His mouth hovered over my breast and dampened my shirt. I exhaled, “Yeah, that’s the one.”
We tossed our clothes on the floor. Guns followed. A sheen of sweat stuck my back to the leather couch. His mouth found mine, his muscles flexing around me. Our kissing deepened. We began to share breaths.
“I’m the luckiest man on the planet,” he murmured.
“Uh huh.”
“I’m the only man who gets to make love to his wife.”
I sighed. We couldn’t assume I was the only woman. And he told me women didn’t mutate immediately after exposure. Maybe some recovered from the sickness.
He pulled back. “Where are you?”
“Why do they call them nymphs?”
He perched his chin on his fist. “A nymph is a smaller immature version of an adult bug. Like a baby bug.”
This implied nymphs would grow into aphids. Which meant aphids weren’t just male. “What do you know about them?”
He traced a finger over my ribs. “I don’t know, Ba-y. Haven’t seen one since those first couple weeks. I think they all died. In those videos I watched online, they looked sick, but not scary—at least when they weren’t attacking. Not scary like an aphid.”
I thought about the alabaster eyes that stared back at me when the aphid dragged me to the bottom of the pool. “But they attacked people. Turned their victims into monsters.”
“Yeah, but in those first few days, everyone was doing whatever was needed to keep their families safe. Honestly, Evie, I don’t know what I would’ve done if you woke up next to me with eggs for eyes. Which probably means most husbands, boyfriends, didn’t survive.”
Didn’t survive. He meant mutated. Unlike all the children and elderly, who died because they were too weak to make the transition.
Fingers moved down, explored my hip, kneaded and circled their way to my inner thigh. His body hummed against mine. Worry lines vanished from his forehead and the heat in his eyes burned out the remainder of my anxiety. The moment he filled me and our bodies slapped together, the storm of pleasure was all I cared about.
Thump.
The muffled echo from the basement stole the air around us. Neither of us moved. Or breathed.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The walls vibrated. Then the shatter of glass. The basement window.
I gasped. “Joel?”
He jumped off me, gathered the guns. I followed at his heels, my pulse a hot beat in my ears. In our bedroom, he dressed, strapped on his holster and hooked mags on his belt.
I pulled on my clothes with trembling fingers. “Where are you—”
“Shh.” He shoved my carbine against my chest. “Stay here.”
“No.”
He narrowed his eyes at me, jaw set. “Wait. Here.”
Scratch. Scratch. Thump.
The basement door.
“Fuck you.”
“Dammit, Evie.” An impatient exhale. “Don’t forget your fucking vest.” He jerked his head to my bullet proof vest slouched in the corner and bolted from the room.
I lugged on the vest and carbine and found him squatting at the top of the basement stairs. If the door at the bottom remained closed, we couldn’t tell. Sandbags stacked to the ceiling and three stairs deep. The true barricade. The painstaking task took him about a week of collecting and hauling. Another activity I left him to do alone.
The scratching grew more persistent.
“Whatever it is, it can’t get in,” I whispered.
“It’s already in. It’s already in our fucking house.” Deep creases marred his brow.
“Fine. But it can’t get to us.”
The scratching stopped. The distant sound of waves broke through the sudden blanket of silence. Like the brushing of water along the shore at low tide. But it wasn’t water. It was sand. The steady flow of sand pouring out of our sandbag wall.
Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.
James Thurber
An orange glow spread over the horizon and dimmed into the violet sky above. Joel and I crept down the hill along our house to the backyard, where the walk-out basement was exposed.
His fist popped up and his eyes bored into me. I nodded. No sound. We edged though the dark and I gathered my courage. Did we make the right decision? We could have waited inside for the sandbag wall to empty and killed the bastards as they came through. Maybe it wasn’t too late to turn back.
We rounded the final corner and I matched his steps to the daylight windows that dressed the basement’s foundation. June bugs tapped off the wide lens of my flashlight like popcorn. Shards crunched under our boots as we neared the broken window, under the cover of the deck forty feet above.
His back stiffened. Then he sucked in a breath and let out a shrill whistle. I shrunk into myself. My eyes darted behind us, expecting the backyard shadows to solidify and attack.
He shouted into the hole, “Hello.”
A toad croaked a mating song from the thick sedge of the surrounding woods.