Authors: Rachel Higginson
Wow. I really hoped that guy wasn’t a Zombie.
“I resent that,” the dark-haired girl announced. “And
I want to know what kind of place you guys are from where you don’t deal with
Feeders every day.”
“Feeders?”
“Zombies.
The
undead.
Those cannibals beneath us that want to feed on your delicious
faces.”
Ah.
Feeders.
It made perfect
sense now.
The guy moved out of the shadows and into some
stretching sunlight. He was ridiculously tall and definitely not hard on the
eyes.
Wow. Was this her Angel? Not bad, Buffy, not bad.
“Can you put the gun down? It can’t kill us anyway,”
Eden sighed.
“Hey! Speak for yourself!”
She couldn’t be killed by a bullet? What? How was that
fair?
Kiran
cleared his throat.
“We’re friends,” he said calmly. “We’re not going to hurt you.”
The two newcomers shared a look. “That’s a lovely
sentiment, but we have this thing about not trusting strangers.”
“It’s a relatively new thing,” the guy grunted at us.
The girl shot him a look but didn’t add an
explanation. “Who are you?” She dragged her words out as slowly as possible;
they grated through the air with a husky, fierce tone to them.
I envied her spunk. She was clearly a bad ass. The
casualness with which she held her weapon, her scuffed up boots and the hard
look in her eyes testified to some serious tenacity. Not to mention she fought
these hideous creatures on a daily basis.
Eden, too, was like this hardened, female warrior. She
didn’t show any fear or panic. The entire time I’d known her, she’d tackled
each problem as it came and kept an upbeat, hopeful attitude.
These were the kind of women that sneered at death and
threw caution to the wind.
I wanted to throw caution to the wind! I wanted to
sneer!
And maybe I still would. The rest of my story wasn’t
written yet. I still had time to grow into
Xena
, Warrior Princess
. I just needed a little bit more time.
“I’m Ivy,” I volunteered. “I came with Ryder.”
“And I’m
Kiran
. This is my
wife Eden.”
“Let me get this straight,” the girl went on. “Like
this town?
Or this state?”
“We’ve got a base,” Eden explained immediately. “It’s
secured enough that we don’t have to fight through Zombies to kill our next
meal or anything like that.”
The girl seemed to consider that closely before
turning to me. “And you? Where are you from?”
I looked out at the ocean and decided how to answer
her. “I’ve…
we’ve
been away for a
while. We had no idea this happened.”
“So how did you get here? If you walked or drove, you
would have seen Feeders everywhere you went.”
The ocean beat against the shore and blended with the
silhouetted sun on the horizon. I tugged at the hem to my stiff shirt, ruined
by salt water. My skin felt tight and gritty, and my hair was a wet mop on top
of my head. “We swam here.”
The girl looked like she wanted more from me, but,
really, that was the best explanation I could give her.
“Well, wherever you’re from, welcome to the
Apocalypse,” the guy said.
“Do we get to know your names?” Eden asked sweetly.
They shared another look. This one was full of pursed
lips and scowling eyes.
“Depends.”
The girl shrugged.
“Do you happen to run an alternate government that’s intent on taking over
North America?”
I snorted. She couldn’t be serious.
An
alternate government?
Those didn’t exist.
“Does it count if we’re King and Queen of a small
kingdom?”
All of us gaped at Eden. “You’re not serious,” I whispered.
“Completely,”
Kiran
promised. “But don’t
worry,
we’re not interested in
any new recruits. We’ve got enough problems of our own.”
“King and Queen?” the girl laughed. “That is maybe the
weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Eden smiled. “Not any weirder than Zombies.”
The girl smiled too.
“Truth.
Alright, fine. You can have our names. I’m Reagan. This is Hendrix.”
“Let me guess,” I mumbled. “Your super powers include
killing Zombies and not dying?”
Reagan took an aggressive step forward. “We don’t have
super powers, little girl. We have to not die the hard way.
By
actually not dying.”
I felt some indignation on her behalf. “Wait. You
don’t have super powers? You have to live with Zombies on a daily basis and
fight them with your bare hands?”
Reagan threw her arm my direction. “She gets it.”
“That sucks. Whoever thought that was a good idea is a
cruel, sadistic person.”
“I’ve often thought that myself,” Hendrix muttered.
“The only thing that could make this worse for you two
is a love triangle!” I laughed at my own joke, but Reagan and Hendrix didn’t
seem to think it was funny.
At all.
Oops.
I cleared my throat to fill in some of the awkward
silence. “Well, I don’t have superpowers either. I’m more of a creator of
problems, than a problem solver.”
“That’s too bad,” Hendrix lamented. “We seem to have a
major problem on our hands.” He peeked over the edge of the building but
quickly drew back.
“
Er
, that’s my fault too.”
Hendrix and Reagan returned their attention to me.
Together they walked over and with guns drawn made a slow circle around my
body.
“Are you hurt?” Reagan asked in a low voice.
“Bitten?” Hendrix pressed.
I shook my head.
“Nope.
Just your average, every day, Siren problems.”
“Siren?”
Reagan sounded
beyond confused.
“As in Greek.”
Eden jumped in to add, “Ivy brings all the boys to the
yard apparently.”
“For real?”
Reagan sounded
truly shocked.
“For real,” I promised.
“All the boys?”
“All the boys.
Even the Zombie ones.
I attract
them,
pull them in with my
Siren
call.”
“That explains a lot,” she mumbled. She circled her
finger around the rooftop. “What about these boys?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Uh,
Kiran
and Ryder are immune. I wouldn’t know about… Hendrix.”
Reagan spun around on her heel and raised her
eyebrows. “Notice anything?”
“She’s pretty.” He lifted one shoulder with a casual
shrug. “But I’m not drawn to her or anything.”
Reagan was quick to reassure him, “It’s okay if you
are. I mean, I won’t care.”
Hendrix’s expression darkened and his eyebrows slammed
together over hard eyes. “I know
it’s
okay, Reagan.”
She backed up a step. “I didn’t mean… I was just
saying. I didn’t want you to feel weird about it.”
“Don’t worry. I don’t.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“Good,” Ryder echoed. “Should we keep talking about
Ivy’s powers as if they aren’t a real issue here, or should we deal with the
real problem at hand? Like the Zombies that are trying to eat us.”
As if to accentuate his point, a first-floor window
shattered beneath us. We all flew to the ledge just in time to watch Zombies
fight and claw to dive through the opening.
“I’m all for making new friends,” Eden told us. “But
let’s continue this conversation on a different rooftop.”
“Sounds good to me,” Reagan agreed. “I suppose you’re
offering up your mojo to get us there?”
Eden grinned. “My mojo is at your disposal.”
Chapter Three
Reagan
She wasn’t kidding.
By the time my feet touched the roof of the next
building over, I was inwardly freaking out.
This feeling wasn’t entirely foreign. The first time I
watched the news with my parents where Zombies headlined the
show,
I remembered feeling this struggle inside my mind to accept this new reality.
I had an idea of what was real and true and based in
my physical world. Then Zombies happened and it seemed like my entire existence
shifted into the crazed, horror-fiction genre. And now it was happening again.
Eden explained that she was an Immortal Queen, a
witch, to be exact. She had real Magic that lifted me from building to building
and made her live forever.
That didn’t fit in nicely with my constant reality of
death and gore.
And Ivy?
The
Siren?
That was even weirder.
She hadn’t been very specific about where she came
from. At least Eden knew Zombies existed. Ivy seemed completely ignorant to the
new world order.
Lucky girl.
We continued on like that, moving from building to
building via Magic. By the time we ran out of Main Street, we had made it to a
three-story building that sat on the edge of town.
The moon hovered low in the sky. It had switched
places with the sun and bathed the desolate, little town in ethereal light. The
stars were bright out this way. The sky blinked down at us, bragging about the
safety up there.
I felt a twinge of jealousy. Nothing bad ever happened
in the stars. They got to sit it out while we battled the ultimate evil down
here.
“We ran out of road,” Hendrix grunted.
As usual the sound of his voice put me instantly on
edge. Not in a bad way… Just like a hyper-aware kind of way. When Hendrix
spoke, all of my senses tuned in. And without meaning to, I would zone in on
everything and anything he did. I knew exactly where he was, where he would
move to and who he was talking to.
So maybe I did have a superpower after all.
Radioactive Hendrix-senses.
I needed a theme song and a cape.
Actually, no.
I wasn’t that
cool. It was actually pretty pathetic how I couldn’t seem to let him go. He’d
moved on. I’d moved on. Why couldn’t my heart figure that out?
“You alright?” his rumbly voice skittered over my skin
and tickled my spine. A year ago, those feelings would have made me jumpy and
flighty.
Today they made me sick.
They weren’t exciting. They were sad. And they weren’t
mysterious. They were regretful.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do next. We have
weapons, but not enough for everybody.” I turned around and addressed the
group. “We came to town on a supply run. We usually travel with more, but one
of the girls in our group is,
er
, sick.”
Hendrix snorted. “Only you would refer to Haley as
sick.”
I elbowed him in the ribs, but he caught my bicep and
tugged on it teasingly. I stumbled off balance and decided to ignore him.
“Anyway, we don’t have enough ammo to defend all of
us. Besides, there’s no place to go. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“We don’t need weapons,”
Kiran
explained. “We come prepackaged with them.”
“How nice for you,” Hendrix drawled. It was still up
in the air whether we trusted these people or not. We’d learned the hard way
that humans could be just as deadly, if not more so, than the Feeders.
And now I felt sick for another reason.
Kane.
Would I ever get over his death?
Over him?
“There’s a car just over there,” Eden pointed out.
I followed her finger and saw an abandoned sedan half
on the road, half in the ditch. The doors were still open. It was clear someone
had abandoned the vehicle after crashing it into the ditch.
“Maybe.”
It wasn’t like me to
give false hope, but I honestly didn’t know what else to do. “But the chances
of it being gassed up and ready to go are slim to none.”
“No worries!” Eden sounded obnoxiously chipper. “We’re
Magic remember? Gas is not a problem for us.”
“What if the previous owners took the keys?” The guy
named Ryder asked incredulously. “They’re probably buried in one of those
pockets down there.” He gestured at the slavering Feeders beating their
decaying fists against the brick building.
“We don’t need keys either,” Eden grinned.
I cleared my throat and forced my mind to accept her
explanation as truth. It didn’t make sense. Her reality didn’t fit the world I
knew. I didn’t get to
Magically
start cars or float
across buildings. I killed things with my bare hands and learned to run fast
out of necessity.
Some people got all the good stuff.
Wasn’t there someone I could write a letter to and
complain? Maybe I could write a bad review and let them know how I really feel?
People loved to write bad reviews. I could be one of
those people.
“So leave this building? Then what? What’s our game
plan?” Ryder asked. “We’ll still have to fight through a horde of Zombies to
get to the car. And where are we going to go once we’re there?”
“We have a jet,”
Kiran
explained.
A jet?
This time my mind just
flat refused to comprehend that. I hadn’t seen a plane overhead in more than
two years.
Where exactly was their Kingdom located.
“We don’t want to go too far,” Ivy explained meekly.
She had seemed rather reluctant to speak. I didn’t know if she was shy or if
Hendrix intimidated her. She kept shooting him wary looks and watching him when
she didn’t think he was paying attention. “Hermes can technically find us
anywhere, but he didn’t even bother to take us all the way to shore. I’m
thinking if he comes back for us, he isn’t going to want to put much effort
into it.”
“Hermes?” Hendrix asked without any inflection.
“The Greek god?”
“Of course, the philosophy major would know who Hermes
is.”
He shot me a dirty look.
Ivy cleared her throat and said, “Yep.
The Greek god.”
“Okay, this is getting weirder and weirder.” I took a
few deep breaths and worked hard not to panic.
Greek gods?
Witches?
Sirens?
Real, true,
never-going-to-die Immortals?
“This isn’t real, is it?” I asked in a quiet voice.
“I’ve finally lost my mind. I’m crazy now. The Zombies made me crazy.”
“If that’s true, then we went crazy together,” Hendrix
said softly.
I looked up at him and met his deep blue eyes. I
couldn’t make out their color in the darkness, but I knew it anyway. I
memorized it. I could close my eyes and picture it perfectly. I would always
remember it. I would always be able to tell the difference between Hendrix’s
eyes and any other shade of blue.
“At least I’m not alone.” I smiled shakily at him.
“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be crazy with.”
His words were teasing, but it was almost like he didn’t realize what he said
until after he said it. He sucked in a sharp breath and looked away, breaking
the tunnel vision we’d momentarily found in each other.
BANG!
I jumped back and my heart exploded into a rapid beat.
The Zombie clamor down below had faded into background music while we hung out
in the relative safety of the rooftop. But I should have known better than to
believe anything could be safe at the end of the world.
I ran to the ledge where a mangled Zombie lay flat on
his back. His friends and cohorts jumped on him as if he were the best kind of
feast. His rotting face disappeared underneath the deluge of hungry Feeders.
Sick.
I wondered what had put him flat on his back until I
noticed the bony, raw fingers just inches from my face. I let out a shriek and
jumped back.
Before I could think about it, I pulled my gun, lunged
forward and discharged my weapon.
The Feeder that had managed to climb the entire way to
the top of this building dropped to the ground, another pile of mangled flesh and
bones for the crowd on the ground to munch on.
“Okay, so we head to the car. But how are we going to
get to the ground? It’s still thirty yards off once we’re down below. And there
are no less than a hundred Feeders trying to scale this building.”
Ryder had a good point. I looked to Hendrix for an
answer.
Before he could come up with an
answer, Eden spoke up, “We jump.
Kiran
and I
will get everyone to the ground safely. We can probably land right in front of
the car. It will be easy.”
“That’s not going to work,” Hendrix disagreed.
Eden sounded mildly outraged when she asked, “Why
not?”
“Because this is the Zombie
Apocalypse!
This is the end of the world! Nothing is that simple. And
things never work out like you want them to.”
“They do for me,” Eden argued.
“Not this time, Witch. You’re on our turf. You have to
do things the hard way.”
“I don’t like the hard way,” she grumbled.
“Me either,” Ivy agreed.
I nearly laughed.
“It won’t work because the Feeders will follow us from
below. They’re fast.
Faster than they should be.
If we
jump, we’ll have to land on top of them and we’ll end up leading them right to
our only escape option. We’re going to have to find another way.”
“She’s right, Love. It’s easy to move around them up
here. Not
so on
the ground.”
Eden pressed her lips together and glared at the
mayhem below.
A scraggy hand smacked the smooth cement ledge and
Eden jumped back and let out a surprised squeak. When the Feeder’s head finally
popped up over the side of the building, Eden stopped being scared. She took an
aggressive step forward and thrust out her hand. A shot of something sizzling
and deadly sparked through the air and suddenly the Zombie’s head toppled to
the side and then his body fell back to the ground below.
My mouth dropped open and I stared at the place where
the hand grasped the cool cement. What the hell?
“What the hell?” Hendrix echoed my thoughts.
Eden flashed us a sheepish smile. “That’s, um, I mean,
I’m not… human.”
Kiran
chuckled. We stared at
him until he explained, “That’s the first time she’s ever willingly admitted
that.”
My eyebrows jumped into my hairline. After watching
her “Magic” manifest itself, how could there be any other possible option.
“What else could you be?” I almost whispered.
“Don’t ask,” she mumbled.
I spun around at the clawing, scraping sound behind
me. Sure enough, another Feeder had reached the top. Its long, jagged
fingernails dug into the cement and clutched on for dear life.
Or,
er
, afterlife.
While I pulled
my gun from the back of my pants, one of his claw-like nails popped off and he
nearly dropped. Blackish blood oozed from his tenderized finger, but his other
nails held strong.
My stomach rolled. I’d had enough of this loser. I
aimed carefully and pulled the trigger.
Bang.
And he was gone.
His hands let go of the ledge with the impact and
momentum of the bullet. I heard the upsurge of Zombie spirits when his body hit
the ground and the snarling, spitting sounds of their teeth chewing the dead
Feeder to bits and pieces.
By now the entire edge of the building had Feeders
scrambling over the top of it. Eden and
Kiran
were
hard at work taking one Zombie at a time with their freaky Magic. Ryder had
stepped in front of Ivy, but that wouldn’t save her for long.
All of the Feeders seemed intent on getting to her.
I heard Hendrix’s feet move next to mine and saw the
glint of metal from his gun out of the corner of my eye.
Okay. This was happening.
Time to embrace the fight.
“They’re slower this way,” I said to Hendrix. “We can
pick them off like this and clear a path to the car.”
“They keep coming, Reagan. I see them in the distance.
It’s like an unlimited supply of them.”
I groaned and got to work.
Their hands reached up first and then their heads
would show. It usually made a nice, easy target. But sometimes I would be in
the middle of shooting one Zombie and another would manage to crawl over the
edge.
There were a few close calls. We kept our backs to Ivy
and Ryder so we could shoot everything coming at them.
The Zombies were just too freaking fast. They didn’t
try to dodge bullets, but most of the time it was hard to keep up with them.
I sucked in a breath just as one of them threw his
body over the ledge onto his stomach and slithered like a snake on speed toward
Ivy’s feet.
I jumped when his hand swiped out at my shins and
pulled the trigger at the same time. After two more shots, I got the fast
sucker in the back of the head. It collapsed on the spot and left a speed bump
in the path of other hungry Feeders.
Hendrix’s hand landed on top of my head with a
forceful thump and he shoved me to a squat. I went willingly but protested with
something crass under my breath.
He shot over my head a few times and then pulled his
hand back. When I stood up again, he was chuckling.
“You could have just told me to duck,” I growled
venomously.
I could hear the arrogant smile in his tone when he
said, “Sure, but what fun would that have been?”
“Oh, are we having fun? I was confused about that.”
“Don’t be. This is always fun.”
“Killing Zombies?
“Fighting side by side.”
Oh.