Book of the Damned: A-E5L1-01-00: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 2)

by V. E. S. Pullen

  On any other day, I’d be flooded with doubts and telling myself it was the study, and no one would be attracted to me, but not today. Today was different. Today, I could let myself believe it all.

  It was really, really nice not to feel compelled to drag myself down.

  I guess I’d never considered an alternative, because suddenly I was really confused as to why I kept doing it. This felt way better!

  Chapter Twenty

  Spider

  There’s something different about her today, and I don’t think it’s just about our relationships evolving.

  She’s calmer, less on edge all the time. Once she got past the drama with Tai, she didn’t seem to be assuming the worst about everything. There’s a sweetness about her — maybe finally having a direction and being able to see a way forward has mellowed her somehow, released some of the pressure. Maybe just getting away from this situation.

  Her foster mother is something else. I’ve never seen someone so resentful of the source of all their good fortune. I know the situation, I know that being Azzie’s guardians got them the big house, the fancy cars, and the highest quality food available on base. Rachel had a cushy job at the hospital where she mostly planned the cafeteria menus since there was a distinct lack of patients, and her only other responsibility was making sure Azzie’s diet and hygiene were taken care of properly. Greg worked at the motor pool, he was an engineer that maintained the GPS systems on the base vehicles. I’m sure they would have had a comfortable life before, but since JANUS-23 emerged, there wasn’t a huge demand for repairing vehicles when there were millions of them sitting around unused — if something as complex as the car’s GPS broke, you just found another car. And it’s hard to be a nutritionist when there isn’t a lot of food available.

  Things are recovering, but it’s slow. The virus was still a very real threat. The early tactics of social isolation had persisted, and most people formed insular communities around family or some other social structure; you kept to yourself and your own, and that was the only real defense we had with the vaccine being incentivized.

  Priorities shifted: farming and agriculture were top career choices, along with many of the neglected trade skills. Knowing how to do things became more important than knowing how to manipulate money or manage companies — CEOs and financial advisors were useless compared to a good mechanic, plumber, or farmer.

  The east and west coasts retained some of the old ways, albeit scaled down. There were still restaurants, museums, concert halls, and religious institutions. There were even universities with students attending classes on campus and not just online, and D.C. was still operating per usual despite being even less effective — it was a joke to hear about laws passing when there was no one to enforce them; maybe in cities, though most of them had been absolutely gutted in the interior as people scattered to escape contamination.

  It had only been four years, but in reality it only took one year for us to devolve into a Mad Max-ian dystopia, the death toll was just that high that first year and the panic was absolute. People believed anything the president said, no matter how ridiculous or transparently false. Conspiracy theories and xenophobia kept us from accepting aid from international organizations when it could have made a difference, and greed crippled our recovery. What good is a strong stock market when there aren’t any people?

  People who wanted power saw this as an opportunity. Net neutrality was eradicated, our data was sold to the highest bidder and restricting access was used to control the flow of information. Whoever had the most money or power could target their opposition unchecked, and any attempt at fair, neutral, or factual reporting was met with convenient mini-outbreaks of JANUS-23 until any sort of investigative journalism became a very unattractive career choice.

  Only two sources of unrestricted and unmonitored communication remain, without any threat of backlash: the “dark web” and the post office.

  Once an underground marketplace for the most taboo vices, the dark web was now a bastion of freedom of information and free speech.

  Once the post office had been viewed as obsolete, with predictions that electronic communication would drive it out of business, but now its fortified strongholds for processing centers and its ranks of weapon-toting Carriers in armored vehicles, were untouchable and incorruptible, dedicated to one credo: the mail must go through.

  Like the rezzes, their boxes and outposts were considered sovereign territory above and outside the laws ruling the rest of the nation, and any package, letter, or object that had postage affixed and showed up in a pick-up location was sacrosanct. Untouchable the moment it hit a mailbox, Carriers would defend their charges with their lives, but more often it was the lives of those who intervened.

  Even in Salem, there were the ubiquitous welded steel mailboxes — now six foot cubes insulated against fire, explosives, and tamper-proof through elaborate electronic security — and familiar armored trucks moved through the town unhampered and unrestricted. You just did not fuck with the postman.

  The extreme measures taken by Carriers to secure the uninterrupted and untampered-with delivery of the mail was almost overkill, because outside of the government, military, and some radicals, no one would dream of impeding deliveries. Carrier convoys were protected not only by their own resources, but were also untouchable in MC territories, militia-governed areas, and the rezzes, which was most of the country in between the coasts. The average citizen was borderline-fanatical when it came to threats to the post office; the other branches of the government had ignored it just long enough that they lost complete power and control over it, helping to create the very thing that could be their undoing. Much like the rezzes.

  Much like Azzie.

  Once she was out there, distributing the vaccine, things were going to change.

  I can’t even begin to imagine what widespread immunity would do to the current hierarchy and power structure, given the way the virus itself has been weaponized to control the people.

  I’m not naïve, I realize that she can only produce so much viable blood, and I don’t even know what the process is to convert it to a vaccine or how long it takes, but even just the rumor of available vaccinations could shift the dynamic.

  Hope is a powerful thing, more powerful than fear, and Azzie is hope made flesh: a living, breathing anti-virus, salvation personified.

  I know she doesn’t understand how we could possibly fall for her so hard and so fast, she thinks her only value is her blood. I know she can’t comprehend how special she is, and she has a difficult time trusting others. The consequences of surviving when so many others fell around her, and the burden of responsibility she feels because of it, in combination with the way she’s been manipulated by those in power, have shaped her into a cynical, jaded, angry person.

  But she’s also beautiful, smart, snarky, intolerant of bullshit, absolutely selfless, with an unimpeachable code of honor, and an absolute loathing of bullies. She deserves to be worshipped like the goddess she is.

  Apparently all of that has escaped her foster mother though, because Rachel is… yeah, she’s something.

  She didn’t see me, I was in the doorway to the garage when she took the book she used to keep track of Azzie’s nutritional needs and the recipes for things like her special lotion, and threw it out. I’d heard Tai tell her to record the proportions and substitutions for us, and I had a feeling that what she wrote down and what was actually in that book were two very different things.

  Rather than make a scene, I waited a minute for her to flounce off to deliver the notepad back to Azzie and dug the book out of the garbage.

  I brushed apple peel and chicken bones off of it and opened the book. It wasn’t very big, just an old-school composition notebook stuffed full with her precise handwritten notes and recipes interspersed with labels or pictures of preferred brands or strengths of materials. I went out to the garage and shoved the book under the passenger side of the eight-seater SUV we’d been loadin
g up with the bags, boxes, and suitcases that Rachel designated must-go then returned to the bedroom in time to hear about Azzie’s first kiss — fucking Sasha! — and apparently a pretty heated make-out session with my brother. I was happy for him, but not gonna lie… I was seeing green.

  But I wasn’t so jealous that I missed her reaction to Luka’s gentle teasing — for a vicious bastard, he treated her like she was spun from moonbeams and spider silk — the uncharacteristic, blushing acceptance of our attention. It was possible that the kisses had awoken the sleeping princess, but I didn’t think that was true; she still seemed to struggle but for whatever reason, she was allowing herself to believe. All I could do is hope that this mood would prevail, that our girl would stop fighting us now that she had a real enemy.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” I grabbed my brother’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze, and he turned that beaming grin on me — I hadn’t seen Tai smile like that since his bootcamp graduation when he was 18. I didn’t have reason to smile like that. Yet. “I think we’re good to go. What’s the plan, Azzie? Is the rest of the family coming here?”

  She shook her head. “We’re going to them. All of us need to stay in the back seats of the vehicle so I hope there’s room or we’ll be unloading some things. It’s going to be cramped, but the family needs to be up front, the only ones visible. Leave all your cellphones in my room here with Sasha’s and mine—” she pointed at the desk where she had two phones lying out, “turned on, batteries intact. Oh, there’s one more thing… Tai, can you help me in the bathroom? I need to cut the tracking chip out of my arm.”

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “There’s a chip— oh, you’ll see.”

  We all followed her into the bathroom not just Tai, but the rest of us though we kept out of the way. On the countertop, she had a set of items laid out on a clean towel: a tourniquet, a scalpel, disinfecting solution, wound-packing material, coagulant powder, and bandages. She stripped off three layers of shirts, down to a tank top with thin straps that barely obscured the bra underneath, and we all saw her arms for the first time. Both of them.

  Tai had described the fistula to me, so I wasn’t surprised at all by the thick, ropey line that ran down the one arm, with mature and developing insertion points dotting its length. What shocked me, and every man in the room, was her other arm.

  I guess it made sense — why would she have vaccination marks? She was the vaccine. Instead of the sunburst-shaped scar and the tattooed serial number and barcode, Azzie had a single oval-shaped raised scar underneath the familiar letterforms the vax gun imprinted on the skin, except hers read simply “AESLI-00” in black ink.

  “Kind of a big giveaway, isn’t it? But they insisted I had to have something or I might be mistaken for an unvaccinated person. And now that I know a little better what that means, I can see their concern,” she said, running her finger over the letters and numbers. “Mouse’s says AESLI-01, since she was the first one vaccinated.” Her smile was bittersweet. “She liked having my name on her, like I claimed her.” She looked up and met our eyes in the mirror, each one of us. “Imagine my surprise when I saw your numbers. They weren’t exactly subtle, were they?”

  She picked up a bar of soap off the sink and wrote “A-E5L1-01-00” on the mirror, Tai’s number, and underneath it “A-ESLI-01-00.” Below that, she wrote my number, A-E5L1-02-00, and AESLI-02-00.

  “All of you have that number, only that one digit changes, right?” She didn’t need our nods, she knew. “Looks like I claimed all of you too,” she said softly. “As soon as I saw it, I knew for sure the study was about me, I just didn’t know what yet. When the patrol let Sasha break into my bedroom, it was pretty damn obvious, but you all know that, right?” Again, our nods weren’t needed. “I really, really hate when people assume I’m stupid. This was… ugh. Don’t get me wrong, I love having my mark on all of you, but it’s going to be a grim reminder how low their opinion of me is.”

  “Don’t think of it like that,” I said, smiling. “It’s a symbol of just how colossally they underestimate you. That’s not a bad thing, it’s kept you three steps ahead of them.”

  “Not three,” she said, looking down at her arm and shaking her head with a tiny, private smile. “At least a dozen.” She ran her fingertip over the ovoid scar and then looked up at Tai. “Can you do the honors and cut this fucking thing out of me?”

  Twenty minutes later, when Rachel backed the giant SUV out of the garage and the doors folded shut behind us, we left behind a table full of cellphones and a bloody mess in the bathroom, but the tracking chip in its sealed capsule was broadcasting merrily from the red-soaked towel crumpled in the sink.

  And on the mirror, she’d written Track this, assholes! in her blood.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Azzie

  The plan was simple: call the kid’s schools, tell the secretary they had dentist appointments. Pick them up, shuffle them into the first bench seat while the five of us cram into the back two benches surrounded by all of Rachel’s shit. Wait for Greg.

  Rachel pulled into a spot a bit away from the doors to Heather’s school, but still on school grounds. There was a car next to us on the driver’s side, but several spots open on the other. Once she’d parked, she called Greg. “Hey hon, I’m over at the junior high. The kids have dentist appointments. Having a little car trouble, can you come take a look?”

  Greg showed up less than ten minutes later, but it was a long ten minutes. Everyone was tense. Rachel was watching everything inside and outside in her mirrors — including us, with a very disapproving attitude — and I was desperate to be up in the passenger seat able to see the area. Instead I was crammed in the last bench, sitting on Luka’s lap with my feet up on Tai’s, so that what would have been my seat and the floor below it could hold a box, a suitcase, and two tote bags. I probably could have let my legs dangle down with Luka’s but Tai insisted it was necessary to sit like this. I didn’t argue.

  Michael and Heather were practically cowering in their seats — getting in the car and seeing all of us shoved in the back surrounded by all their stuff, their mom even more brisk than usual made them anxious — and we couldn’t risk moving around or making noise.

  It got really warm and stuffy in the car with it turned off and no A/C running. We couldn’t open windows. Children and all their accoutrements kinda smell, like stale peanut butter and dried milk. And I’m sorry, but four large men crammed in the back of a vehicle with no air circulation? There was some stank. I kept my face mostly buried in Luka’s shirt, which smelled like pine, spice, and him, just stronger.

  “You need to get used to this,” he whisper-shouted at me when I took another deep breath through the filter of his t-shirt. “Men do things that smell. This isn’t going to be the last time we’re in close conditions.”

  “And this is with our shoes on,” Sev agreed, and I felt a little sick at the prospect. What the fuck was I getting myself into?

  “First time we have to sleep in a tent all together, she’s going to leave us,” Tai added, shaking his head.

  “All I’m hearing is blah, blah, blah right now,” I whispered. “But note to self: always have a bandana and essential oils on my person.”

  “We’re the ones who win in this situation,” Luka said, softer, sniffing my hair. “Girls always smell good.”

  I thought about Mouse, and spraying her with Lysol once after she went almost a week without showering. I thought about her food experiments, and having to use the bathroom in the cabin because the air couldn’t circulate fast enough in the bunker. I thought about pinning her to the ground and shoving her face in my armpit after I beat her in our feats of strength for the first time.

  “Uh huh,” I agreed. “It’s like biological or something.”

  Rachel snorted from the front seat, and Heather belched, filling the car with the scent of her school-lunch lasagna. We all started giggling — silently — hisses of breath and gasps for air, and I almost shrieked when
the passenger-side door opened and Greg stuck his head in. “The truck is shaking,” he scowled at us. “Settle down.”

  He had Rachel pop the hood, fussed with its innards, went over to his own vehicle and did the same like he was getting a part from there, then shut the hoods of both vehicles. When he opened the driver’s side door, he reached down and slid something under the car next to us. Rachel climbed over the console into the passenger seat while he got in and started it up, then he backed us out and turned into traffic at the intersection.

  “Where to?” he asked, seeking me out in the rearview mirror and I smiled, grateful that the A/C was back on.

  “Gaming store,” I said, and Sev caught his breath.

  “The map— ?”

  I nodded, grinning. “You’re pretty smart… for a boy.” Heather giggled while Michael shot me an offended glare and I stuck my tongue out at him. “Pull into the alley behind the store, park sideways in the loading dock so you can’t see the vehicle from the street,” I directed Greg, and he nodded. “Get the kids inside first but stay in the stockroom, okay? We’ll unload everything then I need to see who’s working and who’s in the store before we do anything further.”

  Not a single person questioned me. No one second-guessed me. It still remained to be seen if they would actually follow directions, but for now I felt a weird mix of confidence and fear.

  Mouse and I had a plan, and it was thorough. We’d gone over it hundreds of times, had been preparing for today since before they brought me back to Salem — and calling it Operation: Get the Fuck Out of Town might not sound as meticulously designed as it was, but it was solid.