Page 94 of Break for Me

If he was trying to calm my nerves, telling me to just stay alive certainly did not help. I forced myself to release his shirt and nod at him that I understood anyway. I followed him up those steps, and as soon as he clicked the flashlight off, I locked my left hand in a death grip on the back of his shirt to make sure he didn’t get more than a few inches ahead of me. Some unreasonable and unrealistic fear of ending up trapped in this basement alone with all these putrid bodies made me want to kick that door open myself and burst out of here like there wasn’t a house full of armed people on the other side. Jersey sure seemed to take his sweet time getting the door open though. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but with just about every second that passed I was squishing myself harder into him like he might forget I was right there beside him and leave me behind in that nightmare.

“Baby?”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“I’m going to need you to get your tits off my arm so I can focus.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I whispered back at him as loudly as I could with it still being a whisper. “You cannot possibly be thinking about sex right now. Right here, of all places.”

“You’re the adrenaline junkie,” he whispered with a tiny chuckle. “Are you really going to tell me that you’re not thinking about sex right now?”

“I‘m currently more preoccupied by the possibility of zombies.”

He stopped moving entirely to look at me over his shoulder like I was an absolute lunatic.

“Please, just get the door open, J,” I begged.

“Get the gun ready.”

He pushed the door open just the slightest bit and a tiny amount of light seeped into the stairwell with us. Something about it made me feel like I could breathe just a little easier. He didn’t turn back to me again, but he reached for me blindly and his hand landed on my knee. He squeezed it once before he flung the door open and stepped out with his gun already raised. Fear would’ve frozen me right there, but adrenaline kicked my brain into gear and I stepped out just behind him to face our left while he went right. The lack of movement, the lack of gunfire, the lack of screaming. It all surprised me. There was nothing to see, nothing happening. I lowered the gun for just a second to look behind me for Jersey but he was already almost at the other end of the hallway. I backed down it quickly to catch up to him as he leaned around the closest doorway. I knew the plan and I knew what I was supposed to do if we were separated, but I absolutely didn’t want that to be the case. Ending up alone in here sounded like the worst possible outcome. When I bumped into him at the end of that hall, his entire arm swung across my body to hold me right where I was. He was trying to communicate something to me by the way that he looked back at me, but I wasn’t fluent in former soldier. The man rolled his fucking eyes at me when I just shrugged my shoulders at him to try to tell him that I didn’t understand. He pushed me back a few steps and pulled my whole body into his so he could put his mouth right against my ear.

“Wait here, keep the gun up and ready, don’t fire unless somebody comes after me,” he whispered and then he started to step back but he paused again to put his forehead down to mine. “And if you fire…Don’t. Hit. Me.”

He was moving away from me before I even breathed again, like a fucking shadow. There one second and just gone the next, quieter than any human should’ve ever been able to move. I was able to make out his outline as he moved through the next room. There were people asleep on each end of two couches and a fifth person asleep on the floor. I couldn’t think of a single thing that would possess me to willingly place my body on the floor of this building to just go to sleep, but this guy was sound asleep while Jersey floated among them. Jersey glanced at me to make sure I was ready, and I nodded. I didn’t dare to actually raise the gun. I didn’t trust myself to not use it if someone so much as breathed too loudly, but I kept both hands on it and ready. I watched Jersey slide his knife from some hidden sheath somewhere on his body and work his way from one throat to the next until none were left alive. It was quieter than I would have imagined, watching five people choke on their own blood while they bled out. Hushed gagging noises with Jersey’s hand muffling the sounds from each mouth as he did it, feet kicking ever so slightly. The end of five lives seemed like it should have been noisy. He didn’t even seem to hesitate as he moved from one person to the next, like there was nothing to think about or consider before killing these people. It was…unsettling.

He motioned for me to follow him when he was done, and I very noticeably hesitated to join him that time. Even with the smell of rot coming up from beneath the house, the air here took on a stomach-churning metallic scent that was so strong I could almost taste it. Jersey came back to me yet another time when I’d taken too long for his liking, and he grabbed my arm that time.

“I need you to stay with me, Triss.”

He whispered it, but there was something forceful underneath his voice that suggested his patience was wearing thin for my inability to just accept what was happening and keep moving. His hand shifted from my arm to underneath my chin to raise my face to his.

“I don’t mean just physically, baby. Stay with me.”

He poked me right in the forehead when he said it that time.

That made more sense. He could see what was happening inside me. I forced myself to nod at him again. He turned around to make his way to the next room. The next room was loud and everything happened in the rushing blur that I’d expected initially. The light was coming from a fire burning right in the middle of the floor in this room, and everyone in it was still awake. Jersey snapped into his weird all-consuming rage mode the second that he peeked his head around the edge of the doorframe.

“Get to Memphis,” he hissed back at me before he shoved a folded knife against my chest. I managed to catch it before it fell to the floor, but by the time I’d processed his words, he was gone. And the shooting started a fraction of a second later. Everyone seemed to attempt to yell something at the same time. Men scattered in every direction around the room, darting out through other doorways. I caught flashes of Jersey here and there, but my eyes landed on the small girl, curled up on the floor in the opposite corner of the room. She was facing away from me, on her left side with her wrists tied behind her back and her legs tied together at her ankles.

“Get her and go!” I heard Jersey yell from where ever he was. I made a very conscious effort to not look around the room another time before I sprinted through it. When I was closer, I dropped to my knees to slide the last few feet to her. I opened the knife with some frighteningly shaky hands and started to saw through the rope around her ankles first. She started to squirm, trying to get a look at me.

“It’s Trista,” I said, still sawing. “Jersey is…somewhere.”

She had an absurd amount of duct tape over her mouth, and I noticed for the first time that these monsters wrapped it all the way around her head. Around her hair and all. The next thing I knew, she was trying to scream, trying to kick, trying to roll the rest of the way toward me. It dawned on me about half a second too late that she was trying to warn me. My whole body was airborne and I felt a brief second of the most painful stinging sensation I’d ever felt in my life down my left leg. When I crashed back to the floor and tumbled across it, I realized that someone had thrown me through the fucking fire. That same person jumped through the flame in the next second and had me pinned to the floor between his knees. He cocked his fist back nearly to his fucking shoulder to get ready to swing it at me, but a knife came out of the darkness and pierced somewhere right behind his ear. The hand that held the hilt had shoved so hard that it almost touched the side of his head. Jersey ripped the knife back out in one clean motion, just for the body to fall forward on top of me. I screamed under the weight of him, and most definitely panicked a little at the feel of his warm, sticky blood pouring onto me. Jersey rammed a boot in between our bodies to kick the man all the way off me before he grabbed the front of my shirt and hoisted me straight up to my feet. He ran back to Memphis himself then and knelt beside her. It only took one quick motion with his knife to cut through the ropes around her feet. He grabbed her by both biceps and lifted her until she was standing on her own, and another sudden swipe with the knife freed her hands. She swiveled around to face him the second that he was done. She was already crying, tears flowing right over the duct tape that covered the lower half of her face. She threw her whole body right at him, and her fingers dug into his back so hard that even in the flickering light, I could see every bone and every vein in her little hands straining. He peeled her off just a few seconds later.

“Stay between us,” he said to her. He blew right past both of us and I had to push Memphis to get her moving to keep up with him. He stopped next to a window on the way back toward what I assumed was the front door, I was so ridiculously turned around in this house that I couldn’t have guessed where we actually were. He turned to look back at both of us and pointed toward the floor for us to get down to cross the window, but the second that he faced away from us, there was more gunfire. The glass of the window shattered beside him. He turned back to put his arm around Memphis and he slid both of them down to the floor. He covered her head while he stared at me. I stayed there, crouched beside them, squeezing Jersey’s hand that hung from Memphis’ shoulder.

He waited until there was a pause in the gunfire from the outside and then he nodded over my head. “Back that direction. Stay low.”

I turned and started to awkwardly scoot across the floor back toward the room where we’d found Memphis. I could hear the other two scraping across the floor behind me. I didn’t even make it back into the room before a solid fucking boot cracked against the left side of my face. White spots took over the entirety of my vision but I was very aware of the blur that rushed by me and the horrid wail of a man screeching in pain. Hands latched onto my shoulders and started to drag me the rest of the way across the floor. They pushed my back against a wall and hands way softer than Jersey’s touched both sides of my face. Her thumbs moved back and forth across my cheeks while I tried to blink my vision back into focus. Memphis appeared in front of me, blurry at first, but still her.

“On your feet, Triss,” I heard Jersey say, but my brain had apparently been kicked loose and didn’t understand him. He’d moved Memphis aside and I felt his hands under my arms a second later.

“Up, baby.”

He passed his gun off to Memphis and he put his hands on my face that time.

“You hear me?” He asked. “You can understand me right now, Fancy Face?”

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