Love and Decay
A Novella Series
Season Three
Volume Six
Episodes One-Four
Rachel Higginson
Copyright@ Rachel Higginson 2015
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Copy Editing by Carolyn Moon
Cover Design by Caedus Design Co.
Other books by Rachel Higginson currently available:
Love and Decay
Love and Decay, Season One, Episodes One-Twelve
Love and Decay, Season Two, Episodes One-Twelve
Love and Decay, Season Three, Episodes One-Twelve
Love and Decay, Season Four, Coming December, 2015
The Star-Crossed Series
Reckless Magic
Hopeless Magic
Fearless Magic
Endless Magic
The Reluctant King
The Relentless Warrior
Breathless Magic
Fateful Magic
The Redeemable Prince
The Starbright Series
Heir of Skies
Heir of Darkness
Heir of Secrets
The Siren Series
The Rush
The Fall
The Heart
Bet on Us
The Five Stages of Falling in Love
Every Wrong Reason
To the Readers,
I hope you all have your own Parker.
Episode One
Chapter One
1063 Days after initial infection
“If you touch my ass one more time, I’m going to shoot your hand off.”
“It’s not my fault! I can’t see anything!”
“Damn it, King. I will give almost anything for you to stop groping me. Anything. This is like statutory at this point. On my part.”
Haley snickered nearby, but King had been accurate when he said he couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t either.
“Reagan, I’m really not trying to touch you!”
I snorted in response to that. He sounded sincere. He sounded so very sincere. But he was a sixteen-year-old boy.
What to believe…
Shuffling behind me drew my attention. An elbow in the shoulder blade knocked me forward. When I righted myself there was a new body behind me.
It was absolutely dark outside. The moon hid behind a thick canopy of clouds and there hadn’t been electric light in these parts, or really any parts, for years.
The darkness of this night seemed to eat up every bit of light. We were swallowed whole in a sightless abyss until the dawn. The darkness felt like a physical thing, a heavy blanket that settled thickly over our sweaty skin and dampened our breath. My lungs felt wrapped in cotton. My eyes hallucinated bursts of light that weren’t really there.
Not an ideal situation for the Zombie Apocalypse.
I recognized the body behind me by the simplest brush of his hard chest against my back. His scent. His aura. His everything was familiar. I didn’t acknowledge him though.
Not even to tell him thank you.
I wasn’t as irritated with King as I was uncomfortable with the whole night and our defenseless position as we waited for some minor break of light. King was just a typical teenage boy.
Which meant he had way too many adolescent hormones for me to deal with and the obnoxious consequence of never having alone time.
But he was relatively harmless.
I hoped.
Hendrix however… was not harmless.
Not at all.
My heart squeezed and my lungs constricted. I wanted the groper back. King and his curious, wandering hands had officially abandoned me to his moody older brother.
So now on top of trying to listen for Feeders and figure out how we’d fight them blind, I had to balance heart failure and Hendrix’s nearness for hours on end.
Awesome.
I decided I’d rather deal with the Zombies.
I stilled as best as I could. I even stopped breathing.
Well, for as long as I could make that last.
The ten of us stood tightly together in a crowded copse of trees somewhere in Texas. Or New Mexico maybe? Possibly Arizona? I had no idea where we were.
We’d nearly run out of ammo the day before and we were too far from civilization to find an actual structure to take cover in overnight. We would have climbed the trees, but they were too small to hold us and it wouldn’t have mattered. Balancing on a branch all night just wasn’t worth it when all the Feeders had to do was lift their arms to get to us.
So instead, we braved out the night standing up, ready to run.
Had there been just a smidge of moonlight or starlight, I knew we would have kept pressing on or at least stopped to sleep. But there wasn’t anything.
This had to be the darkest night on planet Earth. Ever.
And the worst part of all was that we had no way to defend ourselves should the Feeders find us.
Unease and mild terror churned in my stomach. Sometimes it was the not knowing what could happen that was worse than an actual Zombie battle. At least then, in those moments, I was in control of something.
Mainly my weapons.
The waiting game had to be the worst.
“I can feel my ankles swelling as we stand here,” Haley grumbled quietly.
I heard the swishing sound of a hand rubbing fabric. “This night can’t last forever,” Nelson assured her. “We’ll find a better place to stay tomorrow night.”
Harrison groaned. “Sure we will. Just like we were going to find ammo today. Just like we were going to find something to eat yesterday. Or the day before when we were going to-”
“Enough.” Vaughan’s voice was a low growl of authority. Harrison didn’t utter another word. “We’re all alive. That’s the most important thing.”
I pressed my lips together and held back my squeak of frustration. We were all alive… today. But we wouldn’t all make it if we were forced to survive like this.
Sure, there had been meager meals before and times we went without much weaponry, but I couldn’t remember our circumstances ever being quite this dire before.
And it wasn’t just the lack-of-civilization society or the Zombie hordes that behaved like cannibalistic pack animals and roamed the southwestern part of the former USA like it was their job to protect the Mexican border. No, it was far more than that.
There was a bounty on our heads. An actual freaking bounty.
Matthias had put a price on our heads.
And payment for bringing us in dead or alive was quite enticing.
I’d thought about turning us in myself a few times.
Okay, that wasn’t entirely true.
And other than the fleeting feeling of being a universal badass straight out of a Clint Eastwood western, having people want to hunt you and kill you or drag you back to Matthias pretty much sucked.
In this anti-technology age, where communication on a grand scale had died painfully and humanity’s trust in each other had been flushed down the toilet, it was really an amazing feat that Matthias had been able to get any word out about us.
We should have been able to ruin his life, mount our loyal steeds and ride off into the freaking sunset without ever hearing from Captain Douche Canoe ever again.
Who, by the way, was not dead. Did I honestly think we could end him after one measly attempt to annihilate him completely from the face of the earth? Yes. Yes, I did.
But apparently that had only been wishful thinking.
I’d gone through the five stages of hope as soon as we left the Colony. I’d been in denial that he could survive. I really believed it wasn’t possibly. I told myself daily there was no way he could live through that attack. I’d been angry at the mere possibility he could still be alive. Furious really. Livid. Raging.
You get the point.
I’d done the whole bargaining bit. I pleaded for weeks for God to make sure Matthias died. Blood poisoning or severe injuries that he had no hope of recovering from, I didn’t care how he died. I just wanted him dead. And if I wasn’t the one that dealt the fatal blow, I prayed that God could perhaps see that it happened anyway. Please and thank you.
Then I did this whole depression gig where I was super sad that a man like Matthias could survive and a man like Kane had to die. That was a bleak month. And I probably owed a lot of people an apology for how I moped around.
During that time, I’d come to two conclusions. One, Matthias was a cockroach that could survive an atomic blast if he were forced into one. And two, I wasn’t over Kane. Nor was I coping well with his death.
Both of those realizations put me into a deeper funk.
Matthias was still very much alive and very much after us.
And I missed Kane. Fiercely.
I never thought I would say those words, or even think them. But they were true. Just like falling in love with him felt like something that I couldn’t stop, so did this. I couldn’t stay the gnawing pain or the gaping ache in my chest. It spread through me like dark matter, eating up every piece of light and goodness as it went. And the double loss of Hendrix only added fuel to the expanding darkness.
But eventually, I decided to stop being so emotionally traumatized and talked myself into moving on with my life. Once I did that, the final stage happened. Step five: Acceptance.
This happened like yesterday.
If Matthias was alive, so be it. The chances of running into him again while we were running away from him were slim to none. We were close to the Mexican border and hadn’t seen another human being in a few weeks.
He might as well be dead. And while it wasn’t exactly the same thing, I would have to learn to live with it.
The point was, I couldn’t keep obsessing over Matthias or the Colony or Kane. I needed to move on with my life. I wanted to move on.
So that’s what I decided to do.
“All right, Willow?”
Hot breath fanned over my sticky neck. I stifled a shiver from the cooling sensation. We were just reaching the summer months, but this far south, the weather didn’t bother with seasons. It was either hot or scorching hot. The sultry heat pulled beads of sweat from all over my body, pooling in the small of my back, dotting my forehead, coating my arms and chest.
“I’m fine,” I whispered. This had been a common question directed at me for months. Apparently I didn’t seem fine, no matter how often I assured everyone that I was. But this exact question, with the use of my last name, belonged only to Hendrix.
Some time ago, he’d stopped calling me by my first name.
I wasn’t sure what that meant.
Probably not something good.
“King’s harmless.”
I let out a long-suffering sigh. “I know. I’m just uncomfortable. He wasn’t helping.”
He made a sound that I couldn’t interpret. Then Vaughan shushed us so we fell silent.
Hendrix punched my shoulder blade gently.
What did that mean? Buck up? Cheer up? The man was more of a mystery now than ever. He had become a sort of masochistic entertainment for me. Like a sideshow. The Unreadable Hendrix Parker. I could write an entire book about his dark looks and random touches and I still wouldn’t know what any of it meant.
Hendrix leaned in until his lips almost touched the shell of my ear. Almost but not quite. I could still feel him though. Like the energy between his skin and mine had become a physical thing. Popping and jumping frenetically. My entire body snapped to stiff attention and my pulse picked up. I stopped myself from swaying. Would he close the distance? Would he keep it? Would I ever be able to predict his touch again?
He stayed an inch away. “This night won’t last forever.”
I nodded, forcing stray hairs to brush over his chin. “I know.” The night wouldn’t last forever, but his distance might.
A little hand slipped into mine and I finally felt the comfort I’d been searching for. Page. She’d grown at least two inches in the last six months. Her ninth birthday had been celebrated with looted snack cakes and a flat two-liter of orange Fanta. But we’d all smiled that day and somehow avoided any run-ins with Zombies.
In fact, most of us had celebrated a birthday since we fled the Colony. I had turned twenty-one in the late part of November. Twenty-one. Wasn’t it supposed to be some major rite of passage? Only there had been no boozy celebration or wild shenanigans. And on my birthday we didn’t manage to avoid Feeder conflict. So instead of celebratory shots and strip clubs, we fought for our lives. And won.
I guess maybe my birthday hadn’t turned out so badly after all. All of the Parkers had also had a birthday. And Haley and Tyler. We were all a year older in age and fifty years older in our souls. Fifty years older in world-weariness.
And don’t even get me started with how old my body was. At the newest part of my twenty-first year, I felt decrepit. I felt ancient. My body wore battle scars that told horrific stories of struggle and survival. My skin had darkened and turned leathery over the past few months spent in the southern heat and sun. I felt prehistoric and looked worse.
I let out another heavy breath. The worst part of this overnight vigil was all of my swirling thoughts. They cycled around my head like a slow churning tornado. So much had happened over the last year. Over the last two years. Over the last three.
I had nightmares consistently. As often as I closed my eyes, they came. They were always a mixture of my real-time problems, Zombies, complications with Haley’s condition, losing loved ones or Hendrix’s heartache all over again.
The ones with Hendrix were usually the worst. He would look at me through the hazy, unconscious fog and say things like, “But I can’t trust you, Reagan. You’re a liar. You lied about loving me. You lied about loving Kane. And you lied about yourself. You’re ugly. You’re a monster. You’re poison.”
Or even worse than those, the nightmares that pulled from my past. I dreamed thick, melancholy memories of Kane that would always, always end in tragedy. My mind would conjure images of his handsome face that would smile at me in one freeze frame and in the next turn gaunt and stretched as he screamed out in pain and death. Or I would feel the very tangible touch of his gentle hands holding me, caressing me, loving me, but then would turn suddenly into torture when his hands stiffened with rigor mortis or his fingernails sliced at my chest.
He would always attack my chest in my nightmares. Always. His yellowed, serrated fingernails would cut like knives and he would desperately claw at my center, straight for my heart. His eyes would drip with blood, his mouth would gape open and ooze blackened puss. He would be zombified and obsessed with eating my heart.
>
He wanted my heart even in death.
Or not him-him, but the memory of him.
Those were the worst dreams. The others I could file away in my new normal. I could explain the rest away because I had to cope somehow. I was only human and I was up against tremendous odds. Of course, my mind would think the worst. Of course, my brain would invoke images of loss and pain and despair.
But Kane trying to consume my heart so no one else could have it?
Yeah, I decided not to analyze that one too closely.
Oddly enough I never dreamed about Matthias nor about any worst-case scenarios should he manage to track us down.
Probably because no amount of imagining would do the real thing justice. I wouldn’t let him get the upper hand again. I wouldn’t let him get the upper hand ever again.
Should I happen to run into Matthias in the future, I knew exactly what would happen.
I would kill him.
Even the darkest parts of my subconscious agreed with me.
See? This was why I should never have time to think. I started picturing all the ways I could kill a man.
That could not be a good sign for my flickering sanity.
The low groan of a Feeder in the distance caught my attention. As one organism, we jumped to attention. We stood in a circle, all ten of us, protecting our center of women and children. What little weaponry we had stood in the hands at our outermost border. We breathed together, we stood together, we thought in tangles of trauma and semi-healing together. We were a Spartan cluster that held one shield against the oncoming enemy.
And when the guttural groaning drifted over us we moved to attention as one organism.
It was a ways away. The night was stale, underused and dry. The silence was so compelling at times it almost felt painful. It pushed against my ears aggressively like an unseen giant jamming cotton balls against my skull.
Love and Decay, Volume One Page 1