Chapter One #2
Absurdly the same. He even appeared to be wearing an identical uniform to the one he’d always adored when she’d known him back in college.
Worn jeans, of the kind you might find on a cowboy who had time traveled here from 1975, a belt with a whole plated buckle on it, boots the size of bowling balls, a sad gray Henley underneath a denim shirt that looked as if it had been washed every day since the dawn of time.
It was honestly a miracle it was still blue.
Or that his enormous body wasn’t just bursting out of it.
Not that she wanted to see said body, all things considered. His shoulders still looked too broad to fit through the average doorframe; his chest was so burly it seemed like a miracle he could comfortably cross his arms over it. And of course said arms were testing that threadbare material.
His biceps bloomed against it, as rounded as some overripe fruit.
She remembered people saying that he had grown up on a farm, or hauled things around for a living, or chopped wood as some kind of hobby.
And she could actually see a block with an axe in it by his front porch.
But she didn’t think that was it, she never had.
He looked like the type of man who came by his bulk through hard graft of some type. Yet she was sure it was something else.
Five thousand press-ups in the early-morning light to stave off having a single emotion.
Or maybe a twenty-mile run in the middle of the night after nightmares that gave him a slight feeling.
She knew for a fact that he loved to swim when no one was around, because of that time in the old Swanson building back on campus.
The cracked door.
The flicker of blue light through the water, and nothing else.
Four in the morning, everything silent and still except for the sound of him surging from one side to the other.
The look on his face when he’d caught her standing there with her hand just barely holding the door open.
She could still see it now, behind her eyes.
Like she’d slapped him. Like she’d stolen something from him.
Though sometimes she thought she’d imagined that last part.
It had disappeared so quickly, after all. And it had been replaced by exactly what she saw on his face now. That smug smirk, near hidden amidst the grizzled beard now just touched with gray. Black-as-pitch eyes with a flicker of amused light in them, beneath that constantly heavy, lowering brow.
He had a slab of a face, slow and resistant to showing emotion of any kind.
But he always managed to achieve triumph at the sight of her failures.
“Oh, what a shock, Daisy Emmett is clumsily risking her neck for some completely unnecessary and ludicrous cause. What happened, you hear a shitty opinion coming from my yard that you just couldn’t wait to shoot down?
” he said, after a long moment of drinking her in.
It made her wish her ass weren’t quite so in the air.
Though she couldn’t focus on that now. He had just said a lot of words.
And she had to now destroy all of them before he imagined he had the upper hand.
“If shitty opinions were the only thing inspiring me, just knowing the shitty-opinion machine was on the other side of this thing would have me nuking the place from orbit. In fact, I might anyway, considering you’re still acting like I’m a messy disaster who cares too much about everything. ”
“You once sank up to your waist in quicksand trying to rescue a rabbit.”
She attempted to throw up a hand. Wobbled, and then drew it back, and settled for just saying how wrong he was getting things.
“It wasn’t a rabbit, it was a small deer.
And it wasn’t quicksand. It was a completely innocuous-looking mud puddle.
That absolutely nobody could have imagined would be dangerous. ”
“Well, I managed to see it. And warn you about it, I might add,” he said, just a little sullen about it now. She could see that pouty lower lip a little better beneath his sloppy mustache, and that meant she had scored a point.
Now to go for the win.
“Because you’re a survival manual made flesh. I feel like you were born in some apocalyptic future and somehow managed to find your way back through time to us. Much to my unending fury at whoever made that possible,” she said.
And got a brief flash of outrage, before he settled into sardonicism.
“So you’d sooner have zombie hordes murder me in some 2050 hellscape.”
“I didn’t say anything about zombie hordes. Or you being murdered.”
“Yeah, but we both know you’re thinking it.
And not just because you’d love to see me trampled to death by a million undead beings,” he said, so withering and sure about it that she wanted to shrug his claim off.
She wanted to scoff at the idea that he still knew her so well.
That there was a familiarity between them, despite how much seething hatred there was in the middle of it.
But she couldn’t.
She understood exactly what he meant.
He had been the only person in her year who’d loved zombie movies as much as her, much to her irritation.
If zombie movies were ever mentioned in any lecture, their hands were raised as one.
They had both attended a marathon of them once in the screening room at the back of the audiovisual center, and he was the only other person who’d made it through all seven movies.
She remembered waking up to him standing over her, disapprovingly.
He had always hated her love of an excessive amount of movie snacks.
Though she was hardly about to cop to recalling any of that.
It already felt like she was being drowned in memories she had long since forced out of her head.
She wasn’t about to let him know this was the case.
“Why are you still calling them beings and acting like they’d do something that pedestrian to your helpless body?
They would pull your guts out through your asshole, Miller.
See, this is your whole problem. No apocalyptic imagination at all.
It’s why your Dawn of the Dead homage died on its arse,” she said, and was pleased at herself for it, too.
Her heart only sank when she saw him tilt his head to one side. Flinty eyes suddenly gleaming. “So you’ve been avidly following my career, then,” he said. Like the spectacular ass he was.
“Don’t say it like I’m obsessed with you. It’s what I’ve been hired for.”
“Somehow I doubt taunting me about my failures was in the job description.”
“Nor was climbing a fence to get you ready for this book tour, but here we are,” she said, as she did her best to reposition on said fence.
It was starting to dig into her shins and her palms. Plus this vicious back-and-forth wasn’t exactly helping her stay stable.
She needed to turn, to sit on it instead.
And she sort of managed.
Her skirt was now too high up her thighs, but she was perched on the fence.
Though it was only after she had that she realized he hadn’t spoken for a long while. Which wouldn’t have meant that much, under most circumstances. He wasn’t a super big talker. He’d once been told off by one of the university librarians for shushing people too much.
But this was an argument.
With her. Oh, he always had words for that.
So what was with the silence?
Then she saw the way he was looking at anything but her and wincing just the tiniest bit, and knew before the words shoved out of him. Almost like a cough, except with syllables and sentences. “Yeah, but I’m not going on any book tour.”
“What do you mean you’re not going? Beck said you had completely and wholeheartedly agreed,” she snapped out, fully expecting some weasel-worded excuse or lie. But instead he snapped back, sharp as anything.
“Yeah, quick question. Did he almost throw up after he did?”
“No. He just went to see if his cat needed letting out.”
“He doesn’t have a cat. Him and his wife have a dog, Ziggy.”
See, and you knew that but still fell for it, she thought to herself. She even pictured the dog in question when he said it: a miniature schnauzer that lived for dragging people’s socks off their feet.
She couldn’t let Miller know any of this, however.
She had to play dumb.
“But then why wouldn’t he just say what kind of pet he actually has?”
“I take it you’ve met him, right? And seen him trying to cover his tracks?”
“Yeah, he does it poorly. That still doesn’t explain why he would do this.”
“Maybe he thought you could persuade me. Given our past relationship,” he said, the last two words so casually spoken it jolted her a little. Since when do you think we had one, she wanted to spit at him.
But then he rolled his eyes.
So she rolled hers back.
“Since when did our past relationship involve me ever persuading you of anything? I couldn’t even get you to concede that fast zombies are superior to slow zombies.
You stormed out of a whole classroom because I argued that something slower than a sloth could never really be a threat to humanity,” she said, and was relieved to see how hard it got to him.
She practically saw the memory slap him across the face. “Yeah, and I’m still furious about it. A sloth,” he ground out, near enough between gritted teeth. Just like when she’d done it all those years ago. In fact, everything was just like it had been all those years ago.
It almost made her dizzy to feel how easy slipping back into it all was.
Everything was supposed to be distant. Stiffly polite. Unfamiliar. Gracie Bremmel, wasn’t it? he was supposed to say. I sort of remember you. I kind of know what you’re talking about. Here, hold my latte for me while I get settled in business class.
Or worse. Like some of the footballers and celebrities she’d handled before Alfie. The spoiled ones, the gross ones. The ones who’d thrown up on her and called her at three in the morning. He won’t be like that, Beck had said.
And he’d been right.
But somehow, the reality was worse.
It was making her sweat; it was making her blush and be as awkward as she had been at twenty-three.
The cracks in the brisk professionalism she’d papered over her personality were showing.
She had to really dig her nails into her palms. Straighten, smooth out her expression.
You have your own business now, Daisy, she told herself.
And you run it like a well-oiled machine.
You run everything like a well-oiled machine.
Your whole life is breezing in, all brusque and efficient, and solving everybody’s problems. Then she answered him, as firm as she had ever been with anyone.
“I’m not going to argue about it while stuck up here,” she said.
“In fact, I’m not going to argue about anything like that with you at all. ”
Only the second she had, he came right back at her. “Well, there’s a real simple solution to that dilemma. It’s called going back to where you came from before I call the cops,” he said, and on the word cops it just happened. Words burst out of her before she could stop a single one of them.
“You hate the cops. You’d sooner be murdered by burglars than call them.”
“Back then. But maybe I don’t feel that way now. Maybe I like them.”
“Maybe you should. Maybe it’s great that they have such massive budgets and almost no oversight. In fact, I’m thinking of writing to my congressperson to demand they be allowed to act with even greater impunity, primarily—” she started, but of course he cut her off before she could finish.
Of course he did. She had known he would.
He even threw up his hands. Near exploded about it.
“Oh my god, stop, stop, just shut up. You do not believe that, I know you don’t. And even if you did, you don’t have a congressperson. You have whatever they have in England … a parliamentary … Lord … a guy in a wig or a guy with a big wand or I don’t fucking know. Either way, knock it off.”
“Right, because you can’t even stand to hear it when you know it’s bait.”
“Fine, I can’t, I won’t be calling them,” he conceded.
But oh boy, the concession infuriated him.
He jabbed a whole finger at her before he continued.
“But I will be going back inside, and locking all the doors, and nothing you do is going to make me come back out. So if you drop down into the yard, you’ll just be stuck here, all night, with nothing to climb on to get back out again. Good luck.”
Then he spun on his heel and stomped back to the house.
The slammed door echoed like a gunshot in the silence that followed.
Satisfying, she thought. Or, at least, she did until something started to dawn on her.
Slowly, as she levered herself back over and down to the bonnet of the car.
She shoved her feet back into her heels, got behind the wheel, and started the engine, and then there it was—a flash of that anger of his, too fierce to just be about how she’d baited him.
No, it was something more.
Something about that sense of familiarity, of being known somehow.
It had distressed him, as much as it had distressed her. She knew it had, because as she drove away she saw the gate crack open, like the door she’d held at the pool that time. Followed by the barest hint of his face, as shadowed as hers must have been, yet so clear she couldn’t mistake it.
It was the same expression he’d had then.
Only now she knew what it was.
Not anger, not irritation, not resentment.
Fear.