by K. M. Raya
Once again, my morbid brain looks them over and can’t help but wonder who they were before. When I look at them, I don’t just see mindless monsters. I’ve never been able to trick my mind into seeing that. Yes, I kill them every day, and I’m damn good at it, too, but it doesn't change things. I see one to the left, the one with scraggly brown hair that falls to her shoulders. She wears a nurse’s uniform, light blue scrubs with a name tag that says Dolores. Even though it’s covered in blood and has a year’s worth of discoloration, I can tell she probably came from that hospital we raided. I wonder if she had kids, or maybe a husband or wife… I’ll never have the chance to know.
And the one next to her, with the red beard and bald head that shows half of his brain peeking through the skull. He’s wearing a fishing t-shirt, and a G-Shock watch with cargo pants and hiking boots. Makes me wonder if he’d been on a camping trip, enjoying the sunshine with his buddies when the bombs fell.
Every single one of these things was once a person. Somewhere in that chemically altered brain of theirs lies decades worth of memories that are just simply lost forever. I think maybe that’s part of the reason I love killing them so much. As weird as it sounds, maybe a part of me takes satisfaction in giving them their final death. Putting them to rest and setting their soul free once and for all. There’s something a touch poetic about that, I think.
This is it, though. It’s really, finally it. After all I’ve done and how fucking far I’ve come… it still wasn’t enough. I don’t think it will ever be enough. We’ve walked this desolate country for a year now, and every town we pass looks more and more bleak. The people we meet are desperate, and will turn to the only thing that looks like salvation. The trappers offer a semblance of safety, but the smart ones know the difference between safety and imprisonment.
The room seems to shrink around me, closing in on me until I feel like that scared little girl again down in that dark well. I could scream. I really could right now, but it would only speed up the process and drain what little energy I have left. There’s nobody out there to hear it. No one to save me. I don’t even have Anubis with me with me. The last time Mac trapped us, Anubis waited nearby, fending for himself in the city, but he never left. He must have circled the tracker camp every day, because when we were set free, there he was. But not this time. My boy will have to lead the others now. He’ll protect them like he’s always protected me.
As each minute passes, I keep wondering what’s taking Mac’s men so long. He wants me dead. That’s the one thing I know for sure. I don’t think he even really cared about Liam or his death. He just wants me dead on principle. I think it also embarrassed him when me and the girls managed to kill every single one of those zoms in the pit with nothing but three pewter butter knives. We humiliated him and his entire operation. And now I’m going to pay the price as soon as someone opens this fence.
Chapter ☣ 26
Wyatt
“What kind of psychopaths are we dealing with?” Dante breathes as Nina and Missy finish telling us all what exactly happened with the trappers a few months ago.
“Exactly what you think. We told you guys, trappers are insane. Especially Mac. His son, though... he was almost worse. I still don’t know how we ever thought Liam was one of the good guys.” Liam… that’s the guy I heard Hell mention when we first met her. In the rearview mirror, I can see the shadows in Nina’s eyes, and I see when Missy reaches out and grabs her hand for comfort. My chest tightens, wishing I had someone here to do the same for me.
That someone, I’d prefer to be Helana. And that’s exactly why we’re speeding down the foggy highway insearch of her. We know the general direction they went, and luckily this county isn’t big enough for it to take too long unless they left the state altogether. But I doubt it. If they knew where we were the entire time, they must have set up some fort or basecamp nearby. Well, we’re going to find it. Having been a fish and game officer in the past, I learned a thing or two about tracking. My family were avid hunters, and so finding the tracks and disturbances in the untouched, dead world around us isn’t hard to find. The trappers were probably too cocky to even care about us possibly following them. Only someone with a death wish would try it…
I don’t know about the others, but I have no choice but to try it. I have to find her and bring her back. The thought of leaving her in the hands of those men makes me see red. Over these past weeks, I’ve come to care about the fiery little hellion more than I should have been able to in such a short amount of time. But I don’t care if it’s too soon. I’m falling for her, hard. I have a feeling Dante’s in the same boat as me. I remember the look in his eyes when he had her up on that desk the other day. Her eyes may have been closed in ecstasy, but his were locked onto her with a concentration that only means one thing.
Just thinking about it makes my whole body ache for her. I need her back and it’s all I can do not to jump out of this car. But we need to be smart about this. We need to get in and out of wherever they’re keeping her with minimal exposure. From the way Hell described them, they’ve got the luxury of numbers. God fucking knows how they managed to even find that many survivors, but when groups of people get desperate enough, they get ruthless. They become hive minded, and they’ll do anything to preserve their way of life, even at the expense of other humans.
Beside me, Alex is white knuckling the passenger door. He hasn’t spoken a word since he ordered us all to get on the road. Something’s different about him right now. He’s focused, angry and intense. Well, more so than usual, anyways. Ever since Jessa fucked us all over, he’s been angry and intense. For some reason, though, he’s committed to getting Helana back, though it blows my freaking mind since he’s the one who wanted her to leave in the first place. He’s been such a prick to her since we found them outside that burning store, so he’s the last one I ever imagined would charge into a tyrannical psychopath’s fortress just to save her.
Worry slices through me. I’m hoping we’re not too late. I wish I’d been closer when she was taken. I never should have taken my eyes off of her, especially knowing she was their target. Fucking stupid... I know Alex feels it too, even though he’s not saying it. I know my friend, and he’s got guilt written all over his face. “Can’t this piece of shit go any faster?!” Alex growls, leaning forward in his seat and checking his weapon for the fifth time in the last ten minutes. His fingers are shaking and he’s dropped a few bullets. I’ve never seen him this worked up.
Pressing the pedal to the floor isn’t helping me navigate these broken streets or focus on tracking. “I’m going over ninety, if I go any faster I could kill us, or I’ll lose their trail. If you want to help Helana, shut the hell up and keep an eye out.”
He curses, shaking his head as he glares daggers out the window. “We’re not gonna make it…” he mumbles nervously. His fist suddenly slams on the dash, causing everyone inside to jump. “God damnit!”
“Alex, stop!” Beretta snaps. “What the fuck is going on? We’re going to get her back, but you need to calm down and be smart about this. Besides, you don’t even like her, so cut the shit.”
Alex whips around to face the others. I can’t look at him because I have to keep us on the road and navigate around all kinds of debris and broken down vehicles, but I can practically taste his desperate fury in the air. “You don’t understand. Before they took her… she was shot.”
There’s a loud round of what the fucks, and my foot slams on the break by accident, jolting us all forward. Nobody says a thing to me, but I swerve back to the center of the road and pick up speed again. Still, I can’t help the stark fear that fills me with cold. “What do you mean she was shot, where was she shot?”
Alex is quiet for a second. He faces front again. “I don’t know for sure. It looked like her chest, but it could have been her shoulder, I couldn’t tell from that distance because she kept running.” He huffs and shakes his head. It’s sort of a laugh,
but not a funny one. “So stupid…” he whispers, almost to himself.
“What aren't you saying?” asks Dante, placing his arms on the seat as he leans forward. “Why do you sound weird?” Raising my eyes to the rearview, I see Dante squinting at Alex suspiciously. I agree, though, there’s something off about Lex right now. Something not right. He’s being all fidgety and panicked, more so even than the rest of us who actually give a crap about Helana.
“Now’s not the time for secrets…” says Nina from the back. We all go silent. I watch Alex’s shoulders tense. “Remember when you told Helana the same thing? Well try taking your own advice for once, you freakin hothead.”
Alex sits back in his seat, letting out a long, tired breath as he tilts his head back against the headrest. The tension in the car is thick, filled with doubts that we’ll never find her in all this mess. The buildings we pass are crumbling, and the roads have been split open where tree roots have taken over. Without humans to tend to the cities, it was only a matter of time until Earth took it back.
“You want to know what happened?” says Alex barely above a whisper. None of us respond in any way, save for Anubis whining in the back seat. Beretta rubs his head, trying to soothe him. “That bullet was meant for me.”
There’s a collective intake of breath, including mine. I can’t quite understand what he’s saying, because that would mean… “She came out of nowhere, that stupid, stupid fucking girl pushed me out of the way and took the hit instead of me.” His voice shakes, only barely, but I can hear it. “There’s no way she could have known she’d survive it. The gun was aimed at my head, and she’s such a tiny thing… but she just…”
We all know what it means. It means that despite all his misgivings and doubts about her and her intentions with our group, and despite how he’s treated her like garbage from day one, she still showed more loyalty to him in that one, tiny millisecond than Jessa did in years and years of pretending to love us. It means Alex was wrong. So god damn wrong that if we were in any other situation right now, I’d be giving him so much shit for it.
Despite how the movies and TV shows make it look, jumping in front of someone and taking a bullet for them isn’t a calculated move. It’s not something you sit around and contemplate, deciding their life is more important than yours. It’s a moment of instinct and desperation. It’s when your true colors and whatever's buried in your heart take over and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. When she pushed Alex out of the way, it must have happened in less than a second. Even with everything going on around her, bullets flying and zoms overtaking the group, she still put Alex’s life ahead of her own without even thinking about it.
That means something. It means something to me, and I know it means something to Alex. He used to be a Marine, just like Helana and the girls, though I’m pretty sure neither of them know it. Eight years ago, when the US was still at war, he was right there on the front lines. If any of us know what loyalty is supposed to mean, it’s Alex. Even with Jessa, who spent all her teenage years and more telling us she loved us… She left us at the earliest available opportunity when something better came along. She left us like we never meant anything to her, and I think that’s what finally broke my best friend. It broke him, and now that he’s been proven wrong, I can imagine he must be feeling pretty shitty right now.
There's a giggle from the back seat that catches us all off guard. The sound is so out of place that for a second I wonder if I just imagined it. But no, looking back there, I see matching grins on Nina and Missy’s faces. Raising an eyebrow, I meet Nina’s stare in the mirror. She covers her grin with her fingers. “Care to enlighten us?” I ask.
The girls look at eachother again, but Beretta reaches up and lightly smacks Missy on the back of the head, and they sober up. Nina just shakes her head. “Men are so blind, I swear to God,” she groans in exasperation.
“Not following…”
“Y'all are idiots if you think that girl would jump in front of a bullet for just anyone.” She casts a glare at Alex who isn’t even looking at her. “For some freakin reason, she gives a shit about Alex. She gives a shit about all of you, and now she’s back where we started because of it. Congratulations, guys, you may have just killed the woman you love.”
Frowning, I catch her eyes again in the mirror. “I don’t understand what’s funny about that.” I don’t even deny her accusation of… love. I can’t find it in myself to deny the obvious.
“What’s funny is, those fuckers underestimate us every single time.They’re like movie villains. Mac’s the kind of dude that makes speeches before he kills someone instead of taking the easy route and shooting them in the head. He has no idea who he’s dealing with, and he’s about to make that mistake yet again.”
Alex swivels around again. “You say you fought your way out last time… how the hell do three tiny ass women fight off a horde by themselves at gunpoint?”
Missy snorts. “Sexist much?”
“Serious question,” he clips.
“We’re fucking Marines, you moron!” Nina finally tells him, throwing her hands in the air. “All three of us. Four years active combat… surprise!”
It’s all I can do to keep a grin off my face, but luckily I never bothered to take my mask off so they can’t see. Still, I glance to my right in time to see the dumbstruck look on Alex’s face, and for some reason it’s so, so gratifying. His mouth opens and closes like he doesn’t have a clue what to say.
“That’s right, baby boy, we’re a bunch of regular GI Janes. The fact that you didn’t figure it out sooner is pretty sad on your part.”
Even Beretta snorts from the back. Still, Alex looks lost. I almost feel bad for him. He turns to me and I snap my eyes back to the road as I leave the highway. There’s a roadblock ahead that looks natural, so I follow the only tire tracks I can make out through the fog. “You knew, didnt you?” he accuses.
Clearing my throat, I just keep my eyes on the road without saying a word.
Chapter ☣ 27
Hell
I’ve been in this cage for too long, and it makes me wonder why Mac hasn’t just killed me already. But in the back of my mind I think I know why.
That asshole wants me to suffer. And he wants to be dramatic. A smart man would have just killed me out in front of all my people. I made a mockery of him when I fought my way out of his pits last time, simultaneously getting away with killing his son, so I guess he’s still a bit testy. The memory of it still makes me smile. I have no lingering feelings of betrayal looking back. I’d latched onto Liam when we banded together trying to survive and thought I felt something, but compared to what I’ve found, it was nothing more than his sick, twisted joke. He wanted subservience. He wanted more soldiers for his father’s workforce. He didn’t want me.
Hands reach for me through the bars, and I’ve stopped pressing myself back into the wall to lean away from them. Instead, I rest my head against the concrete wall and contemplate how badly this is going to hurt. I’ve figured out where I am, though. So there’s something positive. Or, maybe not positive, exactly, but I guess it’s kind of nice knowing where my last moments on earth will be spent. Now that I’ve had time to sit and work things out in my head, I realize why everything looks so familiar. The grey concrete floors that match the stark walls, the earthy scent of cold and wet, and not to mention the chain link cage.
They have me in a dog kennel. A fucking dog kennel. I bet Mac’s getting some sort of sick humor out of this one. The zoms are becoming even more frenzied than before. Their salivating, desperate moans have become background noise, and grow more and more tiresome the longer I sit here. At this point I've come to accept my fate. I realize the situation is hopeless, and that nobody is coming to get me. I still feel so stupid after the way this all went down. I was supposed to be trekking my way to my father’s ranch, soon to be reunited with my brothers, and instead I’m dangled in here like bait, just waiting to have my bones gnawed to sawdust.
Reaching inside my shirt, cringing as my bullet wound is pulled tight, my fingers wrap around the handle of my tiny pistol—the one I keep hidden and out of the way. Like a typical idiot man, Mac didn’t check my undergarments for weapons, luckily for me. Although, maybe not so lucky after all. I have three bullets in the gun. The same gun I clutched desperately while locked in that closet with Alex. I meant what I said to him that day. I meant every word of it. I won’t let myself be torn apart by monsters. I won't let myself feel the agony of dozens of teeth ripping my flesh from my bones. Even I know I don’t deserve that. No one really does.
So. Yeah. I meant what I told Alex. I’ll finish it myself. On my own goddamned terms before I ever let Mac and his hillbilly men get the satisfaction of seeing me in agony. My fingers shake as I clutch the warm metal between them. The pistol is light grey, and weighs barely anything. I remember when I first got it. It was a gift from my brothers. According to them, even though I’d be signing up for the Marines, it didn’t mean I couldn’t have a backup plan when I came back. They’ve always watched over me. Even though they’re only three years older than me, I was the baby of the family. Someone they needed to watch out for at all times no matter what.
So I held onto this tiny pistol for years. Carrying it with me always but never firing a single shot. These bullets were meant to end things. One, two and three things. I’m just glad the other two aren’t here with me. I’m glad they're safe, and if they’re smart, they’ll head straight for Nevada where my family waits for them. They’ll be met with open arms, and a place to live and regroup. They’ll become a part of something that was established long before the world fell apart. A community of people looking out for one another, and with daddy at the helm, I have no doubts about their survival.
