Nicholas staggered to the front door and immediately fell to the floor once inside. He noticed the carpet against his face, the wetness seeping into his shirt, and the searing pain in his stomach.
Grace saw him go down and hurried to his side. His eyelids flickered when she spoke to him. She put pressure on the wound in his back and then noticed the blood seeping into the carpet from his stomach.
She turned him onto his side and pressed her hands against the wounds in his stomach and back. He was still breathing and she prayed that he wouldn’t stop. The baby inside her kicked and she started to think about what she would do without him. What if she was alone when she went into labor. What if the monsters they were running from caught up with her.
Somehow, Nicholas could always make her believe that things would work out, and that they would be okay, but now he was laying in a pool of blood. She felt tears running down her face as she said, “Nicholas, please don’t leave me here alone.”
***
Nicholai had been formulating plans for escape and was beginning to wonder if waiting for the right opportunity was a waste of time. The thin man with the mask continued to stay two steps ahead of the Zombies, and Nicholai hoped he would be able to persuade the thin man to help him and Wendy do the same.
He hadn’t said anything to Wendy about his plans, not since making the ridiculous promise that he would help her escape. She slept in the van with him every night, and the other Zombies assumed that they were together. Wendy did not correct them.
Sometimes he wondered what it would have been like to meet Wendy when things were normal. Would she have been another girl at the office who thought he was creepy?
Because she was pretty, many of the male Zombies viewed her as a status symbol which Nicholai had because of his status in the Zombies. It made sense to them that a high ranking Zombie would have an attractive girl.
The first couple weeks after joining the Zombies, Wendy didn’t say much. Slowly, she began to seem more comfortable around Nicholai, and she began to talk. Nicholai didn’t mind, since this took the pressure off of him to fill up the silence between them.
He learned that she was in grad school and worked in a coffee shop, before things changed.
One day Nicholas asked her, “Did you have a boyfriend? Before, I mean.”
She hesitated. “I was with this one guy for a while,” she said, “We almost got married… but things didn’t work out?”
“What happened?” he said.
After a long pause she said, “We wanted different things.”
