by Lori Devoti
Why did he care?
His mind snapped down like a trap around the last thought. Care? He didn’t care about anyone, even himself. He couldn’t afford to. He had just been alone too long, was unused to dealing with others, and he’d let that get to him.
It wouldn’t happen again.
He grabbed a handful of the trail mix and shoved it into his mouth.
The traffic was slowed almost to a stop now. A trooper stood next to the grill of the truck waving an illuminated wand, telling each car to keep moving. But, of course, each one slowed to rubberneck the scene.
Then some smart-ass in an oversize truck tried to bump his way past on the shoulder just as the car in front of Caleb veered to the left to avoid something that had fallen from the semi’s window.
Brakes shrieked. Metal crunched against metal, but Caleb barely noticed. He was too focused on the object that had fallen from the semi. An arm. A human arm.
He looked up.
A gray-faced zombie, a woman who’d probably been in her twenties when she died, grinned down at him. In her hand was another arm. She dropped it and lunged out the window.
The arm landed six feet from the first one, right on the hood of the compact in front of him. This time the trooper and the driver of the car noticed it and recognized exactly what it was.
The trooper jerked free the radio that had been clipped to his shirt pocket and began yelling into it. Then, reaching for his gun, he took a step back.
The zombie was out of the window now. It had landed not that far from the arm onto the roof of the compact. Inside the vehicle the driver panicked. He hit the gas, ramming into the oversize truck that he’d already struck once.
The zombie slid, then stretched out its arms and grabbed on to the luggage rack attached to the top of the car. It looked over its shoulder. Its nose and lip were pierced and there were tattoos around its neck. And it was fresh. Probably hadn’t been dead more than a few days. Caleb cracked the window and inhaled. The creature barely smelled of rot. It was fresh. It hadn’t been days since her death; it had been hours.
And it looked almost happy about it. It let go of the luggage rack and landed with a thump onto the hood of Caleb’s stolen car.
The semi was on one side of them. The truck that had tried to squeeze past the line was on the other. In front and behind them were other cars.
He and Samantha were trapped.
Samantha.
He grabbed his laptop case and her arm at the same time. “Wake up.”
She jerked awake, her eyes wide and wild immediately.
“Zombie,” he said and pointed to their hood.
The female monster stood, legs braced and hands on its hips. It looked down at them and chuckled.
He had never seen a zombie this animated, didn’t know exactly what to expect.
It strode forward and kicked out their windshield. Caleb grabbed it by the boot. “Run,” he yelled at Samantha.
She opened her door, and placed one foot on the ground outside. Caleb twisted the zombie’s leg. Something popped. The zombie didn’t react; they never did. That at least was the same, fresh or old.
And killing them would be the same, too.
Still holding on to the zombie, he reached for the stiletto blade he’d placed in his boot.
As the passenger-side door slammed shut, the zombie roared and jerked at its leg. It seemed determined now to get free.
The knife in his hand, Caleb considered his next move. He had to get to the zombie’s brain stem. There was only one way to do that from here. He was going to have to pull the creature into the car with him.
He jerked, hard. The zombie plunged toward him, but just when he thought he had it, the undead monster reached up and grabbed hold of the roof.
To Caleb’s left something clicked.
His gun pointed at Caleb, the trooper yelled, “Raise your hands. Now!”
The zombie pulled back its free leg and kicked Caleb in the face. Blood streamed from his nose. The zombie stilled. There was a loud, disturbing sniffing noise.
It smelled the blood. Controlling the creature was about to get a hell of a lot harder.
Caleb grabbed at its other foot, but with a new strength, the thing curled its knees inward and pulled its body out of the car.
Caleb slammed his fist into the dashboard. He’d lost it. With the trooper standing to his left, blocking the driver’s-side door, there was only one other quick exit option.
He leaned back and smashed the remaining mosaic of broken safety glass out of the windshield with his boot.
The trooper fired. The bullet grazed Caleb’s shoulder. He winced. Unlike zombies, werewolves did feel pain; lycanthropy didn’t change that little biological lesson of survival one bit. The lycanthropy virus would make him heal faster, but first he had to survive this attack.
Covered in blood now, he crawled through the windshield. Bits of glass gouged into his bare stomach and back, adding to his wounds.
The trooper fired again, or someone did. Caleb couldn’t see the officer and didn’t feel the bite of the bullet. Not wanting to give the officer a chance to better his aim, he surged to his feet.
The trooper, he realized, had quit worrying about him. A new worry had him fully occupied.
The zombie stood on the ground five feet from the trooper. It raised its arm as if to reach for him. The officer was talking to it, warning it to step back.
The zombie, of course, didn’t. It hopped forward on two feet, like a child jumping into a mud puddle. Shock at the creature’s move was clear on the trooper’s face.
Caleb felt it, too. Zombies didn’t hop; they lurched and staggered. Just how fresh was the damned thing?
The trooper’s gun wavered. Caleb could see the indecision on his face as he wrestled with the thought of killing what appeared to be a young unarmed woman. An almost impossible call for an officer of the law, but not for Caleb.
His knife held overhead, ready to plunge into the base of the zombie’s neck, Caleb leaped.
The trooper fired and the zombie spun. The errant bullet slammed into Caleb’s wounded shoulder. He gritted his teeth against the pain and concentrated on his target. With the zombie facing him, however, his target was lost.
And then the zombie did the impossible. It danced to the side, flinging its arm out behind it as it did and crashing it into Caleb. He landed on the asphalt, the impact jolting his body. He didn’t drop his blade, didn’t lose sight of the zombie, didn’t even pause before surging forward after it. But none of that mattered. Not to the trooper.
The zombie, without even turning its head to look, had grabbed the officer around the throat and was cutting off all his access to air.
“Where’s the girl?” it asked, coolly, casually. “Wanna save this?” It shook the trooper. “Come closer.” Then it grinned.
The thing seemed to be enjoying itself, and for the first time in a long time, Caleb wondered what kind of person this tattooed, pierced girl had been before she became a zombie.
Then he saw the collar.
“Nice necklace,” he said.
The zombie jerked its head. The fingers of its free hand went to its throat.
“Pick that up recently?” he asked.
A crease formed between the zombie’s brows. Then without warning, its head shook, a quick violent motion as if it were trying to shake something free. Its eyes focused back on Caleb. “The girl. Where is the—”
“Right here.”
There was a flash of movement behind the dangling trooper, and the crunch of metal hitting bone.
The zombie took a step, the lurching type of step Caleb expected from its kind, and then another. Then with no other warning the thing crumpled.
The trooper fell to the ground and didn’t move, but neither did the zombie.
Standing behind them, the stiletto blade from Caleb’s glove compartment in her hand, was Samantha.
She stared down at her handiwork. Her head and hand were shaking. �
�I pithed her,” she said. Then she looked up.
Not knowing how else to reply, Caleb grabbed Samantha by the hand and tugged her away from the scene. “And you are getting damn good at it,” he muttered.
“Wait!” She tried to twist away. “The highway patrol officer. We have to help him.”
Caleb tightened his grip. “Remember the first rule of a zombie attack?”
Still looking over her shoulder at the unconscious trooper, she didn’t reply.
“If there was one, more may follow.” He glanced around. People were out of their cars now, screaming into cell phones. More police and emergency workers would be here as soon as they could make it past the giant snarl of traffic that had formed behind them.
“There are people,” Samantha argued. “Besides the officer. There may be children…”
“And every one of them saw you jam a blade into the back of some woman’s neck. Not a zombie’s neck, a woman. She’s dead and you are her killer.”
“I’m not. I didn’t.”
He jerked her closer. “You planning to tell them she was a zombie? That someone else got to her first? You think they’ll say, ‘Sure. Okay. Thanks for helping’?”
Samantha’s gaze drifted over the people staring at her through their car windshields, horror, anger and fear clear on their faces. “But I… What about…?”
“You want to save them? Get in the truck.” He shoved her toward the 4x4 that had tried to squeeze by the traffic earlier. The driver was still behind the wheel, but he wouldn’t be for long, not once Caleb made him another offer.
While Samantha stared at the congregated vehicles, processing what he had said, he reached into his car for his laptop bag and a duffel he kept packed with the rest of his minimal belongings. Then he rammed her in the butt with the duffel and herded her toward the truck.
As he had suspected, given the option of hauling ass out of his truck or riding along with a gun pressed to his temple, the truck’s driver chose to haul.
Caleb wrenched the wheel to the left to disengage it from the compact’s bumper then smashed on the gas.
The vehicle was hot, white-hot. They couldn’t stay in it for long. First order of business had to be dumping it and finding something a lot less conspicuous.
His foot pressed to the floorboard, Caleb couldn’t glance at Samantha, but he didn’t need to. He could feel her withdrawing, going into some kind of shock, either from what she had done or what she had left behind, or both.
She had killed the zombie with professional ease. Too professional for the short lessons Caleb had provided her.
And what about the zombie? It had asked about Samantha, seemed to know who she was. He had never known of a zombie being aware of anything except its next meal.
What the hell was happening in Texas and how were the damned zombies finding them here?
Chapter 8
C aleb got off the highway at the next exit. Three minutes after leaving the interstate while they were traveling on the state highway that intersected it, two sheriff’s vehicles passed them going the other way.
“Reinforcements,” he murmured. He had slowed their speed under the limit as soon as they had exited. A fast pace would only draw attention to them. But it was just a matter of time till someone recognized their vehicle.
With that in mind he pulled off at a road with a sign indicating a state park and killed the lights. With only the almost full moon for light, he wove through the winding pathways of the park.
“How can you see?” Samantha spoke her first words since they had left the accident scene.
“Good genetics,” he replied. Not his natural ones, of course.
When he saw an opening in the brush, he maneuvered the truck into the space and then jumped out. Without waiting for Samantha to follow his example, he began covering the back of the vehicle with branches. His shoulder ached as did his nose. He shook off both pains.
When he was finished with the camouflage, he stepped back to analyze his work. It wouldn’t hold up in broad daylight, but it should work till then.
Satisfied, he grabbed his bags, wincing from the resulting throb in his wounded shoulder, and motioned for Samantha to follow him.
“We’re miles from anywhere,” she said.
It was dark, as only the wilderness could be. It had to feel deserted to her, but Caleb knew better.
“Not many,” he replied. They were actually only about twenty miles from the next town, but Caleb had no intention of walking there.
He wanted a vehicle that wouldn’t be connected to them, at least not immediately. Which meant he had to go past the circle the human authorities would expect once they found this vehicle. Or steal a vehicle no one would report missing.
Or better yet, both.
He had to run, fast and far. He had to shift into a wolf.
But first he had to hide Samantha and convince her not to move from the spot—no matter what happened.
He headed toward the woods, not a path through the trees, but the actual woods. His feet crunched through fallen leaves.
He could feel Samantha’s gaze on his back, but she followed without objecting to the main entrance, near an oversize sign mounted on a concrete base. Weeds and brush had grown up around the sign. The front was clear and readable during the day or under the blaze of headlights to any vehicle entering the park, but the back was crowded with brambles. He tossed his bags over the front, then pulled back a handful of thorn-covered branches and pointed.
“Wait for me here. I’ll return within an hour. I’ll signal you with three flashes of the headlights. Come running and don’t forget my bags, or my clothes.” He began jerking off his pants.
Her gaze had been locked on to the dark space behind the sign. Now she swiveled to face him. He didn’t think she could see him. If she could have, he guessed she would have commented on his bloodied appearance by now. But she could feel and hear his movements and she must have sensed what he was doing.
“I… What…” she started.
Tossing his clothes in after the bags, he gave her a nudge. “Just do what I said. An hour. And don’t come out.”
He didn’t wait for her to hide; he didn’t have time. He just took off in a run. Two hundred feet down the highway, when he was sure she couldn’t see him in the dark, he shifted. Pain ripped through him, as always, but he forced his body to keep moving, stumbling forward. One of the bullets was still lodged in his muscle; the other had thankfully only winged him. When he changed, the bullet still lodged in his shoulder moved closer to the surface. He stopped and took five minutes to dig it out of his own flesh with his teeth. It hurt like hell, even in his wolf form, but it had to be done.
Once he’d spit the offending hunk of metal onto the grass, he ran as if a hunter with a long scope was chasing him and a herd of antelope was in front of him. He forgot the burning pain in his shoulder and the throb of his nose. He forgot about zombies and Samantha. He forgot about the lab and every question he’d had about the woman who had told him about it.
He just ran.
Samantha sat shivering on the cold concrete. Her coat provided only a slight barrier between her butt and the sign’s icy concrete base. But it wasn’t just the frigid temperature that chilled her. It was what she had done, what had almost happened back on the interstate.
Two zombies had attacked her now.
It wasn’t part of her bargain, but it couldn’t be coincidence, either.
And the last zombie had asked about her. Why?
Samantha leaned her head back and closed her eyes, wishing she could close out her reality as easily. Her father had always told her that sacrifices had to be made, that war wasn’t clean or easy. But this—what she was doing, what almost happened, what still might be happening if there were more zombies behind the last two she and Caleb had battled—felt wrong.
She laughed. Felt? It was wrong. It was everything she hated about her father, everything Allison had helped her to stop being.
&nbs
p; But it was also the only way to save her friend.
Her father was right; sacrifices had to be made. Samantha just needed to decide what and who she was willing to throw on that grenade.
Another chill passed through her. She shuffled her feet in the dead leaves bunched around the base of the sign and tried to think of something else. Anything else.
It took Caleb forty minutes of running to locate a vehicle he thought could go missing for a few days without being reported. It was a boat of a car parked behind a residential care center. He could tell by the dust inside no one had driven it for months. His guess was the owner had moved into the group home, but hadn’t been ready to give up the symbol of independence the car provided.
So, he didn’t think the owner would notice its disappearance anytime soon. He just had to hope no one else did, either.
It was the best he could do.
Twenty minutes later he was back at the park.
He pulled up to the sign and flashed the headlights three times. At first there was no movement, then Samantha’s head appeared over the top of the sign.
He put the car in Park and went to meet her.
“Here.” She handed him his pants.
He pulled them on along with his shirt and boots. He had enough reasons for the police to pull him over; he didn’t need to add nudity to the list.
Samantha watched him, her face guarded. He could see the question on her face, but she didn’t mention his nudity. Obviously uncomfortable, she glanced at the car instead. “Where’d you…”
He didn’t bother answering. He could tell by her expression she didn’t want to hear the answer. He picked up his bags instead and carried them to their new ride. “Get in.”
She hesitated. “We shouldn’t have left,” she said after a moment. “There may have been more zombies. Those people…” She bit her lower lip. “They had no idea what they were dealing with.”
He wasn’t a charity or a white knight. He had his own reasons for hunting zombies and not a one was to save humanity. To be honest, he wasn’t all that sure humanity deserved to be saved.
