Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine

An excerpt from my recent novel, We are the Living, a post-apocalyptic love story.  A more tender scene–at Mom’s advice 🙂

I examined his face. There was the beginning of a mask tan on his face. “Do you have to wear the mask all the time?” I asked, in a feeble attempt to redeem myself.
“No,” he said, no elaboration. He took another forkful and chewed slowly, the muscles of his jaw bunching and relaxing in slow, deliberate movements.
“I’m sorry. Perhaps not while you’re eating…”
“No, it’s fine,” he said after he swallowed, “I get along well there.”
“Yeah,” I said, half-laughed. “It looked like you’ve hit off with them.”
His lips twitched. “Heck of group of soldiers, in their own way.”
“Soldiers?”
He shrugged and laughed sheepishly. “Not really. None of them actually are—heck, they have MP5 submachine guns from the army, but about all they know about them is how to pull the trigger. It scares the hell out of me.”
“Yes it does!” A man about my age with a respirator hanging around his neck plopped down beside Liam. He fixed me with a stare that was a little wild. “After Liam teaches us, we’ll know which end to point.”
“Oh, shut up.” Liam grinned, but his eyes flicked toward me. “Even Kayla knows which end of the gun to point, and she’s probably better shot than you.”
“I don’t want to think about that, Liam.” For all my big talk, I didn’t want to think or talk about shooting. Panic, like bile, rose in my throat. I’d had dreams of the grey-eyed infected, still wearing a business suit, flying backward in a pink spray.
I felt Liam’s gaze on me again.
Max leaned in, his rubber mask clunking on the table. “Is he right?”
“Leave it, Max,” Liam said.
“You’ve shot infected?” he asked.
Liam grabbed Max and pulled him back onto the bench. “Leave it!” He turned to me. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up.” His navy eyes said he could guess what I was thinking. And then his lips twitched. “And Max is generally an idiot. Ignore him.”
I pushed away my plate. “I’ll be fine.” I’d be fine, but I wouldn’t be eating. I couldn’t expunge the image from my mind that quickly.
Liam sighed, elbowed Max, and stood up. “Walk with me?”
We slipped out of the courtyard, across the piazza, past the rusted-out Siena truck, and meandered down the road toward the east wall, all without speaking.
As we turned around at the far end of town in front of Rudy’s wheat beds, we paused and stood facing each other in the middle of the road.
“Are you sleeping any better, Kayla?” He asked.
“A little.” It seemed that my sanity had returned after joining the greenhouse crew, as if belonging brought life back to me. “You?”
He shrugged. “About the same. Listen, when Max was… yammering back there. What did you see?”
I looked up at him and gulped. It all flashed before me again. Grey eyes. Lipstick. Poof! The gun knocked me on my ass as her blood sprayed all around. I forgot to breathe.
His warm, rough hand closed around mine. “You tell me yours, I’ll tell you one of mine. No judgment, I promise.”
I swallowed. “I saw… I saw me and Simone in the back of that truck we took from the GI. We drove into the pack of infected, and I shot this one. She was in a business suit and then she just… disappeared.”
Liam flinched hard, and I could almost see the scene play out on his eyes. “I didn’t see that. I’m sorry.”
I swiped at my eyes. “Your turn.”
“I keep dreaming about Alex,” he said. “I’m driving faster and faster toward Torino and I can hear him screaming in the back of the truck.”
I was gut-punched. “He didn’t scream.”
He pressed his lips together, hard. “When we get to Torino, it isn’t him dead in the truck. It’s you.”
“Oh God.”
We stared at each other, with the full weight of our shared horror hanging between us. It drew us together slowly, and I sagged against him, my face pressed into his neck. We didn’t cry. We were past sorrow.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into his warm skin.
His hand slid up and caressed the back of my head. “Just don’t die, okay?”
“I’ll do what I can. Same to you.” I lifted my head and stared him in the face. “You take care of yourself, okay? Wear your mask, and sleep, and talk about… talk about this stuff.”
His face tightened and he sighed, “I’ll see what I can do.”
We began walking up the hill, slowly. “It bothers me that you aren’t armed here,” Liam said.
“That’s not Father Lucien’s style.”
“It’s my style,” Liam said, then quickly added, “Though I wish it wasn’t.”
“But do you need to fend off the infected any more?”
Far away a truck started up, and Liam glanced up the hill before looking me in the eye. “We’re not concerned about the infected. It’s the GI.”
The words I’d planned to say disappeared from my mouth. I blinked up at him.
He propelled me onward. The piazza was in sight. “I haven’t seen them recently. Don’t worry.”
“I wish you’d stay.”
“For my safety?”
“Yeah.”
We paused at the tailgate of the truck. Max and the other guy were already in the cab. Liam would be riding in the back, alone.
“I know I’m being stubborn about this,” Liam said quietly. “But I have my reasons, okay?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” I whispered. I reached out and touched his hand, and the look in his eyes squeezed the breath out of my lungs.

We are the Living is available on Kindle and Paperback through Amazon, as well as on Kobo.  You can read further samples here.

Judge this Book by its Cover

We are the Living is so close to release I can almost taste it.  In fact I do taste it.  It savours of puke at the back of my throat, I’m so dang nervous!  Here is the first look at the cover.

The description from the back:

“Kayla’s plans are as finely tuned as her cello, so when Liam joins her friends on their tour of Europe, she resents him.  The ex-soldier with a fragile psyche seems like a liability.  But when political turmoil in France explodes into a zombie apocalypse, their lives may depend on this warrior’s skills.

Their flight takes them to a tiny Italian community where a mysterious priest is curing zombies. There, the Kayla and Liam’s shared horror draws them together.  But they aren’t the only ones who want the cure.

As the threat of the living eclipses the danger of the undead, they must decide whether to run, or to fight for those they love.”

Stay tuned!

Geralyn

“They’re Overrunning the Barricade”

A scene from We are the Living, which is to be published this summer.  In this scene, the main characters have caught a ride on a military truck out of Paris, which is now overrun with zombies.  They stop at one of the military barricades for night, intending to carry on the next morning.  The scene is from the point of view of Kayla, the lead female character. To my gentler readers: this scene contains strong violence.

We were stopped in the middle of a two-lane road, and warm, humid air. There were the shadows of a few large buildings nearby, maybe a chimney. It was the industrial outskirts of the city, the very last of Paris. The only light was the blinding spotlights set up at the roadblock. Trucks, like the one we’d come in, were clustered around. The white light silhouetted a few soldiers.
Liam and one of his new soldier friends walked us across the road, up to a troop-carrier with a canvas cover at the rear of the roadblock. Again we found ourselves rolling out spare clothes and trying to get ourselves comfortable on the hard metal truck bed.

“They can’t expect road-blocks to keep a mob of infected inside the city,” Morgan whispered as Liam settled down beside him.

Liam sighed. “There are patrols around the border. But you’re right. There’s no way they can contain the whole city. Go to sleep, Morgan. We’ve made good progress today.”
I lay my head down and cuddled up to Alex, my back to Morgan and Liam. I heard a click and looked back. Liam had popped the magazine out of the pistol.

“How many rounds?” Morgan asked.

“Full mag minus one.”

The lost feeling crept in again. My father owned guns, and I’d seen him shoot them, but they’d always scared me. I’d always refused to shoot. I bit my lip and pushed my face into Alex’s shoulder. I hoped to God I could keep that policy.

***

I heard a yell, and a chatter of gunfire. Liam was up before I’d lifted my head. Light shone, green through the canvas cover of the truck, then a square of brightness as Liam peeked out the back.

His hand closed around the pistol in his waistband. “Infected,” he hissed.

I never saw what was coming toward us, and for that I was grateful. Liam told me later what he’d seen—a wave of infected rushing toward us, unmindful of the gunfire and the bodies falling around them. The rattle of small arms was joined by the deeper clamor of a machine gun. The zombies came on, undeterred. As long as they could stay on their feet they still moved.

I, cringing in the corner of the truck bed, still heard a scream even though my hands were clamped over my ears. Then came the ringing report of Liam’s pistol and Morgan’s yell. A disfigured face gaped at me through the gap between the canvas and truck before Liam’s gun barked again. The head exploded backward and out of sight.

“They’re overrunning the barricade!” Liam cried. He lunged toward the canvas flap.

Morgan grabbed him by the jacket. “Don’t you dare go out there!”

Liam staggered back, and steadied himself. He stood taut, gun ready. Something scrabbled on the metal behind me. I whimpered, crawled toward the middle. The barrage of machine-gun fire faltered, stopped, started again. An assault rifle chattered, just on the other side of the canvas and metal and something splattered against the side. There was a low, animalistic moan. Again, scrabbling, like claws or nails on the side of the truck. The gunfire beside us stopped. The machine gun stopped. A garbled scream. The canvas at the back of the truck bowed toward us in the imprint of a head and clawing hands. Liam turned toward it and shot straight through the fabric, right between the pits where the eyes were. The green canvas turned brown as it slid down the side and out of sight. Another moan, then, silence.

In the quiet, a soft patter started on the canvas. Rain.

Still Liam stood. Morgan crouched beside him. Alex slowly rose to his feet. Liam held out his hand. “Don’t.”

We waited. The drizzle became a downpour. I watched with dull eyes as the dark smear on the canvas ebbed downward. It was still quiet.

Finally, Liam eased the edge of the canvass away and peeked out. “Oh, God.” He pulled his head back in and pressed one hand against his chest. He’d gone pale against his grey-blue jacket. He sucked a slow breath through his nostrils and shut his eyes. His body steeled, and he opened his eyes. “Morgan, come. Let’s make sure it’s clear.”

Morgan’s eyes were huge in his pale face but his jaw was just as tight as Liam’s and eyes every bit a stern behind his glasses, even though I could see his hand shaking as he rose to his feet. They jumped down. I heard Morgan say something, and Liam reply. Their footsteps departed.

“E-Everyone’s dead,” I said. “The infected got them all. They’re all dead.” I grabbed for Alex’s hand, as if it were an anchor, because my world was split in two, so far from my control.

“Kayla, we’re alright,” he breathed in my ear, but I could hear the strain in his voice. His fingers were clammy.

I took a shuddering breath. “For how long?”