by Lahey, Tyler
“I won’t put you on a pedestal, I promise,” Bennett muttered. Adira chuckled and pushed his blond hair back from his face.
He continued, slurring his words, “I just don’t know why you chose me. I’m very happy, that you did, did you know?”
Jaxton fought his own demons, and found himself looking at Adira’s body. For the first time, he noticed it in a tank-top. It was slight, not shapeless, but not aggressively figured. All the same, the power of her sensuality came from her eyes and the way her lips naturally curved, beckoning. He felt himself shifting in his seat, feeling like his self-control was slipping away. To his sudden annoyance, Tessa slipped her arm around him and leaned close. The vodka wafted off her lips. He couldn’t be mad for long; her face was an oblivious grin. He felt himself answering her smile, and then she was kissing him. He recoiled slightly, but not far. She rose and attempted to strut out of the room, beckoning clumsily to him and laughing. He looked at Adira.
She knew how this worked; she had been here before. Adira had almost always been able to see attractive people for what they were and move on. Now, that night, she had thought she had caught Jaxton staring at her more than once. Normally, she was sure, she would have been immune. After all, men had been staring at her for years, always wanting what she wasn’t willing to give. She stared right back at Jaxton’s stormy grey eyes. There was energy there, but Adira wasn’t sure she wanted to explore it. She forced a laugh at Tessa, whose boxy form hung on a door frame. Jaxton rose suddenly and crossed to her, and they disappeared into a bedroom.
“You’ll like it there,” Bennett slurred. His wandering eyes were unable to lock onto her own for more than a few moments. That was how Adira knew he was drunk.
She smiled and held his hands. “I never got a chance to really thank you. We had to move so fast. I don’t know where I would be if you hadn’t asked me to come with you.”
“Of course!” He mumbled triumphantly. “You will stay with me.” He stared at her, content.
She looked away, feeling a wave of sudden emotion. Had Bennett been sober, she probably would have felt ashamed. As it stood, he was drunk enough that she almost felt alone, and felt she could say anything she wanted. “I wouldn’t have ended up with them again, I know that.”
Bennett drew her close, but he didn’t notice the shimmering in her eyes. “Hmmm?”
“They didn’t even try to get me. My mom texted me, asking if I was ok. Asked where I was and where I was going. She said they were going to stay put, till it all blew over.”
Bennett stared at her, his eyes glazing over. “No one’s family made it! Don’t blame them, A-di-ra.” He laid his scruffy blond hair on her lap, sounding out her name again. “A-di-ra.”
Adira knew he wasn’t listening, but she spoke anyway. “They weren’t coming down anyways.”
Bennett grunted sleepily. “Why not? They’re your parents. Should be there on graduation.”
“Well my father wouldn’t be down, maybe mom.”
“So… you have daddy issues…” Bennett whispered, his eyes closed.
“What the fuck did you take?”
“I drank half a bottle of Nyquil.”
“Bennett…”
“I’m fine, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t he have come down?”
“He doesn’t like me.”
“What! Impossible!”
Adira knew she was talking to someone barely present. “I wasn’t supposed to be this pretty. Something like that.”
Bennett belched. “Hmmmnum. I don’t, I don’t know...means.”
Adira felt tears collecting in her eyes. Why was she so sensitive? “In some fucked up way, I mean, he hated how much attention I got. It was never anything weird, but it was like it was my fault for looking like this. He hated the way things just came to me.”
Bennett mumbled, and Adira found herself continuing quietly. “But that’s just how it works. Men, I don’t care who they are, treat you differently when you look good to them. I didn’t ask to look like this.”
She patted Bennett’s hair absent-mindedly, feeling him sleeping in her lap. “It was like, like he was acutely aware how my appearance made life easier for me. And he worked as hard as he could to even the scales. I don’t even know why. So, you might not know it, but I’d have no where to go without you.” She looked down at Bennett. Her tears dropped onto his closed eyes. She signed, suddenly feeling shameful and weak. She laid his head gently on the couch and took a swig of the vodka.
As Tessa undid his clothes, her mind tried to race. It was sluggish, and her movements responded clumsily to her nervous thoughts. She hoped she looked ok. Tessa dragged Jaxton’s chiseled form into a darker part of the bedroom, hoping he wouldn’t notice all the hundred things she hated about how she looked. But here he was! She struggled to keep calm as she kissed him, their clothes falling to the floor. Her efforts felt awkward, even in the haze of liquor. Was she moving her hands too fast? Would he like it if she was more aggressive? His hands rested on the small of her back, and her mind panicked, wishing she had fought a little harder to lose any extra weight there. As he touched her, her mind was rolling with a heady mix of lust and fear. He had always seemed to pay her attention when they spoke at school, and she had always been attracted to his easy-going and intense duality. Tessa had seen Jaxton fall effortlessly into the leadership role, seemingly at home in the crisis. Everything about the way he moved and spoke felt cinematic, almost as if he had watched too many films. As she lay back, hoping she looked ok, she forced herself to clamp down on her tongue to prevent from voicing the angry tirade of insecurities running through her brain. He was here now, and that was enough.
Jaxon lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. If Tessa had been someone he sought to impress, he would have been obsessing over his own performance. But there was too much else raging through his head. The room was silent, but there was an inferno inside him. Jaxton considered that he was sleeping in a stranger’s house. He felt like they were sliding off the deep end. The brink awaited them, and in a few days there would be no going back. Shaking the prophecy of doom and gloom, he looked at Tessa sleeping beside him. She was a sweet girl, he thought keenly. Witty, probably misunderstood, and most likely desperate as hell. But she carried herself so well, even with all that pent up longing. It was only as she had begun to touch him that he realized she had no confidence in herself, or the way her body moved against his own.
Jaxton’s thoughts shifted to a set of glistening dark eyes once more. Jesus, he thought, what was going on? He had seen the way Bennett watched for Adira on the trek so far. There was infatuated concern there, the kind that formed in a powerful rush, sweeping away all hopes of remaining aloof. He was smitten in her, though he probably was still fighting it. A hopeless struggle. Who could resist those dark eyes? He could.
Jaxton would have no part of his friend’s relationships. He rose quietly, taking extra care not to wake the girl who probably thought she was in love already, and stole into the dark living room.
He found Adira sitting, and Bennett lying on her lap. Both their eyes were closed as they sit in the faint yellow light of a single bulb. He attempted to sneak past, but cursed as his foot activated a creaking wooden floorboard. Then Adira was staring at him, with her eyes wide open. Jaxton returned her gaze, unable to look away or say anything. Faintly, he heard a voice in his head telling him that the dark eyed girl would be the end of him. Laughing at his own thoughts, he smiled at her and stole out the front door.
The rain had ceased. In the darkness of the little neighborhood, all was dripping crisp rain-water. None of the houses had illumination of any kind. He heard the door creaking behind him, but fought the urge to look.
“Can’t sleep?” He asked quietly. The dark beautiful girl joined him at his side while everyone else was deep asleep.
He heard her silky voice, almost a whisper. “No. Can you?”
“No. I didn’t want to think about it all day, but when I close my eyes it’s all
I see.”
She looked up at him, a full six inches taller. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re the one with that burden now.”
He met her eyes in the starlight. “I’ll be ok, I think. As long as it gets better from here. If it doesn’t…I’ll never be able to sleep again.”
They stood in silence for a full minute.
“Do you think we’ll make it?”
He continued to survey the houses, looking for any signs of movement, unsure what he was hoping for. His heart was not pounding in his chest, much to his surprise. He spoke calmly, with a husky poise. “I would guess we’re about fifty miles out. Backroads from here on, through little towns more or less like this one. Except the further north we go, the more redneck they’ll get. I don’t know what we’ll find in them. I don’t know how much of their humanity they will lose. It could get dangerous, before we get home.”
He could feel the warmth of her skin, she was standing so close. His body stirred, even though he had just been satisfied moments before in the darkness of a sweaty bed.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she purred.
“What is that? That thing you do with your voice?” Jaxton looked down to meet her eyes.
She looked genuinely abashed, and took a step back. “What do you mean?”
“You have to know what I mean,” he said, smiling cynically. “You mean to tell me that whole…Cleopatra thing you have going on there…that’s effortless?”
She smirked, turning away. “You flatter yourself. If you notice anything about me, that’s on you. Don’t be so convinced I’m trying to attract you, or anyone.”
His face stretched into a look of theatrical bemusement. For a moment, they forgot the bulging white eyes of the corpse in the car.
“I haven’t ever tried to be someone I am not already,” she continued, more seriously.
Jaxton wondered at that. “So tell me then, how does it feel, to know every man who lays eyes on you, wants you?”
She guffawed, her dark eyes glimmering in amusement. “Does that kind of question even matter now?”
“Now what?”
“Now that the world is ending, you sarcastic… prick.”
“Good one.” He crossed his arms, trying to look pleased with himself. It worked. “It matters more than ever. Society disappears. Human interaction will just be a battle, a battle between instinct and whatever remnants of morality we manage to cling to.”
“Hmmm, so you fancy yourself a philosopher then,” she cooed, slanting her eyes.
He said nothing, preferring to wait.
She sighed, looking at the little streaks of lightning that snapped silently across the sky in some cloud a hundred miles distant. “It’s more tiring than you know. Do you think I consider it a blessing?”
“I would,” he said frankly.
“It’s different for guys. You idiots can be powerful because of how you look, how confident you are, how strong you are, how funny you are, or how rich you are. We have to look good to do anything. Even if a girl is all the above and ugly, she’s still got a huge uphill battle.”
“Something you wouldn’t know anything about,” Jaxton mused.
She pursed her curved red lips. “I didn’t always look like this, you know.”
“No?”
“No. I was an ugly duckling. No one paid me any fucking mind in high school till I got a little older. So I know how shitty it can be, how frustrating to watch all these girls strut around you and see the guys flocking to make them happy. They live for that, that relentless validation.”
“Now you’re one of them.”
She sighed deeply, taking a seat on the concrete stoop near the porch. Her voice lost all its playfulness, and she titled her face skyward to gaze at the little specks of white starlight that were boldly poking through the fading cloud cover. “Do you have any idea how annoying it is? I can never take sexuality out of the equation. Every interaction I ever have with another man is charged with this…unwanted tension. I just want to do my thing, and everywhere I go it follows me, relentlessly.”
Jaxton eased down beside her, rubbing his arm muscles to warm them against the chilly night. “So how do you think that’ll change, now that society is dying?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” she berated.
“Don’t be so sure,” he snapped. “You saw that video too. Those fucking things we haven’t spoke of once. They’re north of us. Don’t be so sure the army can stop them.”
“They’re fucking people, Jax, stop saying otherwise.”
“Those…were not people. They were animals. They were more than just… sick.” He listened to the distant rumble of thunder rolling through the night-air. “This shit is going to balance the scales. Nature’s nuclear winter.”
Adira didn’t say anything, and wished he would stop talking. She crossed her arms and sat frostily.
Yet he continued. “It’ll get more difficult for you. Men’s desires will run unchecked, now that the rules are fading away. There will be no pull of decency to stop them from pursuing you at every opportunity.”
“Oh. Is that so, Jax? Who the fuck made you the muse?”
Jaxton knew he probably wouldn’t have continued were it not for the slow burning buzz that was nursing inside him. “Because I’ve noticed it myself, Adira.” He turned to face her, making sure to put some distance between them, lest he appear sinister in any way. “At first, you were just an attractive girl. Noted, filed, and moved on. But there’s fear in the air. There’s tension. Nerves are at the breaking point. Don’t people feel more animalistic to you? Their base emotions are fighting to reign supreme. It’s something in the air, something in the fear that every single one of us nurses deep inside. Who wouldn’t be bolder in such a climate? The fragile niceties of society have crumbled.”
Adira laughed, feeling feisty. “You can’t scare me, buddy.”
He rolled his eyes, exasperated. “I’m not trying to scare you. Forget it. This is starting to make me sound insane, and more than a bit creepy.”
The silence between them lingered uncomfortably for a few seconds.
“No no. I think I know what you mean; what did you mean?” She spoke more softly, her eyes running over his jawline.
He stared right at her, feeling his heartbeat quickening. “Do you mean to tell me that you haven’t been staring at me today? Where did that come from?”
She stuttered, “I mean I-“
“You’ve been staring at me, and I’ve been staring at you. And there doesn’t seem to be any real point in fighting the urge I have to touch you right now.”
Jaxton didn’t move though, and he frowned at Adira, trying to judge her reaction as his own heart pounded.
She wished he would have reached out his callused hand, knowing it didn’t make any sense but she was scared of the future and nothing seemed to matter anymore. But he didn’t. He looked back out over the houses and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“You see, that would have never even come up if this infection hadn’t started. You’re with Bennett, and both of us aren’t the kind to go behind a friend’s back.”
Adira struggled with a wave of disappointment so powerful she almost spun on her heel. But she knew the man beside her was right.
There was a crack like distant thunder, but snappier and shorter. A series of them pounded in quick succession and the sky was alight with fire off to the south. The booms continued as the clouds flickered with flashes of light and fire. The muffled explosions shook the wooden frame of the house slightly. Adira shivered, watching the inferno licking the bottom of the clouds. She felt an arm around her shoulders, as a friend would stand. She leaned into Jaxton’s well-built chest and leaned her head on his shoulder, totally confused. His warmth felt good, and safe. She felt herself abandon thoughts of past and future. Only the now mattered in such times. The door creaked behind them.
“What the hell is that?” Liam scratched his eyes. No one spoke, but the crescendo of firepower
continued to hammer unseen targets. Liam scratched the beard that was slowly growing bushier on his face and wrapped his arm around Jaxton and Adira. The three of them stood together, watching the world burn.
Chapter Nine
2 days after outbreak. Somewhere north of Washington, D.C
“Got some in here sir.” Adira turned in her sleep. What the hell was that? She opened her eyes.
There were three figures standing over the couch. Adira screamed. Their flashlights came on, and Adira was suddenly at gunpoint. Behind the black gun-barrels were three camouflaged forms, their faces covered by gas masks and goggles.
“On your feet! Everyone up!”
Jaxton rose from the opposite couch, shielding his eyes from the light. “What the hell is going on?”
One of the masked men lowered his weapon. “You’re being evacuated. Let’s move. Everyone out! Grab your shit and get outside!”
Adira fumbled with her backpack and dressed quickly, sliding back into her damp clothes. She shivered against the chill.
Stumbling, the group was prodded outside, to the street. A series of trucks were waiting for them, already half filled with bleary eyed and frustrated others. Adira felt Bennett draw closer to her, as he always did, like her guardian. There were teams of soldiers moving all around them, their little cones of white light sweeping houses and yards.
A tall, slender female officer urged them forward. “Names?” Her mouth was tight, and small.
“Uhh, Adira Bitar.” Before she could speak again, she was pushed forward from behind.
“Next,” she heard the female sergeant bleat. Bennet stepped forward, his eyes swimming. As he opened his mouth, the soldier’s radio crackled. “Latofsky, get them moving. I’m being advised the line is changing.”
