Bang. Bang.
Two shots directly into the top of his head. He fell limp and officially dead with his face buried into the V of my legs.
Oh, good lord.
I was suddenly very thankful for my period. I would take that every day of the month over having this guy bleed out all over my crotch.
I pushed him off me before the ocean of blood soaked through too much and scrambled to my feet just in time to jump right back into killing the rest of his buddies.
Kane’s shots had been messy. There was just not the way to have a clean shot from three feet away with an assault rifle. My arms, hands, torso and legs were covered in a fine mist of sticky blood and chunks of flesh. I wrinkled my nose and tried not to cry.
I could be as brave as humanly possible any day of the week. Give me Zombies, Matthias Allen and the Black Plague for all I cared, I would fight them all. But I didn’t care what anybody said, having globs of already-decomposing flesh splatter your entire body and land on places near your mouth was enough to bring the strongest of us to desperate tears.
Linley had scooped up Page again and she clung to Kane’s mom with quiet desperation. I pushed my focus away from her, though, as we continued to travel across the room. Probably twenty dead Feeders were strewn about the floor by now. Page’s old room had been overtaken with at least seven more of them if I correctly counted all the arms sticking through the split and clawing at us. My room had a window in it as well, so I knew it was just a matter of time before Feeders found that entrance.
Linley’s room was the only space in this entire house that did not have a window or another exit besides the door. Well, the small bathroom, too, but I knew we couldn’t all fit in there.
Finally, we made it across the room and just in time. The Feeders were closing in and my gun felt frightening light of bullets. Linley dashed into the room with Page in her arms and I made a move to follow but just as I did, three opportunistic Zombies saw the opening and went for Kane.
I got one before he closed in the space. Kane hit the second right in his face but the third launched himself at Kane’s torso.
Kane went down with the guy on top of him and shoved his gun sideways into the hungry Feeder’s mouth. I kept shooting at the wall of Feeders doing everything in their power to get to us. My heartbeat was so loud it resounded in my head and pushed out all other sounds of the struggle. I knew my breaths were wheezing in my chest and the adrenaline in my blood made me feel light-headed, but I couldn’t focus on anything except saving Kane and getting back to Page.
Kane thrust his arms straight with the gun still lodged in the Feeder’s mouth and I took a risky three seconds to swing my gun and shoot at the Feeder. I got lucky with a bull’s-eye right in between the eyes and he fell on top of Kane, gun still lodged in his mouth.
Kane didn’t waste time or energy to even stand up. He crouched low and sprinted into Linley’s room just as the door across from us burst open and more Feeders spilled into the room. Kane hooked me around the waist and yanked me back against his chest. He slammed the door directly behind me and locked it with one swift movement.
The windowless room felt like heaven or at least a haven from the gory storm; except I knew the rest of the Feeders would be knocking down this door in no time. Already, I could feel their fists pounding on the other side and their screams and guttural moans came muffled through the wood.
My back was to the door and Kane pressed against me with his hand still poised on the lock. For just a moment he dropped his forehead to mine and closed his eyes. He seemed to need some time to pull his shit together and honestly, I was in the same boat.
For probably thirty more seconds we stayed frozen like that, him leaning against me, me absorbing all of him. It was the shared air and spirit of traumatized camaraderie that pulled us back into survival-mode.
His eyes flashed open and he hit me with the magnitude of his gray depths. “That was close.”
I opened my mouth to argue with him and tell him it was more than close, it was way past close but he had already turned around and started shoving furniture out of the way. Linley put Page down to help Kane with whatever the hell he was doing. The bed got pushed against the door and I had to scramble out of the way or risk them trapping me in place.
Page ran over to me and clung to my legs. Her entire body trembled and shook. I quickly wrapped my arms around her shoulders and pressed her against me. Tears started to fall again and that same soul-sickness that drowned me earlier came back with renewed force.
I had been so lucky so far. Each day I managed to squeak by with fingers and toes attached, brains firmly in place and my humanity somehow still intact. Haley and I both had been through some really messed up shit and yet we’d always come out the other side unscathed. At least physically.
Okay, at least in the we-still-weren’t-Zombies physical way.
I didn’t know the reason I had survived thus far or if there was even a pattern to this thing. I just knew that I had been fortunate. I had been blessed so far and part of me believed that it would always be this way. Some arrogant, narcissistic side of me believed that I had just what it took to survive this world, that I somehow possessed an extra set of skills that kept me above all the rest of the death and destruction.
But not anymore.
Now, I realized that I had never been lucky. I had been the unluckiest of us all. How cruel, how twisted was it, that I had survived this long only to fall for a family that I truly loved more than myself? While others were killed off early or forced into human-specific-cannibalism, I had gone down the road to hell to get to know the Parkers, for falling so irrevocably in love with Hendrix. I felt tied to him at the core of my soul and I cared for his sister like she was my own flesh and blood. Page meant more to me than almost anything else on this earth. She was Page. She was the creed we had taken to protect. She was the reason we struggled so hard and fought to stay together. Everything we did was for her and I had let her down.
Me.
Me alone.
But I couldn’t face them. The Parkers. I wouldn’t face them after this unforgivable sin.
I knew what I had done. I felt the eternal consequences in every single bone and muscle in my body. My entire existence screamed out against the injustice of this little girl getting bitten but not me. Even after the epic fight still raged around me, I had once again come out unscathed.
I would not be the one to tell Hendrix what happened to his little sister and how Kane had put her out of her misery because I was too weak.
I would not.
I would go down with her. I would not make her do this alone.
And I would hold onto her until someone else pried us apart.
There were a lot of people I would have forced myself to let go of. There were a lot of people I would have shot myself just so they would not have endured any unnecessary suffering. Haley was one of them. I would have forever mourned my best friend, but I would have pushed on after her. I even believed I wouldn’t have been this sacrificial for Hendrix. We loved each other but the whole Romeo and Juliet scenario wasn’t romantic to us. I would have shot a lot of people I loved as soon as a set of Feeder teeth grazed their skin. But Page would never be one of them.
In fact, she might be the only person that I would have given up my fight for.
As I clung to her more tightly, both of us shook, and cried uncontrollably. Kane and his mom crawled around on the floor doing who knew what, but I didn’t have time for them right now.
I waited for Page to bite me. I knew it was coming.
Any moment her brain would stop registering logically and all she would be concerned about was eating flesh. I had been fortunate enough to never have witnessed a child Zombie before but I knew they existed.
I could only imagine how horrific it would be to shoot a child.
I wouldn’t find out though. And that was the part of me that wished she would just bite me and get this over with.
Sudden
ly, the floorboards popped open in a big square of a hidden door right in the center of the room. Linley immediately disappeared down into darkness. She called Page to follow her but neither Page nor I could let go.
Kane walked over and put his hands on my shoulders, careful not to squish Page. “Reagan, we’re almost through this. I need you to get your ass down there.”
“What’s the point?” I whisper-cried.
“Can you just obey? Just once? I promise not to ever expect you to do another thing I tell you to do ever again.” The slight twitch of his lips annoyed the ever-loving hell out of me and so I tilted my chin and pooled all my stubbornness into a palpable force field around me.
“Nope.”
Kane huffed out an impatient sigh and forcefully disentangled me from Page. She rushed after us as he callously tossed me down the hole at his mother. I landed in a painful thud on the dirt floor and screamed obscenities up at him.
Page quickly followed me down. On her own, without Kane’s help.
The pounding at the door amplified violently. I pulled myself from the aching heap of tangles I’d landed in and scooted until my back was against a single cot. Linley sat down heavily on the green army blanket and Page jumped into my lap.
I held her against me. I could feel the blood from her back wound as it seeped into my clothes. I had slipped into this willful denial of her fatal injury. She hadn’t shown signs of turning yet, so I had started to force myself to believe that the Feeder never made contact, that I’d imagined the entire thing or that my brain had projected the horrific chain of events but they’d never actually come true.
Some masochistic hallucination that f-ed with my reality.
The blood running over my hand and sinking into my clothes told a different story, a story that even while it confronted me face-to-face I couldn’t allow myself to believe it.
Kane fiddled around upstairs, taking his sweet time. I didn’t really think this hole was any better of an option than the room. The Feeders would find us no matter what. It was just a matter of time, just the difference of how long we wanted to drag this horrific end on. Kane seemed determined to make this last forever though, and I wasn’t in a position to argue with him. I could hear him moving all kinds of things around up there while the Feeders pounded their fists, clawed at the door and screeched those ungodly sounds.
The house seemed to tremble under the weight and force of them, but in this little hideout beneath it all, things were relatively peaceful. This was a bunker. A doomsday bunker clearly. It reminded me a lot of Gage’s uncle’s place where I’d once hidden out with Kane in a very similar scenario.
Linley had lit a dim camping lantern so I could make out the gist of this underground prison. There was a door in the back corner that I believed was a bathroom of some kind. Besides the cot we leaned against, there was another one across the room. A counter made up one entire wall with all kinds of cabinets surrounding a sink. A Bunsen burner kind of camping stove sat next to six camping lanterns lined up and three flats of bottled water. Along the other wall hung guns of every size and shape and a metal cabinet on wheels pushed into a corner, similar to the one that my dad used to have in our garage for his tools. I hoped to God it was full of ammo.
But there I went again… believing in some elongated survival. My brain would not process that this was the end. That these were my last moments.
Apparently I wasn’t wired to give up, even though that was exactly what I would be doing just as soon as Page got hungry.
I could tell Kane was up to something upstairs because the sounds he made were familiar; I was just too panicked to put them together. My brain had reached an unfamiliar place of whooshing air and fuzzy confusion. I knew there were things to think through but I could not make my brain process any of this. I just felt too hysterical.
Suddenly, Kane’s intentions all clicked quickly together when a hot blaze of light brightened our dark hole. Fire. Kane had lit a huge fire.
Once the flames were blazing, he dropped down into the hole after us. He closed the lid that I realized was wood on the topside but some kind of metal on the inside. He latched it closed, padlocked it, slid a lever into place and turned around with a satisfied grin. He looked at the space around us, nodded and then took Page and me into serious account.
“I need to look at her back, Reagan,” he said calmly. He said it so freaking calmly, like we hadn’t just been attacked and Page hadn’t just been bitten.
“No,” I growled at him.
“You can’t live in denial forever, Sweetheart. Show me her back or I will take her from you.”
Page looked up at me with clear eyes wet with tears. “It’s okay, Reagan. We need to know.”
More tears flooded my vision from her bravery. I nodded my consent and she turned around so Kane could lift the back of her shirt. He hissed out a breath and I immediately had her lay across my lap so I could see.
There it was. A huge, nasty bite that was red, angry and gruesome.
I couldn’t deny the evidence before me.
Page had become the next victim of the Zombie Apocalypse.
Chapter Four
At the sight of Page’s obvious point of infection I started shaking violently. More tears came and mingled with the snot that dripped down my face. Wailing sounds came out of my mouth but I couldn’t be held responsible for them.
My reaction was probably the worst thing for Page’s own mental stamina but I had officially lost it. I pulled her up and crushed her against my chest. I whispered meaningless promises against her hair, swearing that this would be okay, that she would be all right.
Neither of those things was true.
None of us would survive this.
Even Linley put a delicate hand on my shoulder as if to comfort me. She squeezed gently and her breath shuttered as she exhaled.
This sucked.
And I could tie it all back to Kane. He brought me here. He kidnapped Page and me. He thought this place would be secure enough to keep out the Zombies. But it had failed us.
And so had he.
I could have thought through all those things and each one would have tracked a different road to furious. But I couldn’t process all that yet.
Page was enough for me.
And so instead of anger and vengeance, the only thing I could feel was sadness.
Extreme, bone-deep, life-altering sadness.
Page looked up at me and with the wisdom and insight of someone a hundred times her age, she picked up the gun that had fallen uselessly to the ground and handed it to me. “Reagan,” she said in a trembling voice. “Do it. Before I hurt someone. Do it.”
I shook my head frantically. “No, Page. I won’t. We’ll go through this together. Whatever happens, we’ll do this together.”
It was her turn to shake her head. Her blonde curls whipped around her face and got caught in the streaks of tears that ran down her face. “I won’t hurt you,” she cried. “I won’t take you away from Hendrix. He would be so mad at me! I won’t do it! Kill me now! Don’t make me hurt someone!”
I was full on sobbing. “No!”
“Reagan!” Kane shouted but I ignored him.
The gun felt extra heavy in my hands, cold and deadly as I fingered the trigger.
“Please, Reagan,” Page begged with a broken voice. “Make it fast. Make it so fast I don’t feel it. Please, I don’t want to hurt anyone. Please don’t make me hurt someone. I can’t take it if I accidentally bite you.”
“Reagan!” Kane shouted while he loomed over me. He expected my attention but I wouldn’t give it to him. This was between Page and me. This was our thing.
Could I shoot her? Could I put her out of her misery like she asked? What would that take? Soulless bravery? Or compassion? Cowardice? Callousness? The pure evil inside of me that would surely infect everything that was left of my soul? Or would this be an act of mercy?
God, why did I have to make this decision?
I wanted any
other hardship than this! I would have faced any other thing! Why this? Why Page?
I broke down into tears again but my finger slid over the trigger. Page saw the small motion and scrambled back so that I had plenty of room. She stood strong. She stood courageously. She stood like no girl in her position should.
I knew that even I couldn’t stand with that kind of moxie.
Trembling and feeling dangerously light-headed with adrenaline and fear, I pulled myself up to my knees. Linley let out a wailing, hysteric sob but didn’t move to stop me.
I could feel the temperature rising in the room as the roar of the fire blazed above. Kane would hopefully take out the entire horde with this inferno, but the house would be demolished as well. And who knew how far this fire would rage. It had the potential to take out the entire forest. Would more innocent lives be lost because of the Allens and their sick obsession with control and possession?
This was enough.
Page was more than enough.
I stared at her, admiring her more than I had respected any other person in my life. The gun shook and rattled in my hands but I sucked in a calming breath.
She was already dead, I told myself. She was already dead.
I had been so sure that I would let her bite me. I had promised myself that she wouldn’t go through this alone. But just like all the times before, I yielded to her request. Easily. This girl had always had me wrapped around her finger and this moment was no different. If she wanted the peace of knowing she hadn’t hurt anyone else… of knowing she hadn’t hurt me, I would give that to her.
How could I not?
“Reagan, put the goddamn gun down!” Kane yelled at me.
“No,” I told him hoarsely… firmly. I raised the weapon, certain it only had a few shots left. These would be the most careful shots I ever took. They would be perfectly placed, perfectly aimed. Like she asked, I would make this fast. I would do this for her.
There was too much darkness in this act to comprehend what would happen to me if I pulled the trigger.