It starts with drunken laughter. Lilly roars with belly-deep guffaws—she hasn’t laughed this hard since the outbreak of the plague—and she doubles over with chortling, honking laughter until her sides ache and her eyes begin to glaze over with tears. Austin can’t help joining in, and he laughs and laughs, until he realizes Lilly has grabbed him by the front of his hoodie, and she says something about not giving a flying fuck about condoms, and before they even know what’s happening, she has yanked his face toward hers, and their lips have locked onto each other.
The liquor-fueled passion erupts. They wrap themselves around each other, and they start making out so vigorously they knock over the bottle and the lamp next to the couch and the stack of books that Lilly was meaning to read at some point. Austin slips off the edge of the sofa and slams onto the floor, and Lilly tackles him, sticking her tongue into his mouth. She tastes the sweet liquor on his breath and spicy musk of his scent and she burrows between his legs.
They bathe in the heat flowing off each other—the latent desire repressed for so many months—and they go at it for many minutes there on the floor. She feels Austin caressing the curve of her breasts under her top and the softness of her hips and the sweet spot between her legs, and she moistens and begins breathing hard and fast, flushed with excitement. At last she realizes that he’s cringing from the pain in his side again, and she sees the bandage where his hoodie has been wrenched up toward his chest, and she pulls back. The sight of it breaks her heart—she feels responsible for it—and now she wants so badly to make it all better.
“C’mere,” she says, taking his hand and lifting him back onto the couch. “Watch me,” she whispers to him as he flops down on the sofa, out of breath. “Just watch.”
She takes off her clothes, one piece at a time, not taking her eyes off him. He already has his hands on his belt, unbuckling it. She slips out of her top, gazing at him with twinkling eyes. She takes her time. She folds each article of clothing as it comes off—her jeans, her bra, her panties—transfixing him, holding him rapt, until she is standing completely nude in the slice of moonlight in front of him, her hair in her face now, her head spinning, tipsy from booze and desire. Goose bumps rash down her arms.
She goes to him without another word. Not taking her eyes off him, she sits on him. He lets out a breathy, lusty sigh as she guides him into her. The feeling is extraordinary. She sees artifacts of light and sparks in her vision as she rhythmically rocks up and down. He arches his back and thrusts up into her. He is no longer injured. He is no longer just a young dude trying to be cool.
Austin comes first, his orgasm shaking both of them. She shudders then, the tingling sensation starting at the tips of her toes, and then coursing up through her until it converges on her solar plexus and explodes. The orgasm rocks her, and nearly knocks her off him, but she holds on to his long, lustrous, curly hair, landing in a heap of sweaty satisfaction in his arms. They collapse onto each other, holding each other, letting the calm return like a tide rolling back in.
*
For the longest time, they lie there in each other’s arms, listening to a silence broken only by the soft syncopated symphony of their breathing. Lilly pulls a blanket over herself and comes down hard to reality. A stabbing pain starts at her temples and travels down the bridge of her nose. What has she done? As the buzz fades, a vague sense of regret knots itself in her gut, and she gazes out the window. Finally, she starts to say, “Austin, listen—”
“No.” He strokes her shoulder, and then begins to pull on his pants. “You don’t have to say it.”
“Say what?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know … something about this being just one of those things … and we shouldn’t make too much of it … and it’s just the alcohol or whatever.”
She smiles sadly. “I wasn’t going to say that.”
He looks at her and grins. “I just want to do the right thing by you, Lilly … I don’t want to pressure you or anything.”
She kisses him on the forehead.
And then they start cleaning up their mess—picking up the spilled contents of the side table, propping lamps back in place, stacking books, and putting clothes back on. Neither of them has much more to say, although both are dying to talk about it.
*
Sometime later, near dawn, Austin says, “You know … something’s been bothering me about that feeding room down there in those garages underneath the track.”
She looks at him, flopping back down on the couch, exhausted. “What’s that?”
He swallows air. “I don’t mean to be gross but it’s bothering me.”
“What.”
He looks at her. “Okay … so … the Governor supposedly fed the dead pilot and the girl from the helicopter to those walkers. Right?”
Lilly nods, not wanting to think about it. “Yeah. I guess so. Alas.”
He chews his lip. “Again, I don’t mean to be disgusting but I just can’t shake this feeling there was something missing.”
“And that would be?”
He looks at her. “The heads. There were no heads. Where were the fucking heads?”
TEN
Bruce Allan Cooper stands outside the garage door in the subbasement beneath the arena, a single tungsten bulb in a cage above him providing the only illumination flickering in the narrow corridor. He puts the sounds coming from behind the door out of his mind—how the hell does a man go at this for so long? The angry shrieks from the black girl have now deteriorated into garbled, choked, sobbing sounds.
Bruce has his big arms—as thick as stovepipes—crossed against his broad chest, and his mind keeps wandering to those pre-plague days when he ran the gas station with his dad. He would lose track of time back then as well—buried in a 427 Camaro with overhead shafts and hemispherical combustion chambers. Now he’s lost track of time again. He thinks about his old girlfriend, Shauna, and how long they used to go at it—a memory that makes him happy in a vaguely melancholy way. But this. This is different.