Page 16 of Outbreak (Revolution X #1)

CHAPTER 15

Rue

T he scream leaves my throat without my permission. My asshole has officially sucked a lemon in this seat watching my masked kidnapper inspect the roadkill. And I’ve officially lost my fucking mind.

I pinch my exposed thigh through my ripped leggings, squeezing my eyes shut tightly, as if it might wake me up from this nightmare.

This can’t be real.

When the pain prickles and stars burst behind my eyelids, I release a slow, steady breath. Whatever this is, is really happening. I don’t even know where to begin processing this, so I do what any normal human would do in this situation, I shove the fucked-up confusing mess to the back of my mind and lean back over the seat to see where Ghost is. That thing grabbed him, and I saw him go down. I didn’t mean to scream, but it startled me. Is he dead? What the fuck am I supposed to do now? I’m cuffed on the wrong side of the fucking truck to make a break for it. And I’m definitely not sticking around with whatever the fuck that was if he’s dead.

I find myself sick to my stomach at the thought of leaving him on the side of the road. What the fuck is wrong with me? He is literally holding me against my will, but I want him to be okay. I’m praying that his head pops up any second now and I don’t have to figure this shit out on my own.

I need him to be okay.

I’m just as startled by that internal confession as I am about the not really dead, dead guy we hit. I don’t think I even want to process that shit right now. Before we hit that thing, I was taunting him in hopes he would do something. I needed him to take it from me because I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of getting what he really wants—me begging for him. But I had sat in that seat for several hours fighting with myself for how fucking turned on he made me. I wanted to stick my hand between my thighs and give myself an orgasm right there in front of him. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was the chickenshit I was accusing him of being.

“Where are you?” I whisper to myself, scanning the area near the body. I can just see the man, his skull now caved in and the pipe discarded next to him.

A startled scream climbs up my throat with my heart when the door I’m leaning against suddenly opens, and I nearly topple out of the truck.

“I’ve got you,” he says, pushing me back into the truck and helping me turn to him. He uncuffs me from the dash but leaves the cuff dangling on my arm as he pulls me out of the truck and sits me down on the ground. His voice is dazed when he speaks again. “You need to see this to believe it.”

Anxiety swirls in my stomach, and I can feel the death already in the air around us. “I don’t think I want to.”

He tilts my chin up to look at him. “Yes, you do. I can’t even begin to understand what the fuck is happening and this is the second one I’ve killed. It’s got to be the virus. It… changes you. It looks like it kills you, but your body comes back. I need you to understand what we’re dealing with.”

“Okay,” I whisper, finding myself much more compliant to him when he actually talks to me and explains things. I hate when he gives me clipped, half-responses, or cryptic answers that I don’t understand.

He interlaces our fingers and pulls me behind him to the back of the truck. “We don’t know how the virus is transmitted, so don’t get close.”

I can’t believe my eyes. I can barely hear what he’s saying over the rushing in my ears. The man was very clearly dead before we hit him. But he wasn’t? He was walking in the middle of the road like a... zombie?

Then it hits me in the face. “Oh, my God. The smell.”

“Death,” he states, and something about the way he says it has my spine snapping straight and goosebumps erupting all over.

Death.

Something nudges at the corners of my mind—a memory—but it slips away as quickly as it came. I don’t have time to chase it down. I’ve got a very real, very dead problem to figure out.

“So the virus, it’s killing people and turning them into… what? Zombies? That’s insane,” I ask, shoving the weird feeling back down with all of the other things I can’t deal with right now.

“It is insane. But if you have a better explanation, I’m all ears,” he says, leaning down and picking up the pipe, poking at the man, and rolling him onto his back. He’s already decomposing—his skin is a paper-thin grayish-green.

“I–uh. I have no fucking idea,” I admit. “Do we just leave him here? Can’t we at least move him to the ditch? It’s not that far. Just so no one else hits him. He might be a dead guy, but I’m sure he was someone before this. It feels wrong to just leave him here.”

He looks like he wants to do anything but touch him, and I think I’m going to have to figure out how to do this myself when he finally agrees. “Fine. But you don’t touch him.”

He uses the pipe that’s already coated in the dead guy's decaying flesh to roll the body over to the ditch and lets him roll the rest of the way down the small hill.

“There. Is that better?” He asks, cleaning the pipe off on the grass. He walks to the truck and lays the pipe in the back. “Let’s go.”

Putting as much distance between me and the dead guy sounds like a really good plan. Even though I have no idea where we are going or what he wants with me, he’s made it abundantly clear that my safety is a priority. So, kidnapped by a protective psycho might not actually be the worst place to be when the world tells you to ‘fuck off.’