Love and Decay (33 page)

“Not even close. I don’t even know where the
car is from here. Micah could barely walk. Colony soldiers
surrounded us. We were lucky to find that shed. But it only lasted
so long before the Feeders found us.”

“The Colony never did?”

“If they did it was after the Feeders showed
up. We’ve been fighting them off for hours. The Colony would have
assumed we were dead. Or going to be shortly.”

“Well, you’re not.”

Luke narrowed his gaze at Page. “Let’s hope
not.” He opened his mouth again, then closed it. Finally, he let
out a deep sigh and admitted, “She got bit protecting Micah. She
saved his life twice. She doesn’t even know him.”

“That sounds like Page.” I looked over Micah
again and hoped he was damn well worth all this. “Get in,” I
ordered. “We have to move.” I slammed the back gate once everyone
was settled. It was definitely more crowded back there this time
and tighter with two of them laid out. Before I moved to the front,
I told those in the back, “Keep an eye out and stay down as best as
you can. We ran into trouble a while back and if the Colony catches
up to us, they have guns.”

Everybody nodded and I hurried to the
driver’s seat.

Mertz was there, standing in my way. “Let me
drive,” he suggested.

“No way.”

He pointed at my hands. “Your hands are
trembling. You look like you got run over by a semi. I think you
have a concussion. Just let me drive.”

My stomach rolled and I knew he was right.
Being stubborn about this could mean I wouldn’t get us back to the
safe house.

Pulling the keys from my pockets, I realized
that I was, in fact, shaking. My hands and arms trembled and my
stomach kept flipping, threatening to add puke to the Zombie chunks
covering me.

I handed the keys to Mertz and regretted it
instantly. I was used to being in charge. And if I wasn’t in
charge, then I only had to listen to my brothers.

But handing over something as important as
getting us securely to the safe house to a kid I knew nothing
about, made me question every single thing.

He seemed to sense the internal battle waging
inside me because he stepped back, giving me more of a space to
walk through, and said, “Let’s go, man. Time’s ticking.”

“Right.”

I forced my feet to move. I hurried around
the truck and jumped into the passenger’s seat. As soon as I sat
down I felt the weight of today. It pressed down on my shoulders
and legs, pushing me deeper and deeper into the worn seat
fabric.

I hadn’t slept last night and now that I was
sitting, the adrenaline drained from my body in a cruel depletion
of energy. Sleeping wasn’t an option, but even my bones were
tired.

I felt the exhaustion in my soul. To the very
core of me.

Adela’s hand reached for mine again and that
same rush of intensity filled me, spreading out from the small
contact where our fingers were entwined.

I rolled my head to look at her. Her eyes
were fixed on the highway, her body language prim and proper, even
with all the blood.

I read it all over her face. She was willing
to comfort me, give me what I needed, but she didn’t want to talk
about it or acknowledge it or give me hope in a hopeless
situation.

But I was tired of playing this game with
her.

I was tired of measuring myself to Diego,
when I knew I was a better man than him. Without a doubt.

And not only that, but I was a real man.

The majority of her obsessive connection to
Diego was based in memory and their past. Well, she’d only just
joined up with him again and now she could see for herself that he
hadn’t changed in all these years.

He was the same druglord turned warlord.

The same heartless dictator that ruled the
Mexican territories with as much fear and oppression as Matthias
Allen controlled the Colony.

She should know better by now, but she
didn’t.

And I had let her get away with it
before.

But no more.

We were done with this game. She needed a
wakeup call and a reality check and a reminder that she was in
charge of her future… of her destiny. She was the only person that
could tell her what to do.

Mertz started the truck and gunned the gas.
For a moment I could do nothing but lean back as we propelled down
the empty highway.

But I kept my eyes on her. I stared at her
until she squirmed and shifted uncomfortably. Finally, she looked
at me.

She couldn’t help it.

She was as drawn to me as I was to her.

“I see you,” I told her.

Her brows drew down over her cute nose.
“What?”

“I see you,” I repeated. “You try to hide
your substance. You try to stay out of sight, away from where
people will think you’re worth something… that you mean something.
But you can’t hide that from me. I see you. I have always seen
you.”

Mertz cleared his throat and fidgeted in the
driver’s seat. I realized this was super awkward for him, but it
didn’t matter because I’d said what I wanted to say.

Adela didn’t say anything.

Five minutes into the trip back, we ran into
more Colony patrols. There were three vehicles headed in the
opposite direction from us.

We saw them far enough off that Mertz swung a
U-turn and sped off in the opposite direction.

But the thing about the end of the world was
that there just wasn’t enough traffic to conceal us. So a big white
truck doing a U-turn in the middle of the highway was obviously
suspicious.

Mertz gunned the gas and sped on. I turned in
my seat with my arms across the back of Adela and watched as the
other vehicles picked up speed in pursuit.

If I were the Colony I would have been
searching for us anyway and we were just the unlucky bastards that
happened to run into them.

Twice.

We had a pretty good head start, but Mertz
pushed our lead to the limits. He sped through old, abandoned towns
and took corners like a pro.

But the bastards kept up with us.

Every time I thought we’d lost them, they’d
reappear in the rearview mirror racing after us like demons from
hell.

“How are we going to get rid of them?” I
shouted over the roaring engine.

Mertz checked the gages and the review and
then shrugged. “I don’t think we are. We’re going to run out of gas
first.”

I sputtered a breath. “Do you know where we
are?”

“Sorta.”

“Sorta,” I mumbled.

“But like I said, it doesn’t matter because
once we run out of gas, that’s it. It won’t matter where we
are.”

“Mertz, I’m counting on…you need to get my
family somewhere safe.”

His glare did not move from the road. “I’m
trying. Can’t you see that I’m trying?”

“Well stop trying,” I barked. “And do
it.”

He huffed a breath, but didn’t say another
word. His foot slammed on the gas harder and the engine revved with
new life.

We drove through another town. The sign read,
Welcome to Marietta.

Marietta had been a cute little town once
upon a time. Now houses were empty with black holes where windows
should be. The main drag of town was a ghost town. There was
nothing left for even the Feeders to pick on.

Mertz knew the area better than all the other
ones. He anticipated the turns and drove the backroads like a
racecar driver.

The truck sped in and out of neighborhoods
until Mertz found the house he had apparently been looking for.

The garage was open and Mertz sped straight
inside. Someone from the back jumped up and yanked the garage door
down with the pull string.

All light disappeared and as soon as Mertz
shut the truck off, we were submerged in dark silence. Glancing
back, I saw that light did sneak through the garage in places where
bullet holes had penetrated. My eyes adjusted more and I could make
out an old riding lawnmower tucked away in the corner and a wall
filled with hooks where shovels and rakes and whatever other kind
of tools could be hung.

It was empty now.

Shovels and rakes made excellent weapons in a
pinch.

“Where are we?” I whispered, afraid to break
the stillness, but unable to hold back my curiosity.

“My house.” Mertz shifted in his seat. “Well,
my old one.”

“This is yours?” Adela gasped.

I pictured the faded yellow paint. The small
ranch style with vines all but covering the front porch. This yard
that was practically dirt.

This house had been a home once.

“You’ve used this place before?” Fear made me
angry. If he’d driven us to a place the Colony knew about so they
could find us I would murder this man.

“Shh,” he whispered.

The growl of trucks could be heard a ways
away. Gunshots rang through the town. I wrapped my arm around Adela
and caged her against my body.

I would fight them if they found us.

I would kill every last one of them.

But they didn’t turn down this street. They
sped through town, assuming we had stayed on the highway because we
had through so many other towns.

We sat there for a long time. It was
impossible to keep track of time, trapped in the darkness like
that, but I imagined hours went by.

Nobody spoke. The truck barely fit the tiny,
one-car garage. At first the engine made some tinkling sounds but
eventually quieted. For that whole time the only thing that could
be heard was Page’s soft whimpers and everyone else’s tensed
breathing.

“They don’t realize we have to go back,”
Mertz murmured after a long while. “They think we kept heading
north.”

My voice stayed low, but I’d been working up
to some pretty good paranoia over the last couple hours. “Your
house is a pretty convenient hiding spot, Mertz.”

I couldn’t make out his features in the
darkness, but he turned to face me and I felt his irritation.
“Yeah, well how do you think I got hooked up with Luke to begin
with? I was part of Allentown for too long. When I left, I came
here. I didn’t know about Luke or that he existed. I just had to
get the hell out of that town. This was the only other place in the
world I could think to go. On the way, I ran into some of Luke’s
men and assumed they were Colony. When I told them to just go ahead
and kill me, we figured some things out. We’ve been using this
house ever since. But we’ve never been caught here and we will
never be caught here. This was a forgotten neighborhood long before
the infection happened.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Anyway,
we have a network of these from Texas to North Dakota. You’ve got
to know where you’re going in this place or you’ll run straight
into the Colony. Remember that.”

Sufficiently pacified, I stared ahead again
until my sister’s whimpers made my chest hurt and my blood ignite
with fire.

I couldn’t get comfortable either. Not that I
was used to being comfortable. But my body grew restless and
fidgety. I had a serious case of the jimmy legs and all I could
think about was getting out of this garage-size coffin and back to
the rest of our family.

They would know what to do with Page. How to
help her.

Tyler had walked her through this once
before.

“We
have to
get her somewhere.” My
words were pulled from a dry throat. I realized that I was starved,
thirsty and in pain everywhere. But I hardly registered my own
suffering over my sister’s.

It did make me think of Adela though. “Are
you okay?”

She turned to look up at me and the top of
her head brushed against my jawline. Both of us jerked from the
contact. “I’m fine,” she whispered. “You?”

“Fine too.”

Her finger glanced over my cheek and I closed
my eyes, praying she couldn’t see how deeply affected I was by her
touch. “You hit your head too many times today.”

I loved her accent. I always had.

It was one of the reasons I sat up and paid
attention to her ten years ago. I remembered thinking that her
voice was the one beautiful thing I wanted to take with me to the
end of my life.

It had been a ludicrous thought at the
time.

But I’d never been able to change my mind.
Her voice. The way she said her words. The way she spit Spanish and
lilted over English. The way she said my name…

It changed me.

Her voice made me want to be a better
man.

Her voice made me want to forget all the
bullshit between us and go back to how we fought today: side by
side, back to back, her protecting me and me protecting her for the
rest of our lives.

Forever.

Forget Zombies and the Colony and Diego and
just be us.

“I’m fine,” I repeated. “I’m more worried
about getting Page home and you somewhere safe.”

She nodded and mumbled something in Spanish.
Something like, “There’s no such thing.”

Miller’s voice boomed through the garage.
“Enough of this shit. Get us to my sister.”

Mertz jumped and spun around. “We have to be
smart about this. I don’t have another secret hiding place if we
run into trouble again.”

Miller’s voice dropped low and dangerous, “If
we run into trouble again, I’ll rip their heads off with my bare
hands. Do not doubt me on that.”

Mertz looked to me and even in the lack of
light I could see his exasperation.

A smile lifted the corners of my mouth. “I
don’t doubt him, Mertz. Do you?”

Mertz made a sound in the back of his throat
and lifted his gaze to the rearview mirror. “Luke?”

“Yeah,” Luke replied seeping with exhaustion.
“It’s time to go.”

Someone jumped over the truck bed and yanked
on the pull rope. The garage slid upwards and warm sunlight flooded
the space.

Mertz turned the truck on while we blinked
through the brightness until our eyes adjusted.

He drove a different way back than the way
we’d come. But it was as uneventful as a drive could get.