The bitterness in her voice, the regret — I hated it. I hated that Azzie blamed herself for Mouse, for everyone. None of this was on her, and I wished she’d just see that, but Tai said that all these negative thoughts are part of PTSD: it’s really common to feel hopeless and numb inside, and responsible for anything bad that happens.
For him, it was like these constant, vague feelings of both guilt and inadequacy that get in the way of feeling good, and the second he did feel something good, the damaged part of his brain kicked in and told him that he’s a garbage person. Or it told him that even having good feelings in the first place is something he should feel bad about; he said your brain tries to rationalize the terrible things you’ve been through by determining you either don’t deserve anything good or it will just get taken away.
And when it was at its worst, he needed to destroy all the good things in his life because he didn’t deserve them, and Azzie could go through periods like that. She might either try to drive us away or freeze us out, slipping into complete avoidance.
All of that on its own would make it difficult to have a relationship, but there are also these massive trust issues: your perception of your self is so negative that anyone who seems to imply differently is lying or out to get you. But we all agreed it was our job not to let her brain win because it wasn’t what she wanted — the opposite, in fact — but it was how she punished herself for surviving.
It’s so fucked up, and no lie, we’re all low-key operating under this because we’re living through a pandemic, though most people’s brains eventually heal and adjust back to “normal.” Tai had two specific traumatic events happen when he was deployed overseas — one in Iraq and one in Japan — and he fixed it by doing some weird shit in therapy with eye movements and repetitive motions. He basically rewired his brain to process the trauma differently, but Azzie can’t be fixed like that — she’s got the kind where there wasn’t just one or two triggering events, instead it’s like death from a thousand cuts.
He and Spider talked to the three of us about it after Azzie murdered Spider’s soul by telling him what it was like here in Salem when the pandemic hit — they wanted us to understand PTSD a little better so we might cut Azzie some slack when she has her epic AZZIE SMASH! rages, and it explained so fucking much about how jagged her emotions can get, and how she distances herself from us when she feels vulnerable.
Again: So. Very. Fucked. Up.
Thing was, any other person, at any other time in my life, and I would’ve walked — no, run — away and never looked back. It’s a lot of effort and work to have a relationship with someone who’s been traumatized so brutally; you aren’t just fighting the world to stay with them, you’re fighting the person too, and it’s a person who is so afraid, deep down inside, of losing you because you realize how awful and undeserving they are, that they’d rather you hate them for being a monster.
But you know what I wasn’t doing? Running away.
Because Azzie was worth the work.
And it wasn’t because of her fucking blood. It was because, after everything, she was sitting here outside this fucking cave having walked thirteen people out of a death trap — and arranged to save countless others — all so she could go out into the world and fix the bullshit and damage that others have done in her name.
Because at seventeen years old, I was getting stoned and boning everything in sight, and she was drinking liver smoothies and injecting herself with viruses to save people she didn’t even know. People who wouldn’t ever know what she did for them, and might even try to hurt her out of ignorance or spite.
And it was because Azzie is Azzie, and there wasn’t another fucking person in this world like her, and I wasn’t some stupid fuck who couldn’t appreciate her. She is who she is because of her trauma, and not in spite of it, and it made her into a warrior goddess. She’s Kali the Destroyer, or Sekhmet, the lioness of the desert, loosed upon the world.
I’m never going to be half the man that my little sweetpea is, and I’m okay with that because she makes me twice the man I’d be otherwise.
Not gonna lie though, it helps to have my four brothers working just as hard alongside me to follow Gandalf’s rules and keep her secret, keep her safe. Eventually, we’re going to make her believe she’s worthy of every good thing and none of the bad.
Maybe, between the five of us, we could collect all the splintered parts of her and fit them back together. Maybe fix ourselves at the same time.
Our stepmom, Gwen, told us about this old Japanese art form called kitsune or Kentucky or whatever — it started with a K is all I remembered — where broken bowls are mended by joining the pieces together with glue mixed with gold dust. Instead of trying to cover the breaks or hide the damage or throw out the broken bowl, they make art out of it. That’s what we’re going to do, together. We’re going to find all of our broken pieces and weld them together with gold, which is a fucking metaphor for love.
This family we’re making? It’s gonna be epic.
Sasha
Azzie sounded so bitter. And something else.
Whatever changed when she talked to Rachel, it was eating away at Sev too, and I moved closer to my youngest brother. Luka was staring off into space with a dazed but happy expression, but Sev watched Azzie with a dour focus as she explained what this place was.
“Mouse told them that she wanted to stay with me. She wanted a hundred acre wood just like Pooh, and a badass truck. So they gave her a job in her own lab where I’d see her every day, and they gave her the land — this land — and a house of her choice, and her big military-issue humvee that they painted for her.” She stopped, frozen, eyes wide, and she looked to Tai, demanding, “Where’s Mouse’s truck?!” with the barest hint of hope coloring her voice.
“The hospital,” Tai said, expression grim, and she shut down. She had hope for a second there, but then it was gone again.
“Okay,” she said, morose again. “Mouse chose this parcel, knowing that the bunker was here, and had them build her a little cabin. While the cleanup and construction crews did their work and I was off at another base getting poked and prodded, Mouse scoured what was left of the town and gathered everything she wanted to bring out here.”
“But how did you know this was here?” The girl — Heather? Heidi? Heather, I think — asked. Those two kids seemed to genuinely like Azzie but they were also a little uneasy around her, like they weren’t really supposed to be talking to her. Or maybe I was imagining things; it was pretty much the first time I’d ever seen these kids in my life, and had no idea what their normal dynamic was. And I honestly didn’t really care that much, except how it seemed to affect Azzie.
“This place was famous around Salem,” Azzie replied, her voice a little warmer, speaking to the girl. “All this land over here was owned by this old doomsday prepper couple, and they were… extreme, like the dude was notorious for detonating explosives underground whenever he wanted to expand the bunker, not even warning anyone. First time it happened after we moved here, my brothers were just babies and my mom thought there was an earthquake and freaked out, had us all under the kitchen table for hours. The preppers had a pretty big family, something like eight kids and all of them were outdoorsy, conspiracy-theory-loving nutcases who married other people just like them and had kids, and even the littlest girl could kick your ass. Every single member of that family was positive the end was nigh, and they were right, but they were prepared for a foreign invasion, or the Rapture, or the government coming for their guns. They were not prepared for a lowly little virus that would spread before they even knew it existed, and get them all at pretty much the same time. But anyway, everybody in town knew about the Bunker, it was legendary, but once the town went, that meant that no one else in the world knew this place even existed.”
She was so low-key about discussing the decimation of an entire town to these kids, that whole nightmarish situation… Spider was still wrecked about it.
“
When we showed up at the barricade telling them we had a vaccine—” she was staring off into the distance as all of us looked around at each other like what the hell?! — I think we all assumed that when she survived JANUS the first time around, her doctors figured out her blood was important.
But… but she’d said it a bunch of times: only she and Mouse survived. There were no doctors, Salem was quarantined completely. She and Mouse had to have figured it out on their own, they created the vaccine on their own, in the middle of a town full of corpses. How fucking long were they trapped in that hellhole?!
“Azzie, what do you mean?” The little boy — Michael? — piped up, interrupting her. She jumped, like she’d forgotten the rest of us were even here.
She made a sound in the back of her throat, eyes darting around looking for help that wasn’t going to come; we all wanted to know just as much as he did. “I’m afraid that’s not a very good story,” she shrugged. “And I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
The kid nodded, but it was really difficult not to insist. Really difficult. I glanced over at Spider, saw that look on his face, and decided I didn’t want to know after all.
“Yeah, so anyway, since the town was conveniently empty and already walled off, they decided to convert it to a base where I could live, and they could produce the vaccine and do research here. They figured out how many soldiers they needed to guard it, and how many regular people needed to fill the town and work the regular jobs, and started isolating them. Like since I was going to go to regular school, I needed teachers and classmates, so they prioritized doctors or researchers or even officers with families and got them in lock-down immediately, early on. And you and Heather — it was only maybe a month or two into the pandemic when you moved onto your dad’s base, right? And you didn’t have regular TV or internet access anymore once you were there. They were getting you ready, and eventually you all got vaccinated and a week later, you moved to Salem. But before anyone could move in, they had to clean out all the bodies— I mean… uhh, clean up the mess people left behind—”
She paused, tilting her head and looking between the two kids and their parents. She stared at them for just a few seconds, gradually narrowing her eyes, then something resolved itself in her. She shook her head with a cynical little smirk, looking off into the distance.
“I don’t know why I’m trying to shelter you, you kids need to know the score. They isolated you before coming here so you wouldn’t know how bad it was getting out there and accidentally let anything slip to me. All that was about keeping secrets from me, but I already knew — more than anyone — how bad it could get. Salem was the first hotspot, the first massive outbreak. This whole town died, a lot of them when they were trying to get out or get help but the Army and National Guard wouldn’t let them past the walls. There were bodies everywhere. Everyone knows the course of the disease now, but no one knew what was going on then, and there aren’t any symptoms right away because the eryptosis stage — cell death — is a natural process. But the viral load is slowly building up, until your body finally figures out something’s wrong but by then it’s too late, the number of dead or dying cells are starting to outnumber what’s left alive. You get a high fever then, as your body tries to burn out the virus, so you’re achey and feel terrible, but the fever doesn’t work and you can’t process all the dead cells out of your blood and it’s becoming toxic. More and more are dying and it’s just agonizing all of a sudden, all your muscles are cramping, and then you’re vomiting from the pain and your body is shutting down and suffocating from the inside out— oh God. I’m sorry.” She finally noticed the kids were terrified, sobbing and huddled up with their parents who had gone pale and frozen. Like every other fucking person sitting there. In a panicked attempt to reassure them, she blurted out, “You’re not ever going to have to go through that though, right? Because you got the vaccine.”
It wasn’t really helping. Them or us.
My baby sister, my Maja, died from JANUS. That’s what she went through. That’s what it was like.
I swallowed back the bile burning in my gut and throat, wiping a hand over my face. I couldn’t look at Tai or Spider — we were lucky. We’d only lost a few to JANUS, as painful as that few were, but they’d lost many. Worse, they weren’t even home with their family and community for any of it; both of them had been deployed overseas until the military was consolidated.
“Is that— is that what it felt like last week?” Gemma asked, and that was a brand new pocket of horror opening up as I realized Azzie was describing it so vividly because she’d lived through it. Twice.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Watching from outside the barrier was bad and we knew she was horribly sick, but we didn’t know how it felt for her, and the nurses pulled the curtain closed a bunch of times but wouldn’t tell us why.
Azzie shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “Yeah. I mean, close to that… obviously I never suffocated or anything, my cell production could keep up with the cell death. I was mostly sick because my fever was so high for so long, and they couldn’t do anything for it. No one knows what helps and hurts against full-blown JANUS except large influxes of blood to replace what’s dying, which I didn’t need, so I couldn’t take any medication to bring the fever down in case that was the thing keeping me ahead of the curve. And I was sick because the dead cells couldn’t get cleaned out quickly enough, it was hard for my immune system and spleen to keep up. I’m sorry,” she glanced over at her foster parents, “I really didn’t mean to scare the kids.”
“Az, you’ve been through that twice?” Jason asked, and I couldn’t tell if his voice sounded crackly from anger or tears. They’d had losses too — the only people living in a bubble were back in Salem or on the other bases. “By choice? You did that by choice?”
She nodded again, shrugging. “I had to. Believe me, I really wasn’t looking forward to it, but I had to do it. And honestly, it helped to be around all of you. Even you, Evil Viper Twins,” she said, pointing at Adriana and Gemma. “It reminded me of why I was doing it, to feel superior to your ungrateful asses.”
“Bitch,” Gemma said with little conviction, hanging off her sister. “Spiteful gash.”
“Right back atcha, skanky cunt,” Azzie replied, and Adriana started choking.
“God, I wish I could still hate you,” she cried.
“I’ll try harder then.”
“Mom, why are they so mean to each other?” the boy whispered loudly, and Rachel shushed him, saying teenage girls are crazy and not to repeat anything they said.
Azzie glared at her, hissing, “Don’t even try to act superior.” The woman looked away.
Yeah, we needed to have a talk.
“Right, so we were talking about the bunker, and I do need to explain it because… it can be overwhelming. So Salem is empty of anyone still alive at this point, and surrounded by a barrier that sits a few miles outside the town in every direction. The people in charge brought in crews to clean out all the bodies and disinfect or burn anything that couldn’t be salvaged, then they brought in a crew to do construction: to build some of the things the military needed that didn’t already exist, and to turn the temporary barrier into a permanent wall with guard towers. They built the turbines and put up the solar panels to have an independent power source here, added some roads and took out others, all that infrastructure stuff.
“Mouse moved in at the same time as the demolition and cleanup crew, slept in a tent until her cabin was built — it was the first new building they put in. And the whole time this was going on, she was using the steam tunnels to get around town and gather up anything she thought would be useful and hiding it in the tunnels, like all the equipment to make the vaccine. She’d gotten a map and the door codes out of city hall before an inconvenient fire happened, and as she cleared out a place, she’d find a way to seal up the entrance and cover it. Neither of us had ever been inside the bunker at that point so she didn’t know what was already here,
she just grabbed everything she could. The demo crew and construction crew gave no shits about anything except being in a town where everyone had died from the virus, so they weren’t paying a whole lot of attention to things disappearing or moving around.”
She took a swig of water and seemed lost in her thoughts for a time. Then she began to talk again, but her voice was softer and distant, like she didn’t realize she was saying anything out loud. “I can imagine what it was like, to have to drag all those bodies out of their homes. Businesses had all shut down except for the hospital and doctor’s offices, everyone was staying home and isolating themselves and their families but it was too late. It had already spread before my teacher died, the one they said brought it here, and it started with the kids at the junior high and with the old people at the nursing home, and there were so many people who came and went from those places before anyone realized what was happening. My brothers got sick early — I wasn’t showing any symptoms because my PV was neutralizing the virus, and at the beginning, I really hadn’t felt that good in a long time. I probably gave it to them, not even knowing I was sick, and they took it to their school. And when kids get sick… their parents and relatives don’t stay away, you know? A parent is going to take care of their kid even if they’re at risk, going to go to the grocery store, the pharmacy, and take them to the doctor. It spread, so fast.
“Most of this I heard from Mouse later. After my brothers… I developed a fever, and my parents took me to the hospital because it was still operational then. I even got a bed in the ICU because of my PV, they didn’t think I’d live long, and once my parents were gone— Mouse didn’t have anything better to do, so she sat with me wearing a hazmat suit so I wouldn’t die alone. But I didn’t die, and Mouse didn’t get sick. People stopped coming to check on me, no one was bringing food around, and after awhile, Mouse went looking. Everyone was dead. The streets were deserted except for bodies piled up like people had moved them out of the way — thinking surely someone would come for them, right? — before they all ended up getting sick. A lot of houses were deserted, and it wasn’t until later that we found all the cars lined up on the roads leading to the barriers, filled with people trying to get out and then giving up when the soldiers never opened the gates. As they built the walls, they kept finding bodies of people who’d tried to get away cross-country — for a good year after Salem was reestablished, patrols walking the woods would find bodies randomly, all over the place. So I can see why the people sent to clean out the town might not pay much attention to the stockroom of the furniture store suddenly missing a pallet of rugs or how basements suddenly started acquiring new walls or shelves were moved around. And once things were cleared out and construction was done, no one questioned anything.”
Book of the Lost: AAV-07d25-11: (A reverse harem, post-pandemic, slow-burn romance) (The JAK2 Cycle, Book 3) Page 2