They could have been sisters. I mean, not that they looked very similar or anything but just the dynamic between them was so... close. Actually, they didn't look similar at all, apart from being the same age and maybe more or less the same height.
Fiona obviously had a lot of Irish in her. Actually she was almost a stereotype of an Irish person. Her bright, fiery red hair was cut short and freckles covered her pale face. Louise had cut her hair short too, even shorter actually. She was dark-skinned and had a much more voluptuous body shape than Fiona, who had a really petite frame. Lola's hair, also cut short, looked like it might have been several colors at the same time at some point, there were little bits here and there of various shades but her natural blond was breaking through in most parts. She was a little odd in that, while her frame was as slight as Fiona's, her chest was huge, totally out of proportion to the rest of her.
"What happened?" Chloe asked. We'd stopped eating and silence had fallen on the table. Lola took up the story.
"I don't know," she said, "but... it was all gone. It wasn't a big city or anything so I doubt it had been nuked, but something happened to start fires. The whole place, every building was burned. You could see ruins or whatever but... nothing else, no people just... nothing."
"I'm so sorry," Simone said.
"We stayed the night," Fiona said. "We'd lost the RV by that point, it had given up a couple of hundred miles before so we just kind of camped. You can imagine how we felt. We'd been so hopeful... especially after meeting you that... that someone... something might have survived..."
"In the morning we decided," Louise said. "Actually, we didn't really need to talk about it. The whole journey, we saw no one. We tried to stay away from built up areas whenever we could to avoid red-eyes but, still, we didn't see a single person. Not one. Coming back here was really the only thing we could think of. Ever since the First Day, this was the only place we'd felt... safe... like... like we could just... breathe."
"We lost Alex about two weeks later," Lola said. Fiona's head dropped and Louise covered her eyes with a hand. "We were on maybe our second car since starting back and when it crapped out... I guess we'd just got used to finding another one pretty fast but, I don't know what happened, wherever we were, nothing worked. We spent two days walking, trying to find a town and when we did, even there, nothing worked. We couldn't get any of the cars started. We stayed there that night, in a house and..." She drifted off when I heard her voice catch a little in her throat.
"They came," Fiona said, "the red-eyes. The next morning. We started walking after we got up but we hadn't even made it to the edge of town. There were six of them, maybe more. And they made this... this sound..."
"I know," I said, "we've heard it. It's... terrifying."
"Fucking awful," Louise said, "we were scared shitless. We had the guns and we tried to use the training you gave us Caroline but... fuck... when they started moving they were so fast."
"We got three of them," Lola said, "before... before they reached us but... they just kept coming..."
"It was a bit of a blur after that," Fiona said. "I lost my gun but... I could hear the others still firing. One of them was on top of me, trying to... to bite me. There was blood dripping out of its mouth."
"I managed to hold onto my gun when one of them jumped me," Louise said, "and... I don't know how but... I was able to shoot it in the head. It just exploded... I was fucking covered in it but I was so fucking panicked I just jumped up. I saw there was one on top of Fiona but I was so scared I'd hit her if I fired but... I guess I thought it was better to die that way than get fucking... eaten or whatever... so I did."
"And then I was fucking covered too," Fiona said.
"I lost my gun too," Lola said. "I mean... the whole thing was... frantic, you know but... I was on the ground and one of them was on top of me and there was this moment where... I just knew. I knew I was going to die and... I don't know... I... I accepted it. I was glad I was with people I loved when it happened, you know, glad I wasn't alone. And then some part of me clicked. It was weird. It was like there was a voice in my head saying you're not fucking dead yet. So I reached for the knife in my belt and just jammed it as hard as I could into its head."
"By the time I saw Lola get up," Fiona said, "Alex was already... gone. I guess she'd lost her gun when they jumped her too and... well... it just..."
"I blew it's fucking head off," Louise said. Her voice was grim and determined and her face betrayed more rage than sadness. Fiona sobbed quietly and a solitary tear slid down Lola's cheek. I think we were all crying at that point, to be honest.
"We... we were pretty fucking scared," Lola said, "but... we... we couldn't just leave her there like that. We buried her, as best we could, before we moved on."
"It was six more days before we found a car that worked," Fiona said. "I don't know, obviously other than the First Day there have been times since that I was scared but... those six nights... I think those six nights were collectively the worst of my life."
"Me too," Lola said. "Honestly... it was this place that kept us going. Just knowing that you guys were here, that there was somewhere we knew was safe...."
"I really think," Louise said, "if we didn't have this place to aim for, we might not have made it."
Fiona and Lola nodded gently and silence descended again. Obviously it had been a fucking harrowing story to hear but... I don't know, I guess at least it did make me feel pretty good that we'd been able to help them, just by being here. That felt good.
"So... I guess..." Lola said, taking Louise's hand in hers, "I guess we, ah, we thought maybe... we'd take you up on your offer from before... you know... to... stay here... for a while."
Now, a thought passed through my mind here. What did for a while mean? When we'd made the offer the last time they were with us, I think the words Simone used were 'as long as you like' but, really, where the fuck else were they going to go? And, perhaps surprisingly, that's actually what I said. Even by then, as I'm sure you'll have been able to tell already, it was usually Simone who spoke for us on such matters but, technically, it was still my house, right?
"For a while?" I said. "You have some place else you'd like to go?" I was smiling when I said it. I didn't mean it to be... sarcastic. But I wanted to be sure they understood me. "Listen," I said, "for a while, as long as you need, it doesn't matter. As far as I'm concerned, this house is your home now too. As much as it is for me and for Caroline and Simone and Chloe, you'll always have a place here, as long as you want it."
I'm not sure how the others felt about how I'd put it but, looking around after I'd said it I knew straight away they were in total agreement and I felt Simone's hand rub my back gently. There was more silence for a minute while Louise and Lola and Fiona took in what I'd said. They looked at us and looked at each other. Honestly, there was a massive lump in my throat and I was finding it a little difficult to see with the tears in my eyes. I wanted so much for them to stay, to be in a place where they'd be safe and happy.
Anyway, after a few seconds, Lola stood up and moved around the table towards me and I stood up too. There wasn't any discussion or hesitation or anything. She just wrapped her arms around me and I did the same. And... we just cried together for a minute. Louise and Fiona joined in and then Simone and the others until we were just this one big pile of hugging, sobbing people in the middle of the kitchen.
When it finally broke up, Lola said thank you. I'm pretty sure the others did too actually. I remember Caroline looking at me and smiling and I just nodded at her.
"You get that one for free," she said, just as I'd said to her on her first night with us, "but no more thanks. We're just glad you're here."
It was still pretty early I guess but it was also clear that the three of them were totally exhausted so, with a little encouragement they went to bed for some sleep. We decided to take the rest of the day off working on the fence. We'd make a pretty big racket and we didn't want to disturb them. And I guess it also felt like.... we just needed to stop for a minute. I mean, even then, I think we understood in some way that something pretty extraordinary had just happened. In an instant, the population of our little sanctuary had almost doubled.
We didn't do much, really we just kind of sat around and talked. There was practical stuff to think about, like sleeping arrangements for example. The last time they'd been with us they'd been happy to share for the night, and Chloe and Simone had both slept with me. Not that I had major objections to that being a more permanent state of affairs, but I didn't think it'd be that practical. So we made plans for the next day to head up to Chloe's house with the truck and bring back some beds. If we cleared out the old storage room upstairs properly, it would definitely fit an extra bed and Caroline insisted that her room could take an extra one too, she didn't mind sharing. We thought about using my dad's old office at the front of the house as a bedroom but, actually, we all felt it was nice to have a space like that in the house, especially now that there'd be more people here. It was lined, wall to wall and floor to ceiling with shelves of books and movies. It was always my favorite room in the house, probably in any house. Still is actually.
And we talked about power. Like I said, Caroline and I had been working on expanding our capacity and now that we had extra people in the house, we were going to need it. But even that, I mean those projects, the fence and the power and stuff, it didn't escape our notice that with three extra pairs of hands, there was so much more we'd be able to do.
And yeah... I mean... obviously we talked about... other arrangements. We needed to decide what to tell them... when to tell them... They knew from their first visit about Simone and Chloe and I but I guess our collective experience with how Caroline had found out about that meant that we were pretty sure we needed to be totally up front with them about the fact that I spent the occasional night in Caroline's room, especially given that it wasn't going to be just Caroline's room anymore.
We were a little bit nervous about it. I certainly was. Sure we'd had this really nice, emotional moment together, wanted them to feel at home here but... well... I guess it was on my mind that... well... put plainly, I didn't want them to feel like... I mean, up to now there had been three women living in this house and I had a regular and very healthy sexual relationship with all three of them, so I guess what I'm trying to say is, I didn't want them to feel like that was what we were all about, you know? Like, they'd feel different or excluded somehow because they weren't a part of it. And I definitely didn't want them to feel as if they somehow had to be a part of it.
Honestly, I swear to god, that thought had not crossed my mind. I mean, sure they were obviously three very attractive young women, of course I'd noticed that but... honestly, I really thought that I was just about getting the hang of effectively being in a relationship with two women at the same time while also having pretty regular mind-blowing sex with another one.
Anyway, I'm not sure if we watched a movie that night. In any case, the new girls didn't get up. They slept right through till morning, eighteen hours or something. Simone and Chloe were sleeping in so it was just Caroline and me in the kitchen when they got up. Actually, this was kind of the plan we'd made.
Caroline had made breakfast. Powdered eggs aren't a thing anymore, but people from before the First Day would have said they were pretty much garbage, but we'd really grown to love them. We didn't have them everyday, we didn't have that big of a supply, but it was nice occasionally. Louise, Fiona and Lola definitely thought so.
Anyway, if things had been pretty heavy the day before, I think everyone was in a much lighter mood that morning. They'd noticed the fence obviously and we talked about that and the power project and our plans for starting to grow food and stuff. Caroline made plans to meet with them all separately for a medical check-up. They were all feeling OK, and much better after eighteen hours of uninterrupted sleep in a warm bed, but none of them objected to talking to Caroline.
I wasn't sure exactly how it would go, if I would have to bring it up. The night before, we'd agreed that we had to talk about it one way or another but that, maybe it would just come up on its own and we could roll with it. And it did. I wasn't surprised that it was Lola who mentioned it. She'd been the one when they were with us the previous time who seemed to take the most interest in our... domestic situation. "Pretty kinky," she'd called it.
"So Jim," she said, a little smirk on her face, "you and Simone and Chloe still going strong?"
