Pox by P X Duke Read Free Book Online Page B

useless.
    Maybe not, but she was trying too hard.
    —I never thought that you would be.
    I took my time pouring coffee from the thermos. It
was the last thing I could do to delay the inevitable.
    —Who was staying with you, Caitrin?
    She hesitated. Her eyes moved in every direction but
mine. I had all the time in the world. She did too, until she
didn’t.
    —My boyfriend.
    Her admission wasn’t a complete surprise. I wanted to
know if he was an actual boyfriend, or someone she had only hooked
up with for convenience - hers, not his.
    —For how long?
    —Since before the purges.
    So he was her boyfriend. That was good to finally
know.
    —He’s been getting weirder and weirder in the last
month. Maybe he found a cache of drugs. He wanted to move us back
into the center of the city. Why, I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell
me.
    It seemed more like the two of them had had a
knock-down, drag-out fight, judging by what had been deposited into
the pool. One, or both, had stomped off when they didn’t get their
way.
    —So you two had a fight and you took off back to my
place?
    —No. Not at all. When I left, the place was just as
neat and tidy as it always was. I’d been alone there for a couple
of days. And yes, we had a fight, but that was a week ago. Konnor
took off and I thought I wouldn’t see him again. In fact, I was
certain of it.
    She wasn’t so certain now. For all I knew, the poor
chump could have his eyes on us and neither of us would be the
wiser.
    —Well, we’re into it now. What do you want to do?
    If she was smart, she’d recognize that there was
safety in numbers. And if she was real smart, she’d know I was
definitely hooked by now. Hell, even I knew that, and I was one of
the dumbest sons of bitches on the face of the earth when it came
to women. Perhaps by now, I was the last one.
    —Will you take me back to your place? I feel safe
there.
    There it was. The old, I feel safe with you
routine .
    —Let’s get going.
    Who was I to question it?
     
    I let Caitrin help push the bike into the garage, and
then I started talking.
    I re-hashed last night’s conversation. I reminded her
about what we had decided. I explained that from now on, we’d need
to be more careful about our safety if we were going to be a team.
We’d need radios to stay in touch. We’d need to get vests and more
guns. From there, we’d increase the number of safe houses we could
relocate to if need be. We’d begin our search for the trucks we
needed.
    I led her to the map pinned on the wall in one of the
spare rooms. It covered a radius of a hundred miles. It had roads,
rivers, railways, power lines, waterways and lakes, everything we
needed to know, plainly marked. I showed Caitrin where we could
move to next if we had to.
    She didn’t think it wise until we did a recon of each
of the areas.
    She was right. I agreed.
    And that’s what we did over the next ten days. We
found two trucks with good rubber and loaded them to the tailgates.
We kept in touch with two-way radios. We did our recons. We locked
suitable locations into the GPS and marked them on our paper
maps.
    Through it all, we got to know each other better.
    It surprised both of us how easily we got along. At
the end of the day, if we weren’t too exhausted, we’d watch a cache
of old black and white movie DVDs we had found about the end of the
world. We’d fall asleep on the sofa. One or the other would wake
and we’d stumble off to bed to make frenzied love, or, more often,
fall into exhausted sleep.
     
    After suffering through months of loneliness, it was
a good feeling to finally have a sense of routine with someone
other than myself. Perhaps it had come too easy, but even it had, I
welcomed it. I enjoyed it.
    I wasn’t so sure about Caitrin. I was beginning to
get a sense that she was becoming distant. I didn’t say anything
through her long periods of silence. When I had a question, it
seemed like it took her forever to come up with an answer.
    —Is