Silver Horizons (Silver Horizons #1)

Silver Horizons | 10

            “Let’s take this stuff back to Forest and Annie first,” Kyle said, walking away. I followed him.

            Everything was quite crazy. The zombie apocalypse, Annie’s bite, Forest’s attachment to Annie—everything. It didn’t seem real, to put it simply. I hadn’t ever expected to have to travel to a quarantine across the U.S. with a boy who could more or less hate my guts.

            Then again, everything made perfect sense. Everyone was already expecting the apocalypse, so why was it so farfetched that it actually happened? Maybe it was just the fact that I’d seen so much death already. Death really did signify the end of the world, and that scared me. I knew that we were going to either have to leave Annie behind or kill her, and in both of those options, she would die.

            That would kill Forest. He’d already had to leave his parents behind, and I was pretty sure that he’d lost other people. A person can only handle so much death.

            But then there was me. Wouldn’t that mean I was close to the breaking point too? Because I’d experienced death too? Even though Annie didn’t mean as much to me as she did to Forest, I was still responsible for her. I had promised her father that I would take care of her. Letting her die—I’d be breaking my promise.

            My head snapped up at the sound of Kyle dumping the canned goods on the ground. The first thing that I saw was Forest yanking up Annie’s pant leg. She yelped in pain, but he didn’t seem to notice.

            My gaze flickered down, and there was her bite in all of its gruesome glory. Red and puffy, puss was gathering around the opening of the bite, and it looked as if it were throbbing.

            Man, it must really hurt to be bit by a zombie.

            This bite was different than the one that was on my Dad’s arm. A chunk of her leg wasn’t missing; it was just bitten into. For the zombie, it must’ve been like biting into a Big Mac, but then not being able to eat it. In other words, he was probably hungry. Then again, he was dead, and it wasn’t like I cared whether he was hungry or not, because I didn’t.

            “What the hell,” Forest muttered underneath his breath. Annie tried to jerk her leg away from his grasp, but he resisted and pulled her leg closer to him.

            “Stop, Forest,” she said, trying again to escape his hold, but again she failed. “Please,” she begged. To me, it sounded as if she’d known the entire time that she was bit.

            Kyle, sighing, walked over to Forest and Annie, crouching down near them. “Annie,” he said, and her gaze turned toward him. Fear was evident in her big, brown eyes, and I instantly felt sorry for her. This entire time, she’d been quiet and only trusting Forest. In the end, she was going to die. “You know what that is right?”

            Slowly, she nodded. “It’s a bite.”

            He raised his eyebrows, his facial expressions not wavering once. I had to give the kid props. He was staring right at the nasty bite, and yet he didn’t seem bothered one bit. “Right, do you know from what?”

            She gulped. “A zombie.”

            “That’s good,” he said, a grim expression overcoming his face. “You know what we’re going to have to do, right?”

            I wasn’t sure if I felt sorry for her because Kyle was being so harsh or if because she saw her impending death looming over her head. Maybe both.