by Jenika Snow
“You think Rockport will have anything left?” Asher sat next to Mason, and the three of them started passing around the can of beans and jerky.
Mason shrugged and swallowed the mouthful of food before speaking. “Not sure. I know the smaller towns lasted longer after the infection than the bigger cities, but it has been months. I doubt there’s much left, but we might be able to find a few supplies.” They finished eating in silence, and then they sat there, no one speaking, but the discomfort was thick.
Maybe she was the only one who felt this way? She certainly hadn’t been very social before the infection hit, and it kind of made it even more awkward for her now, given the fact that she felt like some kind of third wheel in their relationship.
“So, Sparrow.” She lifted her eyes and looked at Asher. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, and for a moment, Sparrow let her eyes travel over the hard, defined lines of his biceps. “You got a last name?” His white T-shirt, or what had once been white, molded to his chest, and even with the single candle being the only form of illumination, she could still make out the ridges that lined his abdomen.
She stared into his eyes, ones she couldn’t see very well because of the shadows but that she knew were a bright blue. Even after traveling with them, she had only told them the bare minimum about herself, and she didn’t think a last name was really important anymore. “Gray. It’s Gray.” His blond hair was short, but then again, Mason had just cut it with a rusty pair of scissors. She flicked her eyes to Mason. He watched her silently, but she noticed he did that a lot.
“Is Sparrow a nickname or something?”
She didn’t talk her eyes off Mason when Asher asked her. Clearing her throat, she pulled her jacket closer to her body and shook her head. “No, my parents just wanted their kid named after I bird, I suppose.” She hadn’t said it to try to be funny, but apparently he thought it was, because Asher chuckled softly. She hated her name growing up, got teased relentlessly during school because of it, but now as an adult, she liked that it was so unusual.
“You don’t talk much.” Mason’s voice was just as deep as Asher’s, but he had more of a stoic personality.
She glanced over at him. “Neither do you.”
He smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. Being on the road with these two guys had showed her a lot. Sparrow didn’t just keep quiet because it was the smart thing to do or because that was what Mason wanted. She also did it, because it gave her a chance to really learn about them and see the things they might not have shown if they knew someone was watching.
Most of the time, she didn’t even think they realized she was still with them. They would be so caught up in talking strategy or scanning their surroundings that Sparrow watched them and learned little things about them. For instance, Mason always had a hand on the hunting knife strapped to his outer thigh or on the butt of his gun. He also was the one who listened more than spoke, and he seemed cold on the best of days.
Asher, on the other hand, seemed far friendlier out of the two of them, and the few times she saw him smile or show emotion, she could see that if she was to penetrate any of their hard exteriors, it was going to be through him. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t as frighteningly powerful or dominant as Mason. When the two of them stood side by side, they looked like hardened warriors ready to kick some ass.
“How did you survive so long after the infection broke out?” Asher grabbed the half-empty bottle of water Mason handed to him and took a swig. He held his hand out for her to take the bottle, and when she did, their fingers brushed. She quickly snatched her hand back, thankful for the darkness that hid her cheeks, since she knew she was blushing.
“I was with a group of four when the infection really started to spread. But slowly, they were picked off until I was the last one standing.” She glanced between them and then drank a mouthful of water. She never thought water could taste as good as it did when you were scrounging for it. When she took her share, she passed it to Mason, but he shook his head.
“You go ahead and finish it off.” The offer was kind, but his expression didn’t show any emotion.
“You sure?” she asked, and he nodded and turned his attention to the candle. “Thank you.” He grunted once in response, but before she finished it, she looked at Asher.
“You go ahead. I’m good.” Asher gave her a warm smile, and Sparrow found herself smiling in return. God, it felt so good to do it. She hadn’t realized the small, almost insignificant things that she had taken for granted until she just didn’t do them any longer. She handed the now empty bottle to Mason, and he tucked it into his bag. “I ended up finding a couple that took me in for a while, but then I started noticing the way they looked at me.”
“Looked at you?” Asher leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. She watched the tendons flex beneath his skin and swallowed down her irrational desire. Sparrow hadn’t felt this way with anyone else she had been around since the fall of civilization, but being with these two men turned something on inside her.
“Yeah.” She glanced down and twisted her fingers together. Sparrow didn’t want to think about it, but they wanted to know. “They didn’t know I was watching. I was getting some wild berries we had just found in the woods, and when I made my way back to their place, I saw them beating a man to death.” At their blank stares, because she knew death wasn’t new for any of them, she said, “And then proceeded to cut him up.” Bile rose from her belly at the image of them slicing open the man. “They shoved the meat they cut off in bags around their waists. And then I knew that those ‘looks’ I thought I was getting from them, the ones that made me feel uncomfortable and uneasy, meant they were sizing me up for dinner.”
Chills raced up her spine. “I don’t know why they didn’t kill me right away, but I’m thankful they didn’t. Even though this is the apocalypse, I don’t want to die, least of all like that.” She glanced at each of them after she said that. “I ran. I ran as hard as I could until I collapsed from exhaustion.” It had been one thing after another, and humans no longer held compassion or integrity. Well, she thought that… until she met these two men. “And then you found me, saved me, and here we are.” The silence stretched between them, and she cleared her throat.
“Yeah, people sure have gotten fucked up since this shit happened, but that’s what happens when the world collapses, I suppose.” Asher’s words were pitched low, and there was a hint of depression in it. “I have seen a lot of shit on the road since this whole thing started, and only one percent of it was decent.” He looked at Mason, and there was a silent communication between them. She knew, without either of them saying anything, that meeting each other had been a light in all this darkness. Maybe one day she could have that. It was a farfetched desire and honestly so miniscule compared to the bigger picture.
“It is in our nature to go after one another.” They both glanced at Mason when he spoke. He didn’t lift his gaze from the candle that was slowly starting to dwindle down to a puddle of wax. “This was inevitable. With greed, power, and war, it is in our nature to destroy everything around us, including each other.” He leaned back and scrubbed a hand over his face. Although she knew they had one disposable razor, had seen Asher using it just this morning, Mason sported day-old stubble. It looked good on him, but it also made him seem even more menacing.
“You were in the service.” She didn’t phrase it as a question, and when he flicked just his eyes to her, that was affirmation enough. Mason held her stare with an intense one of his own. His dark hair was longer than Asher’s, shaggy almost, and it hung across his forehead. His eyes were as dark as the shadows that surrounded them, and his body was just as hard as his companion’s. He had a scar on his cheek, about three inches long, but the darkness hid it from her at the moment. Sparrow remembered it all too well. She often wondered how he got it. Had it been when he’d gone to war—if he had, in fact, gone overseas—or did he get it while killing off the infected?
It took her a minute to tear her eyes away from Mason, but finally she forced herself to look away from the power he held in that gaze and looked at Asher. “Yeah. I lived in Thornton my whole life. After... everything, I didn’t know where in the hell I was going to go, but I knew I needed to get out of a heavily populated city.”
“No place was safe. That sickness spread faster than the fucking plague.” The air stilled at Mason’s dark words. “It was like every fucking person needed that damn flu shot after they announced it had all those cancer-curing properties bullshit. They thought it was the miracle drug of the century. They should have known man can’t play God. You fuck with shit, and this is what happens.”
Sparrow didn’t bother talking to Mason about how science saved lives, how people had been able to be with their loved ones because of what man could do. None of that mattered anymore.
“We are only human and can’t control life and death. I’m all for helping the sick, but there is always a point when we just need to step back and say things happen for a reason,” he continued. Whether she agreed with him or not wasn’t the point, not anymore. “All we are doing is prolonging the inevitable.” Mason scrubbed a hand over his jaw, and she saw a muscle tic right beneath his skin. “Everyone wants to be in control, but that isn’t how life works.”
Asher cleared his throat and reached out to Mason, but the dark-haired man stood before contact could be made and started pacing. He did this for several minutes, and when it was clear he got himself under control, he sat back down.
“Go on, Sparrow.” He motioned with his hand for her to continue, but it was the way he said her name, like sandpaper across her flesh, that had a shiver racing through her body.
She swallowed and explained, “I was an LPN and going to school part-time for my BSN.” Her voice was low, but it wasn’t because she was purposefully making it so. This was the first time since being in their presence that she had seen a sliver of emotion come from Mason as she spoke and as he asked her these personal questions. It was at that moment that it made sense. He had lost someone very close to him, possibly by his own hand.
She knew many people had to kill their loved ones after they turned sick, herself included. Was that why Mason was the way he was? He shut himself out until something she said broke the wall he erected inside himself. Sparrow thought herself pretty good at reading people, and up until this moment, Mason had been a mystery to her. But he was asking her things, wanting to know about her. Over the last few days in his company, this was the most he had ever said directly to her.
“Got someone with a useful skill, huh?” Asher’s voice cut through the tension surrounding them, and she smiled, but she knew it probably didn’t look genuine and was a bit forced. “You worked in a hospital or something?”
“I worked at an assisted living home. I was doing my clinical rotation at St. Anthony’s when the news first broke about the immunization changing people. Immediately, there was hysteria and chaos. My family had gotten the immunization, and my class was due to get theirs that day as part of the school’s requirements.” The images of that day were scorched into her brain.
“If you weren’t one of the lucky ones to die from the immunization, you turned into the piece of shits roaming around.”
She nodded at Asher’s statement. “Yeah. My parents didn’t survive, but my brother, who was only twenty-one, turned into….” She picked at a loose thread on her jacket. “My brother wasn’t lucky enough to die and instead became one of those things.” This was the first time she had actually explained in depth what happened to her, and honestly, she didn’t know what it was about Mason and Asher that made her feel comfortable enough to open up to them like this. The people she traveled with before finding these two men hadn’t cared two shits about her life before the sick had taken over, but she hadn’t cared enough about them to know how they had lived either. It was a very, very sad realization.
“What happened to him?” Mason asked.
Sparrow grew sad thinking about her brother, but she had no more tears left to shed. Those dried up long ago. “I killed him.” The air seemed to still, and something flickered behind Mason’s eyes. Keeping his stare, she said, “I couldn’t let him suffer like that, even if the news said the infected couldn’t feel pain and were no longer the people we knew and loved.”
All of that had been a load of shit. The government, the scientists, everyone who had been involved had wanted to smooth things out. They had caused this, but the people had fueled the fire. But Sparrow was sick of casting blame anymore. What good did it really do? The world was hell, literally, and all she could do was take it one day at a time.
“I had never hurt anyone before, and it took me four times before I could get the blade in.” Her stomach twisted, and she wrapped her arms around herself. She should stop, but she couldn’t. It was like something opened up inside her. “He made this gurgling noise when the butcher knife finally went into his neck, and although he still came after me, I knew he felt something.” She cleared her throat as she replayed that day in her mind. “It wasn’t until I ended up putting the knife through one of his eyes as he tackled me to the floor that he finally died.”
For a moment, she couldn’t say anything after that, but there was no room in this new life for what she was feeling. It only caused weakness, and that caused death. “Once I killed my brother, something shut off inside me. I worked on instinct, grabbed what I could—food, clothes, water, anything I thought I would need to survive—and took off in my mom’s car. We had no other family, and I had no place else to go, so I just drove until I ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.”
She lived with her mom and dad while working her way through school, had no place of her own, and what friends she did have were more of a passing thought. She hadn’t been close to anyone but her parents and brother, and now they were gone. Even now, she could see the fires blazing from the houses she drove by and the thick riots in front of the stores. Murder, violence, and mayhem were aplenty now. “I ran out of gas and trekked my way down backroads until I saw a small group of healthy humans. I stayed with them up until they either got attacked by the sick or killed each other off. And you know the rest after that.”
“What are you, twenty-five, -six?”
She answered Mason’s question. “Twenty-three.”
“Shit, you’re young.”
She looked at Asher at his scoff and then at Mason. They looked older, maybe in their late thirties, early forties, but certainly not old enough that they should have thought her age was an issue. She felt the need to make them see she could handle herself and be an asset to their group.
“I can fend for myself and kill if I need to.” They stared at her, but neither responded to her statement, so she decided a change of subject was best. “You can’t be much older than me.”
Mason slowly crossed his arms over his chest, and the muscles bunched under the dark thermal he wore. She slid her eyes over to Asher and saw him staring right at her. In all honesty, she couldn’t trust anyone but herself anymore, but there was a point in someone’s life when solitude wasn’t a friend but an enemy. She wanted to trust them desperately. But the what-if slammed in her head. Maybe they meant to do a hell of a lot more than degrade her? Who was she kidding? She had been with them for three days, and the only thing they had done was keep her safe and share their food with her.
“I’m thirty-eight.” Asher was the first to speak, but she didn’t think Mason would’ve answered her anyway. “Mace is forty-one.” He flicked his eyes over to Mason, and she didn’t miss the scowl that went across his face.
Another moment of silence stretched, but Sparrow wanted to know about them, the same way they asked about her. “What about you guys?” She looked between the two of them. “What was your life like before all this happened?” She heard what Asher had done previously when she eavesdro
pped, but of course she wasn’t about to admit that. When neither answered right away, her embarrassment grew, but Asher cleared his throat and offered her another smile.
“I used to be a trainer. Used to get guys ready to fight in underground cages.” He shrugged. “The money was really good, and since I hurt my knee and can’t fight myself, that was the next best thing.” When she didn’t respond, Asher continued. “Hey, we all have to make a living, right?” He gave her a lopsided grin, and it was hard not to return the expression.
He shrugged again, and his smile grew. “I came from Ohio originally, had myself a girlfriend, but she turned sick shortly after she got the immunization.”
“So, you had a girlfriend?” She hadn’t meant to sound surprised, but the sexual sounds she heard from them had led her to believe that the same sex had been their cup of tea. She also flicked her eyes toward Mason. He had a scowl on his face and refused to meet her stare.
“Yeah, I did. I actually only had girlfriends up until shit hit the fan.”
Her cheeks heated. “I meant no offense.”
He waved off her apology. “I take it we weren’t as quiet as we were trying to be? You know as well as the next person that things change.” Now, it was her turn to break eye contact and look anywhere but at them. “Listen, no shame, all right? The road changes people. Fuck, the world ending tends to put a bunch of shit into perspective.”
“Yeah.”
“I certainly didn’t go out looking for a guy, but Mace and I just kind of found each other one day. Both of us were traveling alone, and for the last three months, we watched out for each other. The world nowadays is unforgiving. We aren’t looking to hurt or degrade you. Besides, power is in numbers, and even though for a long time after this happened I wanted to be alone, that kind of silence doesn’t bode very well for the mind.” She lifted her head, and he tapped a finger to his temple. “I’m sure you know what I’m saying.” Yeah, she did. “Besides, we aren’t bastards. We couldn’t just leave you to fend for yourself. But we gave you the choice to join us or be on your way.” Asher’s voice was deep, but soft.
