Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology)

by Chrissy Peebles

  I don’t know if it was divine intervention or just a stroke of luck. At that moment, a huge dog ran through between Trent and Cage and jumped around the men with guns in a circle. They were distracted by this and momentarily lowered their guns.

  The next thing that happened was a shock to everyone. Rose attacked the younger of the two. She full-on attacked him. Her teeth ripped into his neck, her nails clawed into his skin, and she took him to the ground. The momentary chaos gave Cage a chance to hit the other guy, holding the gun, in the face with his elbow. We all scrambled to get back to the truck at that point. Cage picked up the gun and pointed it at the others standing on the side of the road. We had to walk past Rose’s victim. She was proudly standing with her foot on his chest, knowing that she had brought him down. Cage yelled at the girl from the gas station, who was frozen in fear, and she, finally, snapped to attention and ran towards the truck.

  “That could have been really bad.” Trent took the driver’s seat this time and took off towards the camp again.

  Cage hung his head out the window as we drove off. “You just got infected, buddy, have a nice day!”

  Chapter 14

  A New Camp

  Trent parked the truck on the side of the road. He thought walking up to them would seem less threatening.

  The girl we had acquired was curled up in the fetal position in the back of the truck. Trent looked at Cage disapprovingly.

  “Why would you bring her?”

  “I am the reason her dad was going to kill her, Dad. I wasn’t going to leave her there.” He stood over the truck, looking down at the girl he had mauled earlier. I could tell he wanted to reach down and get her attention.

  I stepped forward and shook her for him. She didn’t want to move, so I shook her harder. She sat up with hate-filled eyes.

  “You should have let him kill me. I don’t want to eat people. You are all monsters.”

  I sighed and thought about how it looked since Cage had bitten her, and then, basically, kidnapped her.

  “We aren’t monsters. We just want to fight the infection long enough to find a cure. We won’t hurt you, anymore.”

  She hopped down out of the truck and brushed off her jeans. The fact that it was completely red from blood and the mud in the bed of the truck didn’t faze her. The little bit of dust from the drive, now that bothered her.

  “I’m Amber. Keep him away from me.” She pointed at Cage and backed away. I thought that was only fair since he had attacked her.

  As we made our way up the road, we certainly didn’t look threatening. Every one of us was limping and moving slowly. The scuffle I had with Cage had made me sore. Trent was nursing the leg that had been shot. We were a sad- looking crew. That probably wasn’t going to work in our favor because what we did look like was a bunch of zombies.

  As we approached the camp, I noticed it was a lot different than the other one. This one looked more like a military operation. This was not something that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Trent took this as a good sign. He thought that they would be more likely to help us since they were military.

  There were three tanks sitting outside of the building. It was a white brick building that looked like it had just been built. There was still scaffolding on the side of it, and various pieces of lumber lying about. There wasn’t anyone guarding the outside of the building.

  The doors and windows were secured with thick black bars. This place looked like it belonged to people who were prepared for this type of thing. The cars in the parking lot had a layer of pollen on them. It made me wonder how long they had been parked and waiting.

  Past the parking lot was a yard of sorts. The grass was a vibrant green. It almost looked unreal, like it had been put there to give the people the illusion that something could grow. As we moved across the parking lot, I had a strange sense of foreboding.

  I wondered if anyone else thought that this was a little strange. This building was just out here in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t anyone guarding the doors, but there were army tanks outside. Something was off, and I had a strong desire to turn and run.

  We stopped before we reached the grass. All of us exchanged looks with one another before we moved onto the lawn. We were in the home stretch now. Just a few feet of grass and we would reach our destination.

  The ground blew out from under me and sent me flying back into a car. There were clumps of dirt and grass falling all around me. Somewhere, Rose was screaming. I couldn’t see right away because there was a lot of smoke. What the hell had blown up? I realized they must have been waiting for us to step on the grass. I had been right; nowhere was safe. Now I rubbed my eyes, trying to clear them enough to search for Cage, Trent, and Rose.

  I saw Amber lying a few inches in front of the car. She was staring at me, but not moving. Her neck was turned at a funny angle. She was dead. I heard another scream and realized that it was coming from me. Two arms wrapped around me from behind and I fought as hard as I could.

  “Cassie.” I knew that voice. I was looking into Cage’s eyes when he spun me around.

  “Amber’s, Amber is…” I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.

  “I know. Let’s find the others and get out of here.” The distinct sound of gunfire came from the direction of the building. We crouched down behind the cars, trying to avoid certain death. I spotted Trent, army crawling towards us, underneath the cars.

  “Where is Rose?” I said it quietly, as if the shooters hearing us made a difference. They would shoot us if they could.

  “Here, I’m here.” Rose was scooting to us on her butt. Her arm was missing. Where her arm should have been, there was a bloody mess. Tendons were hanging down and blood was quickly gushing from them. I was sick to my stomach, but I held it together for her sake.

  Trent sprang into action. He ripped a large piece of his shirt off and tied it around the stump that used to be Rose’s good arm. Too bad it couldn’t have been her infected one. This was a strange way for me to look at it.

  “Stay low, everyone. We have to get back to the truck.”

  Crouching and crawling behind cars, it felt like it took us forever to get to the edge of the parking lot. Rose whimpered quietly, as I’m sure her arm was in a lot of pain. She was still losing a lot of blood. I felt certain she would soon meet the same fate as poor Amber.

  The color had drained from her face and as Trent helped her to the edge of the parking lot; she didn’t look good. We had an open road to run across to get back to the truck. I feared one of us would be shot on the way.

  “Stay here. I will go get the truck and y’all will have to jump in. Got it?”

  We nodded our agreement and watched Trent head down the road as fast as he could with his bum leg. The spray of bullets had stopped, but I had a bad feeling they were just reloading. Right as Trent reached the truck and jumped in, a bullet pierced the windshield, shattering the glass. Luckily, it was on the passenger side and didn’t hit Trent.

  He quickly came driving up to us and Cage jumped in first. I helped Rose up and we got into the truck together. I tried not to notice that I was now covered in her blood, as well. We drove in silence and I kept my arm around Rose as her sobs grew quieter.

  Chapter 15

  From Bad to Worse

  Rose was gone. Her eyes remained open, with tears still clinging to her lashes. Her breathing had stopped and she had grown rigid beneath my arm. I didn’t tell the others for a few minutes. I had to deal with the loss. She had felt like a friend. She had been my partner in this, and now she was gone.

  “Guys, Rose is dead.” As soon as the words left my lips, Trent slid the truck to the side of the road. He was out of the truck with Cage and around to the passenger side before I knew what was happening. They pulled Rose from the truck and set her on the ground. As they went to get back in, I panicked. I leapt from the truck to stand by my friend.

  “We are not leaving her here.” I didn’t feel confident but I put my hands on
my hips. “She is going to come back. She will be all alone, and I will not abandon her. ”

  Trent got out and came around to me. “Cassie, when she comes back, she is going to have one agenda. That agenda will be to eat me. I can’t have a full- fledged zombie riding around with us like it’s hunky-dory. “

  “Can’t we just put her in the back? If she acts crazy, then we can turn her loose. Please, Trent, she is one of us!” I knew I wasn’t being rational. I didn’t care. I felt like I should fight for Rose. I would hope she would do the same for me.

  I stood my ground. Cage and Trent exchanged a look. They had left their loved one behind; they barely knew Rose. The next thing I knew, they were tossing her body in the truck bed. They weren’t gentle with her at all. Trent pulled a heavy chain from behind the seat and wrapped it around her. He bound her one good arm to her body and then wrapped it around her neck. She was then chained to the truck by massive hooks. This was better than leaving her? I decided it would have to be.

  When we got back in the truck, there was a lot of tension. The fact that there was more room made it easier for me to ignore my companions. No one spoke for a long while as we bumped along down the road.

  “If she comes after me, Cassie, I’ll shoot her. You understand?” Trent looked at me and I nodded. If she came after him, he should shoot her. There was no reason to put the only uninfected one in danger if Rose was a threat.

  I relaxed a little. The fact that he spoke to me meant he wasn’t that angry. “Where are we going now?”

  “I am not sure. I have been wrong about the safety camps helping us. We are going to have to go right to the source.”

  “Going to the source of what?” I tried to rub some mud off of my pants. I succeeded in making it look worse. I looked up and caught Cage watching me. I smiled at him and felt warm when he returned it.

  “We are going to where this whole disease thing started, the Centera Factory. They let this thing loose, and they should have the cure.”

  He seemed so certain of this. I was curious if he was hoping it was true, or if he actually knew that was where it started. Trent seemed like he would buy into any conspiracy theory, once he got desperate enough. I knew that the TV had reported that the Centera was involved, but they reported a lot of things.

  I periodically checked on Rose, but she hadn’t seemed to move at all. From what I could tell in my short time with the effects of the disease, people were affected different ways and died different ways. I had a small bite so I was transforming slowly. Ms. Hamrick had her legs chewed off so she transformed a lot quicker; of course, she had died from blood loss. Rose wasn’t bitten badly, but it probably wouldn’t take too long for someone to come back if they had been bitten before they died. I didn’t think the cure would work for Rose, if there was one. It would probably only reverse the effects on the living. We drove for a couple of hours before the sun began to set. We needed to find somewhere to sleep for the night. Trent spotted a barn up ahead and thought we should check it out. Perhaps, it would be abandoned and we could make camp there for the evening. It was pretty close to the highway so it wouldn’t be hidden if people came by with not so nice intentions.

  As he pulled into the little makeshift road that led up to the barn, we looked around for any sign of life. Not noticing anything that immediately alarmed him, Trent parked the truck right outside the barn door. He held up his hand for us to wait and crept inside the barn with his gun.

  He was gone for a couple of minutes. When he returned, he opened the barn door up wide.

  “Cage, pull the truck in here. This will do for tonight.”

  He pulled the truck into the barn and Trent shut the doors behind it. I looked around at our home for the evening. The pitchfork and rake hanging on the wall might come in handy, if we needed it. There was a loft that had a sketchy ladder propped up on it. There was hay everywhere. Fortunately, the barn didn’t smell bad. It must have been for a farmer without animals.

  I was suddenly aware of how beat-up my body felt. I sank down onto the floor and pressed my back into the barn wall. Trent looked at me, and then over at Cage. He seemed to be contemplating something.

  “I know what we need.” He went over to the truck and pulled out a bottle with a black label. He had brought liquor! I had consumed my fair share of liquor even though I wasn’t even eighteen yet. I had access to it through older cousins and my parent’s liquor cabinet. I hoped he planned on sharing, because I could use something to numb me for a little while.

  He poured out the contents of a water bottle and poured half the liquor into it. Trent was going to spend the evening drowning his sorrows. We had all lost so much. It seemed like a good idea. In hindsight, getting wasted when there are undead hungry creatures wandering around was not the best plan.

  “This is mine.” He handed Cage the bottle and walked over to climb in the truck. “That one is for the infected.”

  He turned on the truck and let some music fill the barn. It was some sad country song, but I was grateful for a small sense of normalcy. I knew he wouldn’t leave it on long because he needed to conserve the truck’s gas and battery power.

  Cage and I settled onto the barn floor and passed the bottle back and forth. I welcomed the burn in my throat as a sign I was still human. I was feeling less human as the days went by. It had only been three days since I had been bitten, but so much was happening.

  Cage took a swig of liquor before handing it over to me. “You have a boyfriend somewhere out there?”

  Was this his idea of small talk? “I liked someone, but then I bit him in the face.” I took another sip and felt thankful for the buzz I was beginning to acquire.

  Cage laughed so hard he started to choke. Tears were streaming from his eyes by the time he finally got a hold of himself.

  “I’m glad you think that it’s so funny, Cage.” This was not the reaction I had expected from him.

  He was holding his stomach and bent over his knees. “I’m sorry. It’s just such a crazy situation we are all in. If we can’t laugh about it, then we might as well give up. You bit someone in the face, and you wanted to get with them. You can’t see how that is funny?”

  I don’t know if it was from the sheer exhaustion I felt or because it really was funny, but I busted out in my own fit of laughter.

  We laughed and talked until our eyes grew drowsy from sleep and liquor. I felt brave with the buzz I had built up, so I went to sleep with my head resting on Cage’s shoulder. It felt nice to be close to him, and to have shared an evening of just enjoying each other. Trent had long passed out in the truck when I closed my eyes.

  Chapter 16

  The Stragglers

  We set up camp in the barn. Trent thought we should stay for a couple of days to refresh ourselves for the trips ahead. We kind of loafed around. There wasn’t much to do. Cage and I created a fun game where we threw rocks at different levels of sticks we had set out. We had ended up in a small town in Virginia. Trent had scouted the area to see where we were.

  Trent had, somehow, managed to keep the gun through all our adventures and it was always close enough for our protection. We were in a particularly heated game of rocks and sticks when Trent decided he wanted to take a nap. He propped up in his truck with instructions for us to wake him if anyone came at us.

  He needed to relax, simply because he had been on point since we got into the barn. He was sleeping soundly a few seconds after he stretched out.

  “You want to take a walk? We won’t go far.” Cage turned that bright smile on me.

  “Yes, but just right out front.” I didn’t have any desire to venture too far away from the security of Trent’s gun.

  We walked outside and took in the scenery. The sun was shining and it was really pretty. It almost felt like a good day until I remembered everything that we were dealing with. We walked along right in front of the barn. We talked about silly things like hating classes and our favorite snacks. It was nice to not spend time talking about
gloom and doom.

  When we got to the edge of the barn, I was getting ready to turn towards him when something caught my eye. In the distance, making their way across the field, were a couple of slow- moving forms. One of them was really hunched over and the other was dragging his leg beside him. There was no doubt they were zombies.

  We ran back inside the barn to wake Trent up.

  “Dad, we have company.”

  Trent shot out of the truck and out the door, looking around in a panic. When he realized the company Cage was talking about, he laughed. It was pretty comical. There were only two of them and they were advancing so slowly that we, probably, could have run over them with the tractor that was parked there.

  Trent waited until they got close enough to see. The one in the front was groaning loudly. He was hunched over in a way that made me think his back was broken. He could have died of a broken back. As he got closer, I fought back vomit as I realized his eye was hanging from its socket. Trent raised the shotgun that he had confiscated from the idiots who tried to take us hostage. He fired one shot right into the zombie’s other eye.

  The hunchback dropped on the spot. The other one was not deterred by this, in the least. He slowly walked by his buddy and kept coming at us.

  This one was not as beat up, but he had a wooden stake sticking out of his chest. There was blood all around it on the white wife-beater he was wearing. I wondered if someone thought that you killed a zombie like a vampire. It wasn’t slowing him down any.

  Trent waited until he was closer than the other one and fired another winning shot right between his eyes. The staked zombie and the eyeless wonder were no more!

  I did a little happy dance right there beside Cage, who laughed at me. I was too thrilled that Trent was no longer in any danger to be embarrassed. We went back inside and had the last can of beanie weenies that Trent had scavenged. He cooked them over the open flame of his Zippo.