“I’m all right,” she answered. “Now.”
He closed his hand over the smaller one that lay on his chest, the one that gently curved right over his heart “You didn’t think you were through with me yet, did you?” he said huskily.
She answered him with a smile. The same one that he had seen in his dreams. The same smile that had kept shining, even when they were apart, straight through the darkness.
“I promised you I would look for you,” he reminded her.
“I remembered. I kept waiting for you to find me,” she answered him.
“You think some damned zombie apocalypse is enough to keep us apart?”
She rested her forehead against his chest for a moment, fighting the tears.
“I’m here now,” he soothed. He took her in his arms and held her as if he would never let her go again.
She put her arms around his waist and leaned into his strength. “Lathan Daniels, I lo- ”
But he silenced her next words as he dipped his dark head and kissed her. Passionately. Deeply. Reverently. With all the love that his soul was capable of feeling.
“All that matters,” he whispered against her hair. “Is that I’ve found you again.”
Chapter 12
“They came through here.”
The heels of Dalin’s leather boots made their own impressions in the soft mud. They had come upon the tracks earlier and they had been following them for the past half hour.
“Something’s not right,” Dalin said as he stooped down and studied the prints more closely. He lifted his head and listened. Parisa watched him silently, waiting for him to go on.
“See here? The woman fell and the man’s footprints are right on top of her. Looks like he hit her.”
“Maybe he was trying to help her up,” Parisa suggested, not comfortable with the scenario Dalin was painting.
“No, she was trying to crawl away from him, and he was standing over her. She had long reddish hair. He must have grabbed her by it when he hit her.”
“You can tell all that?” Parisa asked.
“There’s some strands of hair here that have been pulled out by the roots.”
“Maybe it was a hunter.”
“No. A hunter’s gait is all different.”
Parisa didn’t comment. Since the man had rescued her at the house, Dalin Young had shown his competence time and time again.
“And there was a kid with them,” Dalin said grimly, his chin pointing slightly over his shoulder as he spoke, but he didn’t look directly at Parisa. “Whoever it was, the tracks head west.”
The story the tracks told put a knot in Dalin’s gut as he straightened. The man’s footsteps led right to the trailer, past two hunters lying in the yard. He walked over to the trailer and peered through one of the windows. “It’s a bloody mess in there,” he said without turning.
Parisa swallowed hard. “Could it have been- ” She couldn’t finish.
“No,” Dalin said. “There are tracks leading off again. Four sets of ‘em. One belongs to the kid. There are other tracks, too,” he muttered to himself as he stroked his chin thoughtfully. “But they go back the way they came.”
He was staring up at the tree house now. And the ladder. “Fresh mud on the rungs,” he said under his breath.
Parisa was instantly alert, staring upward, too.
“Nobody there now,” Dalin told her. And then he added, “Whatever happened, there was a lot going on here at some point,” he said, nodding slightly. They weren’t Cayla’s prints. He knew that. But someone had been here. Someone had been in trouble. Maybe that someone had seen Cayla. It was the only lead he had right now.
He was looking at the prints that led away from the trailer. “We’ll head out in the same direction,” he said. “But first, I’m going to have a look up in that tree house.”
A little while later, they were both sitting with their legs hanging over the edge of the tree house floor.
“You fell pretty hard.”
Dalin looked at Parisa frowningly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You fell,” she repeated. “For Macayla.”
He looked away from her and sighed deeply. He didn’t deny it.
Parisa stared out across the mist-veiled landscape. “Did she- feel the same way?”
After a pause, he shook his head. “Yeah, she did.” He was looking down at the ground below them. He laughed shortly. “Funny thing to happen in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, isn’t it?”
“I’ve seen stranger things.” It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she wished someone could make her feel like that, too. But she remained silent, keeping her thoughts to herself. It was enough at the moment to be happy for Macayla.
“Always wanted one of these,” he said, gripping the edge of the tree house floor.
“You never had one?”
“Tree houses are for kids.”
“Weren’t you a kid once?”
“Not so’s you’d notice,” he said quietly. “Seems I mostly skipped those years.”
Parisa was lost for a moment in her own reflection of the past. She was thinking about Matthew again but she couldn’t do that for long. If she did, the tears were going to start all over again. She gazed out over the cornfield from their high vantage point. “You think- ” she began. She stopped, shook her head.
Dalin turned his face towards her. “What?”
“I was going to say something stupid, like, you think they need help? It’s always hard to think of children trying to survive through all this.” Her chin lifted. Her mouth straightened. “We don’t need to be taking on more trouble.”
“No, but I have a feeling trouble’s going to eventually find us,” he said thoughtfully, his voice low and husky as he ran a hand over the dark beard stubble shadowing his chin.
“What are you thinking?” she asked without looking at him.
“I’m thinking that a tree house is a good place to hide from the rest of the world. You know, kind of sitting above it all and not being a part of everything else that’s going on.”
“Whoever built this one was probably thinking the same thing,” she said. She got to her feet and arched her back as she stretched. A silence fell between them, followed by a slight creak of hinges. “Whoever- ” she began. But she never finished.
And then Dalin heard her say behind him, “I’ve found something. You need to see this.”
He stood up in one lithe movement, not in any hurry. The floorboards shook slightly as he crossed the tree house and stood looking down. He went still and then looked closer. There inside the lid of the wooden box was a name scrawled in bold letters. ADDY. And an arrow pointing west.
“She was part of our group. She went missing a long time ago. We always did that. We left our names in case someone was looking for us.”
Dalin turned to stare back out across the distant landscape, wishing it had been Cayla’s name that had been written there.
Cayla’s face was still stinging from the brutal blow to her face.
“That was your first lesson,” the man warned. His hand was still raised threateningly. “Keep still or I’ll give you another one.”
She already knew that she could expect no mercy from the owner of that voice and that the man was fully capable of making good on his threat. She had already run into him before. His body was half turned as if he was intently looking out the rear window of the car at something behind them. At the moment he was concentrating on that instead of on her. He finally gave a satisfied snort and turned around.
Everything had happened so fast. Her desperate attempt to hide herself. The two men brutally jerking her away from the massive log she had been hiding behind. The awful realization that she’d been brutalized by one of the men before. And finally, the men taking her with them and forcing her into the backseat of a car.
She was trying her best to clear her mind and to come up with some kind of escape plan before any more time got away from her,
before they got farther away. She had tried to fight them, to no avail, and right now the car was moving too fast for her to try and jump out without serious injury to herself. In any case, she had no doubt the men would immediately stop the car and hunt her down.
The man in the front seat was driving almost recklessly, swerving from one side of the road to the other, taking the curves entirely too fast. The car hit a deep rut and she was flung like a ragdoll against the door beside her. She couldn’t keep from crying out in pain as the door handle dug deeply into her side.
The man sitting beside her grinned at her. “We should keep this one for ourselves,” he spoke up, talking to the driver. “Who would know?”
“You mean take her somewhere else instead of taking her to Meng?” the driver asked.
“That’s just what I mean. After all, we’re already acquainted. Aren’t we, honey.”
Even in the dimness of the car, Cayla couldn’t help but see that the man beside her looked at her with such evil intent that she couldn’t help cringing as far away from him as possible.
“No one has to know,” the man went on, trying to convince the driver. “She can be our little secret.”
The men continued their discussion like she wasn’t even there. The driver mostly grunted his answers. He didn’t agree. Nor did he disagree. He also didn’t slow his breakneck pace down the dark road. More than once Cayla had to grit her teeth against the bone-jarring bumps.
“We could say that she was eaten and that there was nothing left of her,” she heard the man beside her say. “Hell, Hitch, who could prove anything different happened?” He continued to watch her, as if anticipating the effect his words had on her.
“Yeah. We could say that,” came Hitch’s remark from the front seat. “It’s not like her boyfriend back there could tell anyone a different story,” he pointed out. “He’s got to be dead by now.”
She refused to believe that. Dalin couldn’t be dead. She had to get back there and know. She had to help him if he needed help. She had to let him know she was still alive even though she was getting farther and farther away from him by the moment.
The man beside her tilted his head as he continued to regard her with hawk-like intensity. “Who says we have to obey Meng’s orders,” he said. “It’s not like we don’t have a say in anything we do.”
“Maybe he’ll let you have ‘er,” Hitch suggested with a quick glance over his shoulder.
“Not this one,” the other man said soberly as he continued to watch her. “He won’t give her up. He’ll want to keep her at the Fortress.”
Cayla’s heart was pounding hard in her chest and sending blood pumping hotly through her veins. A surge of adrenaline made her reckless. “What’s the Fortress?” she asked breathlessly. “And who is Meng?”
“The Fortress?” her back-seat captor echoed. “The Fortress is a dead end for people like you. I can promise you, you’ll like staying with me a whole lot better. And Meng? Hell, you don’t want to find out. He runs the whole place. Just like he controls every square inch within miles of there. He runs it all.” As if he wanted to make sure she understood, he leaned closer to her. “Anyone enters Meng’s territory, they are herded and trapped like cattle, and then they are rounded up and taken to the Fortress for a one-way trip.”
“People? Not hunters?”
“Hunters?” the man echoed. “Oh, you mean the dead bastards. No, we don’t have any use for them.”
“So you- you round up living people.”
“It’s not as hard as you would think. People are desperate enough, and usually stupid enough, to fall for anything. Look how easy it was to catch you and your boyfriend. In fact, I caught you twice.”
“You’re at an advantage if people underestimate you,” Dalin had told her. “If they believe you’re not a threat, they won’t be so watchful. In some situations that can make all the difference.”
Cayla knew she had to keep the man talking to give herself time for a plan. He absolutely was not going to rape her again. No matter what it took. “So that’s where Meng is? The Fortress?”
“You got it,” came the bland reply. “People are nothing to Meng. Hitler wanted to take over the world. To a man with the same kind of ambition, it’s not so hard to pick up the pieces of this broken world and carve out your own little piece of territory.”
“Where men like this Meng are the king?” Cayla already knew that power-hungry men were dangerous men. They always had been. And now that there were no laws-
“Why not? There are plenty of people left in this world who are so scared and so tired of running and starving that they’ll do anything to survive. And the truth is that most of ‘em want to be led. They don’t want to do the leading. Monkey see, monkey do. They see others doing something, they figure it’s okay for them, too. Gives them a kind of permission they wouldn’t normally give themselves.
“Meng offers lost souls food and a safe place to live, a code to live by, and even his own perverted brand of religion. There’s something for everyone.” He chuckled humorlessly, cynically in the darkness. “For others,” he went on cryptically. “There are other lures that keep them in line,” he said suggestively.
“You do Meng’s bidding, too?” she asked. “Monkey see, monkey do?”
His lip lifted in a sneer. “We work for Meng, but we don’t spend much time at the Fortress. There are too many restrictions for men like us. Right, Hitch? We live on the outside, like soldiers guarding the outer walls. Meng doesn’t want us there anyway. He wouldn’t risk it. He knows we’d be- a disruption and that we wouldn’t stand for the kind of control those people live under behind their fences and their brick walls.” He sounded like he was boasting.
“They think the walls and the fences are there to keep them safe, but Meng has his own reasons for those things. If the people don’t do what they’re told, if they try to leave, they find out they’re expendable. Meng makes sure they know that and, more importantly, he sees to it that they always remember what disobedience can lead to. In a way, they’re confined like mindless cattle, too. Only they do the choosing. It’s their choice to live that way.
“As for the ones that insist on leaving, Meng has some of them taken to a funeral home and preserved there. Every once in a while he takes groups of his people up there to mourn. And to remind them what will happen if they forget to do as they’re told. If they try to leave, they’ll be just like those rotting corpses up there. Or worse.
Macayla listened with growing comprehension. And horror.
“Meng’s clever. I’ll give him that. He’s convinced them that if they try to eat anything that he hasn’t personally blessed and sanctioned, then they’ll become infected. And they believe him because it’s what they want to believe. It eases their conscience, helps them sleep at night. Yeah, he’s got a regular cult going on up there. And Meng? He sees himself as a Messiah in the middle of an apocalypse.”
In the darkness, Cayla caught the predatory gleam in the man’s eyes as his gaze roamed boldly over her. It made her flesh crawl. “But I’m saving you from all that. And I expect you to start showing me a little gratitude. Just like Meng shows gratitude for all that I do for him.”
Dalin heard his own voice cry out. He bolted upright in the twin bed and looked around the dark, unfamiliar room, momentarily confused by his surroundings. His heart was pounding from the nightmare and for a long time he couldn’t shake the disturbing image of Cayla dying. Of Cayla needing him. Only he was so far away that he couldn’t reach her. It had all seemed so real, so unchangeable.
Fully awake now, but still in the grip of the nightmare, he got out of bed and stood before the window. The sky was dark and starless but he sensed dawn coming on. Bracing his hands on the window frame before him, he looked down into the yard of the big house. Nothing moved down there, not even a shadow. They’d left the window open. It wasn’t raining now, but everything was dripping wet. It was going to be a cold, wet walk through the woods when they did se
t out.
Parisa was awake now, too, and she was sitting on the edge of her bed. She had awakened instantly when she’d heard Dalin call out for Cayla. She could barely make out his features in the darkness, and she watched him silently for a while before she asked, “You’ve had another nightmare?”
His reply was little more than a low growl.
She had allowed herself the luxury of sleeping without her boots. She pulled them on now and sat waiting for Dalin to talk if he wanted to, but she accepted his silence, too, if that’s what he chose.
“Rain’s ended,” she heard him say so softly that she could barely catch the words.
Without looking at her, he said over his shoulder, “Daylight’s coming on. We’ll head out soon since you’re already awake.”
He said no more. His lips were set in grim lines as he turned back to the dark room and groped in the darkness for his own boots.
Chapter 13
Parisa’s gloved hands clung to the wooden gate. On either side of her, stretching out in both directions, was a waist-high stone fence. On the other side of the fence was a rolling field, overgrown, but fresh-smelling after the rainfall. The far end of the field dipped down to a small pond which was half hidden by a long drift of low-lying fog.
It was a desolate landscape. And silent. Nothing moved out there. There were no hunters. No birds. No wildlife of any kind. They had headed out in the same direction as the footprints. Dalin had kept up a relentless pace all morning and well into the afternoon, but they had finally stopped to rest. Right now Dalin was seated on the ground with his back against the stone wall.
Parisa watched him mark off another day on the small calendar he always carried with him. “Why do you do that?” she asked.
“Hell if I know,” he replied as he returned the calendar to his pocket. “It’s just a habit. Maybe it’s so I know what to expect from the weather. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.”
Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Page 13