Darlings of Paranormal Romance (Anthology) (137 page)

He was gone for a little over ten
minutes when a shrill scream pierced the air. The three of us
looked at each other briefly, before we all took off running into
the gas station. Trent had pulled a pistol out of the glove box
that I was unaware he had. I caught the glimmer of it as he ran in
front of me, and realized we didn’t know what we were running into.
I recognized it as a forty five; my Dad had always carried one with
him. The scream came again, louder, and caused us to quicken our
pace.

Chapter 12

Time Grows Short

It didn’t take us long to find the
source of the screaming. A young girl was in the back room of the
gas station, in a struggle for her life. I took in her appearance,
as I watched in horror. I determined from the necklace, made of
candy, she was wearing and the cheap clip-on hair feathers she
donned, she was around fifteen years old. Blood was starting to run
down the front of her shirt, all the way down to her cut-up jeans.
She was fighting a maniac who was tearing at her throat with his
teeth. An inhuman growl came from him and his fingers were digging
into her arm so hard that blood was running down it. Her
cherry-painted nails were trying to pry his fingers away to no
avail.

I had to blink a couple of times to
make sure I wasn’t seeing things. The madman that was latched onto
her was Cage. I found myself screaming along with the terrified
girl. Trent stood still, with his mouth hanging open. I could see
that he was weighing his options before he did anything. I charged
at Cage, thinking I would be able to get him to stop.

When I made contact with him, I sent
us all crashing to the ground. I knocked him off of her, which only
angered him. She crawled away as he turned his anger on
me.

“
Cage.” I was holding his
face back from mine, screaming his name. “This isn’t you, Cage, let
it go. It’s Cassie. Let it go.”

Something changed in his eyes. They
grew soft and then terror filled them as he jumped up and pulled me
to my feet. It let me know, unlike his mother, there was still some
of him left.

“
I’m so sorry, Cassie.
What did I do?” He was looking at the blood on his hands now. The
girl had run out of the gas station before any of us could stop
her.

“
Tell me what you
remember; start from when you walked into the gas
station.”

Rose and Trent had relaxed a little
now that Cage was acting normal again. Trent walked over to put a
hand on his shoulder to encourage him to tell us what
happened.

“
Okay, let’s see. I walked
inside and I heard a door slam shut. I went to see if I could find
out who was back there. I walked through that door and then…” As he
pointed to the door, he seemed to be trying to recall what
happened. “I saw a girl, and she looked tasty.”

He looked at his father, then at me.
He seemed shocked by his own words. I knew exactly how he felt as I
remembered thinking the same thing about Brett. It seemed this
disease made us completely unpredictable and in little control of
our impulses.

“
Oh, God.” He put his hand
over his mouth. “I attacked her, didn’t I? I don’t remember
anything except for running at her.”

He sank to the floor as I tried to
find the words to comfort him.

“
She’ll be infected now,”
his voice was a whisper. “She will become one of them, I mean one
of us.”

Trent knelt down in front of his son,
putting a hand on his leg to get his attention. ”Look at me, Cage.
You couldn’t help it. There is something diseased inside of you
that made you attack that girl. If you wouldn’t have done it,
someone else would have. You can’t beat yourself up for it. We will
find a cure.”

Cage slowly stood up and hugged his
dad. He didn’t look completely convinced of his innocence, but at
least he was trying to move past it.

“
Let’s get some supplies
and get the hell out of here.”

“
That’s my boy!” Trent
smiled and walked towards the door to go back into the gas
station.

Rose followed him out of the room,
and Cage and I were left alone. He looked so pitiful; I wanted to
hug him again. I refrained from impulsively pulling him to me. The
last thing he needed right now was my making him uncomfortable. To
my surprise, he walked over and held his arms out to me. He folded
me into them as I walked forward and I put my head to his
chest.

“
What is happening to me,
Cassie? Who eats someone? I’m becoming a monster.”

I sighed against his chest, searching
for some reassuring words. “Technically, you didn’t eat her; you
only bit her a little.”

“
I wanted to eat her,
though. Why else would I have attacked her? It’s like a part of me
I don’t know took over my actions. You have no idea how scary that
is.”

“
I think I do,” I mumbled
into his chest and prepared to tell him what happened with Brett.
His father interrupted us by running into the room and
hollering.

“
We’ve got to go, now!” He
pulled us both along until he was sure we were following him. We
all raced out the door together.

“
What’s going on?” I
stopped in the parking lot to try and make sense of it.

I realized what the problem was when
a large booming voice alerted me to the man standing in front of us
with a shotgun. The bloody girl was behind him, and he was aiming
right at Trent. Trent was pointing his pistol at the man and the
standoff between them was terrifying.

“
You the one that bit my
girl?” The man with the gun was really pissed. I assumed the girl
must be his daughter.

“
Yes, I am! I will shoot
her if you don’t put your gun down.”

“
Go ahead, as soon as I
take care of you all, I will be shooting her myself. You will save
me the trouble.”

I was appalled and the girl looked
terrified. “You would shoot your own daughter?”

“
She’s just going to turn
into one of you. I am not going to have that. I have a whole family
here to protect.” I had guessed right, she was his
daughter.

I hadn’t noticed Cage wasn’t with us
in the parking lot at that point. What I did notice was him
sneaking up behind the guy. He had a bottle of Coke in his hand and
he swung it as hard as he could. It connected with the guy’s head.
The gun didn’t drop from his hand, but he fell. As he fell, he shot
Trent in the leg. Trent hollered and grabbed his leg.

“
Get in the truck,” Cage
was screaming at us. “Rose, help Dad. Cassie, you’re going to have
to drive.”

He tossed the girl he had just bitten
over his shoulder as I ran to get in the driver’s seat. He
deposited her in the bed of the truck.

I waited until he climbed in. “Go,
now!” He didn’t get his door shut until we were on our way down the
road again. The girl in the back of the truck screamed as she slid
around in the truck bed. I tried to drive as straight as I could,
while steadily increasing speed

“
How bad is your leg,
Dad?” I didn’t take my eyes off of the road but I felt Trent bend
down beside me to pull up his jeans.

Trent breathed a sigh of relief. “It
just grazed me, son. Lucky for me, that guy was a lousy shot. It’s
just a flesh wound. Hand me a cloth or something.”

Cage reached behind the seat and
brought out a red handkerchief. The color caught my eye and I
glanced over at it.

“
Eyes on the road, girl,”
Trent reminded me to pay attention to driving, so I turned my focus
back to the white lines blurring by. This was the fastest I had
ever driven. It would have been exciting if the situation would
have been different.

I was beginning to realize we
couldn’t rely on anyone. Our fellow men looked at us differently. I
had a bad feeling about trying to go to any safety camp. I knew
that Trent wouldn’t stop looking until there was nothing he could
do for Cage. I hoped we weren’t driving to our doom.

Chapter 13

A Different Family

I had been driving for about three
hours before Trent told me to take the next exit. I was glad that
we were finally going to be able to stop. I was nervous about what
might wait for us at the next camp. After our last run-in, nothing
would surprise me. I pulled into the road to the camp and slowed my
speed.

“
It’s about forty minutes
down the road from here. It’s in a more remote location than the
other one was.” Trent tied the bandana tighter on his leg and
encouraged me to drive forward. I had kind of zoned out a little,
checking out the sides of the road where there were lots of trees
with houses peppered in between. It was such a sharp contrast to
the highway scenery we had been driving past. That is why when a
lady walked out into the road in front of the truck, I almost
didn’t see her.

I slammed on the brakes and the truck
slid to a stop right before I hit her.

“
What the hell. Get out of
the way!” I was shaking from the scare I had gotten by almost
killing her. She didn’t move; instead, she just smiled at us. Trent
got out of the truck to see what she wanted. She was a little
dirty, and her blue dress was torn up the right side. She didn’t
look like she was bitten or turning, but you could never really be
sure.

She didn’t say anything, just kept
smiling that creepy smile. She could have been a pretty girl at one
time but now she looked evil and her skin was covered in dirt and
bruises. I was too busy paying attention to the girl to notice the
men sneaking up behind the truck. They had slid in under the radar
and one of them had a gun pointed at Cage through the
window.

“
Put your hands where I
can see them, ladies.” The man leered at Rose and me. He was
missing his front tooth, which made him look more sinister. He was
dirty. I was full of rage. Here we were so close to our destination
and these crazies were going to take us hostage. I could only
imagine what they planned to do with us. I had a feeling they might
have been this way before the outbreak of dead people. It had only
been a few days after all.

I put my hands in the air, as did
Cage and Rose.

The other guy was like an older
version of this one with a few more tattoos. His white t-shirt had
a hole in it so his large belly was visible. He had a gun pressed
into Trent’s back. He was grinning at the girl who had stopped us
in the first place.

“
Good job, sweetie.” He
sent her back into the house with a pat on the butt.

The other guy jerked Cage’s door open
and stood back. “Get out of the truck, slowly.” We all piled out of
the truck and stood on the side of the road. Our gas station
hostage screamed as they drug her from the truck bed. Going from
one bad situation to another was making her insane.

“
What the hell do you guys
want from us? We don’t have any money.” I was steamed so I wasn’t
really watching how I was talking to them.

They were going through the truck
already. I thought they were being extremely rude the way they
threw things from the truck and onto the road. I didn’t know what
they thought they were going to find.

“
Where are the keys? We
are going to be taking this truck.”

The way that the older man said it
was like he was entitled to it. It really rubbed me the wrong way.
How dare these crazy people take the only thing we have?

The guy going through the truck
walked back over and pressed his gun into my back. He smelled
horrible and just his close proximity was making me
nauseated.

“
Come on, sweet thing;
let’s go see the backyard.”

He pushed me forward as the older guy
pushed Cage and Trent. Rose was drug along behind us. They pushed
us through a narrow opening between the house and the garage. I
heard Rose groan as she struggled to make it through. The smell
that came rolling off of the men was seeping out the sides of the
house. The girl from the gas station was cussing under her breath
until the younger guy walked back to her and slapped her across the
face. She then started sobbing and he forced her to sit down beside
the house.

When we got around to the back of the
house, we had a reason to be afraid. There were people lying in a
heap to the side. These people had done this before; I felt like we
had just stepped into The Devils Rejects, Zombie Style. They had to
be nuts to just kill people passing through. We were in deep
trouble here. They were enjoying our fear. I assumed they were
father and son, as they stood in front of us with the guns pointed
straight at Rose. They must have thought she was the weakest, and
they could scare her the most.

I don’t know if it was divine
intervention or just a stroke of luck. At that moment, a huge dog
ran through between Trent and Cage and jumped around the men with
guns in a circle. They were distracted by this and momentarily
lowered their guns.

The next thing that happened was a
shock to everyone. Rose attacked the younger of the two. She
full-on attacked him. Her teeth ripped into his neck, her nails
clawed into his skin, and she took him to the ground. The momentary
chaos gave Cage a chance to hit the other guy, holding the gun, in
the face with his elbow. We all scrambled to get back to the truck
at that point. Cage picked up the gun and pointed it at the others
standing on the side of the road. We had to walk past Rose’s
victim. She was proudly standing with her foot on his chest,
knowing that she had brought him down. Cage yelled at the girl from
the gas station, who was frozen in fear, and she, finally, snapped
to attention and ran towards the truck.