After the Cure by Deirdre Gould (year 7 reading list .txt) 📕

light. A few broken cot springs and lost gurney wheels were piled against the corner of the abandoned medical hut. Nella shoved them aside as she pulled on the flimsy plywood door.

It was dark and still inside except for an occasional stray gust that made it through the gaps in the door frame. Nella sighed with relief and pushed further in to make room for Frank. She pulled her pack down and felt around for the battery powered lantern. It had been an expensive trade but she’d never regretted it. The doctor in her occasionally tried to force her to conquer the basic fear of the dark, but after what she’d seen during the Plague, she doubted if she would ever be able to walk into a dark place without a bristling pang of adrenaline rippling up her back.

The lantern lit up the small hut completely. It was empty except for a jumble of cots in the corner.

“Didn’t anyone clean these sites up before they moved on?” Frank asked.

Nella struggled to pull a cot free of the tangled mess. She dropped her pack onto the cot and began hunting for warmer clothes. “This was one of the first camps I think. As soon as we knew the Cure worked, there was a mad frenzy to push outward and retake areas as quickly as possible. We were routinely given a day to pack after the patients had recovered. The Barrier was moved outward on that day, and then we hiked to the next site,” she said as he dropped his pack beside hers. She shrugged. “I did always think someone came behind us to break everything down that was left. I guess I was wrong.”

Frank took off his suit coat and began unbuttoning his shirt with one hand while the other searched his open pack. Nella turned toward her own pile of clothes with a blush. She pulled off her boots and jacket, trying to think of a way to change without him looking at her.

“Is it far from here to the smuggler’s entrance?” he asked, startling her.

“No-” she said and turned around. She sucked in a shocked breath. He was half turned away from her and small shattered moons glowed dark against his skin. She had felt the edges of the rough craters in his skin before and had seen them briefly from across a room, but the livid twists of purple along his arm were different, more real this close.

“What?” he asked, turning his head to see why she had stopped. His face blanched and he smiled, embarrassed as she reached out and touched one of the scars gently, as if it would burst open. “I know, it’s not attractive. But you should have seen them when they were new,” he turned to face her and rubbed one of the broken crescents stamped into his arm. “They were far, far worse. Trust me. It’s taken years for them to fade this much.”

She stepped in closer to him, tracing the edge of the teethmarks with a feather light finger. The arch was so small. She could see that the boy must have twisted his head at the last second, trying to take the flesh with him because the scar was pulled and stretched, elongated.

“I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt,” she said. She looked up at his face. “Sorry,” she said suddenly, “I didn’t mean to make you self conscious. I just didn’t realize he’d bit you so many times and that hard.”

She moved her hand from the curved punctures on his long arm to the shattered starburst on his shoulder. He was still, as if he didn’t want to frighten her. But she felt a ripple start deep under his skin as her fingertips slid over his shoulder. She felt the pattern of his breath change, like wave racing in front of a storm.

He had been beautiful once, she could guess that. He carried himself differently when he was around her, as if he had forgotten his ugliness. As if it were a mask he could simply slip out of. As if he were falling back to an older self.

Nella had stopped thinking of him as ugly, but if she were honest, she knew he was not beautiful. It wasn’t the scars, not really. It was the mark that severe want had left on him, in him. He was still so thin, even six years after surviving starvation. She could see the twisting cable of muscle in his arms too clearly. With no fat to soften them, it was as if his skin were peeled back and all the secret life within him exposed upon the air. Each bone in his chest was a cathedral arch pushing painfully through a thin canvas of flesh. Almost without realizing it, she kissed the jutting ridge of rib, half in sorrow, half in longing.

She felt his hands shake as they closed around her waist. Hunger wasn’t the only want he’d held for too long. He baked under her hands, a frustrated flame consuming itself even in the chilled early spring air. The way he spoke- or didn’t speak to people who abused him, as if he were no longer their equal because he was not one of them, because he had lost- something. Nella’s eyes blurred as she thought of all the somethings, all the beautiful somethings, the world had lost, and she closed her eyes so he wouldn’t see.

“Nella,” he said, his voice thick and rough. He pulled her slowly into him. She could feel his heart under her palm. Every beat was thunderous with yearning. If she could just take away some of the want, fill it for a little while, maybe he would get some of himself back. She slid her hands around the back of his neck and felt a sigh travel from his chest to his throat and then warm in her ear as she pressed against him. She kissed the jagged scar on his cheek with soft lips.

The tight control he had maintained over himself for so long was gone. He turned his head and caught her mouth with his. For a second, he kissed her with so much force that she would have fallen backward if he had not been holding her so tightly.

But she sank into him, like water over dry earth, melted and curved around him and he quickly grew gentle again. He still held her with one arm. He tried to unbutton her blouse with the other hand, but he was shaking so badly that he only managed the top two before she took pity on them both and began to help.

Frank untucked the bottom of her shirt and slipped his large hand underneath the fabric, kissing the base of her throat as his fingers glided over the skin of her stomach and rested between her breasts. A ripple of joy started beneath his warm hand and spread like an echo bouncing over her skin. She became frantic to undo the last buttons as he pressed into her mouth again and his hand slid over her breast. She shrugged the shirt off at last and gasped as the cold air hit her back. She reached between them and unzipped her skirt. It fell onto the dirt floor with a soft puff of air.

He lifted her from the floor, both of his long arms wrapped around her. She locked her legs around his hips. Frank’s breath was warm and wet through the thin silk of her bra and again on the overcharged skin of her stomach.

A small explosion bloomed in the center of her chest and spread outward. “Oh God,” she whispered.

Frank stopped for a moment. He lifted his face to look at her. His breath was rapid and thin, as if he were drowning in her. He reached behind her with one hand and she tensed, waiting for the crash of the hiking packs being shoved from the cot. But it didn’t happen. He pulled his arm back and began wrapping her shoulders in the warm fabric of her sweater.

“It’s too cold Nella,” he said softly. He relaxed his hold on her and gently let her stand on the ground. He traced her jaw line and her lips with his thumb and bent his head so that their foreheads touched. She could feel the pull of their breath between them, a whirlpool of warm air sucking her towards him more and more. His heart thudded against her hand, a rapid chant of “I want, I want, I want.”

Frank let a ragged sigh wobble its way out of him before he lifted his head. He let his fingers trail down her neck and over her breast before dropping way from her. “I’ve never wanted anything so badly in all my life,” he said quietly, “Not even Sarah. But not here, not in this place.” She looked up and was surprised to see his eyes were red. He smiled nervously. “Besides,” he said, “it’s too cold, we’ll freeze to death.”

Nella warmed his wind-chapped face with her hands. “We have a long way to go, and not much time,” she said, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have- shouldn’t have interrupted our preparations.”

She let him go and pulled the sweater over her shoulders. Frank slowly buttoned the front, his fingers briefly traveling up her center like tiny solar flares as he pulled the fabric closed between them. He kissed the corner of her jaw and whispered into her ear, “If you knew how much I’ve wanted to touch you since I shook your hand the first time we met, you wouldn’t apologize.”

Then he drew away and turned back to finish dressing. Nella drew on her jeans and tried not to feel as if she’d trampled something.

 

Beyond the Barrier

The shadow of the Barrier was creeping long and seeping into the plain when they reached the little break that made the smuggler’s entrance. The Barrier had stopped there a few years before as the City’s manpower reached its limits. There were simply no more people to guard the Barrier so it stopped expanding. Cure teams and scavenging missions still extended beyond the Barrier, but as fewer and fewer Infected were found and old resources grew ever more scarce, it looked as if the Barrier was now a permanent fixture instead of a mobile one. Someone had utilized a small gap between sections of the hollow cement wall that made up the Barrier and widened it into a tunnel with a rickety, squealing metal door at either end.

After checking the area to make sure that they weren’t watched, Frank opened the door, wincing at the sound of metal scraping against concrete.

“Wait,” said Nella, putting a hand on the door, “Have you been outside since the Cure?”

“Not since I walked to the City.”

She put her pack down and knelt beside it, opening the side pockets. She pulled out a dart gun and the box of Cure darts Dr. Carton had given her. She silently loaded it. She hesitated for a moment and then drew out a pistol from the other side pocket. Frank crouched beside her.