Kissing Holly was like sucking on a cherry ring-pop. Her lips, though parched, still tasted sweet. It must have been my imagination, or maybe it was her lip gloss. Everything about her was succulent and feminine. Growing up, I never liked her because of how girly she was, and now I understood it only added to my desire for her.

Her skin smelled like sunshine and roses. The blush in her pale, translucent cheeks as her lips met mine, again and again, reminded me of a field of flowers under the sun. I could understand as I ran my lips over her skin why all the boys in school were obsessed with her. Yet, here she was with me and not any of them.

As Holly pressed her chest against mine, I felt the softness of her breasts under her fuzzy sweater. Momentarily, I was embarrassed I never had much of a chest. My figure was boyish at best. In contrast, Holly had more than enough bosom for both of us. She raised her hand to my neck, directed my gaze back to her face, and pressed my mouth up against hers.

I wasn't content to let her take the lead in everything we were doing. I wrapped my hand around the softness of her bosom. She was mine. Holly. The one who all the boys in my high school wanted was all mine.

I wondered why. Maybe in going after that vampire today, I had proved myself to have more steel inside me than the rest of them. Then again, the only competition I had was Jack, who was about as useful to us in a fight as a pair of glasses was to a sea urchin.

"What about Andrew?" I whispered to her as Holly kissed her way down my neck, and her hair fell around my face in a cascade of light brown.

"What about him?" Holly replied as she pulled my shirt over my head. She pinned my arms above my head and straddled me. I didn't even care that her jeans were stained with vampire blood. What did a little bit of black, dried blood matter anymore? We were probably all going to die soon.

"Nothing," I replied into her smirking face. Yes, why ruin a good thing? Who knew if she was really dating Andrew or he was just one of her many back-up boys on retainer.

"Just lay back and relax," Holly said with a mischievous smile on her face. "You don't need to be scared with me. I'm going to keep kissing you."

As Holly kissed her way down in the valley between my breasts, down the hollow of my stomach, I wanted to stop her.

"Holly," I whimpered.

"Just relax," she whispered again and continued.

*

After my shower, I went downstairs for a glass of water. Glancing at my face in the mirror by the front door, I noticed my cheeks were extremely flushed. They were going to give away my secret rendezvous with Holly to our third-wheeling friend Jack. As I rubbed my cheeks, I decided I didn't care.

At least I was clean now. After I left Holly in the shower, I had put on the fresh jeans and a t-shirt. Searching around, I made myself a make-shift belt with a tieback I stole from the curtains upstairs. Andrew's belts proved too big for me. He must have been a huge, muscular boy with a waist to match.

I didn't know what Holly saw in me. Perhaps, I was overthinking things. It's possible she didn't see anything at all. At the end of the world, even a girl like Holly couldn't afford to be picky. Even so, I couldn't stop thinking about the way her silky-soft lips felt as they kissed me. She so easily found the aching in my soul with her delicious mouth.

I didn't understand it yet, but it felt as though she woke a feeling inside me that I never knew I was capable of feeling. From the beginning, I never found boys very interesting. My heart only quickened at the sight of girls with a certain mystique about them. I never knew why until tonight.

Too bad, we were going to die. I was on the brink of a whole unknown world of discovery.

Jack waved at me from the living room as I came back from the kitchen. He was sitting cross-legged in front of the cable box with all its wires ripped out. While the two of us girls were taking turns showering, he had been hacking into the cable box. The TV was flickering and making all sorts of angry static sounds.

I sat down on the couch behind him. Periodically a blurry scene showing mass evacuations came on the TV. This was interspersed with scenes of reporters standing outside the Yagerin headquarters in Beijing.

"You got the TV to work?" I asked in awe. "You are a genius."

"It's not working enough for us to find out anything useful," Jack complained as he continued to tinker with the box of wires. "If only I can use the satellite to get a cellphone signal."

"Even if you managed it, who would you call?" I asked. "Your family? I doubt they have a signal where they are."

Jack ignored my question. The images on the TV screen reflected in his black-rimmed glasses.

"Do you know what this means?" Jack asked as he pointed to the flashes of chaos and looting on screen. I saw a scene of a hospital that had been thoroughly looted with bodies being brought in human remains pouches.

"Why don't you tell me?"

"There are no more Lumins. Not for anyone. From this point on, the Blight is a death sentence."

"Oh? Hasn't it been like that for a while?" I asked, trying not to sound too sarcastic and bitter. Jack was very naïve and well-sheltered if he had been hoping that by the time we reached Miami, Yagerin would appear and shower Lumins on us while smiling and blowing kisses like Eva Peron.

"But that's not the point — the point is, before Liang swallowed a bullet, people had hope. Hope is a powerful thing; it keeps you from turning into animals. With the promise of Lumins, the police could keep order. When all hope is gone, people will turn against each other."

"So, I guess all there's left to do now is to pray?" I couldn't conceal the hard edge to my voice. My mother and sister were both vampires now with no hope of a cure. If another bout of Blight Rain were to hit tomorrow, maybe it was just as well. What was there left for me to fight for?

Then again, there was Holly.

I don't know if I meant anything to her. She probably did this all the time, with both guys and girls. In the best circumstance, she probably kissed me so that I wouldn't die a virgin. It was an act of mercy, maybe the only one we were capable of offering each other at the end of the world.

"Cheer up, Jack. You worked for Sylvirua. You guys were in the know. You must have some idea this was coming."

"Yeah," Jack mumbled and leaned back into the foot of the couch. He picked at the wooly carpet, really digging his nails into the carpet as though he wished it was a vampire. His eyes stared off into the eerie static. "Do you know why I quit working for Sylvirua? Everyone, including my parents, thought I was crazy. Working for Syrivua is like every little boy's dream job. They have more perks than Google."

"You must regret quitting now. If there is a place in this world safe from the Blight, the Sylvirua higher-ups must know about it."

"Yeah, I guess quitting was a dumb idea in retrospect," Jack said. "I had reasons."

"Let me guess; it's something related to Manna City?" I recalled the lone question that Jack insisted on asking that poor policeman before we drove through the checkpoint. Who the heck cares about those folks in Manna City? They sure as hell didn't care about us.

"Yeah, not Manna City, just with what's inside Manna City."

"Other than annoying celebrities, gaudy crap, souvenir shops, and tourists?"

"You speak like you've been there!" Jack joked and playfully slapped my knee. I smiled despite myself. Then I wiped the smile off my face as a scene of a mass fire raging through a rural town appeared on the screen. Charleston had fallen, and so had Philadelphia. They were evacuating D.C. As I continued staring, I saw the onion-dome of a cathedral in Moscow. The vampires were all over the world now.

"No, I've never been."

"I know you haven't. I've only been there once, and I was a programmer with Sylvirua at the time."

"Well, at least you got to scratch your tourism itch before the world started going to hell."

"I'm not telling you this to gloat about my Instagram feed. I'm telling you this now because there's a place in that city; it's sort of a big hole in the ground that leads to something awful."

"Like a pothole?"

"No, bigger, much bigger." His hands trembled over the remote as the television cut to a scene of a burning city along the Mediterranean. It looked like St. Mark's Square. Jack sat on his fingers to stop me from staring. "No one knows exactly what's down there."

"Why are you worried now?"

"I go back there in my nightmares," Jack whispered. "I see that place, with all its sticky, oily wetness, where the air itself draws the breath out of your lungs. All this that's happening here, it's just a warning of what's going to happen. In Sylvirua, there is a rumor that something crawled out of that place in the ground some twenty years ago. Whatever it is, I think it has something to do with what's happening right now. I think i-it's growing — getting stronger."

Okay, now I wondered if Jack was crazy. Great, not only do we have vampires to deal with now, Jack has lost his marbles too.

I could hardly care less about what was living in a dirty pothole in Manna City. That city was thousands of miles away. Even so, looking at Jack's somber expression, I wisely refrained from laughing at his ghost story.

I got up and went to the fridge. Holly had been right. Andrew kept his stock of beer in tip-top shape. The only food I saw in there was a bag of spinach, some ketchup, and a couple of eggs. I guess our last meal was going to be veggie omelets. I snapped off the caps of the Coronas and offered Jack one.

He took it and drank it without protesting. Jack sat his lanky butt back, straightened his perpetually hunched shoulders, and let loose a relaxed belch.

I wasn't a drinker, but I made an exception that night. I never liked the taste of alcohol; it sometimes made my heartbeat weird. At that moment, the bitterness of the hops was precisely what my nerves needed.

Finally, after we both downed about half a bottle, I spoke up again. It was the question of the night, the one on all our minds.

"What do you think we should do now?"

"I don't know. Evacuate? Stay and fight? I guess those are our only two options."

"Is there a point to evacuating?"

"Probably not," Jack said and finished his bottle. As he raised the bottom of his glass to the sky, his t-shirt pulled up from his belly. I saw a glimpse of muscular abs. It looked as though Jack was secretly hiding a toned physique under all his nerdy paraphernalia. I wondered if I should mention it to Holly or if she might feel like removing his shirt and examining him for herself.

Nah, so what if Jack had done some sit-ups back in the day? He was still useless in a fight. "We have some time until the next storm. The weather report says clear skies for the next couple of days. We can visit the tents on the beach tomorrow. See how screwed we are when the next Blight Rain comes."