Hot and Haunted

Hot and Haunted

MEGAN HART, LAUREN HAWKEYE, SARANNA DEWYLDE

Contents

N
OTHING
E
LSE
M
ATTERS

Megan Hart

Chapter One

S
KIN ON SKIN.

It was what she always needed after a shift outside. Hours spent in the stink and the heat of the city. Hours spent ramped up on adrenaline, terror so constant she could no longer feel it as anything but an absence of emotion. Her neck and back and shoulders ached and burned from carrying her pack, her weapon, and, more rarely, live bodies to safety. Most often the bodies she carried were already dead when she piled and burned them.

Too many of them were the Resurrected.

First a hot shower, though the water always got cold too soon. Eventually, she supposed, the city water would stop pumping altogether. The generator would run out of gas, and she wouldn’t be able to get any more. But not today, Lira thought as she tipped her face to the rapidly cooling spray and rinsed away the grime. Please. Not today.

Shower, then a quick meal of whatever the day’s cook had put together, or maybe something from one of the foil pouches they were supposed to be saving but had already begun digging into when the fresh-food supplies dwindled. Simple but necessary pleasures to wash away the day’s work and refuel her.

But what she really
needed
was skin on skin. Mouths searching, hands roaming, the stroke of tongues. She needed to devour someone and be devoured—but wasn’t that just some kind of sickness? She spent her days outside doing her best not to get eaten, and when she came back in, all she could think about was consuming. Destroying and being destroyed.

She spent her days with death; fucking made her feel alive.

“Lira?”

She turned at the sound of the familiar voice. The
plink-plink
of the water still dripping from the showerhead was loud on the concrete floor. She slicked her hair back from her face, her nipples already going tight. Heat rose between her legs.

His name was Anthony, and he was beautiful. He wore a pair of faded jeans and had bare feet because the floor in the shower room was always damp, and when you had a good pair of shoes, you made sure to take care of it because you might not get another. His T-shirt, snug against his broad, muscled chest, had probably once been blue but had faded over many washes to become an uneven, steel gray. He held out a towel.

Lira took it, but instead of wrapping it around herself, she hung it on a nearby hook. She put her wet hands on the front of his shirt, pushing him a step or two back against the wall. He was taller by a good few inches, but that didn’t stop her from winding her fingers in the thickness of the dark hair at the base of his neck and pulling him down to her.

The kiss bruised, but that was the way she liked it. Their teeth clashed for a second before his mouth opened all the way, and his tongue found hers. His hands, those big, callused hands, fit to her naked waist as she worked the button and zipper on his jeans. He was already hard, his cock long and thick and lovely and in her hand within seconds. He moaned into her mouth.

She got his jeans down as far as his knees, hobbling him. Where did he have to go, anyway, but harder against the wall? His hands tightened at her waist, lifting her. She fit against him just right, her knees gripping him, his cock trapped between them.

Needy and greedy, Lira let go of his shoulder, confident Anthony wouldn’t let her fall. Her body had grown tight with muscle, and she’d become much thinner in these after-days, when the work was hard and finding food was harder; but also, Anthony was strong. He had the lean, muscled body of a man used to working hard, and not at the gym. She knew the taste of him and how he sounded when he came, that he didn’t like eggs but would eat just about anything else, that he’d been visiting his brother in Pittsburgh when everything began—but she didn’t know much beyond that. He’d have told her anything she wanted to know, she knew that, but Lira had always been careful not to ask. She didn’t know what he’d done in his life before, but she guessed he’d worked with his hands, building things. Anthony had been the one to make the barriers upstairs in the synagogue to protect all of them down here below in the basement shelter.

She used her free hand to slide between them, gripping his erection to ease him inside her and settled slowly onto his cock, both of them letting out a sigh at that initial pleasure. She slanted her mouth across his, the kiss gentler this time. The soft probe of his tongue urged her to open wider for him. She thought he breathed her name, but if he did, it was lost in the low, soft moan he gave when she rocked her hips forward.

Anthony turned them both so Lira was the one pinned against the wall; this gave him the leverage he needed to fuck into her. Slowly at first. Then, just before she thought she might break, might plead, he moved faster.

Her fingers dug into the soft fabric of his T-shirt. In the days before everything went to hell, Lira had always made sure her nails were manicured. She’d preferred pretty French tips but had sometimes gone with a pale pink or peach. But then the freak tornados decimated the country, and people began going crazy, rioting and killing each other. And as their faces exploded into black spores that infected others with the same madness—suddenly manicures didn’t matter so much. Now her nails were ratty, broken to the quick, too often painted red, and not with polish.

She cupped the back of his neck and dug her fingers into his hair again. Pulling, just a little. He made her crazy when he tried to take his time, when he tried to keep her on the edge for too long. When he tried to make love to her instead of fucking her.

“Harder,” Lira murmured into Anthony’s ear, then flicked the lobe with her tongue before biting it.

His neck was next, victim to the scrape of her teeth. She tasted him, drawing his flesh into her mouth with a gentle sucking. Not to leave a mark though it would. But because she wanted to open her mouth and take as much of him inside her as possible. Because until her body went up, up, and over into climax, her mind would keep fighting the images of gnashing teeth, people hunched over each other, tearing. Slashing. Biting.

Someday, is that what she’d become?

“Yes. Harder . . .” His voice had gone low and rough-edged, like sandpaper, scraping. His hips pumped.

Her shoulders slammed against the concrete wall, but she wanted the bruises. She needed them. They would cover the ones she already had. Pain made the pleasure sweeter, both sensations twisting and tangling so tight inside her there was no way to tell them apart. She didn’t cry out with it—silence was ingrained in her by now, the habit too hard to break even when she was breaking apart. She kissed him, instead, and took in his breath with a gasp as the pleasure engulfed her. Turned her inside out. When he shuddered against her in his own release, she gripped him tight and rode the final waves of desire coursing through her.

Lira became slowly aware of the steady drip from the showerhead and the pain of the scrapes on her back, the tension of her muscles keeping her clinging to Anthony, and the trembling of his arms as holding her up suddenly became a struggle. She shifted as he put her down, one foot at a time, until she was flat on the ground. He bent to kiss her, and she let him, but she didn’t kiss him back.

He moved half a step away, his jeans around his ankles, and pulled them up without saying anything else. The slick warmth of their joining slid against her thighs. She wiped it away with her towel before wrapping a second around her.

“It was bad, today,” he said. Not asking. He could tell.

“It’s always bad.”

“Worse than usual,” Anthony said, not letting her get away with pretending. That was okay when he was balls deep inside her, but not now.

Lira pushed past him to slip into her impractical rubber sandals. She only wore them into the shower because they were useless for most everything else—and to think, they’d been the height of fashion just a short time ago. This pair had been festooned with small plastic plugs set into the holes in the rubber. An American flag, a Disney character, a soccer ball. She’d taken them off a Resurrected who’d been trying to get inside the synagogue’s locked doors by plucking at the lock with his fingertips until they wore to the bone. She might’ve been able to find herself a new pair in one of the many stores, but she tried to confine her looting to stuff the people in the shelter actually needed. They counted on her for their survival.

“Hey. Wait.” His voice stopped her better than his hand on her arm, which he dropped when she gave him a look.

“Yes,” she said in a tight, cold voice meant to brook no argument. She didn’t want to talk about what had happened above. What she’d had to do. The smells and sights and sounds of the dying and the risen dead. She didn’t want to tell him anything because he would want to try to help her, and everything she wanted from him, she’d just had. “Yes, Anthony. It was worse than usual.”

Then she left him there.

“
L
IRA!”

Biting the inside of her cheek, Lira turned. “Candace.”

“When you go out tonight, do you think you could pick me up some moisturizer? Some kind of lotion, anything?”

“When she went out”—as though it were a quick trip to the drugstore instead of one more scavenging trip made on a few hours’ sleep and hardly any downtime in between. Lira usually tried to take at least a day or two in between, but they didn’t have that luxury anymore. They were out of nearly everything. But lotion? Really?

Lira eyed the other woman with a gaze that certainly felt enough like a laser to send her up in flames, though Candace, as usual, didn’t seem to notice. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Incredibly, Candace snagged Lira’s sleeve as she turned. “I really need it, Lira. The air in here is horrible. My skin’s turning to paper. Look.”

Lira didn’t want to look. She didn’t give a rat’s ass about Candace’s wrinkles, her dry skin, her craving for diet cola. “I’ll see what I can do. I can’t promise anything. You should know that by now.”

“I just thought—”

“Candace.” Rabbi Cohen poked his head around the lower set of concrete stairs outside the rec hall. “I need you in the kitchen. Lira, will you be back by morning?”

He always asked her that. Most times, she said yes. Sometimes, if she knew her roving would take her too far away to make it back to the synagogue, she said no. But no matter what she said, they all knew that every time she left, the chances were good she might not come back at all.

At least, not alive.

“Yes,” she said this time.

Candace, frowning, had already pushed through the swinging double doors into the rec hall. The rabbi waited until she’d closed them behind her before turning back to Lira. He handed her a list, printed in his careful hand. It was pretty long. She looked it over, noting the starred items close to the top. Mostly medical supplies. Canned goods, though she could never carry very much since they were heavy, and she only ever wore her backpack. Taking anything bigger made her too slow.

“This stuff,” she said, pointing. “I’m not sure where to find it.”

“I looked up a shop in the phone book. It was an old one . . . well, I guess it would be, wouldn’t it?” The rabbi smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. He’d aged a lot in the short time since she’d first met him a few weeks ago. “I mean, before this all happened, I’d have looked it up on the Internet.”

No more Net. No more television. No more radio. No more phones. Lira supposed there must be some sort of communications in place, somewhere. The entire world wouldn’t have shut down, not completely. But downtown Pittsburgh wasn’t the world, and everything here had gone dark months ago.

“Heather will need things for the baby,” the rabbi said quietly. “And we need things for the delivery.”

Lira nodded. What he said was true. They’d all been quietly tiptoeing around it for months, but they couldn’t keep putting it off. Heather was going to go into labor any day now, and there was no doctor on hand to help. Not even a nurse. Danny and John had been Boy Scouts, but how could two teenage boys be expected to deliver a baby? Out of the seven people sheltering here, not a one of them was equipped for this.

“I’ll do what I can.”

He reached to take her hand and hold it between both of his, which surprised her. “I know you will. Be safe, Lira. God go with you.”

If there was a God left in all of this, she thought, surely He’d abandoned them all a long time ago. She didn’t say so. The rabbi didn’t deserve her scorn, and she didn’t need a lecture. Instead, she nodded briskly and shifted her pack on her shoulders.

She hadn’t made it up the stairs before Anthony stopped her. With her foot on the landing, ready to get to the next level, Lira stopped to look down at him. Nobody else came up this far, with only one set of steps left before the synagogue’s main level. The barriers Anthony had built were just beyond the top stair, and they’d all agreed it was too dangerous to go past them. The Resurrected were dangerous because they bit and fought and tried to kill and maim, but they didn’t seem capable of infecting anyone once they’d been reanimated. That danger came from the infected, boiling with rage, whose faces hadn’t yet exploded with the spores that both killed them and made more of the infected. Any of the survivors here might be able to fend off a Resurrected, but none of them could risk breathing in the spores. Anthony had agreed, too, even if he didn’t like it. She could just walk away without saying a word.

Except he hopped up a few of the stairs to snag her sleeve. “Wait.”

“I have to go. It’ll be dark by now. I need to make a lot of headway.”

“I know. But before you go . . .” He shook his head a little, not meeting her eyes at first. When he did, she wished he hadn’t. “Can we talk about it?”

“No.” She turned to go. He was up the stairs after her, pushing her toward the metal-and-wood barrier. When he snagged her sleeve again, Lira shook him off. “Go back downstairs, Anthony. You can’t be up here, you know that.”

He gave her a steely glare. “We need to talk about it. Before you go. In case you don’t come back.”

That he said the words out loud shocked her though it was what they all thought. Herself included. That he could voice it that way, brutally honest, meant more to her than anything else he’d ever said or done, including what he was trying to say to her now. Still, this was not the time. Or the place, if any time or place could ever be the right one for love, anymore.