They say you can't love the undead.
They say once they turn, it's over—emotion dies, mory rots, and everything human is erased.
They never t her.
Her na was Rae.
She was fire—fierce, fast, and bright.
She saved more tis than I can count.
But I couldn't save her.
It happened in a field of bones.
A trap.
A dozen undead crawling out from the dirt like nightmares made flesh.
She took the bite for .
One mont, she was human.
The next…
She was sothing else.
I should've ended it then.
She asked to.
Begged, even—while her fingers shook and her jaw clenched against the hunger.
But her eyes…
Her eyes were still hers.
"Don't," she whispered. "Not yet." Ifyou'renoton*,you'reviewingacopy.
So I didn't.
She didn't attack .
She didn't leave.
She stayed.
We moved at night. Slept in shifts.
I fed her small doses of the suppressant we stole from a dead dic. It didn't cure her, but it slowed the decay—kept her lucid. Kept her… Rae.
And we learned to live between pulses of the sickness.
Monts where she was more fla than corpse.
She'd laugh when it rained.
She still called "idiot" when I forgot to boil water.
And once, in an abandoned theater, she kissed —rough and desperate and confused.
"I'm not dead yet," she said.
So days were worse.
She'd lose words.
Forget who I was.
Tremble with hunger that no human food could satisfy.
But even in the worst of it, she never hurt .
One night, I fell asleep too deep.
Woke up to find her sitting beside , blood on her lips.
Not mine.
"I fed on a deer," she said, shaking. "It didn't feel right. But it wasn't you."
That was the night I knew.
She wasn't just surviving.
She was fighting.
Rae was becoming sothing new.
Not undead.
Not human.
Sothing in between.
Unkillable. Untad. Unbreakable.
Her love didn't die. It adapted.
The others wouldn't understand.
We tried joining a survivor camp once.
They saw her eyes, her twitching hands.
They tried to burn her.
I burned the camp instead.
Now we walk alone.
Legends in the ruins.
They call us "the beast and the boy."
Say we're cursed lovers, haunting the wasteland.
Maybe they're right.
Maybe this isn't love.
Maybe it's obsession, or madness.
But when she looks at —with those half-rotted, still-burning eyes—and says my na like it's sacred…
I don't care what they call it.
She saved before she died.
And sohow, she's still saving .
Not alive.
Not dead.
Just ours.
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