You’ve already escaped, you just have to keep going.
“Leave me alone!” he yells, doing his best to chase away his own delusions. After a lingering moment, he is blissfully and tragically alone.
What has he done? He can’t do this without her.
“No…come back. I’m sorry. Come back,” he whispers, as the rotter ambles closer, promising an end he didn’t ask for but may as well accept.
For the first time, he thinks letting nature take its course might be the best option. It would be on his own terms now. That has to be worth something in itself.
What does he think will happen, anyway? That he’ll show up at some random community covered in mud after having been isolated for years, unable to do much more than sob in a corner? If she found him then, it would completely ruin whatever semblance of a normal life she’s managed to build.
He can’t do that to her, and he can’t live without her. That leaves the most obvious option, and he’s so damn tired straight down to his bones that if he just lays here and lets it happen, he knows it’ll be quick. He’s weak. He’ll bleed out easily after a few bites in the right spot.
Wade isn’t suicidal enough to do it himself, but he is indifferent if it comes for him.
Until someone screams loud enough that even he hears it. It pierces through the air, sounding so much like his name and in such a familiar voice that before he realizes what he’s done,he’s already on his feet and climbing back up the embankment. Leaves the slow rotter down below and runs toward the sound that’s only gotten more desperate and terrified by the second.
It sounds like Kara. At the core of everything that matters to him is the unrelenting need to protect her. That’s what drives him forward, even when the voices tell him it’s a trick.
He’s willing to risk it, but only for her.
When he finds the source, she’s struggling with two rotters, backed up against a tree as she kicks one away and stabs the other in the head, her knife getting stuck.
She looks more real in this moment than anything he could conjure up in his own head. Maybe hope is dangerous, he thinks, rushing forward. Or maybe it’s the only light worth following in a storm.
Chapter 5
Wade is gone.
She left for only a moment, determined not to hover when that only makes it worse, and now he’s escaped out the window as if she held him hostage.
How could she have failed so completely and so soon? How could every decision she’s made have been consistently wrong? He was safer back at Paradise Falls, where he’d have to scale the gates to get out. She was only fooling herself in assuming she could handle this alone.
Kara doesn’t pause to grab her coat. Barely notices that it’s raining until thunder cracks in the distance as she’s hopping the back fence. She isn’t a tracker by nature, only knows what he taught her when they were kids, and what the army supplemented after that.
She tries to think like him, but that’s difficult when he’s not thinking like himself. He wouldn’t circle around to the front gate if he were distraught. In his right mind, he might try to throw her off, but now she figures he’ll follow a straight line from the point of exit and simply keep going. So that’s what she does, too. Calls out for him a few times before realizing that’s a bad idea. He’s running from her. He’ll only hear her as a threat. So she curbs the instinct to yell his name as a plea to whatever god might be left and focuses on moving forward.
Branches lay broken in her path, and footprints in newly forming mud point her in the right direction.
He got far and fast for someone as weak as he is. They have to be at least half a mile from the house by now. If she stops for a second, she’s not sure she’ll be able to pick herself up again under the weight of possible failure. This time, her mistakes could land them back where they started. With him gone and her unending search beginning anew.
Stupid to come out here, she thinks sadly. She was certain the quiet solitude would be the best environment, but she only offered him an easier way to break free.
‘If he runs, I’ll just follow him until he stops’, she told herself, and while that’s true, she ignored how difficult it might be to catch up to someone with that big a head start.
Her world has narrowed into a single goal, and that leads her into another error. One she should be far past by now after surviving alone in the woods for so long. She stops paying attention to her surroundings beyond Wade’s trail and misses the rotter stumbling out from behind a tree, nearly running face-first into a bite.
It startles her and instead of instantly unsheathing her knife, her hands come up to protect her face as she flinches away. It’s a split-second reaction, but enough to give her opponent an advantage.
The rotter is on her so quickly that it has to be fresh. The slower, older models aren’t this strong, but this one has plenty of muscle tissue left and it’s twice her size, looming and heavy while shoving her against a tree and trying to take a chunk from her neck like a fucked up vampire.
Kara kicks it back as best she can and grabs her knife, certain she can dispose of this and get back to what’s really important, when another one appears in her periphery.
She doesn’t have time for this distraction. It’s angered her more than anything else, at least until her blade gets stuck in a hard skull. The other one advances as she struggles to pull her weapon free, and that’s when fear grips her tight.
Instinct has her screaming out Wade’s name. She doesn’t expect him to save her in his current condition, but he’ll always be the one she turns to in her worst moments. That isn’t about to change now.
She can’t die out here. Who’s going to find him if she’s gone? Who would even know he’s missing again until Luke comes back to check on them? Silas and his men could stumble across Wade and recapture him, and she can’t let that happen. Can’t allow herself to be taken out of the equation when she’s all he has and it’s her fucking job to make sure he’s safe.
