“And never ever-ever-ever let yourself get surrounded. They’re slow but they can horde in on you if there are enough of them.”
“You said that already.”
“The point is, you always know which way to run if you have to. Remember, you’re always going to be faster than they are … but that doesn’t mean you can’t get penned in.”
Austin nods and gazes intermittently over his shoulder, keeping track of the darkness on all sides of the trail. He turns and slowly backs along the trail for a moment, searching the shadows.
Lilly watches him. “Put your gun away for a second,” she says. “Grab your knife.” She watches him switch weapons. “Okay, now let’s say you’re out of ammo, you’re isolated, maybe lost.”
He gives her a sidelong glance. “Lilly, we’ve been through this part … like twice already.”
“That’s good, you can count.”
“C’mon—”
“And we’re going to go through it again, a third time, so answer the question. How do you hold your knife?”
He sighs, backing along the trees, his boots crunching in the cinders. “You hold it blade-down, a tight grip on the hilt.… I’m not stupid, Lilly.”
“I never said you were stupid. Tell me why you hold your knife like that.”
He keeps backing along the edge of the woods, moving absently now, shaking his head. “You hold it like that because you got one chance to bring it down hard on their skull, and you want to do it decisively.”
Lilly notices a stray timber—a piece of creosote-soaked railroad tie—lying beside the trail, about twenty feet away. She silently moves toward it. “Go on,” she says. With one quick, discreet movement, she kicks the timber across Austin’s path. “Why do you do it decisively?”
He lets out another weary sigh, blithely backing along. “You do it decisively because you got one chance to destroy the brain.” He keeps backing slowly toward the timber, gripping the knife, unaware of the obstruction lying across his path. “I’m not an idiot, Lilly.”
She grins. “Oh, no, you’re a regular ninja, the way you were clearing the woods for us today at the crash site. You got it all going on.”
“I’m not afraid, Lilly, I’ve told you a million times, I’ve been around—”
He trips on the railroad tie. “Ouch!—FUCK!” he blurts when he hits the ground, raising a puff of cinder dust.
At first Lilly lets out a blurt of laughter as Austin sits there for a second, looking defeated, embarrassed, humiliated. In the darkness, his eyes shimmer with emotion and his curls dangle in his face. He looks like a whipped dog. Lilly’s laughter dies, and guilt twinges in her gut. “I’m sorry, sorry,” she murmurs, kneeling by him. “I didn’t mean to—” She strokes his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m being an asshole.”
“It’s okay,” he says softly, taking deep breaths, looking down. “I deserve it.”
“No. No.” She sits down next to him. “You don’t deserve any of this.”
He looks at her. “Don’t worry about it. You’re just trying to help me and I appreciate it.”
“I don’t know what I’m doing half the time.” She rubs her face. “All I know is … we gotta be ready. We gotta be … I hate to say it … but we gotta be as fucking bloodthirsty as the biters.” She looks at him. “It’s the only way we’re gonna get through this.”
His gaze locks on to hers. The ambient drone deepens around them, the roar of night sounds rising. In the distance, barely audible, come the hyena howls of the dirt track spectators cheering for blood.
At last Austin says, “You’re starting to sound like the Governor.”
Lilly gazes into the distance and says nothing, just listens to the sounds drifting on the breeze.
Austin licks his lips and looks at her. “Lilly, I’ve been thinking … what if there’s no other side to get through to? What if this is it? What if this is all there is for us?”
Lilly thinks about it. “It doesn’t matter. As long as we have each other … and we’re willing to do what it takes … we’ll survive.”
The words hang in the night air for a moment. Almost imperceptibly they have come closer together, Lilly’s hand lingering on his shoulder, his hand finding the small of her back.
Lilly realizes—all at once—that she might have originally been thinking about the whole community sticking together but now she’s thinking only about Austin and her. She finds herself leaning in closer to him, and he responds by leaning toward her. She senses something unraveling, a letting go, and their lips coming together, and the kiss about to happen, when suddenly Lilly draws back. “What’s this? Jesus, what’s this?”
She feels something wet down around his waist, and she looks down.
The bottom hem of his sweatshirt is soaked in blood. Some of it drips in runnels onto the leafy ground, as black and shiny as axle oil. The knife blade sticks out of a tear in his denims where it sliced through the flesh of his hip in the fall. Austin puts his hand over it. “Shit,” he utters through gritted teeth, the blood seeping through his fingers. “I thought I felt something bite me.”
“C’mon!” Lilly springs to her feet and gives him a hand, carefully hoisting him to his feet. “We gotta get you to Dr. Stevens.”
*