He sighed. “I wish right now…”
“What?” she asked as she pushed the bar and Luke pulled.
“That we’d just kept traveling. We’d never have argued, we might even have reached the coast eventually. You could have sunbathed and I’d have rubbed lotion on you.”
“And we wouldn’t be about to die.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
One final push and pull and the bar was out. It hit the floor and they moved it aside to the pile with the others before picking their weapons back up. Jackson stood up and looked around the room—at their little team. Sebastian was filling syringe after syringe with some sort of murky blue liquid. Pete and Jay were pulling out Sebastian’s cutting equipment—the thing he went through bones with. In a few seconds they would have to leave, and not a one of them didn’t know they were going to die. Not one.
“Let me say it, Jack,” Luke said, taking her chin and pulling her face around so that her eyes met his.
Jackson shuddered. “I can’t…”
His thumb brushed against her lips and he sighed. “Well, I’m going to say it anyway, and you’re going to hear it, because you need to, Jack. And then, when I’m done, we’ll go out there together and face death knowing the truth.”
“Hand in hand, is it?” she asked and she wanted it to be a quip, a way to lighten the mood, but it didn’t come out that way at all.
“To the end, Jack,” Luke said. “Always to the end, because you know that I love you, don’t you?”
And Jackson’s skin shivered and her heart raced and she wanted to scream to the sky, because it was all so fucking unfair. Everything! The months of traveling, of hiding, of starving—and always watching, always waiting for death. A death she expected and had readied herself for too many times. The day she’d left her apartment. The time she’d stood on that observation deck with the snow swirling around her face. Even the time when they’d driven straight through the horde. It had always been there. Always lingering on the edges. And now here, when it came to claim her at last, it gave her this. This one moment of something she’d never thought to find. Something that now she would never have.
She swallowed around a lump and in that moment it seemed like all the lumps. Tye’s lump, and her brother’s lumps, everyone single person’s she’d ever known lifted themselves up and lodged there, desperate to burst free.
“Luke…”
Her voice faltered, the groans dimmed to be replaced by a roaring in her ears, and she looked into the perfect blue of his eyes, wishing she could say the words back to him. But even as she opened her mouth Jackson knew that if she spoke again the lumps would be set free, and she couldn’t let them, couldn’t even begin to give them the chance. Because that would be all it took, she realized. They’d leave her and as they did they would strip out everything she’d put in place to keep herself hard. Everything that allowed her to kill zombie after zombie.
“I know,” Luke said and he bent forward and he placed a kiss on her forehead. “I know.”
She wrapped her arms around him and for no more than a heartbeat they held each other as tightly as they possibly could. Jackson saying everything with that hug that she couldn’t say with her voice. And then they were pulling apart and the others were coming over with their stuff, Sebastian handing them each a syringe, and Pete pulling on the cord to charge the cutting equipment.
“It’ll buy some time,” Sebastian said. “It’s all I can do.”
Jackson secured the Glock in her waistband, put the syringe in her left, and held Mandy in her familiar right grip before facing the door.
“Are we ready?” she asked.
Luke reached out and wrapped his hand around hers and by default, Mandy’s hilt. “Ready,” he said.
Death groans sounded around them, a continual pounding in time with her heartbeat permeated the room, and warmth raced up her arm from the feel of Luke’s hand—held so tightly to hers. How strange to think this would be the last time she’d ever get to feel it, to feel anything. That in mere moments she’d be dead at last. Nothing more than a very sick person’s meal.
“Jack?” Luke prompted and she took a deep breath, pushing the horrific thoughts to the very back of her mind. They’d do her no good now. If anything, the thoughts would work against her. Make her slow and sloppy. She couldn’t be Jackson the bad-ass if she was filled with regrets, could she?
She lifted Luke’s hand to her lips and placed a quick kiss on it, her way of both saying good-bye and putting her mind in fight mode. Drawing a line. Maybe the line between life and death.
“Let’s do this then,” she said, and Jackson kicked the door open and together they went out to meet the end.
Chapter Thirty-six
Why hadn’t he realized it would be dark? That the only light would be from a full moon and the room they had just left. Why hadn’t it fucking occurred to him?
“To the trees,” he said to Jackson, noticing that the moonlight shone in a clear circle in the middle of them. “We’ll get to the trees and make our stand there, okay?”
“Did you see a light—”
“The trees,” he repeated, barely considering her words, and with her hand on his, started to sprint.
She ran next to him, easily keeping up pace and maybe they would have had a clear go of it but the first of the zombies spotted them and it too ran, so fast Luke could barely comprehend it. It groaned and leaped at them. Pete turned around, swung forward, and took its head off in one go, the power tool cutting through it in one smooth move. More were coming now though, alerted by the groan, and Luke sped up just as one landed on his back. He let go of Jackson’s hand, shrugged it off, and lifted his ax to take the arm off. But since it was so fucking dark the farther they moved away from the room, he missed, cutting instead through its shoulder.
“It’s too dark,” he roared. “I can’t see the bastards.”
A swing sent him reeling back and he scrambled off the ground, just as one landed next to him, snapping its teeth. He grabbed Sebastian’s syringe from his pocket and buried it in the fucker, depressing the top only when it was so far in it’d never come back out.
“We have to move,” Jackson shouted but he couldn’t see her. “It’s too dark to fight here.”
“Jack?” he shouted, panic evident in his voice, but she was by him then, her arm pulling him onward.
They ran, as fast as they could, making for the trees bordering the field, the circle of light that was their last hope. Luke could hear heavy breathing next to him and knew that the others, some of them at least, were still alive. But he could hear groans too, and grunts. The zombies were on their heels.
Luke wanted to keep on running, to just go and go until he heard no more, but he knew he wouldn’t. They’d make their stand at the trees. It was the only option. The zombies were too hungry not to chase them and sooner or later one, then another of them, would falter, until none of them were left. That was unacceptable. So they sprinted until their feet were bathed in the moon’s silver glow.
“Now,” he shouted and they all halted, breathing ragged, and lifted their weapons.
The zombies were just yards away now, dozens of them, their faces screwed up into their usual snarls, their teeth snapping, pus oozing. The smell from their wounds warred with that of the fresh vegetation around them and something else…a smell that was familiar to him but he couldn’t remember from where…
In that moment everything crystallized for Luke, in the way it does when it’s all it can do. He didn’t try to fight against the inevitable and he didn’t try to sweep Jackson behind him. There, in the circle of the moon’s glow, as the dozens of hungry zombies came at them, he knew exactly that this was the point his life had led him to and that at the end this was where Jackson belonged too.
Next to him.
Fighting.
Until it was all over.
Why had he tried to change that?
He lifted his ax, freed his gun, and took a deep breath. This was it…
