by Emma Castle
Shit…he wanted her. That wasn’t good.
“Just let me go,” she said again.
“No can do.” He bent to pick up the can of beans and slipped it into the pack on his shoulders. Caroline almost made a run for it, but he was too close and would easily grab her before she got far.
“I’ll give you my bag,” she offered, hating that she would do just that if it saved her life. She had gotten far too used to starting over. Losing everything she had the moment she started to get ahead.
The man sighed. “I don’t want your bag.” He held out his hand to her again. “Now, come on. Let’s go someplace safe to talk.”
Caroline knew her chances were better if he never saw the attack coming. She placed her hand in his. The flare of heat between that single connection rocked her to her core. She hadn’t touched another person in so long, she was surprised by the warmth she felt. For a moment she imagined that this wasn’t the end of the world and she was just walking hand-in-hand with a sexy man.
I cannot be feeling anything. It’s just shock from touching another person after so long.
He led her toward the front of the store. She walked along beside him, still holding his hand. When they were within feet of the exit she lunged, stabbing him in the shoulder with the glass shard. The glass cut her hand, but she pushed harder. He grunted and released her as he tried to pull the glass out of his shoulder.
She sprinted around him, running for freedom, but with a panicked cry she twisted her right ankle, coming down on it hard as she collided with a shelf. The structure wobbled, and she looked up in terror as the metal shelves teetered and fell right on top of her. She blacked out and crumpled to the floor in sheer agony as the metal hit her body. A moment later, she was conscious again. She breathed in heavy pants as she tried to claw her way out from under the shelves, focused on the only thing that mattered—escape.
Metal creaked and groaned as it came off her body, and she dragged herself free of it. Then the metal crashed back down, and the bearded man stood there, breathing hard as he watched her. She closed her eyes, praying death would be swift if that was her fate now.
A pair of hands slid under her body, lifting her up effortlessly. She cried out in fear, clawing at the man as he held her against his chest.
“Easy, beautiful, easy,” That gentle rumbling voice of his made her restless panic ease, but only for a fraction of a second. The pain in her ankle was so great she could barely think. She closed her eyes, breathing in and out, her hands fisted in his thick sweater.
Stay alive. That was all that mattered. Whatever he wanted to do to her, he wouldn’t do it here and not right now. She could fight him off and escape as soon as her body stopped hurting.
He stepped through the doorway and carried her into the street, bold and unafraid. She’d run from car to car to get here, hiding like a mouse. But he strode out like a god of war. For now, she belonged to him. That seemed to be the way this dead new world was going to work. Ten thousand years of civilization was gone in less than four months. Whatever rules humans made now would be hard and cruel. Caroline shivered as that burning hope for mankind shrank even more.
Even with his wounded shoulder, the man carried her half a block as though she weighed nothing at all. Then he stopped in front of a black Ford SUV. He shifted her in his arms as he opened the back door and settled her into a passenger seat. Fresh pain shot through her ankle, and she lay uncomfortably on top of her backpack, like a turtle flipped onto its shell.
“Please… Don’t…” She whimpered as she saw him digging around in his own backpack. She couldn’t escape; she couldn’t fight him off.
He pulled out a syringe with a mean-looking needle and ripped the cap off.
“No!” She kicked at him, but he anticipated the blow. Her foot barely made contact.
“Stop it. I’m not going to hurt you.” He grabbed both of her legs with one hand and pinned her down. Caroline screamed in pain. The man hissed and pulled up her sweater, jabbing the needle into her side just above her hip.
She moaned and thrashed. Her leg hurt so badly that she had no strength left. She rolled onto her stomach, trying to drag herself through the vehicle, her fingers scraping over the nice leather. Whatever he’d given her was moving through her veins, dulling her senses, numbing her all over. Tears leaked out of her eyes as she struggled and fought. Strains of the last address on the radio by the final president of the United States came back to her.
“We shall not go quietly into the night. Stand together, stand strong…”
And just like the radio, the lights around Caroline went dark.
Chapter 2
@CDC: Hydra-1 update: There have been many rumors and speculation about the disease. It is believed to have originated in a wet market where live and dead animals were sold out in the open with no sanitary control. We have traced its origins to a wet market in Guangzhou where horseshoe bats were caged too closely to palm civet cats. Much like the way SARS developed, Hydra-1 jumped species and is moving to humans. The CDC is analyzing samples to begin developing a vaccine.
—Centers for Disease Control Twitter Feed
November 13, 2019
* * *
Lincoln tossed the empty needle to the ground and stared at the unconscious young woman in the back seat of his car.
Somehow he had fucked up, bad. She’d been terrified. He knew better than to approach a civilian like that. She was frightened out of her mind. He should have followed her and waited until morning to approach her. Sneaking up on her like that had been cruel. She didn’t know that he wasn’t like the other monsters out there, the men who would have raped and killed her. She was attractive—he wasn’t going to lie to himself about that—but he wasn’t a rapist.
It was just…well, he couldn’t let her go on her own. He’d been following her discreetly for a day now, trying to assess her. She had developed some survival instincts, but she clearly wasn’t military. It was a miracle she’d made it this long without someone watching her back. The fact was she needed protection. She was young, probably in her early twenties. So whether she liked it or not, he was going to look out for her. It had been two weeks since Adam died, and he hadn’t seen another living person in all that time, though he’d found plenty of evidence of the kind of people who might still be roaming the cities. He’d seen smoke from fires, heard gunshots. Enough to know that the people still out there were dangerous. In all his years as a soldier, he’d seen hellscapes before. Men roving in gangs, killing and raping. People turning on each other for a scrap of food to survive. And that had been in war-torn areas, just small pockets of chaos. But now the entire world was in chaos.
Lincoln closed his eyes for a brief second, his breath slowing as he remembered seeing this girl for the first time yesterday and how it had been like seeing the sun after months of clouds.
He’d been sleeping in one of the military vehicles parked in the woods close to the underground bunker. He heard her footsteps as she passed him on the road. He’d sat up just enough to catch a glimpse of her. He’d lied to her about only having seen her from behind. He’d gotten a damned good look at her through his long-range binoculars as she’d turned around to scan the road. But he hadn’t really believed what he’d seen. She had long, coffee-brown hair that glowed beneath the afternoon sun, and her eyes, a rich hazel green, made him feel strangely homesick for a home he’d left a long time ago. She was a tiny woman of only five foot four, and when he had taken one look at her curves, something inside him demanded he pursue her. Pursue and protect and maybe one day…
He shook himself. Two weeks out of the bunker and he was already thinking like a barbarian. He wouldn’t allow that. The country he’d defended might not exist, but he could still defend its ideals. Still, he couldn’t help but dream, imagining a connection forming between them, and maybe one day he would get lucky enough to know exactly how she felt in his arms when her eyes were bright with passion and her lips were hungry for pleasure.
But that wasn’t in his control. The only thing in his control right now was protecting her. Two people together had a better chance of survival than one alone.
Lincoln walked around to the driver’s side and climbed in. He had plenty of gas for now. He was one of the few survivors still using vehicles. Quite a few of the stations still had gas, but only older stations off the beaten path still had pumps he could start without paying. But he was also pretty good at siphoning gas. Special forces training had come in handy during the end of the world.
As he drove down the road to the house he’d been using as a base of operations for the last week, he noticed the twilight slash across the sky as a deeper purple bled into it and the moon rose even higher. He stared at the endless neighborhoods of eastern Nebraska, stunned at how empty it all seemed without people.
Life after us… Is it really life?
Since he’d left the bunker two weeks ago, he had been lost. Not literally, but figuratively. There were no more missions. His best friend and former commander—the last president of the United States—was dead. There were no terrorist cells to track down, no hostages to rescue, no tyrannical governments to topple. It was all over. Everything he’d done in the last decade of his life had become meaningless on the whim of some microbial virus. For as long as he could remember, he’d been a kid with a plan and then a man with a mission. Now it was just about surviving.
But surviving for what? What was the point of all this? For a man who didn’t like dwelling on philosophy, he’d become far too comfortable with existential thoughts these last few months.
Lincoln could still taste the bitterness when he thought back to that first night after he left the bunker, how he’d sat by a small campfire deep in the woods and watched the firelight play upon the barrel of his gun. It had felt heavy, a solid weight that was almost comforting. The bullet in the chamber promised an end to his worries.
He’d nearly put the gun to his temple, his hand had even lifted an inch or two off his lap, but something had stopped him. Some damn internal instinct to survive. He’d seen a flash of the old lake cabin his parents used to take him to during the summer when he’d been a kid. The quiet still water, the blue sky above and the wooded hills reflected on the perfect mirror surface of the lake. Then there had been a flash, just an instant of light in his head and a whisper…one word…hope.
The vision had been so clear, so powerful that he’d dropped the gun back to the ground, his heart pounding wildly as he gasped for breath. He couldn’t go through with it now even if he wanted to because every time he thought about it, he heard that word in his head again. Hope. But how could he have any hope left? It hadn’t been possible.
Until he had seen her.
He would have to figure out what her real name was. She probably wouldn’t like being called beautiful. She probably already thought he was some crazy, insane creep who just wanted to use her and kill her. But he’d show her he wasn’t like that. They were in this together now, and he had a strong desire to believe in her, if he couldn’t believe in anything else right now.
Lincoln pulled into a neighborhood of expensive houses and drove down a series of streets. It seemed that looters didn’t like driving through a maze of complex neighborhoods and hit the easier targets in town. It was safer to embed himself deep into a neighborhood instead of choosing a house close to a city street.
He parked the car and killed the lights. He left the woman in the car while he unloaded a month’s worth of supplies.
On his last trip he had found a decent haul of medical supplies, food, and camping gear. After he put away all the supplies, he returned for the woman. She was still unconscious. Good. He’d given her a powerful cocktail of painkillers. She would probably hate him when she woke up in a few hours, but she needed pain relief for that ankle and for any pain she had from when the grocery shelf had collapsed on her.
He carried her inside the house and up the stairs to one of the bedrooms. His room. Not because he was going to do anything he shouldn’t. He simply needed to keep an eye on her while she slept. She was a fighter, and no matter how badly she was hurt, she would try to escape, and he couldn’t have her getting hurt again. So the closer she was to him the better. Unluckily for her, he was a light sleeper by nature and by training.
Lincoln set her down on the bed and turned on one of the camping lanterns. Bright light blossomed through the room, creating an eerie sense of daylight tinged with shadows on the edges. He moved one lamp closer so he could examine her leg. Carefully, he pushed her jeans up to her mid-calf. If she’d been awake, she would’ve been in agony. Her ankle was already swelling. He’d seen this type of injury before. A man in his unit, Jenkins, had been forced to jump out of a second-story window to escape enemy fire. He landed badly and popped his ankle out of place and popped it back in a second later when he righted himself. Their medic had later told him it would have been less painful to simply break the bone.
Pressing gently around the woman’s ankle, Lincoln felt no evidence of a fracture. But until he could get the swelling down, he couldn’t be sure if there was a break or not. Christ, he wished he had a bag of frozen peas to lay on her ankle. He would have given anything for that. The best he could do was a cold towel. He’d broken into a sporting goods store last week and found a set of exercise towels that turned cold when drenched in water to a chemical reaction. He’d seen the genius of it and grabbed three of them.
Lincoln went into the master bathroom and to the sink, where he soaked one of the blue towels. Although the power was out in this area, the water was still running. He’d have to set out some barrels to catch rain soon just in case the water stopped running. Then he returned to the bed and removed her boot and sock before he wound the towel around her ankle. Then he slipped her backpack off, which was lying lopsided beneath her. After a quick check for weapons inside, and finding none, he set it on the floor near her. Then he peeled off her coat and covered her with several thick blankets. March in Nebraska was not usually warm, the temperature would fall to fifty-five degrees inside the house tonight.
Lincoln checked her palm next, the one she’d cut when she’d stabbed him in the shoulder. It was a shallow cut, but he didn’t want her to get an infection. He retrieved some antiseptic cloths from his first aid kit and thoroughly cleaned the wound before he used a wound sealer like superglue to bind the cut together, and then he wrapped it securely with some bandages. As long as she was careful, she wouldn’t need stitches. He’d have to track down some antibiotics in a day or two to battle any potential infections.
Once he was certain he left her in as comfortable a position as possible, he grabbed one of the lanterns and headed back into the bathroom. He set the lantern on the counter and tried not to grimace when he caught sight of his face in the mirror. He hadn’t shaved in at least three months. He looked like a fucking bear. No wonder she’d screamed when she saw him.
He winced as he removed his sweater and turned his back on the mirror. He glanced over his shoulder. The piece of glass she’d stabbed him with had fallen out during their struggle. It hadn’t been deep, but blood dripped down his chest and was drying in dark black streaks. He cursed, grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and dabbed some over the wound. He let loose a string of curses his mother would have smacked him for, but he muttered through gritted teeth so he didn’t wake the woman in the bedroom. He worked quickly, cleaning the wound with antiseptic wipes and covering it with antibiotic cream. At least it wouldn’t need stitches.
He pushed a single finger through the place in his sweater where his little beauty had stabbed him. Dried black blood had ruined the expensive fabric. It had been one of the last few military-issued pieces of clothing he’d taken with him, aside from his boots and shoulder holster. He pressed his palms on the counter for a moment, praying this all hadn’t been a huge fucking mistake. No, this was right—he needed to help her. She was a survivor like him, and she wasn’t one of those bastards he’d heard from a few nights ag
o who were firing shots off in the nearby woods. He’d steered clear of whoever that had been.
Lincoln brushed his teeth and drank a glass of scotch from a bottle he’d found in the basement. Then he lay down in the bed beside the woman and closed his eyes.
God, he needed to sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes, all he saw was Adam’s face before he pulled the trigger, and then the ruins, the bodies, the empty world left behind.
He didn’t want to think about the two graves he had dug in the frozen backyard that contained the two bodies he’d found in the car in the garage. The house’s owners had killed themselves rather than face the agony of dying from the inside out. He had cleared out the garage, carefully moved the people to the backyard, and buried them. Two simple wooden crosses marked their graves. He’d never been a religious man, but he’d looked up into the cold, wintry gray skies, listened to the sound of wind whistling down empty roads nearby, and whispered a prayer.
The home they’d left behind was a good one. Two main stories and a basement that opened up to a backyard that sloped down to a creek. It wasn’t a bad place to settle temporarily. He would have to move out eventually, but for now, he could make trips deeper into the city and still find decent supplies. He’d found his beauty, after all. She had been worth the risk. He didn’t have a clue what to do with her once she was healed, but he didn’t want to let her out of sight. It wasn’t safe out there.
Lincoln slept fitfully for a couple of hours, then headed downstairs to the kitchen and grabbed a few bottles of water. When he returned, he set them by the side of the bed closest to her. The meds he’d given her would dehydrate her. Then he lay back down. Waiting. Waiting for her to wake up, waiting to fall asleep…waiting for this nightmare to end.
