by Laken Cane
“He’s not strong enough to cut us free,” the same man cried.
He was probably right, but I couldn’t stop. I had to free the boy. I’d free him and hope for the best. “I’m sorry,” I murmured.
And finally, the ends of the rope parted, and the boy took a deep, hoarse breath, and he was smiling.
Smiling, even in his situation.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
“Vito.”
I nodded. “I’ll remember. I’m Teagan.”
Cutting the rope from his wrists went much faster, and when he was free, I handed him the knife. “Which one of these men will help the others, Vito?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Danny, in the back.”
“I’ll get his neck, you get his wrists, okay?”
“Yes.”
Danny was waiting. He was nearly indistinguishable from the others. He was restrained, filthy, and beaten. But he wasn’t broken.
“Help them when you’re free,” I told him. “I’ll try not to cut your throat.”
“I’d rather have my throat cut than this,” he said. “Do what you can. Vito will stab me in the heart if you can’t get me loose, won’t you, buddy?” He laughed.
I shook my head, unable to comprehend how they could still laugh. Or talk. Or function.
I cut him free.
Terrified with every second that passed that the mutants would find me, that the gods would awaken, and that I would never have enough time to find Sage.
“I’m looking for a little girl and a new boy,” I said. “Do you know where they might keep them?”
“Girl, really?” one of the men said. “Do we look like we see anything but this shithole?”
“Alcohol,” I told them. “It kills them.”
But they were no longer listening to me. They were begging Danny and Vito to cut them loose or kill them.
I grabbed my gun and got the hell out of there. I leapt off the wagon, and though I could no longer hear them, I imagined I could.
I could still hear death screams, and flickering flames lit up the night. Everything bounced around in my skull like ping pong balls and all I could see was hell.
Fire, smoke, death.
“Sage,” I screamed. “Sage!”
A melting mutant ran toward me. His shirt had burnt into his skin as the alcohol ate away at his flesh, and his eyes were wide and demented. I could feel his desperation, and I knew if he got his hands on me, I was dead.
Or worse.
I didn’t run. I brought my gun up and I pulled the trigger. A stream of alcohol burst from the barrel and hit him in the throat. I didn’t stop, though.
He fell to the ground, twisting and screaming, his body smoking, and still, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.
I knew I was wasting my mutant-killer, but I couldn’t stop.
Then Lila appeared out of the smoke, her face covered with soot and blood. I saw her mouth moving and I knew she was screaming at me to find the kid, find Sage, but I stood there like an idiot and sprayed alcohol on a dead mutant.
She shoved me.
The gun flew from my grasp about three seconds before I hit the ground hard enough to shake the crazy loose, and the sharp, immediate pain from my already damaged tailbone brought my mind back to the matter at hand.
She plucked my gun off the ground and threw it at me, hitting me in the chest. “Find the fucking kid,” she screamed. “You have thirty minutes.”
Thirty minutes.
Shit.
“Okay,” I murmured. “I’m okay.” I pulled a full bottle of alcohol from my belt and poured it into the gun with surprisingly steady hands. Then I turned and ran toward the other wagon. Where else would she be?
But I knew they could have stashed her anywhere—if they’d been the ones to take her in the first place. Human baddies could have gotten her.
And in the back of my mind a quiet voice told me that I was never going to find her.
Sage was gone forever.
Chapter Eighteen
The second wagon was full of supplies, and despite everything that was going on, part of me wanted to get into the driver’s seat and drive those horses, the wagon, and the supplies out of there.
No bodies were in the wagon—alive or dead.
I ran into the grocery store, and tripped over a sleeping mutant who lay right inside the doorway. I screamed before I could control myself, but he never moved.
I scrambled to my feet and wiped blood from a cut on my face. I had no idea where it’d come from. It didn’t matter, really, but my mind wanted to fixate on that injury.
I had another flashlight in my belt, so I pulled it free and clicked it on, then I pointed my gun at the sleeping mutant.
He didn’t move as I sprayed him. And when I moved on, I found another, and another, and another.
I watched their skin blister and burn with a grim, almost psychotic satisfaction I’d never felt before. I destroyed the ones in my path, but I knew there were others, probably all over the store. Everywhere, there were others.
And I had yet to see a sleeping god.
I sprinted down the aisles and deeper into the store, every sense I had on high alert. The beam of my flashlight bobbed as I ran. It lit up a path for me, but made the shadows even more ominous. I felt spotlighted.
My running footsteps were loud and echoing on the hard floor, and my breath could have been a bellows.
Despite the noise I was making, I heard the prisoners.
The pregnant women had been herded into the back storage room and left there on the hard, cold concrete floor. They were connected and restrained by ropes and by collars around their necks.
The collars were thick and heavy, but I had strong blades almost sharp enough to cut through stone. I could cut through a collar.
They moaned. That’s all they could do.
But their moans were like winds sweeping through the store, rising and falling, gentle and harsh.
There were fourteen of them. Fourteen pregnant women.
Fourteen dead women.
I could free them, but then what? They were carrying mutant babies. They wouldn’t survive the births of those monsters. Still, I would give them whatever chance I could.
I began to cut them loose, panting and frenzied, agonizing over the fact that there was still no sign of Sage or Caleb.
And any minute, the gods were going to wake up.
I averted my eyes from distended bellies and broken bones and terror filled stares. I closed my mind to the fate that awaited me if the gods woke up.
Their moans were almost as painful to hear as the mutants’ death screams.
“I beg you,” I said. “Be quiet.”
They fell silent so abruptly it was disorienting.
In that horrible silence, I cut them free.
One at a time.
Each slash of the knife, each slice, took an eternity. Sweat gathered on my forehead, then ran down my face in itchy rivulets. Some drops caught on the tip of my nose before falling off with plops I could almost hear.
I cut the collar from the first woman, then hacked through the rope binding her arms. She grunted and scurried into a dark corner to hide as I continued on to the next one.
They couldn’t hide from the gods. Not there. But I didn’t know what else to do.
“Ah,” one of them murmured, when I sliced into her arm in my hurry.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “So sorry.”
The third pregnant prisoner was a young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and she made no sounds at all. When I looked at her, flashlight in my mouth, her eyes did not sparkle. There was no life in them at all.
When she was free, she simply fell over.
I took a moment to squeeze her cold hands. Later, I would cry. Right then, there was no time.
And I went on to the next woman.
I cut too fast. I hurt some of them, though I doubt I caused them any pain that was stronger than the agony the gods had given them.
By the time I was done my heart was broken, and my throat hurt from the thickness of tears I could not allow myself to shed.
They sat there, those women, free from their bonds but too resigned, too injured, and too pregnant to run.
I stood. “Come on. Come with me. I’ll take you out of here.”
But no one moved. In the shadowy light they stared at me with hollow, hopeless eyes and broken minds.
“Get up,” I whispered. “Please get up.”
One of them smiled at me. I think it was a smile. Her gaze was soft, and she understood. I know she understood. She tried to wet her lips with a swollen, pale tongue, but it was too dry to do anything other than scrape her split skin.
“Thank you,” she whispered. And she held out her hand.
“God.” I broke down, but just for a second. I sobbed as I handed her my alcohol gun. I pulled a smaller one from my belt and gave that to her as well.
And then, I placed the blade on her lap.
She nodded.
I turned and ran, but my feet were slow, my legs heavy.
Her haunted eyes stayed in my mind as I sprinted through the store and slammed through the doors at the back.
I had to get away.
Not only because the gods were stirring, but because I needed to get to a safe place before I lost my shit.
I heard the gods roaring, and maybe I heard a scream as my people tried to escape the awful mutants who’d taken over our world. Maybe.
Maybe I didn’t.
I ran faster than I ever had, sick with disappointment and guilt and awful, awful despair.
Sage was lost.
Probably, she was dead.
Maybe I’d never see her again, but I would never give up searching for her.
Not until I found her cold, dead body and had proof she was gone forever.
I couldn’t seem to save anyone, and deep inside, I felt like Sage was my last chance to…to do something. To redeem myself.
To prove that I was worthy of the life I’d been given.
Why wasn’t I back there in that cold storage room, pregnant and doomed?
I was always escaping while other people died.
Maybe I hated myself a little for that.
I had been spared, surely, for a reason. I could no longer hide. I could no longer cower in a house of supplies as the world crawled on, full of murderous mutants and pitiful humans.
I ran to our temporary new home and slammed through the back door.
Then I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, my mind chaotic and confused.
I wasn’t sure why I was there.
I had no real recollection of the run home. I vaguely remembered falling to my knees and vomiting nothing, then curling up on the ground until my position made me think of the babies inside the doomed pregnant women.
Mostly, I remembered running.
Richard and Lila were still in town, fighting. I’d left them there. I’d slunk home like a coward, leaving them to fight while I hid inside my house. Just as I’d always done.
I hadn’t even found Sage, and I’d barely even thought about Caleb.
Or freed the men in the wagon.
Or saved the horribly pregnant women.
I threw my head back and moaned, because the sorrow was too big to hold inside.
Then, as some of the pressure inside my skull eased, I hurried to the table and grabbed a machete and another bottle of alcohol.
I shoved an extra blade into my belt, drank a bottle of water, then headed back out. I didn’t think about it.
Thinking too much was one of my problems.
I was a different person when I left that house.
Just slightly.
But different.
Better.
I jogged down the dark street, listening, watching for movement as I went back to search the shadows for a child I couldn’t let go of.
She’s not me, Teagan.
I have to save her.
Save yourself, sister.
I did that once. Not doing it again.
I’d thought the mutants—even the orphans—would be occupied in town, fighting my new friends. So when one raced from a yard toward me, his hands up, I gave a quick, involuntary yell of shock before bringing up my gun.
I was vulnerable, exhausted, and heartsick, and his death scream hit my brain with a violent, vicious malevolence.
He couldn’t hurt me. He was dying.
But as I stood there on the pavement, shaking my head to dislodge the confusion and pain their screams carried, I caught movement behind him.
Mutants.
And not just one or two.
Dozens.
A new group, I figured, on their way to join the cluster in town.
I ran backward, moving my gun from side to side as I sprayed them with an arcing stream of alcohol.
But there were simply too many of them for one girl with one gun. They surrounded me.
And those death screams.
“Shut up,” I shrieked. “Shut up!”
And in the midst of that chaos, another threat appeared. A pack of dogs, wild, starving, and unafraid, threw themselves full force into the fight. They were there to eat, and they didn’t care if they ate mutant or human.
Some of the mutants turned to meet the dogs—they yanked knives, machetes, and swords from their sheaths, and they fell upon the dogs as viciously as the dogs fell upon them.
But the other mutants—the scouts—ignored the dogs.
They came for me. Some of them died before they could reach me, but unlike the simpler orphans, the scouts were canny and quick.
For a brief second I thought longingly of the bear spray I’d once carried—not that it’d hurt the mutants but it could save me from the wild dogs. As if that was something I needed to worry about.
A mutant ripped the gun from my grasp, then used it like a club as he rammed it into my face. I heard my nose crunch, and there was a second of hesitation before blood spewed forth like an explosion of water from a busted water hose.
The sounds were deafening. The dogs with their snarls and growls and screams of pain, the mutants with their clicks and death screams and yells. It was too much. Overwhelming.
One of them caught me as I fell backward. He held me under the arms, his bony fingers digging into my soft flesh. Digging, clawing, pinching—a vivid image flashed through my mind of him tearing the ribs from my body, then using his teeth to strip the meat from my bones.
They would eat me. They would devour me.
Or maybe they wouldn’t.
Maybe they’d plant a hideous baby inside me.
They swarmed me, a dozen growling, screaming mutants, and I knew I was about to die. One way or the other.
Then, with the curious moon watching, one of the scouts grabbed me by the throat. “Mine,” he told the others, as his nuzzled my skin. He inhaled deeply. “You smell of my master.”
He opened his mouth, wide enough that I heard the crack of his jaws, and the moonlight glinted off his fangs.
His face, almost familiar in its humanness, loomed larger and larger in my vision, and then, he struck.
His teeth sank into the side of my throat, and just as the death screams had battered my heart and mind, his bite seized everything that was left.
My body.
My soul.
My blood.
I flew through centuries of memories and emotions and thoughts. Knowledge and hatred and pain battered my brain. Images of death and birth and rebirth flashed through my mind.
And I knew why it was forbidden for a mutant to bite a human without killing that human. I understood what the mutants were.
No, they were not aliens.
When the killing, unstoppable flu had wiped out most of the human race, the mutants had risen from the earth to take their place. To take their turn.
They were not mutants.
And they were not like vampires.
They were vampires.
I struggled against my attacker, and with his memories flooding my mind, I drew a breath that almost didn’t end. I released it in a scream.
The scream was mine, but it was his, as well.
It was a weapon.
It was everything.
He’d given it to me.
And as I died, I released it into the air, the town, the world.
My scream.
My death scream.
Chapter Nineteen
When he ripped his teeth from my throat, the memories, thoughts, whatever they were, ended abruptly.
At once.
The screams stopped, as well, but I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about dying, about becoming pregnant—though none of the mutants had raped me—and about how Richard looked with his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes wild and raging as he, Caleb, and Lila raced toward us, guns up.
Caleb.
They’d rescued Caleb.
They hadn’t seen me. They weren’t there to save me. They were there to kill the group of mutants. Perhaps they thought I was back in town, caught in the cluster of gods.
As I watched, a dog—or was it a wolf?—huge and shaggy, leapt at Richard. I saw it sink its teeth into his shoulder, and then, I saw Lila.
Her eyes widened when she spotted me, and she raced toward me and the mutants who’d attacked me, shooting as she ran.
The mutant who’d bitten me arched and screamed as a stream of alcohol hit the back of his head. It ran over his forehead and face, sizzling as it burned a path over his skin.
Alcohol soaked me as well as the monsters that surrounded me, but it didn’t hurt. I lost sight of my friends as the mutants began falling. One of them, maybe the one who’d bitten me, fell on top of me.
He stared at me as his entire face crisped and blistered, and I swear I saw something inside his eyes. Confusion, pain, defeat.
He tried to rise, but his injuries were too severe.
I shoved him off me and scooted away from the growing pile of melting, smoking mutants, but it took three tries before I could stand.
I scooped what seemed like handfuls of blood from my face and my eyes and flung it away. My mind screamed at me to run, but my body was slow to listen.
