Page 28 of Monsters within Men
Back in London, Zeke dated a few girls, mostly people Zaya set him up with. He hadn’t gotten very far with any of them. He’d just never felt that connection, that supposed magical spark that others spoke about. But he’d never even considered dating a guy. Never even looked twice at them.
But was that completely true? What about Oliver, his partner in crime at the lab where they’d worked? He’d enjoyed getting him to laugh, and they were spending increasing amounts of time together before Oakfield shut…
“So, what’s the deal with your love of foxes? I thought most Londoners think they’re pests?”
Zeke blinked. “Zaya and I aren’t from London. We’re from Rye—a small town near the coast in Kent. They evacuated us there a month after the outbreak reached stage three.” He hadn’t thought about Rye in such a long time, and it was an unwelcome punch to the gut to be reminded of it. “It was a crazy time.”
Noah, likely noticing his discomfort, said, “You don’t have to tell me about it. Unless you want to.”
Zeke paused, wondering if to continue. Post-RONS virus, everyone hadtheir story. His wasn’t one he ever told. But for some reason, tonight he was in a sharing mood.
“After they announced stage three, we stayed locked up in our house for weeks. They kept promising our area was next on the list for evacuation, but nothing ever materialised. We boarded up all the doors and windows, so couldn’t see outside, but we could hear… we could hear…”
Zeke closed his eyes as if it would stop the sounds from looping around his brain. Oh, thescreaming.
A warm hand on his thigh brought him back to reality. A hand that started to move up and down his leg in a comforting motion. “You’re okay now,” Noah whispered.
Zeke forced himself to continue. “Anyway, we ran out of food two weeks in. We’d been rationing, obviously, but food supplies had been fairly scarce up to that point, so we were running low from the beginning. My dad, after seeing Zaya faint for the third time, said he was leaving the house to find help. He never came back.”
Noah squeezed Zeke’s leg, and Zeke let his head drop onto Noah’s shoulder.
“You can probably guess what happened next. Our mum gave it forty-eight hours before she completely lost it. She had a complete meltdown. By this point, all of us were severely malnourished—I remember Mum could barely walk—but still she removed the wooden boards on the door, told us she loved us, then went to look for him. Zaya and I barely functioned after that. We knew our parents were dead, but were too sick to even grieve for them. We just… lay on the floor together. It was another three days before the evacuation order eventually came through.”
An image Zeke had never been able to forget fought its way to the surface: Zaya’s face, gaunt and shaking, taking unsteady breaths as she turned up the volume on the TV, which was broadcasting an emergency channel.
“We had thought they’d pick us up at our door,” Zeke said. “But they said we all had to get to a rendezvous point. I grabbed a few photographs from upstairs so we were all ready to go, but when I went back to Zaya, she was on the floor. Her eyes were shut and she wouldn’t wake up, even when I shouted her name and shook her. She felt so cold.”
Zeke’s voice cracked on the last word, and Noah’s arm snaked around his waist to pull him towards him. Zeke resisted for a moment before letting himself melt fully into him. He hadn’t ever recounted this story, not to anyone, and the emotional intensity of reliving it was surprising him.
Noah brushed his fingertips over Zeke’s arm, so softly Zeke wasn’t sure if he was imagining it. “What did you do?”
“Well, you’re going to find this hard to believe,” Zeke said, trying to inject some light back into the conversation. “But I ended up carrying her. The whole way.”
“You’re joking.”
“Hey!” Zeke said, lightly slapping Noah, who started laughing before stopping himself.
“Sorry. But that’s incredible, Zeke. Especially when you were only twelve and were in a similar condition to Zaya yourself.”
Zeke shrugged. “At that point, Zaya was my entire world. I would have rather been eaten by types than leave her behind. But it was a difficult journey. My only weapon was a random kitchen knife. I had to carry Zaya three miles to the meeting point.”
“Did you see any types?”
“Yes. Luckily, there were loads of bodies on the street that they were fighting over. There was one close call, though. We had about a mile left of our journey when a type jumped out of an alley. He was recently turned, middle-aged, a bit of a belly. He was wearing this red Coca-Cola t-shirt. I remember it because it had blood all over it, a different shade of red to the material. Anyway, I dropped Zaya and just froze. I just stared at his red t-shirt as he took a step towards me and sniffed the air. I thought it was all over then. I said all my goodbyes in my head. But then someone else screamed nearby, maybe down an adjacent road or something, and he took off. I can’t even describe how terrified I was, I was literally shaking with fear. I was tempted to just give up. I thought I couldn’t take another single step. But I kept thinking that if I didn’t continue, Zaya would die. So I picked her back up and carried on. And when I reached the military trucks, I collapsed onto the floor with her and begged someone to help her.”
There was a slight pause before Noah said quietly, “Thank you for telling me all that, Zeke. You were very brave. Zaya is so lucky to have you in her life.”
“Well, all we have left is each other now.”
Noah’s face twisted. “Same with me and Uncle Nathan. He’s all I’ve got left.”
A silence full of ghosts choked the space between them.
Zeke inhaled a deep lungful of air and reluctantly shuffled out of Noah’s embrace, before his brain could misinterpret Noah’s kind-hearted comfort for something else. “Anyway… let’s go back to the foxes. Our parents got us a matching pair of that fox toy you saw in my bag one Christmas. Zaya and I used to steal food from the cupboards to go feed this little family of foxes that lived opposite our house. Mum used to go nuts, said it was encouraging them not to hunt naturally or something. I think she was just annoyed about the food going missing.” Zeke laughed, lost for a moment in the handful of happy childhood memories he still had left.
“Talking of stealing food…”
The light was fading as dusk set in, but Noah’s bright grin was clearly visible as he opened his rucksack. He took out a brown paper bag, tilting it towards Zeke to reveal a handful of apple slices and slabs of the synthetic meat fondly known as facon.
