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BEN
“There’s something I want to tell you.” Ash’s voice rattles out through her chattering teeth. Ben wishes he had a jacket or a blanket or anything warm to put over her shoulders.
“We can talk later,” he says. “Don’t waste your energy.”
“No.” Ash shakes her head. The ocean crashes, a constant hum in the background as they run. “I should have told you a long time ago.”
“It’s waited this long.”
“Stop arguing with me, anaciano casacarrabias.”
He has no idea what she just said, but he can hazard a guess. Ash often flips into Spanish when she insults someone.
“Do you remember that day when Carrie and Melissa went missing?”
“Yeah.” How could he forget it? Those two girls snuck out of College Creek while everyone slept. Their note said they were going to the dorms on the north side of campus to see if they could find food.
Ben knew it was a lie. They’d been afraid of Johnson. They’d run away.
Johnson had known it, too. He had a thing for Melissa. The way he’d looked at her left no doubt in Ben’s mind what he intended, and it wasn’t flowers and a romantic stroll.
“I looked for them,” he tells Ash. “After the massacre. When I went my own way. I scoured the north side of campus for any sign of them.” That was how he’d found Kate and the others at Creekside, though he hadn’t revealed himself to them at the time. He’d been hell bent on tracking down Johnson and killing him. “Ash, I don’t know what happened to them, but if they made it to the north side of campus, I never found them.”
He’d even looked for their bodies among the undead. The girls weren’t cut out to survive. They were scared of everything and didn’t know the first thing about taking care of themselves. Hell, Carrie admitted to having never done her own laundry until moving away to college, and half the time she just took everything to the dry cleaner and paid to have it washed.
“They never made it to the north side of campus,” Ash whispers. “They tried to sneak away. I was keeping watch at the time. Johnson caught them.”
Ben grinds his teeth. He wants to plug his ears, but there’s no escape.
“Johnson and Ryan.” Ash swallows. “They caught Carrie and Melissa as they tried to sneak away. I—” She stops, a cough wracking her body.
“I asked you,” Ben says. “The next morning when we realized they were missing. I asked you if you saw anything.”
“I lied.” Ash doesn’t look at him. “I’m sorry, Ben. I was so fucking scared of Johnson. The only reason he didn’t try to touch me in the beginning is because he knew I could defend myself. But it was only a matter of time.”
“What happened to Carrie and Melissa?” Ben demands.
Ash dissolves into another round of coughs. She looks worse than ever, though this time Ben doesn’t think it has anything to do with the hypothermia.
“I have never been so scared as when I was living in that maldita frat house with all those boys. I’d face a hundred zombies before I’d put myself through that again. Caleb did his best to shield me.” Her face crumples. “But he couldn’t be with me every second of the day. Johnson made sure of that.”
Ben wants to hit something. “What did that fucker do?”
“Not as much as he wanted to do. But a lot more than I wanted.” Her face is wet with rain, but Ben doesn’t miss the tears snaking down her cheeks. “Johnson and Ryan killed Carrie and Melissa. They caught the girls and dragged them to the library. I—I found their bodies. They’d been raped before Johnson and Ryan killed them.” She chokes on a sob. “I didn’t do anything to stop them. I could have told you. I could have intervened, but I was a coward.”
Something inside Ben cracks open.
God dammit. He’d known. In his gut, he’d known Johnson and Ryan had done something to those girls. The tally in his head goes up. Instead of sixteen kids on his conscious, he now has eighteen.
“Why are you telling me this?” His voice comes down like a hammer. He couldn’t hold his anger back even if he tried.
“I’m sorry I lied to you that day,” Ash whispers. “If I’d told you the truth—if I hadn’t been a coward—I could have saved the rest of the students. If I’d told you the truth, you could have gotten the rest of them away. You could have taken them to Creekside, to Kate—” Her voice breaks. She stops in the middle of the trail, body convulsing with shivers. “It’s my fault all those students died,” she gasps.
Ben has no words. He’d failed Ash. That was the simple truth. He’d seen the fear in her eyes when he questioned her about the disappearance of Melissa and Carrie. He’d suspected she knew more than she let on.
Yet he had done nothing.
Every day he’d stood by and done nothing. He’d been in denial as to how dangerous Johnson was. He’d stood by with his thumb up his ass and all those kids had been slaughtered.
Anger and self-loathing boil up within him. He can’t speak. He doesn’t know how to tell Ash how very, very sorry he is.
“Ben,” Ash murmurs. “I just wanted you to know the truth. Don’t hate Caleb for something I did.”
Her knees buckle. Ben catches her as she falls.