by Rick Hautala
Over the course of so many marched miles, Charlse had seen the light in those emerald eyes gradually dim with each pop of a bullet. Scar tissue had built steadily inside the man, driving away sinew and soul, until only the hardened shell remained. During break periods, he no longer sat with the Steeges, the older couple who’d kept pace alongside the Newberns, a younger partnership in their twenties. For a time, he’d hung around Cathy Buckley, an attractive blonde, which had piqued an ugly but unavoidable streak of jealousy in Charlse, but now Joe no longer shadowed her. That had become Bequith’s obsession. Gruether Hartrich and the Kinsail kids ate and drank in silence. Joe watched over them.
Charlse watched Joe.
*****
They resumed walking.
A meadow of timothy grass stretched for what Charlse assumed were several dozen acres, toward a road. A stream meandered between the two, a place where the travelers could wash up or cool down. Depending, of course, on the safety factors. A mourning dove sang its melancholy song from the tree line. A deceptively golden light rained down from cloudless skies the color of denim.
Charlse had met Joe at the shelter in West Babylon, back when the lights were still on and the soldier’s hair was brush-cut trim and a plan was in place to curb the spread of the infection, if not cure it or wipe it out altogether. If said cure was still on the table now, the world showed no outward signs of progress. The last flying craft they’d seen was at least a month behind them, if not longer, and it had been falling out of the sky, aflame and in pieces, at the time.
The sweet fragrance of the timothy grass and meadow flowers threatened to intoxicate him. Charlse caught a hint of Joe’s scent, and the danger of bewitchment by pleasant emotions in a deadly landscape quadrupled. The smell of a real man’s scent, sweat mixed with adrenaline, perhaps testosterone, something Charlse had noticed before on other masculine men that always reminded him of summer rain on bare skin, teased his nose. He drank in a deep breath. Joe. Handsome, lost Joe.
They marched down to the stream, and the two soldiers deemed it safe enough for the group to rest.
The Steeges sat at the water’s edge, huddled close beside one another, soaking their bare feet in the stream. Neither wore a smile; like high-def and microwave ovens and talking GPS units, smiles were a thing of the past. But there was an intimacy between them impossible to miss. Mr. Steege loved Mrs. Steege, and vice versa.
Bequith moved beside Charlse but didn’t make eye contact. “You believe them two?” he drawled, his accent from somewhere between the Bayou and the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“Them two what?” asked Charlse.
“That out of all the people from that shelter in West Babylon, those two old farts is still here, still on the run. What the hell do they got to look forward to?”
Rage, sudden and sweltering, rushed through Charlse’s blood. He managed to choke down most of it, something he’d gotten good at well before the outbreak. This latest gulp joined a can of dry potato sticks and all the other anger he’d eaten over the years, lodging in the soft lining of his guts, where he imagined it turning cancerous.
“How about not getting eaten alive or, worse, bitten?” Charlse answered, surprised by the calmness of his voice. “How about being alive and hoping to live through this together, maybe enjoy what can still be enjoyed in life?”
Bequith grunted. “Sorry I said something. You didn’t have to be such a little bitch about it.” He burped and plodded away, joining Cathy Buckley by the stream, no great surprise there.
Joe stood at a distance from the others, keeping watch with his rifle at his side, also not a surprise. What did surprise Charlse was that he walked over and joined the soldier, his steps spurred on by Bequith’s idiotic rant and the need for fresh air.
“Hey, Lone Wolf,” he said lightly.
Joe eyed him from behind his sunglasses. “’Sup?”
It struck Charlse that the sound bite was the most personal conversation between them since the shelter, when Hell had spilled open across the earth, and two dozen civilians and a pair of soldiers escaped jagged teeth and hypnosis at what had seemed like a hundred sets of glowing copper eyes. His pulse galloped; this close, the scent of Joe’s sweat was unmistakable, magnificent.
“I just wanted to say,” Charlse started, only the words escaped him.
“Yeah?”
The mourning dove cooed. Sunlight rained down in a dazzling display, reflected in the silver lenses of Joe’s sunglasses. The sentiment was there, but it died before reaching his lips.
“Thanks,” he settled for instead, because there was no sane way to convey the magnitude of what he really wanted to say.
*****
Copper eyes, eyes the color of new pennies, fixed him with a hypnotic look. Charlse forgot about the brick in his hand. A man, a former young man with copper eyes, had bewitched him. Charlse saw his own death moving closer with the seconds. Worse, his un-death, should the young man or any of the other corpses swarming through the parking lot only bite him and not finish the job cleanly.
A thunderclap exploded at his left, and the magician’s head came apart from the eyes on up. A sharp pain thrummed through his head as the link between Charlse and the dead man snapped.
Joe fired again. Another of the infected mob coming at them from the remains of the liquor store, Laundromat, and pizza parlor went down and didn’t get up.
Bequith was firing, too. The clatter of bullets grew deafening, smothering screams. Charlse was suddenly aware of the brick again. He swung it as hard as he could at the nearest effigy dressed in sad rags. The crack of skull bone shattering shuddered up his arm in a sickening pulse. The dead man—later, he realized it was a dead woman—went down.
More reports sounded. Bequith yelled, “Cathy, you kids, get behind me!”
Charlse saw the Steeges, deemed old and useless, a burden, an acceptable collateral loss, surrounded, beguiled by numerous copper eyes. Gripping the brick, Charlse charged.
The dead fell upon the Steeges before he could reach them, biting and drawing blood. A succession of shots, some from Joe, most from Bequith, sealed the deed. The Steeges dropped, along with those who’d infected them, one body undistinguishable now from another. For a white-hot instant, Charlse hated Joe. The next, he loved him more than he thought possible for sparing the older couple one death followed by a miserable rebirth. If there was an afterlife in the spiritual sense, Joe had made it possible for them to enjoy it together.
He caught a hint of copper color from the corner of his eye and swung, catching the dead man’s face at the chin. Through the madness of a hundred nightmares happening around him, some unaffected register in Charlse’s mind recorded the sharp crack of breaking teeth, the wet slosh of blood, or maybe it was sputum, spittle. Their teeth were bad enough—they turned you with their bite. But they hooked you with their hypnotic copper glances. Closing his eyes, Charlse took aim and swung again. A sickening liquid popping jagged on his ear, followed by a slumping sound. When he looked, he’d enucleated one of the dead man’s eyes; the brunt of the attack had also caved in his attacker’s nose. All that mattered was that Charlse had damaged the corpse’s optic nerves.
Bequith was yelling, hooting, in a voice that sounded giddy, a frat house call. Close your eyes and you could imagine him slugging back plastic cups full of cheap keg piss-beer, not squeezing off bullets into the faces of men and women who’d already died once, only to come at you until you killed them again, thought Charlse.
A terrible silence settled over the battle zone in the wake of the last gunshot. The survivors were down by four. Charlse turned toward Joe, handsome Joe, and their eyes met briefly before Joe’s, behind his sunglasses, deflected away. The soldier moved back several steps, putting distance between himself and the thinning crowd. Sobs broke the stagnant atmosphere. In the distance, a rumble of thunder joined in counterpoint. A light rain began to fall.
*****
A big green awning with picnic tables beneath and the remai
ns of a picnic from another era, another life, sheltered them. Rain lashed at the tent over their heads. Wind nipped at the fraying edges of the awning and stirred the fetor of rot from the surrounding trashcans.
Charlse sat in a huddle, rocking back and forth, hiding his eyes from the others. He didn’t think himself capable of tears anymore; he’d already shed too many, had exhausted his supply. Dryness stung at his ducts. The rain fell warm, but it had chilled him to the marrow on the approach to the fairgrounds.
The Steeges, left in the open, in the middle of a parking lot, like so many bodies dumped at the sides of roads. And not just Alvin and Trudi Steege, but the guy named Hadley, and Mrs. O’Bare. What was the point of continuing forward, toward the coast? Where was the impetus to hope if they were to be picked off, one at a time? No tears fell, and Charlse imagined his face hardening, calcifying. He’d taken down three of the dead with a brick from a pile that had once been a wall, part of some ransacked strip mall, and hadn’t felt one iota of remorse. No more of that tired chestnut from earlier days, that the things with copper eyes had once been somebody’s daughter or son or mother or lover and, as such, were to be respected; they were just things now, vile things with hypnotic eyes, dead but also alive, ravenous and reanimated through an enhancement to the optic nerve. Self-replicating soldiers, set loose to take down a world already struggling to hold onto a semblance of civilization. The puppet masters behind that plot had succeeded, judging by all outward signs. The world as it was known was gone. Why forge on? What was the purpose?
The wind gusted. Instead of trash and rot, Charlse smelled summer rain, that clean scent of a real man’s skin. He realized it was Joe a second or so before the other man moved beside him, plunking his butt on the top of the table, one bent leg and big combat boot on the bench beside Charlse’s huddled torso, rifle balanced on the knee of the other. The soldier’s closeness shocked Charlse as much as it excited him. Up close, facing Joe’s handsomeness, hopelessness drew back a degree.
Saying nothing, Joe pocketed his sunglasses.
“Do they work?” Charlse asked.
“Against the sun?”
“No, against those dead Svengalis.”
Joe shrugged. “I don’t know, but I feel safer with them on.”
“Good.” Charlse attempted a smile, but the gesture felt foreign, deceptive. “I should look for a good pair of shades, next town we come to.”
Silence, then: “What did you want to say to me that day, near the stream?”
Charlse fell into the pull of Joe’s gaze. Emerald, not copper, he was more powerful a hypnotist than anything dead and walking around out there in the new wilderness of an anarchic America. The perpetual knot in his stomach pulled tighter. Glancing away, Charlse lied, “It was nothing, really.”
“It was something, or you wouldn’t have tried to say it. ‘Lone Wolf,’ that’s what you called me, remember?”
Charlse forced down a dry, painful swallow. He willed his eyes back to Joe’s. In their bottled gaze, he found the courage and confessed. “I wanted to tell you that I love you.”
Joe stared without blinking. “What?”
It was out in the open; there was no taking it back. Strangely, now that the statement was out of him, a lightness came over Charlse. The knot in his stomach loosened. His racing pulse slowed. Breathing wasn’t as difficult as he feared it might become.
“I love you, Joe,” Charlse said. “I love how you have kept watch over us since that debacle at West Babylon. How you could have run like so many others in your unit, but you didn’t. How you’ve made some really hard, ugly choices, like the Steeges, but you always do what’s right, even if it’s not easy. I think—”
“I’m not,” Joe interjected. The look on his face hardened an extra degree, and Charlse instantly regretted his honesty. Only Joe’s words, the few he offered, weren’t angry.
“I didn’t think you were gay,” Charlse continued. “But I wanted you to know how much I’ve come to respect you, to love you, over these months. I needed you to know that someone did. More so, I thought you needed to know, and that you’re not as alone as you maybe think you are.”
A single tear broke through the desiccated flesh of Charlse’s right tear duct and slipped down his cheek, one more raindrop in the surrounding downpour. But Joe’s emerald eyes noticed it and, to Charlse’s relief, the soldier’s hard expression softened the slightest.
“Thanks, man,” Joe said. He fidgeted somewhat, obviously uncomfortable this close to any living soul, let alone one that had just made the ultimate expression, another male at that. But he didn’t retreat from Charlse. “So what did you do before everything fell apart?”
Charlse smiled again. This time, the gesture felt genuine, natural, a blast from the past. “Me? I hung out a lot at coffee shops, the library, and bookstores. Listened to jazz. I owned a bunch of antique typewriters.”
“You’re speaking a foreign language, dude,” Joe said.
“You?”
“I surfed a lot. Rode a skateboard. Beer, not coffee. I played the guitar, too.”
“Sounds great.”
Joe dropped his chin and peered at Charlse with the same wounded look of sad puppy dogs. “This isn’t a date, you know.”
“I know,” Charlse chuckled. “You didn’t bring me flowers.”
Joe laughed too, a deep but awkward sound, one that Charlse guessed had been bottled up or in sparse supply for far too long. Charlse fell under the soldier’s emerald gaze again, and a shiver tickled the nape of his neck. It felt as if Joe were studying him, seeing him with fresh perspective, trying to figure out the parts of the whole. Or trying to figure out what to say or do next.
“You’re not alone, Lone Wolf,” Charlse said, helping him out.
Joe shifted, placed his free hand on Charlse’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he said, and then he returned to his place at the outer limit of the group, a distance that felt to Charlse like a gulf of miles.
*****
It was a dream. It had to be.
An arm circled his waist, a strong one. The arm of a real man, with dark hair superimposed over the muscles and white tape looped around two fingers. Charlse tensed.
“Shhh,” Joe whispered.
Charlse had fallen asleep on a strip of dry grass beneath the awning. Joe maneuvered behind him, assuming the classic spoon position, bracing Charlse’s spine with his front. One of Joe’s big, booted feet and a length of leg covered him protectively. The warmth of Joe’s closeness drove out the chill. Joe sighed, his breath teasing Charlse’s ear. The soldier’s erection pressed against him.
“Joe,” he sighed, speaking the other man’s name in incantation, a powerful spell capable of warding off the darkest of evils. Charlse covered Joe’s hand with one of his. Joe opened his fingers. Charlse took the invitation and they laced together.
Joe settled his cheek on Charlse’s skull. No words were spoken. None were needed.
They stayed that way too briefly, until Cathy Buckley’s screams roused the survivors and, against the white magic spell of Joe, multiple sets of copper-colored lights appeared, glowing through the rain, in the night.
“I love you, Joe.”
“I let down my guard. I can’t—”
“I have enough love for both of us. Don’t give up.”
Silence.
Charlse turned. For a moment, he caught twin flashes of copper in the murky darkness before dawn, and his heart sank, too, threatening to steal the last of his hope down into the depths.
Not copper, silver. Joe had donned his sunglasses in preparation for facing one more uncertain morning.
*****
The survivors marched forward over cobblestones, along a pristine section of street. The courtyards leading into this stretch of the quaint brick coastal village had been the antithesis: piles of embers and ashes littered nearly every open space. Bodies stacked like cordwood burned, fouling the air with rot and a smell somehow worse, one akin to cinnamon.
Th
ey’d spotted the oily smoke on the horizon, assuming it was one more city set aflame.
“No, that’s controlled burning,” Joe said.
They passed the fires, strolled down the street until the sharp thunderclap of a gun’s report stopped them from advancing.
“Hold it right there.”
Joe lowered his rifle and held up his free hand. “We’re clean. Don’t do anything stupid,” he barked.
Men appeared, real living men in crisp black uniforms, with weapons and dark sunglasses shielding their sight. They approached Joe, who identified himself, his former unit, and declared there wasn’t a copper eye among the seventeen men, women, and children he and Sergeant Bequith had shepherded all the way from West Babylon.
“Good job, soldier,” said the man Charlse assumed was their leader. “You have to pass through screening and decontam, but there’s hot food and showers not one minute down the road from where you’re standing.”
“Hallelujah,” said Joe.
They continued to the next street corner, where the fishing village’s brick buildings broke, and the wharf rose to view. A trio of leviathans lolled on the icy blue water, far off the shore. Beyond the docks and the quarantine stations, the clean white tents and the armed soldiers standing guard beneath raised American flags, a flotilla of smaller craft connected the shore to the cruise ships. Even at the distance, numerous people could be seen on the upper decks, strolling about in the sunshine, all of them alive, living.
“We’ll be safe there,” said Charlse. “Thanks to you, Joe.”
Joe tipped a look at him and smiled. “Yeah.”
“Maybe you can surf.”
“Maybe. And I bet there’s coffee.”
As they passed the last of the small brick buildings, Joe reached into a flowerbox hanging askew beneath a window and plucked a purple blossom from the thatch of green. He reached for Charlse’s hand and hooked it possessively with two fingers wrapped in tape. The new world, Charlse thought, no longer seemed so lonely or hopeless a place.
