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“Looked at you?” Asher leaned forward and rested his forearms on his thighs. She watched the tendons flex beneath his skin and swallowed down her irrational desire. Sparrow hadn’t felt this way with anyone else she had been around since the fall of civilization, but being with these two men turned something on inside her.
“Yeah.” She glanced down and twisted her fingers together. Sparrow didn’t want to think about it, but they wanted to know. “They didn’t know I was watching. I was getting some wild berries we had just found in the woods, and when I made my way back to their place, I saw them beating a man to death.” At their blank stares, because she knew death wasn’t new for any of them, she said, “And then proceeded to cut him up.” Bile rose from her belly at the image of them slicing open the man. “They shoved the meat they cut off in bags around their waists. And then I knew that those ‘looks’ I thought I was getting from them, the ones that made me feel uncomfortable and uneasy, meant they were sizing me up for dinner.”
Chills raced up her spine. “I don’t know why they didn’t kill me right away, but I’m thankful they didn’t. Even though this is the apocalypse, I don’t want to die, least of all like that.” She glanced at each of them after she said that. “I ran. I ran as hard as I could until I collapsed from exhaustion.” It had been one thing after another, and humans no longer held compassion or integrity. Well, she thought that… until she met these two men. “And then you found me, saved me, and here we are.” The silence stretched between them, and she cleared her throat.
“Yeah, people sure have gotten fucked up since this shit happened, but that’s what happens when the world collapses, I suppose.” Asher’s words were pitched low, and there was a hint of depression in it. “I have seen a lot of shit on the road since this whole thing started, and only one percent of it was decent.” He looked at Mason, and there was a silent communication between them. She knew, without either of them saying anything, that meeting each other had been a light in all this darkness. Maybe one day she could have that. It was a farfetched desire and honestly so miniscule compared to the bigger picture.
“It is in our nature to go after one another.” They both glanced at Mason when he spoke. He didn’t lift his gaze from the candle that was slowly starting to dwindle down to a puddle of wax. “This was inevitable. With greed, power, and war, it is in our nature to destroy everything around us, including each other.” He leaned back and scrubbed a hand over his face. Although she knew they had one disposable razor, had seen Asher using it just this morning, Mason sported day-old stubble. It looked good on him, but it also made him seem even more menacing.
“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.
“What happened to him?” Mason asked.
Sparrow grew sad thinking about her brother, but she had no more tears left to shed. Those dried up long ago. “I killed him.” The air seemed to still, and something flickered behind Mason’s eyes. Keeping his stare, she said, “I couldn’t let him suffer like that, even if the news said the infected couldn’t feel pain and were no longer the people we knew and loved.”
All of that had been a load of shit. The government, the scientists, everyone who had been involved had wanted to smooth things out. They had caused this, but the people had fueled the fire. But Sparrow was sick of casting blame anymore. What good did it really do? The world was hell, literally, and all she could do was take it one day at a time.
“I had never hurt anyone before, and it took me four times before I could get the blade in.” Her stomach twisted, and she wrapped her arms around herself. She should stop, but she couldn’t. It was like something opened up inside her. “He made this gurgling noise when the butcher knife finally went into his neck, and although he still came after me, I knew he felt something.” She cleared her throat as she replayed that day in her mind. “It wasn’t until I ended up putting the knife through one of his eyes as he tackled me to the floor that he finally died.”
For a moment, she couldn’t say anything after that, but there was no room in this new life for what she was feeling. It only caused weakness, and that caused death. “Once I killed my brother, something shut off inside me. I worked on instinct, grabbed what I could—food, clothes, water, anything I thought I would need to survive—and took off in my mom’s car. We had no other family, and I had no place else to go, so I just drove until I ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere.”
She lived with her mom and dad while working her way through school, had no place of her own, and what friends she did have were more of a passing thought. She hadn’t been close to anyone but her parents and brother, and now they were gone. Even now, she could see the fires blazing from the houses she drove by and the thick riots in front of the stores. Murder, violence, and mayhem were aplenty now. “I ran out of gas and trekked my way down backroads until I saw a small group of healthy humans. I stayed with them up until they either got attacked by the sick or killed each other off. And you know the rest after that.”
“What are you, twenty-five, -six?”
She answered Mason’s question. “Twenty-three.”
“Shit, you’re young.”
She looked at Asher at his scoff and then at Mason. They looked older, maybe in their late thirties, early forties, but certainly not old enough that they should have thought her age was an issue. She felt the need to make them see she could handle herself and be an asset to their group.
“I can fend for myself and kill if I need to.” They stared at her, but neither responded to her statement, so she decided a change of subject was best. “You can’t be much older than me.”
