Love and Decay, Vol. Four

by Rachel Higginson

  “Enough,” Vaughan shouted, silencing us all. “Adela, one of us is immune to the infection. That is why we know we can help find a cure. We’ve been bitten and survived without turning into a Feeder.”

  Heavy silence answered Vaughan’s admission. I chanced a glance back at Harrison, only to find him staring out the window with his arms crossed stiffly against his chest. Page sat on one side of him squirming uncomfortably.

  I looked at Adela to find her already watching me. Her eyes widened and she mouthed the word several times before she said, “Immune? Do I understand that word correctly? It means… it means…”

  Hendrix saved her stuttering by saying, “It means that when the person is bit, they will not turn into a Zombie. The infection only makes them very sick, but they can survive it.”

  “That’s… that’s… impossible!” She slipped into her native tongue and mumbled for a while in a language we didn’t understand. She glanced among us wildly and I wondered if she was waiting for one of us to turn into a Zombie in front of her.

  “We thought so too,” Nelson said gently. “But then it happened and… and we survived.”

  “Who is it?” Adela demanded on a fierce whisper. “Who is… immune?”

  We looked at each other around the van and waited for someone else to say the name. It wasn’t going to be me. I would never put Page in a position where someone could exploit her. But Nelson and Vaughan had been right to tell Adela why getting to Colombia was so important for us. Adela was part of us now and we had to trust her, just like she had to trust us.

  “Me,” Page said bravely, taking the choice away from all of us.

  Harrison’s hand slammed down on her shoulder and he pulled her close to his chest. “Page,” he winced.

  Page looked up at him with an innocent expression. “What? I’m not afraid to tell Adela. I like Adela!”

  “But someone could use that against you.” Harrison kissed the top of her head and said, “Someone could hurt you.”

  “Adela won’t,” Page declared. “I know she won’t.”

  Adela turned around in her seat and watched Page for a few long moments before she said, “You were infected? Something bit you?” I heard the catch in Adela’s voice, giving away her concern.

  We made the right choice in showing her that we trusted her, even though our group did not share a consensus.

  “Yes,” Page whispered. Her eyes went blank as if she were remembering that horrific time period and how sick she’d gotten. “But I survived.”

  Miller slid forward from the other side of Harrison. “And she’s going to keep surviving. You’d better not even think of trying to use that against her.”

  Adela gave Miller a look of pure disdain. “I’m not going to hurt the child. Dios mio! You and you are loco!” She pointed at Miller and Harrison and I could not disagree with her.

  Hendrix snickered next to me and I turned back around to give him a raised eyebrow. “You don’t think this is funny?” he whispered.

  “Harrison acting like a complete douche? Uh, no. Not even a little bit. Adela is going to hate all of us because of him.” I tried to whisper, but…

  “Hey!” Harrison yelled at me. “I heard that!”

  Hendrix tipped his head back and dissolved into laughter while I tried not to feel bad for getting caught. It was all true! He should know better.

  “I would have shot you in the important man parts if you talked to me like that when we first met,” I told him. Hendrix laughed harder. Even Haley couldn’t hold in her giggle and she had been desperately trying to get Lennon back asleep since we woke him.

  “Yeah, well you were different, Reagan.” Harrison looked somewhat chastised.

  At least until I said, “Would it help if one of your brothers had a weird crush on her? Would that make it easier to be nice?”

  Harrison’s expression soured immediately. Whatever I said truly pissed him off.

  “I’ll volunteer!” King grinned. He shot Adela a playful wink. “I have no problem taking this one for the team.”

  “Shut the hell up,” Harrison growled. “You people are all idiots. This is so dumb.” He turned to look out the window and speak quietly with Page.

  “What?” King chuckled maliciously. “What did I say?”

  Adela turned around with raised eyebrows. I knew she expected an explanation, but unfortunately I didn’t have one.

  I had no idea what was going on.

  When I spun back around, I felt a little queasy with guilt. “Should I apologize?” I whispered to Hendrix and prayed the rumble of the rough road would drown out my voice.

  Hendrix gave me a sideways glance and shook his head. “Don’t you dare,” he said. “He’s got to figure it out somehow and it’s not going to help if you coddle him.”

  “Coddle him?”

  Hendrix turned to face me fully and I could see the twinkle of mischief dancing in his blue eyes. He swept a chaste kiss over my semi-parted lips and stayed close to whisper, “You’re as clueless as he is, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talk-”

  “We should turn around,” Adela nearly shouted. “I… I wasn’t paying attention. You must have taken the wrong turn. This is not where we should be headed!”

  Vaughan glanced at her over his shoulder before explaining, “There wasn’t a wrong turn to take! This was the only way the road would let me go. Everything else was destroyed or blocked off.”

  Adela started mumbling in Spanish again before Vaughan demanded she tell him what was wrong.

  “This is the road to the… como se dice…? Slums. This is the road to the slums and it is not a good place to go. I have heard stories…” Her voice trailed off as the scenery around us changed.

  I sucked in a gasp and felt my heart take off in a sprint. The industrial buildings gave way to tightly packed hovels that could barely stand. They practically stood on top of each other as they filled every available space on the opposite sides of the narrow streets.

  Vaughan spun the van in a U-turn and urged the van down a narrow street. The buildings did not get nicer. In fact, they got worse.

  Vaughan turned around again, but we couldn’t seem to find our way out of this place. In the dark, we got turned around and managed to lose ourselves in the cluster and confusion of the ghetto.

  The van barely fit between the piles of garbage and dead bodies. The smell of death and decay was stronger here than it had ever been. Looking out the window I saw an inky stream of something coagulated and green slither down the road. The moonlight hit off the surface and illuminated an oily texture that I was certain could corrode anything that touched it.

  “Sewage,” Adela explained when she saw most of us staring at it. “That is their sewage.”

  I closed my eyes and tried not to be sick. Of course, there would be waste in an environment like this. We had been lucky enough to live a transient enough lifestyle that we didn’t have to worry about a permanent solution for our bodily needs. But this was above and beyond any nightmare I could have imagined.

  “Is that just since the Apocalypse?” I asked in a hoarse voice.

  Adela’s voice dropped and I could barely hear her over the engine. “That has been there for a long time. This place has always been like this.”

  “Turn around, Vaughan,” Hendrix demanded.

  “I’m working on it!” Vaughan answered. He glanced over his shoulder and back at the road, but there was nowhere for him to go.

  The side streets and alleys had been blocked off and the road was too narrow for him to do anything but continue moving forward. When he glanced over his shoulder again I knew he was contemplating backing up the entire way.

  I didn’t blame him.

  This was seriously creepy. It was like they were funneling us to them- whoever them was. These streets had been strategically blocked off. I felt like a fly caught in a spider’s web. We had walked right into this.

  “Adela, who runs this place?” Vaugha
n asked with a deceptively even tone.

  “What do you mean?” Her words trembled as she tried to cover her fear.

  Vaughan looked over his shoulder again and this time I followed his gaze. Red eyes glittered from behind piles of trash. They stared up at me as they hovered over half-eaten bodies and chunks of flesh.

  Abruptly I realized the contaminated scent of decay had gotten stronger. I hadn’t noticed at first because of the putrid sewage and other smells of decomposition. But now that we were this far in, I recognized the punch in the face of Feeder rot.

  Vaughan had been forced to slow down as the streets progressively narrowed and more debris filled their already rough surface. The engine had quieted as a consequence and I could hear the dropping of limbs and bodies as the Feeders picked up our fresh flesh. Their nails scraped over rusted metal, their moans became frenzied and greedy.

  We had willingly driven into a nest of Zombies and not given ourselves a way out.

  Holy shit!

  Haley cradled Lennon closer to her chest. I put my hand on the back of hers. Nelson, who sat on the other side of her, tightened his hold on her shoulders. The van rippled with movement as everyone readied their weapons.

  Vaughan glanced back at Adela again, “Who runs this place? Warlords? Cartel? Traffickers? What are we up against other than Feeders?”

  “All of them,” Adela panted. “They’re all here. Before… before the infection, there were drugs and sex trade and prostitution. All of it. This was one of the most corrupt places on the planet and I do not think that has changed.” She was silent for a minute. We all were. When she spoke again, I felt the ominous tone in the marrow of my bones. “We should not have come here,” she whispered.

  “I’m starting to feel that way about my entire life,” Tyler mumbled. Vaughan shot her a look and she grinned at him.

  I would have smiled too, if I hadn’t been so afraid. I picked up my gun from off the floor. I had been resting it between my feet, because I found that trying to keep it tucked into some piece of clothing while we drove for hours at a time was uncomfortable. I had a bag of other weapons down there as well. Andy had made sure we were stocked and ready to go before we separated ways.

  I checked my gun and made sure it was ready to deliver. I had no doubt things were about to get bloody. Then I steeled my nerves for the killing that would come.

  “Vaughan, are you going to try to go forward or back out of here?” Hendrix asked in a low, measured voice.

  Vaughan glanced in the review mirror. I wished I wouldn’t have watched his shoulders jump from surprise. If I hadn’t seen him visibly react, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to turn around and check it out for myself. I wouldn’t have turned around and witnessed the horde of Zombies filling the street on every side, wading through the river of sewage or jumping from roof to tin roof with their beady red eyes trained on the van.

  I would have been able to pretend we had some kind of option for escape.

  I would have been able to believe we had some kind of freaking chance.

  “I’ll, uh, go forward,” Vaughan decided weakly. “Forward seems like our best option at the moment.”

  “Holy shit!” Harrison shouted. “Where did they come from?”

  “Oh, my god,” Tyler echoed. “What… How…? We’re so going to die.”

  Haley tensed next to me. Her eyes squeezed shut and she clutched Lennon to her chest while tears squeezed from the corners of her eyes. She pressed her lips to his soft head and whispered a prayer that was thick with desperation and bargaining.

  I didn’t know how to comfort her or tell her things would be all right.

  I wasn’t sure they would be.

  “Why aren’t they attacking?” King asked with more curiosity than I felt.

  I didn’t care why they weren’t attacking. I was too wrapped up in what would happen once they did. I couldn’t take my eyes off them as I watched their numbers increase. They leaked out of buildings and jumped from higher rooftops. They abandoned their suppers for our fresh meat. They became a seething mass of black, gunky decay and sharp white bone. Their red eyes glowed in the darkness, never blinking or turning away.

  They became one, a specter of gloom, following us to our death.

  And we could do nothing to stop them.

  Vaughan tried to speed up, but the road was dangerously torn up and too narrow. The Feeders, with their superhuman speed, had no trouble keeping up with us.

  “Does it feel like they’re herding us somewhere?” Nelson asked in answer to King’s question.

  “What?” Tyler groaned. “No. No…”

  That’s not possible. “That’s not possible,” I whispered. “Right? Right?”

  A side road opened up to our left. Vaughan started to take it when a cluster of Zombies stepped from the darkness and clawed at the van. He quickly readjusted our course, smashing the van against the corner of the building in the process. We lost a side mirror, but left the Feeders howling after us.

  “They are herding us,” Vaughan decided. “This can’t be good.”

  Hendrix slid forward in his seat and slapped a hand on my knee. He squeezed tightly and let out a shaky breath. “We need to fight them.”

  “I’m sorry what? Did you not see how many there were? We don’t stand a chance!” Vaughan shook his head and kept his eyes firmly on the road.

  Hendrix insisted, “They’re pushing us somewhere bad. I don’t know exactly where, but I’m pretty sure we can all agree that we do not want to go there.”

  I nodded. That was true. I did not want to go where they wanted me to go.

  “So let’s kill them before we get there,” Hendrix encouraged. “Stop the van and let’s fight on our terms.”

  Vaughan shook his head. He knew the risk. He knew we didn’t stand a chance. “Hendrix-”

  “Vaughan, they kill us now or they take us back to their hive and kill us there. At least we can try. At least we’re not where they want us yet.” Hendrix’s fingers dug into my thigh. His voice was tethered by the thinnest tendons. He didn’t know if he believed his plan yet, I could read it all over him.

  “Make sure you’re prepared for this,” Vaughan demanded, speaking to the entire car. “This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  “We’re really going to fight this horde?” Miller asked incredulously. “You really expect any of us to survive?”

  “Yep!” Vaughan shouted backward for the entire van to hear. “We survive or we die. Those are our only options.”

  “What the hell!” Miller yelled back, just as the first crack to our back window fissured through the smooth glass.

  “It’s started.” Hendrix slid his arm up my leg and threw it around my shoulders. “Stay alive,” he whispered to me.

  “What happened to stay by your side?” I asked, even as I spun around and knelt on the bench.

  “Stay alive,” he amended. “So you can stay by my side.”

  The second rock shattered the back window and hell exploded into my reality.

  Chapter Two

  “The road ends,” Vaughan shouted. Something landed on top of the van with a crunching thump. “The road ends!”

  My next breath wheezed in my lungs. By now, I should have been used to the blind panic that screamed through me whenever we found ourselves in this kind of situation.

  But I couldn’t get used to this. I didn’t think I ever would. Zombies would attack and I would reel with hysterical mania. I couldn’t find my center. I couldn’t see through the madness that closed in around me. It wrapped its thick fingers around my throat and squeezed until I knew I would die from fear.

  Until I just knew my heart would stop and my brain would explode.

  “We have to go!” Hendrix urged in my ear. “Now, Reagan!”

  I opened my eyes to see everything in motion. Guns blazing, Zombies screaming. Vaughan gave instructions while I prepared to die.

  Damn, adrenaline. Sometimes it worked for you. Sometimes… not so much.
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  “Reagan,” Hendrix demanded.

  Something flipped inside me. I went from the helpless victim to the deranged killer in less than a second. I gripped my gun, grabbed my messenger bag filled with more weapons. Ignoring my freshly healed injuries that still ached and stung, I followed Hendrix into the night.

  Tyler, Vaughan, Harrison and King kept the creatures back while the rest of us closed in around Haley, Lennon, Page and Adela.

  I refused to look at Haley. I couldn’t watch her hold that baby to her chest and know that this could be the end of his very short life. He was too precious for the ugliness of this world. Too innocent.

  Instead, I focused on killing as many moving things as I could. I mentally kept track of my death toll, pushing myself to reach new, macabre heights with each kill shot.

  I had a personal best of twenty-three Zombies in one fight. Something sick and competitive compelled me to beat that record.

  Tonight seemed like the perfect opportunity.

  Through the chaos, I surveyed the road. A roughly fashioned metal gate blocked it off. It looked like people had dragged the siding off the closest shanties and welded them together. It had been bound together with a rusted metal chain that padlocked on the other side. It might have been strong enough to keep our van out, but I doubted it could keep Feeders out.

  Especially these. They scaled the rundown housing around us like monkeys climbing trees, using their freakish strength and lack of fear to propel them from the ground to the roof in seconds. They vaulted from rooftop to rooftop with mangled ease, landing on already-broken ankles or crushed feet.

  I took aim at the ones on the roofs closest to me and tried to hit their darkened silhouettes. The only real marker I had when they moved this fast was their unblinking red eyes that glowed in the bright moonlight.

  One. Two. Miss. Miss. Three.

  Hendrix stood at my side, his shoulder pressed into mine. He could see better in the dark than I could and his victims fell fast. They dropped from the rooftops, splashing the sewage in thick, coagulated streaks on the muddy banks.