by S. P. Durnin
It had been evident to all that O’Connor was in no condition to lead their little party so, despite her quite emphatic protests to the contrary, Kat had remained The One In Charge. That was fine with Jake, too. He’d been busy remembering how Laurel had gazed at him when she’d said goodbye from the roof of the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Plant. He suffered hallucinations about how her left cheek quirked up in a slightly lopsided smile. He had recurring dreams about how worried she’d been for him, during his terrifying game of Pac-Man with the dead on the streets of Columbus. Of how she crossed her arms and cocked her hips when she was angry. Of her touch, her scent, her kisses…
She’s gone-she’s gone-she’s gone-she’s gone-she’s gone!
Jake’s reasoning abilities fractured once more, and his pace increased two-fold. He all but flew around the track moving flat out like an Olympic sprinter, racing on over its faded, weather-beaten surface at speed. His arms pumped, his lungs worked like billows, his pulse thundered in his ears. Sweat began to stream back along his torso, flying into the air in his wake to splatter unnoticed on the asphalt as he passed. He ignored it all. The burning in his throat, the pounding behind his eyes, the protests from his straining and overworked muscles, the heat of the sun beating down on him. All he knew was the loss, the pain that bounced around in his skull like an awful, white-hot sea urchin.
Jake pushed everything away and ran.
He ran as if Skathach—the Celtic shadow-goddess of vengeance and ruination—trotted cackling madly at his heels.
He was on his third such lap, streaking along over the pavement, half-aware and nearly mad himself, when Kat entered through the field’s gate.
Unlike Jake, she still had her pistol, extra magazines and sword, while his only weapon was the crowbar sweatily riding between his shoulder-blades. She watched from beside the bleachers as he shot around again; arms pumping, legs blurring. Jake moved over the baking hot ground like his feet were turbine driven. Her chest tightened when she saw his wild unseeing eyes on his next pass. She sighed, and realized he was living in his memory again. The pretty Asian had done that a few nights herself, after Laurel’s rooftop sacrifice. The redhead had been her best friend for almost three years after all, but she could still only guess how hard it had been for Jake to watch his lover die.
As he raced around the far curve once more, Kat strode quickly onto the track and planted herself squarely in his path, fully intending to take him to the ground if need be to halt his maniacal dash. While Jake’s strength and endurance were certainly impressive, Cho judged the ambient air temperature to be in the high nineties. Certainly high enough to cause someone exerting themselves for extended periods of time—as he’d been doing for quite a while now—to suffer from heat exhaustion. In the Zombie Apocalypse, that could be fatal. Their group’s options for cooling a victim of heat stroke were limited, seeing that : A-there was no way for them to make ice or even refrigerate liquid, and B-the only nearby hospital was sure to be understaffed, considering everyone who worked there was a slouching, hungry corpse now. So, hoping to break him out of the self-imposed state of lunacy, she set herself in the center of Jake’s lane and began calling out to him.
“I need to talk to you.”
He gave no sign he’d heard her. Jake was halfway around the track when she yelled out to him again, louder this time.
“Jake? Did you hear what I said? I need you to stop.”
Still nothing. He was circling the far curve again now, and still moving fast. She knew if they collided, there was a damn good chance one—or both—of them might need some serious medical attention. Possibly from Kat taking him down hard, possibly from Jake knocking her ass-over-teakettle as his larger frame plowed through the spot where she was standing. Kat began to worry at that point.
“You can’t keep doing this. You’ll keel over in the heat! Will you stop already?”
He came on like a 220 pound bullet. There were seventy yards between them. Fifty-five yards. Thirty, twenty. She cringed inwardly. Oh, this was going to hurt.
“Jake!”
The last she yelled almost into his face as O’Connor shot towards her. A second before impact, she saw reality impose itself in his eyes again. He realized that he was too close and moving way too fast for her to dodge, so he chose another option. With his next step, Jake threw himself to the left. Over the bench just inside the field’s edge. The one reserved to second string members of the football and soccer teams, or even just players who needed a break during the game. He cleared its top easily, bounding a good three feet over the bench’s dusty, aluminum seat-back. The awkward leap to avoid crashing into Kat broke his stride midair and, after an almost comical stumble, he went tumbling across the surface of the overgrown field. He slid to a halt fifteen yards away flat on his back, a bit scratched up from where the thick grass had torn at him as he rolled, ears ringing from where his own crowbar had glanced off the back of his skull, but basically unhurt.
The ninja-girl vaulted the bench and trotted quickly to his side as Jake sat up, groggily attempting to shake a Milky Way’s worth of stars out of his vision. Kneeling to support him while his eyes crossed and he swayed drunkenly, Kat leaned Jake towards her so she could check his head. There was already a fair sized lump rising on the back of his skull, but thankfully the heavy weapon hadn’t broken through his skin. He groaned when she probed said lump gently with her fingertips, and relief flooded through Cho when she didn’t feel any cracks or divots. Jake had almost pulled it together by then, and was giving her a look master chiefs reserved for new recruits on the first day of SEAL training’s Hell Week.
“Can you not poke the large, throbbing bulge on my head?” O’Connor demanded crossly, tilting his aching melon away from her touch.
“Don’t be a baby.” Kat let him go and scooched backwards slightly. “You’re lucky you didn’t stick the hook end of that thing into your brain.”
Rubbing the sore spot on his skull and wincing he demanded, “What do you want?”
There was really no way for her to sugarcoat it, so Kat decided to just hit him with the news. Hopefully, it would shock him out of the emotional ennui he’d been living in for almost two months.
“We’ve decided it’s time for you to take charge again.”
Jake’s eyes fell earthward and he turned his head away. “You’re doing fine. Besides, I’m not fit to lead a pack of starving border-jumpers to a taco stand, let alone this group.”
Mmm. Tacos. Kat thought. It had been a long time since they’d had anything to eat except for freeze dried food and MREs. Hey, she could dream couldn’t she?
“Well, saddle up, Chavez. The vatos are hungry.” Maybe a little of her unique brand of smart-ass humor would do the trick.
Nothing. He wouldn’t even look at her.
Kat raised an eyebrow and decided to change her approach. She rose and stood over him, arms crossed. This wouldn’t be kind of her, but they needed him at one-hundred percent again.
“You know, Laurel would kick your ass right now.” Jake stiffened at her remark and Kat pressed on. “I can understand how you feel, but if she were here? She’d punch you right in your stupid mouth.”
“You don’t know anything about what she’d do.” The muscles in his jaw fluttered as Jake clenched his teeth.
“Hey, I knew her a hell of a lot longer than you did, remember? You never actually got to see my roomie really pissed. She’d have most likely kicked your butt up around your ears about a month ago.” Cho hated being cruel, especially when it came to Jake. It wasn’t in her nature. There was no way she was going to let him slip back into mobile catatonia though. “She would’ve definitely laughed at you over the way you’ve been acting, right to your face, I think. Just before she told you to stop being such a whiny bitch.”
That engendered a reaction. Jake swiveled his face towards her and gave Kat a murderous look before turning to st
are at the overgrown grass again. “I can’t see Laurel referring to me as a ‘bitch’ for missing her.”
“We all miss her,” she replied quietly, and looked towards the tree line past the rusting fence. “I don’t know how I got through the first week, after she died. It felt like someone had cut off one of my arms. I’ll be missing Laurel until they finally put me in my grave, Jake. Preferably about a thousand years from now, but I don’t have high hopes for that long. At least, not unless you pull it together.”
O’Connor remained silent.
“She wouldn’t want you to keep doing this to yourself, Jake. Laurel knew how you felt about her. She wasn’t stupid. There’s no question in my mind she had some pretty strong feelings where you were concerned, too. That’s why she told you to keep living. Remember?”
As Kat watched, Jake once again flashed back to that night at the Cincinnati Gas and Electric Plant.
* * *
They’d just handed the Purifiers a jumbo-sized ass-kicking.
Kat had shredded fully half their number from the third floor level of the facility’s generator building, with help from the M134 mini-gun she’d lugged unseen through the white supremacists’ fortress, while Jake had made his escape along the power conduits stretching from the transformer yard to the catwalk where she’d been concealed. The writer was shortly thereafter stabbed by the hostile group’s second in command, and then all but beaten the man senseless.
Kat had been the one to actually finish Milo Tompkins, after Jake nearly collapsed from the pain of pulling the Nazi’s antique RAD dagger out of his own shoulder. They’d managed to decimate the rest of the Purifiers, once Rae, Penny, Gwen, and the now deceased Donna tossed a few grenades into the cafeteria the bastards had been sheltering in, and were headed back through the primary turbine facility when the dead found them.
When George rammed the Mimi through the Purifiers’ main entrance, destroying any hope of ever again securing it against all the infected outside, the surrounding horde was hundreds if not thousands strong. It more than filled the road leading to the power plant, even after Foster had run through them and smashed the massive gate from its hinges with the Screamin’ Mimi’s bladed prow. The dead had streamed through the opening and spread out in the front half of the facility, making their way eventually to the primary building and office block. Jake and the others had been forced back outside into the transformer enclosure, pushed outside when the creatures filled the ground floor. Donna had gone down fighting, and by doing so bought Laurel—who’d been cut off from the others by the press of the rotting bodies—time enough to flee up to the roof.
After she’d secured the access door topside, the redhead saw her friends sheltering within the transformer yard, separated from her by five stories of empty air and hundreds upon hundreds of flesh-eaters. They’d been hoping for George to find them when the dead began beating down the door to the roof, and Jake had been frantic to get to her. He’d searched desperately for some why to reach Laurel before the hungry things managed to pound their way through, and get their rotting teeth into his lovers too-fragile flesh.
But it hadn’t happened.
She’d charged the dead when they finally clawed their way onto the roof of the office block, and blown them—along with herself—to kingdom come with a bandoleer’s worth of grenades.
* * *
As they sat in on the overgrown grass, Kat hoped she hadn’t sent Jake back into a state of mental ennui. There was little she could do as he relived it all again, except stay at his side and pray the uncaring sky-beasts would be kind for once.
That was how the she thought of the gods. As arrogant, petty, vengeful, self-centered beings, concerned with nothing but wringing every bit of amusement out of the mortals they were supposed to be protecting. In her mind, the fact that dead had risen en mass around the world to consume the living served only to reinforce that theory.
Jake remembered everything while she hovered close beside him; every detail, every word, every gesture, every expression that had passed over Laurel’s face during their time together flickered through his brain. A slew of images passed behind his eyes while Cho watched, and he started to fade away again. His expression slowly transformed from a look of confused pain into to a numb, lifeless mask, devoid of human animation as Jake began to fall back into his hurt.
Cho felt the icy fingers of panic tickle her spine at the thought of losing him inside that dark pit again, so she did the only thing she could think of at the time.
She kissed him.
It was either that or belt him a good one, so she chose the lesser—and far more pleasant—of two evils.
Jake didn’t respond at first. For a few moments, the lips against her own had all the animation of a department store mannequin. Kat refused to give up, however. She pressed one hand against the back of his neck lightly, holding them together as she tasted the still-wet saltiness of his mouth. Doing so caused her pulse to quicken drastically, but she managed to resist running her hands over his perspiration slick chest.
Just barely, but she did it.
Keeping her cool around him had been difficult over the last weeks, in no small part due to the way she’d felt about him ever since the morning of the outbreak. Jake had returned to his apartment, where Kat and Allen had been in the midst of some heavy petting, determined to retrieve Laurel from the third floor walk-up the two girls shared nearer to the city center. While he hadn’t flat out asked either his lighthearted friend or the pretty ninja-girl to come along on the nearly suicidal drive, both had known full well he had virtually no chance of making it there—let alone back again—without their aid. The pair had followed him out into the walking corpse-filled streets willingly. Then they’d helped him to rescue not only Laurel, but the muscular EMT, Maggie Reed, young Karen Parker, and Heather Bell also. The latter two had been killed by the Purifiers, but that didn’t negate the raw courage Jake displayed that day, as humanity all but vanished down the gullets of the hungry dead.
It had been doubly hard for Kat, because O’Connor seemed to remember nothing about their escape from the power plant after Laurel’s death. That included everything she had said to him and his own half-delirious responses at the time. Rae had explained it in great detail, most of which the ninja-girl hadn’t bothered to remember after hearing the news, but she understood the gist of it. In layman’s terms; the sedative Rae had given him while their quartet sheltered within the transformer yard—combined with excessive blood loss from the stab wound in his left shoulder—had caused Jake to suffer minor brain damage. Not enough to seriously affect him cognitively or physically, but it had resulted in some short-term memory loss. That had made the last month-plus hellish for the pretty Asian. It wasn’t that he’d blown her off, or even that Jake regretted what he’d said, he honestly had no recollection of it. Those synapses had been damaged by the trauma he’d been put through and, according to Rae, his memory of those events had been erased, likely forever..
While Kat knew it was probably for the best Jake didn’t remember what they’d said to one another, that didn’t at all lessen the hurt she’d felt upon hearing the news. She hadn’t found the nerve to admit her feelings to him since, due to his withdrawn state. He’d recovered from his wounds, and now would at least talk to his companions—unlike the first weeks after Laurel’s death—but his red-haired lover’s sacrifice had injured something inside him.
So Kat had kept quiet. She knew Jake wouldn’t be able to accept—or return—her affections, at least not yet. He needed time. So, she’d put on her best “bubble-headed, sex-kitten” act, and let him believe she was her normal, jovial self. She could wait.
Their group needed to move, however. The survivors’ time in Langley had allowed them a period of rest during their journey, but they couldn’t stay. No matter how many of the dead in the area they put down, more would eventually come, possibly in large numbers. While
they were all becoming quite proficient at fighting the creatures, they still needed to make their way to Pecos and eventually west over the Rockies. Their need for haste was prompted by the fact that Rae had not been able to make contact with the South Texas sanctuary for some time now.
Rae assured them it was still secure, but no one was replying to her calls. Thanks to some deft work on her part at pulling imagery from a “covert observation platform” (read: a spy satellite the United States put in orbit to watch China and other hostile countries) by way of her laptop and platter-sized, PAPSA transmitter dish, Rae could see the sanctuary was still occupied by living, breathing humans. What she couldn’t understand at first, was why she was unable make contact with them through either satellite up-link or radio broadcasts? Everything seemed to be working perfectly, but her transmissions weren’t going through. No matter what she tried, the residents of Pecos were unable to respond. It made the buxom woman short-tempered, to say the least.
Rae finally learned it was because the government’s secure facility at Groom Lake (the infamous Area 51) had fallen from the inside. She’d managed to hack into the installations camera feed after losing contact with Pecos, and their party had watched in horror as her laptop screen displayed image after image of dead personnel shuffling mindlessly about in the facility’s subterranean hallways. Without someone living to press buttons and turn dials in the control center there, there was no way to activate the orbiting platform’s transmission capabilities. Worse yet, Rae glumly informed them, it was only a matter of time before all the spy satellites orbits deteriorated, and they began plummeting to Earth. The days of looking at the planet from space were swiftly coming to an end, which was why they needed to get on the road again immediately. Without the ability to view their path to the southwest, the survivors would be completely dependent on their Humvee to scout the way again. They needed to move. Now.
