“Afraid it’s a tad bit warm, darlin’.”
Her voice was soft and gentle and seemed slightly out of place in the barrage of banging from outside.
“Couldn’t find any wine glasses, neither so these’ll have to make do.”
She squatted beside him and he found his attention drawn to the patch of curly hair between her legs. At the same time, he felt a stirring in his own nether regions and his face warmed with embarrassment; his stomach did a flip-flop, just as if he were riding Thunder Road at Carowinds, and the wine within the plastic cup seemed to vibrate as he took the tumbler into his trembling hands.
Carrie had to have noticed but, to her credit, she simply placed her hand against his bare chest and stroked the nest of hair between his pecks. Her touch was light and warm and sent chill bumps tingling along his scalp and arms. Closing his eyes, Luke breathed in slowly as a smile crept across his own face.
“To us…”
He opened his eyes again to see Carrie holding her own tumbler aloft.
“In this crazy, nightmare world everything’s been turned on end. The dead won’t stay that way. People would just as soon kill ya as say hello. Everyone we ever knew… everyone we ever cared about… are gone. But we still got each other. We still got this one night. We still got love. And those bastards out there won’t ever be able to take that from us.”
The words were a typical Carrie speech; she’d always dreamed of being a poetess, had filled notebooks with scribbles of verse, stanzas of longing and remorse. As such, she tended to lean toward the melodramatic which (though Luke never would have dreamed of admitting to her) sometimes came across as a little corny. But there was something different about this toast: perhaps it was the way her voice quivered with emotion or how the little muscle in her neck seemed to tremble as she spoke.
“So, to us, my love… to us.”
They touched their glasses together and tilted back their heads to drink. The wine was dry with only a hint of sweetness; but there was also a bitterness in the aftertaste that made Luke pucker his lips and squeeze his eyes shut.
“Drink it all, Darlin’. Bottom’s up.”
Taking a deep breath, he threw back his head again and gulped the remainder of the wine quickly. It warmed his stomach and left his throat feeling as if he could use a glass of water.
But these thoughts were immediately vanquished as Carrier took his free hand and raised it to her breast.
Luke felt as if his heart had skipped several beats and the bitterness seemed to form a hard lump somewhere in the back of his throat. Every nerve in his body tingled and he stroked her nipple softly with this thumb, his excitement building as it grew firm beneath his touch.
“Go ahead,” she whispered, “it ain’t going to bite ya.”
He squeezed a little more firmly and his breath caught in his throat with a gasp as her other hand snaked between his legs.
“Don’t be scared, darlin’. I’ll be gentle.”
He dreamed of this very moment so often, had pleasured himself on countless nights with fantasies of how Carrie’s lips would feel against his own, how her breath would tickle the little hairs in his ear as she moaned softly. But nothing his imagination had ever conjured could compare with the sensation of her tongue slowly sliding across his belly or the way her bangs lightly brushed against his skin.
His hands ran along her back, tracing the arch of her spine with his fingertips, massaging the firm cheeks of her ass. Neither of them said a word. They simply allowed their hands to explore each others body: probing, caressing, petting, squeezing gently as sighs as soft of the wind passed through their lips.
Finally, she eased herself onto him, enveloping his member with the warmth of her body and moving in a way that was somewhere between a bounce and a slow rocking motion. Her hands pressed against his chest and her head was tilted slightly to the side; with eyes half closed she bit her bottom lip and slid her pelvis back and forth as she whispered his name over and over.
Every nerve in Luke’ body seemed to tingle as he clutched her gyrating hips in his hands; he began thrusting in time with Carrie’s own movements, perfectly matching her rhythm as his pulse quickened. So she was soft, so warm, so beautiful and perfect.
“I love you, oh God, Carrie, I love you…”
Nothing else mattered: the dead outside, the fires that burned out of control in Charlotte, the fact that the reactor at Duke Power would probably go into meltdown soon without anyone around to man the controls. All of that may have as well existed in some other time, some distant dimension that was as hazy and insubstantial as a half-remembered dream. All that mattered was this very moment, this closeness with the woman he’d once feared would be nothing more than a friend, these two bodies that had merged together and moved with the synchronicity of a single organism.
Carrie was moaning now and she rode him more intently, the muscles in her face tightening and relaxing with each push into her body. Her chest glistened with a sheen of sweat and her breasts jiggled as spasms coursed through her body.
“I love you too, I’ve always loved you, always, always, always…”
Within moments, Luke erupted into her, clenching his teeth as his fingers gripped her sides so tightly that his nails left little red marks in their wake. Carrie collapsed on top of him, her breasts pressed firmly against his chest, and together they panted as they tried to regain their breath. He wrapped her hair around his index finger, toying with it lazily, and his eyes felt felt heavy. It was almost as if ejaculating had drained every ounce of energy from his body: he felt satisfied, happy, and as lazy as a cloud drifting across the Carolina skies.
“Thank you, baby. Thank you, so much.”
His voice sounded distant and fuzzy to his own ears and when Carrie replied her words were thick and slurred.
“Couldn’t…”
She yawned and nuzzled her cheek against his chest slightly.
“Couldn’t let ya… die… a virgin… darlin’.”
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her with the last vestiges of his fading strength.
And he was tired… so damn tired…
They closed their eyes together and, with their naked bodies lying atop one another, allowed the beating of their hearts to lull them into the darkness of sleep.
Outside, the dead continued their assault on the trailer. More and more corpses joined the congregation and pieces of siding were ripped away as they clamored over each other. The hinges of the door had begun to creak as screws slowly gave way to the force being exerted on them. But it no longer mattered. For sitting on the kitchen counter within the trailer was a partially full bottle of wine; the bottle’s cork rested beside an empty bottle of sleeping pills that left a bitter aftertaste in the mouths of anyone who took them. And, just beneath the bottle, was a sheet of notebook paper. Written in careful script across the blue lines were the following words:
Signed,
Luke James Gilford and Carrie Marie Tate
R.I.P