Love Starts With Z (3 page)

“Take care of it outside,” he barked before turning to help another orderly wrestle Colten into a room.

If he were able to take his eyes away from her, he would’ve missed the sadness that washed over her features for a moment before she turned her back and left the building.

“Who was that?” he asked the attendant in scrubs who stood beside him.

“Not who…what. That,” he said with a sigh, “is Soren.”

“She’s hurt.”

“Not bad enough to kill her. Don’t waste your concern on the undead,” he said with a friendly pat on Kaegan’s back. He turned and said over his shoulder, “They’ll kill you the minute you do.”

Undead.

But, she talked. She looked hurt when the doctor dismissed her. She’d been stabbed and didn’t kill her abuser. How could something with human traits, feelings, be undead? And how had she come to be?

Colten thrashed against the medical bed the doctor had managed to press him into, and the older man in the ball cap slid a needle into his shoulder. Seconds passed before his sick friend went limp. His mumbling quieted, and the staff wasted no time in cutting the leg of his pants to expose the injury that had caused the fever.

Kaegan turned back to the door and narrowed his eyes at it. He’d been in this situation at least ten times before. There was nothing to do for Colten but wait for the doctors to do all they could for him. With one last glance at the team working feverishly on Colten’s leg, he strode through the door and into the sunlight.

He wasn’t sure which direction she went, but a mother clutched a child to her legs, and they both looked up the trail. The woman’s expression screamed disgust, while the boy of no more than ten exuded curiosity from the safety of the woman’s protective arms.

He lengthened his stride and jogged to catch up. The reactions of the colonists were all similar, leading him deeper and deeper into the heart of Dead Run River. Maybe it wasn’t willingly housing the Dead after all. The mysteries surrounding the girl mounted by the minute. Finally, he came to a point on the trail where it thinned, as if people didn’t use it as much. No one offered clues as to where she’d gone, and the deeper he traveled into the woods, the louder the song of the birds. Sunlight permeated through the canopy of thick branches and leaves, leaving the forest floor speckled with yellow light. The grass grew higher the farther he walked, as if no one lived near there. As if no one took care of this corner of the community. On and on he walked, not sure if he was headed in the right direction.

And then he saw it. An archaic tree stood stoically against the backdrop of woods and fence. In its branches, someone had built a home of sorts. It had three walls and a partial roof, and the fourth wall was open, overlooking the woods on the other side of the fence. A hammock swung in the breeze inside the tree house, and a handmade ladder leaned against the trunk. In the branches, Soren crouched with her back to him.

A slick sound came from her as her arms moved with some unseen work.
Pit, pat, pit, pat.
Red ran in a steady river from her seat on the branch to the forest floor below.

“You’re not vaccinated,” she said in a low voice.

He jumped at the sound of her voice. “How do you know?”

“I can smell it.” She slid him a loaded glance and then turned her attention inward again.

She hadn’t gone the way of the ladder, and he pulled himself into the tree, careful of his aching ankle as he climbed higher and higher until he sat on the limb where she was perched.

“Don’t come any closer,” she warned. Her hands were red with her own blood, and her shirt was lifted until it covered only her chest. Her stomach was flat and taut as she pulled thread tight to close the wound Colten had made. A row of raised, angry looking scars stretched low over her left hipbone.

He swallowed so his curiosity would stay lodged in his throat, and it sounded very loud in the quiet that stretched between them. “You shouldn’t be doing that on yourself. Here, let me.”

Her voice was muffled behind the muzzle. “You aren’t vaccinated,” she repeated.

“Are you contagious?”

She gave a curt nod and pulled another loop through her flesh.

“Are you airborne contagious?”

Settling her inhuman eyes upon him, she stared for a long moment. “No. The virus hasn’t mutated like that. At least not yet. I’m contagious from my mouth, just like all the other Deads.”

Kaegan made a show of looking up and down his red splattered arms. It wasn’t his blood or Colten’s that bathed him in crimson. It was that of the Deads he’d fought. “Your blood won’t hurt me then, so I’ll take my chances. Please, it’s the least I can do after my friend did that to you.”

Her eyes narrowed like she was suspicious he’d push her from the branch if she got too close. Something about it made him so sad. It must be an awful life to live as a monster.

“Fine,” she muttered. Her voice was muffled, and an irrational piece of him wished he could talk to her without the muzzle. If it was there, it was put on her for a reason though, so he left it alone.

She stepped lightly over him and leaned against the trunk of the tree, stretching her back so he could reach the skin of her stomach better. Hesitating, his fingertips hovered just above the pale skin near her ribs. It felt dangerous to touch her. Not fatal, but dangerous in some way he couldn’t understand. Like if he touched her, he wouldn’t be the same afterward. Maybe she was a witch after all.

He plucked the dangling needle from the air and straddled the branch. Her skin was soft, warm…alive. Not what he’d expected and his vision of the monster wavered. Her ribs showed when she breathed, and though it was common to be underfed in these times, still, it made him sorry for her hunger.

“Does it hurt?”

“No. Not like it would hurt you. I don’t feel things like you do. Pain is just a small discomfort for me.”

“Are you immortal?”

Hurt washed over her face, and she looked away and shook her head slightly. “No and I’m glad for it.” She turned serious, unsettling eyes to him. “Who would want to live more than one lifetime like this?”

Her words were an ember in his gut, igniting as it settled in, burning through him until a dull ache formed at her sad question. Who would indeed? He’d seen how people here looked at her in just the short time he’d been here. One lifetime would be more than enough if he were in her shoes.

Four more stitches did the trick. They weren’t straight, and they’d likely leave tiny scars, but it was only the third set he’d given in his twenty-six years. The others had winced in pain, but she breathed steadily, chest rising and falling as she looked expressionlessly out over the gates to the woods beyond. When he turned to see what she was looking at, three Deads shuffled slowly through the trees beyond the safety of Dead Run River. Where he looked at them with disdain, she looked at them with a wistful look in her oddly colored eyes.

She was probably the most frightening creature he’d ever encountered. Why then was he tenderly cleaning her skin with a cloth like she was a friend instead of the enemy? He’d lost his damned mind, that’s why.

The people here looked at her warily for a reason. He knew nothing about her, really, and he’d treed himself with a Dead with little thought to his own safety. She’d been right when she’d accused him of not being vaccinated. One nip from her, and he’d turn within minutes. And it wasn’t just his own safety that was at risk. If he turned, the entire colony could go down within hours.

She frowned and dropped her gaze to his chest. Could she hear his erratic heartbeat? “Thanks. It’s been years since someone helped me with my stitches.” She was giving him an out. Dismissing him so he could go on his merry way and survive her.

He made for the branch below him but stopped as the same hurt he’d seen earlier took her eyes.

“You get stabbed often?” he asked.

“You’d be surprised. Tell your friend to go for the brain next time.”

“Oh, she’s got zombie jokes,” he said with a surprised chuckle.

Her eyes crinkled like she was smiling beneath the muzzle, and his fingers itched to unlatch the damned thing and throw it to the forest floor. Her smile might be terrifying, but what if it wasn’t?

“Get away from her!” a shrill scream echoed through the woods. A petite woman with dark hair and eyes and a furious countenance raced toward them. “Get away from that Dead!”

He’d been on his way down but stopped. Stubbornness at being ordered away by a stranger made him straddle the branch below Soren.

“Who are you?” he asked, cocking his head.

The woman panted as she skidded to a stop beneath them. “Who am I? I’m Z’s handler. Who are you?”

“Z?” He lifted his face in question to Soren, but she was looking away. She drew her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them like she was shutting down.

When she wouldn’t look at him, he shook his head. He was in way over his pay grade. He didn’t understand the dynamic here, didn’t understand why Soren was here or how she had even come to be. His head swam and he stepped to the next branch below him. When he hopped to the forest floor, the tiny woman sank her claws into his arm, and he yanked away.

“What do you think you’re—”

“Don’t,” he said. His anger was sharp and hot, and he didn’t have to answer to anyone, especially some woman bent on belittling the creature in the tree. Soren was different and dangerous, but surely she didn’t deserve to be treated like this.
Z
. Oh, he could guess what Z meant. They called her Zombie.

For the first time in his life, he pitied a Dead, but something in him said she didn’t need him to be her champion.

“Bye, Soren,” he said.

“Bye,” she said quickly, swinging a startled gaze to him.

He looked back twice as he walked the trail back to civilization. Both times, despite her handler shrieking at her from below, her eyes stayed riveted on his retreat.

S
OREN
L
EANED
A
GAINST
A B
RANCH
that jutted through her canopy house. Her legs dangled from the edge of the open wall and slowly, she drew one knee to her chest. A clear, gray dawn was just peeking over the horizon. Above her, stars twinkled in the still dark sky—winking, as if they knew something about her destiny that she didn’t.

She didn’t sleep much, and when she did, she never dreamed. Dreams were reserved for humans, she supposed. Seamus had always told her about his dreams growing up, and she’d been enamored by them. He said they were like a movie playing in his head, and since she’d never actually watched a movie, it sounded magical and mysterious. She’d give a finger, maybe two, to have a dream.

The breeze picked up, and the weapons tied to the wall behind the hammock clanked against each other. A warrior’s wind chimes. She inhaled the crisp, clean air and tried to imagine the world before the apocalypse. The old timers described it well, and she’d listened as a child. Her old journals were full of drawings of what she imagined the world looked like before Deads trolled the land.

Her newest drawing was of Kaegan.

It was a charcoal sketch of the first time she’d seen him. He’d stood in the middle of Dr. Mackey’s waiting room staring at her with surprised gray eyes the color of a dove’s breast. His hair was longer and had been tied into a leather band at his nape at some point, but in his skirmish to get through the gates safely, some of it had fallen forward into his face. She hadn’t a guess at the color of his skin because it was drenched in the pungent blood of Deads. His dark eyebrows matched the color of his unruly tresses, and they lifted in pity when he pulled his friend’s knife from her belly.

He was a fighter. It wasn’t the scars on his skin or the limp in his gait that told her so. It wasn’t the thick beard he’d grown between colonies. It was his size. He was massive. A behemoth. Giants of modern times must have birthed a son as gargantuan as their lineage, because his shoulders were wide enough that he would have to step sideways through a door. He was tall enough that he’d have to duck any standard entrance, and muscle, thick and intimidating, pressed against the blood-moist fabric of his shirt when he drew his ragged breaths.

He could kill her or anyone else he pleased with no weapons and little effort.

The most irking thing about the man was his apparent lack of intelligence when it came to the vaccine. Did he have a death wish? Some people did. Or maybe he was one of those fighters who thought themselves invincible. No need for a vaccine if they were going to live forever, right?

She shook her head and tossed the leaf she’d been shredding to the ground below.

“Ca-caaaw,” Seamus screeched from the woods. He got worse at bird calls with age. “Don’t shank me, Mitchell. I come bearing gifts.”

He was the only one on the planet allowed to call her by her last name, and he was only awarded that privilege because he’d called her that since age three. He knew exactly where she came from—understood the community and their tendency to use surnames.

“Well, if you bring me gifts, I suppose I’ll cut back on my pre-dawn shankings, Guist.” She said his last name with a smile. How many times had their fathers called each other the same when they were growing up?

He scaled the ladder and dropped a plastic sack beside her with a smile that begged praise. It smelled of blood, and her stomach rumbled. She’d be embarrassed if it weren’t Seamus who stood beside her.

“I thought so. You haven’t been eating again.”

“Gah, why is everyone so interested in my diet?”

“Hey, I’m on your side. I just want to know what’s going on with you.”

“Marie keeps making me eat cooked food. It’s making me sick. Not being dramatic. I mean, I’m really getting sick.”

Seamus cursed under his breath and took a seat beside her. “I’ll talk to her. You can’t eat food that doesn’t agree with your digestive system.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.” Pulling the opening of the bag away, she smiled at the skinned bunny inside. “Where did you find this? I know you didn’t hunt it down yourself.”

“Mikey Walen does snares outside the gates now and sells his catch behind Ricky’s.” Game meat and moonshine, the black market of Dead Run River.

She’d never partaken in the liquor Ricky made behind his bar, but Seamus had on his eighteenth birthday with some of his buddies. He hadn’t had a drink since as far as she knew. She would’ve paid good money to see him drunk, though.

“You can eat it now if you want. I won’t gag, I swear.”

Tempting if she didn’t know how much it really bothered him. He liked his steak well done, and she was pretty sure that was because he’d grown up sitting with her at mess hall. The Denver colony was more accepting about her diet than the people here. It was a requirement after all. To settle in the legendary Sean Daniel’s colony, colonists had to accept her presence. It was part of the rule sheet Sean and Vanessa gave all newcomers when she had lived there. If new colonists bucked against living in a place with a Dead hybrid, they were moved to Dead Run River.

Thinking of home made her ache so badly, she had to wait a moment to speak. “I’ll eat breakfast when you leave. Right now I want all of the juicy gossip.”

“Soren,” Seamus groaned. “I’m a dude. I don’t keep up with that stuff, and you know it.”

“Give me anything. I’m wilting here. I’ve been banished from Dr. Mackey’s office for three days and hanging out here is becoming seventeen shades of monotonous.”

“Fine, okay, fine. No cure yet, and we’re not any closer than we were months ago. Which you probably already guessed. We’re at a standstill with it. Dr. Mackey needs more tissue from you, so he told me to tell you to come in tomorrow for a sample day.”

“What about the tissue I gave him last week?”

“We blew through it. We followed up on a lead that did nothing but waste what you’d given us. But we still had to try.”

“Did the man live? The one who attacked me?”

“Yes, he’s recovering. Doc said by tomorrow morning, he’ll move him into temporary housing with that big guy, Kaegan. That’s when he wants you to come in so your paths don’t cross. Let me see the injury.”

“It’s fine.”

“Soren.” He quirked an eyebrow and waited.

With a put upon sigh, she lifted her shirt and waited while he studied it under a pocket flashlight.

“No infection,” he muttered. “Did he nick anything inside?”

“Nothing that I could find, and I was thorough when I searched. I got lucky he used a small knife. It also didn’t suck that he was weak and his aim was off. It’ll be nothing but a memory in a few days. Dead powers aren’t as awesome as superpowers, but at least they’re good for something.”

“Yeah, well with the number of times you’ve been injured, superior healing is definitely a win. You aren’t invincible though, Soren. If he’d cut an organ, we’d be having a very different conversation right now. You have to be careful.”

How on earth was she supposed to know she’d be a victim of a stabbing one random day at work? Seamus was just worried though, so she nodded.

“The big guy—”

“Kaegan?” she asked, jerking her head to Seamus.

His lips set in a grim line, and he pressed his glasses farther up his nose. “Yeah, Kaegan. He asked Dr. Mackey about you. He wanted to know why you’re here.”

“And what did Dr. Mackey say?”

“He said you’re here for observation. And that if Kaegan values his life, he needs to get vaccinated or stay away from you completely. He chose staying away.”

“Well,” she said, stomaching the hurt, “why wouldn’t he choose that over a needle prick? He doesn’t even know me.” The gray had lightened to pink on the horizon, and she sighed.

Seamus stared at her for a long time, then said, “It won’t be like this forever. We’ll find the cure, and then your life will be different. Easier.”

“And if the cure doesn’t work on me?”

He turned to the breaking morning light. “We can’t think like that. It’ll work.”

Kaegan hefted another bundle of lumber over his shoulder, and when it was balanced, walked it over to the proper pile and came back for more. He’d been at it all morning, but his shoulders barely complained. He was too lost in his own thoughts to pay much mind to the ache of fatigue. At least pain meant he was alive, and that was more than anyone could say for Trevor and Mike. The loss ate at him. Over and over, he imagined what he could have done differently, but every time was the same. He couldn’t save them. He’d barely been able to get Colten to safety.

The noise of the antique sawmill was the perfect soundtrack to his internal struggle. Blades against wood, the hollow clunk of lumber as it was stacked, the shouted orders from the foreman, and laughter from a trio of workers taking a lunch break. It was all so…normal.

He threw down another bundle and turned, almost running into a woman with auburn hair that had gone gray at the temples. Her bright green eyes studied him for a moment before she offered him a smile. It seemed genuine enough, but failed to reach her eyes.

“Mr. Langford?” she asked.

He pulled a work glove from his hand and offered it. “You can call me Kaegan.”

She frowned at the rough palm of his hand but shook it. “Mel. I’m the leader here at Dead Run River. I’d like to talk to you for a couple of minutes if you can spare the time.”

“Uh.” He hesitated and looked at Gary, the foreman. The man was a badger of a boss who didn’t like workers taking breaks unless it was for lunch.

“Gary,” Mel called. “I need Kaegan for a while. I’ll send him back when we’re done.”

“You got it,” he called with a smile.

Wow. He hadn’t seen Gary smile in the three days he’d worked at the sawmill. He looked at Mel with more interest.

She led him down a less worn path that pointed toward the back of the colony. “How do you like it here so far?”

“I like it fine, ma’am. You’re running one of the nicest colonies I’ve ever set foot in.” It wasn’t flattery but the truth.

“And how long do you plan to stay?”

“Well, I was going to come see you here in the next couple of days. Colten and I won’t bother you for too long because there is somewhere we need to be. The reason we left our last colony was to join up.”

She stopped and waited for him to take a place beside her. Pulling a leaf from a low hanging tree branch, she asked, “Join up for what?”

“The war, ma’am.”

“Kaegan, if you call me ma’am again, I’m going to fillet you.”

“Sorry.”

“What war are you talking about?”

“At the last colony Colten and I lived in, a group of fighters came in late one night. They only stayed for a few days, but they said the Deads were migrating. Gathering little by little at the coast near Empalme. Mexico, you know. Migration has been happening for a few years, and this time around, people are starting to talk about killing them off. Taking back the cities when they get the population low enough. That’s just what I’ve heard, but Colten and I, and our team, we wanted to see if there was any truth to the rumor. Have you seen as many Deads around these parts this season?”

Mel pursed her lips. Instead of answering, she asked, “Do you know where Dead Run River got its name?”

“No.” He fought the urge to say ma’am. She seemed nice enough, but her threat sounded pretty sincere.

“When we settled here, the Deads had gathered by the river. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and for what we couldn’t ever figure out. They seem to steer clear of water, so why would they all stand there, staring into the rapids?”

Kaegan inhaled and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t want you riling up the people here. We have a good life and taking innocents on some crusade because of hearsay is irresponsible and dangerous.”

“Oh, I’m not planning on recruiting. Just laying over until Colten is better and my ankle can hold my weight again. You’ve got nothin’ to worry about from me.”

Her vibrant eyes narrowed. “I make it a point to know everything about everything that happens in my colony. You’ve been asking around about Soren.”

Now it was his turn to clamp his mouth shut. Eyeing the path as they walked, he shoved his hands into his pockets and shrugged. “So?”

“So, it’s natural to be curious about her. Most newcomers are, but that is where it has to stop.”

“I heard you need a new handler for her.”

The silence was filled with birdsong from the branches above. Finally, she said, “You aren’t vaccinated, so why would you ask about the handler position?”

“I’ll keep my distance from her, report everything she does.” Even he could hear the tinge of pathetic desperation in his voice.

“What was your trade before you came here?”

“Fence builder and welder. My size determined it early.”

“Well, that’s why you’ve been assigned to the sawmill. Your talents are best used there.”

“But—”

“No buts,” she said. Spinning, she stopped in front of him. “You are new and don’t know much about Soren, but if you value your life, you’ll stay away.”

Surprise caused him to lean closer. “Are you threatening me?”