That sounds a lot like he’s admitting he dreamed of bringing her here all this time. That’s a whole lot different from simply wanting to check a hike off the bucket list. Her pulse begins toflutter the way it did the night before when they were locked in a staring contest, his hands on her skin and his gaze full of something she’s terrified to put a name to.
She swallows hard, looking at the ground instead of him. “You never mentioned it before.”
He sighs. “Never felt like the right time.”
“Why is it the right time now?”
She waits with her breath held tight, hoping he might say something that’ll take them from this murky, unlabeled zone into clearer waters, because there’s not a chance she can be brave enough to do that herself. Instead, he throws an arm out across her body to halt her movement, his other hand coming up to rest at his lips in the universal sign for don’t say a word.
She follows his nod toward a single rotter standing still in a cluster of desert overgrowth. It hasn’t heard them yet. She could creep up behind it and shove her knife into its skull and be done with it. That’s almost what she does before a second one catches sight of them a few yards away and runs in their direction full blast.
“Take the close one, I got the runner,” Wade tells her, and there’s no time to argue.
They make quick work of each, but there’s no denying the commotion from the runner was a lot more noise than either of them planned to make today.
“Just wait,” she whispers. “Where there’s one, there’s more. They’re like roaches.”
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 herout 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.
