Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 3: The Ones Who Died Without A Name]
Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍
Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes, Jace is here unfortunately.
Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.
Chapter title is a lyric from: “Holiday” by Green Day.
Word count: 6.1k
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The Tahoe runs out of gas just west of Ashland, Ohio, coasting to a stop along the shoulder of State Route 96, sapphire skies and cotton ball cumulus clouds, emerald fields of Swiss chard and beets slowly being nibbled bare by deer and rabbits, the inheritors of an abandoned earth.
“Well, that’s it,” Baela says, offhand, blasé, as if it’s not a disaster. You’ve sorted this out, it didn’t take long: there are people who aren’t allowed to panic. If they do, it’ll be like a dam crumbling, and the flood will burst through to drown everything, like when Noah’s wrathful God decided it was time for the world to start over. Baela can’t panic. Aemond can’t panic. And maybe you can’t either. Rio gives you a skeptical look—Are we really about to walk to Oregon?—and you slap his thigh encouragingly as you climb over him and out of the Tahoe.
“Everyone gets a gun,” Aemond says as he starts distributing them: Rugers for Rhaena, Baela, and Helaena (although she winces as she obediently takes the revolver, immediately tucking it away into her burlap messenger bag), .22s for Daeron and Aegon, Remington 12 gauges for Jace and Rio, who gives you his M9. You’re better with it anyway. Aemond’s Glock 20 is in a handmade leather holster he took from the cellar of the house back in Distant, Pennsylvania. Luke, still a potential zombie, will not be armed; but Aemond slings the strap of a .22 over his own shoulder for in case Luke recovers.
“Safeties on, right kids?” Rio goes down the line checking everyone’s gun. “Remember what we practiced, use your sights, don’t go pointing the barrel at anyone unless you’re okay with blowing a hole in them. The noise is risky, but getting bit is worse, so use your best judgment.”
“I don’t have any of that,” Aegon says, grinning.
Rio grabs Aegon’s sunburned face roughly and smacks a kiss onto his cheek. “I know, Honey Bun. Don’t you worry. Stick close and I’ll do your thinking for you.”
You spy it up the road a ways on the right, half-obscured by tree limbs: a white and orange sign, a logo shaped like a diamond. “Oh my God. It’s a Stewart’s.”
“A what?” Aemond asks, squinting at the sign. It’s late afternoon, and soon the sun will be sinking into the west like a drowning man through deep water, and like all prey animals you are restless without the promise of shelter.
“A Stewart’s Root Beer. They used to sell hot dogs and barbeque and all these neat soda flavors like key lime and black cherry. We had one where I grew up. That was the fancy place. You knew it was a good day if you ended up at Stewart’s for dinner.”
Aemond considers you, that subtle ceaseless curiosity. “We can stay the night there.”
“I thought we didn’t want to waste any daylight, Aemond,” Jace jabs as he helps Luke—miserable but presently human—out of the Tahoe. “That’s what you said when I wanted to check out that Barnes & Noble, Aemond.”
“What the hell do you need books for?” Aegon says. He’s grabbing clear CD cases out of the center console of the Tahoe. He pounds on the eject button and then punches the CD player when he realizes he won’t be getting that particular disk back. “Oh, you bitch! I had Shakira on there!”
“I would like to preserve my ability to read at higher than a fifth-grade level. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. I was going to work for Sullivan & Cromwell, you know.”
“And now you’re a jobless loser just like me. Isn’t life funny?”
“You can’t be serious,” Baela says to Aegon, his arms full of CD cases. “You’re going to carry all those to California? You don’t even have a way to listen to them.”
“I’m not leaving my mixtapes.” Aegon shoves them into a U.S. Army backpack he found at Fort Indiantown Gap and then hoists it onto his back with a grunt.
Aemond tells Jace: “We only have a few hours until the sun starts going down. We don’t know what’s up ahead. We should take advantage of a safe place to sleep if it’s available. Getting caught out in the open after dark is the worst case scenario.”
“Whatever, Aemond. It’s your call. Everything is your fucking call.” Then Jace plods out into a field of rabbit-ravaged Swiss chard to relieve himself semi-privately, his back to the Tahoe.
“Hey, Chips Ahoy,” Aegon says, taking the folded-up map out of the pocket of his shorts, mint green plaid. “Want to tell me if there are any nuclear power plants near our route so we can steer clear of them and not get irradiated?”
“Uh, well, I don’t exactly have them all memorized…” You examine the map, hoping the black-ink cities will jog your memory, trivia you catalogued years ago, snippets you’ve heard from your fellow seamen. “Perry’s in Cleveland. We won’t be anywhere near that one. Fermi is up by Detroit.” You hesitate as your fingertips skate past Chicago. “Braidwood, LaSalle, and Byron are someplace between Chicago and Peoria, but I’m not sure where. And then there are a few others around the border of Illinois and Iowa. West of that, I don’t know. Rio?”
“Cooper’s in Nebraska, dead east of Lincoln. That’s all I got.”
Aegon is nodding, making notes on his map with a glittery forest green gel pen. “Cool, cool. If I don’t end up eaten or a zombie, I can look forward to being a sterile, glow-in-the-dark mutant.”
Luke frets: “What if we accidentally drink contaminated water or something?”
“Then you die an agonizing death, kiddo,” Rio says. “Your cells dissolve and you turn into human Jello and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.”
Luke swallows noisily. “Awesome.”
“You might just get cancer if the dose is small enough,” you tell him. Luke does not seem pacified. Rhaena gives him a sip of warm Coca-Cola from a plastic bottle from the Wawa.
Jace comes trudging back to the road, zipping up his khaki chino shorts. “Alright, are we ready?”
Helaena is gazing solemnly out over the fields of green leaves, red roots that grow like arteries into the soil. “We should try to find antivenom.”
“Antivenom?” Aemond asks, distracted as he makes sure nothing of importance was left in the Tahoe. The keys are still dangling from the ignition; you won’t need them. There’s no breathing the Tahoe back to life. There’s no returning to Aemond’s house back in Boston. There is only the West, beckoning you to cross rivers and plains and mountains to join her, and to do it as people did two hundred years ago, no cars, no phones, no escape hatches. The only way out is through.
“For the snakes,” Helaena says.
Aemond stares at her. The stitches in his face are dissolving as the flesh weaves back together, jagged maroon scar tissue, beautiful savage ruins, landscapes of improbable survival. “Helaena, antivenom has to be refrigerated. Even if we miraculously found some, it wouldn’t be useable.”
She nods, eyes wide and glazed, still peering into the fields, into the earth.
~~~~~~~~~~
A hand brushing the loose strands of hair out of your face, a whisper through the dissipating indigo of sleep: “Guess what today is.”
You startle awake and yelp as you bolt from your assailant. Aegon is watching you without any shame whatsoever. People are laughing as they gather up supplies so you all can get moving again, brushing teeth, arranging hair, drinking glass bottles of Stewart’s soda found last night in crates in the storeroom, snacking on bags of Utz chips. Sunlight is streaming in through the windows; specks of dust glimmer in the air like comets through the inhospitable void of outer space.
Luke says from where he is sitting on the floor, his arms and legs tethered: “Hopefully the day when somebody’s going to untie me.”
“It’s my birthday!” Aegon announces.
You’re still blinking at him, disoriented. “What…?”
“Aegon, I told you,” Aemond says, sipping a bottle of Stewart’s key lime soda. “It’s not your birthday. It’s not the 23rd.”
“It’s the 20th, right?” Rhaena says.
Rio looks to you, bewildered. “Isn’t it like the 25th?”
“We’re still in June?” Luke says. Now Aemond is hacking through his ropes with a hunting knife from the cellar in Distant, Pennsylvania.
“Your hand is healing up. Your color is good, your temperature is normal. I guess we can officially declare you human for the foreseeable future.”
“I knew it,” Jace says, combative so no one will see the desperate relief underneath.
Aemond examines your hands next, calloused over where the heat of the transmission tower burned the skin. There is no pretext for needing to tend to them any longer, no antiseptic or ointment or gauze. Aemond nods somberly at your palms, as if he isn’t entirely happy to pronounce them cured. His hands linger on yours for slow, unnecessary seconds.
“So what are we going to do special for my birthday?” Aegon presses eagerly.
“We’re going to walk between ten and twenty miles towards California,” Baela says.
“That’s not a birthday activity!”
Daeron groans as he inspects the screws and bolts of his compound bow. “Aegon, it’s not your birthday!”
“Shut up. You can’t even apply to get a credit card.”
“No one can get a credit card now! Currency is worthless!”
Rio offers you a cherries and cream soda. You take it and say: “Aegon, how old are you? On today, your alleged birthday?”
He hesitates. “That’s not the important part.”
Aemond smiles as he tells you, mock-whispering: “He’s thirty.”
“Thirty?!” Rio exclaims. “That’s like, an actual adult age. Marriage and a mortgage, shit like that. What were you doing before everything went insane?”
Aegon gestures vaguely. “I was considering a number of opportunities.”
“He was living on my couch,” Aemond says.
Rio shakes his head, grinning. “No job? No school? No nothing?”
“I wasn’t doing nothing. I played a lot of golf.”
“He was totally doing nothing,” Jace says. “I was in my third year of law school at Harvard, Baela was getting a master’s in Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT, Rhaena just started an Anthropology PhD, Luke was getting a master’s in Screenwriting at Boston University—he was going to be very sad and very broke, but still, he had a plan—and Aegon was doing…nothing.”
“I’ve never had a real birthday party before,” Aegon tells you; and there is something in his murky blue eyes that is tremendously sad, wounded, childlike. “I might not get another chance.”
“What do you want to do?” Now people are alarmed, skittish glances and mouths open to object. You are encouraging him.
“I don’t know yet,” Aegon says. But he’s glad you bothered to ask. You can see it on his face.
It’s not until several hours later—after noon, the sun high and blazing, everyone’s unpracticed feet aching and blistering in their shoes—that Aegon experiences a revelation like the angel Gabriel appearing to the Virgin Mary or Sir Isaac Newton extrapolating gravity from an apple falling on his head. Aegon’s epiphany appears in the form of a bowling alley in Shenandoah, Ohio called Luxury Lanes. It is remarkably unluxurious, a nondescript black rectangular building with a few doors in the front, one small tinted window on each, and no other openings. To Aegon, it is an oasis in a desert.
“I want to go bowling!”
“Aegon, we’re not going bowling,” Baela says, breathing heavily but trying to hide it, her hands massaging the small of her back. Aemond is watching her worriedly. Baela is the only person not burdened with carrying any supplies beyond her hammer and shiny new Ruger—and she resisted this accommodation at first—but still, she suffers more than anyone.
“Once again, it is my birthday—”
“Aren’t bowling allies soundproofed?” Rio asks Aemond. “You know, so they don’t get noise complaints?”
“Uh, I guess so…?”
“It’s kind of a fortress, isn’t it?” Rio continues. “Not many ways in or out. We wouldn’t be seen or heard. Might be a good place to stop for the night. ”
“Yeah!” Aegon says. “Right, Aemond?”
Aemond looks at you. It takes you a moment to figure out why. “I think the bowling alley is a good idea,” you tell him. “It’ll be safe, assuming we can clear it. And Aegon can have his party.”
Aemond is skeptical. “A party?”
“Survival isn’t just about not dying. It’s also about holding onto the things that make us human.”
“Like bowling!” Rhaena says excitedly. “It’s preserving a tradition! And I used to be so good at bowling. I bowled a 250 game once.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Aegon says, still delighted to have her on his side.
“There’s a sign for a Walmart maybe half a mile up the road,” Daeron points out. “We could search it for supplies and then double back here.”
Aemond polls the audience. Everyone agrees.
Shenandoah is tiny, rural, religious, and out of the way from the major highways. The Walmart doors are chained shut with padlocks, and amazingly no one has taken that as an invitation to drive their car through them or otherwise shatter the glass yet. Rio is honored to be the first. He takes the butt of his Remington shotgun and punches through the glass of the locked doors, kicks away loose shards, whistles and shouts to lure out any zombies. A dozen of them come reeling out of the aisles and towards the doorway. Daeron shoots down most of them with his compound bow. Rio kills two with the butt of his Remington, his new favorite toy. Aegon, the birthday boy, uses his golf club to beat in the skull of a teenager who is still wearing glittery pink nail polish and fake eyelashes. According to her nametag, her friends and family once called her Raelynn.
Inside the Walmart, Jace and Aemond take one side of the store, you and Rio the other, doing a quick sweep to make sure you didn’t miss any undead employees or customers waiting for the chance to sink their teeth into you. And when that’s done, you begin shopping.
The shelves are probably two-thirds empty, but there are still treasures to be found. You push carts through the aisles and fill them with candles, lighters, Chef Boyardee, Doritos, canned soup, fruit snacks, tuna pouches, 5 gum, bottles of Snapple, socks and underwear, hair ties, t-shirts and shorts, Kleenex tissues, pads and tampons, toilet paper. Baela finds some cute maternity dresses. Helaena picks through the pharmacy for useful medications, Aemond shadowing her with a baseball bat in his hands and his Glock at his waist.
“Chips, they got Cheddar Whales!” Rio exclaims, tossing several boxes into your cart.
“I miss grocery stores,” Rhaena says as she climbs the shelves to get the last box of Teddy Grahams.
“I miss going to the mall and getting Auntie Anne’s pretzel nuggets,” Aegon commiserates. Then he stumbles upon the liquor aisle and his eyes light up like high beams. “Aemond!”
Aemond appears—perhaps a bit flustered—and deliberates for a while as he browses the selection, Aegon waiting anxiously, before he decides: “Since it is allegedly your birthday, you can drink tonight. And you can pick one other person to drink with you. But only one.”
“Rio,” Aegon says immediately.
“Come on!” Daeron whines.
Aegon is already putting bottles of Captain Morgan rum into a cart. “Sorry. Illegal. Underage.”
“I’ve helped you butcher countless zombies, but I can’t drink?!”
“Just Say No, as Nancy Reagan would tell an innocent child such as yourself.”
Jace strides over, sly and playful, gnawing on a Twizzler. “Aemond, were you over there rummaging through the medicine aisles again? What do you keep looking for? Condoms?”
There is an awkward silence, an extremely awkward silence. Aemond glares at Jace. Jace’s eyes go wide.
“Oh, I, uh…I was definitely joking. But…congrats on the possible future sex!”
“I already checked,” Luke tells Aemond apologetically. “You know condoms were the first thing to get bought up or looted everywhere.”
“Okay, great,” Aemond says quickly, willing the conversation to be over. There is blood, hot and mortified, flaring in his cheeks. He was thinking of you, he had to be; the only other single woman here is his sister, and obviously that’s not an option.
Jace takes another bite of his Twizzler. “Just pull out, man.”
Baela, incredulous, gestures to her belly. “Because that worked out super well for us.”
“I told you to stop riding me!”
“Yeah, a whole two seconds before you impregnated me with your super-swimmer Michael Phelps sperm.”
“Please don’t make me listen to this,” Luke begs. “I’m starting to wish I really was bitten.”
“Don’t you know all the tricks to not getting someone pregnant, Aemond?” Jace says. “Wasn’t that going to be your specialty? You wanted to be a vagina doctor? So don’t you know all the mysteries of the vagina, Aemond?”
“He was going to be an OB/GYN,” Baela says, unamused.
“Really?” Rio turns to Aemond. “Why would you want to do that?”
“So he gets to look at pussies all day,” Aegon says morosely, as if heartbroken that such a path is inaccessible to him.
“That’s not why,” Aemond insists, mostly to you.
You smile. “I didn’t think so. What’s the actual reason?”
“Interns do rotations in different departments so we can figure out what we enjoy and what we’re best suited for. I knew within two days of my OB/GYN rotation that that’s where I wanted to be. Giving birth is the only life-threatening trauma that is necessary for humanity to continue. I wanted to help people get through it as safely and painlessly as possible.” Then his gaze darts to Baela. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound worse—”
“No, it’s okay, I’m very much aware. It hurts like hell, people die. Believe me, I’d be thinking about that even if you hadn’t said it. I think about it all the time.”
“I have an idea you’re not going to like.”
“What?” Baela says. Aemond nods to the nearest shopping cart. “No way. You’re not going to push me around in one of those.”
“I believe it’s an adequate solution until an alternative appears.”
She sighs. “I’ve lost my body, my career, my society, my parents…must I lose my dignity too?”
Aemond winks. “Only when you’re too tired to walk.”
“Alright, Aemond. I realize you’re under the impression that this is a favor. So thank you.”
“That’s what I’m here for.”
“Let me give you a favor in return.” Then Baela begins shooing everyone except you and Aemond out of the liquor aisle. “Grab anything else you want, we’re leaving in five minutes! Jace, come look at the baby clothes with me…”
When the two of you are alone, Aemond says: “I really hope that didn’t make you feel too weird. I’m not someone who gets uncomfortable about the…um…the subject matter in general. But I wouldn’t want you to think that I was trying to…I don’t know. Assume anything or pressure you into something that you weren’t already open to. Obviously I like…um…I mean, enthusiastic consent is essential, and I just…I would never try to convince anybody or…you know what, I’m just going to stop talking now. Okay?”
“Aemond, I’m fine. I didn’t think it was weird.”
“It’s a compliment,” he confesses, flushing pink again, touching his chin, perspiration gleaming at his temples.
Now you have to show interest so he knows you’re on the same page. You’ve never had to think this way before, you’ve never liked anyone enough to play the game. “So hypothetically, if someone didn’t want to get pregnant but there were no condoms, pills, etcetera…what are the options?”
He looks at you, pleasantly surprised. “Well, there’s the rhythm method. It’s not perfect, but it’s been around forever and is reasonably reliable if done correctly.”
You are only vaguely familiar. “We didn’t get a lot of sex ed down in Kentucky.”
Aemond chuckles then leans in, a mischievous curl of his lips, a craving in the crystalline river blue of his eye. He grips the shelf above your head, his arm a canopy. His voice is hushed. The front windows of the Walmart face west where the sun is setting; golden light floods in to illuminate the store. “Is your cycle regular?”
“It is, actually.” This should be embarrassing, but it’s not; it’s exhilarating. You’re imagining him seeing you, touching you, unearthing secrets you’ve never been tempted to share with anyone else.
“So if we imagine it like a circle…” He draws one on the back of your hand, invisible, mesmerizing, blue-white lightning crackling up the path of your metacarpals, wrist, ulna and radius, humerus and clavicle, descending ribs like the rungs of a ladder to jolt the sinus rhythm of your heart. “The start of your period would be Day One.”
“Okay,” you say, hypnotized as his fingerprint skates in an arc across the bumps of your knuckles.
“Ovulation doesn’t happen until around Day Fourteen. You might have noticed some increased arousal and…wetness. Clear in color, elastic consistency.”
Your eyes are trapped in his face, smooth skin, jagged scar tissue. You tease him back, stepping closer. You can hear people snickering in the next aisle as they eavesdrop. You don’t care about them, and neither does Aemond anymore. “Now that you mention it…”
“That’s nature trying to trick you into reproducing. Day Fourteen is crunch time. Once ovulation occurs, the egg is only good for up to twenty-four hours. And then the rest of the cycle you’re effectively useless, as far as making miniature humans is concerned.”
“Wait, you’re telling me people can only get pregnant one day a month?” This seems improbable. “How has the species managed to survive this long?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Aemond admits. “Depending on the health of the specimens, sperm can survive up to five days inside a woman’s body. And it’s difficult to tell exactly when ovulation occurs. So, in practice, there’s basically one week a month when you’d want to avoid a man…completing the act, if you will.” He’s still smiling, taunting, famished, imagining the same scenes you are. You know this with a categorical certainty, as if you’re reading his thoughts like stark stripes of distance on a measuring tape. “And that’s also the week when your hormones are demanding you have sex, inspiring you to make all sorts of impulsive yet extremely consequential decisions.”
“Don’t I know it,” Baela laments from the next aisle, and there is a rupture of wild giggles.
“Anyway.” Aemond lifts his finger from the back of your hand and you have to stop yourself from reaching for him as he recedes from you. “There’s a basic overview.”
“It was very educational.” You follow him out of the liquor aisle.
“I’ve used the rhythm method for years,” Rhaena says as everyone makes their way towards the front of the store with their carts. “Clearly that’s just anecdotal, so don’t think I’m officially endorsing it. When I’m in my fertile week we add condoms. Well…we used to. Back when we could get them.”
“Ugh, I hate condoms,” Baela grumbles.
“We can tell,” Aegon says.
“I hate the way they feel, I hate the way they smell…”
“They’ve never bothered me,” Rhaena says. “I don’t notice that much of a difference. And it can be fun to try different kinds.”
“Are you on drugs?” Baela whirls to you. “Seriously, what is wrong with her? I’m right, aren’t I? Condoms are awful.”
Rio gives you a cautious look, uncharacteristically reticent. He’s not going to be the one to reveal it. He doesn’t know if it’s something you’re willing to share. But if anything is going to happen with Aemond—and you want it to, already you know you want him—then it’s something you think you should be honest about. You want him to know about you. You don’t want to have to create some false version of yourself to wear like a pelt, heavy, smothering, something that will inevitably need to be taken off.
“I am regretfully not qualified to say.”
“You’ve never used condoms?” Baela asks, a bit dubious.
“I’ve never done any of it.”
Everyone freezes at the defunct checkout counters and turns to gawk at you. “No sex?” Jace says. “No nothing?”
You shrug, smiling a little self-consciously. “I made out with a guy once.”
“The Marine from Corpus Christi?” Baela asks. They’re obsessed with him, they’re convinced there’s some lore to be excavated, translated, displayed like a relic in a museum. There isn’t. Sometimes people pass in and out of your life as seamlessly as shadows or sunlight, no weight, no indentations, nothing to recall or relay. He existed and then he didn’t. He was an airplane drawing contrails in the sky that faded before the blood red fire of dusk filled the horizon.
“No. Someone from home. Just a guy, not even worth mentioning.”
“Girl, you gotta fix that, soon, pronto, like yesterday.” Jace seems genuinely horrified. “You can’t die a virgin.”
“You really can’t,” Daeron adds, and Aegon pretends to be distraught over the loss of his youngest brother’s virtue.
“That’s what I’m always telling her!” Rio says.
“Not everybody wants to have sex,” Helaena murmurs as she records today’s findings in her spider notebook.
“True,” Jace concedes. “And that is totally legit. Mother Teresa, Queen Elizabeth, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Joan of Arc, Sir Isaac Newton, Nikola Tesla, the Jonas Brothers for a while, all great people. But Chips is not celibate by choice, correct?”
“Buddha had a wife and son,” Aemond says, preoccupied. He isn’t looking at you now, which is concerning; he’s peering down at where his hands grip his shopping cart, his brow creased with…what is that? Unease, disapproval, concern, thoughtfulness, fear?
“It’s not some big thing,” you backpedal. “I don’t have a hangup about it, I just never met a guy I liked enough, and enlisted men, they’re…well, a lot of them are taken, or cheaters, or idiots. Or all three.”
“Not to worry, Chipper.” Aegon claps a hand on your shoulder; and you aren’t sure if it is his purpose to break the tension, but he seems to have that effect regardless. “If you ever wish to be initiated into the art of lovemaking by a slightly below average and entirely unintimidating penis, I’d be thrilled to assist you. I love condoms. But in their absence, I am the king of pulling out. 100% success rate. Zero bastard children running around to my knowledge.”
“You should give Jace lessons,” Baela says.
And the last thing Aegon takes from the Walmart is a green battery-powered Toshiba CD player so he can blast to his mixtapes.
~~~~~~~~~~
Flickering candles lining the middle lane, drinks and snacks strewn across the tables, Rio’s Moonbeam propped up so it’s aimed at the disco ball still hanging from the ceiling from a time before the dead started devouring the living. Daeron is at the end of the lanes to reset the pins after each player’s turn. Helaena is keeping score in her notebook; Rhaena is currently in the lead by a massive 80 points. Aegon is wasted, dancing on a table and crunching Cool Ranch Doritos beneath his bare feet, his blonde hair flopping. Each time it’s his turn to bowl, Aegon has to roll the ball down the lane with two hands like a child. Rio, several shots deep but unable to feel much shy of half a bottle, is singing along with him to Cruise by Florida Georgia Line, but it’s really more like shouting, each sentence an off-key monstrosity that makes you laugh.
“Baby, you a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise!
Down a back road, blowin’ stop signs through the middle, every little farm town with you!
And this brand new Chevy with a lift kit, would look a hell of a lot better with you up in it!
So baby, you a song, you make me wanna roll my windows down and cruise!”
You cleared Luxury Lanes easily; the only difficult part was figuring out how to get into the area called the pit where, in normal times, felled pins were mechanically collected and sorted. There were two former employees roaming around back there in their tattered uniforms, snarling and drooling blood. Both were rapidly neutralized.
Someone always has to be by the front doors, watching through the small tinted windows for signs of trouble, whether from zombies or living humans. Aemond is currently on guard, nursing a Snapple. According to the bottle, the flavor is called Takes 2 To Mango. You grab your own Snapple—plain and simple Lemon Tea, no charming gimmicks—and walk over to join him.
“So now I guess it’s my turn to say I hope that conversation didn’t make you feel weird.”
He smiles politely, glancing out the window. “No, I’m completely fine.”
“Good. Because I don’t want you to look at me differently than you would any other girl, like I’m better than them, or worse than them, or like there’s anything wrong with me, because it really isn’t something I consider to be paramount to my identity, and people always seem to get all twisted up about it, but it’s a pretty boring story, I just…”
“You’ve never liked someone enough to take the risk. I get it. I don’t think you’re a freak or anything.”
“Okay. Good.” The next song on Aegon’s mixtape is Shaboozey’s A Bar Song. Jace is dancing with Baela, spinning her around as she giggles. With Rhaena’s coaching, Luke bowls his first strike. You rest your head on the door as you gaze up at Aemond, the phantom of a smile on your lips. “I might like you enough.”
And he says as if it’s the worst thing in the world, a plague, an infection, an apocalypse: “You’d fall in love with me.”
It hurts, of course it does, this flippant rejection. He burns you, he cuts you, he stitches you up with no anesthetic. You try not to show it. “You’re…confident.”
“No, I don’t mean because of anything specific I would do, it’s just…it’s natural to form a certain…attachment. To the first person you’re with. It leaves an impression.” Not an impression like a first judgment, superficial and swift; an impression like an imprint, a hollow, a prehistoric fossil that is preserved through eons. “That was already true before. And everything is more intense now, because life is so…” Aemond takes a while to settle on a word. “Precarious.”
You say like a challenge: “Are you still in love with the first girl you slept with?”
A shadow that ripples through his face, a flinching he tries to hide. You shouldn’t have asked. Still, you feel like you need to know, like you’ll run out of oxygen if you don’t. “I think I’ve gotten enough distance from it to realize that she wasn’t…wasn’t good for me in a lot of ways. It was an unconventional situation. But I still carry all these pieces of her around with me, yes. I don’t think that will ever go away.”
“Aemond,” you say gently. “Who was she?”
He is evasive, smirking. “It’s a cliché.”
“Was she a patient? That’s very Grey’s Anatomy of you.”
“No. She was my professor.”
An older woman, wise and experienced and captivating and sophisticated. He’s cut you again, a blade slicing effortlessly through veins like soft butter. “Oh. From med school?”
“Undergrad.”
“You were really young,” you say, a little startled.
He nods. “I was eighteen when it started. I was this shy, insecure, friendless freshman, she was married with two kids around my age. And it was off and on, but there was never anyone else for me, she took up too much space in my head, in my chest, like I couldn’t breathe unless I knew we were okay.”
“It went on for seven years?”
This seems to stun him, hearing how much of his existence she bottled like a terrarium. “I guess so.”
Is she dead? Missing? Safe somewhere with her husband and kids? “Is she…gone?”
His gaze drops to the floor. “Yeah.”
“Did you see it happen?”
“I was the one who killed her when she turned.”
It’s indescribably horrible; you don’t know what to say. “Aemond, I’m…I’m really sorry…”
He is abruptly nonchalant, the blue of his eye cool and dispassionate. “Look, I’m not prepared for this to be anything more than casual. And I don’t think casual is really in the cards for us. So it’s probably best to leave it alone.”
“Right,” you agree numbly, not meaning it.
“We’re headed different places, I’m going to California, you’re planning to end up in Oregon, it’s just…a bad idea to muddy the waters, I think.”
“Because I haven’t done this before.”
He shrugs ambiguously. “It’s a contributing factor.”
“Well you seemed pretty interested before you found that out, so.”
“I don’t mean to offend you.”
“You aren’t offending me. You’re disappointing me.”
Now Aemond is offended. “By trying to protect us?”
“No, by saying you don’t think I’m a freak when you clearly do, and by having some savior complex, or a whore-Madonna complex, or whatever’s going on in your head, it’s always such a mystery to everyone else.”
He downs the rest of his Snapple and shoves the bottle into the nearest trash can. You hear it thump against the bottom, no garbage bag. “Alright. This was fun.”
“Maybe you’re afraid of making a mistake, just like I always was.”
“Maybe I don’t want to have to teach you how to do everything,” Aemond snaps.
“I taught you how to shoot.”
“The fact that you don’t realize how wildly different those two situations are proves you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Okay, bye. Sorry about your zombie girlfriend.”
Aemond glares at you, shocked, furious. “That was so fucking low.”
It was. You regret it. But you can’t bring yourself to tell him that. You flee to the far end of the bowling alley and sit alone at a table draped in shadows. After a while, Rio notices and ventures over to see what’s wrong, a bottle of Captain Morgan swinging from one hand. He’s tipsy now.
Rio sighs as he takes a seat beside you, reaching over to rub your back. His hands are large and indelicate; what he means to be comforting is more like getting manhandled. Sometimes he leaves bruises, but it’s not his fault. Nature gave Rio the body of a killer. If anyone is going to survive the zombie apocalypse, it’s him. “What’s going on, Chips?”
Your voice breaks as you say it; tears sting in your eyes. “I hate caring about people.”
He bursts out laughing. “Yeah, it’s the worst, isn’t it? But once in a while it works out.”
“Bryan.”
And now he knows you’re serious. You have his full attention, large dark eyes fixed on your face, lines etching into his brow beneath the artificial starlight of the disco ball. “What are you asking me?”
“We can’t leave them and walk to the West Coast ourselves, can we?”
“I mean, technically we could, but it would be really stupid. Everything’s so much easier with ten people. And also I think I’d have to kidnap Aegon and take him with us, I love that little dude. Why? Do you really want to leave them?”
“No.”
“I figured.” He offers you the half-empty bottle of Captain Morgan.
“I’m not drinking that.”
“Come on. It’ll take the edge off.”
You look at him. Rio looks back, smiling now.
“I’ll watch out for you,” he says. “And if you get bit I’ll shoot you dead, no hesitation, swear to God. I remember our promise. I won’t let you die alone.”
“You’re a good guy.”
“I know.” He nudges your arm with the bottle of Captain Morgan. “A few swigs won’t hurt. It’ll help you sleep.”
You take the bottle, twist off the cap, drink down amber-gold poison that burns like gasoline, like fire.
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