Page 53 of Zomromcom

“I want to move,” she told Max. Told the flaming remnants of a wonderful couple’s former home. Told the Buchwalds. Told her parents, wherever they were. “Even if we kill every fucking zombie on this planet, I want to move.”

He hesitated before answering, his arms tightening around her. “Okay.”

“I carry their memories with me wherever I go. I’m a living, breathing reminder of their lives and their love for me, and I’m still alive even though they aren’t, so I can go. I should go.” She tipped her head in the direction of her childhood home. “I don’t need the house.”

“You don’t have to make that decision now, darling,” he said gently.

“I know. But I did.” Leaning back, she let him support her full weight, and he didn’t falter.

Not even for a moment. “You’d better gird those awesome loins of yours, vampire boy.

Soon enough, you’ll be making small talk with strangers who are mere humans , and if you’re a condescending jackass to our new neighbors, I’ll withhold sex. ”

His snort ruffled her hair. “No, you won’t.”

“No, I won’t.” Even she wasn’t that stubborn and self-defeating.

“But I’ll eat nothing but processed food in front of you for days at a time, dude .

Endless cans of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Falafel and various jerkies of mysterious provenance, washed down by weird green-tinged sodas containing absurd amounts of caffeine and chemicals as yet unexplained by science. ”

“You wouldn’t.” His forefinger lightly flicked her earlobe. “You’d miss your pomegranate juice.”

Insinuating herself further into the cradle of his body, she rubbed her ass against his hardening dick. “Anything in the name of revenge.”

“Short of denying yourself orgasms,” he said, voice as dry as the kindling they’d used to light the Buchwalds’ home on fire.

“Exactly.”

“I’ll make small talk. If it means I have you.” He rubbed his hands up and down her arms, even though the house fire was throwing off an enormous amount of heat. “If you want to move, ma puce, we’ll move. If you don’t, we won’t. Simple as that.”

She twisted her head to kiss him, and he met her halfway. Afterward, still wrapped up in each other, they stood and bore silent witness to the final destruction of the Buchwalds’ home for a long, long time.

And then…something changed. The Girl Explorers hadn’t given a signal, and Edie hadn’t heard or seen anything unexpected. But somehow she had a feeling.

Time was running short.

If she died tonight, she wouldn’t do so regretting what she hadn’t said.

“I’m falling in love with you.” The declaration wasn’t tentative or nervous, but a firm statement of fact. “You need to keep yourself safe for me, Max.”

He squeezed her so tightly she squeaked. Although he didn’t respond in words, he pressed a fierce kiss to the top of her head, then her temple, her cheek, and her ear.

“I don’t need you to say it back.” She figured he hadn’t offered his love to anyone for a long, long time. Maybe not since his parents’ death. “It’s okay. I just…you had to know.”

“You’re mine,” he finally said, his voice hoarse and low. “I swear I’ll keep you safe, no matter the cost.”

She didn’t want that. She’d never wanted that.

But she didn’t argue. Instead, she silently made the same promise to him in the privacy of her thoughts.

When she turned in his arms, the flick of her tongue against his lips distracted him even more effectively than she’d hoped.

He had no attention to spare for the discreet movements of her right hand or the faint purr of his hoodie pocket’s zipper opening, then closing again.

Before he noticed his pomander’s return, the signal came.

The Girl Explorers had spread out, so they were barely within hearing distance of one another and covering as much ground as possible.

Once the first girl sighted a zombie in the distance, she’d make a sharp, distinctive owl hoot, which the next girl would pass along the chain.

In the end, the telltale sound would reach Riley and a few other especially powerful half-fae Explorers where they sat perched far above the central battleground.

That moment had arrived.

From now on, all subtlety was abandoned. They wanted the zombies to know precisely where they were gathered. Right here, right now.

“Take your positions,” Riley shouted. “Two strays up front, and the pack not far behind! A mile ahead at most!”

The Explorers lifted Starla and Gwen high up into the trees as well, using the branches as a sort of escalator, while Sabrina, Kip, Lorraine, Max, and Edie ran to their assigned places.

Kip called out a final reminder. “Eliminate or incapacitate as many as possible, and if all else fails, drive them back into the compound! Once we’re done, we feast!”

“You’ve been feasting for the last hour and a half, troll,” Max muttered. “I know what happened to that huge pot of saffron-shellfish risotto.”

“Understood!” everyone else yelled in response.

Four minutes later, the first snarl echoed through the forest, and Sabrina set off a final flare.

Edie brandished her cleaver just as the first zombies leapt into sight, jaws wide open.

***

There was no missing their small group of fighters. Not when they remained so close to the blazing house and so easily visible through the trees, their exact position highlighted by a torch’s flickering light and a small campfire.

There was only one obvious route leading to them, and the two strays took it.

The creatures raced along the side of the burning home, on the path cleared by the Girl Explorers, and into the backyard abutting the woods.

The fence lining that backyard had long ago begun to sag.

In one spot, a substantial section of the fencing had collapsed entirely, leaving a straight shot into the forest, toward all five waiting figures.

Edie tightened her grip and held her breath, invoking the names of all the gods and goddesses she could remember in an urgent request for assistance. Just in case it turned out she was Enhanced and simply hadn’t noticed for the past thirty-eight years.

“Come and get it,” Sabrina called out, the words a brazen taunt.

Suddenly, this entire plan seemed like a terrible, terrible idea. Like, worst ever .

When the strays spotted the stretch of collapsed fencing, their determined lope sped into a starved sprint.

Their lean gray-pale bodies jolted with every bounding leap forward, saliva dripped from their slavering jaws, and the creature in the lead rasped something that sounded like bonjour as it raced past a few dilapidated wooden pickets, through the fence’s gap, and up a small incline.

Only to disappear from sight mid-growl as the underbrush and dead leaves beneath its feet gave way to a deep, wide pit. Too deep to jump out of, too wide to leap across. A pit the Girl Explorers had dug after creating the firebreak, using whatever fae powers they could still muster.

Less than a heartbeat later, the second zombie dropped and vanished too.

Stepping forward, Kip peered down into the pit and offered the creatures a cheerful wave. “Bonjour!”

More growls and hisses erupted from the depths of the hole, but as Edie and everyone else had fervently hoped, the zombies seemed unable to climb out of their makeshift enclosure.

Edie glanced around, her heartbeat slowly steadying. Under her breath, she whispered, “If I’m an Enhanced who can now commune with deities, please give me a sign.”

Nothing. She waited a few seconds more, though, just to be sure. When she shifted her feet, she stepped onto what appeared to be a fossilized remnant of dog poop from the Buchwalds’ boisterous little terrier.

Okay. Fair enough. No unexpected powers for her.

“Next wave, coming right up!” Riley hollered. “The main pack this time! Girl Explorers, collapse in toward the center as soon as you safely can!”

The zombies burst into view from around the side of the house, their appearance wavy and distorted in the intense heat emanating from the blaze.

And Edie had to believe that most or all of the strays must have found their brethren and joined the main group at some point, because holy shit .

It was paralyzing, the way the pack seemed to roar endlessly forward like water from a collapsed dam, the creatures so innumerable and tightly spaced that they could have been a single, enormous entity, with a single, inexorable intention: death.

Tearing, clawing, throat-ripping, head-removing, brain-slurping death.

The leading edge of the apocalyptic river reached the backyard.

Ribs heaving, gray eyes glowing with an eerie, intent light, the zombies raced through the fencing gap and…

toppled into the canyon awaiting them. Gone in an instant.

Gone, gone, gone and raging in their thwarted frustration at top volume, mostly in rumbling howls and keens of rage, but also at least one furious, garbled order for the mimer to stop miming.

The flow ceased, and all the zombies were contained.

Lorraine cracked her knuckles. “This might be easier than we thought. Who’s in the mood for a buffet tonight? Your treat, mini-vamp.”

“Dammit, Lorrie,” Sabrina complained. “Have you truly never heard of jinxing—”

“There are more!” Riley’s panicked voice was shredding. “This wave is bigger!”

Kip reached over and smacked the back of his cousin’s head.

Lorraine’s nose crinkled. “Sorry. That’s on me.”

The second part of the pack arrived then, and shit, that compound must have been fucking enormous , because there was no end. The creatures leapt into the unseen pit by threes and fours, pure rage and hunger in their creepy fucking eyes, and they just kept coming .

The zombies on the bridge must have been a group of strays. Not the main pack, by any means, which meant—

“We’re in trouble,” Max muttered. “Edie, it won’t be long until—”

The zombies filled the pit.

They filled it , forming a living bridge over top of the gap, and those who arrived afterward didn’t even miss a single stride as they crossed the barrier.

“ Fuck .” Sabrina’s voice shook as she assumed her fighting stance.

“That’s the last of them!” The troop leader sounded close to tears, but she was still screaming out information with all her might. “Girl Explorers, get ready!”

The creatures’ howls turned exultant. Expectant. They sprinted closer and closer yet, until the bloodstains circling their muzzles and the chunks of gore in their bared teeth became much more visible than Edie would have preferred.

In an oddly beautiful wave of motion, the creatures at the front launched themselves onto their hind feet in unison, preparing for the kill ahead, and they grunted with each lengthy stride as they reached out with red-smeared claws.

Their speed only increased with the proximity of prey—and they’d almost reached their midnight snack when the first zombie’s body dropped to the forest floor, decapitated.

Edie stared blankly at the rolling head.

It’d worked.

Her idea had worked .

It was eerily noiseless too. She didn’t know if she’d expected a sucking noise or a tearing sound or…something else.

But as more zombies lurched onto two feet and leapt forward at full speed—directly into the razor-sharp wire Edie used to cut her soaps, strung tightly between the trees at the height of a zombie’s neck—their deaths were virtually silent.

“Human. We both know what happens next.” Max’s face was stone, his stance aggressive, his words rushed and fierce. “You do not risk yourself for anyone else. Understand?”

Yeah. She knew what was barreling toward them. But she couldn’t give him what he wanted, because her potential last words to him couldn’t be a lie.

Edie raised the cleaver in her right hand and the other knife in her left. “Here we go, vampire boy. Be careful.”

The whimpers and grunts from the creatures nearly drowned out Max’s rage-filled growl.

This close to the zombies, the smell of blood and unwashed bodies merged with the choking smoke still billowing from the Buchwalds’ home, and the stench only worsened as more of them leapt toward their prey and into the wires.

She couldn’t smell pine anymore. Not from the trees, not from Max.

Her lungs were full of death.

“Edie, do you understand ?” Max bellowed, helpless fury in every syllable.

She would pat his arm in consolation, but she didn’t want to accidentally stab him, so she simply cast him one last, split-second glance. Stamped him indelibly into her memory, strong and whole and nearly unhinged with terrible, terrified love for her.

The howls of the zombies closing in seemed to pierce her eardrums.

“Be careful,” she repeated, but she couldn’t tell if he heard her over the deafening, knee-weakening sound of last night’s plan inexorably heading toward the worst-case scenario.

The razor wire would only work as a temporary measure, which they’d known ahead of time. It bought them a couple of minutes and removed a few zombies, but that was all.

Far too soon, the stack of bodies under the makeshift garrote became an obstacle, the creatures veered around their fallen comrades, and their speed dropped.

Without sufficient momentum, they didn’t lop off their own heads when they hit the wires that ringed the fighters.

They merely gouged out chunks of flesh and lost sprays of sickly yellow blood, and that wasn’t enough to kill or stop them.

It did slow them considerably, though.

“Girl Explorers!” Riley’s hoarse shout echoed through the trees. “Troop initiative three-oh-five, Zombie Restraint, begins now!”

Shit . They’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this. The girls had already drained so damn much of their power with the firebreak and the pit. They couldn’t have much left, but—

“If you die,” Max snarled, “I will find you. I don’t care if I have to rip out the throat of Death, Edie. I will fucking find you , wherever you go, for the sheer joy of killing you myself .”

She had to laugh, despite the adrenaline and terror slicking up her palms and shaking her knees. “Love you too, babe.”

Branches whipped down from the trees and lashed around some creatures’ wrists, while roots erupted from the soil and manacled the ankles of others.

There was no time to panic. Calm settled over her like a cool blanket.

She knew what to do. They all did.

“Now!” Lorraine shouted, and all five of them waded into battle.