by D. Laine
Despite the flutter in my chest, I kept my expression neutral. So what if he remembered the scent of my favorite shampoo? It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t erase his deception.
Yet thirty minutes later, locked away in the bathroom with a flashlight and surrounded by the familiar scent, I couldn’t help but recall one of the last times I had smelled it. I shouldn’t have been reminiscing the not-so-long-ago morning Dylan and I shared a shower—though we hadn’t done much showering.
The memories heated my skin more than the lukewarm water in the otherwise cold room, and distracted me from the dark-gray color left behind on the washcloth as I scrubbed. By the time I finished washing my hair, the bucket was empty and the bottom of the tub was smeared in pasty ash.
Afterwards, I stretched out on the oversized couch opposite David with a satiated stomach and basked in the subtle coconut scent that surrounded me. Our feet intertwined in the middle, flooding me with warm admiration for my friend, and a contented sigh passed my lips. Other than a distracted, tired smile from David, no one paid me any attention as they settled in for the night. Except for one.
My eyes darted up and settled on Dylan where he sat in a wooden chair near the door with a gun in his lap. The subtle light from the fire didn’t reach him and most of his face remained in shadows, but I knew his eyes were on me. His gaze was like a palpable touch, and warmed all the places that had been neglected for far too long. Places he had brought to life where others had failed.
He would keep watch for a few hours, before rousing one of us to take his place. We would alternate throughout the night, as we had every night for the past two weeks.
Once again, I forced my eyes shut under his watchful gaze. Always watching. Always waiting.
We both knew how long he was forced to wait was up to me.
2
DYLAN
I thought I would feel something when we finally crossed the invisible line at the Idaho-Nevada border—some sense of accomplishment or pride or relief for having survived and making it as far as we had. The straps of the backpack cutting into my shoulders and the blisters slowly eroding my feet put a damper on my celebration.
After covering roughly four hundred miles, I should have been happy to know we were two-thirds of the way to our destination. I should have been looking forward to the protection the agency could offer us—and hopefully some hot food, a shower, and a soft bed.
The problem was we didn’t know what the agency could offer us. We didn’t know if there was an agency left. For all we knew, we were walking all this way for nothing. The uncertainty was too great to enable anything resembling hope to flourish.
The only thing that kept me from dropping my shit to the ground and staking a claim on some random slab of rock in the mountains was the faint mark behind Thea’s ear. I had stared at it so long I no longer knew if it was getting darker or not. My eyes betrayed me, thanks in part to dehydration.
What I needed was a good IV infusion, a juicy steak, and some answers.
Why did she have the mark of a tag? How had she gotten it, when she was genetically the same as Jake and me, and we were supposed to be immune? If she really had been tagged, why hadn’t she matured by now? Why was it taking much longer than the standard three days?
According to everything I had been told about the purple and black swirls behind her ear, Thea should have turned into a flesh-craving monster a month ago. Jake and I both knew the only way we were going to get the answers we needed, and get the help Thea needed, was to make it to the agency. All we could do was hope it was still there and still operational.
The next two hundred miles would be the hardest of our journey, but I kept that knowledge to myself. No need to worry the rest of the group yet.
Thea and David were relieved to see the amount of ash falling from the sky lessening with each mile we walked. Our visibility, while still shitty, had vastly improved compared to what it had been. We could see farther. We could see more of what lay ahead of us.
Of course, that meant we could also be seen. With a lot of nothing between us and the agency’s base in the desert, we had few places to hide if we ran into trouble. Meeting Jake’s worry-lined eyes, I knew I wasn’t the only one who realized the potential dangers that awaited us.
“We can jump from mountain range to mountain range,” he suggested. “Use the cover as long as we can.”
I nodded thoughtfully as I peered across the wide-open basin in front of us. It used to be an assortment of browns and oranges and yellows with an occasional speck of green. Now it was a depressing shade of gray. Everywhere I looked—gray. The next mountain range, I knew, lay two miles south of us.
“We need to run through the open fast, though. If we’re spotted . . .”
“This next range runs all the way to Elko,” Jake reminded me—or tried to convince himself that we weren’t completely screwed. “We can follow the 225 all the way to the interstate.”
“It’s going to be busy down there,” I muttered.
Several towns and one major interstate awaited us once we climbed out of the mountains in northern Nevada. Abandoned cars and lots of trapped, confused people had likely attracted the attention of tags in the area. There wasn’t any way around it. We had to pass through to get to the base.
We would have to prepare Thea and David for what we would encounter. For now, we maintained our brisk pace moving south, sprinting across the open basin before slipping into the protection offered by the next mountain range. There, we hid amongst the rocks and foliage as we followed the highway that ran to our left.
It was too far to see clearly through the ash. Every now and again, the wind would blow just right, permitting us a glimpse of the road in the distance. Empty. No moving traffic. Vehicles left abandoned, their engines rendered useless from the thick dust in the air.
I suspected we weren’t the only survivors hiding in the mountains. Though we didn’t see any signs of life, I knew they were out here. They had to be out here. There had to be someone left to fight for.
My gaze involuntarily traveled in Thea’s direction. Even if she wasn’t talking to me, she was worth fighting for. I realized the words sounded like one of those talking Hallmark cards in my head, but I couldn’t stop. It was constantly saying shit like, “She’s worth the wait” and “I never thought I could care about someone the way I care about you.”
I had a whole bunch of shit rolling around on repeat in there. Stuff I needed to say to her. Stuff I wanted her to know when, or if, she gave me the chance.
For now, I gave her the distance she wanted. I would wait for the day she took down the wall she had placed between us. But if it didn’t happen soon, I would be forced to tear it down for her. Because I knew she was stubborn like that.
While I waited, I kept our relationship entirely functional. I assisted her with climbing the steep rock walls her short legs couldn’t tackle on their own. I watched her back and made sure she ate and drank when she was supposed to. I gave her an extra hour to sleep at night, absorbing it during my watch rotation.
She had no idea I did that, of course. It wasn’t all out of thoughtfulness on my end either. I had selfish reasons for doing it, too. Because when she slept, it was her who I watched.
THE SOUND of shoes scraping over loose rock stirred me from a light sleep. Even before I was fully awake, I knew the sound had come from the entrance of the shallow cave we had taken shelter in for the night.
My eyes popped open in time to glimpse a human-shaped silhouette against the faintly lit backdrop. Whoever, or whatever, it was slipped outside and I pushed up, instantly awake and alert.
On the other side of the cave, Jake slept in his sleeping bag. David sat at his post near the entrance, his head rolled back against the stone wall. His mouth dropped open with a soft snore, and his gun lay by his feet. Thea’s sleeping bag was empty, her coat and gun gone.
I bolted to a stand, and shrugged on my coat as I darted outside. Fresh footprints in the bed of
fallen ash made it easy to follow her. She had half slid-half ran down the steeply sloped rock that dropped away from the narrow ridge, and continued into the skeletal trees that filled the valley.
Her trail wandered between a few trees before disappearing around a large boulder. My pace increased as I followed. My fingers instinctively reached for the weapon in my coat. I hadn’t brought a gun in my haste, but I had my favorite blade.
I was fully prepared to defend myself—and Thea—against any threats we encountered. I was not prepared for the possibility of Thea being that threat. The unwanted thought tickled the recesses of my mind before I stomped it out.
If she was in trouble, it was from something else. Not herself. If she hadn’t matured into a tag yet, she would never mature.
I held the weapon firmly in my grasp when I rounded the boulder and barreled over something tiny in my way. The small squeak that came out of whatever I’d just plowed into kept my blade-yielding arm in check. Looking down, I saw familiar wisps of brown hair sticking out from under a bulky hood.
“Jesus, Thea!” I slid the knife into my pocket and put a hand out to help her to her feet. “What in the hell are you doing?”
Her small, ice-cold hand trembled in mine, and I held on to it a little longer than necessary. Once she regathered her balance, she ripped it out of my grasp.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” She picked up her weapon from where it had fallen on the ground.
“What are you doing?” I repeated—gently this time.
“I had to go to the bathroom,” she mumbled.
“You—” I gaped at her bowed head. “Why didn’t you wake one of us?”
She shrugged.
“Thea, you can’t—” I shook my head at the ridiculousness of the statement on my tongue.
As the only girl in our group, I understood her need for some privacy, but come on. We were living in a world in which privacy was a luxury with dangers we couldn’t afford. As ridiculous as it sounded, it was the reality we had to live with now.
“You can’t go off by yourself,” I finished. “It’s not safe.”
“I didn’t go far.” She gestured toward our hideout at the top of the hill over my shoulder.
“Right. You were close enough that we would have heard your screams. Too far for us to save you if something happened.”
She scoffed. “I don’t need you to save me.”
“You got lucky,” I muttered with a shake of my head.
“I’m capable of—”
“Didn’t you listen to anything we told you?” I barked. “Do you have any idea what we’re dealing with? Haven’t you seen them, Thea? How could you—”
“Of course I’ve seen them!” she whispered harshly. “I’ve seen my own parents turned into monsters, Dylan. I watched them nearly kill you, so yes, I know exactly what we’re dealing with. Only because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Certainly not because you told me.”
“What are you—”
“You lied to me. The entire time we . . .” She lowered her gaze to the ground with a brisk shake of her head. “It was all lies.”
I put my knuckles to my chest, rubbing at the heavy ache that settled there.
I had been waiting a long time to have this conversation. I knew it would come, and I thought I was ready for it. Now that the time had come, the words I had mentally rehearsed and prepared for weeks to say to her got lost somewhere between my brain and my mouth.
Instead of saying anything remotely profound, I countered her with a lame, “Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think anymore,” she muttered. “Maybe I think nothing.”
“Or maybe you’re overthinking,” I suggested softly. At her bewildered expression, some of what I needed to say found its way through the fog in my head. “I couldn’t tell you what I was doing in Bozeman. You’ve got to understand that, Thea. When everything started to go down, I knew I had to tell you the truth. I tried to get you out of town. Don’t you remember that? What do you think I was going to tell you once we left?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “More lies?”
“The truth,” I countered. “I did tell you the truth when I came back for you. Until the evidence was in your face, you wouldn’t have believed me anyway.”
She knew I was right. I glimpsed the flash of self-awareness in her eyes, just enough to motivate me to keep going.
“Keeping the truth from you didn’t have anything to do with what happened between us,” I finished. “That was all genuine.”
“We hooked up, Dylan,” she muttered. “You don’t have to pretend it was more than that for my sake.”
I stood rooted to the ground when she brushed past me. Finally coming to my senses, I spun around and called after her, “That’s it? Just a hookup? That’s all it was to you?”
She turned, and I knew from the look on her face that she didn’t believe herself any more than I did. Despite the finality of her next words. “That’s all it was.”
“Now you’re lying.” I approached her with careful steps. “The question is, why?”
She stared at me.
“That’s not all it was, Thea,” I said softly. “Not for either of us, but unlike you, I’m not afraid to admit it.”
She jumped like a caged tiger poked with a pointy stick. “I am not afraid.”
“Then prove it.” I threw my arms out to my sides. “Don’t lie to me to spare yourself from admitting the truth. Tell me what you feel—what you really feel.”
“Felt,” she countered through clenched teeth. “And what I felt changed the moment I learned about the mountain of lies you were feeding me all along.”
She spun on her heel, like she thought she had gotten the last word. As if I would ever let that happen. To her retreating back, I sang out, “I still call bullshit.”
Those words brought her to an abrupt stop—as I suspected they would. She turned slowly. Her downcast eyes traveled up until her gaze locked with mine. The memory of what happened the last time I used that line was evident in her heated gaze.
Okay, so it was mixed with a whole lot of anger, but there was just enough lust visible to give me hope. Only this time, I wasn’t so sure a spontaneous kiss would fly. Not without getting myself slapped afterwards.
I needed to stick with words. For now.
“Thea, I don’t know—”
“Stop.” She put a hand up. The spooked look on her face told me it wasn’t because she didn’t want to listen to what I had to say. Her gaze drifted over my shoulder and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Did you hear that?”
My back stiffened. “What did you—”
Glimpsing a flash of movement in my periphery, I lurched forward to snag the front of Thea’s coat. My other hand covered her mouth at the same instant I shoved her against the surface of the boulder. She grunted into my hand from the impact, then stilled as I pressed against her in an attempt to conceal us both.
With my eyes on the group of tags moving through the trees, I whispered, “Don’t. Move.”
Thea melted into the rock in an attempt to make herself smaller. Her arms moved around my waist to pull me flush against her. I slowly removed my hand from her mouth and her ragged breaths fanned my neck. If it weren’t for the small army of flesh-devouring creatures parading past us twenty yards away, I might have enjoyed the closeness a little more.
So far I counted a dozen tags, but I suspected more were hidden in the curtain of falling ash. It didn’t matter how many were out there. I already knew there were too many of them for the two of us to take on our own.
“I’m going to get your gun,” I whispered into Thea’s ear.
Her head nodded fractionally, and I slowly lowered my arm to grab the weapon from around her waist. Her grip on me tightened when a straggler stumbled through the trees to my left—closer to us than the others.
“Get to the hideout and warn Jake,” I told Thea urgently as I disengaged
the safety. “No matter what you hear, don’t stop. Don’t turn around. Don’t come back. Just run to Jake.”
Her fingers dug into my back. “No, Dylan.”
The straggler wandered closer, veering farther from the rest of the group. His nose tipped up in the air like an animal sniffing out its prey.
“He’s going to find us,” I whispered harshly. “I’m going to have to take him out. The others will hear. They’re going to come fast. Once I move on him, you run and don’t look back.”
Her head shook vigorously. “No.”
I couldn’t move out of her unyielding grip. Not without making some noise. “Dammit, Thea. Now is not the time—”
Her hands shot up to frame my jaw. She held me firmly in place as her lips smashed against mine. Warm and powerful and full of all the feelings she claimed had been washed away by my deception. The truth came out with one desperate kiss.
A kiss I never wanted to end, because I didn’t know if I would ever get another one. If I died in the next sixty seconds, this was a hell of a send-off. But I knew that wasn’t what she was doing. Despite that realization, I sank into her. Just for a moment. I could give myself a moment.
When I pulled away, I grumbled, “That’s not fair.”
Her eyes darted in the direction of the approaching tag. Behind him, another straggler wandered closer. Neither had spotted us yet, but they would soon.
“We do this together,” Thea whispered to me.
My eyes squeezed shut when her lips brushed against mine again. Far too soon, they disappeared.
“Thea—”
“I’m not running without you,” she informed me, “so you better take them out quietly.”
I nodded brusquely as the closer of the two tags trudged toward us, faster now that he had our scent. As I released my hold on Thea, I shoved the gun back into her hands. I pulled my blade as the tag rounded the boulder with a hungry growl.
I swung with swift precision, slicing through the meaty side of his neck. His head dropped to the ash-covered ground with a soft thud. A second later, his limp body crashed into the boulder.
