He’d been dead as soon as one of the monsters had gotten his teeth into him. In a few hours, he would have fallen into a fever and died, but we didn’t have a few hours. The monsters were closing in, and Danny had been in no condition to run, and there was no way I would have left him to be live meat for the Feral Claws.
I could feel Tobias’s emerald eyes on me, he was giving me that look again, part horror part awe. I didn’t want to see it, so I made a show of wiping my bloody hands on my bloody jeans.
“We need to go,” Tobias said.
My chest ached, my legs ached, I was one big throbbing mass of pains, and I was so bloody tired of running.
“Eva, come on. We need to go.”
Tobias’s fingers grazed my arm, but I pulled away, “I’m fine.” I gave him the look, the one with the set jaw and steady gaze, the one that said I just needed a moment of space after killing my friend
Tobias ran a hand over his face, nodded curtly and jerked his head in the direction of the wooden workbench at the back of the shed.
A clatter outside had me going into freeze frame. Tobias’s eyes were bright in the gloom, the whites gleaming in terror. I put a finger to my lips forgetting that they were covered in blood, the coppery tang stung my nostrils and turned my stomach, but this was no time to be sick. Stepping over the body, I moved stealthily to the workbench. It was well stocked, lots of sharp, pointy and jagged things to use as weapons.
I picked up a hammer and passed it to Tobias. He took it, his eyes straying to the flimsy wooden door; the only thing standing between us and the monsters. The workbench was littered with screw drivers of all sizes; a saw, metal rulers, a box of bolts, screws and a cleaver.
Perfect.
Its weight settled, heavy and reassuring, in my hand. Swing and slice, thunk and take a chunk. It would have to do for now.
The door rattled, and the sound of a deep inhalation cut through the silence. Heat crawled up my neck as the cleaver handle molded to the palm of my hand ready for action. Tobias locked eyes with me again, and I nodded. Time to fight, time to run, because the thing on the other side of the door could smell the blood, it could smell us, and there was no hiding from it.
Side by side, we waited for the inevitable.
The door rattled. The shed shook.
Blood pounded in my ears, and a taunt expanded in my chest before bursting from my lips. “Come ON!”
Tobias let out a battle cry, and we surged forward, just as the door flew off its hinges revealing the monster behind it. It growled and hissed, its bloodshot eyes pinning us with violent hunger just before the cleaver met the juncture of its neck.
The beast went down, but a howl in the distance told us it had already signaled its comrades. The cleaver made a sucking sound as I pulled it from the monster’s neck—a beautiful, sick, wet sound which meant its death and my survival. But we weren’t done, not yet. I brought the blade down again making sure to sever the monster’s head from its body completely. The action took an immense amount of strength, but Dad had trained me well, plus it was the only way to make the Feral Claw fuckers stay dead.
Tobias grabbed my hand, and we were running, loping around the side of the shed and diving into the woodland beyond. The beasts would track us until dawn. We had to keep moving. Tobias, tall and athletic, took the lead, his powerful runner’s legs eating up the distance, our pack of meager provisions bouncing against his back. But I kept pace easily, regulating my breathing to make sure I didn’t lose momentum.
Another howl rose up into the night air, from the east this time. Shit! The bastards were flanking us. It wouldn’t be long before they caught us, before they ripped us to shreds. Covered in Danny’s blood, we were a beacon screaming, here we are, come eat us! There was no way we would outrun them until dawn. My legs were already on fire, and my chest was wrapped in a vise, but then, like an answer to my silent prayers, the river came into view.
Tobias squeezed my hand, and we veered off toward the water. The ground flew by and icy wind slapped my cheeks, stealing what breath I had left, and then I was leaping, flying over the water in an arc before hitting the bone chilling liquid with a silent scream as I forced my unwilling body under. My eyeballs ached with the chill, but I forced them open scanning the murky depths for some clue as to direction. I couldn’t see a damn thing. My body was being tugged, the current wrapping me in its frozen arms and pulling me down into the darkness.
Just swim with the current and let it guide you, but don’t let it take you. Just swim and stay in control. Dad’s words reverberated in my rapidly numbing brain.
I broke the water’s surface, inhaled, scanned, and went back down. The opposite bank was only a few meters away. We could make it. I sensed Tobias close behind. We swam, washing the scent of blood off our clothes in the process, wiping the trail clean.
I’d always been the stronger swimmer, and I touched land first, pulling myself up onto the bank and sinking into the earth while the water drained off me. My hand went to the leather strap around my neck and clutched the watertight, plastic-covered key attached to it. Dad had given it to me a month before he’d died. Until then, it had hung around his neck. It was the only piece of him I had left. If I lost this, I’d be losing him all over again, but even more than that, I’d be failing him.
The winter air blew through my wet clothes, stinging my soaking skin.
Fuck. Next challenge, not catching pneumonia.
Tobias landed on the bank beside me gasping for breath and clutching at his chest. I scooted over to him, clenching my teeth to stop them chattering.
“Can’t … breathe.” He clutched at his chest with rigid fingers.
“Relax, breathe.” I massaged his chest, willing him his lungs to work “Where’s your inhaler?”
Tobias shook his head.
“Shit!”
The pack was gone. I patted his wet jacket and jean pockets with trembling hands, but the inhaler was nowhere to be found. Not that it would matter, it was out of date and almost empty. The damn thing was more a placebo than anything else now. The cold water and frigid air must have constricted his airways. He was panicking, and the panic would bring on an attack if I didn’t calm him down.
“Okay, Tobias, we’re okay.” I grabbed him beneath the armpits and pulled him up so that he was leaning against me. “Just focus on my voice. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay …” I rocked him gently, stroking his hair. “You remember when we were kids? Remember how you’d always kick my ass in training, do you remember when I shot up a couple of inches and took you down? Remember how safe the compound used to be … Remember home.” I missed feeling safe, falling asleep knowing that we were being watched over. The compound had been our little haven, tucked away from the atrocities of the New World.
Tobias’s breath had evened out. His hand covered mine. “Thank you.”
I kissed the side of his head and pressed my cheek to his tight, dark curls. “That’s what friends are for.”
We couldn’t risk lighting a fire, not until the sun was up, but the barn we found was warm and dry, and soon, the sun would be up.
“Take off your clothes.” I stripped to my underwear, not caring about nakedness, only caring about not catching cold.
There was an old, itchy blanket laying on a bale of hay, and I wrapped myself in it now.
Tobias hesitated a moment before turning his back to me and peeling off his T-shirt. Lack of food meant there wasn’t an ounce of fat on him but still, he’d filled out and his shoulders were wider. Muscle rippled under his dark, silken skin. He hooked his thumbs in his waistband, and I turned away, scanning the barn for a safe spot to pass out for a couple of hours. A ladder led up to the rafters. Perfect.
I headed over and began to climb, holding on to the blanket best I could. “Grab the clothes and come up,” I called down.
A pink sky greeted me through dormer windows, a signal of temporary safety.
“I don’t suppose there’s another blanket?” Tobias
stepped up behind me, his hands cupping my shoulders through the thin fabric.
His proximity sent a flutter through my stomach which I staunched. “No. But this one is big enough for the two of us.” I sat down and opened the blanket out for him. My legs broke out in gooseflesh immediately. “Well? Hurry up then.”
He settled beside me, his bare shoulder brushing mine, his naked thigh pressing against mine, and pulled the blanket around us both. Long seconds ticked by and the chill slowly subsided, but with the chill gone there was nothing to distract me from him. My best friend who somewhere along the way had become a man. A man that made my stomach ache and my breath catch at the oddest moments. Like now.
No distractions, Eva. None. Dad’s voice again reminding me that Tobias shouldn’t even be here. That his presence hadn’t been part of the plan. But when it had come down to it, leaving him behind had been too hard. And here we were, running and killing to survive. It had worked out, despite what Dad had advised. Tobias kept me sane in a world were normality was a curse word, so sitting here, wrapped in a blanket practically naked, wasn’t a big deal. Six years living in close quarters, moving from shelter to shelter after the compound had fallen, trying to survive had knocked any sense of modesty out of us, but being on the road, side by side all day every day for the past few weeks had introduced a new layer to our relationship. One that I wasn’t free to acknowledge or explore, not if I was to complete the task Dad had left me with.
Dad had protected us both when we’d been too young to protect ourselves. He’d trained us to run, hunt and fight. Survival skills classes which he’d tried to make as fun as possible, tried to make us forget that we were really being chased by bloodthirsty monsters, tried to make it seem like a game. We’d found a safe house for a while, an abandoned bank with a vault that dad customized into a panic room. That year had been almost bearable. But then the attack had happened, and Dad had been bitten by one of the Feral. We knew he was a goner, but he’d hung on for a week, screaming in pain until I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d ended it for him. But I didn’t like to think about that.
Tobias yawned so widely his jaw clicked.
We were nocturnal creatures now. Sleeping during the day and forced to keep on the run at night. It was the only way to get any rest. We slept when they slept so they couldn’t hunt us. We’d tried sleeping at night, taking it in turns to keep watch, but the lack of food made it impossible to stay awake. It was better to stay on the move at night and use the day to sleep.
“What if it’s an urban legend?” Tobias said.
“It isn’t.”
He turned to face me. “How can you be so sure, Eva?”
How could I be so sure? Because my dad had told me so before he died? Because if I stopped being sure then the last vestige of hope burning in my chest would die? Because I had to believe if only to continue to survive. I wasn’t ready to show him those cracks yet, maybe not ever.
“I just am. Remember Gerald and Fran?” We’d met the pair four years ago, they’d told us about the transmission, how they were heading to the coordinates, but Dad said we weren’t ready to make the journey. Tobias had just recovered from the flu and I was coming down with it. Fran and Gerald had gone on their way, and the transmission hadn’t been mentioned again … not until dad was dying.
Tobias exhaled. “Yes, of course, the transmission.”
“Dad gave us the coordinates for a reason, Tobias. He wanted us to survive, to get somewhere safe.”
Lie. He’d wanted me to survive. In fact, he’d insisted on it. My hand went back to the key around my neck. The key is important. You keep it safe, you keep it secret until you get to Haven. Find Benedict. Benedict will know what to do. And even then, don’t let it out of your sight. Survive, Eva. To do this, you must survive. Your life above all others. Promise me. And I’d promised, snot-nosed and tear streaked, I’d promised
But for Tobias, I’d left out the part where Dad had been delirious when recalling the coordinates. I left out the part where I wasn’t even sure I’d heard him right. I left out the part where I’d slit his femoral artery and held his hand as he bled out.
Tobias didn’t need to know that.
Tobias’s parents had been killed in the compound, and Dad was dead, we were all we had left now.
The sun was cresting the horizon, and the world was waking up from the horror of the night.
“We survived another night,” Tobias said. He nudged me with his shoulder. “We’re alive.”
Yeah … for now.
Tobias fell asleep almost immediately, but sleep didn’t come for me straight away. Instead, the past filtered through my mind—places we’d been, people we’d lost. The most recent being Danny. We’d picked up Aida and Danny two weeks ago, despite my consternation. Tobias was a soft touch like that, and he’d pointed out that there was safety in numbers. That with the other two tagging along, we may be able to travel during the day and take shifts sleeping at night. We’d already found a map and plotted the best route to Bristol, the location of Dad’s coordinates, steering clear of open spaces, roads and the like. We moved through the streets, using the houses as cover. We hid, scavenged, looked out for each other, keeping watch in pairs. A journey that should have taken us maybe two to three days max, took over a week. We’d lost Aida on day three—surprise attack by the Fangs just outside of Birmingham. I didn’t see her die. They hauled her off. Fangs liked to hoard, then feast. If only I’d had a gun to shoot her with. Killed her quick and clean, but Dad’s handgun had been left behind, useless without bullets—an extra weight. We’d escaped with our lives and the knowledge that Aida would suffer endless hours of pain before she was finally put to rest. The Claws got Danny, and I’d ended it for him.
So, now it was just me and Tobias, ten miles away from the coordinates, drifting to sleep under the heat of an innocent sun. His arm slid over my waist, and his lips brushed the nape of my neck as he mumbled in his sleep. He touched me like this in his sleep, unknowing, intimate in a way that wasn’t invasive but made my heart ache for more. Right now, the ache spread to a soothing numbness that had my eyes drooping. My body relaxed. I allowed sleep to take me, reminding my body to wake before sundown.
I woke sudden and completely to a sun low in the sky and the chill that came with the evening. Nights were always winter, and days were spring. Apparently, everything was topsy-turvy since the world went to shit, but I wouldn’t know any better, I was a child of the New World, the old one was just a fairytale. There was no anticipating the weather. The snow and rain came and went at will, and the months meant nothing to the seasons, they were merely a means to tell how much time had passed. It seemed the imbalance caused by the virus had affected nature itself. There was no scientific explanation for it, because the creatures affected, and the things they could do, couldn’t be explained away by science.
I rolled on to my side to face Tobias. He was awake, his emerald irises darker than usual today. They scanned my face, dropped to my lips and then jerked back up to lock with mine.
“You hungry?” His voice was husky from sleep.
My stomach rumbled in response.
Tobias held out a cereal bar.
My eyes widened. “Where did you get that?” We’d gotten lucky after Aida was taken, and come across an abandoned shelter that still had a few shelves of dried goods, but the impromptu dip in the river had lost us our pack and rations, or so I’d thought.
Tobias’s stomach rumbled too. He coughed to mask the noise, but it didn’t help. That rumble was much too loud. “Had it in my sock, wrapped in cellophane.”
I ginned. “Clever.” I eyed the cereal bar making a point not to study his gaunt face, or the rings around his bright green eyes. I plucked it from his fingers and caught his sigh of relief.
Idiot. If he thought I was going eat the last of our rations by myself, he had another thing coming. I peeled off the wrapper, snapped the bar in half, popped one half into my mouth and held the other to his lips.
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br /> For a moment, I thought he was going to argue, but then he opened his mouth accepting the sustenance. He wasn’t stupid, just gallant. His lips grazed the tips of my fingers, and the back of my neck grew warm. I ignored the sensation and averted my gaze.
We dressed in silence with our backs to each other. I opened my hair, ran my fingers through it then scraped it back into a ponytail which I tucked into the collar of my polo shirt. Less for them to grab hold of if they got close enough. Please don’t let them get close enough. I needed this night—the final stretch—to be easy. Just one easy night.
We had maybe two hours of sunlight left before the world slipped into darkness, and the monsters came out to play. How much of that mile and a half could we eat up before the shutters came down?
We climbed down from the rafters and left the building behind.
“You sure this is the way?” Tobias asked me for the fifth time.
No, I really wasn’t, but it was the best guess considering I’d lost my compass with our rations. I was using my gut, and I hoped it was right. Much of our world was wilderness now, but then we’d stumble across a stretch of land that looked untouched, a town frozen in time, undamaged by the crazy. The village we were cutting through was one of those spots, it looked deserted, but I knew better than to think we were safe. It wasn’t just the Feral we had to be wary off. Humanity had been tested harshly after the catastrophic event three decades ago, and not all of us had passed with flying colors. The New World brought out the worst in people. I’d learned that all that mattered was survival, and it was usually the fittest, the strongest, and the ones with the smallest conscience that survived.
I hit two out of three and was still working on the third, although something told me that one I’d never master.
City of War (Chronicles of Arcana Book 4) Page 21