Page 167 of My Undead Love Life

We listened. The house settled.

“We clear the rest,” I said quietly.

Spencer nodded once, wiping quickly under one eye with the heel of her hand.

We cleared every room. Slowly and thoroughly without splitting up.

The upstairs bathroom had been stripped of everything useful. Another bedroom had broken furniture piled against one wall. Downstairs, the pantry was empty except for mouse-chewed packaging. The back door was nearly ripped off its hinges and had to be shoved closed again. The cellar had been empty, too.

“We should stay in the living area upstairs,” I said after the house was as clear as we could make it. “More open. Window access to each side of the house. Easier to defend than the bedrooms, and no zombie blood covering the floor from the horde.”

Everyone agreed, and we got to work.

We reinforced what boards were still there and blocked the broken windows as best we could. Keith and I worked on the largest gaps while Oxi and Luck dragged furniture into position. Spencer moved through the house with a strange, quiet efficiency, gathering blankets that were dirty but usable, pulling boards from places that didn’t matter to strengthen places that did.

It wasn’t perfect by the time we were done, but it should hold for the night.

Hopefully.

We sprayed ourselves again with Sofia’s scent-masking compound, though I wasn’t sure what good it would do now that we weren’t moving. If the leopard had already tracked our route this far, sitting still inside a half-broken farmhouse wasn’t exactly a brilliant strategy. But we had no better option.

The radio crackled to life once Keith set it up near the upstairs living area window. Static hissed, and a voice slithered through. “…the blessed beast has left the city…”

We all went still. My hand tightened around the axe handle.

“…it will find them…”

Spencer’s face went pale.

“…it will bring justice to the sinners…”

Luck let out a slow breath. “That’s us.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “That’s us.”

“…we await its return…”

The signal cut.

For a moment, the only sound was the faint rattle of wind against the boards.

“At least it sounds like they aren’t leaving the city after us,” I said.

“They aren’t,” Keith said, staring at the radio. “But the leopard is.”

“We knew that already.”

Night fell fast. Too fast. The sky outside went from bruised gray to black, and the farmhouse changed with it. In daylight, it had been broken and sad. At night, it felt hollow. Every creak carried too far. Every draft seemed to move like breath. The boards over the windows blocked most of the view, but thin slices of dark remained between them, narrow enough to watch and wide enough to remind us something could be watching back.

“We’re almost home,” Spencer said softly.

I looked over at her and frowned. She sat on the mattress we had dragged into the upstairs living area, wrapped in layers, her hair braided loosely over one shoulder. She looked so tired. But beneath it was hope.

I wanted to protect that hope almost as much as I wanted to protect her.

“We’ll take shifts,” I announced as we got ready to settle in. “Two at a time.”

Luck, already wedging himself between Oxi and Keith for warmth, lifted his head. “Uneven amount of people.”