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The thing that Jack says he misses most about the world before the zoms changes faster than the wind—Eugene could fill a book with all the ones he’s heard since he started traveling with Jack. Or two books. Or an entire shelf of encyclopedias. While he’s thinking of it, maybe not even something printed that he’d have to go to lengths to revise– He could fill an entire wiki, if, y'know, wikis were still a thing.
✜ ✜ ✜
The first one he remembers hearing was five days after (literally) stumbling across Jack. The two of them fumble their way into an abandoned Tesco in the middle of the kind of downpour of rain that sounded particularly like fists banging against a roof (“Zombie fists!” remarks Jack).’Gene creeps through the ghostly, empty shelves, his dented length of metal pipe poised as a makeshift bat, while Jack shoves over as many displays as he can to block the already-boarded-up windows. Once they declare the shop safe enough to rest in for a bit, they sling their rucksacks off aching shoulders and string their soaking clothes across the cleanest of the shelves.
Eugene tries not to fall asleep, but the Tesco is warm compared to the frigid downpour outside, and before he knows it he’s struggling to keep his eyes open, jerking his head forward every few seconds when he feels himself drifting. Jack doesn’t look over, but he smiles the tiniest, tiniest bit, and offers to take the first watch. ’Gene accepts tiredly, scrubbing a damp hand over his scruffy face and trying to curl up and get as much sleep as he possibly can before they have to start running again.
As he falls off into the darkness of exhaustion he can swear he hears Jack mutter something under his breath.
“God, I miss fresh socks.”
When Eugene wakes back up, the setting sun is glinting through the tiny skylight in the center of the room. Jack’s pulling on his now-dry clothes and smiling to himself, the sun glancing off his straw-colored hair as he wiggles his toes into dry socks that might not be anywhere near the cleanest socks this side of the pond, but the smile on his face grows when he meets ’Gene’s eyes until ’Gene has to look away, smiling down into his lap as he pushes his fingers through sleep-mussed hair.
✜ ✜ ✜
“Tinned peaches,” Jack groans, slouching in the aisle of the deserted, detritus-strewn supermarket’s storeroom, leaning on W.G. like a third leg, “Always a little bit of everything but the peaches.”
“I never took you for the fruit sort.”
“I am a man of many mysteries.”
“You once asked me if Fruit By The Foot counted as real fruit.”
“Well, excuse me, mister fancy food journalist! It’s got… vitamins! And fruit juice! And vitamin C!”
“Yeah, let’s prevent scurvy with a gross children’s snack that’s main ingredients are multiple different kinds of sugar."
Jack’s brow furrows in indignation and he opens his mouth to object to his favorite candy being slandered in such a malicious way, but a sharp clatter from right behind him and a shadow in his periphery has ’Gene shoving him aside to beat the living (non-living? undead?) crap out of a particularly quiet shambler, which lets the two of them know that maybe their leaving the area should occur sooner rather than later. They wrestle as many cans as they can possibly fit into their packs and dart out the way they came. And so what if Eugene stops to grab the last box of Fruit By The Foot when Jack isn’t looking? Hey, it’s got vitamins, hasn’t it?
That night they hole up in a garden shed barely big enough to fit one person, let alone two. Jack boards up the door while Eugene takes stock, equalizing their pack loads and trying to figure out how long this last haul will last them. He’s gotten almost everything situated by the time Jack’s done nailing the last board in place. Jack turns ’round, dropping his hammer on the top of the pile of things that were going to go back in his pack, and slumps face-first onto his sleeping bag as melodramatically as humanly possible, pushing at ’Gene’s legs where they dig into his side.
“All the stores we’ve dug through since humanity’s gone all shambly and rotten and we haven’t found one single can of peaches.”
Eugene rolls his eyes, used to hearing about peaches by now, but figures that now’s as good a time as any and proceeds to dump the box of Fruit by the Foot onto Jack’s back. Later, he’ll confess to having never had a Fruit by the Foot before as Jack has one trailing out of his mouth like a grotesque, three-foot-long yellow and green tongue. He regrets his words almost instantly as Jack grins around his mouthful of sticky sweet and lunges to shove the opposite end of the candy into Eugene’s mouth. Eugene chokes a little and rolls his eyes again at the cheesy Disney movie reference, but he smiles into the kiss, and if he admits he does rather like whatever flavor “Color By The Foot” is supposed to be, so what? It just means Jack’ll have to learn to share.
✜ ✜ ✜
“Christmas dinners were downright lethal at my house until Jill learned to cook. That’s my sister. Jill, I mean. My sister Jill,” Jack mumbles through a mouthful of tinned salmon. Their last two grocery store heists had turned up nothing but tinned fish, and most of it wasn’t even the good sort—all chunk light tuna in oil, or sardines, or weird shrimp thingies—and they had all but finished what was left of the good. At least it wasn’t SPAM.
“Chew with your mouth closed, you cretin,” Eugene interrupts, after swallowing his mouthful of tuna, of course.
“I remember once,” Jack continues, shoveling more salmon into his mouth, “Mum bought a whole turkey for all of us and managed to mess it up so bad that even our neighbor’s dog wouldn’t touch it. The whole house reeked like burned turkey and rotted meat for ages.”
“Couldn’t have smelled any worse than your morning breath. It’s like waking up next to a raccoon. A very large, sleeping-bag-hogging raccoon. That tries to give me sleepy morning kisses.”
“It’s the freaking zombie apocalypse, do you really think I’ve got the capacity of mind to remember to carry a toothbrush and paste with me everywhere?” Jack pouts, shoving in another forkful of salmon. Eugene rolls his eyes. One of these days they just might roll all the way out of his head. Occupational hazard of dating Jack Holden through the zombie apocalypse.
“That’s right, I forgot you’ve got the attention span of a six-year-old. A six-year-old who’d just been given a six-pack of Coke and a funnel.”
“Pillock.”
“You could at least, like, use the corner of your shirt or something.”
“Massive, massive pillock, why do I even bother romancing someone so dreadful, really—” Jack complains, tossing his empty tin into their trash pile, but Eugene cuts him off with a fond, albeit fishy, kiss. When he pulls away, it’s with a laugh.
“Romancing? Really?” Eugene quips, and Jack huffs out an impatient breath and pulls him back in, but he just continues the moment they separate. “I’m not entirely sure coming on to me like an overly-amorous octopus counts as romancing.”
“Well, you’ve never complained about sucking before, have you?”
“You’re such a nerd, oh my god.”
“You know, there was a time when I had a boyfriend who didn’t tease me relentlessly. I miss that.”
✜ ✜ ✜
Jack never thought he’d miss SPAM, but there was a first time for everything.
“I swear to god, this is like, the third supermarket in a row to have nothing but tinned freaking fish,” he mutters, scooping the cans off the shelf and into Eugene’s open pack, “it’s like, zombies get to eat brains, zombies are all about brains, whatever, but all we get to eat is fish. I didn’t sign up for this apocalypse, but I sure as hell didn’t sign up to be a pescatarian either.”
“Jack.”
“Would it kill the universe to give us, like, anything else? Something that doesn’t come from the ocean?”
“Jack.”
“I miss SPAM. I’m never saying anything bad about SPAM again. I miss SPAM the most. I swear to god, if I could wish for one thing right now it’d be SPAM.”
“Jack—” Eugene tries again, only to be cut off by Jack’s petulant tone.
“Eugene.”
“Jack—”
“Eugene.”
“Jack, would you cut that out, it’s—”
“Eugene.”
“Jack, would you just look up!”
Jack whirls around, W.G. at the ready, looking for a zom, but Eugene shakes his head and points towards the back of the store. There she is, on a distant top shelf, shining like the crown jewels, but less gaudy and quite a bit more useful—and most certainly not fish. Jack bolts over, letting ‘Gene’s bag clatter to the floor, and clambers up the empty shelves to reach for the tin.
“It’s just you and me tonight, baby,” Jack croons, holding the tinned meat at eye level. “Just you and me now.”
“You are not cheating on me with canned meat of questionable origin, that is not happening,” Eugene says, kneeling to pick up the spilled tins and his rucksack.
“Don’t worry darling, he’s just jealous.”
✜ ✜ ✜
“I had an uncle,” starts Eugene, looking up at the night sky. Jack doesn’t say anything, just leans back, hums in agreement, and waits for ’Gene to continue. The pause lasts for a long time, just the two of them sitting silent with the night stretched out all around. A long ways away, a fire’s burning. A big one. The air stings with ash, even this far from it. “I had an uncle in New York. The city, not the state. I mean, yeah, the state too, but he lived in Manhattan.”
Jack shifts closer, just a little bit, so Eugene’s head can lie on his shoulder. “He was like a dad to me, after my dad died.” ’Gene wraps an arm around Jack’s waist, and his hands are ice-cold. “I only saw him a couple times a year growing up, and it was mostly when he’d buy plane tickets for me to fly out there over summer or winter break. But every time, sometime before I would leave, he’d take me up to the mountains. A friend of his, some lawyer at the same firm, this friend of his, he had a house up in the mountains. We’d stay there for a night and go up and sit on the roof and look up at the stars.”
Jack pictures a younger Eugene, surrounded by stars and smiling, and listens, tucking his chin above ’Gene’s ear. “Sometimes we’d fall asleep up there. When I was little, I’d wake up the next morning tucked in bed, but when I got older, I’d wake up surrounded by sky and my uncle would be there too, joking that he was getting too old to accidentally fall asleep on the roof and that next time I’d wake up alone up there.”
The fire in the distance looks brighter. Looks closer.
“I never did.”
For now, the stars above them are still brighter than the fire, but Jack knows it’ll have to be an early start in the morning.
“He sounds wonderful.”
“I miss him. I wish you could have met him.”
“So do I.”
✜ ✜ ✜
“Did you ever have pets?” Jack asks one day while they walk a winding footpath through a verdant, green forest, well aware that zoms could be dragging themselves about nearby even though the thin underbrush offered few hiding places for them.
“We had a dog when I was a little kid, but I don’t really remember him much,” Eugene replies, puzzling over the faded, creased map in his hands before he continues, “He died when I was four. My parents adopted him when they got married. His name was Sgt. Rock but we called him Rocky.” Jack nods, apparently satisfied, and they continue in silence for a while, Eugene intent on winning a staring contest with his map and Jack gently steering him around potholes and raised roots when they come up. After a while, Eugene stops and sighs, folding the map back up and carefully zipping it back into their cleanest surviving zip-lock bag. “If I’m being one-hundred percent honest here, I have no freaking clue where we are.”
“I always knew aborting your career as a scout was a mistake. I should’ve listened to my mother and married that rich banker so I could have at least been torn apart in an expensive flat on Park Avenue rather than wandering to death in the countryside,” Jack snipes, punching ’Gene on the shoulder lightly.
“You’ve always got to bring the mother-in-law into things, haven’t you.”
“Well, it’s not like you’ll get to meet her now, is it? So it’s my job to give you the patented Holden mother-in-law experience. It’s like multiple personality disorder, but with less medical legitimacy and more guilt about us not having grandchildren for her yet.”
“It’s not my fault you can’t seem to get me pregnant, mister Holden.”
“Oh, hey, low blow! Literally!”
They keep walking, dispatching any crawlers found dragging themselves across the path. When Jack stops to wipe a bit of spatter off of W.G. onto a particularly dense bush, Eugene speaks again.
“What about you?”
“What’s that, love?” Jack asks absently, not looking up from cleaning his bat.
“I mean, what about you? Did you have pets?” Eugene asks, thinking of pulling his map out again but deciding against it.
“Nah,” Jack says, deciding W.G. had been satisfactorily cleaned and giving him a couple of practice swings, “but we always had a couple cats coming and going as I was growing up.” ’Gene gestures down the path, and the two of them continue their walk. “There was one I raised from a kitten, though. Named Paul. Mum always hated that, her least favorite brother-in-law’s middle name was Paul, but Dad always thought she was a little loopy because of that.”
“I dunno, Paul’s a solid name for a tomcat,” Eugene adds absently, dragging his fingers through the thin bushes that line the path.
“Not a tomcat. She was a tiny little thing, and I guess I was too young to tell the difference between boy cats and girl cats when she showed up, and by the time we got her to the vet to get her jabs she’d been Paul for a couple months. Seemed kinda cruel, y’know, to take her name after all that. But she used to follow me around everywhere. Slept on my pillows if I didn’t get to bed fast enough. Jill always teased me about being pussy-whipped by a literal pussy.”
They walk further in the forest, sun shining through the leaves until it seems like they’re in a peaceful sunny green tunnel, lined by nothing but verdant, living green all around them, but the illusion is shattered when they stumble upon a pack of undead hikers, still kitted out in posh boots and windbreakers and such. ’Gene, with taunts and jabs with his pipe, herds them towards Jack and trips them up so Jack can dispatch them efficiently with blows to the head.
The two of them continue down the path in silence for a while, weapons trailing behind them and bumping against the rough ground as the end of the tunnel draws nearer and nearer.
“She used to do these giant snores when she was deep asleep and happy,” Jack smiles at the thought as he cleans W.G. once more, and Eugene doesn’t need to ask who as Jack continues. “Like, these deep, loud sighs and she’d stretch a little bit, and stuff. She drooled, too, this gross fishy cat drool.”
They step out of the shade, blinking away the spots that the bright sun brought to their eyes, and Jack loops one arm through Eugene’s.
“I miss the cat snores. They were nice.”
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“It’s always the little things, isn’t it,” Jack states, fanning his fingers out into the gravel of the flat roof they’re camped out on and leaning back onto ’Gene’s shoulder. Eugene had petitioned for something offering more protection, but it wasn’t like there were other buildings around, and the plate glass windows of the gas station were all shattered. It had been getting dark and there was no time to find something else. Anyway, ’Gene’s glad for the roof now.
“Yeah,” Eugene breathes, grabbing for Jack’s hand without unfixing his eyes from the sky, “yeah, it’s the little things.” The stars are falling faster now, one after the other before the next, and yeah, Eugene knows they’re not stars, but just let the moment be, right? For now, it’s too dark to see anything past the hazy glow of their torches, but tomorrow morning they’ll be on the road again. The stars will be gone, and the meteors, too, but he and Jack will still be there in the morning. For now, they’re alright.