I Found Dad Among the Dead and I Never Let Him Go

The asphalt of Phoenix seethed beneath the wheels of the Hunter. My armored truck, bristling with wire and rusted plates, chewed up miles while I crushed every infected bastard that got in the way. Every skull that burst against the bumper brought me closer to the neighborhood where I grew up. The mission was simple in my head: get my parents out of hell and onto the squad’s helicopter.

When I turned onto the same old street, a scream shattered the silence. I recognized it in the breath, a sound that split me in two. I hit the gas, leaving a trail of crushed flesh behind me. The front door of the house hung half-open. I went in with my rifle raised, ready for the end.

What I saw wouldn’t fit cleanly into memory. My father, no longer himself, naked in the middle of the living room, with milky eyes and a slack mouth. His cock hung at half-mast between his legs, still glistening with fluids, and on the floor there was a puddle of semen mixed with blood. My mother’s voice came from the built-in closet, also naked, begging. I understood it in a flash: the infection had caught him on top of her, with his cock inside her, and she had managed to wrench free and lock herself inside in time.

I kicked him in the chest and made him stagger. I opened the closet, pulled my trembling mother out, and wrapped her in a blanket. The helicopter blades filled the sky. My teammates leaned out of the side door and stretched their hands toward her to lift her in first. When it was my turn to jump, stone-cold fingers closed around my ankle. My father. I hit the asphalt face-first and a horde spilled out from the avenue like a black tide.

I looked up and signaled Sergeant Ramos. Go. Save her. Ramos pressed his fist to his chest — the salute of the condemned — and the helicopter rose with my mother inside, leaving me with the monster my father had become.

I aimed between his eyes. The barrel trembled. I squeezed the trigger and no bullet came out, only a sob. I lowered the weapon. I sealed his mouth with duct tape and dragged him into the rear cage of the Hunter. He was still my father. Something in me wouldn’t let him go.

***

I found shelter in an abandoned supermarket on the edge of the highway. I tied him to a column with climbing ropes. Every time he tried to bite, I landed a clean punch on his jaw. He learned fast. After a few days he stopped trying and walked beside me, hanging from the rope like a big, decomposing dog.

His white eyes lit up in front of the meat freezer. I threw him an entire thawed pig and he tore into it with primal hunger. While he ate, he looked at me a second too long, and I swear the muscle in his face twitched into something like a smile. Something was born in me then. A crooked, bright idea: train Dad.

The weeks became months. With cuts of meat as a reward, he learned to stay still, to wait for me, to follow my pace. He was clumsy. He was mine.

One afternoon I wanted to wash him. The water from the barrels in the back came out brown and cold, but I used it. I rubbed his skin with a rag, trying to scrub away the stench of rotten fruit and wet earth. It wouldn’t come off. I realized I barely noticed it anymore. It was Dad’s smell, the smell of my survival.

My hand slid over his sunken stomach and went lower. The cock hanging between his legs throbbed once. Then it throbbed again and turned hard as a carved branch, thick, long, the purple head peeking out from beneath the wrinkled foreskin. Pale, veined with a web of violet lines that looked like roots beneath the skin, cold to the touch but firm as stone. His body responded to something that wasn’t life, but wasn’t total oblivion either.

A clumsy heat rose through my belly and settled between my legs. I hadn’t touched myself in months, locked up in uniforms and fear, and my cunt clenched all at once, wet before I could even think. I am what I am: a woman with a sex that won’t bother being what other people expect. That night, crouched in front of him, I stopped fighting the image and let myself feel. One hand closed around that dead cock and squeezed it slowly, measuring it, feeling the way it answered the friction. The other hand went to me, two fingers sinking between my soaked lips until I found the hard clit.

I let the rag fall. I knelt on the wet tiles. I brought my nose to his sex and smelled what I expected — sweet rot — and underneath it, another smell, older, salty, almost familiar. I opened my mouth and tasted it. It wasn’t what I feared. It tasted like meat cured in the air, salty, with a metallic edge. My heart hammered at my throat like a war drum. I sucked him without thinking, with a hunger that had been asking permission for months. I took him all the way to the back of my throat, until the cold head hit my throat and made me tear up. I pulled him out with a wet tug, left a strand of spit hanging, and swallowed him again. My tongue traced his swollen veins, licked his frenulum, circled the tip before plunging back down. One hand grabbed the base and pumped while the other stroked his loose balls, cupping them carefully, and he let out a guttural growl that wasn’t human but was, without doubt, pleasure.

I stripped off my clothes awkwardly. The wet fabric clung to my skin. My nipples had gone so hard they hurt against the cold air. I got on all fours on the slick floor, arched my back, offered my ass by spreading my legs, and with one hand I guided his hips and with the other I brought his cold cock to the entrance of my cunt. The thick head sank between my lips and opened me slowly. He entered cold and fast, and I let out a hoarse cry that bounced off the empty aisles. Almost at once I felt something viscous and warm pouring out from inside him, a thick fluid that lubricated everything and streamed down my thighs.

His clumsy hands seized my hips with brutal force, leaving purple marks already. He learned how to move in two thrusts. The first was a blind shove that rammed me to the hilt in one shot and knocked the air out of me. The second already had rhythm. By the third, he was fucking me with the raw cadence of an animal, each hard slam lifting me off the floor, his cold balls slapping against my clit, the whole cock sinking to the root and coming out almost all the way before driving back in. His body still knew what desire was, even if his mind didn’t.

I braced on my elbows and let myself be used. I slipped one hand between my legs and rubbed my clit to the rhythm of his thrusts. My cunt made obscene sounds, wet slaps filling the empty supermarket. When I came, I arched hard and screamed against the concrete, and the walls of my pussy clenched around that dead cock and squeezed it dry. He growled from deep in his chest, dug his fingers in until I bled, and unloaded a cold, thick stream inside me that mixed with mine and ran down my thighs to my knees.

I stayed there on all fours, with his cold semen dripping out of me, trembling and laughing under my breath. Dad was still inside, still hard. He never softened.

***

The supermarket became our home. Every aisle held a postcard. I had him up against the dead refrigerators, my tits crushed against the cold metal while he drove into me from behind, his cock sliding in and out with a constant wet slap. I had him on the butcher counter, me lying on my back with my legs over his bony shoulders, him standing and driving me to the hilt, a rusty butcher knife ten centimeters from my head. I taught him to eat me out. At first he didn’t understand what I wanted, until I shoved his head between my legs and pressed his cold tongue to my clit. After that, he went on his own. He would kneel, open me with two clumsy fingers, and lick me for hours without ever getting tired, because the dead don’t get tired. That dead tongue was better than any living tongue: cold, hard, tireless. It made me come four, five times in a row until I pushed his head away to make him stop, and even then he still wanted more.

I taught him to take it up the ass. The first time I screamed and dug my nails into his parchment skin. With patience and the viscous lubricant he secreted himself, it ended up becoming my favorite place. I had him from behind, against the expired canned goods, while I shoved three fingers into my cunt and came crying. Among the expired cans I slept pressed against his cold flesh, wrapped around a weight that didn’t breathe but was there, his still-soft cock buried between my stained butt cheeks. He stayed motionless, staring at the ceiling with his white eyes, and I, curled up there, slept like I hadn’t slept since before the end of the world.

We hunted together. His instinct was cleaner than mine. It took him a while to understand he couldn’t bite the prey, that that was my food. He learned to break their necks with a sharp twist and leave the body intact for me. I was afraid of losing him if I got infected, I always thought when I washed the blood off my hands. I was afraid of forgetting everything if I turned.

I bathed him in the creek out back. I brushed his teeth with an old toothbrush and cold water because his breath bit at my nose. I talked to him for hours: about the first time I rode a motorcycle, about the name I chose for myself, about things I had never told the living version. Then I’d grab his wet cock and suck him off in the creek, kneeling among the stones, with the icy water up to my knees, until he poured a long, thick stream into my mouth that I swallowed whole without spitting out a drop. He didn’t answer. Sometimes that was better than any answer.

A whole year can fit inside an empty supermarket. I learned to forget the calendar.

***

That night I was riding him, on a mattress thrown on the floor. He lay on his back, his stiff cock buried to the root in my soaked cunt. I rode him slowly and shamelessly, my hips keeping a rhythm we both knew by then, rising almost enough to pull him out and dropping back down hard until my pelvis bone hit him. His cold hands gripped my waist, leaving purple marks that would last for days. I held my tits with both hands and pinched my nipples until they hurt, leaning back with my head hanging. I whispered to him in broken little words — daddy, baby, like that, deeper, fuck me — words he didn’t understand but could feel in my ragged breathing.

The wet slapping of my cunt against his balls was the only sound in the supermarket. That, and my long, open moans, getting higher and higher.

I didn’t hear them come in. My moans, long and open, must have led them to the center of the supermarket. I didn’t hear boots on concrete. I didn’t hear safeties being switched off.

—Sergeant Vega?

The voice hit me like an ice knife between the vertebrae. My body tensed like a bow. I opened my eyes.

They were there. My old teammates, in a semicircle, pale faces under the yellow beam of their flashlights. Faces of pure horror. They must have been standing there for God knows how long, watching, listening to the wet sounds of our bodies in the concrete silence.

I didn’t move. Impaled on him, out of breath, feeling every inch of that dead cock inside me while the entire world judged me in silence. An old ribbon of semen was dripping down my thigh. The flashlights illuminated everything: my hard tits, the purplish cock buried deep in my open cunt, my father’s slack mouth.

And then my father — the zombie, the shameless dead man — felt how panic tightened the walls of my cunt and mistook it for pleasure. He growled from the bottom of his dry throat. His hands gripped my hips and he shoved into me all the way in one thrust. I felt him twitch inside me, a violent pulse that went through my whole body, and then the hot stream that filled me so much it overflowed and ran down my ass to soak the mattress. My body answered with a traitorous spasm, my cunt squeezing him out for the last drop, a grimace halfway between ecstasy and shame slipping from my open mouth.

—What’s going on? Why are you just standing there? —another voice said.

My mother.

She pushed through the soldiers and stepped into the circle. Her brain refused to read the scene at first. She saw a familiar silhouette mounted on someone. Then the details started falling into place like drops of acid on her face.

She saw my hair. She saw the curve of my back. She saw the pale parchment skin of the man underneath. She saw the sunken ribs. She saw her husband. She saw how her husband’s dead sex was still buried in her daughter, and how the dead man’s cold semen was dripping down her thighs.

The scream didn’t come from her throat. It came from her guts. A tearing sound that wasn’t human, the exact noise of a mind breaking clean in half. Her eyes searched for mine and didn’t find the daughter she had buried a year before. They found something else. Then her knees buckled and she fell backward onto the concrete with a dull thud. The epitaph of my family.

Chaos was my door.

My teammates threw themselves over my mother’s body and turned their backs to me. Adrenaline yanked me out of shock. I slid off him with an obscene sound — a wet plop followed by a stream of cold semen that fell onto the mattress — that nobody heard. My fingers found a smoke grenade in the backpack lying beside the mattress. I pulled the pin and threw it without looking.

The muffled blast spat out a thick white cloud. Coughing, curses, confusion. My perfect curtain. I grabbed my father’s cold hand and pulled. He came with me without asking anything, because he didn’t ask anything anymore, his cock still hard and swaying between his legs as we ran.

We got out through the back door and onto the asphalt. The Hunter was still there, covered in dust and me. I shoved him into the passenger seat, jumped into the driver’s side, and the key turned before the door even closed all the way. The engine roared. The tires bit into the pavement. We tore north like a desperate bullet.

***

The gas ran out somewhere along an unmarked road. The engine died with one last metallic gasp and we were left in silence. There was no road left but the woods, so we went into the woods, both of us naked. The run had been frantic and nobody had thought about clothes.

The slope was steep and slick. We climbed until the tree canopy opened up. A dark wooden cabin appeared, the last breath of civilization planted on the summit. And the view. The city below, a tapestry of broken lights, and on the horizon the orange flashes of artillery fire. My old squad fighting another battle against another horde in another ruin.

My father stopped beside me, a silent statue, his cock still half-erect. Then he turned his head slowly, lifted his arms, and opened them. A clumsy, learned gesture. An embrace.

I understood.

I took a step and slipped into that hollow. I rested my head against his cold, leathery chest. His arms closed around me with the strength of a vise. And then I heard it. A slow, almost inaudible drumming beneath my ear. His heart, what was left of it, beating slowly. A funereal, steady rhythm. The only real sound in a world of ghosts.

We stayed like that, watching the sun sink and stain the sky orange and blood-red. Down below, the war went on. The screams, duty, Sergeant Ramos’s orders over a radio that was never going to look for me again. All of that belonged to another woman. To another life I no longer wanted.

I drew back a little to look at him face-to-face.

—I don’t want to go back anymore —I whispered, my breath making a small cloud between us—. I want to stay here. With you.

I took his face in both hands and brought my mouth to his. His lips gave way slowly, cold and firm as wax. I ran my tongue over the corner of his mouth and he opened on reflex, learned. My tongue found his, inert, icy, and wrapped around it with my warmth. A clumsy kiss, slow, without the coordination of the living, and for that very reason more mine than any other.

When I pulled away, a bright thread stretched between our mouths and snapped.

I lowered my hand and grabbed his cock, still half-awake. I squeezed it slowly until I felt it harden fully against my palm. I knelt among the dry leaves and took it into my mouth right there, in front of the burning city, with the smell of gunpowder rising from the valley. I sucked it with a new hunger, looking up at him, his white eyes fixed on me without really seeing me. Then I turned around, put my hands on the rough wood of the cabin, arched my back, and offered him my ass. He took my hips without hesitation and sank into me in one single thrust. My cry was lost among the trees. He fucked me slowly that time, almost ceremonially, each thrust marking the rhythm of the dying sun. When he came inside me, with the last orange ray burning our backs, I felt the cold stream rise up into my belly and I came crying, cheek against the wood, feeling him pulse inside me like a second dead heart.

There, watching the last glint of light die in the city of the dead, I understood it all. My father. My boyfriend. My lover. The only two inhabitants of a tiny kingdom at the end of the world. A queen and her dead king, finally at peace.