Reawakening (13 page)

Like eat each other.

Really, it was only natural that they’d progressed to this. And she knew in her heart that she should have been relieved. After they’d all dozed and/or pretended to be asleep, they’d eaten breakfast together. Jamie and Blake had still pal-ed around. Everybody could still look each other in the eye.

It hardly seemed worth mentioning that everywhere they’d touched her, they’d left an imprint like a burn. She could still feel Jamie’s mouth pressed into the skin of her throat—hell, she could still feel Blake’s
breath
pressed there.

They’d left a trail and the trail led down, down into the land of more, more.

She couldn’t stop touching all of those points—even though doing so made her look like a serial masturbator. Who needed that? What kind of person really wanted to see her touching her left breast all the time?

Apart from a person like Jamie, who’d lost just a little of his restraint somewhere along the way to mutual masturbation and now occasionally watched her with steady, heated eyes. And touched her in odd, intimate ways when she was least expecting it.

Though bizarrely, it
still
didn’t tweak her comfort zones. He did it all so amiably and they were both so casual about it all…what did it matter if Jamie pushed a hand under the thick mess of her hair, to suddenly grip the nape of her neck?

Like a massage. Like a light and totally casual massage. Like something that made her liquid, anyway.

And Blake…well. Blake was a little more reserved with it. A little more cautious. But she could feel the shift, anyway. He batted at her when she said something teasing, like—
is that a gray sweatshirt again, today, Blake? Don’t push the boat out too far, okay?

He even smiled—and that sure was something. Real, wolfish smiles, from Blake.

Plus the next day he wore an actual
blue
sweater. Which seemed like some kind of progress, all right. Especially when he looked at her with this sharp little spark in his eyes, and Jamie slapped the table, and she just thought—

I should have made a move on them, last night.

They’d been waiting for it. She knew they had. They hadn’t even slept facing away from her—Jamie had dozed off almost spooning her right side, for God’s sake. She just couldn’t fathom what had stopped her.

Maybe it was due to the easy way the last thing had happened? Just almost like a mistake, like something you did for a buddy when they were feeling low, like…she didn’t know.

And still couldn’t fucking say.

Though she’d made up her mind—tonight. Tonight was going to be the night when she had some kind of awkward conversation with them about it. About how it wasn’t like basketball and they couldn’t just fall into a game. They could do stuff and ask for stuff and that was cool. Right?

Absolutely. And after that, she was going to fuck both of their brains out.

She wasn’t sure if she’d ever thought of a more excellent plan than that one.

* * * *

Unfortunately, there was one pretty big and glaring problem with her excellent plan. And it came to her when Jamie said, too brightly and too cheerily—

“We’re gonna take a short trip out. To get some extra fuel for the winter.”

She kind of hated him for using the phrase “short trip out”. Like he was just popping down to Wal-Mart for some barbecue supplies. And she would have hated him harder if it hadn’t then occurred to her with some measure of embarrassment that she could get something too, while they were out.

In fact, it was a
necessity
that she get something. They were clearly planning on going without her but that didn’t matter. She needed this thing, and they could go fuck themselves. What did they think this was? The age of chivalry?

“Great. I’ll come with you.”

That stuck a bag of sand in their craws. She could see it immediately on their faces—a sudden shadow passing over. One that made her feel kind of bad, for thinking that age of chivalry thought. And kind of good, that they felt that way about her.

It made actual mortal terror happen when they considered her coming with them and possibly getting torn limb from limb. But that was okay because just thinking about them both flying away in the helicopter to meet their certain doom made her unable to breathe briefly.

Jamie went to say something, but she never found out what. It got stuck in his mouth or his throat or someplace else that she liked to call “my empty heart cavity”.

“I think what Jamie’s trying to say is,” Blake started, and she kind of really loved him, for that. “We need someone to stay here. And that’s…that’s not ‘cause you’re a woman. It’s just…simple math.”

“Yeah. Math,” Jamie echoed. He seemed excited, suddenly, as though Blake had introduced the most gripping concept of all time.

“I mean, there are two of us. And only one of you. If we lose one of us, there’s still…help me out here, buddy. I think I’ve started talking in a different language.”

“Nah, it’s coming through clear enough,” Jamie said, then turned to her. She didn’t think him turning signaled that something good was on its way. “If you die, there’s no more of you. If one of us dies, there’s a spare.”

Yep. Definitely not something good.

“Don’t talk like that. Neither of you are a spare.” The words snapped out of her, good and strong. And they stayed that way through the even harder part of this speech. “If another woman came along, is that what I’d be? The spare?”

Though immediately after she’d spoken, it became clear that neither of them had considered that way of looking at the whole thing. No. They’d been thinking of it in a different way altogether, apparently.

And she knew they had because they both laughed. As though she’d said something crazy.

“Not like that, like—” Blake started, then Jamie finished it. Or at least, he tried to.

“No no no, June-y…come on. You don’t love us, so it don’t matter. Whereas we—”

He stopped mid-speech, as though suddenly sensible of the only possible end to that sentence. And the only possible end meant…well it meant…

It meant that
there’s no more of you
took on a different slant, altogether. He wasn’t using the word
you
in the woman way. As in “there’s only one woman”. He was using it in the
you’re special
sort of way. In the
I love you
sort of way.

She thought of Blake saying
you’re amazing
three hundred times, and went a bit dizzy. Then tried to say something back—just anything at all, really—and wound up taking a lot of little weird breaths, instead.

What if she said it back and Jamie didn’t mean that? It had only been a few months, after all. Also—what if she said it back then they went off into Zombie World and never returned?

“I’m coming with you, no arguing. And if you try to, or you try flying off in that helicopter without me, I’ll swim across that damned lake after you. Got it?”

They didn’t argue once water excursions had been mentioned. And they argued even less when they revealed their attitude to zombie safety, and she found she had a lot to say about it.

For a start, neither of them seemed to think it necessary to wear neck or wrist guards. They didn’t even have any in their entire extensive armory! She searched through it and came up with gas masks, face protectors of various kinds, HAZMAT suits.

But no goddamned wrist or neck guards—to the point where Blake actually asked her what she was doing at the kitchen table, cutting up belts and poking new holes through the leather.

She had to explain. Actually explain.

“Act like you’re going to swing at me,” she said, which sounded like a good, solid, practical thing to say, despite the awesome nerves that were currently threading through her system at the thought of Blake being this clueless.

“You want me to…pretend to punch you?”

He was growing a bit of sarcasm, steadily. Day by day. She couldn’t fault him for it—it was comforting. Like the real him, coming back.

“Yeah—just in slow-mo. Swing your arm.”

She stood and he was good enough to follow. But he hesitated on the fake punch.

“What is this going to prove?”

“You’ll see.”

Then he didn’t hesitate. And at the very least, he didn’t throw a bad one. He didn’t actually swing, but cut straight out in a way that suggested he could go in quick and hard, if he wanted to. Which was good, very good—but not quite good enough.

As his fist moved at a snail’s pace toward her face, she grabbed his wrist whip-quick and brought it to her mouth. Bit down hard. Not hard enough to draw blood, of course. Just hard enough to make him jerk all over and yank his arm away, shocked.

“The first place they go for are the things you get in their way. You punch out at them, slap at them, try and shove them away—they will grab your arm and bite your fucking hand off.”

She picked up a piece of one of his old belts.

“Leather is tough. It stops them.”

He hugged his wrist to his chest, all fake hurt. That was cute, too.

“Okay, okay—you don’t have to be so vicious. Jeez, June,” he said, but he was laughing as he did so. Plus he followed it with a look at the longer strips she’d cut.

“So we’re all going to go out looking like we disco at an S&M club?”

Now it was her turn to be thrown. Had he just said S&M? Yeah, he’d said S&M. And now that she thought about it, it was kind of weird. All of them going out into the world with collars and bracelets on.

She wished, for a second, that she’d not lost her bag on the way to the building with Jamie. Her bag had contained spare studded things—stuff her and Kelsey had found in Hot Topic, that last bastion of protective gear for the zombie stressed.

Though she couldn’t quite say how wearing something studded from Hot Topic was better than going with cut up bits of belt.

“You okay, June? You’ve kind of gone into your head a little, there.”

That
brought her back. How often did she do just that, and have them wonder if she was sinking into some abyss of herself, never to return? Probably a lot, if she was honest.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just…”

“Hey look—we’ve gone out before. We know what we’re doing, believe me. I mean—you’ve probably had a lot of hand to hand confrontations…” He paused and swallowed a little too thickly. It made her wonder if he was imagining it. Her, being attacked, bodily. No gun, no blade, no nothing. Hell—it had happened. No sense saying it hadn’t. “…with them. But we never intend on getting that close. We’re ready if we have to. But we’re solid enough with snipers, with handguns…we’ve got the heavy artillery.”

“So did the army. So did the cops.”

She watched him fold his lips in. It was a tense, considering sort of gesture.

“They simply weren’t prepared for what happened,” he said, finally.

“And you were?”

It just popped out. She couldn’t stop it. She thought again of Jamie being so prepared, and this place, and what someone would do if they’d suspected this clusterfuck was going to come down on the human race.

This—all of this—was exactly what she would have done. And she knew it.

His gaze flicked up to her and his eyes looked suddenly pale, in the wintry light of the kitchen. That was what was wrong with Blake’s eyes—sometimes they looked electric blue. Other times they seemed drained of all color. Of everything.

“No. No. Not…back then.”

She waited, holding her breath. It felt as though she’d been holding her breath for this ever since she walked in the door. Here it was—how he survived the zombie apocalypse. The harrowing tale of survival and despair. How Mrs. Henderson had attacked and killed his little sister then turned on him.

Or was that her? She couldn’t quite recall. She didn’t want to recall, ever.

“I was just lucky then. My car broke down out in the empty flats. I slept in an abandoned gas station. One of them came to the door and just banged and banged and then after too long a time of eating pretzels for breakfast and trying to pee off a roof, Jamie found me.”

There were so many things that came to mind to say then. Did you have family? Did you wonder what happened to them? Did you ever try to find them? Do you still wake up, sometimes, calling for your sister? Did Kelsey take her place, and now you call for her, too?

Because that’s what I do.

But instead, she found herself asking something deathly practical, as always. No time for lost sisters. No time to ask what Jamie was doing at the time of finding him.

He’d said
empty
flats. He’d said only
one
of them ever tried to attack him.

“What are the empty flats?”

* * * *

It occurred to her as they lifted off that she’d only ever been in a helicopter when she couldn’t possibly appreciate it. Though the last time should have been a time of great appreciation and just hadn’t been because her brain had fallen out of her head and she’d spent the whole journey blubbering over Kelsey.