Love at the End of Days

by Tera Shanley

  “You seem to like me one minute, but then I gross you out the next. Why can’t you just treat me like the others do? At least until we get back to Dead Run River, and then we can go back to never speaking again.”

  Cocking his head slightly, he opened his mouth but was interrupted.

  “Dinner’s on!” Finn called from the stone-encircled fireside.

  Sean slid an angry glance toward his second-in-command and then gave her a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Dinner’s on.”

  Dinner, as it turned out, was a new dish that, according to Jackson, Finn had mastered a few supply runs ago. Grease hissed and sizzled into the fire from a spit impaling five small, skinned animals.

  “Please don’t tell me you killed someone’s pet Fifi,” she said through a careful mask of ambivalence. If they admitted to cooking up cats, she was going to be sick.

  “We’re having squirrel,” Steven said. “And if this is the part where you admit to us you’re a vegetarian, know in advance, we’re not hunting down a salad for you.”

  Squirrel? Okay, definitely a little less nasty than barbecued kitty.

  “How are we supposed to eat them?” Brandon asked. He sat on his backpack beside the fire, and his shoulders slumped as he stared suspiciously at their meal.

  When the only answer the boys offered was a noncommittal and very caveman-like grunt from Jackson, she helped him out. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say you eat them with your fingers.”

  Steven pointed to her and said, “Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner.” He held up a stick like a microphone and said, “Jackson, why don’t you tell her what she’s won?”

  Jackson answered by pulling one of the tiny animals from the spit and handing it to her like a hot potato. The grease was fire against the palms of her hands, and as quickly as she could manage, she gingerly set the tiny meal on a log someone had dragged up beside the campfire.

  “I’m going to do a perimeter check,” Sean said and left the light of the flames.

  Finn watched him go with a thoughtful look, and then his dark gaze slid to her. “You need to let him be.”

  She checked behind her, but the only one sitting in the immediate vicinity was her. “Me? What did I do? The man doesn’t even talk to me, so if you’re looking for someone to blame for his gnarly mood, you can point your judgy Sasquatch finger elsewhere.”

  She balanced the squirrel on her fingertips and blew the steam from the meat. Finn could glare at her all he wanted. It wouldn’t change the fact that Sean’s attitude was his problem, not hers.

  Squirrel was her new favorite meal. It tasted good enough. Finn had known just when to take them off the fire to keep them from drying out, and the simple salt and pepper seasoning worked just fine for a camp dinner. The best part of the whole fifteen minutes it took to pick her meal clean, however, was watching Brandon try to eat it. Hopeless and entertaining all at once.

  “I miss video games,” Steven said. “The first-person zombie-shooting games? I miss those.”

  “Why? Because you get unlimited life as long as you have a bucket of quarters and no one behind you in line?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah. But all the chicks in that game dressed sexy and were a lot less mouthy than you.” His baiting grin was obnoxious.

  “Oh, you want me to dress sexy while I’m running from Deads and trying to save your sorry life? I’ll be sure to pack my stilettos next time I need a go-bag, you jack-wagon.”

  He shrugged like her offer was acceptable. “That’s all I ask. And maybe a little makeup wouldn’t hurt. A little lip gloss so we have something pretty to look at, you know.”

  She chunked a miniature, cleaned leg bone across the fire, and it bounced off his forehead. “Parasite,” she muttered as he and the boys chuckled like they were the funniest things to ever grace the planet.

  “Where are we supposed to sleep tonight?” Brandon asked over the noise. “There isn’t enough room in the back of the truck anymore, and we can’t just sleep out here in the open.”

  “Yes we can. We’ll take turns on watch,” Jackson said. “Not much choice for it at the end of supply runs unless you want to all sleep together in the cab of the Terminator.”

  “I’m not doing that,” Brandon said, plucking a tiny piece of meat from his mostly intact dinner. “You idiots can go to sleep out here like an all-you-can-eat buffet for the night walkers, but I’ll take the leftover space in the back of the truck. I like my liver intact, thank you.”

  “Great,” she said. “I’m tired of listening to you talk in your sleep anyway. It’s weird.”

  His lip curled up in offense. “I do not talk in my sleep.”

  “No? ‘Oh, Mercedes. Come closer, Mercedes.’”

  His face blanched with heat as it crept up his neckline and landed in his cheeks. “Shut up,” he muttered. “I was talking about the car.”

  “Mmhmm.” She threw the bones into the fire and wiped her hands on a tuft of grass beside her.

  “I’m not the only one making noises in their sleep, Vanessa.” He spat her name like a curse. “You’re over there moaning and groaning all night too.”

  His words sounded venomous, but they had little actual sting. She shrugged. “Yep. Nightmares are a bitch, and I’ve been stabbed a couple times this week. It hurts to move.”

  “I can make you some of the tea Doc sent with us if you want,” Finn offered. “It’ll take the edge off.”

  “Thanks, but no. I may be sleeping up in a tree tonight, and I need my head on straight so I can strap myself in without hitting every branch on the way down.”

  He pulled his canteen from his pack and washed down the last of his meal. “Carpenter, you take first watch. Rookies have to pay their dues.”

  “What?” Steven groused. “I’m not the only rookie here. Don’t tell me you’re favoring her because she’s a girl. She’s the one always saying she wants to be treated like the rest of us.”

  Finn waited with a dark, arched eyebrow raised. “You done?”

  “Yes. No. She already got a nap. Now I’m done.”

  “Carpenter,” Finn said with an unhurried drawl, “count your injuries.”

  Steven cleared his throat quietly, pointed to a tiny cut barely even visible in the firelight on his finger, and said, “One.”

  Vanessa leaned forward and squinted. “Do paper cuts count?”

  “No,” Finn said. “Vanessa needs rest, and we take care of our own. If it was the other way around and it was you who was injured, Vanessa would take first watch.” His gaze traveled over the campfire to her. “But if I had to guess, she wouldn’t be complaining like you’re doing. She’d just offer.”

  Hmm. Maybe Finn was starting to understand her after all.

  “Now, Vanessa, I want you to take all of our dishes and go find some running water to wash them in.”

  Or maybe not.

  The corners of his lips turned up, and his eyes danced with reflected flames. “That was a joke. You should’ve seen your face though. I think you have steam coming out of your ears.”

  Irritation blasted heat into her cheeks, an odd sensation with the bitter chill that was seeping into the breeze.

  “Vanessa,” Sean said in a quiet voice from just outside the firelight. “Come here. I have something to show you.”

  Jackson whistled, but Finn jabbed him in the ribcage with an audible thump.

  “Um, sure.” Slinging her rifle and backpack across her shoulder, she shuffled into the woods behind Sean with her flashlight beam dancing across the ground. Why did she get the feeling he was leading her far away to yell at her? She sifted through a mental catalog of inappropriate things she’d done and said throughout the day, but the others had done and said worse. Okay, maybe not worse, but at least in the same boat, surely.

  “Look, if this is about the small penis jokes with Jackson, I’ll dial it back to thirteen or fewer jabs a day.”

  Silence.

  “Twelve and that’s my final offer. I mean,
he named it Thor, so it’s almost a call of duty to make fun of him, and besides, he knows I’m just joking about—”

  “Vanessa. I’m not reprimanding you. Do you ever just listen? I mean, table the snark and open your ears. What do you hear?”

  She frowned at the back of his head and dragged her flashlight across the area. Leaves fell from a black walnut tree to their left in a constant stream under the wind’s urging. Little creaks and groans sounded from the trees as their branches were brushed with the invisible force of Mother Nature’s breath, and some distance away, a bird called and another answered. No groaning, no gnashing of teeth. Just peace. And then a sound so subtle touched her ears, and she turned her head to the side so she could better hear. The soft babble of a stream talked happily in the night as it rippled over rock and felled tree.

  “I hear water.”

  He waited for her to catch up and tipped his head. “I thought you could bathe tonight, after the boys are asleep, if you wanted. You’ll have to remember your way to and from it though. Do you think you can?”

  The prospect of a bath was at once exhilarating and terrifying. It was colder than a polar bear’s nipple, and that water would likely be the consistency of a slushy, but oh to be clean again. It was tempting to wait the extra two days until they got back to Dead Run River where she could finally take a hot shower, but not tempting enough. She wanted to feel untarnished and human again. She liked to think she’d out-matured the consuming-vanity phase of her life, but very little compared to feeling clean.

  The stream pushed its way around boulder and tree to wind through the woods like some giant serpent.

  Sean sank onto a giant rock and rubbed a seemingly irritated hand over the stubble on his face. He’d been doing that more and more lately.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I’m just ready to get home.” He graced her with a self-deprecating look. “I miss my kid.”

  She searched the woods. Sean had never been so candid when he spoke to her, and her curiosity to know more battled with the urge to heft her rifle over her head and high-knee it out of here. Squeezing her eyes closed and releasing a long sigh, she sat down beside him against her better judgment. His closeness was just as dangerous as a Dead’s. Both had the power to inflict irreparable damage. “Is this the longest you’ve been away from her?”

  “I used to head up most of the supply runs for my colony, and I was used to being away from Adrianna. It was like traveling for work or being deployed. It hurts less if you’re used to it, you know? She’s older now though, and she started asking me not to go, so I stopped for a while. I’m all she has.”

  “I thought you were the colony leader of Denver. Why were you running supplies?”

  “My life isn’t any more valuable than anyone else’s. The other men on my missions had families and loved ones back home too. If I went with them, I could give them a better chance of making it back to them in one piece.”

  “Yeah, but anything could happen out here. I heard about you. Your life was more valuable because you were the youngest colony leader, and you had the best survival rate.”

  He rubbed his chin on his shoulder as he searched her face. “And now I have one of the lowest. My entire colony was compromised. The tragedy of all those people—those women and children, and good men who’d survived the outbreak—that’s on me. It always falls on the leader’s shoulders. I should have seen the betrayal of my second long before he had time to plan what he did. He’d been unreliable from the beginning, but I just wanted to trust him so badly. No one else but him was up for the job of taking care of the colony when I was on runs.”

  “I knew people at your colony.” The admission made her throat tighten up as she remembered the faces of her friends. “I asked Laney to give you a list of people I knew, and you told her you hadn’t seen any of them in the room of survivors.”

  “That was you?”

  She nodded.

  “I remember some of those names on the list. They were good people. I’m sorry.”

  “Stop apologizing for things that are out of your control, Sean. You couldn’t help them, and shouldering all of those ghosts is a poison.”

  “I want to know what happened with Jerry.”

  Shocked at the shift, she automatically shook her head in ready denial. No way was she in the mood to rehash something she’d been trying to put out of her head for the last few days. “I don’t want to.”

  “And I don’t want to hear it, but if you keep that stuff inside, it’ll eat at you. Trust me.”

  “Polite decline,” she said, reaching for her backpack.

  His hand was warm and firm on her forearm. “Please. I need to know.”

  “You just said you didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Needing and wanting are two different things.”

  Anger washed over her like a fiery wind. Talking didn’t make anything better, didn’t he know that? If she let all the demons loose, they’d never stop coming. So many would be released, she’d never get the door to hell closed again. What right did he have to ask for such a personal piece of her? He might as well hold her soul in his careless hands, and she’d be damned if she was giving anyone the ability to really touch her.

  “Please.” His voice was deep, soothing, pleading, and it pacified the fury just enough.

  “Fine,” she gritted out. Maybe if she just said the facts, as unemotionally as possible, he’d be satisfied without her really letting the taint of that day sink into the remaining goodness in her. There had to be some somewhere. “Jerry dressed me up like a doll. He had this old dress he’d found somewhere, and he asked me to fix my hair. He wanted to have a nice dinner to celebrate, so while he made food, I searched for an escape. My options were back the way we came, with all those Deads, or through the door Jerry used. But he was there when I opened it, and I lied and told him I was coming to help him with dinner.”

  Her lip trembled, and she bit it as punishment. “I gagged when I saw the plates with chunks of raw meat, and he was angry I couldn’t eat it. Over and over, he’d say, ‘I won’t hurt you. I won’t hurt you. I don’t need to eat you. I don’t need to eat you.’ But his eyes would go vacant, and he’d watch me like a bucket of caviar sitting on the buffet table. He started repeating everything he said, like he was trying to convince the monster half of him that I’d be more valuable alive. And I was shaking so bad—shit.” She leveled him with her gaze, begging. “I can’t do this.”

  Sean slid his hand over her knee, and he squeezed it. “You have to finish it.”

  Her voice hitched, and she took a long, sobering breath. “He said he’d just bite me a little, and then I could come back, and he’d save me like he did himself. He’d give me all the medicines, and then I’d be able to eat what he made for me. Like that would justify it. He paced for an hour, maybe two. I don’t know. Just talking to himself and picking at the skin on his face. Jerry was insane. The stuff he said? The things that came from his mouth? They were horrifying. There was very little man left in him. Still. He’s the first man I’ve ever killed.”

  “He doesn’t count as a man, Vanessa. Whatever he did to himself didn’t keep him human.”

  A warm tear slid down her cheek, and she gave her gaze to the river so he wouldn’t see. “He was human enough. Between rants, he would apologize and talk about a girl he used to love. When the hospital fell, he’d been trapped inside but carved out this little life for himself. He experimented on the Deads and after he was bitten, on himself, and he worked for years on a cure so he could save the world.” She let Sean see the agony that consumed her. “He couldn’t even save himself from a hundred pound woman with a hidden knife.”

  Sean couldn’t hold her gaze and let his drop to the leaves beneath their feet.

  “Afterward, I got lost in the hospital. I couldn’t think straight. My mind just kept playing the last moments over and over like it was my punishment for what I’d done. The sound of the end of his life was—” She
swallowed hard. “The sound of the end is something that’ll stay with me. He screamed and then begged me for help. And it felt wrong to let him die alone, so I sat there beside him while he babbled about how maybe it was better this way. The monster wasn’t there at the end. Just the man.”

  His whisper was ragged. “Vanessa—”

  “Don’t. Don’t let me off. I had no choice, but still, I ended a life. You shoulder the lost lives of your colony. This one is mine to bear.”

  Sean’s gaze dropped to her lips in the half moonlight in the quiet of the woods. When he lifted them to her eyes once again, they were tortured. “I shouldn’t have left you there. We walked out the front door knowing you were in danger, knowing you would have to make that decision. And when time went on and on, and you weren’t back, I wanted to burn down the damned city to get back in there to you.” He rocked back in a tiny escape attempt that didn’t pan out.

  With a tortured sound, his lips crashed onto hers. His kiss had the violence of a tornado behind it. Like he couldn’t stop himself if he tried. So unexpected was the warmth of his lips, she froze for an instant before she closed her eyes and let the tide of relief wash over her. For this moment she didn’t have to think about Jerry or Keeter or all of the near-death experiences of the last week. She could just let go.

  He kissed her harder, urging her mouth open until she gave in and his tongue grazed hers. A jolt of adrenaline and lust and something deep and warm inside pushed her closer. With her hands around the back of his neck, he pulled her hips into the safety centered between his knees. So powerless was she under his capable command, she didn’t protest when he lifted the hem of her shirt with a frustrated growl, or even when he brushed her bare ribcage with his thumb. She would melt into him at any moment and cease to exist, and for the life of her, she couldn’t find a single thing wrong with it. It was so natural to disappear after everything. So potently good to be under his attentive hands after feeling the sting of Mitchell’s rejection for so long. “Sean,” she pleaded against his lips.

  His response was immediate. His hands dropped to her hips, and he lifted her onto his lap with a strength that rivaled iron. Under his uncompromising grip, she slid against him like she was made to be there, cradled in his embrace. How had she lived so long without this? His warmth seemed as important as breathing, and she gasped as he dropped his kisses to the base of her neck. Arms snaking around her, he pulled her tightly against him until she could feel his hardened response to her between them. His arms were smooth, taut, and strong under her hands, and she eased back long enough to pull the shirt over his head.