Love and Decay: Revolution, Episode Ten

by Rachel Higginson

  He was the only Mexican along for the ride. And the only addition from the list that Luke and I had agreed on.

  But neither Luke nor I had been willing to stand up to Diego once he’d declared that he was going with us. I had a feeling Diego was as curious about the capital city as I was. He hadn’t said much once we’d been loaded into the truck bed and told to stay down and keep quiet.

  We’d driven right by the horde of Feeders that was still camped out on the surface of the salt mines. They’d lifted their heads and sniffed the wind as we rushed by, but as far as I could tell, they didn’t bother following us.

  My heartbeat had quickened as we passed them and my fingers had started itching. A weird feeling had spiraled through me, but I hadn’t been able to identify it. I’d been trying to figure it out ever since and couldn’t make sense of it.

  I wanted to call it déjà vu, but that wasn’t quite right.

  The rest of my people were crowded around me. Harrison, King, Joss, and Tyler. Luke had brought Micah along too, as well as Crash and Trish.

  I had been surprised to see Micah, but he hadn’t offered an explanation, and I hadn’t asked for one. I did notice that he sat back in the truck bed with us while Trish and Crash squeezed into the cab with Luke.

  After hours of bouncing around and shivering, I breathed a sigh of relief when the faint glow of a settlement could be seen in the distance. The dim lights were easy to spot on the flat terrain, blocked in by darkness on every side.

  The truck ambled over a long bridge. Abandoned cars on both sides were pushed out of the way and left to rot. The remnants of civilization rose on every side, crumbling monuments of a world long gone.

  On one side of the road, a reflective sign caught my eye. Part of it had been torn off, while the remaining white letters declaring the city that had once been were scuffed and dirty. MAHA. Population: 446,599.

  Not anymore.

  What had happened to those four hundred thousand people? Where were they now?

  I trembled against Miller. I didn’t want to know. Whatever persisted of the population now took up a small portion of the decaying city. As we traveled in near darkness, the abandoned buildings and houses looked like haunted tombs in an endless cemetery. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

  We pulled off the highway onto lesser roads. A giant glass dome, taller than a lot of the skyscrapers in Colombia, reflected moonlight, pulling my attention.

  “What is that?” I asked aloud.

  Micah looked over his shoulder before leaning through the cab window to ask. When he sat back down, he said, “It was a zoo.”

  Vague images of animals in cages and holding my mom’s hand drifted through my memory. My dad putting me on his shoulders. My brothers running wild while my parents tried to get us contained for a picture. “Say cheese.”

  Cheese?

  That didn’t make any sense.

  “You okay?” Miller murmured against my ear.

  I shrugged off the unhelpful memories. “Fine.”

  Luke turned again and again, the truck’s engine rumbling loudly in the quiet night. My heartbeat picked up its pace, hammering against my breastbone. This was it. The capital—Allen City. Population: 2,000-ish.

  Matthias Allen had moved north from his original base of operations in the south. He’d situated himself smack dab in the center of his territory, of his empire.

  We pulled behind a cluster of buildings and Luke shut off the truck. The abrupt silence felt like a prison. The noise from the engine had broken up the tension and nerves surrounding our mission. Now that there was nothing, no sound, no whipping wind, nothing but our thoughts and the night and this city, I was forced to come to terms with what was about to happen, what we were about to do and how close to Matthias I would finally be. A feeling of unease wormed through me, slow and sluggish like a snail, leaving a trail of slime in its wake.

  I hadn’t been this close to him in nine years.

  A lot had happened in that time. I wondered if he would recognize me. Could he pick me out of a crowd? Could he identify Miller?

  I looked at Tyler. What about her?

  Miller and I had been kids when we fled. Over the years, I’d watched Miller evolve from a gangly child to a muscular man, but I could still see the little boy I first met in his face. His eyes were the same, even if they were harder. His hair, his smile, the way he wrinkled his nose when he heard something he didn’t like. But what would Matthias see? Not those endearing qualities that felt like home to me.

  Matthias would meet vengeance. Matthias would come face to face with a son that blamed him for a long list of sins. Mathias would find a killer.

  And what about Tyler? She might have some of the same features, plus some extra scars. But what else? Maybe grief and pain and the consequences of the world we lived in had changed her enough to leave her unrecognizable. She had been broken before we left the States. But now she was a hollow shell of the woman she used to be.

  Could he identify the ghost of his daughter?

  Luke stepped out of the truck cab, and the rest of us climbed down, anxious for the mission ahead.

  “It’s a hike,” he explained. “I parked as close as I could, but we’ll need to trek the rest of the way on foot. If you’re not comfortable with that, you’ll have to wait here.” When nobody said anything, he went on, “Our objective is to get into the city and scout. Our most recent intelligence,” Luke looked pointedly at Micah, “has Allen moving the majority of his army to the capital. We want to know why. He’s left several of his settlements undermanned and under armed. When we’ve scouted the area, we haven’t seen a notable uptick in hordes. We want to know if there have been uprisings within the city or if there is another manmade threat from a competing colony.” Luke’s gaze moved to me. “Or if we aren’t as in control of our own rumors as we’d like to believe we are.”

  Instinct flared inside me. Did Matthias know we were back? We’d brought the Mexican king and a small contingent of Colombians with us. Had word spread?

  Or could he feel us hunting him the same way I could feel his presence poisoning the air around me? Could he sense the threat to his life the same way I sensed the threat to mine? To my family? To Miller?

  “We’re not here to rescue anyone or save a city,” Luke continued tersely. “We’re here to observe. Stay out of sight the best you can, but blend in if you have to. Under no circumstances are you to engage or reveal yourselves. Is that understood?”

  Again his hard glare didn’t leave mine. If he mentioned starting the city on fire, I was going to punch him in the face.

  “Understood,” we mumbled together.

  He nodded before jerking his head behind him. “We should reach the settlement by dawn. You have until noon to gather as much information as you can. Leave the city at noon and meet back here. If we’re somehow separated, we’ll wait till twilight for you. At twilight, we leave. If you’re not here, you’ll have to find your own ride back.”

  “You’re kidding?” Tyler bit out.

  Luke’s lip curled at being questioned. “No. I’m not.”

  “And if we get caught?” Harrison asked.

  “Don’t get caught,” was Luke’s response.

  I shared a look with my brother, but kept my expression blank. Luke assumed at some point we’d get separated, but he didn’t know how we operated. We wouldn’t leave each other. And we certainly wouldn’t leave someone behind.

  It didn’t escape my notice that the majority of our team was made up of my people. Did Micah count as one of his? Or one of mine since I’d been the one to save him?

  Either way, I was suspicious. It was possible Luke hadn’t meant for so many people to come or he’d traded out his people for mine. Maybe that was my fault? I’d fought to bring these very people. Or maybe he’d rather risk us than his own?

  Something didn’t feel right no matter how I looked at it. I couldn’t explain it, but instinct warned me to be extra careful and watchful.
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br />   With a few more instructions and a more detailed explanation of where we’d parked and how to find the truck again, we set out for the settlement.

  We picked our way through empty streets lined with rundown houses, completely overrun by the browning bushes. Tall trees reached out with heavy branches. Thick, overgrown grass pushed toward the sidewalk and streets, waving in the night breeze. Wild dogs ran between houses, following us at a distance, but never daring to get too close.

  If I closed my eyes, I could picture what neighborhoods like these would have looked like once upon a time. I could conjure up faded images from my childhood and see manicured lawns and idyllic houses. I could see dogs on leashes and summer sprinklers and pretty snow-blanketed sidewalks. Now everything was dead. Instead of bright greens or sparkling whites, the world before me lay in shades of brown.

  Splintered glass and shattered happiness. We lived in a post-beautiful world. Our purpose co-existed with sharpened blades and blood-hunger.

  We lived in a world of decay trapped in the graveyard of an extinct existence. Where people once lived, once thrived, was now only an obstacle in our way. Life hadn’t stopped. Time hadn’t ceased. But everything had changed. I’d been alive longer in this world than the former. This world was all I really knew. And yet the core of my being cried out for the places and people that had been lost. Everything in me demanded that I return to those easy, peaceful days. Everything I was made of refused to quit fighting until I could live like that again.

  The closer we got to the settlement, the more careful we had to be. Patrols roamed the streets flashing bright lights into darkened spaces, restricting our movement. They were easy enough to avoid, but only because we knew how. Zombies would be drawn to the light, and the patrols would be able to spot them right away.

  The dark night sky lightened to a gray purple, then finally, pastel clouds streaked across the horizon, haloing a just wakening sun. We’d stayed close together, a silent military unit as we’d hiked across the rotting remains of the city.

  We came across a wide street where a wall loomed. Thick, smooth cement had been used to build an impenetrable barrier, hiding whatever civilization lay behind it. The buildings and outcroppings between us and the wall had been demolished. Like a concrete moat around a king’s fortress, nothing could approach Allen City without being seen. Large floodlights swept the empty space, searching for unwanted hordes and unwelcome guests.

  The only way inside was through a heavily guarded gate just big enough for a large truck to fit through. Other than that, the smooth wall kept everything else out. There was no way in.

  Except of course if you knew the secret passage.

  Or rather tunnel.

  Luke led us inside a dilapidated structure just beyond the search light’s reach that once boasted being a car wash. We moved past giant brushes and empty hoses to a corner crowded with piled up cardboard that looked like ordinary trash. But beneath the flattened boxes lay a trapdoor. And beneath the trapdoor lay a tunnel. From dark to light, back to dark, we descended into the cool, musty earth—another version of Luke’s Underground.

  We pulled out flashlights that had been given to us prior to leaving the salt mines and walked through the tunnel in a single file line. The small beams shed just enough light, so we didn’t trip on the uneven ground. Our shoulders brushed the sides of the narrow passage and dirt sprinkled down on our heads as we moved quietly beneath the ground toward the heart of Matthias’s empire.

  My anxious breathing seemed to scream through the silent tunnel. There was too much to fear. What if the rickety tunnel collapsed? What if we were buried alive? Had the crumbling walls moved closer together or was that my imagination?

  What if they were already waiting on the other side? We wouldn’t be able to run. We wouldn’t be able to fight!

  I held back wheezing hysteria, but just barely.

  Just when I’d begun to believe I wouldn’t survive this tunnel, a shred of light, slicing through the sifting spray of dirt overhead, appeared. Luke pushed open a second trapdoor and beautiful, hazy sunlight filled a portion of the tunnel. Dust danced in the soft glow, while I sucked greedy gulps of fresh air.

  We emerged in another abandoned building, surrounded by useless junk from before the infection. Computers, televisions and exercise equipment piled on top of each other in forgotten heaps. The most astonishing thing of all, however, were the unbroken windows on every wall. They were streaked with dirt, but completely whole.

  Walking as quietly as I could, I moved over to one of the windows and strained to see through it. My stomach clenched, and my fears turned into reality right in front of my eyes.

  “Miller, look,” I whispered.

  His fingers slipped through mine as he stepped up and peered through the window. His hand trembled, clinging to me for support. His voice shook when he said, “Tyler, come see this.”

  His sister squished in next to us and rested her chin on my shoulder. “What did he do?” She reached out and scrubbed a small peephole in the window.

  “What is it?” Harrison asked.

  “It’s perfect,” I whispered.

  Joss and King rushed to another window, and Harrison found a third. I heard their gasps of surprise, their murmurs of disbelief.

  “It reminds me of home,” Miller whispered.

  My hearted thumped once. Twice. “Me too.”

  This wasn’t the only building without broken windows. We looked out on smooth streets and tidy buildings. Down another block sat a neighborhood with pretty green lawns and flowerbeds with wilting petals as they succumbed to autumn’s chill. Big red leaves drifted lazily toward the ground from stretching trees. The sun rose higher in the sky, casting the utopic haven of Allen City in golden, sparkling light.

  “It’s our biggest battle,” Luke explained from behind us. “How can you convince anyone to leave the safety and protection of the capital and face the desolation outside this wall? And good behavior from citizens of other settlements can win them a raffle to live here. Of course, they give up a lot under Matthias’ reign. But for most of them, it’s worth it.”

  “They give up everything,” Micah added. “That picture you see of some perfect world where Feeders don’t exist, and everything looks like a painting? It’s all deception. He feeds you his lies until you choke on them, but somehow he always convinces you to ask for more.”

  Tyler took a step back, her voice dropping with equal parts fear and disgust, “When I was younger, before Miller and I left him, we lived in a school. It was the same. Protected. Safe. Isolated from the rest of the world that couldn’t survive. He’d figured it out. He’d figured out how to keep an entire city alive and peaceful. The people used to talk about him like he was some kind of god, like he had the solution to everything.” She sucked in a steadying breath. “But he never let us forget what was outside his realm of protection. He made his men hunt for Feeders so he could keep them lining the walls of our home, shoved into lockers like animals in cages. He would starve them so they were gaunt and weak, but no less dangerous.”

  Micah stared at her. “That’s sick.”

  Tyler turned around, her icy glare finding his. “He made us live there. Made us walk long hallways lined with Zombies on either side. He said we had to face our fears, that we needed to remember we were stronger than them, better than them. When someone disobeyed him in our community, he would allow them to be bitten. Then he would shove them into a locker and let them rot in front of us all.” She shivered. “This place is too perfect for Matthias. Too clean. It makes me wonder what horrors await us.”

  “Plenty,” Luke murmured. “But as far as we know, Zombies aren’t allowed inside the city.”

  Miller sighed. “As far as you know.” He squeezed my hand. “I get the impression you don’t really know anything.”

  “How did you deal with the smell?” Crash asked.

  Tyler’s eyebrows squished together. “What?”

  “Inside the school,” he
explained. “Didn’t they smell?”

  She shook her head. “If you don’t feed them, they don’t smell.”

  Micah’s mouth turned downward in disgust. “Your dad is one twisted bastard.”

  Tyler shared a look with Miller. “You’re right. They don’t know anything.”

  Miller’s lips twitched, but he didn’t comment further. Luke cleared his throat, retaking command and moving on. “We need to change into clean clothes. There are basins for water, so wash the dirt from the tunnel off and do something with your hair. The people here are clean and well groomed. They’ll notice if you’re not. Look as fresh and kempt as you can. There are enough people living here that you won’t be immediately pegged as a stranger if you look the part.”

  I turned back to the window. The city was starting to wake up. I decided that no matter how much I cleaned up or how expertly I dressed the part, I would never blend in here. I would never be mistaken for someone that lived in a place like this so they didn’t have to face the rest of the world. So they didn’t have to face the truth about what the world had become.

  About who Matthias Allen had become.

  We moved quickly to wash off and dress. Stepping behind a stack of boxes used as a privacy wall, I stripped out of my leathers and scrubbed my face clean and dealt with my hair. Trish dropped off some clothes, and I put on a pair of barely worn jeans and a tight tank top to go beneath a crazy soft sweater. I stood there for an extra minute, trailing my hands over my forearms and biceps. My rough fingers snagged on the fabric and felt wrong next to something so heavenly, but I couldn’t seem to stop petting myself.

  “Cashmere,” Tyler grinned at me. “Nice, huh?”

  “I didn’t know something could be this soft.”

  She chuckled. “It’s no good for hunting though.”

  “You’re not kidding.

  Micah stepped over to us just as Tyler had finished slipping on a ribbed sweater that wasn’t nearly as soft as mine. “Women wear their hair down,” he said simply, noting our braids.

  “That’s not very practical,” I grumbled.