Die For You: Catastrophe Series, Book 1 (2 page)

These days, you had to assume everyone was a freak. Because they probably were. Guilty until proven innocent. Early on in the outbreak, soon after her family got sick, she’d seen her parents’ next door neighbor brutally murdered after he’d opened his front door to a man pretending to be a police officer. Rachel wouldn’t be making
that
mistake.

Her hands shook as she pulled out Dad’s gun, gingerly unwrapped it and placed it on her lap. She took a deep, stuttering breath, swallowed against the bile rising in her throat and forced herself to pick up the weapon. She hadn’t held a gun in over twelve years and had planned on living out the rest of her life never having touched one ever again. But this was like the Wild West. Kill or be killed. A goddamn Spaghetti Western, and she had to be ready. There was no time left for phobias and fears, only action and reaction. Life or death.

Rachel had a clear view of the Hummer from her driver’s side window. She watched with eyes wide as the door swung open. First one buff-colored boot hit the pavement, then a second, and a dark head rose above. The door shut and her jaw dropped.

“Shit, he’s huge,” she said.

A soldier. He wore army camouflage pants. A black T-shirt crossed his wide shoulders and covered the tops of his massive arms. He looked Hispanic with dark tanned skin and buzzed brown hair. She couldn’t see his eyes through black sunglasses. But one thing she could clearly see—he had enough firepower strapped to him and in his hands to take out a small army.

Rachel had been raised to trust and respect soldiers. Instinct told her to fling her door open and run into this man’s arms. She watched him plug a clip of ammo into his handgun and hold it up with both hands, finger on the trigger. She bit her lip, shook her head and clicked the automatic lock for all four doors. Nope. Safer to hide in the car.

He looked right at her.
Uh,oh.
She slumped in her seat.

A moment later, he tapped his knuckles on her window. “Ma’am? Can you hear me? Come out, it’s safe.”

Terror kept her glued to her seat. “Safe. Yeah, right,” she snorted, gripping her gun.

He brought his face level with hers and yanked off his glasses. She blinked. Her breath caught in her throat. Wow, he was handsome. No, gorgeous—gorgeous like Benjamin Bratt. And he had a wicked scar that carved down the right side of his face, which in reality, only made him more handsome, in an edgy I’m-about-to-ravage-you kind of way. Coffee-brown eyes and full lips curved into a tight smile. “Ma’am? Are you okay? Are you sick? Roll down your window, please. We need to talk.”

Polite too.

“I’m not talking to you,” she muttered. “I don’t care how cute you are.”

“What?” he said. “I can’t hear you.”

His deep voice sounded soothing and trustworthy. A siren song.

She examined his face again, searching for the answer to her most burning question. Was this man a gentle giant, or trouble on two legs? Either way, ignoring him wouldn’t prevent him from shooting her in the head through the car window. Rachel decided to negotiate.

She lowered the glass an inch. “I’m not sick.”

“Good,” he sighed.

“I have a gun.”

“So do I.” He smiled. “Several.”

Her nostrils flared. She straightened her shoulders. “I’m not getting out. I’m leaving. Okay, pretty boy? You go on back to your car, and I’ll stay in mine and I’ll drive out and we’ll go our separate ways. No harm done.”

The big, scary guy frowned. “That’s not a good idea. You could get hurt on your own.”

“And I could get hurt with you. Thanks, but no thanks.” Being alone would be hard, lonely and downright miserable, but at least she’d be alive and unharmed if she traveled by herself. She’d take the unknown any day over journeying with a possible freak in a pretty package.

“I wouldn’t hurt you.” His voice turned frosty.

“I don’t know that. Now step away and walk back to your car.” She raised the gun with trembling hands and pointed it at him for emphasis.

She must have offended him, because he looked pissed. He gripped the edge of the window. “Ma’am, I’m First Lieutenant Adam Sanchez, an officer in the Marine Corps. I got back from Afghanistan and found this,” he said, throwing a hand out to the highway. “Out of one shit storm and into the next and somehow came out of it alive. Now as far as I can tell, you and I seem to be the only two people left alive in all of San Diego. You think I’m going to waste our precious time attacking you?”

“Yes, I do!” she shot back.

He stood up and rubbed his head. “Fuck me,” he grumbled, before he strode off toward his Hummer.

She watched his retreating back. And his, um…well, his magnificent ass.
Oh damn.
He’d backed off? He could’ve easily shot his way inside the car and taken her, but instead he’d walked away? Her self-righteous anger drained away, leaving uncertainty in its wake. Maybe she’d made a mistake. What if he was the same as her—a decent human being trying to find a way out of town?

She put down the gun, unlocked the door and got out. “Mr. Sanchez?” she shouted after him. “Adam?”

Who did she think he was? A criminal? A rapist? For chrissake, he’d only planned on helping her.

He heard her call his name and took a few more steps.
Oh, fuck this.
He stopped and took a deep breath. She was possibly the last person alive in San Diego and he didn’t even know her name, or what she looked like. All he’d seen through tinted glass was a female with a caustic tongue. Why was he letting what she’d said get under his skin? Curious and starved for human contact, he swung around for a closer look.

He eyed her from head to toe and noted that she was young, pretty too, in that girl-next-door way with wavy brown hair and magnetic blue eyes. She wore shorts and a baggy-as-hell pink shirt that drooped off her shoulder like it was two sizes too big. He relaxed slightly. She looked normal. Like someone he would have known.

Thank you, sweet Jesus.
Not bad. Could have been worse, much worse.

She raked her gaze all over him, also giving him the once-over. He wondered for a moment if her initial fear came from his scar.

Their gazes collided and he lifted an eyebrow, questioning her.
You like what you see?
He watched her lips part and her cheeks flood an attractive shade of pink.

His body heated in response, possessive instincts automatically clicking into place. He took a deep, calming breath. Christ, they’d only just met. His libido needed to calm the hell down. He didn’t know a damn thing about her, and he was busy trying to stay alive. So what if he hadn’t seen a living, healthy and attractive female in weeks? And he hadn’t had sex in…how many months? She looked young, much too young for what he had in mind. Like a deer caught in headlights.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m a woman, so I have to be careful. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

He grunted.

“How about we start over? My name is Rachel Donnelly, nice to meet you.” Her hand shot out.

“Wait,” he interrupted, placing a finger over his lips and cocking his head. “I hear something.”

The whine of an engine grew steadily louder. His jaw clenched in irritation and his fingers flew to the holster at his hip. A person of unknown intent was about to join their party? Just fucking great.

“I hear it too.” She gasped and turned her head toward Interstate 5 south. “It’s another car!”

Adam cursed. Why had he bothered to come home? Life had been safer and calmer fighting the Taliban.

“No,” he said. “A motorcycle. Get back in the car,” he ordered. “Lock the doors. If something happens to me, get the hell out of here. Understood?” She nodded and ran to the Lexus.

Chapter Two

The lone driver pulled to a stop ten feet away on a red-and-white Kawasaki motorcycle. The kind Adam detested—loud, irritating and look-at-me. He used to see them buzzing around town, darting between traffic, driven by impulsive twenty-somethings. Except this man didn’t seem so young. He had matted black hair, a scraggy beard, wild eyes and dark skin. What was he hiding inside that long, brown trench coat? Weapons or his naked penis? The guy stared at Adam, eyes blazing with the intensity of a terrorist on a suicide mission.

His attire and stance flipped every one of Adam’s switches.

Who was this crazy bastard?

The man cut the engine to the bike and the freeway returned to silence. A raven cawed from above. Claustrophobia started to settle in, scratching against Adam’s chest. The stench of death assaulted his airways. He needed to get out of this city and into the fresh air and open countryside.

Today.

Gun in hand, he engaged the target and aimed for the T-zone, ready to take him out with one precise shot. Fuck verbal de-escalation. He had Rachel to consider. “Who are you and what do you want?” he demanded.

The crazy bastard didn’t answer. His gaze slipped away and he opened and shut his mouth like a fish out of water, strangely silent. His eyes rolled up into his head and he slumped forward, falling to the side and sliding off the bike, crashing to the asphalt. He lay there, eyelids welded shut, not twitching a single fucking muscle.

Adam blew out a breath. “Not again.”

He holstered his weapon and rubbed the back of his sweaty neck. Well, that explained everything. The guy had the virus. They always lost consciousness before bleeding out. Over the last few weeks, he’d become an expert on the symptoms, watching Ruyigi infect and kill everyone on the goddamn base, city and planet. Christ, he could write a book on the subject.

“Is he dead?” Rachel yelled from the open car window.

He pivoted and shouted back. “I’m gonna check on him. Stay there.” She nodded and leaned back into the leather seat.

Adam strode past the cobalt blue cab of an enormous delivery truck with
Walmart
emblazoned across the back. A dead body slumped in the driver’s seat.

He shook his head.
Jesus, get me the hell outta here.

His boots crunched on broken glass as he walked over, fully expecting to find a corpse in a widening pool of blood. Instead, he found a man passed out on the freeway—without a single rash or welt. What the hell? He blew out a breath. They always had a deep burgundy rash that started on the chest and spread up to the face. Always.

Adam crouched next to him and found a weak pulse on his filthy wrist. The guy was hot as a furnace with perspiration beading on his face. The trench coat fell open to reveal his bare chest, simple blue shorts and scratched knees. Thank fuck. At least he wasn’t naked.

“Sir, can you hear me? Are you sick? Do you need help?” Nothing. Adam glanced at the noticeable rise and fall of his chest. Damn. Alive but unresponsive. Sick, but not far enough along to show the worst of the symptoms.

He hung his head. What in the hell should he do now?

He could drag this diseased stranger, who would die anyway, into the Hummer and take him with them. Try to give him a few worthwhile minutes as he bled all over the frickin’ car.

Or he could leave him here and go.

Fuck.

His eyes sliced to the Lexus. What would Rachel think? Should he ask her opinion? His mind flashed to the mass burials, all the people he’d nursed, everyone who’d died. He was so done with death. His gut twisted at the thought of ministering to one more patient. One more sick, diseased, messed-up, confused, desperate and vomiting patient. His hands clenched into fists and he ground his teeth in frustration.

He knew what to do. He wouldn’t burden Rachel with this decision. It was his and his alone. Adam stood up and turned his back on the last Ebola victim and strode back to the Lexus. Rachel opened the door and stepped out.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “He’s dead.”

She glanced toward the distant body. He noticed then that her hair wasn’t actually brown, but auburn. A silky wave of red highlights shone in the morning sun, thick and touchable. His lips thinned into a straight line. What the fuck? Why was he responding to her like this? His dick tightening, his hands itching to tear her clothes off? She was a fellow survivor, a companion, a comrade in this hellhole situation. He tried to refocus, but his asshole mind wouldn’t let it go.

If she is the last woman alive, and they stick together, at some point they would need to fuck, right?

Adam cursed under his breath. He desperately wanted to peel those baggy clothes off, drag her to the Hummer and fuck her blind with a slamming session of I’m-alive celebratory sex. He turned his head, examining the industrial neighborhood next to the freeway. He needed to get his mind out of the gutter.

“Adam?” Rachel caught his attention, innocently unaware of the graphic images racing through his head. She took a deep breath, a pained expression on her face. He worried for a moment she guessed his primal intent. Or wait, did she want to check on the guy behind them? He curled his fingers into fists. Dear God, no. What a mess that would be.

Her eyes locked with his. “Have you seen anyone else alive?” she asked.

Adam exhaled. Good, she had no clue. “No one,” he answered. Nada. Nothing. Big fat zero.

“I haven’t seen anyone on the streets in two days.”

“I’m not surprised,” he replied, doing his best to keep his head in the game and his eyes off her lips. For chrissake, they were in the middle of San Diego, surrounded by dead bodies. “Yesterday, the last few people on the base died. I’ve been on the radio since the phones and internet went out, trying to reach other people on military or civilian bands, but I haven’t gotten a response. I brought along a mobile tactical radio. It’s in the Hummer. We can use it to keep broadcasting and find other survivors.”

“Nothing?” she whispered. “Not even from the government. The Army?”

He looked at her tormented expression and reexamined her soft features. How old was she? She seemed young. Too young. Like someone’s kid sister.
Hell.
“Like I said, I haven’t been able to get ahold of anyone. I’m thinking that New York, Chicago, San Francisco—everywhere—they all look like a repeat of this.” He swept his arm to encompass the panoramic view of the devastated city.

“So you’re saying it might be just us? Maybe we’re the only two people in the whole world who survived the outbreak?” Her face paled noticeably. “That’s not possible.”

Man, what if it
were
just the two of them? Forever. Starting the human race over again like Adam and Eve? Or isolated like in that movie
The
Blue Lagoon
?

She gave him a wary look. “Why are you smiling?”

Meaning, how could he find humor while standing knee deep in stinking corpses? When they might be the only two people left alive? A true Marine could crack a joke under any circumstance, climate or condition. He’d come up with some of his best lines while evading enemy snipers in Fallujah. “I was thinking that if we’re the last two people alive, that makes us Adam and Eve.”

Her lips curved. “Well, Adam, that would be weird. Too bad I’m not named Eve.”

“Or Ev-uh.”

She rolled her eyes. “What, now you’re comparing yourself to
WALL-E
?”

He lifted an eyebrow. A woman who caught his obscure Disney movie reference right off the bat? Maybe being stuck with Rachel Donnelly wasn’t so bad. She might be young, please God, not too young for what he had in mind once he’d gotten her settled and safe. At least he’d have someone to talk to. Someone to fuck. He didn’t want to end up talking to a volleyball he’d named Wilson. “Well, I do appear to be the last man alive, in Southern California at least. But I’m not cleaning up this mess.”

Her brow furrowed. “So you do think there are other survivors in California?”

“Yes, I do. And we’re going to find them. Out of the billions of people on Earth, it can’t only be you and I who survived. That’s statistically impossible. I mean, at the very least, there must be people alive in China and India. I’m certain there are more survivors in America. They’re just as isolated as we are, so finding them will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Adam noted that they’d both tuned out that crazy bastard on the road behind them, shrugging him off like yesterday’s news. Sad, how they’d both become indifferent to death.

Rachel remained quiet for a moment. She seemed to be thinking hard about what he’d said. Then she whispered, “Before the TV went out last week, I heard on the news that they’d figured out why some people were immune and why others weren’t. Did you hear that too?”

He tensed. “No, I didn’t hear that. What did they find?”

“The news reporter said it was a formerly unknown, rare genetic mutation that made some people immune to the virus and gave us some sort of previously unidentified antibody. Apparently, those of us who are immune have a common ancestor they think originated somewhere in Africa. The reporter said it’s estimated only a few hundred thousand people worldwide have the mutation. They were trying to create a vaccine that would mimic the effects, but they must have run out of time.” She paused. “I guess the virus just kept going until it ran out of people to kill.”

“How did the CDC figure it out?”

She licked her lips. “Through autopsy, after they killed an established survivor. But it wasn’t the CDC. Some rich people got together and hired a group of mad scientists who were working on some isolated island somewhere. They did it.”

Adam chewed on that for a second. His jaw clenched. He gritted out, “They killed some poor bastard who they established was immune so they could cut him up and study him?”

“Actually, they killed hundreds of people, a cluster of survivors they found living in a remote village in Africa, to try to figure out why they survived. I watched an expose on it before the TV went out.”

“Shit, what is this world coming to?”

She glanced around. “Nothing. It’s come to nothing.”

“Good thing they never found out about the two of us,” he muttered.

“Yeah, good thing,” she agreed. “I just…I just wish that my family had it too. Instead, it was only me lucking out, surviving because of something rare I was born with I didn’t even know I had. Something that’s normally meaningless but turned out to be a golden ticket.” She looked at the wasteland around them and a breeze blew her hair back off her neck. “This is all so weird, like everyone went somewhere else, and you and I are left behind.”

“Like we won the mega lotto of life.”

Rachel nodded, gave him a half smile and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “So—” she sighed, “—what are we going to do next? What’s the plan?”

We? He liked the sound of that. “How about we transfer your stuff to the Hummer, start driving, get the hell outta here and figure out our next step together?”

“If we’re traveling together, we’re taking my car and I’m driving,” she told him.

Yeah, right. Like he’d let this girl drive. “Fuck that.”

Her eyes widened. “Excuse me?”

He’d make sure she was safe, comfortable, fed, happy—fucked?—all to the best of his abilities. But no way in hell was this inexperienced girl running the show. He used his officer-in-charge voice. “Look, ma’am—Rachel—that Hummer is big enough to take all my supplies, weapons and equipment, and it’ll fit whatever you have too. We still might run into other survivors once we leave this area, and we have no idea of their intentions. It’s big and fast enough to outrun anyone desperate enough to attack us. If someone tried to ram into us, we’d shrug them off. We’ll be safer in the Hummer. And that’s final.”

“Final?”

He couldn’t stop from grinning. “My way or the highway.”

She smirked and folded her arms. “Okay, Schwarzenegger. You’re the boss.”

Lucky for her he admired Arnold. Well, except for the adultery. That was some stupid shit. He looked down his nose at her. “You’re like a little dog who thinks he’s big, aren’t you?”

She lifted her chin and her impossibly blue eyes flashed with determination. “Guess so.”

His smile widened. She was young, but feisty. Good. He liked feisty.

“Look, Adam, that Lexus was my mom’s—”

“No.”

“But it’s all I have left—”

“No. I don’t care if it was Schwarzenegger’s, we’re leaving it here. It’s a liability at this point and…”

Suddenly, her face crumpled and tears formed in her eyes. Oh, Jesus. He didn’t know how to handle this. Why were women so emotional? “Come on, don’t cry. We’ll—”

“I’m not crying,” she bit out.

He blinked. “Whoa. Of course not. My mistake. You’ve probably got something in your eye.”

“Sorry.” She sniffed. “I’m not acting like myself…laughing one minute, crying the next.” She stopped and took a deep, steadying breath. “I’m just one big hot mess.”

Did she want him to agree?

“Oh!” Rachel gasped and her eyes flew wide in shock.

Shit, what now?

His hand automatically gripped his gun. She pointed a shaky finger over his shoulder at the crazy bastard, who should be dead already. “That guy moved!”

Adam’s response was almost Pavlovian. He grabbed her arm and started walking them to her car’s trunk. “Let’s go, time to start moving your stuff to the Hummer.”

“But…” she sputtered.

He stopped, cupped her jaw and looked straight into her frightened eyes. This close, he felt her heat, saw how full and kissable her lips were. He felt an odd pressure in his chest. Shit. He tried to ignore his wild hormones and the strange sensations that rocked through his veins. Being this close to an available female was playing tricks on his mind. That had to explain why he felt drawn to her. It couldn’t be anything but lust. They’d just met.

He needed to concentrate on what he had to say. Fucking could wait until later, when they were safe and secure.

“He’s dead,” he told her. “You imagined it. We need to leave this place before it drives us crazy. Come on.” He dropped his hand. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to spend one more night in this godforsaken city. We need wide open spaces and fresh air to clear our heads. We need to move on, search other cities, other areas and find a group of survivors we can join up with.”