Page 2 of The Dead Don't Talk
Decomposed.
I squeeze the trigger. The thing’s head explodes in a mist of dark blood, the remaining brain matter disintegrating in a puff of lead and gunpowder amongst the brush and trees.
“Fuck yeah! Four points. Write that down, Moros,” I call out, pumping my fist. The branches I’m hidden between stab at my arm when I do, but I don’t let that stop me from celebrating the kill.
“It’ssensei.”
“Do not make me call you some weird shit.” I think he’s joking but it’s hard to tell with how even his voice it. Deep. Steady.Sultry. “Nooope. Nah. We aren’t going there.”
I roll out of my prone position to my feet with rifle in hand, careful to not puncture more of my skin on the broken branches and shake leaves from my head.
Moros just watches me, one dark brow arched up in question, a contrast to his light-toned skin. He’s the kind that gets tan from the sun, maybe even burns beneath the rays, though I’ve never seen him with the raw skin.
“Don’t ask,” I mumble and brush debris off my front.
He grunts as he stands like his body isn’t thirty-four years old and shakes out his hair. His long hair. Hislooong, dark, hair.
Knock it off, Amo. Fuck!
It’s not even that long. Like … to his chin. And it curls behind his ears after running his hands through it. Not like my own curls that barely brush my shoulder on one side and end up like tendrils of ringlets that bounce when I move, but—
Ugh!
“Wasn’t going to,” he murmurs in that deep fucking voice that makes the little hairs on the back of my neck raise as he brushes the earth and soil from his powerful-looking thighs.
“But I wa—” I slam my lips shut on the nonsense of wanting him to ask when that brow wings my way again. “No, fuck.Never mind.”
Jumbled and flamed—my face, not just me—I huff and scramble after him,withoutstaring at the muscles flexing in his back with each step through the overgrown brush that his thick boots crush.
But I do look at his ass, though.
Who wouldn’t?
It’s a beautiful ass that carries him across the grove and through the in between that stretches between our fences andthe rest of the wild. It’s a huge distance, one that is patrolled by the Guard, and tends to be graced by the decomposed like the one I shot.
It’s target practice and pest control all in one.
“What the fuck does sensei even mean?”
Moros makes another sound that’s somewhere between a grunt and chuckle—I think?—and adjusts the strap across his broad chest beneath the chain that he keeps looped around his neck.
It just makes the butt of his riffle bop near his round ass, and I swear my mouth doesn’t fill with saliva.
Yep. Definitely gay.
“Teacher,” he answers, snapping me out of the trance his covered cheeks put me in, and I speed up. Walk next to him on the well-worn path. Shake my fucking head out.
“What?”
“Teacher,” he repeats with a deeper exasperation and sighs. “Didn’t they show you shit while you were in school?”
“Uh, no. But I can cook and know how to do taxes. Whatever those are.”
The history lesson from our eldest member of the community still sits in the forefront of my mind, the eighty-three-year-old’s perspective one that just … doesn’t make sense to me.
I mean, he’s one of the few left alive frombefore.
You know, before theapocalypsepart.
