After that, he walked away from me. The entire group fell into a prickly silence, everyone lost in their own thoughts. If only there was something I could say to comfort them, but I remembered my disdain for the doctors, nurses, friends and family who had offered me ridiculous platitudes after the accident.
You’ll be okay. They would carry on, yes, but they would never forget their own sense of mortality.
Time will heal you. Losing a loved one was like losing a limb. You were always aware of what you were missing, of what you used to have.
I’m sorry. I was, but those words wouldn’t really mean anything to any of them. Their friend was gone, and they wouldn’t see him again until they died. That thought wouldn’t comfort them tonight.
“The zombies have become more resilient,” Frosty said, shattering the quiet with a harshness he usually reserved for me. “The halogens used to send them running away. They didn’t run tonight.”
“I don’t think they’re more resilient,” Cole said, his tone now as dark as it was hard. “I think they were that determined to reach Ali.”
“But why?” I asked, baffled.
No one had an answer for me.
*
The next few months passed in a daze. Brent hadn’t gone to Asher. He’d already graduated and had been living on his own, away from his family, so no one at school knew he was gone. No one understood why Cole and friends were all on edge, ready to snap at any moment.
Cole held a small, private memorial service for Brent, and seeing him and the others, each more stoic than the last, break down over their friend’s death had affected me deeply. I’d sobbed like a baby.
Sometimes all I could do was worry about who would be next to fall. Cole? We hadn’t had another vision, and still weren’t sure what that meant for us. What about Frosty? Just how would Kat handle his loss? Not well, that was for sure.
But as I’d already learned, no matter what happened around us, life would always go on. Every day after school I worked out and trained with Cole. In the ring, I was never as good as I’d been in the field. I couldn’t fake the spring of adrenaline or the rush of fight or flight no matter what we were practicing.
I was definitely the weak link.
Cole tossed me on my butt countless times, nicked me with swords and daggers, but he hadn’t kissed me again. Not that I’d thought about that or anything. Really.
I stayed up almost every night. If I wasn’t patrolling the forest around my house with Cole, I was setting traps for zombies. If I wasn’t setting traps, I was hunting for nests. If I wasn’t hunting nests, I was watching for monsters from my window or trying to decipher the rest of the journal.
Two more passages had opened up for me, one about the first of the zombies, which Dr. Wright had already explained to me, and one about the first of the slayers, which she hadn’t. Those first slayers had not been able to leave their bodies and had had to learn to fight the zombies while in their natural form. But then, the death of one of their own had saved them. The zombies had eaten his spirit straight out of his body, and somehow an infection had spread, nearly wiping out the undead. Nearly. That’s all I’d been able to make out, but maybe that was for the best. Everything I learned confused me more.
I’d finally broken down and showed the journal to Cole, but the pages had been coded to him—all of the pages. That meant I was somehow deciphering the words on my own.
Cole had no idea how I had done it or who the author could be and had asked me to hand the entire thing over to his father for further study, but I’d refused. I couldn’t bring myself to part with it.
Cole had argued with me, but in the end, he’d relented. He’d taken pictures of the pages, yeah, but he’d relented.
There was never a dull moment for me, that was for sure, despite the fact that the zombies had stopped coming out. There hadn’t been a single appearance since the night they’d hunted me, and Cole thought it was because they were finally catching up on their rest. I’d speculated that Team Hazmat could have something to do with it, but he’d said his dad and Mr. Ankh were staking them out and there’d been no movement on their end, either.
Home wise, my grandparents were not happy with me. I constantly fell asleep during class and my grades had dropped significantly. I’d been sent to the principal’s office twice, lectured, grounded, and taken back to the therapist.
The first time I was sent to the principal’s office—and set free by Dr. Wright without any punishment, thank you—Wren and Poppy had dropped me as if I were radioactive waste.
“We can’t afford to be associated with trouble,” Poppy had said. “Not when our every deed could be Tweeted online. No colleges will want us.”
“We warned you this would happen,” Wren had said.
Yeah, and she’d also smiled at me that day in the cafeteria, silently telling me to go for Cole. Which, I now knew, was because she’d wanted Justin Silverstone for herself. I’d seen them in the halls, holding hands. Apparently, they were Asher High’s new “it” couple.