Page 86 of My Undead Love Life

His hand lingered for one careful second before he let go.

Oxi came out behind me.

I turned, katana already in hand, and took position beside Luck as we covered Mad and Oxi while they shifted the slab back into place from outside. Another heavy sound thudded through the parking lot when it dropped.

The noise rolled outward and faded. The wind howled in response, stirring up small frozen snowflakes on the ground.

“Let’s go,” Mad muttered, jerking his head south. “We need to make distance before nightfall.”

“Or snowfall,” I murmured, glancing at the sky.

Luck adjusted his grip on the shovel. “Yeah.”

The parking lot stretched wide and open around us. It felt too open considering just a couple of days ago, it had been tight with moving bodies of the undead. The absence of them left the space exposed.

Snow crunched under our boots as we moved in a tight formation, scanning our surroundings constantly. There was no movement, and no sign of stragglers. Despite seeing a few of them from the rooftop above. It was unnerving. The city shouldn’t have been this quiet, especially after a horde.

“To your left,” Luck called out just as a zombie lunged from behind a buried car to my left, its stiff arms reaching for me.

Luck tripped forward through the snow and whacked it in the face with his shovel before it could get close enough to grab me.

Its head snapped sideways, and I swung. The katana sliced through its neck cleanly. Blood sprayed in a thick arc, splattering across the snow and asphalt.

I had never been happier that we’d all wrapped scarves around our faces.

“Gross.” Luck gagged.

I flicked the blade sharply, sending droplets scattering.

“Keep moving,” Mad ordered.

“Thank God for scarves,” I muttered, adjusting the fabric over my mouth.

If I had angled that any worse, we would have gotten blood all over us.

Hours passed as we moved slowly through the city, checking for any possible threats.

We didn’t take the main road for long. Mad hated open stretches, and after the horde, the streets were a mess anyway. Cars had been shoved into one another. Snow hid curbs, potholes, broken glass, and frozen corpses. Some undead, some not. More than once, we had to climb over a line of vehicles or backtrack when a side street had been blocked by a collapsed awning.

The sky darkened faster than it should have, clouds swallowing what little light remained. The wind picked up, and our visibility dropped. Snow began to fall again in fine, slanted needles that stung the exposed skin around my eyes.

My legs ached from walking through uneven snow. My shoulders burned beneath my backpack. My fingers had gone stiff around the hilt of my katana, and every breath scraped cold down my throat.

“We need to find somewhere to stay tonight, and we need time to clear wherever we decide on,” Mad said.

“We should’ve done that an hour ago,” Oxi snapped.

Mad’s jaw tightened. “We’ve been stagnant for two months. We have to make some kind of progress.”

“Progress won’t matter if we freeze because you want to make impossible time.”

Luck exhaled hard. “Can we argue inside a building?”

I was about to respond before the hairs on the back of my neck stood.

My heart dropped into my stomach as my vision narrowed in on one pale shape that moved low to the ground. That shape became two. Then, three.

Three massive cat-like shapes appeared through the blowing snow, almost invisible until they shifted. Pale fur blended with the drifts around them, their dark rosettes breaking up the outlines of their bodies. They moved in silence, using the cars and snowbanks as cover, slipping between abandoned vehicles like they’d been built from the storm itself.