Haven (26 page)

And in the quiet peace of the gym, he said it again, in almost a whisper, his voice rumbling up from its depths. “No way in hell, Kennedy.”

It sent a warm shudder through me, and as his dark blue eyes pinned me down, I struggled to reply. “I know.”

I released him and went back to my breakfast, and again the silence enveloped us. To fill it, I explained, “I’m not the best field medic. I was always better with weaponry.”

This brought a smile to his lips. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

I didn’t ask what that meant.

“Your dad taught you both, didn’t he?” Harrison asked in a way that made me think he already knew my answer.

“Yes, he wanted me to know how to protect others as much as myself…Teamwork. Keeping others alive preserves your survival.”

I paused and smiled to myself, acknowledging the irony of that foresight. Here I was trying to keep Harrison healthy because I needed him, in more ways than one. Although I doubted that my dad had this particular scenario in mind when he trained me.

Stirring me from my thoughts, Harrison stated compassionately, “He was a good dad.”

“The best. A good person all around,” I said and then my muscles braced against the swell of anger that followed. “When they said what they did about him…”

Immediately understanding where I was heading in our conversation, he insisted, “You don’t need to explain to me.”

“So you heard the rumors?”

I could feel him staring. “I don’t listen to rumors, Kennedy.”

I nodded slowly. “Then you did hear them,” I said and a sinking feeling came over me.

He maintained, for my comfort, “You don’t need to-”

“I do,” I said, realizing something with unwavering clarity. If anyone needed to know the truth about my dad, it was Harrison. “He was a security guard. More than that. He knew more about security and defense than most guys with a badge and gun will ever know in their entire life. His job was Chief Security Officer at a lab and it was a cakewalk for him. That was something he needed. He came back from the Middle East with…scars.” Harrison tipped his head, showing me he understood they weren’t only on the surface. “So the job was stress-free, kept a roof over our heads, and allowed him to come home every night. Until…one night…he didn’t. One of his buddies woke me up early the next morning…Edgar but everyone called him Mack…and he told me to get dressed, and when I went into the living room and saw it full of people without my dad there, I knew…I just…knew. I don’t remember much after that. Adrenaline has a way of blocking out details. It was a few days later that Beverly told me in a planned-accidental slip of the tongue. They had – my dad’s buddies – had been careful to block the details of it from me. The TV wasn’t allowed on; the newspaper went into recycling before it ever made it into the house. But there are some things that can’t stay hidden, not when everyone is talking about them, and…not when a friend of yours wants to see your reaction after you hear the details for the first time. She broke the news at lunch, saying something about ‘a history of security guards going stark raving mad’ and I asked what that meant. It took a little pushing, but she finally told me. I didn’t believe her, of course, so I left school to find a newspaper. It’s how I knew about the space between the buildings on the south side. It was there in that strip mall that I learned what they said my dad did. He didn’t though, Harrison,” I said, lifting my head up to him. “He wouldn’t have. He had nightmares, like me, but he wouldn’t…he wouldn’t…
do that
.” I sat there realizing I hadn’t actually filled him in on what they said he’d done and raised my head to him before continuing. In a firm voice, I stated very clearly, “
He did not eat the face off another security guard
.”

Simply saying those words caused me actual pain, suddenly shooting waves of heat to every part of my body and leaving my stomach in a knot. I pushed aside what remained of my breakfast before what had been swallowed could come back up. Then I wanted to hit something, hard. So I stood and strode with long steps down the length of the courts, looking for something I could beat to a pulp. Almost blindly, filled with more emotion than logic, I shoved open the door to the weight room and in the dim, windowless room the punching bag caught my eye. Then I was beating it, fist after fist, my arms flying in rhythm at it, my body rotating with power. I felt nothing beyond the emotions that consumed me. I didn’t hear Harrison follow me. I didn’t realize I wasn’t alone. I only cared about the bag.

That’s the problem with rage. It takes everything out of you. Including oxygen. And when I was done and my body was using the bag to keep me up, Harrison made his way to me. I collapsed to the ground and he crouched down facing me, taking my hands and holding them between his, a gesture I deeply appreciated in that moment.

Tenderly, with a way that touched my heart, he whispered. “I know… I know, Kennedy…I know.”

I began to shake at that point and tried to focus on his calm, handsome face. It was my anchor as the room began to pulsate around me. Then the tears swelled, blinding me, taking away the sight of him, and that comfort I needed so much right now. I closed my eyes, squeezing them away, but Harrison didn’t wait for this to happen. His arms, strong and firm, slipped around my body and slid me to him, pressing me, holding me, supporting me. And there I sat on the sturdiness of his thighs, catching my breath, and letting the tears drain away the pain. Exhaustion followed my outburst, leaving me limp, and tired enough to close my eyes, blocking off the rest of the world. Then there was only me and Harrison and the cool darkness of the air surrounding us.

“I’m sorry,” I said, uncomfortable about having dragged him into my little episode.

“It’s all right,” he reassured. “That’s been a long time coming…I’m guessing.”

I almost laughed at the understatement.

“I think it’s time for
me
to bandage
you
now.”

“Hmm?”

He held up my hands to show me what I’d done to my knuckles. They looked like I’d dragged them down the pavement at a fast speed. The stinging pain was just a dull sensation at the moment, but it would soon be an agonizing, throbbing reminder of what I’d just done. I stood and he did the same, and we headed back into the gym where he pulled out the first aid kit and started doctoring me up.

Unlike me, he was careful in his approach, gently cleaning the blood from the shredded skin and winding the gauze around my knuckles. His touch was more of a caress than a dutiful application and more than once he looked up to assess my pain level.

When he was done, I held them high because the blood was already seeping through.

“They look like white hand wraps,” I commented.

He grinned. “You thinking of going another round on that bag?”

I could, I really could, but when I began to smile, Harrison laughed. And somehow the feelings that had just been eating away at me disappeared entirely.

“I really am sorry about…about that,” I said, lifting my chin toward the weight room. “It’s been hard. I mean, if the company he worked for would just have given me an honest answer, shown me the reports – the unmodified, true account – it would be easier. But they wouldn’t divulge…anything…saying that what happened was classified information.” I drew in a deep breath and closed my eyes for a second, a trick my dad taught me to use in stressful situations. Sadly, I’d forgotten to use it up until now. “Do you know I even wondered after this virus broke out that maybe, somehow, the two were connected? I mean with the lack of information, I just…But no, they couldn’t have been. My dad died a year before the outbreak and Chicago wasn’t the only place hit.”

We contemplated this for a moment.

“I wouldn’t be surprised though,” I said, my teeth remaining clamped so that it sounded like I was seething, which was actually true. “Do you know the president of the company, my dad’s boss, came to his funeral? What kind of a person goes to a funeral while withholding information that will give the family some peace? What kind of a person does that?” I scoffed to myself. “He worked at Ezekiel Labs,” I added and then glanced at Harrison. The name didn’t seem to affect him, at all. He wasn’t trying to figure out if he’d heard it before or seen the name on a highway billboard. He simply sat quietly staring out at the courts. “Have you heard of them, Ezekiel Labs?”

I asked this because some reports included the name of my father’s employment and where the attack occurred and some didn’t. Apparently, Ezekiel wanted its name out of the news and had connections high enough to make that happen, with the latter reports anyways.

“Yes, I’m familiar with it,” he said, still looking straight ahead. “My aunt,” he began again and paused. His eyes flitted to the ground as if he were contemplating something and then came back up again. “My aunt works at Ezekiel Labs.”

Instantly, my expression transformed to a mixture of regret and shock.

So he’d heard all the explicit details…

Finally, he looked at me.

“That’s how I…,” he said and shifted his legs uncomfortably before starting again. “That’s how I recognized you in the cemetery that night. I…I saw the name on the tombstone where you were laying.”

My eyes widened as I stared back at him. I had always assumed it was the gossip chain that had delivered the news to him.

“I was sent here a few days before your dad’s…incident.”

I continued to gawk.

“When it happened, Eve didn’t come back to her apartment except for random stops to pick up a change of clothes. So I asked her about it and all she would tell me was that there had been an…event…at the lab. She told me the same story as the news reported and that was supposed to explain why she was putting in extra hours.” He pondered this before adding, “Of course, it didn’t explain it, but…”

“I…,” I mumbled without any clear understanding of what I meant to say. Astonishment had its fingers wrapped around my brain so hard I couldn’t think. “I wonder if my dad knew your aunt.”

Harrison shrugged. “I don’t know. Ezekiel is a large building. But it’s a strange coincidence…” He let that sink in and then muttered, “Definitely a strange coincidence…”

“Odd,” I remarked, perplexed by it all. “Others in our families may have known each other before we did.”

Harrison laughed, a brief outburst, but it was pleasant to hear.

“So you knew all about me when you saw me for the first time in the cemetery.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he corrected. “What happens to someone isn’t a reflection of who they are. Who you are is made up of your personality, willpower, motivations, dreams. And all of those things I didn’t have the first clue about when I picked you up and carried you home. Well, carried you back to Mr. Packard’s home. It took me several more months to figure out the important stuff, the stuff that actually makes you…you.”

“And what have you figured out so far?”

It was a loaded question. I knew that, but I refused to shy away from it. I wanted to hear his honest opinion of me.
Did he think I was too gruff, too prissy, just right? Did he think I was too masculine? Did he think I was a wimp for not admitting my secret life to the rest of the world?
I wanted to know if he saw me as a girl or a woman. But he didn’t answer me in the way I expected. It wasn’t a separate response to my individual questions but an all encompassing one, and it stirred my heart.

He turned to me with clear and genuine sincerity and confessed, “I figured out that I could fall in love with you.”

My response was to sit in stunned silence, even as excitement swelled inside me. Jolts of stimulation traced their way down each of my limbs. My heart thumped wildly in my chest. He continued talking but he’d changed the subject so I couldn’t say what it was about. All I understood was the sensation those words, his declaration, had given me. It stayed with me the rest of the day and even into the next several days, every time he looked at me or spoke to me or made his presence known around me. It was with me when I curled up on the landing pad each night and felt Harrison’s body press down next to mine. It was with me when I woke up in the morning and found my head on his chest and his arms wrapped protectively around me. It was with me as we talked for hours about our dreams and motivations. And it was with me when the reality of our situation found its way through the unavoidable cracks in my happiness, when every once in a while I reminded myself that we had only a finite amount of time before the Infected broke through the fence, flooded our school, and took away everything…our dreams, our motivations, our personalities…all of what made us who we were…with a single bite. And on the second week of Harrison’s quarantine, that moment arrived.

~ 10 ~

W
HEN MY EYES OPENED, THE GYM
was still dark, although I could see a sliver of the moon through the windows overhead. It was a clear night, which was becoming rarer. While I hadn’t been marking any calendars lately, intuitively I knew we were close to the end of November, rounding the corner on fall and coming into winter. With a single glimpse out the window you’d find that the orange, gold, and red leaves that – without the street sweepers and landscape maintenance crews on duty began littering the streets and piling up around the vehicles tires in the parking lot and along the fence – held remnants of the first snowfall. The coolness in the air was also a sign. Without the heating system on to regulate the temperature inside, the school had turned cold, in the mornings especially. For this reason, I was thankful when I found Harrison’s arms folded around me.