Come Whatever Storms

by J. M. Snyder

  Ronnie simply grinned. “Too late for that.”

  Now, with the bandage off and the air cool against his skin, Court felt the first niggles of irritation deep within the wound. He tried to ignore them, and kept his hands behind him so he wouldn’t be tempted to scratch. He watched Adam, and tried to think of something to take his mind off the damn itch.

  But when he opened his mouth to speak, he really didn’t have anything to say. So his words surprised him as much as they did Adam. “Hey, do you still have any of those condoms left?”

  “What?” Adam squawked. A dull blush crept into his cheeks. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Ronnie said he gave them to you.” Court bit the inside of his lip to keep from grinning at Adam’s obvious discomfort. “Are there any left?”

  A bead of sweat appeared on Adam’s brow, and his glasses seemed to fog up. “It’s none of your business,” he snipped.

  Court shrugged. “Jeez, I just wanted to know if I could borrow one or two…”

  “Borrow?” Adam’s voice actually squeaked—for such a large man, he was easily embarrassed. “If I gave you any, I wouldn’t want them back.”

  “I mean any I could have,” Court corrected. Why did some people have to be so damn literal? “Ronnie said he’d try to find some but if he gets too involved with those ATV things, he’ll probably forget.”

  Adam’s eyes widened until Court thought they might fall out of his head. His glasses only magnified them, making them look like saucers. “But you said you two weren’t…you know…”

  “Well, we weren’t when you asked, but we are now.” Court was pleased at how nonchalant he sounded about the whole thing. Nothing in his voice or posture gave any indication that his heart quickened at the thought of Ronnie. It pounded in his temples, in his ears, in his chest, even in his groin, and if his knee hadn’t been up, Adam would’ve seen how aroused he was just mentioning his friend’s name. His lover’s name, now, even if they hadn’t officially done anything more than kiss. Give them time, though. Court knew they’d get there soon enough.

  Time and a box of condoms, he thought. The next time they came upon the looted husk of a store, Court would make a bee-line for the prophylactic section. The pharmacy might be picked over, all the good drugs gone, but he couldn’t imagine anyone would’ve taken the condoms or the lube.

  And really, wasn’t lube all they really needed? Court knew Ronnie, better than he knew himself. He knew the only person Ronnie had ever had sex with was Melissa, and he knew even that dwindled in the last year or so before she passed, because Ronnie had told him intercourse had grown too painful for her. There were no one-night-stands, no other lovers in Ronnie’s past, no one he’d slept with who might have given him some disease. No drugs, either. Aside from an occasional beer or glass of wine with dinner, Ronnie didn’t give into excess of any kind.

  So the condoms weren’t really all that important. A good lubricant, though—that would be key. If they couldn’t find an unopened bottle of K-Y Jelly, maybe some hand lotion might work. Court had always liked the unscented one Jeanie kept in the bathroom when he had to jerk one out. Once he’d made the mistake of using her gardenia lotion, which he’d given her for her birthday, and whenever he smelled it on her hands after that, he got a boner that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with masturbating thinking of Ronnie.

  Yes, he could admit it now, even if he had never let himself realize it before. Every time he had jerked off in the shower, he’d thought of his friend. Hell, sometimes Ronnie had been in his head when he made love to his wife. Had Ronnie ever thought of him in the same way, or was the sudden deepening of their friendship the result of having their lives upended and no one else to rely on for help?

  Adam took off his glasses and cleaned them using the hem of his shirt. Without looking at Court, he admitted, “There are only a couple of the condoms left. Bree has them, though, not me. I can check with her and see if she’ll give you one—”

  “It’s cool.” The more Court thought about it, the less he thought they really needed rubbers. “But you don’t happen to have any lube, do you?”

  The blush burned in Adam’s cheeks. “What? No.”

  “Or hand lotion? Maybe Bree—”

  “No,” Adam said again, shaking his head this time. His face lit up to the roots of his hair. “God, can we change the subject? I mean, I’m happy for you and all, but I just don’t want to talk about…you know, this.”

  “Sex?” Court snickered as even Adam’s ears turned red. “What’s wrong about sex?”

  “Nothing…” Adam choked on the word.

  Court would’ve ribbed his friend a little longer, but before he could open his mouth, a low droning sound filled the air. It was so strange and yet familiar at the same time—something he’d heard before, something he used to be used to, that seemed so out of place here and now. Leaning forward, he placed a hand on Adam’s arm and whispered, “Do you hear that?”

  Slowly Adam put his glasses back on, the color draining from his face. “It sounds like a motor of some kind,” he whispered back.

  “The ATVs,” Court said, excited. “Ronnie got them working!”

  Adam wasn’t so quick to rejoice. “Or someone else coming this way.”

  “Like who?” Court scoffed.

  “Another prisoner, maybe,” Adam said. “This one on a bike. Probably with a gun.”

  “We have a gun, too.” Court pushed himself to his feet. His bad leg threatened to buckle, but it held his weight. Glancing around the campsite, he asked, “Where’d we put it?”

  Adam snorted. “Like you can shoot it.”

  “If we don’t have it out, Ronnie will get mad.” Then Court remembered he had tossed it behind him into the tent, and he leaned down into the open flap to get it. The sounds of motors grew louder with each passing second; they revved and voomed, choppy like a ragged cough. Court found the gun and stood, debating on whether to tuck it into the waistband of his jeans like Bree did or just hold it and hope he looked intimidating. He didn’t feel intimidating, that was for sure, but he did feel quite pleased to be able to stand for once without help.

  Then the stillness of the camp was shattered as the motors roared down from the interstate above them. Adam stood beside Court and together they watched as an ATV flew out from between the trees to crash through the undergrowth that covered the hill up to the road. A second later, another ATV appeared, just as reckless as the first, bumping and jerking as it followed pell-mell down towards them.

  The ATVs were light-weight vehicles with brightly colored chassis—the one in front, which Ronnie drove, was a neon orange, and Bree’s was lime green. They were low-bodied bikes with wide seats and flared handlebars, and four large tires. It was easy to see how well the ATVs would handle any terrain, asphalt or dirt. They came barreling down the hill at breakneck speed, and threw leaves and stones in their wake. Ronnie circled around the fire while Bree pulled to a stop at the edge of their site. He continued around behind both tents—first the one Adam shared with Bree, then the one he shared with Court—and cut the engine as he coasted up behind Bree’s bike. His front headlight tapped one of her rear side panels, bumping her slightly.

  They were both grinning from ear to ear, and Bree jumped as if goosed. “Woo!” she cried with a laugh. “God, I’d forgotten how fun these things are!”

  Court beamed, pleased with Ronnie for getting the bikes working, but Adam stared at them in shock. His mouth opened and shut as if he were trying to catch his breath. Court clapped him on the back. “Looks like our rides are here.”

  Finally Adam found his voice. “No helmets? You said we’d drive slow! What the hell was that? You could’ve both been killed!”

  “Oh, please,” Bree said. “You don’t even need a license to drive one of these. It’s just like riding a bike.”

  “A motorbike!” Adam cried. “They aren’t street legal!”

  Ronnie dismounted. “Who cares now?�
� he asked. Then he saw Court, and grinned. “I see you’re on your feet. That’s good. Does your leg hurt?”

  With a shrug, Court answered, “It’s okay. So are we going to ride out of here tonight, or what?”

  “I am not getting on one of those things,” Adam announced.

  Ignoring him, Ronnie squinted at the sky. “It’s too late to leave now. I want a full day ahead of us.”

  Adam said again, “I am not—”

  “Then walk,” Ronnie snapped.

  Bree came around the fire to hug Adam. “Don’t worry, hon. I won’t let him leave you behind.”

  If they were leaving in the morning, they had a lot of work to do to get ready to go. Ronnie’s trips to the neighborhood across the interstate had bulked up their food supply, but they wouldn’t be able to take everything with them when they went. The shopping cart they had used earlier was gone—the others took it with them when they left, almost a week ago now, and there would have been no way to bring it along, anyway, if they were going to ride the ATVs.

  The orange ATV had a pair of compartments above the rear wheels, almost like built-in saddlebags. They wouldn’t hold many cans or boxes, but Bree suggested putting clothes and bedding there and using the backpacks for food. “You can really tuck things in,” she said through gritted teeth, forcing her extra clothing down into the bottom of the first compartment. Court watched in awe as she made everything they weren’t using fit—everything they could pack away early without needing it before the morning.

  There were no such compartments on the green ATV, but there was a small steel tailgate on the back that could hold a few items when in use. Thinking ahead, Ronnie had taken a large cooler that he’d found with the ATVs; it sat on the tailgate nicely, and could be tied down with the bungee cables Ronnie had snagged, too. Bree set about packing the cooler with as much food as she could squeeze into it, and Court watched, amazed, as she managed to fit more and more into it.

  “You’re really good at that,” he said, handing her things from their food supply—a half-empty bag of rice, a box of cereal, packets of instant oatmeal.

  She opened the cereal box and tossed it aside, keeping only the bag of Cheerios inside. As she found space for it in the cooler, she admitted, “You learn to pack right when you spend most of your life moving around all the time.”

  Court remembered they had picked Bree up just outside of Petersburg, not far from the back gate of Fort Lee. Or, rather, what used to be Fort Lee, before the virus. “Military?”

  She nodded and took the bag of potato chips he handed her. Opening it, she fished out a chip and popped it into her mouth, then let the air out of the bag and rolled down the top so it would be easier to fit into the cooler. “My dad was in the Army. Would you believe I was born in Japan?”

  “I never would’ve guessed,” Court said with a laugh.

  “That’s the only cool place I’ve been,” she said, “and I don’t even remember it. We moved back to the States when I was like five or six, lived out in Oklahoma for a while, then New Jersey, then here. He retired out of the service my senior year of high school. Just as they were finally settling down, I was off again.”

  “College?” Court asked.

  Bree started stacking cans into the bottom of the cooler; he handed them to her as they talked. “First it was New York because I thought I wanted to be an actress. But that was too expensive, so I went to ODU for a semester. Didn’t like it, transferred to northern Virginia, didn’t like that, transferred to a private school out in the mountains—”

  “Didn’t like that,” Court joked.

  She laughed. “It would’ve been great if I wanted to major in horseback riding.”

  “What did you major in?” Court asked.

  She shrugged. “This and that. I was undecided up until the last possible minute. Then I picked English because I figured at least it was a degree, you know? And before you ask, no, I didn’t want to teach. By that point, I just wanted to graduate.”

  Court watched her rearrange the items in the cooler to get a better fit. “What do you do with an English degree besides teach?”

  “Office management,” she told him. “Admin assistant. Secretary or receptionist, that sort of thing.”

  “Fun,” he muttered.

  She gave him a long-suffering look. “Tell me about it. The best thing about this whole situation to me? I mean, big picture, looking back on it, you know?” He nodded in understanding, and she said, “No more time clock. No more answering phones, or replying to emails, or taking minutes at board meetings. None of that shit that means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. All that tedious, boring, busy work just to get paid—gone. Hallelujah.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Court said.

  Bree was kneeling on the ground behind the ATV; Court sat on the bike’s seat. Now she leaned back and stretched her shoulders and gave him a quizzical look. “What’d you do before the shit hit the fan?”

  “Ronnie and I worked for Dominion…” he started, but when he saw her sly grin, he asked, “What?”

  Bree laughed softly. “Why am I not surprised you both worked at the same place? Did you both go to the same college, too? Lived next door to each other? Were your wives best friends?”

  Court ducked his head, but he couldn’t deny it, any of it—she was right.

  “God, am I good or what?” She clapped her hands in delight. “That’s too cute. I bet she even knew you liked him, did she? Your wife?”

  “She knew,” Court said, his voice low, remembering the last thing Jeanie had said to him. She knew, all right. And she loved him anyway.

  For that, he’d always love her.

  Bree touched Court’s knee. He looked up and was surprised when his vision blurred with tears. Quickly, he laughed and blinked them away. “I miss her,” he admitted. “I know she was in a lot of pain at the end, and I know she would’ve wanted me to go on—but I…sometimes I feel like none of this is real. It’s a nightmare camping trip, or maybe some sort of vacation from hell, and sooner or later we’ll go home again, and Jeanie will be there with her hand on her hip and some smart-ass remark about how we took so long getting back.”

  “Jeanie?” Bree asked.

  “Jeanine,” Court clarified. “You would’ve liked her. She was a straight-up, no-nonsense, take charge kind of woman. You remind me a lot of her.”

  Her hand squeezed his knee in comfort. “What about Ronnie’s wife? What was her name?”

  “Melissa.” It was harder to recall what she had looked like right before she had died—whenever Court thought of her, the image that came to mind was invariably the heavily freckled, petite redhead he first met in college. The years she struggled in her fight against cancer had left her a mere shadow of the woman he’d first met, and secretly he was glad those memories weren’t the ones he had saved.

  Bree took his hand in hers. “Did she die of the virus, too?”

  Court shook his head. “Cancer, two years ago. She was already gone when all this started.”

  “And Ronnie’s been waiting for you since then?”

  Court glanced up at her sharply. From the smile on her face, it was obvious she already knew they were together—she must have been watching them at the creek long before she had bothered to do her little knock, knock routine. “I wouldn’t say that,” he hedged.

  With a laugh, Bree said, “Well, that’s a far cry from your I’m not gay protest a while back. I saw you two in the water. You’re cute together.”

  Court didn’t know what to say to that, but his lips were beginning to hurt from the grin spreading across his face.

  “Oh! Before I forget…” Bree sat up on her knees and reached into her back pocket. Then she slapped his knee, and when she removed her hand, she left a condom wrapper behind. “Adam said you were asking about them. I don’t have many left—”

  “God,” Court muttered, embarrassed. He held the condom out to her. “No, take it back, we’re not—”<
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  “Not yet,” Bree pointed out as she closed his fingers around the wrapper. “But you’ll get there sooner or later, so hold onto it. That’s the only one I can spare.”

  Court laughed. “That was a full box!”

  Bree smirked. “Yeah, well, the nights are getting colder, and sharing a sleeping bag is the best way to keep warm. Though I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that.”

  Chapter 11

  By morning, they were ready to go.

  They had so few supplies. Court hadn’t realized just how little they had until he saw it all neatly packed and folded and tucked away. The saddlebag compartments of the green ATV were full, as was the cooler strapped to the back of the other bike. The tent poles were tied down alongside the ATV seats—they would make riding a little difficult, but not impossible. Bree had tied brightly-colored handkerchiefs on the ends of the poles so she and Ronnie would avoid jousting each other while driving. There were four backpacks, mostly full of bottled water, which made shouldering them a pain, but Ronnie said they could always find food if they needed it; clean, fresh, drinkable water was more dicey.

  The first time Court pulled on his pack, he almost toppled over backwards. “Christ!” he cried, struggling to stay upright. “Do we have to bring all the bottles?”

  “You can leave some here,” Ronnie said.

  “Thank God.” Court started to remove his pack to take his friend up on the suggestion.

  Ronnie gave him a withering look. “But don’t think any of us are going to share when you get thirsty later.”

  Court shrugged back into the pack without further comment.

  Breakfast was the last of the eggs—they were too fragile to take on the ATVs, and wouldn’t last long anyway, so Bree scrambled them up. There was leftover chicken and rice from the evening before, as well, and the four of them ate quickly as the morning sun crested the hilltop. When the plates and pans were washed in the creek, then added to the rest of their supplies, and sand had been kicked over the remains of their fire, Ronnie straddled the green ATV and said, “All right, let’s go.”