by Joss Ware
“I’m going to have to send for Cath this time,” Vonnie said, her voice unsteady as she stared at the gashes without making any move to touch them. A cloth dripping with steaming water dangled in her hand.
“No.”
“Who’s Cath?” Theo asked, maneuvering Vonnie out of the way so he could examine the wound. He’d seen and treated more than a few ganga marks in the last fifty years—and those people were the lucky ones.
These gashes were deep but not life threatening, that he could tell—unless they got infected, which was a real possibility, considering where those filthy, flesh-tearing hands had been. She’d need stitches probably. “What do you have to put on them?” he asked, taking the warm cloth from Vonnie’s hand. “Any alcohol?”
“Cath’s the closest thing we have to a doctor,” Vonnie told him, coming back to life as Theo began to gently dab at the gashes. “Here. We have this balm to put on it. I’ll get bandages.” She set a lidless jar on the counter next to them and bustled away.
“Yeah,” Selena said, her voice tight, her face raised back to the ceiling after her emphatic negation a moment earlier. Other than that, she seemed unmoved as Theo shifted a pink bra strap out of the way. “Cath gets to save the ones who can be saved. I get to watch the rest die.”
The bra strap hung, useless, halfway down a toned arm that curved with sleek, feminine muscle. Theo noticed . . . then moved on from the fact, and also noticed that one of the lacy pink shells now gapped away from a nice handful of breast. “Ganga nails are probably going to cause an infection,” he said, wishing that Elliott could be here. “You need to be stitched up. Have you got anything to clean it with, Vonnie?”
His voice was calm, if not peremptory, but the thing that scared the shit out of him was the fact that she’d been that close to a ganga. Close enough that she could have just as easily been torn to shreds and devoured. “What the hell were you doing out there?”
Selena pressed her lips together, but if she meant to glare at him, she didn’t succeed. Her face, grimy and blood-streaked, seemed to have gray undertones, although it was hard to tell for certain in the faulty light. She had long thick lashes that fanned over her cheeks; and her straight hair was plastered to her chin and temples. As he brushed it out of the way, exposing slender shoulders and an elegant neck, he noticed a long thin cord around her throat disappearing in a deep vee beneath her arm, as if something weighting it down had fallen to the side.
She must have realized he noticed it—maybe his fingers had pulled on the lanyard, tightening it against her skin—and she sat upright suddenly, clapping one hand over her half-bared breasts as the other gripped and slid down along the cord. “You should be in bed,” Selena told him.
A fierceness blazed in her eyes as she stared him down. Ferocity and determination.
“I’m in a lot better shape than you are,” he said. Much as he wanted to, he didn’t allow his gaze to travel along that cord to see what she was trying to hide. That would give her too much satisfaction.
“I wasn’t dead three days ago.”
“No, but you could have been tonight. How the hell did you get away from them?” He looked at her. The peace and serenity he’d admired earlier was gone. She was bedraggled and clearly exhausted; in pain and yet in control—and for a minute, her look reminded him of Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy: defiant, and yet weary. World-weary.
But Selena wasn’t a vampire slayer. Or a zombie slayer, for that matter.
Yet, the fact remained . . . she had obviously been in close proximity to one. And had escaped with little more than a few scratches. How?
Just then, Vonnie bustled back into the room (he hadn’t even noticed she’d left). “Here,” she said, setting a heavy bottle on the counter. “Vodka.”
Before Theo could snatch it up and pour the antiseptic over the seeping gashes, Selena said, “Can you take over here now, Vonnie? He needs to get back in bed.” She steadied her breathing and continued. “I’m not sure what he was doing out of it in the first place.”
“Looking for the john,” he said flatly. Pain had tightened her features once again and the faint little grunt at the end of her sentence told him she wasn’t feeling any better.
It wasn’t worth arguing any longer. Clearly Vonnie had regained her competence, and Theo saw no reason to waste any more time here. The sooner he left, the sooner Selena would get cleaned up and taken care of.
He wasn’t needed, nor should it be his concern. In a day or two, maybe sooner, he’d be leaving this place.
“Stitches,” he suggested firmly, turning away and realizing that his knees had strengthened considerably during the last thirty minutes. At the same time, however, that shadowy warning hovered at the edge of his vision. Bed might not be a bad idea.
“I’ll take care of it,” Vonnie said, her voice just as firm as Selena’s. “Now back to your bed. The bathroom is on the way. The hall on the right.”
Theo cast one more glance at Selena. Her gaze met his—that determination and defiance sitting there, thicker than a brick wall.
The thing that niggled at him, though, was what the hell was she hiding behind that wall?
***
When Theo opened his eyes again, sunlight blazed through the window. He sat up without difficulty this time, shaking off the remnants of dreams with his copper-haired Sage, some orange-eyed gangas . . . and the curve of a blood-slashed shoulder.
He wasn’t certain which image left him the most unsettled.
A crash in the distance, followed by an annoyed bellow, drew Theo’s attention to the area beyond what he’d come to think of as his own hospital room.
“Goddamn zombies!” came a gruff exclamation. Whomever it was slammed a door and stomped across a nearby floor in what sounded like heavy boots. “Don’t know what the hell I have to do . . .” His voice trailed off into something unintelligible, but clearly annoyed as he clanged and banged and thudded. “Damn things!”
Fascinated, the way he might have been by a mountain lion toying with its prey, Theo slid his feet to the floor, cocking his ear to listen. Then he was off the bed and out of the room, following the sounds and padding on bare feet back to the kitchen to find an elderly man sorting energetically through the contents of a pantry.
Elderly he might be, the man appeared to have excellent hearing—or maybe just a sixth sense for being crept up on—for he turned just as Theo walked in on what he’d thought were silent feet.
“Who the hell are you?” the man asked, turning from the pantry and skewering Theo with sharp gray eyes. He wore olive green workpants and a matching shirt that strained over a rounded tummy, although he wasn’t by any means fat. Short white hair bristled all over his head as if to match his personality, and rolled-up sleeves exposed surprisingly muscular forearms. “You one of Selena’s friends?”
“I’m Theo,” he replied, and realized with a start that this man was probably at least a decade or even two older than he and Lou. There weren’t many people who could claim that.
The man had already dismissed him, turning back to the pantry and muttering in a gruff, nasally tone, “Nobody tells me any damn thing around here. Damn good thing I don’t care.”
Something bounced out of the closet and tumbled to the floor, eliciting another round of cursing from the man. Before Theo could move to offer assistance, Vonnie stalked into the room.
“What are you looking for, Frank?” she asked, standing there with her hands on her hips in that age-old way of feminine annoyance.
“Eh?”
“What are you looking for?” Vonnie repeated in a louder voice.
“A goddamn pair of pliers,” he replied. “Don’t need to shout, dammit. Have to fix the damned fence around the—”
“They’re right here,” Vonnie said, interrupting him as she yanked a drawer open.
Theo didn’t miss the meaningful look she gave Frank—a tight-lipped glare that meant for him to shut up.
He either didn’t notice or didn�
��t care, for he continued his tirade. “Goddamn zombies always have to tramp through my ca—”
The pair of pliers clattered onto the counter. “Frank,” Vonnie said loudly, “did you eat breakfast?”
“I didn’t have no breakfast but my damned coffee, as usual,” he growled, snatching up the tool. “Nobody around here to cook when I got up. Everyone sleeping the damn morning away. Damn day’s half over already.”
Theo had edged farther into the kitchen by now, at once fascinated by the bundle of energy in drab olive and curious about what Vonnie was trying to hide from him. She glanced at him warily, but before she could speak, Theo asked, “How’s Selena?”
“What the hell’s wrong with Selena?” Frank demanded, pausing for the first time. Was the guy deaf or not? Theo couldn’t figure it out.
“She’s fine,” Vonnie replied, looking as if she were walking a tightrope.
“I don’t know why the hell she’s got to mess with those goddamn zombies,” the old man said. But instead of a complaint it sounded more like worried affection. “Leave them be.”
Theo tried not to look interested, certain that the moment he did, Vonnie would put the kibosh on any further information from Frank. And he realized suddenly that he was more than a little interested in what the hell was going on here.
He watched as Frank jammed an old baseball cap on his head and snatched up a rifle that had been leaning in the corner. Pliers in hand, he stalked out of the kitchen with the faintest hitch in his step, but at a pace that would leave most people half his age in the dust. Theo had to squelch the urge to follow him.
“So you got her stitched up?” Theo asked, sliding onto a stool at the kitchen counter as Vonnie busied herself at the sink.
For a moment, a blast from the past settled over him and he felt a long-submerged wave of nostalgia. He was catapulted back to his mom’s sunny lemon-and-lime kitchen.
He and Lou sat at the counter and Mom made them oatmeal or eggs or whatever for breakfast in the morning before school. Dad would come streaking in to grab a cup of coffee on his way out the door to the hospital, where he managed the lab. He’d cuff them each affectionately on the back of the head as he passed by. Their older sister was already at work, so they didn’t have to fight her for the bathroom.
When they got older and visited home from college, Mom made them sit there and talk to her while she cooked dinner, refusing to let them have their laptops or iPhones open. Anyone who dared even think about accessing a keyboard would be served cold liver and onions, she’d threaten. Or lima beans with some awful healthy grain called quinoa—a threat she actually carried out once. And after they turned legal, she even offered beer or wine as an incentive for getting information about what was new in their lives.
“I only find out what’s going on when I check your Facebook page,” she’d complain good-naturedly. “Can’t even call your mother and tell me you got a new job, but you can post it for all and sundry to read?”
The memory of his mother—a PhD in English lit—using such phrases while wielding a wooden spoon coated with spaghetti sauce brought a breathtaking pang of grief to Theo.
Mom and Dad, and their older sister from Dad’s first marriage, had perished during the Change, at least as far as he and Lou knew. Since the catastrophic events had wiped out ninety-eight percent of the human population—as well as actually changing the continental makeup of the earth—there was no reason to think otherwise.
“Are you hungry?”
Reality swooped in over him, jerking Theo back to the year 2060, where he looked as if he were no more than thirty years old, even though he’d been alive for almost eighty.
“I could eat,” Theo said, looking at Vonnie. He suddenly realized how starved he was. Maybe that hollow feeling in his stomach was because he was hungry. Maybe not. “Something more than soup, if that’s all right.”
Vonnie beamed at him. “Eggs and sausage sound good?”
Theo liked the sound of that, and as he watched her mound scrambled eggs onto a plate, he realized she hadn’t responded to his earlier question about Selena. But rather than call her on it, he decided to take a different tact.
The eggs were like ambrosia: light and fluffy, salted just right. And the sausage wasn’t in casings but fried up like ground beef. He didn’t think he’d ever tasted anything so good. Vonnie poured him a cup of hot tea—something Theo hadn’t been a big fan of in the past, but he found that by adding a bit of honey, he almost enjoyed it despite its woodsy aftertaste.
“This is really good. Do you do all the cooking around here?” he asked, figuring that while food might be the way to his heart, admiration of mothering skills was often the way to a woman’s heart. Especially one like Vonnie.
“As much as I can,” she said, bumping her round hip against the counter as she reached for something.
The kitchen, it seemed, couldn’t be a quiet place when she was there. Pots clanged, silverware clashed, things fell on the floor and bounced into the sink—she was the epitome of “haste makes waste” . . . but in a delightful sort of way.
Theo watched her drop a towel twice, then lunge too fast to grab an apple in the bowl across the counter, knocking over the salt on the way. “Oops,” she said, picking up a pinch of salt and tossing it over her shoulder, then continuing with her work.
He was more than amused; he felt so much at home, it hurt. Right in the center of his gut. “How many people do you have to cook for?” he asked, glancing longingly at the bowl of uncracked eggs.
She must have seen his look, for Vonnie snatched up a trio and cracked them into a different bowl, then whirled to get a pitcher of milk. “It depends. There’s me and Selena, of course, and Frank—who you just met; he eats like a horse—and Selena’s son, Sam, and his friends Tim and Tyler, and Andrew, when they’re around. Sometimes there’re family members of the people Selena’s seeing to. They don’t usually eat much, but sometimes. It’s Tim’s dog Pigment that found you, you know.”
So Selena had a son. Did she also have a Mr. Selena? And how did he feel about being married to the Death Lady? If so, why the hell wasn’t he lecturing her about tangling with the gangas?
“Do you grow all your own food, or is there a place to trade nearby? . . . I’m from Envy,” he added, “and we have most everything there.” Except chocolate.
Though Theo had traveled around quite a bit in his work for the Resistance, he’d never been near Yellow Mountain. He wasn’t even certain where it was.
“Frank keeps chickens, cows, and a goat; and he’s got a big garden out there. Sam, Tyler, and Tim help him with it. And Selena said you were from Envy. Mmm, that’s a long way away,” Vonnie said. “How did you get all the way up here?”
“Hell, if I know,” Theo said. “The last I remember, I was about a day and a half from Envy, near the ocean, and the next thing, I wake up here. Where is here?”
“Here,” she said, slapping two scoopfuls of eggs down on his plate, “is about ten miles from the ocean. And there’s a settlement up yonder between Lake Isabella and the shoreline called Yellow Mountain. They’ve got lots of things to trade there. That’s where Jennifer and Tyler and the other kids live. Only five miles away.”
Theo wasn’t certain where Lake Isabella was, or whether it had existed before the Change. It did sound vaguely familiar, though; so when he got back to Envy, he’d try and find it on the cobbled-together version of the Internet he and Lou had put together. They’d used caches from as many computers, mainframes, and servers as they could find over the decades to create a semi-working version of the Web on their own private little network. There were countless holes and 404 page errors, but it was better than nothing.
The satellites that he and Lou—mostly Theo, a point which he never resisted reminding his twin—had managed to hack into after the Change had failed decades ago. What data they’d managed to collect about the state of the earth after all of the cataclysmic events (not pretty) was more than twenty years old and had
certainly altered since then. But there were clearly significant changes: most of California had disappeared, and the ocean’s shore now cut into what had once been Vegas. The entire West Coast line was violently different than the map they’d grown up with.
And the East Coast? Even worse. Europe, Africa, Asia . . . all a mess.
And then there was that new continent that seemed to have erupted or somehow formed in the Pacific Ocean. It was about the size of Texas.
Just then, Selena walked in. Her eyes scanned the room, caught on him and continued to Vonnie as she made her way over to snatch up an orange. “You look like you’re doing all right,” she said, and eyed him as she jammed her thumb into the thick skin and peeled the fruit.
The smell of orange filled the air, citrusy and fresh, as Theo gave her the once-over. Her shiny dark-brown hair was pulled up into a messy sort of bundle at the back of her head, a couple of thick strands straggling down the nape of her neck. Her eyes seemed a bit soft, as if she were tired or worried, but the rest of her face wasn’t drawn or tight with tension. She seemed to be moving all right, considering the wounds he’d seen last night. Whether by accident or design, she was wearing a shirt that covered every part of her torso, so he couldn’t tell what the gashes looked like now. But Theo trusted that Vonnie had done a good job taking care of a woman she clearly had great affection for.
“You too,” he replied and tugged his eyes from the apple-sized breasts hinted at in the vee of the simple linen tunic she wore. His gaze skittered away and over the lean sweep of thighs in jeans that had seen better days—hell, they had to be fifty years old, because no one made Levi’s anymore—and down to the surprise of bare feet.
She had slender, golden feet that matched the rest of her skin—the color of honey—with elegant arches, slender toes, and red toenails.
Red toenails?
Theo looked again. He hadn’t seen a woman with painted toenails for fifty years. He pulled his attention away from the anachronism and found Selena watching him. But she didn’t make any comment about the fact that he’d been staring at her toes. Maybe she thought he was looking at the floor.
