Red Eye | Season 2 | Episode 3 Read online

  Barrett cocked his head to look at me and growled angrily. “This would go fucking faster if you’d help.”

  “I’m sorry. Sorry,” I muttered, moving forward and hooking my hands under the arms of a smallish once-man with auburn hair. I shifted the body off the pile and pulled it away from the door. Barrett had cleared the rest of the way before I was done. “It’s Shake ’n Bake and I helped,” I said, almost smiling, because it was something my fiancé used to say. He wasn’t much of a cook, but anytime we bought one of those “easy” baked chicken kits, he’d shake the plastic bag full of the breadcrumbs, spices, and poultry and he’d say that. And he’d be so proud of that one little damn thing he did.

  “What…” Barrett’s voice trailed off and he looked at me slack-faced for a second before shaking his head and muttering “never mind.” He opened the door and strode in, all business.

  I tried to follow but he was already exiting, a large, heavy crate cradled in his arms.

  “Get in the truck and shift the crates to the back as I bring them.”

  “I can’t lift them by myself—” I started to remind him.

  “Just get in and slide them across. When we need to stack, I’ll do it.” He lifted and dropped the crate down onto the bed of the vehicle and then he disappeared back into the shadows of the weapons building. I crawled awkwardly up into the bed, foot on tailgate, fingers clawing for the closest roof frame support. I pushed the first crate to the very back after I’d finally gotten inside, and I was breathing heavily by the time I was done. I was freaking proud of myself. I was useful. I could help. I wasn’t a mindless monster only good for killing after all. When I turned around, Barrett had already brought a second and third crate for me to move. And I basically felt useless again.

  I heaved and shoved and felt the return of nausea roll over me like an orgasm gone sour.

  When there was nowhere else to slide the crates, Barrett jumped up in the back with me and started lifting and stacking. When we were two across, four deep, and two high, he got back out for more. On his second time back in and out of the weapons store though, trouble hit.

  “Out.” Barrett slammed down the crate he held and reached for me.

  I stepped the foot forward to let him grab my hips and lift me down fast. It was almost a dance motion, smooth and close, and his acrid breath was intimate, though it did nothing to quell my nausea.

  “What is it?” I gasped as he let me go in a quick push.

  “Company,” he responded tersely. “Get in the truck. Don’t fucking hesitate, just go.”

  I listened to Barrett, not because he was the big guy that could handle himself and I was a weak woman, but because as soon as I leaned past the back of the vehicle to check our surroundings, I saw five zombies shambling our way. “Shit,” I murmured, fear roiling in my belly to join the lingering illness. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “I said don’t hesitate, goddammit.” He pushed me and I pitched forward, nearly falling to the ground.

  I started walking fast before I regained my footing completely; being off balance caused me to stumble to the side and hit the metal of the truck more than once. The sound was loud enough to call more attention to me and Barrett. I heard him close the rear hatch as I rushed to safety.

  My eyes found the zombies. Their heads were jerking side to side, some tilted in the air as if they were sniffing their surroundings. Even from the distance, I could see the red of their eyes. I wondered if I looked like that when I…temporarily turned. A mindless flesh-bag searching for anything living to scratch the itch of not wanting to be dead.

  I’d left my door open. Barrett was already in the driver’s seat, his door closed and his hand shifting gears. He didn’t wait for me to close my own door. The truck launched forward with a jolt. Barrett steadied our course and headed straight for the dead, the same as last time, showing no mercy for anything around us.

  Two of the walking dead he hit straight on, but the other three were too spread out. One reached up as the truck passed and it snagged the large side-view passenger mirror. Somehow it managed to hang on, even as its arm was ripped out of the socket and its fingers bent back at sickening angles. It opened and shut its mouth, grinding its teeth together, and gave a bestial scream, equal parts strangled and hoarse. I hoped the truck’s window glass was strong. It had to be strong, didn’t it? It was a freaking military vehicle.

  I flinched away from the door, inching closer to Barrett.

  He lifted my rifle off the floorboard and shoved it at me. “Take the gun, dammit,” he growled when I made no move to claim the protection.

  Hands shaking with fear, I gripped the stock and barrel. I let my fingers wander to the metal loop around the trigger. When Barrett had given me the fast lesson on how to use the M4 military assault rifle, I’d focused on two things: how to shoot it, and how not to shoot it. Or… how to kill and how not to kill. It was different from any weapon I’d handled before—not that I had a huge amount of gun experience under my proverbial belt.

  There wasn’t much cause to worry over trigger finger when you were doing arabesques and pirouettes.

  “Shoot it,” Barrett yelled as he worked to dislodge the zombie.

  I looked at the gun and then thought back to the mall…how the zombies had all walked around me, seeing me as one of their own and not as lunch. They hadn’t sensed my humanness because of the monster living inside me. It had terrified me at the time; hell, it still did, but it was also useful. I placed the weapon back on the floorboard and slid my body back across the bench seat to the window. It was manual, not electric. I worked the handle slowly, rolling the window down.

  “What the actual fuck are you doing!” Barrett’s voice bellowed, and I felt his hand gripping my shirt angrily.

  “Trust me!” I screamed back as fast-moving and pungent wind hit my face. I leaned over the window, hands reaching toward the danger. Toward the danger, because I am the world’s biggest fucking idiot.

  My fingers found the dead’s broken-yet-somehow-still-viselike grip on the steel side mirror. I pushed my index finger between its rotting skin and the metal, trying to dislodge its hold. It just looked at me, its mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, dying slowly but unable to do anything about it.

  The zombie defied odds and continued to hang on as Barrett drove the truck erratically and I tried to forcibly ruin its grip. Barrett angled the truck into tents as we passed them, trying to help me in my efforts. Nothing worked. It shouldn’t have been that strong and dead, dammit. It wasn’t until we encountered something more solid—a smaller civilian SUV—that our joint labors bore fruit.

  Barrett jerked the steering wheel to the right and the truck careened into the dark blue sport utility vehicle. The screeching sound of metal against metal was so loud that I had to slam my hands over my ears. The zombie was pinned between the two cars, its flesh being scraped apart, ripped down to the off-white bone. Its mouth was opening and closing as it desperately still tried to hold on. If it did have some sense of what was going on…some tiny glimmer of self-awareness, wouldn’t it let go? Why continue to try clinging to the truck? When we reached the very end of the hood, the thing that was once human finally gave in to the inevitable. I watched in the smashed-up side mirror as it fell to the ground, and my eyes saw the ruined blue SUV behind us, decorated in browning blood and bits of flesh.

  Apocalypse graffiti. It would probably have sold for a mint at Christie’s Auction. If it wasn’t the end of the world and some insanely rich person was interested in art blood nouveau.

  “You okay?” Barrett reached across the space between us and touched me on the arm.

  I jerked away automatically, and then forced myself to relax. “I’m fine,” I bit out. “But you know how that could have been avoided,” I kept talking even though my brain was telling me to shut up and not start a fight. “By skipping stealing a bunch of military weapons and just getting the hell out of here.”

  He didn’t respond. I ang
rily rolled up the window, glad to block out the choking scent of death, that both aroused and sickened me.

  “You’re right,” Barrett finally said as the truck broke through the last barricade of tents and corpses to thump onto the road we’d originally taken to find our way to this not-so-safe haven.

  “Did you just admit you were wrong?” I gaped at him in utter disbelief.

  “No, I didn’t say I was wrong. The guns were a good move.”

  “But you just said—”

  “I said that you were right. If we’d skipped the guns, a zombie wouldn’t have hooked onto the truck like a stage-four clinger. But I’m right too. These guns?” He cocked a thumb back over his shoulder. “Are a golden fucking ticket to Willy Wonka’s secret survival factory. You don’t leave a goddamn gift horse behind.”

  “I hate you sometimes,” I mumbled, crossing my arms over my chest and turning my body to stare out the window.

  Chapter Five.

  There was carnage everywhere.

  I’m not sure what I expected to find as we moved away from the military installment and back out into the world. So far, my experience of the end of the world had come in capsule doses of unreality.

  The inside of an airport.

  The parking lot of an airport.

  The inside of a passenger van.

  Within the “protective” sphere of a survivor base.

  Things were changing now. Barrett and I were utterly exposed to the width and breadth of the darkness spreading through humanity like hellfire. I sat there, bouncing up and down against the hard truck seat, thinking about the flight that had started all of this for me…me and Rose.

  What stars had to align to put her and me on the same flight? What direction had the wheel of fate turned so that we would find one another? It was cruel, I thought vehemently, to let us meet and then rip us apart.

  Frequently, Barrett had to go off-road because the highway we were on was a congested mess of abandoned cars and rotting carcasses. Carrion birds circled in the air, hundreds of them. They were part of a community that thrived when everything else perished. The opportunists that looked for food and wealth among the wreckage of a planet gone mad. I glanced over at Barrett; his face was unreadable. He was a member of that community.

  An opportunist.

  “When we get to Vegas, what then?” I questioned, watching road signs pass slowly. Victorville, CA was 50 miles away. Below that 237 miles to Vegas.

  “We find my people.” Barrett looked at me quickly; he couldn’t take his eyes off the road for long—not with so much shit in our way.

  “I want to find—”

  “Yes. I know. You’re all goddamn bent out of shape over finding your little English Rose, I fucking get it. But we have no idea where she is, no idea where the helicopters will land. If, and I mean if, they make it to Vegas. That was a pretty shoddy fucking operation they were running. That escape? I’ve seen better coordinated plans from a pack of kindergartners.”

  “It can’t be that hard to find a big military installment,” I reasoned, hugging myself tighter at the thought that Rose might not make it to Vegas. If she didn’t, how would I find her?

  “Yeah. It’s not that hard, especially when you’ve got a group that knows the city like the back of their damn hands. My people will know. They make it their business to know everything that goes on in Sin City. Does that make it clear enough as to why we should find the people I know for help?”

  I frowned at him. “You never once explained it like that, Barrett. You’re too damn busy being a self-righteous asshole.”

  His mouth quirked, the makings of a smile that died before it was properly born. “You know, every woman I’ve ever loved has told me that exact thing at least once. ‘Self-righteous asshole’ must be translation for ‘too damn sexy for my own damn good.’”

  “Sure, Barrett. Keep telling yourself that,” I sighed. “So we get to Vegas, we find your friends, we find where the military is set up, and then we find Rose.”

  He nodded. “It’s going to be slow going the way the roads are, though. And”—he leaned forward and tapped the fuel gauge—“we’re going to need diesel soon.”

  “We have to stop somewhere…” My voice trailed off. We’d narrowly avoided the zombies left in the camp. I had no doubt danger would find us again if we stopped.

  Silence enveloped us for a while; it wasn’t the comfortable kind that feels familiar, and I could only stand it for so long. At the next road sign that said Victorville, CA 20 miles, I finally broke down, needing to fill the void.

  “Barrett, can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did,” he countered, once again that little quirk of the mouth blossomed and then faded.

  “Shut up,” I said, leaning back against the woefully sized and not-soft-at-all headrest.

  “Ask away.” He steered around several bodies in the road.

  I wondered why he was taking more care with the dead now, when back at the camp he’d rocketed right over anything in the way.

  “Why do you do what you do?”

  “Are we back to me being a self-righteous asshole? Because if we are, I might have to start taking offense.” His eyes went to the fuel gauge again, as they had many times in the past thirty miles.

  “No. I mean…why the drugs and guns? Why the illegal stuff?” I toed the two rifles on the floorboards.

  “Money,” he said, his tone clipped like I was an idiot for asking such an obvious question.

  “That can’t be all. I’ve seen—hell, I don’t know—a glimmer of good in you.”

  “A glimmer of good? Fuck, I guess I need to change my shit up then.” He shrugged.

  I rolled my eyes. “Maybe ‘glimmer’ was too much. Let’s make it a sliver of good. A fragment, if you will,” I said sarcastically back. “Seriously though, I mean hell, you’re keeping me alive and I’m a total stranger, basically.”

  “I have a habit of saving beautiful women.” He shot me a look, heat in his eyes.

  “Stop that. You’re deflecting.”

  “And I thought you were a dancer, not a psychologist.”

  I paused at that, giving him a curious gaze. “I don’t think I ever told you that I danced.”

  “Honey, one look at that body and any idiot could guess.” This time he didn’t glance at me, he appraised me fully—from toe to scalp, his eyes following the line of my form.

  “It’s not that obvious.” I rubbed my palms down my legs. The clothes from Karla’s sister were filthy. I realized it was ridiculous now—what I’d chosen to wear: jeans, a silky top, a blazer. Real end-of-the-world, kill-some-zombies clothes…if I were wielding a blade at fashion week.

  “If you could have seen the way you fought leaving the terminal, you wouldn’t say that. You move like a dancer, Sam. Every damn inch of you does.” Barrett ended the last sentence on a low, almost sexual growl.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m not that anymore. None of us are what we were.” I smiled, but it wasn’t a joyful thing. It dripped sarcasm and pain. “Except people like you, I guess. People who already lived to seed the underbelly.”

  “Seed the underbelly.” Barrett nodded slowly. “I’m going to put that on my resume. Might give me a real leg up on the interview competition.”

  I shook my head at him. “So why do you do what you do?” I repeated my earlier question.

  He didn’t respond immediately, and the quiet stretched on for so long that I assumed he’d never answer. He was bravado and bullets, not honesty.

  “Be real with me, please,” I begged, feeling insecure and childish but ignoring the feelings because I had to have some realness right then. I needed to be grounded, humanity stronger than the changes inside. “I need that from you, Barrett.”

  He was silent a little while longer, and I was about to plead with him again when he started speaking. “I told you about my mom.”

  “And the cereal.” I nodded, coaxing him gently.

  “I told you I
went into the system after jail. What I didn’t tell you is that Mom died. Dad skipped town shortly after. When I wasn’t in group homes, I was with real pieces-of-shit foster families who were only in it for the paycheck.” He spoke slowly, clearly. I had a feeling that every word exiting his mouth was like a pinprick against his skin. He was facing something he’d buried, because I needed to poke at his origins. “I met Caden senior year of high school. He was running with a crew. He gave me a life that didn’t involve cigarette burns and leftovers better suited for a pig trough.”

  “But you could have gotten out, right? You didn’t have to stay stuck in that life.” I thought back to his story about getting arrested for stealing as a kid. He was so smart. He could do more with his life.

  “I wasn’t stuck in that life.” His voice edged into anger. “Caden and his crew saved my ass, Sam. Maybe saving me meant getting involved in illegal shit. They’re my family. I’m a lot of things—a self-righteous ass who likes to be in charge, a guy who appreciates a woman’s body, and a wise-cracking son of a bitch when shit gets tough. Mostly, I’m loyal to a goddamn fault. I stayed in the life because it was my life. Period. It doesn’t feel bad or wrong. It feels like fucking heaven compared to what could have been. I’m fuckin good with who I am and how my life is. It’s you who’s the unhappy one.”

  I looked away, his words stinging with the bitter truth of them. “I’m sorry, Barrett. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “Prying is exactly what you meant to do.” Barrett guided the truck deftly around a six-car pileup.

  “I wanted to ask before, but I didn’t. Why did you end up in juvie? It was just a pack of cigarettes and you were a first-time offender, right?” I played with my hair absentmindedly as I probed him.