Page 42 of My Undead Love Life

It was a horde…the biggest one I’d ever seen.

They filled the far end of the parking lot and poured between the abandoned cars, bumping against bumpers, dragging their dead hands over rusted, broken doors, stumbling over curbs and bodies that had fallen before them. Some moved slowly, their joints stiff from decay. Others lurched with horrible bursts of speed, mouths opening and closing as if they could already taste us. Their groans rolled over each other, desperate to infect.

They were too close.

My grip tightened around my katana. The worn wrapping pressed into my palm, and I clung to that small, familiar texture because everything else was too much.

Rot, decay, and death soaked the air as the undead moved toward us. It saturated my hair and my clothes and coated the back of my tongue until I could taste it even when I tried not to breathe. My eyes watered from the stench.

“What about Keith?” My throat bobbed painfully around his name.

The others kept moving, but I slowed down without meaning to. My eyes snapped back toward the stairwell we had climbed up from, toward that dark opening in the ground that was obstructed by zombies. “What if he’s still alive down there?”

The question hurt coming out. Alive meant he was trapped. He would’ve been able to hear the horde above him, or below him, or all around him. Wherever he was.

Mad’s head turned slightly, but he did not stop. Luck’s expression tightened as he looked back, something hard and pained flashing across his face before he looked toward the mall entrance again. Neither of them had an answer fast enough to save me from the one I was already afraid of.

“He’s not down there anymore,” Oxi said.

I barely heard him through the groaning.

His hand closed around my arm. He grabbed me hard enough to pull me back into motion with the group. His fingers dug through my sleeve, grounding me in the present.

“Oxi—”

“He’s not down there anymore, Spencer,” he repeated, and this time his voice was rougher. His face was pale, jaw clenched so tight it looked painful. He didn’t meet my eyes for long. “We can’t go back, and we can’t stop.” He dragged me toward the mall entrance. “Not with the horde behind us.”

The horde groaned louder, and the sound swelled until it seemed to press against my back. My chest ached with the need to turn around and look for Keith, but Oxi’s hand stayed on my arm.

Luck moved in beside me, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine. “Keep moving,” he whispered.

Mad reached the mall first.

I yanked my arm free from Oxi and stumbled to a stop. “What if⁠—”

“There is no what if!” Oxi snapped, spinning around so fast the end of his cane sword scraped against the asphalt with a harsh metallic sound that made my shoulders jerk. His face had changed. The color was high in his cheeks now, anger cutting through the fear. “Nobody survives that. And you’re going to get us all killed if you don’t snap out of it!”

His words hit me like a slap. I flinched before I could stop myself.

The horde groaned behind us, louder now, their awful chorus rolling across the parking lot and pressing into the space between Oxi and me. The smell of them came with the wind again, worsening it enough to make the tears come faster. But all I could feel was the sharp sting of his words and the place where his fingers had been around my arm.

Nobody survives that.

The sentence carved out my heart.

“Oxi,” Mad and Luck hissed at the same time. Luck’s voice came out sharper than I had ever heard it, while Mad’s was low and dangerous.

Oxi’s jaw flexed. He looked like he wanted to say more, but then his eyes flicked past me toward the undead filling the lot, dragging themselves over the hill of asphalt, coming closer with every second we wasted.

I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to shove every ugly word back into his mouth.

Mad turned toward me, and the anger in his face softened into something quieter. “We have to get into the mall right now or we’re going to die.”

Behind him, the mall entrance waited, its broken glass doors hanging open like a mouth. The shadows inside looked deep and cold, but they were shelter. A chance for survival. The horde was still coming, and the distance between us and them was shrinking while my grief stood in the parking lot with its hands around my throat, making us an easy target.

Oxi looked away first. His grip tightened on his cane sword until his knuckles paled. “I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

The apology was rough. Barely one at all. But his voice cracked like he meant it.