The grumbling Zombie’s sounds cut through the air and sliced over our heads. If we could hear it, it surely could smell us.
Panic took hold in my gut and scraped at my nerves. Page’s hand squeezed mine and Hendrix took a step closer to me until his chest bumped against my backpack. In fact, as a whole, we collapsed in on each other. There was more to protect in our group than ever these days.
We were no longer the infantry of aggressive Zombie killers. We had become fragile. We had become dangerously vulnerable. And it put us all on edge.
“We’re going to have to fight,” Vaughan whispered.
I had been expecting some instruction, but I still jerked from surprise when his voice broke our cocoon of silence. Another Zombie gurgled in the distance. There was most likely a horde of them.
This far south, Feeders traveled in packs like we had only glimpsed before. And six months ago when we confirmed what we had only speculated, I felt shaken to my very core.
It was one thing to fight an enemy that felt no pain, that was inhumanly fast and strong, and that would do anything in its power to get to us. It was entirely another thing to learn that enemy could communicate with others of its kind, had learned to adapt to the environment with its half-decayed body and mind and responded to commands.
What would become of this world if Zombies continued to evolve?
I didn’t want to find out.
I also didn’t have a choice.
I clutched my recent weapon of choice, a shiny baseball bat, in my hands and tried to steady my breathing. We might not have much ammo down here, but there were baseball bats aplenty.
Mine was aluminum. The handle heated beneath my sweaty palms. The tangy metal smell mingled with over a week’s dirt caked to my skin and churned my stomach. We needed a bath.
First, we probably needed to survive.
But then a bath was definitely in order.
We just had to find clean water first.
Vaughan went on with his instructions. “We’re going to have to move. Hopefully, there is a building or something nearby. King, Harrison, and Miller stay with Nelson and Haley. Page, stay with them too; hold Harrison’s hand. The rest of us will cover you. Stay together as best as we can. It’s too dark to wander.”
Raw fear washed over me, like a thirty-foot wave that swept away the sand beneath my feet and left me flailing. It wasn’t just the unknown of battle or the darkness of this unseeing night. It wasn’t just my life or the life of the people I loved standing around me.
It was most pointedly for the unborn child that my best friend carried in her swollen belly.
Haley. My best friend. My soul sister. The girl I would do anything and everything for. Yes, she was preggo. Severely so.
And I loved that unborn baby. And I loved her. And I wanted the very best for both of them. But it should be said, this girl, this wonderful, lovely, loyal girl… picked the very worst time and place to get pregnant.
Also, she was huge.
Okay, probably not as huge as she could have been if we had a steady diet of nutritious food. But her flat, end-of-the-world stomach definitely had a living creature hiding in there.
We weren’t exactly sure how far along she was. We knew she wasn’t nine months yet. We thought maybe six or seven.
The thing was, she probably shouldn’t be pregnant at all right now. Her periods, like Tyler’s and mine, hadn’t been regular in a long time. Also, she swears Nelson and her were safe.
Although, the deed had been done. So… it wasn’t like she was proclaiming a virgin birth or anything. Nope, she’d handed in her v-card and her innocence.
I’m just kidding. She had never had a whole lot of innocence to begin with.
She also didn’t have a whole lot of alone time. Apparently while Page and I had been guests at Casa del Kane, she and Nelson had banded together in their time of fear and uncertainty.
Literally.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Nelson plus Haley plus an entire storage bay to themselves equaled one very unplanned pregnancy.
Plus, there was all that candlelight ambiance to set the mood.
So Haley got knocked up and now we had to split our emotions with excitement for this little miracle of life and the terror of trying to protect it, as well as an equal amount of anxiety trying to protect Haley who could no longer run fast or fight.
The last few months had been… complicated.
Very, very complicated.
I squinted into the darkness and tried not to trip when Vaughan took the lead and started moving. Our eyes had adjusted just enough that we could make out the shadows of objects in front of us, but not far in front of us.
Our feet crunched over wood chips and grass and finally pavement when we found the highway.
To tell what was near to us was impossible. Was there a town or gas station or anything that could offer sanctuary tonight? We had no idea what was ahead of us, or if we would even be able to see far enough ahead to find something before the Feeders found us.
My pulse hammered in my ears; the quick pounding felt so loud in the quiet night. Convinced that the Zombies would be able to pick up on the rush of fresh blood in my veins, I tried to breathe steadily. They would turn their nose to the wind and smell our filthy but warm skin and hunt us relentlessly.
I tightened my grip on Page’s hand and then let go. She moved behind me and I knew she went straight to Harrison. Hendrix filled her place and stood by me silently.
As we moved as quietly as we could, Vaughan and Tyler took the lead. Hendrix and I moved to the back of the group. And Miller and King took the sides. Haley and Nelson stayed in the middle with Harrison and Page. It wasn’t foolproof, far from it actually, but it was something. We had to protect those most vulnerable.
But I mildly resented the habit of pairing Hendrix with me. I understood that Vaughan had a thing with Tyler, no matter how subtle they tried to keep it. And Hendrix felt protective of me even after everything that happened, even if it was just because I was a woman and he was an unapologetically alpha male.
Plus, it made tactical sense.
Still, why? Traveling with the Parkers and fighting next to Hendrix was a special brand of purgatory. Sure, I probably deserved it. But that didn’t mean I wanted to experience it.
Where was absolution? Hadn’t I paid penance when Kane died?
I sucked in a breath when the moaning started moving faster. They’d picked up our scent. This fight was now inevitable.
Maybe it always had been.
Haley’s pregnancy became very inconvenient at this point. Normally we would have taken off in a sprint. Someone would have scooped up Page and we wouldn’t have looked back.
Now we tightened our ranks and steeled our courage against the unknown.
The clouds parted overhead and a sliver of moonlight pierced through the heavy darkness. The light illuminated the road in front of us and the emptiness of civilization that we faced.
I stood up on my tiptoes and prayed for some kind of outbuilding or anything where we could stash Haley and Page inside.
There was nothing!
Where did all the Feeders come from if no people had ever lived here?
I compressed my irritation and tried to ready for the attack.
A rumble of uneven footsteps grew louder and louder. They were coming up from behind us. A sick tremble of satisfaction that I would be the first to meet them slithered over me.
I needed to kill something. I needed to slay this helpless frustration and greasy feeling of vulnerability. I wanted to wrestle back some control.
I could do that by bashing some Zombie heads in.
I mean, if I had to.
We hurried forward, but the rumble grew closer. It would be stupid to keep our backs to them. I slowed down when Hendrix did.
“Vaughan, we’re not going to outrun them,” Hendrix said in a low voice.
Vaughan glanced over his shoulder with an annoyed look, but stopp
ed speed-walking. The group came to a halt near a useless street lamp. Haley immediately leaned against it.
Her drawn face looked exhausted. She needed a good night’s sleep. And a real meal. And to not be trapped in the middle of an inevitable Zombie showdown.
I turned around to face the oncoming horde. “Feels a little Wild Wild West, doesn’t it?” I asked to no one in particular.
Hendrix shot me a slow smile and stepped next to me again. “You’ve got to ask yourself one question.”
Vaughan stepped to the other side of me. “Do you feel lucky, punk?”
“Well, do ya?” Hendrix finished for him.
“That’s not even from a Western!” Both boys grinned at me. Apparently that wasn’t the point. “It’s like you share a hive brain.”
They clicked their safeties off and readied their firearms. “We just know all the good stuff.”
I could make out the outlines of the first few Feeders as they caught up to us. The highway was long and straight, traveling through the deserted areas of the American/Mexico border. The moonlight hit their rotting faces like a spotlight. The soft glow made their exposed bone gleam at this distance. I could see the bottom halves of their faces covered with blackish ooze and blood. They snarled at us, their energy renewed once we’d come into sight.
I swung my bat around and felt the familiar pangs of ache across my back and in my abs. A baseball bat was a new weapon for me, but I made it work. I had argued for a gun earlier in the evening, but there had been some consensus that I was a tad night-blind.
It was obnoxiously true.
Tyler leaned forward and winked at me. “You ready for this?”
“So ready.”
“If we survive, I’ve decided to boycott all future activities until I get a bath. You in?”
I grinned. She was a girl after my own heart. “So in.”
Vaughan grunted. “Where are your priorities, girls? We need food. We need a vehicle. We need a place to sleep more than thirty goddamn minutes at a time. A bath is, unfortunately, low on the list of priorities.”
Tyler and I shared a conspiratorial look. We would see about that.
I couldn’t stand being this dirty for much longer. I could not stand it. And no doubt, if we survived, we would be even filthier.
I flat out refused to wear Zombie blood as body paint any longer.
Tyler checked her weapon and aimed it at the fast-approaching Feeders. There were ten of them. “Tell you what, Vaughan, let’s make a wager. Girls against guys. Reagan and I against you and Hendrix.”
“I’m listening.”
“If we take out more Feeders than you guys, we get to move bathing to the top of the list. You win, we stop complaining.”
Hendrix raised his eyebrows at me and I almost laughed. “Tyler, are you sure you want to make that bet? I’m sure we could nag him into prioritizing it.” I had to shout over the roar of oncoming Feeders.
“You underestimate my need to get clean, Reagan. Trust me on this one.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. It was either make the bet or go with Vaughan’s way anyway. This at least gave us some hope of scrubbing the dirt off soon. And it might motivate Tyler to kill things. She had one of our coveted guns not because she was an excellent shot, but because she would be dead long before the bat in her hand ever did any damage.
“Fine, I’m in. Vaughan? Hendrix?”
“Sure, I’ll take this bet. It’s cake,” Vaughan said evenly. “Hendrix?”
Hendrix moved to trade weapons with King. He gave up his handgun for another aluminum baseball bat. “I’m in.”
When I raised my eyebrows at him, he explained. “Just wanted to be fair.”
I snorted. “Sure. Call out your body count. And don’t shoot me on accident!”
“Reagan, don’t let me down!” Haley called from behind me at exactly the moment I moved into action.
Let Haley down? Never. Besides, this was one kind of bet that I could not wait to win.
Chapter Two
Hendrix and I rushed to the right side. Vaughan and Tyler shot to the left.
The Zombies were staggered in their attack. They were freakishly fast, but their rotting appendages slowed some of them down. If they’d lost their foot or part of their foot, they just couldn’t run as fast as their friends.
So some led the attack and some trailed closely behind. Thank goodness too! Otherwise, we wouldn’t have needed to worry about the bet. We would have been Zombie food long before any of us could have called out a number.
I had never played baseball in my life, but the Parkers had spent a large amount of time teaching all of us how to swing a bat. And despite my malnourished state, I still had a good deal of muscle. We weren’t starving yet, just perpetually hungry. There was a big difference.
Or that’s what I told myself.
But I was able to keep muscle on my arms and get some force behind this home-run swing.
The key to killing a Feeder at close range was to swing before they could attack. Obviously this could get tricky.
The first Feeder that I ran into had a dislocated jaw that hung off its mouth at an odd angle. His jawbone flashed from ripped-apart flesh. He definitely did not have a full set of teeth, but enough to gnaw me to pieces if he wanted to. Probably slowly… but still. It could happen.
I sprinted to him and lunged forward at the same time I pulled my arms back and swung in a wide arc. I held my core strong and put everything into this counterattack.
Zombies weren’t smart enough to block blows, even the evolved ones. They had become pack animals of a sort, moving together, living together, and hunting together. But there were still motor skills that escaped their finite thinking, like protecting themselves. They were too single-minded in their addiction to flesh.
My bat connected with his head in a sickening crush of flesh and bone. I turned my head away and clamped my mouth shut as blood splatter and pieces of teeth, jaw and brain matter splashed all over me. I couldn’t stop the gag reflex, but I worked hard to keep my mouth shut tight.
Nobody wanted an accidental shot of Zombie guts in the mouth. Thanks, but no thanks.
I sensed the Zombie, now dead, fall at my feet and popped my eyes open. “One!” I shouted over the roar of Feeders screeching, gun shots and cheers from my friends.
I didn’t have time to gloat over the first kill of the night, though; I had a body count to rack up. “Two!” I hollered after another swing and hit.
“Four!” Hendrix yelled back. “Keep up, Willow!”
Bastard. This was important! Couldn’t he at least pretend not to be perfect at everything?
I stepped over a dead body and met my next victim. My bat became slick in my hands from the blood coating it. I quickly wiped my right hand on the front of my shirt and re-gripped my bat.
I glanced up at the road and realized there were more than ten Feeders. I couldn’t see them well in the darkness. But at least ten more stumbled toward us. I hoped that meant they were in worse shape than the first wave.
Worse shape physically, but hungrier. If they were at the back of the line, they didn’t get to eat very often. That meant they would be more vicious than ever.
I pulled my arms back to swing again, but the Feeder I went for lunged out of the way. I didn’t think it was on purpose, she kind of stumbled to the side. But when I swung at her, I missed. My bat grazed her head without doing any damage. The end of the bat came away with clumps of moist hair. I had a moment of horror at the sight of her stringy black hair, coated in syrupy blood, hanging from the end of my weapon before I jumped back into action.
She righted herself and came at me. I swung at her and hit her shoulder. I felt the bone give way to my swing, but even with a broken shoulder, she was still deadly. She bounced back and I used the end of my bat to shove her away. She snapped her teeth at me like a rabid dog. I jammed my bat into her mouth and hoped I broke a few teeth in the process. I pushed hard, but she grabbed the bat with her g
narled hands.
In a blind terror, I kicked out with my right foot and hit her in the stomach. Her mouth dislodged from the bat, but her hands held on tight. I jerked wildly when she yanked on it. I pulled back, but that only brought us closer together.
Her hands slid up the bat and her face was suddenly in mine. My first instinct was to punch her, but I didn’t want to give her a chance to bite me first. Fear clawed up my chest when I started to realize she was seconds away from getting the bat away from me and feasting on my face.
Panic bloomed into harsher panic. I felt sick. I shook the bat, hoping to dislodge her and only managed to piss her off. I just barely kept her from getting to me. Her sharp fingernails dug into my hands and I cried out in pain.
A gun went off. The hungry Feeder stopped digging her claws into my flesh and fell to the ground. I tugged my bat out of her corpse’s grip and met Tyler’s eyes.
“Five!” she shouted with a grin.
“Thank you,” I breathed.
She shrugged and went back to shooting Feeders. That’s when I realized, five? I needed to catch up!
I spun around and met the Zombie waiting for me. Or not really waiting for me, more like moving in to eat the back of my head.
Not good.
Because of my angle, I had to swing from the left side, even though I wasn’t left-handed. It wasn’t the strongest swing ever, but it did the job. I hit the bastard right in the forehead and his entire head deflated with the blow.
He dropped backward and stayed there. His blood-red eyes stared up at the night sky truly unseeing and his entire head looked like a cracked egg.
Gross. “Four,” I called out weakly. That was a truly disgusting sight.
I pulled my arms back and swung out at my next victim, only this time my grip slipped. There was too much wet blood on the aluminum. The bat went flying from my hands and clattered loudly on the highway some ways away, on the wrong side of this conflict.
Shit.
I whirled around and took off running toward… toward anywhere but here. I needed to find a weapon and fast.