“Human.”
“—dicks down bucks like Gaston,” she sang out as they swung onto the road once again. “With an antelope cock—”
“Neither male nor female gazelles are called bucks. They are in fact antelopes, but—”
“—nobody sucks like Gaston!”
“Vampires are pansexual. Thus, I am quite accomplished in the dick-sucking arts.” He paused. “I do draw the line at bestiality, however. I want that made clear.”
“In your grassland clime he’ll beforn-i-cating—”
In the end, shutting her up required another quick stop on the roadside shoulder and a hard kiss.
When they got going again, they might have been headed to their doom. Didn’t matter. They were both smiling.
16
At some point, they must have let their guard down. Maybe because they hadn’t spotted a zombie for nearly a full day, and they knew—or thought they knew—that the pack remained within Zone C, fully occupied by inflicting grisly violence on helpless residents there.
Still, Edie had no good explanation for how they could fail to anticipate or notice a stray zombie lurking in the most obvious place imaginable: just inside Max’s home, hidden behind the front door, which was half hanging from its hinges.
Despite their evident distraction, he insisted—as he always did whenever he thought there was even a slim possibility of danger ahead—on entering the house before her. Given his height and the bottleneck created by the doorway, she couldn’t see around him. Couldn’t try to intervene before it was far too late.
A shuffling noise, immediately followed by a triumphant, guttural howl and a spray of cool blood across her cheek, was her first warning that something had gone terribly wrong.
She shouted his name, and his hand reached below his napeto unsheathe his sword, the movement so quick it was little more than a blur. He didn’t answer her. Couldn’t answer her. Not when he was engaged in full-scale battle with a zombie while—judging from the growing pool of Merlot-red blood at his ever-shifting, agile feet—bleeding heavily.
Very heavily.
Hands shaking with adrenaline, she unzipped her cross-body bag and unearthed her cleaver. She gripped it so tightly her knuckles ached, waiting for the moment when Max would edge forward and allow her to enter the doorway and support him in the fight.
The seconds ticked past. She kept waiting. And waiting.
It took her unforgivably long to realize what he was doing.
As long as he blocked the doorway, she remained safe. Even if it meant he couldn’t drive the zombie backward into the hall, where he would have more room to maneuver. By protecting her, he’d put himself in a position where he couldn’t pursue an advantage and advance on the creature, and he couldn’t easily dodge the creature’s tearing claws—or, worse, its ragged, needlelike teeth.
Another few endless moments crawled by, punctuated by rage-soaked growls and grunts of effort and pain.
More blood. Wet ripping noises that indicated tearing flesh. Max’s flesh.
Assuming the zombie didn’t do the job for her, she was going tomurder him.
“Fuckingmove, asshole!” she shouted.
No response. He wasn’t going to let her inside, the stubborn jackhole, and pushing him forward could destabilize him and might very well lead to his death.
Fine, then. This godsdamn house had more than one entrance, and all of them were currently busted wide open. Turning on her heel, she leapt down from his front porch and raced for the patio around back, whose door—if she remembered the house’s layout correctly—would give her a pretty straight shot at the zombie’s rear flank. Skidding around the corner of the garage, she slipped and fell heavily to the muddy, brittle grass but immediately heaved herself back upright and kept running.
The patio door hung askew, its window panes’ remaining shards of glass tipped with dried yellow blood. She batted the door aside and finally got a clear view of the zombie and the stupid fucking vampire she was going to kill as soon as she saved his stupid fucking life.
The war cry tore from deep in her chest. It rang in her ears and shredded her throat.
“Over here, fucker!” she bellowed, and brandished her cleaver with her feet firmly planted.
Max’s startled jerk unbalanced him. In a moment of uncharacteristic awkwardness, he slipped in his own slick blood and fell to one knee, and if she’d wondered how badly he was injured, that answered the question.
Very. Very badly.
