“Hey Justice, high five!” Tony, one of the other ZoCOS officers, grinned. He was the suburban type who looked older than he was thanks to premature balding of his mousy brown hair and a softening around the middle.

Justice put his hand out to catch the man’s hand only to have it slapped by one of the black rubber fists similar to the one Merlin had been fighting with the day before.

Tony howled with laughter, and the rest of the bullpen joined in.

They were a motley crew. It seemed disaster was the great equalizer. After all, Justice started out as a beat cop. The team looked like a Benetton ad of diverse races and women serving shoulder to shoulder. Equality. Yes. They were also equally assholes.

If the fist dong was there, then maybe Merlin was too. Justice scanned the laughing faces, but his partner wasn’t among them. To find his partner, Justice had to peer to the other side of the room, where he found Merlin sitting at his desk, squinting at his computer screen. Then he looked down at his keyboard, typing with two fingers. Appearing to sense Justice’s attention, he looked up, frowned, and then went back to work.

Justice leaned against a desk as he turned his attention back to the rest. “Funny.”

Tony poked at Justice with the hand until Justice yanked it away.

Tony chuckled, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. What was that look? Fear? Derision? “Come on, man. We’re just playing with you. Dildo factory, huh? Anyone there get you with their baloney pony? I mean, I heard you were into that. Must’ve been hard working there with all those other dicks around.” The laugh turned sinister.

There was a pause as Justice tried to think of a comeback, but he had a hard time seeing past his humiliation. Before he could say anything, Merlin spoke.

“He’s apparently been working around dicks for months and hasn’t gotten aroused.” Merlin sneered as he looked up from his keyboard to pointedly glare at the group.

That wasn’t going to win him any congeniality awards, but Justice appreciated the support.

“What was that? Did you just…?” Tony looked at Justice as if he could control anything Merlin did. “Did your partner just call me a dick?”

Justice grabbed Tony by the arm. He was a hothead type, always looking to mix it up. Having zombies to beat on only seemed to normalize his brutality. After Merlin had helped out, Justice didn’t want to see his partner hurt.

Merlin apparently had no idea whose cage he was rattling. Or didn’t care. “I did, but just a little one.” He held up a pinkie.

“What the fuck?” Tony’s face went slack with shock as he looked at Justice. It was difficult for Justice to keep a straight face, even if he was getting seriously worried about Merlin’s survival instinct. Tony outweighed either of them by at least forty pounds.

Justice grabbed Tony and whirled him around. “Come on, he’s new. We had a bad day yesterday.”

“I don’t fucking care what kind of day he had. No one calls me a dick.”

Merlin had crossed the room at light speed and was up in Tony’s personal space. “Maybe not to your face.”

The abruptness of Merlin’s proximity seemed to spook Tony, since he shrank behind Justice. He looked between Merlin’s empty chair to where the blond currently stood. Today Merlin had dressed down a little, wearing a white oxford with a fresh white T-shirt beneath. He had embraced jeans, only his were red denim and clung to his body enticingly.

Tony shrugged out of Justice’s grasp to swing at Merlin. “This fucking guy. What the fuck, this fucking guy!”

It made Justice flush with shame to see how ridiculous it looked when someone tried to hit Merlin. On the best of days, Tony couldn’t help but telegraph his punches, but Merlin seemed to tap into some subconscious level of the human psyche that told him what was going to happen before it happened. His expression didn’t change as he easily turned his shoulders and held up a hand.

This was when Justice realized Merlin must have gone easy on him the day before. Whether it was because of their confined quarters or knowing he’d have to work with him, Justice didn’t know. But this time, Merlin wrapped his basketball-player-sized hand around Tony’s clenched fist. Merlin raised his elbow and then, with little more than a slight grimace on his face, Merlin twisted his hand, somehow managing to lift Tony off the ground and up into an ungainly flip in the air and finally crashing onto the desk behind them.

“Augh!” Tony grabbed his back.

While the squad knew that Tony was a complete dickwad who deserved everything he got, seeing him get what was coming to him at the hands of the new guy didn’t sit well. Justice could feel their resentment and fear as they crowded Merlin.

Merlin ignored them, bending over to retrieve the fist-shaped dildo that was dropped in the middle of the altercation. “Now, if you don’t mind, I have some evidence to catalog before the press conference.”

He didn’t even seem to notice the quiet hostility of the room.

“Press conference?” Justice addressed first Merlin, who passed him, and then his squad, but they all pretended to be very busy. “Hey, Merlin. Press conference?”

Still on the desk, Tony groaned again, but no one bothered to help him. Justice gave it a thought but decided that helping the guy who attacked his partner would be unseemly. Besides, he was still irritated by Tony’s harassment about Justice’s sexual preferences.

Back in the day, Justice had tried to keep his sexuality on the down low when he’d joined the force, but after an internal investigation that got nasty because of his expensive car and high-rent apartment, he’d been forced to admit his gay lover was supporting him.

Justice was sure it stunted his career from ever getting promoted, and maybe it had. But now that warm bodies were in short supply, no one had time for such petty differences. At least, not usually. Every so often, someone had something to say, and it brought back unpleasant memories.

If Merlin had cared about the jibe, he didn’t show it. In fact, in his own way, he’d come to Justice’s defense. And, of course, weird aftermath or not, he had saved Justice’s life the day before. He approached Merlin’s desk.

Merlin looked up at him and sighed. At first Justice thought he was exasperated with having to talk to him. “Apparently, the girl we rescued yesterday was the mayor’s daughter, Prodigious.”

“Mayor Bottom’s daughter?”

Merlin nodded. “Yeah, I was surprised as you were that the mayor managed to knock up a woman, but evidently he did, and we saved her, Prodigious Bottom.”

The mayor’s daughter was the woman at the dildo factory? That must have been why they received the backup.

While he hadn’t had much time to formulate his thoughts as to what they would talk about right now, the mayor’s sexual preferences wasn’t the conversation Justice expected. “What are you talking about? Mayor Bottom represents family values. Back in the day, he ran on a platform of not granting homosexuals equal rights. He talks about his family all the time.”

In fact, as the situation went on, Bottom alleged that the whole zombie affliction was a punishment from God—a judgment on the unholy and unworthy, of which gay people were, in his opinion, both. But since he obviously didn’t have the courage of his convictions to stone them in the street like the Good Book called for, he was trying to remove regulations about using zombies for slave labor and working them twenty-four hours a day. “May as well get some use out of those sinners.”

Either way, Justice didn’t understand why Merlin would think Mayor Bottom was gay.

Merlin tapped his index finger to his lips. “There’s always artificial insemination. Either way, there’s no way that guy gets it up for a woman.”

Justice folded his arms. “He hates gays, Merlin. Hates them.”

Merlin rolled his eyes. “Hate? That’s how you know who is the deepest in the closet. I mean, we all do it, don’t we? We find something about ourselves that we dislike and when we see it in others, we hate it even more. “

Justice had heard of that; he’d experienced it, but Mayor Bottom? No way. “You mean like how you hate my overcompensation even more because you overcompensate at trying to be butch? I mean, it’s obvious why you would. Your long blond hair makes you look like a girl.”

“Hah!” Merlin’s laugh came out similar to a bark and was so sudden and harsh that it scared Tony to his feet. Merlin stroked his long hair, smirking. “Where I came from, hair shows your status. The longer the hair, the better off you are.”

“Where are you from, then, the seventies?” There was something strange in Merlin’s eye when he spoke of where he came from. Justice wanted to press, but Merlin threw his hair back over his shoulder as he stood.

“Anyway, me and my girlie hair need to go outside for the press, as do you. I don’t think we have to say much. I imagine Mayor Bottom will want to do most of the talking. I’ve been told he’s always campaigning, an odd choice considering that in the postapocalypse, you’re unlikely to have any elections, but I guess old habits die hard.”

Justice followed hesitantly. “I don’t want to support him. I mean, I’m glad I saved his daughter. I wouldn’t leave anyone to the whim of zombies, but I don’t want to stand there as if I endorse anything he does.”

Merlin turned and cocked his head. “Well then, you’ll have to come up with a way to keep from getting sucked in. Or sucked on. Shouldn’t be hard for a big ol’ top like you.” The hotter Justice’s face got, the more widely Merlin grinned.

As much as Justice wanted to protest that he was a bottom, straight people could be so weird about the dynamics of gay preference. In their minds, it seemed to be some kind of dominance issue, and he and Merlin already seemed to be engaged in some subtextual power struggling. He didn’t want to give his partner more ammunition, so he let the comment go. “I don’t want that man’s mouth anywhere near me, talking or otherwise.”

~~This series will continue in daily increments through the end of March 2026. After that, it will be once a week on Tuesdays~~