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She isn’t quite sure what the fuck they plan to do if a herd shows up.

They could take their chances inside one of these little houses dotted along the outskirts, but a strong herd would bulldoze their way through easily enough when most of the windows are already shattered from break-ins.

She scans for higher ground, her ears focused on what sounds like shuffling in the distance, and her mind refusing to accept the inevitable.

“Oh fuck.” Wade’s voice holds the kind of awe she used to have for moments like these, when the raw expansiveness of a giant herd was so overwhelming it stunted the ability to speak more than a few coherent words.

“Run! We need high ground and we need it now. Go!” she yells, because there is no use anymore in trying to keep quiet when hundreds, if not thousands, of rotters are bulldozing their way through the desert like a stampeding herd of buffalo.

“Up the mountain!” he calls out, leading her to the trailhead they’d been aiming for anyway.

The ground trembles as the dead close the distance between them, stumbling over each other but never staying down long. She tries not to look back. It’ll only slow her escape. As they begin to ascend the smaller, easier rocks, it’s impossible not to gaze over her shoulder to judge their fate.

Her gut drops when they get high enough for a better view.

They are going to die out here. There are so many coming from the distant open land where they must have been clustered, that she can’t even spot an endpoint.

They funnel in from all directions, every rotter that she and Wade had somehow avoided since arriving in Sedona suddenly offers a clear answer as to why their meeting was delayed.

They’d been here the whole time, swarming like bees, waiting for someone to kick the nest.

Kara’s never been much of a climber. The first half is easy enough, and for a moment, she thinks they’ll make it. Unbridled hope filters through her despair as they kick up the pace another notch until she spots the dead begin to climb up right behind them.

“What the fuck? You never said they could climb!” Wade yells, grabbing her hand to yank her up a steep cliff’s edge.

“I didn’t know they could! I haven’t seen it before. We were on flat land back home. Not a lot of mountains to scale back there.”

To be fair, the rotters aren’t actually climbing.

They are clumsily assembling themselves into a tower that keeps growing until the ones in the back can easily run over the top.

She isn’t even sure if it’s a real effort or a byproduct of sheer will to catch and eat their targets.

When they reach the steepest part of the hike, it suddenly doesn’t matter much because, with their luck, they might slide right down the cliff face and into snapping teeth.

Wade wasn’t kidding when he said it was nearly vertical.

There’s no time to second-guess or find a long-lost fear of heights with a herd on their heels.

So she follows him up, her legs burning and her fingers scraping against the rocks.

Her heavy backpack tugs at her and she fears she might fall backwards, stopping for a moment to regain her balance, while giving the rotter below a chance to snatch at her booted foot.

It feels like this section might last forever.

It’s a damn good thing there’s enough adrenaline racing through both their veins to power them up because that’s the only way they’re doing any of this at breakneck speeds.

When Wade climbs over the top and turns back to help her over, she can see the naked fear in his eyes as he looks past her to the herd below.

“Don’t you dare look,” he growls, dragging her over the edge and up to her feet again.

They’re almost at the pinnacle. She has no idea what that means for them. It’s a dead end, as far as she can tell. They run up the remaining switchbacks, and a shiver racks her body as she sees a mass of rotters scaling the mountain behind them like ants up a hill.

They are going to die up here, in the most beautiful place she’s ever laid eyes on.

Wade takes her hand and leads her out onto the ledge where she imagines so many couples have stopped to view the sunrise and sunset, so many families have posed for pictures, and soulmates have gotten married.

It is enough to steal her breath even now.

She tugs at him when they reach the end. There’s nowhere else to go.

“I love you,” she says quickly, because nothing else matters now. “I’ve loved you since the very beginning. I don’t want to waste another second without you knowing.”

He looks back at her as if she’s struck him, the tears in his eyes mirroring hers and the rumble of their pursuers finally cresting the top, only moments away.

“ I love you. It could never have been anyone else, because it’s been you since the moment we met.

We have to jump, Kara. We can’t become one of them. ”

Since the moment we met. His words caress her heart with the sweetest stroke.

What a cruel way to find out that the man she’s felt bound to all this time has been bound to her just the same.

There is no one else she’d rather leap off a cliff with, she thinks with a sad squeeze of her heart.

It is different now, compared to every other time they’ve said these three words.

The weight behind them is heavy, but the exchange is almost trivial when there’s no time to let the true meaning sink into their bones.

She is angry at having that moment ripped away from them.

When the herd gets bottlenecked by fallen rocks, offering them the smallest reprieve, she remembers that there’s something else in her pack they grabbed from a store one state over for a situation just like this.

“The kitchen timer.” She turns around swiftly so he can fish it out of her bag.

She isn’t sure if it’ll work, but they’re out of options, and she isn’t ready to give in just yet.

The bottleneck breaks to allow the herd to funnel out onto the ledge.

The wind picks up, grabbing their scent and casting it off the mountain.

Wade sets off the kitchen timer and tosses it over the edge, pulling her to the side into the smallest alcove barely big enough for the two of them to shield her with his body.

He is warm and firm, the safest place she could ever be. Where she felt terror only a moment ago, there is nothing but peace. If this is how she leaves this world, in the arms of the man she loves, then there are far worse fates.

Through the smallest crack of light between his arm and the rock, Kara watches the first rotter fling itself over the edge, chasing the blaring ring of the kitchen timer screaming in the abyss.

Then another follows, and another, and soon it’s an endless flow of corpses running straight into the sunrise. They are only following each other now. The sound is long gone, but the beauty of herd behavior is that the members at the back don’t need to know what they’re chasing. They only follow.

The frantic thump of Wade’s heartbeat stutters under her ear, his grip so snug around her that it might be uncomfortable if she were with anyone else. Her fingers twist in his shirt, and her tears wet the fabric, the two of them locked in the protective embrace of the mountain.

There are so many rotters that she begins to wonder if most came from neighboring towns or even states, following some deeply rooted signal to locate each other while using one of the only two functional behaviors they have left.

To eat and to gather. When the last one finally tumbles over and the ground goes quiet, they quietly peek out of their cocoon and into a settling dust cloud.

It takes a moment for the view to clear.

When it does, she has never felt so alive.

They made it. They survived when they shouldn’t have.

They lived another day, and that means they have another chance to make up for so much lost time.

What she doesn’t expect is for the ground beneath her feet to give way, leaving her scrambling at a new edge, her body dangling over the resting place of all the lost souls that just crashed to the ground.

One moment she’s staring at Wade and the next she’s falling with a shriek, grabbing what she can at the last moment until his grip finds her wrist, and then her backpack, yanking her up and over again with so much force that they both roll, landing on their backs.

“Are you okay? Kara?

“I’m good. I’m fine.”

They’re quiet for a long moment, catching their breath in a daze as the sun begins to warm the tips of the mountain.

She rolls her head to face him, locking eyes for a moment before a ridiculous bout of laughter creeps up from her belly and breaks loose.

She doesn’t laugh. Usually. She absolutely doesn’t giggle, or snort, or embrace the kind of lightness that tickles her now.

This can only come from facing death, not once but twice in the same hour, and it’s all she can do to keep the tears in.

His laughter matches hers, heavier and deeper, like the best song.

Suddenly, she can think of nothing she wants more than to seize their second chance.

Every intimate moment they’ve shared on this trip flickers in her mind one by one, softly encouraging her forward until she’s braced above him, one hand on his chest and the heat in her gaze quieting the laughter between them.

His eager acceptance is so plain to see that it burrows into her core and stokes those flames she’s been teasing, threatening to burn.

Before she can let this opportunity slip through their fingers or say something else that’ll crash this moment down around them, she surges forward and down to press her lips to his, lingering for a single heartbeat that feels like twenty, then pulling back to face the consequences.

She’s on the edge of that cliff again, ready to jump, irrationally certain that everything they’ve built is about to crumble.

It had been such a brief, testing point of contact that she hardly gave herself time to enjoy it or feel it.

It is simply a question asked without words because finding the right ones was never in her skill set.

If he changes his mind and tells her this is a mistake, she will shove her love for him back into the deepest part of herself and take whatever he is willing to offer.

Instead, Wade catches her face with a warm palm against her cheek and leans up until he’s sitting and they’re on a level playing field.

For a moment, they breathe each other in, the air heavy with everything unsaid.

Years of yearning stretches between them, fragile and electric.

His thumb traces the curve of her jaw, and something in her shatters.

They hang in limbo for a beat, balanced on the edge of everything they know about their relationship…changing.

Then his gaze flares and his lips find hers so swiftly that it steals her breath, not just from surprise, but from the ache of finally feeling something she’s only ever dreamed of.

The force of the kiss pushes her back an inch, leaving her suspended in his arms, but he follows like he’s afraid she’ll disappear if there’s any space between them.

He’s everywhere at once. A roaming hand feathers up her back while the other cups her neck, anchoring her to him. His mouth is eager and reverent, like he’s remembering the shape of her because he’s been kissing her in his head for years and now finally gets to do it for real.

Kara matches his efforts with everything she’s held in for so long. Every what if, every I wish, every not yet, pouring them all into this one perfect moment they never thought they’d get.

Teeth click and noses bump and he sucks on her lower lip so hard she gasps. They aren’t good at this yet. What they lack in familiarity, they make up for with enthusiasm. She counters his every move with one of her own until she feels nothing but him.

There’s a gentleness to his kiss that sneaks into her heart to make her feel worthy of it.

A tenderness to his touch as he grips her hip, the delicious pressure of his fingertips lighting her nerves aflame while a warm tongue teases the seam of her lips.

She’s never been kissed so completely in her life, soaring so high that not even those mountain peaks could compete.

How has she lasted so long without him when he’s already become an addiction?

“We should get off this ledge,” he breathes against her mouth, nuzzling his nose beside hers.

She nods, helping him up and slipping her hand into his. “Let’s get out of here.”

His quick smile has her blushing at the thought of what they’d just done…and what she hopes he’ll do to her very, very soon.

She hasn’t told him the one secret she promised she’d confess, but she pushes that aside in favor of indulging. They’ve embraced one truth today and somehow the world didn’t end all over again.

She’s with the man she loves, racing toward the unknown after a first kiss that proved he loves her back.

Today, reality is far better than any dream.