Page 55 of Say You'll Stay

Lucy’s wails echo in the background.

Don’t fight this, she tells herself. It’s always worse when she fights it. Give them what they want and maybe they’ll let her live so they can have more later. She can’t save her baby if she’s dead.

“Hey… guys…someone come look at this…”

The one at the window is ignored and a cold finger gropesbetween her legs.

“…what the fuck is that…”

She can tell Cole is still alive by the crashing and cursing coming from the other side of the room. He’s still fighting.

The two about to assault her argue over who goes first, granting her a reprieve.

“…holy shit, we gotta move…we gotta go…what the—”

The terrified warnings from the man watching the window are abruptly silenced when the front door bursts open and the playing field is instantly leveled. The dead swarm into the house like locusts, so fast that it’s difficult to process until half a dozen have converged on the men attacking her.

As she scrambles away, she pulls her pants back on while the shotgun goes off and then the pistol, both weapons pointed at the dead, but doing little more than pissing them off. No one cares much about her anymore. It must be hard to focus on raping someone when your face is being eaten.

A gush of blood from a torn limb sprays across the bassinet as she lunges for it, but Cole grabs it first, along with their bag beside it.

“Run! Out the Back!” he yells.

With rotters hot on their heels, they aim for the kitchen door. She seizes Flower’s harness with one hand while grasping Cole’s with her other, snatching the cat off the counter and holding her suitcase style as they all rush outside.

She’s never run so fast in her life. Never had so much adrenaline pumped through her veins that it feels like she could levitate. As they race across the ice-covered lake, their only goal is to outrun the dead, and she fears they may not reach the other side. One glance back at the horrifying reality reveals dozens of rotters, all so much fasterthan anything she’s seen since the turn, funneling out the back door of the cottage.

They’re all going to die right here. There are too many. They can’t outrun them.

Instead of the sharp claws of death consuming her, a crack beneath her feet is the only warning before her world is engulfed by water.

She spins, disoriented with shock, and tries swimming to the surface, only to be met by ice overhead. Her fists pound against it, trying and failing to break through. Hordes of the dead have fallen in with her, most sinking to the bottom, but one grabs her leg and drags her down too. Olivia kicks and squirms in a fruitless attempt to save herself. It is heavier than her, more determined, and unbothered by pesky needs like breathing.

Soon, her lungs burn, and her vision blurs.

All she wants is to inhale and relieve the pressure, but she resists, knowing the moment she does, she’ll never see her baby again. Never see Cole again.

There is a limit to her resolve and eventually, her body takes over, forcing that deep inhale against her will. As the water fills her chest, pulling her into darkness, her last thought is a desperate hope that Lucy and Cole are safe.

Chapter 15

One moment he’s racing across the ice, holding a baby carrier in one hand and Olivia’s palm in the other, then the cat whizzes past his head and Olivia is gone.

At first, Cole doesn’t understand what happened. A horde is chasing them, and each wasted second brings them closer to certain death. Already, he fears they won’t make it. Never seen rotters this fast before, and without any barrier to stop them, his and Olivia’s legs will give up long before the dead do.

Thinking she tripped, he turns back, expecting the group to be rushing towards her, ready to fight them off, only to discover the lake empty.

There are no rotters except the few stragglers at the cottage door.

An eerie silence replaces the constant groaning and growling of the dead.

A massive crack in the ice ends right before his feet. Everything chasing them has fallen in, taking her with it. Rotters, fixated on him, stream from the house’s rear exit, charging into the icy water and sinking like boulders.

Cole scrambles to the edge, calling out her name, blindly reaching in with one arm but finding nothing. He abandonsthe baby in her carrier on solid ice, shoving Lucy a few feet away in case the entire thing collapses under his weight.

Knowing exactly what he needs to do, fear shivers through his limbs, pumping his lungs at double the pace.

For a brief moment of self-doubt and terror, he believes he can’t do it, only to realize that he’d rather drown than regret not attempting to rescue her. He takes a deep breath and slips into the jagged opening, all his organs seizing up at the freezing temperatures, and then dives beneath the surface. The army forced him to learn to swim. He tried to quit, only to be denied. Considered breaking his leg to avoid the water, but heard stories of men who did the same for other reasons and still couldn’t get an honorable discharge. With his luck, he’d be stuck in the army and forced to swim with a broken limb. Somehow, he survived and passed. He spent that entire stretch of time in cold sweats in his bunk at night while the others slept, fighting nightmares in the shadows.

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