The duo had been too engrossed in their assault to notice they were no longer alone. Jake, Adam, and Seth had entered the room behind them. The sounds of struggle I’d heard were our men beating the piss out of the sick bastards. They dragged them from the room and up on deck, where they held them at gunpoint while Jake and Adam tended to Meg, Nancy, and myself.
“Wow,” was all I could say to them after they retold events. Daphne had been cowering in the invader’s boat when Jake and the men returned. They left her there until they had taken care of the situation for fear of alerting Mel and Dave to their presence. Can’t say I blame them. Her big mouth had kicked me in the ass on numerous occasions this past month.
Our group was topping the charts at ten—of course I included Daphne in the count—since Jake and the two soldiers returned. Not one of us had a lick of energy left. There were no squabbles over who slept where, people found the closest soft surface and crashed. Meg and Will opted to camp up on deck, probably for some privacy so she could give him her own special welcome home party. Go Meg, I thought, and let out a stifled laugh.
Jake looked at me in question and I brushed it off as a cough, pretending to clear my throat. The master bedroom was left to Jake and me. With the major migraine that had settled in, there was no chance I’d be giving any welcome home parties of my own.
I scrounged up some Motrin from the bathroom medicine cabinet while Jake changed the sheets to get rid of the blood. Even with the funky smell, neither of us cared about the puke drying into the carpet as we got into bed. I wasn’t ready to sleep yet, not until I found out where he had been for the past three weeks. We settled under the covers and gazed into each other’s eyes, content just being near one another.
“Hey, Jake?”
“Mmm hmm?”
“Next time you sneak away like that, I’ll castrate you.” This was followed by a hearty round of laughter from both of us and Jake conceding to my demands.
“Yes, dear.”
Ah, my favorite two words in the English language.
Chapter 25
Like Father, Like Son
“So… whatcha been up to lately?” I asked him, giving him a full-toothed grin. There was no chance his story would be a fun one, so I tried to lighten the mood a bit. He sighed and held me closer.
“First, I need to tell you how sorry I am for leaving you like that. I knew if I woke you to say goodbye we would just fight again, and I didn’t want that.”
He was right. I’d have tackled him to the ground and forced him to stay. Hell, I may have even broken a kneecap just so he couldn’t get on that truck.
“The trip to the bridge was clear. It gave us a false sense of security as we peeled off from the other team. We left the Humvees at the end of the bridge and went in on foot. We only encountered a handful of them on the bridge, but they were easy enough to dispatch with our weapons. Got boxed in and had to jump. It was a bloodbath. There were only eight of us left by the time we went over the side of that bridge. One of the soldiers, they told me later his name was Statham, couldn’t swim. We tried to get to him but the fall had knocked the wind from us all, and we were having a hard enough time keeping ourselves afloat. He went under and never resurfaced. We swam to the closest bit of land we could find. Unfortunately, it was on the Fort Myers side of the river.
“However bad we thought things were on this side of the bridge, it was worse over there. The area was thick with them, and there was no place to hide. If we opened a door, they were waiting on the other side, they were just everywhere. Any time we stopped moving, they were on us in seconds. So we ran, without stopping, for nearly a full day until our bodies started to give out. Private Germain was the first to run out of steam. His legs just stopped working and he fell over. We couldn’t stop to help him because they’d be on us if we let up even a little. By this point our pace was just barely faster than the walking meat sacks. I’m haunted by the sound of him being eaten alive, screaming for help.”
I could sympathize with him. Kat’s screams haunted my dreams every night and I woke up in a cold sweat.
“We were about to give up, barely able to move our muscles anymore, when we heard the screech of tires behind us. A car was barreling towards us and hitting our pursuers with the hood like they were bowling pins. The car pulled up next to us and the driver yelled for us to get in. The six of us piled into a tiny Prius with the driver.”
The memory of piling in the car amused Jake and his mouth curled up at the corners. I was getting tired and fought to stay awake. Jake noticed and suggested he finish his story after we got some sleep. I declined, wanting to wake up in the morning and not have to start off the day in a dark place.
“The driver, Chris, had been bitten. We all saw the bite right away. It was hard to miss because it was on his shoulder and bleeding copiously. The problem was, he was currently driving and we couldn’t do anything about it. He kept driving in circles, explaining that he was out scavenging for food and was surprised by a zombie locked in the pantry of a deserted house. At first I thought he was just succumbing to the infection and getting delirious. But as we passed a house for the fourth time I saw movement in a window. Chris was driving us erratically to get all the lurkers to follow us away from the house. Eventually we were able to shake most of them and made a mad dash for the house. Chris wasn’t doing so hot by then, we had wasted a lot of time he didn’t have. The figure we saw in the window was his seventeen-year-old son, Chris Junior.
“That was the hardest thing I’ve dealt with so far, I think. Chris knew he was turning and said goodbye to his son. He left us all in the house and just walked out the front door. We watched him from the window, half expecting a horde to descend on him. The street was eerily empty as far as we could see in either direction. He stopped in the middle of the road and turned back to the house, then his body just went rigid and he crumpled to the pavement and started to convulse. We were so fixated on what was happening outside, we didn’t even notice when Chris Junior opened the door and ran to his father. By the time he reached his dad, he had fallen still. He turned and, just like that, was devouring his son.
“We could have saved him but we were out of steam. Every movement felt like we were trudging through wet cement. The two of them lingered outside for days just milling around the area aimlessly. It was almost like they still knew they were home. Sometimes they even came up to the front door and just stood there. Eventually more and more of the wandering corpses joined them. We stayed there for a week eating the food Chris had managed to scavenge and drinking first the bottled water, and finally resorting to drinking the water from the toilet basins. A day went by after we ran out of food, and we knew starvation was inevitable if we didn’t get moving.”
Jake rubbed his face with his hands and leaned over to grab his water from the bedside table. As he leaned over I caught view of his bare chest. His abdomen was sunken in from malnutrition, and his ribs were painfully visible under the thin layer of skin. I traced the lines of the protruding ribs with my fingers, and he took my hand and brought it to his lips. Kissing each knuckle, he closed his eyes and relished in my touch.
“So,” he began again, “we left the house. We got lucky and found a small motorboat. There were no keys, but Tapper had some experience hot wiring cars in his teen bad boy years.” I made a mental note to keep my eye on Private Will Tapper since he was getting cozy with Meg. Jake must have read my mind. “He’s a good kid, just went through a rough patch is all. The army straightened him right out. Meg is in good hands. Not to mention I already gave him the speech.”