by John Inman
Jonas was mumbling to himself as he crawled along at Terry’s feet, “That’s enough exploring for one day. It’s back to the cabin for me. Yessireebob.”
“Need a drink?” Terry asked with a grin.
“Yes!” Jonas snapped back. “And I might need to change my underwear.”
Chapter Fifteen
JONAS SAT cross-legged on the cabin floor with Bruce curled up beside him. He had his portable typewriter perched on the edge of the coffee table, and he was clacking away at fifty words a minute. The racket clearly annoyed Bruce, who every now and then heaved a sigh of exasperation and squeezed his eyes tighter, trying to sleep.
Jonas stopped typing long enough to watch Terry stomp through the front door with an armload of firewood. He dumped the logs into the woodbox by the fireplace, then kicked the door closed behind him and lowered the crossbars that sealed the door. It was coming on to evening, and the light outside was fading. With approaching night, the colder air was moving in too. The starlings blathered in the rafters, talking about it. The cacophony of their jabbering and the clatter of the firewood tumbling into the box, not to mention the blasted typewriter, was the final straw for Bruce. He dragged himself to his feet and plodded up the stairs to escape all the noise and try to get a few winks of sleep under the bed.
Jonas was as excited as the starlings about the coming cold. He couldn’t wait to seek a little warmth of his own by getting naked later and snuggling with the burly redhead standing by the grate clapping the bark from his gloves.
When they were clean, Terry shed his gloves and leather jacket, then dragged the helmet off his head and tossed it on the couch. Terry might have shaved that morning, but he already had a red shadow of fresh whiskers sprouting on his cheeks. His hair was still long and frazzled. It cascaded down in a curly mass that almost reached his shoulders. Standing in front of the fire, Terry buried his hands in that lustrous red mane and gave his head a shake, combing through it with his fingers to get the tangles out and the circulation moving. With the fireplace ablaze behind him, it looked like his head had suddenly shot up in flames.
Jonas gave a soft admiring whistle. “Wow. For a mountain man, you are something else.”
Terry peeked through his fanned-out hair and offered Jonas a dubious smirk. “I’m not a mountain man. I’m a substitute schoolteacher and a notary public. And you bloody well know it.” He looked embarrassed as his eyes traveled to the typewriter. “Working on your book?”
It was Jonas’s turn to blush. “I was. Until you decided to get sexy in front of the fire and ruin all my fantasies by telling me you’re not Paul Bunyan.”
Terry laughed. “If you think I’m Paul Bunyan, then you’ve been away from butch men far too long.”
Jonas rolled his eyes in exaggerated wonder. “Boy. What you don’t know about yourself is a lot.”
There were two rosy splotches still burning on Terry’s cheeks, so Jonas figured he had teased the man enough. He glanced into the fire for a moment to gather his thoughts. From the fire, he let his gaze travel around the cabin. The walls and ceiling were all fortified now with the galvanized fence posts sturdily nailed down with only two-inch gaps between them. Nothing bigger than a hamster would be getting into this cabin without a bulldozer. The trick for actual survival, of course, was not to be trapped outside the cabin when the creatures attacked. Consequently, every excursion they made from this point on, either into the tiny town of Spangle for supplies or across the mountain slopes to check out the caverns on his map, would be a gamble. It was then their lives would be in the greatest danger.
Terry plopped himself on the sofa. He uncapped a bottle of water and guzzled it, smacking his lips when he was finished like it was really what he needed. Jonas smiled watching him.
“When was the last time you saw a living person other than me?” Jonas asked.
Terry stared at him, his lips still moist from the water. He carefully replaced the cap on the bottle and set it on the table. Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, he studied Jonas closely.
“I don’t know. A few weeks maybe. But I’m sure there are still people around. They just prefer to stay hidden. Why do you ask?”
Jonas gave a shrug. “I was just wondering if we’re the last two people on the face of this mountain.”
“I doubt it. But what if we are?”
“I’m not sure,” Jonas said. “Do you suppose the authorities know we’re here?”
Terry considered that. “Maybe. Maybe not. I haven’t seen any helicopters running sentry over the place. No National Guard troops beating a path through the underbrush or tearing through the houses in town, trying to scare up survivors so they can hustle them off to safety. On the other hand, they could be accessing satellites and drones and keeping tabs on the area without us knowing anything about it. Seems to me they have to know we’re here.”
“Then don’t you think it’s kind of odd they haven’t tried to make contact? A lot of people have died here.”
Apparently his last statement struck a nerve. Terry’s eyes grew hooded. The line of his lips tightened. “First off, I never wanted to be contacted by the authorities. I have no intention of letting them decide if I should stay or go. That’s why I destroyed the cell phones. Secondly, I know a lot of people have died here. Some were my friends. One was my husband, remember? Everybody I knew who shared this corner of the world with Bobby and me are gone. They either left while they had a chance, or the creatures picked them off one by one. So what exactly are you getting at?” He glanced down at the portable typewriter in front of Jonas. “What are you writing, anyway?”
Jonas’s fingers slid across the silent keys. He could feel the muscles in his jaws work while he tried to decide exactly how to formulate the words to explain what it was that had started to worry him so much. Finally, he pushed the typewriter aside and leaned over the table. He reached across to touch Terry’s knee.
“It’s not going to go on like this, you know.”
“What’s not going to go on like this?” Terry asked.
“Us,” Jonas said.
Terry drew his knee back, evading Jonas’s touch. “If you want to leave, you can. Just because we’re sleeping together doesn’t mean we’ve made any promises of everlasting commitment. I got along fine before you came along. I can get along fine if you—”
Jonas smacked the tabletop hard enough to shut Terry up. He leaned closer and snagged Terry’s pant leg again, pinching it tightly between his thumb and forefinger. Holding on. Refusing to let go.
“Please don’t pull away from me again, Terry. That’s not what I’m talking about. You know how I feel about you.”
Terry didn’t look convinced. “How am I supposed to know how you feel about me? You’ve been under my roof for what? Six weeks? Going on seven? We fuck each other and suck each other’s dicks, but that doesn’t mean I can read your mind.”
Jonas inhaled a deep breath and tried to calm himself. He forced himself to speak slowly and rationally. This wasn’t the conversation he had wanted to have today. His worries lay far deeper than how the two of them were beginning to feel about each other.
“Terry, listen to me. Even I don’t know how I feel about you exactly. It’s confusing. I want to be with you every minute. If that means I’m falling in love with you, then maybe that’s what I’m doing. In the middle of everything we’re going through, is it really that important if I fall in love with you or not? Do you really think that’s where our priorities should be focused right now?”
“It’s never the wrong time to fall in love,” Terry said stubbornly. His voice was calmer now, but his eyes reflected hurt. He stared down at Jonas’s fingers clutching at his pant leg. He couldn’t seem to lift his eyes to Jonas’s face.
Jonas studied him closely. He could feel his heart thudding behind his rib cage. It had been a long time since a man had avoided looking at him like this. It had been a long time since any man had harbored enough feelings about him to even contem
plate doing such a thing.
“You’re right, Terry. It’s never the wrong time to fall in love.” He chewed on his bottom lip. “And maybe that is what we’re doing. I hope it is. I like being with you. You’re the sexiest man I’ve ever known. You seem to like me too.”
Terry chuckled wryly at that. The chuckle was pretty sarcastic, but at least he managed to smile afterward, and that gave Jonas hope. But it still wasn’t what Jonas wanted to talk about right now.
“Terry, listen to me. How we feel about each other will happen whether we want it to or not. But right now we’ve got bigger problems.”
“Yes, I know, but—”
“No,” Jonas said. “I don’t think you do know. What do you think the authorities are doing right now?”
Terry blinked in confusion. “The authorities?”
“Yes. The authorities. The people who are trying to keep this mountain and your little hometown quarantined. What do you think they are talking about? What do you think their plans are for the long run?”
“The long run?”
Jonas huffed in annoyance. “Terry, they’re not going to want these creatures to escape out into the rest of the world. You know that, right? They’ll do everything they can to keep them isolated right here. So they can deal with them in a relatively confined space.”
Worry wrinkles bunched up on Terry’s forehead. He leaned in a little closer, allowing his own hand to brush Jonas’s now. Reaching out with his other hand, he pushed the tumble of dark hair back from Jonas’s forehead. The touch was gentle. It was something a lover might do, and that didn’t go unnoticed by Jonas. But still it wasn’t enough to steer him away from what he really needed to say.
“Terry, if the authorities think there are only a couple of idiots like us left alive on this mountain, a couple of idiots too stupid or too stubborn to leave, don’t you think they’ll give us up as lost anyway. And go ahead with whatever contingency plan they’ve decided on.”
“What contingency plan? Spit it out,” Terry said. “What exactly are you trying to say?”
“Terry, if the authorities think that most of the civilian population in Spangle and on this mountain are either dead or gone, they’re going to try to destroy the creatures in the quickest and most thorough way they can. Don’t you think that’s what they’ve been waiting for? The last thing they want is for these things to break free. If they do, there will be absolutely no stopping them, no holding them back. They’ll breed, they’ll spread, and… they’ll feed. Everywhere. No one will be safe.”
Terry had unknowingly tightened his grip around Jonas’s hand. Finally, Jonas had to gently extract his hand before Terry snapped his fingers like matchsticks.
“What could they do?” Terry quietly asked. “The authorities. What could they do to destroy the creatures while they’re still here? What is it that’s worrying you so much?”
Jonas studied his face. “You honestly don’t know?”
“No. Explain it to me.”
Jonas sighed but then proceeded to do exactly that. “My guess would be they would go for a single massive strike. Wipe out the whole area. It would be the only sure way to annihilate all the creatures.”
Terry scooted back on the couch and simply stared at Jonas, his face blank, empty. He mouthed the word “massive” under his breath. “How would they do that?” he asked, his voice muted and numb, as if he needed to know the answer but didn’t really want to hear Jonas say it.
Jonas understood that completely. He didn’t want to say it either.
“They could napalm the town and mountain. Or hell, they could drop a small nuclear device and wipe everything out. It’s the only way they could be sure to succeed.”
Jonas watched the reality sink in as Terry turned his head and peered through the cracks between the galvanized fence posts nailed across the nearest window. At the trees outside. At the birds, still frolicking in the rafters, unaware it was their futures at stake as well. Unaware that their little lives were hanging in the balance too. Past the birds, Terry stared out farther, through the trees and across the mountain to the meadows and the valleys he loved so much.
Oh so gently, as if the words were slipping away from his lips without any forethought, Terry whispered softly, “I do care for you, you know. I’ve cared for you since the first time we slept together. I know we’ve only known each other for less than two months, but it doesn’t matter. I know how I feel. I’ve known it since the first time you touched me.”
Jonas groaned his way to his feet and stepped around the coffee table to lower himself next to Terry on the couch. He took him into his arms and pulled Terry snug against him. With his lips in Terry’s hair, he whispered, “I care for you too, Terry. I’ve known it just as long as you have. Now the question is, what should we do about it?”
Terry pulled back and studied Jonas’s face. “What do you mean, what should we do? Are you talking about leaving?”
Jonas smiled then. “You don’t want to leave. This is your home. And lately, I’ve sort of been thinking it’s my home too. I love this cabin. This mountain. And you have a house in town. I’ve never seen it, but somehow I know I really want to spend time in it with you, if you’ll let me.”
“As lovers?” Terry asked, his green eyes wide and hopeful.
“Yes. As lovers, if you want.”
Terry’s bottom lip gave a tiny quiver, like a wee hypodermal earthquake had shifted the layout of his chin. He licked his lips and gazed down at Jonas’s hand again, where it rested under his. Jonas could see him struggling to find his voice.
“Everything I have, Jonas, everything I am, is here on this mountain, in this town. My life. My past. All my memories. Everything I own. And ever since you came along, even my future is here, I hope. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Jonas said. “I do know that. And it’s my future too. I don’t imagine either one of us wants to see it all go up in a flash of napalm or be vaporized to pixie dust inside a mushroom cloud.”
Terry almost smiled, because the thought was so horrific he had to lighten it in his thoughts somehow before he could really comprehend it. “God forbid we should ever let that happen.” Then his face darkened again. The worry lines etched themselves back into his forehead. “But what can we do? How can we stop it?”
It was Jonas’s turn to stare through the slats at the mountain outside, at the dusk settling over the cabin, at the starlings in the rafters working their way toward bedtime, their chittering quieter now, their stirrings less frantic.
“We have to find the creatures, Terry. We have to find them and destroy them ourselves before the authorities decide to take matters into their own hands. If we can’t destroy them, then maybe we can tell the authorities exactly where they are so they can pinpoint their bombs with enough precision not to take out the rest of the area too.”
“In the caves, you mean,” Terry breathed, following Jonas’s gaze. “We have to find the creatures in the caves.”
“Yes. In the caves,” Jonas said. He leaned in and buried a kiss in Terry’s hair. He inhaled the delicious scent of the man and his cock shifted in his pants. Jesus, even under the threat of nuclear annihilation, he had the energy to erect a boner. If that isn’t love, what is?
“That must be where they are,” he said, ignoring his dick for once in his life, or trying to. “In the caves. Where else could they be? Tomorrow we’ll really start to search. We’ve concentrated on reinforcing the cabin long enough. We checked out the one cave you knew about. Now it’s time to check out the two on my map.” He gripped Terry’s shoulders and pushed him far enough away to look into his eyes. “You and me. We’ll do it together.”
“Of course,” Terry whispered, nodding. “We do everything together, don’t we?”
At that, Jonas almost smiled. “We do indeed.”
Once again, Jonas’s heart gave a leap. He leaned in closer, dragging Terry into his arms. They sat like that, staring into the fire, enjoying the silence, watc
hing the darkness close in outside and thinking their own thoughts.
Later that night, after they made love, after the sparrows and the finches had settled down for the night and the fiery embers on the grate had crumbled to ash, Jonas lay naked with Terry in the bed at the top of the stairs. As the stillness gathered around them, he couldn’t help wondering if the creatures were outside waiting. Growing hungrier now as their food supply dwindled. Desperation settling in. Longing for the scent of blood. The taste of flesh.
Aching. Aching to feed again.
And maybe, like Jonas and Terry, contemplating a search of their own to find it.
Chapter Sixteen
THE MOUNTAIN was small. Terry supposed if a person wanted to be technical about it, it might not truly qualify as a mountain at all. Just a mishmashed pyramid of boulders and trees and seams of granite bulged up into a heap by some long-ago terrestrial upheaval of earthquake, volcano, and converging tectonic plates. The landscape was peppered with wildlife, but there was humanity in residence too, or had been before the trouble started. Vacation homes were sprinkled here and there inside the piney woods, tucked in among copses and up against cliff faces. Alongside game trails, hiking paths and dirt roads for motorcycles and ATVs crisscrossed the terrain. One rutted lane, broad enough for vehicles, gave Terry’s Jeep and the other residents’ vehicles access up and down the mountain. The backbone of the mountain reached a height of less than 2,500 feet, even at its tallest point. It covered a grand total of 400 acres from the beginning of one rising slope to the conclusion of the other, yet it didn’t have a name. To Terry it was just his mountain.
The town of Spangle, nestled at the foot of the mountain on the opposite side from where Terry’s cabin sat, encompassed an even smaller landmass. Perhaps eighty acres, tops. No major highway connected Spangle to the rest of the world, only two-lane blacktops and a scattering of gravel roads. Once you were off the mountain and in the middle of town, you were in what could best be described as backcountry desert. The land was flat and hot and sandy. Rattlesnakes flourished in the summer, and every third or fourth winter, it might snow enough to draw the tourists from San Diego, many miles to the southwest.
