But I couldn’t do that. So when he didn’t immediately pull me into his arms, I felt a fissured start at the top of my head and crack and split its way all the way to my toes. The action or really lack of action triggered a defense mechanism inside me that I didn’t even know I possessed. I probably should have made him hug me… made him pay attention to me. But I didn’t.
Instead, I made a decision that would forever change him… forever change us.
Nerves and fear mixed with my own grieving and intense frustration. I didn’t want to drag him into the Allen-circling-vortex-of-hell. I didn’t want Hendrix involved with any of this. As it seemed I couldn’t freaking extricate myself entirely, I wanted to at least protect the man I loved most from the poison these people injected into everything they touched.
Including Page.
But it was because of Page that I had no choice.
More gun tips popped into the hole and Parker brothers appeared on every side.
“You’re alive,” Nelson breathed relief. After a fast moment he demanded, “Where’s Page?”
“Get up here, Reagan,” Hendrix commanded.
“Where’s Page,” Vaughan growled with so much suffused anger in his words they hit my skin like golf-ball sized hail.
“Page needs help,” I squeaked.
Vaughan dropped into the bunker before I could say anything else. “Where is she?”
Hendrix followed and Nelson came next, barking at his younger brothers to keep watch. Linley muttered something that I couldn’t quite make out, but by the tone of her voice I knew it wasn’t nice. Vaughan forcefully shoved her up the ladder. He shouted instructions to his brothers about shooting to kill if she tried anything.
They happily agreed.
I had glanced up for just a second to watch Linley leave and when my attention came back down it was to Hendrix who knelt next to Page, his hands hovering over her uncertainly. Vaughan fell to his knees next, mimicking the prayer position perfectly. Nelson followed, positioning himself at her feet. His gun clattered to the concrete floor next to him and I tensed automatically, waiting for it to accidentally go off because I knew it was loaded. And if I had to bet my life, it would have been that the safety was off.
The gun didn’t discharge. That would be miracle number one on our journey back to the compound.
The three boys, kneeling together, did not make a sound. Collectively they huddled over their sister engulfed in silence. They didn’t move and maybe didn’t even breathe. They looked like Greek statues of fallen gods.
Their blondish heads huddled together and their shoulders made a solid line of strength and defeat all at the same time. My heart ached in ways that it never had, not even when I’d lost my own parents.
It was one thing to experience your own grief, to go through your own mourning process and experience those endless depths of hell and solitude.
It was quite another to watch people you loved go through that same journey. I could handle my own grief, even if it were just barely, because I felt somewhat in control of it. It was mine. I decided when I would wallow or when I would merely obsess. I could play out all the possibilities or memories of our past in my head and feel authority over those things. When it was my grief, I owned it, I made it mine.
When it was someone else’s… especially someone else’s that I loved, all I could do was take a back seat and become the passenger to their own despair.
Then that grief doubled, maybe even tripled. Watching the Parker brothers absorb the tragedy of their little sister, my grief increased by at least a hundredfold.
I stopped breathing. I might have forgotten how. The room spun and the world tilted off-kilter until I was Alice, falling through a rabbit hole where nothing made sense and things that were supposed to fall with me floated back to the surface and there was nothing to grab on to or help slow my progress. I just fell and fell and fell until whatever pieces of me were left spun out of control, shedding important parts as I went. Up was down. Down was up. And everything important and consistent in my life began to crumble.
This was the moment. When I looked back it would be this broken moment in time where I felt my failure to the marrow of my bones and the despair and hopelessness that had been consuming me break some unfixable piece of my soul that I would never get back, no matter how much time rolled by.
I had held on to my humanity for two years. Through death, tragedy, fear and the witnessing of horrible things… I had managed to keep it, to preserve whatever goodness I could.
I had killed countless times. I had feelings, unnamable and confusing feelings for a legit psychopath. I had been held hostage, kidnapped and held hostage again and forced to compromise myself in almost every way.
But it would not be the ugliness of this world that broke me. It would be the grief. It would be what happened after the ugliness.
“She’s not dead,” I told them when the silence stretched on and not one of them had made a move to touch her.
I realized from their vantage and the way that she had her head turned away from them and her hair a mess of tangles over her cheek that she might look dead to them. And because they didn’t know about the immunity, my words meant nothing. They could see her bite mark.
And so I forced myself to push on. “She’s not dead and she’s not a Feeder. I know you think the worst right now. And you are right to. She… the other night we were attacked and she… a Feeder bit her. But she didn’t turn. And she hasn’t turned in three full nights and three full days. She’s sick, and her fever is out of control, but she is immune to the infection.”
They still didn’t move. Not one of them asked a question or demanded an answer.
I cleared my throat. “I watched it happen. I… When we were attacked, I couldn’t get to her fast enough. I tried. I tried everything I could, but the Feeder attacked and, um, by the time I took her attacker out, Page had been exposed to the infection. We were under severe attack, so I immediately engaged with the rest of the house and we eventually made it to here. She never turned. Once we were safe, Kane told me about others that have been bitten but not changed. He said it had happened a couple of times at the Colony.”
Hendrix spoke first and his voice raged an inferno of fury. “When did he tell you?”
Silent tears fell from my eyes and my insides shook with the heavy truth I had to speak. This could possibly be the most horrific thing I ever had to admit to. And I had to own up to it in front of Hendrix of all people. Maybe they would take Kane’s perspective and not blame me, but I didn’t know if it would matter. I almost shot and killed their baby sister, the one thing they protected most in this world.
I didn’t think there could be forgiveness for that type of sin.
“When I wanted to shoot her,” I confessed on a rasp of genuine misery. “I didn’t know she wasn’t going to transition.” I shrugged one shoulder and pressed it to my face in an effort to hide from their matching blue eyes. “I didn’t know it was possible to be immune. I just… I just didn’t want her to suffer.”
My chin trembled and my words were weak and remorseful. I felt sick with it… sick with everything that had happened since I’d been taken from the compound. I couldn’t justify my actions or emotions with Kane, Page had been attacked and bitten and it was only a matter of minutes before I would seal my fate with Hendrix forever.
If I hadn’t already done that.
Hendrix’s face contorted with so many fierce emotions that I tore my eyes from him before I puked. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t face everything I forced him to feel. Honestly, I didn’t even know what it was and I wondered if he felt as confused as he looked. Not in a passively confused way, his emotions were obviously active and volatile. There was nothing speculative or pondering happening inside his head. I could feel his muscles coil and prepare to spring forward, I just didn’t know who his wrath was going to be aimed at.
Me?
Or Kane?
When Vaughan spoke, I forc
ed myself to look at him. He was no more calm than Hendrix was, but his fury seemed easier to feel. I didn’t love Vaughan the way I loved Hendrix and so I could take his anger courageously.
Hendrix’s anger would kill me. I knew it would.
Much like the way he still hadn’t touched me yet was killing me. He stood across the room while an invisible wall began construction between us.
I had dreamt about this moment for days. I’d spent my hours down here fantasizing about this very moment. Hendrix had come for me and now he was supposed to pull me into his arms and hold me against him. I wanted to be absorbed into him, to feel his strength and power and safety. I wanted to bury my nose in his neck and inhale him until he was the sole source of my oxygen. I wanted to kiss him until my lips were raw and swollen and I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began.
But he hadn’t touched me.
And I felt every bit of his distance in the center of my heart.
“You were going to shoot Page?” Vaughan asked in a grave voice.
I shook my head helplessly. “I didn’t know she wouldn’t turn. She asked me not to let her hurt anyone else.”
“Reagan thought she was doing the right thing,” Kane added from his position on the floor.
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” Hendrix growled in a voice that legitimately scared me.
Kane clenched his jaw shut and worked to swallow. I could feel the indignation building inside him like it was a palpable animal that grew every time it was fed, but for some reason he obeyed Hendrix. I shot him a double-take, but he kept his eyes firmly forward.
Nelson sat down in the middle of the cot and allowed himself to gently touch Page’s bare back. “She’s burning up,” he grated. His eyes found mine with an aggressive question in them, like I could somehow know the answer to his confusion and the solution to Page’s condition.
“She’s been like this since it happened. The fever spikes and recedes some, but mostly stays high. And she hasn’t been awake since an hour after it happened. I’m worried about her getting dehydrated, and we’ve tried to give her water, but so far she hasn’t been responsive.”
“And the bite?” Nelson asked and I was thankful for his rational tone.
“I don’t know. Linley, er, Kane’s mom, thought it looked better today. But with all the puss and discoloration, I can’t tell.”
“You let that bitch near, Page?” Hendrix snapped suddenly. “Reagan, what were you thinking?”
My entire body shook with grief at his question. But he was right. I shouldn’t have let her near Page or help look after her. I should have found a way to kill both of them while we were down here. Instead, I had succumbed to my own riotous emotions and indecision. I had failed Page and I had failed the Parkers.
I sniffled and tried to pull myself together and tried to be anything but pathetic and weak.
What had happened to me? Since when had I become so broken?
Was it the captivity? Had Kane’s plan worked out exactly how he’d hoped? Was it just sheer exhaustion from the last week? Between all my head injuries, being kidnapped, dealing with Kane and Linley and isolation and then Page’s attack? Was it living in this bunker for days without sleep and in a constant state of near-panic?
Maybe it was everything combined.
Maybe it hadn’t happened until this moment, when Hendrix clearly blamed me for his little sister’s predicament. Maybe he blamed me for the entire catastrophe.
From the way he stared at me now with fire in his eyes and his mouth turned into a grim line, his entire body shaking with rage, he probably blamed me for the whole Zombie Apocalypse.
I couldn’t answer Hendrix’s question so I shrugged noncommittally. I had let Linley near Page. I hadn’t even tried to stop her.
“Where’s Reagan?” Haley demanded from the top of the hole. “What the hell is taking so long?”
I waved meekly. Her body visibly relaxed the moment we made eye contact but then her gaze moved on to Page and the tension went right back to her shoulders.
“We’ll be up in a second, Haley,” Nelson told her.
She ignored him. “I’m coming down.”
“Haley, we will be up in a minute,” Nelson reiterated more firmly.
She huffed out a frustrated breath but listened. She met my gaze one last time and we stared at each other. There were both too much to say and not enough words to describe everything between us. I wanted to pull her aside, curl up on my mom’s suede couch in Atlantic, Iowa and eat pints of Ben and Jerry’s while we talked over nineties' movies. That’s all I wanted to do right now. I just wanted to stick my head in the sand and pretend none of this had happened.
“Reags,” Haley said before disappearing.
“Hales,” I replied in a choked whisper.
At least with Haley it was simple. There weren’t words adequate enough to describe the utter elation that she had lived through the time we’d been apart. And I knew she felt the same way. This was the longest period of time we’d ever been separated since before the infection happened. We went to school together and hung out every weekend. We had been inseparable for as long as I could remember. We even vacationed with each other’s families back in the days of old when people still vacationed. So it meant something to me that the one time we had been forced apart, my entire world imploded.
“Is Page going to die?” Hendrix demanded in a cold, cruel voice detached of all emotion and sensitivity.
I shrugged again. How could I possibly answer that question?
“Goddamnit, Reagan! Answer the question!” He didn’t just yell at me, he bellowed at me. His entire body shook and vibrated with the ferocity of his words.
Finally, some semblance of whom I used to be returned to my body because instead of shrinking into the fetal position on the floor, I met his anger with my own frustration.
“How could I know that? How could I possibly know that!” I matched his volume as well, infusing all of my own fears and fury into each word. “I’m doing everything I can for her!”
“Except kill him,” Hendrix spat out and each of his words dripped with venom. He gave the wall behind me a pointed look and when his gaze returned to me, I saw the malicious accusation in his eyes as clearly as if he’d screamed that out, too.
I sucked in a struggling breath and glanced down at Kane still kneeling on the floor. “He saved your sister’s life.”
“After he kidnapped her.” Hendrix stepped forward and raised his gun. “After he brought her here and put her in danger. After he let her get bitten and shoved her in a hole in the ground. After he’s caused me endless headaches and constant, needless anxiety.”
He took one more step and his gun pointed at Kane’s bowed head.
And this was the moment everything truly went wrong.
I moved in front of Kane. “You’re not going to kill him.”
Hendrix’s eyebrows shot up incredulously. “Because you’re going to stop me?”
I nodded once. “I am.”
“You don’t care about my sister? You don’t care that she’s on her deathbed? That he put her there?”
“I care that he stopped me from finishing the job.” I wanted to sound strong. I wanted to sound invincible. But my voice broke and the tears continued to fall. “I would not have been able to live with myself, Hendrix. He’s the one that saved me from that. And maybe I won’t always feel this way, but today I owe him something.”
“You’re as delusional as he is,” Hendrix spat out.
I didn’t have a response to that. He might have been right.
“Hendrix, enough.” Vaughan took a step forward so he was side-by-side with Hendrix. “Reagan’s been through hell. Give her a break.”
Hendrix snorted and made a very sour expression, but when he spoke his voice broke and made the stabbing feeling in my heart turn into a hole. “Give her a break while she stands next to him? You’re out of your mind.”
“Whether you want to believe it or not, he saved Pa
ge’s life.” Something inside me made it impossible for me to back down. It didn’t seem to matter that I was now the most damaging force in my own life. Maybe I had always been built to self-destruct. “What would you have done if you were here when Page got attacked?” Nobody answered me. Not one of those boys. I raised my voice and demanded, “What would you have done?” Still no answer. “Fine, I’ll tell you since apparently you’re afraid to say the words out loud. You would have shot her. You wouldn’t have waited to find out what happened or if she transitioned. If your sister had been bitten in front of you, you would have put a bullet through her head. And nobody would have blamed you. You believe it’s the merciful thing to do. We all do. But by some miracle of God, Kane was here when it happened and he intervened. Now she has a fighting chance. Now she could live through this. I’m not going to always stick up for Kane. But today he deserves my grace.”
Hendrix seemed incapable of speech, as if his own anger was choking him.
“You get today, Reagan,” Vaughan warned me. “One day. Tomorrow he doesn’t get you to stand up for him. Got it?”
I didn’t answer him. Honestly, I didn’t really have an answer. Tomorrow I could very well wake up and agree with Vaughan. That was the nature of my relationship with Kane. I decided not to argue with Vaughan until I knew how I felt in the morning.
Vaughan didn’t wait for my reply. “Nelson, take Reagan and Kane up. Hendrix, help me with Page. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
I didn’t wait around for Nelson to escort me with the other prisoner. I bolted to the surface and sucked in the smoky air. I tilted my face to the sun and closed my eyes against the brightness. When I opened them again, I took in the burnt earth and charred forest. The fire had destroyed a lot of the woods, including the house. Ash still floated through the air and layered on the ground deceptively like a fresh layer of snow. Most of the surrounding area was completely covered in debris and natural casualties from the inferno.