Walter pulled Bing’s hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to the tight knuckles. “I really want to hold you right now.”
“We have to find Sand. She’s the only one who knows what’s going on. Maybe together we can get her to explain it.”
Walter nodded. “Yeah, we do. But we also need to take care of ourselves or we won’t be any good if it comes to a fight. That was something you were never any good at, even when things were going your way.”
“What?” Bing jolted enough that Walter felt it through their joined hands.
“We lived together for a year and a half. You were the one constantly pushing to get things done, to work on the script or the set. Even going to industry parties was about furthering your career. You didn’t like those things—”
“I hated them.”
“But you went, and it was work.”
Bing nodded. “We were trying to build something. We were trying to—”
“Make a movie. Yeah. And in all that, who pushed you to take a breather, to relax before we tried again the next day?”
Bing rolled his head so that he gazed at Walter. “You,” he said softly. “Always you.”
“And you thought I was just being weak.”
Bing didn’t answer, but Walter knew it was true. You couldn’t live with someone 24/7 without knowing, deep down, the other person despised your weaknesses. That every asthma attack was met with tolerance and a vague sense of disappointment. Bing was ever patient, but he never found any kind of work/life balance.
“I was an idiot,” Bing said.
“Yup,” Walter said with a grin. “But you were also a product of your upbringing. Now you get to choose. Who do you want to be? What is important to you?”
“Feelings?” he scoffed.
Walter didn’t say anything. He’d wanted Bing to say thathe, Walter, was important. That their relationship and their movie were important. Hell, he’d have been happy with a sex joke at this point, because that would give Walter some value in Bing’s life. Right now he was just the driver on the way to see some bizarro Kangaroo King.
But he swallowed those thoughts down. He was used to being discounted, ignored, and dismissed. He was a screenwriter, after all, in a family of doctors and engineers. But it hurt. It hurt because his best friend and lover couldn’t value what they felt for one another. And that that made him feel like shit.
So he focused instead on something Bing did value—getting ahead of whatever paranormal disaster was going on. They were about five minutes away from the big red circle on the map. It was a small town that had been struggling before Wisconsin gave rise to the big black lake of expanding doom. This town had been well inside the dead zone, so the plants had died and the people had fled. If it had been in Texas, a tumbleweed would be blowing through. But it was in Wisconsin, so Walter expected to smell bad cheese or something. What did he know? He was from Los Angeles.
He was about to ask Bing where they should go next, but the man abruptly straightened and his nose twitched. “Do you smell that?”
“What?” They were in a moving car rented by his production company. All he smelled was stale coffee.
Bing put down the window while Walter slowed. They were driving past boarded-up buildings in a barren town, heading toward an empty central square. Frankly it was depressing as hell, but Bing was practically vibrating as he turned his face into the breeze.
“They’re here.”
“Auntie Sand?”
“I don’t know. Someone. A lot of someones.”
“Really? Where?” Because the entire place looked deserted. Or it did—until he came to a dead stop in the center and saw an SUV outside a large building with a sign that readMegalopolis Courthouse.
Walter snorted. “They seriously named this place Megalopolis?” The town couldn’t have had more than five hundred people.
Bing shrugged. “Isn’t that an American belief? If you build it, they will come.”
“That was a movie and….” He shrugged. “Yes, that’s the theory. Obviously it didn’t work out here.”
“Yet,” Bing quipped as he stepped out of the car and looked around. “Something is here.” He peered at the SUV. “I think that’s Nero’s ride.”
Walter climbed out of the rental car. He didn’t see anything except the SUV. “Lead the way.”
