The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (15 page)

“Sweet Jesus,” he said, unable to stop himself.

She was blonde and she was perfect. It wasn’t just because he hadn’t seen a nude woman in almost a year. It was simply a true fact that this woman who had helped him shoot his way through a mountain of monsters was frankly one of the most beautiful he’d ever seen. She was easily the most perfectly proportioned woman
he had
ever laid eyes upon.

Her face, once hidden by layers of dirt, was pink and bright, scrubbed rosy by soap and towel. Her hair, wet though it was and clinging to her scalp was the color of summer corn. Jean’s neck was long and slender and led down to shoulders that were held back, presenting a most gorgeous pair of heavy breasts, nipples erect, the flesh pimpled either from the rush of water or some excitement she was feeling. Cutter could not see her rib cage standing out starkly against her flat and solid belly, so she was obviously
,
not starved as so many were, these days. Hips flared out spectacularly toward muscular thighs, calves rippling with muscle, ankles slim. Even her toes were perfect.

Without waiting for a request, she turned and raised her arms, allowing him to see her back, the flow of her spine, the perfect rise of her buttocks.

Looking over her shoulder at him, she smiled seductively.

“Don’t you think you need to examine me more closely?” she asked. And winked.

Cutter didn’t think. He didn’t allow himself to consider much of anything. The words,
don’t do anything stupid
, kept running through his mind, but he banished them and stood on them, stomped them down into his unconscious and locked them behind a couple of tons of testosterone.
Still
the voice was warning him.
You have rubbers in that trunk over there, dumbass. Go get one. It’ll only take a minute. At least do that.

There
was nothing for it
,
but for him to follow his lust. This woman did it for him, and it wasn’t just
because
he’d been without female companionship of any kind for at least a year. Jean was his physical ideal. She closed all the circuits. She pushed the right buttons. The vision of her was more than he could resist.

With her back to him, he strode across the floor and put his arms around her. His hands found her breasts and he seemed to weigh them in each palm, feeling the firm push against his sweaty flesh.

Jean moaned. “Squeeze me,” she said, and Cutter’s hands pressed her breasts, his thumbs found her erect nipples and rubbed across them, back and forth, again. There was a sound in her throat and then she turned and her mouth found his, their lips meeting, their tongues questing, exploring one another.

Lust overcame him, his
hands were on her chest, at her waist, grasping at her butt, pulling her toward him,
and
shoving her crotch into his erection, his pants a bothersome barrier.

Suddenly
,
Jean was on her knees, pulling herself from his arms. Her hands were at his belt, his zipper slid down and she reached into his opened pants and pulled his throbbing penis out, wrapped her lips around it and sucked the shaft of it down to the base, the head of his dick as far down her throat as it was possible for it to probe.

“Oh, God,” Cutter said. His hands were on her
head
as she bobbed her head up and down on his erection. “Jesus!” He said
. Suddenly he
pulled
back, tearing at his pants,
kicking off
his boots
,
and tossing the clothes aside as fast as he could,
not
seeing
or
caring where they ended up.

He looked down to see Jean lying on her back, her solid thighs spread as she presented her vagina to him, the labia pink and inviting. Cutter all but fell upon her and she grabbed at his dick again, this time leading it into her, the moist lips opening, taking him in as she wrapped her legs around his back and pushed toward him, meeting his own pelvis, thrust for thrust.

“Fuck me,” she said. “Fuck me good.”

Cutter rode her;
he
rocked against her hard stomach, pushed deep into her again and again, feeling their genitalia grinding one against the other.
The
smell of their sex
and
the sound of their cries
filled the house
.

“I’m going to come,” she screamed. “Come with me. Come with me!”

He moaned. He thrust and felt himself spend, holding his body still, frozen in a brief moment of ecstasy as he ejaculated.

“Oh,” she said, lying back on one of those brightly colored rugs. “Oh, my baby,” she cooed. And her strong, lean arms wrapped around him and pulled him close, his chest pressing against her full, firm breasts.

All right then. Definitely
she
stays
was all he could think.

**

Later, they lay together in Cutter’s bed. It was a luxurious
-one
that he’d
pushed, pulled,
and dragged up the stairwell one cool day in autumn.
He had
covered the mattress with a soft topper and had fitted it with sheets and blankets and trapped it out with soft pillows and a down comforter. It was something to come home to after a rough day, and Cutter liked that bed.
Now
he liked it even more.

She was looking at him as he sat up and stared at her. There was no reason to be coy about it. He just couldn’t stop looking at her, and she wasn’t in a position to play games. The two of them had been at it non-stop for hours. Cutter had finally come to at least some of his
senses, had found the
condoms
,
and used them. There was nothing they could do about that first round of sex…

“Where did you come in from?” he asked her. “You were dirty, for damned sure, but you aren’t starving. You’ve been living somewhere. Somewhere safe and with food.” It was time to question her.
He
had to know what he was into.

Jean rolled over onto her back, pulled a sheet over her body and stared at the ceiling. “I’ve been slowly fighting my
way
down from the mountains for the past seven months,” she said. “It’s bad out there. In the country, I mean. The roads are all impassable.
There are
so many weeds and brambles that you’d
be
ripped to shreds if you even tried to walk the roads. The only pathways have been hollowed out by deads. They just tramp through that stuff and open up a trail
,
and then other deads follow behind them.” She blinked.

“That makes it tempting to walk the paths they make, but if you do you end up in a bad situation. So the only way to move around is to stick to the woods. And most of that isn’t much better than the roads. Sticker bushes, thorns, ticks, mosquitoes, deerflies. And fucking dogs. Don’t get me started about the dogs.” She turned and looked at Cutter. “I haven’t so much as heard a dog since I got close to
Charlotte
,” she said. “That was nice.”

Cutter pushed the pillows out of his way and sat up straighter, looking down at his guest. “But where have you been? You’ve been in one spot for a while. I can tell,” he told her plainly.

“Well, like I told you, I’ve been trying to get here—well, not your place, but the city—for months now. All I had left was my pistol that my dad made me.” Jean paused. “Somewhere around Matthews—where you can see downtown
Charlotte
pretty good—I found this stand-alone grocery store.
Damnedest
thing
; must
have been one of the last family-owned grocery stores in the state. Griswold’s, it was called. I could still read the signs through the weeds.

“As soon as I got there
,
I realized that it hadn’t been looted. Well, at least not so that you could tell. The windows were boarded up and the doors were all barricaded
, so
I figured it was abandoned. What I ended up doing was making a ramp out of some lumber and I was able to climb up on the roof. From there I could see the neighborhood and that the deads weren’t really heavy. I stayed up there for a while trying to figure out if anyone was holed up inside, but after a while I just had to bite the bullet and go.

“There was an access door on the roof that was locked, but I broke it open. The wood framing was rotten, so it wasn’t that hard to get in. After that, it was just a matter of sucking up the courage to go down there.”

Cutter waited. Everyone was so full of horror stories and tension that it was pointless to recount each and every monstrosity that you witnessed or took part it. It was just shit, and it happened.

“Thing was, it was empty. Of people, I mean.” Jean sat up and the sheet peeled away from her, revealing her perfect body. Despite half a dozen orgasms over the past few hours, Cutter felt himself becoming aroused again. “The store was full, though. Like I said, it wasn’t a big store. A family-owned grocery. Like you see out in the country every once in a while. The Griswolds had obviously fixed it up to keep it from being looted, but something had kept them from going back there.”

“They were probably all killed and eaten,” Cutter told her.

“Yeah, probably. The coolers and freezers were all closed up and I sure as hell didn’t open those. Stuff had all rotted in there, but I didn’t crack the doors—no telling what nasty contagions had been incubating in there. But the shelves were stocked, mainly. Some stuff was gone—maybe the owners had hauled out some supplies or donated stuff right there at the end. But for me, alone, there was enough food and supplies that it kept me going…well, for the past few months.”

“Nobody ever came there? Tried to get in?”

“Ron. It’s a jungle out there. I tell the few people I’ve met who are trying to get out of the cities that the countryside is worse. The deep forests are okay, but anywhere the land was cleared and where sunlight can reach—it’s nothing but weeds and thorns. You can’t hack your way through it. If you had a bulldozer, you might muck out a way through it. But outside of that…it’s not worth the risk.” She looked around, and Cutter could tell that her eyes kept falling on her abandoned clothes, but that the stuff was so filthy she didn’t want to put them back on now that she was bathed and clean.

“We can wash your clothes,” he told her. “I’ve got a galvanized drum I do that in. We’ll boil water, soap.”

“And in the meantime you’ll keep me naked?” There was a bit of a smile buried there.

“No. You can wear something of mine. I have some convertible slacks and some jackets you can wear.”

At that, Cutter got up and walked across the room, searching for and gathering up his own clothes that he’d cast off in the heat of their lust. He pulled on his pants
,
but just draped his other stuff across the back of a chair. Then he went back to the kitchen counter and the first thing that met his eyes was the little
homemade
pistol that Jean’s father had made.

“I have to ask you about your family,” he said, turning to her. There was the gulf of space separating them. “Any man who knows how to fabricate his own guns must have been at least partially prepared to face…” he raised his arms, indicating the world…this.
”

“What happened to your dad? Your mom? Did you have a husband?”

The woman finally left the bed and took a couple of steps toward a rack where Cutter hung his jackets. She picked one out and drew it over her arms. Fitted to Cutter’s longer torso, it covered her well, hanging down to just above the top of her thighs. If anything, it made her appear even more comely to him and he definitely had another erection coming on.

“My mother died when I was in high school
, so
she didn’t have to witness any of this shit.
When it finally came to a head,
I was living in Raleigh. My dad came to get me—he arrived just when the power all shut down and things went completely to hell.” She drew the coat tightly about her throat, thinking of the things that had happened.

“And you’re right. He was prepared. He drove to get me in one of his four-wheel drive trucks. Complete with winch. And guns. He didn’t bring a lot of guns, but he brought…well, enough. We got out of town while the place was all but burning down around us. He had forty gallons of gas in jerry cans in the truck, and we managed to make it most of the way home.” She looked up.

“To Brevard, I mean. That was home.” She stared at the floor and took a few steps across the room toward Cutter. “And, yes, my dad had quite the place. We weren’t off the grid there, but he had things set up so that it wasn’t hard to make the transition.” Jean smiled, thinking of the place. Cutter could see old memories flowing through her mind,
which were
reflected on the upturned corners of her lips, in the pleasant squint of her eyes.

“All he talked about on the way back was that we would be safe and sound as soon as we got back to the home place. He’d kick in the wind-power generator and get the pumps going. He had enough stuff canned and put back so that we could weather the worst for a year without breaking a sweat. My dad even had a bunker
he had
built himself back in the hill behind the house. Yeah, we’d be okay as soon as we got home, was all he kept talking about all the way there.”