18. Chapter eighteen
Chapter eighteen
Kieran
I ’m running. I’m running as hard as I can, as swift as I can, and thank the stars I’ve got those damn sneakers on, even if I hate how they feel on my feet.
It's not even the Walkers chasing me. It’s the damned red rain.
Roe warned me. He fucking warned me. We thought the sky was clear, but once I started going up on my own, the ominous red clouds of rot and death peeked over the mountain like something hungry.
Roe and Sami left me half an hour ago at the long ascending driveway that leads to Max’s house. They head to the facility while I try to talk Max back from the brink.
The brink I’m sure he’s almost teetering over, just one more step before he’s gone. Tass . His best friend. His other half. The one who was always there for him, who understood his darkness and took it in stride.
She’s gone. She’s fucking gone.
It’s going to break him, if he isn’t already broken.
I push harder. Legs and lungs burning, arms pumping, my heart going haywire. My throat constricts and I can barely hear anything over the sound of my own breath and blood. Terror crawls up my spine and settles behind my teeth.
I keep running.
A little while further. It’s not far now, but why does it have to be so damn steep? Why couldn’t he pick a house on nice flat terrain?
I see the end of the hill, close, so close. I crest it and it’s right there.
The beautiful house is enormous in the daylight, the pool of horror in front of the back entrance still a deathtrap, but the sliding doors are open.
He’s here.
Even though it’s darkening, the clouds rolling in fast, I stop for a second and look up.
Fuck .
I take a stuttering breath, eyes wide at the blood-red sky.
And a single drop falls right between my eyes.
No. Fucking no!
Panic eats me whole. It takes the last of the steady out of my legs and then pushes me harder, running like my life actually depends on it.
Too late. Too late. I’m too fucking late.
It starts to rain for real now. The drops on my skin like little knives, each one a tiny death sentence.
Chompy thrashes in his pit, high on the red rain. I don’t check to see what’s in it, if Max went on a spree and threw bodies in there.
I don’t look. I just keep running.
I push through the door, almost collapse on the floor, and tear at my skin in a wild panic. No, no, no, no. I’m soaked. I’m fucking soaked .
Touched.
I start shaking.
It can take minutes. Sometimes it takes mere minutes.
I’m trembling all over, throat raw and burning, and I stare at my hands like they might change. I’m half-expecting the red-streaked skin to sprout claws or something equally moronic.
I start counting. To ten. Twenty. Sixty. Then again. Two minutes. Three. Five.
I turn to the sliding doors, where the rain still hammers, and close my eyes, forcing myself to focus on my body, my breaths, and the dull ache in my legs.
I’m ready to run into that damn pool if I feel it, if I start to change, if the virus takes me. Let Chompy have me, because I’m not letting Max do this again.
He had to kill Tass; he ended her so she wouldn’t become a Walker, a shell of herself. If I turn, he’d have to kill me too. I’d rather die now than force him to do that. I’ll take whatever comes.
But nothing happens.
I'm not changing.
It’s not one of those quick switches people whisper about.
I force a breath in and exhale shakily. Another slow one. In. Out. In. Out.
I’m good. For now. An instant switch is very rare.
Usually, it can take hours, days, before you even become a carrier, Touched…
Before the blood darkens, before the senses sharpen and their doom is written in their veins.
And to become a zombie, a Walker, after that…
It can take months, years, as the virus slowly spreads.
Opening my eyes again, I shove the panic to the side because I have to focus on my man now. Not my ultimate demise. I force my breathing to slow and dart up the stairs to his room. His sanctuary.
My eyes find him immediately.
He’s on the big balcony that hangs over the ocean, the red rain sluicing over him. For a second, I freeze. He looks wrong and perfect all at once, like some fucked-up statue: skin stained red, wet, hair pasted to his forehead, standing like he’s letting the world punish him.
It’s as if he belongs to the ocean, the storm, and it almost hurts to look.
“ Max. ”
He doesn’t turn. He doesn’t look at me. He just stands there, letting the rain eat at his skin as if it’s something he’s been waiting for.
“Stay. There.” His rough voice cuts through the hiss of rain. “Do not step a foot forward. Don’t let even a fucking drop touch you.”
I grit my teeth, forcing my face into something harder than the fear bubbling in my chest.
“Max—”
But his next words cut me off, cut straight through my thoughts, low and quiet, almost lost in the downpour.
“I don’t want to send you to the afterlife as well.”
The afterlife. The word punches me in the gut. He might have to .
My head tilts as I watch him, standing there in the open, arms loose at his sides, his chin lifted like he’s daring the rain to strike him down.
“The afterlife?” I echo, my voice sharp but uncertain. “Do you believe in that kinda stuff?”
He shifts then, not just looking but offering himself to it, arms spreading wider as if the storm belongs to him. The crimson drops spatter across his skin, streaking down his cheeks, tracing over the sharp lines of his jaw like war paint.
He just… stands there. Soaking it in. Untouchable. Immune.
Beautiful.
Not that I’ll ever tell him that. Not out loud. I like to keep my head where it belongs… on my fucking shoulders.
“I need to believe it’s real,” he mutters finally, the rain swallowing his words. So quiet, I’m sure they weren’t meant for me.
But I understand. I know exactly what he means.
Tass.
It’s been mere days, and the ghost of her is here.
She was the only one who could match him, the only one who could drag him back from the edge when he spun too close to the abyss.
Until the infection finally got her. Until the virus in her veins finally snapped, and she turned.
Exactly what now will happen to me someday.
And Max… Max was the one who had to end it. Who had to drive steel through one of the few people that ever counted as his family.
Now he stands out there like he’s daring the rain to take him too. Like he’s begging it to take him to her.
And me? I can’t move. I can only watch.
My heart bleeds for him, for her, for this. It bleeds for the empty space she carved out of him. She was the light to his dark, and I’m so fucking afraid of what this loss’ll do to him. What this could do to us… to whatever thread keeps us from unraveling.
If he doesn’t have her, if he loses that thing that kept his demons at bay, what happens then? Can I be enough for his darkness? For his monster? Can anyone be?
There’s just this sense of wrongness that emanates from him sometimes.
Of wickedness. Of wildness. Of wrath.
Like the universe fucked up somewhere and spat him out as its retribution. He doesn’t just carry chaos; he is it. It’s worn into his skin, etched into every sharp smile, every twitch of those bloodstained fingers.
You don’t approach someone like Max. You survive him. Or you don’t.
And I will survive him. I’d give everything for him, and I’ll fight tooth and nail against whatever the red rain tries to write in my blood.
I swallow. Take that step forward, the need to go to him, to soothe him so strong, I can’t fucking resist it.
He must hear something shift, because he snaps his gaze to me. A fucking growl rips out of his chest, low and fierce, and then it cuts off so abruptly when when he takes me in.
“ No !” That one word tears from him, loaded with so much anguish it makes the room spin.
He shakes his head. His whole body trembles, like someone’s hit him in the chest. “Oh gods. Please. Please no. You’re Touched. ”
He rushes through the sliding door. His hands don’t find my throat this time; they find my red-soaked cheeks, rough and certain. My hands clamp to his wrists like my life depends on it, because maybe it does.
“ Kieran.” He says my name, and it’s everything. Filled with sorrow, pleading, a rawness that makes my guts twist.
“I know. I’m so sorry,” I whisper, the words thin and useless. I close the distance and press my forehead to his, my hands burning on his skin, gripping him tighter. Trying, uselessly, to be the anchor he needs.
“Why did you do that?” The tone in his voice is something I’ve never heard from him before. Devastated and desperate.
“I had to come find you,” I say. “I couldn’t sit there and do nothing. While you were—While she—”
He shakes his head again and again, cutting me off. “Kee, no . I would’ve… I would’ve come home. Eventually.”
“But I didn’t know. You were gone. And then we heard about… I was scared for you,” I say, the sound rough in my throat.
His fingers clench on my wet cheeks, thumbs pressing hard, forehead leaning to mine. He smells of smoke and rain and something older. “I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry. Tass …” His voice breaks.
“I know. I know. Shit, I’m sorry, Max. She didn’t deserve that. You didn’t deserve to have to do that.”
He shakes his head once more, the tip of his nose going past mine in a wet slide, and for a blink the world narrows to the two of us and the hiss of the rain. “I can’t kill you like I killed her. I can’t. Please don’t ask me to. I killed my best friend. My only friend.”
My head is mimicking his, shaking hard. “No, Max, baby, no. You didn’t kill her. The virus did, that damn infection did. That’s not on you.”
“I can’t… I can’t get them out . No matter how many Walkers I kill, how many I gut. I can’t get that itch out. I tried . The bloodlust… That damn static. It doesn’t stop. ”