Garden of Spiders Volume 1: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 3

by Quil Carter

  He wouldn’t be able to trust me?

  “You’re both mentally fucked up. Failures of engineering,” Silas snarled. Nero cowered down as shards of glass hit him, I could see dots of red forming in several places. “The only one who’s near human is the fucking wimp.” He started walking towards me; Cristo sitting with his back against the wall, and Dylan had a hand over his mouth and wasn’t moving.

  “I’ll be beginning the process of creating new chimeras from your genetics. I’ve had eight years to work on perfecting the chimera, and the day they take breath is the day I cull the defects,” Silas said lowly.

  I stared at him, each word he spoke making me flinch, like a lance was attached to each one.

  Were they the truth? Did he want to kill us?

  I had all of these questions, but I wouldn’t get a chance to answer one of them. Behind Silas, Cristo appeared – and he was holding a gun.

  Before I could even react, Cristo raised the silver handgun, and a spark of light flared, followed by a teeth-rattling bang sounded. The impact threw Silas forward, and I saw his forehead bulge as the bullet failed to penetrate the second wall of skull and scalp.

  King Silas fell onto his stomach. There was a hole in the back of his head, quickly dying his wavy blond hair a deep crimson red. As a commotion erupted around me, I stood there staring at my dead master, his words replaying around me like I was stuck in a time loop.

  Did he mean what he said? If he knew this about us… if he hated us this much… why did he pretend when he wasn’t drunk? I didn’t understand any of this, but my heart hurt and my brain was scrambling to find something I could learn from this.

  I learned that I was a failure.

  After an untold amount of time, I was grabbed. Still in a daze, I stared over Cristo’s shoulder as he carried me down the hallway to the elevator. Behind him was Nero who was holding Dylan’s hand, they were dressed in outside clothes, jackets, and boots, and they were both carrying suitcases and backpacks on their backs.

  Then I realized I was also now dressed in outside clothes, and there was a blanket over me too. I didn’t remember them dressing me in new clothes… What was going on? Where were we going?

  “Cristo… we can’t do this!” I heard Dylan cry. “He’s going to kill us when he resurrects.”

  Cristo got into the elevator and Dylan and Nero did too. I looked at Nero and saw that he was scared. Nero never got scared, he was tough and rarely cried anymore, but now it looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  “I don’t want to go,” Nero suddenly wailed. His face crumpled and I saw big tears drip from his purply-blue eyes. Seeing Nero afraid made my own fear fight through the confusion and fog, and it rose up to the surface and attacked me full on.

  I began to cry, and Cristo rubbed my back.

  “This is why we have to do this, Dylan,” Cristo said. I watched as Dylan picked up Nero and held him in his arms. “We raised these two, a fuckload more than that asshole did, and it’s our duty to protect them from him.” He stroked back my hair. “Dyl… he said he was going to kill them. And he’s heartless enough to do it.”

  He is?

  “He was drunk, Cris,” Dylan pleaded. “He’s not even going to remember what he said to them tomorrow.”

  Then Cristo spun around and when he spoke, his voice was choked. “But they’re going to fucking remember this for the rest of their lives!” he cried. Then he started to cry too. This scared me so much. Everyone was falling apart. No one was acting like they should be acting, everyone was being weird and I hated it! Adults were supposed to know what was happening, that’s why they were adults; they always knew what to do.

  Cristo let out a sob. My head was over his shoulder so I could hear him sobbing loudly by my ear. “I’m scared for them,” he choked. “I don’t want them alone with him anymore.”

  The elevator was taking us down. Were we going outside? What about Garrett? Why didn’t he take Garrett too? And Ellis?

  “Cristo, I know you’re upset, but we can’t do this,” Dylan pleaded. “I love them as much as you do… but they’re not ours.”

  “I’ve been raising these boys since they were newborns,” Cristo said. “And for eight years I’ve been watching Silas torture them whenever he falls into one of his bad states. They’re growing up to think this is normal and it’s not, and now he’s saying they’re defective? They’re defective because of this fucked up upbringing he calls a childhood and I’m sick of it!”

  The elevator doors opened and I looked over my shoulder and saw the lobby.

  “If you’re too much of a coward to do the right thing…”

  “What is the right thing, Cristo?” Dylan whispered. “Do you even have a plan?”

  Cristo sniffed, his hands still rubbing my back. “I’m taking Nero and Elish to the outlands. I… the greywastes are too dangerous, but the outlands… Silas doesn’t let anyone live there, the scavenging will be good… it’s still on the island…”

  Dylan swore and closed his eyes. “Cris… think this through. It’s not too late…”

  “He’s going to kill them!”

  “He was drunk.”

  “I fucking overheard Zamir… they’re perfecting the chimera creation, they’re already talking about making more,” Cristo said. “He said it himself… they’re the boys’ replacements. Nero and Elish. If he’d said a bad word about Gare and Ellis, I’d have him too.” Cristo walked out of the elevator and towards the emergency exit at the far end of the lobby. Dylan stayed behind, his brown eyes terror-stricken and flickering back and forth.

  Then he began following us.

  Dylan put Nero down when we were outside. It was cold and dark, and I soon felt raindrops fall around us, landing like little icicles on the skin that my outside clothing didn’t cover.

  I heard a sniff as we walked through the grassy yard, and I looked to my side to see Nero walking close to me.

  And when he saw I was watching him, my brother looked up at me… and he reached out and took my hand.

  “Don’t worry, Elish,” Nero whispered to me. He squeezed my hand, and through a face stained with tears, he gave me a reassuring smile. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. Not even Master Silas, I promise.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I’d never been outside of Skyfall before. My childhood home was surrounded by trees with thick brown bark and green pine needles, and there was green grass on the ground that smelled sweet but tasted bitter. We had bugs, birds, and in the distance we could hear the rooster crow and the goats and sheep bleat.

  I knew the world outside of Skyfall was dead. I’d seen photos that Perish brought back when he’d taken the plane to Washington, and during that time he’d shown us pictures of his trip to Germany before we were born. I’d known the world was in ruins and that it was grey and dull, unhappy and full of radiation that would kill us if we weren’t immune.

  But I didn’t know the full extent of it until Cristo had driven the car out of Skyfall. It was dark out, but the headlights illuminated falling down structures that looked scary in the night. They had broken windows, the shattered glass reminding me of sharp, reflective teeth, and doors wide open, so open it was like they were screaming faces. It was scary, and when I looked away from them Nero put his arm around me.

  It was weird to accept comfort from my little brother. I was the oldest so I should be the one comforting him, but Nero had always been tough. Give me a problem I needed to figure out with mental strength, I would solve it in seconds… but when you needed someone to be strong and protective… that was Nero. I loved Nero a lot, and even though I was the oldest (even if it was by only a minute), I let myself feel safer with him here.

  And I needed the comfort, right now I was terrified and confused. Everything had happened so fast and my mind was reeling and spinning in circles. None of this seemed real and I was uncomfortable and nervous about what Cristo and Dylan were doing, but I was taught to respect adults and do whatever they said so I remained
quiet. They were both adults… they knew what they were doing.

  Deep down, I knew they didn’t…

  Then Nero, who still had his arm around me, shifted towards me and whispered, so quietly even with my good hearing I could barely hear him, “When they’re both sleeping… we’re going to run away back to Skyfall.”

  My breath was snatched from my throat at his words. They scared me. I didn’t like being scared. I had everything under control just twenty-four hours ago. I needed time to think. Once I had time to think, I’d know what to do, and then I could tell Nero what to do. I didn’t like people telling me what to do!

  “Silas says he wants to replace us,” I whispered back quietly. “Cristo… he says he’s saving us.”

  “Silas wouldn’t do that. He was drunk, like Dylan said,” Nero whispered back. “We gotta go home. I gotta take control of the Legion and you gotta help Silas run Skyfall. He won’t hurt us… and if he does, I’ll kill him. I learned guns, I know how.”

  My insides squirmed. I couldn’t explain to Nero that I had to think about things, so I nodded. But it looked so scary out here, this wasn’t like the city at all. “What about the dangers here?”

  Nero put on a brave face. “I can survive easy out here. I’ll steal Cristo’s gun and that’ll help.”

  I nodded again and realized I was chewing on my bottom lip, the pain helped me with my anxious feelings. But what I needed was to just sort through all these thoughts and put them in single file lines so I could sort them all out. Right now I couldn’t, they were all flying around.

  In the end, I closed my eyes to try and slow down these thoughts running circles around my mind like they were on a race track. Eventually, I’d find the positive things in this situation, and many things I had learned, but I decided to save that until later. I didn’t think this was the right time to use this as a learning experience, but I had a feeling once it was… I’d be pleasantly surprised at what all of this had taught me.

  That alone made me feel a bit better about this situation. I let my eyes remain closed and let the motion of the car relax me.

  And without realizing it, I fell asleep.

  I was roused some time during the early morning by Cristo picking me up. He wrapped me in a blanket and I heard him talking quietly to Dylan but I was too sleepy to listen. Cristo walked with me and I opened my eyes slowly when the sun started to make my eyelids turn red.

  Oh wow…

  My eyes widened and I raised my head. I was being held so my stomach was against Cristo’s chest and my head over his shoulder so I was seeing behind him. It was a parking lot full of cars, but the cars were covered in brown like the greywastes had given them their own coat of paint, almost all of their windows were broken too from the roofs collapsing, but some of them remained intact but cloudy and grimy from the elements.

  And as we walked by them, I saw dusty rubber tires hanging off of rims like rolling tongues, and ribbons of fabric dangling off of the inside ceilings to fall down onto ripped seats with brown springs jutting out like hidden traps. There were dozens of these cars, parked side by side like condemned prisoners in front of a firing squad.

  Then I looked over my shoulder and said an audible, “Wow.”

  In front of us was a shopping mall, a huge one that had a giant A-frame triangle decoration above a sign that said Woodgrove Center. There weren’t any windows where we were walking, but there was a fancy entrance that had glass doors and pillars holding up the signs. Also I could see stairs leading down to a grey door that was barred shut and other doors that were also barred.

  The front of the building was grey with a blue roof, but it also had black streaks running down it, giving me the impression of it being diseased, I knew it was mildew though, the same black grime dripped down the buildings in Moros too. This place was in worse shape than the Moros buildings since they hadn’t been repaired at all, and it looked so decrepit I was afraid to go inside. I bet there were animals inside of there and we weren’t greywasters who knew how to kill dangerous radanimals. The closest we had to a greywaster was Nero since he was shadowing General Zhou.

  “This is a mall called the Woodgrove Center,” Cristo said. He put me on the ground and draped the blanket over me. “We’re in the outlands, what used to be called Nanaimo. We’ll be safe here until we figure out what to do.” Cristo’s hand brushed his belt and I saw a handgun in a brown leather holster.

  Nero was looking around in awe. He pointed to his left and I looked to see that there was a Walmart in this mall. “I bet they have a toy store too,” he whispered. Then he looked at me with a smile. “We can have fun here, Elish.” I knew he was trying to make me not worry, but I felt terrified and anxious over all of this. The greywastes were dangerous, Silas had told us many scary stories and Perish even more so. This wasn’t the place for two Skyfall princes and two sengils.

  I don’t think these adults knew what they were doing… and that fact utterly terrified me. I was with two men who had no idea how dangerous this place was.

  But… how could we go home with what King Silas had said to us?

  And like my own words were cracking open a bottle of shaken pop, the despair over what he’d said to us burst all over me.

  Mentally fucked up… failures of engineering…

  Never be able to trust me.

  Perfect fucking Elish

  The words sunk into my skin, turning the pop into acid; it seared my skin, leaving smoking wounds behind, ones that I knew would give me permanent scars.

  Scars that would never go away, no matter how much time passed.

  What positive things could I salvage from this? What could I learn?

  Cristo told us to stay and he went ahead with the handgun in his hand. He walked up to the glass doors and got down on his knees so he could peek into a shattered lower half. We were all silent behind him, so quiet we could hear the glass crunching under Cristo’s shoes.

  “There’s a lot of dirt on the floor and some foot prints and dusty bones but I think they’re old,” Cristo called to us. Bones? What kind of bones? “Stay here with the boys. I want to look around for a bit before we go into it. There’s a kiosk with the map of the area so… I’ll look for a Sears or someplace that’ll have beds.”

  Dylan made a nervous noise. He shifted his feet and let out a breath through his nose. “Okay,” he said, but I could tell he didn’t like that plan at all. Cristo looked back and nodded, then crawled through the broken area of the door and soon was swallowed up by the darkness.

  Nero got bored eventually and started looking into the rusty cars. I found an overturned shopping cart and sat on top of that. Nero couldn’t sit still for long but I could, and I had a lot of thinking to do, and even more worrying to do.

  “Look, Elish,” Dylan said. He pointed to a building that wasn’t attached to the mall but was in the same giant parking lot. “It says Chapters, that was a large bookstore before the Fallocaust. The roof looks intact and since Silas doesn’t allow any people here…” His voice trailed and he smiled lightly at me.

  I turned and looked. Excitement managed to crawl out of the swamp of bad feelings and lit several sparks. “Can we go to it?” I asked. It was a big building with fancy arches and brick pillars, and not a lot of cars parked around it. That made sense though, if there was war they wouldn’t be stocking up on books. That meant more for me.

  Dylan nodded. He brushed back a curl of light brown hair and shielded his eyes from the sun. “Maybe once we’re all settled in. You can stock up on books and we can find some stuff to keep Nero occupied. Hell, if that Walmart has a fraction of the stock still in it… we’ll be set for years.”

  My gut twisted. For years? We… we might stay here for years?

  The twisting made nausea fill my stomach and it soured and bubbled. I knew right then that there was no way we’d be staying here for years, that just wasn’t going to happen. Either Nero and I were going to walk back to Skyfall, or Silas was going to find us.

&nbs
p; Oh gosh… Silas… was he awake by now? It was the next day, and I remember him saying that when he died, his body had to heal itself. How long would a bullet hole take to heal?

  There was so much confliction going through me. A part of me wanted Silas to find us, but I was scared of what would happen when he did. Was he going to kill us? He’d had such hatred behind his words, like he’d meant every one of them…

  I didn’t know what I wanted to happen, I was so confused and hurt.

  Dylan rubbed my back. “Don’t be scared. We’re not going to let Silas hurt you.”

  I sighed and nodded, not knowing what else I was supposed to do. I couldn’t even explain how I was feeling, so how could Dylan know?

  “Look what I found!” Dylan and I both looked to where Nero’s voice was ringing like an excited bell.

  Nero was holding a small human skull in his hand. He was grinning big and running towards us.

  “Jesus Crist, Nero, that’s filthy and full of disease. Put it down!” Dylan said exasperated. Nero shook his head no, and brought it to me. I cringed away from it and wrinkled my nose, but it didn’t smell like anything but old dust.

  “This one was strapped in a car seat,” Nero said happily. “I’m going to name him Gerald. Let’s go back exploring, Gerald.” My little brother ran off, his large hand wrapped around the base of the old grey skull.

  “That child is so strange,” Dylan mumbled.

  After what seemed like ages, we heard glass crunching by the shattered windows. Dylan tensed at first and he drew his own pistol, but then Cristo, covered in dust and cobwebs, got down on his knees and waved us over.

  “I’ve seen evidence of radrats and croaches, and some old nests and really old bones, but it looks clear and in mostly good condition,” Cristo called to us. “There’s some holes in the ceilings but they’re offering perfect lighting. There’s a Toys-R-Us for the boys, and there’s a Pier 1 building by that Chapters which will have mattresses, a huge Walmart that looks to have a lot of food still in it… Fuck, Dylan, I think the Walmart will even have generators, and there’s gas stations nearby…”