Salvaged

by Maya Riley

  “Those things are not awww,” I argued, before Puppy came bounding over and scared the opossum family away. They disappeared, but not without a brief hissing match. “Those things scare the shit out of me, even more so than rotters.” I could feel my heart threatening to beat out of my chest.

  I tossed the can back to the ground. “Come on, let’s go, I’m ready to get out of here.”

  We reached the car and I noticed Mateo’s smirking face.

  “Shut up,” I grumbled, as I took my spot in the passenger seat.

  We drove along for a few more hours. It was as slow a pace as ever. There were so many abandoned cars everywhere that we ended up driving in the grass a good chunk of the time. Doing that, though, we ended up running over a lot of dead rotters that were hidden in the overgrown grass, instead of swerving around piles of useless cars. I couldn’t decide which was more annoying.

  “I wonder how far those other people are,” Maura mused from the back. I looked at her in the rearview mirror, and she was staring out the window with a thoughtful expression. “The mean ones who heard the radio message and drove away.”

  I sighed and returned my eyes to the front windshield. “I have no idea, but it wouldn’t do anything to dwell on things you can’t do anything about. If we see them again, then we’ll just deal with it. Whatever happens, happens.”

  The trip was mostly silent and uneventful. Or at least, as uneventful as drive through a post-apocalyptic world could be.

  We crossed over into Louisiana. The terrain didn’t change much, everything looked mostly the same as everywhere else.

  I saw a sign for Shreveport up ahead. “Hey, let’s stop and take a break here.”

  “Any certain spot in particular?” Lincoln asked, as he pulled off the highway ramp.

  “Nah, anywhere is fine. I mostly need to find the little girls’ tree.”

  “Gotcha.”

  He pulled the car into an area that had one gas station, and most of the rest of the area was surrounded by trees.

  Once he put it into park, I hopped out and went straight for the trees.

  “Don’t go too far out of sight,” Mateo called after me.

  “I’m not going to pee in plain sight,” I yelled back to him in a singsong voice.

  I found a spot behind some bushes and did my business. Once I was done, I headed back to the others, but not before a blur of blue in my peripheral caught my attention.

  “Uh, guys?” I called out. “Is that you?”

  “What? Did you say something?” Lincoln yelled back, from the complete opposite direction as the blur.

  “I think there’s something over here.”

  In moments, the rest of my group was running over to me, and Puppy was growling. She stood in front of me, turning every which way, trying to follow whatever it was. The others formed a circle with me, all of our backs to the center as we faced outward.

  Then, finally, I saw it.

  A rotter sped through the trees and we all turned in every which way to find it. Rather than coming straight for us like the other psycho rotters had, this one was weaving in and around the trees around us. It was impossible to accurately classify these things, because any of them were rarely exactly the same. Patches of blue and gold blurred around us as we maintained our circle facing outward, each one of us ready for the attack.

  It ran close enough to us and stopped barely long enough for me to get a decent, brief look at its face. “Wait… does it say ‘penis’ on his forehead?”

  “I saw that too,” Adam replied beside me. “Probably one of those things where your crappy friends think they’re funny and write on your body. Too bad he died before he could wash that off. Imagine running around for all eternity with that written on your forehead, your body decaying everywhere but there. Who knows how much longer it’ll be before that finally rots off his skull.”

  The penis rotter ran under a low hanging branch, and left tufts of dirty blond hair hanging from the branch behind it in the process. Bits of its scalp still hung from it, and I scrunched up my face at the sight.

  Nothing in this world should surprise me anymore, but there was always something new. Sometimes even morbid. And watching that happen to its head right now was one of those things.

  The rotter then turned and ran at full speed toward our group, straight for Jonah. Before any of us could jump forward and attack, Puppy shot out and leapt. Her jaws dug deep into the throat and she body slammed the rotter backward. The entire body hit the ground, except for the throat, which was still hanging from Puppy’s jaws.

  “Good girl,” I cooed, to which she wagged her tail. She still held on to the throat as the ends crumbled and sprinkled down to the ground.

  “That dog scares me sometimes,” Mateo muttered.

  I laughed. “That’s a good girl.”

  The windows of the little gas station building were too dirty to see through. The glass on one of the two front doors was shattered, so we stepped inside without bothering to open the door.

  Shards of glass crunched under our boots as we helped ourselves inside and looked around. Piles of empty food packages were strewn about, and little pellets covered the shelves. There was a small hallway that led to a men’s and women’s bathroom, but I decided to steer clear of that. I was afraid to set loose whatever smell lay beyond those doors.

  I moved behind the counter. As expected, everything back there had been scavenged as well.

  To the side of the wall behind the counter was a single door. I grabbed the handle, but it didn’t budge. “Hey, guys, this door is locked.”

  “What?”

  “This door here, it’s locked. I think it’s an office room or something.”

  “If it’s locked,” Adam said as he walked over, “then that means nobody has been inside since the outbreak.”

  Mateo made his way over first and took out a pocketknife. He expertly wedged the blade around until the door clicked and swung open. We began gagging as a rancid smell hit us, and threw our arms and hands up to cover our noses and mouths.

  The others came over, except for Maura, whose yearn for breathable air outweighed her curiosity for a closed door.

  Lincoln was the first one inside, then Mateo followed next. I poked my head around the corner, trying not to breathe. There was a body slumped against the wall with a wound to its abdomen. A sticky, red substance pooled on the floor around him. The cheeks were sunken in, and the skin was peeling and dropping to the floor.

  This corpse was in the stage of decay where maggots were crawling in and out of the stomach wound, and I lost my breakfast right there. It didn’t matter that it had been a little while since I’d eaten. It didn’t matter that I’d spent months fighting and killing corpses that literally walked and ran.

  My stomach wasn’t prepared for this one.

  I walked away and out of the building, unable to stand the stench any longer.

  A hand rubbed my back and I looked up. Jonah was looking at me with his sweet, ocean green eyes filled with concern.

  It was too gross in there, I couldn’t take it. The smell was awful and made it much worse.

  He nodded in understanding. It was pretty bad.

  Lincoln stepped through the door next, coughing. He saw us and walked over. “Dude, that’s bad. The guy must have been in there since the outbreak. I can only assume this place was getting ransacked and he went in there to hide, but not before getting attacked.”

  The others joined us soon after.

  “Let’s get out of here, there’s nothing left for us to use.” Mateo headed to the car and we followed. “It’s not even midday yet, I want to make good use of the daylight.”

  Blyss

  After dispatching a few more rogue rotters, we were southbound again. The closer we got to our destination, the more antsy everyone became.

  Adam was in the passenger seat again, playing with the dials of the radio. He was anxious to see if we could get any more information floating around out there, no
w that we were getting closer to where we needed to be.

  I was driving, and doing my best not to treat the car like a monster truck and run over everything in my way. The more we drove, the more debris was piled up. We assumed that when so many people migrated south before, it didn’t end too well for a lot of them.

  In some of the vehicles I drove by, I could see someone hunched over a steering wheel here and there. Other vehicles had a rotter trapped inside, the hands pressed against the window, unable to produce enough strength to push it open.

  I turned the steering wheel to the right to drive around a broken-down car. Inside was a female rotter with long, brown hair sticking out of parts of its head, and bald patches in the other. The rotter pressed its mouth against the glass, jaw as wide as it could go. A rotted tooth fell out of its mouth, not even fazing it.

  I scrunched up my face and kept going. There were too many rotters trapped inside cars to do anything about right now, but maybe someday we, along with more people, could go around and rid the world of them.

  If you get rid of the thing that causes the problem, then you get rid of the problem.

  We continued to drive straight down toward the coast at the bottom of the state. Once we got close enough to the border, we veered west. We were almost there, and everyone was practically on edge.

  We crossed over the state line into Texas, and cheers rang up throughout the car. We’d almost made it there.

  “We’re in the home stretch now, fellas.” I could barely sit still in my seat as I drove us on farther down the road.

  There were more cars up ahead and off to the side of the road. Which was pretty normal, but there was steam coming from them. I was also pretty sure one of them was on fire.

  “Hey, do you guys see that? Up ahead.”

  Adam tore his focus from the radio and looked straight forward to see what I was seeing. “Yeah, something must have happened recently for there to still be a fire.”

  I drove us closer, and sure enough, flames had fully engulfed a car and were beginning to burn the overturned pickup truck next to it. The thing that made me nearly lose control of the steering wheel though, was when a man crawled out from under the overturned truck.

  I pulled over and the guys were already out of the SUV before I even put it into park.

  I got out and ran toward the man, but he’d already successfully pulled himself out, and was now running toward us, away from the wreckage. His eyes were wide in terror so great, it made me pause and then take a step back.

  The man ran at us, frantic. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak a word, a gunshot fired. The man fell to the debris covered road, dead.

  Blood seeped out from the back of his head and pooled around his body.

  Maura screamed from somewhere behind me and I turned around to yell at her to get back in the car.

  With two knives drawn, I ran to take cover behind the car we’d driven up in. Before I could make it back though, a bone-chilling howl rang into the air, contrasting the gentleness of the flowers that my eyes chose to focus on as the world spun around me.

  I knew that howl. That octave. That voice.

  Tearing my eyes away from the flowers, I looked up. The beast man, who I’d only met once before, which was once too many times, was smirking.

  The blood in my veins ran cold. Somehow, he’d survived the fire. Even if his lackeys hadn’t survived, he did, and that was still enough.

  Mateo and Lincoln flanked either side of me, both of them gearing up for a fight.

  Beast man chuckled. “I see you have some backup. A nice little family, how adorable.”

  I could feel Lincoln vibrating beside me as heat rippled off of him. He was doing all he could to keep his fire in control. It’d be better to throw a controlled string of fireballs than it would be to turn into a flaming man and burn out within seconds.

  “I believe we’ve met before. It’s been a little while. How have you been?”

  “I could do with some more time away from you, but other than that, it’s been decent,” I responded.

  His lips drew up in a sneer, exposing some blackening teeth in the process. Slacking on dental hygiene didn’t help his appearance at all.

  “Oh, we have a comedian here.”

  “I’d bow my thanks, but I don’t trust you enough to show the back of my neck.”

  “And a smart one at that, I’m impressed.”

  “Can I play with her? We could be best enemies and I could braid her hair. It could do with some basic care anyway.” A woman with short blonde hair appeared behind the man. She leaned against the burning truck, which should’ve been too hot to touch. Then again, when you’re as mentally unstable as these people were, it was best not to overthink the strange things they did.

  She pulled out a knife and began to pick dirt out from underneath her fingernails with the tip of the blade.

  She glanced over at us, and her rosy red lips turned up in a smile that was so sinister, it would even scare the crazy doctor back at the lab.

  “Mateo! Oh, how I’ve missed you. You were one of my favorites.” Her smile dropped as she looked over at me. “Then you had to go gallivanting off with that trollop.”

  I could feel Mateo cringe beside me, clearly not thrilled to be in her presence again. If fire couldn’t kill these people, then I didn’t know what would.

  “Uh, I’m pretty sure if there was anything between you two that it was over when you took his eye.” I shrugged. “Some men like the kind of foreplay that doesn’t nearly kill them. I know, it’s strange, but to each their own.”

  Lines creased the woman’s forehead as she frowned. “You stay out of what you don’t understand, young lady.”

  I took one step forward, my patience thinning. A hand on my arm stopped me before I could continue any farther, and I looked up to see Mateo’s stern face as he mouthed, “Don’t.”

  Two men were walking toward us from off in the distance, and I had a brief moment of hope. While we already outnumbered these people, they would still give us a bigger fight than it was worth. If these other two joined in, we would have a better chance of getting out of this alive.

  As they neared, though, my face fell. I recognized them too, as also being at the fire station that one time.

  Was everybody fucking immune to fire?

  The two men walked past the beast man and stood in between him and us, but slightly off to the side. The blond-haired one cracked his knuckles. “Which one do we take down first, boss?”

  Beast Man sneered, “Take out the two men on either side of her. Then take the girl. If you could get them all at once, that would be even better.”

  If he only referred to three of us, then that meant the other three had made it to safety. So even if we were in a screwed up situation, we still had backup, and they wouldn’t leave us.

  My right arm exploded in pain and I cried out as I fell to the ground in shock. Blinking through the blurriness, I could see a knife handle protruding from my right bicep.

  How in the hell?

  They acted before I even had a chance to see what was happening. The two guys fell to the ground on either side of me, each with a knife handle sticking out of their legs. No. They couldn’t take us this easily.

  Reaching over with my left hand, I wrapped it around the handle and tugged. After some yanking, the blade came free with a sickening plop. I barely registered the letter R engraved into the hilt, before I sat back on my heels and cocked my arm back, then set the knife loose right back at them.

  It embedded itself in one of the two newcomers who was trying to get out of the way, but ended up running into the path of the knife instead. It would’ve been quite comical if I hadn’t been so pissed off.

  Chaos broke out. Arrows were flying around, and Puppy was running from out of nowhere and chasing the guy who didn’t get hit with the knife.

  “Ryker, take care of that damn dog,” Beast Man hollered out, as he backed up, trying to get to an area with sligh
tly more protection.

  The man called Ryker ran toward a nearby van. The blonde woman, named Conni, opened a door to the van, and Ryker moved at the last minute so that Puppy went into the van and the woman closed the door.

  “No!” I screamed. The van happened to be feet away from the truck that was now on fire. If those flames grew any higher…

  I needed to fix this. These scavers were going down. Nightmares were what scavers were made of, but I would become the thing they’d learn to fear the most.

  I could feel the skin on my arm already stitching itself back together. The dried blood that caked my arm was barely noticeable as I stood up and lunged at the man I stabbed.

  He was the closest to me, and the first one to go through to get to what I wanted.

  My body crashed into his and we both went down. I straddled his middle, and then clenched my fists and rained blows down onto his face. I was merciless.

  I was vaguely aware of the barking that drove me to this position, but my main focus was bringing about as much blood as possible.

  Arms wrapped around my middle and neck, lifting me off of my bleeding prey. I screamed until the arm around my throat tightened and my main focus became breathing.

  “Now, we can do this two different ways. One, you guys continue to fight us, and you watch your girl here die before dying yourselves. Or, two, you surrender and, well… still die.” The beast man walked out into my line of sight—an absolute mountain of a man. “Really, there isn’t a good outcome for you. But at least there’s a good outcome for us, so continue to look on the bright side.”

  He walked up to me and I felt my stomach lurch. I had no idea what was going on with the others, but if I couldn’t hear sounds of them fighting, then that wasn’t good. I should’ve been glad that Lincoln wasn’t overextending himself with his fire, but then again, the fact that he wasn’t worried me that something may be wrong.

  “You forgot about option three,” I choked out around the arm that was pressing against my windpipe.

  He walked over to me with a maniacal grin. “Sorry, but there isn’t one. You’re all out of options.”