The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(7)

There’s not a scrape on her; must have been exhaustion from the struggle. She smiles up at me, and the emotion of the moment shifts. We’re starting to feel safe now.

“How do I look?” she asks.

It sounds cheesy, but I say the first thing that comes to mind: “Perfect.”

Nearly naked, completely vulnerable, in the middle of the road, directly in front of the grocery store, out in the midday sun, she sits up and pushes me onto my backside.

Checking me for wounds is just a formality. I’ve heard of at least two different cases where the adrenaline rush and the shock of the attack kept a person from realizing they had been bitten for several hours. Never witnessed this first hand but I never like to risk anything. Laughing to herself as she struggles to pull off my shoes, she begins to undress me. The urgency in the moment is gone; she takes her time. By the time Alicia begins unbuttoning my pants, I have my own shirt off. I smile at her.

“Nothing to see here,” I tell her.

And so we survived. Again. Our third such close-call together.

We seem to be good luck to each other.

I look into her eyes and she smiles back at me in relief. There’s no feeling more exhilarating than the feeling of being in no danger, immediately after escaping mortal danger.

I try to stand up, wanting to get dressed and go back inside and find my knife, but Alicia pulls me to her and kisses me, and whatever danger I just put myself in for her, this is worth it. If I had a large gash on my ankle in the shape of a bloody bite mark that meant I only had a matter of hours to keep living, this would still be worth it. She’s kissing me, I’m kissing her, and despite my instincts screaming for me to stop, we continue on, kissing faster and more passionately.

I can’t help but question her actions.

“Right here?” I ask.

She tells me to shut up.

Funny, that’s what I wanted to say to myself.

There are any number of things that could come up this road in one way or another. Once we were watching a gas station surrounded by walkers trying to figure out the safest way to get inside when a band of marauders arrived in a large truck. I remember a mean-looking woman with a sword who nearly single-handedly staved off the walkers while other members of her group broke in to clean out the place. I hate to think about what could have happened had they found us inside. They certainly didn’t look like the kind of people we’d want to get to know. That’s how things are now, running into another group of survivors is just as dangerous as finding a group of walkers. You never know how people are going to act. At least the walkers are predictable.

I don’t want to think about what would happen if anyone were to come walking up the street right now, so I don’t. Alicia and I lose ourselves in each other. I don’t know what brought this on—maybe it was her waking up to me stripping her down, seeing me labor and stress over her well-being, or the general excitement of the whole ordeal, but whatever it is, I don’t care.

It is only the second time we’ve made love.

Diane, please forgive me.

You may find yourself thinking about how uncomfortable it would be to have sex in the middle of an open road, next to a ransacked grocery store littered with shards of broken glass. Don’t dwell on it. This rural road already has large patches of weeds growing up through the cracked asphalt, soft little patches of lawn in the middle of harsh pavement. Between that and our discarded clothing, we do just fine.

When it’s over my mind is racing. The one thing we’ve never talked about is how she really feels about me. We spend every waking moment together, but we do that because we have to. If there was anyone else to talk to, maybe she would favor them instead. Maybe I would, too, but I doubt it.

No, this is real. The look in her eyes when she looks at me: that’s love. I may not know much, but I know what that looks like. She may not feel it for me as strongly as I do for her… but it’s there.

I can tell.

Alicia loves me.





She loves me! I think to myself, at first excited, and then burdened with the guilt of officially having a new relationship after losing Diane less than a year ago. My mind races as I return to the grocery store to retrieve my knife. That’s not something I can just leave behind.

I’d reconciled myself to never loving again after I lost Diane. I’ve learned to live with it. I remember her, and it makes me sad. That was my burden, the pain I carry inside me. Alicia, I thought, liked me and was with me because I was all that was available. She found comfort in my arms. I was fine with leaving it at that.

This is something else entirely. This makes the relationship real. She’s getting over James, I’m getting over Diane, and we have mutual feelings for each other. This isn’t something I can take lightly. This is something I have to treat with respect. That’s what Alicia deserves.

She deserves to know the truth.





There were a few houses in the area and a lot of daylight left. We decided to explore them, and see if we could find more supplies. Over the course of the day we found clothes, another bottle of shampoo, some soap, toothpaste, and a whole mess of food: canned soup, crackers, and various things that were either completely unspoiled or edible, but only if you were really hungry.

There were a few walkers milling about, in or around the houses but we saw them early and easily avoided them. This was a small miracle, as distracted as I was. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had to tell Alicia, what I was going to say to her tonight. By the time we returned to the apartment across the street from the grocery store, darkness had already come.