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To end her.
As he had ended others as the madness swept through the congregants and guests and sanity devoured the world.
But as the darkness closed around the bride’s mind, David had paused on the very brink of commission. Horror and grief and shock and pain and ten thousand other emotions warred on his face.
It was clear that he had wanted to kill her, needed to. Had to.
This was the plague, and it took only a few moments for anyone to understand its rules. The infected bite people. The bitten die. The dead rise. The cycle continues until no one’s left alive. They’d all heard the news stories about this, but those stories were all back East. In Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. In New York and Atlanta.
Not here.
Not in California.
Not in Coldwater Creek.
Not in this little church.
Not today.
Not now.
Not . . .
God.
David had knocked her down after she’d bitten her own mother. After she’d bitten David’s sister.
He’d struck her once with the heavy cross.
Now he was poised to finish it. To finish her.
David. The last man standing.
David, who had once wanted to be a minister, who’d almost taken a scholarship to a seminary. David, who was the gentlest person she’d ever known.
In that moment he had been every bit as much a monster as the dead who thrashed and moaned around him. The cross raised in his strong hands. The need to end her and this madness written on his face.
She wanted to tell him to do it.
She tried.
She begged him to end her life. No—to end what this was. Whatever this was.
Un-life.
She screamed her plea to him.
She was sure of it.
But all that came out of her mouth, all that she could hear, was her voice making a strange, long, low, unutterably desperate moan of bottomless hunger.
Tha
t wasn’t what stopped him. The moan was no different from the ravenous cries rising from every dead throat in the chapel. If it had been only that, then even David would have brought the cross down and ended her life. Ended her pain. That was how he would see it, she was certain.
Helping her. Not killing her.
After all, she was already dead.
