Chapter 1
Don’t fall in love during a zombie apocalypse
Amo
No one ever answers when I ask when did the apocalypse ever actually end?
Or are we in that state that just becomes the norm, and it never really ends, but it isn’t widely accepted as fact until all the earlier generations die off?
I mean, most of our community is either immune or uninfected already.
Only those whose blood runs dark with the infection end up as Guard with only a few exceptions. Like me, and my pal Cassia.
So, to me, it looks like we’re surrounded by just zombies, minus the apocalypse part.
Undead that walk half decomposed. Gross and gnarly motherfuckers that seem to run quicker than they did yesterday but what do I know?
I’m just a closeted queer guy, who’s constantly told I’m too young and inexperienced by everyone that ever bothered to listen.
“At least my name doesn’t mean death,” I mutter under my breath to my grumpy as fuck trainer and refocus my sight through the scope.
He just grunts.
He’s always fucking grunting.
Like … like it’s his own fucking language or something.
If he weren’t the only openly queer guy in our community, I’d think he reverted back to some kind of caveman mentality or something.
Which, I guess the cavemen could have been gay, too.
Bet they didn’t make the queer people feel strange about their sexual conquests like the commoners back at the community do.
Or lack thereof.
“Just point and shoot, kid.”
Ugh. Kid.
Rolling my eyes, I zero in on a target through the iron sights.
The cranium is already half missing and appears to be oozing something puss-like from its loose jaw that dribbles down its front in dark patches of tainted blood and whatever else it ate last. It wanders around driven by a hunger it’ll never be able to fulfill, looking but not seeing. Alive but not living.
Decomposed.
I squeeze the trigger. The thing’s head explodes in a mist of dark blood, the remaining brain matter disintegrating in a puff of lead and gunpowder amongst the brush and trees.
“Fuck yeah! Four points. Write that down, Moros,” I call out, pumping my fist. The branches I’m hidden between stab at my arm when I do, but I don’t let that stop me from celebrating the kill.
“It’s sensei.”
“Do not make me call you some weird shit.” I think he’s joking but it’s hard to tell with how even his voice it. Deep. Steady. Sultry. “Nooope. Nah. We aren’t going there.”
I roll out of my prone position to my feet with rifle in hand, careful to not puncture more of my skin on the broken branches and shake leaves from my head.
Moros just watches me, one dark brow arched up in question, a contrast to his light-toned skin. He’s the kind that gets tan from the sun, maybe even burns beneath the rays, though I’ve never seen him with the raw skin.
“Don’t ask,” I mumble and brush debris off my front.
He grunts as he stands like his body isn’t thirty-four years old and shakes out his hair. His long hair. His looong, dark, hair.
Knock it off, Amo. Fuck!
It’s not even that long. Like … to his chin. And it curls behind his ears after running his hands through it. Not like my own curls that barely brush my shoulder on one side and end up like tendrils of ringlets that bounce when I move, but—
Ugh!
“Wasn’t going to,” he murmurs in that deep fucking voice that makes the little hairs on the back of my neck raise as he brushes the earth and soil from his powerful-looking thighs.
“But I wa—” I slam my lips shut on the nonsense of wanting him to ask when that brow wings my way again. “No, fuck. Never mind.”
Jumbled and flamed—my face, not just me—I huff and scramble after him, without staring at the muscles flexing in his back with each step through the overgrown brush that his thick boots crush.
But I do look at his ass, though.
Who wouldn’t?
It’s a beautiful ass that carries him across the grove and through the in between that stretches between our fences and the rest of the wild. It’s a huge distance, one that is patrolled by the Guard, and tends to be graced by the decomposed like the one I shot.
It’s target practice and pest control all in one.
“What the fuck does sensei even mean?”
Moros makes another sound that’s somewhere between a grunt and chuckle—I think?—and adjusts the strap across his broad chest beneath the chain that he keeps looped around his neck.
It just makes the butt of his riffle bop near his round ass, and I swear my mouth doesn’t fill with saliva.
Yep. Definitely gay.
“Teacher,” he answers, snapping me out of the trance his covered cheeks put me in, and I speed up. Walk next to him on the well-worn path. Shake my fucking head out.
“What?”
“Teacher,” he repeats with a deeper exasperation and sighs. “Didn’t they show you shit while you were in school?”
“Uh, no. But I can cook and know how to do taxes. Whatever those are.”
The history lesson from our eldest member of the community still sits in the forefront of my mind, the eighty-three-year-old’s perspective one that just … doesn’t make sense to me.
I mean, he’s one of the few left alive from before.
You know, before the apocalypse part.
When the world was different and the infection didn’t exist. When the water didn’t need special treatment to be consumed and the animals were safe to eat while rare.
And the skies didn’t dump blood from time to time.
So, he’s got some interesting perspectives but mostly it just seems like story telling because he wasn’t even alive early enough to know what to do with shit like a four-oh-one queue—or was it kay?
Who cares. Little fibs are what he tells, I just know it.
Half-truths that keep some kids interested and others, namely me, involved just enough to pass the lesson and move on to the rest of life.
Adulthood, or whatever you consider twenty-three. Which I did. Three fucking years ago.
I even have my own place now that I’ve taken this position with the Guards, and don’t have to bake for the community anymore. That shit got old quick, having to hand out loaves every morning to every residence after manning the ovens all night long, only to get sneers in return from most people.
They don’t like my pink hair. It’s like a weird reminder of the rain or some shit. All I did was use the beets we grow to make it not light anymore the second I was old enough to make my own decisions.
And! There’s only one roommate at my new place. She’s chill and all but when I’d expected to have girl time and talk boys, she let me on a little secret.
My roommate is as gay as I am.
Which means the elders pairing us up to live together does the exact opposite of their expectations of things like making babies and being in a relationship.
So, while I talk boys, she talks about eating cookies and then steals my clothes. It’s a great time.
“Hey there, honeypot.”
Speak of the devil!
I hiss at Cassia as we cross paths, both heading to the back of the truck that brought us all out here for practice rounds. It barely runs, the solar panels rarely holding the power from the sun, but it gets us out here far enough to do our jobs.
Cassia just laughs and jabs my ass with the butt of her rifle, her short hair blowing in the slight breeze.
“Hey now! Be careful where you put that thing.”
She leans in close, close enough for only me to hear when she says, “Why? Think you might like it?”
“Bro, are you flirting with me?” Cassia grins big and cheesy and tosses her shit into the back of the truck with the rest of the crew.
There’s a small bunch of us this go round, just four wistful souls training to put our lives on the line to keep the rest of the community safe. To patrol the space between the barricades and our homes. Keeping out anyone and anything that might be dangerous.
At least, that’s my intention. Not necessarily to risk my life, but to do something with myself besides make pancakes and drink with my friend.
I never even thought I’d make it into the Guard with my thin physique and tendency to be too much or too loud.
Not to mention my inability to be still for more than a few moments.
I just needed … more.
Something to just make me feel something.
Swear, it makes sense.
In the three weeks since Cassia came back with the approvals for us both to join the Guard, my aim has improved a ton, and we’ve both moved up to the next phase.
Which means releasing us to the wild for individual rounds is in the near future so long as Moros, the grumpy fuck, gives us the go-ahead.
All we have to do is finish these last few supervised rounds.
While we’re having a blast, the other two recruits look like they’re half asleep and ready to accept anything other than this.
How are they not as jittery as me right now?
We all load up, me in the passenger seat because Moros is driving, the other heathens in the open bed of the truck, and head to the next post along the outstretch of our land. The truck sputters along the entire way, showing its distain with each foot we grow closer to the next post.
The community’s reach goes miles out in each direction, leaving the livable part protected in the middle with plenty of space to hunt, grow, and live. The Outskirts between the two spaces are outside of the barricades, but still considered ours, and monitored, though not as heavily.
Which is part of what our new jobs will be. Keeping this space quiet. Free from decomposed and anyone else intended to do us harm. Some will end up on the barricades as part of the rotation, while the rest of us will take turns coming out here. To the Outskirts. Where all the fun shit is.
This is just training, a dry run for doing actual rounds before we’re released on our own shifts in the coming days, but it’s no less daunting to bump along the barely-there paths and outsmart the already dead that wander too close.
And Moros is kind of a hard ass when it comes to this.
Which is probably why he’s the leader? That, or the elders just didn’t know where else to put him.
There are stories about him, after all.
I roll my eyes up at the validity of those rumors, the fact that he’s still alive a test to their truth, and look out the window, the trees and brush whizzing by as we bump over the trail.
It doesn’t take long to drop us at the next post, run the drills, and move on. We do that sixteen more times before he finally dismisses us.
“But what about the last one?” I ask despite Cassia’s low growl and nudge of dismissal. I know she doesn’t want to miss the nightly bonfire, but I really want to see the last post.
It has just as many stories about it as Moros does.
Something about a cannibal? A loner that shoots and eats the decomposed?
I don’t believe those either.
“There is too much activity out there to take a group of fucking teenagers,” Moros half snarls out and I rear back.
“Sheesh. Just call us a liability, why don’t you.” He grumbles and straps his rifle across his chest as I keep talking. “And for the tenth time, I’m fucking twenty-three.”
“Take them back to camp.”
The glittering of keys flies through the air before smacking me in the chest and dropping to the ground.
“What? Me? Hell, no, I didn’t sign up to be a babysitter.”
He steps in close enough that I’m pretty sure he’s stamping the keys he just threw at me into the dirt, but I don’t give a fuck about any of that when his scent wafts up like a slap to the face.
It’s musky and sharp. Like sweat and pine and something else that I couldn’t name, even if I tried.
“Then what did you sign up for?”
Oof.
Chills run down my spine at the gruffness, the closeness, and I jut my chin when I feel the rest of the crew step back. Scatter. Take their seats back in the truck to be toted home like the good little Guards they are.
“I signed up because I’ve got something to prove,” I mutter back through clenched teeth. “And I’m not gonna let you stop me.”
He stares at me for a long beat, intense dark eyes bouncing between mine.
But then his nostrils flare. His forehead smooths. Like whatever he was questioning finally settled in his mind.
“Start walking.”