Lost Brothers – Chapter One

**This is the new zombie thing I’m working on. I don’t have an actual title for it yet, so ‘Lost Brothers’ is just a placeholder. I hope you enjoy ❤

Riley Monroe woke up with a faint metallic taste in his mouth. It wasn’t real — just a phantom memory that clung to his tongue some mornings — but that knowledge didn’t make the taste any weaker. He sat up slowly, rubbing the back of his neck as he tried to shake off the lingering fragments of his dream. Blood. Sirens. Screams that warped and faded into static. He drew in a sharp inhale, blew out a slow exhale, and reached for the bottle of water on the nightstand.

His uniform was already laid out on the chair by the window: navy blue, patched with the city’s emergency medical service crest. Riley dressed in silence, except for the click of his belt and the creak of old floorboards beneath the shifting weight of his feet. Most days, he moved through the morning like a background character in his own life. Detached but efficient.

Most days, that was the only way to survive.
Riley passed a hand through his dark hair before grabbing his cell from the nightstand. The screen lit briefly, an unread text flashing at the top. Riley rubbed a tired hand near the corner of his eye, tapping the phone’s lock button with the thumb of his free hand.

Eli.

Jesus. He hadn’t talked to his little brother in months. Or Eli hadn’t talked to him. Their little tiff seemed so damn far away — he couldn’t quite remember who actually started it anymore, or who had given who the cold shoulder first. But there was a message from Eli regardless, cold shoulder be damned.

Eli: Please be careful today

Riley stood still for a moment, thumb hovering over the sensor to unlock the phone. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Be careful. Be careful of what? And why? And since when did Eli care if he was careful or not?

Riley unlocked his phone and opened the text message.

Riley: Are you okay?

He waited a moment for any indication Eli had seen it, but the little read checkmark circle remained unfilled, and the three dots for typing never appeared. Riley locked the screen and tossed his phone onto the counter.

Coffee. Cheap, bitter, reliable. Consistent. And unlike Eli’s ominous text, part of the detached and efficient routine.

***

The station was already buzzing with activity when Riley arrived. Two fire engines were rolling out — one north, one south — and an ambulance followed north before he even made it to the main roll-up door.

“Just in time, Monroe,” his partner, Tara, said as she tossed him a protein bar.

“We headin’ out too?” he asked as he snagged it out of the air.

She nodded, giving him a good once-over. “You look like hell.”

“Mm. Never gets old,” Riley said, pointing the bar at her. “What’ve we got? Fire?”

“Yeah, but not ours. We have a drunk guy who wrecked himself on a mailbox and then threw himself through the window of his neighbor’s living room.”

Riley nodded, peeling back the wrapper. “Excellent.” He took a small bite of the corner. It was the same bar every day. Same brand, same flavor. But today, something metallic snuck in there. He closed his eyes. He could detach himself from a lot of things, but the taste and smell of iron never ceased entirely. Somehow, they always managed to squeeze through the cracks in the walls he’d built up.

He cleared his throat. “You drive?”

“Sure.” When Riley finally opened his eyes, he couldn’t help but notice the glaring concern written all over Tara’s face.

But she did him a favor and didn’t mention it. Riley appreciated that. Cold, detached, efficient. Couldn’t move forward if you were looking back. Addressing the concern was looking back. Addressing the copper was looking back.

And he could only stand to move forward.

***

Midmorning, after dropping off a patient who’d been in a hell of a bar fight the night before, Tara gently backhanded Riley’s chest, pulling his gaze up from the spattered blood on the floor. “I gotta pee. Go get yourself a coffee or something from the vending machine. Better yet, go pay that cute doctor of yours a visit. Anything to get rid of…” she waved a hand over him “…this.”

“Rude. And he’s not mine. He’s just… a guy.”

“Mmhmm. Sure he is.” Tara smiled. “Well, a ‘guy’ is coming this way, so pretend to be alive for a few minutes.”

“Could you just go take your damn piss already and leave me alone?”

Tara snorted, patting his shoulder as she walked past him. Riley straightened himself out just a hair as she walked away, dusting his hands down the front of his shirt. Tara admittedly wasn’t right about most of things, but she was right about just this one — Doctor Sian Hopkins wasn’t just a guy.

A warm hand brushed against the back of Riley’s. “Missed you at trivia last night.” A pause. “Hey.” The gentle tug on Riley’s hand pulled his attention away from the floor once more and to the man standing beside him. “Where’d you go?”

“Last night?”

Sian offered a soft smile. “No. Now.”

“Oh.” Riley cleared his throat, forced a careless shrug of his shoulders. “Just tired.”

“Mm.” Sian nodded, pulling his lips into his mouth as he turned toward the TV in the corner of the waiting room. “What about last night?”

Riley’s eyes slowly drifted back to the floor. “Shift got switched. Needed to sleep early. Thought I texted you.”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh. I’m… sorry about that.”

Sian rocked back on his heels, shoving his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. “Do I need to take a hint, Riley?”

“A hint for what?”

“Like… how you’re just not that into me?”

Riley turned toward Sian again. “What?”

That soft smile came back to his face. “I’m not stupid, Riley. But I’d just prefer… some communication. Something direct. Closure. Just tell me you aren’t interested. I won’t be offended, I promise. I won’t make anything weird if you won’t. We can just be friends, right? Friends… who have seen each other naked a time or two. People do it all the time.”

“Four,” Riley said after a moment. “Four times. I’d like a fifth.”

Sian raised a brow. “You would?”

“Desperately.”

Sian snorted. “Your desperation is much different than mine.”

Riley rolled his eyes. He walked past Sian, grabbing his coat sleeve on the way. He pulled him around the corner and down the hall, into Sian’s little office next to the lab. He closed the door and pushed him back against it, one hand on the wall, the other wrapped around Sian’s chin. He closed the distance between them, lips only a breath apart. “It’s me. It’s not… I come with baggage, Si,” Riley whispered.

“We all do,” Sian whispered back.

“Five or six times is when… when my dates start wanting to spend the night. Want me to start spending the night.”

“Yeah?”

Riley leaned his forehead against Sian’s, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to see that compassionate, understanding look on his face any longer. He’d seen enough of that to last him a lifetime. “I’ve got night terrors, Si. Kicking, screaming, thrashing. The whole shebang. My room’s a fucking mess, my house is a fucking mess. I am a fucking mess.”

Riley’s cheeks flooded with warmth as Sian took his face in his hands and pulled him back a few inches. Riley forced himself to open his eyes again. “Let me help you clean it up. The room. The house. You.” Sian offered a smile. “I want you, Riley,” he whispered, “even if you come with night terrors and PTSD, or late nights and early mornings, or skipped trivia nights and no-shows. I want you, and that includes everything you’re carrying.”

A smile tugged at one corner of Riley’s mouth. “You’re gonna regret that.”

“That sounds like future me’s problem.”

“I… think I can live with that.”

“Perfect,” Sian whispered. “Now, can you fuckin’ kiss me already? You drag a man down a hall and pin him against a door, and you can’t even kiss him?”

Riley rolled his eyes and muttered a quiet, “Always so damn dramatic,” before leaning in to kiss him. Sian let out a little hum of appreciation, one hand sliding back into Riley’s hair.

The beep of Sian’s pager pulled them apart with a groan. Sian stuck his hand in his coat pocket and pulled the offending device out for a look. He raised a brow, but the lack of immediate concern or hurry was, at the very least, comforting. Comforting compared to his brother’s ominous message earlier in the day, and comforting compared to the fact that Eli still hadn’t even read Riley’s response.

“I’d like to see you tonight. For real this time,” Sian said, tucking his pager back into his pocket.

“What’s tonight? Karaoke or something?”

“I was thinking… my place.” Sian reached up to comb his fingers through Riley’s hair, un-disheveling it a bit. “You, me, takeout, a movie, maybe we lose the clothes at some point. Just a night in.” He smiled. “You don’t have to put on a mask for anyone. It’ll just be us. Okay?”

Riley offered a smile, though he could feel his looked far less warm and far more tired than Sian’s did. “Okay.”

“Perfect.” Sian pressed a kiss to his lips. “I’ll text you a time. And if you stay the night or not? That’s up to you. I won’t be mad if you don’t, and I won’t judge you if you do.”

“Thank you.”

“Of course,” Sian said, his voice soft. His pager beeped again. “I need to go deal with this, and I’m sure Tara’s wondering where you headed off to. I’ll see you later, okay?”

Riley nodded. “Okay.”

“Be safe out there.”

Even though the words brought Eli’s text back to the forefront of his mind once more, Riley managed a smile. “I will. You be safe in here.”

“I will.”

***

By noon, Los Angeles was baking beneath one hell of a heatwave. After successfully loading their empty gurney back into the rig, Riley wiped the sweat from his brow. “You’re staring at me again,” he said as he closed the doors, doing his best to avoid meeting Tara’s gaze.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yep.”

“You sure?”

Riley scratched his jaw. Tara knew more about him than just about any other living person. Telling her wasn’t going to hurt anything. If he believed his therapist, talking to Tara — or anyone, for that matter — was good for him. For his ‘trauma’. “My brother texted me this morning.”

“The scientist brother you haven’t spoken to in, like, forever?”

“The one and only. And I think he’s technically a researcher.”

Tara slashed a dismissive hand through the air. “What’d he want?”

“I… don’t know. He told me to be safe. It just felt… ominous, I guess. Out of the blue.”

“It is. Out of the blue, I mean. But I don’t think it’s ominous. He probably just saw the news, and it made him think of you.”

Riley laid a hand on the door, raising a brow in Tara’s direction. “What news?”

“The TikTok stunt thing?”

“You lost me at ‘TikTok’.”

“Some kid uploaded a video of a guy thrashing around in the middle of traffic, blood all over his mouth and around his eyes. When people started calling it fake, the user deleted the video, but because it’s the internet, someone else re-uploaded it, and now there’s like, two ‘sides’ of TikTok, where one side thinks it’s fake and one side thinks it’s the beginning of an apocalypse or something.”

“Like zombies?” Riley asked.

Tara shrugged. “Or something.”Riley was going to go back to not believing his therapist.