“This is where you live?” Wendy panted, marveling at the three levels of balconies.
Troy hopped off his horse and towed it to a black gate that had to be at least seven feet tall. “This is home,” he said, unlocking the gate with a large skeleton key.
“For now,” Stephanie added, steadying her horse while Paul climbed down.
“And the best part? No anchors.” Curtis shot Paul a playful grin before jumping down into the sand.
Inside the fence, they left the horses untied in a shaded area with cushioned patio furniture and a massive fire pit that could double as a hog spit. Paul noticed Wendy’s eyes light up at the surfboards leaning against some palm trees to the right. Troy locked the gate behind them with a loud clink, prickling Paul’s nerves. Troy grinned at him. “Don’t worry, nothing is getting in here.”
“Yeah, or out.”
“Hey, you’re free to leave anytime you want, pretty boy. Don’t let the door hit ya in the ass.”
Paul turned a pointed glare on Curtis that brought a wide smile to the man’s tanned face.
“Curtis,” Troy grumbled. “Don’t be an asshole.”
Curtis shrugged. “How do we know they’re not going to kill us in our sleep?”
“You just saved our lives,” Wendy laughed. “Why would we kill you?”
Stephanie snorted. “You haven’t heard his singing yet.”
“Come on,” Troy said, leading them up a steep staircase. “Let’s get something to eat.”
Inside the three-level home, walls of glass let in massive amounts of light that warmed the entire place and made Paul nervous at the same time.
“The glass is hurricane proof,” Troy said, reading Paul’s mind. “Those things couldn’t break in even if they got past the fence.”
“Which they can’t,” Stephanie added, going into an open kitchen.
Paul moved to a window looking out across the front yard to see a huge black pickup dwarfing a new Corvette Stingray out in the driveway.
“All work and no play makes Curtis a dull boy.”
Paul turned to Curtis, wanting to smack the cocky grin from his face. Instead, Paul went into the living room and dropped onto a thin couch with straight lines, a sigh pushing past his lips. His adrenaline receding, lethargy seeped into his bones. “How long have you been here?”
“Long enough to know we’re all fucked.”
“Come on, Curtis,” Troy said, keeping his eyes on Paul.
Curtis laughed and there was no disguising the contempt in his voice. “Oh yeah, let’s throw a parade because we found two people! Whoopty fucking doo! Now it’s five against five million.”
“Don’t pay any attention to my younger brother. He gets grumpy when he’s out of weed.” Troy sat in a leather armchair with studded seams and linked his fingers behind his head, a cut-off Chevy t-shirt showing off his bulging biceps. “We’ve been here for a week; came down from Kansas City after we lost power.”
Stephanie crossed the room and passed out some water, grapes and power bars. She was a tall drink of water with oily jeans clinging to her long legs like body paint. “Almost froze to death in the process.”
“Thought we were the last normal people on the entire planet.” Troy took a long drink of water before telling Wendy and Paul about the people they’d lost along the way and the numerous times they’d nearly died themselves. Curtis stripped off his shirt, revealing his tattoos and chiseled abs, and shared the ghastly parts with such detail it made the hairs go up on Paul’s arms. The conversation eventually drifted back to former occupations – Curtis raced stock cars in the NASCAR Xfinity Series (NASCAR’s minor league circuit) with his older brother Troy as his crew chief. Stephanie, she told them, was a personal trainer and a part-time cheerleader for the Kansas City Chiefs. She stopped her tale when Paul slipped upstairs and went out onto the top balcony for some fresh air.
Pinching his eyes against the bright sun, he leaned against the railing and watched the waves explode onto the beach. This house must’ve sold for millions and no one was here to stop them from taking it. It was uncanny but this is who they were now.
Thieves.
Pirates.
Cheats.
Paul had cheated death and cheated Sophia and he blamed the wind for the tears in his eyes. He hung his head and ran a hand through his clean hair, insides twisting. Everyone was dead and the only connection he felt to anyone in the world was a busty stripper he met last week.
“Are you okay?”
He turned to find Wendy standing in the doorway behind him. “Yeah.”
She came closer, undoing her ponytail and letting the wind run through her hair. “Well, that was a close one.”
Paul snorted, glancing at her when she stopped next to him at the railing. “I can’t even die right.”
“Don’t say that.”
Her arm brushed against his as they gazed across the sea and he couldn’t help but wonder what the weather was like under Sophia’s willow. He hoped it was sunny and warm, like this. She deserved that much.
“Who were you talking to back there anyway?”
Paul gave her a frown.
“In the boat’s bedroom, you were staring at something and then you said: Lead who?”
Sophia skittered through his mind. At the time, with the incessant pounding on the bedroom door and the writhing arm in the porthole window, she seemed so real. So alive. “It’s all a blur. Everything happened so fast.”
She studied him through dubious eyes, mulling his answer over in her head. “You saw someone. Who was it?” she whispered, the breeze quickly whisking her words away.
He stared back, for how long he didn’t know. “No one.”
Wendy looked down to the beach, unconvinced. “Do you want to stay here? With these people?”
He shrugged. “Do they want us to stay here?”
“I don’t know but they seem nice.” She twisted a lock of hair around a finger. “And if this place is hurricane proof…” She blew out a breath that ruffled her lips. “Those things will never get inside.”
“If you want to stay, we’ll stay.”
She stared up into his eyes. “I think we should try it out, at least for a while.”
“Okay.”
“We could make a stand from here.”
“Then we will.”
Her ocean blue eyes glittered beneath the sunlight. “I’m sorry I kissed you.”
He leaned against the railing and pushed his guilt down with both hands. Paul could see Sophia’s face again and she wasn’t happy and he had no one to blame but himself and another temporary moment of weakness.
Wendy set a hand on his. “I’m still shaking,” she whispered, blinking a tear down her cheek. “I can’t stop seeing those people on the boat. We were so close to…”
“It’s okay to be scared.”
She nodded weakly. “Still think we’ll be good at this?”
A faint smile crept back into the lines of his mouth. “This is where we make our comeback, and you know everybody loves a good comeback.”
Her laughter was music to his ears.
She grew quiet, searching his face as seagulls swooped down and waves crashed. “We made it, didn’t we, Paul?”
He looked her in the eye. “We made it.”
“So what do we do now?”
When he spoke, conviction filled his words like never before. “We’re going to get it all back and nothing is going to stop us. For every one of ours they take, we’ll take a thousand of theirs. I promise you that.” Paul’s face hardened. When there is nothing left to lose, it’s easy to risk it all.
Wendy gripped his hand tighter. “Thank you,” she whispered, a fond look softening her eyes.
“But first, we should probably take a few days off and learn how to surf.” He shrugged. “In case we have to paddle our way out of here.”
She surprised him with a big hug, her abrupt bubbliness bringing laughter to his lips. They would be okay – as okay a
s one can be in such tumultuous times. There was a learning curve to this new world and they would figure it out as fast as humanely possible. Those damn things would not win.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Startled, they turned to find Stephanie walking out onto the balcony.
“It is,” he replied, dropping Wendy’s hand and turning back to the ocean.
Stephanie stopped on the other side of Paul, the smell of vanilla mixing with the salt in the air. She stared out over the water, wind blowing her hair back like a model shoot. “We can win this war, you know. And that’s what it is…a war.” She turned to face Paul. “We would love it if you and your wife stayed on to help us rebuild.”
“She’s not my wife,” he said too quickly, noticing Wendy take a step back in his peripheral vision.
Stephanie’s dark eyes dropped to Paul’s wedding ring.
He rubbed it with his thumb. “My wife died on the way here.”
“I’m sorry, Paul,” she said softly, placing a hand on his arm.
Much to Paul’s relief, she didn’t follow her condolence up with a loss of her own to level the playing field. Instead, she gazed across the glistening water and shared a comfortable silence with the wind tugging at her hair.
“Rebuild what?” he finally asked.
Stephanie glanced at Wendy. “Whatever we can. For now, we have solar power, warm water, and plenty of food and weapons.” She swept a tongue across her lips, making them shine. “It’s a start, but we’ll never make it on our own,” she said, nodding to the beach house. “Not with just the three of us.”
“We’ll need more. Your brother is right; five will never be enough.”
“And we’ll find more, Paul. Just like we found you.”
He grunted. “Hopefully not exactly like that.”
She flashed him a pretty smile that brightened her eyes. “We patrol the beach every day, searching for survivors and killing stragglers. This place is fairly free of danger, and with that fence you can sleep at night.”
Paul surveyed the expansive fence and gate. It looked solid and he couldn’t help but wonder who used to live here. Obviously, some rich person afraid of someone getting in. “So what? We just wait for more survivors to find us?”
Stephanie’s eyebrows went up. “Would you rather go to them?”
“Hell no,” Wendy answered for him. “We don’t even know where anyone is and this place is safe.”
“And we can stay as long as we want, Wendy,” Stephanie continued. “The houses and shops around here have everything we need. These people spared no expense when it came to vacation time.” She thumbed behind her. “You should see the bar downstairs. It’s ridiculous.”
Wendy put a finger to her lips. “Which way was that again?”
Stephanie laughed. “I bet you could use a drink after this morning.”
“Or seven.”
Paul eyeballed the handgun riding on Stephanie’s hip. “Where’d you get the guns?”
“A cop shop three towns back. Place hadn’t been touched either. Think everyone was called into the field when all of this began and none of them made it back. Unfortunately, most of the guns went out with them.”
Paul nodded, movement on the beach pulling at his attention.
Stephanie followed his gaze to a lone figure stumbling across the sand. “Straggler,” she said, grabbing a pair of large binoculars from a patio table and bringing them to her eyes. “We usually see two or three a day. There used to be more.” She handed the glasses to Paul. “A lot more.”
He peered through them and rotated the dial in the middle, bringing a skinny old man into view. Clad in only a pair of dirty shorts, the man reached out with bony arms as he walked, like he was chasing some invisible ghost. Long skinny legs propelled him through the sand, one uneven step at a time, his lipless mouth opening and closing like he was talking to someone. Paul followed his determined gaze to the right but sand and clumps of seaweed were all he found. Maybe these things weren’t so smart after all. Maybe mankind stood a chance. Paul started swinging back to the old timer when something caught his eye. Jerking the binoculars to the right again, he zoomed in on a grisly mob coming into view around the corner of a turquoise-colored beach house. The dead were moving quickly and heading right for the straggler. Paul twisted the dial in the middle, focusing on the zombie in the lead. Her tattered robe was hanging wide open, flying through the air behind her like a cape, and there was something off about her cadence. She was skinny as a rail yet moving fast as hell across the sand and that’s when it hit him. His heart seized inside his chest. He pulled the glasses from his face to make sure he wasn’t seeing things.
He wasn’t.
“What is it?” Wendy asked, worry coating her tone.
Paul put the binocs back to his face, confirming his sneaking suspicions. The woman wasn’t running with the horde; she was running from them. With over a dozen of those things hot on her heels, her bare feet kicked up sand as she tore across the beach and screamed things he couldn’t hear. He brought her twisted face into focus as she ran closer, breath catching in the back of his throat. She had shoulder length brown hair with silver streaks and a thirty yard lead on the group driving her into the open arms of the old man in shorts. The binoculars slid from Paul’s fingers to the cement floor and broke into pieces.
“What’s wrong?” Stephanie shouted, straining to see what had him so spooked.
His wide eyes turned to find Wendy staring back at him. His hands shook, blood pumping too fast through his veins to think clearly. When he spoke, his words were barely audible over the crashing waves. “It’s Cora,” he said, dashing down the balcony staircase and drawing his Beretta PX4 Storm.
The End
About the Author:
Born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa, Sean Thomas Fisher graduated from The University of Iowa and is the happy husband of the most beautiful woman in the world. He is also the proud father of a sweet little girl who stole his heart and refuses to give it back, which explains his lack of compassion.
Like Sean’s Facebook page for future release dates, end of the world forecasts, and safe-house locations at - Facebook
If you are reading this, you are the resistance...
A Little More Dead Page 26
