Chapter One

1063 Days after initial infection

 

“If you touch my ass one more time, I’m going to shoot your hand off.”

“It’s not my fault! I can’t see anything!”

“Damn it, King. I will give almost anything for you to stop groping me. Anything. This is like statutory at this point. On my part.”

Haley snickered nearby, but King had been accurate when he said he couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t either.

“Reagan, I’m really not trying to touch you!”

I snorted in response to that. He sounded sincere. He sounded so very sincere. But he was a sixteen-year-old boy.

What to believe…

Shuffling behind me drew my attention. An elbow in the shoulder blade knocked me forward. When I righted myself there was a new body behind me.

It was absolutely dark outside. The moon hid behind a thick canopy of clouds and there hadn’t been electric light in these parts, or really any parts, for years.

The darkness of this night seemed to eat up every bit of light. We were swallowed whole in a sightless abyss until the dawn. The darkness felt like a physical thing, a heavy blanket that settled thickly over our sweaty skin and dampened our breath. My lungs felt wrapped in cotton. My eyes hallucinated bursts of light that weren’t really there.

Not an ideal situation for the Zombie Apocalypse.

I recognized the body behind me by the simplest brush of his hard chest against my back. His scent. His aura. His everything was familiar. I didn’t acknowledge him though.

Not even to tell him thank you.

I wasn’t as irritated with King as I was uncomfortable with the whole night and our defenseless position as we waited for some minor break of light. King was just a typical teenage boy.

Which meant he had way too many adolescent hormones for me to deal with and the obnoxious consequence of never having alone time.

But he was relatively harmless.

I hoped.

Hendrix however… was not harmless.

Not at all.

My heart squeezed and my lungs constricted. I wanted the groper back. King and his curious, wandering hands had officially abandoned me to his moody older brother.

So now on top of trying to listen for Feeders and figure out how we’d fight them blind, I had to balance heart failure and Hendrix’s nearness for hours on end.

Awesome.

I decided I’d rather deal with the Zombies.

I stilled as best as I could. I even stopped breathing.

Well, for as long as I could make that last.

The ten of us stood tightly together in a crowded copse of trees somewhere in Texas. Or New Mexico maybe? Possibly Arizona? I had no idea where we were.

We’d nearly run out of ammo the day before and we were too far from civilization to find an actual structure to take cover in overnight. We would have climbed the trees, but they were too small to hold us and it wouldn’t have mattered. Balancing on a branch all night just wasn’t worth it when all the Feeders had to do was lift their arms to get to us.

So instead, we braved out the night standing up, ready to run.

Had there been just a smidge of moonlight or starlight, I knew we would have kept pressing on or at least stopped to sleep. But there wasn’t anything.

This had to be the darkest night on planet Earth. Ever.

And the worst part of all was that we had no way to defend ourselves should the Feeders find us.

Unease and mild terror churned in my stomach. Sometimes it was the not knowing what could happen that was worse than an actual Zombie battle. At least then, in those moments, I was in control of something.

Mainly my weapons.

The waiting game had to be the worst.

“I can feel my ankles swelling as we stand here,” Haley grumbled quietly.

I heard the swishing sound of a hand rubbing fabric. “This night can’t last forever,” Nelson assured her. “We’ll find a better place to stay tomorrow night.”

Harrison groaned. “Sure we will. Just like we were going to find ammo today. Just like we were going to find something to eat yesterday. Or the day before when we were going to-”

“Enough.” Vaughan’s voice was a low growl of authority. Harrison didn’t utter another word. “We’re all alive. That’s the most important thing.”

I pressed my lips together and held back my squeak of frustration. We were all alive… today. But we wouldn’t all make it if we were forced to survive like this.

Sure, there had been meager meals before and times we went without much weaponry, but I couldn’t remember our circumstances ever being quite this dire before.

And it wasn’t just the lack-of-civilization society or the Zombie hordes that behaved like cannibalistic pack animals and roamed the southwestern part of the former USA like it was their job to protect the Mexican border. No, it was far more than that.

There was a bounty on our heads. An actual freaking bounty.

Matthias had put a price on our heads.

And payment for bringing us in dead or alive was quite enticing.

I’d thought about turning us in myself a few times.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true.

But I was really hungry.

And other than the fleeting feeling of being a universal badass straight out of a Clint Eastwood western, having people want to hunt you and kill you or drag you back to Matthias pretty much sucked.

In this anti-technology age, where communication on a grand scale had died painfully and humanity’s trust in each other had been flushed down the toilet, it was really an amazing feat that Matthias had been able to get any word out about us.

We should have been able to ruin his life, mount our loyal steeds and ride off into the freaking sunset without ever hearing from Captain Douche Canoe ever again.

Who, by the way, was not dead. Did I honestly think we could end him after one measly attempt to annihilate him completely from the face of the earth? Yes. Yes, I did.

But apparently that had only been wishful thinking.

I’d gone through the five stages of hope as soon as we left the Colony. I’d been in denial that he could survive. I really believed it wasn’t possibly. I told myself daily there was no way he could live through that attack. I’d been angry at the mere possibility he could still be alive. Furious really. Livid. Raging.

You get the point.

I’d done the whole bargaining bit. I pleaded for weeks for God to make sure Matthias died. Blood poisoning or severe injuries that he had no hope of recovering from, I didn’t care how he died. I just wanted him dead. And if I wasn’t the one that dealt the fatal blow, I prayed that God could perhaps see that it happened anyway. Please and thank you.

Then I did this whole depression gig where I was super sad that a man like Matthias could survive and a man like Kane had to die. That was a bleak month. And I probably owed a lot of people an apology for how I moped around.

During that time, I’d come to two conclusions. One, Matthias was a cockroach that could survive an atomic blast if he were forced into one. And two, I wasn’t over Kane. Nor was I coping well with his death.

Both of those realizations put me into a deeper funk.

Matthias was still very much alive and very much after us.

And I missed Kane. Fiercely.

I never thought I would say those words, or even think them. But they were true. Just like falling in love with him felt like something that I couldn’t stop, so did this. I couldn’t stay the gnawing pain or the gaping ache in my chest. It spread through me like dark matter, eating up every piece of light and goodness as it went. And the double loss of Hendrix only added fuel to the expanding darkness.

But eventually, I decided to stop being so emotionally traumatized and talked myself into moving on with my life. Once I did that, the final stage happened. Step five: Acceptance.

This happened like yesterday.

If Matthias was alive, so be it. The chances of running into him again while we were running away from him were slim to none. We were close to the Mexican border and hadn’t seen another human being in a few weeks.

He might as well be dead. And while it wasn’t exactly the same thing, I would have to learn to live with it.

The point was, I couldn’t keep obsessing over Matthias or the Colony or Kane. I needed to move on with my life. I wanted to move on.

So that’s what I decided to do.

“All right, Willow?”

Hot breath fanned over my sticky neck. I stifled a shiver from the cooling sensation. We were just reaching the summer months, but this far south, the weather didn’t bother with seasons. It was either hot or scorching hot. The sultry heat pulled beads of sweat from all over my body, pooling in the small of my back, dotting my forehead, coating my arms and chest.

“I’m fine,” I whispered. This had been a common question directed at me for months. Apparently I didn’t seem fine, no matter how often I assured everyone that I was. But this exact question, with the use of my last name, belonged only to Hendrix.

Some time ago, he’d stopped calling me by my first name.

I wasn’t sure what that meant.

Probably not something good.

“King’s harmless.”

I let out a long-suffering sigh. “I know. I’m just uncomfortable. He wasn’t helping.”

He made a sound that I couldn’t interpret. Then Vaughan shushed us so we fell silent.

Hendrix punched my shoulder blade gently.

What did that mean? Buck up? Cheer up? The man was more of a mystery now than ever. He had become a sort of masochistic entertainment for me. Like a sideshow. The Unreadable Hendrix Parker. I could write an entire book about his dark looks and random touches and I still wouldn’t know what any of it meant.

Hendrix leaned in until his lips almost touched the shell of my ear. Almost but not quite. I could still feel him though. Like the energy between his skin and mine had become a physical thing. Popping and jumping frenetically. My entire body snapped to stiff attention and my pulse picked up. I stopped myself from swaying. Would he close the distance? Would he keep it? Would I ever be able to predict his touch again?

He stayed an inch away. “This night won’t last forever.”

I nodded, forcing stray hairs to brush over his chin. “I know.” The night wouldn’t last forever, but his distance might.

A little hand slipped into mine and I finally felt the comfort I’d been searching for. Page. She’d grown at least two inches in the last six months. Her ninth birthday had been celebrated with looted snack cakes and a flat two-liter of orange Fanta. But we’d all smiled that day and somehow avoided any run-ins with Zombies.

In fact, most of us had celebrated a birthday since we fled the Colony. I had turned twenty-one in the late part of November. Twenty-one. Wasn’t it supposed to be some major rite of passage? Only there had been no boozy celebration or wild shenanigans. And on my birthday we didn’t manage to avoid Feeder conflict. So instead of celebratory shots and strip clubs, we fought for our lives. And won.

I guess maybe my birthday hadn’t turned out so badly after all. All of the Parkers had also had a birthday. And Haley and Tyler. We were all a year older in age and fifty years older in our souls. Fifty years older in world-weariness.

And don’t even get me started with how old my body was. At the newest part of my twenty-first year, I felt decrepit. I felt ancient. My body wore battle scars that told horrific stories of struggle and survival. My skin had darkened and turned leathery over the past few months spent in the southern heat and sun. I felt prehistoric and looked worse.

I let out another heavy breath. The worst part of this overnight vigil was all of my swirling thoughts. They cycled around my head like a slow churning tornado. So much had happened over the last year. Over the last two years. Over the last three.

I had nightmares consistently. As often as I closed my eyes, they came. They were always a mixture of my real-time problems, Zombies, complications with Haley’s condition, losing loved ones or Hendrix’s heartache all over again.

The ones with Hendrix were usually the worst. He would look at me through the hazy, unconscious fog and say things like, “But I can’t trust you, Reagan. You’re a liar. You lied about loving me. You lied about loving Kane. And you lied about yourself. You’re ugly. You’re a monster. You’re poison.”

Or even worse than those, the nightmares that pulled from my past. I dreamed thick, melancholy memories of Kane that would always, always end in tragedy. My mind would conjure images of his handsome face that would smile at me in one freeze frame and in the next turn gaunt and stretched as he screamed out in pain and death. Or I would feel the very tangible touch of his gentle hands holding me, caressing me, loving me, but then would turn suddenly into torture when his hands stiffened with rigor mortis or his fingernails sliced at my chest.

He would always attack my chest in my nightmares. Always. His yellowed, serrated fingernails would cut like knives and he would desperately claw at my center, straight for my heart. His eyes would drip with blood, his mouth would gape open and ooze blackened puss. He would be zombified and obsessed with eating my heart.

He wanted my heart even in death.

Or not him-him, but the memory of him.

Those were the worst dreams. The others I could file away in my new normal. I could explain the rest away because I had to cope somehow. I was only human and I was up against tremendous odds. Of course, my mind would think the worst. Of course, my brain would invoke images of loss and pain and despair.

But Kane trying to consume my heart so no one else could have it?

Yeah, I decided not to analyze that one too closely.

Oddly enough I never dreamed about Matthias nor about any worst-case scenarios should he manage to track us down.

Probably because no amount of imagining would do the real thing justice. I wouldn’t let him get the upper hand again. I wouldn’t let him get the upper hand ever again.

Should I happen to run into Matthias in the future, I knew exactly what would happen.

I would kill him.

Even the darkest parts of my subconscious agreed with me.

See? This was why I should never have time to think. I started picturing all the ways I could kill a man.

That could not be a good sign for my flickering sanity.

The low groan of a Feeder in the distance caught my attention. As one organism, we jumped to attention. We stood in a circle, all ten of us, protecting our center of women and children. What little weaponry we had stood in the hands at our outermost border. We breathed together, we stood together, we thought in tangles of trauma and semi-healing together. We were a Spartan cluster that held one shield against the oncoming enemy.

And when the guttural groaning drifted over us we moved to attention as one organism.

It was a ways away. The night was stale, underused and dry. The silence was so compelling at times it almost felt painful. It pushed against my ears aggressively like an unseen giant jamming cotton balls against my skull.

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 stopped 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.