by Jory Strong
They stepped off the bus onto a deserted street. The houses for as far as the eye could see were nothing but rubble, with yards full of weeds and burned-out cars.
Uneasiness filled Araña, a terrible certainty that the witch had betrayed them with her answer. Your stop is the last one. It’s close to the red zone.
“Which way?” she asked, but the drone of an engine coming toward them made the choice an easy one. Instinctively they headed toward the nearest cluster of buildings and took cover.
Matthew and Erik freed their knives. Araña did the same, her heart skipping into a too-fast race when the long-bodied guardsmen’s vehicle that had passed only moments earlier jumped the curb and stopped.
Seven men got out, six of them young. The seventh was grizzled, old enough to recognize Matthew and Erik from the days they’d pirated in the waters near Oakland.
He directed three of the men to go across the street, then pointed at the row of destroyed and ruined houses where Araña crouched next to Erik, his voice carrying across the distance. “They had to have gotten out at this bus stop. Fan out. We take the men dead or alive. Either way we can claim the bounty on them.”
“And the girl?” a pale redhead asked.
“Probably a piece of diseased boat trash. Take your chances if you want to. But don’t leave her alive when you’re done with her.”
“Give me some credit, Sarge. I’m not that sloppy.”
Araña’s hands tightened on the knife hilts. She could kill. She’d been forced to do it before.
“If you get a chance, separate from us and make a run for it,” Erik whispered, his breathing already strained from the sprint to shelter. He shifted his knives into one hand and dug out his wallet, then slid it into the pocket of Araña’s shirt. “Don’t go back to the boat. It’s not safe and by tomorrow she’ll be confiscated. Hide among the gifted.”
Icy fear squeezed her heart. A terror born in her childhood and fed with ranted sermons about Hell and damnation, beatings that came with being judged as demon-tainted.
“I won’t leave you,” she whispered, refusing to let the thought of what waited in the afterlife make her abandon the men who’d saved her life and made her a part of their family.
When she would have given the wallet back to Erik, Matthew stopped her. “Keep it for now. Only two of the guardsmen have rifles. The rest have handguns. Eliminate any one of them and get his weapon and the odds start to change in our favor. We’ll hide and wait for them to come to us. We won’t outrun them.”
Araña nodded, hearing in Matthew’s words his own declaration. He wouldn’t leave Erik regardless of what happened.
Matthew moved around the corner to hunt the hunters. She found a place among a curtain of vines, one that allowed her to see the building where Erik melted into the gloom of a room that had collapsed except for a small area.
There was no sound save for the thunderous beat of her heart. It felt as if the world around them held its breath, silencing birdsong and insect noise alike, stilling the wind so there was no rustle of leaves or whisper of grass.
A guardsman appeared, the pale redhead with his own plans for her. He walked quietly, his arm outstretched and gripping a gun. His movements held a bold confidence, as if he were stalking prey and his possession of the weapon protected him from attack.
The thin leather of her belt could serve as a garrote, a way to kill without risk of a shouted warning. But it took strength and time, and with the others patrolling, she couldn’t take the chance of using it.
Her breath caught when he glanced briefly at the building housing Erik, and released it when the guardsman shunned it in favor of aiming toward the open doorway near where she hid.
In her mind she prepared to attack. Saw herself striking without hesitation as Matthew had taught her to do.
She let the raw need for survival turn fear into strength, conscience into primal instinct as adrenaline surged, honing her focus so all reality faded save for the need to kill her enemy.
He neared, his eyes flicking over her hiding place, dismissing it. The scent of sweat and cologne trailed him as he stepped past her.
She struck. Driving and twisting with the knife in her left hand.
The gun fired as his grip tightened on it reflexively. A cry escaped before the knife in her right hand found its mark, slashing across his throat and making arterial blood spray onto the vine and concrete.
Araña pushed him away and crouched, picking up the gun. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Erik emerge from his hiding place and grab the arm of a guardsman summoned by the noise.
They struggled. Erik’s back was to her, preventing her from using the dead man’s gun.
She rushed forward. A shot fired. And then Erik crumpled to the ground.
Animal sounds of rage ripped from Araña’s throat. She leveled the gun and pulled the trigger without thought, didn’t stop moving forward as the bullet slammed into the guardsman’s forehead, the force of it taking most of his skull and driving him backward into rubble.
And then Matthew was there, a rifle in one hand, his knife in the other. He knelt by Erik, the weapons dropping to the ground as he lifted Erik off the cracked, broken cement and cradled him in his arms.
Araña crouched next to them, agony swelling in her chest, incapacitating her, the present and past colliding in an overwhelming instant of anguish.
It was the scene from her vision. The death she’d known waited with the first glimpse of Oakland.
Matthew’s face was a mask of unbearable grief as he put Erik down and snatched up both the rifle and the pistol she didn’t remember dropping. “Don’t follow me, Araña. Run. Hide. Live for all of us.”
He disappeared around the corner before she could say anything. There was the sound of a gun firing, then another.
Araña cast a quick glance at the guardsman who’d killed Erik, but she didn’t see where his weapon had landed. She grabbed Matthew’s discarded knife as well as her own dropped one. A sob escaped as she turned her back on Erik and did as Matthew ordered. She ran, dodging rubble and blackened cars in an effort to escape the guardsmen.
Behind her she heard a shout go up, followed by the crack of a shot being fired from a rifle. A bullet grazed her side, the shock of it distracting her for a precious second from the hazard-laden ruin of what had once been a street crowded with houses. Her foot snagged on something hidden in the weeds, pitching her forward.
There was blinding pain as her head struck a rock. Terror made her fight through it and scramble to her knees to look for her knives.
The men were on her just as she staggered to her feet. The hard smash of a rifle butt to her chest sent her tumbling backward and struggling for breath.
A heavy boot landed a blow to the middle of her stomach, making her roll to her side and vomit what little she had in her stomach.
The dark-haired man delivering the blow drew back his leg, and she braced herself for a second kick even as she tried to gather the strength to surge upward, to at least kill one of her attackers with the knife she’d managed to recover.
The man with the rifle stopped his companion from delivering the blow by saying, “Enough already. I don’t want to fuck a corpse, Nelson.”
There was a raunchy laugh from the third man. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“Shut the fuck up, Cabot. My cock was out of that girl before she died.”
The rifle barrel dropped to point at Araña’s hand. “Let go of the knife or I’ll fire. Putting a bullet into you won’t ruin our fun. You won’t bleed out before we’re finished.”
The demon mark was no longer on her shoulder. It was on her bare mound like an exotic tattoo, ready to kill the first man who touched his flesh to hers in an attempt to rape her.
Its presence gave her courage. Matthew’s last words gave her strength. She opened her fingers and let the knife fall away.
The blond guardsman named Cabot immediately holstered his gun and unzipped his pants. “
I go first,” he said, pulling his cock out and fondling its hardened length.
The man holding the rifle kicked Araña’s knife out of reach before pressing the barrel of the gun to her forehead. “Push your pants down.”
Her heart pounded violently inside her chest, a seething mass of fear and grief and hate. Bile rose in her throat at the thought of revealing herself to these men.
She wanted to kill them. To see them writhing in agony. But only their faces and hands were exposed and the spider needed bare skin.
The waistband of her pants was wet with blood. Touching her fingers to it broke the barrier of numbness her mind had erected.
Araña fought against crying out as pain rippled through her, originating where the bullet had grazed her side. Her jaw clenched as she refused to show them anything more than their deaths.
She undid the buttons at the front of her pants. Her fingers trembled slightly despite her efforts to keep them steady and focus her mind on what she needed to do in order to survive. In the coming confusion she’d grab the dying man’s gun and—
He grew impatient and bent down, took a fistful of material and jerked, wrenching her pants and underwear to her knees. The sight of the spider sent him stumbling backward, his penis shriveling.
His two companions laughed. The one not holding the rifle unzipped his pants. “I’ll take your turn. Looks like we’ve got ourselves a lawbreaker. A tattoo like hers is illegal. I’m betting she likes it rough and bloody.”
“Give me your gun, Nelson,” the man with the rifle said, holding out his hand.
“I’m not going to fuck her with it. Not till after you have a turn with her.”
“Gun.”
A petulant expression came and went on the dark-haired guardsman’s face. He unholstered the weapon and slapped it onto his companion’s outstretched hand. “I want it back. I want to finish her with it.”
A shudder went through Araña. She found it easy to imagine any one of these men brutalizing her with a gun and then firing it inside her as his companions looked on.
Erik and Matthew had always ensured her safety, but life among fugitives and societal outcasts had stripped her of what was left of her innocence when it came to the atrocities men were capable of. The settlements and floating boat cities were full of women left disfigured by the violence done to them.
“Hurry up,” the man holding the rifle barrel to her forehead said. “We’ve still got to haul the bodies to the truck then find out if Sarge was shitting us about there being bounties on the two men.”
Araña closed her eyes against the wave of pain that crashed through her heart with his words. A tidal wave of grief threatened to drown her.
She wanted to scream out her rage and anguish. Instead she fought her way through it, for Matthew and Erik, as well as herself.
Her eyes opened when her assailant climbed on top of her with a grunt. She was barely aware of the feel of his hand and cock brushing against her skin as he tried to find her opening. And then he was rolling away, screaming and shrieking, his penis and hand swelling as black streaks of poison spread.
She grabbed the rifle barrel, deflecting it. A bullet slammed into the screaming man, putting him out of his misery and sparing him long moments of torment.
Araña hung on to the rifle, fighting to wrest it free at the same time she tried to use her grip on it to pull herself up, in the hopes the spider would be able to find skin and kill again.
The tangle of her clothes around her knees interfered. A kick to the chest sent her backward.
There was the sound of a bullet being chambered, and the end of the rifle was once again placed against her forehead. But death didn’t come, though the blond guardsman whose penis had shrunk at the sight of the spider said, “Kill her so we can get out of here.”
“I’ve got something better in mind. We’ll take her to Anton and Farold. They’ll pay good money for her, no questions asked. Then we turn around and double it by going to a betting club and watching while she runs the maze.”
“She’s a witch,” the blond said, aiming his pistol at Araña, his voice shrill. “Look at what she did to Nelson. Look at the glove on her hand! Look at it! I bet she’s been branded by the Church.”
“Don’t turn into a chickenshit just because your dick shrunk. Good thing it did or you’d be dead. If she could have killed us with a spell, she’d have done it. I’m betting we’re safe as long as we don’t touch her.”
“I don’t care! Out of seven of us, look how many of us are left. You and me, Jurgen. You and me. Everyone else is dead.”
Anger tightened the rifleman’s face. “Use your brains before you piss me off, Cabot. Think about the edge knowing what we know would give us at the club. Tonight they’re running convicts in the maze. They’ll let them loose to have some fun with her before setting the hunters free. We’ll make a killing betting on her.”
The guardsman pulled the barrel back from Araña’s forehead, trusting that she’d prefer to remain alive, to take her chances elsewhere rather than die where she lay. “Take off the glove.”
She pulled it off, revealing the brand burned into her flesh when she was twelve, when an exorcism failed to rid her of the demon mark.
“We’ll get more for her once Anton or Farold sees it,” the one called Jurgen said. “Maybe Anton will even let the demon out in the maze tonight.”
His blond companion backed away, but he nodded. “Okay, but I’ll shoot her if she tries to touch me.”
She was ordered to her feet and allowed to restore her clothing so she could walk. At their command, she emptied her pockets. They took her keys to the boat, but not Erik’s wallet. Somewhere between the first dead guardsman and the one the spider killed, it had fallen out of her pocket.
“Move,” Jurgen said, indicating the direction with the rifle barrel.
Fresh blood poured from the wound in her side. Pain stabbed through her, but it was nothing compared to the searing agony as Araña passed Erik’s body and then Matthew’s.
The need for revenge burned at her core, intensified when the blond, Cabot, said, “What about collecting the bounty? What are we going to say about Sarge and the others being dead?”
“We’ll radio it in to headquarters and say we were ambushed while trying to bring three people in for questioning. We’ll tell them we’re still chasing the third one. Let them send another unit to collect the bodies. Even if it turns out Sarge is wrong about there being bounties, after what happened here, nobody is going to care.”
Two
HE hated humans now as fiercely as he’d hated them for centuries. If not more so.
They were dust, the walking dead. Frail and unworthy.
They were less than the most simple of beasts.
It was their cunning, their intellect that allowed them to rule. And yet their base nature always reasserted itself. Time and time again they raised civilization to unimaginable heights only to plunge it into a dark abyss of decadence and decay.
He’d witnessed it for more years than he could count, seen the cycles of humankind repeat themselves over and over again. Blissfully he could no longer remember all of the details.
He was old. Hundreds of years old. That much he knew from what memories he still held.
Perhaps his age could be measured in thousands. The heavy weight of his soul whispered it might be so, though why he should be so convinced he had a soul was beyond him.
His form was human, but it wasn’t his true form. He was positive in that regard. Just as he was equally sure the name resonating through him was his own. Tir. Though he hadn’t heard it spoken in centuries and would never willingly share it with any of his captors.
Was he the last of a supernatural race no longer walking the earth? Tir didn’t know the answer. He had never met another of his kind.
Great stretches of his remembered life had been spent in darkness, in damp underground catacombs, his ankles and wrists manacled. In the early days the priests and their
acolytes cut out his tongue periodically so he couldn’t speak. Then, later, as science gave them other tools, they sewed his lips together and fed him through a needle in the arm.
He could no longer remember why his human captors feared what he might say. Apparently neither could they—though they still feared what he might do.
They were right to.
One day he would be free of the sigil-inscribed collar around his neck. When that day came and his memories poured into him along with the power he sensed at his core, he would wreak vengeance not only on the human race but on whatever beings had first enslaved him.
He would have his revenge. The promise of it had kept him sane over the centuries, given him the strength to endure torture and dismemberment, depravation, and degradation.
In the cage next to Tir the human finally succumbed to his injuries. His rattling breath was a death knell making the hyenas laugh and the lion charge.
The wereman, his body caught in a grotesque blending of cougar and human, paused in his savage assault on the bars of his cage, his lips pulling back to reveal broken teeth and a bloody mouth.
At the far end the lethal dragon lizards turned their heads, flicked their tongues out to capture the scent and taste of death. Their huge size and venomous bite, their aggressiveness, made them terrifying creatures, illegal to house or transport, though Tir had seen little evidence that humans obeyed the laws they were so fond of creating.
The sound of footsteps drew Tir’s attention away from the companions he was caged alongside. He shifted his weight, and the chains tethering his shackled wrists and ankles to a metal belt around his waist rattled.
There was enough play in them to allow for a shuffling walk, to allow him to scoop food into his hand and bend his torso to eat, but not enough to allow him to kill—though given the opportunity, he wouldn’t hesitate to attempt it.
His hands curled around the bars of his cell. The door at the far end opened, allowing pure sunlight into the building. His eyes stung, but he didn’t close them. He let the light burn itself into his soul, let it strengthen him and feed his resolve for freedom and vengeance.
