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He searched for Sparrow after that, obsessed with the need to make sure she survived, not because he wanted her, but because there was some drive to make sure she was… okay.
And then he’d found her, still with those two men she’d traveled with. Knowing she was safe had been enough to ease his obsessive need. And so he’d walked away and never looked back.
The sound of a twig snapping in the background had him slowly rising, unsheathing his hunting knife, and trying to see through the darkness. But he didn’t have to wait long, because the moaning and groaning came right before he saw the corpse of a man stumble out of the forest.
He was still in Colorado, made camps nightly in the Rocky Mountains, and was content that way. He was out in the middle of nowhere, and although there were times one of the dead found him, it was easy to take them out.
The dead came closer. The fire didn’t bother it, and it didn’t seem to be affected by the light or heat. It came forward even more, tripped over a small log, and fell right into the flames. It started thrashing back and forth, trying to right itself, but when Collin moved closer to it, the corpse seemed to forget about the fire as it tried to reach for Collin.
The sounds coming from it were earsplitting, and the smell of its rotting flesh being burned away from its bones was nauseating. It finally managed to move out of the fire and crawled toward Collin. Cooked and burned rotting flesh hanging from its head, arms, and legs, his face was half gone from the decay, and his mouth gaped open as its jaw was partially torn off.
He moved a step back, kept his knife held tightly in his hand, and wondered who this man had been before he was contaminated.
He could be an original, one that had gotten the vaccine and changed into what Collin was looking at right now. Had he been a doctor, lawyer, or some other honorable profession that helped others? Or had he been a bad man like Collin, killing people when they crossed him, doing and selling drugs, and fucking any and all women who were willing? Or maybe he had been bitten, turned into a walking corpse?
It didn’t matter now. As he stared at the gruesome-looking being in front of him, with his skin burned and charred, blackened in areas from the fire and necrosis, all he saw was the dead. The zombie lifted a thin arm toward Collin, flesh and muscle hanging from the bones, and opened its mouth to let out a low, hungry howl.
Collin plunged the blade in its skull, the sound of the knife sinking into its decrepit body slightly sickening. It dropped full to the ground, truly dead now, since its brain, the control center for it all, was destroyed.
Collin cleaned his blade off on the tattered clothing of the corpse and pulled the body from the fire. There wasn’t any snowfall yet, but it was cold enough that the body should be frozen within a few days, as long as the frigid temperatures dropped. Once he had the body a good distance away, he took a step back and looked at the corpse.
The night and the heavy trees around him made it impossible for him to really see the once living man.
He turned without giving it another thought, knowing he’d pack up in the morning and find another place to set up camp. He stayed in the mountains but didn’t camp out in one place for any given amount of time. That was too dangerous, and he wasn’t going to test his luck that way. Besides, his supplies were low, and he needed to gather more.
He knew there was a town close by, and a hike down the mountain could bring him right to the heart of it.
Collin sat back down, grabbed the small bottle of water he had, and cleaned his hands. He picked up the can of peaches he set on the ground and started eating them again as he watched the fire still burning brightly.
He had always lived his life any way he saw fit, but now he was living just to survive, because there were no back-alley deals, no pleasures handed to him on demand.
It was eat or be eaten, and Collin was going to be the biggest fucking dog in the fight.
5
The warehouse Rebecca stayed in was about ten miles from the nearest town. She had gone through another city before stopping and making her home in the loft, but she scouted out the surrounding area, so she knew the lay of the land.
She certainly wasn’t one of those survival men she had seen on TV—well, back when there had been TV—but she learned a few things in the last seventeen months.
