Survival of The Fittest | Book 2 | Shallow Graves

by Fawkes, K. M.

  “Or does she actually know things that might be useful?” Sally asked thoughtfully, staring at me, her fingers to her chin in a classic thinking pose. “She says she knows how the bomb worked. Supposedly, she knows what they put in that bomb, too. What if another one is coming? What if she could actually help us survive it?”

  Bruce snorted, and a gush of alcoholic fumes flew my way.

  “Her? She’s just a kid. Probably some rich kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. What could she possibly know?”

  I almost gagged at the smell in the air, and then almost laughed at the picture he had of me. Some rich kid who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ha. He couldn’t have been more wrong if he’d tried—not that he would realize that.

  Not that he’d have time to figure it out. Because I was already busy trying to creep toward Will’s pack. I needed the guns that were in there. I needed a way to protect myself if shooting started. Even better if I had a way to get them out of here. Take the offense and scare them the hell away.

  Either way, I wanted to go down shooting. Go down fighting.

  The thugs were still arguing in the background, but I’d stopped listening to them, my focus on that pack and how far I had to go—and whether I could do it slowly and subtly enough that they wouldn’t notice. I was about halfway there, I thought. Maybe five more steps and I’d have it, but I had to take them slowly, creeping rather than just walking. I was just shifting my foot, just getting ready to move forward again, when I heard another sound from behind me.

  This one was like a gurgle. A gurgle gone completely wrong.

  I turned to see that it was Bruce. He was clutching his stomach and starting to stagger, and a white foam had begun erupting from his mouth. And the sound he was making… wasn’t quite a gurgle anymore. It was a whole lot more like the sound you might make when you were trying to breathe and failing completely. Like you were trying to breathe and finding that your throat had filled up with liquid, and you didn’t know how to get around it.

  And you were starting to see the writing on the wall, and panic.

  The others were staring at him in frank horror, both of them poised as if they were getting ready to run from him rather than helping him.

  I didn’t blame them, personally.

  Then, just as I was trying to figure out what to do, and whether I could use this distraction to run for the pack I’d been aiming for, he started to spasm and dropped to the ground.

  Chapter 26

  I watched him drop, horrified at the after-effects, my mind gone completely blank. I’d been going for the guns before, but now…

  Now, I wondered if I could turn this some other way. It would just require a hell of a lot of acting on my part. No, I’d never been a very talented actress. My talents tended to lean toward the more rational, straightforward side. Hacking didn’t require fooling anyone; it just required knowing how to find a weakness and push at it.

  Though, I guessed this went along those same lines. Find a weakness. Figure out how to take advantage of it. Then do it.

  Luckily, I’d already set up the start of the hole in the firewall, so to speak. I’d already achieved the distraction—and the hole in their defenses. Because although that bottle had never been meant for Bruce—or at least not intentionally, though I supposed I might have had him in mind when I first set the trap up—it had caught him, and now that he was lying on the ground, dead (I assumed), he could be just the thing I’d been waiting for.

  Just the excuse I’d needed to get Sally and Jameson the hell away from here. Far, far away, so that I could run in exactly the opposite direction.

  I breathed a quick thought of thanks to whatever part of the universe had been watching out for me, and had caused the whole thing to happen so quickly, and then launched myself into the most important acting job of my freaking life.

  “Oh, God, it’s the neurotoxin,” I gasped, ducking down and looking at the sky in fear—as if that would do me any good at all. “They must have sent another bomb out already!”

  Sally and Jameson immediately started looking at the sky, their eyes snapping back and forth through the coming dawn like they’d be able to see some sign of what was approaching. Like there might be some enormous cloud labeled ‘VXM here’ or even an airplane dropping a bomb that was clearly labeled as neurotoxin. Something they could spot and run from. Something they could identify as the thing that might kill them.

  As if they’d have any clue of what to do if they did see something like that.

  “You’ll never see it!” I shouted, doing my level best to make my voice sound completely panic-stricken. “It’s invisible! You’ll never be able to see it coming and it will get right up your nose and into your lungs before you even know it!”

  I threw myself to the ground and made to cover my head, leaving myself only enough room to watch them. Sally had already drawn the neckline of her jacket up over her nose, and Jameson was on his knees, his hands over his mouth and nose. They both looked just as terrified as I’d hoped they would, and if Bruce had still been alive, I thought he probably would have been running around like a chicken with his head cut off.

  I almost laughed at the mental image. I know, it’s not nice. And there was absolutely nothing funny about that situation. But when you’re up against a gang of thugs that wants to kill you, and you’ve just found yourself with the upper hand, the adrenaline and sudden triumph gets to you.

  Beyond that, their reactions confirmed that they were just as gullible as I’d expected. Just as willing to believe me as I’d hoped. Which meant that I just might be able to pull this off.

  “Do you know what it does to you?” I gasped, trying to sound as if I was about to start crying. “It makes your muscles spasm. Makes them spasm so bad that you can’t move. And eventually, it gets to your lungs and they seize up, too. Then it gets to your heart and stops it. But it can’t stop your brain. Your brain keeps right on ticking, so you know the entire time what’s going on. You know that you’re dying. You can feel all your organs just… stopping.”

  “Is that what this is?” Sally screeched. “Is that what happened to him? How do you know?”

  “It has to be!” I shouted. “I was locked up with a scientist who’s worked with the stuff before, and she knew all about the symptoms. And I watched people dying on TV when it happened. Heard them on the radio. I heard them screaming. I heard them dying. And they all did just what Bruce did—the spasming and the moaning and the foaming at the mouth. What else could it be? Why else could he have died? I told you guys they were going to attack again! I tried to warn you!”

  And at that, Sally’s movements stopped and she stared at me, deadly serious.

  “You also said you knew how to survive it. Tell us now, and I’ll let you live. Tell us now, and I won’t shoot you.”

  Well that was fucking rich, I thought. Tell them how to survive a biochemical weapon that had already killed most of society and they wouldn’t shoot me—but would no doubt leave me here to die from the very weapon they were trying to run from.

  Still. If I was careful, and convincing, then it would all go exactly to plan. If this mad flood of ideas in my head actually counted as a plan.

  “Get away,” I groaned. “We have to get away, to someplace where we can find shelter. Maybe it’s not everywhere, yet. Maybe if we can get back to the safe room that saved you guys before—”

  Sally darted forward, grabbed Jameson, and yanked him to his feet. Then, she gave me one final glare.

  “We’ll get back to the safe room,” she muttered. “You can stay here to die, for all I care.”

  And she turned and ran off into the dim morning, dragging her one remaining comrade toward the car I assumed they’d stolen, so they could (presumably) get back to the safe room and sit there, rocking themselves in fear, for who knew how long.

  I wondered if there were any supplies left in there. I wondered how long they would stay in that room before they finally came out a
gain. Because I knew for a fact that I needed to be long gone before they emerged—and realized that I’d lied to them.

  They disappeared into the misty morning then, and I whirled around and took stock of the scene they’d left behind, complete with the body of my friend, and the man I’d just killed by shaking rat poison into a bottle of whiskey.

  Chapter 27

  I heard a horrible ruckus from the direction in which we’d parked the bike—the bending of metal and a crash that told me that the bike wasn’t going to be in working order anymore when I got to it again—and then the roar of an engine in the near darkness. I listened to the tires screeching as they tried to get away, the headlights throwing swerving beams of light across the road. I wondered where they’d gotten the car and whether they knew how to hotwire vehicles after all—or if it had been the CEO’s and they actually stole the key from him. Maybe that thing had been parked in the garage the whole time, and I’d just been fooling myself thinking that they wouldn’t be able to follow us quickly.

  Of course there’d been a car—and I’d been stupid to think they wouldn’t have found one somewhere, especially if they were set on coming after us. But that guess had been the guess of a desperate mind, and I wasn’t going to apologize for having grasped at straws when straws had been all I’d had at the time.

  It made sense about the car, I realized now. If the CEO had arrived at the house while they were there, it made sense that he’d done it in a car, and that he’d therefore had a key. Probably in his hand, in clear evidence, so they’d known about it right away.

  And if they’d found that key, it made sense that the car would still be working, and that they’d used it to come after us.

  All things that I wished now that we’d thought about when we were actually trying to figure out how long we had.

  I still didn’t know how they’d managed to find us on the alternative route we’d taken, but that didn’t really matter. I was trying to figure out problems that lay in the past. The problems that I had to deal with right now—and in the future—were way more important.

  I stared at Bruce’s body, which I knew was dead and no longer mattered. Hell, even if he’d been alive, it wouldn’t have mattered. I had absolutely no intention of saving him. I didn’t know how rat poison worked—and it had done its job a whole lot faster than I’d expected, if I was being honest—but I figured he’d die eventually, anyhow. I didn’t have the equipment necessary to do anything fancy like pumping his stomach and getting rid of the poisoned whiskey, which meant I could cross him completely off my list as no longer my problem.

  That also allowed me to avoid the larger question of whether I would have saved him if I could. Because I just wasn’t ready to examine my humanity that closely. Not right now.

  But then my eyes went to the other body in this circle of light, and my heart broke. Will. That body… that person… was my problem. Because it was going to be a whole lot more lonely to go on without him. And though I hadn’t really been searching for a partner, now that I’d had one—and that one had been Will—I wasn’t exactly sure how to go on without him.

  I know, I know, how horribly tragic. How stupid. How weak, for me to even have thought it. It was tear-jerking-movie worthy. And so not like me. But it was the truth. I’d always been a loyal person to those I called friends, because when I let someone in, they became family.

  And Will had somehow managed to do that faster than anyone else I’d ever met. Which made the loss that much harder.

  I stumbled toward his body, trying to figure out what I was going to do with it. Trying to figure out how I went on from here. Did I just leave him here? Carry on like nothing had happened while he was lying in the dirt behind me? It didn’t seem right, and I knew I couldn’t do it.

  And in the back of my mind, a voice was telling me that I hadn’t been paying enough attention to know how to hotwire a bike or anything else without him, which meant that even if the Harley was still in working order (I doubted it), I was screwed, there.

  So, I would be on my own and on foot. Fucking terrific.

  But before I even dealt with that, I had to see to Will. I’d left Simone alone in that bunker, and God only knew what had happened to her body. I knew I would never know. Never have a chance to make it right. Never have a chance to do right by her or even leave flowers on her grave. Let her know that I remembered her and what she’d done for me.

  I wasn’t going to do the same thing here. I was going to give him a proper burial, even if it took me all freaking day.

  Or the rest of the night, as the case may be. Because outside of our little circle of light, cast by the flashlights Sally and Jameson had left on the ground, true dawn was still a little while away. I was living in a world filled with grey, misty fog that restricted my vision. I didn’t know whether that was comforting… or scary.

  I got to Will’s body and dropped to my knees, sobbing a little bit at the sight of his face, pale in the semi-darkness and eyes closed. I pressed my palm to his cheek.

  “I didn’t know you long, Will Cartwright, but I believe you were a good man,” I said softly. “I wish I’d gotten to know you better. Known you longer.”

  He coughed and opened one eye.

  “Why exactly are you speaking about me in the past tense?”

  I almost hit him. I was so startled, his movement and words so unexpected, that I almost hit him just out of pure instinct—and as a reaction to the last hour or so, when I’d literally been fighting for my life.

  Then, once that urge left me, I gasped and jerked him up to me in a rough hug, careless of whether he was wounded or broken or even just bruised.

  “Ouch!” he grunted. “Dude. I’ve just been shot, here. You think you could be at least a little bit gentle?”

  I leaned back, laughing, too relieved that he was alive to take it seriously, and laid him gently back down on the ground.

  “I just can’t believe you’re alive,” I said, my hands starting to move over his chest. “Where were you hit? I’m going to have to take your shirt off to see, I think. Can you tell how bad it is?”

  I was already unbuttoning the black shirt he was wearing, my fingers moving as swiftly as I could manage in the darkness.

  “Just discovered I’m still alive, and already taking my clothes off, eh?” he joked.

  I almost hit him again. But I was still feeling so much relief over his sudden return to life that I refrained.

  Half an hour later, I’d figured out that he’d somehow managed to have a flask in the exact right place to block the bullet that came flying his way. I still didn’t quite believe that had happened, because it just seemed so… like something that only happened in Hollywood, honestly. How was a flask even heavy-duty enough to have blocked a bullet from such close range? Shouldn’t the bullet have shot right through it?

  I’d never thought of flasks as being incredibly thick or sturdy. Then again, I guessed if you filled something with good alcohol, you wanted it to keep.

  And thanks to the bullet-proof flask, the bullet had scooted sideways and bounced off a rib, basically just scratching his skin on the way by. He had…

  “A scratch,” I’d said, looking at it in surprise. “You have a scratch.”

  “Feels like all of my ribs are broken, though,” he muttered, gritting his teeth. “I don’t recommend trying it.”

  I wrapped him up in one of the sweaters I’d stolen from the mall, knotting it on the other side from his injured ribs by tying the arms together, and sat back on my heels.

  “You probably do have some bruised ribs,” I allowed. “I wouldn’t breathe too deeply or anything like that. And definitely don’t cough, because I bet it’ll hurt like hell. Also, don’t get punched in the ribs or anything. But you’re lucky to be alive. At least the pain tells you that you’re not dead.”

  He lifted one eyebrow.

  “Does it, though?” he asked. “Don’t you suppose pain is just the sort of thing the devil would use in Hell? It�
��s supposed to be eternal damnation, right? What if part of that is pain? And another part is you believing you’re still alive and then finding out that you’re dead, again and again?”

  I crossed my arms over my chest.

  “Are you saying that I’m also part of your eternal damnation?”

  He looked up at me, his grin caught between relief at being alive and… something else. Something deeper. Something that I wasn’t going to think too much about.

  “Never,” he answered solemnly.

  I let that sit there for a moment, too surprised at the way it made me feel to really know how to react, and then I was moving again, standing up and shuffling toward the blankets. I grabbed them all and brought them back to Will, spreading them out on the ground around them so he could just sort of scoot sideways to get onto them. Once he was lying on the blankets, I put another couple over him, and then went to grab the guns out of his pack.

  “We’re never sleeping without these next to us again,” I said when I returned.

  I put one on his side of the bed and the other on mine, and then laid down and made sure I could reach mine quickly and easily. I did it three times in a row, just to make sure.

  I ignored the sound of Will laughing at me as I did so. He was the one who'd gotten shot. He had no room to make fun of me for trying to make sure it didn’t happen again.

  I didn’t think Sally and Jameson would be back, though. I hoped I’d scared the living daylights out of them and that they were running for the hills. I hoped they got to that safe room and looked themselves in and didn’t come out for a whole week—and maybe even killed each other while they were in there. But I wanted to be prepared, in case anyone else showed up.

  Then, I finally leaned back and let out a sigh, trying to get myself to settle down enough to sleep again. Yes, it was almost dawn. But I felt as though I’d run an entire marathon since I’d been woken up, and I didn’t think it would do Will any good to get on the road already. He was wounded, and surely that meant he needed rest.