47. My Arms Died Along Time Ago -Finn #2
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, more disbelief than question, my voice tinged with a bewildered gratitude I couldn’t quite hide.
He grinned, just a little—that familiar half-smile that promised a story he’d enjoy telling.
“Well,” he said, settling back on his heels, “Lock got here first. About a week after everything went to hell.”
I blinked, letting that sink in.
“Lock is here?”
“Living and breathing,” he confirmed. “I’ve been holding things down since day one—the animals, the property, the gardens, all of it. It’s Lock, you know how he is. Give him a piece of land, and he’ll run it like a military installation. The place looks better than when you left it.”
I let out a long, slow breath.
Of course, Lock came. Of course he did. The man had a compass in his bones that always pointed toward the people he cared about, and he’d never once in his life needed to be asked.
“Then Sloane, Ethan, and I showed up about six weeks ago,” Callan added, ticking off the timeline with a casual efficiency that told me he’d organized this information long before I’d asked for it.
“Sloane?” I frowned. “Who the hell is Sloane?”
He scratched the back of his neck, a tell I recognized from our time serving together. It meant he knew what was coming would earn him grief and had already decided to endure it.
“…my girlfriend.”
I stared at him.
The silence stretched.
“Your girlfriend,” I repeated.
“Yeah.”
“You have a girlfriend? Last I heard, you were married.”
“Sadie and I split before the world did. She, uh… she didn’t make it.”
“So you got a girlfriend before or after the apocalypse?”
“After,” he said, at least having the decency to look slightly sheepish. “Timing’s weird, I know.”
I huffed out a laugh that hurt my ribs, and I didn’t care. “Timing’s weird. The dead walk the earth, and Callan Ward finds a second woman willing to put up with his ass. That’s not weird timing; that’s a biblical sign the end is here.”
“Are you done?”
“Not even close. And Ethan?”
“The kid’s dad saved us, got us here. Definitely a story for another time,” he said. “Ethan’s sixteen. Good kid. Solid head on his shoulders. A pain in the ass, but the useful kind.”
“Nice.”
Callan smirked, and the familiarity of it settled around me like a warm coat after hours in the cold.
“We’ve been here since,” he said, his tone shifting, growing quieter. “Keeping things going. Fortifying the property. Running supply runs to the mainland when we have to.” He paused. “Waiting for you. Lock and I both figured you’d gone for Fiona—that you’d come back when you had her.”
“I did.”
His expression shifted, something careful moving behind his eyes.
“When the girls showed up earlier…” he said, slower now, choosing his words, “they told us you didn’t make it off the mainland. Said the dead overran the marina, and you went down covering their escape and rescuing a damn cat.”
I winced.
“Yeah,” I said. “That got… complicated.”
“Complicated.” He repeated the word slowly, as if tasting it, filing it away for later.
I looked down at the dock, jaw tightening until my teeth ached, staring at the grain of the wood between my boots without seeing any of it.
A long pause stretched, broken only by the lapping of water against pilings and the soft rustle of wind through the trees onshore.
Then Callan’s voice dropped, not softer, but stripped of its usual edge—the voice he used when something mattered enough to warrant careful handling.
“What’s Libby to you?”
I went still.
Of course he’d ask. Of course he’d seen it—or heard it, or pieced it together from the way the girls talked about me, and how one of them in particular had fallen apart at the thought I’d died on that shore.
Callan had always read people the way other men read maps: accurately, with an attention to detail that missed nothing.
I leaned back against the dock post, tilting my head to look out at the water for a long moment before answering.
The darkness stretched endlessly, the surface catching no light.
Somewhere out there—twenty miles back—the mainland sat, rotting, overrun, and full of things that had tried to pull me apart tonight.
“She’s…” I started, but the sentence stalled. I exhaled through my nose and tried again. “She’s the reason I’m sitting on this dock right now instead of floating face-down somewhere between here and the coast. She’s everything, man.”
He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t joke. He just waited, as he always knew how to wait when it counted.
“I spent my whole life not getting attached,” I went on, my voice dropping lower, rougher, scraping against the truth of it. “You know that. You watched me do it for years.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
“One-night stands. Women whose last names I never asked for. No strings, no one waiting up, no one giving me that look when I came through the door at three in the morning. Kept things simple in a sad way, I guess.”
“Also kind of pathetic,” he said, his voice low.
I snorted. “Yeah, well. It worked. It worked for a long time.”
I paused, picking at a splinter on the dock plank beside my leg.
“Then the world ends,” I said. “The dead start walking, everything collapses, and suddenly I’m stuck with people. Not by choice but by circumstance. Responsibilities.” I shook my head. “My worst nightmare, handed to me on a silver platter by the apocalypse itself.”
Callan smiled faintly in the dark. “Poetic.”
“Shut up.” I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand. “And somehow—somehow—in the middle of all that, in the middle of running and fighting and keeping people alive and watching the whole world come apart at the seams, I end up getting attached anyway. To both of them. But to her…”
The word sat there, unfinished, and I let it sit.
He didn’t push.
“I watched her think I died today,” I said, my voice so quiet the wind nearly stole it.
“I stood there on the shore, those things dragging me down, and I looked up and saw her face. She… she broke, Callan. Right there. Standing on that boat, watching me go under, everything in her just… came apart.”
I swallowed, my throat dry and raw, clicking with the effort.
“And that broke something in me,” I finished. “Something I can’t undo. Something I don’t think I want to undo, and that scares the hell out of me more than anything dead.”
Callan absorbed my words, turning them over, giving them the weight they deserved.
“Yeah,” he said finally. “That tracks.”
I let out a tired, unsteady breath, rubbing both hands over my face, dragging my palms through the grime and dried salt.
“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with any of it,” I admitted. “Never learned. Never wanted to. And now I’m sitting here in the dark, half-dead, talking about my feelings like some kind of—”
“Human being?” he offered.
I glared at him.
He grinned.
“Welcome to it,” he said. “It’s terrible. You’ll hate every second.”
“Already do.”
“Too late to go back.”
I looked out at the water. Twenty miles of dark nothing, and I’d made it across. Still breathing. Still bleeding. Still here, with people waiting up the hill, worth every inch of it.
I planted my hands on the dock and shoved myself upward with a grunt. My legs shook beneath me, my body protesting the shift from horizontal to vertical with a symphony of cracks and groans that made Callan wince in sympathy.
“Let’s go,” I said, steadying myself, squaring my shoulders as best I could. “I’ve got people to get back to.”
Callan grabbed the carrier—Doc Fluffbutt letting out one more quiet, exhausted mrrp from within—and fell into step beside me.
“Fair warning,” Callan said as we walked. “Libby’s a wreck. Lock tried to talk her down for two hours; she finally went into your room and passed out. Fiona’s barely holding it together, and Lily has been rotating through various stages of grief since she got here.”
“Great,” I muttered. “Can’t wait.”
“Also, Lock made soup.”
I glanced at him.
“Soup.”
“From the garden. It’s actually pretty good.”
“The world ended, and Lock is making soup.”
“The man handles crises in his own way, Finn.”
I shook my head and kept walking, the carrier bumping gently against Callan’s leg with each step, the cat silent.
The path wound upward through the trees. With every step, the house drew closer—a shape in the darkness, warm light glowing in the windows, solid and real, and mine. Something I had been bracing against, without quite knowing it, began to go quiet.
Not all the way.
Not yet.
But enough.