The Breaking of Liam

“We’ve got to go.” The first intelligible words I heard. Liam. His voice was low, but deadly calm. He grabbed my shoulders and raised me up, but I recoiled from him. He didn’t seem to notice. “Simone,” he said. “We’ve got to go. We can’t stay here.”

“I still have my gun,” Simone said.

I turned, saw the gun still locked in Liam’s hand and stifled a scream. Morgan’s body lay behind me. I couldn’t turn around, so I had to look at Liam’s face, blank as blank could be.

“The map is gone,” he said, “But I remember the way. Come.”

Simone started after him, and so did I. And then I glanced back. Morgan’s body lay crumpled, just off the road. Blood pooled around his head.

I vomited onto my shoes.

Liam turned around, dead eyed. “Keep up.”

Keep up? Rage welled up inside me. “Keep up? You just shot your brother and you’re telling me to keep up? You… you psychopath!”

Liam’s face twitched. His mouth opened and clenched shut. He turned around and kept walking.

“Hey!” I followed after him. “Hey!”

Liam spun around. His face was almost purple, so contorted he could hardly be recognized. “What do you want me to say?” he ground out. I could hardly hear him over my own pounding heart. Again, a little louder, “What do you want me to say?”

Simone grabbed me from behind. “Stop it!”

I didn’t care. I wasn’t even in my right mind. “I could kill you!”

Simone clamped her dirty hand over my mouth and restrained me. Liam turned around. His shoulders formed a hard line, a wall between us, and he marched on. Simone pushed me forward, after him.

“Stop,” she whispered in my ear. “Just leave him alone. You don’t understand.”

Something about her words clicked in my mind. My anger dissipated to a low burn, and I followed after Liam.

My legs pumped in an effort to keep up with Simone. My mind reeled in unintelligible patterns. My stomach ached from vomiting. I would keep up. I would.

The sun began to set. Liam pointed to a house in the distance, and we made it just as the sun slipped behind the hills. We had the last few twilight minutes to make sure the house was empty. It was.

But for safety, Liam packed us into a tiny, windowless room. Simone, then me, then him against the door. The air was stifling, reeking of my own sweat and that of my companions.

We were silent. There was nothing to say. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t. Beside me Liam was rigid as full rigor. His breath rasped in and out.

I huddled close to Simone so I didn’t have to touch him.

Then, like a rupture, I heard a tearing groan come from within him. He slumped against the door. His cries hissed through his teeth, until even that could not contain them, and he sobbed like a baby.

Strong Liam, so broken, terrified me but I could not comfort him. I would not. Instead I grabbed Simone’s hand as if she could reassure me. She did not. She pushed my hand away and climbed over me to Liam. She grabbed his hand and pressed it to her lips.

“Liam,” she whispered, “Liam.”

He stirred. She grabbed his head and cradled it in her arms, stroking his face. He clutched at her hands, weeping. She cried too.
And I just lay against the wall. Every part of me hurt, but I would not cry.

And then, as quickly as it came, the storm passed. Liam jerked away from Simone. She held out her hand to him, but he ignored it and pressed himself against the wall.

“Kayla.” His voice came, low and rough, out of the darkness. “Kayla, if this should happen to me or Simone…”
“No!” I sat up. “No!”

He reached across and grabbed me by the arm. His fingers dug in to my soft flesh. “I’m serious. You can’t let that happen to Simone and you can’t let that happen to me, just like I won’t let it happen to you. Understand?”

Admit it. You wouldn’t mind having the chance.

Like I could say that to him. I was afraid of him. He was a monster. “Understood,” I squeaked. I burrowed down against my pack. My shirt was damp, sticking to me with sweat. My stomach turned with… with what? Fear? Grief?

His hand was still on my arm, but his fingers loosened and gentled before dropping away. Simone crawled back and lay down between us. She whispered in my ear. “Don’t worry, Kayla. I can do it.”

Her words, tinged with resignation, chilled me right through.

I didn’t really sleep that night. I dozed. The house made too much noise, though it may have been my imagination. There were creaks, moans like that of the undead, groans from Liam. Once I thought I heard footsteps. Liam lifted his head and listened for a long time, but the footsteps never came closer.

Thunder crackled, louder and louder. Then rain rattled on the terra cotta tiles of the roof. The tiny stream of air under the door turned moist, carrying the scent of trees and fields. Out there, things were still living.

This is an excerpt from my recent novel, We are the Living.  I have to admit that, of all the characters, I loved Liam the most.  I said to him (because authors talk to their characters sometimes), “I’m sorry, but you are going to be wrecked by the time I’m done with you.”  But will he redeem himself?  Well, I can’t tell you that, can I?
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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.