I wasn’t angry any longer. At least not at them, not really — more like I was angry at the situation they put us in, and how it basically ruined any trust I had for either of them. All I felt was regret, a sense of loss. “I can’t forgive you for this. You really are an asshole.”
“You have no idea, sweetcheeks,” Ryan laughed from right beside me, he’d moved closer as Jason distracted me, and I turned and punched him in the gut. He barely flinched. I hadn’t tried very hard anyway.
Jason smiled down at me, squeezing my shoulders again and tugging me back to face him. “Promise not to go running to your boyfriends?” I grudgingly nodded. Nothing would be gained by telling them, all it would do is cause more friction, and probably end up with someone bleeding. “When we get out there, we’ll take the girls and go east. The rest of you go anywhere but east. That work?”
I nodded again, wary. “What was going to happen, if I hadn’t given this to you?”
I saw Ryan shake his head out of the corner of my eye. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want answers to, Az.”
“Okay, then tell me this? Who was your handler?”
“Kane’s assistant, Bertram,” Jason wagged his eyebrows at me. “We didn’t know that until after the meeting, although he’d been—” he fake-coughed “—meeting with Gemma and Adriana before that. Mostly Gemma, the horny bitch. For what it’s worth, we were required to check in at least weekly so sending the email was normal, and it was in code. The real message was something only our dad would know, so Bertram has no idea about any of this.”
“And I should trust you because—?”
Ryan leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Sweet, sweet Aesli Azrael. I’ve half a mind to kidnap you just to keep you for myself.”
I glared at him, wiping my cheek as Jason growled, “Brothers share.”
I flipped both of them off and backed up a step, shaking the feel of his hands off my shoulders. “This stays between us, I don’t want your blood on my hands,” I leaned in, jabbing Ryan in the chest. “And if you think I’m talking about them killing you, you’re way off. I’d do it myself.”
Jason closed the distance again, leaning in even closer to loom over me. “Bullshit.” He quickly twisted, catching me in a kiss, his hand snaking up to cup my cheek. About four or five — okay, ten — seconds after recovering from the shock, I pulled away.
“Don’t do that.”
“Fuck it!” was the only warning I had, then Ryan was kissing me, grabbing me around the waist, and running his hand down to cup my ass.
I broke free of him too. Eventually.
“I mean it. Last and only time.”
“Won’t be the last,” Jason grinned as Ryan purred, “Won’t be the only.”
“GOD, YOU’RE ASSHOLES,” I yelled, stomping away. “Go fuck yourselves!”
They laughed, and I held my hands up to my cheeks, trying to cool the flush.
I found Adriana in one of the aquaculture rooms, watching the fishies swarm the coral reef. It was one of Mouse’s favorite tanks, and she’d set up a little area in front of it with a giant beanbag under a beach umbrella, decorated in bikini-clad Hello Kitty fairy lights and six different styles of plushies with her as a mermaid. Adriana was sprawled out on the beanbag and hugging the biggest mer-kitty-maid.
“Hey,” I said, and she jumped.
“Time to go? Gemma’s taking a nap,” she said as she crawled off the chair and tossed the stuffie away as if she wasn’t quite sure how it ended up in her arms. She got to her feet and smoothed her clothes out, not meeting my eyes.
“Not quite,” I smirked, and then lifted up the small duffel bag and waved it at her. “This is for you and doublebitch to take to your family. Jason and Ryan have their own. Make sure you do your family first before you share it, okay?”
She stared down at the bag in my hand, hesitating to reach for it, then looked up at me with a mix of emotions so twisted up it was almost painful to witness.
I sighed. “It’s okay, they confessed all. We’re going to split up outside.”
She eyed me, shaking her head. “You’re really somethin’, you know that?”
“I’ve been told.”
“Not poisoned?” She reached for the bag. It was my turn to hesitate, acting like I was reconsidering, then I laughed and handed it over.
“Not this time. There’s a little case inside there with a couple different vials. I couldn’t remember how old your boy is, but if he’s less than two, use the green one — general rule is one mil per year, and that’s one mil diluted a bit with purified water. Younger than a year, or if he’s particularly small, use the red one, it’s a little over half a mil diluted out to one. Either one would be safe for a baby under two, but the red one will be a bit slower to work if he’s bigger. Whatever you don’t use is fine for another baby. Both kinds have been tested, several women here have had babies and we got the dosage proportions from the lab that does the main vaccine production. Do at least three different pokes with the needle, in the bicep muscle.”
She stared at me, her eyes filling. “Azzie…”
“Don’t go getting soft on me, bitchy bitch,” I shook my head at her. “I still loathe you.”
“Right back atcha, whore,” she sobbed, hugging me to her. I sighed, and let her get it out.
“You done?” I finally said, and she squeezed me even tighter, then gave me a big, smacking kiss on my cheek. “God, what is with your family and the kissing? Personal boundaries! Learn to respect them.”
“Oh, like those two kissed your cheek,” she said slyly, grinning at me. “Not too late to pick a better set.”
I rolled my eyes. “Quit whoring out your cousins.”
She leaned in again, brow wrinkled. “Seriously though, their girlfriends have always been very satisfied, and they are faithful to the grave. A lot of men in our families aren’t, but those two? Their dad cheated on their mom and had a mistress for years and those boys love their mama. Seeing how it affected her… neither one of them would stray, not ever. You could do a lot worse.”
“I like your cousins fine— or at least I did,” I grimaced. “But they don’t do it for me, okay? They’ve always just been friends.”
“Good kissers though, right?” She nudged at me — which I dodged — and now she was waggling her eyebrows. What the fuck was going on?
“I mean it, stop trying to sell me on your cousins, I’ve got enough on my plate.”
“FINE,” she sighed, stepping back. “Too bad, I woulda liked having you around.”
“For target practice?”
“Whatever, Azzie-kins. You know we got some girl-crushes going on between us. Don’t deny it.”
I shuddered. “You’re fucked in the head. Seriously.” I edged away from her as she threw back her head and laughed.
“Not going to forget this,” she said, gesturing with the bag after her laughter had sputtered out. “Any of it. We owe you.”
I nodded again, heading for the door. “Yup. Cool. I might collect some day. Plan on leaving in about a half hour or so, okay? And go ahead and take that stuffie with you, I know you want to.”
I didn’t wait to hear a response, I exited the room like my ass was on fire and went to download about fifty copies of Mouse’s research.
I cut through the gym to bypass Mission Control — the guys were in there sorting out supplies and I wasn’t ready to face them yet without spontaneously spilling out the Callis brothers’ bullshit and causing more drama. In the library, I rifled through one of the desk drawers under a secondary security terminal.
Just on a lark, I jiggled the mouse and woke the terminal up, looking at the recent entries: nothing major except for me hitting the panic button in the armory and Greg engaging the safe room in the kitchen, but someone also tripped a sensor in the other aquaculture room. That made me chuckle. I figured at least one of them would go back to see if we really were growing pot in the back corner. Spoiler alert: yes.
I’m in constant pain
with a fucked up digestive system, and usually I can compartmentalize and keep going regardless, but sometimes I don’t want to hurt for just a little while. And sometimes I don’t want the anxiety I get with eating or being hungry. On those rare occasions, I smoke a bowl and problem solved.
Which reminded me that I needed to bring some with us because there may not be any available out there, or it could be laced with something ugly, and I needed to pack up Mouse’s seeds. I added another couple items to my mental checklist to deal with later, because the files were priority.
I found the box I was looking for in the bottom drawer — a stockpile of flash drives and burner phones — and took the whole thing with me back to the dark and silent lab. Sev and Tai had finished up and moved everything to Mission Control, and it felt especially empty; Mouse’s absence hit me like a bat to the face. I teared up but swallowed it back. This wasn’t the time.
It took me a half hour to get all her files together and transfer them onto two dozen flash drives — all of Mouse’s research plus everything she’d stolen from McNamara, and anything else we’d picked up over the years. Sometimes it was just pictures of random whiteboards seen from the hallway, or snippets of conversations between researchers recorded in elevators; 90% of it was probably useless, but we hoarded every bit we could get because you never knew what word or phrase could lead to a breakthrough. Mouse and I had even talked about doing a fake murder wall just for the glorious absurdity of it all, with yarn stretched between every transcribed conversation and purloined email, but we hadn’t gotten around to it. Yet.
Quit your crying, you baby.
While the files copied over, I removed all the phones from their packaging and set them to charge, messaging my new phone from each one to get their numbers. There was no cell service down here — or anywhere within a few miles of Salem — but the bunker had a closed wifi network. The phones themselves were four years old, ancient in tech years, because Mouse had looted them from the wireless store along with every other retailer in town, but from what I’d heard over the last twenty-four hours, even four year old phones were like gold.
After I’d loaded all the flash drives, I shut the terminal down and unplugged it, then moved the CPU to the server room right off the lab. It had the lab’s servers — super powerful and barely used except as file storage — and backups of the main server room, and I decided no one was going to need to access this room so I didn’t share the entry code with anyone else.
Just like I didn’t share the entry code to my room or Mouse’s room.
This was still our house first, and if Mouse wanted to come back here, she wasn’t going to have to deal with her room being a sewing room or some bullshit. Especially since there already was a sewing room, with enough machines and supplies — including a fucking loom — to keep a family of thirty-three well-clothed during the Apocalypse.
Rachel, Greg, and the kids had a couple dozen other rooms to live in, with plenty of things to keep them occupied besides maintaining all the systems and staying on top of food production. They didn’t need access to these three places.
The other codes I chose not to share were the admin-level security override codes.
At any time, Mouse and I could get back in. We could open any of the safe rooms, and disarm or rearm the alarm systems. We could even shut down the power completely to drive out anyone who needed to go, and there’s one hidden tunnel that we’d decided to keep only between us, ever, that leads beyond the walls. We even removed any maps that showed it, the same way we hid the steam tunnels.
No one had the ability to take over our home permanently and keep us out, we’d worked too hard to just give it away. And I didn’t trust Greg or Rachel, and I wouldn’t think anything but the worst of those two ever again.
They fucking poisoned me. For years.
I meticulously labeled every one of the flash drives with “AESLI Vaccine Research,” tucked one in a drawer, and left one on the counter in the lab. Mouse and I would each get two drives in our go-bags — an heir and a spare — and every one of my little band of refugees was going to get a phone and one of the flash drives to take with them. I’d be hanging onto the rest of the drives to pass along to anyone who might be able to use the information; I wasn’t sure where we’d end up or who we’d meet, and this vaccine wasn’t going to be a secret anymore.
I wasn’t going to be a secret anymore.
Chapter Eleven
Azzie
I stopped by the aquaculture room for “supplies” and then took one last look at my room and Mouse’s, to make sure I didn’t forget anything. We always had go-bags packed and ready, but there were a bunch of personal items that each of us wouldn’t want to leave behind, and it was rough having to get those together for her.
At least I could fill her bag with just those items — she didn’t exactly need a water bottle and toothbrush for the trip — so I took anything that I thought was important to her, including a couple of her favorite onesies. My bag had a lot of other shit in it — like a water bottle and toothbrush, among other necessities and clothing — so I had less room for extra stuff. But at the same time, this was it: this was going to be all my worldly possessions, and dammit, I was going to be a little selfish.
I removed all my “extra” shit, all the extra bottles of lotion and shampoo and such, and the adjuvant and preservative from the lab, bundling all that together to go into a separate bag, and used the space to include more of my things. My personal items. Like not just a flash drive with a bunch of photos on it, but some of the originals of my family from when I was little, and a book my grandma gave me when I was ten that had beautiful pictures in it. I packed clothes that weren’t just practical survival gear: a couple pairs of fuzzy socks, my favorite beanies and leggings, and my unicorn onesie. Mouse had rescued my mom’s jewelry — along with my dad’s gun — from my family’s house before it got torched, and I packed that with my little brothers’ matching dragon beanie babies that she saved in the same trip — one black and one red, which says everything about their personalities. I don’t care if my bag weighed ten pounds more and was stuffed to capacity, I wasn’t leaving this all behind. It was all I had left.
A single bag was all I had to show for my entire childhood and life here in Salem.
After I got those pesky tears to retreat back into my head without being spilled, I put on a few more layers: a plaid flannel shirt and thin fleece hoodie over my fancy athletic shirt, because that fucker was way too light to keep me warm. I had another coat and rain poncho to wear over all of it, if needed, but those weren’t very warm either, so I needed to layer up underneath. Once I was satisfied that I’d stuffed everything I possibly could into my bag, and wasn’t leaving anything behind that it would break my heart to lose, I hauled it all over to Mission Control where all the stuff we were bringing was compiled.
My guys were already there, consolidating and repacking the food, survival gear, and weapons down into fewer bags to accommodate the lab supplies and vaccine cache. It was still an incredible amount of stuff, but I wasn’t sure what, if anything, we could legit leave behind. Not having ready access to the things I’ve grown comfortable with, was turning me into a bit of a packrat.
Hi, my name is Azzie, and I’m a hoarder.
I paused in the doorway, looking everything over without them realizing I was there, just to give myself a few minutes to admire my men. My men.
It felt completely natural to describe them like that, until I thought about it, then it felt weird — but weird in a way like it should feel weird, but really doesn’t because apparently I’m shameless now that I’ve gotten some.
I have five boyfriends, I’m totally hoarding men too.
Five beautiful slabs of man-flesh (with good personalities!) who apparently genuinely like me — if not more — despite my attitude, anger, trust issues, and cynicism. Or maybe because of it, I don’t know, they’re a little bit wacked themselves.
They really aren’t just p
retty faces either.
They’re smart. Tai could (and should) be a doctor; Spider is a teacher and I think he has multiple degrees. I heard Sev was on track to be valedictorian of his high school — except pandemic — and Sasha and Luka are no dummies either, even though Luka acts like a goofy puppy half the time. I feel like all of them have the same drive to understand that I do, that insatiable curiosity that demands answers to every question, even though it frequently gets me in trouble.
They are — all of them — interesting, funny, and insightful too. I sometimes feel like the triplets are speaking a different language (Bikerese?) and have a completely foreign outlook on some things, but they don’t seem to be limited by those beliefs. It doesn’t make them closed off to other perspectives, and that’s what I think is important: I don’t expect to find kindred spirits that share my same values and goals, I just don’t want to be judged or rejected for them. And I try very hard not to do the same.
I don’t know who they’ll ultimately be for me, what role they’ll play in my life for however long I have them, but I know what they mean to me.
Tai is my conscience, he understands the roiling emotions inside me and keeps me from becoming lost in them; Spider is my truth — he’s the one I have the hard conversations with, the one who alleviates my fears and doubts.
Sasha is my backbone, my strength, and his effortless sense of his own power and self has validated mine: Sasha is so unapologetically Sasha that it helps me be Azzie.
Sev is my creativity, and my deviance… I can be as weird and nerdy and fucked up as I want to be, and he’s right there by my side egging me on and loving it.
And Luka? He’s my sunshine. That might be the endearment Tai calls me, but for me, it’s Luka. Life is fucking hard and the world is a dumpster fire, but as long as I have him, I have joy.
Book of the Lost: AAV-07d25-11: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 3) Page 13
