Break Free The Night (Book 1)

by Fitch, E. M.

  “Why?”she asked, immediately on the defensive.“Are you alluding that I should be old enough to take care of myself? Because there is nothing wrong with being a part of a community and watching out for each other, in fact—”

  “Hold up,”Jack interrupted with a laugh.“I was just curious. Not implying anything.”Kaylee frowned. He turned back around and kept walking, just ahead of her, and she followed mutely.

  It was true that she didn’t leave the building. And there were many days where the feeling of containment and claustrophobia was overwhelming. Kaylee jumped as Jack kicked a nearby can that had been discarded years ago, the rust had stained the concrete and red flakes were jarred loose from the metal surface. She drew a deep breath to steady herself before taking a good look around.

  The shops and storefronts were as she remembered them: broken windows, random graffiti, trash and litter being blown about by the light breeze.

  And the bodies. The bodies were everywhere. Barely breathing, chests rattling, they had fallen wherever they had been standing when the sun finally lowered. Most were curled into themselves in the fetal position; some were sprawled over each other. A sickly sweet odor of rot issued from their gaping mouths, air forced out over broken, yellow teeth. Kaylee shuddered.

  “You don’t like them,”Jack observed. Kaylee hadn’t noticed that he was now keeping pace besides her. She shook her head.“But you think killing them is wrong?”

  “It’s not my place.”

  “Whose place is it then?”Jack persisted, watching her as he continued to walk. They came to the corner, three directions spread out before them. Kaylee paused.

  “It’s no one’s place, I guess,”she answered, her eyes kept on the road.“Which way?”

  “Let’s keep west,”Jack said, turning left and walking in the direction of the hazy, deep purple sky. From behind them, the sounds of gunshots followed by the shattering of glass echoed into the night.“But what about Emma?”

  “What about her?”Kaylee asked, feeling defensive again.

  “She would have killed me in the cornfield with that rock. Would that have been wrong?”

  “She thought you were trying to eat me,”Kaylee said, her lips twisting in irritation.

  “So, self-defense is acceptable?”he pushed.

  “I don’t know, okay?”Kaylee said, the volume of her voice rising with her frustration.“What do you want me to say: if it came down to them or me, would I pick me? Probably. That I’d kill to save Emma or Dad or Andrew if I had to? Well, I probably would. But I hate it, all right? I think it’s wrong. What if we’re not all that’s left? What if there’s a cure? What if they’re supposed to live? I couldn’t stand there and pull a trigger when anyone of them could be—”she broke off, angry that her eyes prickled with unshed tears and her breath was coming far too rapidly.

  “You mean her,”Jack said in a soft whisper.“Your mother?”

  Kaylee hadn’t noticed before but somewhere during her rant she had stopped walking. Jack was standing three feet from her in the middle of the crosswalk. She nodded quickly and stepped past him. He followed her lead.

  They walked in a comfortable silence. Storefronts and restaurants came and went, windows long shattered and debris littering the sidewalks. It didn’t feel odd any longer to see the city in this permanent blackout. Kaylee knew not to expect the streetlights and neon signs, the stoplights and the glare of oncoming traffic. Instead, at night, it felt as though she was cast in a 1950’s sitcom; everything was drained of color, black and white. Dark, empty windows stared down at them now. Shards of glass, like teeth, still clung in some, occasionally reflecting the bright and scattered stars. The moonlight made the pavement glow silver and cast dull shadows across their path. Even the bright red of Jack’s tee shirt darkened to a charcoal.

  He was whistling lowly, a cheerful tune, as he walked with her. He seemed at ease, his hands swinging loosely by his side, fingers occasionally brushing Kaylee’s. He didn’t attempt to grab her hand again. His demeanor invaded the space around them and it was impossible to feel upset, even in this wasteland of industry, this walking graveyard, even as thoughts of her mother flashed inconsistently through her mind.

  “Have you noticed the smiley faces?”he asked after a time. Kaylee’s irritation had dissipated and she started out of the comfortable silence with a confused humming.

  “Hmm?”She pulled her gaze from the line in the center of the pavement to look at him. He was walking towards an old deli, one Kaylee remembered particularly for their Italian combo sandwiches. On the glass of the storefront, directly over the old neon‘Open’sign; someone had spray-painted a large smiley face, a tongue hanging off its’stick mouth.“Oh, those. Andrew does them after they’ve cleared out a store. It means there’s nothing left worth scavenging.”

  “Interesting choice in graffiti,”Jack mused, chuckling as he stepped back towards Kaylee. She laughed.

  “Yeah, well it’s unique in it’s own way. Nobody else thought to use that when they were predicting the apocalypse,”Kaylee joked. It had been common practice as people fled their homes to loot, raid, and steal. And then when the infection had really taken hold the mass hysteria gave way to religious fanatics that stood preaching among the masses their apocalyptic visions. So it became common practice for buildings to get marked with passages from the Bible or warnings that condemned every race, religion, and lifestyle with the blame for starting this plague.

  Jack hummed and nodded, his lips still curled into a smile. Kaylee saw a dimple she hadn’t noticed before mark the right corner of his mouth.

  “I think I like you better out here,”Kaylee mused, watching him as she spoke her thoughts aloud.“You’re not nearly as obnoxious.”Jack barked a laugh.

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “Why is that, do you suppose?”she continued, watching him closely. He continued to grin but there was a nervous set to his jaw now.

  “You’re not nervous?”Kaylee questioned as Jack’s fingers once again brushed hers and he withdrew them for the fifth time. He chuckled lightly.

  “You caught me,”he admitted freely.“Haven’t been on a date in a while.”

  Kaylee snorted.“This is not a date.”

  “If you say so,”he continued lightly, now teasing again.“But I’m not so sure. I mean, c’mon, I am taking you to the movies.”He gestured grandly to the cinema across the street. The glass cases that once held movie posters were covered in old spray paint. Kaylee raised her eyebrows at the trite saying covering over an old Sandra Bullock movie poster: The End is Near. Typical.

  “Hmm, classy,”Kaylee remarked, staring pass Jack into the broken down movie theatre. Over a pile of barely breathing infected that blocked the doorway, she could see glass shards and garbage scattered over the lobby’s carpet. Popcorn that had once been yellow and fluffy was shriveled and black, smearing against the glass case that contained it.

  “Would you prefer dinner?”he asked, finally linking fingers with her and pulling her further down the street.“I thought I saw, ah yes,”he said in triumph, pointing down the road.“Italian?”

  “Hmm,”Kaylee hummed, delicately extracting her hand again and putting one finger to her chin. The corner restaurant front had once boasted‘New York Style Pizza’though with the broken glass it now read‘York e Pizz.’

  “No?”Jack continued, spinning on the spot and pointing again.“French?”Kaylee laughed as he picked out a little bistro.

  “Maybe I’m not that hungry,”she said, shrugging.

  “Well, there’s always the mall,”Jack continued undeterred.“Or, I think I saw a museum a few miles away.”

  “And if we couldn’t find anything we agreed on to do?”Kaylee asked, following Jack as he steered them around an obese infected man who was lying prone in the street.

  “Then you’d finally let me hold your hand and we’d just walk,”he answered simply, grabbing her hand again. She didn’t protest this time, just rolled her eyes and followed him. The road
s were in far worse a condition than the last time she had traveled them, though admittedly that was a long time ago. Jack steered them west and Kaylee followed blindly, trusting in the weight and pull of his fingers.

  “Sit with me?”Jack asked, stopping suddenly. He tugged on her hand as he dropped to the pavement. He sat in the center of an intersection, looking up at her expectantly.

  “In the middle of the road?”

  Jack turned his head from side to side, glancing down the traffic-empty streets, the wind blew lightly and scraps of long discarded paper were picked up and lifted, twirling aimlessly in the abandoned night.“I think it’ll be okay,”he said, smirking up at her. Kaylee pursed her lips but knelt. His fingers squeezed hers in approval.

  The concrete was cold, holding no warmth from the sun. The spot Jack had picked was clean, just a dry patch of silvery road. But it had crumbled some over the years. Lack of maintenance combined with the continual pounding of bare feet had left it gritty, not uncomfortable, just noticeable. Kaylee wasn’t sure if Jack noticed or not. He was laying back now, his free arm propped under his head. Kaylee had a fleeting desire to tuck herself into the crook of his shoulder, but she dismissed it almost instantly.

  “It still amazes me,”Jack said, staring up into the night sky.

  “What does?”Kaylee asked when he didn’t elaborate.

  “This,”he said.“The sky.”

  Kaylee craned her neck and looked up. She had no memory of the stars being so bright. She always supposed they were somewhere, but never in the city.

  “It’s pretty,”she said.

  “Pretty?”Jack scoffed, blinking up at her.“You’re not looking correctly or you couldn’t say just‘pretty.’C’mere.”

  He pulled gently on her hand and she lay next to him. Not on his shoulder, which looked warm and inviting, but on her own arm, bent back behind her head as his was.

  “See them? See how brilliant?”

  They were, Kaylee supposed. They were bright and numerous and yes, if she were pressed, she could admit that they were interesting. But, there was something tragic about them too.

  “I guess,”she conceded to Jack.“But they’re so far away. Did you know that the stars we see could already have died? The light travels so far that by the time it reaches us, the stars could already be gone. Something about that seems so sad to me.”

  “Not sad,”Jack corrected gently, as though he wasn’t talking just about the stars.“Amazing. Think of something that glows so bright and strong that it can reach us here and now from so far away. It can give us this moment. There’s power there, in that little white light. It’s beautiful.”

  Kaylee had never thought about it quite like that. Never thought of the stars as tiny, shining moments in time, as tributes to the very now. Put like that, they did become kind of beautiful.

  Jack’s fingers squeezed hers with a now familiar kind of pressure, gently applauding her as he felt her change of heart.

  “What about their stories?”Kaylee asked, resting her cheek on the cold pavement as she turned to squint at Jack’s profile.

  “Stories?”

  “Yeah, the Greek and Roman ones? You know, someone stole someone else’s wife and killed their own brother and now they’re trapped in the stars as punishment.”

  Jack laughed.“I know some of the Greek ones but if you mean can I point out constellations? I’m afraid I can’t. New York, remember?”

  “Right. We could never see them from here either,”Kaylee murmured, looking back to the sky.

  “But I could make some up for you,”Jack offered, a smile in his voice.“See that there,”he started, bringing up their combined hands to trace a diamond in the sky.“That’s a large kite.”

  “And there’s a book,”Kaylee added, moving their fingers to another patchy, square cluster of stars.

  “Right, and how about a T.V. over there, see?”

  “You mean the one with the antenna?”

  “Obviously,”he answered.“Well, at least we’re original. I don’t think the Greeks wrote about television sets.”

  Kaylee rolled her eyes.“They could also see things that weren’t just square.”

  Jack laughed.“True, maybe we’re not that original.”

  “I guess that depends on the story you come up with. Something epic revolving around a kite, a book, and a T.V.”

  “With an antenna.”

  “Right, of course, with an antenna.”

  “And there has to be a girl. No story’s complete without one,”Jack added in a low tone. Kaylee nodded her silent agreement.“And maybe a boy? Or two?”

  “One’s enough,”Kaylee answered. Jack chuckled but nodded.

  “You’re probably right.”

  Kaylee felt an involuntary shiver course through her from the prolonged contact with the pavement. She scooted closer to Jack but he was already getting up. He pulled her to her feet with him and started the walk back towards the firehouse.

  “So tell me honestly,”Jack started, giving Kaylee a sideways glance before turning his gaze back towards the pavement,“what’s with Andrew?”

  “I…I’m not sure I…”Kaylee’s forehead wrinkled as she frowned. His hand was still wrapped around hers and she was suddenly very aware of the constant press of his fingers.“What do you mean exactly? He’s Andrew.”

  “What is he to you?”Jack clarified.

  “My best friend,”Kaylee answered honestly, looking sideways at Jack. His hand slid from hers and her palm felt instantly cold.

  “Ah,”Jack murmured, shoving is hands in his pockets and looking up into the starry sky.“And he won’t like it that you’re out here with me, will he?”

  “Probably not,”Kaylee conceded.“But I’m glad I came.”Jack grinned at her and stopped walking. She faltered her step before turning to face him.

  “I’m glad too,”he said and his voice took on a husky quality.“I’d like to do this again.”

  “You mean before you leave?”Kaylee questioned, ignoring the crushing sense of loss that overcame her at the thought. For the first time since she met him, Jack looked almost upset. His brow wrinkled and he swallowed roughly.

  “Right, yeah, before that,”he said.

  “So you are then?”she asked in a small voice.“You’re definitely leaving?”

  “I’m with Quinton,”Jack answered in a tone that sounded rehearsed.“I’m not going to leave him.”

  So, that settles it.

  There was really no point in getting to know Jack any better than this. In a few days time, he would be gone. He was going north. He was never coming back. Kaylee blinked and was taken aback at the moisture that had collected in her eyes. She swiped at her face with the corner of her sleeve, removing all evidence of emotion.

  But, as disappointed and upset as she was, in a way, she understood. She knew Jack had been alone for six months at the start of the outbreak. He spent six long months foraging for food, running from the infected, living off the forest floor. He had been on his own, isolated, lost. Having to question whether you are the last human alive was a fear that was embedded in every survivor’s mind. Jack had lived that terror for six months. He couldn’t force that on Quinton, he wouldn’t.

  The walk seemed much shorter as the firehouse loomed ahead. Jack was walking just slightly in front of Kaylee. An explosion of sound broke the stillness followed by a loud whooping from the roof.

  “Emma’s improving,”Jack said, stopping with his face turned toward the roof. There was a faint outline of a girl jumping up and down.“Quinton’s really enjoying her company. Actually,”he stopped to chuckle,“so am I. She’s a good time.”

  “I’m lucky to have her,”Kaylee agreed. She stepped up to Jack’s side and watched Emma celebrating her improving skills.“And I understand why you have to leave,”she added in a soft tone. She saw him nod, both in acknowledgement of her words and in acceptance of his fate. He gave a sidelong look and offered a small smile before he started walking again.

  �
��Oh, and Jack?”Kaylee said, stopping him. He turned to look at her and she momentarily forgot what she was going to say. The moon was high in its’orbit now and it cast him in soft shadow. The normal olive tone to his skin was glowing pale and his dark, endless eyes were watching her. He smiled as he waited.“Seventeen,”she said in a breathless whisper. The night was so still that he heard her easily.

  “Hmm?”he hummed in confusion. Kaylee saw his brow wrinkle as his head tilted to the side.

  “I’m seventeen,”she clarified, walking past him towards the firehouse. She noticed his grin return as she passed.

  Chapter Seven

  “Kaylee!”Andrew shouted, grabbing her by the forearm and dragging her into the garage.“Where the hell have you been?”