I could only see blackness. I was sure I would cease to exist after this horrific act. I wouldn’t die. I wouldn’t get the mercy of entering into some kind of afterlife. I would be sucked into hell through a vacuum reserved only for the truly appalling people.
And I would deserve it.
I would deserve every second of my future suffering.
I gathered more courage knowing I would be punished for this. Knowing Page’s killer would get exactly what she deserved gave me more strength. I inhaled deeply and let the breath out through my nose.
Kane realized for the first time that I was serious about this. He jumped in front of my gun and put his hands on my shoulders in a soothing gesture. The unyielding barrel jabbed him in the stomach but he didn’t attempt to move it or take the weapon from my hands.
Frantically, he said, “Page will be all right for a second. Put the gun down and come talk to me.”
I glared at him and then the floodgate on whatever emotions I had been holding back burst and I slapped his hands away and stabbed him in the stomach with my gun. “Page will not be all right, Kane! Page will never be all right again! Can’t you see that! You did see it! You saw it! You saw the bite! Let me help her! Let me end this for her so that she doesn’t suffer anymore!” My voice was raw and stripped with agony. I couldn’t see straight through the cloying tears and my heart felt one more emotion away from complete combustion.
Page hiccupped a giant sob and I was right there with her. I was covered in blood from multiple sources, my face was wet with tears and snot and I knew that I looked as crazy as I felt. But Kane looked down at me with this utter adoration plastered across his handsome face and I wanted to do nothing but spit at him.
How could he look at me like that?
How could he ask me to leave her for even one second when we all knew what this would mean?
“You are not going to shoot that little girl,” Kane ordered me.
I shoved the gun to the side to prove my point, to prove that I took care of her, not him, to prove that I wasn’t a bad guy for doing this. I was a good guy.
He was a bad guy and he always would be.
He jumped back. He left me to go run in front of Page and shield her with his body. “Stop this, goddamnit! Stop it! I won’t let you hurt her! I will not let you shoot her, Reagan. Put the gun down and just think about this for one second!”
I shook with fury now as I screamed at him. “I have thought about this! Don’t you know that I’ve thought about nothing else but this! What else can I do, Kane? There is nothing else to do! Let me get this over with, please. Please, god, let me just do this before I lose my courage and she has to… before she has to…” But it was too late. I had lost whatever will power I’d worked myself up to. I dropped the gun at my feet and covered my face with my hands. I fell to my knees and let out the ugliest cries of my life.
Page couldn’t take it anymore, either. She ran across the space between us and collapsed at my side. We clung together again and cried and cried and cried. She buried her face in the crook of my arm and let out all the fear she had kept so tightly locked up.
Kane walked over to us and knelt in front of me. He tipped my chin up so that I was forced to look at him. I blinked away the tears so that his face came into focus and hated the comfort I found in his honest gaze.
“Reagan, I promise you that Page is going to be alright. Will you please talk to me for just a minute? We’ll just step over there. You can come right back to her. And she will be here, okay? She will be safe and human and waiting for you.” His southern drawl was soft and coaxing and his hands reached up to cup my biceps.
“How can you promise me that?” My voice was complete desperation, my spirit grasping for any glimmer of hope.
“Because she hasn’t tried to bite you yet.”
I sniffled and looked down at Page who had fallen asleep in my arms sometime in the last five minutes.
She’d fallen asleep.
Not died. Not turned. Not become a horrendous monster that tried to eat my brains.
She’d closed her eyes and her trembling breaths had steadied into soft snores of unconsciousness.
If she hadn’t been bitten an hour ago, I would have expected this behavior from her. Whenever she’d been in the middle of one of our battles with the undead before, she would always make it through like a champ and crash from the sudden drop in adrenaline. She was tiny, underfed, malnourished and only eight. Sleep was her go to bodily reaction for the kind of trauma we lived with daily.
I looked up at Kane in complete confusion. “Why hasn’t she tried to bite me yet?”
Finally understanding that I wasn’t going to give up this girl, Kane joined me on the floor with his back to the cot. His long arm laid out against my back but he didn’t exactly wrap his arm around me; it was more like it was there if I wanted it, if I asked for it.
I glanced back at Linley who had pulled her knees to her chest and started to shake as badly as I had been moments ago.
“You alright, Mama?” Kane asked gently.
She shook her head and buried her face in her knees. Kane reached out and wrapped his large hand around her ankle. He held her there and she seemed to settle some. She looked up at the ceiling and flinched at the extremely loud roar the fire made over our heads. Sweat had started to bead along my hairline while the heat of the blaze overhead warred with the damp, coolness of the bunker.
“We’re alright now, Mama,” Kane promised her. “They can’t get to us down here and we have plenty of food and water to last until the fire’s gone out. We’re safe now. Someone is coming out to check on us the day after tomorrow. We can last two days down here. Easily. Alright?”
Linley nodded vacantly and tried to sniffle back her tears. “Alright,” she whispered.
“Why don’t you lie down for a while? You’ll feel better if you get some rest,” Kane suggested.
She nodded again and tipped to the side, right where she was. Kane leaned over, squishing me in the process, and helped his mother cover up with a rough, scratchy blanket. I glanced back at her one last time and noticed that even while her body continued to quiver, she had closed her eyes and her breathing had evened out.
“Is she going into shock?” I asked Kane just loud enough for him to hear me. The noise from above should muffle my voice and keep it from carrying to Linley.
“I’m hoping she can fight it,” Kane replied. “If she gets some rest, maybe the worst of it is over. She’s just not used to this. She hasn’t seen the Feeders like this. My father has kept her safe this whole while. The only time she’s really been exposed to Feeders has been when they’ve been caged.”
I grunted. I had no sympathy for Linley Allen. And Kane just proved my point about the Colony. They hid their people away, especially their women. In a world as dangerous as ours a lack of exposure and ignorance was a fast track to death.
I looked down at Page and realized it didn’t actually matter.
Whether Matthias kept you locked away or you had an army of determined brother’s to protect you, the wrong place at the wrong time meant death no matter what.
“Kane, why hasn’t she tried to eat us yet?” I asked after several minutes of silence. It had to be somewhere in the middle of the night by now but the thought of falling asleep never entered my mind.
And after the living nightmare I’d just endured, I might not ever sleep again.
That is, if I survived the rest of the night.
“There is a possibility, a small possibility, although the more time that passes, the more likely it is, that she… that she’s immune from the worst of the infection.”
I didn’t respond.
There was nothing to say.
What he just said was impossible.
Sensing my hesitancy to believe him, he went on, “Reagan, if she would have reacted like every other person infected, she would be wild by now. We would have had to restrain her or kill her. It wouldn’t have mattered that
she was a child. It wouldn’t have mattered that she is small. She would have been as lethal as any of them. She is immune.”
“Immune,” I repeated. I let the word settle on my tongue and roll around in my head. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know the science of it,” Kane started. He turned to face me and this time he did wrap his arm around my shoulders. “But I’ve seen it before. If you think about it, it’s just an infection. It’s simply a communicable disease. In almost every disease known to mankind before the Zombie plague, there have been those that were somehow exempt. Smallpox, Scarlett fever, chicken pox, malaria… you name something humanity has faced and I will show you how humanity has prevailed. We are fighters. We were born to survive this world, to make it ours. Zombieism is an expectation, but we have an exception to every rule.”
“You really are your father’s child,” I whispered, half in awe of this possibility and half terrified of it.
He shook his head and his expression grew grave. “No,” he argued. “No, this is all me. My father hates this. He hates that he can’t control every single outcome. He hates that this could lead to a cure or a vaccine and that his power could be stripped away from him. On this, my father and I are different.”
I pressed my lips together wondering if I could trust Kane. I believed him one thousand percent that his father hated that there were those potentially immune to the infection. And I completely understood Kane’s explanation. Matthias used the Zombie infestation to control the people that worshiped him. If people didn’t have to fear Feeders any more then his power would be significantly depleted.
He would be nothing but a figurehead. His people might stick with him for a while but only until they didn’t need him.
If the Zombie threat could truly be eradicated and the world made safe to live in once again, Matthias Allen would lose everything.
“You’ve really seen this?” I asked.
“My father… my father and his men have a lab. I’ve seen a lot of things.” The bleakness to his tone tightened my chest. He shook his head and met my gaze again. “But I’ve seen people be immune before. I’ve seen them repress the transition.”
“Did your father kill them?” I clasped Page to me again. Matthias would never come near her. I would do whatever it took to keep her away from that entirely different kind of monster.
“He didn’t have to.” He ran his hand over Page’s matted blonde curls again. “All of the ones I saw still died of the infection; they just didn’t turn into Zombies. There’s a fever that follows the bite. They were still infected; they just had something inside them that kept them from becoming Feeders. Page is about to get really sick, Reagan. Really, really sick.”
I kept her close to my body and felt myself tear up all over again.
“And if she bites someone? Will she infect them?”
Kane shook his head. “Not from what I’ve seen. My father has tested that theory though.” His tone was darkly amused.
“Of course, he would have that tested. What greater weapon than someone who could still think and function in normal society but still infect people.”
“Exactly,” Kane agreed. “But it hasn’t been possible so far.”
“So there’s… there’s a lot of people immune?”
“I’ve seen two over the last two years. If there were more, my father didn’t tell me about them. But I don’t think he would hide that from me. It’s a small percentage of the population. But the immunity exists.”
“Is it… would he have researched enough to know if the immunity was genetic?” Hope flared in my chest so bright I thought it would blind me. The Parkers. All of them could be immune.
He smiled sadly at me. “It’s not. There was a brother and sister pair that… the girl had tried to… anyway, my father wanted to punish the girl but she was immune. He brought her brother in to test that same theory but he turned. She died later from the fever.”
“What a life you live,” I mumbled. I didn’t think he heard me though, not with the fire crackling overhead.
“Could she wake up and still transition?” I shouldn’t be so trusting of Kane but I couldn’t help it. I had nothing left to lose at this point and nobody else to help me sort this out. If Kane had seen this before, I wanted every piece of information possible.
“Not into a Feeder.”
A thousand pounds lifted from my shoulders and I sagged against him. “She could live through this?”
“Reagan…”
“Kane,” I cut him quickly. “If there is room for hope let me hope. I know that everyone you’ve seen has died, but I can only imagine what kind of conditions your dad placed them in. And I doubt he tried very hard to save them.” Kane stayed thoughtfully silent, so I continued. “Page has me. Do you understand what I would do for this little girl? Do you understand what I would sacrifice?”
He smiled softly and looked down at the top of Page’s head. “I do understand what you would sacrifice. I almost watched it happen.”
“I didn’t want her to… I didn’t want her to die a monster. She isn’t one. She’s the most beautiful, innocent creature I’ve ever known. And she might possibly be the only lovely thing left in this world.” Tears fell again but this time they were from the overflow of all this emotion. I had been through everything tonight. From the very pits of despair to this new feeling of complete and redeeming relief.
“She is a beautiful thing,” Kane agreed. “But she’s not the only one.”
I looked up at him and he leaned into me. His arm was tight around me and his body heat seeped into my skin and spread over me like wildfire. He pressed a kiss against my forehead and sat back a little.
“What you did for her was very brave, Reagan. I am constantly amazed by you.”
“Stop,” I told him. “Nothing I did today was amazing. I failed Page. She should never have been bitten to begin with. We shouldn’t have to face a fever or infection or any of this. I mean, could you imagine if she hadn’t been immune? What if… what if she would have… Or what if I would have…” my words caught in my throat and I couldn’t get out anything else. I held Page closer to me, and the tears started again.
I didn’t think I would ever stop crying after this day. I was too much of a mess now. Tonight had ruined me.
I hoped Hendrix was ready for this upgraded level of brokenness…
Or maybe he wouldn’t want me at all after this.
Oh, gosh! New waves of sickness washed over me.
Page had been bitten under my watch. How would I ever explain that to Hendrix and Vaughan? And would they ever trust me again?
No. The answer to that question was a resounding no.
Kane pulled me into the curve of his body as I broke down again. He kissed the top of my head and made soothing sounds. I let out more tears than seemed possible for my body to produce.
“Reagan,” he soothed after a while. “You have to stop. You have to be able to take care of Page or my mother is going to have to.”
He sounded amused while he scolded me, but he was right. Damn.
I sniffled into his shirt and attempted to pull myself together.
“Besides, don’t you want to ask me about this place? I know you’re dying of curiosity.”
Now I could tell he was grinning into my hair. “Fine,” I huffed. “Tell me how you just happen to have a bunker down here.”
“Gage’s uncle.”
I looked around at the space again and realized it did look vaguely familiar. “Really? He built this for you before Zombies ever dropped by?”
“Yep. Gage’s Uncle Dan was a bit of a nut job to begin with. I mean, he took this stuff really seriously. I bet that warehouse was packed with survival stuff when Gage got there.”
“Was he super religious or something?” I hadn’t pulled away from Kane yet and sometime in the last few minutes I had decided I wasn’t going to. I would be faithful to Hendrix and I would even force myself to remember that Kane was not only m
y enemy but also my kidnapper and the whole reason Page and I were in this chaos.
But I also needed comfort. I had been through hell today. I needed a hand to help me get through the aftermath. I needed support before I crumbled into unfixable pieces that turned into jagged edges that would cut anyone who got close. Kane said I would save him, but tonight he saved me.
In more than one way.
He shook his head. “No, not religious. He was all about government conspiracy theories. He always had these theories about Russia invading and the government collapsing. He was a really entertaining guy to drink with.” He looked down and winked at me.
“You knew him?”
It was hard for me to take Kane and Gage’s past life seriously. It felt so different from who they were now; I usually wrote it off as some alternate reality or Zombie fan fiction. It was even weirder because of the connection they used to have with each other. They didn’t just have lives; they had life together.
“Yeah, sure,” Kane shrugged. “Small town. Everybody knew everybody.”
“I know what that’s like,” I admitted. “So he built this for your dad?”
“Yes. My dad wasn’t quite as bad as Dan, but… close. He had a lot of his own theories and fears that made him pursue something like this construction. I didn’t know about Dan’s bunker until, well, until we got trapped in it.”
“And the ceiling is fireproof?” I had my doubts the longer the thing blazed overhead. It had gotten seriously hot down here. I was uncomfortable with the heat but not enough to feel as though my life were threatened. Actually… this was the safest I had felt in a while.
“Should be.” His arm squeezed mine. “My dad always has a contingency plan lined up. We’re all right for now, Reagan. And someone is coming out to check on us soon. You’re safe.”
I nodded against his arm, too afraid of my easy concession to verbalize anything. “Thank you, Kane,” I whispered to him after long minutes of silence.
His entire body stilled and I felt his breathing stop altogether. “For what, Reagan?”
“For stopping me. For recognizing that Page wasn’t going to turn. Thank you for keeping me from… hurting her.”