“No,” Lucas replied, making a face. Glancing at me, his expression quickly sobered. “You?”
There had been times when I’d wished for death—but they were tangled times, trapped inside a multitude of trauma and pain. Thinking back, I found I couldn’t always differentiate between what had been real and what had been something my overloaded brain had simply conjured up. So I didn’t discuss them, not even with Lucas.
“No way!” I replied with a bit too much forced enthusiasm. “Can’t die before I get to go to Europe, can I?”
Lucas watched me closely for several seconds, his gaze softening. “Hey,” he said, nudging me with his elbow. “Wanna get out of here for a little bit? Go exploring?”
I shot off the branch, tugging Lucas down with me. “Yes, please, let’s get out of here!”
“We can’t go too far,” he warned, as I was pulling him down the stairs. “And we definitely can’t tell Logan. Willow—are you listening to me?”
“Nope!” Dragging him across the office, I climbed up onto the windowsill, leaping into the grass below. Lucas landed beside me, both of us scrambling to our feet.
“Tag!” I yelled, punching Lucas in the shoulder as I took off running. “You’re it, Lucille!”
My heart thumping wildly in my chest, my legs and arms pumping hard and fast. Yet, despite my best effort, Lucas quickly gained on me, his long legs eating up the distance between us with infuriating ease.
“Tag!” He laughed, his warm breath tickling my ear as he leaned in and tugged on my braids. Passing me, he called over his shoulder, “Gotta be quicker than that, Williemae.”
“Don’t call me that!” I shouted after him. “Locus-Pocus!”
Lucas passed the garden shed, disappearing behind a grove of thick oaks and bushy pines. I followed after him, the forest canopy making the air refreshingly cooler. Slowing, I sucked in deliberate breaths, breathing in the woodsy scents, much preferable to the stale, musty air inside the farmhouse.
We carried on running, weaving around clusters of blooming magnolia trees, leaping over dried creek beds, our surroundings quickly becoming little more than a blur of browns and greens. It felt so good to run—to be so well rested and well fed that we had the energy to even want to run.
“Up ahead,” Lucas panted, pointing. “Do you see that?”
Following his finger up a steep hill, where light was pouring in through a break in the forest, I grinned and nodded. We turned together, where I managed to shift into first place for only a moment; the higher the hill, the slower I ran. Lucas flashed me a smug smile as he loped ahead, once again reclaiming the lead while I only continued to slow, cursing after Lucas as he ran through the opening into the light. I laughed.
And then he was gone.
Just…gone.
One second Lucas had been just ahead of me, grinning over his shoulder, and the next he wasn’t. I blinked, my steps faltering, only to find myself face to face with a Creeper who’d stumbled out from behind a nearby tree. Staggering backward, just barely missing its grasping hands, the Creeper heaved forward once more. Another near miss.
I danced around it, pulling my blade from my belt holster, and quickly struck the base of its skull. The sharpened steel slid easily into the soft, fleshy rot and the Creeper ceased moving, its prone body dropping to the forest floor.
Turning toward the light, I called out for Lucas, receiving a garbled growl in response. Spinning around, I caught sight of another Creeper; squirming on its stomach, both its legs dragging uselessly behind it, it was clawing its way across the ground through the grass.
Cursing, I ran for the light, breaching the tree line only to come skidding to a stop. Tottering at the edge of a cliff, my arms pinwheeled as I desperately tried to reclaim my balance, causing me to lose my grip on my knife. As I fell backward onto my ass, the ground crumbled and gave way beneath me, revealing a ravine as deep as it was wide… and teeming with Creepers.
While my blade vanished below and I scrambled for safety, bits of dirt and rock flying in every direction, dozens of milky gazes swung upward. Growls and snarls wrought the air as the Creepers clambered forward, trampling one another in a frenzied bid to reach me. My frantic gaze swept up and down the ravine; there were hundreds of them—Creepers as far as the eye could see.
My hands pressed to my heaving chest, I searched the mangled faces of the bulging crowd below. “Luke?” I screamed. “Luke, where are you!”
The ravine had been trapping Creepers for many years now, judging by its occupants’ differing stages of decomposition. There’d been a bridge here at some point, too—jagged bits of concrete and rebar jutted out from earth on both sides of the chasm, the actual bridge all but gone.
“Luke!” I wailed his name, fearing the worst.
The Creeper with the broken legs crawled through the forest line, growling in earnest as it continued its desperate bid toward me. Tears and sweat blurring my vision, I jogged away from it, keeping along the edge of the ravine.
“Lucas!” I called. “Luke, tell me where you are!”
The growing mass of bodies only continued to surge upward, reanimated corpses barreling over each other until their bony hands were nearly grappling at the dirt near my feet. Worse, the commotion had alerted two more Creepers who’d stumbled from the woods, both of them headed in my direction. My empty hand flexed, missing my blade.
Always carry a backup weapon,Logan’s commanding tone echoed in my thoughts. But I’d been so excited to be free of that musty, rotting house, I’d stupidly forgotten the length of pipe I usually carried.
“Lucas?” I screamed his name, my voice breaking on a sob. My time was up; I couldn’t stay here, I was attracting too much attention, and without a weapon, I was as good as dead; and yet… how could I leave?
Swiping the tears from my eyes, I rushed the trio of Creepers, shoving the one closest to me and sending it stumbling straight into the ravine. As the activity below grew louder and more agitated, I spun on the second, barreling my fist into its chest—once, twice—it staggered back with each swing of my fist until it was teetering on the edge. One push and it tumbled over into the hungry hands of the dead.
Not bothering with the Crawler, I rushed back the way we’d come, jumping at every noise, checking over my shoulder every other minute, each time expecting to find that the Creepers from the ravine had caught up with me. Though I wanted to, I didn’t dare call out for Lucas, afraid of leading the dead back to camp.
As the garden shed came into view, I glanced behind me once more, turning just in time to clip my arm against a tree. Jagged bark cut into the bare skin on my shoulder and arm. Biting back the cry that threatened, I gripped my arm and picked up my pace.
Pulling myself up through the office window, I tumbled into the room, grasping for the weapons we’d forgotten to bring with us. Once I was fully suited up, I forced myself to stand, fear making me dizzy.
“I’m coming, Lucas,” I whispered, climbing back through the window.
Lucas, Lucas, Lucas!As I ran back through the woods,I chanted his name like a mantra, like a prayer, like a fevered wish that this had all been just a bad dream and that he would be there at the ravine when I returned, waiting for me with a smile on his beautiful face.
