My heart jumped. “Yes.” I threw my arms around his neck. “I do. God do I ever.”
He chuckled, placing a hard peck on my mouth. “Good.”
After we ate, I walked Ryder to my door. I never realized that I would actually be sad to see him go. I thought last night would just be a one-time thing, we would move on and nothing else would come of this.
But as he stared down at me with those dark eyes of his, I fell. And I fell hard.
Ryder
A while later…
My vision faded in and out. A sharp pain stabbed me in the side, reminding me that I was still very much alive. I wasn’t sure how or why. They should have just killed me already. I didn’t know what they wanted. I couldn’t even understand half the shit they were saying. But I was an American Soldier. I had all the answers. I would have rolled my eyes if I could keep them open.
But they had no idea. They could try and get whatever they wanted from me, but I was trained. Even my father didn’t know half the shit I had done, and he was a Navy SEAL. He had done things. Seen things. Survived things to get back to my mother. I needed to do the same to get back to my family.
Clara.
Fucking hell, she probably thought I was dead. I hadn’t texted her back in God knew how long. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t safe. Our camp had been ambushed. Men and women died. My brothers were beaten and tortured, while my sisters…I swallowed past the bile burning my throat. I would never get the images of what was done to them out of my head. They weren’t blood. None of them were blood but it went far past that. I reacted the same way as if they were my own flesh. I kept thinking of Gigi and Meadow and what I would have done if it were them who were beaten, raped, and mutilated.
A heavy fist landed against my cheek, the bone beneath the skin shattering. I was numb to the pain anymore. They could hit me. Beat me. Fucking kill me. Nothing they did would get what they wanted from me. No matter how hard they tried, my lips were sealed and the secrets I knew were safe.
But I knew…hell, I had known even before I was taken…there was no way I could come back from this or that things would ever be normal again.
I just prayed with everything in me that Clara would be patient with me. I liked her a lot and knew that what we had, could turn into something more.
Wait for me, Clara, and I promise, baby, it’ll be worth it.
But even I knew that some promises were meant to be broken.
About J.M. Walker
J.M. Walker is an Amazon bestselling author who hit USA Today with Wanted: An Outlaw Anthology. She loves all things books, pigs and lip gloss. She is happily married to the man who inspires all of her Heroes and continues to make her weak in the knees every single day.
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Cindy
Lorne Oliver
Cindy
“Your dead guy,” Constable Brandi Faye, pointed to the far side of the road where the grass was matted down. “Ah, he was there. Was he there?” She spun around surveying the chaos around us. Cars were on their sides or crushed against each other, the smell of extinguished fires and spilled gasoline filled the air and there were spots of what I assumed was blood on the pavement. People were still screaming or crying. “Oh, there he is.” She pointed a finger towards a grove across a small field. A large man stumbled into the trees. “That’s your dead guy?”
I stared at where the man had disappeared. “Dead guy?”
Brandi shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, Chickie, the paramedic said he was dead. Zombie on the loose?”
“Do we have a police code for that?” I looked for any free constables that I could send to fetch him. They were dealing with traffic and the people collecting on both sides of the accident wanting a look. The other Major Crimes investigators were dealing with their assigned parts of the scene. Mine was taking a stroll.
Brandi was dressed in an all-white “bunny suit" required for her job of crime scene analysis. “I thought in the major crimes handbook it said, in case of freaks, tweaks, psychos and zombies call Corporal Faryn Steel?” Her smile disappeared as she raised her mask and went back to work.
I returned to my police issued unmarked Pathfinder for a handheld radio that I clipped on my belt, disposable gloves and a few disposable masks which I shoved in my coat pocket. Not sanitary, I know, but better than going breath to breath with a zombie. Strange that I was more worried about the COVID-19 virus than a possible walking dead. Maybe this was going to be where it all started.
I tied my chestnut hair back before heading into the field. I would have to find somebody to check me for ticks later. I wore black leggings that went all the way into my army style boots, but I swear I could still feel the ticks, their tiny feet crawling up. I had been talking to a new married couple that might be interested in checking me over later. Focus, Faryn.
Initial reports on the accident were that at approximately 2:15pm a flatbed truck heading south hit the pick-up in front of it and veered into oncoming traffic. It was Friday and some of the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions had been lifted, so of course the north bound lane was full of people getting a jump at the lake. The flatbed crushed the Honda Civic in the other lane before hitting a van. The scrap metal the truck was hauling broke free. One piece speared through the cab of the pick-up a mere second after the first hit. Other vehicles swerved or crashed into the ditches and each other. A van flipped into the shallow ditch and a mustang rolled end over end into the field. Seven vehicles in all were in the immediate incident. Many injured, some serious, the occupants of the civic were pronounced dead on the scene. So was my zombie.
The greenery in the field was pushed down where he had stumbled, and he left blood on the plants. Did zombies bleed? I pulled a pair of blue gloves on just in case.
In central Saskatchewan the fields were spotted with groves of woods. As I got close to where the man disappeared my hand went to the pistol on my hip. My thoughts were, why did this man walk away? How did he walk away? He was probably in shock and may not have even known what was going on around him.
He stood inside the trees leaning against a birch. A long piece of metal protruded through his back close to the right shoulder.
“Sir? Are you okay?”
The zombie moaned as its eyes raised to the sky. Blood dripped from its coat. He took a step and the metal twitched. Blood squirted.
“Sir, I need you to stop moving!”
He stopped.
My fingers wrapped around the handle of my Smith and Wesson. I was more a fan of the Shaun of the Dead zombie, slow and silly, than the fast ones from 28 Days Later. Either way, if this guy came at me, he was going to get a double tap.
The blood squirted out around the metal again. His heart was still pumping. This was no undead.
“Sir, I need you to stay right there.” I started walking around to his side. “I’ll come to you, okay? My name is Corporal Faryn Steel. What’s your name?”
He turned his head, “Faryn?”
“Don’t move, sir.”
“Faryn’s a pretty name.” He said it as fast as he could, so he could with an exhale on almost every word. His right arm stayed at his side. The fingers twitched more than flexed. As I moved around him, I got a better look. He was about 6 feet with a built frame. There was an open gash across his forehead creating a curtain of crimson down his face. His black hair was all messed. It was flattened down in a ring where he always wore a cap. The metal going through him was in a T shape. It was about 3 feet long, 1 foot in the front. I was amazed he was still standing. His eyes flicked in my direction as I stepped over a downed tree and was in front of him. “Why do you have a gun?”