Savage

by Jade C. Jamison

  I had to say it. “And what if we don’t?”

  “Then we have the weapons.” He let that sink in as we continued our trek down the hill. “I haven’t yet seen any infected carrying a weapon.”

  I let the air out of my lungs. He was right. I hadn’t seen that either, nor had I heard of it. The infected seemed to not understand how to use tools or equipment. I thought back, recapturing in my head the image of the infected man stuck in his truck in front of my house. He hadn’t figured out how to open the door or start the truck back up again. It was as though all he could think about at that point was getting at me and Larry—and, for what purpose, I suspected I knew, after all the news reports I’d tried to avoid and all the stories my neighbor had managed to slip inside my psyche, even though I hadn’t wanted to know about them.

  “I guess you’re right,” I admitted.

  “Of course, I’m right.”

  That was the sort of thing I would have expected Larry to say, and as I got ready to retort and looked over at him, I saw a giant grin on his face. He was messing with me—having fun, something I’d forgotten how to do years earlier. I smiled then and even let out a little giggle. Then he laughed.

  And then I did something I hadn’t done in ages. I attempted my own joke. “And your head is getting pretty big.”

  His smile turned up higher on one corner and he kept walking. “Nothing new.”

  On the rest of the walk down the hill, past Larry’s truck, past the two sets of barbed wire fences and through all the soft snow, I looked at Kevin off and on.

  He was still as gorgeous as ever.

  I admired, through sideways glances, his hair. It was longer than the men I worked with, because they kept their hair short for the office, but it wasn’t long either. It touched his neck, just like it had back in high school. That facial hair, though. That made him look fully a man, a man I was beginning to desire deep in my belly, even deeper in my loins. He had that goatee that must have been neatly trimmed at one time, but the beard hair was filling in everywhere now as the days passed by. I could tell by looking that it was past the pokey phase, long enough to still be wiry like beard hair but soft.

  Nice to kiss because it wouldn’t leave a woman’s chin red, burned from being scratched.

  His hair was long enough to grab in a fist.

  Oh, yes, my mind was going places it hadn’t been in a very long time. It was thinking thoughts it hadn’t explored in eons.

  It was making parts of my body tense up in ways they hadn’t in ages.

  I hadn’t seen him without clothes either, but he appeared to be in good shape.

  Oh, God, why was I tormenting myself this way?

  I could see the road wasn’t far away then, and I forced myself to think about what we had to do. Thinking about Kevin in that way was only making me miserable.

  I felt like a teenager again—the older version of myself, the one who discovered her likes and tastes once she went off to college—because I couldn’t shake those thoughts, even while I should have been thinking about what we were doing…and looking for danger behind every tree.

  We got to the main road and I followed Kevin’s lead as he turned to the right to head west as we’d told Larry we would.

  And, while we walked without talking, my brain ignited with images of Kevin grabbing me around the shoulders and taking me against a tree. Only that fantasy fell short as my sense of reality kicked in. It was way too cold up here to engage in any shenanigans. Even a kiss might lead to regret—wet lips would turn to freezing lips quickly. So my mind began imagining indoor locations, unfortunately mostly taking place in my Aunt Lou’s house, simply because that was where we’d been, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get my mind out of his pants.

  He was the only regret I had from my youth.

  I hoped he wouldn’t want to stop and talk…I didn’t want him looking in my eyes, because I knew they would give me away. I’d been told so many times over the years that my eyes were more expressive than most, and that was part of why I employed the actress inside off and on, because she could hide the pain and grief and distress. But when I couldn’t hide it, my eyes were mirrors into my heart and reflected anger, lust, joy, pain, disappointment…

  So I knew there would be no hiding how I felt, because I was letting my mind go wild.

  I took a deep breath, trying to pull my mind back to the here and now, and—as the grade changed and we had to begin climbing somewhat—I was finally able to do it. Just in time, too, because Kevin paused in the road to ask me a question. He pointed at the hill where another dirt road, not unlike the drive at my aunt’s, climbed and disappeared into the trees. “Think that’s the Bransons’ property up there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think there are any other homes up that way?”

  I could feel the eyebrows jump up on my forehead. “Not that we’d want to chance it.” He gave me a look, and I couldn’t tell if he agreed or wanted to debate. Before he could say something else, I pointed to the silver-toned metal mailbox next to the turnoff. “There’s only one mail receptacle, so I think it’s safe to guess that no one else lives up there.”

  He was musing, clenching his teeth, considering my words. “What if they have a post office box?”

  Oh. Damn him. He was right. I also knew of a few people who had summer homes in the other direction, closer to Chipeta Springs, and I didn’t think they had mailboxes either…but I wasn’t going to mention it. The chances of summer home people being there now in the dead of winter were slim. Still, I had to admit that he was right. “Yeah, I guess that’s a possibility. Do you want to head that way—where we know there were biters—just because someone might be there?”

  I could tell he was thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons. Finally, he said, “Well, let’s keep heading up the road. We can always come back here if we need to. It’s close by.” So we did. After a while—and seeing no roads that turned off—he said, “We’ll want to pay close attention to how long we’ve been gone and where the sun is. The days are getting shorter.”

  I nodded. “At least we have roads to follow if it gets dark.”

  “True…but we wouldn’t have the advantage of sight if any infected were to show up.”

  “Yeah.” As we continued walking up the snow-covered roads, I once more noticed that there were no tire tracks. I could see older ones underneath the fresher powder, but no vehicles had traveled down it recently.

  We hiked up the road for over an hour before we found another drive. Like my aunt’s place and the Branson place, the road wound up the hill into the trees. I knew there were some homesteads farther up that were located on the other side nearer the creek, but I had no sense of real distance. If I gave it a lot of thought, I could see in my head how the road wound and where we’d see particular landmarks, but I had no sense of distance. I never had been good at it. I could remember walking down this road as a little girl with my aunt one time and swearing we’d walked a mile. She’d laughed and told me we weren’t even close.

  Not much had changed since I’d grown into an adult, except that I did have a slightly better internal measure, thanks to driving. I knew a mile on foot was a lot longer than I thought, every single time.

  Kevin stopped in front of that small windy road and said, “It’s getting late, so here’s my thought. Today, we just scout. See where the drives are and that should give us a good idea of how soon we’d have to leave in the morning to check them out. Sound okay?”

  I agreed readily. And, by the time we were ready to head back, we’d found several places on both sides of the road that we could check out. What I found discouraging was that I saw no vehicle tracks on those drives either. It was like everyone had disappeared.

  Maybe they had.

  Chapter Forty-one

  “Scream Aim Fire” – Bullet for My Valentine

  AH, THE BEST laid plans. We forgot that Mother Nature wouldn’t always have our backs. The next day we h
unkered down indoors close to the fire. There was no snow falling from the gray skies, but the wind was hard and biting, creating a bitter cold that nipped at our cheeks and noses when we fought against it. We didn’t even do our regular chores, having stood outside for a few moments to gauge what was the weather was doing.

  I had lost complete track of time and had no idea what day of the week it was. Without a Monday-through-Friday job as an anchor or those other things that kept me on track (the electric bill is due on the twentieth or so-and-so’s album comes out next Tuesday), my brain decided that knowing what exact day it was was less important than the other things it wanted to hold onto.

  Survival was one of those things, but my growing lust for Savage was another, possibly stronger, one. It was funny, because looking back, I would now classify the way I felt about Kevin when I was a youngster as an innocent, girlish puppy love (even if I had told myself I would have gladly sacrificed my virginity to him), but today there was nothing innocent about it. I wanted the man, and I wanted him in the filthiest, rawest, most animalistic ways possible.

  It didn’t help that I hadn’t had sex in years. Literally years. My husband hadn’t been able to walk for a number of his final days, and even sex had been out of the question. It had been one of those needs I’d buried because I was busy enough to not have to worry about it. I had other things I had to do.

  Now, though—here, away from distraction, free from all those things that made me think sex no longer mattered—my body and my mind told me it mattered very much.

  So it was hard being cooped up in that house. We found my aunt’s book collection, and we would all spend time reading, or we’d engage in playing a board or card games, but those distractions weren’t always enough to keep my mind from wandering. You’d think having to be in that situation—wondering if we’d have enough water to last until we could fetch more, tiring of the same four or five winter vegetables in a meal, bathing with a cloth in front of a wood stove, wearing the same clothes for days on end, lacking anything that could be considered luxury, worrying about our loved ones we knew nothing about, feeling boredom—my mind would have been on anything and everything other than primal lust…

  But it wasn’t.

  Maybe it was the boredom or the fear or the worry that created a need to escape. A need to release. And sex, in my distant past, had proven to be those things and more.

  But I didn’t see it happening with Savage. Not by a long shot.

  First, there was the question of his wife. Were they really separated or had he just been saying that? He hadn’t mentioned his family much since we’d arrived here. Granted, I hadn’t asked, but I wondered about them. If he and his wife were still in love and planned to work things out, there was no way I wanted to wedge myself in the middle, no matter what my inner beast desired.

  Second, I was pretty sure he wasn’t interested anyway. Yes, we’d warmed to each other, had accepted (even, I think, appreciated) one another as partners in this brutal civilization-turned-wilderness, but I had no misgivings about his emotions or thoughts toward me. I was pretty sure that if we managed to escape on this day or the next or even the following week that I’d become a distant memory.

  He would be able to forget me once again.

  In spite of all that…I couldn’t take my mind off him. I’d never seen him naked, never even seen him without a shirt, hadn’t even seen him wearing a pair of shorts back in the day, and yet my mind conjured up images of what he looked like underneath it all. My fantasies conveniently left out that we were removed from civilization, in a place that was cold and harsh and, therefore, not conducive to bouts of lovemaking. There was no lingerie, no background music, no mood lighting. And, in spite of the fact that I was now able to feel somewhat clean, I hadn’t had a refreshing shower that I could stand under until everything—absolutely everything—had been washed away.

  No, in the bitter here and now, my fantasies were simply that—something to pass the time, to keep my mind occupied and preoccupied…

  And to drive myself fucking crazy.

  Now that I was sleeping alone in that cold, dark bedroom every night, I considered something I hadn’t done in ages—masturbation. My fingers would remember what to do, and it could relieve a lot of the tension I was feeling, but by the time night came along, I felt exhausted, and by the time my body heat had warmed the bed, I was just shy of drifting off. Every evening was the same.

  So I allowed my mind to play, and I thought it was a healthy way of dealing with my emotions. Instead, it just made me feel wound up and taut. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was much like the pressure cooker my aunt was so fond of using…and the metaphor I often used in relation to the emotions I kept locked inside. My contents were under pressure and ready to blow, because—unlike that pot—I had no valve to let off steam.

  A couple of times, I’d wake up in my sleep and find my thighs clenching against each other, my pussy squeezing itself in an orgasm my mind had managed to induce, something that had happened off and on my whole life since puberty. It was pleasurable, yes, but tame compared to the real thing, and all it did was make me want it more.

  I would consider again taking care of myself, but it wouldn’t be the same thing as being filled up by a man, of skin pressing against skin, of touching him with my tongue, of tasting the sweat off his neck as he ground into me, bringing me to heights I hadn’t scaled in too long to remember.

  And the days drifted on.

  In the meantime, though, we continued trying to get home. I knew Kevin was mere fantasy, just as he’d turned out to be in my youth, but reality was my home, my children, my parents, my brother, even my job and people I considered friends. Those were the things I knew I needed to focus on, but, even while I did, I couldn’t get Savage out of my mind.

  It didn’t help that he was right there.

  I would have sworn until being there with him that growing older did no favors for anyone. I, being my own worst critic, had seen what the toll of decades had ravaged upon my face and body, and I knew my better days were behind me. They’d been wasted on an endless cycle of work, sleep, work, and sleep. It was as though I’d awakened one morning to find the scars and carvings of life, the payment existence demanded, etched upon my features.

  Most times, I hated the fucking mirror.

  Kevin, though…sure, he looked his age. He appeared older. But the years had enhanced the way he looked. Sure, I would have loved his hairline to be more youthful—a little lower on his forehead—but I had no complaints, and I doubt he did. His eyes were as sharp and alert as ever, as green as a chunk of jade with the sun beaming down on it; his hair, the same reddish-brown and still soft looking, making me want to run my fingers through it (I didn’t remind myself that we hadn’t washed our hair in a while). The skin around his eyes had lines, but they made him look more distinguished, more discerning, sharper somehow. The facial hair was probably what made him look even better than ever. He’d been so clean shaven in our youth, and so he’d had what I’d called a cute look about him back then, but now he looked masculine, mature, no nonsense. His visage now was a little bit bad boy with a lot of rugged thrown in.

  And, God help me, I couldn’t keep my mind off him to save my soul.

  A couple of days later, we were able to venture out again. It was still cold outside, but the wind had died down once more, and it was far more tolerable. After our morning chores and midday snack, our two teams headed out once again. Kevin and I this time planned to begin walking up private drives off the road to see if we could find someone who could help us get out of here, whether they could drive us to get gas to fill up Larry’s truck or if they would drive us to Winchester. We didn’t care; we only hoped that we could find someone compassionate enough to want to help us get home.

  I would make an appeal if need be. I had no issues with telling people about my kids and my maternal need to get back to them. Hell, I’d tell complete strangers my whole life story if that helped them d
ecide they wanted to assist us.

  We were walking up the main road when, out of the blue, Kevin said, “I think it’s almost Thanksgiving.”

  I let that sink in. It was yet another reminder of how my mind had lost track of time. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah…or maybe it was yesterday or today.”

  “You think?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  We walked in silence for a while until my thoughts compelled me to talk. “Thanksgiving is probably my favorite holiday—good food and family.” I said that, but I couldn’t remember the last Thanksgiving that hadn’t felt off. The year before hadn’t been too long after my husband’s death, and even though I’d spent it with extended family (or, perhaps, because I had), it had felt empty and foreign, and the sympathetic looks towards me and my kids from well-meaning relatives didn’t help. The year before, my husband had been ailing. The year before that, I’d been working one of my part-time jobs on that day. Paid time-and-a-half, but I was away from those I loved.

  “Yeah…if you like turkey.”

  I laughed. “Oh, my God, I hate turkey. I don’t get the appeal.”

  “Me, either.” That was nice. Something in common we could pretend to commiserate over. “And the way my mother-in-law always cooked it didn’t do it any favors. Dry and tasteless. I’d dump half a shaker of salt on it to make it edible. I tried gravy once, but her gravy was even worse than the turkey. What she did was a crime. I’d wind up drinking way too much beer watching the bowl games with my ex’s family.”

  Aha. That was the first time I’d heard him refer to her as his ex-wife instead of his present-day spouse. Don’t think for a second that my core didn’t tighten a little as I took note of that fact.

  “It’s all in the way you cook it.”

  He tilted his head toward me and glanced for a moment but continued looking forward in the way we’d grown accustomed to. We continually swept the landscape for threats and had gotten so good at it, we didn’t think much about it anymore. “Yeah? Would your cooking make me a turkey fan?”