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The first night it happens, she’s just killed Van Ark with a rocket launcher.
Sam is apparently, obviously, into that. On some psychological, unconscious level.
(He is also consciously into that, because when he watches through a half shattered camera as Five, red in the face and bleeding from her collarbone, her skin tan from a hellish, hot summer – the after effects of climate change don’t cease with the apocalypse, it seems – and covered in a sheen of sweat, kneels down, brushes her hair from her face, furrows her brows, and with a gasp of exertion hikes up an unyielding, shiny AirTronic onto her shoulder and squints up at Van Ark’s plane, he feels a wave of raw desire spike through him that makes hugging Janine when the plane does actually go down an awkward and challenging experience. But he’s trying not to think about that because Sam is a normal person who has normal desires and does not have some kind of bazooka military-babe kink, okay? Okay.)
He didn’t think he was into that. But. In some Freudian level of his mind, he clearly was. Because it happens that night, for the first time.
Sam collapsed into bed more than a bit exhausted and emotionally confused. It had been a day – from finally, finally sending their archnemesis-crazy-stalker-mad-scientist-possible-origin-of-the-zombie-apocalypse-maniac to the promised land (Hell, as far as Sam was concerned) in a crunching scream of blistering metal and fire, to losing over a third of their people to a mysterious brainwashing tone in the middle of the party to celebrate said sending of their archnemesis to the promised land (what is his life). It was the type of day that any of the routines of normalcy feel wrong and faintly absurd, like brushing his teeth, like settling into the same bed in the same comms shack that he slept in every night, like doing any of the patterns that dictated the rhythms of his life. How could he carry out the routines of the everyday when this day was so unlike any other that had ever happened?
It felt wrong, trying to sleep. Obscene, somehow.
That’s probably why it happened, really. His brain felt so guilty, so confused at his body’s need to give into something as regular as sleep that it threw its hands up, said in for a penny in for a pound, and slid balls-to-the-wall into pure, sheer depravity. Like it was so perplexed at the fact that its fleshy host could be so indecorous that it tried to make up for it by becoming as deviant as possible to stay in tune with the rest of his limbs. Like it – like he – couldn’t fight the scandal anymore.
He had fallen face first into a muzzy, head-aching drowse when the dream started.
He could see her. She’s hot (figuratively, of course, but also literally), sweating with the scorch of a humid evening, like she was today, in his memory. She had blood smeared across her that beautiful divot between her collarbones, and mud, and the corner of her shorts are burned away by the acid she threw at Van Ark, revealing even more mileage of strong, taut leg (gulp). She’s standing in the doorway to the comms shack, and Sam’s at his desk as always. She looks at him, raking her eyes over his puzzled face. He’s been ordering up his desk, stacking papers, throwing out clinking empty marmite jars (should have been the first indication that this was not in any way real, since Sam hadn’t cleaned out his desk since Abel became a thing), and he pauses to look at her, holding a sheet of paper covered in pen scribbles and deranged notes halfway above the bin. She opens the door all the way, too loud in the quiet. It is quiet, too quiet, he realises. He can’t hear anyone – not the hums and breaths of the runners over the comms, not the creak of machinery outside, not the chatter of runners and children and Janine passing through the courtyard beyond the doors. Silence in a way he hasn’t heard silence since before he lived in a commune of people, guarded against the ceaseless hordes of rotting corpses that bayed for human flesh outside but forced to live in constant, personal-space-less, noisy proximity to one another. The only sound that isn’t silence is Five’s breathing.
‘Sam,’ and her speaking, apparently.
He finds his voice is too dry to reply. Her eyes are glinting, eyebrows furrowed in the same way they were when she stared up into the blazing sky, at a plane that contained the man that had half-tortured her to death, at a plane that was moving too quickly away. She was looking at him like a target. Like something she wanted to accomplish.
He finds himself pinned beneath that hot, dark gaze. Her eyes are green, and the light throws half-shadow, half-moonlight on them, so they almost look calico. Some parts luminous jade, some parts dark as a fir tree.
‘Sam,’ she says again, and then she’s striding across to the desk, huge, wide-legged, wanting strides. She grabs him by the front of his t-shirt, crumpled in her dirty fingers, her face close to him, to his throat. Then she’s on him. Mouth all over him, on his neck, dragging teeth against the soft vein under his jaw, her nose under his ear. She’s almost smelling him – smelling him? – pressing the underside of her bottom lip to the pulse in his neck. Every drag of her nose and her mouth against his skin is the best feeling Sam has ever experienced in his life – like she’s memorising him, like she wants to eat him alive, and hey. Sign Sam the fuck up. He could be an excellent medium rare steak, he wants to be her excellent medium rare steak – which feels like a slightly inappropriate desire considering the incredible amount of time he spends actively avoiding being eaten by other humanoid creatures, but whatever. Her hands are warm, and when he looks down he can see blood and mud from her palms pressing onto the skin of his stomach, exposed under the rucking up of the t-shirt, leaving red-brown crescents of her fingers – her fingers! Her palms! On him! – against the curve of his hip, the flat of his belly. She takes her arm and sweeps the remaining papers from his desk. She grins up at him.
‘Don’t want to get your desk dirty, do you Sam?’
The whole thing feels amazing – amazing – but off, somehow, ersatz. Her hands have the same warmth as a hot water bottle, or a microwaved dish. A second-hand warmth, an artificial heat. Not like it’s hers, like it’s not really come from her body even, not emanating from the chemical processes in her muscles, not the warmth that radiates from a real person’s palms. He’s felt that warmth from her before – in a desperate thank-god-you’re-alive hug, in a high five after a particularly wonderful D&D play. This doesn’t feel the same.
That doesn’t seem to matter though, when she turns, her hands in his t-shirt turning him with her, hoiking herself up sitting onto the edge of the desk and pulling him between her legs. Still kissing him.
‘I want you, Sam. I want you so much.’ And that – that’s just. Wonderful. Isn’t it? To hear that from her – to see the shape of her lips forming those words. He’d stared at that mouth (not creepily! Don’t listen to Simon – that traitorous bastard, a part of his dreaming brain remembers – or anyone who says otherwise) over the dinner table. Watching it trace the outline of his name – Sam – over and over again. The pull apart of her lips to make the S, how the inner softness almost seems to want to stick together, the long separation of the A, the plush, rosy way they fall back over one another at the final M. He loves to see the movement of his name in her mouth. Loves it. Likes the sound of it even more – living for it, on her runs, when she’d shoot back a ‘Roger that, Sam’, or a laughed S-aam when he’d said something deliberately ridiculous, or a desperate, panicked, trusting ‘What do I do, Sam?’, like she relied on him, believed in his ability to get her out of any situation. Any danger.
He’d imagined what her mouth would look like, shaping those words, I want you, those words he had wanted to hear. He’d thought about what they would sound like, coming out before his name. Wondered how her breathing would shape them, coming out in pants around the syllables. And it does sound like it, when she’s saying it now, sounds exactly like how he’d imagined. Desperate, breathless, a sweeter version of her panicked asks for direction on a run, with the same beat of trust, of need, of right now, Sam. Like she was wrapped in the emotion of it, caught up in the same frenzy as when she was running away from zombies or deadlocks. Unmoored. Wanting him, an uncontrolled, devouring, help-me want.
Sam wanted to help her. In all ways. But especially – sexy ways.
God, his brain was tired.
And it is down to this tiredness that he puts the weird, lingering disappointment that sparks in his chest when she does sound like that, like the way he’d imagined her to sound. Like he’d wanked over her sounding. There’s no other logical reason for it, to be disappointed that she was exactly as he’d dreamt, is there?
So, he ignores it and kisses her back, hard, skating his tongue along her bottom lip, pressing her back into the wood of the table, taking, taking, taking, with a confidence he didn’t know he had lurking in him. Like he was golden. The Sam he wanted to be in his head. The Sam who whispered innuendos back to her, who cupped the small of her back in the canteen, who winked and offered her a sports massage when she complained of aching thighs. The Sam that he kept buried beneath a layer of doubt.
‘I want you, Sam,’ she says again, and she’s lying on the desk now, and her top has gone, and he doesn’t know if it’s the lateness of the night or the lack of light or his own sleep-addled brain but her body feels blurred, like a smudged photograph. He knows it’s beautiful, and he knows he wants to look at it, but when he does, it’s like a fuzz. He can’t remember it, really. He is on her in an instant, though. Covering her, hands on her ribs. It’s happening.
‘I want you, Sam.’ And he’s unbuckling his belt and this is going to happen, this is really going to happen, he’s going to have Five, he’s going to touch her and feel her on him, feel every part of her like every part of him wanted to (every part. He didn’t know you could feel desire in your ankles, but, boy, he felt it there too). He was opening his mouth to tell her so, tell her I want you more, I love you I want you I’ve wanted you with every part of me since you fell out of the sky he’s opening his mouth and then.
Then Sam wakes up.
It’s not the end of the world, the first time. He’s had dreams about Five before, dreams like that – dreams where he touches her and sees her and she wants him back. Yes, last night’s showing felt particularly real, and he had woken up aching and needing to take a long, freezing shower that left his skin blue-washed and tingling, but he put it down to a particularly wild and disturbing day that had left his unconscious brain filled with lurid anxious energy. It didn’t mean anything, and he smiled at the real Five over breakfast like everything was normal, like he wasn’t breathing through his teeth when she let her tea go almost cold and she swallowed it all in one. Like his head wasn’t hurting watching the long, lithe line of her throat bob as she drank.
But – this is where it began to get weird.
The night was drawing in, and everyone in Abel was still walking around as if they were concussed. The yard felt strangely empty, with most of the people gone. The exuberant high of killing Van Ark and the confusing desperation of the mass exodus had left the air taut and muzzy, the people looking wide-eyed and glassy at one another when they brushed past each other from building to building.
The dream – painful as it may have been, reminding Sam that what he wanted definitely did not actually want him back in real life, leaving him with ghostly fingerprints on his belly – did prompt him to actually make some attempt at cleaning his desk, popping empty marmite jars in his bin and tucking away his loose sheets into folders and into drawers. He has his back to the door, so it makes him jump when he hears it swing open. He needs to get some oil for it. Oil helps squeaky joints, he’s pretty convinced on that. That engineering degree was clearly good for some things.
He turns, and she’s there. Of course she’s there. She’s not muddy and bloody, and she’s not in running clothes, but she’s there, real and fresh from a well-deserved shower, her long hair wet and dark, already starting to curl. Her skin is warm and damp beneath her house dress, pale and floral, washed out from the sun and too many laundry loads. It looks wonderful on her, though, her collarbones a shadowy line under the cotton blue straps, her running tan glowing and warm on her legs, strong and soft out from under the hem. When the door opens it lets in a breath of hot air with her. He forgot how searing it was outside.
She grins at him, nervously, but the purpling light and the stars of the summer evening outside make her eyes dark, that calico green from his dream. She raises a glass bottle and some crisps at him, a peace offering. Sam blinked at that bizarre thought. There wasn’t any need for peace offerings – they’d had no war. She was just bringing snacks. Get a grip, Sam.
He swallows.
‘Hi Sam,’ she smiles, steps in a bit further.
He tries to stop his eyes from drifting down, tries to stop himself looking at the tide line of her dress hem above her knees. He wants to put his mouth on the bone, he wants to touch her calves, smooth them with his fingertips, run them up and down her shin bone where it stands out glossy sometimes against her skin in the light, feel the taut veins and the shadows of her calf muscle. He wants to touch her everywhere. Stop it, Sam.
She’s talking to him, and he makes a concerted effort to actually listen to her.
‘It’s been a long two days. Everyone is sort of shell-shocked. And then everyone wants to ask me about Van Ark, and I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t know, it feels weird to think of a triumph when we’ve lost so many, and I just – I thought it would be nice to maybe hang out? And not talk about anything that has happened? I just want to laugh again. And I’m always laughing when I’m with you’
She looks at him, eager in the eyes, and her face is still nervous. She’s been to the comms shack approximately eight thousand times, so Sam doesn’t know why she’s suddenly Miss Anxiety. He reproves himself immediately for being uncharitable. She’s probably suffering the same problem as him yesterday – when the absurdity of events makes normality seem off-kilter and wrong. She lifts the glass bottle again, shakes it a little.
‘I brought ginger beer, and pringles. Don’t tell anyone. I’ve been hiding them under my bed for a few weeks, saving them for a special occasion.’
‘Am I a special occasion?’ he asks, before he can stop himself. She laughs, and the weird tension between them cracks into pieces, and she’s Five again. She’s Five and he’s Sam and he beckons her in.
‘Always, Sam, always.’ She laughed, dropping down gently onto the sofa. Her laugh was bright and pealed out, curling around Sam’s head like church bells. He didn’t ever believe in that God, and his parents never took them to the parish down the road from their own house, but he used to love the sound of those bells, loud and frosty and bright as winter. She reminds him of those bells. Cold stone and cold mornings, the glint of gold and copper in the sunlight, almost out of eyesight. Red-green ivy.
‘Right, what film are we watching, then? I don’t have any runners out, so I think we can spare the monitor.’ He turns towards his rusted filing cabinet, one that Janine dragged out for him from the damp basement of the farmhouse, not without complaining. He imagined she would be even more unpleasant if she realised that he didn’t at all use it for the official documents and files he claimed to need it for, but rather stuffed it with whatever DVDs the runners scavenged.
Five clapped delightedly.
‘Well, we watched Raiders last time. It’s time to visit a temple filled with death and hearts and doom, is it not?’
‘Haven’t we had enough bloody doom?’ He groaned. ‘Do we have to watch that? It feels vaguely racist and it’s so gory, it turns my stomach.’
She grinned. The comms shack was dim and he noticed that the few splinters of creamy moonlight that curled in through the window glinted dully off her bared teeth. Her incisors curved like a spine bone. He realised he had never properly looked at her shoulders, or her back. He wanted to tell her to stand up, so he could walk behind her and just stare at it. He knew it would be freckled. He wanted to put his mouth on the bump of spine that would rest gently, like a pearl, at the base of her neck.
Good God, Sam, get it together. Christ, he was like a dog, a panting dog. He felt silly and drunk. Temple of Doom. Fire. Raw organs.
‘Don’t be such a wimp, Sam. You’ve seen real bullet wounds and intestines and –’
‘Not out of bloody choice, Five! That was absolutely not a leisure activity! It was a forced viewing of bullet wounds and intestines! If I have to see that on my day job, why would I want to watch it on my time off?! That’s like –’ he scrabbled around for the right image. ‘A lawyer watching Law & Order! Or a teacher watching Dead Poet’s Society!’
‘I’m sure that teachers loved Robin Williams as much as any other profession, so I’m not sure your simile stands there. And also, it’s good to prepare yourself, Sam, steel your stomach. Maybe you could join me on more runs then, if you weren’t so afraid of a little bit of good, old-fashioned viscera.’ She was smiling, laughing at him. Her smile was wide and almost cruel, just this side of fun. Or it was just her usual grin, warm and moony, gentle, and the combination of the dream and the sharp edge of the light had given her a strong, bloody colour in his mind. It didn’t matter. She already knew they were watching Temple of Doom. If only because she goaded him.
Sam Yao was a weak man. A weak, weak man. A weak man that had a tooth fetish, apparently. That sharp incisor. What was happening?
He turned away, digging through the fax cabinet, throwing a few films onto the desk behind him as he rifled through. He could hear her laughing softly behind him, bell peals, and a quiet shuffling as she stacked up the scattered DVDs.
‘You have to be more delicate with these, not many left.’ Her voice was light, not a real admonishment. ‘And, besides, don’t want to get your desk dirty, do you, Sam?’
A cold panic flushed its way up his back, and his fingers fumbled around Harrison Ford’s face. What? Sam was going to die. She said – and she said it, funny, he could hear the smirk in her voice. And he was there, there again, her in front of him in running shorts half ripped, her tan stomach, the pink line of her knickers just edging over her hip, her eyebrow raised. I want you, Sam, I want you.
Sam Yao was not a weak man. He was a dead man. A dead, stupid, delusional man who thought he was going to pass out. Why was the world cruel to him? He was a good person. He did good things. He saved his runners and he let Jody have the last bit of macaroni and cheese last week. This punishment was unjust.
He turned slowly.
‘Sorry, Five, what did you say?’
She was leaning against his desk, holding a stack of Guy Ritchie and Pixar. The breeze from the window behind her settled the smell of rosemary and earth around her shoulders. The moonlight nudged in there too, nicely, warmly. Beaming behind her as it did, picking out the flyaway hairs and the curve of her shoulders but not her face, not those maddening, dream-like teeth, Sam realised that this was real because her face was hers. Warm, kind, the curl of her nose and the bow of her lips. That was what was wrong with it, in the dream. It wasn’t kind. Her face was almost like a caracal’s, then. The liquid eyes and the cheekbones and the lips bitten lung-red, dark.
Five had those things now too, but she was also – also her.
Her looking at him like he had been hit on the head by Van Ark’s plane debris.
‘That you shouldn’t throw your DVDs around like they’re made of titanium? They can get scratched easily, and there’s not enough around to keep replacing them.’
‘No, the other bit, what did you say about my desk?’ why was he still talking. Sam, why are you talking?
‘That you didn’t want to get it dirty? It looks like you’ve just cleaned it, after all, and you wouldn’t want to clutter it up again before Janine can give you an appropriately backhanded compliment, wouldn’t you?’ and it felt so normal, her saying that, her smile a bit unsure but hers, her posture straight up and not cocked towards him, holding Finding Nemo and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels like an angular plastic baby cradled in her arms. So normal it felt like she hadn’t said it at all. He felt faint and stupid, all at once.
‘Right, yes,’ he blinked. Christ, man, how do you not know how to separate dreams from reality? He’d have to talk to Maxine about waking dreams, about how to know if you were delusional – Maxine, Maxine who had walked away in a trance hearing music that they couldn’t hear, Maxine who was gone. The flush drained from his face, and he suddenly didn’t feel anything but tired. He closed his eyes and tried not to press on the bruise of not knowing what to do.
There was a hand on his arm. A warm palm. On his elbow.
‘Sam, we’ll figure it out. We will.’ Her eyes, green, specked with grey. Looking at him. This touch felt – real. Not like a hot water bottle. Real.
They watched Indiana Jones until she stumbled sleepily from the comms shack, and Sam sat on his creaky comms chair, watching her long after she’d zig-zagged from sight.
It didn’t happen again until a few weeks later. He hadn’t spent much time with Five in real life – only over the headset. Janine had her out running missions a lot of the time, tracking down leads on their missing people, rescuing stupid (but annoyingly endearing) teenage boys who came bearing beautiful presents of bizarre technology, saving their new and frankly unpleasant boss from a helicopter fiasco. Five’d seen too many of them, he thought.
They’d had to endure a long and arduous seminar about the Ministry’s plans to automate the running system (which he was deeply sceptical of and more than a little put out by), and Amelia and/or her lackeys were always in his shack now (thank God he’d cleaned the desk), delivering instructions on how to programme the pre-recorded messages, how to record the messages themselves, how to press this and fiddle with that and what he could do with the cameras now. He felt like he was back in school, and he was faced with a particularly frustrating and hard-nosed set of teachers, who did not seem to get that you couldn’t learn everything from books.
Which, yeah. He could see where that thought led. How his unconscious latched on.
He’d shut down for the night, and it was too hot still to sleep under much more than a sheet, so he made do with a slightly unwieldy blanket stitched together from three beach towels (a craft project of Jody’s which hadn’t quite landed). The material was rough but not warm, which was a relief. He was so tired that it didn’t take him long to drift off, echoes of Amelia’s grating, instructional voice clanging at him like a school-matron still in his ear.
He was in his old school. He was pretty sure that it was his old school – he remembered the Macbeth poster that hung, slightly battered, on the wall of his English teacher’s classroom. The teacher had starred in that production, in a pre-teaching life, and was still inordinately proud of his thespian experience.
He wasn’t there now, though.
It was bright – autumn sun streaming in through the window. He didn’t know how he knew that it was autumn, but he did know it, in some baseline of his mind. It made sense. The light was coppery-gold. The sky was the crisp blue of a September morning. Back to school.
The bell rang, and he expected it to be that dreadful, high-pitched clanging one that used to squat on the wall near the door, but it sounded light and joyous. A church peal of music.
Then she was there. Perched on one of the formica tables that used to service as desks. Her hair was pulled up behind her into a neat chignon, but he could see the curls threatening to break the conch-shell clasp that held them together. He hadn’t seen her with her hair like that before, and he wasn’t sure whether it suited her. She was dressed like herself, too (later, he would praise all that was heavenly and holy that his fantasies hadn’t strayed into the realm of the schoolgirl, and he felt vaguely proud that his unconscious wasn’t creepy), herself in her down time. He had seen that sundress earlier, a few weeks ago. It was white and nipped in at her waist. He knew that it had a tie-back, which left a warm splash of skin at the small of her spine visible. He’d spent a long time thinking about, and looking at, Five’s back once he realised he hadn’t given it it’s true due before. Dresses weren’t a common outfit of choice at Abel – not suited to dashing away from the grabby hands of the undead – but it had been Molly’s second birthday, so the occasion had been deemed special enough to spruce up a little bit. She had laughed, and tore the pink icing off her slice of cake, nibbling at it and leaving the cake itself untouched. Sam had thought about that dress a lot, and here she was, wearing it, sitting on his old school desk, swinging her legs, looking up at him from under her eyelids.
This was not good news.
‘You’re not wearing your uniform.’ She informed him, as if he might not be aware of that fact. He looked down and saw what he had fallen asleep in, his faded hack-a-thon t-shirt and a pair of cloth shorts. ‘You’ll get in trouble.’
‘You’re not wearing any either,’ he found himself saying. His voice was weak, faint, like it used to be when he had to speak at the front of the class. ‘And who’s going to shout at me?’
‘Well, I don’t have to wear uniform,’ she smiled at him, hopping off the desk lightly. Sam felt the world slow for a second as he watched the honey-taut skin of her calf as it uncrossed from over her thigh, watched the muscle jump a bit as her feet hit the ground. ‘And me. I can get you in trouble. I am the teacher.’
Sam felt his mouth dry up. He was aware of every molar in his mouth, aware of his tongue and the way it sat awkwardly. For a panicked moment, he thought he would swallow it and choke.
‘You’re the teacher?’
She grinned at him, and it did look more real this time. Not totally right – still a bit off, but not in a sharp way. It looked a little smug, intellectual. An I-know-better-smile. It didn’t look quite correct on her face. On Five’s face.
‘Don’t I teach you so much, Sam?’ And she did, didn’t she? She taught him more than anyone. Stupid things, like how to peel a tangerine in one sinuous movement, or the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen songs, or what plant had what name. But big things too – how to swallow fear and just do it, how to harness that fright and not ignore it, feel it, use it. How to hold a baby. How to take care of a friend.
How to feel like your world is hinging on your ability to make someone smile.
He nodded, because he didn’t know quite what to say.
‘It’s okay, though,’ she moved towards him. The desks seemed to slide smoothly out of her way. ‘All you really need is a tie, and I have one of those.’
There was one wrapped around her wrist. He hadn’t noticed it before. He watched her fingers – Five’s chewed nails, the little bits of blood at her cuticles – fiddle with it, pick at the knot. He liked her knuckles – like little seashell whorls, pink and moving under the sand of her skin. She untied it, baring her wrist, the lunar bump of bone.
It was his old school tie, black and red.
She looked up at him again, the eyelashes dark. They weren’t long, but they were thick, and gave her sort of a fringe of smoke around her irises. Those irises were greyish, today, he noticed. He wished she would stop looking up at him in that way, giving him the chance to see her face tilted and wanting at him. It made him think of other things – other ways he would see her from that angle.
He was so preoccupied with these thoughts that he barely noticed her reaching up to loop the two ends of the tie around him until he felt the fabric at the base of his neck. She was so close to him now.
She didn’t smell of anything, which felt strange – Five always smelled good. Not of perfume (where would you find that nowadays? Even if you could, any that remained probably reeked of out-of-date chemicals), but fruit, strawberries and citrus – whatever she’d been eating. Or the salty touch of her sweat, the leafy thickness of her hair, tangled up with green shoots and trees from her runs.
Her breath was on his neck, and her hands were slowly moving, fabric over fabric, pulling it into a strong, taut knot. Her wrists and forearms would occasionally bump against his chest, her fingertips feather-touching the divot between his collarbones. She pulled the knot up to meet it, slowly. Her eyes were still flickering up to him, and he silently apologised to her for whatever gormless visage she saw there. She smiled, small, then pressed a kiss to the fabric knot of the tie. He could almost – almost – feel the edge of her lip at the skin behind the tie.
He thought all the air had gone out of the room. She followed the tail of the tie, covering it with kisses, enough that he could feel the pressure of it through the fabric on his skin, but not enough either, not enough as if it was her mouth. She didn’t stop when the tie ended, always open-mouthed and soft, the press of her lips plush and sweet, across the hem of his t-shirt. He could see her knees bending, and then he saw that face, that looking-up face, that angle – he saw it from the way he had wanted to see it all along. She grinned, that almost-right grin, and stroked her thumb in a swipe over the drawstrings of his shorts. A slightly less mature part of his brain helpfully reminded him that had he actually been able to score a blowjob in his English classroom he probably would have been a lot more popular in school.
‘Do you want this?’ She asked. That chignon made the light turn weirdly on the end of her nose. Underwater.
‘Of – bloody hell, Five, of course I want this. You’re my runner – you’re –’ She undid the knot of the strings, slid his shorts to the floor. He was sure he’d had boxers on under these, but he didn’t now. He watched the September sun turn the top of her hair red-brown, autumn leaf, as her head bowed towards him. He felt spiritual.
Then, of course, Sam woke up.
Sam wasn’t a person that didn’t believe in coincidences. Those people annoyed him – like Runner 8. She would always be saying that coincidences weren’t real. Everything was part of a larger plan, a conspiracy, some intrigue set up ready to bring Abel and everyone in it down, concocted by dedlocks, by New Canton, by Van Ark, by a whole host of shadowy figures that lurked outside the walls.
(Thinking about Sara gave him a sharp sting in his chest, like the pain of her death was embedded in his lungs, a wasp tail. She’d like that, almost. That she resonated, even after she’d moved on. She wouldn’t be pleased he was sad – but she’d grin at the thought she hung on. Like a particularly nasty infection. He could hear her say it.)
Sam wasn’t like that, though. He believed that sometimes the world was simply weird. Things were strange! They were in an apocalypse. A real, live, flaking-flesh apocalypse. Sometimes odd stuff just happened. Chance. Serendipity. Coincidence.
But this – come on.
He had a rare, precious day off – they were few and far between, and usually he was too valuable to let off (which made a deeply insecure part of him shine and glow smugly). No one could work the comms like he could (partially because he was the only one who knew which buttons actually functioned and which were too jammed up with marmite to budge). But all the hard runs for this week were done and dusted (scheduled hard runs, that is. There was always a chance that something that happened right now immediately and a dozen runners would have to be dispatched to save the world, again), and Janine had told him that rest was good for him physically, and ‘invaluable’ for his morale.
He thought Janine was more affected than she let on by the death of the Major. She was top brass (apart from Amelia, and who even cared about her) in Abel now, no safety net. He’d noticed phrases the Major used to say leaking into her words, her rhetoric. Her stance changed too – she always stood straight tall, now, like even letting her shoulders slump a bit would bring everything down around her. She had a confident nervousness to her, and that didn’t even make sense. Maybe he did need a rest day.
But the issue was, rest days were really boring.
He was slightly uncomfortable and felt more than a bit guilty that the zombie apocalypse was the ground-shaking event that really delivered Sam his perfect job – and it still didn’t feel quite an equal trade off, maybe he would have been less satisfied as a chemical engineer or a desk jockey but at least he wouldn’t have to think about slow and horrifying death at all possible moments – but, Sam really did love being comms operator. He found it fun, and exhilarating (and absolutely anxiety-inducing), and he also didn’t quite trust anyone to care about his runners in the same way as he did. He sometimes thought about those old job websites, the ones that would constantly pop up on TV promising ultimate career satisfaction, with women throwing back their heads in joy and men looking smart and proud in suits and ties. Indeed, and Glassdoor, and places like that – wouldn’t have helped him at all, would they? Check this box if you need the constant threat of cannibalisation to motivate you.
And the problem with having found his perfect job is that when he was away from it he was inevitably, incurably bored. Especially when Jody and Five were out running, and Paula was titrating chemicals while combing radio frequencies to find any hint of Maxine, and Janine was always busy trying to maintain Abel’s autonomy in the face of Ministry intervention while also being a true serious legend of command (as Owen put it). He didn’t have Maxine to go and chat with while she ministered to the sick, or Simon to be agitated by.
Once he’d reread the comic that he’d asked Owen to rescue from Forbidden Planet a month ago for the third time and made some half-hearted attempts to plot out a session of Dungeons & Darkness (didn’t feel the same without Maxine), he was well, and truly, and thoroughly bored out of his mind.
So, of course, he set out to bother Janine in the comms shack. She’d taken over a run – just until the automation system kicked in, as Amelia was fond of reminding them at every given opportunity – not a strategic one, no big deal, just on instructions for materials that some of the various supervisors in New Canton and Abel felt was missing. The lack of people caused by the mass exodus had not, as expected, diminished the need for resources, but in actual fact had just highlighted their glaring need. Yes, people were consuming less food than when they had their full population, but without half of their living population to help out, regular jobs were made considerably more difficult. Their agricultural group had asked for more plant nets, since half of their work had to be left unfinished at the end of each day, and had to be turned down for a sit-on lawnmower (how the hell they thought the runners were going to take that back, Sam had no idea). The forestry project working on the woods around New Canton asked for a chainsaw to save some trees from rotten branches (these trees were apparently of the utmost importance strategically to New Canton). An axe took too long when your entire corps was reduced to two people, apparently. These runs, squeezed in here and there, had become common – so common, in fact, he didn’t question what the exact purpose of today’s mission was, what directions they were under.
Which is why he is blindsided – honest to God, smacked round the head with an iron anvil like Wil. E. Coyote – when he sidles over behind Janine and glances at the headcams to see, to his abject horror, Five and Jody are standing in the middle of a classroom.
‘Five, will you check the bookcase behind the desk please? We’re looking for any books that we can use for the elder children and teenagers – they can read them by themselves so Lily and Hamish can focus more on teaching the younger children for longer. Jody, if you can go through the desk itself – any files, especially any worksheets, will be absolutely golden.’
Five smiles and ambles amiably behind the desk to the bookshelf, and stretches up to the top shelf, and Sam can see her shirt ride up to the small of her back, the little whorls of skin there, the freckles, he can see the strain in her legs (lovely, lovely, lovely legs) and the little patch of sunburnt red on the back of her neck ,where her hair has been pulled up for the run.
‘Janine,’ his voice is hoarse, noticeably hoarse and good God, he needs to pull himself together before anyone actually realises that every time Five enters the room Sam’s knuckles go white and he finds himself tongue-tied, like a thirteen-year-old with a crush. ‘Why are Five and Jody in a school?’
‘If you must know, Mr. Yao – even though I don’t see why you are even here considering, as you well know, it is your rest day and much as you may doubt me, I am just as if not more so a competent director of stratagem and method as you – since we unfortunately lost three teachers to the tone incident, Hamish and Lily need more resources to effectively manage the amount of children whilst maintaining their education to adequate levels.’ She’s squinting at the screen, her hair pulled back from her face. She looks tired, and even her snappy retort is not quite as rebukingly castrating as usual. Simon was good for her. It’s a shame he turned out to be such a rotten bugger. He made Janine lighter, somehow, without losing her strategic brain.
Now he’s thinking about how Simon made Janine more relaxed and yuck, yuck get away from those thoughts, brain, and Jody was speaking to him –
‘What Janine’s saying, Sam, is that we need books to make sure the children don’t leak their brains from their ears playing stupid games and ignoring the classics in favour of pulp comics – like some radio operators we know…’ her voice lilted into a sing-song as she rifled through the desk, shoving two files packed full of worksheets into her backpack.
‘Yes, Miss Marsh, there are many in Abel whose performance could have been improved by virtue of a little proper education. Good, that should be an adequate amount of questions on Shakespeare to keep them going. Five, how many books have you been able to fit into that backpack? Six? That should be enough for now. I’m going to need you to go down two flights of stairs then to the left – mathematics corridor. We need some worksheets, a calculator, if they have any, and any sets of rulers and protractors.’
They set off at a good pace, fast enough make alright time but not enough to make any noise against the hard plastic floors.
‘They always look the same, don’t they, classrooms?’ Jody was saying, but Sam couldn’t focus on anything more than Five classroom school. ‘My school was up North, but these floors – even the coloured crepe on the wall displays – God, it could be identical. It does make you wonder if all schools are incredibly creepy when they’re this silent and deadly.’
‘To the right, into this classroom, get collecting.’ Janine had no soft touch with the runners like Sam did. It made a difference, he thought.
Five, classroom, school. With her hair up, close and swirling with curls desperate to escape her long-suffering bobble.
‘You know, I always wanted to be a teacher,’ she was saying, and leaning back against the desk. Sam’s head was swimming. This was – uncomfortable (Janine was right there! Why were his dreams Pavlov-conditioning him to get flustered and overwhelmed at every movement Five made? He shifted in his jeans and prayed to all that was holy on this earth that Janine would not notice lest he never be able to never, ever get a boner again out of sheer humiliation).
‘Miss Five!’ Jody laughed. ‘You would’ve been terrible at discipline. You’re far too nice. How would you ever tell anyone off?’ She pulled out a protractor triumphantly from where it was stuck to the underside a child’s table.
‘I’m not sure that’s fair! I wouldn’t have stood for people getting in trouble.’ Sam was going to faint. Or collapse. Or sign up for a lobotomy.
And during this brain-melt of an experience, the connecting door to the classroom behind them burst open to reveal five zombies, four of whom were wearing school uniform and one who was wearing the salmon pink reasonably priced shirt and careful khaki trousers of a maths teacher. One of the children had a ruler stuck point blank through her neck.
Sam didn’t know how it was possible that the zombie apocalypse still kept finding new and disgusting sights to throw at him. He didn’t know how it was possible that he was still not used to it.
‘Oh bugger, Five, pass me that book of algebra, it’s heavy enough to give this old bugger a hefty whack on the forehead,’ Jody was panting. Five had pulled the ruler out and skewered two of the children in the head like a kebab. Still not used to it.
Jody cracked Mr Maths to the floor and crushed his head with her trainer – he didn’t miss Janine’s quiet, muttered ‘ten points’, interesting, definite blackmail material – which was good, 3/5, but they were out of materials and good God could children really move that fast even when dead?
‘Five, supply cupboard! They might have staplers!’ He shouted over Janine’s shoulder, pointing the outline of the door on the screen, ignoring Janine’s ‘they can’t see you, Mr Yao!’.
‘Staplers, really, Sam? Is that all you could think of?!’ Jody was running round the desks like a Benny Hill cartoon, with the two zombildren following her, hungry and snapping. One hooked its ankle around a chair and fell, but the other one clung like glue, too close for comfort on Jody’s heels.
‘Staplers, rulers – Five could do her nifty kebab trick again – I don’t care, it’s better than an empty classroom! Worksheets can’t kill two zombies! Five, don’t mess around trying to pick the lock, kick the bloody door down!’
‘It must be serious if you’re shouting at Five, Sam, she’s never in trouble with you –’
‘Keep running, Miss Marsh! This is absolutely no time for teasing Mr Yao!’
Did he ever mention how much he bloody loved Janine? Heart and soul, he truly, truly loved her.
Five finally had the door open – but fuck, lo and behold, there was another bloody zombie there too – but good God there she was, and the door handle was through the supply cupboard zombie’s eye (why was her competency so sexy? What is that about? Why was Five making Sam discover so many absolutely abhorrent kinks?) and she was chucking one of those old waist high wooden rulers at Jody and using a heavy abacus to crush the skull of the zombie tangled up on the floor. Jody took a harsh swing with the ruler to the other zombie’s cranium, and when it was staggered, she drove it through like an ice pick.
Five and Jody stood breathing in harsh pants, brushing off the flecks of pink lacy flesh from their bodies – and then of course, Janine was off directing again (never gave them two seconds, Janine did, never let them get their breath back, no bedside manner – runside manner?), they had to do this that and the other and then Jody was bipping back and Sam was so overwhelmed for a moment by the effervescent noise that he almost didn’t notice that Five had migrated back to the cupboard and was saying something – looking at the zombie and saying something.
‘Janine! Jody! Stop niggling a second and listen!’ Janine immediately turned around to look at him with a look that absolutely said I’m not impressed with you interrupting and I will absolutely take it out on you later but Sam could not think about that right now. ‘Five’s found something. We should listen to her.’
‘Thanks Sam – it’s just. This zombie isn’t in uniform. Like the children.’ She looked at the zombie quizzically. ‘You’re not in uniform, are you?’
Sam chokes. Honest to God, physically chokes. Janine fixes him with A Look but thankfully does not comment further – one of the few times in Sam’s life he’s been grateful that it was Maxine who was taken and not Janine, as Maxie would never have let that slide – and though he knows his face is open and agog, he cannot just close it, or school it into a remotely more normal expression because all he can hear is you’re not in uniform and all he can see is her, sinking to her knees, her mouth red and open and her eyes glittering and her breath on his hip and her fingers undoing the drawstrings of his shorts. You’re not in uniform.
‘But he’s not dressed like a teacher, either. He’s – in running shorts.’ She bent down to where the zombie hung, quite forlornly, from the door handle. ‘And he has a Comansys badge clipped to his top. Oh, God, he’s been shot. I can’t see any bites, just a chest wound from a bullet. How did he end up here? What happened to him?’
‘Runner Five, that is excellent work – brilliant. Having a Comansys badge may enable us to get us into some of their buildings without resorting to explosives. Unclip that badge and search his pockets – and then you can come back in.’ Janine still didn’t crack a smile, but there was an accomplished glow rolling off her in waves that made Sam feel both pleased for her and bizarrely inefficient.
‘Thanks, Janine, glad we can leave this bloody creepy school. Good spot, Five. Maybe you should have gone into education – you’re always teaching us, Five, aren’t you?’
And maybe this is Sam’s personal hell. Maybe this really is. But coincidences are not this coincidental are they? Are they?
He’s still reeling with the implications of what the fuck is happening with his dreams echoing out into reality when Jody and Five come strolling into the comms shack triumphantly, chatting and slinging off their backpacks and presenting them to Janine.
‘What – what is that, Five?’ His voice doesn’t feel like it’s coming from his mouth. He’s looking at her wrist. A black and red tie, twirled round jauntily, its tongues falling along her forearm as she holds it up to look at.
‘Oh, we grabbed them on the way out. Jody thought it would be funny. Like St. Trinians.’ She nods at Jody, who Sam only briefly notices has a similar tie wrapped round her head like she’s an extra in the music video for School’s Out for Summer before going back to look at Five. Look at the way her beautiful, pearly wrist peers out from beneath the fabric.
This is.
Too much.
‘Take it off.’ She’s looking at him quizzically, her head cocked, and he can see out of the corner of his eye that Jody and Janine are also staring, and he knows that he is absolutely being strange, unforgivably weird, but his heart is about to give out and he can’t keep looking at that wrist that tie he can’t keep hearing the words he can’t – ‘it could – it could be infected with flesh. We haven’t checked you for any grazes. You don’t want to get any – anything in you from those ties.’ Nice save.
He spends the remainder of his rest day in his bunk alternating between indulging in the desires that keep swirling in his head (you’re not in uniform you’ll get in trouble do you want this?) and then hyperventilating with his head between his knees.
Sam is being weird.
Well, Sam is always being weird, that’s why everyone likes him – but at the moment, he’s being really weird, with her in particular. It’s making her itchy, especially because he seems to want to avoid her at every single possible moment. After they went to the school, and he had choked, flustered over the tie she’d wrapped around her wrist and brushed it off with some nonsense about ‘zombie particles’, he was barely anywhere. She missed him, and him not being there felt like someone had just taken a knife to her little finger, or her big toe. She could still move, she could still function, but something in her world felt unbalanced. She kept reaching out to grasp things and dropping them, forgetting there was a missing end to her hand. She kept going to run hard down and tripping over, forgetting her foot was off-centre.
He avoids her so much that she’s driven to the point that she’s finding excuses to watch him through the comms shack window just to catch a glimpse, which is so bloody creepy and stalkerish she can’t even believe she’s doing it. She finds legitimate reasons to be there – stopping just a little too long to tie her shoes, digging plant beds near to the door at the very edge of the allotment, clearing out the gutters. The worst is, that she’s spending her few and precious moments of rest time to do this. (Janine is impressed with her ‘dedication to the township’, and bestows glowing, beatific smiles on her whenever she sees her, which is strange. Jody mutters ‘kiss ass’, which is better).
How bizarre is that. Whiling away the only moments she has to herself, in arduous physical labour, just to see him – not just his back as he’s running away, cheeks bright red. She likes to see his hands as he fiddles with the keyboard, strong and long fingers. The shadows of veins on the back of his palms, the muscles leading from his wrists to his knuckles, as he stretches them out after spending a long time fiddling with wiring or another. He has freckles across his middle and ring fingers on his left hand. She wants to touch them, wants to thread his fingers through hers, wants to feel his skin against her palm, her fingertips. Wants to touch his knuckles.
Five thinks that she might need to get out more.
She misses him speaking to her, too – she misses the way he’ll ask her questions, what do you think, Five? Nobody really does that, in Abel – which she doesn’t mind, she likes her running and she likes feeling competent and useful, and she is truly too indecisive to be given a lot of control over what she has to do with her day. But nobody really asks what she thinks.
Sam does.
And she loves listening to him. Over the headset, when he breaks up the monotony of endless fields and empty roads with tangents about D&D and his favourite music that he used to play on the student radio – on the memorable run back to New Canton’s waiting Land Rover after she had killed Van Ark, he had sung the whole of No Surrender by Bruce Springsteen with her – and about the food from China he missed the most and the list of apocalypses he thought were more likely than zombies. But even more than over the headset, she loved listening to him in person, watching him while he talked. He was one of those people who conversed as much with their hands as he did with his mouth, throwing his palms this way and the other, pointing to posters on the wall, fiddling endlessly with the cap of his pen. She missed feeling the warmth of him next to her when they watched films. It wasn’t enough – God, it would never, ever be enough, just sitting next to him, feeling the space between their bodies with a physical ache, knowing she couldn’t ever actually touch him – but it was close. It kept her going. Kept her able to pretend that maybe one day. Maybe one day she wouldn’t just be another Five to him. Maybe she would be the Five to him. His Five to him.
Fuck’s sake. She needed to stop stealing Jody’s iPod and mainlining Taylor Swift albums. It was clearly doing her No Good.
And now, there were no movie nights or comms chats or dinner time talks at all. He spent all his time in the comms shack, he even ate there, and when his shift was up he went straight to bed before she could even crack open the shack door with an offer of The Conjuring and Patrick Wilson’s wonderful performance of devoted-Dad-cum-exorcist-legend to tempt him. (Was Patrick Wilson still alive, she wondered? She hoped so, somewhere out there, that he was playing his guitar to a bunch of child zombies, curing them one by one). Even Janine thought Sam was pulling too much work, and that was saying something.
She felt sick, and worried – had she given something away? Had she hinted to him that whenever they were in the same room she just wanted him, wanted him. Wanted to ask if he’d like to repopulate the earth with her. Get it on, Marvin Gay-ger counter style. Give her his special cure to the zombie virus (his dick).
She really, really needed to stop hanging out all the time with Owen.
She missed Simon – she didn’t think that she was really allowed to say that at the minute, nobody could. Everyone was very emphatically anti-Simon, which she absolutely understood. What he did was terrible, obviously. But – Runner Three was her friend. He kept her company on runs. He looked out for her and made her laugh. She really liked Owen, inside and out, but – there was still a hole. Five thought Owen felt it too, and he leaned really hard into the hardcore, Simon-style raunchiness, and it was a bad influence on Five. She kept daydreaming about asking Sam if she could play a song on his digeridoo, then ended up feeling so disgusted with herself she wanted to scrub her brain with toothpaste.
Sam couldn’t avoid her now, though. He needed new radio wiring and camera chips (or something. When she had the expert running with her, and she was just providing protection, she didn’t bother to actually listen when Janine outlined what they were actually going to get), and there were apparently two types of red wire that were almost exactly identical to one another and only Sam could tell the difference. They were heading out to a circuit shop on the outskirts of dedlock territory – close enough that no-one had dared to pick it clean, but far enough away that with some careful manoeuvring they could avoid the brightly t-shirted freaks who thought being able to withstand the rush of ten year old boys when the new Superman toy came out meant that they had the authority and experience to breeze through a whole-ass zombie apocalypse. And Jody had sprained her ankle, Owen was required in New Canton to help them with a problem with a birthing sheep (apparently Owen had grown up on a sheep farm in Australia and was unusually keen to get his hands dirty – literally). So, all that was left was Runner Five, and Sam couldn’t do anything about it.
‘Mr Yao, this is an important mission, and Runner Five is free. I really do not understand the issue –’ Janine stopped when she entered the room, and Five felt an awkwardness spread from her toes to the roots of her hair. He really didn’t want to be around her at all. Did she smell?
‘I was just saying, Janine, that Runner Five’s time is far too precious to waste protecting me!’ Sam wouldn’t look at her. Good God, she didn’t want to force him to be in her presence.
‘I’m looking forward to it, Sam. I’ve missed you – I feel like I’ve barely seen you the past few days.’ She could hear Jody shouting at her in her head. Play hard to get, you idiot. ‘Not that I, um, noticed, or anything.’ She leant an arm on the filing cabinet, looking off to the side, trying to play it cool. Nice, Five.
‘And ensuring that we have adequate comms is one of the most important jobs in the whole of the township. There is no job that I would be happier to spare Runner Five on.’ Thanks Janine – the ultimate (if unwitting) wing-woman.
The run is excruciating. Sam blushes bright red every time he looks at Five, and barely speaks to her. It’s even worse because he is excruciatingly attractive when he’s running – she loves the way he smells, it drives her mad, even the sweat of him. The sweat! She feels like she’s a Blink-182 pop punk man from the 2000s dreaming about the gym shorts of their bad-girl crush. His eyes always dilate in the golden light like this, get glossy and brown and speckled with little egg-shell cracks of honey and café-au-lait. She likes it when his hair sticks to his forehead, when it gets curly and damp from the heat. He has lovely ears. She wants to put her mouth on the pulse point, the bony bit, under them. What? What. Stop looking at him, Five. It’s already weird.
They collect the chips and the wires without incident – Five keeping an eye out for dedlocks outside, Sam rooting through the debris indoors, filling his backpack. They barely speak, still. Five doesn’t really know what to say. Since Van Ark’s death, she has spent so much time not knowing what to say.
‘Good,’ Janine says. ‘That’s good, Five and you too, Sam. You can make your way back home, now.’ Even Janine seems mildly surprised with how uneventful the whole thing is. Which of course is when they run smack bang into a tribe of patrolling dedlocks, and she has to fasten her hand around Sam’s wrist and physically pull him into the back copse of straggling firs and collapsing pines at the end of the estate.
‘If we keep heading out this way, we’ll lose them in the farmland. There’s a few places up here – at least three are empty, and one’s friendly. We can shelter in them until the coast back to Abel is clear.’
Sam is looking at her hand where it is grasped around his wrist and she drops it like her fingers are on fire.
‘Hey, Five – thanks. I don’t think I would’ve gotten out of there fast enough if you hadn’t pulled me along.’
‘Don’t mention it, Sam. Couldn’t lose you to a bunch of jumped-up toy shop employees.’ She smiles at him, and he seems to marginally relax a bit. It feels easier, between them, not like he’s pulling away from everything she’s saying.
‘They are looking a little lighter, though, the dedlocks – Janine, do you think that the Comansys tones got some of them too?’
‘I’m not sure, Mr Yao. I know New Canton reached out to them a while back. I’ll have to inquire whether we got any response.’
She takes them up to Afelbach farms, because not only are they off the beaten track, covered by huge sweeps of heavy firs, apple trees that she knows will be flowering white and cloudy, and aging, gnarled oaks, but also because the farms are run by an old Welsh couple that she loves to go visit. They always sneak her Welsh cakes, packed with juicy, sweet raisins and as crackling and warm as a fireplace with spicy cinnamon and sharp flakes of orange zest. It’s always good to go say hello – she misses hearing the accent. They plant daffodils every March. Sometimes she takes the long way home, just to see them, a thousand little nodding suns, all the different varieties – mustard and ochre and orange and silvery, delicate white. The couple trade butter and cheese with Abel, and sometimes lamb meat in the spring. She realises that she hasn’t checked in with them since just before she sent Van Ark to hell in a handbasket labelled, he’s your problem now, Satan. She feels a sickness deep in her stomach. Please don’t let Comansys have gotten to them, either.
‘Sam, do you like horses?’ She thought he would find that funny. For some reason, she couldn’t imagine Sam on horseback, leg over the stirrup, galloping along. He was too urban, or suburban, even. Despite the apocalypse, he hadn’t shaken off his preference for walls and routines. He liked the countryside – loved it, even, but wasn’t at home with it. Jody was the same. Owen got it, though. Him and Five were both green-grass babies. Comfort in the large and natural emptiness.
She wasn’t expecting him to stop stock-still, pale at the gills, and wheel round to stare at her.
‘What did you just say to me?’ Did she – did she let the thump-thump of affection that hummed in every part of her body leak into her words? She thought she was smarter – sharper than that. But why his reaction, then, if he didn’t hear some affection, some love seep into the words?
‘Mr Yao, I really must insist you keep running! Runner Five has given you an ample head start and those heavy oaks should conceal you but I would get inside the farm house itself as soon as possible – this is no time to be stopping!’
‘Oh for God’s sake, Janine, stop switching between Sam and Mr Yao, choose one or the bloody other.’ She winced at that – she hadn’t heard Sam sound so genuinely annoyed with Janine before, and she could hear Janine’s huffy shocked gasp crackle through her headset. Anxious to avoid an argument or make things even worse, she kicks off sprinting again.
‘Come on, Sam, just a bit further. Mr and Mrs Llewellyn are good friends to us – they’ll be happy to shelter us for the evening, and the dedlocks don’t mess with the farms. They think that the farms that have managed to stay working, and keep their cattle safe, must have some balls. Some balls and an almighty stash of modified battle farm equipment or radioactive manure. I would believe it of those two, mind. They are fiery for seventy-one-year-olds.’ She can hear herself over-talking, trying to be funny, trying to defuse and deflate and more than anything distract. She’s picked that up from Sam, that habit. If things were awkward before, she’d just give over to the silence until everyone unpicked themselves. Now, if she ever feels awkward, she talks herself further over the cliff. She needs to stop spending so much time with him.
They crest up to the farm, and though she misses the yellow carpets of sun-drunk daffodils, seeing the pale apple blossoms pearly and luminescent in the late sun, spreading sheets of gauzy, moony light over her arms as she jogs underneath them feels strangely cleansing – and also exciting. The smell of them is sweet, almost effervescent – clean and bubbly, like champagne and heavy night jasmine – and it makes her think of summer parties when she was a child. Dressing up to bat eyes at boys from school. First kisses in the green fields. It feels, with the afternoon coming to a close, the sun mingling deep purple and pink-lilac with the milky canopies of flowers, with the smell of summer, with her body warm and tired from the run – it feels like something is about to happen.
She knows that feeling is absurd. Things like that don’t happen anymore. Things like mind-control music and things like strains of plague that make their hosts fast and sharp and hungry and things like having to learn to fire a rocket launcher and things like being experimented on – yes. Things like that happen. But things like parties and romantic beginnings and excitement and new starts – rarer, those. And especially rare on an evening like this, where Five is running next to a man who for some reason can barely stand to be in the same room as her all of a sudden.
She takes them round the back way – it leads into the old stone kitchen that the Llewellyns usually let them in through, and by taking the edge through a patch of pear trees it provides an extra bit of cover which always comes in handy. The sky has dimmed considerably, and she can see the first winks of stars. Summer sunsets come quickly in this part of the world, she’s found. The dipping down of the sun under the horizon takes its time, languishing, bathing the world in gold – but when it is down, night comes riding too sharp on its heels. On the plus side, the dedlocks will have almost certainly gone back to their creepy toy sanctuary. On the negative, there is no way they’re getting back to Abel this evening. The lanes are dangerous enough in the light, let alone now. Janine will never give them an affirmative to carry it on. While a part of Five sings – uninterrupted time with Sam! No escaping! – another part of her sags. He clearly doesn’t want to be there, clearly doesn’t want to be anywhere near her. It feels cruel to force him this way.
She taps three times on the old crooked door, and after a long pause and a distant shuffling, she can hear Mrs Llewellyn through the wood.
‘Now, who’s here? I am telling you now, we’ve got more than enough force to deal with you if you’re not friendly.’ Five smiles. She knows there’s already a gun pressed behind the lock. They have a few old hunting rifles – not the quickest on the reload but will give you a nasty bite from the shrapnel alone, even if you forget the gaping bullet hole it’ll leave in your torso. And they do know how to use them – Five’s seen that herself.
‘Mrs Llewellyn, it’s me, Abel Runner Five, and our comms operator Sam Yao. I think you’ve spoken to him over my headset before. We wanted to come check in on you –’
Before she can even finish Mrs Llewellyn is butting in.
‘Well, that’s a load of lies, isn’t it? You’ll do well to remember, Miss, that my grandson set us up with cameras all the way along the hillside. I saw you get caught by those bloody yellow shirts. Don’t give me coming to check on us.’
‘You didn’t let me finish, Mrs Llewellyn! We were running away and instead of heading to the abandoned farms near, I thought, two birds, one stone – I’ll check in on the Llewellyns! See if you needed anything. We’ve got supplies I can send over. And I wanted to see if you’ve been affected. there’s been a bit of an issue over in Abel township,’
‘With those tones, is it? That madness music? Yes, we heard it. Arthur, the fool, bloody tried to carry off with it! All dead-eyed like a fish, trying to get out of the house. Well, I sorted that right out. He’s right as rain now. Frightening, though. All right, you can come in. Can’t say we haven’t missed you – don’t let that go to your head, mind.’ She slid the (six) locks open, and then she was there, small and wrinkled and propping a rifle on her hip. Five could see Mr Llewellyn behind her, waving, blissfully half-deaf.
‘Sorry to eavesdrop – well, I’m not, as this is my role, but did that lady say she had cured her husband from the Comansys tones?’
‘Tell that voice in your ear – yes, I can hear her, you’ve the volume way up and I’m not deaf – that it’s rude to call someone that lady, who am I, the cat’s mother? Yes, I did get Arthur to stop being an idiot and go chasing after siren music. No nonsense in my house. I strapped him down to the chair in the basement,’
Worrying, that they had a chair in the basement with straps on it.
‘And made him some tea from the flowers we have in our decorative Japanese garden. Arthur was the one that pushed for it – he thought that it would encourage tourists to come visit on a day out. What I would need with bloody English coming round here watching me milk a cow and pick the apples, I don’t know. It didn’t work either way. But if he was going to have a fussy Florrie arrangement then I insisted we have some of the flowers that my mam used to grow back in the valleys. It took some time for them to take, mind, they didn’t grow very well – they liked the clean Welsh air more, I suspect, and who could blame them, can’t believe I’ll never be taking it in again myself, thanks to Arthur who had to move us to this old place just for a few years, Ruth, then we can take the profits and get a place down Pembrokeshire on the beach bloody thirty years ago, that was – but eventually they came in droves. Whenever we had a headache or a migraine or whenever anyone was suffering from the nerves – like my Bampa Thomas, good God mad as a fruit fly he was when he had one of his attacks – mam used to brew us the flower tea and it would clear your head right up. Did the same for Arthur, of course, like I knew it would. Load of nonsense, that going around and staggering this way and that following some genie music.’
‘Sorry, I lost the thread a bit there’, Sam started, and she kicked him in the side of the foot to get him to not insult the woman who was hopefully going to let them stay the night ‘but did you just say that you cured a Comansys victim?’
‘Well, excuse me, young man, I like to have an introduction first. I’m Mrs Llewellyn, and you are? Also, who are you calling a victim? Arthur had a funny five minutes, that’s all. Now, are you coming in, or not? I’m not holding the bloody door open all night. I’m presuming you’re staying the night, be absolute madness to try run back in the dark. You’re more than welcome – I’m making rarebit for tea, your favourite, Five, I had a feeling I’d see you today – but I’ll be wanting some more bullets from your township there, and I want some books, some nice wool – I’ll never forgive Arthur for not buying a sheep or two – and some of your baked beans. And you’ll have to rub the horses down for me tonight before bed. My arthritis is bad today, I can’t get all the dirt off them, muddy buggers. You can take two of them back with you tomorrow, then, help you get there quicker. You can return them when you come with our supplies. Now, in, in.’
They were promptly pushed into a pair of large brown-leather wing-backed armchairs, overflowing with Welsh blankets (Mrs Llewellyn had threatened many a time to teach Five how to make them herself) and pretty tartan cushions. Mrs Llewellyn fussed over them, tucking in the blankets over their knees, calling for Mr Llewellyn to light the fire, turning the room bright and candle-warm. Sam’s skin looked like honey in the glow.
‘Alright, kids, how’s your farm?’ he offers before moseying off to pick up an Agatha Christie and sip his cup of tea.
‘Arthur, you twp, it’s a township, not a farm.’ Mrs Llewellyn admonished, sweeping into the room carrying two plates in each hand. Her voice is clanging, bell on every tooth Five’s grandmother used to describe voices like that as. Arthur ignored her, smiling peacefully and quietly swooping through pages.
The rarebit is perfect, oozing with smoky, sharp cheddar and earthy mustard, the bread warm and fresh-made, a deep rich brown that is malty and perfectly toasted, swimming with butter. Mrs Llewellyn makes hers with chilli flakes (now, that’s my only criticism about the Welsh, see, is that we always shy away from spice! When I was in my teens, we had a lovely family move in next door from Bangladesh. The mam gave my mam some chilli flakes and well, we never looked back. Life’s too short not to burn your tongue a bit!) and it bursts across the tongue in fireworks of flavour. Sam eats with the face of a man who is seeing God, despite looking a bit bemused by the whole situation. Mrs Llewellyn looks appropriately smug.
‘See, Abel have been good to us, and I have to admire what you’re doing down there – can’t fault it, can’t fault it at all. But with just us two, we have a much better store of food. We can make it taste that bit more luxurious, can’t we? I’m glad to see you runners eating properly. I see you all the time, criss-crossing the bloody country. You need to be fuelled properly.’
Once they’ve settled their plates, Sam, with an enormous amount of trepidation on his face, asks the fateful question.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs Llewellyn, after such an excellent meal – thank you so much for that, by the way, it really was wonderful, I’ve not had a good cheese on toast in so long –’
Five inwardly groans.
‘Let me stop you right there, love, it’s Llewellyn, hear that rough double l sound, and it’s not cheese on toast. I wouldn’t make guests cheese on toast. It’s rarebit, I’ll thank you to say.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Llewellyn’, he tries, bless him, and Five feels a bit wobbly, seeing the effort he makes, seeing how happy it makes Mrs Llewellyn to hear him attempting it (badly), ‘the rarebit was wonderful. I was just wondering if you could tell us more about the flowers? We’ve lost a good few people in Abel, so if you have more information about how they work we would be so grateful.’
Mrs Llewellyn puts her hand to her chin and thinks a bit.
‘I’m trying to remember their name, I am, but it’s escaped me. I can show you them though. Now, you don’t want to be too late with the horses, so I would go do them now. You have to pass the ornamental’ her face twists with an eyeroll as she says it ‘garden to get to the barn. Five knows where it is. Feel free to pick some, if it’ll help.’
Five stands, surreptitiously shaking off a few toast crumbs, and offering her hand to Sam who – shock – takes it, pulling himself up and following her. He drops it quickly, and Five barely resists the urge to flex her fingers like Mr Darcy. She can feel his skin all over her, like the press of his palm to hers has sunk something of him, something deep and golden, into the lines of her skin.
The night is cool, a sweet breeze drifting lazily and sending the smells of ripening apples and dewy fields around them.
‘It smells good out here,’ Sam says. She’s missed his voice. He takes a deep breath in and she studies his face – the strong line of his nose, the sharp of his cheekbones. She imagines the air in his nose, his throat, down his neck to his lungs, and as she watches the muscles of his Adam’s apple and the divot between his collarbones, she feels herself get a bit dizzy and lightheaded. ‘Clean. Five, you have some absolutely bonkers friends.’
She feels herself get a little defensive over Mr and Mrs Llewellyn.
‘They’re good people –’
‘Yeah, I know. They’re great.’ He’s smiling at her, and the trees and fields around them seem to make his grin bigger, brighter, more real. She’s going to faint, she thinks, all of a sudden. She doesn’t, but the rush of smell and empty green and Sam, looking like he’s sprung out of the ground, a man made of the trees and the leaves and the sun-trap flowers, the rush of all of those things make her sway in place. ‘They’re mental, but amazing. Like you, actually, Five.’
She tries not to smile like an absolute idiot at him but fails rather quickly. Heat spreads through her like she’s a solar panel, like she’s stored up all the sun from the day and is just luxuriating in the post-glow. In lieu of speaking, which she’s not sure she can do, she takes him to the barn.
‘Where are we, now, then?’ his voice has taken on sort of a hushed reverence, a whisper. She finds that people from outside of the country always sound like that when they’re faced with agriculture and animals. A deep respect, and a sort of lost familiarity, like somewhere in their bodies they recognised that they used to do this, used to understand the rhythms of this, and abandoned it somewhere along the way.
‘One of the barns. They used to have a proper stable for the horses but they had to cut it down for wood in the first few months of the apocalypse – remember we had that really nasty winter? They only have four horses left now, so they adapted this old barn into a place for the horses to come at night. Mrs Llewellyn always exaggerates when she asks me to clean them, they’re never dirty, she just likes someone to go in and give them a treat before they go to bed. Come on in.’
She swings open the doors and is greeted with a soft chorus of whinnies. Sam looks nervous.
‘This is Marid, and Arwen, and then at the back we have the boys, Dylan and Teilo. I love being in here with them. Everything’s so quiet, and all they want is to be smoothed. They don’t want anything from you other than for you to stand quietly next to them, brush their hair, give them sugar. They don’t ask for anything, they don’t need anything other than for you to just be you.’
She isn’t looking at Sam, just running her hand along Arwen’s long, bony nose. She presses up into the touch, making soft little huffing noises. When she does glance up, Sam is closer than she remembered, and looking at her with eyes dark and luminous in the weak moonlight coming through the barn doors. ‘It also smells nice, I think. Real. I like places that smell like real living things. Do you like it here, Sam? I thought – you might be afraid of horses, because of earlier. But they love you, look at Dylan, he can’t get enough of you.’ Sam had brushed all the dirt out of Dylan’s neat brown mane like a pro, and the horse was resting his head practically on Sam’s shoulder, sending moony eyes at him. Dylan was the youngest and the most affectionate, but still – Sam was a natural.
‘I – I like horses, Five.’ He isn’t looking at her, either. ‘I like this place too. I like being here, with you.’
He’s standing closer to her, now. Being here. With her. She can smell apples and horses and Sam. Sam. Like the sea, rusty and sharp. Like the forest, dew-heavy and wooded. Like sweat and marmite and salt and lemons from the detergent he kept hidden in the comms shack. She’s looking at him and he’s looking at her and the moon is everywhere and there is hay everywhere and she is thinking oh my God, oh my God he’s going to lay me down on this barn floor, oh my God I’m going to feel his hands on my body, oh my God the horses are going to watch, and oh my God I don’t even care and she feels the air between them, the physical space between their bodies get smaller. She feels it all.
Then Mrs Llewellyn shouted out from the main house that they better bloody get going if they want to see the flowers soon because her and Arthur liked to be in bed by half ten and it was near enough ten past and they couldn’t keep the lights going because did they not realise fuel didn’t come easy anymore?
Through the half open door, she could see the figure of Mrs Llewellyn half hanging out the door, and when she looked back, she could see Sam’s body, drifting away from hers, curved back towards the horse, turned from her. His eyes, a second ago so luminous and pregnant with reflections of the scarred stars, were black now, half-dipped in shadow. Gone.
They walk to see the flowers in silence, even though they both know what they’re going to find. Swirling carpets of the nodding, lunar blue flowers, bent into rows, swirling into circles, shaped into ornamental rows. The same ones from when they found Veronica.
She kneels down, plucks a few.
‘I guess we should take some back as samples. Feels wrong to cut them like this.’ She looks at them, little crystal shards, little watching eyes. She feels a petal. Looks back up at Sam. ‘They’re so beautiful. And so soft! I just want to lie down in them and go to sleep. Like a fairy queen in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. Do you get what I mean? Don’t you want to lie down in them?’
Sam, for some reason, has both hands covering around his eyes.
‘Right. I’m going to tell you both something because I don’t know what else to do, but it sounds mad. And I don’t think I can handle questions about it without going absolutely insane, so unless it’s a solution I can’t quite deal with any comments yet. Is that okay?’
Sam has both hands on the desk, and he is determinedly looking in the same direction, down at the wood, abjectly refusing to conduct this conversation staring his friends in the eye. Janine and Paula sit on the other side, Paula concerned, Janine absolutely inscrutable as always– Paula because Maxine is still AWOL, and Paula is the second best medical option considering his other choices are Veronica (who is way, way too young to deal with this, and also freaks Sam out a bit), Nadia (better, but Sam still resents her a considerable bit), and Jody (absolutely not in any way shape form or lifetime would he consider telling Jody), and Janine because as soon as she sniffed out that Sam was consulting Paula on a private matter she pulled rank to be included, which she has been doing all the time since Amelia’s spectacular fall from grace and her promotion to de facto leader.
He takes a deep breath.
‘Okay. I. I don’t know how to say this. But I think I’m having visions.’
He still does not look up, because he does not want to see their faces. He doesn’t want to let them begin to interrupt him, which will be absolutely unbearable, so keeps powering through even though every word makes him feel faint with embarrassment.
‘The issue is, is that I keep having dreams – really vivid dreams – and most of them are nonsense but there will be words, or phrases, or little moments that happen in them that then happen exactly the same way the next day.’ He does chance a look up at them now, and Paula looks concerned. Janine looks sceptical and annoyed but – hey. That is her default expression. ‘It started off coincidentally. Like, in the first dream, Five said something about my desk being dirty, and the next time I saw her, she said the same thing in real life. Or, the second time, Five was talking about school uniforms and had a tie wrapped round her wrist, and guess what – Janine! You were there! She said the exact same thing to the zombie as she said in the dream; ‘you’re not in school uniform’. And then, the other day –’
The other day. The dream he’d had, where he was riding a horse across a sunset-spilt red and orange plain, the smell of cool water in his nose and the moon shifting and sparkling above his eyes. The horse was dark haired, glinting in the night’s slippery light, warm under him, his fingers tangled in the reins, confident (even though he’d never ridden before, ever, so in retrospect obvious that it was a dream, really). And there she was, behind him, arms wrapped around his waist, mouth pressed, insistent to the back of his neck. Her fingers toyed with the skin of his stomach under his shirt, the skin of her legs pressed to his jeans (he knew he liked cowboy films – who didn’t love Clint Eastwood – but he’d never realised he had a bit of an outlaw fantasy hidden within him. Could he feel a Stetson on his head?). He was barely resisting the urge to let go of one of the reins and skate his hand down them. God, he loved her knees. They were so elegant, looked like cut glass, shifting moons under the skin, creamy and speckled with freckles that he just wanted to mouth at forever. He could smell her, floral, like pear and night jasmine, sweet and fresh.
‘Do you like horses, Sam?’ She was practically mouthing the words into neck, barely speaking them aloud. He urged the reins harder. ‘Do you like to ride?’ He could hear the implication in her voice, he could smell it in the wisps of her smell around him, he could feel it in the warm press of her hands. Would you like to ride me?
And then he had driven them to a stooping apple tree that bent crookedly over a small pool, drawing the horse up short, swinging down and fastening his hands around her waist and lifting her bodily, bodily, till she was on the floor, her feet bare, her legs free and tan under a froth of creamy skirts, looking up at him, hair undone and wild on her uncovered shoulders. The blossoms from the tree above were floating down around them, covering her curls in fragrant pearls of white.
‘You’ve found me the flowers, Sam,’ She told him. And then he laid her down, rucking her skirts up around her waist, spreading his hands across the warm, generous hips, pressing kisses to the flat of her thighs, and the flowers were everywhere, winking and blue-white in the light and he was staring down at her underwear, and he could smell her, sweet there too, sweet and tangled with life. She was breathing, soft little gasps, sending torrents of blue-white flowers everywhere.
‘You – lying me down here, in all the flowers – you make me feel like a Queen,’ a sharp intake of breath as he caught the band edge of her knickers with his teeth and pulled. ‘I feel like a Queen’.
– and then. Then, of course, because Sam’s subconscious couldn’t stand to just torture him a little, because it wasn’t enough to make life incredibly difficult for him and his interactions with real-life-Five wincingly awkward, his fantasy couldn’t even give him the relief of actually getting to at least imagine what it would feel like when he took her underwear off. When he touched her. It always ended just before.
‘Yeah, the other day, I had a dream where Five asked me if I liked horses, and we had a horse, and then we found a patch of luminous flowers. And of course – that’s just what happened, after we ran into those dedlocks and we had to run up to the farm house. Just, yeah, every time I have one of these dreams, it’ll happen, and after Five said that – do you like horses – I just thought, this cannot be a coincidence, especially since it started happening after the tone incident –’ he stops, mid-garble, and risks a glance at Paula and Janine. Janine looks repelled and sceptical, but that’s a normal expression for her so who even knows what she’s thinking. Paula – Paula has a layer of worry over her face but her eyes are gleaming with something that reminds Sam too much of Maxine and can also mean nothing good.
‘So, what I’m hearing is, Five is always in these dreams?’
Nothing good.
‘Yes, but that’s not really of optimum concern here Paula – I am having visions of the future –’
‘Oh, of course, Sam, this is huge news. We’ve got to be thorough, here, to understand it. What happens in these dreams? What are you and Five doing before she says – the visions?’ Paula’s smile is brighter and sharper than he’s seen in the entire time since Maxine is away, and even Janine is sitting up a little taller in her seat.
What are you and Five doing?
Well, Five is usually beneath him, either on the desk, or on her knees, or in a field, and she’s hot and writhing and he’s pressing kisses to the soft under-spot of her ear and her warm hands are on his hips and are drifting down to press against –
‘I don’t know, just chilling out, I don’t – does that matter?’
‘Mr Yao, we are going to need extensively detailed reports on these dreams so we can analyse them and figure out if there are any particular conditions or occurrences in the day that provokes them, so we need to know exactly what happens, your emotions, what you’ve eaten. It will be imperative for you to keep a detailed dream journal that we can run over with our top level scientists to understand exactly how this is happening –’
He can’t even take a moment to appreciate that they believe him about the fact that he is suddenly having premonitory dreams like fucking Nostradamus – well, to be fair, considering the world they live in, not believing in the fantastic would in itself would be insane – can’t take a second to feel thankful that he has friends who trust him so implicitly. He’s panicked, because he just knows that Janine will push and push and push, and Paula has learnt from Maxine so he knows she will niggle and cajole at him until he exposes the dreams, until he exposes himself to the world, until lets them all know the horrible, aching, stupid, inappropriate (God, in a regular job he would so get fired for fantasising about one of his colleagues) want for Runner Five that, if made known, would just ruin everything, and he has to stop them he has to throw them off the scent.
‘No! No – why do we need a detailed report? Why can’t we just, like, focus on the visions part? Why do we need to understand the whole dream? That isn’t important, isn’t it?’
‘On the contrary, Mr Yao,’ Oh no, Janine has her puffed up I-am-in-charge and head of government face on, which means she will not let this go. ‘That is most important. We need to know everything.’
‘Sam, it shouldn’t be an issue, just explain the rest of the dreams – us knowing the whole content of these dreams might help us to understand if certain moments prompt the clairvoyance in particular. We are professionals, there is nothing that you can tell us that we will consider strange or out of the ordinary – well, once, I myself had a dream that Maxine was braiding long strips of film into my hair and singing video, video, video girl over and over to me –’
‘We’re fucking, okay! Five and I – in the dreams – we’re fucking or I guess about to fuck it never actually happens but oh, my God, are you both happy now?’ Throwing them off the scent went very well didn’t it, more like leading them straight to the scent and shouting here, here’s the scent, come smell it. Sam doesn’t think he’s ever said fuck in that context, that brutally, out loud before, and he isn’t happy about the obvious embarrassment in his voice and he can’t actually believe he said all of that loud he is going to die.
‘Mr Yao! Language!’
Paula mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like Maxine called it before turning to him with a professional smile and a warm glow in her eyes. She rests a warm hand over his across the table, and says, very calmly;
‘Don’t worry, Sam. Dreams are a complex and confusing space, and we understand that they are totally out of your control, and that your real feelings might not be represented truthfully within them,’ he feels rather than hears her sceptical stress on the word might, ‘This will not leave us, I assure you. Now, tell us everything.’
Nothing, nothing, nothing good.
He knows that they’re going to find the Comansys ship that day, because of course he does. He sees it, the night before. He sees her.
He doubts the Comansys ship will look like it looks like right now, in his mind – a strong, clean wooden bow, painted a creamy eggshell white, warm honey-brown floor. This is a yacht, rather than a ship, he thinks, and then panics because who the hell does he know that has a yacht. A yacht that is glowing in peach sunset light, a ship that is made pearl and apricot by the swirling clouds and the bloody sun. a yacht that slices through the waves easily, smoothly. Sam barely feels the rock of the water beneath him, but the soft sound of it is everywhere Like exhaling. Like breathing.
She’s there. Of course she’s there.
At the bow, looking out to sea, looking away from him. He can just see her back – her beautiful, glowing, peachy pearly apricot-y bloody back, smeared with the painted light of the sky. He wants to smudge his fingers into the colours on her skin, draw lines across it, drag the oil and the pastel across her shoulder blades. The dress she’s wearing has no back, a long, deep cut exposing her from the base of her neck to the base of her spine. The slight bump in the middle of her hips, where her spine ends, catches the light, a pool of gold. He wants to dip his mouth and taste it, taste if it feels coppery and bright or warm, like sun-baked earth. She has light dimples either side of it, he notices. Before he can even comprehend what he’s doing he’s walking over to her, fitting his hands around her hips, marvelling at how his thumbs can just stroke the edge of the dimples while the tips of his fingers can feel the jewelled jut of her hipbones. She’s breathing like the sea, soft, in and out, and he dips his mouth to the back of her neck. Her skin feels warm against his tongue, and it tastes like – like brown sugar, and balsamic vinegar, and too-sweet tomatoes. She moves back into him, lets him kiss her there, drag his teeth over the bump of bone. She keeps looking out at the water, breathing slow, in and out. He moves one hand from her hip to wind in her hair, feels the curls grip around his fingers. In a move that Sam has never made before, and one that is far too dominant for awake-him to let himself think about, he pulls the hair back a bit, just this side of too hard, so the front of her neck – that beautiful front, those two freckles that he’s stared at, the little divot between her collarbones that he’s wanted since he saw her running towards Abel, away from a helicopter crash – is open, creamy, there for him to touch. Her eyes shade themselves close, eyelashes long and shadowy against her cheeks in the dead light. Water beneath them, in and out. The waves pick up, and they send her hips bumping back into his, and he could groan with how good it feels, just that touch of her warm body to his own. Her mouth is open, bitten, the warm pink-red a mouth goes when you’ve finished eating cherries and you’re stained with juice. He takes his other hand from her hip and brushes his thumb against it, that open, open mouth. Open for him. Wanting for him. Another wave and his thumb slips inside, and his head echoes nothing but that thundering, breathy sound of the water beneath. Her mouth is so sweet, so wet, warm around him. He can feel the pulse of the waves everywhere in him, in his hips, in his groin.
He pulls his thumb from her mouth and uses it to press a silvery, slightly damp trail from her bottom lip down to her jaw, down her neck to the divot between her collarbones. He keeps his hand there, lightly holding her neck, lightly pressing. His other hand comes to ruck the dress up, pull the satiny curves up over her ass. He plays with the band of her underwear, lightly running his fingers under the lace, pressing patterns into her freckles. The way she gasps – Sam feels like a man seeing God, hearing that gasp, hearing that ragged tear of air from her throat, but that image doesn’t quite feel right either, because Five now, Five like this, hips tipped up and over and gasping for him – she’s more than holy. More than sacred. Better, brighter, more beautiful than God. He's going to fuck her like this, bent over the bow of the ship, one hand on her neck and the other on her full hips. He’s going to fuck her under the sky and above the water, and he’s going to show all that beautiful world that the girl he has in front of him, shifting and making those sharp little intakes of breath for him, that that girl is more wonderous than anything any God could’ve put together.
‘I’m going to fuck you like this,’ he tells her. He presses his nose under her ear, because he can.
‘The water may seem rough, Sam, but underneath it’s calm.’ Her voice is so still, but her body is on fire, pushing back into him, her hips electric, her soft skin pressing at him through his trousers. ‘They may seem like they’re the ones we want, but you have to remember – they didn’t do this.’
‘Who didn’t do what, Five?’ he’s not really listening. His world has centred on pulling her ass back to push against him, to send brilliance sparkling up his spine. His world has centred to taking the hand from her waist – criminal, that separation – and using it to fumble with his trouser button, to get them off so he can take, so he can take her like this.
‘Albert, the people on the ship. We’re not looking for them.’ Some reptilian part of Sam’s brain wants to rip whoever the hell Albert is apart, considering that he’s a distraction to the squirming golden girl that Sam wants all to himself. ‘We’re not looking for them.’
‘Five, I’m looking for you.’ He pulls her knickers down over her hips, letting the lace rest just under the swell of her ass. The sun smears more colours on the skin there too. Sam feels faint.
‘Sam, I’m looking for you, too. I’m always looking for you. Don’t you know that?’ He bites down at her shoulder and she doesn’t even seem to have any control over the sound she makes, like it’s been torn from her bodily and Sam redoubles his efforts to get his fucking trousers off. He can feel the skin of her neck jump and pulse under his hand when she gasps, and yeah, okay, he likes that. ‘Don’t you realise that it is always you I’m looking for, always you?’
Colours – images – flash through his mind, Five looking at him over the horse’s back at the farm, Five running to his shack first thing every time after she’s back from a run, Five’s eyes flickering to his face when she makes a joke at lunch, Five bursting out of the Land Rover door after Van Ark’s death, not staring at anything other than him as she fucking launched at him for a hug. He remembers the smell of her hair. He remembers the warmth of her skin. He remembers those eyes.
Looking for him.
He finally gets his trousers off and he crowds up against her, ready, ready, finally ready for her, but before – before he can have her, before he can get inside her (oh God, the thought – the thought is mind melting) some part of him, the part that has been her lifeline on every mission, the part that recognises she trusts him more than anyone in the world, the part that knows that trust is a gift, absolutely precious, that part of him sees her, her shoulders shaking with how hard she’s breathing, her skin trembling under his hands. And he just has to make sure. Make sure she’s okay.
‘Five, please. You have to remember to breathe for me, okay? You have to keep letting me hear you breathe. You need to keep going.’
It’s going to happen. He can feel himself at her, about to have her. This is it. There will be no broken, half-cut moment of frustration. His mind is finally, finally going to let him have her.
Which is of course why he wakes up hard enough to cut diamonds and so frustrated that he almost bites a hole in his pillow case.
Five, despite the absolute lack of oxygen she is currently experiencing in this moment, can hear the difference in Sam’s voice, this time. Perhaps because of the lack of oxygen, she feels like it’s significant. Like the desperation in his voice might mean something.
‘Five, please!’ Louise is almost there, Five can see her. If Five can keep pushing herself, if she can get her fingers to move so the depth charges will go off, she’ll be there too. Her brain, however, does not seem to be connected to her fingers, which tingle with numbness. There are shards of light at the edges of her vision, which does not seem to be an optimal occurrence. She doesn’t regret giving Louise the oxygen, though. Louise needed it just as much as her. She wouldn’t mind, if this was how it had to be. Falling asleep down here, watching blue break itself into a million shards of colour.
The problem with that plan was Sam.
It was Sam’s voice, because hearing that utter despair – that utter sadness, that utter panic – in his voice made falling asleep down here sharp and jagged. She couldn’t let him sound like that. She couldn’t let him ache like that. Not for her.
‘Five, please! You have to breathe. God, I know you must be so tired. I’m so sorry for that, and I’ll kick Janine’s arse if she tries to make you go running at all in the next seven days –’ She hears a muffled curse and an angry Mr Yao, you have no authority to say that, how dare you, and it pulls a lazy smile out of her mouth.
‘But right now, you have to breathe. You have to set off the depth charges. You need to get up there. Please. Five, please. You have to remember to breathe for me, okay? You have to keep letting me hear you breathe. You need to keep going’. He enunciates every word very clearly, like he’s reading off a script. The world slows, and something in those words resonates in Five’s bones. Something like she’s heard them before, and her body knows its next line. Knows what it needs to do. Her fingers fight the right button and though she can’t feel them at all she knows she’s pressed it because she’s suddenly shooting towards the surface, water rippling over her body like steel, like silk. Green, purple, silver, blue splintering across her face, white foam curdling like milk in her mouth, and then she’s there, the surface, gasping. Tearing the air from the sky like it is flesh and she is hungry. She can see Paula and Louise, almost at the huge shark nose of the boat’s bow, and after she’s given herself enough of the oxygen she needs she takes after them. There’s a faint roar in her ears that takes a moment to shake off, but when she does, she hears him.
‘Thank God, Five, oh my God. Jesus,’ He’s saying her name among them like it’s a prayer.
‘Lot of blasphemy, there, Sam,’ she manages to choke out into the headset as Paula gives her a hand up onto the deck. She can hear him laugh, faintly, though he still sounds as wrecked as she feels.
‘Five, I will – God, I was going to say I will kill you but I don’t think anything could be further from the truth. When you get back to Abel, I’m just going to –’ There’s a thrum of heat in her stomach, under her bellybutton where she thinks about what she would want him to do when she got back to Abel. She would want him to take her into his Comms shack, she would want him to take her, she would want him to put his mouth to her ear and tell her exactly how much he was afraid he’d never to get to do this. She can feel a phantom tingling on her shoulder, like she can almost feel his teeth. For a moment, it’s so real she can see it – glittering, right there, around her. And then she realises that. He’s Sam. Her Sam, but not just her Sam. Everyone’s Sam. He’s like this when any of his runners are in danger. ‘Well, I’m going to. Make you a cup of hot tea and give you a very big hug.’ It’s the lack of oxygen, but Sam sounds a bit breathless too. Unsure. Like he’s not quite telling the truth. Like that wasn’t what he was going to say.
He's with her, of course, the rest of the trip – with her in her ear as the screams echo out from below deck. He’s there as they manage to crack Maxine out of the cryogenic freezer. He’s there as they pound the wood, he’s there as they search frantically for the lifeboats, he’s there when Maxine is slurring and dizzy and they have to literally carry her, he’s there when the corpse they managed to take with them sits up and starts talking. Normally, though, when he’s there, he’s panting as hard as they are, his panic staticky and jangling across the headsets. He’s not this time, now, though. He's oddly, oddly calm the entire time they’re running and sneaking and trying not to make a sound. Like he knows what’s coming next. Like it’s a script he’s following. She gets a weird feeling that nothing about this is surprising to him – which is bloody annoying because it’s certainly surprising to her, and she can tell it’s certainly surprising to Louise and Paula too.
‘Five, you need to believe him,’ he’s saying. About the corpse-man-thing that’s telling them, quite primly, that Comansys are not behind the tones that took away half their people, that took away Maxine, for god’s sake – well they are, but only to protect them from a much superior villain who of course just happens to be their former boss, convenient, that. Sam’s acting like believing him, believing this man who is clearly an integral cog in the Comansys clock, is the most obvious and natural thing in the world to do.
‘I believe him’, Sam tells her, his voice measured in her ear, and fuck him for knowing exactly how much that would mean to her. How much she’d be willing to do anything, trust anyone, if Sam told her to. If Sam told her he did too. ‘And I know you do too. Somewhere. I know Five, more than anyone, you believe him.’
Paula looks mercenary, like she’s about to kill this man – he said his name was Albert, a voice in her head kindly reminds her – and Louise isn’t too far off blood-lust vengeance by the look on her face either. She realises that they can’t hear Sam. He’s switched off their mics. He’s speaking only to her. She can hear Janine faintly in the background, and why isn’t she stepping in to tell Sam off? Five feels the sun on her neck and it makes her feel dizzy and sick because she realises Sam is right. She does believe him. She does believe that he isn’t the person that they’re looking for, she believes that he and his people didn’t do this. He knew it before she did.
He makes up his mind not to avoid Five anymore. He has a few days to think about it, while she’s still on the Laetitia Greenwald with Albert and Maxine. He has a few nights of torturous imagination – not premonitory, these ones, he doesn’t think, because they barely speak in them, and when they do there aren’t any pearls of wisdom from Five’s mouth. It’s more a litany of please, fuck, Sam – which, hey. That’s fine with him. He really doesn’t mind.
Five in the backseat of a car, hot and warm underneath him. He can see a lake beyond the windows of the car, glinting under a night sky of stars and a sprinkled silver moon, so they must be at some kind of make-out point (he needs to stop watching so many bloody American teen movies, but they’re Five’s favourites and when she holds up a copy of She’s the Man and grins at him who is he to say no?), but he doesn’t stop to look at anything else much longer because he has a girl beneath him whose hands are working on the buttons of his trousers and her hand is warm against his dick and –
Five straddling him, her lovely, long legs either side of his hips, her hair long and wet, curling around her face, smiling down at him with a grin that makes him feel electric, electric, electric. She smells like salt and he can feel sand under his skin as she grinds herself on him, little movements of her waist, little pulses of her hips, her thighs brushing against his own. She stretches and shakes her hair, sending those damp curls like petals, like seashells, across her tan and freckled shoulders, and the sun catches her outline turning her gold and he thinks if he could die right now, staring up at her sharp collarbone and her face drenched with coppery freckles, staring at her bronzed by the sun – well he would be happy, and then he’s drawn from his revery when she reaches down and pins his hands up above his head and –
Five and him in a dark room, full of bodies and music and the too-sweet, nail polish smell of alcohol. Due to the fact that Sam rarely ever has stepped foot in a real club (he meant to, some time! It was just you know, university was eh and then the zom bie apocalypse happened and really, what could he have done?), the music that’s playing is not anything near what would actually be playing in a party now but is instead, of course, ‘Let’s Get It On’ (his brain is a walking cliché). She’s against him, her back to his front, and with every thrum in the music she’s moving against him, slow and warm as wax. Sam never knew why they called it grinding before but he understands now, because she is grinding she is pulling his heart out of his dick, she is setting every nerve in his body alight. He mouths at her neck, catches the glow of the dim light across her golden skin, feels his mind stop working for a moment as she throws her head back onto his shoulder. He slides his fingers town to scratch at her thigh, lightly, to play with the gusset of her underwear through her dress and she is desperate for it, for him and –
Five. Five. Five. Hundreds of fragments of Five and he knows if he doesn’t see her real face as soon as he can some part of him will fundamentally shatter. These dreams seem to be becoming a necessary, endless part of his life now. Call him selfish, but Sam Yao cannot spend the rest of his life avoiding Five. He can’t. He needs her too much.
He still isn’t quite prepared when he’s walking past the dormitories and she pulls him inside quick enough that he doesn’t realise she’s even there (not a good advertisement for his spatial awareness, which, funnily enough, is rather a necessary skill for the zombie apocalypse). He knew she was back from the Laetitia Greenwald, watched her enter the compound on his monitors, but Janine had commandeered Five and the rest before he had the chance to talk to her, to stare at those eyes, that mouth, those cheeks. Her legs. Try to see if his dreams mimicked the way that she breathed close enough. He’d seen Maxine, which was truly, truly wonderful, but she had said Five was still reporting back to Janine and then had to take a decontamination shower. He hadn’t missed the way her eyes had glittered when he tried to oh so casually ask where she was, and he had also not missed the entirely too gleeful way Paula had declared, ‘Maxie, you must come to our lab. We have such fascinating new research to show you on dreams and how they interact with the tones’. Though Abel had felt fundamentally bereft without her, Maxine not knowing (and torturing) him with the information that his wet dreams were predicting the future was an immediately missed state of affairs.
Five had pulled him into her room, and the knowledge that this was her room, even though it was the dormitories, and they looked the same as all other dormitories, and even though the walls had nothing of her personality up on them, even though he knew Jody and all the other women slept here too, the sheer fact she had taken him into her room, where she slept, where she undressed – the sheer fact he could tell which bed was hers – sent a dizzy pulse of want straight to his groin. Her hair is wet and curls around her shoulders, and the way it leaves a faint spiral of water on the freckled curve of the bone makes him ache. Ache. He’s getting hard over a shoulder, for Christ’s sake.
‘Sit down, Sam’, she folds herself, criss-cross legs, onto the bed. She pats the space in front of her. Her pyjama shorts have ridden up slightly, and he can see a pale blue splash of colour. Her knickers. What is happening.
He cautiously slots himself onto her bed (her bed). He doesn’t say anything because it seems that Sam Yao no longer possesses vocal chords.
‘How did you know?’ She asks him, rocking up a bit, closer to him. She smells like nectarines. He can’t help himself not to look at her, not to drag his eyes across her rib cage, down over that neck those arms the pool of those hips on her sheets and fuck. Fuck. This is better than any of the dreams. She’s not touching him, he’s not got his mouth on her, she’s not saying yes fuck please, she’s sitting in pyjamas with her hair wet from a bloody decontamination shower and yet. This is better. She seems to notice then, his eyes, his eyes on her. A flush spreads across her cheeks, down her neck, over her nose and Sam wants to follow it with his mouth. ‘How did you know,’ her voice is quieter now. Weak, ragged. ‘How did you know that I believed Albert? How did you know I needed you to tell me to breathe? You knew Sam. Like you’d seen it all before. How did you know?’
And how the fuck does he answer that. How does he say, I know because I’ve been having dreams that predict the future and also in these dreams you are naked and you want me, you want me more than anything, and hey, do you want to make that part come true, too?
How does he say that?
Then he thinks, fuck it. What if he doesn’t say anything? What if he just, what if he crosses the distance of the square of bedspread and slots his mouth to hers, what if he presses his mouth to her warm, cherry-stain lips?
It feels inevitable, and it feels like she knows it too, and he’s going to do it, he is –
And then Janine’s voice blares from the speakers in the yard that there’s a small horde of zombies heading straight at Abel and she needs all hands on deck right now immediately and fuck. Sam could cry. It’s like his dreams. Never enough. Cut away before the big moment.
Five looks like she’s going to say something, but Jody barrels in, flinging shoes out from under the bed to find her trainers, chattering away and that’s it. That’s it.
The night he barely sees anything. Just Five, her face, her smiling, open mouth. She’s lit up from behind, colours everywhere, gold and pale pink and deep blue and wine red. She’s laughing, that high and clear laugh. Church bells.
Five doesn’t know quite why Maxine is so urgent about this, but it does send a bolt of annoyance up her spine. Perhaps it’s the irritability that has sunk deep into her marrow after she thought that Sam was going to kiss her, was going to take her in her bed, and again the illusion had to bloody shatter into a million pieces, because Sam would never want her that way and Abel came first, the way Abel always came first, and she had to tie herself back into her running shoes and force her aching muscles and the strange hollow in her belly and take her anger out on a few particularly unfortunate zombie heads. She had to listen to him the entire time, directing her and all the others, cool and calm and collected, with every clear direction telling her that whatever she had felt, it was only her who had felt it.
So perhaps, yes, she wasn’t feeling the most charitable towards Abel, in this moment. Less so when she’d spent a little bit of time today on herself, on making herself feel at least somewhat pretty, swiping some lip-gloss from Jody and carefully stepping into one of her savoured, special dresses. This one was white, down to her mid-thigh, and she felt good in it. Delicate. Feminine. Not caked in blood. Today wasn’t meant to be a running day. It was a celebration day. Daisy and Tom from the kitchen were getting married. This was meant to be a day off.
It was never a day off for Five.
‘Daisy and Tom cannot get married without candles, Five! And we have no rings, or no vows, we have no flowers – nothing! The wedding isn’t till this evening and no-one else is as good as you, Five. Also literally everyone else is busy with wedding errands. Please, Five. There’s an old CoE church a ten minute run from here. We know the area is cleaned out of zoms, totally safe. You can even keep your dress on!’ And Five wasn’t so bitter that she didn’t want to help out two people hopelessly in love. It was ten minutes. So what?
‘Amazing! Five, you are a life saver. Sam doesn’t have any jobs either, and he knows the church. You guys can run there together!’
Five sometimes felt that everyone in this township was out to get her. She’d proved herself to them, right? She’d given them everything. Why, why did they do this to her?
The run is excruciating. Neither of them talk, but she’s acutely aware of him breathing next to her. She’s acutely aware of him looking at her. She realises then. He knows. She gave herself away, yesterday. She knows she wants him. He’s going to let her down easy. In this church. Politely, nicely. Give her time to lick her wounds before the celebration tonight. Do it in private, so no-one from Abel can stride in and catch her embarrassment and spread the story everywhere around the township. There’s so much thought, he’s so nice about it – it makes her feel sick and humiliated and so resentful it stings. Everything is an insult – the sun over the thick green hedges is an insult, the sugary smell of the sweetpeas in the Church garden is an insult, Sam holding the door open to the church for her like a fucking gentleman is an insult.
He busies himself making sure the door is properly secured behind them to ensure they have time to investigate without danger– can never be too careful – and she takes her time walking up the aisle. She drinks in the pews, which still smell like wood polish and beeswax, and the cold stone. The altar glints gold, still covered in cream and red. The candlesticks stand over it all, watching it. Above the altar, and on either side, are huge stained glass windows. She stands beneath them, and the twinge in her eyes from earlier seems to hurt less, looking at them. There’s so much light. So many colours in it. She feels drunk.
She can hear him walking the aisle behind her, and she hears herself say it before she can even consider what she’s doing.
‘You don’t have to give me the talk, Sam. I know you know, now, that I like you – fuck, that I’ve loved you from the moment I heard your voice, the moment you guided me home in the dark – I know you know that I don’t just like you as a friend. I know you know and that’s fine but you don’t need to let me down gently, you don’t need to be kind, I know you don’t feel the same way –’ She feels a hand on her wrist and suddenly she is facing him and his eyes are the colour of coal chips, all-black and there’s a rawness to his face, a hunger to his face that she’s never seen before and then –
Then he’s kissing her.
Fuck, it’s so much better, he can’t get over how much better it is. It’s not like it was in his dreams, she’s not like she was in his dreams – she’s here and she’s real and she’s moving her mouth softly against his, little, wanting movements, her lips so soft that he can feel the press of her teeth behind them. He could never have imagined it, he could never have imagined how she tastes like the fat, over-juiced strawberries he had watched her eat at breakfast (hiding his inconvenient erection under the table), could never have imagined how she opens her mouth so easily for him, could never have imagined the touch of her fingertips on his shoulders, harder than he would’ve thought, holding him so that he can almost feel the scrape of a nail through the fabric of his shirt. Holding him like she wouldn’t let him move away from her – as if he would ever want to.
She kisses him like she was made for it, like she was born to be there, her wrist still in his hand, her fingers pressed so tight to his shoulder bones through his t-shirt like she was drowning and he was the last hunk of detritus from the shipwreck keeping her above water.
He can feel her saying his name into his mouth, he can feel the drag of the letters against his mouth as her lips part, S – a – m, can feel her lips open in their rhythm, and fuck, fuck, he’s going to die from this. He can’t even confine himself to romance, he can’t just think that this kiss is enough, he can’t stop himself from thinking of her, can’t stop himself from running a hand up that lithe, curving waist, over her ribcage, sliding his hand up all of her until he’s cupping her jaw with his palm, letting his thumb stroke against her neck, feel the way her pulse thrums out a beat of I need you too.
He’s been wanting this for so long, he’s literally been dreaming of this for fucking months now – and then she’s making a soft gasp, she’s touching her tongue lightly to his lip, asking him – asking him! – if he’ll let her in and he does. He does. Her mouth is so warm, and she pulls the kiss from him, her hand coming up to cup his cheek, trace a line across the bone there. He let his hand drop to her hip, run his fingers over the jut of it, feel the heat of her skin radiating under the fabric of her dress. He can’t breathe, and then she drags, softly, her teeth over the swell of his bottom lip and honestly, he doesn’t care that he’s in a church and that his grandmother would kill him all he cares about is that the altar is big enough to fuck her on and so he pushes back, crowding her up against the stone and the silk. God, she groans, a hurt, hard, I want you animal noise, and she drags her fingers through his hair and pulls, pulls him closer to her, like he could get closer to her. He wants to be closer to her. He wants her to eat him alive.
With a strength and a poise that seems to be emanating purely from the amount of I-want-to-be-in-you adrenaline that is coursing through his body right now, he slides his hands under the creamy froth of her dress to grab at her ass, fuck, her ass, soft and his to hold now and lifts her up onto the altar, barely drawing away from her mouth enough to get a hand between her thighs and pull them apart so he can fit himself between them. Her eyes are fevered, glassed over, and when he presses himself against her, against her knickers, between her tan, spread legs, her head tilts back and that blush blooms like jam under her freckles, her mouth wet and open and her lips swollen from him, bruised from him.
Just seeing her – real, just hearing the warm sounds she makes, so vital, so hungry – sends a pulse of raw want to his cock. She surges up to press her mouth back to his, and then her hands are pulling up his shirt to press her hot hands to his stomach, to trace lightly up and down the tuft of hair that trails down under his trousers. Her tongue is warm, languid, in his mouth, taking from him, drawing him closer to her. Sam wants every centimetre of space between them gone, right now, and though he wants to kiss her forever he has already waited too long. Too long. He pushes the dress up over her hips, up over her underwear, and though he’s loath to do it, he pulls away from her mouth because he needs to see her body for the first time, revealed to him, like this. Her thighs are so lovely, so tan and soft-hard at once, and when she sees him looking she ducks her head, as if she’s embarrassed, and, no, that can’t happen, because her legs – because she is so beautiful he can’t stand it.
He doesn’t know where the compulsion comes from, but he finds himself sinking to his knees before her on the altar, like she is a God, because, in this moment, letting him have her, take of her body, take his in return – she is his God. Her mouth is open with want, watching him, he realises, her eyes a kaleidoscope of green – calico, like the first time, but also rich with deep pine, silvery grey, rivulets of paint stripper blue, seam hunks of topaz. He realises, then, that all of the dreams together – that’s her. Little slices of her, elements of her – her hands pressing his stomach from the first dream, the sly dominance of the kiss from the second, the spread legs and warm blush from the fourth, the desperate need, the deep love, of the fourth. Fragments – nowhere near the beauty of the real thing. She’s looking at him, kneeling at her feet, he realises. Looking for him.
Always looking for him.
He starts with her shoes, slipping them off slowly (never untie them, just in case). He mouths at her ankle, dragging his teeth over the bone there, pressing an open-mouth kiss to her skin. He follows the lovely line of her leg up with his fingers, running his thumb up the line of muscle in her calf, bites at her knees – she laughs at that, a squirmy, out-of-breath laugh – and then he moves his head to the outside of her legs to press his mouth to the juncture of her outer thigh and her hip, where she has lovely tide-lines in her skin, pale sketches of froth. She tries to wriggle away from him then, but his hands span her waist and hips, keeping her seated on the altar’s edge. He moves his head back between her legs, presses a chaste to her inner thigh.
Her underwear – her there – is right in front of him, now, and Sam feels like someone’s filled his head with honey, his thoughts sticky and slow. They’re purple, pale purple, and he can tell she’s wet just by looking at them. He doesn’t know why, but purple seems significant. He presses the pad of his thumb to her, to her clit, through the fabric, and she almost yelps with it, bringing her hand to her mouth to bite down on.
When he looks up at her, then, between her legs, on his knees at the front of church like he’s about to receive communion, the stained glass window behind her turns every part of her face gold, her hair curling and picked out in copper, the pools of colour sending spots of green and rich red and aching blue all over her body, all over her dress. A particularly perfect spot of flowers on the glass gives her a halo of roses atop her curls, and Sam feels sick with the need to taste her.
He takes her like she’s sweet, like she’s spiced and rich wine and Five doesn’t ever think she’s been drunk in the way he drinks her, the way he runs his tongue along her, the way he circles her clit. He watched her, the entire time, and every time she could bear to look down at the awe between her legs his eyes were on her, every part of her, and it was like he knew her body from another life – knew to run his tongue in little, soft circles on her clit, pressing in with pressure when he felt her hips start to shake, knew to take one finger and slowly sink it into her. Pull back when he felt her back go taut, go harder when she threw her hand over her eyes.
Every move he made was intricate, perfect, his eyes staring at her body hard enough to commit to memory. He knew she was about to come before she did, dropping his gaze, using those hands to pull her legs as far as they could go, till she could feel them burn, using his tongue to lick long, slow waves over all of her, finishing her off with fast, quick fluttering flickers until like the crescendo of a hymn her back curved like a bowstring and white-gold pulsed behind her eyes.
It didn’t bloom through her – it took through her, it scythed through her, brutal. Every breath hurt, like he’d taken a knife to her windpipe and let the want pulse out through the wound. Something about coming at that moment felt old, older than the church, a rhythm that carved its way through her like it was his birthright, her birthright.
He didn’t even give her a moment to think, using his grip on the underside of her thighs to push her backwards until her spine was fully pressed to the altar. He rose quickly, and there was a deep swell in his eyes, the same as that night in the farm. They were dark, too dark, shot through with speckles of brown like stars.
He tugged off his shirt in a smooth motion, kicked off his trousers. She felt like a sacrifice, under that gaze. He ran his hands along her dress, the skirt rucked up above her bellybutton.
‘Five, take this off for me,’ His voice was soft, and there was her Sam. His hands were warm as they pressed into her belly, his thumbs brushing careful pets into the skin. ‘Please, let me see you’.
She dragged it up and over her head, and she hadn’t ever felt so exposed. Communal nudity was an unfortunate fact of life in the zombie apocalypse, but this – was different.
‘I feel a bit weird being naked in a church,’ she started, and Sam’s smile was warm and beatific, the snaggle of his teeth catching the light.
‘In for a penny,’ he laughed, and moved over to press his mouth to her neck.
Fuck, she’s like a painting. Spread out for him there, her breasts soft and her nipples so pink and responsive to his thumbs as they brush over them, so plush and rosy as he rolls them between his fingers. He can’t help but run his other hand down to her wetness, to feel what he did to her as he presses a finger inside of her, can’t help that he just wants to hear her ache like that again, hear the soft oh God as he does so and Jesus H. Christ Sam thinks every moment he wasn’t doing this to her, wasn’t feeling her writhe beneath him, wasn’t seeing her naked and cast in gold, was sacrilegious and as such anyone who prevented him from doing so (mostly his own self) was destined to eternal damnation.
He wants to look at her forever, wants to stay here and watch her come again and again on his mouth and his fingers.
But also –
‘Sam, are you going to look at me, or are you going to fuck me?’ and it’s like that, is it, and he can’t help the grin that cracks across his face even when he has to grip his cock to avoid coming right there, right at the raise of her eyebrow cheekily at him, at the spray of freckles across her nose.
He isn’t going to last, he knows that, as he sinks into her. She’s so hot inside, so smooth it’s almost silky, and she’s so wet and fuck, Sam isn’t going to last. He isn’t going to last and she’s –
‘Fuck, fuck, Sam,’ her voice is a prayer, her mouth pliant and her eyes drowsy as they rake over his body, rake over his shoulders and hips. He can feel her hands pressed so warm against his back, the brush of her thumb over his spine. He holds his hips there, body pressed fully flush to hers, just feels where she’s so tight and so perfect. If he thought she was made for kissing – he was wrong. This was what she was made for. ‘Fuck, you’re so fucking – God. Sam, you feel incredible.’
The fact that she can still talk when it feels like every word has disappeared from Sam’s head is incredibly displeasing so he grinds against her, makes her feel the pulse of him inside her, and she fucking yowls like a wild cat. Sam feels a part of his brain fully melt inside his skull.
‘Next time,’ she’s whispering, up at him, her mouth so wet and her eyes wet too and her hair spread out like water underneath her, and next time next time next time bounces around his skull. ‘Next time, I’m going to suck you off. I would be so good at that, for you, Sam. Fuck, I could take you so far. Want you to come in my mouth.’ He can see her, the pink stretch of her mouth like rose petals around his cock, can see the pearls of him on her lips, can see her begging him for more.
He'd been holding back, slow, not to hurt her, or to have this end far too quickly but with that image he can’t help the way his hips stutter and thrust into her harder than of his own accord.
‘Fuck – Five, don’t say stuff like that that if you don’t – fuck,’ but she’s staring up at him, and there’s something so hungry on her face that Sam’s own stomach clenches with want.
‘Please, Sam,’ and her voice is wrecked now, when did that happen? ‘Sam, fuck me like that. I want it. I want you, I can take it.’
He can’t stop himself, can’t stop the way he thrusts then, the way he slams into her, sparks of pleasure writhing their way up his back. She likes this, he realises, she likes hard, and so he takes her hands above her head, pins them to the stone of the altar, fuck, laid out for him. He uses the leverage they provide to drive every thrust home, not fast but hard, every stroke electric.
‘You like this,’ he says, desperate, a litany of promises and odes and filth that Sam Yao has never even allowed himself to think let alone say aloud.
‘You like it when I fuck you – like this,’ he punctuates the word with a particularly slow thrust that he grinds into at the end, just to see her spine arch like that, feel her wrists tremble underneath his hand. She’s incoherent, and she feels so good that Sam thinks this is absolutely not going to last, the tightness of her body, the way it hugs him, the way her wetness smooths along him.
In for a penny.
‘Fuck, you like this, Five, you like being laid out and fucked like this, fuck, golden – in this light,’ he is desperate as the shiver-shock of climax begins to fizz at his tailbone. ‘You like me taking you. You like taking me. So pretty,’ another thrust, and the feeling starts to starburst up his spine and Sam needs to make her come otherwise he is going to die, ‘Fuck, like this, you’re mine, you’re mine,’
‘I’m yours,’ she whines, eyes half-closed. The blush has spread to her chest, peonies under freckles. ‘You’re mine?’ and though she’s gasping, so close, he can still hear the question.
‘I’m yours,’ he tells her, ‘going to have you at the front of this church, fuck, going to take you like you’re my wife,’ and then she’s tightening around him, a delicious, devastating warmth, and her head falls back onto the altar and her eyes open to the sky, and the gold from the window turns the green in them almost silver and then the knowledge that him calling her his wife is what’s doing this to her sends him there. He can’t think, his hips a separate entity as blistering, bruising pleasure wraps itself around his neck and almost chokes him with its tendrils, bursts through his eyes like sunlight – and this. This is a religious experience.
She kisses him softly when he collapses ungainly on her, murmurs I’m yours I’m yours I’m yours and though he knows it isn’t, Sam feels like he’s dreaming.
As he slides the strap of her dress up her shoulder, kissing the warm tan of her curved shoulder as he does so, she squirms –
‘Sam, I’m ticklish,’ and laughs, high and pretty – church bells.
With her pressed against his side that night, her hair fussing his nose, her breathing slow and even – Sam doesn’t mind falling asleep.
He dreams of nothing. He doesn’t need to.