At first and for a long time, Jean was alone.
She'd used to wish for this, back when her powers first came. If everybody would just shut up, she'd thought. If I could get five minutes of peace and quiet. She would have given almost anything for that to happen.
Well, there was almost never anyone inside her head anymore. But it wasn't anything like what she'd wanted. It wasn't some curse being lifted so she wouldn't have to hear them, all the time and everywhere. It had fixed itself all wrong. The only people left were the quiet ones, and if they caught her, if they ever did...either they would make her like them, or they would eat her.
It wasn't what she'd wanted at all.
***
She learned to travel carefully during the day, when she could see; to lock herself up at night, when she couldn't. There were a few close calls, especially at first. She'd forgotten what it was like not to automatically know when other people were around. She wasn't used to listening with her ears anymore, or to responding to things seen in the corner of her eyes. She learned both of these, or re-learned them, at the same time as she taught herself how to kill a zombie from a hundred feet away, with or without a gun. If her telepathy was no good anymore, her telekinesis kept her alive in those early days.
She learned other things, too. How to break into a convenience store without making a lot of noise. How to barricade the door of a public restroom securely enough to sleep for a few hours at a time. How to go into a grocery store with an empty backpack, and come out with enough dry food to eat for two weeks. How to look around a corner without giving herself away. How to kill someone she'd had a class with without flinching, without even hesitating. How to walk away from the body, after she did, because to bury or burn it would take too much effort and too much time away from keeping herself alive.
Sometimes she wondered why she bothered, what the point of living even was. Once, she'd thought she wanted it to be quiet, for everyone else to go away, for at least a little while. Now, she wasn't sure there was a point in even being around if there was no one around to listen to.
It was like that for a long time. At first, she kept track of exactly how long it had been, marking off days and week in the little planner she'd brought from home. Then she had a few really bad days in April—days she spent laying on a couch in some dead person's apartment, knowing she should get up and keep going, but unable to do anything but sleep and cry and sleep some more—and she lost count. Once she'd lost count a little, it didn't seem worth it to guess. She wasn't going to graduate in June, wasn't going to start college in September. It was enough for her to have a vague idea of the seasons, to know spring followed winter and summer would follow spring and fall, too, would come in its turn.
The world had ended in February, and it was sometime in late summer or early autumn—August, maybe, or September, she'd think later, when it started to seem worth it figure out the dates again—when she met the others.
***
If she'd had a gun in her hand, she would have shot Scott for sure.
She'd just come out of the public restroom she'd spent the night in—not her favorite option, but good strategically: it was located on top of a hill in a city park, which meant really good visibility; and the window was big enough for her to climb out of it if she had to, and close enough to the roof to make the visibility mean something—when she heard the commotion. It was the same thing it always was, the same noises she was always listening for: the crashing sounds, the low moans, the harsh, panicked breathing of their prey.
It took her a moment to realize she could feel someone inside her head this time—that what they were after wasn't a deer or a dog. By the time she did, the boy with the red visor was coming straight at her up the hill, with four zombies right behind him.
If she'd had a gun in her hand, she still would have shot him. It would have been automatic, a learned reaction based off the other times she'd been in this situation. It would have kept him away from her, would have given the zombies something to do that wasn't noticing her (which they would if she just stood there and they would if she closed the door. There was no way for her to win). But there was nothing heavy nearby she could throw at him with her telekinesis to distract them all, and so instead she opened the bathroom door wider and said, "In here!"
That was mostly automatic too, not a learned reaction this time, but pure instinct; if she'd thought about it she never would have. By the time she did think about it, even a little, she and the boy were locked in together, while the zombies moaned outside the door.
"Thank y—" he started, and she shoved him in the door, and backed away from him.
"Stay away," she said. "Don't come near me."
"Um, why not?" he said, with an uneasy look at the door—as if the danger could possibly matter to him like it did to her. "You're not. Um. You're not going to try to eat me, are you?"
Jean had been ignoring his mind until then. It was something she'd tried and tried to learn before, but never got the hang of until now. Everyone whose mind she'd heard since the first few frantic days had already been on their way down—or if they hadn't been, they'd been too far away for her to try to help them. She'd have gone crazy if she hadn't learned to wrap herself in silence.
Now, though, she honed in on him, the way she hadn't done for anyone in so long she'd almost forgotten how.
"Oh my god," she said. "You're a person."
"Um. What?"
"You haven't been bitten, either." But he'd had a lot of close calls. "But not for lack of trying, huh?"
"...I'm confused," Scott said.
Jean dragged the covered trashcan over to the window, hopped up on top of it, peeked out. No zombies were waiting on this side of the restroom, and so she forced the window open.
"Come on. We can talk after we take care of these guys."
***
That part turned out to be easy; with Scott along, Jean didn't even have to grab her gun out of her backpack. All she had to do was point him in the right direction, and tell him when to turn his visor back off.
They sat on the roof for a long time afterward, just talking, neither of them having had the chance to have a real conversation with another person since it had happened. It was a stupid thing to do—they should have gone as soon as it was safe to go, because moaning carried, and zombies usually came in groups of more than four—and they were both totally away of that, but they couldn't help it.
Before she told him her name, she knew pretty much everything there was to know about him. She knew about the big things, like how he felt responsible for his foster parents' deaths, and for not being there to save his brother; she knew about the little things, like how much being dirty and grubby all the time bothered him. She'd used to hate knowing so much about someone the minute she met them—it was a one-way intimacy no one ever wanted—but she found herself soaking it in this time.
He thought she was beautiful, and Jean had never had much patiences for people who thought she was good to look at one second and were weirded out about her the next—but Scott was a mutant, too, and didn't seem to be bothered by her telepathy. So when he grinned at her, she found herself grinning back...and even though it was stupid, they both forgot the world they lived in now, for just a little while.
Then the moaning started again, from all around them, and they both remembered in the same instant.
They jumped to their feet together, back to back, each of them sizing up the approaching zombie horde.
"There's at least a hundred on this side," said Scott.
"There's more on mine," Jean answered, and maybe she shouldn't have been surprised, because above the trees of this little city park, she could see the skyline of the city. She knew to avoid cities, but she'd thought she was far enough away from this one. Now, she saw wave upon wave of them coming for them, and she knew she'd been wrong.
She already knew the sound the beam from Scott's eyes made when it hit rotting flesh; she heard it now, in the same instant she heard him decide to do it.
There was a decent supply of bullets in her backpack, with the gun right there too; Jean didn't reach for them. She could have had a thousand bullets on her without it being even close to enough. There was no point wasting ammunition to pick just a few of them off, so she raised her hands instead and started throwing them. Zombies could trip, too, and soon they were tripping everywhere.
It wasn't enough. Nothing would have been. They kept getting back up; even when Scott realized she was overwhelmed and came to help, they kept on coming. Together, they slowed them down more than Jean had been able to alone—but it wasn't going to be enough.
There came a moan from behind them, closer than the rest. Jean turned to see the upper half of a zombie, in the process of pulling itself onto the roof. Before it could stand, she took out her gun and shot at it. Once, her hands might have shaken, she might have missed; she'd learned not to miss, so the zombie fell from the roof with a hole above its eyes.
I'm taking care of things over here, she called to Scott, and walked to the other end of the roof and looked down. She shot three or four of them, the ones at the front that had staggered close enough to try to climb, then looked to see how many more were coming from that direction...and had an idea.
If we can make a gap over here, we might be able to run, she said.
Running was risky; Scott had to know it, too. Once the moaning had started, zombies from everywhere would gravitate toward the sound. To run when you didn't know what might be coming was basically asking to be grabbed by one you didn't see in some alley, or hiding behind a tree. You didn't run unless there was no other choice. It was better, safer, to stand your ground until the moaners were all too dead to bring any more. It was best to hide—if you could; if you found someplace safe enough—until they forgot you. If they couldn't see you, if they didn't hear you, eventually they would. If you were quiet, and your hiding place was sturdy and well-barricaded, you could get lucky.
Jean had gotten lucky a lot in the past, but there was no way they could get back through the window. Not with this many zombies this close to them. There was just no way.
Running was risky, but if they stayed here, they were going to die.
Scott must have agreed, had maybe gone through the same thought process, because he came up beside her.
"Where should I aim?" he asked.
There, Jean said, and shot a zombie in the weak spot in the incoming line of them, which was a few heads thinner than the rest.
Rad flash after red flash, gunshot after gunshot, and zombie after zombie fell to the ground. They were getting close to being able to run—
There came a moan from behind them again, and Jean turned to see three of them on the other end of the roof. She shot them in quick succession, headshots all. She turned back to what Scott was doing to see they'd managed to make the tiniest gap in the line—not nearly enough of one, not when it would close up by the time they made it there, but it was something. She started firing in that direction again, trying to calculate how wide the gap would need to be before she could use her powers to keep it open as they passed through.
It was then that she felt someone else in her mind. She'd stopped specifically looking for people months ago—everyone else she'd found had already been bitten, or had been about to be, and it had just been too much—but with Scott so new in her head and the adrenaline of the fight lighting up everything, she saw this other one immediately, where she always would have missed him before.
Help us, she thought, reflexively—though the mind she felt was miles away, and there was no way the person attached to it could get to them in time, even if they wanted to do that instead of doing the smart thing and staying out of it. Please.
***
A lot happened in the next few seconds:
Another moan came from behind them—a chorus of moans, from the six or eight zombies now on the roof and staggering their way.
Jean raised her gun and fired. Once, twice, and two zombies fell.
Scott turned and blasted the other four or five of them, sending them flying off the roof.
And a hand grabbed Jean's ankle, and dragged her toward its owner's mouth. She tried to turn, to shoot the zombie or kick it, or anything to get it away from her—and lost her balance. She fell off the side of the rood, landing on her hands and knees in the dirt, with the zombie grasping for her.
Jean jumped up, threw the nearest few zombies back with her mutation, feeling her own exhaustion even as she did. She didn't have much left. She hadn't landed anywhere near where they'd meant to jump to when they went. There were just too many of them, and they were all way too close to her.
"Jean!" Scott said.
I'm dead, she told him, deciding in that moment that at least one of them would get to live. It definitely wasn't going to be her, so it would have to be him. They're going to be distracted. You should run when it—
Between that moment and the next one, everything changed.
***
—starts Jean finished, and that was when the zombies fell. All of them, as far as she could see. One moment, they had all been coming for her and for Scott; now they were nothing, and the park was full of unmoving bodies between them and the trees.
A few feet away from her stood a guy wearing a shiny silver jacket and a pair of goggles. In his hands was a double-headed axe, dripping black with gore. His goggles were splattered with it, too.
BZZZZT!
A red beam hit the ground right behind where the guy was standing—had been standing, because suddenly he wasn't there anymore.
Stop it, Jean said, irritated only until she saw Scott had been trying to stop anyway, that he'd been about to start blasting at them before anything had happened, and had had too much momentum going not to fire off at least one.
The guy reappeared on her other side. Jean was looking right at that spot, but he moved too fast for her to see even a blur.
"We should go," the guy said, and this time he stayed in one place long enough for her to be sure he was the same person she'd felt, seconds ago and miles away.
From the other side of the roof came more moans—the zombie horde from the city, still coming for them.
"Okay," Jean said. "Come on, Scott."
Scott slid down to the ground, from the roof. Together, the three of them headed across the park and into the woods, hurrying but not quite running—there were too many bodies to step over to try to run.
When they were past the last bodies, they sprinted for a few minutes, enough to put a little more distance between them and the horde. The good thing about zombies was that the more of them there were, the slower they were when they followed you. They'd swallow you up if had you surrounded or cornered, but if you could pull away from them, you'd probably be all right.
When they slowed down again, the guy said, "Where are you guys headed?"
"Nowhere, really," Jean said.
"Away from there," Scott said, gesturing behind them.
"Okay, so," the guy said from her right, "if you don't have a preference," and then from her left, "I'm just going to," and he disappeared completely.
Jean could feel his mind for a split second after he went; then it was gone.
Jean and Scott glanced at each other, then in the direction they'd come from, where they could still hear moans.
"Great," Scott said. "That's just great."
"I think he's going to come back. But we should keep moving anyway."
They continued walking briskly, careful enough to keep an eye out for stragglers, single zombies or small groups on their way to join the horde. They'd been walking for about fifteen minutes when the guy came back. This time, he brought a rush of air with him, like closing a door on a hot summer day.
"You first," he said to Scott, and grabbed him by the back of the neck—and then they were both gone, leaving Jean to walk alone.
She walked for a few minutes, long enough to start wondering if he'd be back for her, after all.
Then he was there again.
"You ready to catch some waves?" he asked.
"I'm always ready to be somewhere better than this," she said.
His hand on the back of her neck was careful and warm, and then the world went by in a blur, and the only reason Jean knew what was happening was that she could see in his mind that they were passing through cities, mountains, forests, fields, faster than anything and too fast for Jean to even try to understand with her own senses.
Then they stopped, and they were somewhere else.
***
There was sand beneath their feet, and the water in front of them was dark and shining. Scott was already down by the shoreline, surveying the dock, at which was tied a large white boat.
"Where are we?" Jean asked.
"Lake Eerie," said the guy in the jacket. "It was going to be California, but I've never taken anyone that far, so I thought about it for a few hours and decided this was better."
He was only sort of joking; Jean didn't have to look very far to see he didn't really have the best grasp of the way time worked for everyone who didn't have super-speed.
"I'm Jean," she said. "That's Scott."
"I'm Peter," he said. "Is Scott your boyfriend?"
Usually, older guys who asked her things like that were being creeps: Jean had figured that much out before the zombies came. She'd figured it out around the time she was ten, even before her telepathy came. But the way Peter meant it was different, somehow. If there was a little longing there, it wasn't any different from the longing Jean had felt every day she'd been alone.
"We just met," Jean said. "Like maybe half an hour before you showed up."
"Oh, okay," he said.
"We'd both been alone for a long time before now, too," she said, because it seemed important, somehow, to make it clear they were all on the same footing, all in the same place. She said it on an instinct, like the one that had made her open the door for Scott, and the one that had made her call for Peter from miles away. And like with those things, it was only later she'd look back and realize how important it had really been.
***
On the shore of the lake were quite a few cabins. The nearest one was as big as Jean's old house. Its three bedrooms were packed with supplies from floor to ceiling: cans and boxes of food, boxes and boxes of guns and ammunition to go with them, bulk packages of toilet paper...and about five hundred packs of Twinkies, for some reason.
There was still running water, somehow, and because of the generator, electricity. They each got a can of something, and once the food was heated up, sat around the kitchen table to eat and talk and ask Peter things about the area.
In the movies, it seemed like zombies were always coming out of the water; according to Peter, the real ones could drown, just like anyone else. The reason there weren't thousands of boats out on the lake right now was probably because it had been frozen over when the zombies came, and so no one around here had known that before they'd gotten eaten or turned.
"Or maybe you don't know as much as you think you do," Scott said, looking anxiously out the window at the shoreline. It wasn't that he didn't believe Peter, so much as it was his way to worry about everything that could happen, when or not it did. That was the only way he could really be prepared for whatever did happen. "There could be thousands of them in that lake without us knowing about it. We could wake up tomorrow and be surrounded again."
Peter seemed to take this in stride. "I've been everywhere, and I've never seen anything like that happen. Anyway, I've also drowned a few. It took a really long time. Worked, though."
Jean shuddered. "I can't imagine getting that close to one."
"Can you tell if there are any around here?" Scott asked her.
"Like in the lake?" Jean asked, and pretended she didn't see Peter rolling his eyes.
"Yeah."
"I don't know, my telepathy only works on people."
"Zombies are still people," Scott said, not because he believed it, necessarily, but because he was thinking about his brother. He'd left him behind when he'd left the area he'd grown up in; he hadn't been able to kill the thing his brother had become, not like he'd been able to with his foster parents. (They hadn't mattered to him in the same way, which was part of it; if Scott had been a different kind of person, maybe he'd have told himself they didn't matter at all. But even though they'd been terrible to him, the ways he'd failed to save them still weighed on him heavily.)
"Not anymore," Jean said, laying her hand on Scott's arm. "That part of them is gone now. If there were anything left, I'd be able to feel...something. Anything. But I never do."
Peter flashed away, then came back. "Still none within ten miles of here," he said. "We should be safe for a while."
They wouldn't be safe forever, of course, no matter how far away the nearest zombies were. They were programmed to keep moving, to keep looking. Eventually some of them would end up looking here. There were too many of them for it not to happen eventually. But to be pretty sure there weren't any on their way right now was as good as it got, these days.
***
They stayed up way too late, just talking.
Jean hadn't let herself stay up very long after dark since it happened. The best way to survive when you were alone was to be up during the day, when you could see them coming; and to find shelter for the night, when you couldn't. But there were no zombies near them, so it didn't matter as much tonight. None of them could have slept anyway, probably. Not when they weren't alone today, as they had been yesterday; not when Jean wasn't the only one who wasn't quite sure the others were really real yet.
They talked, and Jean told them about her parents. About how they'd been when she was little, and how they'd been since her powers had manifested. Even though her mom had blamed herself for Jean's mutation, even though her dad wanted to sent her off somewhere to be cured—even though everything had been so hard and complicated for the past few years, they'd still loved her, so much. In the end, they'd put themselves between her and danger. They'd told her to get out, and she had. She was only alive because of them.
Peter told them about his mom and his two sisters—how they'd all been together through the first wave, and the second...and then how Peter had been out looking for food one day, and suddenly had the feeling he needed to be with them. He'd gotten back fast enough to kill the zombies that had gotten into the house while he'd been gone; he hadn't gotten back fast enough to stop anything else. The next day or two would have seemed like forever to anyone, but to Peter it had seemed like lifetime after lifetime of sitting there with his family, being there for them at their speed in a way that had always been excruciating for him. He was the fastest guy around, but he'd been moments too late to keep them from being bitten, and so he'd slowed down for them until the end came.
Last of all, Scott told them about his big brother. Alex, who'd been away at college. Scott had been supposed to visit him the weekend the zombies first came. He hadn't because he'd had a project due at school, and hadn't wanted to ask for an extension. Ever since, he'd known he'd made the wrong decision, that he should have been there when the campus had gone into lockdown. If they'd been together, they could have fought the zombies off longer than Alex had been able to alone. When Scott finally made it there, someone told him Alex had been a hero. They'd also told him he was locked up in the library, that Scott shouldn't go there. He'd gone anyway, of course, and he was never going to forget what Alex had looked like, the blankness in his eyes when Scott called his name.
In the end, they stayed up so late talking that they didn't make it to bed until the sun was on its way up. They talked about what had happened to the world, and to them personally. They talked about important things and trivial ones, and weird things they still couldn't believe they'd seen, even in the middle of the actual zombie apocalypse. By the end of it, they were all exhausted in the same hollowed-out way—the way everyone feels when they've been storing pain up for a long time, and finally gotten the chance to share it.
***
Maybe it happened between them because they were more or less the last people on earth. Maybe it happened between the three of them and not any two of them because they'd all met on the same day, at pretty close to the same time. Or maybe the reason why was something else. Maybe it happened because Scott should have been there and Peter had been too late and Jean would always sort of wonder if her wish had made the zombies come.
In the end, all they knew was that it had happened, and that it was a good thing. As good, maybe, as finding each other to begin with.
***
It happened like this:
On the first and second day, they explored all the cabins near theirs. Even though Peter said he'd cleared them all before he brought them here, and flashed off about a thousand times to patrol more interesting places, Jean and Scott's hearts raced every time they forced open a new door.
On the third day, they went out in the boat, and ended up spending the night out on the water when the engine failed. On the fourth day, they swam back to shore, and Peter must have been right about zombies and water, because nothing grabbed them or tried to drag them down.
On the fifth day, they brought back some games and puzzles from one of the cabins. On the sixth day, it was raining too hard to go anywhere, so Jean started one of the puzzles. It was one of the complicated ones with 2000 pieces, and would be a deer in a meadow when it was done. If it ever got done; it had been opened before, so they didn't know for sure if all the pieces were there. Peter had decided puzzles were too boring for him to spend a whole second counting the pieces, so as Jean put the side pieces together, Scott did the counting.
They'd been working on the puzzle for a while when Jean caught a thought of Scott's. She'd gotten used to his surface noise, enough not to pay too much attention to his specific thoughts most of the time...but this one was too clear and too about her for her to really miss it, even though Scott wasn't thinking it at her.
"You can," she said.
"I can what?" Scott asked—then he realized, and turned a little red.
"This," Jean said, and leaned over and kissed him. Scott kissed her back, and if it was a little awkward—he didn't have any more experience than she did—it was also really nice.
A few minutes later, Peter's mind flashed back in. Before the kiss even stopped, Jean could feel his reaction. It was surprise and a little hurt and more than a little of that longing. It wasn't for Jean, exactly, and it wasn't for Scott, either. What it was for was both of them, together, Jean's arms around Scott's neck and his hands stroking her hair.
Scott startled, and Jean felt his reaction, too: Surprise, and a little guilt, and wondering if he'd chosen right. Jean couldn't even be offended, because what Scott was feeling was pretty much what there was in her, too.
Maybe we don't have to choose, she said, to Scott and to Peter and to herself.
It had been only seconds, but to Peter it must have seemed like forever already. There was no time to think about it, no time to listen to anything more than her instincts. Before he could flash out again, Jean got up and went to him. She grabbed his hand, so he couldn't go without taking her with him, and dragged him back over to the table, where she took Scott's hand, too.
"Maybe none of us have to choose," she said.
She wasn't sure it would work, knew both of them so well already but didn't know how they would react to this. It took time to be able to figure out what people would do; it wasn't always obvious from what they wanted, or even from what you could see of their past actions.
Peter was thinking, They're just kids, even though he was only a few years older than them, even though that wasn't the kind of thing that really mattered anymore.
Scott was thinking, That sounds weird, and wondering how it could possibly work, if Jean even meant what he thought she did. Two guys and a girl? It sounded messy as well as weird, the kind of thing that could go wrong way too easily.
Peter was the fastest, and so it was Peter who made the first move, leaning down to kiss Scott, who was still in the chair. Maybe he was going on his instincts, too, and maybe they told him Jean was in already, but Scott needed convincing. Scott let out a little yelp, but he must not have needed too much convincing after all, because then he kissed Peter back, just as he had with Jean. It was a first for both of them, kissing a guy, but they both liked it.
Jean let it go on for a minute or two, then tapped them both on the shoulder. "Don't forget about me."
She kissed Peter, because it was the last part left; then she kissed Scott again, because that had been how this had started in the first place.
***
A few weeks later, they were tangled in bed together when Jean said, "I think we should leave. And I think it should be soon."
One or another of them had brought it up, every so often: whether they should settle down here, or go out into the world and find other survivors. They'd always pushed the decision-making part back, but it was starting to feel like they were letting inertia keep them here.
"I don't know," Scott said, and for someone who'd been so anxious about the water when they got here, he was pretty worried now about being able to defend any place where zombies could come from four directions instead of three.
"I'm tired of moving things," said Peter, like anyone had told him to bring back twenty-five hundred boxes of Ho Hos the other day.
"If we leave, we could find others," she said. "We could even bring them back here, if we wanted to. And we could start rebuilding. Not everything, but some things. We could do it together. The more of us there are, the stronger all of us will be."
At first and for a long time, Jean had been alone. It had been something she'd thought she wanted, until she got it and realized she didn't. Now she and Scott and Peter had found each other, and that was good...but the more Jean thought about it, the less she wanted to be even this alone. Five or six would be better than three, just as three had been better than one. She could see similar thoughts way back in Scott and Peter's minds, and though she couldn't be completely sure they would agree with her, she knew them well enough by now to have a good feeling about it.
They talked about it for hours. In the end, they decided they would go back out into the world the next day...but spend the rest of this one here, together.