by Stasia Black
Chapter Four
BILLY
Billy needed another fix. Bad.
That Drea chick, she was gorgeous. Gorgeous and ballsy and not a little scary. He liked her. A lot. He’d definitely like to fuck her.
But more than all of that, he wanted another pill.
No, he needed it.
She just didn’t understand. He had pain. A lot of pain. The little white pills took it away.
If she’d just let him have one more.
“So, don’t you think it’s about time we took a rest?” Billy said, looking over at Drea significantly. “I don’t think Eric’s doing so great.”
“I’m fine,” Eric mumbled. Honestly, it came out so garbled it was more like, “Iiii fiiii.”
That dude was so beyond not fine.
Yesterday Eric had been okay. Sort of. They’d spent eight hours on and off walking south, making it about twenty of the thirty-five miles they had to go before they hit College Station.
But today Eric had woken up feverish and weak. It didn’t take a doctor to tell his arm was infected.
Drea pretended not to notice, shoving the last bite of peanut butter sandwich down his throat and dragging him to his feet. After only a couple miles, he was stumbling so bad Drea had to put her shoulder under his good arm. She’d been all but dragging him for the last three miles.
Billy would have offered to help. He really would have.
As soon as she gave Billy another pill.
He hadn’t had one since last night and that was bullshit. Yeah, fine, he’d agreed it was probably the decent thing to do to give some of the oxy pills to the guy with a broken, busted up arm.
Okay.
But he’d sacrificed two of his pills already. That meant, between the two Eric got and the one Drea had ‘allowed’ Billy, there were only four left.
Four.
He could burn through four in a day and a half if he was under a lot of stress.
And wandering around the middle of fuckall nowhere with two relative strangers, one of whom was a pill-Nazi and the other who looked almost literally dead on his feet?
Not Billy’s idea of a calm summer afternoon.
Anxiety—that was a clinical condition too. He needed the pills.
Should he slow down on how many he took? Sure. He thought about it sometimes.
He always meant to wean himself off them. But then all the shit had gone down at the clinic and he was on the run, and fuck but that was stressful. He’d just been settling in at the little place he’d found in Fort Worth. Then he heard over the shortwave that the damn capitol was under attack. Jesus, he just couldn’t catch a break.
So he’d quit one day. For sure. But he’d wait until everything had settled. Once the Republic was running smooth and he had a stable situation again. It was just crazy to expect him to lose his support system while everything was haywire. He wouldn’t even be able to cope with waking up in the morning without it.
He’d tried once. And stayed in bed for a day and a half, shaking, sweating, barfing his guts up and feeling sure he was about to die.
Nope. No thank you.
One day, sure. Just not right now.
Billy hiked his backpack up higher and continued forward, looking all around them. Damn, they sure were in the middle of fuck-all nowhere. There was nothing around except fields. Fields, fields, and you guessed it, more fields.
Eric stumbled and Drea only barely managed to keep him on his feet.
“Can’t,” Eric gasped, his legs giving out.
He was a big guy and all Drea could do was help him sink somewhat gracefully to the ground.
“A little help here?” She glared up at Billy.
Billy threw his hands up. What did he do? He hadn’t laid the spikes out on that damn road. And he sure as hell hadn’t forced her to drag this Eric dude all over the country.
But when he made the logical suggestion that they leave Eric by the riverbank this morning and then come back for him when they had wheels, she’d freaked the fuck out on him.
“I am not leaving him behind,” she’d all but bitten his head off.
Billy took a step toward where she was now bowed over Eric and she held up a hand, not looking at him. “Don’t. Just don’t.”
Billy threw his hands up again. Well what the hell did she want from him? Help. Don’t help. Which was it?
Damn, he’d forgotten how difficult chicks were. Not that he’d been especially good with them before The Fall, either.
He’d been a skinny resident working seventy-hour weeks and while he could always make his patients laugh, he never had much luck with the ladies. Chicks didn’t want a guy that could make them laugh. They wanted muscles. Or money. Maybe one day he’d have the money, but as a resident he was still up to his eyeballs in med school debt.
So he’d lost his virginity far later than most people—when he was twenty-two—in a hasty closet fuck with a fellow resident, Sheila, who’d just brought a patient back from coding for the first time. Sheila always liked to fuck when she was on adrenaline highs and he was the lucky guy who happened to be around at the time.
Then, when Xterminate hit, the hospitals were flooded with dying women. There was so much death. Billy had gotten into medicine because he liked helping people. People were sick and he could make them better.
Except Xterminate was a problem no one could solve.
Billy had never felt so helpless in his whole life.
But more and more women kept in coming every day.
Plenty of doctors just stopped showing up. But not Billy. Even when his dad brought in his mom and two sisters. Hoping that he’d have some sort of connections to a cure because he worked there.
Billy still remembered the hope in Dad’s eyes when he asked about the rumors that the CDC was testing a cure on small groups of women.
“You can get them on the list, right, Billy? You can pull some strings and get them on the list for the trial medication?”
Billy had nodded mutely.
The next day he told his dad the CDC had come through. His mom and sisters were in the last, most agonizing stages of the disease, and he gave each of them two pills from the bottle he’d stolen, at morning and bedtime.
Their crying and screaming calmed almost immediately. Dad was ecstatic. He fell down on his knees and thanked God.
And Billy? He slipped away to the restroom and took one of the pills himself. It was just your garden variety opioid but suddenly the impossible became slightly more bearable. Enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other, anyway.
His mom and sisters died two weeks later. But they died peacefully, without pain, which was more than he could say for so many others around them.
Dad didn’t see it that way.
The last Billy ever saw of his father was watching him joining the angry mob of men setting fire to the east wing of the hospital.
Billy had run then. First to the pharmacy, where he grabbed ten bottles of pills. Then he got in his car and drove and drove until his battery charge ran out. He joined some looters pilfering a liquor store and then he broke into an abandoned house in a pill and alcohol haze for he didn’t know how long. Weeks. Maybe even months.
The family of the abandoned house he’d chosen to squat in must have shopped at bulk stores because he found boxes and boxes of food in the garage.
He lived off cereal, Pop-Tarts, canned food, and alcohol. He’d really hit the jackpot because they even had a wine cellar. He didn’t know why these people had bugged out, probably Xterminate, but he was happy to take their leavings.
He didn’t even know about the bombs dropping, he stayed so fucked up all the time. When the electricity went off in the house where he was squatting and the water stopped coming out of the spouts, he figured it had just been cut off because the bills weren’t being paid.
The Texas tapwater was shitty and instead of just living with it like most folks, Fancy Family as he’d come to call whoever’d lived there bef
ore him had those huge jugs of water like at an office water cooler.
Billy only stumbled out of the house after he’d emptied the last cooler of water, all the alcohol was drunk, and he was down to his last bottle of pills.
And found out he’d missed the damn Apocalypse.
Drea sat up suddenly, her back going stiff. Billy couldn’t see her face since she was angled away from him, but when she swiped an arm across her face, he blinked in surprise. Was she… crying?
When she swung around to look at him, though, there was no trace of tears on her face. She just looked stoic and determined. Shit, Billy had never met anyone more determined in his life, and he’d spent time with some seriously scary, ambitious people.
“This is what we’re going to do,” she said, putting a hand over her eyes and scanning the countryside around them.
“Over there.” She nodded toward a farmhouse in the distance. “We’ll take him up there and set him up so he’s comfortable. My cache of supplies is only about another ten miles, and the compound another two after that.”
She looked up at the sun. “If we keep a steady pace, we should get there right after sundown. We’ll wait for full dark anyway.”
She looked back toward Billy, leveling him with her gaze in a way that sent a chill down his spine in spite of the Texas heat. “Then we strike.”
Chapter Five
DREA
“Mama?” Drea asked, leaning over Mama.
Mama was sleeping on the couch. But she’d been asleep so long. And she didn’t look right. Mamas weren’t supposed to be that color. So pasty pale.
It wasn’t like Sleeping Beauty sleep either. Mama used to be so pretty. Plump with nice, flushed cheeks. Not anymore, though. She looked more like the old hag lady with the apple than Sleeping Beauty.
Drea looked at the pokey stick and the spoon with leftovers of the ugly yellow liquid on the coffee table.
Mama’d been real talky right after she stuck it in her arm. How long ago was that? Two days, maybe?
Real talky. Wanting to dance around the house. Talking wild talk. Saying Drea was her princess and they should go on the road singing and dancing. Two dancing princesses. She kept saying that. Two dancing princesses.
Drea said she was tired of dancing and Mama yelled that Drea was a bore, why was she always such a bore?
Mama danced by herself after that, clumsy with a scary smile on her face. Drea tried to remind her she needed to eat. Drea scraped the mold off the bread and put some peanut butter on a piece but Mama wouldn’t eat it.
“You tryin’ to make me fat?” Mama yelled before throwing it at the wall.
Finally she musta got tired cause she fell on the couch and fell asleep.
But she’d been sleeping so long, Drea was getting worried. Especially when she went potty on herself and the couch about an hour ago.
“Mama.” Drea shook her shoulder. What if Mama never woke up? Who’d be there to tuck her in or tell her stories or go to the grocery store and get food? Okay, so Mama didn’t always do those things, but sometimes she did.
And a little bit of a Mama was better than no Mama at all.
Drea had a Daddy somewhere, but Mama always said he didn’t want them. That he didn’t like little kids, especially little girl kids. Mama said Mama was the only one who would ever love Drea.
“Mama,” Drea whispered again. She climbed up on the couch and laid down in the crease between Mama and the back of the couch. Mama was so skinny that Drea fit no problem.
The tiny rise and fall of Mama’s back was the only thing that kept Drea from completely panicking. Mama was breathing. As long as Mama was still breathing, it was gonna be okay.
But her skin was chilly. Big time chilly.
Drea breathed through her mouth so she wouldn’t get sick at the way Mama smelled and pulled the old blanket from the back of the couch. She covered both of them with it.
Drea thought about closing her eyes and trying to sleep along with Mama.
But Mama had been asleep so long. Drea didn’t know when Mama had last eaten. Drea finished the rest of the moldy bread last night and then felt bad about it cause she hadn’t saved any for Mama.
But if Mama woke up, she could go to the store and get them some more. Maybe some milk too. And Cheerios. Drea’s stomach cramped up at the thought. Milk and Cheerios would taste so good right now.
“Mama?” she tried again. “Mama, if you still wanna dance, I’ll dance with you. I promise. I’ll dance as long as you want. I won’t get tired this time. I promise.”
Drea started crying then. She couldn’t help it. She was so tired. Not sleepy tired. The other kind of tired. Where you just want to lay down and stop tryin’ so hard. She just wanted her Mama. “I won’t be a bore. Please Mama. Can you just please wake up? Mama. Mama. MAMA!”
Mama jerked awake, twisting and half falling off the couch. “Wha’s goin’ on?”
Then Mama’s bloodshot eyes went wide as saucers. “You,” she hissed out.
“Mama?” Drea asked, tears still wet on her cheeks.
But Mama just looked around like she didn’t know where she was. Her nose wrinkled in disgust and then her eyes came back to Drea. “You,” she said again. “I always knew you was sent from hell to torment me.”
“Mama.” Drea reached out, just wanting to be held, for Mama to go back to sleep now that she knew she was alright. Drea would let her sleep and when she woke up, everything would be all right.
“Get away from me!” Mama shrieked, shoving Drea back so hard that Drea knocked into the coffee table and fell on her backside.
Mama stumbled to her feet. “You’re Satan’s spawn. A child of the devil. Satan came and raped me one night. Domino knew. That’s why he never wanted me anymore. Because of you. You took away everything I ever wanted. You little demon cunt! You poison everything you touch. I should send you back to where you came from!”
Then Mama was on top of her and Drea couldn’t breathe.
She couldn’t breathe! Mama was—
“Mama!” she tried to gasp but nothing came out.
Mama was choking her. Why was Mama—
Mama!
Drea jerked awake, sitting up, hand to her throat.
“You okay?” Billy asked.
She scrambled back from him, stumbling to her feet.
“Fine,” she coughed out. “I’m fine.”
He lifted an eyebrow at her like, you don’t look fine. “Bad dream?”
“I said I’m fine,” Drea snapped and turned her back to him.
“So you finally gonna let me know what’s in that box?”
The box. Right. She looked down at the box that was in her arms. In sleep she’d still clutched on to it.
Even her unconscious knew better than to trust an addict when it came to the important things. Small wonder.
They’d gotten into the outskirts of College Station a little after noon and dug up her cashe that she’d buried here a long time ago. She’d taken one look to make sure everything was still there and then she’d laid down to get some much needed rest. She’d barely slept last night because she kept waking up to check on Eric.
Now she stretched and checked the sky. The sun was setting. Okay, that was good. They were still on track.
“So if you won’t tell me about the box, tell me about this place. Unpack a little bit of the mystery that is Drea… Let’s start with an easy one. What’s your last name?” Billy came up beside her. When she didn’t volunteer anything he rolled his eyes. “Okaaaaay. Was this the house you grew up in when you were a kid?” He gestured to the big white house whose back yard they were in.
Drea scoffed. “Never lived in a house in my whole life.”
She’d lived with her mother in that shitthole apartment until she was five and then Child and Family services gave her to Dad.
Cause yeah. A neighbor came to the door to yell at her mother for screaming her head off. The door was unlocked, apparently, and when the neighbor came in, t
hey found her mom on top of Drea. Strangling her own kid and calling her a demon.
Goodbye homicidal Mom and shitty apartment in south Houston. Hello Daddy dearest and the Black Skulls MC clubhouse in College Station.
Out of the frying pan and into the… yeah. So it goes.
“Drove by this house a lot,” was all she said to Billy. “Always had the prettiest gardens out front.”
The garden was long gone now.
But the box she’d buried in the back yard the night she’d skipped town a decade ago, heart shattered and swearing she’d atone for her sins one way or another?
It was exactly where she’d left it.
Nice to know some things in life never changed.
She squeezed her eyes shut, breathing in deep as she held the metal box closer to her stomach. There was still dirt caked on the sides but holding it was, she didn’t know, such a tangible link to the past. Sure, it was a horrific, bloody past, but it was hers.
“So what’s inside?” Billy asked again. “Come on, you’ve left me hanging for hours now. Just lemme take a peek.”
Drea’s eyes flew open and then she narrowed them, looking back at him. Foolish to let her guard down for even a second with that one. She knew better when it came to addicts.
She was standing between him and his next fix—a dangerous place to be. It was probably only the promise of a longer-term hookup that was keeping him from wrestling her right here and trying to get the little pill bottle in her front pocket back.
He’d been getting more and more fidgety all day. They couldn’t have that if they were gonna pull off her plan.
“Back up,” she ordered.
His eyebrows furrowed in confusion and she repeated her demand, overenunciating each word. “Back. Up.”
He lifted his hands and did as she asked, scooting backwards on the dry grass. His eyes zeroed in on her hands as she reached down for the bottle in her pocket. Jesus, he looked like a salivating dog. Down boy.
She uncapped the top and shook one of the small pill pieces into her hand. “Here.” She held it out to him and he took it eagerly. But the happiness on his face was quickly overtaken by a frown.