TWENTY-TWO
Two is Better Than One
I pulled Romeo aside that night and told him about my request. His cheeks turned red, but he promised to look for me. One thing checked off my to-do list, now for guard duty. I was at the front station, which was a crow’s nest located near the access bridge. It was high enough that you could see to the other side of the inlet during the day. At night, we had a high powered light that we could turn on if needed. But mostly we used a pair of night vision goggles that Zach had.
I was there for about an hour when I heard someone shout that they were coming up. It wasn’t time for me to be relieved, so my brain started churning about what possibilities could have occurred to have someone come and get me.
When Blake popped his head through the trap door at the bottom, I was partly excited and wary at the same time.
“I just came to talk.” He raised his hands in an ‘I come in peace’ gesture when he saw the look of wary apprehension on my face.
“I want to apologize for leaving, for coming back expecting something…just everything. I was stupid. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, I forgive you. It’s good that you’re back, Blake, that you’re alive. We need you.” I tried to smile, but it might have come out more as a grimace. I might have said it, but I don’t know if I was really okay with him leaving.
“I just want to know one thing.” I knew what was coming next and I dreaded giving an answer. Should I lie and cut things off or should I tell him the truth and maybe make things worse?
“When I left, you said you loved me.” He continued.
I nodded.
“Did you mean that or was that just to get me to stay?”
“I meant it,” I whispered.
“Do you still love me?”
Torn. Torn. Torn. What do I say?
“Yes.”
His shoulders slumped at my response and he smiled, but it quickly faded when he saw the look I was giving him.
“I love Zach too, Blake. You have to understand that.”
“How can you love both of us?”
“It’s really easy. You two are both wonderful. It’s easier to ask, how could I not?”
“Is there any hope that maybe…” His question trailed off, but I could tell that he already knew the answer, so I just shook my head and shrugged.
“Blake, just–” He leaned over and kissed me. It wasn’t an apathetic kiss of departure. It was a full-on passionate Blake kiss. I kissed him back too and I guiltily enjoyed it. If he hadn’t pulled away, if he would have pushed for more, I didn’t know if I would have told him to stop. We could have easily made love on the floor of this guard tower, damning the consequences. But he was way more responsible than I was and he pulled back.
He turned and left and a part of me broke apart inside. How was I going to explain this to Zach?
TWENTY-THREE
Supplies Where Are You?
When Romeo and Kirk returned from the supply run, I was disappointed. There was hardly anything in the back of the truck and there weren’t any birth control pills.
“The entire pharmacy was gutted. There is someone else supplying up in this area,” Romeo said with calm certainty.
“We’ll have to go even further next time.” Zach’s face was grim as he laid out the map.
“Why don’t we go bigger? Don’t they have that chain distribution warehouse right over the Mississippi border in the Pearlington area?” I pointed to an area on the map. “And if not, we can check the area around it.”
“That’s about an hour Pre-Z from here, so I would estimate it would take us about three to get there. We would probably have to find shelter out there for the night,” Romeo countered.
“Worst case, we can sleep in the vehicles. Bring the truck and an SUV, the usual four man team. It is doable, dangerous, but the payoff could be amazing,” Zach added.
“Who’s up for the run this time?” Romeo asked.
I grabbed the list from the desk. “Me, Zach, Kirk and Duke.”
“Duke’s out for this one. He sprained his ankle coming off the guard tower this morning.”
Zach shook his head trying not to laugh.
“I’ll go,” Blake volunteered. “I’m not in the rotation because these were made before I got here.”
“I think I want to make this a five man team too, because we are going so far. If you don’t mind, I want to go,” Romeo suggested.
“Yeah, that would work. While the two man teams are grabbing supplies, someone can stay with the vehicles just in case,” said Zach.
“We’ll head out at dawn. Meet here in the morning,” Zach said to the group. “Romeo, let Kirk in on the plan.”
Everyone nodded and started packing up any of their belongings. I held back waiting for Zach who was still looking at the map.
“I hope this works out. This could be a waste of a lot of fuel for nothing.”
“It will.” I kissed him. “Come on, let’s go home. If we have to be up at the ass crack of dawn that means we can only have sex twice…and only quickies.”
“Oh, only twice?” He chuckled.
“Okay, maybe three times, if you’re lucky.”
“Angel, from the day I met you, luck has been on my side.”
“You know I love you, right?” I got up on tiptoe and kissed him lightly on the mouth.
“That’s the best thing I’ve heard all day.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Captain Tight Ass
When Zach said first light, he meant it. I yawned my way into the lead SUV with Blake driving and Zach sitting shotgun. Kirk and Romeo were in the supply truck behind us. Since I didn’t have anything inparticular to do at the moment and Zach and I had gone that promised three times, I laid down on the big back seat and went promptly to sleep.
“She’s amazing.” Raised male voices woke me out of my happy dream about ice cream.
“You don’t think I know that?”
“Then why did you leave, man? Shit, if you were in love with her, you would have brought her with you.”
“I thought I was probably gonna end up dead. I didn’t want that to happen to her. She was safe at the compound and you know why I left., I had no choice.”
I held really, really still…this was good.
“You did have a choice. Why did you really go, man?”
“Fucking Clara.”
“She’s a bitch. She was a controlling bitch when you married her. She’s still trying to control you now and y’all aren’t together. Even during a fucking zombie apocalypse she had to control you. Got your ass to go all the way to Texas to save her.”
“But I knew she couldn’t save herself., I couldn’t let her die. She was in Houston because of me. She was pregnant. tI had to go.”
“You had been split for months, according to you. Was the baby even yours? Hadn’t she been in Houston for a while? You’re blaming yourself for something that has nothing to do with you,” Zach whispered obviously trying not to wake me.
“She wanted me to expand the firm there. She thought there would be more potential in Houston, big oil, that sort of thing. She had everything worked out, wanted us to move to Houston. You would run the New Orleans branch, I would run the Houston branch. She even had a fucking house picked out and our office space. When I told her no, she threw a fit and went there anyway. She expected me to follow, but I served her with divorce papers. I broke down once, a couple of weeks before it hit. We fucked. She said I knocked her up. She was playing that shit before this even went down, called and said she was late on her period. When she radioed, she told me she was definitely pregnant.”
“Fuck, and she lost it on the road back here? That’s gotta be tough, man, but you know that shit still ain’t your fault. She chose to go there. You didn’t have to run the moment she called.”
“She had lost it by the time I got there. She was all screwed up about it.”
“So you get there to save the day and the reason you ran your ass a state away, risked life and limb, and it wasn’t even a factor. She could have been playing you,” Zach scoffed. “You’re a dumbass, that bitch has been playing you since high school.”
“I’m a sucker for a damsel in distress and Clara knows how to play that card well. I’m such an idiot.”
“Blake the hero, the white knight.”
“Shut the fuck up.”
“Captain Tight Ass saves the day.” I couldn’t help but giggle.
“Morning, Lex,” Zach drawled. “Had fun listening in?”
“Didn’t hear a thing,” I yawned. “except for that last part. Who’s Captain Tight Ass?”
“You’re a terrible liar, Lex,” Blake laughed.
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
I sat up and stretched.
The radio buzzed and Kirk who was on forward patrol radioed, “we have a pack about one or two hundred deep coming straight for us.”
Zach and Blake quieted down and slowed the SUV to a halt.
“What are we going to do?” I asked anxiously.
They were on the road that we needed to get through.
“All we need to do is get them off the road, create some kind of distraction. Did you run into anything like this, Blake?”
“Yeah, but with the two lane highway we could usually go around. The one time that we couldn’t was when I lost the Humvee.”
“You’re useless, my friend,” Zach laughed, and it was good to hear him joking with Blake again.
“You think we can get them under the bridge? Isn’t that the Pearl River bridge up there? It’s a steep incline down to the river. They wouldn’t be able to get back up,” I suggested.
“You’re right, Lex. All right. I think if you stand on the banks of this side and cause a commotion, you can attract them before they cross the bridge. Get them going downhill on the opposite shore,” Blake suggested. “Zach, go with her, I’ll stay up here with Kirk and Romeo and we’ll take out any stragglers.”
So that is what we did. Zach and I stumbled down the bank of the river. It was a steep incline from the road to the river below and it would be hard for the zombies to make it back up. I went all the way to the bottom and found the perfect position. When we saw the first zombie crest the rise, I started yelling. Zach fired a shot off and I began banging two canteens together. Sure enough, the zombies got worked up into a frenzy, their shuffling bodies turning toward Zach and I. They stumbled and fell down the embankment and got right back up, only to fall more. As more zombies piled on top of each other, they kept the one underneath them down. They pulled and pushed and bit, but as more piled up on top, they just sort of slid until they were at the bottom of the embankment on the shore of the river, not going anywhere, at least not back up to the road.
After about fifteen minutes, we saw no other zombies crest the top and the Zs were starting to cross the river toward us. Most of them were being swept away in the current, but the river didn’t seem to be too deep so I was afraid a few would start to make it across. We didn’t wait to find out. We climbed our way out of the riverbed to the top of the bridge. Blake was just finishing up the last zombie. There were at least a dozen littering the floor of the bridge around them. Kirk, Romeo and Blake looked in good humor though. There was nothing like a round of zombie killing to lighten the mood.
“It worked,” Romeo yelled, a genuine smile plastered across his handsome mug. His face really transformed when he smiled. It wasn’t something I saw often.
“Fucking fantastic idea, Lex,” Blake looked over at me and grinned.
“There is a reason y’all keep me around.” I smiled.
“More than one.” Zach leaned over and kissed me on the neck, sending warm tingles down my body.
“Stop.” I swatted his hand away as he went to fondle my ass.
When I looked up, Blake’s eyes weren’t angry or jealous. Surprisingly, they just regarded us with interest and hunger. I knew what that look meant, but I didn’t want to go there.
###
After the bridge incident, it was just a few more miles until we were over the border and searching around for the distribution center. It was a very rural area and we were going by old pre-Katrina maps. We had relied so heavily on our smart phones pre-Z that most of our maps were outdated. Why update your print maps when your phone GPS can get you anywhere with real time traffic updates?
The area had gone through some changes in the few years since I had been this way, but I managed to lead us down a heavily wooded road until we rolled up on a large warehouse with the logo of the drugstore emblazoned at the front entrance. Score.
This one distribution center supplied most of the Gulf South. It was a regional drug store chain, so there was going to be everything in here, everything.
There were two zombie guards at the small gatehouse entrance, child’s play. Blake and Zach quickly dispatched them. The warehouse was going to be a different story. Places like this employed hundreds of workers. There was no telling how many zombies were going to be inside.
Romeo banged on the door making enough noise to lure any of the dead to where we waited. They were very courteous zombies, too, marching out nicely to exactly where we wanted them. They were quick, but Romeo corralled them into the sunken loading dock and took them out with the modified spear he had perfected,
which was my idea.
The pits weren’t that deep though and the grade was low enough that they could walk out, so we had to work quickly. Romeo had made four spears and the three of us joined him and dispatched the zombies with quick efficiency.
Jab. Twist. Pullout. Repeat. Jab. Twist. Pullout. Repeat. You didn’t even get any Z goo on you from this vantage point.