Suddenly, Jean was on her knees, pulling herself from his arms. Her hands were at his belt, his zipper slid down and she reached into his opened pants and pulled his throbbing penis out, wrapped her lips around it and sucked the shaft of it down to the base, the head of his dick as far down her throat as it was possible for it to probe.
“Oh, God,” Cutter said. His hands were on her head as she bobbed her head up and down on his erection. “Jesus!” He said. Suddenly he pulled back, tearing at his pants, kicking off his boots, and tossing the clothes aside as fast as he could, not seeing or caring where they ended up.
He looked down to see Jean lying on her back, her solid thighs spread as she presented her vagina to him, the labia pink and inviting. Cutter all but fell upon her and she grabbed at his dick again, this time leading it into her, the moist lips opening, taking him in as she wrapped her legs around his back and pushed toward him, meeting his own pelvis, thrust for thrust.
“Fuck me,” she said. “Fuck me good.”
Cutter rode her; he rocked against her hard stomach, pushed deep into her again and again, feeling their genitalia grinding one against the other. The smell of their sex and the sound of their cries filled the house.
“I’m going to come,” she screamed. “Come with me. Come with me!”
He moaned. He thrust and felt himself spend, holding his body still, frozen in a brief moment of ecstasy as he ejaculated.
“Oh,” she said, lying back on one of those brightly colored rugs. “Oh, my baby,” she cooed. And her strong, lean arms wrapped around him and pulled him close, his chest pressing against her full, firm breasts.
All right then. Definitely she stays was all he could think.
**
Later, they lay together in Cutter’s bed. It was a luxurious -one that he’d pushed, pulled, and dragged up the stairwell one cool day in autumn. He had covered the mattress with a soft topper and had fitted it with sheets and blankets and trapped it out with soft pillows and a down comforter. It was something to come home to after a rough day, and Cutter liked that bed. Now he liked it even more.
She was looking at him as he sat up and stared at her. There was no reason to be coy about it. He just couldn’t stop looking at her, and she wasn’t in a position to play games. The two of them had been at it non-stop for hours. Cutter had finally come to at least some of his senses, had found the condoms, and used them. There was nothing they could do about that first round of sex…
“Where did you come in from?” he asked her. “You were dirty, for damned sure, but you aren’t starving. You’ve been living somewhere. Somewhere safe and with food.” It was time to question her. He had to know what he was into.
Jean rolled over onto her back, pulled a sheet over her body and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve been slowly fighting my way down from the mountains for the past seven months,” she said. “It’s bad out there. In the country, I mean. The roads are all impassable. There are so many weeds and brambles that you’d be ripped to shreds if you even tried to walk the roads. The only pathways have been hollowed out by deads. They just tramp through that stuff and open up a trail, and then other deads follow behind them.” She blinked.
“That makes it tempting to walk the paths they make, but if you do you end up in a bad situation. So the only way to move around is to stick to the woods. And most of that isn’t much better than the roads. Sticker bushes, thorns, ticks, mosquitoes, deerflies. And fucking dogs. Don’t get me started about the dogs.” She turned and looked at Cutter. “I haven’t so much as heard a dog since I got close to Charlotte,” she said. “That was nice.”
Cutter pushed the pillows out of his way and sat up straighter, looking down at his guest. “But where have you been? You’ve been in one spot for a while. I can tell,” he told her plainly.
“Well, like I told you, I’ve been trying to get here—well, not your place, but the city—for months now. All I had left was my pistol that my dad made me.” Jean paused. “Somewhere around Matthews—where you can see downtown Charlotte pretty good—I found this stand-alone grocery store. Damnedest thing; must have been one of the last family-owned grocery stores in the state. Griswold’s, it was called. I could still read the signs through the weeds.
“As soon as I got there, I realized that it hadn’t been looted. Well, at least not so that you could tell. The windows were boarded up and the doors were all barricaded, so I figured it was abandoned. What I ended up doing was making a ramp out of some lumber and I was able to climb up on the roof. From there I could see the neighborhood and that the deads weren’t really heavy. I stayed up there for a while trying to figure out if anyone was holed up inside, but after a while I just had to bite the bullet and go.
“There was an access door on the roof that was locked, but I broke it open. The wood framing was rotten, so it wasn’t that hard to get in. After that, it was just a matter of sucking up the courage to go down there.”
Cutter waited. Everyone was so full of horror stories and tension that it was pointless to recount each and every monstrosity that you witnessed or took part it. It was just shit, and it happened.
“Thing was, it was empty. Of people, I mean.” Jean sat up and the sheet peeled away from her, revealing her perfect body. Despite half a dozen orgasms over the past few hours, Cutter felt himself becoming aroused again. “The store was full, though. Like I said, it wasn’t a big store. A family-owned grocery. Like you see out in the country every once in a while. The Griswolds had obviously fixed it up to keep it from being looted, but something had kept them from going back there.”
“They were probably all killed and eaten,” Cutter told her.
“Yeah, probably. The coolers and freezers were all closed up and I sure as hell didn’t open those. Stuff had all rotted in there, but I didn’t crack the doors—no telling what nasty contagions had been incubating in there. But the shelves were stocked, mainly. Some stuff was gone—maybe the owners had hauled out some supplies or donated stuff right there at the end. But for me, alone, there was enough food and supplies that it kept me going…well, for the past few months.”
“Nobody ever came there? Tried to get in?”
“Ron. It’s a jungle out there. I tell the few people I’ve met who are trying to get out of the cities that the countryside is worse. The deep forests are okay, but anywhere the land was cleared and where sunlight can reach—it’s nothing but weeds and thorns. You can’t hack your way through it. If you had a bulldozer, you might muck out a way through it. But outside of that…it’s not worth the risk.” She looked around, and Cutter could tell that her eyes kept falling on her abandoned clothes, but that the stuff was so filthy she didn’t want to put them back on now that she was bathed and clean.
“We can wash your clothes,” he told her. “I’ve got a galvanized drum I do that in. We’ll boil water, soap.”
“And in the meantime you’ll keep me naked?” There was a bit of a smile buried there.
“No. You can wear something of mine. I have some convertible slacks and some jackets you can wear.”
At that, Cutter got up and walked across the room, searching for and gathering up his own clothes that he’d cast off in the heat of their lust. He pulled on his pants, but just draped his other stuff across the back of a chair. Then he went back to the kitchen counter and the first thing that met his eyes was the little homemade pistol that Jean’s father had made.
“I have to ask you about your family,” he said, turning to her. There was the gulf of space separating them. “Any man who knows how to fabricate his own guns must have been at least partially prepared to face…” he raised his arms, indicating the world…this.”
“What happened to your dad? Your mom? Did you have a husband?”
The woman finally left the bed and took a couple of steps toward a rack where Cutter hung his jackets. She picked one out and drew it over her arms. Fitted to Cutter’s longer torso, it covered her well, hanging down to just above the top of her thighs. If anything, it made her app
ear even more comely to him and he definitely had another erection coming on.
“My mother died when I was in high school, so she didn’t have to witness any of this shit. When it finally came to a head, I was living in Raleigh. My dad came to get me—he arrived just when the power all shut down and things went completely to hell.” She drew the coat tightly about her throat, thinking of the things that had happened.
“And you’re right. He was prepared. He drove to get me in one of his four-wheel drive trucks. Complete with winch. And guns. He didn’t bring a lot of guns, but he brought…well, enough. We got out of town while the place was all but burning down around us. He had forty gallons of gas in jerry cans in the truck, and we managed to make it most of the way home.” She looked up.
“To Brevard, I mean. That was home.” She stared at the floor and took a few steps across the room toward Cutter. “And, yes, my dad had quite the place. We weren’t off the grid there, but he had things set up so that it wasn’t hard to make the transition.” Jean smiled, thinking of the place. Cutter could see old memories flowing through her mind, which were reflected on the upturned corners of her lips, in the pleasant squint of her eyes.
“All he talked about on the way back was that we would be safe and sound as soon as we got back to the home place. He’d kick in the wind-power generator and get the pumps going. He had enough stuff canned and put back so that we could weather the worst for a year without breaking a sweat. My dad even had a bunker he had built himself back in the hill behind the house. Yeah, we’d be okay as soon as we got home, was all he kept talking about all the way there.”
“You guys made it back? You got back to Brevard?”
“Took us three weeks,” Jean said, wandering around the place, looking at the world Cutter had set up for himself twelve floors above Hell. She halved the distance between them while he watched. “We didn’t just get back to Brevard; we made it all the way home.” Jean sighed, her eyes closed.
“What happened?” Cutter asked. He almost didn’t want to ask it, but he needed to know. Ron wasn’t sure just why he needed the answer, but he did.
“My dad had neighbors. Couple of families who lived down the road a ways. Half-mile in either direction. The Lincolns on one side, Keeners on the other. They weren’t like my dad. Not prepared like he was. I mean…who was? Who else you know sets up a wind turbine? Rigs up a wind-powered water pump? A freaking bunker, for Christ’s sake?” Jeans voice was rising and so Cutter walked toward her.
“The neighbors? They…”
“Yeah, those goddamned neighbors. The ones who had smiled in my father’s face for twenty years or more. When we got back, they had taken over my father’s place. My family’s place. They wouldn’t let us in to our own house!” She was yelling it out. Cutter took her in his arms, then.
“They killed him!” She was screaming, and her words soon degenerated into cries and sobs. “They killed him!”
**
They were out on the roof again. Ten days had passed since she’d fallen in with Cutter. The two of them had finally gone into the building below them to scavenge for some decent clothes for Jean, and they’d taken the opportunity to clear out the deads that they’d found wandering the hallways and rooms. Cutter wasn’t sure that they’d gotten them all, but they’d made a real effort. The two of them had even gone to the most obvious places where the shamblers could get in and had done a passably good job of patching up those weak spots.
All the while, they had waited for the streets to clear of the horde of dead that had chased them into hiding. It really had gotten worse over the preceding weeks. The zombies were trickling into the city out of the countryside. Maybe the tall buildings looming on the horizon attracted them. Or maybe they smelled fresh meat. Cutter didn’t know. All he could say was that it had taken more than a week for the streets to clear and for the masses that had gathered around his place to subside and finally vanish.
The day was bright, but not terribly hot, and so they just stood at the wall around the edges of the roof and looked down at the city. “Look,” Cutter said, pointing at a tendril of black, greasy smoke winding its way into the heavens. “That fucking fire bug is at it again.”
“How do you know that’s intentional?” she asked. It could be spontaneous.
“Hell, no. I can tell that he’s at it again. I mean, look. It’s starting at the point where the last fire stopped. Whoever it is, he’s got something up his sleeve. I mean…he’s burning down the old neighborhoods around the downtown area. All of the old traditional places that were suburbs back around the turn of the century. They’re all going up in flames, out toward what was farmland back when our grandparents were babies.”
Jean pulled the baseball cap over her head and squinted into the daylight. They’d found the Charlotte Knights cap in an office below and she’d immediately nabbed it for her own. “Wonder what he’s up to?”
“Damned if I know, but if that neighborhood goes up in flames, I’m going to lose a good safe house I have over there. I’ve got some good stuff in there, too. Some ammo. Couple guns.” He slapped at his thigh. “Goddamn it.”
As they watched, the tendril of smoke grew and was joined by a couple more that seemed to appear simultaneously. Within half an hour, they could see that a line of flames had been penciled onto the landscape, obviously following the line of streets. “What did I tell you? Fucker’s up to something, but I can’t say what.”
“You think he’ll try to burns us out here?”
“Goddamn,” Cutter whispered. ”Like we don’t need one more thing to worry about.”
**
Eleven days had passed since Jean Crump had landed in Cutter’s lap. He was enjoying life for the first time in years, and it wasn’t just the companionship and the sex—there was something else to it. For the first time since the hell had descended on Earth, he felt a fire burning in his heart that hadn’t been there for quite some time.
They had been standing on the roof again, looking down on the city, when they saw something moving out of one of the burned out plots and down the wide way that had once been Tryon Street. For long minutes, the couple had just stood there, staring in disbelief at what they were seeing.
“Is that what I think it is?” Jean stared, her jaw hanging open at the sight.
The enormous forms plodded down the ruin of the thoroughfare, pausing from time to time to examine its surroundings. Periodically, it would stop, reach out and feel at the things to its right or left. As they watched it, they saw another come out of the tangle of brush and new forest to its rear.
“Elephants,” Ron said. “It’s a herd of Indian elephants!”
“Must have gotten out of a zoo,” Jean said, standing beside Ron and putting her arm around his waist, pulling him close. “I wonder which zoo.”
Cutter shrugged, and then he laughed. For the first time in so long that he couldn’t recall it, he was laughing. “I’ll be damned. I’m not sure where they came from, but there they are. Could have come from anywhere. The North Carolina Zoo? Maybe. There was a zoo in Columbia. Maybe someone went in and released all the animals in all of the zoos. I mean…I never thought of that. Or maybe they just broke out. Maybe it was just a big jail break.” He was laughing and pointing at the herd. No less than two dozen of the huge animals had emerged onto the street.
Jean was laughing, too. “Where does a three-ton elephant go?” she asked.
“Anywhere it fucking well wants to,” Ron answered, and soon they were locked together in a mutual hug, their laughter echoing around the rooftops.
Suddenly, Cutter stiffened and stood straight, his gaze still locked on the slowly plodding herd of pachyderms. “He has to see this. It’ll be perfect. He has to see this, and then we can get him to stay. He can stay with us.”
“Who? What are you talking about, Ron?” Jean’s eyes were now on Cutter and she was puzzled.
“The day I met you, I was trying to make it to see someone. A kid who lives alone. All
alone in a freaking tree house, for God’s sake. I could never get him to leave that place. He’s stuck there and he won’t leave. But now…I can get him to leave it.” He had turned to look into Jean’s confused face.
“Go with me. If you help me, we can go up there, get the kid down, and bring him back. He’ll stay with us, I know it.”
“A kid? How old is this kid?”
“I don’t know. Twelve, maybe.”
“There’s a little boy out there living by himself?” There was horror on Jean’s face.
“It’s complicated. Some of us watch out for him, but the only way to get him out of where he is would be to drag him out. And once any of us got him out…well, you’d have to tie him down to keep him with you.” He couldn’t hide the guilt he was feeling. “Well, anyway, that’s where I was headed when we met. I was going to try to talk The Kid—Oliver—into coming here. Hell, I was of half a mind to force him.”
Jean looked back down at the street, at the elephants that had seemed to pause in their march, questing with their trunks at the air of this strange place into which they’d come. “Then let’s go get him,” she said. “Let’s go now, before the movement of those big animals attracts the deaders.”
**
The streets were eerily silent as Ron and Jean made their way across the blocks. As quietly as possible, they walked from point to point, doing their best to remain hidden, flitting from the hulks of abandoned trucks to collapse awnings to the spilled contents of looted stores. As always, they were tense, on the alert for the marauding zombies. They spoke not at all, and they stayed close, using only hand signals to communicate. Jean followed Cutter’s lead.
Off to the north they could feel, rather than hear, the low rumble of the elephants’ movement down the streets. The animals seemed to move very slowly, almost as if they were blindly feeling their ways through the city. At the pace they had set, it would take them hours to move through the downtown area, perhaps longer. However, their presence would certainly attract the attention of the shamblers, and eventually they would arrive in numbers, searching for people to kill.
The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) Page 10
