LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series (59 page)

“I don’t know,” Greg shrugs. “Devon doesn’t want us taking most of the stores. He wants to divide everything evenly and then for us to only take what we can carry. He says that there’s no sense in letting us take the lion’s share of the food and supplies. He’s got a point. We can scavenge and gather things along the way, they’re stuck here.”

“But what if we can’t?” I throw at him. “It’s been a year since all of the world went to shit and over a year people have been wandering around, gathering and scavenging what they can from the ruins. There might not be anything left for us out there.”

“That’s something that we’ll have to take up with him tomorrow,” Greg tells me. “Whatever we do, we need to figure it out in the morning. I think the longer we stick around, the more fodder we’re going to be giving Devon to keep most of the supplies. Noah said that he was going to tell Lexi tonight that he’s coming with us, but I’m not sure that’s going to go over very well. I know that Lexi isn’t going to want Henry, so God help him. I swear that he doesn’t know how to talk to your sister.”

“I don’t think anyone does,” I smile softly.

When my eyes close, I picture the world as it once was. A verdant, living expanse that stretches across the globe, confined only by the cerulean waters sloshing at the shore. I remember going up into the mountains with my father, making my way along the wooded trails and grassy meadows hidden back in the mountains. I remember the deep blue of the Great Lakes and the way the birds would hide in the foliage and the leaves, chirping and singing to us. I remember snow and how it would fall and make the entire world look like the music video to Christmas songs. My father was there with me, in a meadow lined with flowers, dotted with butterflies that glide from flower to flower, flapping their soft wings as they went on their way.

He stands there with me, holding my hand as we walk. I’m a child again and everything is so wild and mysterious to me. I don’t know why I’m so scared. It’s beautiful here, serene and peaceful. As we walk, I look over to my father who is focusing on the path ahead of us. Beneath our feet, the rocks and dirt crunch and grind with each step. As I look at him, I realize that I’m not holding his hand anymore. In fact, when I look at him, his hand is missing entirely. I want to scream, but that’s when I notice the leaf falling between us.

It’s brown and yellow, sickly to look at and I follow the leaf’s trail back up to the vast, sprawling canopy. As I look up, more leaves drift down to the floor of the forest, twirling and gliding, wafting back and forth as they descend. They’re all pale yellow with dark brown spots speckled all across them, like they’ve turned leprous. Soon, the entire canopy is wilting before my eyes, losing all of their leaves. The bark begins to fall off of the branches of the trees, plummeting to the ground with loud crashes as the bark shatters into rotten shards. Like great, oozing sores, the decaying white flesh of the tree is naked before my eyes, quickly turning gray and hardening as the leaves swirl around us in a whirlwind of death.

“Keep moving,” my father calls back to me. I look over to him and see that he’s left back on the trail. He’s no longer clean-shaven like I remember him when I was a child, and I’m no longer a child. The grass on the banks of the trail has shriveled up into brittle tufts of golden blades that snap in the soft breeze. The ferns and bushes are all dead. The trees look like enormous frozen tentacles sticking up from the ground. When the first tree falls, it crashes to the ground with a loud boom that makes me jump in surprise, screaming at the sound.

“Keep moving,” my father patiently calls back to me.

I look up at him and see that he’s bleeding through his shirt as he’s walking. I can hear footsteps in the woods, people shuffling along, groaning and wheezing in the shadows. The verdant world has washed away into a dismal gray that surrounds me everywhere. The sky is a slate of shifting hues and nothing more. I run to catch up with my father, but with every step I take, my lungs burn with the smell of smoke and when I realize that it’s snowing, I stop and hold out my hand. As the snowflakes land on the palm of my hand, they don’t melt. Taking my finger, I poke the little white snowflake and it smears across my palm. Ash. As I look up to my dad, embers and ash drifts between us. Behind him, the forest is burning and I hear an explosion in the distance, gunfire cracks through the sky.

My father drops to his knees, the wound in his stomach growing as he reaches up with his one good hand to feel the wound. His entire abdomen is a bloody circle on his shirt and as he takes his hand away, he stares at his crimson palm and fingers. As he looks up at me with those warm, caring eyes, I know that he’s dying. “Keep moving,” he says to me, clear as a bell.

When he falls over, my eyes open.

The room is cold and I’m sweating. The darkness of the room is comforting, reminding me that it was all a dream. Well, most of it was. The fact that my father is dead and the world has withered away was essentially true. I blink, running my hand over my eyes, trying to wipe away the bad feeling the dream has tattooed me with. It was true. There was more truth in it than there were fantasies. The world has become one enormous nightmare.

Rolling over, I look at Greg and wonder how I got so lucky that he’s here with me. I remember when word got out that students were being advised to head home to their families. The number of students coming to class dwindled to nothing. But getting home became the problem. As the quarantine zones grew larger and larger, driving home was no longer an option. Air traffic was becoming too much and the prices kept skyrocketing, even though no one had money to pay for anything. Greg came from Washington and there was nothing he could do to get home. I remember when he told his mom that he wasn’t going to be able to make it back. She said that they’d find a way to get the money to him, but it was all a pipe dream. There was no way of getting money to him. I remember him looking at the only picture he had framed of his mother, the understanding painted clearly on his face that he’d never see her again.

The last he heard of his mom was that the refugee camp in Olympia rose up and violence swarmed the city. It was one of the first West Coast cities to fall victim to the refugee camps and the growing violence. He tried getting ahold of her, but all the lines to Olympia were dead and cellphone coverage had been suspended. When the casualties were listed online, we all looked in horror when we saw that his mom had died in the uprising. His entire block had fallen victim to someone who had rigged up a propane truck. Before they could get it to the capital building, it exploded near his house. She died in the blast.

When Greg found out that his mom was dead, he didn’t say much. We all still tried to convince ourselves to get up and go to class. Some of the professors were still sticking around for moral support rather than to teach class, trying to maintain the façade of normalcy. I went with him to several of his classes. I think they said that sixty percent of the student body remained on campus, but less than twenty percent actually showed up to classes. Dormitories and student houses were great ways to keep large quantities of people in check without locking them into a compound or refugee camp. I still don’t think he has ever taken a moment to actually process it.

In my own way, I had been mourning the moment I heard that his mom had died. I’d met her several times, even had Christmas with them that last year. She was a good person and when she died, I assumed that my own father was dead. Ann Arbor was a war zone and people on the radio and news were talking about how U of M’s campus exploded into riots and violence. I assumed my father was gone in that moment and I cried for days. Lexi always held onto hope, but while Greg was struggling, I was struggling too.

I look at his handsome features in the darkness. Gently, I reach out and kiss him on the tip of his nose, checking to see if he’s awake. He doesn’t stir as my soft lips touch his. I’m okay with that. I put a hand on his chest and kiss his forehead. He slowly begins to stir with every kiss and touch I offer him. When his eyes open, I can see the dreamy fog slowly start to clear away with every blink, like the windshield wipers on a muddy car. I look into his eyes and kiss him, his body stirring, comprehending what’s happening. As I kiss him, his hands come to me, finding me under the sheets as I draw closer to him, taking another kiss from him, stealing more and more love and attention. As he finally begins to awaken, I feel his grip on my waist tightening, feeling stronger.

With a strong whip of his arm, the sheets fly off of us and I can feel the cold evening air all around me. It grabs me and embraces me, freezing me as I’ve been hurled from my warm little nest. I look at him as he climbs on top of me, peering down on me like some sort of lion readying to feast. I look at him, more than willing to have him. If there’s one thing that the end of the world doesn’t have enough of, it’s sex. Everyone right now is having sex as much as they can, but the pull out method makes everyone nervous, uncomfortable. No one wants to bring a child into this.

Leaning down, he kisses me with such tenderness and desire that I feel like my heart might explode. I love my man. I just want him to be happy, even if that is a tall order these days. As he pulls my tank top off and ravages my chest, licking my nipples and squeezing my breasts, I feel his warm cock in his pants, stroking it and encouraging it to become harder and harder. As he takes me, I try to remain as quiet and muffled as I can, but it’s so hard not to give in to ecstasy. I look up at him, letting out my breathy sighs as we make love, wishing that we might have a different future than the one that’s been given to us. I would have loved to marry him and have children with him in some small town where he could commute to some nearby lab and I’d work at the local veterinarian. That life was stolen from us, but at least we still have each other. At least there’s still a future there for us. It’s not much, but it’ll work for me.

As I draw closer to climaxing, the euphoria is too much and I begin to arch my back, letting out a loud moan that I know we’ll get crap about tomorrow. He clamps down on my breasts as he pumps harder and harder, refusing to give me a chance to recover; as I moan, he throws back his head and lets out a grunt. Twisting my head and running my arms up to twist my fingers into the bed sheets so I have something to grab onto, I open my eyes for a second and see an eye staring straight back at me.

I’m not looking at Greg. I’m staring the wall where Tony put a bullet through it months ago while I bounce back and forth. It’s the size of a child’s fist, but I can see the eye in the pale moonlight, the catch of the glimmer in it that is unmistakable. I look at it and I feel sick. I feel naked and violated as it stares at me, ravenously taking in my naked breasts, my body being thoroughly pleasured, and everything in between. I can picture a shadowy figure jerking off to the sight of me having my orgasm. The eye blinks and I let out a scream, pushing Greg off of me and pointing at the wall. The eye blinks again and vanishes, leaving only a dark hole in the wall, a gaping mouth of shadows.

“What? What the hell, Val?” Greg asks, picking himself up from the floor. I grab the blanket and pull it up over my naked body, pointing at the wall.

“Someone was watching us,” I tell him, hissing at him angrily. I don’t know why he’s just sitting on the floor and not running over to the storage room to see who it was. Tired of waiting, I grab my discarded tank top and underwear, quickly dressing and shoving past Greg who is standing naked, staring at the hole as if he might somehow spawn X-ray vision and see whoever it was from where he’s standing. “Get out of the way.” I shove past him toward the door, throwing it open.

Stepping out into the softly illuminated hallway, thankful that somehow Marko and Devon have kept at least some of the lights working with a handful of solar panels on the roof, I look down both directions; there’s no one. I can hear movement all around the house, people stirring thanks to my scream. I shouldn’t have done that.

If I hadn’t screamed, I might be able to pinpoint where this peeping pervert went. But thanks to my big fat mouth, I have no idea where anyone is, just noise. I storm down the hallway and look at the open door to the storage closet. I look on the wall and see no proof of whoever it was’s masturbation session. I step back in disappointment as faithful Greg, two steps behind me, rushes into the room and looks at it.

“There’s no one here, Val,” Greg says to me as he shrugs his shoulders at the abandoned room. I look at him and resist the urge to punch him in his big fat head. I want to scream and ask him what the hell he means by that, but I remain calm. I feel violated by everything that just happened. Greg doesn’t seem to care.

“Are you serious?” I glare at him, jabbing a finger at the hole in the wall. “There was someone in here, probably jerking off to me and you.”

“At least it was a good show,” Greg shrugs.

“Fuck you, Greg,” I snap at him.

“Sorry,” Greg grins like a jackass at me before composing himself and trying to look like he’s dignified and not a complete frat boy tool. “Sorry,” he re-emphasizes. “What did his face look like? Do you know who it was?”

“If I knew who it was, I wouldn’t have come over here,” I snap at him. I’m completely baffled by his ignorance right now and I want to just smack him upside the face. Walking past him, I step out into the hallway, wondering who would be sick enough to jerk off to me like that. I can only think of the small list of suspects. There’s Noah, who is currently being locked into an unhappy relationship with my sister that probably isn’t getting him much in the way of action. There’s Marko, who has been sleeping with Katrina for months, but they try to keep that silent. They just insist that they’re taking things slowly on account of the end of the world and all. Devon has been suspected of sleeping with Skye for months now, but he denies it at every turn and Skye isn’t saying a thing about it if it is happening. As for Henry, his room is on the far side of the building and isn’t the most spry and hasty person in the world. Plus, he’s about as clumsy and stupid as they come. He wouldn’t shoot my father and then jerk off to me when I go to sleep with my boyfriend. Henry is a jackass, but I don’t see him doing that.

“What’s going on?” Marko asks me with a bathrobe on, rounding the corner, looking like an old Mexican professor. “You alright, Val?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine,” Greg steps out of the room. “She thought she saw something, but everything’s cool. Don’t worry. Just a nightmare.”

I look at Greg silently and see that he’s trying to cover for me for some strange reason. I look at him, baffled and pissed that he would dare try to do something like that. That’s when I realize that he’s trying to protect me. He’s trying to keep me from making a fool of myself in front of everyone. I look at him and keep my mouth shut. He does have my best interests in mind and I feel like such a tool. Sparking a witch hunt in the middle of the night, on the eve of most of us trying to leave, won’t help anyone. I nod and look at the floor.