“Game changer,” Jeremiah said and tapped the neck of his bottle against my own.
“Sure was.” With a gun, we were no longer at the mercy of raiders. Artemis did well with a crossbow and Macon with his axe, but as for sneaking up on threats, nothing was better than a gun. I probably spent way too many rounds on target practice, but I needed to be accurate. Sometimes you only got one shot.
I finished my first beer and Larry passed me another along with some sandwiches that had been made by the cafeteria, special order.
“So, why’d you leave the military?” I asked Jeremiah.
He made a sour face and peeled at the foil label on his bottle. “Too many goddamned rules. The government tells you when to sleep, when to wake up, when to eat, where to take a shit. Sit, lie down, jump. Gets old after a while. You feel me?’
I nodded. Made a hell of a lot of sense to me.
“I’ve been trying to convince Jeremiah to join the Fellowship for some time now,” Larry said and squeezed the man’s impressively built bicep. “Settle down with a nice little lady, maybe start a family.”
“Sounds too much like work,” Jeremiah said with a throaty chortle. “I’m too young for that shit. And I like my freedom. Give me my rig, some weapons, and a few dozen bloodthirsty Rabids to use as target practice, and I’m golden.”
“Do you enjoy that?” I asked, wondering if his enthusiasm was genuine or only some kind of macho act. “Killing Rabids?”
“It pays the bills, as they say. But if you’re asking if I have a guilty conscience about it, the answer is fuck no. I lost my best friend in the Forces to a pack of Rabids. Watched him get eaten alive. I had to climb a tree to get away and wait for the cannibals to leave. I can still hear him crying. Awful stuff. Ever since then, I’ve got no love for the mangy motherfuckers.”
I thought of my own mother’s transformation, the way she’d come at me, mouth gaping, teeth dripping with infectious spit. To see the woman who’d made sure I had my lunch everyday and helped me with my homework, reduced to a mindless, ravenous cannibal. The beer wasn’t sitting right in my stomach, so I shut down those thoughts.
“They’re working on a vaccine, which means a cure might be next. Hopefully we won’t have to hunt Rabids for much longer.” I wondered again how Kitten’s older brother was faring back in Atlanta. His trial must be up by now. Would he come to live here with us or stay there? Would Kitten want to go back to be with him once he was out?
“I’ll believe it when I see it. Until then, the only good Rabid is a dead one,” Jeremiah said.
Larry raised his bottle. “I’ll drink to that.”
I found myself toasting to the death of our diseased kind, and I felt some shame, thinking about the way Kitten had threaded flowers through his mother’s hair and sung to her right before I’d slit her throat. Larry was right. Compassion and kindness was a liability in Rabid Country. Jeremiah seemed to have sworn off all sentimentality, but it seemed like an empty existence. The fact that I had any decency left was largely because of Kitten.
How could I allow that tenderness to thrive and still keep my family safe?
Larry brought out a deck of cards and we played a few rounds of poker until it got dark. The old man lit an oil lamp for light and we continued playing. The Assholes were probably sitting around a fire in the backyard by now, burning the brush Macon collected from his job as a landscaper, trading the day’s gossip just like always. I’d told Kitten I’d be back early to talk and give him some special attention. My sweet, soft boy. God, how I loved him. I didn’t deserve him, but I wanted him with every bone in my body.
“Well, this has been fun.” I stood from the table and swayed a little on my feet. How many beers had I had? Four? Five? “But I gotta get back to the homestead.”
“Already?” Jeremiah said. “Come on, Cipher. You gotta let me try and win back some of my losses.”
“Can’t. I made a promise to my mister not to stay out too late.” Kitten was probably waiting for me to come home. I imagined his sweet, pining eyes blinking at me with devotion and eventually with lust as I did terrible, wonderful things to his tight little hole. He wouldn’t like that I’d been drinking, but I didn’t mind his fussing. It showed that he cared. And I would make it up to him, until he was squirming and shivering in my arms, begging me with his sweet little moans to keep going, to make him come harder than ever before…
“One shot,” Jeremiah said and pulled out a bottle of tequila, clunked it down on the table. My brow raised at the contraband and my watery gaze swung over to Larry. Rather than shut it down, the man produced three shot glasses from out of nowhere, and I thought, well, what the hell?
Maybe just one more hand.
FOURTEEN
KITTEN
It was getting lateand still no Cipher. Sitting around the fire with the other Assholes, my gaze kept swinging toward the back porch, expecting to see him arrive at any moment. He’d promised me to come home early. He wouldn’t break that promise, would he?
“Penny for your thoughts?” Macon asked. I’d been quiet all night, stuck in my head and rehearsing everything I wanted to say to Cipher.
I responded with a long sigh and Macon put his arm around me. “It’ll work out just fine, Kitten. All relationships have their ups and downs.”
“I hope so,” I said, but Cipher had to want it too. I couldn’t be the only one trying to make this work.
I was listening to Macon tell a story about a weedwacking job that got wildly out of hand when we heard a hollering from around front. Macon was on his feet immediately, axe in hand, circling the side of the house with me hot on his tail. In addition to the yelling, there was a loud banging on the front door followed by someone shouting obnoxiously, “Yoohoo, anybody home?”
We found Jeremiah, holding up Cipher who was high, drunk, or both, so out of it he could hardly stand on his own two feet.
