The Resurrected Compendium

  "I'm going to see if I can get this out," she told him.

  "It will be attached to a spring with gears," he said. "If you can get the box open, you should be able to pry it apart."

  As it turned out, the box had suffered from the blow nearly as much as the wooden post had, and it fell open in her hands when she grabbed it. Inside, the gears and springs detached easily enough, leaving the the bottom of the spike free. She tossed the metal bits and pieces aside, then eased the wood down and off. It thundered when it hit the floor. She gripped the spike, slick with blood. She looked at Dennis.

  "Are you ready? It will hurt."

  "Better this way than the other," he said.

  Kelsey gripped the spike just above his hand, and also just below to anchor it. She waited a second to give him time to prepare. Then she let go of the bottom half as she yanked the top half. Dennis let out a stuttering breath, but no more than that. He leaned forward, his head on her shoulder. Blood poured from his wound.

  She hadn't thought this through as well as she might've. Kelsey wriggled away from him enough to pull off her shirt, which she wrapped around his hand. Blood soaked through it in seconds. She pressed, hard, willing it slow.

  "Dennis. Baby, listen to me." She fell into sweet talk unconsciously, heard herself saying it but didn't bother to censor it. "We need to get this taken care of. Right?"

  "Right." He shook his head and put his hand over hers, holding down the blood-soaked shirt. "Upstairs. Bathroom."

  Together, they made it up the stairs to a standard-looking hallway lined with doors, most of them open. Kelsey peeked into a the couple they passed. Bedrooms, sparsely decorated. A sewing room. At the end of the hall, a bathroom, dark without an overhead light and the window closed off with another of those metal shutters. With every step, she waited for something to fly out and hit her, to explode, to shoot. For a woman to burst through one of the doors with a gun leveled at their heads. They got all the way down the hall without incident.

  Dennis collapsed onto the toilet, his hand in the sink. "Should be some bandages and stuff under the cabinet."

  "Is this bathroom like the other one?"

  He gave her a weary smile. "I don't know. I guess we'll find out."

  Kelsey would've stroked his cheek, but her hands were covered in his blood. She settled for turning on the faucet, instead, standing back in case it gushed with boiling water. The pipes didn't shudder, and the water that came out was warm, not scalding. Using the soap from the dispenser on the counter, she scrubbed her hands, watching the blood swirl down the drain.

  Her reflection stopped her. Pretty girl, face drawn, no makeup, in her bra with blood smeared all over her. It was the closest her outsides had looked to how she felt on the inside for a long, long time. Kelsey gripped the sink, breathing in and out slowly, determined not to freak out. Dennis needed her help, and his mother was still presumably in the house somewhere, lurking, ready to kill them both for getting past her elaborate set of traps.

  "In the cabinet," he said. "There should be a kit."

  There was, a full medical kit including sutures and scalpels in sealed packages. Ointments, creams, bandages, all tucked neatly into a metal case with instructions sealed onto the lid. She pulled out several packages of sutures and also a tube of some sort of surgical glue.

  Injuries could be bold, or they could be subtle. Kelsey had learned to deal with the subtle sort. Bruises in places nobody could see. Broken bones from "accidental" falls. She'd become a master at lying to emergency room doctors about what had happened, but even better at treating her own wounds without help from anyone else.

  Dennis's injury was not subtle. The wound gaped, the edges raw. The blood had slowed, but not yet started to clot. It wasn't clean, she couldn't see light through his hand or anything like that, but if she'd pushed a finger through it, it would come out the other side. She pressed a pad of gauze soaked in antiseptic to it, wincing when he hissed.

  "Sorry, sorry."

  "It's okay," he said. "Hands get infected really easily. Can't take any chances."

  She held up the tube of glue. "I'm going to use this instead of trying to sew it...is that okay? I think it will hold better."

  He reached for her suddenly, weaving on his seat on the toilet. "Kelsey..."

  She linked her fingers with his, careful not to press his good hand too tight. "Yeah, baby. It's going to be okay. It'll be okay."

  "No." He shook his head. A hissing whisper trickled from the vicinity of the shower, a scent like sulphur tickling her nose. "No, it's not. And I'm sorry."

  Kelsey blinked, the edges of her vision blurring. "...For what?"

  "Because I forgot about the gas," Dennis said.

  Then everything went dark.

  38

  He caught her before she could hit the ground, her body a dead weight he wasn't sure how long he could hold. He'd pulled in a long, deep breath at the first whisper of the gas coming from the shower head, but he couldn't hold it for much longer. He had to get them both out of there. Steeling himself, Dennis gripped his fingers into the hole in his palm.

  The pain hit him like a fist but kept him awake despite the tinge of red threatening the edges of his vision. He hefted her against him, dragging her as he backed out of the bathroom and down the hall, all the way down, her heels scudding on the polished floor and catching the runner. It bunched, threatening to trip him. It did trip him, and he stumbled, shoulder hitting the bedroom door.

  It knocked the breath out of him. He gasped, hoping they were far enough away from the bathroom for it to be okay. His nose and throat burned, more in memory than anything else.

  "You have to be able to get through it," Mom says. "It's kinda like drowning, Dennis, you have to be able to hold your breath for a really long time."

  Then his head's swimming and the world twists and turns. When he wakes up, she's standing over him with that sad, disappointed look on her face that tells him he did it wrong. Whatever it was, he did it wrong. So he does it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Until he does it right.

  He pulled Kelsey into the bedroom. Placed her on the bed, covered in a plain dark spread he didn't remember, though this had been his room for a long time. Mom had rearranged the furniture in here, and he stubbed his toe on the desk chair. Then Dennis sank onto the bed next to Kelsey, his throbbing, bloody hand close to his chest. He had to stanch the wound, but had left the first aid kit behind.

  Mom had changed the furnishings but hadn't touched what he'd left behind in the heating vent, which came free of the wall with a tug that made him grunt with pain. Inside, dusty but untouched, was his personal kit. It took him awhile, working with just one hand and on the edge of the passing out, but he managed to clean and seal the gash in his hand, then bandage it thickly.

  On the bed, Kelsey stirred. She groaned. Dennis bent over her, turning her onto her side in case she puked, but she only opened her eyes. She breathed in with a cough, then another. She didn't struggle.

  "I'm alive," she whispered.

  "Yes." He pushed her hair from her face, trying to check her pupils, see if they were dilated. To see if the color had returned to her cheeks.

  He wasn't expecting her to sit up, nor for him to kiss him the way she did. Soft and slow, full on the mouth, her fingers threading through the back of his hair. He couldn't move, couldn't shift, couldn't even kiss her back. When her tongue slipped between his lips, though, he startled.

  She looked surprised when he pulled away. "Dennis..."

  He shook his head, wiping a hand over his mouth. She'd kissed him. She was beautiful and sexy, and she'd kissed him, just like in all those movies where it didn't matter what else was going on, the hero and the heroine always had time for a shag in the middle of the apocalypse.

  He'd never felt less like a hero.

  His heart thumped, his dick half-hard just from that kiss and the way her hair had brushed his face when she leaned in to him, b
ut he couldn't let her do it. "We should get cleaned up. Get some sleep. Some food."

  She looked at herself with a grimace. "I thought the shower was out."

  "There's another one." His room had an attached bath, more like a closet with a shower stall and toilet installed, but there wouldn't be anything rigged up in there.

  Kelsey looked where he'd pointed. "I would die for a hot shower with soap and shampoo...I'd rather have a hot shower than a cheeseburger, right now."

  "You should take one."

  She studied him, and under her thoughtful gaze he felt his face heat. "Any sign of your mom?"

  "No."

  "Is she hiding?"

  Dennis shook his head. "I don't think so."

  "You think she's gone?"

  "No." He shook his head again. "She wouldn't leave the house -- couldn't leave it with the security system in place."

  Kelsey paused. "You think something happened to her."

  He didn't know, but he'd started to suspect as much. She'd stopped being mobile long ago. She could be holed up somewhere, waiting to be found, which meant they still had to be careful because she'd be as likely to greet him with a shotgun blast as with a motherly embrace.

  "Can you turn it off," Kelsey asked. "All of this stuff. Can you turn it off?"

  "Yeah. The interior stuff, definitely. But we'd want to leave the exterior measures in place."

  She smiled. "Of course. Protection."

  Would she kiss him again? Why had she kissed him in the first place? Did he want her to kiss him...that was the question.

  Dennis got off the bed. "The control panel's in mom's room. You shower. I'll turn off the stuff inside here, then we can go down and raid the fridge. Find my mom. We can get set up with some of the stuff from the truck."

  Kelsey stood, wobbling for a second or so, putting out her hand to steady herself. She coughed, turning her head, covering her mouth. The sound was thick and ugly.

  "When I was a kid," she said quietly without any trace of waver in her voice, "my grandmother repeatedly made me mix bleach and ammonia. You know what happens when you do that?"

  He paused. His mother's concoction wasn't identical, though based on the same principle of mixing common household chemicals to create something toxic. "Yes."

  She sniffed lightly. "She didn't like it so much when I did it to her."

  Then she got up and went into the tiny bathroom. He heard the pipes whistle as the hot water came on. After another few minutes, the soft edges of steam fluttered around the edges of the doorway.

  Just down the hall in his mother's room, he braced himself for whatever might happen, but nothing did. The panel set into the wall opened with a different code than the other locks had, but he knew that code too. Inside, colored lights indicated which traps had been triggered and which had yet to be tripped. Damn, she'd added a lot more things. They were lucky indeed to have gotten this far encountering as few as they had, but Mom had focused most of them on the places where intruders were likely to head, and Dennis had been careful to avoid them.

  He checked the cameras set up throughout the house and saw nothing out of place. Outside, though, the first edges of sun were creeping over the horizon, making it easier to see the driveway and the road beyond it, the one leading into town. Shapes moved at the end of it, too far away to make out, but moving closer. People, he thought. Not animals. But he couldn't tell if they were normal people or the furious infected, or the staggering resurrected. He watched for a little while.

  Kelsey was still in the shower, based on the sound of running water. He didn't mean to peek at the monitor showing the bathroom, her body clearly outlined through the shower door and steam, even in black and white. He tried not to stare...but she was so freaking hot...the hottest woman he'd ever seen in real life, as a matter of fact, and only his sense of guilt at playing the Peeping Tom kept him from standing there longer.

  In the bedroom, though, the memory of her perfect body hit him hard again, and it sent him to the bed where his knees gave out. He sat there, incapable of moving, imagining what she must look like beneath the sluice of hot water. When she came out, wet hair slicked back from her face and wearing only a towel that hit her at the upper thighs, Dennis discovered his imagination had been pretty accurate.

  She crossed the room to him. She took his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. A moment after that she was on his lap, the towel bunched between them and her mouth on his again. It was even better this time. The soft weight of her. The smell of her wet hair. She tasted like mint.

  She broke the kiss with a small gasp, her face so close to his it was out of focus. "Dennis."

  He turned his face, saying nothing. Kelsey stroked her fingertips over the curve of his ear, his eyebrows, along his jaw. She shifted against him, not seeming to notice or care that the towel had completely fallen away.

  "I have clothes in the dresser," he said. "There should still be clothes in there. And I should shower, too."

  She didn't move. He couldn't look at her. Wouldn't. Everything inside him had clenched. He'd never wanted anything more in his life than to have her push him back on the bed, her fingers working at the zip and button of his jeans...and after that, then what? He would make a mess of it. You only got one shot at the first time, he knew that much. One shot, and all the rest of it would be ruined.

  "Dennis..."

  "You don't have to, okay?" Sounding more angry than he meant to, Dennis pushed her gently off his lap and got up from the bed. "I didn't think...I don't want you to do that. Because you think you have to."

  "I'm not doing it because I think I have to." She frowned, not even pulling up the towel to cover her breasts. "Jesus, Dennis."

  He turned away and gestured at the dresser, then opened a few of the drawers and pulled out some things. "Clothes. Help yourself. Umm...I'm taking a shower."

  He closed the door tight behind him, locking it.

  39

  She wouldn't cry. There were a dozen reasons she could think of right off the top of her head for why he'd rejected her the first time -- she probably smelled bad, for one. She could think of another dozen for why he'd rejected her the second time, but none of them felt right. He wasn't gay, she'd have bet anything on that. The semi-chubby in his pants proved that.

  He wasn't into her, that was all.

  She'd spent a lot of time, money and effort in becoming the kind of woman any man would be into. Yet it was too entirely believable to her that Dennis might not want to fuck her -- how did that happen? How did all the years of turning heads, of cat-calls and whistles and random men offering to buy her drinks, jewelry, a car...how did that all become so easily forgotten?

  Because you're nothing but paint covering up ruin, and he knows it.

  "Shut up," Kelsey breathed, pressing her hands to her ears, though it would do no good. The voice was in her head and could only be stifled, never completely shut off.

  By the time Dennis came out of the bathroom, Kelsey had found a pair of jeans, too big but easily belted, and a flannel shirt. She wore a couple of tight tank-tops beneath in place of the bra she thought would be better burned than washed, and she'd filched a pair of soft boxer shorts to replace her panties.

  "She kept a lot of your stuff," she told him.

  "She keeps everything." Dennis had dressed in the bathroom and rubbed at his hair to dry it. It stood up all over his head. Watching her look, he smoothed it hastily. "Food?"

  Kelsey put a hand to her stomach. "Yes. Sure."

  He let her go first through the doorway. Such a gentleman. Kelsey hoped that whatever he'd done to shut off his mother's internal security worked, or else she was going to end up walking into a garrotte wire or something equally deadly. They made it down the stairs and into the kitchen without anything happening, and she let herself relax a little.

  "It must've been interesting. Growing up here."

  He shot her a look from the fridge, which he'd opened to rummage inside. "Interesting is a good w
ay to put it."

  "Useful?" She added. "Umm...helpful? Prophetic?"

  "Something like that." He held up a carton of eggs and a stick of butter. "Scrambled or fried?"

  Back in the early days, Kelsey had lived off eggs. A carton would last her a week. A hard-boiled egg for breakfast and one for lunch, every day, for weeks. Months. Years. She'd have thought she'd never eat another egg again, but suddenly she was so hungry that saliva squirted under her tongue. Her stomach clenched, rumbling.

  "Scrambled."

  He nodded with a small smile. "Sit tight. I'll have this up in a couple of minutes. Then we can go out to the truck and get some real provisions."

  The food was good, and she ate her fill slowly at first, remembering to chew every bite ten times, to chase it with water to fill her stomach faster...until she remembered they were living in the fucking apocalypse and a flat belly didn't matter. Her bikini days were over for the foreseeable future. Then she dug into her share, scraping her plate and gobbling it up, ignoring her grandmother's persistent yammering in the back of her head about what a piggy she was.

  When she'd finished, Kelsey sat back with a hand on her stomach, wondering if she'd gone too far. Eaten too fast, too much. She burped gently. Her stomach settled.

  Dennis paused, his plate still half full. "Good? Want more?"

  "No. I'm okay." She got up to take her plate to the dishwasher and found it full of moldering dishes. Recoiling at the smell, she put her plate in the sink. "Um...?"

  Dennis got up to look, his brow furrowing. "This hasn't been run in a long time."

  She looked at the plate on the counter that had been there when they came in. "Dennis. Where do you think she is?"

  "Something happened to her." He looked less upset than she thought he might. More grim than anything.