I shoved my weight into her with a growl and she hit the gravel, her eyes widening in fright as I loomed over her. “Where’s your fucking girl code?” I demanded, rubbing my sore boob.
She pursed her lips then hurried to her feet and ran away from me. I cursed as I realised she wasn’t running for the gate. A bunch of them weren’t.
I turned back to help the Unspeakables, watching as Deepthroat held onto a roll of toilet paper with bloody fingernails. What the hell has happened to the world?
I ran forward, shoving a guy away from her as he tried to take the frayed roll, throwing a hard punch to his solid gut.
He lurched backwards, clearly not looking for a fight as he raised his hands in innocence and darted away again. Kyan came swinging with his bat, taking out the final three assholes who were attacking the Unspeakables in a single freaking blow.
He tossed me a wink before darting back off into the crowd and man I almost fucking liked the guy sometimes.
“Thank you,” Freeloader gasped as she and the others gathered up the supplies and made a run for it.
The Night Keepers and Monroe were driving more and more of the outsiders toward the gate and my heart lifted with hope.
Someone grabbed my wrist and I jerked around, ready to fight, but relaxed at the sight of Bait standing there.
“Come on,” he demanded. “We’ve gotta run with them. Let’s go. This is our chance!”
He started tugging me toward the gate and I could see that he was right. We could run, escape this place and never look back. But a tug in my gut made me hesitate for a second as I looked toward the four men fighting valiantly in the crowd. They’d saved me tonight. Wet their hands in blood for me. How could I run now? Surely things would be different after tonight? But was it insane to think that?
I should have been running.
“Come on Tatum, I did this for us! And it’s gone even better than expected,” Bait exclaimed, excitement darting through his eyes. “I just had to lift the gate key off the janitor – couldn’t believe I did it as first but then-”
I yanked him to a halt, my blood turning icily cold. “You did this? You let them in?” I breathed, horror rushing through me.
He nodded, tugging my hand again and I yanked it free of his grip.
“I almost died!” I shouted at him, starting to shake. “People have been hurt. How could you do this?”
Bait gaped at me, opening and closing his mouth as he hunted for an answer. “I didn’t…I mean, no one was supposed to get hurt. I just…”
“What did you think was gonna happen?” I demanded.
Bait turned pale, shaking his head then ran off into the crowd without another word.
My throat thickened as I stood there, torn between running and staying. Unsure why I couldn’t simply make myself go.
People shoved their way past me and a huge hairy guy suddenly slammed into me full force. I was knocked to the ground as he leaned over me, clutching his gut and coughing heavily, seemingly unaware I was even there as he hacked his fucking lungs up.
“Stop!” I screamed in disgust, throwing up a hand to cover my mouth and nose.
I spotted a reddened rash of rose shaped marks on his skin peeking out from his collar and horror and fear consumed me as I tried to scramble away. No fuck, no!
I threw a kick at his calf and he stumbled back, blinking down at me through bloodshot eyes like he’d just realised I was there. A baseball bat suddenly slammed into his arm and he jerked sideways, hurrying away with a yelp of pain as Kyan took his place.
He leaned down to take my hand but I shook my head, needing to keep the hell away from him as I scrambled back.
“Don’t touch me!” I yelled. “He was infected.”
Fear took root in my chest. Sixty percent of people died from this virus within a week. A fucking week. Was I gonna be just another statistic? Was the virus already snaking its way into my body and sliding its teeth into my life force?
Kyan’s lips parted in horror as I got to my feet. He yanked his shirt off, rushing forward and I raised my hands to try and stop him. “Keep still!” he barked, giving me no choice as he used it to wipe over my face, my clothes, any part of me he feared the virus had touched. It was beautifully sweet and painfully pointless.
“Get back, Kyan,” I urged, my voice cracking as I stepped away from him.
He gave me an intense look, tossing the shirt on the floor. “Follow me,” he barked with no room for dispute and I hurried after him as he cut a path through the crowd towards Aspen Halls. A fire caught my eye on the bottom floor and my heart thrashed at the sight of the flames licking their way out of the window of the room, reaching toward the red Ford Mustang parked in front of the building. Holy shit.
Kyan veered towards the Unspeakables who were carrying armfuls of supplies away from the fight.
“Hey!” he snapped and they all turned around at the single word. “I need hand sanitiser – now!”
One of them hurried toward him with a box in his arms, bowing low as he laid it at his feet. Kyan took out a bottle of the hand sanitiser, squirting it all over his hands before turning to me and rubbing it all over me, smothering my face, my neck, arms, even rubbing it into my hair.
“Kyan, it’s too late,” I breathed as his brow pinched and he continued to rub it all over my body.
When he was done, he clenched his jaw, fixing me with a fierce stare. “You won’t get sick, baby,” he commanded like I could really obey that order. But I could see the desperation in him, the need for me to assure him that I wouldn’t.
I nodded, trying to fight back the cloying fear taking hold of me and making an oath I could only pray that I could keep. “I won’t get sick.”
The air echoed and hummed with the cries of the students who backed us and the screams of the fuckers who’d come to try and take what was ours.
Everywhere I looked there were more and more kids and staff running to help us, grouping together as they followed our lead and fought to defend our school.
We might have been a bunch of entitled rich kids, but that entitlement came from a position of power. And every single student here knew that power was a fleeting and fragile thing if you didn’t nurture it. If we wanted to keep hold of it, we had to reinforce it, make sure that those who had come to test it ran from here with their hands empty and their pride shattered.
They needed to fear us. To flee from here with nothing at all but the knowledge that coming against us would only earn them pain and failure.
Miss Pontus was wielding an umbrella like a fucking javelin and the Geography teacher Mr Hilex was smacking the outsiders with a heavy book on volcanoes.
The Night Keepers and Monroe held the front line with me, the footballers and more of the inner circle with a few of the faculty taking up position at our backs. The rest of the student body created a solid wall of flesh beyond that which ensured none of our attackers could head back onto campus.
My knuckles were torn and bloody, my flesh bruised and aching and my corrupted soul singing with an endless kind of energy that set me alight from the inside out. I was surrounded by chaos and carnage, havoc spilling forth all around me and shattering any false sense of security that could have been claimed by my usual routines. But instead of burning in the flames of the chaos, I was blossoming, free falling into the oblivion of the carnage which surrounded us and letting my inner demon do its worst.