Page 140 of My Undead Love Life

The longer we stayed in the city, the worse our odds became of getting back to the Oasis. The cult knew a snow leopard had died. They knew a group was moving through the area. They were angry, organized, and apparently devoted enough to worship infected predators like holy weapons. If they knew how many we’d killed…I didn’t want to think of how worse they’d get.

And we were still in the city.

Mad stood near the door, already packed, his fire axe strapped within easy reach. His golden eyes moved over each of us with determination. “We move,” he said. “Storm or not.”

Keith looked at me immediately. “You ready?”

I tightened the scarf around my face and nodded. “Yeah.”

He squeezed my gloved hand, his thumb brushing once over my knuckles.

Oxi moved up on my other side, cane sword in hand. “I don’t want to see another fucking leopard.”

Luck adjusted his shovel over his shoulder. “Hopefully we won’t.”

Mad opened the door to our little office room and looked back at us. “Move your asses, or we probably will.”

“That is a great point, actually,” Luck chuckled as we went down the stairs.

We stopped next to a crate, and Mad spread his map over it. Keith leaned over to get a better look, and the two of them spoke in low, clipped sentences as if they had been doing this together for years instead of less than two days.

“This route keeps us closer to cover.” Mad pointed, his finger trailing over a route toward the Oasis.

“And closer to the cult’s eastern search pattern,” Keith countered. “They mentioned the station. They’ll sweep from there first.”

“If we push farther west, we lose time.”

“If we stay east, we lose options. I don’t want a cult encounter.”

“And I don’t want to freeze to death.”

Luck wrapped an arm around my shoulders and whispered, “Watching two survival dads negotiate custody of our possible death route is entertaining.”

I choked on a laugh. “Very amusing.”

Mad had pointed at him without looking away from the map. “I heard that.”

Oxi rolled his eyes but sent me a wink.

Once we had decided on an optimal route that they both had to agree on, the sunlight had finally brightened the world outside.

“No conversation unless we have to. Conserve energy,” Mad told us before yanking the door wide open.

The bitter cold slammed into my chest, and we left the warehouse. The wind stole my breath before seeping bone-deep.

Keith’s hand tightened around mine. “I’ve got you.”

“I know.”

The sky was a gray-white sheet above us, thick with clouds and snow. It was brighter than the night had been, though calling it daylight felt incorrect. Still, it was enough to see the road beneath our boots and the shadowed shapes of buildings ahead, which meant it was enough to move.

We followed the route Mad and Keith had chosen, leaving the warehouse behind and cutting through the city while the storm swallowed our tracks almost as quickly as we made them.

Block by block, the buildings thinned. Broken streets gave way to buried roads, open fields along the sides, and long stretches of white where there was nothing to shield us from the wind. The city slowly disappeared behind us until its ruined skyline became nothing more than a dark smudge in the storm.

Ahead, there was only snow. No shelter or landmarks or a sign that the route we had chosen would lead us anywhere except deeper into the cold.

Still, we kept walking because we had no other choice. We had to escape the ‘hunt’. The cultists clearly wanted us dead, and we had to get out of there before they found us…but as the storm erased the road beneath our feet and swallowed the world ahead, I couldn’t shake the feeling that we weren’t escaping anything.