Chapter Twenty-One
N ia starts issuing orders, but I don’t listen. I can hardly listen to Rae either, who’s trying to convince me to sit down and take a moment.
Mason’s gone .
Would the others have killed him? I don’t think so. Their panic seems genuine—Callum looks as though he might burst into tears, and Emma looks vaguely lost, even though we’re all in the same room.
“I need to go and look,” I say, and Rae shakes her head, fingers digging into my shoulders.
“It’s not safe,” she replies. “You heard them before. They might take you.”
“It’s not just us they’re after.” Not anymore. Mason’s not a hunter, and he’s been living in this town his entire life. Why would anyone go after him now?
“Don’t be fucking stupid, Isaac,” Blake hisses in my ear. “He doesn’t care about you. For all we know, he took them and he’s stayed behind to kill them.”
I jerk away. No. I don’t think that’s true, either.
Nia’s orders have turned into faint arguments that grow in volume the longer they go on. Blake drifts that way when he realises the group is more concerned about Mason than Dane.
“I have to look,” I say. I can’t explain it to Rae. I can’t explain it to myself . This feels like my fault, somehow. Mason wouldn’t have cared enough to stay out there and look for the others if not for me.
Rae shakes her head. “I mean it, Isaac. You can’t.”
She’s distracted too when someone mentions Autumn, and when I realise no attention is on me, I slip out of the room.
I walk hurriedly to the stairs and shove the door at the top of them open as quietly as I can. When I close it again behind me, the church is silent in a way it hasn’t been since I arrived. There’s always been someone else in here with me.
Moonlight spills through the stained glass window. I stare at it for a moment, tracing the outline of that strange figure again before I turn on my heel and walk out of the church.
Do I dare to leave the graveyard? Like the church, the town is dark and silent beyond. Whoever or whatever took Mason and everyone else must be out there.
I adjust my grip on my bat and walk through the gate.
Still nothing. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I make my way down into the town, moonlight lighting each step. The gun is heavy in my pocket. I’m still not certain why I took it. It should only have one bullet—if it does contain one at all.
I haven’t brought my pack, have nothing but my bat and the gun and my torch, I realise, but I don’t pull it out. I don’t truly believe I have any element of surprise on my side, and yet I don’t want to risk it.
It takes me a while to reach the spot where Autumn disappeared. The others have been through here, of course, and I don’t really know what I’m looking for.
I just can’t stay up there. It’s bad enough that Autumn and Dane are gone, but Mason… This feels like it’s my fault. Like I failed. I should never have let him push me away today. I should have kicked up a fuss until he let me stay; I could have kept an eye on him then.
A strange, shuffling sound reaches me. I raise my bat and take a few steps further down the street. No one should be out here. The others are all back at the church and, far as I can tell, no one has followed me down.
The sound becomes louder as I reach a house at the end of the street. There’s a strip of sparse grass next to it, a spindly tree and a knocked-over bin, and next to that—
The zombie groans, long and low, but makes no move to get at me.
It’s pressed up against the house wall, legs moving like it wants to keep walking but the house is in the way.
Its eyes roll in its skull, fixing blindly on me for a second.
Withered lips reveal broken teeth, and I stare and stare because I’ve been this close to zombies before, but never one that wasn’t trying to bite me at the same time.
I take a step closer, and the groan turns into a growl. It knows I’m here, then, even if it isn’t out to get me. The question is, what is it doing?
Skirting carefully around the zombie, I reach the front door of the house. Now I do take my torch from my pocket—where there’s one zombie, there’ll well be more—and I kick open the half-rotted door and make my way into the building.
It’s cold in here. Damp. I find nothing on the ground floor aside from abandoned furniture and even less when I head upstairs. I pause in one of the bedrooms, looking out up and down the street. The zombie is still making faint noises next to the house.
Where is it trying to go? I move to a different room, trying to get a view of what might be in a straight line from where it’s walking.
The old school is that way. The park. Beyond that, the woods.
Maybe that’s where the zombie wants to go. Mason said that was where they all stayed, that they couldn’t get in whatever boundary they’d all set up. I sigh and lean against the wall for a moment. He was wrong about that, seems like. Why else would a zombie be here?
I make my way carefully back downstairs and flick off my torch, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness before I step back outside. As I pull the door shut behind me, I freeze.
Something is different.
Something—
The zombie lurches out of the darkness with a rattling groan. I yelp, dodging to one side, and it crashes into the door, falling through it. Fuck. Whatever it was after, I’ve sufficiently distracted it, and I glance up and down the street for any others before I ready myself to end things.
The zombie struggles back to its feet. Its arm is half hanging off, useless by its side, and it drags its legs towards me. I clench my teeth, trying to ignore the terrible moans escaping its throat. It swipes its still-working arm at me, and I dart out of the way.
One swift hit brings the zombie to its knees; two take out its skull. I grimace at the blood and brain spattered over my boots, then give it one more hit for good measure.
Why is there a zombie here? How is there one here? I glance in the direction of the church. Did one of them let it in?
Most importantly, are there more of them out there?
I leave the zombie behind, heading in the direction that it clearly wanted to go for want of anything better to do. There are no others—not as far as I can tell—but I still start every time the wind whistles down narrow streets, on edge in a way I’ve never been.
I turn up nothing, of course. I break into the school, for a moment certain that I feel eyes on me, but all of the rooms are empty and don’t look like they’ve been disturbed beyond the things Mason and I moved the other day.
Where could he be? I pause in one of the classrooms and stare out the window, across the field that backs onto the school.
The woods look ominous beyond, trees swaying in the wind.
If he’s out there, I’ll never find him. Pain fills my chest, pushing into my throat.
It makes no sense to feel so much for him after such a short time, but I think part of me believed him.
He’d never let anything happen to me. He’d keep me here, so long as I wanted it.
And now he’s gone. They’re all gone. Me and Rae and Blake will have to go back to the Citadel and tell them—if we’re allowed to get on that train at all. If Nia doesn’t do to us the same thing as whatever happened to those other teams.
The sky begins to lighten, and I drag myself wearily back up to the church. Rae and Callum are waiting by the doorway, and Rae lets out a cry when she sees me—a mixture of anger and relief.
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
I shake my head. I can’t answer that. I don’t know the answer. Callum takes me in with a sweeping glance, eyes lingering on my boots and the end of my bat.
“What did you find?” he asks.
“Zombie,” I mutter. “Just the one.”
“Where?”
“Next to… a house.” I describe it to him, and he doesn’t look as though he disbelieves me. Doesn’t matter, I guess. What’s left of it is still down there. Callum scurries off and I wander into the church and drop onto one of the pews.
“Did you find anything else?” Rae asks, taking a seat next to me.
I shake my head. “Nothing. I don’t know where they could be.”
“We talked a while after you left,” Rae says. “They think they’ve all been taken out into the woods.”
“Are they going to go and look?”
“Talked about that, too. We tried to convince them, but—”
I shake my head. “What did they say was out there?”
“Zombies.”
“Did Blake tell you what we found?”
She presses her lips together and nods. “For a minute, I thought they’d killed you. Realised they were all still down there with us.”
“Do you think they’re going to let us leave?”
Rae lets out a long breath. “Fuck. I don’t know.”
Blake comes thundering up the stairs and stalks down the aisle.
He doesn’t look at either of us as he passes, and I sigh, tipping my head back on the pew.
I’m exhausted. Too exhausted to worry about everything —I still desperately want to find Mason, so I can’t concern myself with whether or not we’ll get back to the Citadel.
The life I have there feels so distant now. Bleak and cold and quiet in comparison to everything here, and perhaps it’s foolish to think it, but if Mason were before me now and asked me to stay, I know I’d say yes.
I sit up and rub at my stinging eyes.
Rae makes a sympathetic sound. “You should rest,” she says, and shakes her head at the sharp look I give her. “Just for a couple of hours. We can go back out when it’s fully light. See if there are any clues left on that zombie you found.”
I push shakily to my feet. “Yeah, sure. You—”
Blake shouts from outside. I race to the door, Rae on my heels.
The sight before me has me stopping in my tracks. Blake is by the gate, helping another figure who is leaning heavily against him. They turn, and Rae gasps.
It’s Dane.
“Help!” Blake cries. “He’s injured!”