Page 25

I’d faced worse odds. A swing up to a tree branch, my legs locked around it to put me high above the ground, had me in the perfect place to let them catch up with no danger of them getting the upper hand.

“Ladies first,” I said as the female biter reached me. My axe came down in the same breath, splitting her skull with a jolt that shuddered all the way up my arm. She hung for a moment on the blade, the weight threatening the branch, before I shook her free and watched her crumple among the leaves.

The second biter came to a stop a few feet away, enough intelligence remaining behind his dull eyes for him to know if he stepped forward, he’d meet the same fate. It swayed from side to side in that inhuman way most of the biters did. “Come on, don’t be shy,” I taunted. “I have an axe desperate to make your acquaintance.”

I had no idea whether they still understood language, or whether when the virus took over their brains, it did away with comprehension along with their ability to speak. Sometimes they seemed to understand. Most of the time, instinct was all that remained. Find. Run. Catch. Eat.

The biter snarled, frustrated. Life sucked when prey refused to volunteer itself. “Don’t be like that,” I told it. “You’re stronger and bitier. I had to level the playing field somehow.”

My arms were tiring. I couldn’t hang there forever, and the tree wasn’t one I could climb to get higher. And even if I did, it would leave me stuck up there. “Fine,” I said. “One on one, it is. Coming ready or not.”

I dropped, and the biter lurched into motion. I was there ready with the axe, my weapon of choice a deliberate one for its lack of weight. What it lacked in heft, it more than made up for in speed.

The biter moved at the last second, the blade sinking into its neck. One clawed hand came up to swipe at me, and I danced backwards out of reach, my axe coming free with the movement. “You’re starting to piss me off now.”

Its snarl said the feeling was mutual. I backed off a few steps to regroup, taking care not to fall prey to any tree roots. It kept coming, blood streaming from its shoulder where my axe had gouged a chunk of flesh out. “You’re never going to get that shirt clean.”

Another swipe. Another hop back.

“You see, the thing is,” I said conversationally, “that I’ve been taking your lot on since I took my first steps. And today is not the day when I’m going to come off worse. I promised someone they’d see me again, and I’m not breaking that promise.”

The biter lunged as I’d known it would, patience being one of the first things to go in their virus-addled brains. Its eyes were on my right hand, enough self-preservation remaining to know the axe was what it needed to avoid. I moved it in a slow circle, making the light catch the blade, making it glint, keeping the biter’s eyes focused on it.

Then with my left hand, I brought my dagger up and sank it into its eye. The bellow of outrage, shock, pain—did they feel pain anymore?—came to a premature end as I followed up with the axe, the move a carbon copy of the one I’d used on the female biter.

This time, the axe was embedded too deeply, and I had no option but to let go as he dropped if I didn’t want my arm wrenched out of its socket. I had to plant a boot on its skull to wrench it free. My head throbbed as I cleaned the axe on the grass. Yeah, crashing a motorbike and then killing biters. One star. Not recommended.

The forest was eerily silent as I straightened. “Keaton?” He couldn’t have gone far. The entire altercation with the two biters had taken what? Five minutes? Six at most.

A faint sound came from behind. Sounds of a struggle. I sprinted in that direction. Keaton was on the ground, one dead biter draped across his chest, and another a few scant inches away from sinking its teeth into his throat.

I charged at them, the force of my axe in the back of the biter’s head, pushing it closer to Keaton. It didn’t matter. Not when it was already dead and wouldn’t be biting anyone again. I kicked it off him, losing its weight enabling Keaton to roll out from under the other one.

His breath came in pants, like he couldn’t remember how to get enough oxygen in his lungs. When I held out my hand, he took it, letting me haul him to his feet.

Retrieving both his crossbow and the bolts from the dead biter took Keaton a while. Recognizing it for a tactic to recover his composure, I stayed silent, leaning back against a tree and filling my lungs with the damp and earthy scent of the forest.

Keaton still faced away when he eventually spoke. “All you had to do was hesitate for a few more seconds.”

His words made no sense. “Huh?”

He turned, confusion etched deep. “A few more seconds and I would have had it. At which point, you would have been free of me, and you could have just taken the ring and gone on your merry way. Why didn’t you do that? Why save me?”

Because I’m not a killer. I executed the most casual of casual shrugs. “I hit my head, remember? I’m not thinking clearly.”

Keaton’s gaze burned into me. It went on for long enough that heat crawled beneath my skin, and I jerked my gaze away. I gestured toward the road. “Come on. There’s only a couple of hours of daylight left. We need to find shelter. If we’re out after dark, then neither of us is likely to see morning.” I started walking without looking back to check he was following.

Shelter turned out to be a ramshackle cottage that, by the looks of it, hadn’t been lived in for years. Not by anything fully human, anyway. Upstairs was out of bounds, courtesy of stairs that had long since rotted to leave them a potential deathtrap. A tree had forced its way through the kitchen window, its branches growing crooked as it adapted to the confines of the room.

That left the living room as the only viable room for sleeping in. There was no glass in the windows, but someone had boarded them up, the job mostly holding during the years that had followed, except for one loose board at the bottom. We dealt with that by pulling a dusty sofa across to block it.

The room had a fireplace, which was a bonus. Although the sight of it had me shaking my head—metaphorically, not physically, any sharp movement increasing the dull but persistent throb—at my lack of foresight. It wasn’t like me; the head injury had a lot to answer for. “We got water from the river, but we didn’t collect any firewood. Without firewood, we can’t purify the water.” It was annoying to have an entire kitchen full of invasive conifer, but to know it was useless without the time to dry it out.

Keaton’s gaze swept the room, presumably searching for items made of wood. Unfortunately, short of pulling the floorboards up, there was none to be had, what furniture was left made of a cheaper material that wouldn’t burn. “I’ll go back out and get some,” I announced.

I made it two steps before a hand planted in the middle of my chest to push me back. “No, you won’t. You’ll sit and rest. I can tell you’re in pain.”

“What happened to not being a baby?”