by L. L. Soares
Being like this, it was too easy to get dependent on one another. When they were the only two people like this in the world, that they knew of. But this was the kind of life where two people leaving a trail of bodies could draw just way too much attention.
It was hard enough handling things when you were alone. Keeping the heat off.
Too many deaths could draw too much attention. And Grif was determined to keep his promise to himself to never be locked up again.
Viv was smarter. She’d always managed to stay one step ahead of anyone curious. He’d been able to do it by sheer luck.
He tried to think of the first time they made love. What had prompted them to even try it? Were they that sure they couldn’t harm one another, or were they so full of guilt for the lives they’d taken over the years that each secretly desired that the other would take their life?
“Grif?” a soft voice said in his ear. “Wake up.”
He’d been lost somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, and now he opened his eyes. Not that it helped much. The room was dark.
“Colleen, is that you?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” she said. She tugged at his arm. “Come with me.”
“I’m trying to sleep,” Grif said. “Can’t it wait?”
“You can’t sleep out here,” she said. “It must be uncomfortable. My bed is so big.”
“I can’t,” he said. “You know why. Viv told me you know.”
“I don’t care,” Colleen said, tugging at his arm again. “Sometimes I think I want to go through with this, that I want to get rid of that Wayne guy. But I can’t. I’m too scared.”
“You don’t have to come with us,” Grif said. “You can go back. We won’t stop you.”
“No,” Colleen said. “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to do anything anymore. Now that Jeremy’s dead, I don’t want to live.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do,” Colleen said. “Believe me. I’ve thought about this a lot. I can’t do this anymore. I just want it to end.”
“Why me?” Grif said. “Why lay this on me?”
“Because the way people die with you and Viv, it sounds like such a good way to go. No pain. And I know you like me. We almost did it that night in Jeremy’s house. The attraction was there. And now I don’t have any reason to say no.”
“I don’t want to,” Grif said. “I like you, Col. If I hurt you, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”
Instead of arguing further, she stopped tugging his arm and crawled on top of him on the couch. She kissed him. He felt her soft tongue in his mouth and even though he’d satiated his hunger hours before, there was enough of an itch left to get stimulated by her attention. He’d noticed that the closer they got to where Sam Wayne was, the worse the need was. Viv had mentioned it, too. And it was so easy to get it started again.
He kissed her back and pulled her close to him.
“See,” she said, stopping for a minute. “It’s easy.”
“But I really don’t want to do this,” he told her.
“Shhh,” she said and started kissing him again.
He wanted so badly to push her away, but once he started getting into it, he lost all sense of judgment. It was an old cliché, guys not being able to say no and all, but in his case it was really true. He was a slave to his need, and he couldn’t resist it when someone pursued him so rigorously.
“Come on,” Colleen said in his ear. She licked his lobe. “I don’t want Viv to hear us. Let’s go to my room.”
“She might still hear us through the wall,” Grif said.
“I don’t care,” Colleen said. “I just want to do this so bad.”
She hadn’t made love to anyone since Jeremy died, and this, mixed with her desperation, made her as hungry as Grif was, in her own way. Not only was he her way out, it was the most pleasurable way out she could think of.
This time when she tugged his arm, he didn’t resist. He got up and went with her.
* * *
In her dream, Viv saw Sam Wayne above her, holding her down on the floor. He raised his fist to strike her. She struggled beneath him, trying to push him off, but he had her arms pinned under his knees. She had never felt so helpless.
And then, he was no longer Sam Wayne; he was her father. Pinning her with his dead body. She was small and scared and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t push him off by herself. So she started to shout. It wasn’t that loud at first, because she was ashamed and scared, but then she realized that if no one heard her, she would never get free, so she started to cry out louder, and louder.
The door flew open and the light came on. Her mother was hysterical right from the start, shouting out questions but then wailing and crying too much to hear answers. She remembered her mother somehow pulled her father off enough for her to squeeze out from under him. She helped her roll him onto the floor, onto the throw rug. She looked up and Griffin was in the doorway, still a child. He stared at her with big eyes that tried to comprehend what was going on.
And then Grif was an adult, and he looked angry at her for some reason. He turned and ran down the hall. Ran away.
Viv woke. Her breathing was hard again. But she heard something else. The breathing wasn’t all her own. And there were other sounds. Coming from the other side of the wall, where Colleen was sleeping.
She knew instantly what the sounds were, and she tensed, hoping it was a dream. Hoping that she hadn’t woken at all and this was just the nightmare getting worse and worse. But she knew it was real. And she knew who was making those noises.
He couldn’t resist, she thought. He’s going to kill her!
She lay there, wondering what she should do. If she should try to stop them. But she couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. She wanted so badly to save Colleen, but she felt pinned there. As if her father’s body had returned in the night and collapsed upon her all over again.
CHAPTER SIXTY
“I’m coming,” Colleen said beneath him. She was on her belly now, and he was taking her from behind, and she was quivering beneath him. He was a very good lover, one of the benefits of satisfying his need on a regular basis, and it didn’t take him that long to get her to this point. He didn’t just stimulate her with his body, his mind knew how to stimulate the right parts of her brain, too.
Instinctively, and quite against his wishes, his mind sought hers out, stroked the gentle boundaries of her soul. Like a hand, his mind closed around what made her alive, one finger after another. With each closing finger, her sensations intensified, until he knew she thought she was going to black out. But she didn’t. He kept her aware and kept cranking up the volume. It was almost more than she could bear.
She had a hard time thinking; it was all too much. But she faintly made out a thought, and he could hear her. I’m almost there.
And then she cried out beneath him. This wasn’t new to him, but it scared him. If Viv didn’t hear them before, she definitely would hear them now. Usually, people died when they got this far.
Colleen was shouting and writhing and he wanted to pull out of her; he wanted to run out of the room and get as far away from her as he could. The whole building must hear her by now, he thought, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop. He was so close. He could feel his mind around hers, ready to draw her in.
But he couldn’t. She resisted. She surrendered to the most violent orgasms she had ever experienced, letting them rock her like a woman possessed, but she would not surrender her soul to him.
He came. Usually this didn’t happen until the moment when the other person died, then he got release. But this wasn’t a normal situation. Everything was different this time.
Colleen bit the pillow hard, trying to muffle her sounds. It was going on and on and Grif came harder than he ever had before. It just about sapped all the energy out of him, it was so severe, but she just kept squirming beneath him.
It was then that Viv came into the
room. She turned on the light and stared at the two of them there, on the bed. Grif had lost his momentum, but Colleen was still writhing like crazy.
“Stop it!” Viv said, breaking the silence. “Grif, you have to stop!”
But he was already finished. He rolled onto his side and watched Colleen as she rode it out. Her movements slowly calming down. It looked so strange to him. This had never happened before.
“I’m done,” he said, looking up at Viv, who seemed as shocked as he was. “I’m done. I’m done.”
Colleen was hyperventilating and it took a while for her breathing to go back to normal. All the while, they watched her, dumbfounded, not sure if she was in danger of dying. Perhaps her heart would give out after all.
She sat up in bed, covered in sweat and her face was flushed red.
“Oh man,” she said. “That was fucking incredible.”
* * *
“It’s spreading,” Viv said, staring at the TV screen. They had not said a word about the night before. Grif was stretched out on the sofa, waiting to use the shower.
The violence was reaching further inland. More states were affected now.
“It won’t be long now before we’re in the thick of it,” Viv said. “Chances are we’ll never get close enough to even reach him. We’ll be killed before then.”
“Maybe we should turn back,” Grif said. “This is starting to look more and more like a suicide mission.”
“Where would we go?” Colleen asked, coming from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. “No matter where we go, it would reach us eventually, at this rate. And who knows how much stronger he’ll be then?”
“So how do you propose we get close enough to stop him?” Viv asked. “Assuming we can do anything if we reach him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just drive on in and hope for the best?”
“We could always leave the country,” Grif said. “There has to be a limit to what this guy can do.”
“I don’t know why,” Viv said. “But I think the more it spreads the stronger he gets. Eventually, it will spread everywhere. There won’t be any stopping it.”
“You think this is some kind of apocalypse?” Colleen asked.
“It could be,” Viv said. “Unless someone stops it, I think this could be the end of all life.”
“You know there’s probably no way we can get to him,” Grif said. “Might as well just wait here and let it happen.”
“How can you be so sure?” Viv asked.
“It’s spreading, you said so yourself. Who can say when it will stop? What proof do we have that it will?”
Grif looked at Colleen, wrapped in her towel.
“You know what?” he said. “At this point, I don’t care. If you two don’t care about living anymore, then I’m more than willing to ride this out with you. We can have a little fun before the end, at least.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” Colleen told him. “I don’t want to die anymore. I don’t know what you did to me, but now I want to live more than ever. It’s like you opened up something inside of me that made me realize how important it is that we finish this.”
It was true that she looked energized, refreshed. Viv had not seen her this way since the height of her relationship with Jeremy, when she last seemed truly happy.
“They haven’t been able to get close enough to him to drop a bomb or do anything that could really stop him,” Viv said. “When anybody tries, they’re never heard from again.”
“And nobody will hear from us, either,” Grif said.
“There’s something different about us,” Colleen said. “You two aren’t like other people. I don’t think I am, either. There has to be a reason why we’re wrapped up in this. Maybe there’s a reason why he’s attacked people I was with before, but never harmed me. Maybe he can’t harm me.”
“You have no proof of that,” Viv said.
“Both times, I got away. When I turned back to look at him, he seemed distracted. Confused. But he could have killed me easily. I was right within arm’s reach. And yet, he let me go.”
“Could just be dumb luck,” Grif said.
“And I can’t explain it, but I feel full of energy after what happened with Grif,” Colleen said. “I feel like a charged battery.”
“It’s called afterglow,” Viv said.
“No, it’s more than that,” Colleen said. “I know we can stop him.”
“The pep talk sounds great and all,” Viv said. “But do you really believe it? How do we know he won’t just kill us, just like he’s killed everybody else?”
Colleen walked toward her and stopped just in front of her. “You know me better than that, Viv. You have to trust me on this one. Even that time at Wayne’s house, when I went in to get you. The people he’d infected, who were killing each other, they didn’t attack me. I was in the car, watching, and none of them came near me. When I got out and went toward the house, none of them tried to hurt me. I just walked on by, like they didn’t see me at all.”
“That’s good for you, but what about us?”
“You survived him attacking you,” Colleen said. “Nobody else can say that. When he’s lashed out at other people, they die. And if you can survive a confrontation with him, that probably goes for Grif, too.”
“We don’t know anything for sure,” Grif said. “It’s all speculation. We could drive in there, and get slaughtered before we even find Wayne.”
“We could,” Colleen said. “And then maybe we won’t. The only way to find out is to try.”
“Crazy or not, somebody’s got to do something to stop him,” Viv said. “He’s not getting any weaker.”
“He’s like a fucking god of war,” Grif said. “Spreading his plague across the Earth.”
“We have two choices,” Colleen said. “We dive in and try to end this, or we get as far away as we can. But I’m starting to think we can never get far enough at this point.”
“Do you think she might really have a clue as to what’s going on?” Grif asked Viv.
“I don’t know,” Viv said. “So we drive right in and hope someone doesn’t kill us along the way?” Viv said. “It just sounds too risky. We have to come up with a better plan than that.”
“Well, we better decide on something soon,” Colleen said, staring at the television. An overhead camera showed people hitting each other with whatever was handy. It looked like a Roman gladiator pit. Blood-smeared corpses littered the streets. “It sure isn’t getting any better out there.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
They were waiting to get up the nerve to leave. That’s the only explanation that Colleen had for why they were delaying the final leg of the trip. It was as if everything had flipped. She was now more eager than ever to go on, to get this over with. But the other two, they seemed to have lost their desire to complete this.
This was especially strange because she knew that Viv was the one who had wanted revenge most of all. Back at Jeremy’s house, she was all wound up and wanting to lash out at something.
She could hear them in Viv’s room, arguing. There was something in the air, Colleen could feel it too. A kind of electricity that made her tense up. Viv and Grif were shouting. They were talking about her.
“You were insane to risk it,” Viv was saying. “What if she had died last night? I told you not to do it.”
“I couldn’t resist. She begged me to do it. You know how it is.”
“You never did have any willpower. Hell, you’d just fed a few hours beforehand. And even then you didn’t have enough?”
“Something about her,” Grif said. “I couldn’t say no. What’s the problem, anyway? Nothing happened. I wasn’t able to do it. She’s safe from us.”
“Maybe it was just this time,” Viv said. “Maybe next time it won’t be so good. Could you live with her death on your conscience, Grif?”
He didn’t reply. Colleen wasn’t sure how to take that. She was sure that he’d done worst things in his past. She suspected
that he could get over anything, given enough time. He didn’t seem the type to linger on things too long.
Their voices were so agitated. Whatever was in the air was affecting them. Colleen went back to her bed and stretched out on it. Not knowing what else to do. She’d wanted to go outside and get some air, but this strange feeling she had. It scared her. She wouldn’t feel safe if she left now.
As if to reinforce her fears, sounds started coming from outside. Pounding, shouting. There were other people in the hotel and they were experiencing it, too. They were even more vulnerable to the bad, churning emotions that filled the air.
Someone screamed.
Viv and Grif came out of Viv’s room. They’d had the door shut while they argued. Not that it helped any. But now they were out in the suite. She could see them from her bed. Her door was open.
“What was that?” she asked.
Viv turned to face her. As if in answer, there was another scream. This one was louder and longer, followed by a sound that made them think of a thick metal pipe crashing into a wall. There was one more scream, and then silence.
“It’s started,” Viv said. “Whatever is happening. It’s here now.”
Colleen got out of bed and went to them. The noises were getting louder.
“The world’s going fucking insane,” Grif said.
“We have to stay here until it passes,” Colleen said. Her voice sounded very sure. “As long as we stay here, we’re safe.”
“This madness is going to circle the globe,” Viv said. “There’s no way we can stop this.”
And then a chorus of new screams filled the air. Colleen covered her ears with her hands.
* * *
At some point, Colleen brought Grif back to her room and they’d started fucking again. More to block out what was happening outside than anything else.
The way he made her feel, Colleen wanted to fuck Grif forever. He seemed totally astounded by the way she reacted. He’d clearly never met anyone who could match his stamina before. Hell, she didn’t match him, she surpassed him. He was having a hard time keeping up with her.
