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There were mutterings about a new strain of flu from your fellow nurses when you’d finished your shift early Saturday morning. You thought nothing of it, pushing it to the back of your mind and forbidding it from distracting you from who was waiting for you at home.
It was such a rare and precious thing when Kyle got to spend more than a week at home, and you had planned to take full advantage of every second with him.
You’d gotten to the house just after the sun had risen, practically launching yourself into the waiting arms of your fiancé the second he stepped out the front door. He wrapped his strong arms around you, pulling you as close as he could physically get you.
You remember the gentle warmth of the morning sun shining down on your back. His familiar scent of tuberose and vanilla filling your nose, making you feel more at home than you’ve felt in months. The sharp, amused wolf whistle from Mrs. Graham, your elderly neighbor who spent all her time split between being too invested in your relationship and letting her grouchy cat run amuck in your garden.
You didn’t believe in perfection, but that Saturday was damn near close.
By Monday, it was all gone.
Fire and decay consumed the world, the apocalypse carried across the earth on the backs of the dead. Life as you had known it was gone, crumbled to dust under the weight of the confusion and chaos.
Five years later, you still aren’t used to the stench of decomposing flesh and rot that forever lingers in the air. It sticks to your clothes, your car, your skin, never coming off no matter how many times you wipe yourself down.
Kyle, your saving grace, helps keep you focused. You’d gotten a few self-defense lessons from him before the world had ended, but now he has you up early every morning to train. He’s done most of the heavy lifting, if you’re honest. More often you feel more hindrance than help to him, the elite military training giving him far more of an advantage in this new world, but he never once complains.
He does his best to comfort you, to teach you, to protect you.
You do what you can, of course. Your medical knowledge is invaluable now, and Kyle makes sure to remind you of that as often as he can. It’s part of why he’s so adamant about keeping you safe, aside from the obvious.
“Can’t let my favorite doctor go hungry,” he laughs when he forces you to take his rations, trying to joke away your concern. “What kind of husband would that make me?”
You see the exhaustion in his eyes, and it kills you to watch him always put himself last. It borders on suffocating sometimes, his concern for you. There are times when you want to scream at him to let you help him, let you offer more than just your presence and ever-changing inventory list. He’s taught you how to use a knife and a gun and your fists; you can protect yourself if you need to, but he refuses. He keeps you safe and tucked away whenever he has to run for supplies, and clings whenever he returns.
You know why he does it, why he holds you so close at night as you fall asleep to the screeching and wailing of the distant undead.
(You’d only met his team a few times in the past, but you knew how much they meant to him. You remember his determination to find them again when the world went to shit, leading you through neighborhoods and towns to get to their supposed meet-up spot.
You remember the exact moment when, after three months of walking and fighting, you’d finally made it to that dusty, boarded-up pub on the outskirts of the city.
His team was there, in all of their undead glory. Skin peeling and blistered, wailing around the black blood pouring from their mouths as they dragged their decaying fingers down the boards on the windows.
Kyle was quick to get you out of there, finding an empty store for the two of you to hole up in for the night.
The moment it was safe, he crumbled. You held him through the night, letting him silently sob into your shoulder. All you could offer was quiet comforts and a promise that you would never leave him.)
So, you let him hover, let him worry as you swallow down your complaints, and follow his plan to keep the two of you moving. It works for the most part, keeping both of you alive for longer than those you encounter on the road. You pass by the bodies, half-eaten and rotted, thanking whatever higher power may be watching for your continued luck.
Luck can’t continue forever, though, and so it is that five years, six months, and twenty-eight days later, you find yourself in an abandoned flat trying to staunch the bleeding from Kyle’s side. It’s difficult to see, the only light available to you the pale moonlight shining through the hole in the roof and the flickering of your dying flashlight, but you refuse to let that stop you.
You clean his wound, wipe the darkening blood away with quick and delicate hands, purposely ignoring the rasping of his breath and the teeth-shaped holes. He grips onto your arm, squeezing with all of his hindered strength when you try to disinfect it.
Kyle calls your name, his voice so weak it brings instant tears to your eyes.
You don’t look at him. You can’t look at him. You know what you’ll see if you do.
You need to pretend, need to keep yourself in this illusion or you’ll lose your mind.
Maybe if you could do stitches, he can hold on until you find someone–
Kyle calls your name again, a weak hand landing atop yours. He laces your fingers together, the sharp cold of his a stark contrast to the blood-slick warmth of your own. You glance up at him, and the bubble bursts.
Even in the silvery moonlight, you can see the dark veins growing across his face. Cheeks already starting to sink, those beautiful brown eyes already fading to a milky beige. He coughs once, watery and rough, and you can see the blood sinking into the lines between his teeth.
Still, he smiles.
“I always…knew this day would come,” he wheezes, trying to laugh.
You don’t care about hiding, don’t care about making noise. You curl forward, cradling his face in your hands as you sob.
“So glad…got more time…with you.”
You press your forehead to his, and he moves his other hand to rest against your cheek. It takes a painful effort, his limbs already beginning to stiffen.
“Always…love you.”
“I love you too,” you cry, never taking your eyes off of his. He tilts his head up, and you meet him for a kiss without hesitation.
You don’t pull away until his eyes fall closed and his arm goes slack, his hand sliding from your cheek to land on the warped wood floor with a hard thud.
You only have a few minutes before he turns. You know what you should do, what he’s made you promise to do should this ever happen.
You grab your gun from your bag, aiming at him–at the love of your life–with shaking hands, and you know you can’t do it.
Instead, you scream.
A mournful wail that rattles your chest, echoing across the empty room. You shriek and cry and beg for mercy from a God you know won’t answer.
When his eyes open again, you squeeze yours shut. You hear the telltale groan, the shuffling as his body sits up.
A brief second, a silent moment, before he screeches and launches himself at you.
You raise the gun.
-
The drive back to your home is long and tedious.
You don’t waste your ammo, taking back roads and side streets to avoid as many of the shambling undead as possible. Any that cross your path, you mow down with your SUV and no remorse.
Your street is worse than you left it, abandoned cars scattered across the road, flora overtaking the fences and walls, and gardens worn down after years of being trampled over and unwatered.
Mrs. Graham’s corpse lies on the broken rocking chair on her porch, the skeleton of her cat still curled up in her lap.
You stop in front of your old house, staring up at the broken windows, peeling paint, and overgrown ivy crawling up the side paneling. Something stirs in you, pained and nostalgic.
A groan from your backseat brings you back to reality, and you sigh.
You step out of the car, taking a moment to clear the porch steps of as much dirt and dust as you can.
Something screeches further down the road, a small chorus responding to it from one of the other houses.
You open the back passenger door of the SUV, stepping back as Kyle shambles out, nearly falling onto the driveway. Your shot to his leg left him unable to run like the others and gave you just enough leverage to get his hands tied together. After that, it was easy to tie a scrap of cloth over his mouth and keep him from biting you.
He tried a few times on the road, but all it amounted to was his mouthing at your shoulder through the cloth while you drove.
You walk to the steps, and he limps after you. He doesn’t stop when you take a seat, falling on top of you. You move him to the side with a huff, pulling your knife from its holster as he sits up. His opaque eyes follow you as you lean over and begin slicing through the rope around his wrist.
The screeching down the street is closer now, a flurry of footsteps before something crashes into one of the abandoned cars.
The moment his hands are free, Kyle grabs at you. His nails are too blunt to scratch now, paper-thin skin ripping when he moves too fast. You lean back against the wooden railing, as he lunges for your neck, trying to sink his teeth into your pulse.
You bring a hand up, settling it on his cold, clammy cheek.
“I’m sorry, my love.”
Your fingers curl into the cloth around his mouth, pulling it down as you crane your head and expose your neck.
The pain is unbearable, like fire burning through your veins. It only takes seconds for your hands to go numb and your vision to blur. Kyle doesn’t stop, not even as blood spews from your neck. Not even as he reaches bone.
It couldn’t have ended any other way.
You never could’ve killed him.
There was no conceivable world where you’d want to continue without him.
Your body soaks in the pain, letting it morph into an aching throb as your lungs begin to constrict.
You think back to the day he proposed, after the celebrations when you both sat on these very steps watching the sun sink behind the horizon.
You hadn’t stopped smiling, positively beaming as you admired your ring and the way it shimmered in the golden light while Kyle gazed at you like you were the most precious thing in the world.
A smile blooms across your face, the taste of iron flooding your mouth as your undead love finally pauses in his feast, trails of tendons and muscle and vocal cords hanging from his lips.
When you finally looked up at him, he leaned in close, forehead pressed to yours as he murmured, “Til death do us part, right?”
You had pressed your lips to his in a tender, heart-filled kiss. Pulling away to murmur against his lips.
“Not even then. I’m with you forever.”