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LOVE NEVER DIES
by
Jennifer Loring
Wind rattled the screen. Over the hiss of rain, as it splattered on the scorched blacktop of the parking lot across the street, a train whistle blasted apart the silence of another gray dawn.
Jillian rolled over and curled her body against Zander’s, brushing her breasts against his back. Normally his skin was warm, but this morning it felt cool and a bit clammy. The fan on his dresser had blown too much cold air onto him all night.
Because of the rain, she decided they should spend the weekend in bed. Without waking him Jillian slid her hand over his hip and grazed her fingers over the wiry black hair between his legs, and made a fist around his erection.
Beyond his bedroom door, Zander’s roommate announced his departure for the weekend with a deep, braying cough and locked the front door behind him.
After a few more strokes Zander still hadn’t stirred.
Jillian wondered if he had finally caught whatever it was his best friend couldn’t seem to shake. His cock withered in her hand; she gave up and rolled over and drifted back to sleep.
*
When Jillian woke again it was still raining. Zander stared up at the ceiling, and his chest moved up and down with rapid, shallow breaths. The permanent dark circles beneath his eyes, acquired from too many late nights and too much stress at work, had deepened, and broken capillaries filled the whites with webs of red.
“Are you okay?” Jillian asked, but there was only his breath, and the rain.
She reached for his cell phone on the dresser behind the bed. After punching in 911 a pre-recorded message informed her that service was not available. She folded the phone and tossed it onto the floor as the knot of dread in her stomach began to grow into something much worse.
Physically he was there, but nothing remained behind the hazel eyes gazing at the expanse of white paint above them.
*
Close to noon, Jillian pulled on her underwear and Zander’s t-shirt and walked into the living room.
Since he didn’t have cable she headed straight for his computer and double-clicked the Internet Explorer icon. She’d tried to call 911 a dozen more times, and every cab service in the phone book as well, all with the same result. Without a car there was no way to get him to the hospital.
The online editions of the local papers had little to report. Hospital staff had seen a surge in ER patients coming in with respiratory complaints, lethargy and joint pain. No one was quite sure what to make of this syndrome, except that its progression was quick and fatal.
Three stories below, someone moaned and collapsed outside the ground-floor pizza shop. Jillian left the desk and peered down at the body splayed out on the damp cement. Nothing indicated that he had been attacked, and besides, in this neighborhood violent crime was nearly unheard of.
Was it the illness they were talking about on the Internet? The same thing Zander seemed to have?As she turned toward the bedroom to get dressed and offer the man whatever help she could, (which wasn’t much at all), a Port Authority bus careened down the street and veered into the bus shelter in an explosion of glass and bones and blood. Flames erupted from the engine.
Jillian winced and turned away as a train whistle screamed in the distance.
She made sure that both front and back doors were locked. The wood was old on both and not terribly strong, though she didn’t know why that should bother her.
Jillian looked out the window again. The body was already gone.
*
Zander hadn’t changed position in hours. Jillian brought him a glass of water and tried to raise him up just a little, but he was much bigger than she, and in his present condition she might as well have been trying to lift an SUV.
Only his mouth was different. The beautiful, soft lips that kissed her last night had pulled away from his teeth, twisting his face into a horrific grimace.
“Please wake up,” she whispered, staring into the eyes that clearly couldn’t see her.
He stopped breathing.
*
It was hard to tell when day ended and night began.
The rain had stopped an hour ago but the clouds remained thick and dark, promising more sometime during the night.
As Jillian’s tears dried on Zander's chest, more always replaced them. She couldn’t feel the heartbeat that less than twenty-four hours ago lulled her to sleep. It wasn’t real, it couldn’t be. Zander was young and healthy and all that she loved in this world, and whatever had gone wrong out there couldn’t be happening to him.
She cried the most when she remembered the way they met. Awkward glances across the office where she had just begun working, expecting nothing more than a new job and a steady paycheck. In an instant her heart, dead of feeling, sparked back into life. It never happened like this, not to her. Love at first sight happened in fairy tales and made-for-TV movies.
She should’ve noticed the symptoms just because he rarely fell ill. It should’ve been obvious.
Without him, the light inside her would die forever.
*
The streetlights fizzled and flickered, and some finally went out with a soft pop. No one came to survey the damage and death caused by the bus accident. The normally busy street was silent. Even the trains no longer rattled along the tracks beyond Zander’s apartment. On the Internet, websites reported the exact same news as that morning. Dead air replaced the pre-recorded message from the phone company.
The world had stopped, yet somehow Jillian remained.
And she wasn’t sure that she wanted to.
She stood by the window for half an hour, searching for anything out there that resembled life. She made the grim calculations as to how long Zander’s food supply would last her. She had weeks left, weeks trapped in this apartment while he lay rotting on his bed.
The tears came again.
Through her blurred vision she saw something stumble through the shadowy parking lot. Something human.
Overjoyed at the prospect of salvation, Jillian leaned down close to the screen so her voice would carry across the street.
But as she opened her mouth and the man staggered into the fading light beneath the streetlamp, her throat seized up and words died before they were born.
Behind him was a woman with a section of the steel rods that connected the seats on the bus jammed through her left eye socket. The other end protruded from the back of her skull, slick with blood and brain fluid and the sticky remains of her eyeball. Beside her, a man in the standard Port Authority black shirt and khaki pants shuffled toward the building as huge chunks of windshield glittered in his throat. Even up here she could hear the whistle of air through his severed windpipe.
It took a moment to register that people could not walk around with injuries so severe and still be alive. And as that realization finally sank in, Jillian saw other shapes crawling from the burned-out bus like cockroaches fleeing the light.
The man she first noticed stopped directly below the window, glanced up, and sniffed the air. His right forearm dangled by a few tendons at the elbow, flapping in the rain-cooled breeze though he paid it no attention.
Jillian flattened herself against the wall, away from the window, but whether he could see her or not didn’t really matter.
She knew that he had smelled her.
*
At first she thought she imagined the moan coming from Zander’s room.
A swarm of them had gathered outside on the sidewalk and in the quaint brick-paved street, and they made the same moaning sound, primal and hungry, knowing only the need for what led them here. They moved with machine-like determination toward the building, ever more of them, and stood in a swaying, stinking, bloodied mass to stare up at the third floor.
Then one of them discovered the narrow walkway leading to the back steps. The others followed.
Jillian ran to the bedroom and stood at the foot of Zander’s bed. She couldn’t have been happier to see his arms stretched out the way he used to reach for her, though his limbs crackled with rigor mortis and his entire back was a violent purple mass of pooled blood beneath the skin. He was moving again, and the implications of that didn’t concern her.
The back door rattled in its frame. They’d made it up the stairs; it wouldn’t take long for the wood to break. Already she could hear it splintering from the force of its attackers.
Jillian lay beside him on the bed. Thin silver threads of drool clung to his chin as he slowly rolled over and his right arm fell lazily over her like it did when they slept.
She kissed Zander’s cold, pale forehead and whispered, “I love you,” as she had every night they spent together, low enough so he couldn’t hear her.
They hadn’t been together very long, and she feared that speaking the words aloud would scare him away.
Even though she knew, from the very first day she saw him, that she would love him for the rest of her life.
Zander’s pupils dilated, and his watery eyes scanned her face as Jillian ran her fingers through his wavy black hair. In his pained groans she thought she heard him struggle to form words, the words that she dreamed she’d hear him say.
I love you.
Wood cracked and split as dozens of hands tore their way into the apartment. Jillian nestled against his chest as if to sleep, and felt Zander’s teeth clamp down on her neck. She remembered kisses there, nibbles and bites in the heat of passion, and a tear slid down her cheek.
Warm blood ran over her collarbone. For a time she heard only the wet shredding of flesh, and when she opened her eyes she saw them in the doorway, immobile.
You cannot have her, Zander seemed to say with each chunk ripped from her body. His fingers clutched Jillian’s hip and pulled her closer. He used to love biting on her lower lip when they kissed, and this time when he did the pink lump of tissue, oozing blood, came away in his teeth. The pain blinded her, but nothing compared to what she would have suffered at their hands. In his own way he had done all he could to save her.
They seemed to smell her death already, and turned to go. The room started to go dark despite the impending sunrise.
His ragged breath was hot against her ear.
She could not kiss him anymore, but before she slept Jillian closed her teeth around Zander’s shoulder and tasted him for the very first time.
TO COMMENT ON THIS STORY CLICK HERE© Loring, 2006
Jennifer Loring has published numerous short stories and poems in venues such as Scared Naked Magazine, Scifaikuest and Aoife's Kiss. In 2004 she received an honorable mention in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror for her story "The Bombay Trash Service." She made her first anthology appearance in Cold Flesh, a zombie anthology published by HellBound Books, in 2005. Jenn lives in Pittsburgh, PA where she has been, among other things, a DJ.