Chapter 2 #2
Wyatt phrased it like a question, but it wasn’t. Jesse knew that much by now. He hauled himself up and off the couch and hobbled over, took the chair Wyatt kicked out for him.
Wyatt set his forearms on the table and leaned in. His eyes on Jesse were weirdly intense for a situation in which neither of their lives were under threat.
Or not imminently, at least. “Oh man, I’m not gonna like this, am I?”
“I gotta head out,” Wyatt said.
Jesse glanced to the nearest window. The shutters were closed, latched and locked, but the sun had set hours ago.
He knew that much. “Like, to hunt?” Wyatt did that sometimes — found them rabbit, deer, the best meals they had between one week and the next.
A little deep into winter, though, for hunting much of anything.
Wyatt’s eyes flicked away. He was looking at the fire again, not Jesse, when he said, “Kinda.”
“Then what do you…” The realization landed in Jesse’s gut like an itty-bitty, crazy heavy cube of tungsten. “Hunt, you mean, but not deer.”
“Not deer,” Wyatt said, “no.”
The silence after sat just as heavy. Wyatt was looking at Jesse now, though. His mouth was flat, kinda set. Grim, maybe, was the word. He was looking at Jesse like he was expecting Jesse to argue, which wasn’t an unreasonable expectation.
But the exhausted look in Wyatt’s eyes, the one he’d locked away so quickly — that was still all up in Jesse’s mind, another chunk of tungsten weighing on his conscience, dragging back on his impulse to always be a selfish, needy loser.
So he didn’t argue. For once, he didn’t. “Why?” was all he said.
Wyatt pressed a hand flat to the table. “When we were passing through Missoula,” he said, “what was left of Missoula, I met an old buddy of mine.”
Jesse remembered him. Big guy. Bald. A crazy bad scar cutting up through his cheek and no emotion of any kind visible in his one remaining eye. Jesse shuddered. “How good a buddy are we talking here, exactly?”
“Buddy’s stretching it.”
“Good.” Jesse drew the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands, making fists of them, bunched up. “That’s, uh, good.”
“He needs help clearing out a nest,” Wyatt explained.
“Where?” Missoula was a wasteland, mostly raised, zombies everywhere, no saving it, no point. “Not Missoula, right?”
Wyatt shook his head. “Waterville. Hanger on an airfield a little outside of town.”
They’d passed through Waterville weeks ago, before the weather really started to close in. Wasn’t much left of it, but there were still people around. Plenty of them and the potential for more. Open plains, bright light when it wasn't raining, the sharp cold of winter — nothing zombies liked.
“Payment’s good,” Wyatt said.
It would have to be, to backtrack so far. But Jesse knew the kind of payment Wyatt was talking about. Canned food. Fresh food. Ammo and gasoline. Med supplies. A whole new med kit, maybe.
“Then I can come with,” Jesse said. “You know they won’t turn down a medic on the team.” They wouldn’t. They hadn’t before. Jesse wasn’t exactly combat ready, but he never was, and Wyatt always had his back.
Except right then, apparently.
“No, bud. No can do. Your ankle’s fucked.”
“It’ll heal.”
“Not if you keep walking on it.”
“Then it’ll heal after.”
“It won’t heal right.”
Jesse couldn’t argue. For once, he genuinely couldn’t. Wyatt wasn’t wrong. In fact, chances were good Jesse’s ankle was already a little permanently fucked.
“Snows are coming thicker,” Wyatt said. “The undead, they don’t like the altitude. They don’t like the temperature. They don’t like the water, especially when it’s cold.”
Seemed like Wyatt liked telling Jesse shit he already knew. “Wyatt, man—”
“They don’t like anything about any of this. You’ll be safe here.”
Jesse would be safe, yeah, and Wyatt absolutely would not be. Wyatt would be in danger every single second of every single day until he was back with Jesse, sitting exactly where he was right then.
There was a wholeass argument to be made that Wyatt shouldn’t move at all. Except you didn’t argue with Wyatt, not if you wanted to win. That was another thing Jesse had learned on their intra-apocalyptic road trip.
So he let his shoulders sag the way they wanted to. He knew when he was beat. “How long will you be gone?”
“I’ll leave at first light. Couple weeks. You saw the roads. A month, maybe, if I run into trouble.”
“You’re gonna run into trouble. That’s deadass certain.”
Wyatt didn’t say anything. Just tipped his chin, giving Jesse the full intensity of his stare.
And fuck that — Jesse looked away. He looked down at his sweater paws instead, shaking his head a little. Because he couldn’t get his head around it, how quickly everything had gone to shit, just because Jesse tried and failed to get his dick wet.
They were gonna hole up for the winter, that was the plan.
Hole up in the cabin and then keep on pushing north in the spring, aiming for the border and then BC, for the safe zone on Vancouver Island.
Wyatt knew a guy who knew a guy. Jesse’s med skills, Wyatt’s combat experience — no one that mattered was gonna say no.
But that wasn’t happening now. Wyatt wasn’t sticking to the plan. Wyatt always stuck to the plan. Wyatt made the plans and executed them, and they never went wrong.
Except everything was going wrong.
Panic clawed sharp at Jesse’s chest wall, the internal anxiety zombie at work. He shook his head some more. “I can’t do this without you.”
“I’m coming back, Jess.” Wyatt’s big hand was on Jesse’s chin, finger and thumb, tipping Jesse’s face up, making Jesse meet his eyes. “Bud,” he said, and his voice was so unbearably gentle that Jesse didn’t know what to do with it. “I’m gonna come back.”
He had to, because the thought of losing Wyatt was fucking with Jesse’s head way more than the thought of losing his only escape route out of the apocalypse.
Jesse sucked down a breath. “You better.”
“I will. I promise.”
“You can’t promise shit.” Zombies and snowdrifts and avalanches and psychopaths with more bullets than braincells. It was the apocalypse. “Promises are for shit in the apocalypse.”
The side of Wyatt’s mouth tipped up. “You telling me what I can’t do, bud?”
Little like telling the sun to rise in the west. Jesse shook his head.
He laughed too, a kinda shocked puff of it.
Even to his own ears, he sounded defeated, but Wyatt’s mouth was still hooked, still smiling without smiling, and that was something.
That was enough. “No. Nope. Definitely not doing that.”
Wyatt nodded slowly. “Then it’s a promise,” he said. “One I intend to keep.”
* * *
They’d shared a bed before.
Plenty of beds. Abandoned motels and looted mansions and bedrolls in the middle of the forest — shared those beds, all of them. Shared the bed of the truck. The cab of the truck.
Jesse and Wyatt, they’d slept in way closer confines than the cabin’s queen-sized bed. But fuck, somehow, someway, they’d never slept closer.
Jesse wasn’t a big guy, but he was still a guy, fully grown and shit. Wyatt was a big guy, and they were sharing a bed that wasn’t all that big, and it was a soft bed. Wyatt’s weight pulled them both toward the middle, a slow, inescapable slide.
“Fuck,” Jesse whispered, digging into the mattress with the heel of his good foot, trying to put some space between them. Didn’t work, though, not even at all.
When he wasn’t on watch, Wyatt fell asleep pretty much instantly. He had that night, hours ago. He woke up just the same.
“Stop,” Wyatt said.
Jesse did. He froze. Because contrary to popular opinion, he could actually follow orders.
“Jesus, Jess. I didn’t mean—”
Wyatt turned toward him, his big hand sliding over Jesse’s hip, manhandling Jesse, turning him onto his side too, arranging Jesse’s useless, limp-ass limbs until Wyatt was big spooning Jesse so casually that Jesse could almost pretend that this was normal, that this kind of closeness was a thing they did outside of the desperate need to share body heat.
“God,” he whispered, quiet enough for only himself to hear, and then again, a little shakier, when Wyatt’s breath brushed across his ear. “God.”
“You good like this, bud?”
Was Jesse good? Simple question, arguably. And Jesse was a simple dude. Should’ve been a simple answer.
Still took him a second, though.
Wyatt’s arm was wrapped around Jesse’s waist. He was holding Jesse snug in the big, warm, solid cradle of his body, not a single inch of space between them and no incoming hypothermia to explain it all away.
But in the weird, tense, stretched-out second it took Jesse to reply, something inside settled so gently and completely that the answer he was looking for was simple, suddenly, the only answer Jesse had.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice still no louder than a whisper. Didn’t matter, though. Wyatt would hear him anyhow. He always did. “I’m good.”