Every other day(56)

She was screaming.

I catapulted my way over the gate, lost myself to the blur of the motion, hit the front porch, and breathed in through my nose.

Death, I thought, the word oddly dull in my mind. The dead and the dying had a smell—a bit like rusted metal, a bit like rotting food. The scent of it set the hairs on the back of my neck on end.

Walkers, Zev said. Lots of them.

It took me a moment to translate, to know that by Walkers, he meant the walking dead.

Homo mortis.

Zombies.

I had my knife in hand before I realized I’d reached for it, and I had kicked open the Davises’ front door before it ever occurred to me that it might have been unlocked.

“Kali?” A familiar voice—tight with panic, tinged with disbelief—caught me off guard. The only thing that kept me from putting my knife straight through the top of Elliot’s spine was a surge of interest from the chupacabra inside me.

A realization that Elliot smelled human.

He smelled good.

“Where are they?” I asked. My voice sounded different—gravelly and low, humming with power and need and want.

“Beth’s down the hall, barricaded in. I can’t find Skylar—”

“No,” I said sharply. “The zombies. Where are they?”

On cue, one of the living dead dropped down from the stairway overhead. Its bones crunched as it landed, and when it stood, I realized that it was like me—it couldn’t feel pain, couldn’t tell that its legs were broken, the bones protruding through dead and rotting flesh.

Its mouth—or what was left of it—opened, revealing a cavernous hole. No tongue. I caught the faint whiff of sulfur in its blood and wondered how anyone could have ever thought that zombies started out human.

“Kali, look out!”

Elliot’s words were lost on me, his presence a distraction I didn’t need.

Kill it, I thought. Kill it now.

I flung the knife and a second later, I heard the sound it made cutting through flesh, lodging itself in rock-hard bone. I leapt forward, a wild thing, slamming the heel of my hand into the hilt of the blade. The creature’s spine gave way; its head detached, and a second later, my knife was back in my hand.

“Kali?” Every muscle in Elliot’s body was tense. His face was pale, but his eyes were hard.

I said nothing. Somewhere below us, Skylar screamed.

“Weapons,” I said, my voice a foreign thing in a throat that wanted nothing more than to be coated in the blood of the thing I’d just slayed. “Whatever you have, give it to me and get out.”

Elliot didn’t seem any more inclined to follow my instructions than I’d been to follow most of Zev’s.

“Beth’s dad collects guns,” he said. “They’re in the basement. That’s where I was headed.”

I didn’t have time for this. Not with Skylar screaming, not with the hunt-lust exploding inside of me, like there were a hundred zombies in this house, a thousand.

I left Elliot—left him standing there, light blue eyes, cheekbones sharp as any knife. Either he’d survive or he wouldn’t. Either way, I knew without asking that if it came down to a choice, he would have sent me after Skylar, told me to save her, protect her—

Kill them. Kill them now.

I didn’t know the halls of this house as well as the layout of the biology building, but this time, I didn’t have to rely on memory or a mental map or anything other than an unerring sense of where they were.

The things I needed to kill.

The closer I got to the sound of Skylar’s screaming, the more of them there were. I felt like I was swimming in corpses, cutting my way through one after another after another in my pursuit. Around number ten, I lost my knife, left it buried in a corpse still twitching with what was left of its mockery of life. Then all I had was my hands, nails as sharp as blades, and my blood.

I fought my way toward Skylar, my flesh shredded and bleeding, and when I found her, she was still screaming, but she didn’t look scared. She didn’t look hurt. She’d managed to crawl on top of what looked to be a very large safe—easily one and a half times her size—and she’d squished herself back against the wall, just out of range of the yellowed fingernails and white-gray hands groping for her body.

For her blood.

“You okay?” I asked her.

She nodded, then screamed again, the sound piercing the air like a siren—and for a moment, the horde of monsters in between us shrank back.

“Little Sisters’ Survival Guide, rule number thirty-seven,” Skylar said. “Scream before they hit you.”

And then she screamed again.

I didn’t have time to question her logic—or the existence of the little sisters’ survival guide. “Close your eyes,” I shouted, over her shrieks and the wet, gargling moans of the things that stood between us.