share’ me with Anna, and I had to put my foot down and spell it out that I had never meant to lead her on, but I’d always been looking for Anna. It was always Anna. She’d cooled off a little after that, but I was still having shady looks thrown my way like it was Mardi Gras and her glares were beads.
“Mmmm, I know. But I don’t want to go alone,” Anna says sleepily as she yawns again for the millionth time.
I almost spit my coffee out at her words, and she looks at me confused before it dawns on her. Blushing, she says, “That’s not what I meant, although that wouldn't be a bad thing either.”
Watching her, I smile. Elise had never been so direct, and it was refreshing. I didn’t have the headspace to guess what Anna was thinking, it also saved a lot of time we would have spent just dancing around each other.
“If I come to bed with you, it’s only to sleep. Understand? None of this attacking me and kissing me again,” I tease as I yawn too, set off by her.
She nods, and together, we head back to my room, where we drag the two single beds together against the wall.
I try not to stare as Anna strips down to her underwear and pulls one of my T-shirts out of the drawer. Her back is scarred, long deep gashes are criss-crossed over the skin, but they’re faded. It’s the brand between her shoulder blades that catches my eye. It’s a crescent moon, with some weird lines, burned into her flesh. Without thinking, I reach out and brush my fingertips over the raised skin.
“Redemption liked to mark their incubators,” she laughs bitterly as she glances over at me.
“This doesn’t mean that he owns you. No one can own the moon. She represents regeneration and power. She’s a fighter, waxing and waning but always returning, full of light.” I sweep her hair over her shoulder and gently press my lips against the mark, whispering the words between kisses as she shivers.
She leans back into me as my kisses move up her neck. I’m slow, deliberate. I don’t want to rush anything between us because the feelings I have for this woman frighten me. I also wasn’t going to pass on the opportunity to see her like this, exposed, raw, and very much alive under my touch.
Turning, she kisses me, and I’m lost to her again. She’s a stranger, but it doesn't feel that way. It feels like she was made for me as her arms come around my neck and we stand locked in an embrace that acknowledges the pain we’ve been through. We’re both survivors. We’re both scarred. We’re both in this together.
“Come on,” I say quietly as I pull away, even though I don’t want to. “You need to sleep.”
I don’t miss the way she hesitates before deciding that I have a point and pulling a T-shirt on. I push down my trousers and tear off my shirt, crawling into the makeshift double bed next to her in my only boxers. It was asking for trouble later, but right now, I wasn’t prepared to break the connection we had. Human contact was a craving when I was near her, and if that meant holding her while she slept, then I’d take that.
Anna turns the light off and settles in beside me, curling into my side, her head on my chest. She smells like soap and grass as her arm comes around my waist and our legs tangle together.
“I can hear your heartbeat…” she whispers as her fingers dance lazily over my skin.
“Go to sleep,” I say, stroking her hair, completely comfortable with the petite woman in my arms.
Her voice is thick and drowsy as she gives me a squeeze and says, “Mmmm, talk to me.”
“About what?” I ask as I lay there in the darkness, thinking about what made small talk these days. It had been a while since I had to do this, I normally kept to myself and closed off—I’d had to.
“Anything. Everything.”
“Okay,” I think for a moment before realising that I want to talk about my life before. I didn’t want to keep running from my memories. “I met my wife Elise when we were in university together. I wanted to be a teacher, and she wanted to be an archaeologist.”
“Mmmm,” Anna mumbles, only half-awake. “What was she like?”
I think for a moment, my wife had always been the life and soul of any room. She was a force, a light that couldn’t be dimmed...until she’d been completely extinguished by the virus. I clear my throat. “She could walk into a room and make friends in minutes. Everyone was drawn to her, she just had this energy that made you want to be near her. She was always laughing.”
Anna murmurs, the words slurred, “Did she like you?”
“No,” I chuckle softly. “She thought I was arrogant. And grumpy. It took us a while to become friends, well, time and a bottle of sambuca.”
The sound of heavy breathing tells me that Anna is already gone, lost in a world of dreams, and I lay there thinking about my life before and how it hurts a little less than before.
Chapter Thirty-One
Anna
It’s late afternoon when we wake, and I somehow manage to persuade Donovan to sneak into the women’s bathrooms with me to take a shower. He locks the cubicle door behind us but tells me in a hushed whisper that we need to hurry.
Except I don’t want to hurry. This is the most normal I have felt in almost two years. This is the first time I’ve had complete control over my own body since the outbreak, and I thoroughly intend to enjoy it. I turn the lukewarm water on and help him wash, taking my sweet, sweet time before he returns the favour. His hands roam all over my skin, exploring every scar, every mark, every freckle as he kisses away the memory of every touch that came before his.
I grab him, my hands firmly rooted in his hair as I claim his mouth with a desperation I haven’t felt since before Luke was born. I need this man. I want him. And I don’t want to think about why or whether we’ll still feel like this next month. I just want to feel. As things start getting heated between us, a sharp knock on the cubicle door has us both jumping out of our skins.
“Luke is looking for you guys…” Mia calls playfully through the closed door. “He’s in the mess hall.”
We look at each other for a minute, still a knot of limbs tangled together, our bodies slick and warm before we both laugh.
“Fuck, I told you we wouldn’t have long,” Donovan grumbles as he turns off the water. He quickly pats himself dry before handing me the towel, giving my body another hungry glance.
“Well, I thought we’d have more than ten minutes!” I chuckle as I start to dry off. “I guess I forgot I was still a mum for a moment there. Privacy doesn’t exist when you have kids.”
“Tell me about it,” he agrees as he starts to pull his clothes over his still damp body. I wonder if he’s thinking about his daughter when he says that, it must have been hard losing both her and his wife. I couldn’t imagine anything worse, Luke was my whole world.
“Donovan, it’s okay if you want to talk about your family. I’ll always be here to listen,” I offer up as I wrap my hair in the towel and pull my jogging bottoms on.
He places his palm against my cheek, like I did at the Wharf. His dark eyes are fixed on my face as if he’s memorizing it.
“Thank you.” His voice is tender as he rubs his thumb across my skin. Leaning in and kissing the tip of my nose before pulling me into a hug, he says, “But I was on about your child, he’s been my shadow recently. I knew we wouldn’t have long.”
“Yeah, Luke isn’t great with boundaries. It’s o
nly ever been the two of us, so I’m not surprised he latched on,” I explain as we head to the mess hall.
“He’s a good kid, you’ve done a great job.”
“Thanks.” I can feel my cheeks going pink. Raising Luke had been hard, but I wouldn't have had it any other way.
“But this is still going to happen,” he growls quietly, gesturing between us. “I’ll find a way to make it happen.”
“That’s why the quickie was invented,” I tease with a wink as we push through the doors to the mess hall and find everyone sat, tucking into their dinners.
“No,” he says, face serious as he takes my hand in his. “The first time we have sex is not going to be a wham, bam, thank you ma’am moment, okay?”
I nod and fan my cheeks a little, not sure what to say in response. I was a grown adult, feeling like a teenager whenever I was with him.
The others look up and either smile or give us a small wave as we take a seat at the table with them. Their faces look tense, even though they welcome us. Luke perks up when he sees us, not even bothered by the fact we’re holding hands.
“Can I go and play with Ryan?” he asks after scoffing down some porridge type meal. We’ve barely been here for five minutes and already he wants to leave. I resist the urge to sigh, we probably could have not come and carried on...with what we'd been doing and Luke wouldn't have even noticed. Sometimes I think kids just need to make sure you’re still there, they don’t actually want you. Once he’s gone, Donovan flashes me a secret smile that says he had the same thought. We could have been naked, showering still.
“Any news on when we actually leave for Rosehill?” Donovan asks, one hand still firmly holding mine as he pours us both a coffee with the other hand.
Alex looks around for a moment, and when he spots Kelp leaving the mess hall, he leans in. “No, not yet. But the sooner, the better.”
“Tensions are running high,” Fischer comments, tearing into her bread and dunking it with a strange aggression that sets me on edge. Looking around the large hall, I realise that the children aren’t running around like they usually are. People seem to be quieter, hushed voices surround us instead of the noise I’d become used to, making the atmosphere almost oppressive. As more survivors enter, I notice that no one is sitting near us or even glancing our way. What was going on?
Donovan gives my hand a gentle squeeze, trying to reassure me as Lily walks past without a second glance, before whispering, “Is everything okay?”
“No, supplies have gone missing...downstairs. And Kelp is unleashing a manhunt because of it,” Alex scoffs while Mia looks away and swirls her spoon in the stew, a faraway look on her face. “He thinks it was us.”
I feel my body tense as I look at Donovan. With a small frown, he says nothing as he rubs this thumb over my hand, once again trying to comfort me. Mia still hadn’t told Alex.
Fischer doesn’t look up as she grumbles, “Not that anyone else knows what he’s looking for, of course, they don’t have a clue about what’s hidden here. They just know something is going on.”
Putting people on alert was always a risky strategy, but nothing I’d heard about Kelp could convince me that the man knew what he was doing. Things would get out of hand if he let the situation escalate, especially since we were confined to the base. Rumours and suspicion always bred fear.
“If we’re not careful…” Donovan says with a sigh as he runs his hand through his hair and looks around again. Some of the people were on Alex’s side, but this was the end of the world. Survival came first. People looked out for themselves first and foremost, which meant that if Kelp gave them a choice...they wouldn’t choose Alex. It was a brutal truth, knowing that what’s right wasn’t enough anymore. Morals were worth nothing when you were stuck between a hard place and a zombie horde.
“He’ll kick us out with no support or supplies.” Slamming his mug down so hard on the table, Mia flinches and Alex laughs bitterly. “Yeah, I know.”
Placing a hand on his arm softly, Mia hisses, “We need to leave tomorrow. If we delay any longer, there’s going to be an issue.”
She looks anxious as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and avoids Alex’s gaze. It looked like the mess hall wasn’t the only place full of tension.
Clearing my throat, I ask, “They won’t all turn on us, surely? I mean...Kelp is the one keeping pets on-site?”
“I see Donovan filled you in,” Alex says, eyes narrowed at me.
Mia rolls her eyes as she crosses her arms. “Actually, it was me.”
“Why?”
“She’s one of us now. She deserves to know.” Fischer argues, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m part of something. Not just a slave, not just a body, but a person.
Alex seems to calm a little. “I know, I just thought we agreed that the less people who knew—the better.”
“Things are changing. The zombies are changing. We can’t keep going the way we are.”
This time it’s Donovan who speaks, his words ringing in my ears as they sink in. Even though I felt fairly safe and normal with these people, it wasn’t going to stay this way. It couldn’t.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Donovan
“Can you do me a favour?” I ask Alex as we leave the mess hall, Anna going ahead with Mia to begin making a list of what is already at Rosehill and what we may need to set up a base and become self-sufficient. Kelp wasn’t likely to give us much, so we had to make it count.
“Yeah, sure,” he says as we head over to one of the vehicle hangars. “What do you need?”
It turned out that Hazeldine had been keeping a few trucks behind just in case of an emergency, and he needed to move the lab equipment. Kelp had taken some persuading, but he’d finally agreed to give us a truck and a trailer, on the condition that we came back in a few weeks to return the trailer and give a progress report. He didn’t seem to believe Alex or Mia when they tried to explain to him that they wanted to build a community with some kind way to travel between the two bases.
I clear my throat. “I need you to have Luke for the evening.”
Alex scoffs, “Mate, you can’t be serious? You want me to babysit so you can get laid?”
My mouth twists into a grin, that was exactly what I was after. If I didn’t get some actual alone time with Anna soon, I was going to strangle someone. Or be eaten by zombies first. And I didn’t like either of those options.
“When you say it like that…” I say with a laugh. “Yes.”
“Fine, but you owe me.” Alex watches me carefully for a moment. “It’s so strange seeing you like this.”
I ignore his comment, but I understand what he means. Before I met Anna and Luke, I was quiet. Closed off. Alex used to joke that he’d forget what my voice sounded like because sometimes I could go days without speaking. Mia had helped me with that, but Anna had changed everything.
“You could use the extra pair of hands loading the truck up,” I point out as one of the soldiers hands us the keys for the truck and shows us which trailer we’d be taking with us.
“Fair point. He’ll also be a good buffer.” Alex clambers up on the trailer, trying to gauge how much space we had. He pulls out a tape measure from his pocket and starts taking measurements, muttering to himself.
“Huh?” I say, frowning.
Perching himself on the edge rail of the trailer, Alex scowls. “Something is going on with Mia, and I’m tired of trying not to fight with her.”
I try to keep my face blank, I guess she still hadn’t told him about Avery and the baby. It must be eating her up, but I don’t understand why she didn’t just explain it to him.
Would he be angry that she snuck into the lab? Yes.
Would he be annoyed that she kept it a secret? Yes.
But would he get over it because he was madly in love with her? Also, a yes.
“So, you’re going to use my kid as a buffer?” I try to look annoyed, but fail, my face cracking into a grin.
>
“Your kid?” he says, repeating my words.
I shrug. “It’s the apocalypse, who has time to hang around anymore?”
“True. Very bloody true,” he commiserates as I give him a quick salute and leave him in the hangar. I wasn’t going to hang around here, not when I had plans to put in place.
Two hours later, I’m pacing my quarters. I exhale slowly, not sure why I’m so nervous. Maybe because it’s been two years since I’d been in this kind of situation, or maybe because it was Anna and there was something about her that made me feel like she was mine. She was made for me.
The door clicks open softly as she enters, I watch her face light up as she spots the candles dotted around the room. I’d also found a long glass and filled it with some wildflowers. It wasn’t much, but it was all I could do given the end of society and all that jazz. Rose petals and champagne weren’t on top of the raid lists these days, not when food was running in short supply.
“When did you manage to do this?” she asks, as she smiles. I’m caught up in the way she looks at me, I’d do anything to make her smile like that every day, especially when the world was so grey and dreary otherwise.
Shrugging, I try to keep my voice casual. “Earlier, while you were helping Mia make a list of basics.”
“Where on earth did you get the candles?” She steps towards me and grabs my shirt, pulling me into her. The warmth of her body pressed against mine as we stand toe to toe makes my heart race. It’d never felt like this before. Maybe it was because I didn’t appreciate what I had, but now it was like I was experiencing everything again for the first time.
Her arms come around my waist as I explain, “From a church. Had to kill a zombie to get them too.”
Reaching up, she kisses me gently. “Romantic.”
“There’s wine too,” I say as she gives me another kiss before glancing at the bottle of dusty wine on the bedside table.
The Survival Games (Book 2): Hide & Seek Page 18
