Love and Decay, Volume Eight (Episodes 9-12, Season Three) (30 page)

“He believed you about Page? About your
blood?” Hope ignited inside of me, blazing through my blood and
digging down to my bones. Could we really stay here? Did we really,
finally,
hopefully
have a
future?

Hendrix shrugged one shoulder, “I don’t think
he believed me, but he wants to see for himself. He’s thrilled I
said we would let him run tests on us. He’s all for that. But he’ll
have to see for himself whether we’re all that we claim. That’s
fine with me. We’re good for it.”

“Do you really think it’s in all of you?” I
had never heard Hendrix claim this before and while I had wondered
it myself, I was surprised to hear him declare it to complete
strangers.

“Out of six of us, two have been immune so
far. The odds are in our favor at the very least.”

“That’s a good thing,” I whispered. I ran my
hand down Hendrix’s bare chest and marveled at the work of art
before me. He needed to gain weight and there were scars from
shoulder to shoulder telling the story of our journey, but he was
still beautiful. He was still an incredible sight to behold.

And he was mine.

“I’ve made it very clear they can’t touch
Lennon yet. Not for a long while. I’m just as curious as they are
to see if it’s genetic through generations, but we’re not in a
hurry. The rest of us have plenty to donate to the cause until he’s
of a better age.”

Tears welled in my lashes again. “Is he okay
then? And Haley?”

“They’re fine,” he whispered. He tried to
hide the brokenness in his voice, but I caught the catch in his
throat, the glistening in his eyes. “Everyone is alive and well.”
We were silent for a minute as we acknowledged that
not
everyone was alive and well. Not everyone made it.

I closed my eyes and fought the shuddering
sob as it vibrated through my chest. Hendrix scooped me into his
arms and held me tightly to him. We cried together then. We cried
from sweet relief and from the torture of missing Vaughan, of
knowing he was so close, but didn’t finish the journey with us.

We lay like that for a very long time.
Hendrix’s hot tears landed in my hair and I soaked his chest, but
neither of us moved.

There was a part of me that knew how sacred
this moment was between us. My husband wouldn’t always keep his
emotions this close to the surface, but he needed me until this
heartbreak receded and I needed him.

Eventually,
we found control again and Hendrix pulled back so he could look at
me. “We’re safe for now, Reagan. We’re truly safe. They’ve run out
of Feeders. Oliver says they’ve migrated elsewhere or they’ve been
used in their tests. They were at their wit’s end until we showed
up. They were ready to give up and we’re hopefully offering them a
breakthrough.”

“They’re going to let us stay?” My heart
fluttered with the idea. Granted I didn’t know anything about these
people. I didn’t know anything but that they had clean sheets and
electricity. And that was enough for me.

If Matthias could have offered me those
things, I would have been a lot less likely to kill him.

Just kidding, I still would have killed
him.

He was a psycho.

“There are only three of them left,” he
explained. “There’s Oliver, whom you met. Then there’s Shay. She’s
Australian, I think? She’s not a big talker, but I think that’s
what her accent is. Then there’s Fang, who is from Hong Kong.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “Fang, geez. I
didn’t expect you to say Hong Kong.”

Hendrix smiled at me. “Were you expecting me
to say werewolf?”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“He’s okay, Reagan. All of them are. Maybe a
bit neurotic and paranoid, but I can’t blame them for that. They
seem to really want to save humanity and that’s what we came here
to do. I think they can help and
I
believe that we
can help them.”

“You trust them?” I heard the fear and doubt
in my voice, but there was no point in covering it up. I knew
Hendrix had gone through or was going through this same thing. We
had learned the same lessons.

Maybe in different ways.

But the outcome was the same. We didn’t trust
anybody but each other and our family. That was it. There were no
exceptions. Ever.

“No,” he answered like I knew he would. “I
don’t trust them, but my instinct tells me we’ll be all right. I
trust that.”

“I trust that too,” I promised him.

He leaned down and kissed me again. He
worshiped my mouth with his intimate knowledge and expert tongue. I
found myself pressing into him, scratching at his bare skin and
fighting the sheet that separated us.

“Not yet,” he whispered against my lips. “I
told them I would introduce you when you woke up.”

“
Well,
that’s not as fun as what I had planned,” I pouted.

My body shook with his laughter because of
how
firmly
pressed together we
were. “We’ll come back to this.” He pulled back my sheet and
examined my naked body. “To exactly this.”

“I love you,” I confessed. There wasn’t
anything else to
say at
this
moment. We had been to hell and back and that was the one thing
that remained constant. I loved him and I loved his family. I loved
my friends and I loved those we’d collected along the way.

We had battled the decay of this world and
the evil that reigned, but love was what got us through. Love was
what saved us.

“I love you too.” His hand cupped my face and
he held my gaze. “Thank you for bringing us here. Thank you for
being undaunted by the journey. Thank you for your relentless
spirit and sheer determination. Not one of us would be standing
here without you, Reagan. We have you to thank for our
survival.”

Surprised emotion punched me in my tender gut
and I had to try very, very hard not to cry. “You can’t say all of
those things to me,” I rasped.

He canted his head to one side and asked,
“Why not?”

“Because those things are true about you, not
me. I wasn’t relentless, I was stubborn. And I was far from
undaunted. Very, very far. We wouldn’t be here without you,
Hendrix. Every step I took was for you… because of you. And your
family.”

“I love you, Willow. You know that. I have
devoted my life to loving you, to cherishing you… to protecting
you. I have the highest opinion of you. But in this one thing, I’m
afraid you’re wrong.”

I tried not to smile. Tried and failed. “I’m
not Willow anymore.”

He stared at my lips and I watched delicious
distraction cloud his fierce blue eyes. “I’m okay with that.”

“Me too.”

“Ready to meet everyone else?”

I gave into the reality that I was going to
have to get out of this bed. I couldn’t stay here forever with
Hendrix, but we could come back. That promise was the only reason I
was able to put my feet on the cold concrete ground and go about
the tedious task of getting dressed.

Thankfully, Oliver had handed over some clean
clothes. There was even a pair of generic, boring white underwear
waiting for me. They were uninteresting, but they were clean and
fresh and not… gross. So basically they were the best thing
ever.

I also received khaki pants and a green polo
that had the logo of the research facility stitched over the breast
pocket. I pulled my hair into a braid and tied it with a piece of
thread
I tore from the
polo
.

Hendrix had gone to the trouble of giving me
a sponge bath that I now realized I sort of remembered. It came
back to me in flashes of consciousness in between memories of
debilitating stomach pain and embarrassing bodily functions.

Thank God, this man had already married me. I
needed a
binding
contract after
what he’d endured over the past twenty-four hours.

I also remembered working toilets.

We’d officially found the Promised Land.

Hendrix dressed in an identical outfit, only
with men’s boxer briefs instead of the granny panties I was
currently rocking. We slipped on black socks and our old boots. We
would have to remedy the shoe situation, but for now this was a
thousand times better than what we’d showed up in.

Hendrix opened the door and revealed a narrow
hallway with dimmer track lighting. Doors were spaced out on either
side of the corridor and I assumed they were more living spaces,
but I had no real knowledge to back that up.

Hendrix led the way through a maze of
hallways. At one
point,
we stepped
through an arched metal doorway and entered a less-sterilized,
less-military way of living. Metal walls gave way to painted
drywall and natural lighting. Windows graced the space and
transformed the cold prison-like feel into something warm and
inviting.

We kept walking and eventually found the
clinical side of things again. Only this was actually clinical for
a reason. Labs and lab equipment sat behind glass walls meant to
observe the scientists at work. More glass rooms with metal tables
in
them
sported bloodstains and
hand and feet restraints.

I had to assume those were guest quarters for
Feeders.

I didn’t see any of those rooms occupied at
the moment and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d held
in.

Eventually,
we passed those too and came to another common room. This one was
split in half. On one side of the
room
recreational activities littered the space. There
was a ping-pong table and a foosball table. There was a TV set up
in front of couches and an empty vending machine with no glass. On
the other side of the room were round tables and a cafeteria style
kitchen.

This was where we found everyone waiting for
us.

I stumbled to a stop as soon as we walked
into the room and let the peace of seeing my friends so at ease
settle over me. It took me a full minute to believe that this was
real… that we were really here and not in immediate danger.

I couldn’t remember feeling like this. I
couldn’t remember not choking on the panic that we could die at any
second or that nobody was hunting us. I couldn’t remember seeing
Haley so serene as she nursed a contented Lennon on the couches
across the room or Page so happy as she giggled at something
Harrison and King said to her. I couldn’t remember Nelson looking
so happy or Miller not vibrating with the rage that consumed
him.

There was an intense grief that still
followed us, that still kept Tyler isolated and despairing, but for
the most part we had set that aside for right now. My friends let
this new environment mean something profound to them and I
appreciated that.

We would have time to grieve Vaughan and the
last three years. We would have time to process everything we had
been through and all that had happened to us.

All that we had done and been responsible
for.

We would have time to breathe.

Time to heal.

We would have time to just be.

Or I hoped so. It was my fervent prayer that
we could take some much needed time and
rest
.

They looked up at me as I walked into the
room and they smiled at me. All of these people that I loved and
cared for
smiled at me
and they were beautiful.

Sure, they were too skinny, they
were beat
up and they were hurting… but they
were also alive. And now they had hope.

I had never seen them look more striking. My
heart swelled in my chest and a few pieces of my sanity snapped
back together.

We made it.

We
actually
made it.

“I’m Oliver,” the man from before stepped
forward with his hand stretched toward me. I took it and let his
strong hand envelop mine in a firm grip. “We met before, but I’m
not sure if you quite remember.”

His British accent was as strong as ever,
clipped and precise. I smiled and it felt natural… it
felt
real. “I’m Reagan. Sorry about earlier… I
just… Don’t ever eat dog.”

He chuckled good-naturedly. “We have been
sufficiently warned. Those little
buggars
. We’ve been trying to catch them for months. They
don’t trust us and we can’t figure out why.”

It was my turn to laugh. “They think you eat
Zombies,” I explained. “They can’t figure out what other reasons
you’d have for hunting them.”

Oliver’s head dropped back as he let out a
bark of laughter. “That explains so much. You’ve no idea,” he
grinned. “See, not one of us is fluent in Spanish. It’s made our
time here very
interesting
.”

“Believe me, if we didn’t have Adela, we
wouldn’t have made it very far.” I shuddered to think just how
quickly our journey through Mexico would have ended.

“We’ve heard,” Oliver sympathized.
“Cannibalism is no way to go.”

I wondered just how much I’d slept through
when Harrison yelled out, “We would have been fine!”

Adela retorted with some sassy Spanish and I
was relieved to know that some things were still the same between
us.

“Anyway,” Oliver continued, apparently
already used to our antics, “This is Shay.” A severe looking woman
stepped forward. Her blonde hair had been pulled back into a tight
bun and her lab coat was pristinely white. She didn’t smile or
wave. She
simply
tipped her chin
once and stepped back. “And this is Fang,” Oliver continued. A
slight Chinese man waved from across the room. I waved back. “They
don’t look it now, but they’re very anxious to get started. We’ve
been at a standstill for months. We’d all but given up on advances
and resigned ourselves to one endless brick wall. You couldn’t have
shown up at a better time.”

Nerves flipped in my gut and my hope
brightened to almost blinding levels. “Do you really think there’s
a possibility for a cure? Or vaccine or whatever? Do you really
think you have enough to find something?”