Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology) (139 page)

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.

We had some of Trent’s alcohol left
over and decided getting drunk again was a good plan. After we had
all consumed enough liquor to be slap happy, we passed out. I
remember thinking, “I hope we wake up if someone or something comes
inside.” I didn’t fall asleep in Cage’s lap this time, but he
wasn’t too far away from me.

Chapter 17

A Significant Loss

Something pulled me out of my sleep.
I rubbed my eyes to try and adjust to where we were. I realized I
had moved my head into Cage’s lap at some point in the night. I sat
up quickly and looked around. There were people
everywhere.

“
Cage, wake
up!”

There shouldn’t have been anyone in
the barn. There were dozens of them. Some of them were covered in
blood. Some of them were missing limbs.

“
Trent!” I screamed for
him, seeing a hoard of zombies crouched over something in the
corner. Please no, please, not Trent. I was sure now that the sound
that had pulled me from my slumber was Trent screaming. A blast
sounded out from the direction of the hoard, blowing one of the
zombie’s heads off. I cringed as the brain matter and blood flew
all over me. I grabbed the pitch fork from the wall and ran at the
closest walker, jabbing it as hard as I could, through the neck. As
I tried to pull it back out, I successfully pulled my opponent down
on top off me and had to use all my strength to push him off.
Screaming at the top of my lungs, I stood up, putting my foot into
the zombies’ chest to pull the pitch fork out. Blood and pieces of
skin were dripping from the tines, as I swung it around to connect
with another zombie’s head.

“
Dad!” Cage was up and
across the barn, pushing at the hoard.

I fought back the bile rising in my
throat, as I saw an arm lying to the side. The number of people
that were around what used to be Trent was enough to devour him,
completely. They were trying and he was putting up a fight.
Thankfully, the arm on the ground was one of theirs and not his. He
was able to successfully cock the gun and take a few of them out.
Trent wasn’t going down without a fight.

Even though Cage threw off as many as
he could, the situation was becoming hopeless. Where had they all
come from? I wished we wouldn’t have gotten drunk so we would have
been aware that we were being surrounded. Perhaps then we could
have gotten in the truck and mowed them all down.

To make matters worse, Rose was fully
awake now and thrashing about, trying to break free of her chains.
She looked the same except her skin was gray and her eyes were
hungry. Well, really, she didn’t look the same; she looked crazy,
screaming and throwing herself into the sides of the truck. The
chains cut into her arms, through her shirt, and blood was soaking
through. Cage’s sobs were full of despair and I cried right along
with him.

Then the situation took a turn for
the worse. There was a man near the bottom of where Trent’s leg
would have been. Trent was still fighting with one leg, and a
completely messed up face. The man turned to look at Cage. His
mouth was covered in blood, and he had a huge gash across his face.
He was missing one eye. Where the pupil and iris should have been,
there was just a blood red mess. He was also missing half of his
hair. The remaining hair looked charred, like it had been burnt.
This strange man turned and bit Cage. Trent was overpowered, at
this time, and I heard him cry out as a skinny blond woman latched
onto his ear, pulling it off and chewing disgustingly. Another
woman attacked his stomach, clawing at him and tearing his skin. I
couldn’t see him anymore, and they were turning on me and
Cage.

Cage screamed in pain and shock. They
were not supposed to bite us. We were infected. The man didn’t let
go and Cage struggled against him until I found a shovel to hit him
with. When I struck him in the back of the head, he let go. Cage
and I scrambled to get into the truck. I was praying Trent turned
off the radio before he passed out or the battery would be
dead.

Cage cranked up the truck and we
drove through the closed doors. Rose was still standing in the back
but she was chained pretty well so I figured she would be all
right.

The tears rolled down Cage’s cheeks,
but we had bigger problems. Why were they biting us? It had to be
because we were not completely infected yet. We had to get out of
there. He was driving angry, but I was scared to say anything to
him.

“
What the hell happened?
Why didn’t I wake up? Why didn’t you wake up? Oh God. Cassie, why
did this have to happen to Dad?”

“
I don’t know how they got
the jump on us. I don’t know how they could have taken your dad off
guard.”

The thought crossed my mind that
Trent may have wanted them just to bite him. Maybe he thought he
would be like us. I didn’t voice this out loud, because it was too
hard to think that he let this happen to himself. I was sad that we
had lost the only man that was capable of finding the cure. His
determination had been what kept us all going. My heart ached for
Cage, but I had nothing to offer him in the way of comfort. We were
doomed and prolonging the inevitable was all we had to live
for.

“
Would you like me to
drive?” I was concerned with where his state of mind
was.

“
No!” he yelled at
me.

I sank down in my seat and remained
silent. This was turning into a bigger nightmare then it had been.
What were we going to do?

After hours of silence, Cage finally
decided he wanted to talk to me. Rose had been screaming in the
truck bed for the first couple of hours, but she was now sitting
down. I didn’t know if she had grown tired, or if she was plotting.
I hoped she was just tired.

“
He might not have made
it, anyway.” I was thankful we had returned to a normal speed and
he wasn’t gripping the steering wheel as tightly. “When we were
getting out of town, there were people the infection just killed.
They didn’t become zombified; they were just dead.”

“
Really, I didn’t know
that.” I was curious what it was about our DNA that allowed us to
live with the virus.

“
The news said it was not
showing any pattern. The old and the young were dying from being
bitten. There was no way to tell who would come back in the
beginning. They showed a morgue that had been torn apart by the
bodies that had come back to life. Some bodies were lying there
that never did.”

He shuddered as he remembered the
story. He looked over at me. “Dad could have died, anyway, but not
like that. Torn apart and chewed on by those monsters! Cassie, we
are going to be like them!”

I didn’t have any answers. I reached
over and took his hand off the steering wheel. I laced our fingers
together and held onto it. We rode like that for a while when we
came to a roadblock. There were police in the road with full body
armor on. I could see that they had hand-held scanners like the one
that had identified us at the first safety camp. This was not going
to be good.

Cage looked over at me, and then at
Rose in the back. She must have smelled the police officers because
she was raising immortal hell. She was pulling at her chains so
hard they were biting into her neck and blood was beginning to seep
out from beneath them.

"We won't be able to make it through
them. They'll know."

I was starting to panic. What if this
was the end of the road, literally?

"Do you trust me?"

Cage's question took me off guard. I
didn't know what he was planning to do. "I trust you," I replied,
then braced myself for what was going to happen. I jerked my
seatbelt on.

Cage grinned at me as he gunned the
truck towards the officers. As he neared them, they raised their
guns, prepared to shoot. At the last minute, he jerked the wheel to
the left and drove to the far side of the block. They were shooting
at us now, and three officers were running after us. I caught a
glimpse of Rose in the rearview mirror, sliding around in her
chains. Her good arm had come free from the chains and was flailing
about.

He was around the side
of the block now and the police officers were running back to their
cars. The chase was on. I was terrified, and exhilarated. If we
went out like this, at least we were fighting back.

Chapter 18

Where are We Going?

We were flying around the other side
of the roadblock now, with the police hot on our trail. There was
one man hanging out the window with a gun. Rose was probably going
to get hit, but she was already dead so I couldn’t worry about
that.