Hot and Haunted (2 page)

“Don’t,” she warned, then softened, just a little. “Please, not now . . . God, I just . . . I have to get out of here and do what I have to do. It’s hard enough without this.”

“You think it’s any easier for me?” He spit the words like they cut his tongue. He ran both hands through his dark hair, standing it on end. “You think I don’t go crazy every time you walk out those doors, knowing where you’re going? What could happen? And that I can’t do anything about it? I can’t help you. Can’t be there for you. I’m stuck down here—”

“Because it keeps you safe!” Her voice echoed in the stairwell, loud enough to hurt her ears. “Would you rather go outside and have one of them breathe all over you? How’d you like to get a faceful of black seeds that burrow into your lungs and send up vines into your brain, where they make some sort of . . .” She lost her voice in her disgust, her throat closing at the thought of watching him become one of them.

“I know what they do,” he said.

“Is that what you want to risk?”

“No.”

Lira gripped the cold metal railing, time tick-tocking away from them, too fast. She’d be lucky to make it across the city before sunrise, at this point. “Nobody thinks less of you because you can’t go up there and do what I do. Not even me. Especially not me.”

They stared each other down, his mouth set in a grim line so unlike his usual expression it made him into a stranger. What she said was true, but she could see he didn’t believe her. Lira understood why—if she had been the one forced to stay here in the basement, barricaded away from everything that was happening above while Anthony went out and risked his life over and over . . . well. It would’ve driven her insane with worry too.

On the other hand, would she have traded this task for his? For any of theirs? In a heartbeat. In a breath.

“You won’t even let me . . .” Anthony’s shoulders hunched for a moment. This was worse than the look he’d given her because this wasn’t about his going outside and risking infection.

This was about her.

She didn’t want to or mean to move toward him; her body betrayed her when she took his face in her hands and brushed her mouth on his. “Shh.”

He put his arms around her, too tight. Too close. She couldn’t breathe, and for that moment, didn’t want to.

“Just let me love you, Lira. I can’t go out there with you and protect you, I know that. But in here . . . let me love you.”

She had no answer for that. They’d gone over this already. In the dark, twisting in the roughness of his sheets on his bone-achingly hard mattress, Anthony had told her he loved her. She believed him. They were the words she’d spent her lifetime waiting to hear from a man like him, ever since she’d been a little girl pretending to be a princess.

She believed him, but she couldn’t let him. Not with the world the way it was. Not with
her
the way she was, immune to whatever it was that infected the living and Resurrected them from the dead. The others who’d taken shelter in the basement would have no way of knowing if they were also immune until they were exposed, and that was a risk they’d all agreed nobody could take. She’d had the spores spewed in her face dozens of times and had not yet fallen ill, but she expected every day to wake up in a murderous rage, to need someone to put her down like a rabid dog. Would he be able to do that if he loved her?

Lira didn’t think so.

She had no answer for him that would feel honest, so she kissed him instead. But when he tried to pull her closer, Lira pushed his hands away from her hips and backed up the stairs. When Anthony opened his mouth to speak, she shook her head.

“No. I can’t give you what you want, Anthony. I’m sorry.”

“You think you’re protecting me,” he told her. “But you’re not.”

Now he’d made her angry. “I’m doing the best I can! You think this is what I want? Nobody wants this. So stop trying to make all of this into some lovey-dovey romantic thing between us, okay? It is what it is. A way to survive. When we don’t have to worry about just getting through one more day, then you can talk to me about hearts and flowers.”

He waited until she’d rounded the next landing before he called after her.

“Come back to me,” he said. “At least promise me you’ll do that.”

But, of course, she couldn’t give him that any more than she could give him the other thing he wanted, and so Lira left him behind without making a promise she wasn’t sure she could keep.

Chapter Two

S
HE CROUCHED, HANDS
up to fend off the thing bending over her, the thing that used to be her boss. Jim had never been the best boss, but this was beyond abuse, this was crazy. Attacking her because she forgot to cc him on a memo? His face was red, spittle flying; he slapped her face with the sheaf of papers in his hand. It was a story about the freak tornado that wrecked the city a few days ago, the one that tore through downtown and left behind all those weird flowers the news reports were saying caused a massive influx of respiratory disorders.

Jim slapped her again. His fingers dug into her. Screaming, he called her terrible names, when suddenly his mouth yawned open wide, his eyes rolled back, and his face . . . exploded. Darkness shot out of his eyes and nose and mouth, and she breathed it in. All of it, she breathed it in.

That’s how it spread. First came the storm, then the flowers that spread the seeds of infection. People turned violent just before the seeds, which had taken root inside them, exploded out of their faces, infecting others even as it killed the hosts, then somehow brought them back from the dead. Lira had gotten a lungful of the spores, not just that first time with Jim but half a dozen times since, and had never gotten sick. Had never died and come back. For whatever reason, maybe the residual effects of childhood asthma she thought she’d outgrown, she was immune.

When Lira got outside, the dead were still everywhere. Bodies in various stages of decay littered the street. A good number of them had been killed by the rage-driven infected. People had simply taken after each other with whatever weapons they could find, including fists and teeth. When they died and came back, those violent tendencies were even worse.

A larger number of the corpses had been killed by the soldiers first dispatched to the streets of downtown Pittsburgh in the aftermath of the tornados that had swept much of the city into rubble. When the riots began, some of the people now lying dead on the streets had been shot. A lot had been burned. Fire seemed the only sure way to keep the bodies from getting up again. The Army had come through with tanks and jeeps, guns and flamethrowers. They’d finally dropped a bomb, which had been stupid since the Resurrected could manage to stagger around with broken limbs and faces sheared away, while the uninfected couldn’t do much to defend themselves in the same condition. Plus, it had destroyed streets and buildings, ruining whatever might’ve been salvaged from inside. For that reason alone, Lira gave the U.S. government a giant “fuck you.”

Now she picked her way carefully through a scattered blockage of concrete chunks. She had a small LED flashlight, but it was better to use the moonlight. The Resurrected didn’t sleep, so far as she could tell, but they didn’t seem to see in the dark any better than a living person.

She’d have gone on foot even if the streets were clear because though a car or truck would’ve carried a lot more supplies, it would’ve been impossible to gas up and would attract too much attention. A motorcycle or scooter could navigate the debris, but she wouldn’t be able to carry much more on one of them than on her back, and if she fell off and hurt herself, there’d be nobody with her to help. No, on foot was better even though that meant it took longer, and she could only carry a few things back at a time.

In her old life, Lira had bought herself a gym membership every January with high hopes, only to discover that by March, self-discipline had left her. She’d preferred to curl up on the couch and read a book than run on a treadmill. She’d favored flowery skirts and pretty shoes and paid someone to mow her lawn because once when she’d tried to herself, she’d run over a nest of baby bunnies, traumatizing her into being incapable of even touching the mower again. She’d scooped up spiders in paper cups and released them outside. She’d never held a gun.

She’d discovered she preferred a knife, anyway.

Guns were loud and had to be reloaded; you had the advantage of distance, but her accuracy, while much improved, was not good enough to fell a charging Resurrected determined to tear off her face. She’d picked up a hunting knife with a six-inch blade off the street in those early days after the storms ripped the city apart. Using it was personal and intimate, you had to be close enough for them to grab you, which was a terrible risk. Using it was also a lot like dancing. She’d always been good at dancing.

She danced now, slicing at the fingers of a shambling man wearing what looked like a velour track suit. One of his legs had bent the wrong way, but that hadn’t stopped him from lurching out from behind an overturned car to grab at her. Half his body was charred, his hair gone, the eye an empty socket. The stench was horrific. He swiped at her again, tilting his head to get a good look at her with his remaining eye, and Lira shoved her knife into it.

The man didn’t scream—they did scream, sometimes, though she was sure it wasn’t pain but rage that always fueled them. His hands batted at the goo dripping down his cheek, a sight the moonlight clearly showed her even though she’d have preferred the blessed cover of shadow. He lunged at her again, but Lira had plenty of time to get out of the way. She dodged him, dancing behind him. This time, her blade sunk into the back of his neck, all the way to the hilt. With a guttural cry, the man stumbled forward. He ended up on his knees.

Lira pulled the knife free. The man slumped onto his face and lay still. He was dead—well, he’d been dead before she stabbed him. The question was, would he end up getting back on his feet?

She didn’t waste time waiting to see. Instead, Lira slashed his Achilles tendons, which would make it a helluva lot harder for him to walk. She used the same slashing motion on his wrists. Cutting off his hands entirely would’ve been better, but she didn’t have time to saw through the bone. At least this way, he couldn’t grab anything. She’d have burned him, but the light and smell would attract others.

The address on the paper the rabbi had given her was smudged, and she had no GPS to guide her, but she’d looked over her map carefully before setting out. She’d lost her fear of getting lost some time ago, mostly because she’d been lost a few times and always managed to find her way back to the church. Downtown Pittsburgh was bordered by water on two sides. That made it easier even when every other familiar landmark had been destroyed

Her calves ached. She started to sweat. Her lower back hurt from where the edge of the backpack bumped her repeatedly. Lira concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, her boots gripping the crumbling sidewalk, her fingers grabbing for support on the piles of debris as she climbed over the barriers everywhere. She moved as swiftly and quietly as she could, but she’d never be graceful.

She wasn’t expecting to run into a crowd when she turned the corner. Only self-preservation kept her from gasping aloud. She froze, one foot just over the ridge of concrete sidewalk that had buckled upward, one hand on the corner of a building that had somehow remained standing.

She’d seen bunches of them before, usually when they were attacking, but she’d never witnessed anything quite like this. Ten, no, twelve . . . no, she counted a few more hidden in the shadows. More than twenty Resurrected stood huddled around a streetlamp. Shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. They all stared up at the sky with their torn and broken mouths hanging open. Moonlight glinted off the eyeballs of those who still had them. She could see crusted black goo around the remains of their nostrils, and she fought a shudder.

This wasn’t the street she was looking for—the one she needed was several past this one—but she’d already tried two alternate routes tonight and been blocked. She needed to get the things on this list, tonight and not tomorrow or the day after. Heather’s baby was due any second. They all needed medical supplies.

It was up to her, and by God, Lira was determined to do it.

She continued to watch them, the huddling group. They muttered and murmured in unison, low growls that rose and fell like a hum. Like a buzzing swarm. They rocked, too, so slightly she might’ve missed the motion except that there were so many of them, they made a giant shadow that vibrated against the sidewalk. They stared as one up to the night sky, toward the moon and a single, bright star.

And then the star went out.

The huddled Resurrected stopped humming.

They turned on her.

Lira didn’t hesitate, didn’t falter. She picked up her feet and put them down, dodging debris and outstretched hands. She had the advantage of not being broken. She leaped a shopping cart on its side, came down a little wrong, and stumbled. Pain flared in her ankle, but she pushed through it. Her lungs burned, and she pushed through that too.

Around the corner, out of sight, she tried to think ahead. Duck into an alley, risk being cornered? Keep running and wind up too far away from where she needed to go? Try to outsmart them, outrun them, try to hide and hope they passed her by?

Ahead of her, a fire escape dangled from the building across from the one she needed to get inside. Lira jumped as high as she could, her fingertips barely snagging the metal step with one hand. The other hand gripped hard, and she swung for a minute before managing to grab with the other.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Upper-body strength, coordination; all those years she’d tortured herself with the elliptical and recumbent bike, when kick boxing and weight lifting would’ve better served her now. Still, she somehow managed to use her momentum to swing and get a leg up on the ladder.

She wasn’t sure it would hold her, not the way the metal screamed against the brick, but then she was on the landing and pulling the ladder up behind her. Breathing hard, she went still as the first of her pursuers rounded the corner.

They didn’t shuffle like old-school Romero zombies, and they weren’t quite as fast as the rage-fueled zombies of
28 Days Later.
They reeked of rot and blood, they grunted and groaned, and sometimes, horribly, seemed to mutter words she’d been glad she could never interpret. They’d been infected and now were dead and reanimated, but if you hit them just right, they did go down for good. Nothing she’d ever read or seen had prepared her for this—not that she was an aficionado of zombie culture. She’d been more of a historical fiction fan herself.

Well, wasn’t reality always stranger than fiction?

Would they see her? She didn’t think any of them were coordinated enough to jump up and pull the ladder down, but she didn’t want to find out. She also didn’t want to attract their attention.

Behind her, the window was still intact. Every other bit of glass along here was conveniently shattered, she thought with a bitter smile, but no. Not the one she needed to get through. With her eyes on the crowd of Resurrected pushing, shuffling, limping, and lurching their way down the street, Lira dug her fingers into the wooden window frame and hoped it was unlocked.

It wasn’t, of course. And worse, the sound of her hands slipping on the wood drew the attention of one of them, both eyes glittering in the moonlight. It cocked its head and stopped moving to stare up at her. Then it launched itself toward the ladder. With her jacket padding her arm to keep it from getting cut, Lira rammed her elbow through the glass and broke it out, then went through the window into the office behind it. More dead bodies here, only a few, but the room was dark enough that she couldn’t see more than shapes. Thank God. The smell was bad enough, she didn’t need to see shredded corpses. Whipping out her flashlight, she headed away from the window into the cubicle maze.

She’d worked in an office similar to this one. It was where she’d sheltered during the first tornado. It was where Jim had tried to kill her, and she’d saved herself by shoving a pencil into his throat. She put those memories from her head as she dodged and jumped over tipped filing cabinets and scattered papers, an overturned watercooler, desks and chairs all over the place, heading for what she hoped was the exit door.

She found it and tugged it open. Was that more crashing glass? She couldn’t be sure. In the darkness of the hall, Lira let herself catch her breath. Her heart pounded in her ears, and she was dizzy. She needed water but didn’t want to take the time to drink. In another minute, she set off, heading for the stairs. The boutique of baby supplies was right next door, fortunately accessible through a shared lobby so she didn’t have to go outside. Getting to the pharmacy across the street would be trickier, but she had no choice. She needed to get to them both, then head back to the shelter or find a place to hole up until tomorrow night.

It took her too long to fill her bag with soft cloth diapers and pins. Her fingers clutched handfuls of tiny socks and tiny shirts decorated with duckies and kitties, and she ignored the way her hands shook. The way her eyes burned. The salt slickness of tears on her tongue and ache in every joint.

With her backpack stuffed as full as it could be while still leaving room for the medical supplies she still needed to get, Lira went to the front of the store to look out on the street. In the early days, rioting and looting had made going out more dangerous than having to fight off the Resurrected. It was quiet out there now though she had to be no less careful. But damn, she thought with a yawn. She was so tired.

She slipped across the street, eyes and ears wide open for any sight or sound, but everything was silent. A bell jingled when she pushed open the pharmacy door, and she cringed, ducking inside quickly to keep it from making more noise. Inside, most of the shelves had been swept clean, but the bottles and cartons were still all over the floor. People had looted the prescription drugs pretty thoroughly, but there was still plenty of other stuff left.

She was busy stuffing bottles of ibuprofen and acetaminophen into her bag when the crunch of a foot on broken glass stopped her. Her head went up, but otherwise, she froze. She eased around the display of cold meds on the end cap, keeping an eye on the front door.

It was a man.

The careful way he moved told her he wasn’t one of them. He looked injured, though, favoring his left leg just a little. She couldn’t see the colors of his clothes, but they looked military issue. His hair was cut close to his head. A soldier, then. Not the first she’d seen, just the first she’d seen alone.