Authors: Christine Dougherty
Promise pulled the scrunchie from her hair now, and considered it as Peter and Chance laughed from the water’s edge. The seagulls had found them and were swirling in looping figure-eights above their heads, crying indignantly. They seemed to have thought the beach was theirs alone.
Promise pulled her hair into a tail; it shone like oil where it lay over her shoulder. She jumped at a soft nudge on her shoulder and turned, laughing. “Ash! You scared me!” She stood and draped herself against the big horse’s side. His black mane was hot against her cheek. Her fingers traced the scar on his chest. He’d had that injury when she found him, and as always, she wondered what calamity had caused it.
She would never know.
She hugged him, and he breathed low in his chest, almost purring. Then Snow’s head appeared over his back as if to check on what Promise was doing to him. Promise laughed and scratched Snow under her forelock. “Don’t worry, I know he’s your boyfriend,” she said. Then she turned to watch her own boyfriend coming to her across the sand.
Boyfriend. The word still seemed so…awkward. Unrealistic, almost, in some way, in its innocent connotations. It made her picture dates to the movies and miniature golfing. Not riding in tandem through the woods with reinforced nets to capture vampires…which is what they spent a lot of their time doing now.
“I know that look,” he said as he got close enough to grab a towel from the blanket. “But this right here…” he threw his arm out to indicate the beach, the hotel, all of it. “…this is kind of like a date, right?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. I didn’t go on many dates. Or…any dates.” She shrugged again and smiled. “You’re my first.”
“And your last,” he said, drawing her close. She liked the cold over warm of him, the water trickling over his warm skin. They kissed.
“Uh, hello? Gross!” Chance said and sat down with a sigh. “Geez.” He put his chin in his hands.
Promise smiled up at Peter. “Some date,” she said.
“Well…” he said and laughed. “We have to get going, anyway. All of Wereburg awaits you!” He bowed and swept out an arm. “And especially mad-dog Evans.” He grinned as she slapped his shoulder.
“Enough!” she said and smiled again.
“Geez, guys,” Chance said. “Cut it out, okay?” Then he jumped back up, seeming to forget his chagrin. “Can I ride Snow back myself?”
At his words, Promise felt a wave of light-headedness, and she reached out to Chance’s shoulder to steady herself. His hand came up to her arm, and she was surprised by the strength in it. “You okay, Promise?” he asked, and all pretense of childishness had dropped from his voice. He was on the verge of becoming a young man.
Nothing is constant
, Promise thought.
Except change
.
“I’m okay…just the heat got me for a minute.” She smiled, and he nodded and turned toward the saddles.
“Okay, so…can I ride Snow or what?” Chance asked, throwing the saddle blanket over the horse’s wide, white back. Then he busied himself with the buckles and straps.
Peter took her face in his hands, his eyes dark with concern. He raised his eyebrows without speaking. He didn’t need to…she could read the question in his eyes. She put a hand to the mild curve–barely noticeable, yet–of her lower stomach and smiled reassurance to him.
The baby is okay, her smile said.
When they rode away, Chance was on Snow, and Promise sat Ash with Peter behind, his arms folded protectively over her belly. She glanced once at the deserted beach, and for an instant, it was full of people, and in their midst, a family–husband and wife, daughter and son–sat contentedly under a summer sun that would never set.
~THE END~
***
I hope you enjoyed reading this trilogy as much as I enjoyed writing it. If you did, please consider leaving a review on Amazon; it would be much appreciated.
Best Regards, Christine Dougherty
***
At the end of the world, the undead aren’t the biggest threat to those who have survived…read on for the beginning excerpt from:
The Boat
Available Now!
Excerpt from
The Boat
Chapter 1
August 6, 2011
Randy leaned back and closed his eyes, letting the tip of the fishing pole dip almost to the water. The yellow bobbin bobbed obediently, riding the gentle waves. The sun was warm and the steady lapping of water against the little rowboat was relaxing. He didn’t get much time to relax anymore and wanted to make the most of this small window.
It was very quiet; a steady breeze made the trees on the banks seem to whisper a sweet song of rest. The sunlight off the water dappled strange but soothing shapes across his eyelids. He felt himself sinking into a comfortable abyss. The pole slipped from his loosening hands.
“Randy,
Jesus
, will you
please
pay attention to what you’re doing? You’ve
got
something on the
line
!”
Bonnie. He’d almost forgotten all about her. He glanced back at his wife of forty-some years, taking in the lines of varicose veins, the pudgy way her thighs pushed at the edges of her Bermudas. Her stomach was pooching out under the life vest she wore. Life vest. Jesus jumped up. In the
bay
?
“Bonnie, you don’t need a damn vest in the bay. What do you think is going to happen? Whale gonna sink us?”
You’re the only whale around here
, he thought and then felt bad about it. He was for sure no skinny Minnie, himself. And the reality was they’d both lost quite a bit of weight in the last two months. Not much choice in it.
He felt a tug on the line and started cranking the reel. He cranked slowly, more preoccupied with Bonnie than he was with the line because chances were better he’d snagged a bunch of debris rather than anything edible.
He turned, straining, to see her better. She was sitting bolt upright in the seat behind his, her hands clutching the sides of the little boat. Her teeth were clenched and thinly veiled panic danced in her tired eyes. The life vest pushed up against the underside of her jaw, doubling her chin, giving her a childlike, vulnerable look. Randy felt the familiar give and take of his feelings: irritation at her constant nagging overtaken by the desire to protect her from anyone or anything. Even if that meant protection from his own unkind thoughts.
“Honey,” he said, still absently cranking the reel. “Just relax. Isn’t it nice out here? Isn’t it pretty in the bay?”
Her gaze slid left and right and then back to him. She shook her head and tears slid into the deep pouches under her eyes. Her chin trembled. She had never gone fishing with him before all this happened. She preferred lunch with the ladies and then a refreshing trip to the mall for more scarves…he would swear she had more than a hundred. So, he’d always fished by himself. Back then, though, it had been mostly freshwater fishing and he’d done it from the safety of a collapsible chair on the bank.
Everything had changed now, though.
Boy, had it ever.
Randy shook his head, thinking. The line was getting heavier by the second. He hoped it wasn’t a tree, all waterlogged with tangly branches.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him, her voice edged with panic. “Why are you shaking your head?”
“Bonnie, please. Nothing is wrong. Would you just try and relax? Haven’t I told you a million times that attitude is everything? If you would just try–”
He’d turned to face her again as he reeled, straining against the weight on the line–something heavy coming up. Her eyes went past him and her mouth dropped open in horror. Randy squinted at her and started to ask what was wrong but before he could say anything, she whooped out a scream loud enough to send birds flying in a panic from the trees along the shoreline.
He turned forward to where her gaze was directed. The line had cleared the water. He’d hooked a man right through the eye socket.
The man’s skin was almost entirely eaten away–by fish or by time or by a combination of the two…it was hard to tell. The one eye he had left was a bleached out blue and the retina was floating sleepily off to the side. It looked like he was trying to see back into the water he’d just been hooked from. His tongue was a spongy mass filling the cavity of his mouth, surrounded by white, split lips.
The man on the line groaned. He pulled a waterlogged arm from the water and flailed at the side of the boat. Randy thought it sounded like someone hitting the boat with a baked ham. He felt a little ill and then became aware of Bonnie’s scream going on and on behind him. Then he saw why. A small water snake had curled itself into the hole where the man’s other eye should have been.
Bonnie hated snakes.
“It’s
okay
, honey, it’s all
right
. That snake doesn’t want you,” he said and turned to try and catch her eye. “He’s content where he’s at.”
The man on the line moaned and the sound had a choking, burbling quality. A thick rope of mucous and water was draining steadily from a hole in his cheek. His arm flailed again but this time, his hand banged over the side of the boat. Three of his fingers disengaged from the pulpy hand and splatted onto the floor where they rolled to and fro.
“Gross,” Randy said, looking at the fingers at his feet. As he watched, one of the fingers began to scrabble in a half-circle, trying to gain traction, then it lay still.
Bonnie screamed on and on.
“I don’t care I don’t care Randy just for God’s sake get that thing off the line so I don’t have to see that snake anymore oooooh I hate snakes!”
She had squeezed her eyes closed and her mouth had squinched up and she was shaking her head like a little girl who has tasted something awful.
“Okay, okay, hold on, Bonnie, just hang on, honey bunny.” Randy dug a knife from his pocket and flipped open the blade. He took one more look at the sinker he’d hooked and regretted the lure he was about to lose. But there was no helping it. He couldn’t put his hand that close to the thing’s mouth. It would bite him for sure and then he’d most likely get the sickness, too. And God knows Bonnie would never be able to get the little boat back to the big boat, so then what? Then Bonnie would end up as a sinker, too.
Nope; definitely not worth the lure.
He cut the line.
The sinker did what all the sinkers do: it sank.
Roger sat back and sighed. They still had a few good hours left in the day, but the fun had gone out of it. If only they hadn’t come across that snake.
But they had, so.
“It’s okay, Bonnie, no snake. All gone, see?”
She cracked an eye open and looked. Then she opened her other eye. She smiled shakily at Randy. “Oh, thank you, honey bunny,” she said. “Ooh, I really do hate snakes. I just…they scare me half to death. I’m so sorry, Randy.”
She smiled and under the weight of years he saw the pretty young girl he’d married. He smiled back and then gave her soft knee a squeeze. “No problem, honey, I didn’t feel like fishing anymore, anyway. Those idiots on
Flyboy
don’t know what they’re talking about half the time; I don’t know what they were thinking sending us out here. It’s a terrible spot to fish.”
Because now the fish had plenty to snack on…it was hard to get them to bite at lures anymore, especially in the bay.
Randy socketed the oars into the oarlocks and began the long pulls that would take them back to
Barbra’s Bay Breeze
. Bonnie tickled his ears and neck each time the rowing motion put him back in her reach. She’d got to giggling. Randy laughed and swatted at her darting, tickling fingers. Then he settled more seriously into the job of rowing. Maybe he could think of a good way to round out the afternoon, after all.
He became contemplative, watching the shoreline as they went past. “Hey, Bonnie, do you think that sinker looked like Al?”
“Al who, honey?” she asked. She was happier now they were headed back. The snake had scared the daylights out of her, but she also didn’t like being in the bay in the small boat. The water was too shallow in places. Too full of…
“Al Anders, that sales guy from Mag Industrial? The big, bald guy? Back in…oh, I guess it would have been ninety seven? Or eight? When we lived down near Baltimore, remember?”
“You mean
Pete
Anders. Pete was the bald man who worked with you at Mag.” There’s amusement in her voice. She’s still holding onto the sides of the boat, but not as tight.
“Oh, that’s right! I always did get him mixed up, didn’t I, Bonnie?”
“Yes, you always did, honey bunny,” she said and laughed.
That guy had been a pretty decent sort, if a bit pushy, Randy thought and smiled a bit sadly. He wondered if old Pete had made it through…not many had. He scanned the shoreline dreamily, caught up in reminiscence.
The shoreline was thick with shuffling corpses that by all rights should have lain still. Their combined voices waxed and waned with the breeze. Every few seconds, they surged forward and the ones in the front fell in and became sinkers.
People on the boats called them chum sometimes, too.
Yep, that one he’d brought up had looked like bald Pete. Could have been him, too, for all Randy knows.
Funny world.
Chapter 2
Maggie stood on the deck of
Barbra’s Bay Breeze
and watched Randy and Bonnie as they rowed in. She stood by, ready to grab their rope and get the little rowboat tied up. She knew she was supposed to call this part of the boat the prow or the port or something equally nonsensical (to her), but she just didn’t feel like it. She was too tired today. Watching Randy and Bonnie was also making her sad, making her miss Joe. How did those two wind up alive as a couple when so many others had not? She and Joe were young; they
deserved
to have survived together–they were only in their thirties where Randy and Bonnie had to be in their sixties.