Reawakening (28 page)

And of course, there was the way he carried on talking in this ever so slightly hollow voice. She thought the hollowness might have been him aiming for light and reassuring, but if so he was missing it by a long, grave mile.

“Did you leave Blake in the house?” he asked, though he might as well have said
how much danger is Blake in?
Because the two amounted to the same thing and besides, she didn’t think he’d walk past her to the gun rack if Blake being in the house meant nothing.

It meant so much that for a moment she couldn’t think—they’d gone for a run, then had some breakfast, then she’d felt a mild tide of panic over where Jamie was and decided to go looking for him.

So Blake was…Blake was…

“Yeah. He’s in the house—or he was, last time I checked.”

He glanced at her then, full on, and it was almost a relief to see a hint of incredulity in his expression—not because it wasn’t happening, because it totally and absolutely was. It was just good to see something familiar on his face, something that she felt too. That note of—
a minute ago we were making out. Is this really happening?

It had caught her off guard again. Stuff like this—it always did.

“Okay, it’s definitely nothing so why don’t you just stay here for a—”

She cut him off before he could finish. Mainly because she could see something else on his face, plainly. It said—
I’m pushing my luck here, and I know it.

“Are you fucking joking? Say you’re joking.”

He grimaced and kicked the rack in front of him, which was something of a shock. Like he’d really believed she might stay, and let him go die up there? He was even crazier than he claimed to be if he thought that had ever been an option.

“Fine. Fine. That siren we’re hearing—it’s for the east edge of the island, near the lake. So we’ve got time, though we’re losing it by the second right now. Take this—put it wherever you would have done out there. No holsters.”

She flushed at that, but took the gun he offered. And added something, before he could give any further military style commands.

“You put a silencer on that, Jamie.”

He’d slapped a magazine into the weapon he’d picked, and she could see he was going to end it at that. He’d already picked up something else to pack full of bullets—something that would be even noisier than the handgun. She wanted him to have at least one thing that would keep him stealthy, even if safety like that was just an illusion.

“There’s no—”

“You put a fucking silencer on that thing right now, or I’ll shoot out your fucking kneecaps.”

His eyebrows went up but he didn’t fight her on it. Though she suspected he didn’t really believe her. Hell—he probably had no idea that she was thinking of shooting out something on him anyway, then locking him in the storeroom. Maybe, like, his right foot or something. Would a bullet wound in the foot stop someone from running off into danger?

Probably, if it had been Blake. But she felt pretty sure Jamie would run on an injury minor enough that any of them could deal with it, later.

“Just follow me, okay. Don’t go off anywhere, not even if you see Blake. Follow me—just do that much, okay?”

His voice sounded frustrated and almost painfully desperate, but that wasn’t what she found herself concentrating on. As she followed him up the stairs, her mind rattled around a hundred different stupid things, like how glad she was that she didn’t have to do this right after an orgasm. Then it focused, abstractly, on every noise a siren or alarm could make—did the West side one sound like an out of control party favor? Did the one that signaled they’d made it as far as the tree line hum and buzz until it got right inside your head?

Because this one was getting right inside her head just fine. It made her want to ask him, stupidly, to turn it off—maybe using a remote control he probably didn’t have—but even as she was thinking it, she understood the reason why.

If the alarm was going, she couldn’t hear them coming. That was the real issue. And oh man, it made getting to the top of the stairs hard. She almost didn’t want to move through that rectangle of sunlight to the island beyond, because they always waited in the places you least wanted them to be.

They’d be around the corner, just past the open door. Or hiding behind the first tree they got to, before she really started motoring. Motoring was good for pushing down the panicked flashes that kept popping up behind her eyes. It helped her to pump her arms and breathe in that measured, even sort of way, and she found she could keep it up even after realizing how much faster Jamie was than her.

Of course, she wasn’t surprised to discover he was. He had that wiriness, and unlike Blake he didn’t seem afraid of getting a tree branch in the face. He just breezed right on past it all, hopping over obstacles when they emerged, gun still drawn the whole while.

She was willing to bet that gun didn’t have its safety on. But then, Jamie wasn’t the sort to accidentally blow a hole in himself or anyone else—no matter what he’d told her. She knew he wasn’t. He ran as steady and straight as anything, while she faltered and fumbled and suddenly couldn’t remember how she’d ever lived like this.

Lord, it was so exhausting and panic filled. After a minute or two of solid sprinting, she could hardly see him anymore—and that was worse. He was just going to barrel right into a whole mess of them head first, and she knew why. To stop
her
from barreling into a whole mess of them head first.

God, he was an ass. He was such an ass that she couldn’t even think of him as an ass, because he was clearly trying to be cool about wanting to protect her and not be all chauvinistic about it, while actually protecting her in a way that made her want to kill him.

As she launched herself over a rotten tree and went for broke—like the fucking T-1000 from Terminator—she cursed herself for not shooting him in the foot. At the very least it would have slowed him down, and she wouldn’t have had to deal with vivid flashes of them grabbing him before she got there. Flashes of her wrestling one of them off him, only to find it was too late, too late, fuck it was always too late.

They just had to drool into your mouth and you were gone.

“Jamie, wait!” she shouted, but that only brought back memories of the staircase. She wondered how many of them he’d hit, when he’d stopped and fired into the stairwell. At the time she hadn’t known that was what he’d done, but it was obvious now. He’d used his last bullets to keep her alive then gone for the only thing that would save her once he got to the top.

He’d have died starting up that chopper. She knew he would have done. He’d have spent his last breath telling her how to fly the fucking thing.

Then suddenly, she couldn’t stand it. Not even a little bit, not on any level. Her thigh muscles were screaming, but she pushed them harder. She thought of him on the ground, mouth filled with blood, and made her breath grate in and out of her, in and out. The siren fed her like a heart outside of herself, and she let it make her strong. She ran and ran and ran and oh God, when she broke from the tree line and the lake came into view, for a second…for a second she was sure it was him on the ground.

Was sure it was Blake, who’d carried her up the stairs.

And though she wanted to go to whoever it was—to fight like she’d always done, or be strong in the way the siren suggested she could be—she found herself almost going under anyway. It had been a mistake to push her thigh muscles so hard. Now they didn’t want to hold her up.

Until the world slowly drew into focus, and the dimming daylight revealed the true picture of what had happened. Or at least, the truest picture she was going to get. There were no zombies—none that she could see on the attack, anyway—and Jamie was shouting at Blake.

Which meant…she didn’t know what it meant. They were both alive, and that was enough for now. It was enough to keep her on her feet and not have her die of grief right there on the mulch-y ground.

Only then she had to make sense of what they were saying. And what the person laid between them meant.

She tried to breathe normally. Tried to stop herself glancing around wildly, as though at any second a feral cannibal was going to jump out of the lake or the forest. They were shouting, and Jamie was saying—

“Has she turned already? Blake, Blake, look at me—how did she get here? Did she swim?”

But Blake couldn’t answer properly. He looked ashen and when she saw the blood on his hands her stomach lurched. Why was Jamie asking if some mysterious “she” had turned, when Blake could have gotten infected? She couldn’t tell if that was why he was deathly pale or not, she just couldn’t tell.

However, she was able to tell a lot of things when Jamie suddenly knelt in the dirt by this person. She could tell that it set off a giant louder-than-the-siren sound in her head that said NO FUCKING WAY.

“Jamie
stop,
” she said, and, by God, her voice came out like stone. Hard and immoveable.

Both of them looked at her immediately. They even watched her approach the person on the ground—though Jamie’s gaze had lost a little of its tight focus. He looked desperate, suddenly. Harried.

Not unlike the woman on the ground, who was slowly choking to death on her own blood.

Her first thought was that Blake had shot this struggling stranger. There was a gun on the ground beside her, after all. And she was clutching someplace on her side, as though to keep her guts in—though guts weren’t really the issue. Whatever had happened, it had punctured her lungs. That was why she couldn’t breathe, and it was what would eventually kill her.

The whole scene made her heart sink. Not for the woman, but for Blake—though thinking about it in those terms made her wince. How callous to only think of him! He’d shot a human thinking it was a zombie, and all she could consider was how badly it had hurt him.

Because she
was
human. June could tell, even with her like this—flailing and gasping and rutting up the earth with her flat little sensible shoes. Her eyes were just too bright and full of color to mean anything but, and she stared up at them all with real feelings in them.
Please help me
, those eyes said, but there was nothing to be done. Nothing at all.

Though Jamie was trying. He had a handful of material—it took her a moment to realize he’d torn off one of his sleeves—and pushed it into that wet, red place on the woman’s side. He was getting his own hands sticky with blood, too, but she couldn’t tell him to stop anymore. If it was just a bullet wound, there was no danger of infection. There was no danger of anything, except extreme damage to Blake’s soul and another failure to save for Jamie.

It made her want to say things to them both, lots of things—though in the end she could only manage—

“It’s okay. It was just an accident.”

Only then he flicked his gaze back up to her, suddenly confused. Like he couldn’t fathom what she was saying and needed to take in her expression to fully grasp it. Not that she could understand why until he said something that made every inch of her body prickle.

“I didn’t shoot her. Is that what you think?” Blake paused long enough to look back at Jamie, who’d started pounding on her probably half-dead chest. He looked beside himself, and she didn’t know what to make of that anymore than she knew what to make of what Blake was saying. “She was like this when I got here—I think it’s a stab wound. Or maybe…I don’t know maybe a bite.”

She thought of rings of teeth in someone’s flesh, like bracelets. They could really bite when they had a mind to it, or maybe dig their nails in until they punctured something vital. She’d seen it happen a thousand times and yet here she was just standing there while Jamie went to breathe into her blood covered mouth…

She shoved him hard enough to knock the wind out of her, never mind him. And it took some doing, because he didn’t want to go. Not at all. He actually fought her for a second, hands too covered in blood, t-shirt too covered in blood, all ready to get some kind of kiss of death from the probable half-zombie thing on the ground.

Even worse, he looked completely pissed when she finally managed to get him off the woman. As though she’d done something stupid in pushing him off, as though he couldn’t register when he was in danger. She watched him sprawl back in the mud, teeth bared, and for the first time actually found herself using the words and meaning them—

“Are you fucking crazy?”

Luckily, Blake echoed the sentiment. He got hold of Jamie before he could go back in for a second try. A fucking second try! Hadn’t he heard what Blake had said? Did he really think it was a good idea to give mouth to mouth to a woman who’d probably had zombies digging in her guts ten minutes earlier?

“She’s not turned, okay, she’s not gone!” he tried, but she stopped him before he could get at her again. It wasn’t as hard as she suspected it was going to be when he lunged at her, but even so. Even so, she could feel him trying to fight her.

“Sometimes it takes longer, Jamie—fuck. You know that, what’s the matter with you?”

It wasn’t strictly true—she’d never seen someone take the length of a lake to turn—but really, who knew for sure? There was no manual on this, no medical textbook. If she’d managed to swim across the water, then maybe the wound had started out as a graze and gotten worse. Maybe she’d dug her own nails in as she felt it festering, maybe maybe maybe…didn’t he understand how powerful and awful that word was?