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“You were in the service.” She didn’t phrase it as a question, and when he flicked just his eyes to her, that was affirmation enough. Mason held her stare with an intense one of his own. His dark hair was longer than Asher’s, shaggy almost, and it hung across his forehead. His eyes were as dark as the shadows that surrounded them, and his body was just as hard as his companion’s. He had a scar on his cheek, about three inches long, but the darkness hid it from her at the moment. Sparrow remembered it all too well. She often wondered how he got it. Had it been when he’d gone to war—if he had, in fact, gone overseas—or did he get it while killing off the infected?
“What did you do before all this happened, Sparrow? Are you originally from Colorado?”
It took her a minute to tear her eyes away from Mason, but finally she forced herself to look away from the power he held in that gaze and looked at Asher. “Yeah. I lived in Thornton my whole life. After… everything, I didn’t know where in the hell I was going to go, but I knew I needed to get out of a heavily populated city.”
“No place was safe. That sickness spread faster than the fucking plague.” The air stilled at Mason’s dark words. “It was like every fucking person needed that damn flu shot after they announced it had all those cancer-curing properties bullshit. They thought it was the miracle drug of the century. They should have known man can’t play God. You fuck with shit, and this is what happens.”
Sparrow didn’t bother talking to Mason about how science saved lives, how people had been able to be with their loved ones because of what man could do. None of that mattered anymore.
“We are only human and can’t control life and death. I’m all for helping the sick, but there is always a point when we just need to step back and say things happen for a reason,” he continued. Whether she agreed with him or not wasn’t the point, not anymore. “All we are doing is prolonging the inevitable.” Mason scrubbed a hand over his jaw, and she saw a muscle tic right beneath his skin. “Everyone wants to be in control, but that isn’t how life works.”
Asher cleared his throat and reached out to Mason, but the dark-haired man stood before contact could be made and started pacing. He did this for several minutes, and when it was clear he got himself under control, he sat back down.
“Go on, Sparrow.” He motioned with his hand for her to continue, but it was the way he said her name, like sandpaper across her flesh, that had a shiver racing through her body.
She swallowed and explained, “I was an LPN and going to school part-time for my BSN.” Her voice was low, but it wasn’t because she was purposefully making it so. This was the first time since being in their presence that she had seen a sliver of emotion come from Mason as she spoke and as he asked her these personal questions. It was at that moment that it made sense. He had lost someone very close to him, possibly by his own hand.
She knew many people had to kill their loved ones after they turned sick, herself included. Was that why Mason was the way he was? He shut himself out until something she said broke the wall he erected inside himself. Sparrow thought herself pretty good at reading people, and up until this moment, Mason had been a mystery to her. But he was asking her things, wanting to know about her. Over the last few days in his company, this was the most he had ever said directly to her.
“Got someone with a useful skill, huh?” Asher’s voice cut through the tension surrounding them, and she smiled, but she knew it probably didn’t look genuine and was a bit forced. “You worked in a hospital or something?”
“I worked at an assisted living home. I was doing my clinical rotation at St. Anthony’s when the news first broke about the immunization changing people. Immediately, there was hysteria and chaos. My family had gotten the immunization, and my class was due to get theirs that day as part of the school’s requirements.” The images of that day were scorched into her brain.
“If you weren’t one of the lucky ones to die from the immunization, you turned into the piece of shits roaming around.”
She nodded at Asher’s statement. “Yeah. My parents didn’t survive, but my brother, who was only twenty-one, turned into….” She picked at a loose thread on her jacket. “My brother wasn’t lucky enough to die and instead became one of those things.” This was the first time she had actually explained in depth what happened to her, and honestly, she didn’t know what it was about Mason and Asher that made her feel comfortable enough to open up to them like this. The people she traveled with before finding these two men hadn’t cared two shits about her life before the sick had taken over, but she hadn’t cared enough about them to know how they had lived either. It was a very, very sad realization.
