Virgil

"Maybe you should sit down."

Joseph and I were sitting in an office – his, I presume. He'd sat in the chair next to mine instead of the big one behind his desk. "We have some information that I thought you had a right to hear." I wait nervously, my heart beating faster. What could he possibly tell me?

"Your wife and the ghoul are in the area." I'm surprised.

"Really?" I smile.

He holds his hands up. "Don't get too excited."

"Why not?"

"We've heard…rumors," He fidgets. "From our confidential informants."

"Well? Rumors about what?"

"That they have been…intimate." I stare at the floor, eyes wide, unable to breathe. I feel like I've been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. "For now, they are just rumors. People see a male and a female together, and they jump to conclusions."

"I have to know." I whisper.

"Indeed. We will do our best to locate them and bring them in, so you can ask them yourself."

Hands clenched tightly in my lap, I nod slowly.

Wendy

After starting a fire in the fireplace of an abandoned house, we sit, eating our dog meat and Instamash. I figured that he's right – beggars can't be choosers, and this dog definitely wasn't anything like my Max. It was mangy, hungry, and came at us with bared teeth and wild eyes.

It's stringy, gristly, and gamey as hell. But it's food.

Whenever we come to a settlement, I go in alone for supplies. Both of us are nervous about it, but he attracts too much attention, and it appears that our reputation precedes us. The last thing we need is another scene like the one at Seneca. It's bothering me. We hadn't done anything in almost a week – we weren't sad or grieving anymore. We were angry. Angry at each other, angry at the wasteland, angry at the world.

Like I'd thought before – it was proximity; grief. There was a fondness there, but it wasn't love. Well, not romantic love, at least. "Do you think he'll know?"

"About what?"

I sigh in irritation. "Stop playing dumb. About us."

"He already knows. I'm sure the Enclave has informants everywhere."

"How can you be sure?"

"I am." His stony silences have become longer, colder. Over the past few days he's become distant, bedding down several feet from me rather than cuddling to soak up my warmth. He's taken to drinking irradiated water to keep him warm – it improves blood flow in ghouls or something, he says. The only one he knows that has any knowledge of or interest in ghoul physiology was Barrows, and they've never exactly been on the best of terms.

"Is something wrong?" I ask him.

"Yes."

"What?"

He turns his head away from me. "Everything."

Nothing more needed to be said. Yes, everything was wrong. I was supposed to have a hand, a husband, a home. He – well, I don't know what he could expect to have. Mal couldn't have been expected to live forever. No, nothing more needs to be said, but I can't shut up.

"Do you want to talk?" I ask.

"No." he spits, curtly.

"Well, too bad." My voice is hard, angry. I want to talk about something. About anything. He turns his head slowly and looks at me, impassively. I search for a question to ask him – something that we hadn't talked about before. "What did you do before you met Mal?"

"I was a bouncer." His eyes narrow almost imperceptibly.

"Where?"

"At the bar in Underworld." He pauses, then adds, "It was called the Ninth Circle, then."

"Like Dante's Inferno." His favorite book.

"Yes."

"And –"

"Do you want my fuckin' life story?" He asks, almost snarling at me.

"Well, excuse the fuck outta me for wanting to know something about you."

He doesn't reply. I light a cigarette and stare into the fire, which is gonna go out unless I toss something else on it. I decide to let it burn out. It's about time we went to sleep anyway. The silence lengthens and he lights a cigarette of his own. He doesn't move to throw anything on the fire either, which I take as a sign that he wants to hit the sack soon too.

He reaches over and digs a bottle of irradiated water out of his pack. He twists off the cap, and downs it in seconds, tossing the empty bottle into a dark corner of the room when he's finished. I scoot over to my bedroll and lay down, facing away from him. I can feel him staring at my back – he probably won't sleep for a while yet, it feels better for him to watch over me, shotgun on his lap. He's doing his job, his duty. It's what he was programmed to do.

Charon

My soul is burning.

I want to kill, rend, hurt something. I want to let the Darkness inside me free.

I remember the look Mal had on her face when she watched me kill with my hands or a knife. There was fear in her eyes, excitement, and lust. It makes me angrier. I'm angry that I did not die first, or die with her. I'm angry that I couldn't go in her place. My face twists into an ugly grimace. Her pain was excruciating.

So is mine.

Instead of succumbing to the empty ache, widening the gaping hole that opened in my heart when she left, I clench my teeth and rage against it. I'm weary of grief. I'm tired of wallowing in my own pain and self-pity. I'm ashamed to be someone who would take comfort in a woman that he has no right to in the first place.

I'm angry because I am what I am.

About Forty-Five Years Ago

Charon

We're in the suite, and she's standing before me, naked and defiant. "If you do one thing for me, I'm yours." She points at her cheek. "Slap me."

I frown, hesitating. This is a conflict in my programming. I can't hurt her. Sure, I've bitten, pinched, and scratched her – all at her insistence – but slapping faces is a whole different ball game. "You won't hurt me," she says, "because I like it." Confused, I stand there, stock still. She starts to hurl insults at me – "Hey, big and ugly," she taunts, "if you ever wanna fuck this again, you'll do what I tell you." I take a step toward her, and she sneers. "Shuffler." She sees the muscle twitch in my face at the epithet. I can feel the rage blossom in my chest. How can she call me that? She smiles, wickedly. "Make a move you rotten zomb-" WHACK! Before I can stop myself, I slap her cheek, hard. She yelps in surprise. She holds her hand to her face, shudders, and looks into my eyes, and her gaze is of pure passion, a perverse hunger deep within her rising to the surface, consuming her. Eagerly, she whispers, "Do it again."

Angry with her, I need little prompt. My palm connects solidly with her other cheek, her head jerking to the side. I grab the front of her shirt and toss her on the bed like a rag doll, as if she weighs nothing. Before she can rise, I shove her down into the mattress by her shoulders, hard. Growling, I slowly wrap my hand around her pale throat. I can feel her heart hammering in her chest, beating rapidly, like a bird. I lean down to her, inches from her face, and snarl, "Don't call me that."

She whimpers, and I can see the lust in her eyes, with a tinge of fear. If she didn't hold my contract, I could kill her by simply squeezing her slender neck. She knows it too, and it excites her. Her nostrils flare with each shallow, rapid breath and she licks her full lips, saliva glistening on them like morning dew. I can feel the heat radiating from her body; when she exhales, I can detect the sweet-sharp smell of whiskey on her breath. I relax my hand and stroke her neck with my thumb and she closes her eyes and shivers.

I slide my hand down her body, cup her breast and grasp a nipple between a thumb and forefinger. I roll it lazily for a moment, then squeeze and twist. She shouts and bucks underneath me, pain mingled with pleasure. "Calling me names isn't NICE, Mallie."

She sneers up at me. "But you're so easy to manipulate."

"Is that so?" I ask.

She laughs. "Yeah. It's fun, too." I scowl at her, caress her soft cheek, then draw my arm back and smack it, hard. WHACK! She groans loudly, delicate eyelids fluttering.

I rise from the bed. "Then I'll teach you to be nice." When I unbuckle my belt, her eyes fly open, wide, clear. She begins to scramble backwards on her heels and elbows in a parody of an escape attempt, and I snag one of her ankles, holding her fast as she fights against me. After a few moments, she stops and smiles. She knows that I'm too strong, too fast; it's pointless to resist my iron grip. I take her in – muscles taut, hair wild, eyes wide, cheeks red from the strikes of my coarse palm.

I release of her ankle and she lies there, silent, compliant. "Close your eyes." She obeys, body trembling, and I give her a moment to reconsider. She could stop it, at any time, and I always give her ample opportunity to do so. I still don't know why she'd want to do anything with me, especially this. But at moments like these, I don't ask, and I don't fucking care. I unbutton and slide my pants down a little, freeing my aching length to the cool air. I wrench her legs open wide and settle myself in between them. "Last chance to say you're sorry." She laughs haughtily, and I plunge inside her forcefully, angrily.

She shouts, scratches at my arms. I catch her hands, one after the other, and pin her wrists to either side. Her body shakes as I thrust into her aggressively, her soft breasts bouncing, teeth bared. We sound like animals, shouting, growling, grunting, fighting each other for dominance. I look into her eyes and see the fire in them, the perverse vitality of an unrepentant deviant; deep in those azure depths is the thrill of being owned, of submitting, of being dominated by another. I feel her broken soul reaching to mine, seizing it, and claiming it for her own. I bite down on the crook of her neck and she shrieks, stiffens, and tightens around me. I roar as a wave of pleasure overtakes me, my primal cries muffled by her supple flesh.

We lay, breathing heavily. I can feel her body beneath me, sinking into the mattress under our weight, chest heaving. I release her wrists, first the left, then the right. She doesn't move – she opens her eyes, gazes into mine, blinks lazily, and smiles, lips parted.

She gasps as I lift myself and slide out of her. "That'll teach you not to call me a fuckin' zombie," I toss a rag on her chest. "Mouthy bitch."

As I close the bathroom door, I hear her laughing.