Until the End of the World (Book 2): And After (8 page)

“I wasn’t by myself! Ana was there, and—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all about you and Ana, the two-girl zombie team.”

I take a breath at his comment, which is completely unfair. He knows how I feel about all of this, how I’m nothing like Ana. “That is not what I was going to say. I was going to say that Ana was there, and I knew you all had our backs. All I had to do was move back, run, anything like that. They were slow.”

He glares at me from the edge of the bed. He’s not giving an inch. I don’t know what’s gotten into him. It’s not like I haven’t done this before, and with his blessing, not that I need it. I want to scream, but I decide to go with common sense.

“Do I ever do anything dumb, really put myself in danger?” I ask. “Even when Ana does?”

He shakes his head grudgingly, but he still doesn’t say anything.

“I have a freaking caution sign on my forehead!” I yell. “Why are you acting like this?”

“Because I fucking love you!” he yells back. “You’re not the only person who worries, you know!”

His eyes redden before he looks at his feet. I think of his mom and sister. He insists he’s fine whenever I’ve tried to bring them up, but there’s no way that’s true. All the fight leaves me. I sit beside him, lace my fingers through his and squeeze two times.

He squeezes back and rests his head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. I knew I was safe up there, but you weren’t safe. You didn’t seem to care that they were coming right at you.”

“You know I cared that zombies were coming to eat me. I would’ve run if I’d thought we couldn’t kill them. I would’ve left Ana in the dust.” He sniffs at my joke. “You were the same way on the radio. I wanted to kick you because it seemed like you weren’t taking it seriously.”

“I was, I swear,” he says. “I just wasn’t freaking out.”

“Exactly. I don’t do anything stupid because I always want to come back to you and Bits. I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.”

“I know.”

“Plus, you don’t need to worry, not with my expertise in karate.” I shoot out my hand in a faux karate chop, which accidentally knocks half of my stack of books on the nightstand to the floor.

“That’s not helping your case,” he says with a reluctant smile, and his shoulders come down a notch. “I really am sorry, sweetie. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I just love you so much.”

“I love you, too.” I push him with my shoulder. “Even though you’re a jerk.”

He pulls a little paper bag out of his coat pocket and waves it in the air. “Would a jerk have saved you the last Twizzlers in the world?”

“Trouble in Paradise?” Nelly asks, when I sit at the lunch table.

“Oh, shut up,” I say. “He got worried and didn’t handle it very well. So you can feed that to the rumor mill before it has us breaking up and moving to opposite sides of the farm.”

Dan and Liz, another of our patrollers, laugh.

“I didn’t think you guys ever fought,” Dan says.

“Of course we do,” I say. “How can you live with another human being and not get annoyed at them at least some of the time?”

Dan points a finger at me. “
That’s
why I don’t settle down. I always end up annoyed out of my mind.”

“Want to hear my theory?” I ask.

Nelly groans. “Here we go—Cassie’s Theory of Relationships.”

“It’s true!” I turn to Dan and Liz. “Everyone is going to annoy you somewhat. The trick is to find the person who only annoys you a little, and where what you love about them outweighs what you don’t love. They’ll never be perfect, but they’ll be perfect for you. The problem is that people think it has to be perfect all the time, and that’s not possible.”

“That’s actually a good theory,” Liz says to Nelly, who shrugs.

“So, anyway, Nels,” I say. “We never got to finish our conversation about Adam. I mean, you admitted you
like
like him, but you never told me—”

“Right now what I don’t love about you is outweighing what I do love about you,” Nelly says.

“You love me so much that the good could never be outweighed by the bad. You can tell me later.
In private
,” I whisper loudly, from behind my cupped hand.

“I hate you,” Nelly says. I blow him a kiss.

“So, are we really closing the cabin?” Liz asks.

“It doesn’t make sense to have anyone down there if they’re going to have to be rescued,” Dan says. “Or waste ammo. It’s better to wait for the Lexers to come to the fence.”

Liz nods. She’s in her early thirties, thin and tall, with short dark hair and muscled arms. I was a little afraid of her at first, but she laughs easily and is nice once you get past her tough demeanor.

Caleb and Marcus pull out chairs. They’re brothers, but they could be twins with their platinum ponytails, snub noses and matching mannerisms. Caleb is nineteen and Marcus is twenty-two. They made it here last summer, after traveling home from college to find their parents dead. Well, they weren’t actually dead. They had to finish them off.

“You can’t see shit from the cabin, anyway,” Marcus says. “Hey, we need to go on patrol soon. We’re running out of stuff.”

Patrol is when we leave the farm for supplies. It takes a lot of gas to run what little machinery we use, and all the little things—like toothbrushes, medicine and random equipment—are out there.

“We need feminine hygiene products,” Liz says. “I don’t know about you, Cassie, but this menstrual cup thing sucks.”

“I don’t mind it,” I say. “My mom used one. It’s better than the cloth pads.”

Liz frowns at the mutters of the men. “What? It’s perfectly natural. The female body is a beautiful thing.” Caleb looks at her almost non-existent chest with a snort. “Yes, Caleb, I am a woman.” She grabs his head in the crook of her arm. Caleb writhes and twists but can’t escape.

“A woman who can kick your ass, Cabe!” Marcus calls.

“I’ve got to go. Art class.” I look at Nelly. “So, we’ll discuss later?”

“Nope,” he says.

The cabin that was pressed into service as the school isn’t cordoned off into rooms the way the others are. It’s a modern pioneer schoolhouse, with desks, a wall painted chalkboard-black and projects hanging everywhere. Once winter set in, Penny insisted we start a school for the kids, and the weapons that once lived in here were moved to the solar barn.

“That’s great, Jasmine,” Penny says to a little girl with a long brown braid who holds out a piece of paper.

Jasmine is Bits’s best friend. She towers over Bits, but she’s shy and reserved where Bits is spunky. Her eyes light up at Penny’s compliment. “Thank you, Miss Diaz.”

“You really don’t have to call me that, Jasmine.”

“My mom says I should, at school.”

Jasmine’s mom, Josephine, is very strict. I don’t blame her. She had three kids and a husband, and Jasmine’s all that’s left. She still jumps at the smallest noise and spends more time worrying than I do. Sometimes I catch her peering through the school windows until she catches sight of Jasmine and relaxes enough to head back to her shift.

“Hello, Miss Diaz,” I say.

Penny waves half-heartedly. She still feels sick, but we’ve been filling in on her other shifts, so she’s been getting more rest. I’ve upped my art classes from two to four days a week. I make them extra long and force her to lie down in the corner.

The fifteen kids, who range in age from five to sixteen, sit at tables working on projects or read in the pillow-strewn library area. I catch Bits’s eye and wink. She returns it but stays put. Penny may be sweet, but she doesn’t let them take advantage. She has the teacher stare down pat.

“Cassie’s here!” Jacob, a ten year-old, says.

The kids mark their pages in books, return projects to their cubbies and come back to the tables with soft murmurs.

“They’re like robots,” I say to Penny. “How do you do that?”

“They listen to you, too.”

“That’s only because I do fun stuff. If I taught math they’d be throwing spitballs at me. Now go lie down.”

Penny flops on the pillows in the library. I think she’s asleep before she gets there.

“We’re going to start working on self-portraits this week,” I say. “Who knows what a portrait is?”

Ashley, who’s sixteen and arrived here last summer with her surrogate mom Nancy, says, “A picture of a person. And a self-portrait is a picture of yourself.”

“Right.”

“Cassie painted me a portrait,” Bits tells them. She pulls the locket out of her pocket. “It’s of my mom.”

I pull out the art supplies while they pass it around. Some of the kids look at it longingly, and I’m sure they wish they had something similar. Chris, Doc’s twelve year-old son, had been on their annual father-son fishing trip to Vermont, and they never made it home to Mom. Even though Ashley has Nancy, she lost her parents. And the list goes on. I’d paint one for each of them, if only I knew their parents’ faces. Maybe if I teach them well enough they’ll be able to make their own before they really do forget.

On my way to the front, I notice a photo of me in the locket, opposite the portrait. Adrian must have cut up an old picture for her. I know Bits loves me, but she kind of has to, since she has no parents. That she would put me into her locket, next to her real mom, makes my chest tighten—in a good way. I take a breath and turn to the class.

“We’re going to make portraits of ourselves, like these.” I open the Frida Kahlo book to a self-portrait, one with Diego Rivera painted on her forehead. “We won’t only draw what others can see, but what’s inside, too. It can be anything—something that has meaning, something we love, even something we don’t like.”

“She has a man on her head!” Chris says.

“He’s not
on
her head,” Ashley says. She tosses her dark gold hair and raises her eyes to the ceiling. “She’s thinking about him.” Chris blushes, his unrequited love for Ashley apparent.

“Let’s look at more of her paintings and talk about why you think she painted what she did.”

They crowd around the book I set on the front table. Bits’s freckled face is serious; she loves art of any kind. And she’s good at it, like I always hoped my daughter would be. I smile and hope it conveys how much I adore her. And when she beams back, I think it must.

I jolt awake when Bits leaps onto the bed.

“It’s your birthday!” she screams into Adrian’s sleeping face, and his eyes snap open.

“Yes,” he says, slowly coming to. “Yes, it is. And I can’t imagine a better way to be woken up than by such a pretty girl screaming in my ear.”

Bits wiggles between us. She was ten times worse on her birthday. And this is before she has cake. “Party time! We took a vote, and we’re going to watch
Ponyo
.”

The party is just dinner with something special for dessert, like we do for everyone’s birthday. But we always fire up the generator and let the kids watch a movie. They think it’s because we love them, but it’s to get them out of our hair while we drink a bit of alcohol.

“That sounds great,” Adrian says. “But first, do you want your birthday present?”

“It’s not
my
birthday,” Bits says.

“Well, it’s mine. And I can give out birthday presents to anyone I choose. So, do you want it?”

She stops bouncing and looks around the room. “Um, yeah! What is it? Can I have it?”

“It’s not in here. It’s in the barn.”

Her eyes grow round. “My kitten? I’m getting my kitten? Holy crap!”

“Bits, language!” I yell, but she pays no attention, probably because I’m laughing.

Adrian gives me a lazy smile. The kind that makes me want to stay in bed and do things. Things you can’t do around the eight year-old who just landed on me with a scream of joy.

I wink and mouth,
Later
, then tickle Bits under her armpits. “Okay, let’s go get that kitten, potty mouth.”

***

The gray-striped kitten’s name is Sparkle, and she’s unbearably cute, with her tiny white paws and pink nose. Actually, the kitten’s name is Sparkle Moon Rainbow, which is what happens when you let a fairy-obsessed eight year-old name a cat.

I’ve just finished work at the laundry, which is the worst job here, barring anything related to zombies. It may not be as bad as Ma Ingalls had it, with the huge drums that we agitate using belts and a generator, but it still involves copious amounts of hot water and heavy lifting. We ran out of toilet paper months ago and switched to cloth. Thankfully, today was not a poop wash day because on those days I’m in the shower within eight seconds of the end of my shift.

Now, back in my room, I hold Sparkle in the air and talk to her while her tiny purr motor runs. “I’m sorry about your name, but I figure we can call you Sparky. That’s not so bad, is it?”

Adrian enters and I deposit her in his outstretched hands. “Oh, I love you, Sparkle Moon Rainbow.”

“I’m going with Sparky,” I say. Adrian rubs Sparky against his cheek, and both of them close their eyes in pleasure. I have a sneaking suspicion he wanted this kitten as badly as Bits did. “So, is the cake almost decorated?”

“Nope, Bits just threw me out of the kitchen. She’s waiting for it to cool.” I lock the door. Adrian places Sparky on Bits’s bed, and his eyes gleam. “Hi.”

“Hello,” I say. “She’s going to be there for a while. She’ll want to sleep here tonight with the kitten, and we’d be evil if we said no. You shot yourself in the foot with that one.”

Adrian laughs. “I realized that, but it was too late. We’ll work out custody arrangements with Peter tomorrow.”

“So, do you want your present now or later?”

“I thought this was my present.”

“Nope.”

“It’s all I want,” he says. “What else could you have gotten me?”

I peel off the damp shirt I wore to the laundry and look in the dresser for something halfway decent to wear. Everything is so boring. I’m not a clothes horse, but something special would be nice every once in a while.

“You’ll never guess,” I say. “Now or later?”

He comes behind me and runs his hands down my sides. “Later. Definitely later.”

I put on my only nice shirt, a black one that shows some cleavage, and sit on the edge of the bed. “Come here.”