Chapter 17 #2
Wyatt breathed a punched-out laugh, kinda disbelieving. Just like the look on Wyatt’s face as he scrubbed a hand through his hair. It was short again now, cut high and tight. Jesse missed the scruff of it so bad in that moment that the longing was a ache under his sternum.
He rubbed at it with the heel of his hand, until Wyatt took Jesse’s hand in his.
“You saw the horde following me,” Wyatt said. He pressed his thumb to Jesse’s palm, tracing the lifeline down to Jesse’s wrist. “That was the easy part.”
“The easy part,” Jesse echoed, sick with it already.
Wyatt’s thumb swept the same path. “I doubled back when the helo was clear. Sent maybe half of them over the cliff.”
“Half of, like, so many.” Wyatt had to feel it, the shudder that ran through Jesse at the memory.
And maybe he did, because Wyatt’s grip tightened.
“Most of them were pretty fresh, still. The cold didn’t fuck them up so much.
But the sky was clear when the sun came up, and they didn’t like that, same as any of the undead.
It slowed them down trying to keep to the shadows.
I’d set up more gasoline traps. Triggered them on the way through.
Took out most of what was left before I even made it back to the cabin. ”
“The cabin,” Jesse said, another disbelieving echo. He’d seen the bites, the scars. The blood loss had to have been near fatal. “But the zombies in the lake, they—”
Wyatt shook his head. “There’s a reason they don’t like water. They mostly just…”
He winced around a word that Jesse was gonna bet sounded a whole lot like dissolved. “Jesus. Fucking ew.”
“You’re telling me, bud.”
“But…” Jesse made a vague kinda gesture, to the all and everything that was Wyatt, not dead, not undead, still, point of fact, alive and breathing. “How?”
“Locked the cabin down. Cleaned out and stitched up the worst of the bites.” Wyatt paused, eyebrow eyebrowing like Jesse hadn’t seen in so fucking long. “Pretty lucky I had a good med kit waiting for me, huh?”
“I forgot,” Jesse said. A laugh wheezed out of him. “In the zombie shitstorm, I forgot to pack it. I’ve been beating myself up about that for months.” He slid a thumb across Wyatt’s eyebrow until it reset. “And after?”
“Took a while,” Wyatt said, not meeting Jesse’s eye suddenly, “recovering from the blood loss. It was a lot, and it was pretty touch and go for a while.”
Jesse’s own blood did a good imitation of turning to ice inside of his veins. He ignored it. Just concentrated on the undeniable fact that Wyatt was there with him right then, undeniably alive. “Ate a whole lotta beans, huh?”
Wyatt pressed his forehead and his shaky laugh to Jesse’s sternum. “So fucking many, bud.”
“Can I—” Jesse gripped Wyatt’s shoulders tight for one long second. Then he asked the question he didn’t want to ask, knew he had to. “Can I see?”
No hesitation. Wyatt stripped out of his shirt. A dark blue flannel, because of course it was. Just as dark as the t-shirt underneath, hauled off just as quick.
Jesse took a sharp breath when he got bare skin. Wyatt’s forearms and upper arms were a mess of ragged scars, torn-up half moons, clamshells of them. More bites on the meat of his shoulders. Two real deep ones to his neck, one of them way, way too close to his carotid.
Jesse pressed his hand there, the flat of his palm cupping the scar. “Jesus, Wyatt.” He could feel Wyatt’s pulse and his own pulse, two steady, solid beats.
Alive, both of them, somehow, against odds that should have fucked them up long ago, when everything that should have kept them safe didn’t.
“Where the fuck did they even come from?”
Because even a whole year later, Jesse still didn’t have an answer. You needed a living person to make an undead zombie, and they’d been so fresh, the horde, too fresh to be anything except new.
“A convoy making for the border,” Wyatt said.
Jesse blinked at him. “You’re kidding, right? In the middle of winter?”
Wyatt’s shoulder lifted in a helpless shrug. “Guess they didn’t know any better.”
“Didn’t know anything at all.”
“There was an avalanche,” Wyatt said, not disagreeing. “Snow drifts they couldn’t clear. The road was gone ahead of them. They’d picked up an infected along the way, didn’t know until he turned, then…”
“Jesus,” Jesse whispered, swallowing down the surge of horror. “How did you know? About the convoy?”
“Came across a couple survivors heading back to the cabin.”
“You take them in?”
Wyatt shook his head. “They saw the bites. Gave me some water and helped stem the bleeding. But they didn’t want anything else to do with me. Can’t blame them for that.”
“Ever see them again?”
Wyatt was still shaking his head. “Figure they were already infected. Figure if they weren’t…”
Then they never made it out of the mountains. “Damn.” But Wyatt did. Out and all the way to Paradise. “Then how did you…?”
“Called it in,” Wyatt said. “Waited out quarantine in the cabin, waited out quarantine on the road, then waited it out again here.”
“A year.”
“Little more. Fifteen months.”
“Fifteen months.” That’s how long Jesse had mourned for him. How long Jesse had dragged his sorry ass around, existing more than living until he had to be talked out of his depressive grief-funk by an off-brand criminal mastermind. “That’s so fucked, dude.”
“It’s something, sure.” Wyatt reached up to cup Jesse’s cheek. His voice was rough, kinda thick, when he said, “God. I missed you so fucking much, bud.”
Jesse breathed through it, the pissy little surge of anger, that bitter curl of resentment. Wyatt had buddies everywhere. Maddie had fuck buddies everywhere. Somebody somewhere had to have known, and nobody tattled. Fifteen fucking months.
But fuck, Jesse couldn’t hold onto the anger or the resentment. Couldn’t make anything stick under the force of the relief that was still roaring through him, spring meltwater flooding into a zombie-filled lake.
Because Wyatt was here. Wyatt was safe. Wyatt was alive.
Jesse hauled in a breath so sticky that it hurt. His smile hurt a little too, from how wide it stretched his cheeks. “Missed you more,” Jesse said.