by James, Guy
The reassurance of his embrace was real, the comfort of his touch unassailable, and she hadn’t known that it could be like that until she met him and got to know him. He made her feel like she was the most important thing in his life, just how she felt about him, like they would do anything for each other. To her, he was the perfect man, and she sometimes felt as if he’d actually been made for her, like a custom job, and she for him, as if such things were possible, and, silly or not, she was feeling that way now.
“I love you, Alan,” she whispered, her voice trembling.
He mumbled something that she couldn’t understand.
“I love you so much,” she murmured. “Please never leave me. Never leave me here alone.”
Without waking, he pulled her toward him.
She closed her eyes and breathed in his familiar smell. At once she wanted to do more than just spoon with him, but she didn’t want to wake him. She would have on a different night, she wasn’t shy about such things, but Alan hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and she wanted him to get some rest. She kissed the line of his jaw and snuggled closer to him.
After a time, she fell asleep again, and, shortly thereafter, was back in a dreamland that was ruled by monsters wrought from guilt. Their power in the night was as great as that of the virus’s legions that controlled the world outside New Crozet. From some torments, those of the soul, the perimeter fence offered no protection.
18
Rays of sun broke through the sparse cloud tufts that were lackadaisically reassembling themselves and beginning to chase one another over the Blue Ridge Mountains. On its way down, the morning sunlight was fractured by branches and multicolored leaves until what was left of it reached a forest clearing, which was crawling with movement.
In the clearing, four-and-a-half miles from New Crozet, robed men and women were moving quickly and with purpose, seeming to slither like serpents. They’d started their work before dawn and now not one of them stopped to look at the rising sun, or to notice that its rays were filtering through to them and alighting on the dark fabric of their robes.
Wordless commands were communicated via nods and gestures, and carried out precisely. Measurements were checked and rechecked and adjustments made. They were quiet and efficient, giving the impression of having done this many, many times before, their proficiency at it resembling art.
The forest-dwelling zombies were watching covetously, leaving dormancy one by one—though to give credit to the robed ones’ mastery of silence, breaking slowly—and trying to enter the cluster of humans. The zombies were surrounding their prey, but were finding their efforts to reach it denied.
The campground was rising out of the dirt and spreading outward, like a boil that had been lanced and was being squeezed persistently in a vice grip, until all it had to offer was revealed. The men and women applied more pressure, and the boil’s rancid contents erupted, poured out farther, found crevices in the ground into which to seep, and took root in those places, sucking from the earth its vitality and converting it to vileness, to a venom more ancient than that of the virus.
The growing expulsion was made up at its limits of a fine netting that the men and women painstakingly moved outward from their circles of trucks. They dragged it along the ground until they reached the limits of its measure, and there they raised it and pinned it up on the trees, creating a shield against the zombies.
They weren’t using noisemakers as diversions. This wasn’t the time to show their hand, not just yet.
Among them were some of the most talented spotters in the world, and they made short work of the zombies that, curious, found their way to the limits of the rising camp.
After the work was done, the men and women retreated from the perimeter they’d created.
One by one, they crept back into the trucks in which they’d come, in which they’d been driving around the night before looking for a suitable spot to set up their base of operations.
In one of the trucks, the one that looked like it was the most cared-for, a dormant zombie stirred, and broke.
19
Alan was on top of Senna in bed, his arms wrapped tightly around her upper back. Her legs were on his shoulders and her knees were pinned against her. They were playing that regular game of theirs, where she submitted to having her limits tested. She was shuddering now, and her eyes were begging for more, and for mercy at the same time.
Their sweat was mixing playfully into salty cocktails.
He waited for her shudders to die down and the pleading look to leave her face, and then the game’s next round began and new limits were reached and pushed and broken and more rounds were played. As the game wore on, Senna’s trembling grew wilder, as she was losing her mind in sensation, in the complete abandon of it.
When her screams died down to whimpers and her shaking subsided, he would let her free, not right away, though, not until…
The entire scene wavered around Alan. The walls, the bedposts, the damp sheets, even the writhing Senna herself. He locked his eyes on her trembling body, glistening with sweat, and tried to steady his shimmering lover with his will, but he couldn’t.
All that he saw yielded to a brief fit of iridescence that threatened to unravel everything, as if the glimmers that he saw were the frayed ends of a knitted tapestry that encompassed the essence of being, and the tatters were about to be pulled by a force greater than reality itself.
Alan’s suspicion was proved correct. The ends of the weave were pulled by an otherworldly force and the beautifully assembled fabric within which he found himself came undone.
It unwound itself with such precision that he understood it had been made to do so from the start. It had been a watercolor that was from the first splash of color destined for submersion. A wall-hanging that captured the crux of lust and made just for him, but one that from its first stitch was already in line for unthreading, so the stitches, first one and all, were made loose from the start.
He woke, drenched in sweat, and alone.
Alan squeezed his eyes shut and let his mind drift back to the dream. It had been a rendering of a game that Senna and he played often, and the intensity of the imagery had been almost too much.
Shaking off sleep, he honed in on the now-familiar absence of dogs barking and birds chirruping and cars being honked and driven too fast by blurry-eyed commuters in the morning rush, sounds that he’d found annoying back when they came free with every box of cereal, or whatever you chose to eat for breakfast, really.
He opened his eyes and rubbed them, then yawned and untangled himself from the comforter, setting the bed to creaking under his shifting weight. He was no longer excited, and the urges he’d felt in the dream had faded. He stood up and felt the cold floor against his bare feet. It was early in the morning, before dawn.
Smiling groggily, he remembered a prior version of himself, one that was entirely incapable of mornings. Now he was okay at them, moderately competent, at best.
Only mildly competent, he corrected himself, if that.
Before the outbreak, it would have been an impressive accomplishment for him to make it out of bed by nine, and on a workday no less—for some reason the prospect of work had always made wakefulness a greater burden to lift.
Past girlfriends had found it endearing. Some had even called him a ‘morning zombie.’ Imagine the irony.
Past bosses had tolerated it, because he’d been pretty decent at his job, putting documents together. How pointless that all seemed now, rushing to put words on paper in a particular order to close some deal here or there.
Most normal things that people had occupied their time with before the outbreak seemed meaningless now. Survival after the outbreak had to be secured more directly, by fight and flight and food growing, and not by working a nine-to-five for currency that could be traded for something to eat.
Staying alive in post-apocalyptic America was a twenty-four-seven gig, even in a settlement like New Crozet. You could let down y
our guard some, thanks to the perimeter fence, but if you were a constant worrier, and if you’d survived this long chances were good that you were, you’d call a perimeter breach a ‘when’ not ‘if’ scenario, and you were always on your guard for it, always thinking and obsessing about it.
Not to mention that food growing and preserving and canning could be made to fill all of your waking hours if you so chose. There was good farmland that was still untapped in New Crozet, and it was a potential treasure trove of rations and tradable produce, if only there would be more hands to tend it.
Senna had never had a problem with mornings; she’d always been great at them in fact.
They always got up this way—Senna first and Alan shortly thereafter. He knew that she was probably preparing breakfast for the two of them, but he still was unsettled each time that he woke without her beside him. He’d rather she were there, and they could eat later, but he knew she was too fidgety and energetic to stay in bed after she was awake. Up before the crack of dawn was the name of her game, and she played that one every day.
Beyond the early rising, Senna was his diametric opposite so far as her personality was concerned. He was in the habit of overthinking everything now, even more so than before the outbreak, when he’d already been a serial over-analyzer. Senna, on the other hand, moved easily and instinctively through the world in a way Alan never could.
Maybe that was part of why he loved her so much, because he just couldn’t understand her. They often spoke past each other, and couldn’t quite connect mentally, but perhaps that didn’t matter. They were helping each other survive, and they cared for each other, Senna for Alan in her way, and Alan for Senna in his.
He peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt and let it fall to the floor, then pulled on the sweater and pants of which Senna had relieved him the previous night. Then he put on his glasses and went into the kitchen, throwing his wet shirt into the hamper on the way.
Alan filled a glass with water, drank it, and stepped outside in his bare feet. Day was breaking and the previous night’s cold hadn’t yet left the air. He shivered briefly, then walked around to the front of the house, stepping in dew-moistened grass and savoring the feel of it. It was cold and wet, and wonderfully alive. The hairs on his legs stood up as the cold feeling ran up his body.
As he walked, he stole a glance at the early sun. He pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and squinted, creasing the skin at the corners of his eyes.
The breaking day was beautiful, as it had been before the virus, as it was now, and as it would continue to be long afterward, if there ever was an after.
20
The sun was invigorating the world with its rays, which were caught by the blades of grass and refracted by the dew that had collected over the previous night. Alan felt as if the wet grass and sun were lending him a natural, ancient strength, and he smiled halfheartedly. Aided by nature or not, no man could overcome the virus. Nothing could.
When he got to the front of the house he readjusted his glasses again—it really was time to get around to tightening those screws.
Jack Hodgins, a painfully thin eight year old boy, was there, sitting on the porch next to Senna. Jack’s half-sister, Sasha Hartley, was there too, sitting beside Jack. She was six, and not nearly as skinny as Jack, but she could have stood to gain a few pounds. Sasha went by her father’s name, and Jack went by his mother’s. Neither wanted much to do with Jack’s biological father and Sasha’s stepfather, local barfly Larry Knapp, and that was understandable, although the man had been getting better of late.
Senna and Alan had taken Jack out to the perimeter fence for training some weeks earlier. He’d done alright, but he’d been more nervous than Rosemary. Even though he was more enthusiastic about the idea of killing zombies than Rosemary was, Alan thought that Rosemary would fare better in a real encounter than Jack would. They were close to the same age, but Rosemary had a little extra oomph, more resolve, something.
Sasha was still too young to go to the perimeter fence to kill her first zombie, but the time for that was fast approaching, and Jack was beginning to coach her so that she was more prepared for the encounter. He’d always taken care of his half-sister, with no help from his father, the renowned New Crozet drunkard.
A smile tinged with bitter notes began to spread across Alan’s face. He stopped it from reaching its full length and tried to look cheerful for the kids. Seeing Jack look after his half-sister made Alan proud, but the situation with his father was a damned shame.
Jack and Sasha shared a mother, Susan Knapp, who’d been Susan Hodgins before she had the pleasure to meet Larry, who at the time he wooed her, hadn’t yet fallen into a bottle. Susan was now deceased.
While Susan was pregnant with Sasha, Knapp thought he was the father. After Sasha was born, however, Knapp raised the question of paternity. At the time, the two year old Jack was the spitting image of his father, olive-skinned and black-haired, short and with a wiry frame.
Sasha bore no resemblance to Knapp, Susan, or her older brother, Jack. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and a pale complexion, a set of features that was rare in town, and owned only by Sasha’s real father, Adam Hartley.
Knapp had long suspected that something was going on between his wife and Hartley, and then it was confirmed not only by Sasha’s features, but by one of Nell Rodgers’s drunken outbursts. As it had turned out, Nell and a number of other townspeople were well aware of Knapp’s cuckold status, and had kept mum for an impressive length of time.
New Crozet was a hotbed of gossip, and that was understandable given the tight space, people’s natural curiosity, and their need to jabber about something while they farmed and otherwise passed the time. That it hadn’t cropped up during Susan’s pregnancy was a testament to…well, maybe nothing, but it went unsaid far longer than most juicy bits of blather in the town usually did.
Knapp couldn’t confront either of the adulterers who’d forced him to bear the weight of this humiliation. Susan had died from complications—blood loss—shortly after Sasha’s delivery, and Adam Hartley had died on a supply excursion outside the perimeter soon after doing the deed with Susan.
But Sasha was alive, and she was the evidence of the treachery that Knapp latched onto. She was someone on whom he could take out his anger. She was a real thing that he could despise.
As soon as Nell confirmed that Sasha wasn’t his, Knapp rejected the girl. The rest of the town took to looking after her and passed her around like a charity case, but they cared for her deeply and treated her well. After Senna and Alan had established themselves in New Crozet, they rose to the top of the list as her stand-in parental units.
When she got a little older and could run around on her own, she stuck more with Jack.
Knapp had softened some over time. Whereas before she’d been entirely unwelcome in his life, now he looked the other way if she slept in his house, though he still didn’t let her eat at the table. Jack snuck food away for her, and the other townspeople continued to help feed and raise her, as they’d done all along. She was doing well enough, all things considered. She was bright-eyed, cheerful, and growing quickly.
Alan thought Knapp should have been more of a man about it, now and before. What Sasha’s mother and the Hartley man had done wasn’t the girl’s fault. Then again, it was an unfriendly world, and Knapp’s heartlessness was hardening Sasha, and teaching Jack to care for his half-sister. Perhaps the children were being taught lessons best learned at a young age, before they could have the chance to hope for something better.
Aside from the contemptible state of his fathering, Knapp drank too much wheat beer to be of any use, besides in trading the small amount of it he somehow managed not to drink himself. He made the beer on his own, from wheat crops that he grew on several plots throughout the town, the largest of which was in his backyard.
No one got into his business as long as he didn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone, and he didn’t except for the occasional loud-m
outhed remark or uncoordinated thrown punch, though the fighting had stopped years ago. He was meaner without drink than with, anyway.
New Crozet people, like all the survivors who were left, didn’t like to get into anyone else’s business when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. The world was dangerous enough without starting anything else up. If he wanted to drink himself to death and vomit up rude remarks until he croaked, so be it.
On this morning, Jack had something in his hand, and he was eating it and letting Sasha take an occasional bite of it too. At first, Alan thought it was an apple, but when he got closer he caught a whiff of it, and that changed his mind.
Senna smiled when she saw Alan trudging out toward them, and then Jack saw him and he smiled too. The boy waved with the hand that had the apple-like thing and Alan was sure what it was now: an onion, which Jack was holding in his hand and eating as if it were an apple.
Alan was close enough now that the sharp and earthy smell was stinging at his eyes, and, somehow, by the magic of hunger, making his mouth water, too.
“Morning,” Alan said.
“Good morning,” Jack said enthusiastically. He chomped on the onion, sending pungent juice squirting from the corners of his mouth.
“Morning,” Sasha mumbled.
“That looks like quite a breakfast,” Alan said, pointing at the watering onion. “You hunt that down all by yourself?”
“Grew it myself,” Jack said, nodding happily. “You want to try it?”
Alan did, but he said, “No thank you, Jack. You and Sasha eat it.”
“Jack was asking me some questions about the crews,” Senna said. “Maybe you’d like to answer them, Alan, if you’re awake enough?” She winked at him, and stole a look at his crotch. He looked down self-consciously, made aware of the bulge that hadn’t quite subsided since the dream.
“Uh, sure,” Alan said, stammering and repositioning himself so that the dream’s leftover eagerness was less obtrusive.
