by Laken Cane
The scouts didn’t seem to notice they were being shot--the bullets didn’t slow them. When humans shot mutants, it was simply force of habit. Habit and panic.
The humans fell quickly beneath the force of the mutants and their own desperation.
I pressed my forehead against the bark and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shut out the shrieks of the humans. I couldn’t shut out the sounds of flesh tearing and bones snapping as the mutants fell upon the men in a frenzy of unstoppable rage and hunger. They did as their leader had ordered.
They feasted.
And high in the tree, I wondered if this were really a world in which I wanted to exist. I should have listened to my mother.
I should have killed myself.
I concentrated on the comforting thought that I still had that option.
It wasn’t too late to die.
Better I should do it myself than to wait for a mutant or a god to do it for me.
Chapter Eight
We stood on the ground with the dead spread out around us in bits of discarded flesh and splintered bone. The air was tight with despair and darkness and heavily scented with metallic blood and freshly gutted carcasses.
For me, the world had changed once again.
The mutants had disappeared with their full bellies, their human collector, and the tormented female prisoner, on to meet up with the cluster from which they’d splintered.
I didn’t know what the lead scout had done with the woman. Or to her. I hadn’t taken my face away from the hard, rough bark until long after the mutants had sated their hunger and stomped away.
Maybe I should have watched. I could have stayed with her in her anguish, but that wouldn’t have helped her and would only have hurt me. Perhaps they’d simply led her away, back to the camp. Perhaps they’d raped her as I sat high in the tree, trying to lose myself in my mind the way Sage did.
“We’re lucky,” Sage said.
I took my stare off the gleaming white leg bone of one of the men. I’d fixated on the bits of meat still clinging to it, and tried to reconcile that bone with the living, breathing human who’d stood there less than an hour ago.
“Lucky,” I said, scornful and angry and afraid. “We’re lucky.”
She pointed at the bone. “That’s not my bone. It’s not your bone. That makes us lucky.”
“We’re not lucky, Sage. We’re stupid for clinging to this awful place. We need to give the world to the gods and see if we’ll be lucky in the afterlife.”
She said nothing, but she stared at me. Her eyes, dark and sunken in her pale, skinny face, were accusing.
I looked away. “Let’s get home before the assholes decide to come back.”
“They won’t come back. Once they return to the cluster, their masters will keep them there, celebrating, maybe birthing a baby, getting drunk.”
I stared, bemused. “They get drunk?”
“The love to get drunk. They do it a lot.”
“Alcoholic mutants,” I muttered. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”
“They get drunk on milk.”
I just shook my head.
“They’re like humans, only…” She paused.
“Only what?” I walked a few yards away, my stare on the ground. I couldn’t find my machete. It didn’t matter. I had others.
“Only worse,” she said.
“How they hell do they pack supplies with them, Sage? And what do they do with them? They eat us. Why do they want our crackers and beans and medicine?”
“There are wagons,” Sage said, falling into step beside me. “And Mother said the longer the mutants are here, the stronger they become. And more like humans. Sort of.”
For some reason, she seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. Almost…cheerful. I stared at her, my mouth open. “Are you serious?”
She nodded. “They absorb.”
“Alcoholic killer mutant sponges,” I said. “This is unreal.”
“The wagons carry the supplies and some of the humans. If you’d kept watching, you’d have seen them at the end of the line. They don’t just eat people. They…”
She stared into her memories, and seemed to forget she’d been speaking. For a second, she was lost somewhere in her past, and was no longer there with me.
“What?” I pressed. I squeezed her arm, gently. “Come back.”
She looked at me blankly, but she looked at me.
“They don’t just eat people,” I reminded her. “Go on.”
“Okay.” She paused for a moment, as though trying to remember what she’d been about to say, then finally continued. “Humans are a…” She frowned hard, searching for a word she’d been told and forgotten.
“Delicacy?”
“No…mutants have to have humans to survive.”
“A necessity?”
“Yes! That. The hunters aren’t supposed to eat humans they find. They’re supposed to take them to the cluster where the gods do their tests, get their picks, and decide what to do with the rest.”
“Tests?”
“The gods figure out what the humans are. I don’t know more. I’m too young.”
I swallowed past the dryness in my throat. “And what do they do with the rest?”
She shrugged. “Lots of stuff.”
I stepped over a rotted log and glanced at her. “So the group just now, they went against their own rules?”
She nodded. “If he finds out, he’ll torture them.”
I swallowed. “He?”
She didn’t look at me. “The leader of this cluster. His name sounds like Kroog.”
The same name the scouts had mentioned.
“How long did they have you, Sage? How long?”
She didn’t say anything.
I opened my mouth to repeat the question when she finally answered me. Sort of.
“A long, long time,” she replied. “Just about forever.”
It was the first time she’d spoken with such…deadness.
I shuddered. I shouldn’t have forced her to think about such bad times. But really, would she ever not be thinking of those times?
I wondered what they’d done to her. What she’d seen.
Why she continued to fight for survival.
I didn’t ask.
We walked out of the woods, jumped a ditch, then climbed a slight incline to the highway. We both kept watch for sneaking mutants, but all was quiet.
The woods continued on the other side of the highway, and we hurried into them. The house was close now.
“We’ll be home in ten minutes,” I said. I had to keep reassuring myself.
She took my hand. “We’ll get there.”
“Yeah.” And then what?
Really. Then what?
I wanted to cry, but I didn’t dare. If I started crying, I’d never stop.
Besides. Crying took too much effort.
We slipped toward my house, stopping every few minutes to listen. The fact that we’d taken a circuitous route home and a more cautious approach made the trek a lengthy one. But we’d made it.
Then just before we stepped out of the dark woods, Sage grabbed my wrist. “Wait,” she whispered.
I dropped to the ground, and Sage immediately followed suit.
Together, we crept to the edge of the woods and peered out. I could see the back of my familiar house.
I could also see the three humans who stood before it.
So close. We were so close.
Three males, I thought, though the shorter one in the knit cap and bulky coat could have been a girl. She carried a baseball bat, of all things.
They appeared to be young, but I couldn’t really see their faces well enough to be sure.
One of them leaned against the building, his head swiveling as he kept watch, and two others studied the path that led to the screened back porch.
One of them said something to the others, but his voice was quiet and I was too far away to pick up his words.
&
nbsp; They had weapons—normal weapons—but each one of them also had what appeared to be tanks strapped to their backs with hoses that led to large water guns.
I looked at Sage and frowned. “Are those squirt guns?” I whispered.
She wrinkled her nose.
Even as I watched, one of them stopped squinting at the ground and with his hand on his weapon—a long, wide sword of some sort—he slowly opened the porch door, and he and his friends disappeared inside.
They wouldn’t be able to get into my house easily—the back door was reinforced and I’d secured it with about a million locks, but if they wanted in badly enough, they’d find a way.
They knew someone lived in that house. The mutants wouldn’t have taken time to study the ground or check the back for extra locks or look for signs that a house was inhabited.
But humans…humans would.
I bit my bottom lip, abruptly furious. I wanted to leap from the ground and blast them to hell with my gun. I wanted to beat them to bloody pulps and scream as loud as I could while I hurt them.
I pushed my face against my folded arms, panting, full of hatred. Full of rage. I realized only when I felt the itching wetness that I’d chewed a little too deeply into my lip.
I wanted to explode.
I was losing my mind.
I honestly wasn’t planning to do anything. It was dangerous, foolish, and I knew doing anything because of my feelings was a bad idea.
I knew that.
But it was as though someone lifted me and launched me at the intruders. The trespassers. The snooping human assholes I wanted so badly to hurt.
Sage screamed, but by then I was already halfway to the strangers. I rushed them, realizing a little too late that I was missing my machete.
I clawed for the revolver in my pocket.
I had five bullets in the gun. Surely I could kill them with that many chances.
Unfortunately I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to practice, and my aim was not great.
But my determination and my rage, those were everything.
I felt like I could kill them from sheer will alone.
I could think them dead.
And if I couldn’t and they killed me…
Well, wasn’t that what I wanted? Wasn’t that what I wanted as I ran toward my house, snarling, clenching my gun, full of death and rage and such a huge amount of sadness and pain and unending, black despair?
And terror. Always, the terror.
Yes.
Kill me.
Kill me.
An image of Robin’s face was in my mind, but that image wavered and the pregnant women were there instead. The women in the grip of the gods. The woman I’d slashed to death.
I was in hell, and I wanted out.
I couldn’t do it myself, but I wouldn’t have to.
And then…
My heart stuttered as I saw something much worse than the three humans trying to gain entry to my home.
“Mutants,” I screamed.
The world slowed down—or maybe my thoughts sped up—and I saw everything. I felt everything.
Sage’s shout echoed mine, her high voice that of a child but loud and commanding anyway. “Mutants!”
They poured from the shadows and around the house, at least a dozen of them.
But they weren’t the mutants I’d fought. They weren’t the orphans, as Sage called them.
The scouting mutants had found us.
Maybe they’d tracked Sage and me through the woods.
Maybe they’d tracked the three people who even now were leaping from my porch, yanking their enormous water guns from their holsters.
I pulled the trigger three times before I hit a mutant—shot him in his eye. An accident—or lucky shot—but it didn’t matter. Guns weren’t that big a deterrent to the mutants.
Still, it made him hesitate, and as he reeled backward, his hand to his eye, one of the humans hit him with a stream of water.
I caught a familiar scent and realized immediately what the humans were shooting from their water guns. It wasn’t water.
It was alcohol.
The kind of alcohol a nurse rubbed on your arm before she stuck a needle through your skin.
Alcohol.
When the forceful stream hit the mutant, it stopped him in his tracks.
His scream was unearthly, eerie, and utterly heartbreaking. I dropped my blades and put my hands over my ears, and only the fact that Sage threw herself against me kept me from running to him.
That scream.
I went down.
Every awful thing that had ever happened was in that scream. Every agony, pain, break. That scream made them…human.
“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, no.”
And I cried with him. For him.
“It’s their death scream,” Sage whispered, her voice wafting into my ear, my mind, my heart. “Shut your mind.”
I latched on to her voice. To her words, frightening as they were. They helped me shut out the mutants’ screams as the toxic alcohol melted their faces and ran in burning tracks down their bodies. I looked around, horrified, watching as the alcohol ate their flesh like they’d been dipped into vats of acid.
The screams echoed inside my mind, and would, I was sure, follow me into my dreams.
Their very screams were weapons—at least against me.
Sage didn’t seem as affected. Maybe she’d heard them before and had hardened herself to them. The three humans didn’t seem bothered, either.
They ran, dodged, and sprayed the alcohol, and kept the mutants away from me and Sage.
Dizziness overtook me and a blanket of black descended, and when I screamed, only a groan emerged.
Then, there was nothing.
My last thought was a prayer, really, and it was similar to Sage’s plea to me.
Don’t let them touch me.
Don’t let them get me.
Chapter Nine
“Teagan? Can you hear me?”
Sage’s voice seemed far away and echoed slightly, and I frowned, trying to remember what had happened. The ground was hard and cold beneath my aching back and a heavy scent of cooking meat hung in the air. My stomach growled. “I’m not dead?”
Sage leaned closer and I realized my fingers were trapped in her small, cold hand. “What?” she asked.
“I’m not dead.”
Her grip eased. “No.”
“You should be.” The voice was young and sounded almost amused.
I opened my eyes, and needles of pain shot through my eyes when the hazy light hit them. I squinted and finally, the world came into a fuzzy sort of focus.
I struggled to sit up, and someone grabbed my arm and yanked me to a sitting position. That was when I realized I had the worst headache of my life.
“What happened?” I lifted a hand to wipe at the wetness on my lower face, and my hand came away covered with blood.
The three people I’d meant to kill were standing around me, arms crossed, unsmiling. The ground was littered with smoking bits of flesh and charred bone.
“The death screams hurt you,” Sage said. She glanced at the three strangers. “And they have found a way to kill the mutants.” Her voice was filled with wonder.
“You’re welcome.” The speaker was a teenage boy with a quick smile and deep brown eyes. He gave me a quick wink when I looked at him, but it was difficult to see him as breezy, cute, or harmless.
For one reason, he was a stranger. And he was male. And…
His face was filthy, his eyes sunken, and he looked like it’d been a while since he’d slept or seen a meal. The other two were no different.
I frowned and looked away, and my glance landed on the girl beside him. She was around twenty or so. A gray knit cap covered her hair, and a bulky coat—too heavy for the early fall—hid her body. If she were trying to pass as a guy, she wasn’t succeeding. Her features were too delicate. Her lips were full, her lashes thick and long, and her face was heart-sha
ped and pretty, despite the grime.
She didn’t smile, and no hint of friendliness lit her blue eyes. “You nearly got us all killed.” She whirled her baseball bat like a baton.
I cringed. She’d hammered nails into the end of that bat, and I was sure she was going to hit me with it.
A man stepped up beside the two others. Maybe he was thirty, maybe fifty. His hair needed cut—and combed. His face was rough with a short growth of gray and black whiskers, and lines radiated out from the corners of eyes so emotionless and light they looked like translucent green glass. A long scar dissected his upper lip, and he had another that streaked across his forehead and traveled down to his left eyebrow. “We need to get out of here. There will be more of them.” A trace of contempt crept into his voice. “You can’t use guns in this world.”
And suddenly, I remembered.
I cried out and rolled away from them, scrabbling for my weapons, but my pockets and sheaths were empty.
They’d taken my weapons.
I ignored the pain in my head and grabbed Sage’s upper arm, dragging her away from the strangers.
“Stop,” Sage said, pulling away from me. “Stop.”
I backed away, still patting my pockets obsessively, as though that would make my weapons reappear.
The three strangers didn’t move.
“They won’t hurt us. Calm down.” Sage reached out to pet my arm, like I was a skittish, fearful animal. “Shhh. It’s okay.”
I began to shiver, then the pain in my head became too much for my stomach and I turned away to dry-heave until finally the nausea passed.
The boy who’d winked at me held up his hand. “She’s right. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re human, same as you.”
“So what? The humans I’ve seen are as bad as the mutants.” But I knew if they’d wanted to hurt us, they would have already. I still wasn’t going to trust them—of course I wouldn’t trust them. But I calmed down.
Strangely enough, I felt…better. Less depressed.
I wasn’t alone. Suddenly taking on the awful mutants seemed less daunting.
“Why did their screams do that to me? Why weren’t any of you hurt by them?”
The older guy crossed his arms. “We’re used to them. Killing the bastards is what we do.”
I put my arm around Sage’s shoulder. “She calls the big ones gods.” I expected them to be as shocked as I’d been.
