by Stasia Black
She’d enjoyed herself tonight. There was no denying that. Nothing compared to a good fuck. And she’d had three of them—four, if she counted the mutual oral she and Henry had given each other. She’d lost count of the amount of orgasms she’d had, actually.
It was far and beyond the best sexual experience of her life. Not that the bar was set very high… but still.
It had been wonderful.
And far more intimate than she’d expected.
Which, in the moment, had only added fuel to the fire. But now? She blinked in the cool room, the candlelight casting dancing shadows on the walls.
Charlie stirred on the bed, muttering something and moving his arm like he was searching for her.
And a big part of her wanted to snuggle back up to him and let him curl that arm back around her.
Too big a part.
Which was the last straw.
It was official.
She needed a goddamned breather.
How could everything be going according to plan and yet at the same time feel like it was running completely off the rails?
Careful to shift the mattress as little as possible, Shay crawled to the foot of the bed and then over the footboard. She eased one foot onto the hardwood, squeezing her eyes shut and wincing as the floorboard creaked.
She glanced around but other than Jonas shifting ever so slightly on the couch, no one moved. She let out the breath she’d been holding and tiptoed over to the closet to grab her robe off the hook. She wrapped it around herself, grabbed the oil lamp and a couple matches from the top of the dresser, and then headed for the hallway.
She shut the bedroom door behind her and gave herself a small moment to enjoy the sense of freedom at finally being alone. She hadn’t been alone since she’d gone to Charlie’s cell to free him. God, that felt like a million years ago but in reality, it had only been a little more than twenty-four hours.
Funny, at the Travisville compound, she’d always resented having to sleep alone in the broom closet rather than being able to bunk in the family dorms. What she wouldn’t do for a little of that solitude now.
It was just… after months and months of waiting, years even, here it all was, actually happening. And it felt like time had become an adrenaline junkie, burning through minutes like they were seconds.
Shay shook her head and headed downstairs to the kitchen. She hadn’t been able to eat much at dinner before the wedding. Nerves got to her in spite of herself.
Still, she’d seen one especially juicy orange in the fruit basket on the counter at dinner. She walked downstairs, still enjoying the quiet of the house. That was another thing she hadn’t had in, well, she couldn’t remember when. At Travisville’s central compound where she’d lived—what used to be the college—there was activity at all hours of the night and day.
There was the brothel and the casino that Colonel Travis liked to pretend were much classier than they actually were. God forbid anyone tell Colonel Travis though. He had dreams of Travisville becoming a premiere destination city in the New Republic, second only to the capitol, Fort Worth.
Even if he did manage it, though, Colonel Travis was so ambitious, he wouldn’t be happy with second place for long before—
“Mama?”
Shay almost jumped out of her skin at the small voice.
“Dad said you’re my new mama.”
“What are you doing in here?” She spun on her heel and stepped back as soon as she saw Gabriel’s youngest son, Alex. He couldn’t be more than eight, if that.
“Dad said we could come back inside. It was so dark and there were noises.” He looked down, his round moon-face tilting toward the floor. “Tim was too scared to stay out there.”
Mm hmm. Tim was scared. She bet.
Shay almost smiled in spite of herself.
“Will you tell me a story? Tim says our old mama used to hold us in the rocking chair and tell us stories when we couldn’t sleep.”
His huge puppy dog brown eyes were so open and guileless as he gazed up at her.
The rush of emotions struck so hard and fast, Shay could barely manage a few words, “I’m sorry. Not tonight,” before turning and fleeing back up the stairs.
She couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on his sweet little face. As soon as she got upstairs, she hurried to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face from the bucket on the counter.
And then she looked at herself in the mirror. It wasn’t her reflection she was seeing, though.
No, it was the memories from eight years ago playing out on an unending loop—starting back when the most stressful thing in her life was worrying about uneven tan lines and trying to stay awake in her morning Statistics class.
At least until the day she missed her period. Her eyes dropped shut as she remembered.
She was usually regular. Like clockwork. Still, when she’d run to the drugstore and bought the pregnancy test, she hadn’t really thought there was any actual chance. She and her boyfriend, Andrew, used condoms. Well, most of the time. There had been that one night they’d been drunk and… but no, she couldn’t be pregnant.
She was singing a different tune twenty minutes later in her dorm bathroom when the little pink plus sign came up in the window on the plastic stick. She thought it meant her life was over.
She couldn’t help laughing bitterly now. God, she’d had no clue.
It was the one thing her mom always warned her against. “You better never show up on my doorstep teenage and pregnant. I’m not doing it again. I already lived through it once when I had you. You can bet your ass I’m not doing it again,” she repeated.
Mother of the year, her mom was not.
The timing couldn’t have been worse, either. Xterminate had just hit the states, with cases showing up in Texas a couple weeks before.
But back then, everyone was still in denial, though. The casualty figures had to be wrong. There was no way it could really be killing that many women. Like, maybe in Africa and underdeveloped parts of East Asia, sure.
But America? America had the CDC. They had DARPA and the CIA and a ton of other agencies with impressive acronyms that would save the day if push came to shove.
As soon as she saw the result of the seven pregnancy tests she’d taken—all positive—she rode her bike over to Andrew’s apartment.
Only to find him packing. He was rich, she’d always known that. His dad was loaded because he was some Dallas oil bigwig.
Andrew barely looked her way when she showed up and tried to tell him about the baby.
“Look, Shay,” he cut her off right before she was about to tell him. “I’ve been meaning to say this for a while but I just didn’t know how to break it to you.”
He threw a pile of undershirts in a suitcase. “This just isn’t working for me anymore.” Then he finally paused to look her way. “It was fun while it lasted and you’re a great girl. But I gotta go. My dad’s waiting outside.” Then he turned back to his luggage, zipping it shut.
For a second, Shay could only gape at him like an oxygen-starved fish. But then she got her wits about her and ran after him, grabbing his arm and spinning him around. “I’m pregnant, Andrew.”
He froze, eyes about popping out of his skull. Then he scraped his hands through his hair. “Shit,” he swore. “Look,” he dragged his hands down his face, not looking Shay in the eye. “Jesus, I can’t deal with all this.”
And then the coward little fucker scurried out of the room to his dad’s car. He drove off without a single glance back.
What was she supposed to do? Where was she supposed to live? Thankfully she’d prepaid at the beginning of the semester so she still had a couple months in the dorm to figure it out. She remembered being so stressed out about it.
But then Xterminate really hit hard in their area. According to the way the scientists said the virus worked, it had probably been in the state for months and people had just been asymptomatic.
But when it went liv
e, so to speak, it was… God, her stomach still curdled thinking about those days. The college town had sixty-thousand people, forty thousand of which were students.
A few weeks in, the quad looked like the scene of a massacre. The National Guard couldn’t keep up with aid and supplies, and the body-burying brigades were quickly overwhelmed.
She’d been fighting morning sickness, fighting to get food for herself, and all-around fighting to survive. She didn’t like leaving the dorm because people had gone crazy.
There weren’t any monsters like in zombie apocalypse movies. No, it was the men who were the monsters.
But shutting herself away in her room, just waiting around to see if she’d get the telltale boils that meant she was infected made her want to scream.
So she decided to put her paltry nursing skills into practice. You couldn’t even get through on the 911 line anymore—there were simply too many people making the very same calls.
So Shay and a couple other girls who didn’t have symptoms sectioned off floors of the dorm as quarantine areas. She became the de facto leader, she wasn’t even sure how. Maybe because she just never stopped working, she so desperately needed to keep busy?
Anyway, she organized them to separate out the healthy girls from the sick ones. There were about four dozen or so healthy girls still in the dorm of six hundred. So they set up a rotation of ‘nurses’ to attend to the sick and dying, even if all they could offer was the most rudimentary of care and comfort. And another crew to get rid of the bodies.
Those were gruesome, terrible days.
Endless, thankless hours caring for and cleaning up after girls going through the most horrific stages of the disease. To this day, Shay remembered the smell of the death rooms. No matter how long she showered and scrubbed herself at the end of the day, she never felt clean. She could never get it off her.
When the bombs hit a few months later, she barely had the capacity to feel horror anymore. There were girls to be attended to. So she turned off the radio describing the aftermath of the bombs and went back to emptying bedpans, changing poultices, and feeding ice chips to patients before falling exhausted into bed. She was asleep when the EMP bursts took out everything else.
All electronics were gone, just like that.
She woke up to darkness and a situation even more dire, though the day before she wouldn’t have thought that was possible.
Two weeks later they were running low on everything—food, the most basic medicine and first aid supplies, and more importantly, water. As soon as they got news of the bombs, a few enterprising girls had filled as many bathtubs, buckets, and any other plastic container they could full of water. But they were quickly working through that supply and the taps did nothing but stutter when you turned them on.
To make matters worse, a mob of men had gathered around the bottom of the dormitory once they realized there was a group of healthy women inside.
Shay and the others knew there’d be no way to block the doors and windows to keep them out for long, so instead they’d worked to cut off access to the upper floors. Back when they’d had electricity, a girl had rigged a bump key for the elevator so they could use it for the manual override stop switch. They’d stopped it on the third floor to block the shaft.
Then they got as much furniture as they could and threw it down the two stairwells to create impassible blockades. As much as they were running out of, furniture was one thing they had in abundance. They filled the stairs up two stories high with chairs and bed frames and mattresses and end tables and any and everything they could throw down them.
And their defenses had held.
But for how long? They were basically living under siege conditions. Sooner or later, the food would run out. The water was an even more pressing matter.
Shay ran herself ragged trying to keep morale up but the situation grew more hopeless every hour. Several healthy women committed suicide by going up to the roof and jumping the five stories to the brick quad below.
Their only hope was for the National Guard to reach their town in time. Shay, never a person given to prayer, got on her knees every night and sometimes throughout the day.
The morning that they heard the noise of a plane circling overhead and then ran to the windows to watch the military cargo plane descending, they rejoiced. Their prayers had been answered!
The tanks came next and Shay had never known such immense relief in all her life.
The Army was there.
Everything would be okay.
She cried even though she was dehydrated from the water rationing. She didn’t have to be strong anymore. She could sleep. Her hand went to her belly. She knew if she didn’t start getting some regular sleep and nutrition, the baby would be in danger.
But they were safe now.
Later that afternoon, the Army men towed a fire truck over to the dorm and used the extended ladder to send an emissary up to them. He said their Colonel would like to speak with whoever was in charge.
All the girls unanimously nominated Shay. She’d managed a short nap but still felt like little better than death warmed over as she stepped out the window. She was terrified of heights, which seemed ridiculous after the ordeal of the past few months. But the soldier was kind and helped steady her. He was patient and talked her through it all the way down the ladder.
He assured her their first priority would be clearing a path up to the other women and Shay was glad, because she wasn’t sure she could ever make that ladder trip again.
He beckoned her over to a car and she paused when she saw the purring engine. “How—?” she started to ask, but the soldier just smiled. “Army’s got EMP-proof bases all over the US. Don’t you worry your pretty little head. We’ll get this country back up and running in no time.”
Shay nodded as she stepped up into the passenger side.
The ride was a short one. Just over to the Administration building. Apparently the Colonel had set up his command base in the old dean’s office.
Shay smiled as she walked up the steps, seeing soldiers in green fatigues standing sentry all along the streets. It was the first time in weeks she hadn’t seen mobs roving everywhere. It looked like law and order was finally returning.
Her escort led her into the dean’s office. She’d never been there before. It was an old, ornate building with ruby-red carpets and dark wood paneling.
The soldier knocked on the door marked DEAN and a voice called, “Come.”
When the door opened, Shay was surprised at the man seated behind the large desk, shuffling through papers. He was much younger than she’d expected, for one. He didn’t look a day over thirty-five, if even that. And he was handsome. She felt stupid for even noticing a thing like that during such a crisis, but she did anyway.
He continued glancing through the papers on his desk for several more moments before finally looking up and acknowledging her presence.
“Well hello there,” he said with a smooth voice. “I understand you’re to thank for stepping up and providing much needed leadership during this terrible time.” He stood up and came around the desk. He was very tall, his chest broad.
He held out his hand.
“I’m honored to meet you. My name’s Travis. Colonel Arnold Jason Travis. But I know that’s a handful, so you can call me Jason.”
Chapter 12
SHAY
Shay and Charlie had been in Jacob’s Well for almost three weeks and they were settling in… well, as much as they could.
Shay was having an easier time of it than Charlie, she thought. She spent her days working on her found object art sculptures. A term which baffled Charlie the more he watched her work the first week after they got to town.
“I don’t understand. I thought you said you were making a sculpture,” he said after hanging around and watching her bore tiny holes in several large chunks of black plastic she’d recovered and sanded down to the shapes she wanted. She usually worked at the kitchen table or on the cov
ered deck out in the back yard in the mornings when it was still cool.
They were outside that day. There was a fresh breeze, the grass was green, and it was so tranquil, Shay kept getting distracted from what she was supposed to be doing.
Charlie looked absolutely baffled as he watched her thread the pieces of plastic together with fishing line to create a three-dimensional shape.
“But you aren’t even using clay.”
Shay laughed at that. “Sculptures don’t have to be made out of clay.”
“Okay, well I know some sculptures are made out of marble or granite—”
“No,” she laughed again, tying off the fishing line, tugging at it with her teeth to make sure the knot was tight. “You’re thinking about sculptures too literally. Or like antique sculptures like they used to make in the nineteenth and twentieth century.”
Charlie looked at her skeptically.
She rolled her eyes. “Sculptures can still be made out of those materials, but trust me, this is also a sculpture.”
After a whole week of him just standing around and watching her, she told him to go find a job.
He’d seemed surprised at the suggestion. “But what if something happens and I’m not here to protect you?”
“Like what?” she’d thrown her hands up. “Have you looked around? You saw the Security Squadron Command Center. They’ve got this place on lockdown.”
“One of Audrey’s husbands always stays with her.”
That had her raising her eyebrows. “Since when do you want to emulate Audrey’s husbands? Never thought I’d see the day. You and Nix made nice yet?”
He just glowered, not answering her.
That was when she put down the pieces of her sculpture-in-progress and walked over to him. She took his hands.
“Charlie.”
He squeezed her hands back and immediately met her gaze. He was always doing that. It took her breath away each time. He was so open. So trusting.
He’d shaved his beard and it made his already expressive features even more so. He was handsome and kind and—
“What?” he asked when she didn’t say anything for a long moment.
