Apocalypse Alone

by David Rogers

  “Maybe a promise.” he said, leaning back in. “But only if we have to.”

  Jessica kissed him again, then giggled. “Did you try the alligator chili?”

  “It wasn’t bad.” Austin said. “If you let it cook all day, and don’t skimp on the spices, it’s sort of like gamey chicken chili.”

  “From worrying about what my—” Jessica began, before chopping herself off.

  “What?” he asked gently.

  “Sorry.” Jessica said, hurriedly adjusting the lid on the box that held her memories of her mom back into place. “It’s just, I used to feel guilty over feeding my kids quickie meals, that they loved mind you, and now I’m contemplating alligator chili.”

  “Day at a time.”

  “Day at a time.” Jessica agreed. “So, garden tomorrow.”

  “That was my thought. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re right. I think I’ve got a decent handle on how to go about it, and Candice did some reading too so she’ll be a big help for more than just watching for interruptions. We’ve both been going through the books you found.”

  “We found.” he corrected. “You were with me when you suggested we should take that detour into that little bookstore in Moore Haven.”

  “Tomorrow we’ll start the garden.” Jessica said, shifting up in his lap and leaning her whole body against his. His warmth and presence were reassuring and comfortable, the contact was seductively appealing.

  “How long for any of it to grow do you think?”

  “We should know in a week or so if we’re doing it right, because we’ll start seeing the plants pop up.” Jessica mused. “And I think most of the things we should try will be maturing in, oh, about three months. Some of them quicker.”

  “So in three months, potatoes?” he said into her ear.

  “Lettuce!” she protested. “Onions!”

  “We do have a lot of bottles of salad dressing tucked away.”

  “I miss salads.” Jessica said wistfully.

  “You know, the salads will just be a side dish when we harvest, right?”

  “I know, I’m not just sitting around in an office all day every day like I used to.” she said. Which was true; the light diet she’d worked on keeping to before everything collapsed had been a function of a lower energy lifestyle. Even spending more days than not in and around the stilt house was anything but.

  Just cooking was a lot of work; tending and maintaining a fire was significantly more involved than simply flipping on a burner and pulling a pot or pan out of a cabinet. And washing clothes and linens, even the limited washing she could accomplish with a storage tote of water and soap, was definitely not as easy as carrying them all to the laundry where they were dumped into the machine.

  “But I miss salads.” she continued. “Anything to break up the monotony of stew, stew, stew.”

  “Salad it’ll be.” he said. “And if it goes well, when we harvest we can expand it and grow more.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  “So it is said, so I shall do, Your Royal Momness.”

  “Stop!” she said, swatting at his chest, though she couldn’t help her giggle.

  “I love having you in charge. It’s so relaxing.”

  “I know.” she said. “Leaving all the hard stuff for me. You’re terrible.”

  “But one of a kind.”

  “Yes.”

  A moment of silence stretched out comfortably, then Austin spoke again. “You know, Candice isn’t entirely wrong.”

  “About what?”

  “About how she can’t stay in here forever.”

  “Austin!” Jessica said, sitting up abruptly so she could see his face. “She’s ten.”

  “I know. But unless that happy ending we’re all hoping for shows up, the days will keep going by, and she’ll be eleven—”

  “Her birthday’s in March.” Jessica said automatically. “March second.”

  “See, she’s almost eleven.” he said calmly. “Then more days, that turn into months, and soon twelve. And so on.”

  “There’s a lot of days between now and then.”

  “I know. And I’m not pushing, or criticizing, or judging.” he said. “But at some point, if we stay here and the hungry undead bastards out there don’t vanish … she can’t live her life out in a house on stilts.”

  “I know.” Jessica said, but she heard the lie in her voice. As far as she was concerned, if nothing changed, and she and Austin could keep everything that went into the functioning processes of living here ticking over, Candice very well could stay right here. Where she was safe, from zombies and everything else. Forever.

  “You’ve talked with Byron’s crew just as much as me. You know most of the reason we see Byron show up with the same two or three people is the rest of them out there on those boats on the lake won’t leave.”

  “Austin—” she began uncomfortably, but he shook his head at her.

  “For a while, it almost even made sense. A lot of stuff happened, and people were in shock. And most weren’t ready for any of it, the after even more than the during. But at a certain point, it starts to be a fair question to ask why they’re content to sit back and be carried by the brave.”

  “You’re—”

  “We’re a team.” he said, cocking his head and giving her his serious look. “No foreplay this time. You and I, even Candice though she’s home base only, we’re a team. We all pull together, and we’re making it together. There’s four dozen people out there that are letting one bold little scavenging party keep them going. You and I, and Candice, are nothing like them.”

  “I just can’t bear the thought of …” Jessica said before trailing off. Involuntarily, her thoughts flashed back to her daughter’s face as Sandra had staggered out of the school back in Georgia. Then her mother’s, when Jessica came upon the monster that had consumed Sharon and turned her to consuming her father. She clamped down hard on the images, hard enough that she shuddered and flinched.

  “It’s okay.” Austin said, tightening his arms around her.

  “That can’t happen to Candice.” Jessica said, feeling both resolved and helpless. Frantic almost. “Even you, even as much as I love you, I just … I’d lose all hope if Candice—” She forced herself, with far too much practice, to order her thoughts away from the overwhelming emotion. “I just … the thought of what can happen to her if … it’s like a vise, a trap, that grabs hold of me all over and drags me down.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “I’m serious.” she insisted. “I … I know what you’ve done, and I know you know what me and Candice have been through, but … I just can’t tell you how hard it was to keep going when the two of us were fighting to stay clear back in Atlanta.”

  “You’re a survivor. A lot of people let their fears and panic and doubt consume them in the moment, but you act, and worry about it later. That’s the difference, and it’s one of the reasons I love you.”

  “It’s hard Austin. Even knowing she’s here, where she should be safe … it’s still hard to go out with you and know she’s here alone while you and I are out getting things done. I have to work at it all the time, from the moment she hauls the ladder up behind us, until we get back and she lowers it again.” Jessica said carefully. “If she comes with us—”

  “It’s okay.” he repeated, leaning forward and hugging her. Even seated, even with all the improvements in her shape and condition in the harsh living that was inevitable in the post apocalypse, Austin still dwarfed her with his physicality. More even. He’d been in great shape the first moment she’d laid eyes on him; months later, with everything he was doing, he was even more imposing.

  Jessica pressed herself against him, welcoming the loom of his presence, drinking in how safe and reassuring he felt.

  “That’s how I feel about you and Candice.” he said, brushing a hand down her back, his fingers stroking through strands of her hair. “But I can’t let it keep me from wanting th
e two of you to stay strong and keep growing. Everything I loved about you in the beginning, you just keep building on it. It’s amazing, and I love it.”

  “Says the he-man.”

  “Even big tough he-man had a love interest.”

  Jessica giggled, unable to even act indignant. “I never watched that show.”

  “I did.” he said, his amusement obvious. “And even tough guys care about people. They tend to like tough women.”

  “Candice is still so … she’s just a girl.”

  “Now.” Austin said gently. “But she’s tough. Smaller, smaller even than you, but tough. And she’s getting bigger and tougher every day. Someday, and sooner than you or even I will expect, she won’t settle for holding the fort and never leaving.”

  Jessica sighed and snuggled closer to him, until she could feel his heartbeat not just with her ears but in her body. “I wish it was just as easy as worrying about when she would want to start dating, about knowing I’m going to have to fight with her about how short her skirts are getting and trying to sneak into my liquor cabinet.”

  “Look at it like this; now all you have to worry about getting her ready for is zombies.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes, then rolled her head back and looked up at him. “Zombies are easier than dating boys?”

  “Trust me.” Austin said, waggling his eyebrows lecherously at her. “As a guy who was once as hormonal and adolescent as any guy is when he’s a teenager, fending off zombies is much simpler for any girl.”

  “Zombies you can shoot.”

  “Just think about it.” Austin said with a chuckle. “I’m not saying tomorrow everything changes. But like all of us, Candice is in this every day. Someday, something will change. Better to be ready for it, right?”

  “Right.” Jessica said sadly.

  Chapter Two — Visitors

  “Boat.” Candice announced loudly.

  Jessica pushed back from the line of amended soil she was busy planting onion seeds into. Sitting on her knees and haunches, she turned and refocused her gaze on the lake. The midafternoon sun was behind her, but its glare was still hitting the lake strongly with a lot of washed out reflections and white-bright flares of light. Squinting, she shaded her eyes with one grimy hand, sweeping her gaze across the water, and finally saw it.

  The boat itself looked fairly typical, a small motorboat that seated up to six or seven people. And as was also becoming typical, the motor wasn’t in use. Fuel, usable fuel that still fired an engine, was not just becoming a rare commodity; it was basically non-existent. Part of the reason she and Austin had done so much scavenging in the last couple of months was knowing this time was coming. And was why they had stored as much treated gas as they could manage to come up with, mostly limited by containers; holding it against some critical need that would demand a vehicle.

  Instead of running the motor, the pair of occupants were using oars to slowly row their boat along. They were coming straight for the line of stilt houses. Jessica frowned, and lowered her hand as she considered. She didn’t even notice she was checking the pistol holstered on her side until she felt the dirt on her hand falling off as she fingered the gun’s grip.

  “Don’t think I … no, I think one of them’s Milo.” Austin said. “That’s odd.”

  Turning, Jessica saw Austin had also left off his gardening and had the pair of binoculars he’d picked up early into their stint at the lake up to his eyes. The tall man was standing with a shovel propped up against his chest, studying the approaching boat.

  “Everything else is still clear.” Candice said, looking around the thankfully quiet dead end road that connected the row of vacation rentals to the nearby small towns. “No zombies, just a boat.”

  “So they’re Houseboaters?” Jessica asked, rising and starting to brush dirt from her hands. It was a lost cause. The sandy soil in Florida wasn’t exactly the best for rich and bountiful growing, even here in the lake area where it was swampy and accorded all the benefits of river soil the world over tended to enjoy. So they’d made use of some ‘soil amendments’ as the books termed it to mix with the earth in the area they’d picked for the garden. In this case, several bags of cow manure she and Austin had hauled in from a hardware store in one of the small towns to the southwest.

  The mixture of sand and swamp and manure looked like it would provide an excellent growth medium for the seeds she was hopefully poking in, but it was also clingy and damp. And it smelled, which made her reluctant to use the legs of her jeans as a convenient place to rub some of it off. Washing clothes was hard enough from normal wear and use; she didn’t want to have to deal with any more of the cow shit during laundry day than necessary.

  “Yeah.” Austin said, lowering the binoculars. “I met Milo last month, when he was running a boat back and forth for some supplies Byron’s crew had hauled down to the shore.”

  “You were helping Byron do the hauling?”

  “For a share of it.” Austin nodded, glancing at her. “That’s where I got all that canned chicken and tuna I came back with.”

  “Why is Milo coming here?” Jessica said, shrugging. “If he hasn’t before? Actually, did he even leave the boat when you met him the last time?”

  “Barely.” Austin admitted.

  “Then why’s he here now?” Jessica wondered.

  “Gotta be something interesting if he’s here without Byron, and I don’t recognize the woman with him at all. I guess we’ll find out in a few minutes, unless he changes course and goes somewhere else.”

  “Let’s take a break, get cleaned up.” Jessica said. “I don’t want to be busy with this while someone we barely know is headed in.”

  “It’s going faster than we thought it would anyway.” Austin said with a nod. “Unless they want to hang around for more than an hour, we should still have time to finish before sunset.”

  Jessica glanced across the rows they’d prepared, which were a little more than half planted at the moment. She shrugged again. “Candice, stay in the house. If anything happens, remember the rules and the plans.”

  “I remember.” the girl said, turning toward the door.

  While Candice left the front porch and went inside, Jessica and Austin washed up in the bucket they’d brought down. They were just finishing when the boat got near enough to be easily visible, as more than just a small blob with two specks in it. Shaking her hands dry, Jessica resisted the urge to check her pistol again. She didn’t, however, object when Austin retrieved and slung behind his shoulder the carbine rifle he’d brought down but set aside while working.

  The M4 assault carbine, as he kept telling her it was properly named, was the weapon they’d appropriated from the leader of the Eagle group that had threatened them that fateful night in Georgia when they’d nearly died. Austin favored it as his preferred long gun anytime he wasn’t headed out intending to go hunting. And, having seen him use it, it made perfect sense to Jessica. It wasn’t like he didn’t have a lot of other choices, with the plethora of other rifles — mostly bolt action hunting models — and shotguns and pistols he’d brought home since they’d setup house next to the lake.

  She’d used to think he was hell on wheels with the MP5 submachine gun he’d been using when she’d first met him; but watching him work through a pack of zombies with the M4 was something else entirely.

  Reminding herself that a semi-stranger coming to visit didn’t necessarily mean something bad was about to happen, and also to trust that Austin was a steeply formidable ally even if the worst did, Jessica settled for walking over to the side of ‘their’ stilt house to wait for the boat’s final approach. Without her even needing to hint, Austin came with her; lending his reassuring presence while she stood watching the boat and its occupants.

  The boat continued to approach, the pair in it steadily dipping and drawing their oars to propel it across the water, until finally it drew near enough that she could hear the splash and swirl of water as they rowed. It was a man and a woman i
n it; both looking like they were about her height. Neither had any weapons except pistols.

  “Hello Milo.” Austin called. “It’s Milo, right?”

  “Yeah. Hi Austin.” the man in the boat called back.

  “Guess he remembers you.” Jessica said quietly, turning her head slightly to look at him.

  “I’m one of a kind.” Austin said, giving her a wink before raising his voice again. “What brings you two out? And without Byron.”

  “That’s what we came to talk to you about.”

  “Oh shit.” Austin muttered.

  “What?” Jessica said to Austin.

  “I’ll bet you anything something happened; that’s why it’s just them and no sign of the regular shore crew.”

  Jessica resisted the urge to … she wasn’t sure what. Make a face maybe, or groan. That something might have happened to Byron wasn’t really something that was cause for alarm — not for her and hers anyway — but she kind of liked Byron. “What do you think?” she said to him calmly.

  “I think Milo looks like he’s been talked into something, and the other one is pretty nervous.”

  Jessica couldn’t help her hand from drifting down to the holstered Beretta, but Austin saw and spoke quickly. “Not that kind of nervous. Like, terrified.”

  “Great.” she muttered.

  “Can we sit down and talk?” Milo called out. The boat was only a few yards from the shore by now, where the water lapped up against the little peninsula; between her house and the vacant one next door.

  “Your call.” Austin said in a low voice that would not carry much further than her.

  “Sure.” Jessica said loudly, gesturing at the vacant house. Its stairs were still intact, and it had the same set of furnishings all of them on the little finger of land jutting out into the lake did. This included a handful of deck chairs, so any vacationing occupants could sit either out front or in the back and enjoy the scenery. They’d serve just fine to host whatever sort of conversation the visitors wanted to have. And she didn’t want them in her house, which was strewn with the fruits of all the scavenging labor she and Austin had been working on all winter.