Alive (The Crave) (9 page)

“Will you be my partner?” The deep articulation had her squeezing her eyes shut. A streak of happiness traced through her.
He wants to be my partner!
At the same time a feeling of dread overwhelmed her.
I can’t let him see me like this.

“Hey Gage, you wanna be my partner?” Allison, the girl who had tripped Eve in the lunchroom, giggled from two seats in front of Eve. She was wearing make-up, Eve could tell, and she didn’t have a big bruise on her face like Eve did.

“No, me and Eve are gonna be partners. Maybe next time.” Eve sucked in a breath at the revelation.
He really wants to be my partner?

“Oh? Uhh, okay.” Allison didn’t sound happy.

Eve still hadn’t said anything by the time Gage scooted his desk next to hers and handed her the worksheet he’d picked up from the teacher at the front of the class.

“You okay, Eve?”

“Fine.” She pulled out a pencil and looked down at the paper.

They managed to get through two problems before he asked her again, “Something is wrong. I can tell.”

He could tell?
What was that supposed to even mean?

“No, I’m fine. Just tired.”

Before he could respond, Eve heard someone approach him from his left side. “You sure you don’t want to come work with us?” It was Allison’s voice again and Eve was quick to turn and glare at the older girl. “Oh my gosh! What happened to your face?” Eve realized her error the second Gage’s gaze found hers along with everyone else in the class. Allison had spoken loudly.

“Nothing.” She jerked forward. Shrouding her face with hair again.

“Freak,” Allison whispered.

Tears welled in Eve’s eyes as she imagined Gage and the girl sharing a look of disgust at her expense.

“Eve.”

She jumped at his voice and the touch of his hand on her shoulder.

“Are you okay?” Gage sounded concerned.
Concerned?
That couldn’t be right. “Did someone hurt you?”

She turned and met his gaze, was helpless not to. The look she found in his gray eyes was like nothing she had ever seen. No one had ever looked at her like that. No one had ever acted like they cared.

Then it happened. Much like she had the realization that she wanted Gage. This time the feeling hit her head on. She stared into his gray eyes, flecked with black spots and realized there was more to life then the way she had been taught to live it. There was more out there. More that was like a flame, which flickered in the depths of Gage’s eyes.

I’m in love with him.

Chapter Ten

“You really handled swimming well today.” Gage didn’t have to look up to know Eve gave him a go to hell look.

“Thanks, asshole.”

“Hey, now don’t be mad at me. I told you I would teach you how.” He still didn’t look up at her as he moved his knife along the stick of wood in his hand. He was nettling her on purpose. Anything would be better than the cold silence he had suffered from her after they had gotten out of the pond and she’d killed the gurgh. She wasn’t even being catty with him anymore, just bare silence, as if he didn’t exist. It kind of pissed him off. If anyone should be mad, it should be him. She was the one who’d brought all the jenks in the house running to their location nearly getting him killed. Yet he gets her in the water where he was perfectly capable of keeping her alive and she acts like he’s some sort of leper?
Whatever.

When she didn’t respond right away he looked at her, sitting across from him, her back against the opposite leather couch, her butt on the stone floor. Her knees were bent with her arms folded across them. She wasn’t looking at him, but staring at the candle that sat between them. The dancing flame flickered across her tan complexion glinting off of her golden hair.
God, she is so fucking beautiful.

He sucked in a breath and looked away from her, ineffectively mashing his rioting emotions back into their broken box. The barely-visible mounted heads that decorated the walls were no more of a comfort
. Coming here was a mistake.
He should have known that emotionally he was unstable when it came to the grand plantation. Every room had memory. Every single flippin’ room. All twenty-five of them.

He leaned his head back against the couch behind him and stared up into the darkness. He couldn’t make out the staircase that led from the second floor to the third, but it was there. More real than anything in the house. The memory burned hard of his brother falling, tumbling down the entire flight. In reality, Gage hadn’t thought the stairwell would seem so surreal to him. It was just sixteen wooden steps that led up to the third floor.
That’s all.

When Collin had fallen, Gage could remember the fear that had coursed through his young body, and the knowledge that his brother was probably dead. He had been sure of it. His brother had twisted and tumbled, though it didn’t seem like slow motion. It seemed more like someone had hit the fast forward button, so quickly that he fell. He cried out for Gage as he went down.

A large part of Gage felt it was his fault. He didn’t push him, but he was the reason that Collin was even near the stairwell. They’d been playing with Batman toys and Gage had chased Collin over to the edge, trying to capture the Joker and send him back to Arkham, but he hadn’t. Instead Collin fell.

Even though Collin survived and the broken arms had made him a baseball legend, Gage couldn’t help but know that because of what happened—when he was eight and Collin was nine—that he ultimately killed him by chasing Collin to the edge of that flight of stairs. His successful baseball career sent him away for college, where he was when the pandemic hit, which was where he died once…and then again when Gage put him down for the final time with a knife through the head.

“Lucky we found that candle, huh?”

Gage shook his head, startled back to the present by Eve’s lilting voice. The sound was like a balm against the aching memories. “Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “We should put it out soon though, since we’re done eating. Don’t want it attracting any gurghs.”

She nodded absently.

The food had been only a few steps away from what Gage was sure heaven tasted like. Together they had shared a can of green beans and each had a stick of beef jerky. The water she’d boiled was still hot when he drank it, but it didn’t matter. It was clean, which was better than any water he’d had recently. He hated to admit it, but a lot of his enjoyment had come from the faces she made while she ate. After each bite she would close her eyes and chew slowly, savoring.
Heaven indeed.

“What are you doing?”

He looked down and realized he had stopped moving his hands. “Whittling.”

“Obviously. What are you making?”

“Arrows. There isn’t time for recreational whittling when there are gurghs everywhere.”

She laughed sadly. “Isn’t that the truth. There isn’t time for recreational anything.” She paused and ran a hand through her hair. “Why do you make them? Why can’t you just reuse the ones your bow came with?”

“I wish I could, only I made Hilda myself in woodshop senior year. It was my senior project.”

“Hilda? You named the bow you slaved over for hours, Hilda?”

Gage couldn’t help the smile that spread across his face. “Yeah, we each had to name what we created.”

“So why not name it something like Hellraiser or Bane? Those sound a lot more intimidating.”

“Cause I didn’t wanna be nocking arrows with some dude.” He said the words dead pan and watched her jaw drop.

“You’re being serious aren’t you?” A smile quirked the corners of her full lips, a hesitant smile like the one she used to give him from her seat next him in AP Physics. Suddenly, all other emotions he had washed away and he wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to be back in the pond, with her hand on his cock and her mouth against his. Damn her fear of water and the stupid gurgh who showed up.

“Yeah.” It was a joke between him and his buddies at the time, which is why he gave her the hideous name, but after he Crave, things had changed and he kept her name. She was his most valuable asset. “Hilda is the only reason I’ve survived for as long as I have.” He glanced down at his precious crossbow. At the time he’d had fun creating it. Had spent a lot of time studying different models of wooden bows and combining all of their best attributes to create her.

“Hmm.” The sound that escaped Eve’s lips was barely audible, but she wore a look of interest on her pretty face.

“Nobody kills gurghs like good ol’ Hilda here.”

“Why do you call them gurghs?”

“Why do you call them jenks?” Gage countered and stopped the strokes of his knife to stare at her openly. She was clothed again in her sports bra and a pair of worn denim shorts she’d retrieved from her pack.

Her eyes seemed transfixed by the tiny dancing flame again. “I saw my first one through the cracks of my bedroom window after my dad boarded it up. He’d come home from work at the Win Dixie in Fenton. His face was white. I’d never seen him look like that before. He had wood and nails and he covered every window in our trailer. He said that Jesus was coming and refused to let us leave.” She spit the words out like they were poison. Each new one holding more venom.

Gage remembered it well. Eve had been jerked out of school weeks before things got really bad. There had been reports of strange occurrences all over the world, people getting sick, their skin turning gray, but it was dialed down. The President issued a Pandemic alert a week later for the sickness they’d named
Syphosis
that brought on fevers so high that it would boil the victim’s brain until they died and came back a shell of their former self.

“How did your dad know? How did he figure it out early before the rest of the world?”

Eve shot him a hate-filled glance. “This wasn’t the first time that he locked us in the house because he thought the world was ending. It just turns out that this time, he was right.”

Gage tried to read the expression on her face and couldn’t. She was utterly blank.

“It was a few days later that I saw Murphy Jenkins. Do you remember him?”

Gage furrowed his brow. “Yeah, Murphy. I remember. He was that old Veteran who walked all over town confused, drunk, and talking about ‘the days of ‘Nam.’”

Eve nodded. “He was the first one I saw. He was stumbling, more than usual, and his skin was gray and nasty. Well, you know how they look.” She waved her hands through the air. “It was shocking at the time though, seeing my first one. I watched him through the tiny crack in the boards over my window in my room. It wasn’t until he was standing in front of my house that he stopped and looked right at me.” Eve clutched her legs. “It was like he saw me, but he didn’t. His eyes were empty.” She paused and took a deep breath. “That’s when I started calling them jenks, after Murphy Jenkins. I didn’t have any other explanation for them. It just stuck, with me at least, and Olive too, though she didn’t see Mr. Jenkins that day.” Eve seemed to be lost in thought, her blue-green eyes focused again on the tiny flickering flame.

He moved his knife along the shaft of his soon-to-be arrow.
Focus man, you gotta finish a few more tonight.
The scrape against the wood seemed to jerk Eve out of her thoughtful state.

“Now, tell me why you call them gurghs.”

Gage considered his answer for a moment. Sweeping the knife against the wood in a smooth stroke. He hadn’t thought about his reasoning for their name in years. It was a part of his past, but not one he liked to dwell on. “A week or so after the President claimed that what was happening had reached pandemic status, the power went out. Remember?”

Eve nodded her head. Her eyes focused on him. “I remember the power going out. It was about a month after my dad confined us to the house. We didn’t have a TV, so I didn’t know what was going on.”

Gage could feel the tension in her words. They were dancing around it. Around what happened earlier the day her father jerked her out of school and Gage didn’t see her for four years.

“I forgot that your parents didn’t believe in that kind of thing.” She said nothing to his admission. “My dad had continued working through the chaos of the school shutting down and businesses closing. It was a mad house, but since he was an ER doctor, he kept going in to work. World-wide sickness meant business was booming.”

“Makes sense.” Eve nodded her head and let her feet slide across the floor before stretching them out in front of her.
God, she has good legs.
Muscular and tan.
“So?”

Eve’s prompt brought him back to reality. “Uh,” he coughed into his fist to try and regain his thought process. “Once the power went out, he didn’t come home. Only me and mom were at the house. Collin was in Louisiana for college. When almost four days passed, we decided to head into Fenton and see what was going on.” He stopped, considering the horror that they found on the road between Sunder and Fenton. “No amount of planning would have prepared us for what we found on the way. People were everywhere. Stranded, crying, dead, dying, undead.

“We found Noah on the side of the road. You remember Noah Smith?” She nodded her head slowly a bitter look on her face. “It was a miracle, really. My best friend was running along FM156 with a horde of the undead chasing him. We also picked up a man named Chris and his little boy, Michael, who was only two.”

“A kid?” Gage didn’t miss the sadness in her voice.

“Yeah.” He looked down at his knife and swept the sharp side against the wood. “You know the sound they make when they approach you?”

“The jenks?”

“Yeah.”

“Like a ‘urghhh’ sound.”

“Yes, the little boy would say ‘Daddy, look a
gurgh
!’. We all laughed at the time and like jenk for you, gurgh just stuck with me ever since.” He expected her to say something. To ask what happened to the little boy, but she didn’t. She knew what happened to little Michael just as well as Gage knew it and she didn’t have to be there to know his fate. Eve just stared at him with her blue-green eyes, a million emotions seeming to streak across them.