Merman - Romance

Chapter 26

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Chapter 26

“Get behind me,” Jessell yelled swinging her dagger and taking down the two in front of her.  “We need to get out of this place before they corner us.”

“We’re right behind you,” Ridec yelled pressing his hand gently in the small of Rea’s back and pressing her forward behind Jessell.  “We have to go back to the school, we can plot our way home from there.”

The dagger swung again taking another head with it.

“Do you still have your weapon?”  Jessell demanded and Ridec couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride that Jessell was relying on him to help with this battle.

“Yes!”  Ridec responded.

“Well get ready to use it because we have a lot of company.”

“Oh my gosh,” Rea squealed pulling the knife that she carried from the back of her pants.  “We can’t kill all of them.”

“What about going back into the jail cell and hope they lose interest again?”  Ridec asked.

“No, there are too many of them, besides, I don’t much like the idea of being cornered in a small place like that,” Jessell muttered slicing through the neck of an oncoming zombie and slamming her foot into the chest of another and sending him careening backward.  “We have to run, you two go first and I’ll try to buy you some time.”

“No, you can’t fight them alone,” Ridec insisted.

“This is no time to argue Ridec,” Jessell grunted severing another head and slicing through a zombie’s stomach, no blood, no organs, nothing came out of it.

“Let’s go,” Rea gripped Ridec’s hand and started to run tugging him along with her.

“I can’t leave…”  Ridec started.

“Go….darn it, just go, if you’re around I’m going to have to be looking over my shoulder all the time,” Jessell screamed.  “Go Ridec and just don’t get yourself killed.”

“Come on,” Rea tugged harder on Ridec’s arm.  “For once she’s right; we’re just getting in her way.”

Ridec hesitated for a moment and then raced forward beside Rea.

“Here’s the path, we should be able to get back to the school…” Rea said breathlessly.

“I’m not going back to the school unless Jessell is with me,” Ridec said stopping and lowering his body behind an old rusted out heap of a car in the road.  It had bits of bush growing out of it and a key was still dangling in the outside of the door.   For a brief moment Ridec wondered what situation would have caused something like that to have happened, but the moment was only brief, he couldn’t waste time thinking about what might have happened to the humans from so long ago, he needed to focus on what was happening right here and right now with Jessell.

“She told you to run,” Rea pointed out but Ridec wasn’t listening, he was watching Jessell fighting her way through what appeared to be a rapidly increasing horde of zombies.

“You don’t get it do you Rea,” Ridec muttered.  “There is no me without Jessell.”

“Don’t say…”

Whatever Rea was going to say was lost on Ridec because he was racing away from her; back towards Jessell and screaming at the top of his lungs.  If he could at least distract some of them from her it would give her enough space to at least try to make an escape.

“Hey!  You!  Fresh meat over here!”  Ridec screamed.

It was working, some of the horde that had been gathering around Jessell turned to face Ridec as if hoping he would be an easier meal.

“Ridec!”  Jessell screamed but Rea had already picked up on Ridec’s plan and had stepped out of hiding a few feet away from Ridec and was screaming her head off too.

Jessell wanted to be upset with them but she couldn’t be, they had definitely thinned the competition and put the odds in her favor, she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.  What she needed to do was dispense with the few determined ones that hung around and head off in another direction as quickly as possible, that would force the creatures to split up and chase them and she needed to do it as quickly as possible so Ridec and Rea would have as much of a head start as possible.

“Go!”  Jessell screamed crisscrossing her daggers about the neck of the last zombie in front of her and watching its body slump to the ground. “Now!”  She screamed as Ridec seemed to hesitate as the horde came racing towards him.

“Where will we find you?”  Ridec shouted.

“I’ll find you!”

For now that had to be good enough, the twenty creatures hurry towards him as fast as their partially decaying bodies could move were not interested in his having an extended conversation with the woman of his dreams.  Just in case he had been thinking differently Rea said, “She’s right, we have to go.”

Ridec glanced across at Jessell one more time as she disappeared through the trees on the far side of the street.

“We’ll head back to the school, she can find us there,” he said reluctantly.  He would have preferred to go after Jessell and to make sure she got back to the school okay but he knew better.  She could take care of herself and she didn’t need him slowing her down.

‘Ridec,’ the name bombarded his mind and he felt his heart leap in spite of the fact that he was running for his life.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Yes, you?’

‘Yes,’ the sudden emptiness in his mind caused his heart to skip a beat.  What had happened, why had Jessell stopped telepathically communicating with him?

“I think we lost those things,” Rea said cutting into his thoughts.

“Yeah, we lost Jessell too.”

“She knows where the school is.”

‘Just meet me back at the school,’ Jessell’s thought pressed in and Ridec’s heart leapt again.  ‘And Ridec…’

‘Yes.’

‘Please don’t get yourself killed before I get back.’

Ridec grinned.

“What are you grinning at?”  Rea asked.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Ridec muttered.  “Come on, let’s get back to the school.”