Chapter 13 #2
She hasn’t slowed down yet. The flashlight might have blinded her, but either it wasn’t enough or her glasses saved her from the stare. It doesn’t matter. She lunged for Maverick, and she was strong enough to grab him, and now she’s biting down on his shoulder.
She’s eating him.
The flashlight falls to the earth, rolling away. He bucks his body, but her grip is too strong. If he can’t break free, he’s a goner, and the only way to kill a lurker is with fire.
Fire…
“Go,” yells Maverick, his voice hoarse and full of agonized pain. “Get out of here.”
Leave me alone.
Chase starts to drag me away, and I know he’s only doing that because Maverick doesn’t want us to watch him die.
He was so worried about following me after I snuck out that Chase doesn’t have any weapons.
You can’t kill a lurker with your bare hands.
If she hadn’t Turned yet, she’d be vulnerable, but she had to have.
She wouldn’t be chowing down on Mav if she was still human.
We need fire. We need to watch her burn.
I elbow Chase in the gut. He’ll forgive me, but I’ll never forgive myself if I just stand here and watch Maverick Brooks be another victim of the lurkers.
He releases me. And before he can grab onto me again, I tear off Rory’s jacket, tossing it behind me.
My tank top is next. Hoping like hell the fabric is flammable, I keep flicking the stupid lighter until I get a flame.
Then, muttering come on, come on under my breath, I shove the lighter against the material and nearly cry out in relief when it catches.
I need something to toss as Eileen—no, the lurker. With Mav’s blood dripping down its chin, she stopped being Eileen Foster the moment it lunged for him and took a chunk out of his shoulder.
“Holden, wait—”
No. There’s no time to wait. I dash forward, holding onto the burning piece of fabric, and aim for the lurker. It’s too distracted because it’s feeding that I’m able to sneak behind her and Maverick and light the lurker on fire.
Its hair catches, and I dance away before I manage to light my own hair ablaze.
For a heartbeat, I’m not sure if it will go up in flame like a full lurker, only for the hair to sizzle and spark and suddenly turn to ash.
The same thing happens to the rest of its body, leaving a sizable pile of ash for Maverick to collapse into.
“Mav? Tell me you’re okay. Maverick! Can you hear me?”
His shoulder is a bloody mess. Tissue and sinew stick out from the hole she tore out of his shirt, and I swear I can see the white of bone beneath it. She got that deep, but as long as he doesn’t bleed out, he’ll be fine.
As long as we get an antidote in him, he’ll survive.
It’s like deja-fucking-vu all over again. Just like how I howled at Maverick to grab me my pack so I could administer the antidote to Chase after he was bit, I crouch down next to Mav, making sure he knows I’m here with him, and turn toward Chase.
He’s bouncing on the balls of his feet, humming in place.
I can tell he wants to run toward me, to whisk me away, to cover my bra up with Rory’s jacket.
But when I shout at him to run for help and see if Veronica has an antidote, he doesn’t hesitate.
We both know he’s faster than me, and maybe I am a kick ass hunter after all, because I flamed that fresh lurker.
Now I have to save Maverick.
Chase swears he’ll be right back, and I know he will be.
Maverick is on his side, face turned away from me.
I can see that his eyes are closed. It looks like his body shut down to avoid the pain of being half-eaten by a zombie, and I don’t blame him.
I do shove my hand under his nose to double-check that he’s breathing, that he’s alive, but the second I do, his eyes pop open again.
“Mav? Mav. Help is coming. Chase will be right back. You just—shit.”
He shouldn’t be able to move that quickly with half his shoulder missing.
I don’t know how he managed it, but one second I’m at his side, panicking that he won’t be able to hang on until Chase returns.
The next? He’s lunged at me, I fall flat on my back, and Maverick hovers over me, his face inches from mine.
His eyes are black.
Fully, completely black.
No. It can’t be. He only just got bit. There’s time before he Turns.
He’s not going to eat me. We’ve been through too much shit for the former cop who calls me “kid” to consider me an hors d’oeuvres.
I gulp, and I don’t know if he can tell how fucking terrified I am. Maybe. All I know is that he suddenly pushes off of me. I scramble back on the heels of my hands, finally breathing again as I put some space between us.
I stay on the ground. Maverick? He’s on his feat, reaching behind him into the waistband of his jeans.
He pulls out a gun.
Wait.
Gun? Where did he get a gun?
Shit. Is that his gun?
The last I heard, Winston took it when we were caught at the NRI.
I have no idea how he got it back. If Delilah knew about it and somehow rescued it to return to Maverick with its single bullet inside, or if he figured out a way to get his hands on another revolver, but as I watch in horror, Maverick put the mouth of the gun to his temple.
No!
Climbing up, I throw myself at his knees. We both hit the ground hard, and the gun falls free from his grip just like the flashlight did.
I can’t let him kill himself. And maybe I’m being selfish. When I confronted Maverick after Chase was bit and he admitted that he had my antidote, he told me all about the meaning behind his gun.
There’s only one bullet left. He used one to kill Darryl in East Jersey, but he held onto the last shot so that he could end his own life before he completely Turned.
He might have survived what the first batch of Project Phoenix did to him, but after losing a chunk of his arm to a lurker’s bite? Unless he has an antidote to combat the lurker’s venom, that’s a death sentence in this world.
Chase is going to get one. I know he is. I have full faith in him. So I can’t let Maverick kill himself, not yet, and I flop forward, hiding the gun beneath me before he can grab it.
Only he doesn’t even try. He takes one look at me with his eerie black eyes, clamps his hands over his bloody shoulder, and runs. For a former cop in his early forties, Mav is fucking fast because I barely can get to my knees against before he’s gone.
I almost go after him. I don’t know why, only that it seems like the right thing to do, but after everything that just happened…
yeah. I don’t have the strength to do it.
I don’t even have the strength to get up off of the flattened grass.
The most I can do is scoot the gun a little further away from me and plop down on the dirt.
And that’s exactly where I am when Chase, David, Veronica, and Aaron show up.