Nothing Personal -Libby #2
This was a man pushing me away because I mattered.
Because whatever this was had already found the gaps in his armor, and that was the thing that undid him—not bullets, not ambush, not the particular violence of a world ending.
Those he had survived before and expected to survive again.
For this, he had no training. No calluses built to protect him from the raw nerve of it.
My eyes burned. I blinked back the tears, holding his gaze even as everything in me wanted to look away—to argue, to tell him, “Hell no.”
But I saw the way he was looking at me.
He needed this. Needed the single, solid certainty of it—something to hold against whatever was coming so he could walk into it without half his mind on me. Needed me to give him that.
“I promise,” I said quietly, working hard to keep every tremor out of my voice, to give him something that sounded like solid ground even though it was being said from the middle of what felt like free fall.
The tension left his hands. He exhaled completely, as if something heavy had been set down.
“Okay,” he whispered.
We sat in the dark. Slowly, his forehead lowered toward mine until we were almost touching—a distance I could have closed without meaning to, without even deciding to.
Close enough to count his eyelashes, to trace the small scar above his left eyebrow.
Close enough to smell him—sweat, dust, and gun oil.
Everything between us was tangled, unresolved, and complicated in ways that defied clean edges.
You’re not my cup of tea.
You’re the closest I’ve ever been to feeling something real.
Both true. Both mine to carry now, to hold alongside each other and figure out what to do with in whatever time we had before tomorrow arrived and possibly made the question irrelevant.
Neither of us moved away. Neither of us reached for the space that would have been so easy to create and so much harder to admit we didn’t want.
* * *
“Libby… baby… hey—hey, we need to wake up.”
His voice dragged me up through something thick and dark, pulling me back into a world I didn’t want to rejoin.
“It’s almost daylight,” Finn said, kissing me quickly. “We need to get moving. Secure everything. Go over the plan with the girls.”
My eyes blinked open.
For a second—nothing. No recognition.
Then it crashed through me.
The house.
The plan.
Today.
I shoved myself upright, muscles screaming from too few hours of sleep and too many hours of dread. Fiona had taken watch sometime in the small hours, giving Finn some much-needed rest.
“I’m up,” I murmured, swinging my legs off the bed.
We dressed fast.
No wasted motion.
No talking.
Just the quiet rustle of clothes and gear—zippers, buckles, the soft thud of boots hitting the floor—as we prepared for something that had no name yet. Something that tasted like finality.
I stopped.
My eyes swept the room.
My room.
Books on the shelves. The dresser. The nightstand with its little lamp, which I’d had since college. Everything sat exactly where it had always been.
My chest clenched so hard I couldn’t breathe for a second.
I crossed the room and lifted the picture frame from the nightstand. Me and Lily. She couldn’t have been more than three months old—swaddled in a yellow blanket, one tiny fist curled against her cheek. My hair longer. My face softer. Unlined. Unmarked by what came after.
I slid the photograph free and tucked it into the pocket of my hoodie, pressing it flat against my chest.
I knew what Finn had said.
Nothing personal. Nothing that slows you down.
But I’d burn before I left without something.
I turned.
He stood in the doorway, watching me. His gaze was steady, and for a moment, I saw the argument he wasn’t making. Then, he gave a short, sharp nod—not approval, but acceptance.
That sufficed.
* * *
Downstairs, Fiona and Lily stood by the front hallway.
Backpacks on.
“Okay,” Finn said, his voice carrying authority—steady, controlled.
I grabbed a backpack and swung it over my shoulder. Finn mirrored my action, adjusting the straps with practiced hands before checking his weapon—magazine, round chambered.
Gun in hand.
Knife strapped at his hip.
He turned and held something out to me.
I blinked.
A cast-iron frying pan.
Ten inches. My mother’s.
“What—?”
“Smash the head,” he said, his voice flat. “Temple. Bridge of the nose. Back of the skull where it meets the spine. Swing hard and don’t stop until it drops.”
My stomach folded in on itself.
He handed one to Fiona.
Then one to Lily.
Lily stared down at the pan in her hands—a seventeen-year-old girl holding a kitchen utensil that had just become a skull-crushing weapon. Her face went blank, like a word repeated until it loses its meaning.
“If anything gets close,” Finn added, his gaze moving between us, ensuring every word landed, “you do not hesitate. Hesitation gets you killed. It gets the person next to you killed. You hear a sound, you see movement, you smell that rot—you swing. Keep swinging. Hit bone and hit it again and again. Don’t let them bite you. ”
My fingers locked around the handle.
It was heavy, cold, and absolutely real.
I lifted my eyes to his, making no attempt to hide the terror, nausea, and desperate, unformed question behind them.
He held my gaze.
“You can do it,” he said, his voice level.
I nodded, even though my hands trembled.
* * *
We moved.
Up the stairs. Onto the roof.
The morning air hit me—raw and sharp, carrying the faint, copper-sweet stench that had settled over the city weeks ago and never lifted.
The sky brightened at the eastern edge, pale and thin, a sickly dawn breaking over rooftops, dead traffic lights, and streets that no longer belonged to the living.
Finn went straight to the edge, dropping low, scanning.
I crouched beside him, close enough that our shoulders touched, my pulse so loud in my throat I kept wanting to swallow it down.
The Suburban.
Still there. Right where we’d spotted it yesterday. Driver’s door closed. Tires intact. A dark green bulk parked against the curb two houses down.
Relief sparked—then died.
Because the street beyond it—
God.
More of them.
Not clustered together anymore, but spread out, wandering.
Some stood motionless in the middle of the road, heads tilted at wrong angles, mouths working at nothing.
Others shuffled along the sidewalks with that horrible, broken-puppet gait—joints bending in ways they shouldn’t, feet dragging, leaving dark, wet smears on the asphalt.
One crouched over something in a driveway.
I couldn’t see what, and I didn’t want to.
But I could hear the sound—a thick, wet tearing, punctuated by the crack of cartilage.
I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth.
“Finn.”
My voice came out strangled.
“Are you sure about this?”
I met his gaze, making no attempt to hide the raw, ugly fear etched on my face. My eyes burned; my throat ached.
He didn’t dismiss it or offer empty platitudes. He saw every ounce of my terror and didn’t look away.
“All we need is a window,” he said quietly. “One opening. That’s it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
My voice was tighter now, almost breaking.
He held my gaze.
“No,” he affirmed.
Always honest, even when the truth had claws.
“We’re not safe here anymore.” His voice dropped.
“I know,” I whispered.
He shifted an inch closer, his hand rising to grip my arm—firm, grounding.
“I won’t let anything happen to you.”
The promise settled within me, heavy, warm, and terrifying, because he meant it completely, with everything he had.
And we both knew he couldn’t guarantee a single word.
I swallowed hard.
“Okay,” I said, not because the fear had vanished, but because staying meant a slow death.
Behind us, Fiona stepped forward, peering over the roof’s edge. Her face, rarely expressive, betrayed a quick, barely visible swallow. “What does it look like?” she asked.
Finn’s eyes tracked back to the street, to the shapes moving below, to the creature in the driveway that had stopped tearing and started eating—jaw unhinging, throat distending, a sound rising from it somewhere between a moan and a gurgle.
“Bad,” he stated flatly.
Lily stood silently behind us all, her fingers cramped around the frying pan handle.
Finn straightened, checked his weapon one last time, and looked at each of us—Fiona, Lily, me. Whatever he found in our faces, he accepted it.
“Get ready,” he said.
As morning swallowed the last of the dark, the street below groaned, shuffled, and hungered—
And it stopped being tomorrow’s problem.