Epilogue

Reese drew a few uneven breaths and continued, "So, you know, at least now it's you and me, and I'm not, like,responsible for you."

"Mmh," said Miles. She was awful at this kind of conversation, but she knew she was supposed to reciprocate. To share something meaningful. "I used to have horses."

"Horses?" Reese turned her head to look at Miles. This was uncomfortable, so Miles, in turn, rolled on her back and puffed the pillow under her head.

"Yeah, horses. I was breeding race horses. It was a business my dad started, and I took over when he wanted to relocate with his new wife. I grew up on that ranch, so I thought why not? Better me than to have it go to a stranger. I'd known those horses most of my life. The mares, I mean. I don't know if you know about breeding horses--" She quickly glanced at Reese to confirm she didn't "--so anyway, it's basically, you have a mare with good lineage, good paternal line, and then you get the seed from the best stallion you can afford, considering the build of course. You hope that the foal will show some promise, and then you sell them. The older they are the better the price, to a point, but then you need to mind their training and compete with them so that they'll show their promise. You know, professionals to break them in, and drive them, and... so I mostly sold them young."

She sighed, pulling the covers closer to her chin. "When it happened, I had six mares in the barn. Two were pregnant and I was waiting on three more to see if they held. And Daisy, who was retired, but was like the matriarch, older than me, and who I just couldn't let go, and anyway she was still in a fair condition.Anyways, it wasn't many as it goes, which is maybe a blessing. I was minding them alone, well I mostly minded the farm alone, but so... I was in a remote area, so I didn't really get how bad it was through the news. I did have to fight a few when I tried to leave the farm once, so mostly I didn't. I had supplies, I thought I'd hunker down and wait for the rescue. I was sure the Army would roll in and save the day, or something, even though the broadcasts got fewer and didn't have any real news in them."

Reese nodded, which didn't surprise Miles. This was definitely a shared experience among the survivors.

"Okay, so, I minded the horses, and minded my own business, and thought I could just make it on my own, like I always did. But then one day, I was bringing the horses in. I took them out to the pasture each day but didn't dare leave them overnight like I usually did in the summer... there was, I think it was a pack of dogs. Someone's dogs that had fled and remembered their ancestry, and they managed to spook the horses. Now, Daisy always followed just fine, but I had Kissy and Mirabelle on leads, and they spooked so bad that they reared up. Kissy yanked herself free, but Mirabelle I held on to, and I gotyanked, and when I came down I twisted my ankle real bad before I had the wits to let go. It was so stupid. I knew better than to try to hold on."

Reese drew a sharp breath. She was a good listener. Her eyes were wide when Miles glanced at her.

"So, Daisy, bless her heart, didn't flee, and I managed to haul myself on my feet and limp into the barn with her help." She made a fist in the air and winced. "I had a death grip on her mane. Once I got back, I closed up the barn, hobbled into the house, and bandaged myself up the best I could. I've had some injuries before, and I knew it wasn'tbad-bad, but I also knew it would take a few weeks to heal. And the more I walked the slower it would heal.

"That's when it started to dawn on me thatI was on my own, that no help was coming. And that sooner or later, the zombies would come, or more dogs, or maybe even honest-to-god wolves. And that I couldn't protect my horses."

She paused. Reese waited for a polite time, and then said, "So... then... you let them loose and moved to Rosewood?"

Miles let out a breath that was more a hiss. "Not exactly. I killed them. They were my livelihood, honing their pedigree was my life's work, and my dad's before me, and... I killed them, starting with Daisy, who... the way she followed me out and let me butcher her just... so I killed them, and stuffed every inch of freezer space I had with meat, and... waited for my leg to heal. I knew I had to leave. That I couldn't afford to be on my own, in case I got injured again. It's so perilous out there. I guess you know."

Miles didn't look over to confirm Reese's barely-concealed horror, but knew it was there all the same.

"But... but... couldn't you have let them loose?"

"They were racers, Reese. Pureblooded. You know how thin their coat is? There's no way they would've survived the winter in these parts. And I rather... I didn't want to think about... that they'd get injured, or surrounded by zombies, or... I'd rather do it myself."

"I... yeah," Reese said with a thick voice. "Man, that's rough."

"Yes. Rough."

The storm filled the silence surrounding them. Miles thought that she had maybe shared a bit too much.

***

Reese could smell it, the second she walked in the door to an otherwise unassuming rancher two streets down from Paul's place. It was there, underneath everything. Underneath the deer heads mounted to the wall. Underneath the trophies in the cabinet, for bass fishing and some other things she couldn't have cared less about. Underneath the Laz-E-Boy, set by itself in the corner of the room, with the TV facing it directly. She saw ten pictures here and there, and only one of them featured the wife. She itched, and she could smell it.

It smelled like...unfulfilled.

***

Miles looked up from setting the branches in their little fire pit, and looked back into the house. She squinted and tilted her head, watching the light and shadow flash in the front of the house. Movement, and sound. She'd heard something, so she rose into a low squat and moved along the back of the house.

"Miles!"

"Ah," Miles said, as she moved toward the back door, "you scared the shit out of me."

Reese set her backpack down inside the kitchen, right next to the useless refrigerator, and then pulled back on the flap. "I found something, and it got me thinking."

"Are you ever not thinking?" Miles smirked, went over to the cabinet, and pulled out two glasses. "You want some water?"

Reese beamed. "That sounds really good."

She reached out the door and grabbed the bucket, recently boiled but chilled by what she guessed was maybe December air, and very carefully filled both cups.

Reese set down a stack of books, paperbacks. Pages slightly yellowed. She said, "I'm honestly not sure how to start."

Miles picked up the book on top, and her eyebrows went up. "Oh. Lost at Sea, huh?"

"Trashy as hell," Reese said, smiling wider and wider with every passing second.

She put down the first one and picked up the second one. "The Ranch Hand. Subtle."

"So I found these, right, and I..." She bit her lip and looked away, blushing. "I'm always a little horny right after my period."

"Oh," Miles said. Her instinct was to put down the book and push the stack away, to distance herself, but that felt like it might send the wrong message. It felt like the judgemental thing to do. She hadn't really apologized for being so snappy with Reese for three days straight, and was feeling a little guilty. Reese's period had seemed to hamper her less, and Miles' hope that she could repay the kindness by doing something in return had come up empty.

So, instead, she just kept the book in her hand. That felt like enough.

Reese flexed her hands, and then squeezed them. "This might go in a lot of directions at once, so bear with me. One... We need a system for privacy. Doesn't need to be much. Can even just be, like, a sock on the door or something, but we need a system."

Then she added, "Because I'm going to masturbate."

"Wow," Miles said, eyebrows riding up her forehead. "You just... went right ahead and said the thing."

"I've been tense, and I just had my period, and it finally feels like we can let off the gas pedal a little bit, so... yeah. I'm gonna do that. And I found these, and I'm gonna start with that one there," she said, pointing to the third book.

Miles picked it up, frowned at the cover, and opened it up.

"And I was thinking that, of course, this isn't just a me problem. I don't know what your horny times are like, or if that's much of a thing for you, but I figured the only way of finding out would be to just talk to you about it. If you don't need that, or don't want that, that's fine, but I do." Then she sat up a little straighter, looked directly at Miles, and said, "I do."

Miles fanned the pages with her thumb, stopped somewhere past the middle, and quickly scanned the pages. "This one is two women."

"Oh."

"The following twenty-four hours passed in a blur," Miles read aloud. "Neither Donna nor Magda got out of bed to do more than open the door for their room service or visit the bathroom, and even then, when Donna wanted to shower, Magda followed her in and they fucked again. Donna had never managed standing sex in her life, but she quickly learned that fingers can be applied anywhere, and from pretty much any..." She clapped the book shut, and set it down on the table with a flat smile.

"So... privacy," Reese said, still blushing a little. "I'm not saying we have to hammer something out this second, but... you know... be thinking about something we can do. It'll be healthy for both of us."

"Okay," she said, quickly, as if saying it would get the conversation over that much faster.

"The second thing is that... you know... days run together a little bit and it can be hard to keep track, but I kind of think ours are gonna get closer and closer."

"That's not a myth? Are we sync-ing?"

"Maybe," Reese said, head shrinking into her neck a little bit. "Which is fine, it's not a huge thing. Mine don't hit me that hard, and even if it does, even if worst case scenario hits, we can just be making it a priority to be prepared. Have supplies. Have food. Do our heavy work the other however many days it is."

Miles folded her arms, running through a series of very bad and messy worst case scenarios in her head.

"This was all one big thought I had after finding these books, because I started thinking we either need to find some of those self-winding watches, so we can keep track of the days, ooooooor..." She leaned over the table, looking very eager. "Or, we get ourselves a chalkboard from somewhere, and we start tracking the moon."

"The moon doesn't line up with months," Miles said.

Reese just waved this off. "Fuck months. Fuck the calender. We don't need to keep any of that shit. What matters to us is the 28 day loop. 30 Days. We track that. The moon is predictable, and it's out every night--"

"Most nights," Miles corrected.

"Whatever. We start making notes, we start tracking, and we stay prepared."

"Where are we gonna find a chalkboard?"

"Every four year old ever had a chalkboard. We just need to find a house that still has theirs. And some chalk." Then Reese was looking at her, intently. "Did you never have a chalkboard?"

"Of course I didn't have a chalkboard."

Reese finally sat back, and took a long drink of her water. "Oh, that's good."

Miles did the same, and rolled the cup back and forth between her hands. "Did you ever think you'd be so excited about the taste of water?"

"No," Reese said. "I was always one of those people that was adding flavored droplets, or iced tea mix, or a lemonade packet to my water. Anything to make it tastenot like water."

They both sat there for a minute after that, quiet, and it was somewhere around the eighty second mark that Miles realized Reese was being quiet. Reese was never quiet. What she had thought was the two of them sharing a moment in remembrance of a world that was gone turned out to be Reese staring longingly, eyefucking one of the books.

"Here," she said, tossing the book across the table.

"Yell if you're coming upstairs," Reese said, excitedly, as she grabbed it and turned back down the hallway.

Miles rolled her eyes, and reached across the table to pour Reese's cup into her own. She wasn't sure what to make of any of what they'd just talked about. It all felt a little bit intrusive. Reese had so many thoughts, and so many ideas, and just kept giving them to her. They were often good ideas, but Miles felt a little put out by it. She drank down the rest of the cup in one long chug, and stared up through the ceiling for a minute.

Then she picked up The Ranch Hand, and quickly thumbed a few dozen pages into it. The protagonist, a widow who had inherited her husband's cattle ranch somewhere in Texas, reminded her of a customer she'd dealt with a lot. A widow herself, Miles realized. Always poking around. Asking questions. Sometimes feigning ignorance just to strike up conversation. Taking up hours of Miles' time while Miles was trying to take care of--

"She was hitting on me," Miles said, out loud, as the thought occurred to her. The widow in the book was acting exactly like her customer had. It took her all of two pages, where the book was spelling it out for her, to catch onto something that had passed over her head for months once upon a time. She put the book back down and sat there in the chair, in the kitchen, very quietly, for another few minutes. There was nothing to be done about it now, and she couldn't imagine what she would have done about it then either.

And then she caught just the slightest hint of noise from upstairs, the faint echo of a cry, and her cheeks went from zero to sixty in the time it took her to get out of the house.

***

The next several days were quite productive, not least because Paul had a mostly functional still in his yard. It was some kind of large metal tank, and on top of it he had fashioned a cone-shaped lid and some copper tubing that wound down into a makeshift spigot. It looked like he had plans to connect a source to it. Some kind of intake pipe, Miles said, and then got very excited about setting up tarps to catch rain and a lot of other things Reese didn't quite follow. Reese just nodded and smiled while Miles fawned over it. It was exciting to see Miles be excited, but the still was the final straw. They needed to de-barricade the door. There was no getting that over the fence.

This allowed them to do their water runs in bursts, getting enough for a few days at a time all at once instead of living bucket to bucket. They weren't positive they were able to do a good enough job cleaning the still, without the aid of a stock of soaps, so they had to continue with the boiling. Although their system of digging holes had done well enough for a crapper, serious conversation about alternatives came up now that they had a garden to think about. They started composting.

"Which way," Miles said, as they stood at a street corner. They were a block north and a block west of Paul's house.

Reese gave a sickly look north, and shook her head. She pointed west. "That way. The north side of town was always more overrun."

"Wasn't that where you were set up?"

"Yeah," Reese said, bowling right into her gab, "we were over near my school. That wasn't where we lived, we lived a little north of town, almost all the way to West Point, but Reese came and picked me up that day, and then there was an accident becausefreaking everything was collapsing, and..." She gave a deep sigh, only a little bit performative, and shook her head. "We got chased out of our car and ran inside a house we'djust seen someone get chased out of. Slammed the door, blocked it, hid in the basement."

"Was that the owner getting chased out?" Miles asked, alarmed.

"Don't know," Reese said. "Someone was banging on the door a little while after, but that made noise and then they got chased off again, and..." She gave a little shrug. "Never felt good about that."

"You stayed in that house?"

"We didn't dare leave," she said. "Not at first. Reese would, after a couple days, just to keep the yard quiet, and then to--"

"Okay," Miles said, cutting in. "I know the whole Reese-Reese thing was a bit, but when you talk about your husband it sounds more like you're talking about yourself in both the third and first person, and it is profoundly weird."

Reese smiled, and laughed a little. "That was the point."

"What was his first name?"

Reese gave a long sigh. "Dale."

"Dale Reese," Miles said, narrowing her eyes as they turned toward a house with gray siding.

"Junior."

"That is the most Kentucky-ass name I have ever heard."

Reese slowly drew her axe from her backpack as she crept up to the broken front door. "He hated the name Dale, hated being confused with his daddy, and hated Junioreven more. Except for his little league coach, I was the first person to call him Reese, on our second date, and..."

Something moved inside the house. Reese twisted her hands around the axe handle, wood grain creaking ever so slightly, but Miles waved her off. She drew her hunting knife and slipped in through the door.

There was asquick, and then there was athump.

"Clear."

"That was when he knew he was in love with me," Reese said, sliding the axe back in its makeshift holster. "We can call him Dale, from now on. It's fine."

"I'd appreciate that," Miles said, "although..."

Reese pulled her backpack around in front of her, and went straight for the book shelf. "I hate my name even more," she said, intuiting the question. From the look Miles gave her, she'd guessed right. "Plus, Dale is... isno longer with us, so he's... I'm sure he won't mind." She cast a quick glance over her shoulder, and as near as she could tell, Miles hadn't noticed the way her voice gave out. "As the last living expert on Dale Reese Junior, I feel qualified to make this decision on his behalf."

After a quiet minute, while Miles went through the kitchen and Reese went through the living room, Miles asked, "Do you want to talk about him?"

"Not really," she said. Then, after clearing her throat, she added, "Yes, maybe. I don't know."

"That was every possible answer," Miles said, leaning around the corner to peer at her.

"Found another can opener."

"Jesus," Reese said. "Is that seven now?"

"When it rains, it pours."

"Leave it." Then, possessed by sudden inspiration, she said, "No, take it."

Miles didn't say anything. Not at first. They filled up their backpacks, ransacking every drawer and shelf and cabinet, and it wasn't until they were on their way home that Miles finally made a sound. It wasn't a real question, but it didn't need to be for Reese to interpret. All she needed to see was the way Miles' face was twisted in thought.

"Here me out," she said, as they walked past Paul's. "I just want... I want to meet the people who settle in around us."

"And," Miles said, blinking and looking around, "if they find nothing, they'll move on assuming that it's all gone. But if they findus and ask..."

"Exactly! I'll give it away for free, as long as, you know, I'm not getting rape-y vibes."

"Don't put that out there," Miles said, wincing and waving her hands. "Let's just not."

"I mean, I know there's just not that many people left alive around here, but statistically speaking--"

"Stop it," Miles said, very severely, and Reese tightened her lips on the spot.

***

A shot rang out, and both of them were crouching behind a pickup truck before Miles had any chance to make sense of the situation. It had maybe come from in front of them--yes it had, and now there were three more, in rapid succession. Reese flinched with each one.

"That's going to draw in everything for a mile!" she hissed. "Geez!"