“Watch your back,” I reminded her as I grabbed the recently turned corpse of a woman and forced my knife through her ear. I eased her to the floor and stepped over her body, yanking the drapes open to flood the room with sunlight. A bed and a set of drawers filled the space. No more corpses.
A thud came from another room that had my pulse jumping. “You okay?” I called out as I strode back into the hall.
Liv must have opened the drapes in the next bedroom. More light spilled into the hallway right before she reappeared. She was breathing hard with blood spatter on her sleeve, her knife covered in gunk. "I'm good."
The sight of her had my protective instincts kicking into gear, and I pushed down the urge to ask if she was sure. I wanted to shield her from all this shit, but at the same time, I'd been drawn to her in the first place because of her ability to deal with it. “Messy one?”
“Little bit.”
We continued to the final room. Another closed door with intermittent thumping sounds coming from the other side. I tapped the butt of my knife against the wood and waited as the noises moved closer. “Anyone in there?” I called out on the off chance a living person was hiding from us.
When no answer came, I opened the door and sent a corpse stumbling backward. The curtains had been left half-open, casting a beam of daylight across the body as it landed flat on its back. While I scanned the space, Liv sidled past me and bent over it, putting her blade through its eye.
The room had been set up as an infirmary, with four camp stretchers lined up along the far wall and first aid supplies stacked on the shelves of an open cupboard. Three other corpses inhabited the room, two of them still near their beds. The remaining one, a skeletal, elderly man with hollow eyes, extended his hand toward Liv while she was pulling her knife from the corpse she’d just put down. His gnarly fingers tangled in her hair, and she gasped, reaching backward to stop it from dragging her off her feet.
My heart gave a hard thump as I dived for her. “Don’t touch it.” If any nicks or scratches on her own hand contacted its rotting skin, she was at risk of becoming infected. I went after it with my knife, leaning over the two of them as I drove my blade into its temple. It dropped to the floor in a crumpled heap, and when Liv straightened, I shifted my focus to the next one.
I'd just taken down a young woman with grey skin and open wounds on her face when Liv's attention switched to the spot behind me. “Cruz!”
The smell hit me first. Death. Decomposed flesh.
Hands tugged at my backpack just before I felt pressure clamp down on my shoulder.
Adrenaline rushed through me, and for one pants-shitting second, I thought it had latched onto me—that one of these fuckers had finally got the better of me after all this time.
But there was no pain. No pain meant no bite.
Liv didn’t know that, though. She morphed into a whirlwind of fury, taking the thing down in seconds and shoving it off me with a strength and speed that left me speechless. Her anxiety was palpable, turning the air tense, her breaths harsh. "Liv."
She flung her backpack and knife to the floor, her eyes filled with panic as she came at me. “No, no,no.Take it off, take-it-off-take-it-off.” She shoved my own pack off my shoulders and grabbed the front of my t-shirt, desperate and urgent. “Take itoff,Cruz.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” I said as I dropped my knife to free up both my hands.
She ignored me, instead gripping the material and yanking it up my chest. With frenzied movements, she tore it over my head and threw it away, her quick breaths filling the silence as she circled me. Her hands stroked my skin, assessing, searching for puncture wounds. I waited, blocking out the sensation of her soft fingertips moving over me, letting her do her thing so she could see for herself that I wasn’t hurt.
Her hands stopped at my shoulders, and she pulled in a sharp breath. “Isawit,” she said. “It bit you. It got youright here.” She traced my uninjured trap muscle, her voice filled with disbelief. Her fingers paused on my skin.
“I didn’t feel anything,” I assured her. “It must have got the strap on my backpack.”
“But I—” Her voice cut off with a harsh sob, reminding me again that she’d lost the most important person in her life just yesterday. The thought of saying goodbye to the only other person she knew must have terrified her. She would have been all alone, away from home, with no idea what to do with the rest of her life.
Without thinking, I faced her and wrapped her in my arms. Our bodies were pressed together from shoulder to hip, and I hugged her hard, trying to transfer some of my strength to her. “I’m okay,” I said in a low voice beside her ear. “I’m still here. Everything’s all right.”
Her arms encircled my waist, and her cheek touched my bare skin, the heat of it searing. Her breaths whispered over me, and a shudder of relief moved through her just before she sagged against me. I hadn’t comforted her like this until now, and it felt good to take care of someone again. I stroked my hand over her ponytail, smoothing the tangles left by the corpse while I tried to remember the last time anyone had needed something from me.
Minutes went by as we stood together, and the longer we held each other, the more I realised this had been as much for me as it was for her. I hadn't been touched in a long time, hadn't felt this kind of closeness with anyone in years. As strange as it was to think, it seemed to heal me, to pull together some of the parts that were shattered when my brother died. So I sank into it and appreciated every second with her, waiting for her to ease away first.
When she finally stirred, I leaned back and checked her over. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes dry, but she still looked troubled. "What's wrong?"
“I didn’t mean to lose it like that. It just scared me to think you could be gone so fast." She blew out a breath of air as she gazed up at me. "I really don't want to do this without you.”
Her words and the fearless way she delivered them had warmth passing between us. Hearing her say she’d become as attached to me as I was to her made me feel like our lives could have a real purpose; that it didn't just have to be about trying to make it from one day to the next.
More comfortable with touching her now, I smoothed a few strands of hair back from her face. “I don’t want to do this without you either, and I’m not going anywhere.”
She stared at me, her expression tense. “But it could happenexactlythat way—any time, any day. It’s too easy to be taken by surprise when we're in new places and don't know who or what's waiting for us there. This is just thebeginning, in mostly familiar territory.”
I understood her point. “We're not used to looking out for someone else. We’ll come up with a system to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
