We Who Endure (Unfinished Fiction)

FOREWORD

This is one of my rare, unfinished titles that's never going to get finished.

I'm posting this basically for completion's sake. Think of this like bonus content.

A brief history.

This was the one Lara X. Lust/Misty Vixen collaboration that never saw the light of day. Until now! It was sort of like Haven, but a few years after the end as opposed to several decades. It was also going to be like Haven, but the focus remained on a small group instead of building up a whole region. It was going to be five 'episodes', kind of like Dead Drift, except the episodes were about twice the length of a Dead Drift episode. It was canceled basically because we were both too busy and there wasn't really enough interest from either of us to sustain it.

To be clear: This is an unfinished story that will never be finished. It is here for archival purposes.

If you choose to read it, we hope you enjoy it!

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CHAPTER ONE

The end of the world was a lot less fun than everyone had made it out to be.

Zeke walked down the middle of some old asphalt road, deep in whatever state he was currently in. Somewhere to the north, maybe Wisconsin. Fourteen months into zombie Armageddon saw him tired, hungry, bruised, and, worst of all, apathetic.

He was also starting to run low on supplies.

Zeke took stock of the area around him again. To the left, a lot of nothing. Fields, plains. To his right, trees and hills. The rode was a nice demarcation line between the two. He wasn’t sure where it was going, but then again, he wasn’t exactly sure where he was going. Somewhere. In the beginning, Zeke had made plans, enacted them, adapted them as situations evolved or dissolved. It was different now.

A lot of it just felt pointless.

He’d made and lost friends.

He’d made and lost enemies.

He’d found and lost lovers.

In the end, it always seemed to come back to the exact same thing: him, alone, walking down some desolate stretch of road, looking for the next place to settle. The next place to get away from the them, from the reaching, screeching hordes with their slack skin and dead eyes and bloody mouths. Their single-minded determination.

Their multitudes.

There was a car up ahead, abandoned, leaning awkwardly to one side like a drunk, tires flat or missing, he couldn’t tell from this distance.

He didn’t drive anymore, there wasn’t really much point. Cars were too hard to maintain, too loud, drew too much attention. From the zombies and humans. They made you a target and people would shoot up your vehicle just to get at you, because they always figured if you had a car, then that car must be loaded with gear, food, water, medicine. Whatever blank their mind was currently filling in based on their most desperate need.

Need something bad enough and you started to see it everywhere.

His hiking boots, old and brown and fraying at this point, struck the cracked asphalt with dull sounds. The sound of his own walking was rhythm, almost melodic. A mild wind gusted across the area, making the trees sway. Several carrion birds circled high overhead, cawing occasionally. It was all he had for company.

Not that he particularly minded.

The infestation in this region didn’t seem particularly high, but Zeke also knew that it could be an illusion. There might be a hundred of them just out of sight, waiting for the wrong thing to set them off and send them lurching for fresh meat.

What was in that car?

He was running low on just about everything. Food, water, medicine. He needed a sewing kit to fix his clothes. Glancing skywards, Zeke tried to get a measure of the time based on the position of the sun. It was a cloudy day, but he put it somewhere towards later afternoon. Maybe around five. He checked his wind-up watch and grinning. Five ten. It was the little things that helped keep you sane, the simple pleasures.

He lost his smile. It was getting harder to find meaning in damn near anything.

The car didn’t seem to be occupied by anything alive or undead. He pulled out his pistol. It was full, twenty one shots, and he had another magazine ready to go, but after that he had nothing. That was probably the most worrying thing of all.

He slowed his gait as he approached the car. The trunk was closed, so that was a good sign at least. This far into the end of the world, a lot of trunks had been busted open and cleared out. When the zombies had turned into a tidal wave of cold undead flesh, a lot of people had packed as much shit as they could into their cars and taken off to somewhere. Anywhere else, really. Some of them were stupid about what they’d brought with them, but some were smart. It was weird, the shit people would grab. Zeke had found all kinds of stuff.

Peering inside, he frowned, spying a corpse slumped over in the front. It had been hidden from view initially, on approach from the rear. Some guy in a t-shirt and jeans, a crater in the side of his head. It had happened awhile ago from what he could tell, the body long since dried out. It smelled, but not as bad as it could.

With a soft sigh, he pulled his gloves on and got to work.

It was slow work, but that was mainly because he wanted to be thorough. You had to be thorough when there no longer existed readily accessible stores of food and medicine, shelter and protection, and you were running low on supplies. The stuff that kept you alive. A careful examination and an extra fifteen minutes might mean the difference between life and death. Or, in less dramatic and most often cases, the difference between day of suffering and a day of merely tolerable suffering. Misery was a relative thing.

And it still struck him as insane how far he’d fallen.

Or, maybe risen. It all depended on how you looked at it and who was looking.

He supposed monks would say he’d become a lot more enlightened. The impoverished and homeless would say now he knew what it was like to be them. Not that he ever had a problem with any of those groups. Hell, he’d been impoverished before, but his goals had been a lot higher back before the undead had come swarming into his life to rip it to shreds and feast on it. But he’d been aiming for money, expensive things, comfort, girlfriends, reputation. Power, ultimately. What was power now? He’d settle for four walls and a roof, a few cans of food, and a loaded gun. He’d settle for a day where he only had to fight a couple of zombies, not even none, just a couple would be a good day. There were so many of them now.

The man had nothing on him. Whoever had killed him had likely emptied his pockets, and the glove compartment, too. There was nothing but trash, empty wrappers and old packs of cigarettes (also empty, of course), and receipts and the other random crap that tended to accumulate in cars. So why was the trunk still shut?

Usually, after looting a car, people didn’t tend to shut the trunks again, there was no point. Zeke found the handle that controlled the trunk and yanked on it.

Nothing happened.

He sighed softly. Well, that made sense. It was a stroke of luck, actually. Because he could open it where apparently no one else could.

It’d make noise though.

Always a risk.

Zeke walked around to the back and reached over his shoulder. Getting a grip on the head of the crowbar he kept in a loop on his pack, he extracted it and then, after looking around for a few seconds and seeing no zombies hanging around, drove the tip of the crowbar into the space between the trunk and the frame.

Metal grinded and shrieked as he worked the trunk until finally it popped.

It was loud, so he started hunting. There was definitely stuff inside, but a lot of it looked useless. He started digging through it, throwing out trash and ripped up clothing. There, two bottles of unopened water, a can of corn. Zeke shoved it quickly into his pack. He prepared to go back in for more when he heard a groan from up ahead.

“Fuck,” he muttered as he looked around the popped trunk.

Three figures had emerged from the trees and were now coming his way. They’d heard him. He pulled out his pistol and took aim, then hesitated as he heard another groan and some shuffling behind him. Zeke looked back and saw now half a dozen of the shambling figures coming up onto the road, reaching for him with dirty hands and broken fingernails. He ran a quick calculation in his head and decided to up his timeline instead of staying and fighting. Keeping his pistol out, his grip firm, he set dashed into the treeline.

It was where they were coming from, but it also likely contained a place to get in for the night, or, at the very least, a tree to climb.

Yeah, some of the variants could climb now, but he hadn’t seen many of them around.

He’d been planning on heading into the woods as it was.

The trees closed in around him as he headed off. Zombies weren’t terribly tenacious, at least not the regular ones. The movie zombies that people expected. They moved a little faster than people expected, but mostly they just groaned and stumbled around. Their danger was in their numbers or if you got into an enclosed space with a few of them.

It was the variants you had to watch out for.

The fast ones or the strong ones or the quiet ones.

Zeke tried not to think about it and instead focused on staying alone. His focused was narrowed down. Once you broke line of sight with them and didn’t make too much noise, the zombies would usually leave you alone.

He slowed again after about a hundred feet, taking stock of his surroundings once more. He saw some uncertain shapes shifting among the trees, but they were farther off and didn’t seem to be coming his way. There were no immediate signs of the other two things that you had to watch out for: wildlife and humans.

Humans were the most dangerous, if only because they might lie to you first.

The undead were a much more honest threat.

True to that thought, he heard a shuffling sound come from up ahead somewhere. Zeke slowed to a crawl, reaching down and holstering his pistol, then carefully extracting his hunting knife from its sheath on his thigh. The blade gleaned in the sunlight as he brought it up, focusing on where the sound had come from.

Zombie was behind the tree ahead and to his right a little, had to be.

He crept closer, closer still, listening.

A low groan escaped the decaying thing. Definitely a zombie. He raised the blade, preparing to strike, and stepped nimbly around the tree as he got up to it. Sure enough, there was a zombie. And it was facing away from him, perfect. It let out a warning grunt at his presence and began to turn, but he was must faster.

Zeke plunged the razor sharp blade into the nape of its neck, instantly severing the brain stem and killing it. He pulled the knife cleanly out as the zombie dropped. Perfect kill. He stepped forward and grasped the falling corpse, easing it down to the leaf-strewn ground quietly, and then dropped into a crouch. Looking around while he wiped the blade down on the cleanest parts of the zombies clothes, getting its thick blood off, he was relieved to see that his attack hadn’t drawn any unwanted attention. Putting his knife away, he began to search the body.

Unbidden thoughts came to him as he rifled through the zombie’s pockets. Who had this guy been before he was a zombie?

Who had he been before the apocalypse?

Zeke had gotten decent at imagining what people looked like before zombification, or so he liked to think, and the guy seemed pretty average. Maybe in his thirties, a little heavy, eyes space a little too close together. He looked like the kind of guy you’d see working in an office or some medical complex. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he’d been a fast food employee or a writer or a drifter or any one of a hundred thousand ways people labeled themselves and each other. Did it matter? Why was he even thinking of this?

Who was Zeke Wallen before the apocalypse?

Probably not all that different to who just Zeke was now. He liked to think he was still himself, just with fewer filters, few hesitations, fewer uncertainties.

When you’d killed people, and fought zombies, and lived in the midst of an apocalypse for fourteen months, that tended to either kill you or toughen you up. He found a lighter and nothing else in the pockets.

“Son of a bitch, why didn’t you die with anything more useful?” he growled as he got back to his feet, resisting the urge to kick the zombie’s head.

Then he gave in and did it anyway. It wasn’t that loud, and it felt good to let out some of the pent up irritation he was starting to feel.

He was hungry, and thirsty, and his legs were killing him, and he had the beginnings of a bad headache coming on.

It was all fucking irritating and he just wanted to be in a place where he could stop moving for the day.

Just to sit down would be a blessing.

Zeke pressed on, heading deeper into the woods, keeping a look out for any of the structures that might be out there in the a wooded area. As time wore on, more people had wanted to get away from the cities, into the woodlands, so they had a lot of cabins and houses built. This created a cottage industry, so there were also resorts and tourist traps and restaurants and gas stations. Those were less like to be actually in the woods, but he’d been surprised before. At the moment, he just needed to find somewhere and be inside of it.

Ahead, through the trees, he caught sight of an anomaly among the woodlands.

Shifting his course towards it, Zeke walked on.

Who had he been before the zombies?

Just some guy living in an apartment in Portland, Oregon, managing a surprisingly successful little burger place. He’d been put in charge by the owner after working there for two years and given a pretty heft raise and a good future reference. Ultimately, he’d wanted to be an investor, to own his own restaurant, then two, then three. But he’d never gotten that far, obviously. For someone in his late twenties, he thought he was doing okay back then. His girlfriend had thought so to, even if she was just staying because he had a nice place, a good car, and a steady paycheck, and he liked to fuck her. Had he loved her?

No. But he did think that he liked her more than she liked him.

But she’d been good to him, mostly, if a little detached.

Maybe it was just how she was wired.

And he’d had to watch her get torn apart by a horde of zombies when they were trying to make it to the evac center at the edge of town.

He’d only just made it out himself.

Zeke still had nightmares about that. A lot of them.

He preferred not to think about it.

There, up ahead, a camp. His instincts had been correct. He’d gotten good at reading the land, at picking up on visual and audible clues. He still wasn’t sure how being a moderately in shape restaurant manager translated to being someone as good at staying alive and killing zombies as he was, but, well, here he was.

The camp wasn’t much to look at, he realized as he stepped into the small clearing. A tent that had a big gash in one side, a foldout chair, a cooler, all centered around the remains of a campfire. There were still wisps of smoke coming from the smoldering embers of the fire, and he saw bootprints heading away from the camp, opposite the way he’d come in. Someone had been here, and recently. Maybe he should try to find them.

Or maybe he should just let them go.

Zeke decided to give it a few minutes and searched the tent. The problem with other human beings was that it was a fifty-fifty shot as to whether or not they would try to at best rob you, at worst kill you. He had several scars now, thanks to several assholes who’d tried to kill him. He’d come out on top, not that he was all that happy about it. He didn’t like to think back on that time. The first time he’d killed someone, it had been brutal, but there had been an edge of excitement to it, like a hard, concentrated shot of adrenaline.

He didn’t like that he kind of liked it.

That he liked the thrill of the fight or the rush of the kill.

He’d tried not to keep track of his kill count, but it felt impossible not to, like it was burned into his skull or something.

Eighteen. He’d killed eighteen people so far.

All things considered, Zeke thought he had a pretty good handle on himself. He could have killed a whole lot more, because he’d been in way more fights than that. He supposed there were a few that he may have killed, but he didn’t know because he’d left them in a sad state to save themselves if they had the will or skill.

He’d probably been in fifty fights so far, maybe as many as seventy.

Those he’d lost count of.

“Motherfucker,” he muttered as his search only turned up an old t-shirt and a tiny can of tuna. It wasn’t a terrible find, but otherwise the tent had been emptied. He looked in the cooler and then debated with himself whether or not to grab it. It was too big to put in his pack, or attach to it, but it was a decent cooler, not too dirty, medium sized.

He decided that he’d come back for it and the chair once he found a place to stay for the night, maybe make a little camp of his own.

He was tired of walking.

A moment later, he found himself staring at the fading bootprints, then into the forest itself. There were a lot of great reasons not to go seeking humans nowadays, but as he stared into the dense woodlands, Zeke found that he didn’t really care right now. His survival instinct was strong, clearly, but he’d been having difficulties lately.

In all honesty, as much as he hated to admit it, he was getting lonely.

He hadn’t seen another in a week, and he hadn’t directly interacted with another human in three weeks now. Moving among the wilderness, killing zombies, scavenging for supplies, it was beginning to lose its charm.

Maybe charm was the wrong word.

Meaning was more like.

He was beginning to wonder why he should go on. Why he should be reaching for the next sunrise. It was something he’d worried about months ago, but the circular logic of surviving just to survive didn’t really bother him. He liked surviving. And yeah, he would be happy with a shelter and a meal and a quiet place to sleep tonight, but maybe happy was the wrong word. Satisfied was closer, but maybe that was even the wrong word now.

Now that he really thought about it, things were beginning to lose their meaning. It was like the color was draining from the world and he was just going through the motions. He’d only noticed this problem over the past few weeks.

Maybe it could be solved by finding another person.

Hadn’t humans evolved to be social? You couldn’t be alone all the time. Or maybe just he couldn’t be alone all the time, much as part of him might like to believe otherwise.

With a soft grunt, feeling a little like he was giving in to something, he set off, following the path of whoever had been here earlier. The fire was fresh enough that they could have left within the last hour, maybe sooner.

He kept watch as he shifted through the trees, following the rough path, making sure he was staying on it and not moving too fast. Even if the person he was tracking might be reasonable, it was all too easy to sneak up on someone an accidentally get yourself shot nowadays. The bootprints faded, but he saw they were headed in a single direction, or had been. There was a broken branch. He walked on a little bit further.

In the distance, there were more zombies, shifting and shambling about, letting out the occasional sound, the deep groan that had become so associated with them. They didn’t seem terribly concentrated here. He’d come across places where it felt like you couldn’t go ten feet without running into some of them. As much studying as he’d done of the undead horrors, Zeke hadn’t ever been able to figure out why they congregated in some places but not others. Sometimes it was obvious, like there was a city nearby, or there had been an encampment there, maybe one of the emergency aid shelters the military had set up.

Back when there was a military.

But sometimes he’d come across ghost towns with only a handful of the undead wandering around. Those were great finds, usually lots to recover. But he found it difficult to stay for long. Part of it was that he had this itch to keep exploring, keeping hunting, keep looking for something. He wasn’t completely sure what. But part of it was the echoes of the dead, what once had been there. It all looked too close to Hollywood depictions of post-apocalyptic cities, only even realer than that. Uglier. It always struck a deep chord of terror in him, a terror he couldn’t or wouldn’t name, and inevitably, he would move on.

Corpse up ahead.

Zeke halted and crouched by it, studying it. Judging from the caved-in skull and the blood splattered across the nearby trees, someone had probably taken a baseball bat to the thing. They’d done the job, at least. It wasn’t moving or twitching still.

That was another great things about zombies: they didn’t know how to set a trap.

Well, the basic ones didn’t know how to set a trap.

Some of the variants seemed to have figured it out. He looked around nervously, not wanting to be caught unawares.

He still seemed to be clear, but the blood, old and coagulated as it was, looked relatively fresh. This person might’ve been cracking this skull right as he was on approach to the camp. He thought he would’ve heard something like this, but sound could do funny things. Maybe he was just out of range. He quickly rifled through the dead woman’s pockets, but she didn’t have anything on her. No pack, either.

Sometimes zombies still carried backpacks. He’d found some cool and useful stuff that way on his adventures.

Zeke stood back up and set off, his pace a bit faster than before, but still reserved. He was getting closer, he was almost sure of it. He didn’t even know what he’d do once he found the person. Maybe offer to trade, maybe see if they had a place nearby, although judging from the state of the camp, he wasn’t sure. He was getting the impression that this was someone like him: a wanderer who’d just happened across the camp and used it for a little while. Maybe he’d just share a conversation and a meal with them and part ways.

He’d done that often enough.

Zeke stopped as he heard something, or thought he heard something. He waited, listened, heard the wind through the trees, the distant groans of zombies, and what he thought might be someone running up ahead.

Then he heard a shout of surprise, a cry of attack, a woman’s voice, and something crack mightily into something else.

Zeke took off running, pulling out his knife as he went.

CHAPTER TWO

He rushed into a clearing and came upon a very strange sight.

An extremely attractive woman in a surprisingly sexy red dress, wearing a choker collar studded with diamonds, was fighting off about half a dozen zombies. Immediately, he could see that by her form, she had more enthusiasm than skill when it came to combat. She was holding a pipe splattered with blood and brain matter.

She must’ve been the one that killed the zombie he’d passed earlier.

One already lay dead at her feet, and as he watched her, she cracked the skull of another. But two more were coming up behind her.

“Behind you!” he snapped as he raised his knife.

She jerked at the sound of his voice, letting out a startled shout, but the encroaching zombies reasserted themselves as the dominant threat. The woman swung the pipe around behind her in a broad arc. It was clumsy, but effective, knocking the two zombies back and buying herself some time in space. Zeke went for the undead nearest to him. It was coming for him, having noticed him and since he was the closer fresh meat, deciding he was a better target. Too bad for it. He drove the blade in through one of its eyes.

The good news was that it killed the zombie. The bad news was that when the zombie dropped like a sack of bricks, it took the knife with it.

“Damn,” he snapped, grabbing his crowbar and yanking it out.

He got a good grip on it and brought it around in a tight arc, cracking open the skull of another zombie that was getting too close for comfort. He saw the woman bring her pipe down in an overhanded swing on a zombie’s head once, twice, three times and the cranium caved in with an ugly spray of gore.

Now that there was two of them, and one of them was a more experienced fighter, they finished off the initial batch of zombies, and two more that wandered up, within another minute. At the end of it, they both stood about six feet apart from each other, panting, her more than him, each eyeing the other warily. Zeke had learned awhile ago not to underestimate, well, anyone. Some people got good at faking being tired, or weak, or stupid. They were good at getting your guard down. But he’d also learned a lot about reading people.

He could tell right away that, unless she had some sort of stash nearby, she was in trouble. The only weapon she seemed to have on her was that pipe. She had no backpack, nothing. She looked tired and dirty.

She didn’t seem dangerous. Well, anymore dangerous than a typical human could be. But he thought she wasn’t going to go after him.

He relaxed and lowered his weapon first, then dropped slowly into a crouch by the nearest corpse and started searching it.

For a few seconds, neither of them spoke, each waiting for the other to make the next move.

Finally, he heard her sigh softly. “Thanks,” she said quietly.

“Welcome,” he replied simply.

Another moment of silence passed.

“I’m Amber.”

“Zeke.”

More silence.

He decided maybe it was his turn to continue the conversation as he moved onto the next zombie, the first one yielding nothing. “You’ve got a curious idea of traveling clothes.”

She let out a huff of irritation. “My other clothes were ripped really bad and bloody, and I didn’t have anything else on me. I found this at a camp. It was the only thing besides a t-shirt that was too small for me.”

“I saw that camp. I have the shirt, actually,” he replied.

“Were you following me?” she asked suddenly.

“No. I mean, not intentionally. I was on the road earlier, started getting overwhelmed by zombies, ran into the forest. Picked up your trail.”

“Did you see anyone else?” she asked.

He looked up, noting the edge in her voice. “No. Why?”

She looked reluctant suddenly, worried. “I thought someone was following me,” she admitted finally.

He moved onto the next zombie, finding only trash in the first’s pockets.

“I didn’t see any other people or signs of people,” he replied. “What are you doing out here?”

“Right now? Heading towards a watchtower. You can’t see it from here, but I climbed a tree earlier to look around and I saw it.”

When she said that, it struck a mental chord in his memories, and, thinking back, Zeke realized that he’d seen the vague outline of a ranger’s watchtower against the horizon. He’d been distracted, but one of his thoughts in the chain of considerations his mind was had been to maybe check it out. Well, now he had more reason.

He was starting to lose his focus, he should have remembered that.

“I mean, where did you come from? You don’t seem prepared for being out here. Were you robbed?” he asked.

“No,” she replied. “The place I was staying at got attacked. I’m not sure what happened. Something blew up last night, and there was a lot of fighting. The zombies got in.” He could see the memories of horror written across her beautiful features and felt a wave of empathy. So she probably wasn’t used to something like this. “We ran. I didn’t even get a chance to grab anything, really. The people I was with, we got separated, or they died. Eventually it was just me. I crossed a huge field earlier today and got to this forest. I made it to that camp, found the dress and the pipe.” She lifted it, frowning at it.

“I’m sorry,” Zeke said. He looked up at her, pausing in searching the final corpse. So far, all he’d found for his trouble was a single bullet that wouldn’t fit his gun and a half-dead book of matches. Not terrible, but not great either. “You haven’t spent much time in the wilderness, have you?”

“No,” she admitted after a long pause. No doubt she was weighing how much to reveal to him. He understood. If you were fucked, it usually wasn’t a good idea to reveal to someone in a position to fuck you harder that you’d be an easy target.

But she looked tired, at the end of her rope, with few prospects.

“I spent most of my time in the emergency camps at first. Finally ended up in a little sort of fort town, but it burned down. The survivors moved to a bigger camp, where I was at. I think it burned down, too. When I was running away, I smelled smoke and saw fire. So…” She shrugged, trailing off, not knowing what to say.

Zeke finished his search of the final corpse and stood, dusting his hands, studying her.

She was very attractive, he realized, and not just because of the sexy dress. (It really was sexy, showing off a lot of her nice thighs and well-sized breasts). She had short, very dark brown, almost black, hair, and pretty blue eyes. She was maybe five five, and from her figure, he doubted she had lacked for meals recently. Not that he was calling her fat. Honestly, the opposite: she had a great, pleasantly curvy body.

“You want some company?” he asked.

She stared at him. Zeke wondered if she was thinking the same things about him that he was thinking about her. He found himself suddenly and intensely hoping so. It had been too long since his brush with the opposite sex, and she was one of the more attractive women he’d encountered in months. He didn’t think he was much of a looker, exactly, but all the physical activity of survival had definitely put him in excellent shape, and by now he knew for a fact that obvious survival prowess was a genuine turn-on for most women.

“Yeah,” she said finally, “if you wouldn’t mind.”

“Nope. Which way’s the watchtower?” he asked.

“That way,” she said, pointing roughly along the path she’d been walking.

He nodded and they began making their way deeper into the forest, leaving the scene of the attack behind.

For the first few minutes, they shared no words, keeping quiet as they moved among the trees. Zeke set a bit of a faster pace. They had a few hours until sunset, but he wasn’t sure how long it would take to get there, let alone what they might find once they actually got there. Finally, he decided to speak up, get the conversational ball rolling. As important as it was to be quiet, he found himself with an intense need for conversation, for human interaction.

“So I get the dress,” he said, “but what about the choker?”

“Oh,” she murmured, her hand going to the black collar around her throat. She ran her fingers across it. “I found it. I like collars. Chokers.” She let her hand drop. “It’s real diamonds, if you were wondering.”

“Wow, that must be worth a lot.”

“It was, yeah. Probably like ten thousand dollars. But now it’s worthless, except that I like the way it looks, I like having it.”

“Someone might decide they’d rather have it,” Zeke replied.

“You’d protect me, wouldn’t you?” she asked.

Zeke pursed his lips. She was trying to manipulate him...and it was working. But he was getting a sense of the situation. She was paranoid someone was following her, asking for his protection. Could be any number of things.

Worst case scenario, maybe she’d had a hand in whatever bad situation she was fleeing.

Less worst case scenario, maybe it was an ex who wasn’t over her, or an obsessive ‘friend’ who’d never gotten the chance to be somewhere alone with her.

Or hell, maybe it was just a garden variety psycho who’d caught sight of her and decided he wanted to see what she tasted like.

“If it came to that,” he replied finally.

She smiled, seemingly happy with the response, even if he’d intended to be a bit vague.

Alliances formed quickly in the wild, but that was the problem with them: they could dissolve just as quickly.

He’d been betrayed before, way more than a few times too. Someone could show up and offer a better deal and your traveling companion might suddenly decide it made more sense to turn against you than to work with you.

Zeke had a feeling, and usually he was right, not always but usually, that she wouldn’t fuck him over.

She might fuck him, though.

She was sticking close to him, letting her arm brush up against his, smiling at him. It had probably occurred to her that she might very well be fucked without him, but he thought he read genuine attraction in her eyes.

“So what about you, Zeke, where are you from? What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I’m from Portland, Oregon originally,” he replied as they walked on, keeping an eye out for zombies. “Got moved to one of the camps when the zombies overran the city. Just barely made it out. One of them actually grabbed me when I was climbing onto the helicopter. Sheer luck someone managed to shoot it and I shook it off. They almost pulled the helicopter down. It was really touch and go there for a bit. But we made it away. They flew us to some big collection of tents off in the wilderness, near a power station, not far from the coast. I stayed there for awhile. After about a month, they started asking for volunteers to train on stuff like hunting and foraging. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I let them train me. Found out I was a really good shot, and I had great reflexes, and I was already in good shape, so I took to the hunting jobs pretty naturally. Spent some time fishing on the coast.”

“Wow, that must’ve been really nice.”

“It was, honestly. After two months, they asked me if I’d move to another camp a ways away, in Montana. They said they needed help of guys like me. I agreed and they flew me and some others out in a chopper with a shipment of supplies. It was supposed to be part of something bigger, I think. I wasn’t military, so they didn’t really keep me in on the loop, but then it all fell apart after a few months. There was this big raid, I think there was a rebellion of some kind, some general wanted power I heard. I don’t know, but between the fighting and this huge horde of zombies that showed up, everything just kind of collapsed.”

“What’d you do?” she asked.

“Grabbed everything I could, loaded it into a car, and drove until it ran out of gas. Then I started walking east.”

“Why east?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know really. Just felt right? I’ve been going ever since. I stop at camps and settlements now and then, trade with people. Fight in battles sometimes.”

“Battles?” she asked.

He glanced at her. “You must’ve had a relatively quiet apocalypse.”

She shrugged uncomfortably. “I mean at first it was like everywhere else. Mean, bloody, disastrous. But then, I guess, yeah, except for the occasional big awful thing happening, it was quiet. Why? What about you?”

“There’s been a lot of fighting. I try not to involve myself too much, but there have been a few times. Usually when a gang is harassing a group of people who don’t deserve it, they’re just on a power trip. If I think I can help even the odds, I do. I have a few times.”

“Why?” she asked after a few more moments of walking.

He thought about it. “I don’t know, I guess I hate bullies.”

“Did you get bullied?”

He sighed unhappily. “No. But sometimes I did the bullying. I wasn’t always the best person.”

She was quiet for a few seconds. “Most of us weren’t.”

They walked on for another five minutes through the trees, becoming lost in their own thoughts. High school was something Zeke was extremely grateful to leave behind, but it was also a thing that still haunted him from time to time. He’d been an asshole sometimes and he liked to tell himself that everyone was at that age, but he knew it wasn’t true. Some people were nice, or at least not mean, even as teenagers.

There were a lot of them that were cruel, though.

He supposed, if you had a certain psychological disposition, cruelty came easily.

It was an uncomfortable thought.

As they came into a less dense part of the woodlands, the trees cleared away and Zeke was given a better view of the way ahead. He saw the watchtower again. It was very high up and after a moment of studying it, he determined that it had to be on a part of the land that rose above the rest of it. It was unlikely that they’d build it that tall.

“So what are your, uh, plans?” Amber asked as they kept walking.

“Admittedly, I don’t really have any beyond get to that watchtower and spend the night. I’ll probably check around the area for supplies. I’m running low, and you obviously don’t have anything. And if I’ve agreed to let you hang around me, then that means we’ll need to split supplies.”

“Sorry,” she murmured.

“I’m not accusing you, just stating the facts,” Zeke replied. He didn’t tell her that he was willing to keep her company simply because he was lonely. Even as good-natured as some people could be, it was surprisingly easy to take advantage of a situation. Especially if you were screwed over in one fashion or another.

“I’m sure we can figure something out,” she said.

He wanted to look over at her but didn’t. Sex was something else he missed, and risky as it was, he wanted to take her to bed. At this point, he probably had one or two offspring that he didn’t know about, maybe more. And as far as he could tell, he didn’t have any STDs. But at some point he’d just decided ‘fuck it, I’ll probably be dead next week, why not?’. Well, here he was, still alive. But it was still true.

This time next week, or even tomorrow, he could be dead.

Why not get laid if the opportunity was there?

At last, they came out of the trees into a larger clearing where a wall of rock and earth rose up into the sky about forty feet ahead of them. There was a cave in the wall and beside it a path that looked like it was the only way up to the watchtower, which sat at the top, on a plot of land the natural wall was a part of.

“Now what?” Amber asked. He looked over at her. She was rubbing one arm, looking around anxiously. He could appreciate how she felt, she was mostly defenseless, and definitely not dressed for this kind of situation.

“Hope that path leads up to the watchtower, and that the watchtower is empty and stable,” Zeke replied, and set off.

They crossed the clearing together, not running into any trouble as they reached the path. It definitely looked a little artificial, and he imagined it had been smoothed out to help rangers or whoever get down to this level more easily. There were even a few basic wooden guardrails installed. He pulled his pistol out, opting to risk drawing unwanted attention and use up precious bullets just in case there was something more dangerous up there than a few zombies. He hadn’t seen any activity from the ground.

“Do you hear that?” he muttered, stopping.

“What?” Amber replied immediately, her voice dropping into a frightened whisper.

He listened more closely, then nodded. “Water. Nearby. Something natural almost certainly. This might be a really good place to stay.”

Zeke kept going. The path let out out onto an interesting plateau. He checked it out slowly, Amber waiting behind him. To his right he did see a small creek sitting at the edge of a dense forest. That was a huge boost. Access to water from a natural source automatically made this an absolutely killer place to hunker down for awhile.

To the left, the natural shelf led out, narrowing a bit until it reached the watchtower they had been seeking. It was more than a watchtower, Zeke was glad to see. Around the base of it, someone had been in the process of building the place up a bit. He saw several chairs and tables, a few boxes, even a desk. Although even from this distance, it was obvious that something bad had happened. The furniture was askew and knocked over, and he was pretty sure he saw dried blood on some of it. And there might have been a corpse in the mix.

Looking up, he didn’t see any people moving around up at the top, but they could be hiding.

Keeping his pistol out, Zeke set off. “Stay close.”

“Okay,” Amber said, tension obvious in her voice.

As they approached the base of the tower camp, she stepped on his heel. “Not that close,” he growled.

“Sorry,” she whispered, sighing softly.

He resisted the urge to chastise her further. She was out of her element and scared and probably hungry and hurting like him.

Admittedly, he found it easier because of how hot she was.

Not the time to get hung up on his dick. He brought her to the edge of the encampment. They had tried to make a little wall, marking the edge of the camp and giving them a good place to hide and shoot from if it was required. It was a half-decent wall, cobbled together from some metal siding, wooden planks, a few big metal barrels, he even saw a car door in there. Someone had done some welding at some point.

It hadn’t saved them, though.

But it was still intact.

“Wait here,” he said, and stepped carefully through the opening meant to serve as a doorway, checking to either side quickly, in case someone or something was laying in wait. But there wasn’t anything dangerous.

He got a closer look at the torn up camp. It looked like a hurricane had been through. It had to be humans who had attacked this place, he decided. There were two dead bodies among the debris, and while they weren’t fresh, they didn’t show the signs of zombification. And they’d been shot. One in the head, one in the throat.

Were they the attackers or defenders?

Did it matter anymore?

Zeke didn’t see anything dangerous. “Okay, you can come in,” he said.

Amber walked in through the opening and hesitated as she saw the bodies. He followed her gaze. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of them. Wait here for now. I need to check upstairs.”

“Okay,” she replied.

Pistol still in hand, Zeke began the long trek up the wraparound metal staircase. He was glad that she didn’t mind taking orders. As far as people he could’ve run into out here went, Amber seemed to be a pretty great one.

Higher and higher he went, getting a better view of the forest. By the time he reached the top, he could see for miles.

There was a lot more forest around.

But for now he needed to see what was waiting for him inside. He finished coming up the last flight of stairs, not liking how loud his boots sounded clanging on them, although he did like that he’d be able to probably hear someone coming. Another plus. Zeke was liking this whole watchtower setup more and more. Though it did beg the question how exactly they’d been overrun. He peered in through a broken window at the room within. It was just one big room, and had obviously been meant to house several different people.

Each corner was its own little area. Three of which seemed to be bedrooms, one of which was a kitchen area. He saw a cast-iron stove. That was good. The place was an absolute mess, though. Bloody. Three corpses. One was beaten to death, another had been shot in the face, the third had been stabbed several times.

As he stepped inside and looked around, checking any obvious hiding places for bad guys, Zeke began to suspect that the attack hadn’t come from outside.

This place had torn itself apart.

He’d seen it happen before. Human nature definitely had a dark side.

Well, the place was secure, he supposed. Now it was just a matter of cleaning it up and inventorying the supplies.

Something which would be way easier with Amber’s help.

He headed back down the metal stairs and rejoined his beautiful companion at the bottom. She was sitting on a chair, leaning forward.

Was she showing off her cleavage?

If she was, damn was it nice.

She had some big tits.

“Well?” she asked.

“There’s nothing dangerous up there,” Zeke replied, taking a moment to stretch and then pop his lower back and neck. He let out a long sigh. “They all killed each other, I think. Anyway, there’s a lot of work to do, if we’re going to stay here.” He looked more intently at her. “So do you wanna stay here with me?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “I do.”

“Okay then. In that case, I’m going to want your help. I’ll make you a deal. I’ll take care of the blood and the bodies if you’ll deal with the other stuff. Organizing the furniture, hunting for supplies, gathering it all up. It’s obviously someone already cleared the place out but I doubt they managed to get their hands on everything.”

“I can do that,” she said, nodding agreeably.

“Good. Start down here. Shout if anything dangerous shows up. I’m going back upstairs to deal with the corpses,” he replied.

“Okay.” A pause. “Thanks, for helping me, and letting me stay here.”

“Yeah,” he said, and began the long walk back upstairs.

CHAPTER THREE

Zeke thought about how he wanted to handle the bodies as he looked at them.

Did he want to haul them all the way down eight flights of stairs?

No, not really. Maybe he could make gravity do the work for him. He gathered up the first corpse after searching it and finding a few loose bullets and matches, then walked to the edge that overlooked the clearing they’d initially come into. Glancing down, he saw that he’d probably be able to get it over the edge of the plateau and onto the ground below.

“Incoming!” he called, and tossed it as best he could.

He almost made it. The body dropped like a rock, hit the edge of the plateau with an awful crack that maybe Amber shout in surprise or disgust, and then flopped over the edge to the clearing below.

“Can you give me more warning?!” she snapped.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Sorry.”

“It’s-fine whatever,” she said.

The next two corpse drops went better, as they were lighter and he managed to heave them a bit farther and clear the drop. They made ugly sounds but just about everything was ugly nowadays. Once the dead bodies were out of the way, he took measure of the interior, studying it more closely. Two of the ‘bedroom’ sections were pretty messed up right now. One of the mattresses was shredded in such a specific way that Zeke suspected someone had hidden something in there, and whoever had walked away from this cataclysm had torn the mattress apart to get at it. The other had a lot of blood on it. The third bed was in decent enough condition, so that’s where they’d be sleeping tonight. He wondered if Amber would have a problem with that.

He supposed they’d find out and got back to work, going over the room and gathering up the bloody clothes and sheets and blankets that were too far gone to be recovered even if they were washed and mended, balled them up, and threw them over the edge too. Well, the bloody ones he did. The ones that were clean but shredded, he kept and used to mop up as much of the remaining blood on the floors and the walls as he could, first.

It wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now.

With that out of the way, he decided to go check on Amber and see how she was holding up. He stepped out onto the walkway and took a look around. He saw some figures moving among the trees, but they all moved like zombies and nothing particularly dangerous seemed to be around. As far as he could tell, this place seemed fairly mild in terms of danger. Which would make it an oasis. In truth, he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But maybe it wouldn’t.

He moved back down to the ground level and found that she had righted most of the furniture and even gathered a little collection of stuff she’d found.

Amber was sitting in one of the chairs.

“Sorry,” she said as he approached, “I cleaned up what I could find, I’m just...really tired. It’s been a long day and I’m just...not used to this.”

“It’s fine,” he replied. “I think we’ve cleaned up enough as it is. There’s probably just enough daylight left to wash and do some chores before bed. I’ve had a long day, too.” He looked at her for a moment, trying to determine a number of things, pushing his already taxed and exhausted mind. There was a lot to consider when a new person got involved, and even more to consider when a new location was involved.

He yawned suddenly and decided they’d done enough cleaning for the day.

“I’m going to wash up in the river, would you watch my back while I do it? I’ll do the same if you want,” he offered.

She seemed to perk up a little at that. “Uh...yeah. That sounds good. Do you have any, like, soap or anything?”

“Yeah, I’ve got some,” he replied, and started walking towards the creek.

Amber got up and followed after him.

As he set his pack down beside the creek after taking a long, careful look at the woods around to make sure no one or nothing was lurking, he stripped naked. After thinking about it for a few seconds, he left his pistol on his pile of dirty clothes. It was either that or give it to Amber. This was one of those times of truth.

She could fuck him over right now.

Grab his pistol and his backpack and run off with it. He was literally naked and defenseless now. But Zeke knew by now that most of the time, he could go with his gut. And his gut told him that Amber was now relying on him, that she was exactly as she appeared: a woman, uninitiated in wilderness survival or combat, alone and afraid.

Also, a woman who was into him.

He could practically feel her gaze and on him as he finished stripping and got into the water with his rag and bar of soap.

As Zeke hunched down and started washing up quickly, trying to ignore the cold water, facing away from her, he decided to test something.

“Don’t focus too much on me, you’re supposed to be keeping watch,” he said.

Her reaction was was he wanted to hear. It had been too long since he’d had sex and the more he was around her, the more he was hoping to sleep with her. He’d learned how to read people. Testing reactions was important.

“Sorry,” she murmured.

He grinned, a little, still facing away from her. Okay, that was a good sign. If she was a bit more difficult, she would’ve denied that she was looking at him, probably even told him to fuck off and stop thinking so highly of himself.

Zeke had never exactly been what you’d call vain, but it had become obvious that he was appealing to most of the women he came across.

And Amber was really fucking hot.

He finished up quickly and then stood, turning around, glad no one had shown up and she hadn’t gone for his gun.

He saw her eyes dip to his crotch.

“For the record,” he said as he left the creek, grabbed a towel and began to dry, “that water is really cold.”

She giggled. “Don’t worry, I, uh, caught a glimpse beforehand.”

“Good to know.”

He quickly dried and pulled on a fresh set of clothes, then started washing his own clothes in the creek a little further down.

Well, as much as he could wash them. Mostly he’d get them wet, wring them out, then hang them up to dry. There had been a laundry line up there.

“Your turn, I’ll keep watch,” he said.

“Okay.” She paused. “I don’t care if you look.”

“Noted.”

She stepped up to the creek’s edge and grabbed the hem of her dress. He watched as she pulled it up and off, revealing a naked body beneath.

She was exceptionally pleasant to look at naked.

Amber was mostly trim, like a lot of people were nowadays, given how hard food could be to come by and how much more often everyone had to do physical labor, but she had some very nice padding in all the right places.

There was a beautiful thickness to her thighs.

An amazing swell to her hips and her ass.

And she had a really nice rack. She sweet, firm double-d cups.

Nice light pink nipples.

Zeke took her in for a few seconds as she made a show of taking the soap and rag and getting into the creek.

Then he focused on splitting his attention between washing his clothes and keeping watch. The two of them worked, splashing quietly as the minutes slipped by and the sun sank lower. He finished, wringing his clothes out as much as he could and then draping them over his pack for the moment. He looked over as he heard Amber clear her throat.

“So do you, um, have anything I can wear?” she asked. “The dress is kind of bloody now and I want to wash it and I, uh, wasn’t wearing panties or a bra anyway…”

“Yeah, hold on,” he replied, putting his damp clothes over his shoulder and digging around in his pack. He passed her a t-shirt and a pair of boxers. “That’s it, unfortunately.”

“Thanks, it’ll do,” she said, pulling the clothes on.

She took a moment to wash the dress and the panties, then wrung them out and came back over to him. They walked back to the campground.

“We’ll probably want to find you some socks, and better boots,” he said, glancing down at the large black boots she was wearing.

She sighed. “Yeah. They don’t fit too well. And my feet hurt. I didn’t want to complain.”

“We’ll figure it out,” he replied.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

“Yeah.” As they came under the watchtower to the little camp beneath it, he passed her his damp clothing. “Here, hold onto that, would you?”

“Yeah,” she replied, accepting it.

Zeke tossed what supplies she’d found into his pack, then began gathering up whatever wood he could find scattered around. “We’ll want to get a fire going. Boil some water. We’re also going to want to find containers to store it in. Probably wouldn’t kill us to drink straight from the creek, but God knows what’s in it. Too many things are fucked up nowadays. Or maybe we can find some purification tablets. Well, either way, we’ve got access to water, so that’s a huge plus. And a forest nearby for firewood.”

“This place seems amazing,” Amber said as he finished gathering what wood he could see and they began heading upstairs. “I wonder what happened to the people who lived here before.”

“I think they had some kind of civil war,” he replied. “Tore themselves apart. Speaking of which, it isn’t exactly perfect up there. Also, as far as sleeping arrangements go, there’s only one bed suitable for sleeping in.”

Amber was quiet for just a few seconds. “Well, I guess I don’t mind sharing.”

“Okay then.”

They got to the top and she started hanging up clothes while he got a fire going. Zeke stole glances of her while she tracked down clothespins and hung their clothes up. She looked really good in his t-shirt and boxers.

Although he supposed she’d look good in just about anything.

She’d look good in rags.

The day wound down after that, and he felt the majority of the stress he’d been carrying around for the past several weeks finally begin to slacken. He had a place to sleep, a secure place, with at least enough supplies to sustain them for a couple of days, giving him an opportunity to search the area, and he had a companion.

One who might want to fuck him.

The sun began to set. He found a pair of good-sized pots, washed them and gathered water in them, carefully hauling them back up the stairs to set on the stove and boil, and then he broke out some of the food he had left.

“I really don’t have hardly anything left, and it looks like we didn’t find much. So we’re gonna have to make this last while I search around for more food,” he said as he pulled out some cans. “What do you like?”

“That corn would be fine,” she replied.

“Okay then.” He passed it to her and decided to go with the little can of tuna he found. It was a small dinner but he didn’t like going to bed on a full stomach anyway.

They ate dinner.

The water boiled.

The fire crackled.

The sun set.

“Do you have anything else you need me to do?” Amber asked after a long yawn. She rubbed at one of her eyes.

“No,” he replied, “you’re good for the night.”

“Okay. I’m going to lay down.”

“All right.”

Zeke watched as she checked out the only functional bed, then got beneath the blankets and scooted closer to the wall. He got up and walked around the outside of the room, checking for threats. When he found none, he set about preparing for bed.

While he stored the boiled water as best he could (one of the pots had a lid and there was a thermos in his possession), he put out the fire that was almost dead anyway, since it was a going to be, not exactly a warm night, but definitely not a cool one. He then stripped down to his boxers and socks and set his gun on a little table beside the bed.

All the while, he’d been not quite looking at Amber, considering how best to approach the possibility of hooking up.

In the end, he decided he should just go for it like he usually did.

“So, um, Amber-” He looked at her as he spoke, then stopped.

She was asleep.

He sighed softly. Well maybe in the morning.

Zeke climbed into bed next to her and lay in the dim room, listening to the faint sounds of Amber breathing and the nature surrounding them.

…

“Zeke.”

He opened his eyes as he felt a hand on his shoulder. “What?” he asked, tired and confused and concerned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Amber said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Oh. What is it then?” he asked, yawning. He’d been facing away from her when she’d gently shaken him awake, but now he rolled over and looked at her.

The first thing that became immediately obvious to him was that she was no longer wearing his t-shirt. Amber was propped on her elbow, the blankets having fallen away from her bare breasts. “I can’t sleep,” she said quietly, “do you wanna...I mean, you know?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I do.”

She smiled and he was just barely aware of her blushing in the dim moonlight. “You can just do whatever you want. I like that.”

“Good.”

He pushed her onto her back and lifted the blankets, looking down the length of her naked body. She’d removed the boxers as well.

He wanted in that pussy so bad.

He got closer to her, suddenly possessed by an intense lust. As his hand came in contact with one large, soft breast, he became even more aroused. He kissed her and she moaned, pushing her body against his own.

She was soft and warm and wonderful.

He felt her hand slip down into his boxers, wrapping around his cock. He was hard as hell and absolutely ready for penetration.

His hand dipped lower as his tongue moved into her mouth, finding her own, wrapping them together. His fingers sought her inner wetness, and as he slipped a finger into her, she gasped and he found her to be extremely slick and hot.

She was ready.

Breathing more heavily, Zeke got on top of her. She pulled him out of his boxers, helping him, and spread her legs.

Divine perfection as he slid into her.

She let out a sound of pleasure, loud in the quiet of the dark watchtower, then moaned as he pushed his way into her.

The pleasure hit him, and then he couldn’t stop.

Panting, Zeke heard himself start grunting and groaning as he drove into her again and again. He fucked her hard and fast, his pace immediately furious, almost manic. She moaned, louder and louder, and he put a hand over her mouth.

Even tired and screwing and horny as hell, his survival instincts kicked in.

Didn’t want to draw any unfortunate attention.

She didn’t seem to mind. If anything she reacted more strongly to it.

“Mmm! Mmm!” she cried, and the sound was insanely hot, turning him on more, and he started fucking her even harder.

Several things happened at once.

The bed began banging against the wall. Something inside of her gave, and she started to come. Gushing hot juices came out of her.

And he started unloading in her.

Zeke groaned loudly, briefly losing control of himself as he put a huge load of his cum inside of her, blasting it into her, filling her with it.

He came in Amber and it was a high unlike any other.

When the moment passed, he almost passed out.

Zeke barely managed to pull out of her and roll off onto his side. She turned on her side and he curled up against her, feeling her soft, warm skin against his.

And then he was asleep again.

…

The next time Zeke came awake, it was early dawn and the bed was shifting.

He raised his head and looked around, finding Amber getting down to the foot of the bed and then standing.

He had a clear view of her ass.

She had one of the hottest asses he’d ever seen.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yeah, fine,” she replied, turning and offering a small, shy smile, tucking some of her dark brown hair behind her ear. “Just need to, um, clean up.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that, I wasn’t all there,” he said, suddenly recalling the fact that he’d gone totally raw with basically a stranger.

Well, life was risk.

“Same,” she said, then walked over to the supplies and found some material to clean herself up with. He laid down on his back, putting his hands behind his head and staring at the scarred wooden roof of the room that was now his home.

He felt good.

Things were going surprisingly well. He had a pretty defensible place to live, access to running water, he wasn’t injured, and a really hot woman was staying with him.

And they’d hooked up.

Amber finished up what she was doing and sat down on the edge of the bed, looking over at him with an awkward smile.

“So,” she said.

Zeke raised his eyebrows at her.

She laughed, blushing. “Um, so the thing is, I’m not on any kind of birth control.”

“Oh,” he replied after a few seconds.

“Yeah. Oh. We might be okay, I’m at the low point of my cycle, and I was never all that fertile to begin with. Some genetic thing. But the thing is, I don’t want to stop. That was really, really good sex. Like really good.”

“It was,” he agreed.

“I’ll go pussy to mouth if you want.”

“I want.”

She laughed and blushed more fiercely. “You’re, um, good at that.”

“At what?”

“Taking control.”

“You like that?”

“Yeah.”

“In sex or everything else too?”

“All of it,” she said, looking down at the floor, pursing her lips. “It’s embarrassing,” she murmured.

“And yet you’re telling me.”

“Yes.”

“Which means you want me to, what, take control of you?”

“Yeah.” She looked at the floor for a few seconds more, then looked back up. “Not like everything. Just, you know, tell me what to do. I like it. I don’t know why. And I like you. But I’ll tell you if I’m having a problem. I like being told what to do, not feeling like I’m being taken advantage of,” she explained.

“Fair deal,” he said after a moment. Zeke pulled back the blanket, revealing his erection. “Ride it.”

Her smile came back with vigor. “Okay.”

As much as he wanted to draw it out, their session lasted about as long as it had last night. And he found out she could really ride dick.

She put those big hips of hers to great use.

This time, when he came, she hopped off of him and took it in her mouth, sucking him dry.

It was a good way to start the day.

After that, he got up and pulled on his clothes and told Amber figure out breakfast. While she did that, he walked outside and took a look around. There were a few zombies wandering around way down in the clearing below the outcropping. He was tempted to pull out his pistol and cap them, but it would be a waste of bullets when he could go down there and use his knife. Never knew when he might get more bullets.

There didn’t seem to be anything immediately threatening them, so he went back inside and found she’d set out a can of peaches and a can of pears.

“I don’t know which one you like better,” she said. She wore only a pair of panties. He found her breasts distracting.

“Pears,” he said, sitting down and grabbing the can. For a moment, he almost asked her why she wasn’t dressed yet. It seemed deliberate. Then it hit him: she was waiting for him to tell her. “Wear the t-shirt I gave you. And you can wear my spare pants for now, they were loose on me. And you can wear my spare socks for now.”

“Okay,” she replied, getting up and gathering the clothes.

Zeke stared at her as he started eating, his eyes following her as she gathered the clothes and dressed. He’d met women like her before. She might be embarrassed, but he knew it was a bit of a big deal that she was telling him this.

When you had this kind of, he wasn’t sure what to call it. Personality trait? Kink? Whatever. When you had this kind of thing, you didn’t share it with just anyone.

She must really like him.

He did like her, on a level that he wasn’t sure he could properly articulate.

Sometimes that’s how it went. You met someone and the two of you just fit together on some deeper level.

It was nice, especially when it was an attractive someone you wanted to fuck and who wanted to fuck you.

The pregnancy thing was dicey, but also strangely hot.

He didn’t want to be running around with a pregnant girlfriend, but on the other hand, Zeke couldn’t deny that the thought of knocking Amber up was a huge turn on.

She finished dressing and they ate breakfast together.

“What are we doing today?” she asked.

“I want to finish straightening up and actually do a thorough search of this place, see if there’s anything we missed now that we’re refreshed and there’s full daylight. After that, I want to go check out that cave down below and the area surrounding us. I saw a few clearings that seemed to have some stuff in them, might be useful supplies,” Zeke replied.

“You want me to come?” she asked.

“Yeah. Always good to have someone to watch your back.”

“You’ll have to protect me,” she said after a moment, absently running playing with her hair while looking down at the table.

“I’ll protect you, Amber,” he replied.

She blushed again and looked up at him, her face titled down. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He wanted to fuck her again suddenly, to take her and bend her over and pull her pants down and just fuck her hard and fast, get his hands all over her sweet fat ass, but they’d already indulged enough as it was.

There were things to do, responsibilities to be tended to, and if you intended to stay alive in a zombie apocalypse, you didn’t let baser needs get in the way.

And now that he had all this in his life, Zeke had more of a reason to stay alive and keep on going than he had for a long while.

And that felt damned good.

He finished his breakfast, then got to work.

CHAPTER FOUR

Amber seemed apprehensive as they made their way back down the path.

“Don’t worry,” Zeke said, his knife in hand as he led the way. “I can handle them.”

“I believe you, I saw you in action yesterday. It’s just, they scare me. I mean, I can handle the regular ones. I’ve seen them enough. I’ve killed some. But the others ones-” she shuddered. “They really scare me.”

“I understand,” he replied. “I can handle them if they show up.”

“Okay.”

They fell silent as they reached bottom of the path. He could hear some of the zombies up ahead and stopped before coming into full view of the clearing. He listened, waiting. The more unique ones, well some of them, had telltale sounds.

After a moment, Zeke raised his knife and adjusted his grip, then set out. He heard nothing but normal zombies out there, and he could deal with those with a knife. Stepping off the path and into the clearing in front of the cave below the watchtower, he spied five of them. There were more farther off, but they probably wouldn’t be a problem.

It was quick work, work that he had practiced hundreds, if not thousands of times by this point as he moved out in the wilderness.

He stabbed each of them in the head, going for the brain, and managing five quick and successful kills in the span of about thirty seconds. They all dropped into smelly heaps on the ground, joining the corpses he’d tossed down here earlier, and no more came around to cause trouble.

“Keep watch,” he said, and started searching the bodies.

Some of them had pockets.

His search turned up a pair of fingernail clippers in decent shape, a wallet that he tossed because no one fucking used money anymore, a ring that he pocketed because some people still went ham for jewelry and would trade good stuff for it, and a few loose matches.

Not a bad haul, overall.

“Okay, let’s see what’s in the cave,” he said, turning his attention towards it.

She trailed after him as he walked up to the opening. The sunlight was doing a great job of illuminating the interior, and already he could see signs of life. Though it was clear that whoever had been in here was long gone.

Zeke had wiped his knife blade off on the cleanest corpse, but he kept it out.

He saw some empty cans and wrappers, a ripped up shirt, a blood-soaked shoe that had dried already. As he moved deeper into the cave, he saw that the light just reached its end. So it wasn’t a very big cave. But there was the remains of a small encampment there. Like a lot of the camps he’d come across, it told an ugly story.

Judging by the ripped up corpse among the shredded bedroll, he guessed that zombies got them while they were sleeping.

Or maybe it had just been one person.

After making sure nothing was hiding, he began looking around and puzzling the situation out. Why hide in the cave when there was a perfect good watchtower in plain sight? Maybe the people in it hadn’t been friendly. But if that was the case, why stick around so closely? Maybe they were planning to try to rob them?

Or maybe they didn’t have a choice.

Or maybe they just didn’t know. Maybe they stumbled onto the cave in the dark of night and was just happy for a place that even resembled a building.

The guy’s backpack was in good condition still, though it was obvious that he’d been low on supplies when he’d died.

Poking around in it, Zeke found some more clothes that looked closer to Amber’s size. He pulled out a t-shirt and pair of jeans, found them to be in good condition and not too dirty, set them aside and kept looking. A packet of rice, a bunch of single serve packets of ketchup for some reason but he wouldn’t turn down ketchup, a cracked mug, and a book.

Not bad.

“Come here,” he said. By the time Amber had joined him, he’d put everything but the clothes back into the pack. “Put those and put your current clothes in the pack. That pack is yours now, I’ll need your help with carrying stuff we find.”

“Okay,” she replied, a small smile on her face.

Zeke still didn’t fully get why she liked him so much, or why she particularly enjoyed this dynamic, but he at least knew why he enjoyed it.

Amber changed quickly while he kept watch. For real, not watching her undress, because getting boxed in inside a cave was really bad news.

She joined him as soon as she was done and they walked back out into the sunshine.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now we start poking around the area, see what we can find. We’ll probably spend most of the day doing that, and eventually we’ll head back and do some more work on the camp, clean it up a bit more, make it a bit more livable.”

“How long do you think we’ll stay?”

“I’m not sure, but I don’t have any real immediate plans to leave. Weeks, at least. Maybe months. Winter isn’t that far off, and those towers are meant to be survivable. So we could do really well for ourselves,” he said.

“I’d like that,” Amber replied quietly. “To stay up there with you.”

“I’d like that, too,” he said. “Come on, let’s go searching.”

They headed towards the next visible clearing in the wooded area surrounding them.

…

“What are you thinking about?” Amber asked.

Zeke glanced at her for several seconds, then looked back down at the can of refried beans he was eating. It wasn’t the best lunch, but he liked refried beans, even uncooked.

“I was thinking more about the long-term, like we were talking about earlier,” he replied.

They were sitting on one of those wooden picnic tables that so many parks seemed to have. It had been an uneventful but unfruitful several hours. It was around noon and they were hungry, so when they had found the table in the clearing, they’d decided to break for lunch.

Beyond fighting a handful of zombies that had wandered too close, nothing bad had happened. But they hadn’t really found much beyond a meager amount of supplies scattered among the ruins of another few old campsites and the recently deceased undead.

“What about it?” she asked.

“As much as I enjoy your company, I don’t think we can really hold down a place like that with just the two of us. A lot of bad things can happen. If even one of us got sick or hurt…”

“Yeah, I see what you mean.”

“And the thing is, I’ve had to learn the hard way that I really can’t live close quarters with other dudes. Like, I just can’t. I fight. I don’t know what it is, but I always fight. So what I was thinking was that it’s going to have to be another woman.”

“Oh.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I’m okay with it.”

“How would you feel about it if me and the other woman also started fucking?”

She was quiet for a few seconds, looking down at the food in her hands. “As long as I got to join in, I’d be okay with it.”

Zeke grinned. “That was the answer I was hoping for the most.”

She looked back over at him with a similar smile. “I figured.”

“What if she isn’t into girls, though? Or you?”

She lost her smile and thought about it some more. “I could live with it.”

“Okay then. Well, here’s hoping we get lucky and find another hot bisexual girl that’s down to fuck,” he said, and went back to eating.

As he finished up, he took another look around, then focused in on something he saw through the trees ahead of them.

“You see that?”

“What?” Amber replied immediately, looking around.

“There’s a barn ahead of us, I think.”

She leaned forward a little and focused, then nodded. “Yeah, it looks a barn.”

“We should check it out. Could be something good in there.”

“Okay.”

They finished up with their meals, then slung their packs back on and started walking into the trees again. Zeke felt elated as he kept an eye out for zombies. Sex with Amber was great, but sex with Amber and another woman?

That would be amazing.

Of course, he’d have to get extremely lucky to find a second hot and willing woman out here. The odds were low, but he felt he was due some good luck after all the shit that had happened. He hadn’t exactly had a good month so far.

More details about the barn became clear as they drew closer. It was covered in faded, chipped red paint, the windows boarded over from the outside, the big front doors shut up tight. It had the feel of a place someone had used as an encampment at one point.

Pulling out his pistol in favor of his knife, Zeke slowed and stopped as they reached the edge of the clearing the barn was built into.

“Wait here,” he said softly, “warn me if you see anything. Stay out of sight.”

“All right,” Amber replied, stepping closer to a tree and looking around.

Zeke eased up to the barn, checking for gun barrels sticking out of holes or between the boards covering the windows. There was no movement. He finally got up to the edge of the building and tried the smaller door.

It was locked.

He moved over to the bigger doors and tried them, but they were locked firmly too.

“Great,” he muttered softly, looking around.

Maybe there was a back door, or another way in.

He started walking along the edge, careful of any activity. Could be people inside, or maybe zombies. Might be nothing, but it was hard to be sure.

There were signs that the zombies had tried to get in, damage to the doors from fists beating on it, same with the boards over the windows, but they hadn’t succeeded apparently. He peered in through the holes he could find and saw only a dim interior with nothing that stood out. Finally, he got to the back, and although there was no door, there was a way in.

A ladder leading up to a hole in the wall, near the top.

Well, it was better than nothing.

Zeke looked around quickly and holstered his pistol, then started up the ladder. It creaked and groaned, but held his weight as he ascended higher at a slow but steady rate. Reaching the top, he peered cautiously in through the hole.

It led to a loft scattered with hay.

He smelled death and blood inside, but couldn’t tell if it was recent or old.

It seemed to hover on the edge between faint and fresh.

Zeke crawled in through the hole and pulled his pistol back out. He crouch-walked slowly across the loft, the boards creaking under him. The loft wasn’t very big, and there didn’t seem to be anything up there with him. He got to the edge and crouched there, looking out over the barn. It wasn’t a particularly big barn.

The middle of the room was mostly empty, but there was stuff along the sides. Some shelves, some boxes, a few barrels, an old metal bed frame, a dresser, other random crap. Obviously someone had been using this as storage before the end of the world. And then someone else had come in and used it as a camp, though he wasn’t sure for how long.

There were signs that someone had tried rearranging things. He saw another bedroom had been put down, and a ripped up sleeping back was spread out on it. There was a corpse, its throat ripped out, near the center of the room.

That accounted for the smells of death, at least.

Zeke carefully positioned himself and then looked down into the space beneath the loft. It was packed with more stuff, but he saw a path among it, leading deeper into the area. Might be a little stash or something back there.

Either way, he needed to get Amber in here.

The place looked secure enough, so he dropped down from the loft with a soft grunt. When that provoked no response, Zeke crossed the barn and unlocked the smaller door. He opened it up and stepped out, let out a little short whistle.

Amber poked her head around the tree.

“Come on, looks clear,” he said.

He watched the area while she hurried over to join him. Once she was inside, he shut and locked the door again.

It would give them good warning if someone, or something, tried to get in.

“All right, let’s look this place over. Search everywhere, find whatever you can. Anything you think might be useful,” he said.

“Got it,” Amber replied.

They got to work. While she started checking over the shelves, Zeke moved to the back. He wanted to check in that little niche back there. Among all the crap that had been packed in the space beneath the loft, there was an alcove open, barely wide enough for him to fit in, and as he approached it and studied it more closely, he stopped.

Something about it made him nervous.

It was dark in the alcove. Dark enough, he realized, that he couldn’t actually see to its end.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the small but powerful flashlight he kept there. He tried to use it as little as possible, given batteries with a charge were harder to come by, and turned it on, while also putting a hand on his pistol in its holster.

“Oh shit!” he snapped.

Several things happened at once.

Amber yelled a question.

Zeke drew his gun.

The quiet zombie, what he referred to as a spider, down on all fours in the darkness at the back of the alcove let out a shriek as it was revealed by the light and began coming for him.

It looked like a thing out of a horror flick, decayed and awful, eyes wide and black and unblinking as it crawled towards Zeke.

He squeezed the trigger and splattered its brains all over the place.

It dropped, shriek cutting off, and it was still.

“Fuck,” he muttered. He’d dropped the light in his panic to draw his pistol. Crouching down, he picked it back up and shined it into the alcove again, then took a few steps forward to make sure he wasn’t missing anything else.

No, it was clear.

“You okay?” he asked, looking back at Amber, who he could hear breathing heavily.

“Fine,” she replied. “That just, it scared the shit out of me.”

“Yeah, same. But let’s get back to work,” he said.

She nodded and, with one more glance at the dead special variant, got back to it. Zeke looked at it himself for a second, then stepped over it, deeper into the alcove.

There actually was something back there, a little box that looked deliberately placed.

He was careful to keep an eye open for anything that he might have missed as he walked to the back of the small alcove. Nothing else was hiding.

Crouching, Zeke looked into the box, and he felt a mild surge at the find.

Someone had stored a collection of nine cans back here. They were mostly vegetables but there were some fruits in there, he saw as he pawed through them.

He picked up the box, brought it out, and then spent a moment transferring the battered, dented things to his backpack.

It would help.

Once the cans were secure, he helped Amber search.

…

They didn’t find much of anything beyond the initial stash Zeke had uncovered.

The barn took up several hours of time to search it thoroughly, and by the time they were finished, Zeke found himself wanting to return to the watchtower for the day, get some more work done back there.

They’d found some of the most important thing: food.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to keep them going for a few days longer.

Their luck held and they found that nobody had shown up to lay claim to their watchtower. That was another problem with having so few people. If you left your home vacant for too long, someone could easily show up and just take it.

And it wasn’t like there were any cops around to call.

They got back home and after securing their find, spent most of the rest of the day getting the place cleaned up and organized, and searching more thoroughly. It felt nice to do with her, after all the fight he’d been doing in the weeks leading up to this. There were a lot of zombies out there. And a lot of assholes, too.

This was nice. Calm. Quiet.

And he just jived with Amber.

For whatever reason they were just on the same wavelength.

Every now and then he’d stop what he was doing and either kiss her or put his hands on her hips from the back. Inevitably they’d slide up the front of her to her wonderful breasts, and he’d grope them, and she stood and let him, leaning back against him.

Then they’d get back to work.

He found himself making plans while looking over the encampment. There were holes they would need to patch in the basic perimeter fence that had been built. That’d be a pain, but it wasn’t impossible. Those boards, for example. If he could find a good hammer, he could pry some of them loose and use them to patch a few holes here.

And when they headed upstairs and spent an hour cleaning and searching and organizing the room they called home, he found himself taking a few breaks and looking out over the forest, this time with a more analytical eye.

He noticed a few more things beyond the simple clearings they’d checked out and he had already mentally marked off.

The biggest thing he noticed was a collection of campers. There were four of them parked in one big area, what might be a parking lot, maybe three quarters of a mile away, to the left of the watchtower, deeper in the forest.

He could just see them among the trees from this vantage point.

They were another quarter mile beyond the barn. That was actually where he’d been drifting when they’d hit the barn, but the run-in with the spider and how long the search had taken made him make the call to head home.

Tomorrow, he’d go there. And probably alone.

He liked having Amber’s company, but it might be best if someone was at least physically present. He didn’t like the thought of leaving her alone, but the chances of something happening to her out there were a lot higher than to something happening to her in here. Of course, if it happened out there, he’d be there to protect her, but not if it happened back here.

He’d ask her tomorrow what she wanted.

After they’d straightened up, he looked over the haul for the day, now gathered on a table in the watchtower. It wasn’t bad. They’d found some scattered breakfast bars and a jar of pickles that they’d overlooked the first time, as well as a few other mildly useful items. Between that and the haul from the barn, it left him feeling good.

As did the wash they had in the creek.

By the time they were headed for bed and the sun was gone from the sky, Zeke was feeling horny as hell.

“Strip naked and get on the bed,” he said.

“Okay,” Amber said in a small voice with that smile she got when he told her to do things. It was biggest when he was telling her to do something sexual.

He took off his own clothes as he watched her get undressed, revealing her well-proportioned body quickly, eagerly.

Soon, she nude, and she got onto the bed, laying on her back and staring at him.

Zeke finished undressing and walked over to her slowly. He could read the anticipation in her body language and her eyes. He knew what he was going to do, but he also knew she’d like it more if he took his time.

Though he did find it difficult to control himself once he was actually in the bed with her. As his lips found hers and his hand ran over her body, first her breast, then to her hip, then back around to her firm ass, his own eagerness intensified. She moaned as she kissed him back, wrapping her tongue with his own, then she cried out as he began to pleasure her, sticking his fingers into her wetness. She was so hot and wet inside.

She was a horny girl and he found himself loving that about her.

He pleasured her for several minutes, then laid on his back. “Suck me.”

“Okay,” she replied, hopping to it. She got down there and took his stiff cock into her mouth, and Zeke exhaled sharply as the hot pleasure of her lips and her tongue set him alight. As she started bobbing her head and working his dick, he was happy to find that she was very good at it. He laid there and enjoyed it for several minutes before deciding the time to start hitting it hard was right about now. He let go of her head.

“Up, hands and knees,” he said.

“That’s my favorite position,” she replied with an eager smile.

“Good, because you’ve got a really nice ass.”

They got into position and he settled behind her, grasping her firm, thick ass. She looked excellent bent over like this.

He slipped into her, finding Amber’s pussy hot and wet and very inviting. She buried her face in one of the pillows and let out a loud, muffled cry of pleasure as he got inside of her. Gripping her hips, he started going deeper until she’d accepted his whole shaft. She moaned loudly in pleasure as he pumped into her, going deeper and deeper.

The hot pleasure hit him like a hammer and he gave himself completely to the experience.

She felt wonderful.

Her hips were hot and smooth in his hands as he pounded her from behind, and he almost started coming inside of her before he remembered that he really shouldn’t do that. Although the idea of knocking her up was still very appealing.

Honestly, during sex, it was downright intoxicating.

“Will you put it in my ass? I found some lube,” she said suddenly as he began slowing. She must have figured out he was close to come.

“You like anal, huh?” he asked as her hand came up with a little bottle of lube. That was a lucky find.

“I love it,” she said. “I really want you to fuck me in the ass.”

“You got it,” he replied, pulling out of her and rubbing himself down with some lube after making sure it was good.

Her ass was so tight.

He got into it a bit at a time, and she let out a series of yelling moans as he pushed deeper and deeper into her.

It had been awhile since he’d hooked up with a chick who really liked anal.

Once he was in, Zeke started fucking her up the ass, sliding smoothly in and out, the pleasure washing over him.

He didn’t last very long.

He fucked her ass until the orgasm exploded out of him and he started unloading into her, shooting huge spurts of his cum into her ass.

When he was finished, he pulled out of her and they both quietly set about cleaning themselves up from the experience.

After that, Zeke took a quick walk around the outside catwalk, checking to see if anything had wandered up.

Confirming they were alone, he walked back inside and shut and locked the door, finding Amber in bed, waiting for him.

He crawled in behind her and slid up against her naked body beneath the blankets.

“I like where this is going,” she said quietly, then yawned.

“So do I,” he replied, putting an arm around her.

They both quickly fell asleep.

CHAPTER FIVE

Morning was already beginning to feel like a routine.

Zeke ruminated over that as he finished eating breakfast.

He’d woken up and screwed Amber until he pulled out and finished all over those beautiful tits of hers, and then dressed and went to get the fire going so he could get some more water boiled and purified from the creek.

The only real difference this time was that a few zombies had wandered in between the watchtower and the water from the woods, and he’d had to put them down. But other than that, it was starting to feel normal.

They shared breakfast, and he debated with himself a little more over whether or not to leave her behind or take her with him while he ate.

“How do you feel about sticking around here today?” he asked, finishing off the can of peaches that was his breakfast.

“I could do that,” she replied.

He looked at her closely. “This is important, Amber. I know you want me to tell you want to do, but I need your input on this. I want to go check out some campers today, they’re kind of far away so it’s a bit of a trip. I think it makes more sense for you to stay here and watch over the place, I’ll be able to move faster on my own.”

“I won’t say I’m comfortable here on my own,” she said, “but I wouldn’t really be comfortable out there, either. But I’ll be okay here. Especially now that I have a knife.”

They’d found a hunting knife among the barn yesterday and he’d given to her after she said she knew at least some of how to defend herself.

“All right. I’m going out to those campers. I’ll try to be back as quickly as I can, but it’s going to be a few hours at the minimum. I’m hoping to find some more food and maybe even a few weapons there.”

“Okay. I’ll be here. Um, good luck,” she said.

He grinned and gave her a kiss. “Thanks.”

Zeke made sure he had everything, then headed out onto the catwalk. He took a moment to study the area again, both looking for threats and also fixing the location of the campers in his head, then started walking down the stairwell.

…

Zeke moved through the woods and wondered about the variants.

He still didn’t really know what had started the zombies. There were a thousand and one theories and conspiracies out there, lots of people positively convinced they knew the truth. Some of it sounded plausible, some of it likely.

Hell, he’d probably heard the truth by now and just didn’t realize it.

Bottom line, he no longer cared about the why.

Because it didn’t matter. Not to him.

No, what was on his mind was those variants.

Those mattered to him, because they were exponentially deadlier than the regular zombies that now roamed the landscape.

The sneaky ones, the spiders, were probably the scariest. They were the only ones who intentionally laid in wait, at least as far as he’d seen. Certainly the big strong ones were scary when they were smashing down a door to get to you, and the runners were terrifying as they covered ground like a cheetah coming to take a bite out of you.

But those spiders, man.

He hadn’t seen many variants around, but that didn’t meant they weren’t there.

What really had him worried was, what else was on the menu? The variants had appeared slowly somewhere around the six month mark. First there were rumors, then confirmed sightings, then he’d actually started fighting them.

It had been horrifying.

But so far, the spider was the last ‘evolution’ he’d seen, and they’d appeared at least four months ago, if not earlier.

As he plunged deeper into the woods, using his compass to keep him on track and keeping a wary eye out for any zombie that might stray too close, Zeke tried to stop thinking about them. It just led down a dark path, one he tried to stay away from.

Dark thoughts invited friends.

Start out thinking about what might be heading your way from the future, and you wound up thinking about what had happened to you in the past.

It had been about a week since he’d had a nightmare relating to his evacuation.

He’d seen a lot of people die, and die horribly, and it left scars in ways he wasn’t comfortable thinking about, let alone discussing.

Looking up as he heard some birds tweeting nearby, he caught a glimpse of the way the sunbeams shone through the trees overhead. For a reason he couldn’t fully comprehend, it gave him a burst of hope.

He found his thoughts turning to better things.

Amber. The watchtower. How well positioned it was. The supply of fresh water.

It really was an excellent find, a wonderful place to stay. And Amber was a great companion. Honestly he would have preferred someone a little more capable in the combat department, but no one was perfect.

In truth, Zeke had been having difficulty finding a reason to go on over the past month. It got a little bit harder to get up in the mornings. A little bit harder to keep pushing. Sometimes he’d reach for reserves of strength or stamina and find nothing where before there was plenty. It wasn’t a loss of physical endurance, he knew that much.

It was a loss of hope.

A loss of purpose.

What was he living for? To keep on living?

What was the point of that?

It wasn’t enough. He wanted more. And this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. It was why he ended up fighting in battles, taking down jerk-off thieves and wannabe fascists and crazed anarchists.

But here, who knew? Maybe he could build up a little community around the watchtower. Already his mind was working it. That outcropping was absolutely perfect, a jut of land that gave them some decent space to work with. If they built a fence along the perimeter, something sturdy, had more people there, they could even set up some tents, lean-tos, maybe put together some little shacks in the area and create a small community within with the walls. And they had the creek, which was a massive boost.

At that point, though, it became a problem of finding people you actually trusted enough to share a communal living space with.

That was a difficult prospect nowadays.

But these were all problems for the future. For now, he just had to focus on finding food. And some more ammo. He didn’t like how long his reserve of bullets was running. The loose rounds he’d found so far weren’t what he needed, and all it’d take was one protracted battle to deplete his current reserve.

Speaking of that…

Zeke had passed the barn and made it about a hundred yards before he heard a gunshot breaking the peace of the forest.

Someone shouted, a woman’s voice, and then another gunshot popped off.

And two more.

Someone was in trouble.

Zeke pulled out his pistol and started jogging through the trees, trying to get eyes on exactly what was happening. It didn’t sound good. He remained as aware as he could of the forest around him as he honed in on the battle, and as he drew closer, he realized that it was taking place near the very campers he was hunting for.

He didn’t hear any return fire, or any other fire for that matter, so it was likely one person. Or a few people and only one of them had a gun.

Either way, he’d now very likely have to split whatever there was to find in the campers. Unless the other person died, or tried to kill him and he was forced to kill them.

Well, it was time to gamble.

Pistol clasped in both hands, Zeke moved on through the trees, slowly getting a better view of the battle that was occurring up ahead. He saw a lot of zombies, over a dozen, no, two dozen, shambling figures all heading towards the same place.

And one lone figure in the center of the clearing that held the campers, pistol in hand.

She was popping off shots one after another, her movements fairly smooth. She wasn’t panicking, so he knew what she was doing.

Zeke made a snap decision, pulling out his knife and holding it with one hand while holding the pistol with the other, as he approached the zombies farthest from the woman currently fighting for her life.

As he got up behind one, he plunged the knife rapidly in and out of the nape of its neck, killing and dropping it.

He repeated that twice more before the other zombies around got wise to his presence and started coming after him inside.

Stabbing one of them in the eye, he lost his knife as it became lodged in the thing’s skull.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Zeke announced his presence by raising his pistol and pulling the trigger, putting a bullet into the forehead of the nearest groaning undead. It dropped as its blood blew out against the tree behind it, and he turned his attention to the next one, pulling the trigger once more and exploding one cloudy white eye.

He popped two more headshots and cleared those around him, then stepped into the clearing. The woman didn’t shoot him immediately, so that was a good sign. He lined up another shot and fired again, keeping careful count of the rounds in his magazine.

There weren’t exactly all that many.

There were a lot of zombies coming in, however.

Zeke checked his back, squared his shoulders, took aim and started opening fire.

He’d done this hundreds of times at this point. The pistol jumped in his hand each time he pulled the trigger, delivering another bullet to another brain. Old blood flew out. Decaying bodies dropped. Things that had once been human beings were eliminated, one by one. The woman was also an excellent shot, he saw.

Even as he was putting down undead, he found himself thinking that she’d make an excellent addition to their little watchtower camp.

Provided she wasn’t a complete psychopath.

He was down to three shots in the current magazine when the last zombie was finally dropped. As it did, he sensed as much as saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, and whirled to face the woman who was now pointing her pistol at him.

He did the same right back at her.

“I don’t want any trouble,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm.

“Me either,” Zeke replied.

She didn’t lower her pistol. Neither did he.

They waited.

Zeke was about to lower his pistol, because she didn’t seem crazy, when he became a heavy breathing somewhere not that far away.

And heavy footsteps, drawing closer.

“Oh shit,” he said, turning to face the direction of the concerning sounds.

She did the exact same thing, both of them now aiming their weapons at one of the campers. They were parked in a rough rough, with a few feet of space between each.

Something was coming.

Something big.

A shadow fell across the space between two of the campers and grew larger, grew closer. The heavy breathing grew louder.

“Fuck,” Zeke whispered as exactly what he was expecting stepped into view.

This was a strong zombie.

He’d heard better names, but he could never remember them, and in his head he just called them ‘strong zombie’.

A fairly simplistic name for something so dangerous.

For some reason, some the zombies put on a shitload of muscle and grew to about eight feet in height. The muscle growth seemed random and consequently, they ended up looking lumpy and disfigured, adding to their overall terrifying presence.

Their arms always seemed pretty beefy, though.

This one’s head hung at an awkward angle and its jaw was dislocated. There were some old bullet holes in its chest and one of its shoulders. Obviously someone had gone to war with it, but they’d also obviously lost given the fact this thing was still lumbering around. That was another thing about them: they were damn hard to kill.

Zeke fired off the last two shots left in his pistol and immediately began to reload and back up at the same time.

The woman also opened fire.

The bullets hit the huge thing and it roared in response, then started coming for him. Zeke had hoped it would take longer to make a decision, as they were both roughly equally far away from it, but it had chosen him right away.

Maybe it was because one of his shots had glanced off its thick skull.

He finished reloading, took aim and opened fire again.

You had to hit it in the eye, that was the most immediately effective way of killing it. Of course, making a shot like that was hard, as the thing had small eyes.

Zeke pulled the trigger four times and missed each shot before he had to get out of the way, lest he risk the big bastard getting its hands on him.

Once a strong zombie got ahold of you, that was basically it.

He headed towards the woman, though quickly got out of her direct line of fire as the strong zombie began coming for him, as he was trying to give her a chance to take it down. Once he was out of the way, she opened fire.

The strong zombie lumbered towards him, roaring again, enraged, picking up speed.

He turned around and tried again, as it seemed like the woman wasn’t having any luck. She’d gotten close though, he could tell. A new hole was opened up on its forehead, which was too thick to properly penetrate unless you had a bigger bullet or were really, really close. Which was exactly what you didn’t want.

The big monster was getting closer now, and it seemed to have chosen him as a target again. He heard the woman cussing under her breath as she kept trying to bring it down. Zeke prepared to take another shot.

He took aim and then waited for it to get closer.

Closer.

Almost too close.

He pulled the trigger.

The shot was good. It hit the eye dead on and the thing went slack, collapsing to the ground mid-run and almost crushing him in the process. Zeke barely leaped out of the way and watched it topple like a tree.

As the sound of it smashing into the ground faded away, all that was left was their heavy breathing.

Zeke looked at the woman. She looked back at him.

They weren’t pointing their pistols at each other this time at least.

“Now what?” she asked.

“I guess I’ll start: I came here hoping to search those campers for supplies. My friend and I need food,” he replied.

The woman frowned, staring at him, studying him.

He did the same to her.

She was slim and shorter than Amber, and yet somehow seemed to occupy more space than her. It was her presence, he realized at once. There was a calm air around her, the way she moved, the way she was sizing him up.

She had long dark red hair pulled into a ponytail, which was a curious choice. She had piercing brown eyes and a narrow, calm face with a touch of natural beauty, even dirty and a bit drawn from exhaustion and stress.

She wore a sleeveless black vest and tight black pants, with black hiking boots.

Certainly, she was dressed for survival. She had a knife on one thigh, and another attached to the front of her vest, and she wore a backpack.

Finally, she put away her pistol. “I came here looking for the same thing,” she said, giving some ground, socially speaking. “Are you willing to split what we find?”

“Yes,” he replied, also putting away his pistol.

“Okay then. My name is Bree.”

“Zeke.”

“Let’s get searching before more of them show up.”

He nodded in agreement.

They decided to both search one camper at the same time, so that there was no possibility of one of them found something great and tried to hide it from the other. Zeke had enough self-respect left that he wouldn’t do that.

Or maybe it was just that he was hoping to get laid.

Amber was really hot, but Bree was really hot in a completely different way.

She was a little plain, but her sheer confident was very alluring. It also probably helped that she was wearing a lot of tight black clothing, and she was in great shape.

They spent two hours searching the campers.

While they worked, pulling open cabinets, looking in the niches and hidden spots that all campers had, plundering whatever they could find, he tried to make conversation with her. They were quiet for the first hour, but during the second, she opened up a little. She seemed reluctant to give any kind of social ground, but he had the impression that she wanted to.

He asked her a few questions, and responded when she asked him.

They started with simple things. Where they were from, what it was like during the early days of the zombie outbreak, what they’d done before it all collapsed.

Only a few more zombies showed up while they were searching, and they managed to dispatch them without much trouble.

It was when they were in the process of wrapping up hunting through the third camper that Bree finally started to head down the path he’d hoped she would.

“So, this place you’re living, I imagine it’s nearby?” she asked.

“Yeah. Within a mile,” he replied.

“The girl you’re living with, that your girlfriend?”

“Sorta,” he replied.

She looked at him when he said that, a calculating look on her face. Then went back to poking through the drawers of the kitchen area she was looking through. “How big is it?”

“It’s a watchtower,” he replied. “So not terribly big.”

“Good vantage, though.”

“Yeah.”

The silence played out for a little while longer and he figured she was either considering the situation, or working up the courage to ask if she could stay with them.

“I wasn’t exactly heading anywhere specific,” Bree said finally. “And anyone I called a friend is dead or far away from here.” She turned to look at him. “Any chance I could stay at your watchtower?” she asked.

“We talking for a few days or longer?”

“Let’s start with overnight, and see how it pans out,” she replied, but she had a little smile on her otherwise emotionless face. A poker face.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’d be fine.”

“You don’t need to talk it over with your sorta girlfriend?”

“She’s comfortable with letting me make the bigger decisions,” Zeke replied.

“Hmm.”

They finished searching the final camper and looked over the supplies they’d found. There was an interesting spread. Silverware, another thermos, some bottled water, a lighter, a loaded revolver, some clothes and books, and enough food to sustain the three of them, combined with what he had already, for perhaps another three days.

“Come on,” he said after he’d packed his backpack, “I’ll show you to the place, introduce you to Amber.”

Bree just nodded and followed him out of the camper.

They started walking back towards the watchtower.

Zeke felt a smile forming on his face.

This was getting interesting.

THE END