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Protect my mother.

I hadn’t seen a woman since the virus exterminated every last one of them three months earlier. Annie's entreaty to protect her mother made no sense. How could I protect a woman when none survived? She had led me to the States, to these mountains, yet not once had she taken me to meet a female survivor or a female spirit.

Her head turned, and her gaze found my hiding place. Lifting her finger, she pointed to the movement beyond the thicket. “Mama.”

I flinched, hoping—always hoping—but definitely not prepared. My focus swung toward the approaching footsteps, breath stuck in my throat, my eyes straining to make out the blurry shape emerging from the shadows.

Moonlight washed over the slender form of a woman, and the startling sight of her skittered electricity through my body. I clutched my stomach, shocked, elated, goddamned fucking beside myself, even if it was for selfish reasons.

Her. Not a ghost but a living, noisily-breathing woman, in the flesh. My purpose. What I was looking for, what I needed. I felt it behind my ribs, fuzzy and restless and alive, more now than ever before. Fuck me, but I clung to that feeling, something to fight for, hope in a world full of nothing.

For a moment, the woman stood there, staring in my direction. She couldn’t see me hidden in the sedge, but I stared right back. It had been months since I’d seen a woman, left with only my memories of the female form to fuel my fantasies. She could’ve been butt ugly and my dick would’ve woken at the sight of her. But she wasn’t.

Her arms were toned, strong, the profile of her ass round and tight in denim. Glowing skin, graceful neck, and her tank top struggled to contain her full, perky tits. Very much alive and not just a woman. A fucking breathtaking woman. My reaction was violent, hardening my cock and laboring my breaths, my muscles heating and tightening with the primal impulse to overpower and fuck her.

“Annie?” She approached the giggling ghost, her lips curling up despite the sadness straining her face.

What was missing was shock. The woman could see dead people and didn’t seem surprised by it. Was it an all-the-time thing? Or was this a special connection?

Her huge eyes, the blond in her hair, and her bone structure were mirror images of Annie. Her daughter.

Annie danced toward me, singing something about ladybirds. But I couldn’t look away from the woman, devouring her beauty with greedy eyes and forgetting to breathe as more blood surged to my dick.

Then it hit me. A woman survived. One woman and God knew how many men. My shoulders tensed, and my thoughts turned wild, vicious.

Protective.

As surely as nature would reclaim paved roads and metal structures, man would return to his most primal instincts. She would be prized, hunted, fought over, claimed…and destroyed.

Protect my mother.

Annie skipped through the brush, stopping a foot before me. The woman trampled after her, too far behind, losing the trail.

Annie gestured at me to bend down, and as I did, she quickly spoke of places and events, guardians and demons, and things that didn’t make sense. I concentrated on the details, committing them to memory, but it was her final words, about the future, her mother’s future, and my part in it, that stole the oxygen from my lungs.

I stumbled back, my teeth clamped to the point of breaking. “No.”

She cocked her head. “You must.”

I dragged my hand through my hair, ripping at the ends. Don’t believe her. I could change it, goddammit. Nothing was absolute.

But as she darted away, leading her mother toward my camp, I knew that no matter how hard I tried, everything she’d told me would come to pass. The prophecy she’d spoken in my ear flooded me with strength and terrible pain and everything in between.

I cannot put my faith in one divinity.

Nor can one sun light my way.

I need three.

~ Evie Delina

Evie

Two years post-apocalypse

Death surrounded me, infecting the mountain air, soaking my shirt and jeans, and snarling in the ravine beneath my dangling feet. I had a helluva lot of fight left, but bone-aching fatigue clawed at the edges of my will power. Sweat slicked my grip on the rope, the only thing preventing a fatal plunge.

The rope attached to the top of the cliff. A daring climb away. Too daring. Too fucking far. What a miserable thought to have as I twisted fifty feet above the ground. Above them. Gathered below, they hissed in drooling sibilants, spraying globs of aggression through insectile mouths.

Dozens of hard-shelled bodies filled the bottom of the ravine. Some had already begun the menacing crawl upwards, their sharp claws digging into the rock face and closing the distance. Worse was my internal connection with them, some kind of biological weirdness evolving inside me. I could feel them before I saw or heard them, like a thousand snapping rubber bands in my gut.