I shouldn’t have told him about my father. Shouldn’t have let him play doctor. Shouldn’t have slept in his arms.
A hand clamps down on my shoulder. Hard.
I spin around, adrenaline spiking into irritation. “I don’t want?—”
Julien’s hand slams over my mouth, cutting off my words. His eyes aren’t soft. They’re wide, scanning the tree line, pupils blown black.
“Down.” He yanks me off the road, hauling me into the overgrown drainage ditch.
Dry weeds scour my face as he shoves me into the dirt, his body covering mine. I try to squirm as a rock digs into my hip, but he presses his weight down, trapping me effectively.
“Stay still,” he whispers into my ear.
Then I hear it.
Slap. Drag. Slap. Drag.
Then the smell hits in a wave of rotted meat that makes me gag.
I turn my head to the side, peering through the screen of dead yellow grass. Legs. Dozens of them. Dirty jeans, torn suit pants, bare skin gray with decay. They’re crossing the road twenty feet ahead of us, emerging from the woods like a slow-motion mudslide.
A horde. Maybe fifty.
Julien’s breath is hot against my neck, steady and slow, while mine comes in terrified, shallow gasps. His hand is still clamped over my mouth, fingers digging into my cheek.
We just have to wait. Let them pass.
A zombie in a gray jogging suit stops. She—it—pauses in the middle of the road, head twitching to the side like a dog catching a scent. Half her scalp is gone, hanging like a peeled orange rind.
Don’t look. Don’t look.
She turns.
Her milky-filmed eyes lock directly onto the ditch. Directly onto the patch of grass where we’re lying.
She opens her mouth, and a low, gurgling screech rips through the air.
It jerks the entire horde to attention. Dozens of heads swiveling in our direction.
“Run.” Julien is off me before I can exhale, hauling me up the muddy embankment by my backpack strap. “Through those trees.”
I grab his wrist. “We can’t outrun fifty of them.”
“Not trying to outrun them.” His eyes meet mine. “Just need to split them up.”
Jogging Suit reaches our hiding spot first. She dives, jaws snapping.
Julien doesn’t hesitate, swinging his machete in a vicious arc that separates her head from her shoulders. It rolls into the ditch, her body following suit.
“Go!” He shoves me toward the tree line. “Don’t look back!”
I sprint.
My lungs burn instantly, and my head throbs in time with my boots slamming the earth. Behind us, theslap-dragrhythm explodes into a chaotic stampede. Snarls. Breaking branches. The sound of fifty bodies crashing through the undergrowth like a tidal wave of rot.
Branches whip my face, stinging like tiny lashes. I don’t care.
“Left!” He barks, grabbing my shoulder and steering me hard away from a dense thicket of brambles.
