Love and Decay

by Rachel Higginson

  His breath pushed against the hair at my nape. “It’s good to see you again, friend.”

  Emotion finally surfaced, past the shock, beyond the speechless awe. “You too. It’s good to see you again, too.”

  He didn’t linger in our embrace. He pushed back, placed his hands on my shoulders again and smiled so brightly I wasn’t sure that it was the same person anymore.

  In the five minutes I’d been around Luke, I could tell that he was a hard man. He looked ten years older than his age, which was only a few years older than me. Deep lines etched through his forehead and from the corners of his eyes; his mouth had a serious tilt towards a permanent frown.

  Even his initial smile looked slightly… forced.

  But now, this one, this smile that stretched as wide as it could and revealed straight, white teeth, lit up his entire face. He looked younger instantly. He looked happier and relieved and… grateful.

  This smile was a peek at the soul I instinctively knew was hidden from everyone, out of necessity for the cause.

  And probably because life sucked at the end of the world.

  If I had lost all of my family, I wouldn’t have anything to smile about either.

  He laughed low and deeply. “I can’t believe you’re here.” And then he was gone. He pulled back and went straight to Hendrix. He then shook Nelson’s hand, introducing his people and my family as he moved through the crowd.

  I shook hands with several people with names I forgot as soon as they moved on. I probably could have remembered them under normal circumstances, but my mind overflowed with new information and I didn’t have a place to store it all.

  I stood toward the back of the crowd and watched Luke’s expression change to wild wonder when he was introduced to Diego. “The Diego?” he asked.

  Diego leaned in with all his suave machismo and smirked. “The one and only.”

  I rolled my eyes as the two men clasped hands. Only Diego could pull off an introduction like that with his lilting accent and warlord aura.

  As the night darkened and the wind turned colder Miller stood next to me with arms crossed over his chest. “Is this what you expected?”

  His voice held that darkness he constantly warned me about and I didn’t know whether to be honest with him and risk his anger at Luke and his community, or lie to him and risk his anger with me when he found out the truth.

  Instead, I settled for, “No, it’s not. But how could I have possibly known what to expect?”

  “They have a lot to prove,” Miller murmured. “I’m not impressed so far.”

  I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Of course, big, bad Miller wasn’t going to be impressed with them. I doubted he would ever be impressed with them or what they’d done.

  “We’ve only known them for ten minutes,” I pointed out. “They still might surprise you.”

  I felt his gaze on my profile. “They’d just better not surprise you,” he countered.

  I chewed on my lip, hating that my thoughts were so aligned with his. And not because I didn’t trust Miller, but because I really was surprised that I didn’t trust Luke.

  After all these years of writing and planning and thinking, I had expected Luke and me to share this insane bond that transcended time and space and zombie apocalypses.

  But seeing him for the first time after such a long time… I had to admit the truth. Luke was a stranger. There was no bond. There was no interstellar connection. There was not even a hint of nostalgic intuition.

  I didn’t know this man.

  I didn’t know anything about him.

  Maybe it was the distance. Or maybe it was the difference between our lifestyles. Maybe it was who he was and who I was and the fact that neither of us could trust anyone on this planet outside of our own people. And maybe those skeptical, paranoid feelings extended to each other, despite our future dependence on one another.

  Or maybe it was just the proximity to Matthias that made me jumpy.

  Whatever it was, I felt itchy and nervous. My skin crawled with warning and the knots in my stomach tightened. I couldn’t let my guard drop.

  Not yet.

  “So,” Luke announced, addressing the whole crowd. “Your first impression of our little operation isn’t a very good one. We use this place for overnight visits only. And we came down here with the very simple mission of extracting Riple. Having y’all here is something of a surprise. A good surprise to be sure. But an unexpected one as well.”

  “We’re easy guests,” Hendrix told him. “We’ll only bother you for as long as it takes to kill Matthias, then we’ll gladly get out of your way.”

  Hendrix’s words were met with enthusiastic group cheers that warmed my heart a little. At least we had a common purpose. Even if I didn’t trust these people instinctively, at least they wanted to take out the Colony.

  “Hey, we can open our doors for that!” Luke called back. “But the logistics for at least the next few days are a little harder to hammer out. We had planned to wait until tomorrow night to head toward home. But with so many of y’all, I’m not sure that’s the best idea. How about we go inside and you can debrief us on what happened and how you came to know our man Ripley.”

  “Oh, that was nothing but a little providence of fate,” Ripley declared.

  Miller leaned in, “He might be right about that.”

  I had thought the same thing, too, over the last thirty-six hours. What were the chances of meeting up with someone from Luke’s people the second we were captured? I mean, that had to be a miracle right?

  Or something close to it.

  Or the complete opposite of it.

  I looked at Miller and noted his grim expression. “You don’t trust him?”

  “Page Parker, my circle of trust is more like a straight line from me to you and then back to me again. I don’t trust most people.”

  “My brothers,” I whispered to him.

  He didn’t bother answering. The message was clear. Of course he didn’t trust Ripley. Of course he didn’t trust Luke. Of course he would never trust another person ever again.

  But he really did trust my brothers.

  We followed Luke and half his people into the barn, while the rest of them spread out with their weapons raised, providing cover. I wanted to have a feeling of relief that they were watching out for us. But it was more like the opposite. They were pretending to be on the lookout for Feeders, while keeping us under the threat of their weapons.

  I wrinkled my nose. They didn’t trust us and that was annoying. I could only understand it because if the situation were reversed, there was no way in hell we would trust them. But just because I understood it, didn’t mean I liked it.

  The inside of the barn was even darker than the black night. The moon and starlight barely penetrated the heavy shroud of the barn. And where there was a streak of light, it landed on ambiguous shadows or rusted machinery.

  The siding lifted in places where the wind blew strongest. The walls would creak and rattle only to slam back against the frame when the wind hit it just right. Overhead the roof behaved in the same way. The rafters groaned and whined at the night sky, railing at the moon as if it were a prison guard on a prison planet.

  Goosebumps spread over my skin and my back snapped straight. I didn’t like this place. I didn’t like feeling like I was trapped here.

  I didn’t like that this wasn’t the cozy homecoming I’d expected it to be.

  “It’s not much,” Luke announced once we’d all gathered around him inside. “But it’s dry and the ground is pretty clean.” He turned to my sisters-in-law with their children in hand. “We set out blankets on the ground over there, if you’d like to sit down.”

  Reagan and Haley mumbled their thank yous and herded their children over. Santi and his guys followed so they could sit, too- because that was how they operated.

  Luke’s inflection didn’t change. His expression didn’t light up. Physically, he gave nothing away when he said, “You’re h
ere.” But there was something behind his tough façade that gave me hope that this quest wasn’t a complete waste of time. He went on. “I… When Hank didn’t come back… I gave up hope.”

  My brothers shared a look and then surprised me by looking back at me. Hendrix lifted his eyebrows expectantly. Apparently I was taking the lead on this one.

  I cleared my throat, “Yeah… he was in a pretty bad way by the time he reached the station. He, uh, had just barely survived the journey.”

  Luke’s eyebrows pinched together. “He knew the risks and he was one of my best men. I didn’t think he’d have trouble with the distance.”

  I cleared my throat for a second time. “It was more than the distance. It was… well sometimes… Er, sometimes it’s harder on their minds than their bodies.” I thought of Stevie nearly dying in the hallway of the research station. “For Hank, his mind was as sick as his body.”

  “So he didn’t make it?” Luke pressed.

  I shook my head. At least for this part, I didn’t have to pretend remorse. “No, he didn’t.”

  Luke’s head dropped and all of his people mimicked the pose. They put their hands over their hearts and whispered something I couldn’t make out.

  “Did you bury him?” one of Luke’s men asked.

  I tried not to squirm. “In a way.”

  I felt a dozen gazes pin me in place. I had the full attention of the room. “What does that mean?” Luke demanded.

  I decided I didn’t want to be the lead anymore. I should have forced Harrison to do this. Or King.

  Or Miller.

  Or really any other person than me.

  “We burn our dead,” I answered confidently. “So, yes, we gave him a proper funeral, but we didn’t exactly bury him.”

  An angry outcry tumbled through the crowd. Great, I’d just made enemies with our only allies on this entire continent in less than ten minutes of meeting them.

  That took skill.

  A special kind of skill.

  Be jealous.

  “They’re not like in the movies,” a woman standing next to Luke said.

  Since she was staring directly at me, I felt compelled to answer her. “What?”

  “The Feeders,” she bit out. “If you bury a dead man, he won’t actually come back as a Zombie. They have to be bitten for the infection to transfer.”

  I was so stunned by her snarky response that I couldn’t form words to reply. Instead I looked at Miller with wide, infuriated eyes and silently passed this task off to him. I could not even begin to deal with someone that talked to me like that without using violence.

  And I was pretty confident Luke would frown on violence.

  At least between us.

  He had to be pro-violence with everyone else.

  Right?

  …

  Right.

  Of course.

  Miller stepped forward. His tall frame seemed especially intimidating tonight as he sized up this mouthy woman. He paused before talking, as if he needed to pick each word extra carefully. And when he finally answered the accusation, the entire room cowered from the force of him.

  “Lady,” he started, “There would not be enough dirt on this planet to bury all the dead we’ve been responsible for. Whether Feeders or men, we don’t have the time nor the inclination to bury them when it’s so much easier to pile ‘em up and light the whole damn thing on fire.”

  The woman choked in disbelief. She lifted her gun, then dropped it to her side just as quickly. “This is your answer, Luke? These people? God, we’re so screwed. We need snipers and you brought us cavemen.”

  I balled my hands into fists just in case my verbal warning didn’t stick, but Luke jumped in before I could do anything.

  “You’ve obviously never seen them fight, Trish. Let them be. We have more important matters to discuss.” Luke’s focus turned to Hendrix. “Maybe it made sense to burn bodies where you were. We can’t do that here because it will give us away real fast. We bury. Never burn.”

  Hendrix nodded crisply. “Noted.”

  “So you’re here,” Luke repeated. “For good?”

  “This isn’t a holiday,” Harrison laughed, but it was bitter and humorless. “Did you think this was a vacation?”

  “I was thinking I hadn’t heard from you,” Luke replied and his gaze flickered to mine. “I was thinking you hadn’t showed up in the last ten years, why would I be expecting that now?”

  I stepped forward, hoping to distract Luke from all my brothers’ pooling testosterone. “We’re here now. We came to help.”

  Luke took a step back. His posture changed at the sound of my honest plea. His expression even opened up. He softened somehow. Or not exactly softened. He… I didn’t know the word. He was hard as stone one second. And in the next, it was like he restrained the tension inside him. He didn’t become less hard. But he also didn’t try to kill us. Or tell us to go back where we came from. Or argue with us any longer.

  And I was starting to realize, that moments like this with Luke were as much of a win as we were going to get.

  “You’re right,” he acknowledged. “You’re here now. That’s what matters.”

  “So fill us in,” I prompted. “Tell us what’s going on.”

  His lips twitched. “Only if you tell me how you got here. I want to know everything about your last ten years.”

  I felt my lips lift in a return smile. “They’ll probably find a cure for Zombieism before I get through half of what’s happened.”

  “The highlights then,” Luke insisted. “And you can give me the finer details later.”

  I nodded. We spent the next hour and a half going back and forth over the decade we’d been apart. Both of us omitted any personal data and kept our story telling to facts and analytic data. I felt like Shay or Oliver as they combed through my blood looking for cures and vaccines.

  I wanted to know everything about Matthias Allen. I wanted to know Colony specifics in miniscule detail. I wanted to know how much ground had been gained and lost… how many people had been gained and lost- to either side.

  And Luke did not disappoint.

  With a civil detachment that I was starting to realize belonged to him, he went into great detail about Colonized cities and the great area of land controlled by the Colony.

  Life inside the walled cities sounded horrific. I expected that, but I wasn’t exactly prepared for the brutality and humiliation Matthias put his people through.

  Matthias punished his people by openly shaming them in what amounted to a public square. If someone or someones disappointed him then they were dragged to the center of town and beaten senseless. Then they were tied up or caged in or stripped naked, or whatever other humiliating method of torture Matthias and his men thought up, and left there for days. Sometimes they were beaten more than once. Sometimes they were starved, desiccated and forced to endure all kinds of inclement weather. Sometimes, when their crimes were considered particularly bad, they were fed to Zombies.

  While the rest of the city watched.

  A memory flashed in my mind from childhood of being trapped in Colony territory. I’d seen Matthias use Feeders like this before.

  I’d watched it happen.

  Luke told us how they’d taken some, but not much, land on the eastern border. It was hard to convince people to side with them when they faced consequences like death by public Zombie feasting or worse.

  I didn’t know what was worse than being eaten to death by a Feeder… but if anyone could think of something more horrific than that, it was Matthias Allen.

  In turn, we told Luke about our plight to Colombia and losing Vaughan. It was hard to read his emotions, but I believed he was truly upset about that.

  If, for no other reason than, Vaughan had been an invaluable fighter.

  Still, I could respect anyone that mourned my brother’s death.

  We also told him about our time in Colombia and how the Feeders had evolved to pack animals of sorts. We sha
red the scientists’ research over the years, but everyone was mostly disappointed that they hadn’t found a cure yet. We did not give details about the blood they were researching or who it belonged to.

  That was a secret my family generally kept locked up tight.

  And then finally, we shared about our decision to join the revolution after Hank showed up. Without giving specific details, we told them we just knew it was finally the right time.

  “So here you are,” Luke acknowledged after I’d wrapped up. “Joining the revolution.”

  I nodded. “Joining the revolution.”

  “It’s not going to be easy,” he warned. “We’ve been fighting for ten years and don’t have much to show for it.”

  My brothers and Miller, Reagan and Haley and Tyler, the Colombians, the Mexicans… even the scientists… everyone bristled at the warning.

  “We’ve never asked for easy,” Miller stated firmly. “You think we’re cowards, but you’re wrong.”

  “Nobody said that,” Luke snapped back. “Nobody blamed you for leaving. Even after you found out Matthias wasn’t dead.”

  I was surprised when it was Hendrix that spoke next. “You don’t have to say it for us to read it all over your faces. It’s fine. You think we’re cowards for leaving. But it wasn’t cowardice that made us leave. It was survival. It was love. It was grief after losing too many loved ones. And say what you want about us, but until now we’ve been able to raise our children in relative peace and safety. Don’t misunderstand this. Do not confuse family loyalty for weakness. Because then you will miss the most crucial part about us. And to do that would be foolishness.”

  “What’s that?” the woman called Trish demanded. “What’s the most crucial part about you?”

  Hendrix took a step forward. His gaze briefly met Reagan’s before it returned to the challenge. “That we will do anything to protect each other. We will do anything to keep each other alive. We’re here to help you, but our family comes first. We’ll help you kill Matthias and take down the Colony, but nothing will get between us. Nothing will stand in the way of my family’s safety first. We are not loyal to you. We’re loyal to each other. We’re not dedicated to your cause. We’re dedicated to keeping each other alive. That’s the only reason we’re here. That’s the only reason we’re willing to fight this war.”