Raven's Hell - Jenika Snow Page 0,22

window and moved back toward the ladder. She was already making her way down it, but it was slow going, as she had to keep adjusting the bags on her shoulders. When she finally reached the last couple of slats, Collin had his hands around her waist and lifted her from the ladder. He held her for a second.

“Shhh,” he said softly against her ear. The sound of moaning and groaning became even louder, and then there was banging on the windows as the infected made themselves known. When they saw Collin and Rebecca, they made this loud screeching noise and clawed at the building. Collin grabbed her hand, and they made their way quickly out of the warehouse and out through the back way where they had entered.

Once outside, an infected lunged forward in the slow, sloppy way a starving corpse did, but Rebecca had her knife ready and stabbed it in the side of the neck. It wouldn’t kill it, but it would slow it down. It gurgled out a sound, and dark blood gushed out of the artery as it fell backward and landed on the ground. Collin and Rebecca started running again, still moving from the horrors that swarmed in on them, yet unable to get rid of the sounds of hell filling her ears.

There was clanging behind them, and once they got into the woods, they didn’t stop. Collin continued to pull her forward, refusing to let go of her hand. She ran as fast as she could, but he had longer legs, and the supplies she carried were weighing her down.

Glancing behind her, the world shook, and the warehouse grew smaller and smaller the harder she ran. The ground was uneven, and when she faced forward again, her foot caught on something. She fell forward, landed on her knees, and the air left her in a whoosh.

“Come on, baby. We have to keep moving until we can’t walk any farther,” Collin said and had her lifted off the ground a second later. He cupped both her cheeks with his big hands and leaned down so he could look into her eyes. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

“But why?” she gasped out, still trying to catch her breath.

He shook his head. “Does it matter why? I am here, won’t let anything happen to you, and I want you to trust me.” He continued to stare right in her eyes, and a little bit of moonlight filtered through the treetop. “We might be safe from those infected, but I want us to get as much distance between us and them as possible. We can talk about all this later, but right now, we need to move.” He kissed her hard and fiercely, broke away, and breathed just as rapidly as she did. “You good, baby? Good to walk?”

She nodded. “I’m good.”

He nodded in response, kissed her once more, and then they were moving through the forest, fast and hard, not stopping until the warehouse was now a distant memory and she nearly collapsed on the ground from exhaustion.

11

Collin finally allowed them to stop once they put a substantial distance between them and the warehouse. It wasn’t as if the fuckers could run—or walk very fast, for that matter—but since there was a horde of them starting to move toward the machine warehouse, Collin didn’t want to take any chances.

It seemed they were grouping together, congregating, and then having more muscle to take down someone. It was easy enough to kill a few at a time if they were destroyed in the head, but if twenty, hell, even ten swarmed him and all he had was this knife, that could get dangerous.

He might have been able to take down a shitload of them when he had helped Sparrow escape all those months ago, but he had an extra gun, a small one tucked in the ankle of his boot, that she hadn’t known about. It had saved him them, and if push came to shove, he would use the knife he had and take down every last asshole who came close to Rebecca.

Rebecca was on the other side of the fire, sleeping. He made a small camp for them a few hours after they ran from the warehouse. Although he had seen the fear in her face, knew she was used to doing things her way, probably slow and safe, he wasn’t going to sugarcoat anything.

This world was fucked up, and she knew that,