Love & Decay
A Novella Series
Season Two
Omnibus
By Rachel Higginson
[email protected] Rachel Higginson 2014
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Copy Editing by Carolyn Moon
Cover Design by Caedus Design Co.
Other Books Now Available by Rachel Higginson
Love and Decay, Season One, Episodes One-Twelve
Love and Decay, Season Two, Episodes One-Twelve
Love and Decay, Season Three, Episodes One-Twelve
Reckless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 1)
Hopeless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 2)
Fearless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 3)
Endless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 4)
The Reluctant King (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 5)
The Relentless Warrior (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 6)
Breathless Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 6.5)
Fateful Magic (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 6.75)
The Redeemable Prince (The Star-Crossed Series, Book 7)
Heir of Skies (The Starbright Series, Book 1)
Heir of Darkness (The Starbright Series, Book 2)
Heir of Secrets (The Starbright Series, Book 3)
The Rush (The Siren Series, Book 1)
The Fall (The Siren Series, Book 2)
The Heart (The Siren Series, Book 3)
The Five Stages of Falling in Love, an Adult Contemporary Romance
Bet on Us (An NA Contemporary Romance)
Magic and Decay, a Rachel Higginson Mashup
Striking (The Forged in Fire Series) This is a co-authored Contemporary NA
Brazing (The Forged in Fire Series) This is a co-authored Contemporary NA
To my children,
You guys rock the Zombie-walk.
Episode One
Chapter One
836 days after initial infection
He was going to kill me. I knew that he was.
I was seconds from death.
I fumbled with the knife in my hands. The blade slashed the pads of my fingers as I tried to find a good grip in the dark. I scrambled backwards in order to get away from him, but there was nowhere to go. I was trapped- caught.
I ran for as long as I could, but they found me.
They always find me.
The knife handle was slippery in my hands; my fingers throbbed and dripped blood everywhere. A whimper fell from my lips, and I hated that I showed them any weakness. They didn’t deserve to hear how afraid I was.
Or that I was more afraid for them to catch me alive than I was for them to kill me.
He flung his body on top of mine in an attempt to wrestle my weapon away. I couldn’t let him subdue me; I had to fight him. All I could hear was my frantic breathing as it rushed in and out of my heaving chest; all I could feel was the cold, unforgiving ground and the throbbing pain in my hand. I’d been stupid to cut my fingers. Now the Feeders would come, too. I’d be forced to face two enemies.
Fear cut into my skin as palpable as the blade in my trembling fingers. I felt suffocated by the panic that shrieked through my veins like a banshee calling out in the wild night. And still the faceless man attacked me.
I flailed my body around, a flesh-eating piranha out of water. I was more desperate for this kill than I had been for any other so far. I wedged my shoulder free and then struck out.
The knife sliced across his throat, so clean… so precise.
I’d done this a hundred times already, I knew exactly where to put the tip of my blade, how to slide it across his rubbery skin. He didn’t stand a chance, not when it came to threatening me or my life.
My knife tore through his jugular hot and fast, ripping a gaping hole through his neck so that his head lolled backwards, almost completely detached from his body. Blood gushed over my skin like a waterfall of gore, dousing me in sticky, thick crimson. I choked on it, drowned in it.
I couldn’t see as it poured over my face and body with the pressure of a fire-hose. This couldn’t be real.
I violently shoved at his now limp, lifeless body, desperate to get him off me and away from what I did to him. I couldn’t breathe; I was gagging on his never-ending cascade of blood.
Sobs now racked my chest as I fell into a full-on hysteria.
Oh, god, get him off!
I screamed with the effort to push, kick, shove him away, but he didn’t move. He weighed a thousand pounds and now I was being crushed beneath him.
“Help me!” I shrieked into the darkness. “Help me!”
And then he was gone. Somebody moved him off me, freeing me from the guilt, suffocating fear and the devastating pressure on my chest. I jerked into sitting, sputtering his blood and wiping at my eyes. Panicked cries still afflicted my body, and I gasped for breath and in the next moment I exhaled whimpering sobs.
I’d just killed a man. I’d just killed a man!
Strong arms wrapped around my body, pulling me into the sanctuary of muscled warmth. I fell into him easily. I let him envelop me with his strength and security. He whispered sweet reassurances in my ratted hair; he rubbed my back; he trailed soft kisses from my temple down to the curve of my jaw.
I threw my arms around his neck as the knife dangled from my weak, bleeding fingers. I pressed myself into his body, knowing he would protect me from every other evil of this world.
“Shh, Reagan, you’re safe now,” he whispered into my ear. “You’re where you belong.”
I continued to cry into his chest, weakening as the minutes wore on. We were both covered in blood, and as it dried it became thick and heavy as if it carried a physical weight. Our clothes glued together, and my skin had difficulty pulling away from his. I gagged as I realized that this was gore from a dead man, from a man I’d killed. I couldn’t hold it together anymore. I was going to lose it. I was going to puke everywhere.
I started to push away from the now cold chest, desperate to save him from my sick.
He didn’t like that I was pulling away. He didn’t like that I would distance myself from him, not for any reason.
I strained my head back when my cheek felt slick again.
He was bleeding this time. Bleeding everywhere.
My vision adjusted in the dark enough so I could make out the gaping wound in his chest. Someone had plunged a knife into him. Someone had tried to kill him.
His hands slid up to my biceps and wrapped around my muscle painfully. “Why are you afraid?” he demanded. “You’re where you belong. You can’t go anywhere. You belong to me.”
&nb
sp; “You’re bleeding,” I whispered as I finally met the fathomless gray depths of his haunted eyes behind thick black-framed glasses.
His mouth twisted cruelly, and his white teeth flashed in the darkness. “You tried to kill me,” he told me.
I shook my head. I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to hurt him. I just needed him to let go of my arms; he was hurting me.
“No,” I whispered. My long, dark hair whipped me in the face when I protested adamantly. It was the same color as the darkness and blended into the night air so that I couldn’t make it out; I could only feel it.
“Yes, you did,” he growled. “You tried to kill me. But you didn’t. You couldn’t.” His voice dropped to a whisper, but I heard every clip of his consonants and lift of his vowels. “I won’t leave you, Reagan. I’ll never leave you.”
My arms were still around his neck with the dagger dangling loosely from my fingertips, almost forgotten about.
“You have to leave me,” I tried to convince him.
He shook his head this time, “No,” he said. “I won’t.”
“You have to, Kane,” I pleaded. “Please, leave me.”
“No,” he bit out finally.
More tears flooded my eyes, more blinding pain that sealed his fate.
I took the knife more firmly in my palm and aimed it as his back. The tip of the sharp dagger pressed into his flesh barely restrained from piercing his skin. His eyes instantly darkened with the determination to prove that I wouldn’t betray him. His head dropped to within a breath of mine, his mouth ghosting over my lips with a gentle kiss.
“Reagan,” he groaned with such heartache that my entire body shivered. “Don’t, don’t make me leave you.”
“I have to.” But I hesitated. How could I hurt him?
“You love me,” he argued. “You can’t hurt me because you love me.”
“It’s wrong, Kane.” I let myself lean into him and press a tender kiss on the corner of his full lips. “It’s
the wrong kind of love.”
His entire body arched into me as if I were safe instead of deadly, as if I was refuge instead of
danger. His cheek pressed against mine; his body heat so deliciously warm and familiar that I wanted to stay wrapped up in him forever. His hands left my arms to lift my shirt and wrap around my waist. My heart thudded sharply at how desperately I wanted more of this intimacy with him.
“I won’t let you tear us apart,” he vowed with his lips next to my ear.
“And that’s why I have to let you go.” I took a faltering breath and sunk my weapon into his back. The force of my thrust brought our bodies impossibly closer together. I felt the heat of his blood as it gushed out his chest wound. His arms engulfed my waist, holding my body flush against his, not leaving any space of our two beings to be separated.
“But I’ll never let you go,” he promised in a cold, hard voice that compressed like a vice around my heart and squeezed and crushed and pulverized my vital organ into nothing more than a flat, empty shell of what it once was.
“Reagan!”
“Reagan!”
I shot to sitting immediately. I wrapped my arms around my dry body that was in no way covered in blood, and felt consciousness bring understanding back to my sleep-addled brain. My body shivered violently in the dark room. I sniffled and realized my face was wet with tears. My limbs trembled and shook as if I were in shock and my heart pounded ferociously in my chest.
A big hand rested on my shoulder blade, and I instinctively flinched away, still lost in the horrifying nightmare that had become something of a reoccurring event.
“Hey, hey,” Hendrix soothed from behind me. “It’s just me.”
At the sound of his familiar voice, I sunk back into his chest and sobbed again at the feeling of absolute love and devotion when his arms went all the way around me.
“Holy shit, Reagan,” Harrison groaned from somewhere across the black, lightless room. “I get that you’re damaged, but you are killing my beauty sleep.”
“Harrison, shut the hell up,” Hendrix growled at him.
Harrison and someone else, maybe Nelson, let out groans of frustrated exhaustion. I felt the tension in the room from being awakened again by one of my violent nightmares. They didn’t happen every night, but they happened often enough that I knew everyone was sick of them.
I heard Vaughan whispering to Page, trying to calm her down and coax her back to sleep. Nelson and Haley were whispering to each other, too. They were laughing a little at something, but settling back into sleep again.
I felt like the biggest idiot. My unconscious screaming embarrassed me, the tears that soaked my face and t-shirt and the entire freaking premise for my nightmare.
It wasn’t exactly a carbon copy every time, but more often than not my dreams took the same trip. I killed the driver of the Suburban and then I had to stab Kane all over again. Always in my dreams he told me I loved him. And always I didn’t- which I took to be a good sign. But every single time I had to stab him again, I felt like my heart ripped open like I’d plunged the knife into my own chest.
This had to be some guilt complex and leftover trauma from that horrific day four months ago.
In a normal world, before there were Zombies, and I lived in an actual house with windows and electricity, I would have forced myself into therapy. Immediately.
But in this post-apocalyptic reality where I foraged for food, carried multiple weapons on me at all times and hadn’t had a proper shower in years, shrinks were out of the question and kind of like a hilarious joke. Besides, what put my distress ahead of everyone else’s?
Honestly, every single person housed in this once-storage-facility-turned-secured-compound had been through the bowels of hell. We’d all killed. We’d all gone to desperate lengths to stay alive. I wasn’t more special than anyone else here.
That being said, there had to be some stupid reason I couldn’t internalize my pain like a normal, screwed-up survivor. For some reason, my ghosts came to life in my head and threatened to strip away my sanity until there was nothing more left of me than a human-shaped haunted house.
Hendrix pulled me back down to the single mattress we shared. He tucked me into the nook of his arm and traced soothing circles on my back while he pressed comforting kisses into my hair. The gesture reminded me so much of my dream, and how I’d imagined Kane in that secret place, that I jerked against him.
“Reagan,” he hushed. “It’s alright; you’re safe.” I forced my body to relax into him as he continued to soothe me with his tender words and gentle touch. “They can’t get you here. They can’t get you ever, yeah? You’re safe.”
I nodded against his chest and breathed him in. He hadn’t bathed since yesterday, and there was an outside smell that lingered to his clothes- wind, earth and the faint hint of his sweat. He smelled like home; he smelled like love.
He smelled like Hendrix.
“Come here,” he murmured. I turned to face him, and he wrapped me tightly against his chest.
I laid my cheek on the heat of his arm and nuzzled into his peaceful sanctum. He rested his chin on the top of my head and squeezed me one more time before he drifted back into sleep.
If I were honest, it was a little difficult to breathe this way, but I wouldn’t have pulled away for anything. I needed the pressure of his chest against mine, the rise and fall of his body as he slipped into a deeper sleep. I needed his strong arms protecting me from the evils that chased me both in consciousness and unconsciousness. And most importantly, I needed the nearness of his body to save me from the demons inside my head.
God, I felt like I was shrinking.
I regulated my breathing and closed my eyes but sleep never came again for me, and I knew it wouldn’t. I couldn’t risk going back to that dream and picking up where I left off.
Or worse, starting it over.
The inside of the storage facility we’d moved into permanently after Kane Allen and his dad Matthias basically decl
ared war on Gage and my adopted family- the Parkers- was mostly dark. There were a few walls that had significant-sized windows, but they were on the top two floors and we avoided them as often as possible. The bottom two floors were concrete and hopefully impenetrable.
The doors that did give us entrance were made from heavy steel and always locked.
Gage’s uncle left him in charge of people who had come searching sanctuary from the Zombie horde or other, more dangerous settlements.
Because while we were a permanent outpost of survivors, this was by far the fairest, most healthy environment I’d stumbled upon since the world fell apart. Usually, in places where humanity was allowed to stay long term, women were treated like property or worse; the population was always greedy and volatile and there was never a guarantee that those in charge were smart enough to keep their citizens truly safe.
In fact, the only other settlement I’d seen that was as stable as ours was Kane’s. Although, The Colony was in no way a healthy environment.
Matthias ran his town like a dictator and had the task of keeping Zombies away down to a science. As long as you didn’t include the Feeders he trapped and starved inside his “courthouse.”
Personally, I believed that my once-human-now-brainless-cannibal friends preferred a quick end to their obviously horrifying existence. But the Allens had a different set of standards. They not only used the infection to punish their citizens who didn’t see exactly eye-to-eye with them, but once they were successfully turned, Matthias had them locked up in holding cells along the halls of the old high school where he kept them starved and suffering.