“Let’s just get some sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow–we have a long ride home.” He nodded and laid back on his sofa and I went to my little room alone. I was very aware of how alone I was when I stretched out on the mattress. I didn’t like it one bit.
TWENTY-SIX
Completely Exposed
I tossed and turned for a few hours, but Zach never came back into the office. I couldn’t tell what time it was, but I guessed it was as good a time as any to head out. From the looks of him when I opened the office door, Blake hadn’t slept either. He was fully dressed and sitting on the sofa waiting for me. Without a word, we packed up our meager supplies and headed downstairs to find Zach.
We found him sitting on the back loading dock of the warehouse. The sky was just starting to lighten with the dawn.
Blake held back and urged me forward. This was my show.
I sat down next to Zach but he said nothing. I bit back the urge to sigh or fidget, or do anything that would make him uncomfortable.
“Just give me some time, Lex, you took me by surprise.”
“I know, sorry about that. I just, it just kind of popped into my head at the moment…”
“Yeah, angel, I get it. I do. Be honest with me. Since he’s been back, have you..?” He cut off his question, but I knew what he was asking.
“He kissed me. He surprised me on watch. It was nothing more. I swear it’s been only you. You know I need you, right?” I leaned over and kissed him, at first he hesitated and then he deepened the kiss getting me all tingly and making me pant. He tugged on my shoulder pulling me closer and I slid my leg over him to straddle him bringing his erection into contact with my core. He moaned in my mouth, trailing his fingers up my sides and under my shirt, pushing it up, exposing my stomach and then my bra. Greedily, he pulled my bra down and took my nipple into his mouth.
I looked over Zach’s shoulder to find Blake’s eyes on us, his face grim, but flushed. I wanted him with us. I knew that for sure now. I wanted to feel his hands on me along with Zach’s. I just didn’t think I would get what I wanted.
“Maybe we should go inside or pick this up when we get home. I don’t know if this is the best place for this.” I looked around nervously. We were completely exposed.
He nodded and laid his head against my chest, pulling my bra back into its proper position.
“I love you,” he whispered just for me and I closed my eyes trying not to hear the pain in his voice as if it was more of a curse than a declaration.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Desperate People Have Bad Aim
The ride back to the compound was very awkward for me. I was sandwiched between Blake and Zach in the supply truck. On any given day, this would be a wonderful day for me with stud number one on my left and stud number two on my right. Care to make me the filling in their Oreo? But today, with me not knowing where Zach’s head was at, I couldn’t even figure out where to put my hands.
There was very little space in the front cabin and the boys weren’t exactly slim, so I was just sort of in the middle, trying not to rub against anything I wasn’t supposed to be rubbing against.
Awkward
.
I had tried to bring up last night, but Zach just shook his head and said it was something to talk about when we had walls around us. Gotta keep our head in the game and all that. I agreed with him even though I wanted our ride home to not be so quiet.
For about twenty miles we met little to no opposition on the road. Every now and again we would see one or two zombies in the road, which were quickly taken out by the truck. But when we neared Lake Catherine, the amount of zombies grew exponentially. The funny thing though was that they were in cow pastures, corralled in by fences, and I didn’t remember passing them on the way out. It wouldn’t hold them that well for long, and it acted more like a deterrent than anything else. Zombies usually took the easier path unless they were near a food source, so they milled about in the fields going in their westerly path until they came across some barrier.
“Do you think someone is putting them in there?” I asked, wondering why we hadn’t noticed this on the trip out.
Could they have recently been lured into the pastures?
“It looks like it. How else would they have so many in one spot? They wouldn’t have automatically gone in there,” Blake suggested.
“That would take a lot of manpower to get that many in there. You think there is a large group around here?” Zach peered out the window looking for any signs of life.
Out of the blue, there was the crack and report of a gun. I screamed in shock when the ting of metal rang out over my head, a bullet slamming into the truck.
“Fuck!” Blake shouted and pressed down harder on the accelerator escaping rather than slowing to investigate.
Zach drew his gun and scanned the area looking for whoever took the shot at us. There was no sign of anyone though. They must have been on top of one of the buildings that pressed against the road.
“Zach, two o’clock,” Blake hissed.
“I see them.” I looked to my right and saw what the boys had clocked. Three men and one woman were running toward us, shotguns in their hands. One of the men aimed and pointed at us.
“Stop or we’ll shoot,” the woman screamed in a heavy drawl.
“Get down,” Blake hissed at us. I hunched down in my seat, but Zach remained up and pointed his gun at the people through the window.
“Keep going, Blake, they have nothing to stop us. If they fire, they’ll probably hit the side of the truck. Gun it.”
Blake gunned the engine and headed right for the strangers, who were now in the middle of the road aiming their guns at us. One managed to get off a shot which shattered our windshield and I heard Zach curse as glass rained down and impeded Blake’s line of sight. He used his rifle to knock out the rest of the glass, but we had passed up the wannabe highway robbers who were sprawled on the side of the road as if they had thrown themselves out of the way.
Another shot rang out and I instinctively crouched down, but it was a meaningless warning shot that didn’t impact a thing.
“Keep an eye open, Zach. Did they get into vehicles?”
“No, I don’t see anyone coming.”
“What fucking idiots. Let’s jump in the middle of the road and shoot at passing vehicles,” Blake mocked.
“Yeah, I don’t think much thought went into that approach, but we are probably the only people that passed through the area in a while. They probably planned it when we made our first pass. I hope they didn’t try it with Romeo when they went through yesterday.” Zach shook his head and pulled out one of our long range radios to see if we could reach the compound.
He managed to hail Isaiah who confirmed that Romeo and Kirk had made it back. Kirk was all good and, yes, they did report that there was a group of people near Lake Catherine that had tried to flag them down, but they kept going because of Kirk’s injury and being pressed for time.
“They tried the friendly way, then the grumpy way,” I laughed. “I wonder what way they’ll try next.”
“We are going to have to go back that way and that route is the easiest, so we’ll have to make contact with those people. Maybe we can offer them some of the supplies or something to get them to calm down and keep the road open. They could make our lives pretty miserable,” Blake said.
“Good idea. We’ll go up well armed in the Humvee as escort and look more official.” Zach scratched at his hair that had grown out over the last couple of months.
“Morons will probably fall in line quickly if we give ‘em a case or two of MREs.”
“Here’s hoping that’s the case. Wouldn’t want them to escalate their highway robbery tactics,” I worried.
“Don’t worry.” Zach slid his arm around me and pulled me in for a hug. “Those were just desperate people. Desperate people do silly, desperate things. The ones we have to worry about are the people that prey on desperate people.”
My mind flashed back to Blake’s story and how he had rescued Pheobe and the twins, Mark and Millie. How many people were out there preying on the weak and the desperate? I didn’t even want to think about it.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Clara {Insert Expletive}
We pulled onto the bridge that crossed the large expanse of water separating our island compound from the surrounding swampland and Zach sent the three burst signal on the radio that signaled our approach. An answering two burst reply let us know it was all clear and we were good to enter. Liam Phillips and Bret Klein met us in front of the building to get a look at our load.
They whistled when we showed them the contents of the truck and we gushed about how much more there was.
“We should probably get another supply run up and ready for tomorrow. I think Jimmy said he knew how to handle a big rig. We can bring him and he can take one of the rigs back.” Liam clapped with excitement.
“You might need to go with a little more firepower,” Blake suggested and told them of what happened.
“Shit,” Bret whistled and agreed that it would be better if they went up in the Humvee with some of the grunts running forward on the cycles.
“Inform Romeo about the situation and have him pull a team together. He knows the location. We got shit for sleep last night, so I don’t think we’ll make this run, but I have a feeling we’ll be doing runs back and forth for a while,” Zach tried to stifle a yawn as he directed Liam.
“Got it,” Liam said and rushed off to find Romeo.
“Blake, pull the truck up to the back and we’ll get a group to unload this. Lemme go round them up.” Zach walked off into the building and that left Blake and I to unload.
When we pulled up in the back, there was a group waiting for us including Clara, who was giving me the evil eye as I slid out of the passenger seat. She immediately ran to Blake when he got out of the truck and threw herself at him. She wasn’t a very big girl, but her surprise attack had Blake grunting and automatically putting his arms around her to steady himself.
“Oh Blay…” she crooned.
Blay? Ugh.
“I was so worried about you going out there like that when you could have sent someone else in your place. That was so crazy. I haven’t been able to sleep at all. I’ve been curled up in our bed crying the entire time.”
Our bed, interesting.
I tried not to look too interested in their conversation, but I couldn’t help myself.
“What are you talking about?” Blake asked, managing to disengage from her arms and pushing her back to a safe distance.
“Oh, you know, my anxiety was all over the place. I tried to get some Valium from Isaiah, but he got all uppity on me and said the medicine was for ‘real’ sicknesses.” She held up her fingers in air quotes. “and that I just had to go find some way to cope like a normal person.”
“You know I wasn’t talking about that,” Blake scowled at her.
“What, you mean the bed thing? Well, you remember how I told you…you want to take this conversation to somewhere more private?” She looked at me pointedly. I was making it no secret that I was all up in their convo.
“This is as good a place as any.” Blake’s scowl deepened. “I have work to do. We have to get this rig offloaded. Why don’t you lend a hand?”
“Uh…well, you know I’m still hurting from the…” she whispered loudly, “the baby, so I don’t know how much help I would be. And you know, I’m still all messed up over that and I think the only thing that will help is if we got back together. We make a good couple, Blay.” She tried to throw her arms around him again, but he pushed her off.
“So this led you to moving into my room?” he asked.
“Well, yeah, I kind of took matters into my own hands. I couldn’t stay with Madison anymore. Those kids, they just don’t stop…and well, I moved into the barracks and there isn’t very much room, so I moved into your office. I figured we can start working on our marriage.”
“I told you that I didn’t want to get back together, or did that slip your mind?” I felt sorry for her. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, but Blake’s anger was boiling and everyone was staring at them.
“Hey, Duke, can you drive a forklift?” I called loudly.
“Yes ma’am.”
“Why don’t you get up in there and get our pretty new forklift working and help us unload these supplies? I think there is a ramp somewhere on this thing.” This got the group moving, and soon the area was buzzing with activity as Duke began lowering the ramp on the truck and maneuvering the forklift into place.
With all the noise that was going on, I had lost track of the fight, but they were still going at it. Blake was shaking his head in frustration and Clara kept stomping her foot like a petulant child. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but it didn’t look pretty.
Finally, Clara reached forward and slapped Blake across the face. The resounding clap had everyone stopping and turning to see what had happened.
“You’ll regret this!” Clara yelled at Blake and stormed away directly toward me. I hoped she was just heading across the field to the houses, but at the back of my mind I doubted it.
I was her next victim.
My muscles bunched in anticipation.
She marched right up to me, ponytail swinging, face flushed, a little gob of spit on her lip.
“You couldn’t be satisfied with just one, could you, you whore!” she screamed at me. “You had to have both of them! How many more men are you going to put in your slut harem?”
“Slut harem?”
I asked, confused. That’s a new one.
“GAH! You are nasty!” she screamed, some of her hair had come loose from her ponytail and it was just swinging around. It was rather distracting.
“Clara, maybe you should go inside and cool down. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.” My hand had clenched around my sidearm and I had to literally force myself to release it.
We must not kill the living no matter how stupid they are.