Page 30 of Outbreak

When I can breathe again, I get back on my feet and keep walking. The dead passed through the woods a while ago, as I lay trapped beneath the mangled bodies. I don't know how long it takes for them to come back, so as soon as the growling stopped, I freed myself. I see lights through the trees up ahead, and a heavy mix of fear and relief fills me. What if Ican’tfind him? What if Idofind him and he’s dead?

Pull yourself together, bitch. You’ve survived worse.

Hauling in a lung full of death-scented oxygen, I slowly release it and step over more bodies until the road comes into view, along with everything else.

“Oh my God,” I whisper, crouching down behind a tree in the woodline. I can’t believe what I’m seeing. The soldiers, standing on top of vehicles, are openly firing on anything that moves. The dead and living alike. If it’s outside the vehicles, it’s getting mowed down as they jump from car to car in sync.

I wait for them to move about ten cars down from Ghost’s truck before I make a run for it. With everything inside of me, Ineed him to be hiding in the truck, waiting for me. I’m sure he thinks I would run, and it wouldn’t be the first time, but I can’t. I just… can’t. Ineedto find him. I need him to be okay. That realization would probably make a therapist consider a career change, but I don’t have the energy or brain capacity to analyze that right now when every cell in my body is calling me to him.

My body hits the truck with a thud, and I rip the door open as quickly as I can. My heart sinks to the bottom of my stomach when I find it empty. “No,” I whisper, tears blurring my vision as I turn around and sink to the ground on my ass. “No…”

I’m alone. Again. I feel my body and mind retreating, going to the numb space I’ve carved out inside myself for when I can’t process shit. “No… no… no…” I whisper on repeat, staring into the trees but not seeing anything. The screams of death and gunfire are a fitting song to the despair I feel inside.

What am I going to do?

“Rue.”

Where do I go?

“Rue!”

Hands grab at my arms, and a face moves in front of mine. I blink a few times to clear the tears from my eyes, and Casey kneels in front of me. “We have to hide, Rue. Come on.”

“I can’t find him,” I say, staring back at her but looking through her at the same time.

“I saw him run into the woods after you. We can look for him when it’s safe. I need you to get up,” Casey says, but I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I was just in the woods. I didn’t see him. Which means he’s probably one of the torn-apart bodies.

“He’s dead?” I don’t know why I ask when I know the truth. Maybe I want her to lie to me.

“No. He was alive. And if you want to stay alive long enough to find him, you need to get up.”

Her words finally break through my mental walls and register. I can’t sit here and mourn without answers. I can’t give up before I’ve at least tried to find him. Taking another deep breath, I let her pull me to my feet. She wraps her arm around my waist, not seeming to mind that I look likeCarrie—the original, not the remake.

“We’ll go look for him?” I ask as she walks us back to her van.

“As soon as it’s safe,” she says. “I promise.”

She opens the driver door, putting me inside before climbing into the back with her girls. When I turn around, I see them huddled together on the floor, terrified. “It’s okay. She’s okay.”

“She’s bleeding,” Violet cries.

“I’m okay. It’s not my blood. I’m not bleeding,” I say, trying to wipe some of the blood from my face with my hands, but they’re coated in just as much dirt and blood as the rest of me.

Casey sits back, rocking and soothing them as they softly cry. I turn back to the front, sinking down in the seat to stay out of sight. Still, my eyes stay glued to the treeline, wishing and waiting for that skull mask to appear.

Seconds, minutes, and hours pass by. The girls finally fell asleep sometime after the gunfire disappeared. I have no idea what time it is, but it’s still dark. As soon as the sun rises, I’ll find him.

CHAPTER 23

Ghost

“Rue!” Where the fuck is she? I saw her go down, shoved into the ditch by the panicked crowd, then nothing. I can’t find her.I can’t fucking find her.It’s dark, but I will pick through every eviscerated body part on the ground before I believe she is dead.

Maybe she ran…My subconscious mocks me, but I can’t believe that either. We were making progress. She was making me forget why she’s being punished in the first place. She’s had plenty of opportunities to run or ask for help and didn’t take them. She’s got to be here, lost and scared. My stomach twists when I sift through the bodies on the ground. I’m no stranger to dead bodies, but when I kill something, it stays dead. I need to find her before these fuckers get a wake-up call from hell.

As soon as I saw her go down, I grabbed a piece of rebar from the back of the truck and took off. The dead pushed the crowd into the woods, and she wasn’t lying in the ditch, so she must have got pushed ahead with them. I followed behind the massive herd of corpses until they came to a clearing and slowly dispersed in different directions.

Now I’m back tracking, searching through the bodies left behind from the checkpoint as the sun starts to peek through the trees. The dead don’t care if you’re a man, woman, or child. They tore through everyone just the same. I try to put the bodies of the kids out of my mind, but something like that has a way of burning into your brain and sticking around. I don’t do kids—I don’t care how good the money is; even a sick asshole like me has lines I won’t cross.

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