Page 18 of Outbreak

“What did we hit?” She asks, breaking the connection to survey our surroundings. Then all the color drains from her face. “Ghost– look.”

Dragging my eyes away from her, I turn to look at what she’s seeing. It’s a man lying on the road, his body twisted around on itself. “We hit someone.”

Her hand flies to the door handle to open it, but I snatch it back. “Stay in the truck.”

“I will not. There’s a person out there needing help, and we can help them,” she demands.

“You will not get out of this truck,” I growl, pulling the handcuffs from my pocket and snapping them around her wrist, the other on the dash like before. If this is what I think it is, I can’t have her running around like a clueless, lost puppy getting herself killed.

Before she can protest, I point to the clearly dead man that lays twisted behind us. “Take a closer look, Rue. That man is dead. And he’s not. I don’t know what the fuck this is, but you’re not getting out of the fucking truck until I figure it out. Got it?”

Her eyes narrow as she twists in her seat to get a better look. His body is morphed in a very unnatural position, and he’s still writhing on the ground, trying to drag his body across the asphalt. He keeps snapping his jaws like a rabid dog.

When I look back at her, her face has gone pale again. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Breathe through your nose,” I say, pulling her head to me and kissing her forehead through my mask. “I’ll be right back.”

“What are you going to do?” Her question is rushed and frantic as I open my door and climb out. I don’t respond because, well, I don’t fucking know. But I grab a long piece of pipe from the back of my truck and quickly scan the area.

There are fences on each side of the road, but no houses in sight. I don’t know where he came from, but we might need to find another road if this area has fallen. Satisfied that he’s alone and nothing is going to come popping out at me, I carefully walk towards him. I can hear his low, raspy growl as he snapshis teeth together the closer I get. When he becomes aware of my presence, his body goes stiff before he cocks his head unnaturally and digs his dirty fingers into the asphalt to turn himself towards me.

His skin has started to rot, molted and tinged with death, and his eyes are a milky white. Dried blood and dirt coat his face and the rest of his skin. I don’t know how or when he died, but hitting him with my truck seems to have broken his legs. They are twisted around each other, and his feet are pointing in the wrong directions.

“What the fuck is this?” I mutter to myself, squatting down and leaning in like I can figure this shit out myself.

His growls get more feral as he reaches for me, his mangled arms trying to pull his dead weight closer. When he grabs ahold of my leg, snapping his jaws at my boots, I nearly shit myself, but instinctively I know what to do.

I might kill the living for a living, but my body operates on autopilot as I drive the metal pipe into his skull. His body falls limp as I hear a faint scream come from the truck, and I fall back on my ass, scrambling away from the now dead, undead man in the middle of the road.

CHAPTER 15

Rue

The scream leaves my throat without my permission. My asshole has officially sucked a lemon in this seat watching my masked kidnapper inspect the roadkill. And I’ve officially lost my fucking mind.

I pinch my exposed thigh through my ripped leggings, squeezing my eyes shut tightly, as if it might wake me up from this nightmare.

This can’t be real.

When the pain prickles and stars burst behind my eyelids, I release a slow, steady breath. Whatever this is, is really happening. I don’t even know where to begin processing this, so I do what any normal human would do in this situation, I shove the fucked-up confusing mess to the back of my mind and lean back over the seat to see where Ghost is. Thatthinggrabbed him, and I saw him go down. I didn’t mean to scream, but it startled me. Is he dead? What the fuck am I supposed to do now? I’m cuffed on the wrong side of the fucking truck to make a break for it. And I’m definitely not sticking around with whatever the fuck that was if he’s dead.

I find myself sick to my stomach at the thought of leaving him on the side of the road. What the fuck is wrong with me? Heis literally holding me against my will, but I want him to be okay. I’m praying that his head pops up any second now and I don’t have to figure this shit out on my own.

I need him to be okay.

I’m just as startled by that internal confession as I am about the not really dead, dead guy we hit. I don’t think I even want to process that shit right now. Before we hit that thing, I was taunting him in hopes he would do something. I needed him to take it from me because I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of getting what he really wants—me begging for him. But I had sat in that seat for several hours fighting with myself for how fucking turned on he made me. I wanted to stick my hand between my thighs and give myself an orgasm right there in front of him. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was the chickenshit I was accusing him of being.

“Where are you?” I whisper to myself, scanning the area near the body. I can just see the man, his skull now caved in and the pipe discarded next to him.

A startled scream climbs up my throat with my heart when the door I’m leaning against suddenly opens, and I nearly topple out of the truck.

“I’ve got you,” he says, pushing me back into the truck and helping me turn to him. He uncuffs me from the dash but leaves the cuff dangling on my arm as he pulls me out of the truck and sits me down on the ground. His voice is dazed when he speaks again. “You need to see this to believe it.”

Anxiety swirls in my stomach, and I can feel the death already in the air around us. “I don’t think I want to.”

He tilts my chin up to look at him. “Yes, you do. I can’t even begin to understand what the fuck is happening and this is the second one I’ve killed. It’s got to be the virus. It… changes you. It looks like it kills you, but your body comes back. I need you to understand what we’re dealing with.”

“Okay,” I whisper, finding myself much more compliant to him when he actually talks to me and explains things. I hate when he gives me clipped, half-responses, or cryptic answers that I don’t understand.

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