by Joss Ware
One hand moved down to cover one of her breasts as his fingers slid to hold her jaw steady, lifting it, holding her there. The tree lined up more solidly behind her and Remy shifted so that her shoulder blades propped against it, and her hips slid forward to match up to his. He was tall, but so was she, and they lined up nicely. She fit her hands to his chest, at last touching the torso she’d been watching for weeks.
Ian broke the kiss and, watching her with those angry eyes, positioned her against the bark as both hands rose beneath her shirt to cup her breasts, finding her tight nipples, and then lifting her shirt so that he could see as he lifted and caressed them. She watched his shadowy hands on her lighter flesh, her breath growing unsteady and desire billowing through her belly and beyond.
He yanked at her jeans so hard she jolted, opening them so that the breath of night air cooled the skin of her lower belly. Without delay, he shoved them down, and her panties, and found the place between her legs. To her surprise and a little shame, she was swollen and wet, and she had to bite her lip to keep silent when he touched her.
Ian held her in place as he unbuckled his own trousers with the same sort of efficiency and lack of emotion. But his eyes had darkened and hooded, and his breath shifted into something more ragged.
Remy dragged his face down for another kiss as he lifted her and she wrapped her legs around him. When he slid inside, she felt him tense and shudder. He paused, resting his forehead against the bark next to her temple, breathing. Then, he straightened and began to move, his eyes closed, his face stony.
She watched him until the pleasure became too great; saw the last bit of daylight illuminating the strong blade of his nose and the sharp, high cheekbones and forehead—and felt her body warming and swelling around him.
His hands shifted to push her more tightly against the tree, ignoring the sharp edges of bark on her bare skin. Remy let her head tilt back and closed her eyes as her world tightened and tightened; and then when he moved faster and harder, she opened her legs, shifting and lifting her hips, meeting him with the same urgent efficiency until she got what she needed.
A soft little oh was all she allowed herself as hot liquid shuttled through her and then exploded. She sagged in his arms, little crunchy pieces of bark rubbing and falling against her as he made one last thrust, then yanked away.
He was leaning against her, breathing heavily; his hands trembling at her hips as he finished with a low groan.
Remy realized what he’d done, and she was flushed with shame and gratitude. The last damn thing she needed was to get pregnant—especially by Ian Marck. What the hell was I thinking?
He released her with more gentleness than he’d shown thus far, steadying her until she had her balance. Her knees were weak and she just wanted to stand there and bask . . . but that wasn’t going to happen.
“Why,” she breathed as he yanked up his pants, “do you always look so angry when you’re kissing me?”
Ian glanced at her, his mouth tight and eyes hot and dark. He gave a sharp shrug. “There’s someone else I’d rather be kissing,” he said. “If I had the choice.”
Remy caught her breath. “Well, that’s probably the first time you’ve told me the truth,” she managed to say. Bastard.
He didn’t smile as his belt clinked back into place. “Probably.”
“Lacey?” she couldn’t help but ask.
“Christ. Fuck, no.”
He stepped away, reaching into his pocket. Then he handed her back the pistol. “Don’t think about trying to slip off tonight. You’ll be sleeping next to me. Tonight and for the foreseeable future.”
She glared at him. As if you could keep me here.
He looked at her. “You don’t think I’m about to let Remington Truth’s granddaughter just walk away, do you?”
“I have something I’d like to talk to you about,” Theo said to Selena.
It had been more than two weeks since Sam died, and he’d seen much less of Selena than he liked. A lot less.
For both of them living in the same house, it was amazing how she never seemed to be at the same meals he was at, and how their paths didn’t cross very often. He’d begun to suspect, with a deep, unpleasant knowledge, that she was purposely avoiding him. He understood that she needed time to work through her loss, but there was a large part of him that wondered why he wasn’t a part of it. Why she didn’t share it with him.
Perhaps because Sam had been hers and not his. Maybe she didn’t think he grieved for the boy. But he did.
Not that he and Selena each weren’t busy with other things. The day after Sam died, three patients arrived for Selena. Theo had been angry about that, angry at the world or the universe or whoever for disrupting Selena’s grief. But she had accepted it with grace and peace and attended to the dying with the same empathy he’d seen before.
Perhaps that, too, was a blessing—the distraction and a return to normalcy.
And Theo had been busy too. He and Lou had been working night and day on the Blizek security (it was a joke on him that he thought he’d made it through the first layer so quickly and easily so many weeks ago), as well as the number strings that seemed, as Lou theorized, to indicate geographic coordinates. But they had to figure out how to recalculate them, now that the earth’s axis had shifted. And Theo had been thinking about what he could do with the pinball machines and game consoles, and their blinking, flashing lights.
Aside from that, now that Sam was gone, Frank had pressed the twins into helping him in a variety of other tasks—which they did willingly, even though Lou grumbled about the speed and strength of the ninety-three-year-old man.
“Forget about you. I think he’s the damned superhero,” Lou said once, after three hours of lugging stones to rebuild part of the wall when Frank hadn’t taken more than a five-minute break.
But now, Theo had managed to catch Selena and suggest a walk after dinner. The sun was a brilliant orange ball sinking toward the horizon, bringing the night. Oddly enough, he didn’t feel that same sort of apprehension he had in the past, worrying that she would go out there.
She hadn’t, since Sam was attacked. He’d been watching.
Maybe she’d given it up, realized that her life here, serving the dying, was more important than out there nearly getting herself killed. Maybe Sam’s death had opened her eyes to the dangers, and to the reality of the murderous zombies.
Or maybe she just wasn’t ready to face them again.
Selena looked at him. “What is it?”
His breath caught for a moment, appreciating the serenity in her smooth face, the way the lowering sun cast an even deeper golden glow over her skin and dark hair. Despite the circles under her eyes, and the deeper grooves of grief radiating from her eyes and mouth, she was beautiful. He wanted to kiss her; he’d missed her company, her warmth, her quirky sense of humor that came up at the oddest times . . . but he held back.
He’d meant to talk to her about Lou and the fact that they were twins, but it didn’t seem like the right time after all. Maybe it was the grief lingering in her face—it had only been two weeks. Maybe he wasn’t ready to take the chance that she, too, might think he was unnatural. Maybe he worried that she held Lou responsible for what had happened to Sam and that she’d never accept that they were twins.
“I’ve missed spending time with you,” he said, reaching for her hand. Maybe instead, I ought to tell her how I feel.
She smiled, and it seemed a little forlorn. She squeezed his fingers. “I have a lot to work through right now.”
He looked down at her, reached to brush that heavy, dark hair from her shoulder. “I understand. I just want you to know that I miss being with you. And I miss this.” He couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward, his hand gently curving under her jaw, and fit his lips onto hers.
His eyes closed at the pleasure, the familiar comfort and desire that came with that mere brush of mouth to mouth. He shifted, felt her mouth move beneath his, her lips part—a bit a
nd he slipped the tip of his tongue along that little opening. Soft, warm, slick . . . Desire and need began to open up inside him.
And then she turned away, her hand moving to settle on his chest. “I . . . ah, Theo, I don’t think I can do this. Right now.”
A black hole suddenly yawned in front of his mind—empty and mysterious. His heart thudding, the suspicion he’d tamped back now blossoming into something unpleasant, Theo tried to catch her downturned gaze. “Too soon?”
“Yes.” She drew in a deep breath and looked at him. “I have a lot of things to work through. I’m confused and angry—so angry—and . . . oh, God, I want it to be okay, but every time I think of it, all I can see is you, that night. Flying into them, smashing those zombies, like some sort of berserker warrior. I can’t get rid of the images, the carnage, the violence. I dream about them. They give me nightmares.”
Stunned, Theo stepped back. What had been a little prickling of worry became a full-fledged roar of danger. His hands suddenly felt cold. “Selena. I wasn’t going to stand back and let them tear you—I thought it was you in there at first—or anyone apart. There was no way I wasn’t going to stop them. If I had the chance, I’d do it again. I’ve got to tell you, I respect your trying to help them, but I’m not going to let them take anyone’s life if I can help it. Especially yours.”
A tear overflowed from her eye and made a gleaming rivulet down her cheek. “I know it, Theo. I understand it. The problem is me. I see you doing that; I see you destroying them, and I’m so filled with hatred and fury—that I want to do it. I want to kill them. I want to destroy them all, those damned monsters, for what they’ve taken from me.” Her voice held a tone that was somewhere between madness and despair. “I want to do that. I want to fucking annihilate them, as violently and horribly as I can. All of them. But . . . I can’t. And I can’t go out there and try to save them either. The very thought makes me ill. I can’t do anything.”
By now, the tears streamed from her eyes and her once-peaceful face had turned angry and hard. There was an ugliness he’d never seen in her features. “And so, I think it’s best if I have some time to try and figure this out. Alone.”
Theo got the message. Loud and clear. He managed to subdue the bark of bitter laughter at the realization that this was the second time he’d fallen hard for a woman, and the second time he’d been shoved aside for some inexplicable reason that had nothing to do with him.
His mouth began to move before he realized what he was saying, but his brain caught up quickly. “That’s good, because that was what I wanted to talk to you about. Lou and I are going to be leaving. Probably tomorrow. We’ve got some things to check on. I’m not sure when we’ll be back. I just wanted to tell you.”
She met his eyes now, and he realized he was frightened by the nothing that was there. “Thank you for letting me know.” She began to turn away, to head back to the house, but she paused. “You’ll come back?”
He resisted the urge to snort in derision. The pain was just beginning to overtake the numbness. “Yes, I’m sure we’ll stop back sometime. I’m not sure when, though.” He did his best to keep his voice neutral and casual.
She stilled, as if surprised, then nodded. “Be safe, Theo.”
Chapter 15
“Well, Lou, you’ve got your wish,” Theo said as he stomped into the arcade. “We’re going to hunt down some bounty hunters.”
To his surprise, there was no answer. “Lou?” he said, walking across the space that they’d turned into their own. The computers were on, as usual, but the screensavers were running. Lou had them set to come on after twenty minutes, so obviously he’d been away for a while.
Where the hell could he be? It was after nine, and old guys like Lou needed their beauty sleep. Or at least, they should be working on their hacking project if they weren’t sleeping. Beyond pissed-off and well into furious, Theo sat down at the nearest computer and woke up the screen to see what Lou had been working on.
Nothing. The idiot had been messing around with Brad Blizek’s new video treasure-hunt video game that looked as if he were going to combine it with geocaching. Not a bad idea, at least back in 2010.
Annoyed, upset, distracted, he began to look through some of the files of screencaps and mock-ups of the game. One of them popped up and he looked a little closer at one of the screenshots of the prototype and froze. Sonofabitch.
It was right here.
The symbol for the Cult of Atlantis—with its swastika, labyrinth, and the scrolling waves—was there, in the screenshot for the game. Holy fucking shit.
Theo’s fingers lost their nimbleness as he tried to start clicking through to other details of the game. Maybe everything they needed to know was here, right here in this game called Wobble.
Holy shit. That’s what he said. “The earth’s going to wobble.”
It was all here. Right here.
After a few minutes, on a hunch, he input one of the strings of numbers that they’d theorized were decimal coordinates and—bingo! It came up as one of the listings for the “real world” geocache list, embedded in the game.
Excited now, Theo delved deeper into all of the layers of files, notes, and mock-ups about the game. There were only fifteen “real world” geocache sites listed in Wobble, but twenty numbers listed in the information Lou and Theo had from the Strangers.
In the real world, back in 2010, where geocaching could be considered anything from family fun to an extreme sport, geographic coordinates were posted on websites for a sort of public treasure hunt in which the hunters used GPS to find the general location of a geocache, within a few square feet. When found, the caches—which were weatherproof, animal-proof boxes like ammo containers—could contain anything from a few bucks to small toys or trinkets, to merely a logbook. But in this game, the geocache locations were much more than that.
They were centers of power, well beneath the ground; and the point of the game was to neutralize each one, like stopping a bomb from detonating before a chain reaction set them off and made the world . . . wobble.
Holy wobbling earth axes. As Theo looked at the notes about the game, examining the files, his emotions ranged from fascination to chills to debilitating nausea when he realized what it meant. Were these geocaches somehow the locations through which the Cult of Atlantis had made the earth erupt, causing the Change?
He envisioned synchronized subterranean explosions of horrific magnitude that caused tectonic plates to shift and subduct, to implode or otherwise erupt . . . thus beginning the chain reaction that caused all of the cataclysmic earthquakes, tsunamis, fires . . . and everything else that combined to destroy the earth.
So this was how they did it.
And Brad Blizek had created a video game that was really a synthetic version of their plans.
Theo was still staring at the computer, trying to assimilate the truth of what had been done to his world and his race fifty years ago, when Lou arrived.
“Oh. You’re here,” he said, sounding surprised. “I thought you’d be gone longer. Maybe even overnight.” He gave a nervous little chuckle. “I saw you and Selena go outside after dinner.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s not working out too well,” Theo said from between stiff lips. “Lou, you gotta take a look at this. It’s all here—how they did it. And, by the way, we’re leaving tomorrow.”
Theo and Lou started in Yellow Mountain, casually asking about the snoot, trying to get enough information to decide which direction to go after them.
While they were there, Theo received some unsettling news.
“Wayne and Buddy are gone,” Patrick Dilecki, the guy who’d organized the search party on the night of Vonnie’s storytelling, told him. “Disappeared about three days ago.”
“Zombie attack?” asked Lou, but Theo was shaking his head. He’d seen them from his perch in the tree during the snoot visit. They’d been the ones who had the old computer monitor and the vehicle engine that had been confiscated and destroye
d by Seattle and his men.
“Nope. No bodies, no evidence of any animal attack either. Just disappeared. Wayne’s momma is pretty upset. And Buddy’s wife—she’s going to have a baby in a few months.” Patrick shook his head, his lips flattening. “They got themselves into something they shouldn’t have been messing with. Dangerous stuff.”
“It’s not a coincidence that the snoot visited two weeks ago and now they’re gone, is it?” Theo asked Patrick.
The man’s face shuttered and he looked away, squinting out over the horizon. “Couldn’t say.”
But he didn’t need to.
“So they took them,” Lou said to Theo once they left Yellow Mountain. “They came back and took them. The bounty hunters.”
“That’s my best guess. At least we know Buddy and Wayne were here at least three days ago. Might make the trail easier to follow, if we can find it.”
“You gonna tell me what happened with Selena?” Lou asked as they hiked through the woods to where he’d left that Humvee in the ditch.
“You gonna tell me where you were last night?”
Neither of them replied.
Selena stared out the window, an ugly, aching gnawing working at her belly.
Night had come, as it continued to do despite her impotent wish to keep it at bay. Because with night came questions and guilt and confusion.
And, still, that deep, burning hate.
She’d stopped wearing her crystal, keeping it locked in its wooden box so that she wouldn’t have to feel it grow warm, beckoning to the zombies. They sensed it; she knew that. They came, they gathered, they cried—all beyond the safe walls.
She saw their orange eyes glowing in the distance. She heard their moans.
She hated them. And yet she was moved by their piteous cries, which only she understood.
Still, she did nothing.
