Love in an Undead Age, A.M. Geever [best contemporary novels txt] 📗

“I’m going to bed, Connor,” she said.

“Miri,” he pleaded, catching her hand in his. “Please. Don’t be like that.”

His hand around hers felt good. It felt right. Her body plunged into the sensation as her mind tried to ignore it.

“What do you want from me?” she whispered. “If we don’t get that serum back, we can’t break the monopoly on the vaccine. And if we don’t break it, nothing will change. We can end this: the zombies, the petty dictators, all of it. Maybe even have a world more like it used to be. I got results tonight and you’re giving me a hard time? The only person who needs to make it out of here with that serum is Mario, because he can use it to make more. The rest of us are expendable.”

“I just want you to be safe.”

“I haven’t been safe for ten years, Connor. No one has.”

Miranda disentangled her fingers from his. Her hand felt naked as she pushed away from the counter and limp-hopped across the shadowy infirmary. She heard the door open and close.

She sat on her cot and began to unlace her boots, not bothering to fend off Delilah’s efforts to lick her face off. She petted the pit bull’s big head with one hand as she wriggled underneath the blankets. She felt, for the first time, just how exhausted she was.

She lay still and listened: the creak of the building, the hiss and pop of the fire, Seffie’s soft snore and Delilah’s loud one, the distant moaning of zombies on the forest floor below. Bethany was down there now, a hungry, shuffling shroud. However inadvertent, they had helped put her there.

She closed her eyes, sure she would pass out immediately, but sleep eluded her. The room was too warm. She threw off the covers and concentrated on her breath as it slid in and out. She hovered at the edge of sleep, feeling its steady, drowsy pull, but a wisp of a question tickled the edge of her mind. Ill-formed, amorphous, it circled at the periphery of her consciousness, just out of reach.

Fuck.

She opened her eyes and sat up. Mario stood with his back to her, leaning against the exam table they had crowded around earlier. She stood, careful to not step on Delilah, and limped over. She hesitated for a moment before she rounded the corner of the table and leaned against it to stand beside him.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Can’t sleep.” Without meaning to she added, “Connor wears me out.”

Mario smothered a laugh. Miranda grimaced, embarrassed.

“Like you really care. Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Mario said, a trace of amusement in his voice. When she did not answer, he added, “Really.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.” A pause, and then, “You did great tonight, Miri.”

“Thanks,” she said, caught off guard. She had not expected a compliment.

“That took guts.”

“Or crazy.”

“Maybe a little of both.”

A tiny smile quirked the corners of Miranda’s mouth. She could hear the amusement, even some pride in Mario’s voice. The cadence of his speech was like the ocean: slow, steady, unconcerned.

They leaned against the table, the silence almost companionable. Miranda looked around the darkened infirmary. The salves, tinctures, herbs, and plants that Bethany had collected were everywhere. It must have been so frustrating, knowing what was possible but being forced to use such crude methods. She thought of Naomi, of the terrible burns the young woman had suffered. In a real hospital, Bethany might have saved her.

“Why did you—” she started, then thought better of it.

“What?” Mario asked.

“It’s stupid, forget it.”

“What is it?”

She should make something up—it would be easier—but instead she asked the question.

“Why did you want to bring Naomi with us?”

Mario’s face seemed to shutter closed as his eyes narrowed.

“I was just wondering if Bethany might have been able to help her,” she said.

Mario looked at Bethany’s tools of the trade in the dim room. “Not with what’s here,” he said. “Naomi was going to die no matter what we did.”

“Then why did you want to bring her with us? Why make leaving her harder?”

Miranda’s curiosity was genuine. The Mario she had known had been kind, but not sentimentally foolish. Not with something so important on the line.

“Having one more person’s blood on my hands,” he finally said. “I just couldn’t stand it.”

Miranda was surprised to find that she wanted to tell him Naomi’s death was not his fault. But comforting him felt too strange, too alien, so she stayed silent.

“Miri, I’m— I’m sorry, for what I did to you,” he whispered. “I told myself it was the only way but if I had known what it would do to you…”

He reached to trace the inside of her forearm. The familiar warmth of his fingers skimmed the slim pink lines of newly healed cuts that overlay the lattice of faded ivory scars.

“It wasn’t worth it.”

Miranda’s heart jumped into her throat, the skin beneath his fingers aflame. When she first learned the truth, an all-consuming rage had engulfed her, made worse by the lack of an apology that acknowledged the damage he had wrought. Now he was, and all she felt was relief. Not validated or vindicated, but relieved, as if a great weight was slipping from her.

“Oh,” she said, more in response to the feeling of relief than his apology. “I don’t— I—” she stammered, feeling the need to draw into and protect herself, to retreat from this sudden intimacy they had stumbled into. She pulled her arm away from his hand. “Thank you.”

Neither of them spoke. His apology and her acknowledgment hung in silence.

“You’ll be on watch after Seffie,” he finally said. “You should try and get some sleep.”

She pushed off the table but didn’t move further. “Can I ask you something else?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Why no lecture about how dangerous it was to go see the Prophet on my own?”

He just looked at her. The moonlight puddled at their feet and reflected up, limning him with an otherworldly glow. The intensity of his stare bored right through her. When his silence was starting to make her uncomfortable, he finally said, “Remember the early days, when you did all those things that needed doing? The sewers and clearing out buildings, and how I begged you not to?”

He stopped. When Miranda realized he was waiting for an answer, she nodded.

“I thought it was about loving you, the begging and pleading, but it was selfish. You needed a clear head and what did I do? I let you know that I didn’t believe you could take care of yourself.” He snorted softly, then said with an edge of bitterness, “And you always made that smart-ass remark: ‘I’ll see you soon. Don’t get dead.’”

“I didn’t…” she said, voice trailing. His confession made her feel thoughtless, but what the fuck did he think she was, especially back then? A mind reader?

Mario sighed and shook his head. “I sure as hell didn’t succeed, but I think I tried to make you as scared as I was so you’d quit leaving safe places for dangerous ones. So you’d quit leaving me. I should have just told you that I loved you and was afraid for you, afraid of losing you, but it felt like tempting fate.”

Loved, past tense.

Even after his apology it stung, being consigned to the past. Rejected. Some desperately foolish part of her had believed that an apology might change things between them, might open up possibilities that just an hour ago would have been absurd, but it didn’t seem to have changed anything for Mario. Miranda felt her gorge rise in her throat as a wave of nausea roiled her stomach. Could she be any more pathetic?

The acid-drenched tone of her voice surprised even herself as she said, “You don’t have to waste your time being afraid for me anymore.”

A tiny part of her brain, the part that felt like an alien observer, knew it was unfair to be angry or cruel. He was only answering her question. Mario had not forced her to ask, nor promised that she would like the answer, but she couldn’t seem to help it. Lashing out to defend herself, to get her guard back up when she was foolish enough to let it drop, was second nature to her now.

She pushed away from the table, rigid with self-loathing anger, but Mario caught her wrist. He studied her face for a moment as if what he saw was familiar—and sad.

“You’re so damn smart, but you still don’t see what’s right in front of you.”

He stepped closer and cradled the curve of her jaw, his touch weightless as a dandelion seed in the wind. Miranda’s heart beat so loud she was sure it would drown out his voice.

“I’m not afraid for you anymore, Miri. I’m terrified.”