“Is that right?”
I pushed the mess of hair off her forehead and kissed it gently. She offered me a smile in return. Those hard lines around her eyes softened for a moment, and I felt a genuine sense of affection.
“What did you do before?” I asked. We didn’t really talk about who we’d been before the incident. I think it was a byproduct of our current situation. I believe that, on some level, we were avoiding the ‘before’ because we wanted to concentrate on the now and not on our old lives. Those were long gone.
“I was a teacher. Social studies was my specialty, but I also taught girls’ volleyball.”
“Makes sense. You fight like a teacher.”
She laughed at that, and I smiled at her in the dark.
“I used to study a lot of martial arts. I took some kaji-kempo, and then some other stuff so I could work on my aggression issues. I had …”
I let it hang. I could hear her breathing in the dark, and she stiffened slightly against me.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“It’s okay. I was hurt once by a man, and I swore that would never happen again, so I learned how to take care of myself.”
I stiffened under the blanket, my body going rock hard as tension primed me for violence. How dare a man lay a hand on a woman in anger. He’d better hope to hell he was long gone from her life in this new world.
“I’m sorry,” I offered lamely. I found I couldn’t let the tension go.
“It was a long time ago, and I usually don’t talk about it.”
“I’m sorry.” I took a couple of breaths to calm down.
“Anyway, I studied and I never feared a person again. Well, until I saw those ghouls and how much damage they can take before they go down.”
“Evolution again?”
“Something like that. They feel pain, and they fall if you shoot them in the head, but a wound just pisses them off. Some are smarter than others, and some are in control. The ones that came at us at the barricade were driven by one of the smart ones. You may think I’m crazy, but we had a theory that the smart ones used some sort of mind control.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“They seem to be able to put the ghouls into some sort of hypnotic state. They whip them into a frenzy, and they go crazy for blood. Did you see how they attacked us?”
She was right; they didn’t act like the zombies at all. Of course, I only had a few days’ worth of experience with the things, while she’d had months. I suppose a form of hypnosis wasn’t that much of a stretch. Look how far it got Hitler.
We chatted for a while longer, and she shifted under the blankets against me but didn’t seem interested in lovemaking. I was just happy to have her with me, so I didn’t press it. Her body was warm against mine, a feeling completely alien to everything I’d known for the last few months. I wrapped my arm around her and, sometime in the night, found solitude in sleep.
Morning came in with the same overcast gray. I struggled up to a sitting position and noticed she had put on a shirt sometime during the night. Katherine slept soundly while I rose and donned shorts and a tank top. The night may have been cold and rainy, but the day was already heating up. My watch was in the kitchen, and I was surprised to see it was after nine. When I was at the compound, we usually woke around seven, but at the cabin I was used to sleeping in—an indulgence I hadn’t allowed myself in years.
I dug out some coffee we’d scrounged from the convenience store and built up a fire in the stove. Water boiled, while I used my old method of suspending the grounds in a wrapped-up paper towel and letting it sit for a while. The water passed through my crude filter as it cooked, and within fifteen minutes, I had a fresh pot of Folgers. I grabbed a box of cereal, Lucky Charms, popped it open and sat down to enjoy breakfast.
She came out of the bedroom a half hour later and joined me. Her long legs hung out of the shirt, and she curled one under her body as she sat down. I felt a rush for her—a burst of emotion I could not readily identify. It was a combination of giddiness and warmth, and I wished I could put the feeling into words.
She smiled when I brought her a cup of coffee.
“Cream or sugar?”
“Neither. I’m used to drinking it black. We had a whole section of coffee saved up during the setup phase at the Walmart, and it was almost as closely guarded as the guns.”
“Priorities and all ...”
I was still getting used to drinking coffee again, having been without it for a few months. I got a quick caffeine buzz today because the brew was dark and very strong. I expected her to turn her nose up at the stuff and tell me it was too thick, but she took a sip, and then another without comment.
She mixed some of the powdered milk with water from a pitcher on the counter and poured it in a bowl with the cereal I was eating. I watched her move around the kitchen looking for things, and I pointed out where I stored items. If I expected her to comment on my placement, I was in for a surprise, because she accepted what I had done and went along without a word.
We ate in silence, glancing back and forth between our food and each other. I smiled more than once, and she returned a tight grin.
“How did you find this place?” she asked.
“It was a friend’s. I stayed here once with Allison, and it seemed like a good place to hide out while I waited for the world to go to hell.”
“Who is Allison?”
“Ex. We came here about five years ago and stayed for a week.”
She didn’t comment.
“So what would you like to do today, honey?” She tacked the last word on with a hint of sarcasm that got a grin out of me.
“I’m concerned about food. The main reason I left the cabin was because I was out, and the stuff we picked up on the way back won’t last long. We need to figure out how to survive.”
“I have a few ideas.”
“Oh yeah?”
Six long sticks poked out along the lake’s edge; bobbers of pinecones and chunks of wood hovered on the calm water while we sat and watched. A bucket of fresh water stood next to the poles in case we caught anything. I had my doubts. During the months I had spent here, I had caught maybe seven or eight fish.
I had dressed in jeans and left the tank top on. She didn’t have any clothes to speak of. Everything she owned had been left behind in the store. The plan had been to rejoin the caravan as it moved away from the city. We didn’t count on getting caught in the mess at the barricade.
So she wore one of my shirts like a dress and looped a piece of rope around her waist. Her pants were soaking in a tub of water with a little bit of soap. She and I set the fishing poles, then dragged down the little chairs from inside the cabin and sat them on the wet ground. The legs sank into the mud, but we were content to sit on rickety chairs as long as we could watch the poles.
We spoke a little, but for the most part, we just stared at the water. The gulf that separated us was in full effect again, and I wondered if it was I who was holding back.
“Penny for your thoughts,” I offered.
“Penny isn’t worth much these days.”
“It wasn’t worth much a year ago either.” I smiled.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m used to being busy, organizing, teaching the others to fight. I’m used to cleaning guns, rationing supplies. There isn’t really much to do here.”
“Except me,” I said with a leer.
“And there is that. I know there’s an attraction, but I’m old, Erik. I can’t have kids anymore, and in this new world, we need to repopulate, to replace the numbers we have lost.”
“You think I’m gonna run off with someone younger than me just because she can have babies? That’s just plain stupid, Katherine. I like you. I like being with you.”