The Human Wilderness (A New America Trilogy Book 1)

by S. H. Livernois

  "I'll survive." She gave a small smile, frowned at his side. "You're bleeding. Let me see."

  She began to pull Eli's tucked shirt from his pants. He took her hands in his; their warmth chased away his temper for a second and dread seeped into his bones, his organs, his soul.

  "Don't worry about it now—"

  "Oh, I get it now..." The stranger fanned out his fingers. "You love her, don't you?"

  Eli left Jane's side to sit on the coffee table and face the stranger. He spotted deep creases by the man's eyes, gray streaking his mustache and his short hair.

  "What's your name?" he said.

  "Let's say my name is Bill."

  Jane stood just outside the firelight behind the sofa. She stared at the back of Bill's head, eyes burning from the shadows like candle flames.

  "Bill it is. Where are you from?"

  "A land far, far away."

  "What are you doing out here?"

  "Searching for the meaning of life."

  Eli's temper flared, like gas poured on a flame. He filled his lungs with fresh air and rammed his fingers into his wound, and the pain chased away his gathering temper.

  "Are you with Simon?"

  "There's another familiar na —"

  "Why did he kidnap Lily?"

  "There's that word again."

  "What the fuck are you doing with those girls?" Jane cut in. "Where are you taking them?"

  Bill smiled. His teeth were straight, small, and only slightly stained. Eli imagined smashing them in.

  "What concern is it of yours?" the man said.

  Jane jolted from the shadows, plucked a knife from her boot, and thrust it inches from Bill's eye.

  "Jane." Eli gave her a look and forced calm into his voice. The effort strained his throat. "Don't."

  Jane glared at Eli and backed away.

  "Yes, I know Simon. And Lily." Bill licked his lips, as if tasting her name. "Sweet girl."

  "I'm going to fucking kill you," Jane said.

  Bill only smiled.

  "Where are you taking her?" Eli said.

  "I already told you — an amazing place."

  Angry prickles stabbed Eli's spine like a thousand tiny stakes. He pushed his fingers into his side again, but his temper didn't ebb this time. Instead, Eli stared at Bill's neck and imagined crushing his Adam's apple. He fought the image and the thrill it gave him.

  "Please, Bill," Eli began, "don't make me hurt you. We just want Lily back."

  Bill tut-tutted and shook his head, his eyes brimming with mania. "You can't have her back. She has purpose now, your Lily." He leaned forward, studied Eli with oily eyes. "I know why you want to find her, friend. She's a pretty little thing. Maybe when I see her again, I'll take her behind a tree. I can tell her to think of you, if you like."

  Eli exploded to his feet. Seized the front of Bill's jacket. Pulled the man up to his face, nose to nose, black eyes to blue. Eli's muscles shook with a temper he bit back until his teeth hurt.

  "Leave, Jane," Eli said.

  "I'm not going anywhe —"

  "Get the fuck upstairs and don't come down until I tell you!"

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Jane flinch at his words. Eli's disguise was ruined, and he felt naked. Jane padded from the room and her steps sounded up the stairs. Eli turned back to Bill. He looked amused, unafraid, even excited.

  "You and I are going to have a little talk," Eli said.

  For Frank. For Lily.

  He promised.

  Eli flung Bill on the couch, tied up and helpless. He glanced into the black eyes, thwacked the man's jaw, and his head snapped back. A bit of the pressure in Eli's chest eased. Bill lifted his head to Eli and smiled. Blood streamed from his nose and into his mouth. He spat blood onto the couch.

  "What do you want to talk about?"

  Eli dipped into shadow, searched the floor. Found Jane's spear, the one with the sharp iron tip, and swiped it from the ground. He sat down on the coffee table with its point facing Bill.

  "About where you're taking Lily." That deadly voice slithered from his mouth again. The man who spoke with it had no patience and softness. It belonged to a monster who did horrible things.

  "Now that's going to be a problem." Bill opened his tied hands, displaying the palms. "They aren't my secrets to spill."

  With a surge of anger, Eli's his hands belonged to that other man, too. They tightened on the spear, lashed its sharp point against Bill's chest. A red line bloomed along the cut.

  Bill peeked at his chest, back up at Eli, and grinned. "You're a tough asshole, aren't you?" He winced. "What else you want to know?"

  "Where are you taking her?"

  Bill shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth, likely for another laugh. Eli's temper pushed hard against his chest and the monster drew another gash across the man's chest; a second line of fresh blood ran parallel to the first.

  "Son of a bitch," Bill said.

  "Just tell me what I need to know."

  So I can stop.

  Eli rubbed his forehead with shaking fingers, pressing hard into his skull and then down the bridge of his nose. He pictured Lily, crouched somewhere in the dark, the kidnappers coming to her one by one.

  "Is Lily okay?"

  The man didn't budge. "Right as rain, friend. Right as rain."

  Eli thrust the spear into the meat of Bill's calf and he cried out in pain. Eli twisted the point, boring a hole into the muscle, and Bill wailed like an animal. The sound made Eli sick, but the beast inside him told him to dig the point in harder, deeper.

  He pulled it out. "You better shut that up. Or they'll come."

  Panic flashed in Bill's eyes but quickly faded. "Next question, please."

  "Why did you take her?"

  "Why do you ask, friend? You going to save her?"

  Eli shot the spear up to Bill's face and held it inches from one of those black eyes. "If I can."

  "You can't." Bill breathed heavy now; he stared at the spear point and his face blanched. "You've no idea where to look, friend. And she could be anywhere."

  Fear clenched Eli's stomach. "I will find her if you help me."

  Bill shook his head. "You don't know it yet, but you don't want to stop this."

  Another electric shock of fury. Eli's muscles flinched and the spear point slashed through Bill's cheek. A deep gash opened below his eye; blood streaked down the man's neck in a silken sheet.

  "Fuck you," Bill said in a spray of spit and blood.

  Eli threw the spear to the floor with a clang. He stood and padded from the room and to the door. Something creaked on the landing. Eli glanced up, found eyes peering down at him from the dark. Jane's eyes. Eli's scooped up Frank's ax by the door and left her there to listen.

  To learn just who he was.

  Eli returned to the living room. Bill stared at the ax's sharpened edge as Eli sat back down on the coffee table. He took off the man's boots and socks, then turned the ax so its sharpened edge faced him.

  "Where are they taking Lily?" Eli whispered.

  "To the moo —"

  Eli brought the blunt end down on Bill's big toe and his sentence ended in a scream. Eli asked again. Bill refused to answer. Eli broke his other big toe. He tried again and again, and each time, Bill cursed at him and Eli begged, in pleading prayers, for answers.

  He didn't get any.

  Just let me stop.

  Instead, the man spat vitriol about Lily and the other girls. About what he'd do to them, what pain and humiliation the other men would inflict.

  That's when Eli moved on to Bill's fingers. Eli crushed each one and Bill grew paler, sweatier. When every finger and toe was broken, Eli stood over Bill and watched him shake with tremors of pain, his clothes streaked with blood. He felt powerful, nauseous, remorseful. But most of all, desperate.

  "Just tell me," Eli murmured. The man quivered. "I don't want to do this."

  Bill smiled through a haze of pain. "Bullshit. You're enjoying this." And then,
in a whisper, "I can see it in your eyes."

  Another jolt. Eli's arm shot back, the fist flew forward, and it smashed again into Bill's face. This time it smacked into the open wound on his cheek. The blood warmed Eli's knuckles. Bill wailed weakly. Eli grasped a handful of the man's bloody jacket.

  "Where are you taking her?"

  Eli pummeled Bill's skull, first the right temple and then the left. Something unhooked in his brain; Bill looked back at Eli with unfocused, dimmed eyes.

  "West," he gurgled. His small, straight teeth were stained red. "West, damn you..."

  Bill's head rolled back and his eyes drifted closed. He teetered over and fell sidelong onto the couch. Eli yanked him back up.

  Eli shook him and his head snapped forward. "Why?".

  For a second, Bill's oily eyes, groggy and filmed with pain, cleared. The mania returned.

  "We're going to wipe out those damned ghosts and take back the world."

  Eli loosened his grip on the man's jacket. He slumped to the couch and lay crumpled there, unmoving, his breathing shallow and faint. The house creaked in the wind.

  West.

  Anger and adrenaline melted from Eli's muscles, transformed into a bone-deep exhaustion that dropped him to his knees. His hands fell on his thighs, palms up, slick with blood. He wiped them on his jeans, but they, too, were soaked.

  Eli imagined the sirens starting to wail, waited for the police to slam through the door and take him away. But the world outside was silent. He was able to torture a man named Bill, if that was even his name. More than that, he'd get away with it, as he'd gotten away with so many other crimes before.

  The world didn't care.

  Jane's footsteps climbed the stairs and thudded across the ceiling to a bedroom. A door closed. The fire behind the grate began to die down, the dim light tracing Bill's form as he lay quiet, his chest rising with shallow breaths.

  Eli listened to him breathe for a while and worried he would stop, repeating three words in his mind.

  The same words Ben said before he died.

  An amazing place.

  Chapter 16

  Eli dug the rusty shovel deep into the earth. The smell of fresh dirt was pleasant and familiar, but he couldn't enjoy it.

  He was digging a grave.

  Bill lay on the dew-soaked grass, dead. Either blood loss or a heart attack had taken him sometime in the night. Either way, Eli was a killer once again.

  Eli repeated those words with every slice of the shovel through the dirt. As he bent and twisted, pain stabbed through his middle, and he welcomed it. He dry heaved over the ground, weak and sweaty and sick, and he told himself it was his punishment.

  He wasn't any closer to Lily. As Bill had said, she could be anywhere and Eli had no idea where to look. In the meantime, the kidnappers could do anything they wanted to her. Torturing this stranger had only uncovered more things that frightened Eli: Simon worked with other people, and plenty of them, and they were all headed west. The mania in Bill's eyes, his vulgar words, haunted him.

  Eli stopped to lean on his shovel and let out a sob. The body lying on the ground, still and bruised and bloodied, proved Frank's words.

  When it comes to protecting the people you love, nothing is too extreme.

  In the cold dawn, as the rising sun lit up what he'd done in darkness the night before — the gash in Bill's face, the swollen and shattered fingers, the slices across his chest and bloody hole in his leg — Eli knew this was too extreme. But then he reminded himself that Frank and Lily were counting on him. He didn't know what else to do.

  With the sun came the birds and their dawn chorus, but Eli didn't feel like singing along as he finished the grave. He felt like falling into the hole himself and scooping the dirt over his body.

  He walked over to Bill, grabbed him by the ankles, and tugged. His limp arms dragged above his head in the same scared, defeated pose he'd made the night before. Eli gently placed him on the pillow of soft dirt, then squatted at the edge of the grave. Bill stared blankly at the sky, one arm squeezed under his body, the other stretched over his head. Eli sighed.

  "I didn't enjoy it," he whispered.

  Eli stood with a rush of dizziness, took the shovel in hand again, and dropped the first mounds of dirt onto the dead man. The black earth thudded on Bill's chest and face and sprinkled on something white poking out from inside his jacket.

  A piece of paper.

  Eli leaned down into the cool grave and plucked the paper from its hiding place. He sat back on his feet, the wet grass cold on his knees and shins, and unfolded the paper.

  It was a map.

  He recognized the roads, the blue lines that marked out rivers, the blue blobs of lakes and ponds. They had a similar map in Hope, with markings pointing out where clusters of survivors had been seen. The map was last updated when Eli arrived, but he'd added very little. This map revealed more than just roads and towns. Someone had drawn all over it; Eli's weakness fled in a rush of joy as he understood the markings.

  A black circle enclosed a town called Lowville, which Eli recognized as Hope. Similar circles marked out other towns, some marked with question marks and others red X's. The word "home" had been scrawled next to a black circle in the north. Hope had been marked with an X. Skulls and crossbones had been drawn everywhere: Parasite camps.

  Far in the west was another circled town, 150 miles away. It wasn't crossed off.

  Was that the kidnappers' next target?

  Eli counted every circled town and red X and found two dozen settlements. And how many survivors in each? How many of them had made it through the last six years?

  A door slammed shut in the distance. Eli peeled his eyes from the map to find Jane walking toward him from the house, her face stoic, pale, tired. She walked up next to him, glanced at Bill in his grave and at Eli's side.

  "I need to clean that."

  Eli's wound had seeped blood through the night, gluing his shirt to his skin.

  "After I bury him."

  "I don't give a fuck about that piece of shit." She wrenched the shovel from Eli's hand and threw it onto the ground. "Inside."

  Eli's legs pulled him back up to the house and inside slowly; the effort made his head swim.

  "Sit," Jane ordered, pointing to the coffee table. He sat and she took the bloodstained couch. Without a word, she pulled off his shirt and undershirt and examined the wound. Calloused fingers probed his skin and he shivered when her eyes took in the rest of his body and its dangerous strength.

  "So, he said they're going west, huh?" She opened a small bag and pulled out a bottle, shoved Eli onto his side, and poured the liquid into the wound.

  Eli held in a pained yelp and nodded.

  "What else?" She patted the wound dry.

  "Not much. Something about killing Parasites and taking back the world."

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "I don't know."

  She pulled him back up and wrapped his middle in bandages.

  "There's this." Eli handed her the map and she looked over the markings. He listened to her breathing and the occasional confused hum.

  "Jesus Christ."

  Eli glanced at her from the corner of his eye and found her tracing the red X's with her finger. He pointed at the circled town that hadn't been marked yet. "Their next target. West."

  She drew her finger north. "And there's the courthouse. It's barely thirty miles away. That's a day's walk, tops. This wound of yours is no paper cut —"

  He stood. "We go west."

  "Eli. You could die of infection before you get there. What good are you then?"

  He crossed the room, rifled through his pack for a clean shirt, put it on with a pained grunt.

  "West. Get your stuff together." He opened the front door. "I gotta bury him."

  He trudged down the hill and back to the grave. The wound in his side throbbed with every step, but it was a minor annoyance. Lily was west, other girls, other victims, were west.
r />   Nothing is too extreme.

  Eli grabbed the shovel where Jane had tossed it, sliced it through the soft mound of brown earth. He tossed clumps onto the corpse until there was no sight of him left, mounded the dirt high, pounded the pile flat. Then he found two sticks and fashioned them into a cross, stuck it at the foot of the grave.

  When he was done, he looked up to find Jane sitting on the porch steps, waiting. He shouldered his pack, stared at her a moment, then weaved between the Parasite corpses to the driveway, knowing she'd follow. At the road — which he vaguely remembered from the day before — Eli pointed west and turned left.

  "Eli," Jane called, but he kept walking. He heard her boots slamming the pavement in anger behind him.

  The house on the hill had disappeared, and Eli finally recognized something: a billboard. He spied the faded lines of a woman's face, downcast. Next to her head were the fading fragments of a phone number and below, the words "Help is at your fingertips."

  He studied the sign a moment and walked on. Hope clung to his dark heart: the hope of rescuing Lily, of saving countless other girls from the same fate.

  If he could get there in time.

  Chapter 17

  The last time Eli saw the courthouse, he was told to kill anything that moved. And he had been prepared to obey.

  In early autumn, they were blessed with a beautiful day: a clear blue sky, leaves blazing yellow and orange and red, the air sharp and cold. They had come into the town, called Elsberry, to raid and steal. Some of the men joked about murder and rape. Eli just wanted to eat.

  Late afternoon, they tiptoed through the silent remains of the town, guns drawn. They passed a line of fast-food joints. A dental office. A bank. A leafy park and rows of narrow houses — yellow, green, blue. They followed bones and rusted cars to the courthouse, glowing pearly gray in the weakening sun. It was protected by a steel wall dug into the street; the cut had been filled with rocks. Men stood on the building's roof and welcomed them with guns aimed at their heads.

  The Commander's eyes flashed.

  "They have something they want to protect," he said.

  A voice shouted from the rooftop, friendly but firm. "What do you want?"

  "What everyone wants these days," the Commander answered. "Food and shelter."