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  Brix kept her gaze on Trevor. “See? Don’t know if you noticed, but this neighborhood isn’t exactly Beverly Hills. We’ll find a car Jason can start. And we’ll get out of here and head for the country, maybe even out to my dad’s property. It’s rural and dad has a ton of guns. There won’t be many zombies at all out there and we can defend ourselves.”

  Trevor visibly relaxed as she said all this. Her strategy was working. She needed to keep him away from that panicky edge. She had no real-world experience in dealing with apocalyptic scenarios, of course. She was no different from anyone else in that regard. But she thought she had pretty good instincts, as well as a very level head on her shoulders. She was just naturally better equipped to deal with a crisis than a lot of people.

  This didn’t mean, though, that she had no doubts of her own. She had no idea, for instance, how closely this world mirrored their own. Did a version of her father exist in this place? No way to know. Ditto for the property he owned and all his badass weaponry.

  But these concerns were all things beyond her control and therefore there was no reason to share them with Trevor. He was calm now and she wanted to keep him that way. The rest of it would take care of itself, one way or another. They would go out to where her father’s property should be, and either it would be there or it would not. And if not, they’d just figure out where to go from there.

  “I’ve got it!”

  Jason.

  His loud exclamation made Brix flinch. She let go of Trevor and turned to look at Jason. “What have you got?”

  He shook long locks off his forehead and grinned. “The fucking word.” He waved a hand at the defaced drywall. “Fucking parthenogenesis. I knew I’d heard it before. I had this sort of Goth girlfriend a couple years back. Name was Mona. Or Moira. Some shit like that. Anyway, there was this song she liked called “Nemesis” by a band called Shriekback. That big goddamn word is in the lyrics.”

  Brix glanced at the spray-painted word. “Hey. Yeah. Now that you mention it, pretty sure that’s how I know it, too. Can’t remember where I heard the song, though.”

  Jason laughed. “Shit, who cares? Bottom line, mystery solved. Somebody here was a Shriekback fan.”

  Brix eyed the spray-painted word curiously. “Huh. I guess.” She looked at Jason again. “So…any idea what it actually means?”

  “Don’t know, don’t give a fuck.”

  Brix moved toward the center of the room again. “Yeah, I guess we’ve got bigger—”

  An ear-piercing scream rang out and Nikki came dashing out of the hallway that led to the bedrooms, wielding a huge handgun that looked almost as big as she did. The gun’s massive barrel looked like a cannon and was aimed right at Brix’s face.

  Brix grabbed for the Glock shoved into the waistband of her jeans. But things were happening too fast. Nikki’s face was a contorted mask of rage and her finger was already squeezing the big gun’s trigger. Thoughts zipped through Brix’s mind like flashes of lightning as her hand closed around the Glock’s grip and yanked it free.

  She was about to die. She had been in this very position less than an hour earlier and she liked it no better this time. And she guessed that Nikki had found the weapon during a search of the room she’d shut herself in, either stashed away in a drawer or up on a closet shelf. Brix felt stupid for allowing the bitch the privacy and time she’d needed to find a weapon. Stupid. So fucking stupid. And there was nothing she could do to change it now. She was just fucked.

  Just as she was bringing the Glock up—albeit far too late to aim and squeeze off a shot before Nikki could kill her—there was a flash of movement in her peripheral vision.

  And then Trevor was standing right in front of her.

  Blocking the path of the bullet as the report of the gun resounded in the little living room. Brix stared in helpless horror as blood exploded from a big hole between her boyfriend’s shoulder blades. The high-caliber slug passed right through him and ended up somewhere else. Brix never saw the bullet, of course–she only recognized that she wasn’t hit. The blast propelled Trevor backward. His body collapsed against her, knocking her off-balance and sending her stutter-stepping to the left.

  There was another report from the big gun. Another miss of Nikki’s intended target. Trevor had saved her again, albeit unintentionally this time.

  Brix was still off-balance but managed to swing the Glock around and squeeze off a shot. She got lucky. The bullet hit Nikki in the shoulder. There was a bright bloom of red and then the girl was screaming in agony.

  The sound was music to Brix’s ears. She had never heard anything so righteous. All she wanted in that moment was to make the bitch keep on screaming—right up until the moment she killed her.

  Nikki staggered backward a few steps and slumped to her knees. The big gun was no longer in her hand. Brix couldn’t see immediately where it had landed. The important thing was that her adversary was unarmed. She was wounded and defenseless. And she was in the last moments of her worthless life.

  Brix stepped right up to her and put the barrel of the Glock to her forehead. “Say goodbye, you fucking whore.”

  Nikki let out a wail of agony and stared up at her with shiny eyes. More tears ran in rivulets down her face, streaking her makeup. “Please, please…no. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Please.”

  Brix sneered. “You’re fucking sorry? Seriously? Tough shit.”

  Her forefinger tightened around the trigger. Her entire body was shaking. Rage unlike anything she’d ever experienced consumed her. She felt completely devoid of pity. Felt nothing at all like compassion as she stared down at Nikki’s anguished face. This person was less than human to her. This person deserved nothing like mercy.

  “Get ready to die.”

  Nikki wailed again.

  Brix put more pressure on the trigger.

  And then Jason said, in a quiet but steady tone, “Don’t.”

  Brix glared at him. “You must be kidding. She killed my man, so I’m killing her. God help you if you try to stop me.”

  Jason held his hands up in a palms-out, placating gesture. “I won’t. I get it. I do. But I wanna talk you out of it.”

  Brix frowned. “Why?”

  He gave her the most earnest expression she’d ever seen from him. “Because I don’t think this is you. Not really. Yeah, you’ve taken out a bunch of zombies. But they’re not people. Not really. This is different. Killing Nikki will make you feel better for about five seconds. But Trevor will still be dead and you’ll still have to deal with that. And you’ll have to deal with the fact that you killed another human being. A defenseless one. I know it’s hard right now, but try to think ahead a minute. How will you feel about it later? It’ll haunt you, I think. I think you know it, too.”

  Brix didn’t say anything to this right away. But she was thinking hard about it, because she recognized the several grains of truth in what he said. He was right. It would haunt her. She broke eye contact with Jason and stared down at Nikki again, whose tears kept pouring down her already very wet face. She was trying to speak but instead was blubbering incoherently, her bottom lip trembling uncontrollably. In that moment, Brix did feel a flicker of something almost like pity. But it was very faint. She couldn’t take looking at Nikki much longer. It was making her sick.

  She glanced over her shoulder at Trevor’s unmoving, very still corpse.

  She stared at him for maybe a full minute, tears stinging her eyes.

  Then she looked at Nikki again. “Fuck it.”

  She squeezed the trigger and the Glock jumped in her hand a little as it expelled a bullet that punched through Nikki’s forehead and blew out the back of her skull in a spray of blood and brains and bone matter. The girl’s body toppled backward, twitched once on the floor, and then went still.

  Brix heard Jason let out a hitching breath. She recognized the emotion. She was feeling it herself, after all.

  She looked at him. “So what now? Is it your turn, Jason? Are you gonna try to a
venge that murdering bitch?”

  He stared somberly at her without speaking for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “No. I don’t like this. I won’t lie. But…Nikki brought that shit down on herself.”

  “Damn right she did.”

  Jason said nothing at all this time.

  Brix kept looking at him, taking the measure of him during the long, tense silence. It was possible he was lying. That he might take the first opportunity to attack her, that he was just waiting for her to let her guard down to make his move. Maybe. Maybe not. There were a lot of damn maybes in this equation. Too many.

  Brix turned fully in his direction, took one cautious step toward him before stopping.

  He met her gaze and still said nothing.

  The Glock felt heavy in her hand. But it was more than just the actual weight of the weapon. She was thinking about using it again. Thinking about raising it and aiming it at Jason’s face. The most ruthless part of her was telling her it was the smart thing to do. She was sure she could survive better on her own anyway. There would be no one else to account for, no one else to slow her down.

  And she wouldn’t have to watch her back night and day for fear of reprisal.

  Now Jason did speak. “If you’re gonna kill me, just go ahead and get it over with. I’m tired and who wants to live in a world like this anyway?”

  There was a space of maybe two seconds during which it almost happened.

  She came so close to raising her hand and squeezing off a shot.

  But she didn’t. “Can I trust you?”

  After another silent, tense moment, he gave her a terse nod. “Yeah.”

  “How do I know that for sure?”

  “You don’t.”

  Brix grunted. “At least you’re honest.”

  Jason nodded again. “Yeah. That I am. So…what happens now?”

  And so they had come full circle. Brix had asked the same question of him only minutes earlier. Now she shrugged. “We start thinking about what to do next. Whether to stay here or go somewhere else.”

  Jason’s head swiveled slowly left to right, again taking in the grisly sight of the fresh corpses splayed across the debris-strewn floor.

  Brix did the same and felt a fresh stab of heartrending anguish at the sight of Trevor’s slack face. She thought of all the dreams they’d shared of their future together. The outlandish plans they’d made. All of it gone now. Erased from existence. Murdered.

  Jason cleared his throat. “If we stay here, I say we at least get the bodies into one of the other rooms. Don’t know about you, but I don’t like looking at them.”

  “Why not drag them out back? If we’re here much longer, they’ll start to stink.” Brix hated speaking so bluntly about the body of the one she had loved, but this was a situation in which emotion had to be set aside. “And there’ll be flies and maggots, all that nasty shit.”

  “That’ll take a while.” Jason glanced at Nikki. His brow creased and he quickly looked away, focusing on Brix again. “Look, there’s a lot we don’t know. If we drag them out back, there’s a chance zombies could be drawn to the house by the smell of fresh meat. The other thing is I don’t think we ought to stay here much longer.”

  “Oh?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. You were right when you were talking to Trevor, you know. We gotta get out of the city. Out to your dad’s place sounds like a good idea to me.”

  Now Brix was nodding, too. “I was just trying to reassure him, but I do think it’s the best move. Won’t be easy, though. Might even be impossible. We could get killed long before we ever make it out there.”

  “Maybe, but we should try anyway. What the fuck else have we got to lose now?”

  Brix stole one more glance at Trevor’s body.

  Jason had a point there.

  She looked at him again. “All right. So let’s do like you say and get them into one of the back rooms and then start talking about—”

  There was a loud thump from the direction of the kitchen.

  Brix gasped as her head jerked in that direction.

  She heard fear in Jason’s voice as he said, “What the fuck was that?”

  Then there was another thump, louder still.

  And then another.

  They exchanged worried glances. Jason said, “Do you think—”

  Brix was already nodding. “Zombies. Beating on the back door. Drawn by the gunshots maybe.”

  More thumps in rapid succession, as if to affirm what she had said.

  Jason moved away from her, keeping his head down as he scanned the floor. She guessed what he was looking for an instant before he scooped up the gun Nikki had used to kill Trevor. The sight of it made her physically sick. But they needed all the protection they could get.

  Jason cocked his head toward the front door. “Let’s go.”

  Brix frowned. “Now?”

  “Yeah. We don’t know how many are out there. Some might be out front already. I didn’t want to go yet either, but it’s fucking time.”

  He was right. There was no denying it. And even as she recognized this, something primal inside her fought against it. She didn’t want to go back out there. Not yet. Not ever. Didn’t want to have to face the ghoulish sight of all those reanimated corpses. The reality of it was so unlike the movies. No movie ever made could accurately convey what it felt like to fight for your life against forces beyond your control.

  She heard something from out front.

  A creak of clumsy footsteps on the wooden porch.

  Jason started toward the door. “Out of time. We’re going right now.”

  He was right again.

  Brix followed after him, then picked up her pace and brushed past him to seize the doorknob, turn it, and pull the door open. A badly decayed walking corpse missing most of the flesh from one side of its face stared dumbly right at her.

  It reached for her with a shriveled, shaking hand.

  Brix shot it in the head and ran outside.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The first thing she was aware of as she struggled toward consciousness was the sound of running water somewhere nearby. She thought she was somehow still in the woods and had fallen asleep close to a rushing creek. But then some other things occurred to her, memories that were fuzzy at first but soon gained crystalline clarity. The clearing. The house. The rich kids with their rich-kid names. Her failed attempt to talk Rick and Grant out of venturing into the woods. And the last thing she remembered was the scream that rang out of the woods. Lashon frowned with her eyes closed, not yet fully awake.

  Because, no, wait…that was not the last thing she remembered.

  The last thing she remembered was a sudden sharp sting in her side, followed by an immediate and overpowering wooziness. She had then stumbled away from a smiling Ashley, taking two or three clumsy steps before dropping to the ground. There had been a final moment of bleary consciousness before everything went black. She had looked up and seen Ashley again. And there had been something in her hand. A little plastic tube, which she now belatedly realized had been a syringe. And whatever it contained had been very powerful, because she had gone from wide awake to out inside of five seconds.

  Lashon’s eyes snapped open.

  She was no longer in the clearing in the woods. She was in a bedroom, presumably inside the house where all those young people had been hanging out on that porch. And the source of the running water wasn’t a creek, but rather was issuing from an open faucet on the other side of a closed door to her right.

  Lashon tried to sit up, but the effort made her head ache fiercely. So she stayed flat on her back and stared at that closed door, wondering what was happening on the other side. It sounded like someone was running a bath. She turned her head and saw another closed door opposite the foot of the bed. No one else was in the room with her, but she assumed that wouldn’t remain the case for long.

  Which meant it was imperative she get up and attempt an escape while no one was around to stop
her. She was still weakened from whatever drug she had been injected with, but she had to somehow fight through it, get up, and get moving. She had no clue regarding the bigger picture of what was going on here or why Ashley had drugged her, but she was a smart girl, smart enough to know it wasn’t a good idea to hang around and try to find out.

  So she braced her hands on the mattress and tried again to push herself up. This time her head hurt even worse and a sudden tide of nausea made her sick. Her teeth chattered and a thin sheen of sweat formed on her brow. But she didn’t give up. The stakes were too high. So she gritted her teeth and redoubled the effort. By the time she finally got herself into a sitting position, her heart felt like it was going a million miles an hour. Still, she had made progress and couldn’t stop now.

  She glanced at the side of the bed.

  Next step, swing your legs over—

  She heard the loud squelch of a faucet being shut off and the sound of running water abruptly stopped. Lashon’s heart started beating even faster. Someone was in there. And any moment now whoever it was would come into the bedroom. She had very little time left to make this happen. Setting her teeth again, she extended her right leg toward the side of the bed. This triggered another surge of nausea, but she remained determined. She got her right leg over the edge of the bed and shifted her hips in order to start swinging her other leg around.

  And that was when the bathroom door swung open.

  Ashley stood there, framed in bright light, with her hands on her hips. She was naked and had a big hunting knife in her right hand. The lack of clothes and the weapon were startling enough, but the change in the young woman’s demeanor was even more surprising. Gone entirely was the open, friendly Ashley who had greeted her so warmly after her catty exchanges with Mercedes. She wasn’t smiling at all, for one thing. Her expression was very hard and there was a dead coldness in her eyes that made Lashon want to whimper.

  Ashley strode into the room, brandishing the knife. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Lashon cringed away from the blade, which cut through the air maybe three feet from her face as Ashley waved it at her. “What have you done to me? Why did you drug me?”