“You’re not gonna leave without me?” he asks his mother.
She’s already kissing his forehead. “I’m not going anywhere, baby. I’m just seeing who’s at the door.”
Then she’s out the door, footsteps quiet down the hall, and I’m alone with my son.
The doorbell rings again.
Bruiser stares at the door his mom just walked out of.
I pick up the fallen pillow from the foot of the bed and set it back, just to give my hands something to do. So I don’t show him that jaw-clenching thing I haven’t fully learned to hide yet. Then I sit down on the edge of the mattress where his mom just was.
“Okay,” I say. “Tell me your best zombie evasion strategy. Because if we’re going to be a team, I need to know what I’m working with.”
He blinks. The fear hasn’t left his face entirely, but something else is moving in alongside it. “For real?”
“Dead serious. Pun intended.”
He almost smiles.
“You gotta go for the knees,” he says after a second, with the certainty of someone who has given this genuine thought. “Everybody goes for the head. But if you take out the knees, they can’t follow you.”
“Solid tactic.” I nod. “Mobility denial.”
“I learned it from Dave.”
“Dave sounds like a strategist.”
“He’s a villager,” Bruiser says, like this is information I should have already had. “But he figured it out.”
“Good man,” I say. “Dave sounds like my kind of people.”
Bruiser looks at me. That checking look. The one that takes me apart.
Then he sits down on the mattress beside me, close enough that his shoulder is almost touching mine, and we both listen to the sound of Harper’s footsteps and then the closing of the outer suite door.
Then we wait.
Together.
TWENTY-EIGHT
HARPER
Anna’s halfwaydown the hall to meet me before I’ve made it three steps out of the suite.
“Who is it?”
“There’s a man at the gate. He says he’s here to talk to you.” She’s holding out her phone, sprint-walking the last of the distance to my side.
I figured whoever she’s talking about is on a phone line, but as soon as I grab it from her, I see it’s just the security camera feed. A small three-inch screen.
Z is standing outside the gate.
I go very still.
He looks like he’s been dragged through hell and back again. And not just from where I shot him in the ass, either. There’s also a head wound matted with dried blood covering half his face, brown and cracked at the edges the way wounds look when they’ve been ignored long enough to just barely stop being urgent.
His left eye is swollen completely shut, and his right arm hangs wrong at the shoulder. His other hand is pressed against the gate pillar, not for emphasis—but like it’s the only thing keeping him upright.