Rot Between Us

The blood on my hands wasn't mine. It had gone tacky in the cold air, flaking at the knuckles, and I stood in the doorway of what used to be a pharmacy with my heart slamming against my ribs and a dead girl watching me from the far end of the aisle.

She hadn't moved. That was the thing. I'd been standing there for maybe a full minute, and she hadn't moved.

Any other one of them would've been on me by now. They ran. That was the part nobody warned you about, the way they could sprint when they caught your scent, arms pumping like some nightmare track star. But this one just stood there, half-lit by the gray light coming through the shattered front window, head tilted like a dog hearing a whistle I couldn't.

I should've run. My legs knew it. My legs were already screaming at me to back out through the door and put the whole block between us.

Instead I said, "You're not gonna try me?"

Stupid. Talking to it. But my voice came out steady, and the sound of it in that dead room felt like the first real thing I'd heard in days.

She didn't snarl. Didn't cock her head again. She just looked at me with those eyes, and that's when I noticed they weren't the right color. Not the milky white I'd gotten used to, the rotten-fish stare that told you the lights were on but nobody was home. Hers were brown. A warm brown, like coffee with too much cream, and they tracked my face the way a person's eyes do. The way a woman's eyes do, when she's deciding whether she likes you.

That stopped me colder than any snarl could have.

I'd cleared this pharmacy three weeks ago. Marked it. Spray-painted a fat X on the plywood over the door, meaning empty, meaning safe-ish, meaning I could come back. And I had, twice, to raid the antibiotic shelf and the good stuff behind the counter. So I knew this place. I knew every shadow in it.

I didn't know her.

She wore a sundress. Faded yellow, straps slipping off one shoulder, and it was clean. That's what my brain kept snagging on, the wrongness of it. Everything in this world was gray and crusted and smelled like old copper, and here was this girl in a clean yellow dress with clean brown hair falling past her collarbones, and her skin wasn't gray either, it was pale, sure, but it was skin, not that waxy paper-bag texture the others got. No sores on her mouth. No black veins climbing her neck.

"You're not like them," I said.

She took a step toward me.

My hand found the machete on my hip before my brain caught up. It was a reflex now, the way I breathed, the way I blinked. The blade scraped free of the duct-tape sheath and I held it low, loose, the way my brother taught me before any of this, back when we were just two guys arguing about whether to keep the generator or sell it.

The girl stopped at the sound. She looked down at the machete. Then she looked back up at me, and her mouth did something I hadn't seen a dead face do in eight months.

It frowned.

Not hungry. Not angry. Annoyed. Like I'd pulled a knife on her in a bar and she was deciding whether I was worth the trouble.

I lowered the blade an inch. Not all the way. I'm not an idiot.

"You understand me," I said. "Don't you."

She didn't nod. But she didn't deny it either, and I swear to God her eyes flicked to the door behind me, then back, and something passed across her face that I could only call patience. Like she was waiting for me to figure out what she already knew.

The pharmacy smelled like rot and dust and, under it, something faint and floral. Her. That was her. She smelled like soap. Like a girl who'd just gotten out of the shower, and the wrongness of that hit me harder than the blood on my hands.

I don't know how long we stood there. Long enough for my arm to ache from holding the machete. Long enough for the light through the window to shift and catch the dust hanging in the air between us like it was frozen.

Then she did the thing that broke me.

She sat down.

Just sat, right there in the middle of the aisle, cross-legged on the filthy tile like a kid waiting for story time, and she kept her eyes on me the whole way down. No lunging. No shrieking. She folded her hands in her lap and waited.

I'd killed eleven of them. I kept count because counting kept me sane. Eleven, and not one of them had ever done anything but try to eat me.

I couldn't kill this one. I don't know if it was the dress or the eyes or the way she sat there like she had all the time in the world, but the machete felt suddenly stupid in my hand, like a spoon at a funeral.

So I did the second dumbest thing I'd done all week.

I sat down too.

Across the aisle from her, back against the shelf, knees up, machete resting on the floor beside me. Close enough to grab. Far enough to feel like I'd made a choice.

We looked at each other. Two people in a dead pharmacy, one of us breathing hard and one of us not breathing at all, and the silence between us wasn't the empty kind. It was the full kind. The kind that has weight.

"My name's Cole," I said, because the quiet was worse than the talking.

She didn't answer. Of course she didn't. But her head tilted again, that little dog-listening motion, and her mouth curved, just barely, just at one corner, and I felt it land somewhere in my chest I'd thought was dead.

I hadn't felt that in a long time. Not since before. Not since the world went sideways and took everyone I loved with it.

Outside, a block over, a car alarm started wailing. The sound bounced off the dead buildings and came through the broken window, and I flinched, my hand going for the machete again on pure instinct.

The girl didn't flinch. She just watched me, and in her brown eyes I saw something that made the hair on my arms stand up.

She wasn't afraid of the noise.

She was afraid of me leaving.

I stayed where I was. The alarm kept screaming. My legs kept telling me to run. And the dead girl in the yellow dress kept looking at me like I was the first thing in a very long time that had made any sense to her at all.