Reawakening (7 page)

She woke with her face pressed into a pillow that wasn’t hers. Right into it, as though she’d been…oh Lord. As though she’d been
making out with Jamie’s pillow in her sleep
.

Before she even became sensible that none of it had actually happened—that it was just a dream, of course it was a dream, it had fucking mailboxes and tents and heart-shaped couches in it, for God’s sake—her cheeks flushed a brilliant, embarrassment red. Couldn’t be helped. She’d woken up snogging Jamie’s pillow. Naturally, humiliation followed.

She was only thankful they weren’t around. The bed was empty apart from her and her weird and stupid dreams about doing sex things with them. Not even just doing sex things! First her stupid brain had had to invent a pretext for sex to take place, a ridiculous ploy like “zombies are attacking, we’re going to die”.

Only her brain had needed more than that, apparently. What had he said again? That he needed to check her for bites, or something? God.
God
. She flushed again just thinking about it. It wasn’t even a comfort, knowing that at least her mind was progressing away from the dreams where she was just running and running. Where they caught her, sometimes, or maybe they caught Blake or Jamie and they
did
end up turned.

No, no. How could it be a comfort when instead she had to deal with
this?
Jamie kissing her. Blake with his hand in her underwear. Was that really what she wanted? She didn’t know, but suspected these thoughts had been hovering on the periphery of her imagination since the actual run, with Blake. Since she’d gotten changed into tighter clothing, and thought about the real truth.

That maybe they just didn’t want her.

Only now her contrary body wanted them, apparently. Great.

She heaved herself out of the warm cocoon of the bed, reluctantly. Or maybe not so reluctantly, because now the bed threatened two things. Unconsciousness—in which she could be surprised by zombies—and weird sex dreams. Weird sex dreams that made her liquid between her legs in a way that meant she didn’t really want to go downstairs.

Would they be able to read it on her face? She checked herself in the bathroom mirror and found her reflection normal, presentable. But maybe there’d be something they could spot with all their consideration about her well-being and such. Maybe they’d want to know why she was slightly flushed. Maybe they’d see how hard her nipples were, even through the extra sweatshirt she put on.

Maybe they had x-ray eyes that would laser right through to her over-heated sex.

She pushed the idea away before it took root—because taking root might mean she gave in to her one instinct, which was to masturbate.
Just masturbate, and clear out all of those strange feelings! Nobody will ever know, and then you’ll probably go back to never being horny again because of all the blood and the biting and the death, death, death.

It sounded like an excellent plan. Except for all the places where it wasn’t. After all—what if they heard her? How loud was the shower, anyway? Not that loud. And sex would undoubtedly break out of her mouth like a nuclear explosion after two years without anything at all.

But even worse than that…even worse than that was the suspicion that…well. What if she did masturbate, and got it out of her system, then sex really did refuse to come back? That this was it—her one chance at ever being horny again.

She couldn’t deny it. There was definitely something compelling about arousal, after all this time. Her skin buzzed with a new kind of electricity. Everything seemed alert in a different way to the alertness zombies required. Her mind kept flicking over Blake and Jamie’s attributes but not in the same fashion as it had before.

Before, she’d counted them in terms of their apocalypse usefulness. Blake truly had found it a little difficult to keep up with her in the forest, but only because he wasn’t great at dodging obstacles. On open ground, he could motor. He was also strong, very strong, and cautious.

Whereas Jamie was obviously, incredibly reckless. Willing to charge into battle at a moment’s notice. But he was also fierce. She could see that in everything he did—that fierceness. Scrappiness, she thought, but then there was his skill with certain survival things, things she’d never even considered before meeting him. He knew how to operate a range of vehicles. He knew things about electricity, generators and solar paneling. Other stuff, too—plumbing and weaponry and even to this day she suspected he’d been some sort of military personnel before this happened—though he never wanted to talk about anything so serious.

He wanted to talk about everything but his past life, while her brain constantly threw up ideas like—he was a pilot. A pilot who went crazy—but not because of the apocalypse. It had happened prior to this mess, she was sure. Something had happened to him and now he was this person. Reckless. Wild.

Willing to scare the life out of her with sudden swells of inexplicable noise. She stopped dead in her tracks, unable to process for a second. The sound bellowed out from the kitchen, so loud and alien she couldn’t grasp it. She could grasp things like screams, growling, warning shouts. Other noises were not permitted during the apocalypse and, even if they had been, she still hadn’t heard anything like this in an age.

Two years
, she thought.
Two years without music
.

Because that was what it was. He’d turned on some music in the kitchen, loud and raucous and completely foreign. It jolted something inside her, like that thing. That thing that always told her how much was missing from this brave new world. All the stuff she’d lost or couldn’t have, because if you turned on some music or listened to an iPod playing the latest Beyonce tune, you couldn’t hear them coming.

She’d had to forgo music the moment Mrs. Henderson burst in the door and tried to eat her. The moment the news had said—
God help us all
. The moment she couldn’t sleep, not ever, not even when Kelsey was on watch.

But there was music here. Oh yes, there was music here. What was there to hear coming? Even with the bad part of her dream still lingering she knew rationally that they were, in fact, on an island. She’d flown over the water to it. She’d seen its edges.

And though her dream self had tried to tell her otherwise, she’d also seen Jamie’s defense strategies. Blake had shown her, during their run—the trip wires. The cameras. The alarms. The compression things he’d put in the ground that told you louder than any sound heard over music that something was coming.

Mines, too, Blake had said. He’d shown her the pattern for them—where not to step, close to the water’s edge. Jamie had the place locked down like a military compound, which only made the urge to ask him about it stronger. She’d almost asked Blake, there, by the water. Still breathless from the run, head all mixed up with thoughts of explosive charges in the ground.

But really, she knew the answer. Jamie was military. Jamie had been a pilot. Jamie was playing a song by Miley Cyrus in the kitchen.

Of all people—Miley Cyrus! She recognized the song immediately, even though little cutesy Miley had probably been dead for two years. Even though her songs—and everyone else’s songs—were now obsolete, really. A relic of a time before.

In which people had stupid things like hoedowns and cared about stuff like whether they should move to the country or be a popstar. In truth, she wasn’t even sure how she remembered any of these things. If she recalled correctly, she’d been a fan of Tori Amos, and even ole’ Tori was starting to fade in her consciousness.

Still, the sound—loud and tumbling and crazy—pulled at her. What did it matter who was singing? It sounded old and familiar and good. Startling in its ability to wake up some long dead thing inside her in much the same way the…dream had.

She moved toward it without thinking, relishing that
clacking
sound Miley’s tongue had apparently made years and years ago into a microphone that no longer existed. The zombies sometimes made a similar noise—a clacking—but it wasn’t the same.

Miley sounded human. Her voice came out, good and strong and human. It made her stand in the doorway to the kitchen, hovering between a smile and something else. Something like the realization that no one would ever record their voice again like this and send their song out into the world. The world wasn’t listening. There wasn’t anybody left to sing, even if the world had been.

Though Jamie made a good hash of dancing.

Of course he did! He’d made her think stupid nostalgic thoughts about
Miley
Cyrus
of all people, and now here he was, dancing to a song of hers. Sometimes she doubted it was PTSD that had made him crazy.

Sometimes she wondered just how much bad acid he’d chewed on during his youth. Though really it wouldn’t have been acid, would it? He was too young for acid. Thirty-five, if he was a day. What had people got hooked on in the late eighties? Cocaine? Meth?

She almost flat-out asked him—did you ever have a bad meth habit?—just before he turned, tossed the bottle in his hand from one hand to the other, used the newly free one to flip a pancake sizzling in the pan, and somehow managed to pull out a chair for her in the middle of it all.

While dancing.

Something inside her doubted it had been a meth habit. Maybe an addiction to Speed, instead.

“You want breakfast, June-bug?”

The music was still thrumming through her. He didn’t stop dancing, even when pouring out more batter from the bottle. Every time the beat hit he clapped or slapped his thigh or just anything, really, that suggested he still understood music in a way she absolutely didn’t.

She wasn’t even sure if she remembered what rhythm was.

“Or you wanna dance?”

Of course
he said a thing like that, right after all of her realizations that she’d forgotten how to dance. Or keep a beat. Or that him doing both looked bizarre and glittering, like a jewel she’d found at the bottom of a pile of dead bodies.

He cocked a look over his shoulder and that alone—his wild grin, the hint of teasing in his eyes, just like in her dream—made her palms wet and something bad prickle the length of her spine. No, no, she couldn’t dance. She wasn’t even sure if her legs still moved in that way. Usually they knew only one thing—forward, forward, forward. RUN.

“Oh no, I—”

Was he creeping closer? It felt like it.

“I think you wanna dance.”

Oh dear Lord why were her cheeks heating, again? As though he’d asked her something else, like—
I think you wanna fuck.

To which the only answer was
yes. Yes I do. I don’t remember that dance any better than this one, but that’s okay. I think you’re going to help me figure it out. It’s just like riding a bicycle, right?

Not that Jamie was about to give her the chance to fathom it out. Instead, he just grabbed a hold of her when she was least expecting it, right in the middle of thoughts of bikes and fucking and who knew what else. And even worse, it didn’t feel
bad
to be grabbed, exactly. Shocking, yes. Thrilling, certainly.

But not bad—or at least, not in the way it had been before. Now it was just bad because she’d had a sex dream about him and he had a hand on her waist and a hand in her hand, as though they’d decided to take part in some 18
^th
Century barn dance.

He even operated her that way, dipping her down on the horizontal then back up again in a way that should have made her stomach lurch but somehow didn’t. The whirling didn’t even make her stomach lurch, bizarrely, though there was plenty of the jolting movement.

He whirled her around the broad oak kitchen table, then when he got bored of that—or maybe just realized that she wasn’t going to puke, start screaming, or go rigid with fear—he whirled her around the living room, too.

He was a good dancer. Better than good. Somehow he dragged her into good, too, even though her feet felt like tripping, sticking clods of mud next to his light as air ones. He also knew just how to swing her around to avoid various perilous pieces of furniture, and when he skirted her past a particularly vicious standard lamp she couldn’t help it.

A laugh popped out.

It almost made him jerk to a stop—maybe because she felt surprise go through him, too. Maybe because her entire body thrilled to hear the sound. Part of her wanted to hate it—that weird, giddy, frivolous thing—but most of her couldn’t. It had been too long. It came out too bright and human and natural instead of the forced thing Kelsey had sometimes sprouted, when she’d said something sarcastic or mordant.

There was nothing sarcastic or mordant about this. And it came again when he spun her around so quickly she had to clasp at him, tightly—as though she was afraid, only not. Not.

The room whizzed by and everything became colors, and she could smell that cinnamon-y scent of him—only like pancakes, too, delicious pancakes—and for just a second she thought he might…do something. His hand was on her waist. His face was in her hair. If he moved even the slightest bit he could have—

When the door banged, she pushed away from him without even thinking about it. Not even a second’s worth of consideration or the slightest understanding of why he had to be away from her, after whole enormous minutes of unfettered dancing.

He just did. Because the front door had banged. And Blake had come in, with his electric eyes that sometimes seemed so empty and drained, and his only occasionally vulnerable mouth.