August Burning (Book 1): Outbreak (12 page)

She knew how this worked; she had been
here before. Adira had almost always been able to see attractive people for
what they were and move on. Now, that night, she had thought she had caught
Jaxton staring at her more than once. Normally, she was sure, she would have
been immune. After all, men had been staring at her for years, always wanting
what she wasn’t willing to give. She stared right back at Jaxton’s stormy grey
eyes. There was energy there, but Adira wasn’t sure she wanted to explore it.
She forced a laugh at Tessa, whose boxy form hung on a door frame. Jaxton rose
suddenly and crossed to her, and they disappeared into a bedroom.

“You’ll like it there,” Bennett
slurred. His wandering eyes were unable to lock onto her own for more than a
few moments. That was how Adira knew he was drunk.

She smiled and held his hands. “I
never got a chance to really thank you. We had to move so fast. I don’t know
where I would be if you hadn’t asked me to come with you.”

“Of course!” He mumbled triumphantly.
“You will stay with me.” He stared at her, content.

She looked away, feeling a wave of
sudden emotion. Had Bennett been sober, she probably would have felt ashamed.
As it stood, he was drunk enough that she almost felt alone, and felt she could
say anything she wanted. “I wouldn’t have ended up with them again, I know
that.”

Bennett drew her close, but he didn’t
notice the shimmering in her eyes. “Hmmm?”

“They didn’t even try to get me. My
mom texted me, asking if I was ok. Asked where I was and where I was going. She
said they were going to stay put, till it all blew over.”

Bennett stared at her, his eyes
glazing over. “No one’s family made it! Don’t blame them, A-di-ra.” He laid his
scruffy blond hair on her lap, sounding out her name again. “A-di-ra.”

Adira knew he wasn’t listening, but
she spoke anyway. “They weren’t coming down anyways.”

Bennett grunted sleepily. “Why not?
They’re your parents. Should be there on graduation.”

“Well my father wouldn’t be down,
maybe mom.”

“So… you have daddy issues…” Bennett
whispered, his eyes closed.

“What the fuck did you take?”

“I drank half a bottle of Nyquil.”

“Bennett…”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Why wouldn’t he
have come down?”

“He doesn’t like me.”

“What! Impossible!”

Adira knew she was talking to someone
barely present. “I wasn’t supposed to be this pretty. Something like that.”

Bennett belched. “Hmmmnum. I don’t, I
don’t know...means.”

Adira felt tears collecting in her
eyes. Why was she so sensitive? “In some fucked up way, I mean, he hated how
much attention I got. It was never anything weird, but it was like it was my
fault for looking like this. He hated the way things just came to me.”

 
Bennett mumbled, and Adira found herself continuing quietly.
“But that’s just how it works. Men, I don’t care who they are, treat you
differently when you look good to them. I didn’t ask to look like this.”

She patted Bennett’s hair absent-mindedly,
feeling him sleeping in her lap. “It was like, like he was acutely aware how my
appearance made life easier for me. And he worked as hard as he could to even
the scales. I don’t even know why. So, you might not know it, but I’d have no
where to go without you.” She looked down at Bennett. Her tears dropped onto
his closed eyes. She signed, suddenly feeling shameful and weak. She laid his
head gently on the couch and took a swig of the vodka.

As Tessa undid his clothes, her mind
tried to race. It was sluggish, and her movements responded clumsily to her
nervous thoughts. She hoped she looked ok. Tessa dragged Jaxton’s chiseled form
into a darker part of the bedroom, hoping he wouldn’t notice all the hundred
things she hated about how she looked. But here he was! She struggled to keep
calm as she kissed him, their clothes falling to the floor. Her efforts felt
awkward, even in the haze of liquor. Was she moving her hands too fast? Would
he like it if she was more aggressive? His hands rested on the small of her
back, and her mind panicked, wishing she had fought a little harder to lose any
extra weight there. As he touched her, her mind was rolling with a heady mix of
lust and fear. He had always seemed to pay her attention when they spoke at
school, and she had always been attracted to his easy-going and intense
duality. Tessa had seen Jaxton fall effortlessly into the leadership role,
seemingly at home in the crisis. Everything about the way he moved and spoke
felt cinematic, almost as if he had watched too many films. As she lay back,
hoping she looked ok, she forced herself to clamp down on her tongue to prevent
from voicing the angry tirade of insecurities running through her brain. He was
here now, and that was enough.

Jaxon lay awake in bed, staring at the
ceiling. If Tessa had been someone he sought to impress, he would have been
obsessing over his own performance. But there was too much else raging through
his head. The room was silent, but there was an inferno inside him. Jaxton
considered that he was sleeping in a stranger’s house. He felt like they were
sliding off the deep end. The brink awaited them, and in a few days there would
be no going back. Shaking the prophecy of doom and gloom, he looked at Tessa
sleeping beside him. She was a sweet girl, he thought keenly. Witty, probably
misunderstood, and most likely desperate as hell. But she carried herself so
well, even with all that pent up longing. It was only as she had begun to touch
him that he realized she had no confidence in herself, or the way her body
moved against his own.

Jaxton’s thoughts shifted to a set of
glistening dark eyes once more. Jesus, he thought, what was going on? He had
seen the way Bennett watched for Adira on the trek so far. There was infatuated
concern there, the kind that formed in a powerful rush, sweeping away all hopes
of remaining aloof. He was smitten in her, though he probably was still
fighting it. A hopeless struggle. Who could resist those dark eyes? He could.

Jaxton would have no part of his
friend’s relationships. He rose quietly, taking extra care not to wake the girl
who probably thought she was in love already, and stole into the dark living
room.

He found Adira sitting, and Bennett
lying on her lap. Both their eyes were closed as they sit in the faint yellow
light of a single bulb. He attempted to sneak past, but cursed as his foot
activated a creaking wooden floorboard. Then Adira was staring at him, with her
eyes wide open. Jaxton returned her gaze, unable to look away or say anything.
Faintly, he heard a voice in his head telling him that the dark eyed girl would
be the end of him. Laughing at his own thoughts, he smiled at her and stole out
the front door.

The rain had ceased. In the darkness
of the little neighborhood, all was dripping crisp rain-water. None of the
houses had illumination of any kind. He heard the door creaking behind him, but
fought the urge to look.

“Can’t sleep?” He asked quietly. The
dark beautiful girl joined him at his side while everyone else was deep asleep.

He heard her silky voice, almost a
whisper. “No. Can you?”

“No. I didn’t want to think about it
all day, but when I close my eyes it’s all I see.”

She looked up at him, a full six
inches taller. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re the one with that burden now.”

He met her eyes in the starlight.
“I’ll be ok, I think. As long as it gets better from here. If it doesn’t…I’ll
never be able to sleep again.”

They stood in silence for a full
minute.

“Do you think we’ll make it?”

He continued to survey the houses, looking
for any signs of movement, unsure what he was hoping for. His heart was not
pounding in his chest, much to his surprise. He spoke calmly, with a husky
poise. “I would guess we’re about fifty miles out. Backroads from here on,
through little towns more or less like this one. Except the further north we
go, the more redneck they’ll get. I don’t know what we’ll find in them. I don’t
know how much of their humanity they will lose. It could get dangerous, before
we get home.”

He could feel the warmth of her skin,
she was standing so close. His body stirred, even though he had just been
satisfied moments before in the darkness of a sweaty bed.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she
purred.

“What is that? That thing you do with
your voice?” Jaxton looked down to meet her eyes.

She looked genuinely abashed, and took
a step back. “What do you mean?”

“You have to know what I mean,” he
said, smiling cynically. “You mean to tell me that whole…Cleopatra thing you
have going on there…that’s effortless?”

She smirked, turning away. “You
flatter yourself. If you notice anything about me, that’s on you. Don’t be so
convinced I’m trying to attract you, or anyone.”

His face stretched into a look of
theatrical bemusement. For a moment, they forgot the bulging white eyes of the
corpse in the car.

“I haven’t ever tried to be someone I
am not already,” she continued, more seriously.

Jaxton wondered at that. “So tell me
then, how does it feel, to know every man who lays eyes on you, wants you?”

She guffawed, her dark eyes glimmering
in amusement. “Does that kind of question even matter now?”

“Now what?”

“Now that the world is ending, you
sarcastic… prick.”

“Good one.” He crossed his arms,
trying to look pleased with himself. It worked. “It matters more than ever.
Society disappears. Human interaction will just be a battle, a battle between
instinct and whatever remnants of morality we manage to cling to.”

“Hmmm, so you fancy yourself a
philosopher then,” she cooed, slanting her eyes.

He said nothing, preferring to wait.

She sighed, looking at the little
streaks of lightning that snapped silently across the sky in some cloud a
hundred miles distant. “It’s more tiring than you know. Do you think I consider
it a blessing?”

“I would,” he said frankly.

“It’s different for guys. You idiots
can be powerful because of how you look, how confident you are, how strong you
are, how funny you are, or how rich you are. We have to look good to do
anything. Even if a girl is all the above and ugly, she’s still got a huge
uphill battle.”

“Something you wouldn’t know anything
about,” Jaxton mused.

She pursed her curved red lips. “I
didn’t always look like this, you know.”

“No?”

“No. I was an ugly duckling. No one
paid me any fucking mind in high school till I got a little older. So I know
how shitty it can be, how frustrating to watch all these girls strut around you
and see the guys flocking to make them happy. They live for that, that
relentless validation.”

“Now you’re one of them.”

She sighed deeply, taking a seat on
the concrete stoop near the porch. Her voice lost all its playfulness, and she
titled her face skyward to gaze at the little specks of white starlight that
were boldly poking through the fading cloud cover. “Do you have any idea how
annoying it is? I can never take sexuality out of the equation. Every
interaction I ever have with another man is charged with this…unwanted tension.
I just want to do my thing, and everywhere I go it follows me, relentlessly.”

Jaxton eased down beside her, rubbing
his arm muscles to warm them against the chilly night. “So how do you think
that’ll change, now that society is dying?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” she berated.

“Don’t be so sure,” he snapped. “You
saw that video too. Those fucking things we haven’t spoke of once. They’re
north of us. Don’t be so sure the army can stop them.”

“They’re fucking people, Jax, stop
saying otherwise.”

“Those…were not people. They were
animals. They were more than just… sick.” He listened to the distant rumble of
thunder rolling through the night-air. “This shit is going to balance the
scales. Nature’s nuclear winter.”

Adira didn’t say anything, and wished
he would stop talking. She crossed her arms and sat frostily.

Yet he continued. “It’ll get more
difficult for you. Men’s desires will run unchecked, now that the rules are fading
away. There will be no pull of decency to stop them from pursuing you at every
opportunity.”

“Oh. Is that so, Jax? Who the fuck
made you the muse?”

Jaxton knew he probably wouldn’t have
continued were it not for the slow burning buzz that was nursing inside him.
“Because I’ve noticed it myself, Adira.” He turned to face her, making sure to
put some distance between them, lest he appear sinister in any way. “At first,
you were just an attractive girl. Noted, filed, and moved on. But there’s fear
in the air. There’s tension. Nerves are at the breaking point. Don’t people
feel more animalistic to you? Their base emotions are fighting to reign
supreme. It’s something in the air, something in the fear that every single one
of us nurses deep inside. Who wouldn’t be bolder in such a climate? The fragile
niceties of society have crumbled.”