Morgan cut off an end piece, the juices still dripping off the thin strip of plump fat on the edge, then carefully slipped the cut into her mouth. Morgan closed her eyes, chewing slowly, her jaw working with small, sudden motions as she relished the beef on her tongue.

  Her lips tightened. Her throat shifted as she swallowed. Morgan parted her lips and drew breath with an audible groan of satisfaction.

  I sat there, smiling as I watched her. She licked her lips, her tongue moving slow and smooth over the remnants of steak juice lingering on her lips.

  “I haven’t had fresh meat in…” she trailed off. “God, I couldn’t even tell you. I can’t remember the last thing I’ve eaten that didn’t come out of a can.”

  A sudden, wracking guilt shot through my chest. I started to fear that maybe Morgan thought I was showing off. I did have it pretty good up here, after all. Plenty of land. The tools to utilize that land properly. Access to healthy farm animals and breeding stock, thanks to everything left behind after the vanishing. All those lessons at the firing range my father gave me back when I was a kid.

  But then Morgan sat back in the recliner again, a contemplative look in her eyes. “I shouldn’t complain,” she finally added. “There are folks who had it a whole hell of a lot harder than I did.” She looked out over the hills, the sun striking her at a perfect angle.

  The sunlight shone across her pale features, across the little golden hairs on her forearms, almost like there were gold strands laced through her flesh. She took a deep breath then looked back to the food on her plate. She sliced the knife through another portion then popped it into her mouth and sighed, her eyelids sliding closed over her bright blues.

  Yet her last comment was still ringing in my ears, piquing my curiosity. What she’d said about how there were folks who had it harder than she did. It was in her tone, the way she said it.

  “You’ve met others,” I said. “Other people. Living people.”

  She chewed the steak meditatively, swallowed slowly, then nodded. “I have,” she said. “It’s been years, but yes, I have.” She turned to me. “You?”

  I shrugged. “A few.”

  I remembered that man’s face again. Eyes, bloodshot and wide. Spittle clinging to his beard stubble. The way he strained against me as I wrapped my left hand tight around his throat, my right hand reaching for my machete…

  “Bobby?” Morgan said.

  I looked back at her, unaware of when I looked away in the first place. “Yeah?”

  “For right now, let’s not talk about the other people we’ve run into,” she said. “For right now, let’s just not talk about that.”

  “Agreed,” I said, then handed her one of the Coke bottles.

  She smiled softly and twisted the cap off and held the bottle up. “A toast to new friends,” she said.

  I cracked my bottle open and held it up, too. “To new friends.”

  We drank. She titled her bottle back high, throat shifting, and I smiled as her first polite sip quickly turned into her swallowing half the bottle in just a few gulps.

  Just like fresh meat, it had probably been a very long time since she’d had anything genuinely cold to drink.

  She lowered the bottle, set it on the deck, then covered her mouth and let out a thunderous burp.

  I chuckled. She did, too.

  “You probably think I’m some kind of pig,” she said bashfully.

  “Never in a million years,” I answered.

  She poked at her plate, plucked a chunk of boiled potato – still steaming, butter dripping from it – and tossed it in her mouth. She seemed to shrink in on herself for just a moment, her shoulders slumping, her chin tucked into her chest.

  “And you don’t think I’m…easy, do you?” she asked quietly, her eyes locked on her plate, her cheeks burning with a deep red shade. “Because I’ve never done that before. Having sex with someone I just met, I mean.”

  “No, I don’t think you’re easy,” I said. “For the record, I’m not, either.”

  She shrugged. With the embarrassed, almost somewhat ashamed tint in her eyes, I was starting to seriously hope that she didn’t regret what we’d done in the kitchen.

  “I’m not a virgin or anything,” she said quietly. “But that totally wasn’t me, what happened down there. It’s just…”

  “It wasn’t me, either,” I added. “It just happened. I’ve been alone for a very long time.”

  At that, her eyes shifted to mine. “Me too,” she said.

  “Whatever happened between us…it was nice,” I said. “At least, I thought so. And it wasn’t just nice physically, either. It was nice to have someone here. To…share something with someone, if you get what I’m saying.”

  That tint of regret in her eyes vanished almost immediately. She stopped slumping her shoulders. She held her head high again. That was a relief. I didn’t want her feeling ashamed of herself.

  Years of this…monsters, a dead world…I don’t see how anyone could blame either of us for losing control for a bit.

  “I thought it was pretty nice too,” she said after a moment. “Physically and the other way, like you said. And again, I cannot stress this enough, but I don’t usually –”

  “Hook up with strangers,” I said, laughing kindly. “Don’t worry, I won’t start thinking you’re easy if you don’t start thinking that I’m easy.”

  She smirked and cut off another portion of her steak. “Okay, neither one of us is a slut,” she laughed breezily. “But that being said, that little encounter in your kitchen…” she paused, then added a girlish shrug and speared the chunk of steak with her fork. “It made things feel normal again, that’s all. Like we were living regular life again, instead of continuing on in some insane world where people vanish and monsters start getting up in your business.”

  I laughed then forked a piece of steak into my mouth, chewing swiftly, realizing I was hungrier than I thought. “You’re right about that,” I said. “About feeling normal again. Honestly, I gave up on returning to any semblance of normalcy years ago. My new normal is this,” I said, gesturing at the house, at the little farm I’d created. “Well, this and monsters. I’m kind of sick of the new normal.”

  “Cheers to that,” she said, then took another long sip from her Coke bottle.

  “Anyway, I told you about that book I found,” I said. “The one I used to learn how to open portals.”

  “You mentioned it,” she said. “But hey, I have an idea.”

  I looked up at her, gnawing on another fatty chunk of steak. “You want me to grab the book so you can see it?” I asked.

  “Actually, I was thinking we could hold off on that,” she said. “I mean, it’s crazy. A real human using magic, that’s just nuts. And don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see you do, like, portal magic or whatever…but for now, I’m kind of enjoying just feeling normal again.”

  I laughed then took a long drink from my Coke bottle. I had to admit, I agreed with her. “I can get on board with that,” I said.

  “No monster talk, no magic talk, no end-of-the-world talk,” she said. “For now, let’s just get to know each other.”

  “That’s just an absolutely brilliant idea,” I laughed. “Better than any I could have come up with on my own. Let’s just be normal for a little while.”

  She raised her bottle. “To new friends,” she said. “And to the old normal, or as close to it as we can get.”

  We toasted again, downed our Cokes, then both of us, giving into our hunger, tore ravenously into our meals.

  Chapter Seven

  When we finished lunch, Morgan stood up by the deck railing, leaning over it, looking down at the solar panels I had set up outside the house. They were heavy duty panels, 100-cell, 500-watt rigs. I had five set up in the grass, wired back to the house, along with another three sets of panels up on the roof.

  “God, with all these solar panels, you must be living like…like a regular life in this house,” she said admiringly, and maybe even a little enviously.

  “Not quite that normal,” I said. “These panels are all residential units, built for supplemental power, not to be a sole power source. Mostly, I reserve the power for running my freezers, my fridge, and powering batteries for tools and stuff.”

  “Aw crap,” she said, shooting me a performative grimace. “So you’re telling me that this dump doesn’t have central air conditioning?”

  I stood by her side then leaned over the rail, pointing at the big Bosch central air unit down at the western face of the house. “That big boy would run through my power like a hot knife through butter,” I laughed. “Earlier, I used to get tempted to fire it up, just to feel normal again. But, well…these days, the summers don’t get quite as hot. That figures, right? Considering there’s hardly any people left on the planet.”

  Morgan laughed, somewhat bitterly. “No more planes and cars and trucks and tanks burping out carbon dioxide to cook the atmosphere,” she said. “Turns out we could clean up all the pollution on Earth. Trouble is, there’s hardly anyone left around to appreciate it.”

  I noticed a sudden, dour glint in her eye. “Hey, c’mon,” I chided her gently. “We agreed not to talk about other people…or monsters…or the apocalypse.”

  She smiled. “Yeah, you’re right.”

  A fresh breeze blew in from the west, gusting down over the mountains, making the tree branches rattle across the hills. Morgan closed her eyes, relishing the cool air gusting across her bare skin, and even shivered a little.

  “You know, I forgot to ask you where the hell we are,” she said.

  I slapped myself in the forehead. “Christ, I’m sorry. It never occurred to me…” I shook my head. “Anyway, we’re in the Pocono Mountains. Northeastern Pennsylvania.”

  “Near Philadelphia?” she asked.

  “Couple hours north,” I answered. “We’re about halfway between Philly and New York City, actually. We’ve got East Stroudsburg to the south, a pretty decently-sized college town. The Lehigh Valley’s farther south, couple of mid-sized cities there, Bethlehem and Allentown, mostly. I take it you’re not familiar with the neighborhood.”

  She chuckled. “I’m a California girl,” she said. “A real beach bunny, honestly.” She laughed wistfully, but a bit sadly. She rubbed her bare arms, her pale skin. “Back before everyone disappeared, I actually had a nice tan, believe it or not.”

  “Oh awesome,” I said. “So you’re telling me that if we step through that portal, we’ll end up on the Golden Coast?”

  “Nope,” she said with a brisk shake of her head. “I was nowhere near home when the world ended. No sir, you step through that portal and you’ll find yourself twenty-five miles northwest of Lincoln, Nebraska.”

  “You went to school out there?” I asked.

  “Road trip,” she said in a clipped tone. Then added: “Me and my ex-boyfriend. He…” she paused, catching herself, then forced a smile that was betrayed by the melancholic shine in her bright blue eyes. “Sorry. I forgot our rule again. No talking about other people.”

  I nodded, watching her for a moment, then sipped my Coke. “So, Nebraska,” I said. “You said you were in a mall, right?”

  “A small one,” she said. “Some rinky-dink Middle-American mall surrounded by exurbs and rural farmland. Half the stores were out of business, like most malls back then. But hey, I got lucky ending up there. There was a camping store, plenty of freeze-dried food. A few fast-casual restaurants. All the meat went bad pretty fast but they canned goods, enough to get me by.”

  “Raid some houses nearby and it sounds like you’d be good to go,” I said.

  She folded her arms, hugging herself. The mirth drained from her face like sand from a shattered hourglass. “At first, yeah. For about two years I managed to keep my supplies up with quick runs into the surrounding neighborhoods, but it just kept getting tougher.” She sighed. “So many fucking monsters…”

  I gave her a moment to compose herself before she continued. She gripped the railing tight, absentmindedly digging little scratches into the wood with her fingernails.

  “Mostly, I hid from them,” she said. “I got that shotgun from the camping store, but I was never a good shot. Nobody ever taught me. I only managed to learn how to clean the gun by looking up how-to manuals in the camping store. Anyway, one day, this big portal opens up, maybe a mile from the mall. Big, man. I mean really big. Quarter-mile wide, maybe. Dunno.”

  Christ, I’d never seen a portal that large. I’d seen some more than a couple hundred feet across – large enough for a small army, like I mentioned before – but nothing on par with what Morgan faced.

  “I was on the roof, watching with my binoculars,” she went on quietly. “Just this massive wave of undead came pouring out. No rhyme or reason to it. No sorcerer seemingly in control of the horde. Just these fucking ugly zombies and skeletons that came tumbling out.”

  An undead horde that size was definitely trouble, but at least lower-level ghouls had next to no intelligence. If left on their own, they’d usually wander off, usually distracted by some animal.

  “If I could have stayed quiet, they’d have left me alone I think,” Morgan continued. “But then I heard this wet, sniffling sound behind me. Some other monster that had gotten into the mall. That happened periodically, you know. Monsters getting inside. Usually I kept to the air vents and maintenance rooms – easier to lock down – and I’d wait until they wandered off on their own. But not that day. I turned around and there was this ugly pig-faced thing with a big ass sword, these pointy tusks jutting up over its bottom lip.”

  “An orc,” I said softly.

  “I guess,” she said. “I was never into fantasy stuff, Lord of the Rings or Skyrim or whatever.” She pulled her hands back from the railing and balled them into fists, so tight her knuckles turned red. “If I would have used my head, maybe I could have slipped past the orc. Maybe the ghouls never would have…” she chuckled darkly. “Anyway, I raised my shotgun and blew the pig’s face off before I had a chance to consider the consequences. Maybe I could have outrun the horde, I don’t know. Instead, I chose to hunker down and seal off the entrances as best I could.”

  A sudden dread sank hard into my stomach. An army of undead, just on the other side of that portal…

  Morgan saw my concern before I could say anything about it. “Don’t worry, I was in a secure room when your portal opened,” she said. “Some tiny maintenance room on the top floor, chained and padlocked three times over.”

  I nodded, somewhat relieved.

  “How many ghouls?” I asked.

  “I never bothered to count,” she said. “They surrounded the mall and I was stuck. I didn’t even want to go out on the roof – too afraid that they’d hear me up there, didn’t want to send them into a frenzy – so I stayed in that dingy mall. Almost no sunlight. Dark. Stale air.”

  She grew tense. She tried to speak but paused, a ball in her throat. She didn’t sob, but came close. She did, however, successfully fight back her tears.

  “I just assumed I’d die there,” she said. “I spent the next few years hiding as quietly as I could, watching my food supply dwindle.”

  God damn. I couldn’t even imagine what she must have felt, trapped in some big box, surrounded by ghouls, counting down the last few cans of food before she’d run out completely.

  Then she took a sudden deep breath and threw her arms out to the sides, grinning widely at the mountains unfurling before her.

  “But then you found me,” she said. Now, she couldn’t hold the tears back any longer. They came streaming down her face, but I couldn’t tell if they were tears of trauma or tears of joy. “You found me, Bobby, and now I’m not going to die.”

  Chapter Eight

  I put our dirty dishes in the sink – I didn’t wash them yet, I’d have to fetch some water from a stream just to the east of the house, in the woods – then I gave Morgan a lazy tour around the property.

  She giggled at the pigs, at the chickens and cows, but I told her not to get too friendly with them.

  “I made the mistake of naming the first few farm animals I brought here,” I said. “It only makes things harder when it comes time to…” I held out my thumb and slashed it across my throat, like a knife.

  She bent down, sticking her fingers through the fence, letting a piglet sniff at her fingertips. It let out a high-pitched oink, wagged its tail, and trundled off.

  “I’ve eaten enough cold beans to never, ever question the ethics of eating meat,” she said. “But good point. I won’t name any of your animals.”

  That comment gave me pause. If she’d been thinking about naming a pig or a cow, that must have meant she was also thinking about staying here.

  I mean…why wouldn’t she?

  I wanted to bring it up. Quite frankly, I was dying to bring it up. I’d been alone long enough. If Morgan decided she wanted to get back into her tomb of a shopping mall by herself, I didn’t know how I’d react, if I could even handle it.

  Still, I kept my mouth shut. I’d broach the topic, just not yet.

  We walked out into the woods, down into the southeast quadrant where old hunting trails made for an easy hike. She carried her shotgun, I carried my rifle; just like me, Morgan wasn’t comfortable taking a walk without her weapon.

  I pointed out a shotgun mic I had hidden up on a spruce bough and told her about my early-warning system.

  “These microphones are wireless?” she asked curiously.

  I nodded. “Blue tooth, each one and every one,” I answered. “If not, I wouldn’t have enough power cords to get the mics on the outer perimeter to reach the house.

  “I assumed wireless gadgets wouldn’t work without, like, the internet or satellites up in space or whatever,” she said.

  “Nope, it’s all just radio waves,” I said. “The only problem is a power source. I have each mic hooked up to a corresponding solar panel.”

  “As big as the ones at your house?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7