“Two rats,” I yelled as I left the room. Because that’s what a fuck was worth these days—two slabs of dead rodent.
I passed by the bar as I buttoned my jeans. Dori was still there, and had a fresh drink in her hand. Snatching the glass from her, I swallowed it back in one wincing gulp.
“Don’t mention her ever again, got it?” I said as I handed her the empty glass.
Nodding, she took the glass and dropped her gaze. “I’m sorry, E.”
Another unwanted sliver of guilt snaked its way through me, making my chest uncomfortably tight before coiling uneasily in the pit of my stomach. But instead of apologizing to her like I knew I should have, I turned away muttering, “Know your fucking place.”
Outside the Cave, I found the sun still shining brightly, mocking me from its place up high in the sky where no one could touch it. Because if I could touch it, if I could reach it, I’d beat the holy shit out of it, make sure it never dared to shine again. There was no place for sunlight here. Sunlight was for the living. And no one was living anymore.
Cracking my knuckles, I surveyed the people passing by. I needed to beat someone senseless, wrap my hands around their throat and watch as the life left their eyes. I needed to not just feel my strength, but use it. It was all I had left, the only thing that could mirror what actually living had felt like, the only thing that reminded me I was still alive.
My wife had made me feel alive. My kids too. My old job, stripping and rebuilding old cars back to their previous glory, had given me a sense of satisfaction once upon a time. Even Wildcat had given me a tiny slice of something familiar, something I’d been hoping would grow into more.
Two men paused in front of me with a mangy-looking and downright filthy brunette in their grasp. She hung limply between them, her wide gray eyes wild and full of fear as they darted back and forth.
“Found her scavenging out by the turbines,” one of the men said, grinning. “The little bitch was eating bugs right off the ground like a damn animal.”
“Where do you want her?” the other asked, his expression one of disgust.
“Ask Jeffers,” I snapped. “I don’t deal with this shit anymore.”
The man slowly shook his head. “Jeffers said otherwise. He said all new recruits are coming straight to you. Said it’s time you started keeping yourself busy.”
Closing my eyes, I worked my jaw. Liv, that fucking bitch, wasn’t going to let me fight; she was putting me to work like the rest of these minions.
I opened my eyes and glanced down at the woman, taking in the tattered remains of her clothing, the caked-on dirt covering nearly every inch of her. Her eyes met mine, and despite being obviously dazed from one too many punches to her face, her bloodied nostrils flared and she tried to snarl.
Smirking, I dropped to her level and leaned in close enough to get a hearty whiff of body odor and feces, probably her own. Smart woman . . . the worse you smelled, the less the rotters noticed you.
“Welcome to Purgatory,” I said coldly, lifting my brow. “Last stop on the road to hell.”
She didn’t respond, but neither did she attempt another snarl. She just stared at me, those big gray eyes of hers shrewdly assessing me.
Baring my teeth, I grinned at her. She wouldn’t last here; her type never did. She was too accustomed to the wild, having gone too long without human contact. There was no domesticating those who had given in to the dormant beasts that hide inside us all.
The fence that surrounded us and its gates were the equivalent of a cage, and she’d be climbing and clawing her way out the first chance she got. I would know; I sensed that beast inside me every damn day, constantly trying to rip its way free. Suppression only succeeded in making it worse, causing the animal within to pace manically back and forth.
“Give her to Dori,” I said, straightening. “She’ll clean her up and put her to work.”
“She bites,” the second man said, laughing nervously. “Claws, kicks, and spits too. Drew had to hit her a few times just to get her to calm the fuck down. You sure you want her in the Cave?”
Giving the man a menacing smile, I moved aside to let them pass. “Give her to Dori and don’t make me say it again.”
Alone now, I glanced down at my hands. Caged as I felt, they were all I had left, my hands and the chaos they could cause, the punishment they could bring.
And the destruction they could rain down on whatever was in my way.
Chapter Two
Autumn
Their calloused hands on my arms hurt. I wanted them to let go, to stop squeezing so much. But every time I tried to fight them, the tall one hit me. It was best to keep still, to play helpless and useless. That was how I’d survived this long, out here all alone. Play dead, hide, stay away from others, and avoid the biters. Hush, hush, must keep quiet or they’ll hear you.
I didn’t normally venture so close to people, always keeping my distance from others, dead or alive, but I’d been so hungry. My traps had been empty for the third day, the horde of biters that had recently passed through had scared all the animals off, and now I was starving. I’d gone in search of food and while chasing a pair of chipmunks gotten too close to the noisy people who talked too much and still laughed like they hadn’t lost everything.
People were bad—violent, aggressive, and greedy. I couldn’t stay here, and I wasn’t going to work here. I was going to kick and scream, determined to fight anyone who tried to touch me.
The tall one dug his fingers into my arm, looking down at me with a sick and twisted smile on his face, a look that told me he was enjoying this, reveling in hurting me. He was angry that I’d hit him, but I wouldn’t have hit him if he hadn’t touched me, if he’d just left me alone. I only wanted to go home, back to my cave, back to the darkness and the safety of solitude.
The men dragged me up the steps, refusing to be gentle. People weren’t gentle anymore; they used to be, though. I remembered how they used to be, but everyone else seemed to have forgotten.
Inside it was cooler and darker, and as my eyes adjusted, my heart began to pound in my chest. There were people in here, too many people, all of them in such close confines. I swallowed hard, my mouth dry and my stomach empty and burning. Feeling dizzy, I squeezed my eyes shut.
It smelled in here. It smelled of something that I remembered, and yet something I’d forgotten. I didn’t like it—the smells, the people, and the noise. It was dangerous, all of it, and would attract the biters. The horde would come back again, and these people wouldn’t be able to hide forever. The biters would come and they’d kill, and I didn’t want to be here when it happened.
I don’t want to be here at all.
My captors paused and I opened my eyes, immediately wishing I hadn’t. A nearly naked woman in a wheelchair loomed before me, her legs missing.
Where am I?
“What am I supposed to do with that?” she asked, her soft voice full of annoyance.
The tall one laughed. “E said to bring her to you. You’re supposed to put her to work.”
Work. What an odd word choice considering they’d kidnapped me and dragged me off to this horrible place. I wasn’t doing any harm to them, wasn’t bothering them, yet they’d cornered me, taken me, even beaten me.
I want to go home.
Home. Was that what I was calling my cave now? Home wasn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t a two-bedroom brick house with yellow rosebushes lining the driveway that I had planted with my mother. It didn’t have a swing set in the backyard that my father used to push me on so high that I thought I could fly. And it no longer had a fully stocked pantry and a working bathroom; it didn’t have a television or a comfy peach sofa with three cream-colored cushions. Home wasn’t any of those things anymore. Home was a small cave, hidden deep within a ravine. Home was safe. Home was something I could trust. I couldn’t trust this place or these people. And I didn’t belong here.
The short man was talking now, but I was suddenly shaking so h
ard my teeth were chattering, and I couldn’t make out a word of it. I couldn’t be here; I couldn’t stay here around these awful people, these loud, noisy people. I couldn’t be here when the biters came back and killed them all.
“What good is she?” the woman shrieked. “She’s disgusting! My God, she’s growling!”
“Clean her up,” the tall one said. “Who knows, there might be a whole lot of good under all that shit.” Glancing down at me, he grinned. “After a week in the Cave, she’ll have all that fight fucked right out of her.”
“No!” The woman looked horrified. “You can’t leave her here! What in the hell am I supposed to do with her?”
The short one groaned and released my arm. “Aw, come on, Dori.”
My body slumped to the ground, leaving me leaning at an awkward angle. The tall one hadn’t let me go, his fingers were still curled around my bicep, his jagged nails digging painfully into my skin.
“There’s shit going down out there, and we need to get back to it or Liv’s going to have a fit. Ain’t nobody wants to deal with her. Cut us some slack, would ya?”
The woman—Dori—sighed. “Fine,” she snapped, her anger and irritation twisting her features. “Put her in one of the back rooms, and lock her up until I can find someone who’s willing to clean her up.”
Gripping the armrests on her wheelchair, she leaned forward as she looked me over. “You try anything,” she said in a low, vicious voice, “anything at all, and I will cut you. You got that?”
Sitting back in her chair, she crossed her arms beneath her breasts and glared. “Why can’t we leave the crazy ones in the wild?” she muttered. “They don’t belong with us.”
I wanted to laugh at her, to tell her how stupid she was, thinking that I was the crazy one. They were the crazy ones. Living out in the open like this, playing with biters, being noisy and laughing as if there were still something to laugh about in this world.
There’s nothing to laugh about anymore.
“I don’t like this,” she continued. “I’ll never get her stench out of the sheets. I’ll have to burn them.” Her voice turned shrill. “And sheets are expensive!”
“Sure, sure,” the short one said.
He reached for my arm, and I shuddered as he touched me. I wanted to go back to my cave. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want their hands on me. I didn’t want to hear their noisy voices. See their stares, their anger. I didn’t want any of it.
“I want to go home,” I whispered, and my voice sounded foreign to me. How long had it been since I’d heard my own voice?
The woman glanced at me, surprising me with a sympathetic expression. “Don’t we all, darlin’.” She sighed and shook her head. “But you gotta know you’re better off in here than out there.”
I could read her body language—the slight pinching of her lips, the slump of her shoulders—and knew she didn’t believe her own words.
“Home is where you stay,” she continued. “And this is where you’ll stay now. It’s safe here.”
A snarl slipped past my lips, the only response I could manage in the face of her lie. Her cheeks flushed hotly and her eyes widened as she realized I could see straight through her, see her for what she really was. A liar, and a bad one at that.
Glancing sharply up at the men, she nodded and jerked her thumb over her shoulder, and they began dragging me across the room. All eyes were on me, the room quiet except for the sound of my sneakers snagging on the uneven floorboards and pieces of dirty carpet strewn about.
I was taken down a dark hallway where the air grew considerably warmer, and the smells rose in their intensity. Closed doors surrounded me on both sides, strange but familiar noises coming from behind them. Groans and grunts, moans and cries, not of pain but of pleasure.
Memories of pleasure came unbidden, even though I didn’t want to remember them. I remembered his handsome young face, the feel of his warm hands, the way his soft mouth would cover mine. He had the sweetest eyes.
But he was dead now. Dead, like everyone else. Dead, like the whole world was dead.
“Jesus, she stinks.” A naked woman pressed herself against the wall as we passed, wrinkling her nose in disgust.
“Don’t I fuckin’ know it!” the tall one replied, laughing. “But pussy is pussy.”
“You’re going to hit this?” the short one asked, sounding shocked. “Man, she probably has a hundred fucking diseases.”
“I’d hit a hole in the wall,” the tall one said. “A knot in a tree, a rip in the mattress, makes no difference to me.”
We came to a stop in front of a door, and the short one released me to open it. Gripping me tighter, the tall one shoved me inside. The room was dark, aside from a lone dirty window that allowed meager beams of sunlight to highlight the sparse furnishings—a small bed, a dresser, and a sad-looking chair.
The tall one released me, and I fell to the floor in a heap. “I’ll be back once you’re cleaned up.”
Lifting my head to look at him, I found him sneering down at me. He pointed to his swollen cheek, and his expression turned deadly. “You owe me for this.”
The men left, slamming the door shut behind them. A lock clicked into place, the sharp sound echoing loudly through the small space, sucking all the air out of the room and making it hard for me to breathe. The walls seemed to grow nearer, closing in on me as my heart beat painfully in my chest.
“I want to go home,” I whispered to no one. Home to my yellow rosebushes that lined the driveway, to the swing set in the backyard, to the full pantry and pretty bathroom, to the TV that I used to watch from the comfy peach sofa with the three cream cushions. I missed that home. I missed that life.
These people, their noises and their smells, this place, they were making me remember all I had lost. I couldn’t remember it, couldn’t remember everything I’d lost . . .
“No!” I screamed, slamming my clenched fists on the floor. “No! I want to go home!”
Chapter Three
Eagle
Storming through the marketplace as people hurried to get out of my way, I turned a corner that would eventually lead me to my home.
Home. Inside, I scoffed. It wasn’t a home, but a safe and secure enough place to close my eyes for a few hours, far from the center of the main complex. There were too many people here, somewhere upward of five hundred, but I’d stopped counting long ago, right around the time I’d stopped caring about pretty much everything.
Regardless of how many lived here, or whether or not I gave a shit about any of them, it was the closest thing that came to a functioning town. There were other settlements; I’d heard of them via word of mouth, even came across a few early in my travels before deciding to set up shop here. Maybe some of them had persevered, much like Purgatory did, but if they had, it was only because they’d locked themselves inside. Whether it be behind a wall or a cage, safety came from hiding from what the world had become.
We were all in cages, and just because our cage functioned in a way that promoted survival—producing electricity, fresh water, and food—that didn’t make it any less of a prison. I felt that cage every day, the steel bars of it pressed up against me, closing in on me, trapping me, suffocating me. Eventually this cage was going to kill me.
But where would I go? Out there I would just be another survivor, having to constantly seek out shelter and food. In here, I was something else entirely.
Monster, a voice whispered inside my head.
A god, I responded silently, forcing myself to scoff even though my hands clenched into fists and my stomach flip-flopped.
A god of monsters, the voice agreed. Who’s lording over a kingdom built on fear.
Feeling sick, I tuned out the voice inside my head, realizing that I’d nearly walked halfway across Purgatory in the wrong direction. Annoyed, I spun around. I had no choice but to walk through the main drag again.
A group of women hurried past me, some carrying young children, others dragging ol
der children behind them, all of them refusing to look directly at me. The kids should have been in school, but there was no school to attend. Their parents were busy keeping them alive, fighting or fucking or scavenging, too busy to worry about schooling them in anything other than their own survival.
Soon, I thought grimly, there would be entire generations who wouldn’t know how to read and write. It was a thought that should have concerned me, but at the same time it no longer held much sway. My own children were gone, and when it came down to it, I didn’t give a fuck about what other people did or didn’t do as long as they stayed clear of me and mine.
Mine, I thought, chuckling darkly at my word choice. There was no “mine.” I had nothing of real worth left to claim. Nothing but a pile of stolen junk and my own two hands.
Finally free of the main drag, I made a right between two buildings. As I walked quickly through the shaded walkway, the stretch of open land that would lead me home came into view.
I’d purposely chosen what had once been a building used solely for storage, a good distance from everything else. Everything out here was overgrown and far too close to the outer gate for anyone’s liking. Except mine.
Making a left, not looking where I was going, I instantly reacted when something knocked into me. Grabbing the body that dared to touch me, I wrapped my hand around a thick neck and loose jowls, and sent whoever it was face-first into the wall of the building behind me.
“Watch yourself!” I bellowed, and slammed him into the wall one more time. He made a strangled, gurgling sort of noise, one that filled me with the sort of satisfaction that only inflicting pain seemed to do. And then his body went limp in my hold. A loud gasp came from behind me, and I turned to find an elderly woman holding a trembling hand to her chest.
Unconcerned, I dropped the man—he fell to the broken concrete like a flaccid slab of meat—and continued on. When I reached the south-side lawn, I slipped into the thick underbrush, the grass and weeds that grew nearly as high as I stood tall, and stopped to squint up at the sun. I stared until my eyes watered and white dots danced across my vision.
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