Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!

The Brighton Park went completely silent.

Not the excited silence from the fight but something different.

Everyone in that space looking between me and Marlon and the knife in my hand and trying to work out what had just happened.

Rico had pushed himself up onto his elbows from the ground and was staring at my right hand. At the knife. His expression had gone somewhere past confusion into something that was almost blank.

Molly hadn’t moved. Her jaw had dropped into shock.

Summer’s mouth was open slightly. She looked from the knife to me to Marlon and back again, working through it.

Maribel, on the other hand, didn’t look all that surprised. She had her arms folded loosely across her chest with this unreadable expression, steady as a wall. Cindy was the same. They both saw what I was from close up.

And Daisy had her hand pressed flat against her chest letting out this long, slow exhale of pure relief.

The moment stretched out.

Then I looked back at Marlon, held his gaze for a beat, and dropped the knife.

"I didn’t come here to fight to begin with," I said, keeping my voice level. "But I hope what I’ve shown is enough for you to understand what I’m...capable of."

I let that last word sit there.

Marlon stared at me for what felt like a long time. Long enough that a few people shifted their weight nervously. Then, slowly, he nodded. One clean dip of the chin.

"Let’s talk," he said.

That was enough for me. I let the tension drop from my shoulders and turned around, already moving toward the others.

"Don’t hold any grudge against me for this," I said over my shoulder.

I heard him make a sound, somewhere between a groan and a growl and when I glanced back, his expression had done something complicated. Like he couldn’t decide if he was annoyed or reluctantly impressed and had settled on both at the same time. He pushed himself fully upright, brushing dirt off his knee without looking at me.

"I lost, that’s all," he said, his voice gruff but without real heat in it. "You’re not an ordinary brat, I’ll give you that much."

"I’m not, yeah," I agreed.

I turned back around and nearly walked straight into Cindy, who was standing there with her arms crossed and her glare aimed somewhere just past me, directly at Marlon. Her eyes were sharp, her jaw set, and she looked about ready to lecture a man twice her size without a single apology about it.

"What you did," she said, "you threw a knife at him when his back was turned. He could have died."

She said it clean and simple.

Marlon looked down at her. There wasn’t any malice in his expression, if anything, he looked almost amused, the way adults get when a kid says something unexpectedly direct. Cindy barely came up to his chest, and still she held her ground without flinching.

"I apologize then," he said, reaching out and patting the top of her blonde head with one big hand. "Little girl."

Cindy stiffened like she’d been struck by lightning.

"W...What?" The word came out half-strangled. Her face went pink from the ears inward.

"Forgive my father." Summer came from behind, with a tired, long-suffering smile that suggested this was not the first time she’d had to say those exact words. "He’s a dad type. He genuinely cannot help himself around girls your age and younger. It’s like a reflex."

"He’s your father?" I stared at her.

I looked at Marlon. Then back at Summer. Then at Marlon again. I was genuinely trying to find a single shared feature and coming up completely empty. Marlon was a wall of muscle and hard edges, built like someone who’d spent decades doing things the hard way. Summer looked like she’d been assembled entirely from softer materials, delicate where he was rough, light where he was shadow.

"What?" Summer tilted her head at me.

"You just...don’t look anything like each other," I said carefully. "I was surprised, that’s all."

My eyes had drifted slightly, doing that automatic top-to-bottom sweep you do when you’re trying to figure something out, and I was still processing the complete visual mismatch between father and daughter when—

A pain hit my ear.

"Will you stop giving girls those long, slow stares?" Cindy had reached up and grabbed my ear, twisting it just enough to make a point.

"M...My bad," I said quickly, looking away. "Sorry."

"Don’t blame him, blond head." Marlon’s voice had shifted into something warmer, softer at the edges. He smiled widely. "My daughter is indeed beautiful. Like a flower. You can’t help yourself. All of it inherited from her mother, who was a blossom in full bloom."

He said those embarrassing, over-the-top, completely sincere words like they were the most natural thing in the world. Like he’d said them a hundred times and intended to say them a hundred more.

There was a beat of silence.

Then Summer’s face went from normal to scarlet in about half a second flat.

"Dad." Her voice came out low and controlled, trying hard to hold back a scream. "Please. Stop doing this when there are people around. This is embarrassing."

"I speak only the truth," he said, completely unbothered.

"Dad!"

Marlon chuckled and reached over to pat her head the way he’d patted Cindy’s, which only made Summer’s color deepen. Then his expression shifted as he turned back to me, and just like that the warmth dialed back down and those sharp eyes were fixed on my face again.

"But any man who dares to touch her," he said, his voice dropping just enough to make it clear he wasn’t joking, "will have to come through me first."

He was looking directly at me when he said it.

Why are you looking at me for that?

"I guess your family line ends with her then," I said, mostly because my brain-to-mouth filter has never worked properly under pressure.

"What did you say..."

His eyes narrowed.

"My little girl will give me a healthy grandchild one day," he said. "Strong like their grandfather. Beautiful like their grandmother."

"Dad!" Summer had hit her limit. Her hands went to her apron strings, yanking them loose with sharp, furious movements. "I have had enough of this!" She balled the apron up, threw it on the ground with more force than was strictly necessary, and marched off at speed, radiating humiliation from every pore.

A ripple of laughter moved through the small crowd around. Even Molly, who almost never cracked, was grinning.

"Poor girl," she said, shaking her head. "Marlon, you really do dial it up too far sometimes."

"I want my little girl to understand she is loved," Marlon said simply, spreading his hands as if this was a perfectly reasonable defense.

"I think she understood it about three conversations ago," Rico said from somewhere behind him.

Marlon turned around.

Rico flinched like he’d been caught stealing food rations.

"N — Nothing! I said nothing!"

This guy quickly deflated under his boss.

"I feel bad for her," Cindy said quietly beside me. Her voice had lost that edge. She was watching the direction Summer had disappeared, something soft and a little sad moving across her face. "But also...kind of jealous that she still has a father."

"Yeah," Daisy agreed from my other side. "Yeah."

Neither of them said anything else. They didn’t need to.

Yeah. They weren’t wrong.

The apocalypse had a way of collecting things from you. People, places, the version of yourself that existed before. I’d stopped counting what I’d lost a long time ago because the list had gotten too long to carry. But if I could have one thing back, just one...

It would’ve been my mother.

I was still somewhere in that thought when—

"Then, gray boy."

SLAP!

"Ughnn!"

The sound that came out of me was embarrassing. Marlon had brought his palm down on my back like he was testing the hull of a ship, and even with my Dullahan Enhanced body, the impact rattled straight through me. It wasn’t casual. It was purposeful, the kind of hit you give someone specifically because you know they can handle it and you want to see if they’ll buckle.

I turned and glared at him.

"What was that for?"

Who was he? My drill sergeant?

But I kept that thought to myself and fell into step alongside him.

Only Molly, Rico, and Maribel followed along as we moved away from the clearing. The rest of Brighton Park slowly drifted back to whatever they’d been doing before the whole knife situation interrupted their afternoon.

"So you actually managed to clear a place," Marlon said as we walked, not really framing it as a question. "Found somewhere solid to get your people settled?"

"Yeah," I said. "A hotel, actually. Same idea as you guys."

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "In times like these, keeping everyone under one roof is the closest thing to safety you’re going to get. Spread out and you die spread out."

"Some people still prefer to be outside though," I said. "Carmen and Shannon, they’re still in their old house, right?"

"It’s close enough that it’s not a death sentence," he said with a shrug. "And some of the others chose different buildings for privacy reasons. Their call. But if something goes wrong out there, they deal with it themselves. I can’t babysit grown adults."

Figures.

Though with Carmen and Shannon, I doubted it was really about privacy. That house was theirs. It had been theirs before any of this happened, back when the world still made sense and people still had things like routines and grocery lists and weekend plans. Whatever memories lived inside those walls, they weren’t ready to walk away from them. I understood that more than I wanted to admit.

"But you cleared a whole hotel in a single day?" Marlon asked suddenly, turning to look at me with a slight frown.

"We started in the morning and finished by afternoon," Cindy said brightly, stepping up beside me with no small amount of pride in her voice.

Well. She wasn’t wrong. She was just leaving out the part where our group included a Dullahan, which tended to significantly speed up the process of removing things that wanted to eat you. And Christopher — even without the Dullahan’s edge, the guy had spent enough time around people like us that whatever he used to be, he wasn’t exactly normal anymore either. People change when survival is the daily assignment.

Marlon made a considering sound and nodded slowly. Then his eyes dropped, not rudely, just observationally, and landed on Cindy’s oversized red shirt, then on my tank top.

You didn’t need to be a genius to connect the dots on that one.

"Quite the thoughtful boyfriend you are," he said, glancing at me. "Though I will say, it is pretty warm out here."

"It’s not what you’re thinking," I said. "Her clothes got soaked. That’s it."

"A very thoughtful boyfriend," he repeated, like I hadn’t said anything at all.

"T...They’re not together, Sir..." Daisy said from somewhere behind us, her voice coming out small and careful, like she was defusing something.

Marlon glanced back at her, and his eyes snagged on her glasses. One lens cracked straight down the middle, spiderwebbing out from a single impact point. It was hard to look at without wincing.

"Why is this one wearing broken spectacles?" He asked.

"Appointment backlog," I said. "Too many people, not enough optometrists still operating. They told her to wait along thousands of Infected."

Marlon shot me a look that clearly communicated what he thought about that answer.

From beside me I heard Cindy stifle a laugh. Daisy made a small, mortified sound.

"Pffhh—"

I turned slightly my head. Maribel had her hand pressed over her mouth, shoulders shaking with something she was actively fighting not to let out. The moment she realized I was looking at her, she straightened up and stared very hard at a spot on the ground.

"And you, glass girl," Marlon said, turning his attention fully to Daisy now. "How do you intend to manage going forward? You’re essentially working with one eye."

"Y...Yes, I know," Daisy said, adjusting her glasses self-consciously. "But we think there might be optical centers in the area...some of them had pre-ordered stock sitting uncollected. There’s a chance some of the prescriptions could be close enough to work for me."

Marlon considered that for a moment, then nodded. "Smart thinking. Don’t wait on it though. Vision is not something to gamble with out here."

"I’ll handle it," I said. "There should be options in Atlantic City?"

"There are, yeah. You’d just need to go past the cleared zone, we haven’t pushed that far out yet," he said.

"That’s fine," Cindy said with total confidence. "We cleared an entire hotel on our own, remember?"

Marlon looked at her. Then that low chuckle came back. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"You fight like your boyfriend, blond head?"

"She’s stronger than she looks, I can guarantee you that," I said.

"Too small," he said simply. Not mean, just stated, the way you’d note the weather.

"What is wrong with this old man?" Cindy muttered.

"I think he’s mapping you onto Summer," I said quietly.

"That’s kind of creepy."

"He’s just obsessed with his daughter. Leave him."

"That’s somehow worse..."

"R...Ryan! Cindy!" Daisy’s whisper had gone loud, her eyes wide behind her cracked lens. "He can hear you. He is right there."

"He’s literally standing next to us," Maribel added, her face doing something complicated between a wince and a suppressed smile.

But Marlon just laughed. Easy and genuine, without a single trace of offense.

Alright. So he wasn’t as bad as the knife-throwing entrance had suggested. Not bad at all, actually. And out here, in a world where the wrong people were in charge of the wrong places and the wrong weapons, that was worth more than it sounded.