by Mason Sabre
She went to the pharmacy and got every antibiotic she could find, every painkiller, antiseptics, bandages. Whatever it was she thought might be of use. She also got the car and brought it into the town. It didn't matter to hide it now, but it was handy for her and Sam to load everything.
James had tried to help—or rather, insist he was helping. She needed him to get better, to get stronger. Not to burn himself out.
“I found a stash of pasta,” Sam said when he came in and dumped down a full pillowcase of the stuff. “And some rice.”
“Great.” She didn’t miss the way Sam stared at James. His eyes all big and thinking. He’d seen the lines on James’ neck and his gaze traced along the lines to James’ hand.
“We ready to go?”
“If you give me about three hours to get up.” James pushed himself off the sofa, but he moved like a man three times his age. At least some colour had come back to his face, and he didn’t have that gaunt, tired skin.
Sam sat in the back of the car with Finn. And Finn seemed happy to oblige with his new friend. Diana tried to pull the dog back. She’d never seen him act like this. He’d decided he was laying his head on Sam’s thigh, and there was nothing anyone would be able to do about it.
"It's all about hierarchy in packs," Sam said. "I guess he thinks I am above him. A more dominant breed might try to challenge me."
She ruffled Finn’s fur. “It’s so crazy.”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
A good hour into the drive and Diana realised Sam was a talker. My God, her brain could hardly keep up with his chatter.
“Where are you both from?” he asked.
"We're two days back south," James replied. He was looking better, not much … but enough it was helping to calm Diana's, anxious heart. "Near the docks at the south side of Exile."
“Near Suicide Beach?”
“Yeah. That’s a nice walking distance from where we were.”
“I bet you saw bad shit there.”
Diana met his eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Sometimes.”
The beach had been named Suicide Beach by the locals because so many people—Others—tried to swim to the safe arms of Exile from wherever they had escaped and if they died, drowned, then their bodies washed up on the shore of Suicide Beach because of the way the current ran.
It happened so often, Others created a patrol for it. Hoping to find the odd person still alive and to save them in that last moment before they lay on the shore and died. Many people made it. Because of the current, it was also easier to get ashore there. Especially if handing over a coin or two, to the smugglers who’d offer safe passage.
Diana and James had made that very trip themselves, sailing from an even smaller island that didn’t register on any maps or navigations systems. Just a place for people to become lost to the world of Humans.
“What about you?” Diana asked, trying to pry her way out from under the weight of her memories Sam’s question had brought up.
“I was born in Exile,” he said. “Me and my sister. We were both born over here. My mum and dad, they’re both wolves, but they’re gone now. Gone before all this madness started.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He shrugged and offered no more about it or what gone really meant. One would assume death, but gone could just mean they left for whatever reason.
“Why are you heading to the Prisoner?” Sam asked, after a moment.
James raised a brow.
“Everyone has a reason for going. Everyone is seeking something, or sick of something.”
“There wasn’t much left in our town,” Diana said.
“Some kids were caught and tagged,” James added, and Sam nodded his understanding at that.
They drove for miles, and the road they were on seemed endless. They kept the windows down an inch so Sam could listen out for sweepers and anything that might cause them harm. He said he didn't need it, but it settled Diana's nerves just to have it.
“Do you think the—” Sam paused, leant forward, his face going white. “Stop. Right now.”
Diana braked so hard, the tyres gave a light squeal in protest.
Sam put his finger over his lips to indicate for them to be quiet.
“Money Hunters?” James asked.
"No. I …" He leant forward even more, his eyes unfocused on anything ahead of him. "Reverse the car and put it into that turning there. Kill the engine."
Diana did as he said, and Sam got out of the car, pulled some hedged wall and yanked it clean out of the ground to put it in front of the car. She couldn’t hear a damn thing. Whatever it was Sam had picked up was far enough away. To her, everywhere was peaceful. They were on a road that ran across a valley. At one side the ground ran higher, but at the other, it sloped down. It would kill anyone who crashed through the wall and rolled down.
“Wait here,” Sam said to both Diana and James.
“I’m going with you. Wait in the car.” Diana squeezed James’ hand. There was no way she could sit in the car and not know what was going on. She wished she had her wings. She’d not missed them in her life. At least she told herself she didn’t, but if she had them, she’d be more powerful than James and Sam combined.
“Diana …”
She kissed James, breathed him in. All these years together and that scent of him–all male and James. It was unique. Him. She could pick him out of a crowd through scent alone, she was sure. “I just need to see.”
Dislike in his eyes, but he gave her a nod. “No heroics.”
“No.”
Diana and Sam kept themselves low. Sam went first because he was the one who could hear, and she had to trust him with that. He crawled along the base of the rocky wall, moving faster than she could, and slowly the sounds came into her ears. Shouts, yells, bangs. Sam peered over the wall, but Diana was afraid to.
“Taggers,” he whispered.
The word sent dread through her body like an iron rod in her spine, and slowly she raised herself, so she could look down below. There was another road there. One she could have easily driven down. An ambulance was parked across the way, blocking anyone who might come. Taggers used ambulances, police cars. Anything that could make noise and get them around. They were so noisy with their arrivals. James had said it was because they thought of themselves as emergency services.
Five men came into view, and between them, they dragged two people out onto the road at the side of the ambulance.
Diana put her hand over her mouth as if she might let out an involuntary scream and give them away. Thank God, taggers were Human. They’d not sense or smell, or even see them watching, but it didn’t mean she wanted to do something that would alert them. “Oh, God.”
A sound behind her made her jump, and she did almost give herself away.
“Taggers?” James asked.
Sam nodded, and Diana glared.
“You’re meant to wait in the car.”
“I know.”
“You’re sick, James. You should have …”
“Shush,” Sam shot at them both.
Two taggers held a man between them, holding his arms out at either side. Diana couldn’t tell what kind of Other he was, but he couldn’t have been a shifter. They’d need a heck of a lot more people to put a shifter down, and even then, it was risky. One tagger had a bat, and he swung it back to give him some momentum before lashing it down into the Other’s gut. The Other made a sound, and a girl screamed, but that was cut off with the slap of a hand and then another hand around her jaw, pulling her face into view. One tagger spat on her. She kicked. They hit again.
“We have to help th—”
Diana went to move, but Sam caught her arm. “We can’t fight them.”
“You’re a shifter,” she said.
“Yeah? And you wanna bet they’ve silver bullets hanging on their hips.”
“We can’t just sit here and—”
James reached for her. “We have to. We have to because it�
�s the only way we live. We have to because this is how it is now.”
She ground her jaw, tensed her body. It shouldn’t be that way. No amount of compartmentalising would ever make it right. When she looked again, the man was on the ground, not being held, not moving, and the girl was crying.
One last fist in her face and she fell back, and the Humans dropped her. Diana thought they would leave because they all walked past them, stepping over the man, but the last tagger kicked the girl in the side. She yelled with it, curled to her side, put her hands up, but he did it again and again; she lay there.
They stayed huddled by the wall, and Diana tried to push back her thoughts. Tried not to think about the girl and the man down at the bottom. Tried not to see the vicious ways they had kicked her.
“I think they’re gone,” Sam said after ten minutes or more.
“I want to go down to them. See if they’re okay,” Diana said.
“But …”
“It’s the only way I can deal with this. If we leave … I …” She shook her head. “I’m not leaving until I know they’re okay.”
Diana didn’t need to be a shifter to smell the scent of blood and urine as they got close to the couple. And as they got close, the man’s vacant eyes stared out at them, not moving, not focusing and Diana stared back, sorry for what had been done. Sorry for what she couldn’t stop. Sorry for the life that had been lost.
“She’s alive,” James said. He was perspiring. Sweat ran down his face leaving a sheen of wet. His skin had flushed too, and that made the lines on his neck look worse. He’d need to sleep in the car. This had surely taken it out of him.
“Take her with us. Can you carry her?” she asked Sam.
“We don’t know who she is,” James said. “Or what she might do.”
James was right but … Diana wasn’t leaving her. Nope. “She’s by herself. She’s hurt.” A pause. “If she tries anything, there’s three of us. We send her packing.” Her eyes met James’ pleading with him. “I’m not leaving her. Not to whoever might come. Sweepers, Money Hunters, or worse.”
“The first sign …”
“The first,” Diana agreed.
Sam was about to pick her up. She was slender, small by the looks of things. “Um … she’s tagged,” he said, putting her arm out for them to see. “We can’t take her to the Prisoner.” He ran a finger across the wound. It bled where the needle had put the tracker in there. “I can take it out.”
“It’ll explode.”
“She’ll lose her hand,” James said.
Sam cocked one eyebrow at them in a bewildered way. “You both know that’s a crock of shit, right? A rumour so we don’t go popping these out.”
“No. I’ve seen it,” James said. “Well not seen it explode, but I’ve seen after.”
Diana wanted to ask him when. She had never seen it. She’d never been with someone who’d got a tag, but there was time for that later.
"Well, it isn't all of them," Sam added. "I've seen plenty. And if it's her hand or our lives, I know what I choose." He pinched where the tracker was, making a hard-lump form on the girl's wrist. "I say we try. Pull it out. We can't wait until she comes around again and chooses."
He lay her back down again, this time, putting her, so she was flat. Her face was a mess. Just like that of Michelle's. Why did the taggers have to do so much damage? He let the claws from his thumb extend out from the tip. It was as sharp as a scalpel as he made a small slit.
“Wait ...”
“It’s fine, look.” The black tube-like thing bulged out of the slit he’d made, and he plucked it up. “No bangs.”
He gave it to Diana. She rolled it in her palm and struggled with the thoughts about it. All this death for these? All that beating. It was utter madness.
“Throw it,” James said.
And she did. Tossing the tracker into the bushes. “Track that,” Diana said, and Sam lifted the girl again.
Chapter 10
The key to living in Exile, Diana mused to herself, was living in denial. Big fat bowls in her head. She decided bowls rather than compartmentalised boxes because sometimes that shit just spilt over and there was nothing she could do except ride it out and hope for the best.
She wiped at her eyes, turning her head as she drove, so neither James nor Sam noticed the leakage of her overwrought emotions. It was nuts. She didn’t even know what it was for. Perhaps that would have helped if she could have pointed to the thing causing her heart to hurt, but it was a cumulation of all. Of Sam, his sister, his town. Of the girl and the boy, they had left at the side of the road, her town, her life, James being sick. All of it created a well of emotion in her chest. It had to come out somewhere.
Yep. They’d left him. Just left the boy like he was nothing more than roadkill, and anyone who drove past him would think of him the same.
Maybe everyone else in the car was thinking about him. Even Finn. A silent blanket lay across them all, not speaking about the unspeakable … the unthinkable. What had it all become when they left a young man’s body to rot? Or to be swept up and trashed? He’d been a person, someone’s person.
“Shush,” Sam soothed, reaching to the girl on the back seat. They’d put her in, laid her in the corner against the door, so it was possible to fit Sam and Finn in too. She blinked, tried to open her eyes
“Do you need me to pull over?”
“No …”
“I do,” James said. “Now.”
His wide eyes, the way he had his hand across his stomach told Diana, it really was a now. She pulled the car to a stop at the side of the road, and James pushed the door open and dashed to the edge of the hedges, bent over and vomited.
“What’s your name?” Sam asked the girl, and it left Diana feeling torn between the two.
“Emily,” the girl said, swallowing, blinking, trying to make herself come around.
Loyalty … yes, was with her husband. “I’m just going to see if James is okay.” He wasn’t okay. The sound of him retching, puking was so loud, no one within proximity could assume he was okay.
Diana grabbed a bottle of water from the boot of the car and went to him.
“It’s like it eases, then it fires up again,” he said, and then he spat whatever remained in his mouth into the grass. He held a hand out, still bent over and not looking at her as he removed the bottle from her hand. Then he took a swig of water, swished it around his mouth and spat that out too.
“Is your fever up again?” Diana touched his forehead. He was warm. Not like before, though, but hotter than he should have been.
“I feel I could sleep for a week. Is the girl okay?”
“I think so. She’s just waking. James do we …”
“No help. Not yet. I think those antibiotics are working, it’s fighting, though.” He rubbed his fingertips at his temples, moving them in a circular motion.
“James?”
"Give me a second." He swayed again, and Diana lunged to catch him before he ended up falling into his own vomit. He went to say something else, but his body had other ideas, and he was sick again, bringing up what little water he had sipped from the bottle.
Diana rubbed her hand along his back and tried to ignore the feel of the black veins under her hand. They were like the sand when the tide has gone out, but the waves having left their marks, lifting the sand, shaping it … the veins were ridges on his skin and under his shirt.
Sam was behind them. The car door was open. Emily was quiet, out again, and Finn went to a little patch of grass and took care of his own business. “You’ve got the sickness.”
“I ate something bad. That’s all.”
Without even asking, Sam went over to James and lifted his shirt, stared at the black lines for a second and then dropped it again.
“You know what he has?” Diana asked.
“Yeah. Silverchromotosis. We call it the Metallic Fever.” He looked to Diana. “How long has he been like this? Since your town?”
�
�No. Since our first night.”
“He ate something new?” He looked to James, “Did you catch something and eat it? Some livestock or something?”
James would have answered him, but all he managed was to shake his head. Diana kept her hand moving on his back. She wasn’t sure if it was helping him to feel better, but maybe it was helping her. Made her feel like she was doing something for him, even though it was helpless, and she felt the enormity of that too.
“He caught rabbit,” Diana answered for him. “On our first night. Like everyone, we don’t get a lot of meat, but he found some and roasted it.”
“You’re okay, though.”
“I didn’t eat any. What is the Silver-toes-sis?”
“Silverchromotosis. It’s a sickness. We lost a few in the town to it about a month after the revolt. You’ve never had any cases?”
She was sure they hadn't. Someone puking their guts up might not have been said around the town, but someone with weird veins on their skin … she was sure that information would have made it to her ears, and if it was killing people … “Maybe we were lucky.”
“Damn straight.”
“W-what is it?” James got himself up again, and his colour came back. It was how he said; it came in waves and thank God, the better wave looked like it was coming their way. At least Diana hoped so. She hated this feeling. Hated to see James suffering in any capacity. He was her James … hers.
"There is something in the animals. I don't know what it is, they have this stench to them." Sam moved so he could lean in and take a sniff of James. "You smell like it too. I … You're not a shifter. I think it might pass on soon. A guy was living with us. He was like you, not a shifter. Witch, I think, and man, he balled his guts up something rotten. I think it'll just fuck you up a little, but you'll be okay."
“Think?” Diana said.
Sam shrugged. "I'm not a doctor. I can just say what happened with us. The guy who wasn't a shifter lived. He had all those veiny things too. Like black worms in his skin. We cut one, or he did. He was crazy like that. I swear, fucking black goo and silver oozed out of his vein. Maybe that's the difference." Sam let his gaze slide up and down James. "You don't have the lines everywhere. Neither did he. With us, though, it's like crazy fast. Creates this black monster out of us. Then boom, dead within an hour or two."