Blackbird's Fall - Jenika Snow Page 0,5

brass was cold, a stark contrast to how hot her body felt. Without thinking, because she didn’t want her dad to suffer any longer if he was still moving, she opened the door.

Maya looked through the hole in the wood, seeing her father’s still body on the floor across from the door. Blood and chunks of his flesh were splattered along the wall, but as the seconds ticked by, she saw the small twitching of her father’s fingers. She started choking up when she heard him gurgle out, and then he lifted his hand slowly.

Even with half his face blown off, he was still somewhat alive, the infection making the dead rise until their brains or spinal cords were severed and destroyed.

Without postponing this, she lifted the gun, aimed it right between his eyes, and pulled the trigger. And just like that, he was done—his life, the infection, and everything that happened up until this moment snuffed out like a candle’s flame. She wanted to sink to the floor, to let her emotions claim her, but she had to check on her mother even though she knew what she’d find.

Swallowing past the lump in her throat, Maya moved away from her dad and back into the bathroom. She grabbed a couple more bullets, popped out the empty shells, and reloaded. She then moved back down the hallway and into the kitchen. The electricity had gone out the first week the infection spread, so now she relied on candles and flashlights.

There was a flashlight on the counter, and she grabbed it and turned it on. But she didn’t shine the light on her mother’s body right away, needing to steel herself for what she’d see. After a long moment, she lifted the light and shone it on her mom.

The gag reflex was instant, and she turned and threw up, unable to keep down what little contents she had in her stomach. After she threw up, she wiped her mouth, her tears strong, her pain so monumental she felt like she’d die from it. Reaching out for a towel on the counter, she wiped her mouth, trying to force herself not to cry. Straightening, she turned and faced what remained of her mother.

It was disgusting the amount of flesh her infected father had eaten, and although her mother’s body was in ruins on the ground, her head was intact, and therefore Maya knew the infection would claim her eventually.

Aiming the gun at her mother’s head and closing her eyes, she pulled the trigger. The bullet being fired had her ears ringing, but it was the sound of her soul breaking that was the loudest.

She fell to her knees then, her sobs body-wracking, her breath stalling, and Maya wished fate wasn’t a scornful bitch. She lost the only family she had in this now miserable world, and the thought of facing the destruction of civilization alone was too much to even think about.

Sherman butted his head up against her arm, and she ran her hand over his smooth body.

“It’s just you and me now, boy,” she said and started crying harder.

“Even when the world is at its darkest, you have to remember you aren’t dead.”

The words her mother used to say to her rang through her mind, and she knew she couldn’t let this destroy her. There was already enough carnage in this world, and it would only be getting worse.

She had to stay strong, not just for the memory of her parents, but for herself as well.

4

Two weeks later

In the two weeks since Marius left the bunker and ventured out into the world, he killed a handful of infected. But it wasn’t the infected who kept him up a night, plaguing his thoughts.

It was the fact that he also had to kill a “healthy” human, one who tried stealing his pack while Marius napped in the forest after a long day of walking.

It was that death that had him exhausted, because he couldn’t sleep at night. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the other man’s eyes widen as Marius plunged the blade in his gut. He didn’t have any other options though, not when a knife had been pulled on him too.

This was a new world, one in which it was kill or be killed, stay alive or be a corpse.

He set up camp in the middle of the woods, far from the road he’d been traveling on. It was safer that way, better to stay hidden from the infected