I awoke to the touch of something cold against my skin. I’d fallen asleep cold, so it took me a split second to realize the icy presence in the bedroom was nothing natural.
Without opening my eyes, I forced myself out of the fog of sudden wakefulness, giving my full attention to my surroundings. I was in bed with Aimee, underneath white sheets and the thickest blanket we could find, still not thick enough to keep us warm on this winter night. I lay on my side, facing Aimee, and although no part of me touched her, I knew her back was only inches from my fingers.
The intrusive, alien burst of cold that had come seeking around our bed retreated. At first it seemed Aimee had slept through it undisturbed. Moments later, she turned to me and whispered, “What was it, Ava?”
I put my arm around her, squishing my breasts against her back, touching my cold nose to the back of her neck. Aimee shivered. “Ghost,” I said.
She made a soft sound, not quite a sigh. “I wish they wouldn’t watch us when we sleep.”
I wished they wouldn’t watch us any time, but the Wild Ones had chased us out of every human city except the City of Ghosts. The ghosts protected us, but when we let our guard down, they could play with our minds.
Nights were the worst. Some of the dead were benevolent tricksters, but others were ill intentioned. The really malicious ones could make us hurt ourselves—and the remaining human population was precarious already. I held tightly to my wife, grateful we had her to lead us.
In the morning, I sat alone at a table in the corner of the dining room. We shared the long-abandoned hotel with about three hundred other survivors. Although the Wild Ones didn’t dare cross the ghosts, after all we’d been through to get to the City of Ghosts we still believed in safety in numbers. A few of the others lined up for their breakfast of fruit and hard bread rolls, but I waited for Aimee. She was always busy, but I knew eventually she’d keep her word and meet me at our usual table. I stared out the window at the gray sky.
“You think it’ll snow today?” The male voice was surprisingly close to me, causing me to jerk around to face him. The tall, dark-haired man who lived down the hall from Aimee and me pulled out a chair at my table.
“Excuse me?” I said, offended he’d invited himself to sit with me.
He sat beside me, ignoring the tone in my voice. “Ava, right?”
I nodded. “…And you’re Steven.”
I’d learned his name the day Aimee and her scouting party came back with his band of survivors. We’d considered them an especially lucky find—an entire town relatively untouched by the Wild Ones, including strong adults with survival skills. I still don’t know how they held out so long without the help of the ghosts. They’d been running low on food, and with my nursing skills, I’d taken care of Steven and some of the other men who’d let themselves get malnourished to give the women a better chance. Steven had injured an arm in a building collapse, and the wound was badly infected.
“You remember,” Steven said, smiling. He had a nice smile; I’d always noticed that about him. When we met in the halls, we were cordial, but we’d never been friendly. I thought Aimee had assigned him to the security detail. “Of course you remember. You saved me.”
He’d probably felt close to death, but except for a high fever and a manageable electrolyte imbalance, his case was far from the worst I’d treated. Two members of his band had succeeded in starving themselves to death.
Given how he remembered me, it seemed rude of me to ask him what he was doing at the table I customarily shared with Aimee. Most of the survivors were so grateful for Aimee’s leadership, they treated everything she touched with a certain respect.
Aimee strode across the room from the direction of the kitchen and sat on my other side. “Steven, thanks for coming this morning,” she said.
“No problem.”
I looked at Aimee. “You asked him to our table?”
“Yes. I have a new assignment for you two,” Aimee said seriously. “Something I want you to work on together.”
I was perplexed—I wasn’t aware that Steven had any medical skills, and if I was correct that Aimee had assigned him to security, I couldn’t imagine what I could do to help him. “What is it?”
Aimee took my hand, lacing her fingers through mine. “Please don’t be upset,” she said. “This has nothing to do with how I feel about you.”
“What are you talking about?” I interrupted her. I looked over at Steven, but he looked as perplexed as I was.
“Ava, I want you to make babies.”
I pulled my hand away from hers and stood. “How could you even think I would go along with this? Because you’re our leader, you think you can give me to some man we barely even know?” I was so angry, I couldn’t even look at her. I started off toward the door.
“Ava, wait,” Aimee said. She caught up to me quickly, laying a hand on my shoulder. “Listen to me. I’m not giving you to anyone. You’re my wife and you always will be.”
“We’re not animals!” I shouted. Everyone in the dining room stared at me, including the unseen ghosts, but I didn’t care. “You can’t breed us!”
“Ava, listen.” She got in my face, forcing me to look into her big brown eyes. “We’ve been here almost a year. How many babies have you delivered since we reached the city?”
“Two,” I admitted. I wasn’t the only medic who performed midwife duties, but I still knew that with our population of slightly under 2,000 survivors, we had an extremely low birth rate. Without any mass communication systems, we had no way of knowing if there were other survivor groups or if we represented all that remained of the human race. “We’re still trying to survive.”
“We’re safe here, Ava. We have enough food to sustain a larger population.”
I didn’t share her confidence. There was still so much we didn’t know about the Wild Ones.
“I need you to try, Ava. People look to me for leadership, and if my wife feels safe getting pregnant, maybe the other women will feel safe, too.”
“I don’t feel safe.” I looked over at Steven, who waited patiently at the table. A good soldier, he’d wait for Aimee to dismiss him before he went anywhere. “Why does it have to be him?”
“It doesn’t have to be him. I chose him for you; I know you’re attracted to him.”
I crossed my arms defiantly. “I am not. He’s a neighbor and a fellow survivor, and that’s all.”
She put her hand on my shoulder, but I jerked away. “I understand why you’re upset, but think about it, Ava. You dated men before you and I got together, and you may be married, but you’re not dead. I’ve sat in meetings with you; somehow, you and Steven always seem to sit near each other. I’ve seen you exchange glances.”
Despite my protest, she wasn’t wrong. Before and during my relationship with Aimee, I’d always had dreams and fantasies about both men and women. Aimee’s responsibilities and her absolute fearlessness meant she’d left me alone many nights. Had I thought about Steven like that? I had; he was the most attractive of our neighbors, and we’d formed some kind of bond when I’d cared for him at his most vulnerable.
“You’re not asking me to sleep with him, right?”
She smiled. “I don’t want you to do anything you’re not comfortable with, Ava, but think of this as a hall pass.”
I couldn’t help but smile back at her use of a phrase that seemed to come from another life, one far removed from the City of Ghosts. “How could you even think that I would cheat on you?”
“You can’t think of it as cheating. You have to think of it as survival. That doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it, Ava. I know I leave you alone too much.”
“But I love you, Aimee.”
“I know you do.” She took my hand and led me back toward the table. I followed her hesitantly. “You’ve fought so hard to survive, and this whole time, you’ve been helping others do the same. You could pass that on to the next generation, Ava.” Aimee sat next to Steven, who stared out the window. He seemed to be avoiding looking at Aimee or me. “Look, I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. I will ask you both for a favor, though: spend some time together.” She turned around to face me. “Ava, will you at least sit down to breakfast?”
We got in line for our portion of fruit and bread, then sat down to a very quiet meal. I didn’t have much of an appetite for my mango slices and strawberries. I couldn’t believe Aimee had blindsided me with this; we’d never even talked about having children. She’d told me a childhood bout with cancer had left her infertile, but we’d never talked about my fertility. We’d never discussed the possibility of raising children together.
We’d certainly never discussed the possibility of bringing a third person into our marriage.
“Excuse me,” I said, pushing my plate toward Aimee.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Aimee told me.
“We sure as shit will.”
I seethed at Aimee the entire time I worked at the med clinic. When I came home that evening, Aimee was out. I went to bed alone, still angry that she’d brought the topic up in the dining room, in front of Steven—in front of everyone—without bothering to discuss it with me first.
Worn out by anger and my long shift at the clinic, unbothered by ghosts, I slept late into the morning. Aimee never came in—not uncommon if she and her captains had to deal with an electrical or food problem. I awoke to a knock on the door. I pulled on a warm sweatshirt and answered.
“Steven.” On this cold morning, his leather jacket didn’t seem out of place indoors. He carried a messenger bag.
He gave me a half smile. “This is awkward, huh?”
“Come in,” I said. “Sit down.” He sat on our battered chair, setting his bag down on the table. It made a clinking sound— glass bottles, I guessed. Since our water source was the sea and our desalination process was still a little crude, we’d taken to fermenting beer to make our water more palatable. The alcohol content wasn’t very high. Beer was strictly rationed—everyone got two bottles a day, and if you missed your ration one day, you couldn’t claim it another. “Look, you can’t take it personally that I’m not jumping at the chance to be the mother of your children. Aimee should have talked to me privately before she brought you into this.”
“Ava, I understand. When I was married, I couldn’t imagine being with anyone but Susan.” I knew his story of how he’d lost his wife; he’d shared it with me soon after we’d met. The way the zombies had destroyed her was gruesome. “No one would be here if it wasn’t for Aimee. I have nothing but respect for her, and for you. It’s one of the reasons I never tried to get to know you better.”
Our eyes met for a moment, and I quickly looked away. Aimee wasn’t wrong; the attraction between Steven and me was palpable. To distract myself, I unzipped his bag. It was full of beer bottles, six of them.
“Aimee brought me my ration, plus hers and yours.”
My anger flared. “She told you to get me drunk and take advantage of me?”
Steven shook his head. “She didn’t, Ava, and I wouldn’t. She asked me to talk to you, and I promised her I would. I know you’re upset…”
I popped the top off my first ration of the day and took a long sip. “I’m not upset at you.”
“…And I also know how it feels to be used.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said quickly. I didn’t need to hear all his secrets. “We all did things to survive—things we never thought we’d do.” I watched his hands as he took a beer from the table. We finished the first one in silence, then started on the second. “What else did Aimee say to you?”
“She said you and I made perfect sense, and she hoped you would take this as a gift instead of an insult. She said she thought it might make you happy.”
“I am happy,” I said quietly.
He leaned back in the chair, looking up at the ceiling. “When I married Susan, she was still in the military. We agreed we were going to wait a few years before we had kids, but Susan got pregnant within the first year. It changed all of our plans, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us.”
I felt a sudden tightness in my chest. “You had a child.”
“Two. A boy named Fenton and a girl named Maddie.”
Without thinking, I reached out to touch his hand. When he looked at me, his eyes were wet. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “How old were they?”
“Seven and four.” He wiped his tears away with the back of his hand, but then his hand came to rest in mine again.
“Even if we…do this, I can never replace…”
“I know.” We sat quietly for a moment. Then he said, “Ava, I don’t want to come between you and Aimee. I respect your marriage. I try to imagine how I would have felt if Susan had wanted to have a child with another man; I could never have been okay with that…even if she did the turkey baster thing.”
I wonder if we have any turkey basters in the City of Ghosts?” I thought aloud. “I can honestly say, for all the things I’ve ever done in the med clinic, I’ve never had to do an insemination.”
I knew who did it every winter, though: the ag people who raised our sheep and goats. My anger resurfaced; I clenched my jaw and balled up my fists.
“I should go,” Steven said, setting down his empty bottle. Realizing I still held his other hand, I let go.
“I’ll tell Aimee you fulfilled your promise.”
He nodded. “I’ll see you around, Ava.” He let himself out, and I locked the door behind him. I needed to think. I needed Aimee to be home so we could work this out. First, I needed to wash up.
I was still sponging myself when Aimee burst in. “Ava, can you get to the clinic, ASAP?”
“What’s wrong?”
“New band of survivors—eight men, three women. I need all hands on deck.” She kissed me. I twisted my black hair into a wet bun and hurried to get dressed as Aimee spouted off what medical details she could remember about the new band.
Despite all she told me, I was still shocked when I saw the refugees, quarantined from the clinic’s handful of routine cases. Each looked as if something had, quite literally, tried to tear them apart.
I spent the next five hours cleaning, sterilizing and suturing wounds. One of the women lost an eye. After we got her resting comfortably, I went to leave her to sleep, but she grabbed hold of my wrist. “What is this place?” she asked me. She had a heavy accent I couldn’t place.
“We call it the City of Ghosts. We don’t understand what attracts them here, but we can sense them all around us. They seem to want us here; the ghosts keep the Wild Ones out. You’re safe here.”
“We thought we were safe on our island, but they found us. They were enormous—taller than men, but hairy like gorillas. They’re like something out of a nightmare, or a campfire story. They can’t be killed. They’re like zombies; shoot them, blow them up, they just keep coming at you, trying to tear you up and eat you.”
I squeezed her hand. “All the survivor bands have different names for them. Here we call them the Wild Ones. We think they can be killed—cutting off their heads seems to work, and so does burning them to ashes.”
She exhaled in a bone-weary sigh. “When we first reached the island, there were four dozen of us.”
They were down to eleven people from almost fifty—and some of the eleven were unlikely to survive the night. They had no children with them.
“I know you don’t believe me, but we’ve been here for over a year safely. Please try to get some rest.” I patted her hand in a way I hoped felt reassuring.
I spent the rest of the day and most of the night working with the medic team on the new survivor band. We lost two of the men and one of the women in surgery. When we finally had the survivors stabilized, I wandered back to the hotel in a daze to rinse the blood and bits of flesh and bone from my body. Aimee wasn’t home. As soon as I dried myself, I sank into the bed and slept.
After a solitary breakfast the next morning, I decided to find Aimee and learned she was holding a meeting with her captains in the hotel’s ballroom. I joined her there, taking an empty chair near Aimee’s side.
“People are scared,” one of the captains said. “The new band describes the Wild Ones doing things we didn’t know they could do, like using boats to reach a populated island. They describe a mob of these things working together, not a few isolated individuals.”
“We’ve never had a good handle on their numbers,” Aimee reminded them. “We’ve always assumed their numbers were limited, based on the fact that we had so few credible sightings of their species before they began preying on humans. We have no way of knowing if their numbers are increasing. All we can do is tighten our security measures.”
“…And pray the ghosts don’t turn on us!” one of the captains shouted. “We know they can get inside our heads!”
“There are factors outside of our control,” Aimee said, cool as ever. “We may not be able to depend upon the protection of the ghosts forever. We still have to make preparations to ensure that the colony survives. For all we know, we could be the end of the human race. I, for one, am not going down without a fight.”
Aimee and her captains continued to talk, but Aimee’s message remained steady: the colony could not allow fear to get the best of it. As I listened to her, I made up my mind: I would get pregnant. I would put Aimee’s ideals into practice and show the community that its leader herself was starting a family. Our future may have been far from certain, but I would use my body and all my energy to show my confidence in Aimee’s leadership.
Hours later, when the meeting ended and Aimee walked me to the dining room, I told her my plan. Her reaction surprised me; she threw both her arms around me and sobbed into my shoulder. Her big, sloppy tears of joy rolled down the back of my shirt.
I laughed. “Aimee, I never knew you were such a big softie.”
“It’s your faith in me,” she said, sniffling. “It means everything.”
“I’m still not sleeping with Steven,” I said. I took a step back and looked her in the eye. “I feel like a sheep—but we’ll do artificial insemination.”
“Whatever you want,” she said.
“I want you to be there for the insemination. I want to feel like this baby is yours and mine.” As I said it, I thought of Steven. We’d talked about what I wanted, and we’d talked about what Aimee wanted, but Steven never told me what he wanted. He’d said he respected my marriage, but would he be happy as a sperm donor, or would he want to be a co-parent? Of the three of us, he was the only one who’d raised a child before.
“Of course,” she said, squeezing me and kissing my cheek. Our lips met, and most of my anger and fear melted away. She told me to sit at our table and volunteered to get our evening meal. As I waited, I spotted Steven sitting at a table with some of the other single men. I decided not to interrupt his meal.
When Aimee returned with two bowls of rice and vegetables, I asked her, “How involved do you imagine Steven being with this baby?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” she said. “I guess we’ll have to talk it out with him.”
As she finished speaking, she looked up at something behind me. I turned around; Steven stood a few inches from the back of my chair. Aimee beamed at him. “We’re going ahead with the project.”
“Turkey-baster style,” I added.
“Looking forward to it,” Steven said. He smiled, but his eyes looked serious.
“Ava wants to know if you’re planning on being the hands-on type of dad.”
He stared at Aimee a moment. Then he turned to me. “I would love to be hands-on,” he said. “From the moment you hold them the first time, you can hardly stand to have your babies out of your sight.”
I looked into Steven’s eyes, and I saw his love for the baby we could have. Desire shot through me. I reached out and took Aimee’s hand, lacing my fingers through hers. I wanted them both, but couldn’t stand the thought of being disloyal to Aimee. A short time later, Steven went back to the men’s table. Later that evening, Aimee and I figured out I would be fertile in about two weeks.
I saw Steven occasionally during the intervening days. When we passed on the stairs or in the dining room, I felt awkward. It felt even stranger to bring a large syringe home from the med clinic and knock on Steven’s door. I woke him up; his hair was rumpled, and his chest was bare under his leather coat. He laughed softly as I handed him the syringe. “Bring this to us when you’re…done.” He nodded.
At home, I kissed Aimee, stripped from the waist down and lay across the bed under our familiar brown blanket. When Steven knocked, Aimee answered the door. I closed my eyes and kept them closed even after I felt Aimee’s reassuring presence among the curious ghosts crowded around our bed. A moment later, I was inseminated. Aimee collapsed on top of me, kissing my lips, my neck, my collarbone. “We’re going to be mommies,” I said excitedly, combing my fingers through her auburn hair.
Our first attempt failed. The next month, and the month after that, we tried the same procedure with the same disappointing results. “Don’t be discouraged,” Aimee told me as I sat on the bathroom floor, holding my knees and sobbing. “We’ll keep trying.” The air stirred, and I heard the ghosts whispering faintly. I couldn’t make out their words, but I believed they were encouraging me.
On the night before we’d scheduled my next insemination, I woke up alone. Aimee was off dealing with some food storage crisis. I couldn’t fault her for that, but I was angry at being alone. I was angry at the cold, impersonal syringe and at not being pregnant yet.
I threw on a sweatshirt and walked down the hall to Steven’s. After I knocked for several minutes, he came to the door. Despite the cold, he wore only black pants. I looked at the long vertical scar down his arm and remembered suturing it. “Ava,” he said, sounding surprised. “It’s early.” He let me in.
I looked into his eyes, noticing for the first time they were no fewer than five different shades of blue. Blue eyes were rare among the survivors, but Steven had them, and so did I. “Make love to me.”
He cocked his head to the side. “Are you sure about this?” I nodded. I leaned in to kiss him, but he held me at arm’s length. “What does Aimee think about you being here with me?” He moved in closer.
“Her idea.” I put my hands on his shoulders, closed the space between us and kissed him. He wrapped his arms around me, and even through my sweatshirt, I could feel his skin was cold. His lips were warm, and his mouth felt wonderful. He kissed me back, admitting my tongue as it gently touched his lower lip.
I couldn’t deny my desire any longer. Reluctantly pulling away from his kiss, I whispered, “I want you.”
Steven didn’t hesitate. He lifted me off my feet, carried me to his bed and sat me on the edge. He undressed quickly and slipped under the brown blanket, identical to the one I shared with Aimee. After I’d joined him under the blanket, he helped me peel off my warm clothes. I unhooked my gray bra and took off my unmatched green panties. We lay face-to-face, studying each other’s eyes for a moment, his fingers lightly grazing my belly, before he held me to him. I ran my hands over his arms, trying to take the chill from his skin.
I closed my eyes as our lips met. I surrendered easily, rolling onto my back. He covered my body with his. I parted my thighs, wrapping one leg around him, inviting in the hardness I could feel against my inner thigh—another part of him that felt warm and alive.
“Are you sure?” he whispered.
“More than anything.” He groaned and kissed my lips. I only had to angle my hips toward him, and he shoved his cock inside me. I gasped at how deeply I could feel him, then ground my hips against him. We moved in imperfect unison. The thrill of this stranger’s thighs slapping against mine while he touched long-untouched places inside me overwhelmed me. The desire I’d been trying to suppress for months came back with a vengeance. Pushing down hard with both hands on the muscle of his lower back, I made my muffled howl into his smooth chest while I came.
I felt the excited pounding of his heart, and I could tell Steven was close, too. In a few quick, hard strokes, he made a loud sound of bliss. With my head still pressed against his chest, I opened my lips and bit him underneath his collarbone. His moan became a shout and we clung to each other, desperately trying to catch our breath. This felt right.
He withdrew suddenly and rolled over to his side of the bed. “Ava, I’m sorry. You feel too good.” He sounded exhausted.
I opened my eyes. “Don’t be sorry. That was perfect. Next time we’ll go slow.” I caught a glimpse of his beautiful smile. It was even prettier now that he was, in some way we hadn’t quite figured out yet, mine. “Are you one of those guys who doesn’t like to be touched while he sleeps?”
He shook his head; his dark hair looked gloriously messy. “I want to hold you all night.” I rested my head on his chest, and he wrapped his arms around me.
I slept deeply, but not for long. Before the sun came up, he nudged me gently awake and said into my ear, “Is it next time yet?” Laughing, I rolled over on top of him. I kissed my way down his chest in slow motion. I wanted to taste him, to taste me on him, but I would take my time. Our first time was short, but sweet—the product of months of self-denial—but our second time would be an experience to savor.
The next day as I walked through the hotel’s halls, I heard bits of songs hummed softly. I didn’t know what it was until the woman from the new band, the one who’d lost an eye, told me. She’d lost the sight in her remaining eye after a series of infections, and in her blindness the ghosts spoke to her.
“Lullabies,” she said. “They want to sing to your baby.”
“My baby?” It would be weeks before I knew beyond a doubt I was pregnant, but she knew.
“The ghosts love babies. New skin, bones and blood remind them of life. They miss it. That’s why they keep us.”
I put my hand on her shoulder, leaned in and kissed the top of her head in the center of her smooth, black hair. In the old world, we’d been more independent, but the Wild Ones had eaten away at some of our boundaries. I would learn to play by the new rules.