by J. Thorn
Possibly, I was a pirate in a former life.
I dumped my bag, as well, with the makeup and the excessive amount of underwear I’d grabbed. Holding up a pair of bright pink boy shorts that had “lickable” written across the ass, I waggled my eyes at Haley.
“Those are horrible,” she groaned but took them from me anyway.
“The joys of shopping in the junior department,” I smirked.
A throat cleared from behind us and Haley practically sprained her wrist trying to hide the provocative panties, shoving them underneath her thighs. She blushed bright red as we turned our attention to Nelson who was standing in our makeshift doorway, looking amused. I almost laughed out loud. Haley had never blushed, not even when we were in school. She owned her hotness and her sassiness; boys hardly ever stood a chance against her. And now Nelson, in all his sexy-stranger-glory, was giving my poor girl a run for her money with his lifted eyebrows and barely contained smirk.
“I just wanted to tell you ladies that there’s a bathroom if you wanted to clean up. We don’t have running water, but you can do the whole sponge bath thing. And then there’s food if you’re hungry.” His dark hair was hanging over his forehead, his dark blue eyes sparkling with humor at Haley’s odd behavior.
Haley seemed unable to speak, so I answered for her, “Thanks, but the bed is enough. We don’t want to deplete any of your supplies. We’re really not here to take from you.”
Nelson cocked his head back like I’d surprised him, and then scratched his scruffy beard thoughtfully. “Reagan, we have an abundance of supplies and when these run out we’ll just move on and build it up elsewhere. We know how to survive and we know how to scrimp when we need to. We offered you a place to stay because we had one to give to you. Now we’re offering you a bath and food because we have that to give to you, too. If we didn’t, you wouldn’t be here.”
I pressed my lips together trying to accept his explanation, both because he was being so generous and because I was afraid to analyze what it would have meant for us if they didn’t have space for us. This family seemed fiercely protective of each other and I truly believed they would eliminate any kind of threat to any part of their family.
Including me and Hales.
Best not to become a threat.
“Alright,” I finally relented. “Thank you, for everything.”
“Sure,” Nelson smiled, but his eyes were on Haley, not me. Not that she would know since she was busy picking invisible lint of the bed spread.
Nelson disappeared and I nudged Haley with my knee. “So, bath?” I couldn’t help grinning from ear to ear.
“Uh, no thanks,” she shook her head. “I prefer the filthy, street urchin look. I think it brings out my eyes.” But then she was wearing her own grin and grabbing all kinds of new clothes and the lickable undies.
I had some travel-size shampoo and conditioner we commandeered at the last safe settlement we’d stayed at. I traded three packs of Marlborough Reds for them. Haley and I were always on the lookout for things like that, cigarettes, bottles of alcohol, fingernail paint. People would pay dearly for their vices, or to just feel normal for a few moments.
This was kind of how I imagined the bartering system in prison to work.
Turns out I would have been a very profitable inmate.
We got to work in the bathroom as soon as the swinging door shut behind us, and made the best use of our opportunity. Since I was still bandaged and broken, Haley washed my hair and I took care of the rest with the tips of my fingers that weren’t covered and a wet wash cloth. It was mostly a pansy effort as far as the deep scrubbing should have gone, but it was the best I could do with lacerated palms.
The water was room temperature and came from a multitude of plastic bottles, but it was better than ice cold and we knew it was clean. I would never complain since we looked human again. Our hair actually smelled good, our nails were clean, our skin not sticky, sweaty and stinky. We dressed in some yoga pants and tank tops that would be comfortable to sleep in, but utilitarian too, just in case we had to leave suddenly. And we even used the mirror to apply some of the makeup I grabbed. Not that we were trying to impress our hosts, but it felt good to have mascara on again. And chapstick, oh, sweetness, my lips felt fantastic.
Back in our borrowed space, we found some more bandages and Neosporin lying on top of the bed. Haley helped change my dressings and we both breathed out a sigh of relief at how well my wounds seemed to be closing up. We both slipped on socks and lined up our shoes at the end of our bed.
It was weird to be without shoes. We never walked around barefoot anymore, there just wasn’t that option. The only time our shoes ever came off, was just so we could change clothes; but immediately they went back on. And we were never barefoot at the same time. We were always ready to run or fight. We had to be. This was the nature of the world we lived in.
We set some better traveling clothes out next to our freshly organized packs and tidied up the small space we shared. Even though this place felt safer than anywhere we’d been in years, we always had to be ready to run- always.
Finally, we left our living space to raid the kitchen. My hair was down and floating around my shoulders; it tickled my skin and felt cool and refreshing since it was still damp. It was longer than it ever had been and I reminded myself to be on the lookout for some scissors so Haley could trim it for me sometime.
“Oh my gosh, Reagan, they have peanut butter,” Haley groaned. She lifted a jar of creamy Jiffy and started to unscrew the red cap.
“Wait, Haley,” I gasped before grabbing a plastic spoon and jumping to stand next to her. “Ok, go.”
She slowly twisted off the cap and we sat there staring at the untouched peanut butter for several moments, just inhaling the scent. I honestly wiped at my mouth because I was afraid I was drooling.
“Knock yourselves out, we all hate that stuff,” Vaughan offered.
“What?” Haley snapped her head up to stare him down. “You all hate peanut butter? Are you sure you’re not Zombies?”
Vaughan laughed. “Pretty sure.”
“So you don’t mind if we….?” I gestured at the peanut butter and swirled my spoon over it.
“Like I said, knock yourselves out,” he smiled at me. “We just found it the last time we went raiding and thought why not? If worse comes to worst, right?”
Haley and I made sounds of agreement but were already spoon deep in the deliciousness and moaning over the taste on our tongues.
“When’s the last time you girls had anything to eat?” Vaughan asked, clearly amused with our reaction to good food.
I looked over the top of my spoon at Haley, feeling the familiar instinct to be careful with what I revealed to others. “What’s it been, Hales? Three days?”
“Four,” she corrected quickly. “And it was a tuna and cracker pack that we shared.”
I shuddered at the memory. Tuna was so gross, but we seemed to find it the most often. Plus, it did have protein, which we needed desperately.
“So you’ve just been constantly moving from place to place, scavenging where you can?” Vaughan asked slowly. His eyebrows were drawn together and his lips turned down in a frown.
I suddenly felt protective of our lifestyle. No, it wasn’t ideal, but it was all we had. And we were surviving, which was the most important part.
“We’ve never had the resources to set up like you guys,” I spat out defensively. “And it’s not like we can just settle into someone else’s settlement. I’m not ready to repopulate the planet with some sixty year old guy that already has seven other wives.”
Vaughan grimaced at my words. “You obviously see how dangerous it is out there for two pretty, unarmed girls.”
“I’m not unarmed,” I shot back.
“Haley is,” he argued.
“For now,” she said with a hint of threat in her voice. “Just for now.”
“We know how to take care of ourselves, Vaughan,” I said evenly to d
iffuse the growing tension between us. I didn’t see why he cared, though. He had given us one night here; he’d made it clear that was as far as his generosity went. It didn’t make sense that now he was trying to convince us to take better care of ourselves. Obviously, if there was a better way, we would be doing it by now. “We’ve made it on our own for almost two years. And while we appreciate your generosity, we don’t need you babysitting us.”
Vaughan held up his hands in defeat, but his eyes glimmered with a silent challenge. “I get it. I’m not judging you.”
Vaughan walked away, leaving us with our peanut butter. The smooth stickiness coated my mouth and tasted like heaven. I sucked on the spoon a little, making sure I got every last bite. I groaned at the taste of something so rich and delicious. These boys could rule the world with supplies like this.
And that wasn’t far from the truth.
A tingle spread out across my neck and I had the distinct feeling I was being watched. My eyes snapped up and locked with Hendrix’s. He was across the room, standing in the middle of the floor just watching me. It was like our gaze had caught him mid-step and he wasn’t sure what to do next.
After years of being chased by Zombies, I wasn’t intimidated easily, but there was something so revealing about his stare I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I pulled the spoon out of my mouth and licked my lips nervously while he just stood there, staring at me.
Haley gave me a nudge with her shoulder and my attention was successfully averted. I looked down at the peanut butter jar and felt my cheeks heat from a confusing blush. I wondered if Hendrix would have been this strange in a normal world, or if everything normal inside of him snapped when things got bad.
Or maybe, in the pre-Zombie world, he was just as brooding and serious. If he were cast in my Zombie version of Vampire Diaries, he so would have been Stefan, the very brother I wanted to watch die of something grotesque and gruesome. Team Daemon every single day.
“What was that about?” Haley whispered. She opened a pack of Ritz crackers and we both dug in, spreading the peanut butter across the cracker before devouring them- this was a feast.
“I have no idea,” I giggled.
“You have pretty hair,” a small, unmistakably girly voice said from behind me.
Haley and I both turned to face Page. She had to Page- the fact that she was a little girl and the spitting image of her brothers mostly gave it away. She had long, dark blonde hair like Hendrix. It curled at the ends and stopped halfway down her petite back. She had huge, bright blue eyes that were widened with curiosity and full, Cupid’s bow lips that I believed were a family trait. She couldn’t have been more than nine and she reminded me of a fairy. Her features were gorgeously exaggerated and she had the cutest ears poking through her curtain of thick hair.
I looked from Haley back to Page, before deciding she was talking to me, since her attention was firmly fixed on my face. “Thank you,” I smiled easily. “So do you.”
“Thank you,” she beamed back. “It’s nice to hear that. Did you know boys don’t know how to say thank you? My mama taught me, she taught me how to use all my manners. But Vaughan says most boys didn’t have the same kind of mama. And he says our mama forgot to teach my brothers.”
Haley and I did our best to bite back laughter. “I bet your mama didn’t forget to teach them.” I leaned forward as if I was telling her a secret. “I bet they just forgot to learn.”
Page’s eyes lit up with excitement and she bobbed her head up and down in agreement. “I bet you’re right!”
“Do you want some peanut butter or crackers?” I asked, holding out the jar for her.
She wrinkled her precious little upturned nose and shook her head again, her glossy hair bouncing around her shoulders. “No, thank you.”
“Those are great manners,” I encouraged before trading my offering to the sleeve of crackers. She took a few from the package and started nibbling on them.
“Hey, Page,” Hendrix greeted slowly. He joined us in the kitchen area, leaning up against the wall. His eyes were narrowed in distrust and he glanced over his sister with careful concern. “Making some friends?”
“Hendrix,” Page said seriously, “They have manners.”
Haley choked on a giggle and I shot Hendrix a saucy wink. He didn’t seem to know what to do with me, which made me kind of giddy for some reason.
“I think Page has given up on the male species as a whole,” I explained to Hendrix. “As it turns, out boys everywhere aren’t able to remember their manners.”
The peaks of Hendrix’s cheeks pinkened and he cast his eyes down at his shuffling feet. “We just tease her,” he admitted.
“And the male species is lost as a whole,” Haley grunted. And then in a whisper she said, “Probably best not to get her hopes up.”
“Is that why you two are traveling alone?” Vaughan interrupted the conversation, followed by the rest of the brothers. Nelson looked truly interested, but King and Harrison mostly looked like they didn’t have anything else to do.
“Who’s left to travel with?” Haley asked on an annoyed grunt. “Everyone we know is dead.”
“Except us,” I reiterated obviously, just so we could hear it again.
“Except us,” Haley whispered.
“How did you girls survive? How have you survived this long?” Nelson asked, his eyebrows drawn and his gaze fixed on Haley again.
“We got kind of lucky,” Haley explained somberly. “Everything fell apart for us in three days. When Reagan’s boyfriend tried to eat her, we decided it was time to skip town and head south.”
“Where are you from?” Vaughan this time.
I allowed the questions, but only because I had as many for them.
“Iowa,” Haley said.
“What do you mean your boyfriend tried to eat you?” Hendrix asked insistently.
I hesitated. Inside my head I joked up about it, but in reality it was pretty f-ed up. Not that everyone still alive and not eating human flesh didn’t have a similar story, but Chris had once been a person, had once been a friend and potential lover.
Ok, I shuddered at that. That just sounded…. wrong. Zombie or not.
“In two days, we’d both lost our parents,” I gestured between Haley and myself. “We hadn’t really taken the Zombie threat seriously until then. I mean, honestly, who could have known Zombies turned out to be real; they were supposed to just be this thing in movies. Our parents got off easy. They were in a town assembly, with most of the other adults, trying to figure out what to make of the military and news reports and the assembly was attacked. Some were turned into Feeders, but a lot of them were just slaughtered. Our parents were the lucky ones.” We all knew that meant they died on the spot, that didn’t need to be said. “We thought about sticking around, making a haven of the place we’d lived our whole lives, but when Chris came over to stay with me….” I trailed off, not knowing how to finish that one.
“He tried to gobble her up. So she stabbed him in the face with a butcher knife and then practiced parallel parking on his body until his head wasn’t attached to his neck anymore,” Haley finished dramatically.
I sighed- so not one of the shining moments of humanity.
“Impressive,” whistled Vaughan.
“Necessary,” I countered.
“Definitely,” Hendrix agreed.
“And then you guys just booked it?” Nelson finished the story.
“First we confirmed that neither of us had added brains to our daily food pyramid and then we packed up the still bloody Escalade and drove it till there wasn’t any gas left.”
Haley added, “Which wasn’t very long. We’d only had a half tank to begin with and by the time we needed to fill up, the gas stations were war zones. We ditched the car and started walking.
“Smart of you not to risk gas,” Vaughan noted. And he was right. By the time Haley and I fled our childhood homes, humanity had seemingly forgotten everything civilized and safe. Groce
ry stores, gas stations and Costco’s- especially Costco’s- all became battlegrounds for a deadly version of capture the flag. All the settlements we saw along the way were set up near a cluster of those things. Even though gas and food supplies were probably on the thin side now, those buildings still represented power and wealth. Even if settlements were relatively peaceful, it was guaranteed they hadn’t started out that way.
“What’s your ultimate plan?” Hendrix asked in a rumbling voice. I looked up at him and met his stare. He was intimidating and practical. I got the distinct impression when Hendrix asked questions they were always directed to get necessary, concise answers.
“We’re going south,” Haley said on a shrug. I shot her a glare but she either didn’t see me or was ignoring me.
“South where?” Hendrix asked, standing up a bit straighter. His shoulders were tense and rigid, his body strung tight with something aggressive.
I cleared my throat in a plea to get Haley to shut up, but she plowed forward, definitely ignoring me. “South America, Compadre. Or what used to be that general vicinity.”
“You can’t be serious,” Vaughan scoffed, sharing a look with his brother. Vaughan rubbed a hand across his scruffy jaw in a gesture of frustration.
“Dead,” Haley smiled sweetly. “Serious that is.”
“Why in the hell would you want to go down there?” Nelson gaped at us.
“Language,” Page hissed in the sweetest, sternest voice I’d ever heard. Pretty sure I was already in love with that little girl.
“Sorry, Pagey,” Nelson smiled sheepishly down at his little sister who gave him a benevolent nod of approval in return. “Why in the world would you head south? You have to have heard about the drug cartel? The slaving? The armies of Zombies?”
All eyes landed on me, as if this was my idea alone and I was dragging poor Haley along to her death. Which…. Ok, maybe that was true, but I had a good reason for going that way.
“Sure, we’ve heard of those things,” I lifted my shoulders casually.
