Love in the Time of the Dead

by Tera Shanley

  He stopped in front of her and reached slowly and unnecessarily around to set his pack beside hers.

  “It’s so hot watching you brain a Dead first thing in the morning,” Mitchell said as he leaned forward, forcing her to look up to meet his eyes.

  He was tall and trim, filling out his tight black cotton shirt and cargo pants impressively. And with warm caramel brown eyes to highlight his dark hair, she understood why all of the women at the colonies threw their hearts at him. To a wiser woman, he was obnoxious the majority of the time and borderline unbearable the rest.

  “Still not interested, Mitchell,” she ground out.

  “Can’t blame a man for trying,” he said through an amused grin.

  She sighed impatiently and rested her hands on her hips, which only seemed to amuse him. “I wish I could still file for sexual harassment in the workplace.”

  “Oh yeah? Who would you file with? And besides, you need me. You just don’t want to admit how much.”

  “What I need is a minute,” she grumbled. She grabbed her pack and headed off to find a menial, though vital, amount of privacy.

  “Not too far,” Jarren called after her. “Leave her alone, Mitchell.”

  She smiled to herself at Mitchell getting reprimanded. It wouldn’t help, as that man was incorrigible, but it was nice to hear nonetheless.

  She checked her surroundings once, then twice. The Colorado mountain breeze held a clean, earthy scent. Mitchell and Jarren were still in view, arguing quietly, and Guist checked and re-checked his weapons. That man was even more thorough than she was.

  She turned to the task of relieving her full bladder, then washed her face with water from her canteen and brushed her teeth. She bent all the way forward, feeling the pull of relief in every vertebrae down her spine as she stretched aching muscles. She didn’t have to worry about Mitchell and Guist watching her. They had been together long enough to know each other’s routines, and they at least respected her enough not to spy. She hoped.

  Laney returned to the group more composed and ready to move. Mitchell tossed her a rough biscuit and mumbled a half-hearted apology. She nodded and picked off the moldy bits before inhaling the small breakfast. Jarren and Guist poured over a map as she washed the modest meal down with canteen water.

  Mitchell and Guist had been Jarren’s childhood friends. They had all enrolled in the Army right out of school and had gone their separate ways after being stationed in different places. They had hung out through the years if and when they were lucky enough to have leave at the same time. Their training made them a force to be reckoned with when fighting Deads. Those men meant safety.

  She begrudgingly did, in fact, need Mitchell for survival against the Deads. She needed all of them. She didn’t have to inflate their egos any more than necessary by telling them that, though. And besides, they needed her too.

  “Looks like we’re going to have to go through a couple of smaller towns just outside of Denver to get to the road we need. It’s that or tack on another day,” Jarren said, looking up from his map.

  Laney groaned internally. She hated towns. Too many places for Deads to hide, plus the buildings all stank of zombies so her nose was basically rendered useless.

  “Well, I’m all for not prolonging this mission,” Mitchell reasoned. He winked. “I’m tired of Laney’s cooking.”

  “Har, har. Questionable cooking for questionable company,” she said through a sweet smile.

  Jarren folded the map and secured it into his backpack. “Head ’em up and move ’em out.”

  A quote borrowed from Dad. Her chest hurt with the effort to compose herself. Thoughts of the lost rattling around in her mind wouldn’t help anything. It wouldn’t keep her alive, and survivors knew that was all that mattered. Laney viciously stomped out the pain.

  She was a survivor.

  Chapter Two

  LANEY IGNORED THE IMPULSE to check her mag for the hundredth time. It was a comforting habit, and a good one to have, but the boys tended to go on high alert if she checked it too often. She had a full mag at hand and plenty of back-ups. She just had to settle down and get through the day.

  They were all settling into the new formation they had been forced to adopt since Monroe was lost. They had been five pair of eyes instead of four for so long that it still felt odd at the beginning of every hike. Mitchell’s gaze was glued to her every time she checked her tactical rifle.

  “I still think it’s a shame what you did to that gun,” he told Jarren, likely trying to lighten the somber mood.

  Jarren shrugged unapologetically. “Never get them mixed up now, do we?”

  Laney smiled at her Mini-14. Jarren had come back from deployment to find her in all the sports he didn’t approve of. And yes, ballet was a sport. Or, at the very least, it required a great deal of athleticism. Jarren bought her the gun as a joke. He’d even gone one step further and taken it to a friend of a friend who added all sorts of modifications to customize it for her, including a glossy blue custom paint job and switching it from semi-automatic to automatic. So maybe it wasn’t the most legal gun. Who was worried about legality now?

  “You know that color makes you a target,” Mitchell pushed.

  “Please,” she grumbled. “Deads are color blind. The only person it bothers is you.”

  “She’s got a point, man,” Guist spoke up. “And anyway, I think it suits her.”

  “Thanks, Guist,” she said with a satisfied nod. “It’s good to know someone else appreciates my baby.” She kissed the stock and kept moving forward. “And besides, she’s never misfired on me and that’s what counts.”

  Edging to the outskirts of North Table Mountain Park gave her a first glimpse of civilization. Or what would’ve been civilization had it existed anymore. She took a draw of the air and hesitated at the sickly sweet smell. Her pause was enough to stop the others. Jarren arched an eyebrow, and she nodded. They were coming.

  The metal click of weaponry and footfall against dry twigs were the only noises in the clearing as she slunk forward beside the others. Thick, once protected forest gave way to a scattering of small houses, and around one of these abandoned homes sauntered the first wave of Deads. It was likely their very human scent that attracted them, and when the filmy, rolling eyes of the zombies landed on them, the creatures galloped toward them. Buckled knees and rotted flesh didn’t seem to slow them down in the least.

  There were five of the monsters: two females and three males. The sound of gunfire cracked against the clearing as she pulled the trigger at almost the exact moment the others unloaded their weapons. There was no panic or fear. Only a single-minded need for survival, and the Deads stood in the way of that. She’d pulled too many triggers to get scared easily. All were downed by direct hits to the brain before they were even a real threat. The noise would attract other Deads in the area, but that was fine. They’d be on the move before more arrived. She ran behind Guist, guns at the ready, fingers beside their triggers. Just one easy motion away from trigger ready. The team moved as one in front of her, eyes trained in a full circle around them.

  “Smell is getting stronger,” Laney informed them breathily.

  Jarren grunted and spoke up. “All right boys, town is close, and if we can get through it today we’ll be to the colony by dark. Stay calm, stay collected, stay focused. Stick to the roofs when possible.”

  She pulled them to a stop when they came to a road polluted with abandoned cars. The smell of the Deads that moved between and around the rusting automobiles was atrocious. She held her breath for relief. “How many, you think?”

  “Too hard to get a head count,” Jarren whispered. “Cars are blocking them too bad. We’ll stick to the woods near the road. We can follow it into West Pleasant View and hit I-70 from there. It’ll be the easiest path through the mountains.”

  The group melted silently back into the woods to pick their way through the forest at a jog. Everyone seemed rushed by both the need to escape the unusuall
y large herd of Deads and to get what promised to be a treacherous day over with.

  “Remember,” Jarren hissed, “no matter what, we get Laney to the colony.” He met Mitchell’s and Guist’s eyes seriously.

  They nodded. Everyone knew how imperative it was that she lived. The reminder of the importance of her survival left a bitter taste in her mouth, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on why.

  The massive ghost town left a deep ache in her gut. So much suffering had happened there that it was like a dark, stifling cloud was filling every shadow, every building, every air molecule. Trash and debris littered the streets, and bodies and bones lay in haphazard heaps. Fat flies buzzed lazily around Laney’s face, and she nearly went mad swatting at them. Even Guist, immovable, impenetrable Guist, gagged at the smell. Adjacent to a small highway, a green sign contrasted against the blue of the sky. It had an arrow that pointed in the opposite direction and read “This way to Denver.” She could only imagine the sheer number of Deads in a city that size. Jarren, thankfully, had the good sense not to drag them through the middle of it.

  As if he read her charitable thoughts, Jarren gifted her with a “Let’s rest here.”

  She sat on the gnarled root of a tree and squinted at the dilapidated exit sign. “I always wanted to visit the mountains in the spring,” Laney said with a small grin.

  Jarren tossed her an apple from his pack. “Well, I don’t think it will be quite as picturesque as you imagined. Anyway, it’s fall.”

  “Party pooper. So why is it so important to get to this colony?”

  Mitchell dug through his pack noisily in search of food. “It’s the biggest?”

  “Well, that’s part of it,” Jarren admitted. “The bigger the colony, the better chance we have of finding someone who can help us figure Laney out.”

  “Plus,” she said, “I’m dangerously low on tracer ammo. I’ll have a better chance of finding someone who can remedy that little problem in a bigger colony, right?”

  “One-track mind,” Mitchell said, watching her like she was an exotic bug that had done something interesting.

  She bit into her apple, a rare treat during missions. The last colony they stopped at had a small orchard and gave them apples as part of the payment for the group’s freelance work. There were at least a hundred small bands of fighters just like them that lived outside of the colonies for various reasons. Some were brawlers, unable to live a subdued and defensive life. Some were adventure seekers, and some simply didn’t fit well into the social atmosphere that the colonies offered. Whatever the reasons, all came to colonies to trade, regroup, or to fulfill a simple need such as getting a safe night’s sleep or socializing after a long run. Or, more importantly, to find the bed of a lover that would give a moment of relief from the nightmares they’d lived. In return, the fighters worked various jobs around the colony to trade for supplies. The most common work included thinning the crowds, so to speak. They cut down the numbers of ravenous Deads that hovered around the colonies, and then they moved on to their next self-inflicted mission. She and the boys had been nomads for two solid years.

  “So who is the leader?” Laney asked, checking their surroundings again.

  “Name’s Sean Daniels,” Jarren said as he tossed his apple core away.

  Laney snorted in a definitively unladylike fashion. “Sean Daniels? What a douchey name. Never trust a man with two first names.”

  “Hey!” Mitchell pointed to his chest. “Derek Mitchell?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “I rest my case.”

  “Come on, Laney. Don’t get judgey before you meet the guy,” Jarren cut in defensively. “I’ve heard good things about him.”

  “Like what?” Guist asked.

  “Like he is leading the biggest colony in America successfully, and he has been for three years. He has minimal losses under him, and he is fair. That’s what I hear, at least.”

  Laney rocked her head back, snoring softly, and Jarren punched her in the arm. He was chronically optimistic about the different colony leaders, and they always turned out to be pricks. Colonies’ defensive agendas were so radically different from their offensive ones. The two groups very rarely saw eye to eye on anything. More often than not the leaders were hard pressed to even let fighter teams into their colonies for fear they would rile up the masses and deplete their numbers. They needn’t worry though, she thought as she caught a putrid whiff of rotting Deads. This life was far too glamorous for most colony dwellers.

  “Time to do some work,” she whispered as she hooked her Mini back onto the strap laced from shoulder to ribcage.

  The men didn’t hesitate behind her. Her nose had never been wrong.

  It was their longest day in recent memory. Jarren, having never been to Denver before, had grossly underestimated how large it was, even in the border towns. They kept a breakneck pace, but even at this clip they’d be lucky to make it into the mountains by dark, much less to the colony nestled miles inside of them.

  Traveling the bridges and overpasses that led around the edge of the city had started out the trip with an eerie feeling Laney couldn’t manage to shake. Two small bands of Deads were on one of the bridges, but they were easy to dispose of. Well, easier than the rest of the fights had been. There weren’t necessarily more Deads in cities than any other place on the planet. The creatures tended to stay where food was, and since humans were a rare find, the zombies in cities habitually migrated. That’s not to say humans didn’t exist at all in cities. Some stubborn fighters cleaved to their homes and eked out a hidden existence amongst the predators. They were probably all gristle. A Dead would likely choke on those leather-tough old buzzards.

  The hours after they crossed the bridges brought too many skirmishes to count and had the group treed up fire escapes twice in as many hours. Laney had fallen over some rubble as they were being backed into a stairwell and had cut her hand badly trying to catch herself on the glass riddled floor. Jarren had wrapped it tightly the moment he felt they were safe enough to administer first aid, but that had been hours before and her trigger hand was now throbbing in rhythm with her racing heart. She’d had worse, though, so what was the point in complaining?

  They had about forty-five minutes of daylight left, and the team was trapped in a housing development on the edge of town. Deads were more active at night, and the action had definitely started picking up.

  Laney checked the lock on the front door again. Pictures of a young family lined the hallways, and two small gap-toothed children grinned from within dark wooden frames. She couldn’t help but imagine that the children who once played in these rooms were presently in the horde of zombies banging on the door and groaning for a taste of their flesh. She pried her gaze from the happy pictures and swallowed a lump in her throat. Houses like this one felt haunted by the ghosts of the unresting souls of the families that once lived in them.

  “What’s the plan, boss man?” Mitchell asked. “We going to try for the colony tonight or are we bunkering down?”

  Jarren shook his head. “Can’t bunker down here. The windows and doors won’t hold under the growing numbers, and they are making enough noise to attract all of the Denver Deads.”

  “We go up then,” Guist said as he flew into action and ran downstairs. They didn’t have to discuss it. They had been in this exact same situation before. Their first order of business would be to search for something to get through the ceiling.

  The houses were attached in that neighborhood, which would make it easier to travel by roof. The problem would be getting outside from the upper floor. There were windows they could climb out of, but the Deads would see them and follow, which would make it impossible to get down and escape.

  “I’ll cover the front door in case they get in before Guist makes it back,” Laney said. She braced herself in front of the banging entry.

  Jarren and Mitchell took the stairs behind them two at a time. Furniture scraped across wooden floors as it was stacked and dragged around th
e room above her. Window glass broke and tinkled across the floor. Bang, bang, bang. The noise grew louder as the Deads became more frantic outside the door and the outer walls of the house. She wiped sweat off her brow to keep it from her eyes.

  “Guist? Guist!” she yelled as the frame of the door splintered loudly. Deads were coming in sooner rather than later, and the team was low on ammo. All hell was about to come barreling through that door and she only had half a clip left before she got to her last mag of tracer bullets. Those she would desperately need after dark.

  “Guist, we got company!” Where the hell was he?

  The door gave way, halting only momentarily as the small chain creaked and tensed before it snapped, illuminating the entryway with waning daylight and a mob of walking Deads. Guist appeared and sprinted for the stairway behind Laney. He held an ax in a white knuckled grip, and slid into the stairwell just as the first wave of monsters poured through the front door.

  She checked out. She always did in battle. It was necessary for survival. No fear, no thought, just her instincts guiding her body.

  Shot to the head.

  Next Dead.

  Aim.

  Shot to the head.

  Next Dead.

  Guist’s strong grip dug into her shoulder, dragging her up the stairs while she kept the Deads at bay. It was all he could do. Guist had been out of ammo before they even made it to the house. Other than blades, he was weaponless. He yelled something behind her, but she couldn’t understand him over the sheer volume of the gunfire and the roaring Deads who stumbled and crawled over the bodies she felled. At the top of the stairs, Guist pulled her into a bedroom just as the zombies clawed at her clothing and gnashed their rotting teeth inches away from her skin. The door slammed behind her, and Mitchell pushed a dresser in front of it so fast it almost hit her in the hip.