Read Alaskan Undead Apocalypse (Book 3): Mitigation Book 3) for Free Online Page B

distracting. With Claire’s cold fingers struggling to open the zipper on his pants, Jerry withdrew slightly but suddenly and took her hands away from his waist.
    “It’s okay,” she said, her breath hot and inviting upon his neck. “No one’s watching. They don’t care anyway. It’s not like our parents are back there or anything.”
    “It’s not that.”
    “Not in the mood?” she asked, rubbing the front of his jeans with the palm of her hand.
    Jerry smiled and shook his head. “I think you can tell that isn’t the case.”
    “Yeah. I didn’t think that was a roll of quarters in your pocket.”
    Jerry leaned his head back and fought back the lump in his throat. He confessed, “It just doesn’t feel right is all. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours since we left Doc Caldwell back there. I don’t know. I guess I’m just feeling a little guilty is all. I just...”
    Where her breath had been warming his neck, she placed her lips and then her tongue. She spoke as much into him as to him, “We each deal with our grief differently. At least that’s what I used to hear on daytime TV. It’s okay to feel sad if you have to. I guess, I just like to forget...at least for the moment.”
    Jerry said wistfully, “I don’t think I can.”
    Her lips now on a southward course down the salty slope of his neck, she said confidently, “I bet I can help with that,” and smiled.

11.
     
    “Thanks.”
    The voice, if not the word, caught Neil by surprise. He and Emma had been walking for at least an hour without so much as a syllable exchanged between the two of them. He was glad for the break in the silence. Counting railroad ties and keeping an eye on the broken path between each wooden stripe of the tracks only went so far as a distraction—not that they needed to be distracted.
    He asked, “For what?”
    “Well, everything really, but I guess especially for the last few...well, since we, you know, left.... I know there really wasn’t much of an option back there with him, but I still don’t think that I’d have been strong enough to walk away.”
    “Well, I don’t know if....”
    “Shut up dammit! Let me finish. It was the right decision. If we would have brought him along, he would’ve died and he would’ve come back. I think dealing with him then would’ve been a helluva lot harder than just walking away. It’s what he wanted anyway, for the exact same reasons. He knew, just like you, what would happen. Someone had to take responsibility for the decision, so thank you.
    “And last night, you and everyone else just gave me the space that I needed. Sometimes misery doesn’t love company and I needed some time to come to grips with, well, with all of it.
    “It’s funny, but it felt like he and I had been together for a lifetime. Hell, it hadn’t even been a full season and we weren’t ever really together. Not like you and Meghan. The pain in my belly and the emptiness in my chest tell me otherwise though. But it’s the same with everyone. We’ve seen so much in so little time that.... aren’t you afraid that...?”
    She stopped short of finishing her thought. He knew where she was headed with her question and, yes, he did fear all she was thinking. How could he not? It was sheer delusion for any of them to think for even a moment that loss and pain was behind them.
    Despite that, Neil could not deny his affection for Meghan any more than he could the same for everyone else in their dwindling ad hoc family. Emma was right in another of her observations and this one, when Neil acknowledged it, was very unsettling. The carnage that had forced them all together and into survival mode had started in August and, to the best of his knowledge, it was now only October or early November. So much had been lost in such a brief stretch of time. It was staggering when he paused to consider it. The world, at least the world immediately around them, was set on its head and it seemed like nothing was ever