Five
Cruz
I took over behind the wheel for the remainder of the trip to Wallin. Liv needed a break to process what had happened at the waterfall, and driving helped me forget the look on her face when it hit home that she'd just killed someone. If we’d had time to talk strategy before she made her move, if I had any idea that she was about to take the woman out like an assassin, I would have done it myself, so I’d be the one carrying the weight now instead of her.
We'd been driving in silence for around fifteen minutes, but the quiet didn't feel as heavy as it had yesterday when we were leaving Melbourne. Anyone who didn't know Liv might have assumed that meant she was doing okay, but I'd seen how well she could shove the negative crap down until the pressure grew too strong and erupted from her like a volcano.
She was passing the time meticulously cleaning her knife on an old t-shirt, removing all traces of the dead woman from her blade. I glanced in her direction and found her frowning in concentration, digging her cloth-covered thumbnail into a long groove. She wouldn't let up until the knife looked brand new again, and maybe then she could put this behind her.
"Why do you keep staring at me?" she asked, her eyes remaining on her task. "Are you worried I'm going to fall apart, or are you trying to figure out the right time to say I told you so?"
"Neither." I returned my attention to the road.
"You're thinking it, though." Liv tossed me a look. "You said we shouldn't let ourselves get distracted until we’re somewhere safe and you were right. Look what happened."
She'd been a distraction since the beginning, no matter where we were or what we were doing, but if I could keep my hands to myself from now on, it would at least give us a fighting chance of reaching Bridgehill alive.
"If it makes you feel better, I didn't want to be right." I rested my elbow on the door and checked the rearview mirror, remembering the soft sounds of pleasure she'd made while I was washing her hair. I’d never known something so simple could be that sensual.
"I didn't want you to be right either," she admitted. Our gazes met and held before she smiled and looked away. "Murder sure has a way of killing the mood."
I laughed. It was the worst possible time to laugh given what we’d just been through, but she delivered her humour in such a deadpan way it took me by surprise. When our amusement faded, we both fell silent.
We'd been driving for a while when her voice filled the quiet again. "Did it change how you think of me?"
I remembered our conversation from last night when I was wondering the same thing about her. She watched me kill Jackson and another member of his crew, and now she'd taken the life of a woman who was desperate and alone. But each time either of us made that choice, it was a case of them or us—and we weren’t willing to die to avoid hurting other people.
None of this was ideal, none of our circumstances normal. Our world had turned to violence, and out of necessity, Liv and I had become each other's calm in the chaos.
"No." I slanted her a look, watching her jaw move as if she was chewing the inside of her cheek. "Did it change how you see yourself?"
Liv tucked her damp hair behind her ear and met my eyes. "I think I feel bad because I don't feel bad," she said, staring out the windshield again. "I'm already forgetting about her and moving on, and now I'm sitting here wondering if that makes me a sociopath… or is it a psychopath? I can never remember which one's which." She stopped and drew an audible breath, sending me another glance. "I'm honestly not sure if I like the person I'm turning into out here in the real world."
I tapped my thumb against the steering wheel and followed the path of a corpse struggling through the long grass on the side of the road. Its dead eyes latched onto our car, its arms grabbing air as we passed by. "How did you feel the first time you put down a corpse?"
Liv looked at me, curious, then her gaze locked on the side mirror as she watched the weathered corpse we'd just passed by. "I threw up."
"Why?"
She shifted in her seat and pulled the hair tie from her wrist, busying herself with re-braiding her hair. "I kept thinking about how the infected used to be humans, and for the most part, they still looked human."
I swerved to avoid a pile of suitcases someone had inexplicably left in the middle of the road. "What else?"
"It's not natural to stab a knife into someone's eye or ear or feel the blade scrape against bone and brain matter. It's just not normal to act in a murderous way, even when the person's already dead."
"How many times did you do it before you stopped throwing up?"
Liv finished her loose braid and wound her hair tie around the end. "I don't remember." She dropped her hands into her lap. "Four or five? Maybe more."
"Why did you stop getting queasy whenever you ended a corpse?"
She took a long breath and let it out slowly, thinking my question over. "Because it was necessary, and I wanted to survive? Because I needed to get home to Haruto—and if the dead kept their distance, I would have happily left them alone and existed in the same world without resorting to violence. It wasn't that I wanted to attack anyone or anything, I just wanted to feel safe."
I let a long stretch of silence pass, then commented, "Safety seems like a pretty reasonable, human, non-psychopathic desire to me."
Liv caught onto my tactics. Realisation dawned, and her lips turned upward. Rather than answer me, she laid her hand on my thigh, palm upward, her fingers wiggling in invitation. Affection rushed through me, and I kept my eyes on the road while I lowered my hand to hers.
As our fingers linked, the warmth from her skin seeped into mine. These were the touches that hit me the hardest, where having a physical connection with me seemed to make her feel more grounded and secure.
I'd never had the chance to bring that kind of peace to a woman before.
I lifted her hand and kissed her fingers, steering the car around a body splayed across the middle of the road.
"We're here," Liv said as we approached the exit sign, "and we made it without dying."
She'd been to Wallin on a girls' weekend about five years ago, but neither of us knew what it looked like now in the aftermath of the pandemic. We’d made good time, even with the detour. Still a few hours to spare until the sun set, giving us enough of a window to find somewhere and get comfortable before the light disappeared.
"If someone tried to steal our car in the middle of nowhere, I'm guessing it’s even riskier driving through a town," Liv said, her voice surprisingly calm.
"I'll turn off as soon as I can and find a place on one of the side streets."
We rounded a wide bend and drove straight into the town centre.I pressed the central lock button and scanned the roadside to make sure no one took a run at us or pitched a rock at the windscreen. I wouldn't rule out anything after what we'd seen the past few days.
We passed a war memorial, a yoga studio, an estate agent, and a Subway restaurant. Liv pointed to a sign that indicated the turn-off to a bed-and-breakfast. "That's where we stayed," she said, smiling as if she’d dived straight into the memories. "One street over from the main road. The Italian restaurant where we had dinner and too many red wines is back there on the left. I had my worst hangover ever the next morning." She turned in her seat to face the area we'd just passed. "It's amazing how quickly everything goes bad when there's no one left to maintain it anymore. I never knew grass could grow in some of the places it does now."
"The town's definitely gone to shit."
There were several cafes with smashed doors or windows, a supermarket, a newsagency, along with a McDonald’s on the corner that somehow looked more abandoned than any other building. A pizza shop had been burnt out long ago, and the adjoining businesses had gone up in flames along with it, leaving black, empty shells behind.
Before the virus, this would have been a bustling regional city, but it was a ghost town just like everywhere else. Eerie. Quiet.
We scanned the side streets as we passed by, looking for signs of life.
At the first roundabout, I took a left and headed away from the town centre, dodging a corpse as it turned in our direction, attracted to the sound of the car. I wondered if people were hidden nearby who'd heard the engine, too. We were moving targets, drawing attention in the open like this, and time would tell whether that turned out to be a good thing.
I continued along a tree-lined street into what would have been an attractive residential area a few years ago.The road was scattered with litter and dead leaves; weeds ran rampant in garden beds and untended grass had grown to knee level or higher in some places. If the living were still occupying any of these houses, they’d be smart to let their gardens stay overrun, so it wouldn’t be obvious they were here.
I took a right and kept driving, looking for a specific type of house.
More corpses were off in the distance, some trapped in a fenced-off front garden, while others wandered along the footpath and meandered out onto the road. As we drove by one of them, I took in its vacant eyes, decaying skin, and the hair hanging in stringy lengths around its face. Bony fingers reached for the car and an inhuman wail followed, muffled by the closed window.
It used to be a living, breathing person, and now...
There were still times it shocked me that this was our reality, even after living it for so long.
My gaze returned to the road, and I scanned the homes lining both sides of the street.
Seconds later, I headed straight for the driveway of a corner house at a cross intersection.
It hit me how attuned Liv had become to our needs when she could look at a place and automatically understand why I'd chosen it. "Four streets nearby so we can leave the area in any direction," she said, tossing me a glance, "and an enclosed driveway with a carport so nobody can get the jump on us."
"Right on the mark." For all we knew, there was a group inside frantically discussing how to handle our arrival, but we had options if things didn't go our way.
The red brick home looked to be dated around the nineteen-fifties, with a path surrounded by overgrown dandelions leading to the front porch. I swung the car around and reversed into the driveway, stopping under the shade of the carport.
Liv and I climbed out and stood still for a beat, listening for movements. All I could pick up were twittering birds and the distant moans from corpses.
When it looked like we were alone, the two of us threw on our backpacks and unsheathed our knives.
My heart thumped double time as I unlatched the side gate and passed through, and my gaze jumped from one area to the next while Liv followed. We stepped into a backyard with a steel water tank in the corner flanked by two gnarly fruit trees, one bearing dozens of bird-pecked red apples and the other green.
"Over there," I said in a low voice, nodding at a tin shed near the fence. Two corpses clocked our arrival and performed a slow-motion about-face.
Liv's gaze shifted to the house. “I guess that answers the question about anyone still living here.” She pointed at the rear door swinging in the breeze.
Corpses couldn't work latches or handles, which meant neither of them had opened the gate and come in off the street. At least we knew the house was free of live humans, although there could still be more of the dead kind lurking inside."I'll take these two.” I crossed the yard and stabbed the first one in the temple before it had the chance to grab me, slamming its body into the other and knocking it to the ground. Without missing a beat, I leaned over the flailing, decaying mess, and put my blade through its eye.
My breaths were coming quicker, my pulse thumping. When I returned to Liv, her tense expression made me frown. “What’s wrong?”
She tried to shake it off, but her attempt at a smile fell flat. “Nothing.”
Flushed cheeks, shallow breaths. Parted lips that looked as if they were desperate to be kissed. Well, well. It looked like I wasn’t the only one turned on by violence. I pinched her chin and pressed my mouth to hers. “Stop looking at me like that.”
Liv glanced away and blew out a loud breath. "I truly wish I could."
I smiled and stepped past her, focusing on the next task to avoid becoming too caught up in her.
We entered a house that looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the day it was built. It smelled like the dead the second we walked inside, the stench permeating the walls and carpet. Strangely, there were no signs of any moving about the place.
Liv and I cleared the lounge, bathroom, and laundry, then moved on to the bedrooms, all in a row off the main hallway. The two nearest doors were left open, the last one closed. That detail usually meant there were corpses on the other side, so we knew to be ready for a potential surprise.
The first room contained two pristine single beds that no one had slept in since the sheets were last changed.In the second room, the queen mattress was covered in blood and fluids, the gruesome sight reminding me of scenes I'd walked into on the job when life was normal.
A muffled moan came from behind the closed door at the end of the hall, and Liv stood back as I swung it open with my knife raised. A female corpse lay on the bed wearing dirty flannel pyjamas, her arms and legs bound to the bedposts, her mouth gagged. When she rolled her head in our direction, her movements turned agitated, her body twisting on the mattress. She pulled against the restraints and lifted her head from the pillow, her jaw working as if she was desperate to bite into anyone who’d come close enough.
Liv sucked in a breath. “What the hell? Were they... is she...?”
“Looks like she’s been here a while.” I approached the bed and gave the corpse a closer look. Her milky eyes locked onto me, her teeth snapping as if she was biting air behind the gag. Skin hung off her face in tattered pieces, and the smell coming off her made my stomach roll. “No visible injuries other than teeth marks on her neck," I said. "Probably trying to keep her safe and stop her from hurting anyone until a cure came along. The other two got sick in the meantime, and she ended up stuck here.”
It was a plausible explanation. There'd been so much talk about a vaccine in the beginning that people were holding onto the hope everything would turn around if we could just hang in there — a coping mechanism to get through tough times.
I put my knife through the woman's ear and pulled it free, wiping the blade on her already stained pyjamas.Nobody wanted to admit we were never coming back from this shit, because once you gave up hope, what the hell was left?
Liv and I stripped the bed with the corpse still in it then wrapped her in the sheet. We transferred her outside and lay her beside what I hoped were cherished loved ones rather than her captors.
When we returned to the kitchen, Liv rested her hands on her hips and took a deep whiff of the air. "I can't do it," she said, scrunching up her nose. "I can't take the smell." So, she stripped the sheets in the second bedroom and dumped them in the backyard as well.
We washed our hands and filled a bucket with apples, picking the fruit with the least amount of damage. I left the haul in the kitchen while we took our time securing the house. The lingering smell meant we might need to move to another property before night came, but for now, we could take a minute to reset.
We dumped our backpacks in the kitchen and Liv hoisted herself onto the island bench. She grabbed an apple from the bucket, flicking out a couple of bird-pecked sections with her fingernail. When she crunched into it and chewed, a trail of juice dribbled down her chin. “Wanna bite?” she asked, holding the fruit out to me. Her brows lifted, and the teasing light in her eyes stirred something in me.
I leaned against the doorway as the atmosphere shifted, and I somehow forced myself to smile. My initial impulse was to lick the juice off her chin and take control of her mouth in one smooth move, but I stood my ground and pushed the urge down. “Tempting, carino, but no.”
She swallowed the bite and studied me. "You don't need to stay all the way over there. I won't take advantage of you if you come closer."
Shame really. My smile came easier this time around, and I straightened and wandered over to her.
Liv set the half-eaten apple aside and widened the spread of her legs, pulling me between her knees. "Come here," she said. "You're always looking after me. Let me do something for you."
She'd already given me more than I could have hoped for, but I rested my palms either side of her on the bench and waited to see what would happen next. Hopefully, it didn’t involve removing items of clothing; there were only so many times I could say no to a woman who appealed to me on every level.
Her hands came up to frame my face, her fingers sinking into the hair at my temples. I should have washed it in the river this morning while I was shampooing hers, but she didn't seem to care about it being clean. Liv massaged my scalp with slow, deep circles, taking her time and covering every inch. I sighed and closed my eyes, letting her take care of me. "That feels good," I told her, on the verge of groaning.
She didn't say a word, just continued the massage with relaxed strokes, covering the base of my skull, my temples— that part pulled a groan from me—and the top of my head. Her fingers moved through my hair, her thumbs applying deeper pressure here and there. "You're a good man, Cruz."
I released a heavy breath as all the pressure of the past few days left me. I didn't need anyone's approval, but I couldn't deny hearing it from a person I admired loosened something inside of me. I slipped my arms around her and dipped my thumbs under the hem of her t-shirt, searching out bare skin.
"I didn't think there were people like you left anymore," she continued, her voice hypnotic. "But there you were when I needed you the most."
I kept quiet as she spoke, soaking up her closeness, her touch. Feeling more like myself than I had in a long time.
She pressed her thumbs into the base of my neck and encouraged a heavy breath from me. "It's an unexpected bonus that you have pretty eyes and a gorgeous body."
I huffed out a laugh and wondered why it had never been this easy to be with someone before Ultimus took over. "No one's ever told me I have pretty eyes."
She combed her fingers through my hair and lifted my head, sweeping her fingertips across my brow, down my temples, memorising my features with her touch. When we weren’t fighting to stay alive, she was so soft and real that a surge of emotion rolled through me. Our eyes met, and a smile tilted one side of her mouth. "Maybe you just never slowed down enough to let anyone see you."
Her words hit home, too insightful, too close to the truth. I kept my gaze on hers and let the silence hover instead of looking away or cracking a joke. The quiet brought me closer to her and strengthened our connection, and when I opened my mouth to tell her just that, a banging sound came from the rear of the house.
“Hello?” a female voice called out. “Hello, are you in there?”