The Arachnid Conclave: A Suspense Romance Novel (MC Saga Book 2)

by Brogan Riley

  “Get off me,” I gasp.

  It’s Mattias. He rolls me over on my back as he presses his body against mine. I’m helpless. I haven’t eaten properly for many months. I haven’t slept properly for many nights.

  My breathing turns into wheezing as this disgusting man atop me parts my legs with his knee and covers my mouth with his. I can feel his erection rubbing against my crotch.

  A dull sound wafts through the air above me. Mattias’s body stiffens and his head bumps against my shoulder. Pain shoots down my arm as his body rests limp against mine. I notice Vilma out of the corner of my eye. She’s leaning over me. My eyes flicker over the big stone glittering in her hand. I roll Mattias off me and scramble to my feet. Red and black flashes dance in front of my eyes.

  “Is he dead?” I squeak.

  I feel contaminated. Rage and panic mix in my chest, rise up to my throat and squeeze it like a massive hand.

  “I hope so,” Vilma says with a high-pitched crack in her voice, her cheeks bright red. “Did he...?”

  “No,” I rasp. “What are we going to do now, grandma?”

  “We are going to survive, child. At any cost.”

  I pull back and forth then watch Mattias. He’s not moving.

  “Strip him,” Vilma says and kneels beside him, taking a knife from behind his belt. “Stanka, my dear, strip him.”

  I always obey Vilma. She’s older than me and I respect her.

  I sit on my heels and put my trembling white fingers on Mattias’s chest then remove his shirt and pull down his trousers. His limp cock looks grotesque and so do his dead eyes.

  “Now you strip and put his clothes on,” Vilma says.

  Watching Mattias’s nakedness, I take off my clothes and slip into his. They are too big and smell of animal droppings and sweat. Vilma cuts a wide margin off each leg of the trousers and adjusts the waistband using the knife and belt. Then she chops my hair. I watch the tendrils of my hair floating to the ground, forming a pile. The knife is blunt and pain seizes my skull. Vilma curses under her breath, working at a steady pace. The rising pile of my hair symbolises me. My mind detaches. There is no me anymore. There is only an animal that wants to survive. Vilma tosses the knife to the ground and it clinks against the stone, the sound dreadful like the naked corpse three steps away from me. Then she rubs soil on my cheeks.

  “You are Mattias now,” she says.

  Tears blind my eyes. “Yes, grandma.”

  “You’re a boy. Behave like one all the time.”

  I nod. “Yes, grandma.”

  We leave the body to rot and continue with our ordeal.

  With each day that passes, Vilma gets weaker and weaker. Her breathing is laborious, every exhalation saturated with acid.

  She will die soon.

  And I will die just after her.

  Munroe

  I’m not a deserter. It’s just that my whole battalion was erased and I was the only survivor.

  The war is over. There is no one to command me so I’ve decided to return to Edinburgh, the city I grew up in. I was born in a small village in the Scottish Highlands, but my parents decided to leave it, seeking out a better life, more opportunities, and more happiness. I guess they didn’t find all those things in Edinburgh. That city killed them both. My father was stabbed in a street fight and my mother met a bad man who strangled her with a piece string. That’s what I heard from Dave Brown, the man who fed me when I almost starved to death. I don’t remember my parents. I remember the putrid smell of the streets, the moans of the whores fucked rough by men from all backgrounds, and the street fights. The delicious taste of fresh bread. The painful yearning for something I couldn’t name.

  I’m tearing my way through the western part of Germany. An old compass and the words of passerby are guiding me. My way is marked by abandoned tanks, patches of burned ground, and bomb holes. I’ve seen a few decaying bodies scattered on both sides of the basic road I’m riding along. The motorcycle I took from a dead German soldier will soon demand some fuel so I look around carefully to find a car or another bike with a full tank.

  I love bikes and I’m going to keep the one I’m sitting on. It’s a solid German job. I hate Germans, but they make good bikes. The war is over and they’ve been beaten up so keeping a German bike won’t stain my honour.

  A group of people passes me in the opposite direction, their faces dead like my surroundings, dread and horror chiselled in their furrows and wrinkles, hunger visible in their sunken cheeks and wide empty eyes. Their silent mouths exhale clouds of vapour and they shiver in the chill of this early November morning.

  Ominous clouds have gathered in the sky and the air is still, a misty unearthly aura blanketing the world like a delicate veil. Black trees stand like skeletons, like the monuments created to remind us of the battles that have destroyed this once beautiful land.

  Ten minutes later, I ride along a concrete road that stretches through the pinewoods. I hate Germans but I must admit their road is very good. The wheels of my bike rattle on the junctions between the concrete slabs as my lungs absorb the humidity laced with resins puffing from the woods.

  On my left, a boy kneels and leans over a woman. She’s lying on the ground. A few steps farther, there is a wagon. A dead horse is lying in front of it and flies are buzzing above the black shining corpse.

  The boy wails like a girl as I pass him. What a fucking cry-baby.

  I shake my head and focus on my goal, on my journey home, but something claws at my heart and tells me to stop. I park my bike on the mossy ground and move towards the boy. I stand right behind him.

  “She’s dead,” I say in my broken German.

  Purple patches of livor mortis mark the old woman’s hands and neck and she smells of death.

  The boy turns his face towards me and his emerald eyes widen. Fucking hell. I’ve never seen a boy with such girly eyes. Thick eyebrows frame them and long eyelashes adorn them beautifully. He has really girly lips. Women must love his pretty face, but surely they must hate his softness. He’s crying like a girl. He needs to harden. This is not the world for soft boys.

  I let out a guttural growl and he hugs himself.

  He looks fourteen.

  I’m thirty-four.

  A thought wafts through my head. I could be his father.

  “The woman is dead,” I say in the purest English I can manage.

  He turns his head and stares at the woman.

  It’s none of my business so I rush forward, but something jabs the side of my chest and tells me to stop. I turn back. It’s as though something is pulling me back to the boy.

  “Leave her and come with me,” I say.

  The boy looks up at me. “Nie.”

  My lips curl into a wide grin at the sound of his breathy girly voice.

  “You’re not German, are ye?” I ask.

  “Nie.”

  “Where are ye from?”

  “Slovakia.”

  I whistle. “That’s a long way.”

  The boy averts his eyes.

  “Come with me,” I repeat with impatience.

  I’m not going to stay here forever because it’s not safe here, and his indecisiveness is pissing me off. The old woman is dead. Nothing is going to resurrect her and the boy looks so helpless I’m pretty sure he’ll die without me.

  I need company, someone who will talk to me. The boy can be useful to me in other ways. He can pick up twigs and take care of the fire when I’m resting at night. I’ll leave him in Dover. All the Slovakian people I’ve met headed for Dover so it’s convenient for him to join me.

  “Burial,” the boy says.

  “For fuck’s sake. Ye want a burial with an expensive coffin and an orchestra? And where do ye want to bury her?” The boy’s eyes cloud with confusion and I know he’s struggling to understand me. I take a deep breath and speak slower, like a fucking Englishman. “We can throw a few stones over her body, that’s all. And what about the horse? Are you going to bury the horse
as well?”

  “The horse didn’t want to eat,” the boy says in a barely audible voice like there is no life left inside him.

  “It looks fucking very old and sick. No wonder it didn’t want to eat. You should have shot it dead a long time ago to end its ordeal.”

  The boy sobs like a child and something pricks my heart like a needle. I feel like a bad man. The war is over so there’s no need to behave like an animal. I don’t know though, there is something about the boy, something touching a tiny soft part of me that I wasn’t aware I had.

  “Alright,” I growl. “Gather up as many stones as you can.”

  I move closer to the wagon and assess it for a few seconds. The wood is partially rotten. Happy with my discovery, I clamber on to it then kick the top rail with my foot until it breaks so I can grab a long piece of it to use it as a shovel. I jump off and look around. My eyes spot a square piece of muddy ground. I walk towards it and dig my pseudo shovel into it. Working at a steady pace, I manage to create a shallow grave as the boy keeps bringing stones and gathering them into a pile.

  We hold the woman by the arms and legs and move her into the grave. I cover her body with a layer of mud and top the grave with the stones.

  The boy crosses himself and mumbles a prayer, tears trickling down his cheeks. They mark his face with grey smudges of dirt.

  We cover the dead horse with branches and stones. It deserves some respect too.

  I take the flask from my bike and pour some water onto my hands then onto the boy’s palms.

  “Time to go, boy,” I say.

  Stanka

  He stares at me with his cold blue eyes framed by thick asymmetric eyebrows and I notice three scars stretching across his unshaven cheek. They move as he grins at me, exposing his perfect white teeth. He threads his fingers through his short brown hair. A few greys shine around his temples. Delicate wrinkles mark the skin under his eyes, giving him a strangely alluring appearance. A menacingly alluring appearance. He is a killer. My subconscious can sense his ruthlessness and it causes hair to rise on the back of my neck.

  He grunts like an animal, making me shudder. My eyes slide over his massive frame.

  A gun hangs at the wide belt around his waist. His British uniform has holes and patches of black dirt—the proof that he’s fought in many battles, the proof that he’s killed many of our enemies. My eyes spot more details—the burning touch of the summer sun that has left pale patches on the fabric of his jacket, missing buttons, missing shoelaces in his black boots replaced by two pieces of string. Three war medals. He is a hero.

  No, he’s a dangerous man. A dangerous man who smells like a pig. Well, I do too. Maybe the odour of my sweat will deter him or at least keep him far enough from me? It seems like we’re heading in the same direction. What if he decided to join me?

  No, no good—

  I’m thinking like a human craving the company of another human. Like a human planning to live.

  I’m not a human. I’m a corpse that needs to get that man’s gun. I could use it to shoot myself dead. Vilma let out her final breath many hours ago as did the horse. When this man discovers that I’m a girl not a boy he will do horrible things to me. He’ll do what men did to all the women I and my grandma met on our journey. He will rape me. Maybe he will even chop off my breast or my fingers. Vilma and I have seen the monstrosities men can do to women.

  Those women invited us over for a meal, allowed us to sleep in their stables, smiled at us, gave me clean men’s clothes and small men’s boots, but they were dead even though their lungs moved to breathe in the air. They were widows, sisters, mothers, waiting for their men to return even though those men died a long time ago. Some of them yearned for death. Some of them took a piece of rope and ended their existence.

  A lot of people were celebrating the end of the war though. Some women shot me yearning glances. A few kissed me on the cheek and giggled. They exuded joy, danced, laughed, twittered. Those beings filled me with hope. Vilma’s death has just erased that hope.

  I’ve been lucky so far and Vilma invested a lot of effort to protect me. She could pretend to be a really nasty old witch or a hysterical old lady when necessary. It worked perfectly. Now, she’s dead and I’m on my own.

  Death is not such a bad idea. It would save me from that dangerous man leaning over me.

  They’re all killers, damaged by war, insane. It doesn’t matter which side they fought for. The war made them think like monsters. A woman on her own should stay away from every man these days.

  “Come with me,” the man says in a husky voice and grabs my arm.

  His English is coarse, edged with impatience indicating a bad temper. I have to focus to understand him. My English teacher was from London. This man must be from Ireland or Scotland, I’m not sure.

  He’s been talking to me for a while, but it’s been a blur, except for a few sentences.

  A hiss escapes my mouth as his fingers dig into my flesh. His scent engulfs me—tobacco, earth after rain, resins. Sweat. He smells like the men in my family home but needs a bath urgently.

  “You’re very delicate, boy,” the man says loudly, hurting my ears with his accent. “Whit’s yer name?”

  I shake my head. “My name?”

  “Aye. Your. Name.”

  “Mattias.” I lower my voice as much as possible, but it resembles a crow’s screech not a masculine voice.

  “Munroe.” He curses under his breath and says something to himself.

  I understand two words ‘Englishman’ and ‘fuck’. It definitely means that he’s not from London.

  I sigh as he drags me behind him towards his bike and my eyes catch the last glimpse of my dear grandma’s grave. I will join her soon. Calm washes over my heart.

  I just need to figure out how to steal the gun from Munroe.

  In the meantime?

  It seems like I’m going to ride on Munroe’s bike.

  Holy shit.