Page 41 of My Undead Love Life

My nose scrunched, but Mad opened the doors anyway.

Cold air rushed across my face as we stepped out, but it carried the putrid smell with it, heavy, wet, and undead. My stomach tightened so hard I had to press my lips together.

“Fuck, that reeks!” Luck gagged. He turned his head and coughed into his sleeve, his face twisting.

“Not just a few corpses kind of reek,” Oxi muttered. He had gone pale around the mouth, and one hand covered his nose while the other kept his cane sword ready.

He was right.

This decayed scent was thick and coated the inside of my mouth. It smelled like old meat, sun-baked corpses, damp rotten flesh, and infected blood. It smelled like a horde.

“It’s a horde,” Mad choked out. Hearing him choke on the words scared me more than the smell because I didn’t see or hear them yet. He lifted one arm, pressing his forearm briefly against his nose, but his gaze stayed on the open space ahead of us. His axe was already up. The sunlight caught in his golden eyes.

“But…” I swallowed hard, trying to control the gagging sound rising in my throat. My stomach rolled again, and my eyes burned. “They were so late. How is the horde this late?”

We walked away from the subway and toward the large mall in front of us. Its parking lot stretched ahead of us, empty, aside from the abandoned cars. The asphalt was wide and cracked, silvered in places by old rainwater, with weeds forcing their way up through the seams. Cars sat scattered across the lot at odd angles, doors hanging open, windows smashed, tires flattened or missing entirely. Some had rusted so badly they looked burned. Others still had bodies inside, and I refused to focus on them for more than a second.

The mall itself loomed across the asphalt. It looked bigger than I remembered malls being, though maybe everything looked bigger when it was buried by time. Its glass doors were cloudy and broken; the panes spiderwebbed with cracks or knocked out completely. Faded signs still hung crooked over the entrance, advertising stores that no longer existed. The old letters had peeled and warped from the weather, and one sign swung lazily in the wind with a soft, whining squeak.

The sound crawled under my skin.

Malls used to be busy. Music came from storefronts. The food court was filled with chatter. Perfume sample salesmen made it smell too strongly. Now, this mall stood silent across from us, full of shadows and the smell of rot.

“The horde has been progressively arriving later because of their numbers increasing, I think,” Oxi told me. He sounded like he was trying to make the information useful instead of horrifying.

“They were over a month late,” I mumbled. “I didn’t think…”

I didn’t finish my thought out loud because I didn’t know how to explain that I was hoping they’d stopped migrating without making it sound stupid. I knew they wouldn’t. Patterns like that didn’t break. But Keith had hoped the world would give us mercy.

I wished he was right.

“The horde always comes,” Luck said with conviction.

“I know,” I whispered.

Cold air dragged over the parking lot and worked its way beneath my jacket. The sky had that washed-out, brittle look it got before the season turned for the worse. Gray clouds smeared across the pale blue.

Snow would come soon. It would cover the old bloodstains and the cracked roads and the bodies that had been left behind. It would soften the edges of ruined cars and collapsed storefronts and make everything look cleaner from a distance.

We had to beat the snow and the horde.

An awful collective of groans and moans rolled through the air, breaking the silence. It all came on at once: ruined throats, wet lungs, jawbones clicking wrong, and a thousand other undead sounds tangled into one massive, miserable horde.

My stomach turned.

They had to be close.

Mad lifted a hand and gestured for us to move through the parking lot toward the mall. We moved fast across the parking lot, boots scraping over loose asphalt and broken glass.

My breath came out quickly, turning into little white ghosts in the cold air. The smell followed us, thick and sour, pushing against the back of my throat until every inhale felt like I would hurl.

The parking lot’s hill rose toward the entrance. When we hit the peak, I looked back.

My heart dropped.

Thousands of bodies shambled forward.

My brain struggled to process what I was seeing. Torn shirts, dragging feet, decomposed faces, heads lolling, gray skin split over bones, scalps with hair peeled back, and white, milky eyes.