The Dead Saga (Book 6): Odium VI

by Riley, Claire C.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off sharply.

  “This ain’t up for debate, Nina. Wear it or stay the fuck here. That’s your choice. The Rejects will eat you alive if you’re there without this on.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath and we let the misplaced words settle between us.

  He dragged a hand down his face. “Why do you have to fight me on every little thing, woman?”

  I scowled. “Why do you have to act like such a caveman at every opportunity?”

  “Just fuckin’ wear it, please.”

  I huffed out a heavy breath and snatched it from him. “This doesn’t change anything,” I replied, putting the cut on. It was heavy—heavier than I’d expected. It felt strange, too, like I was wearing armor that could protect me, when really it was no more than a piece of material that wouldn’t protect me from shit. But the best thing was that it smelled of Shooter. Like leather and oil, sweat and something else that could only be described as Shooter.

  I swallowed, not liking the way it made me feel.

  And how did I feel?

  Like I was betraying Mikey by wearing it, that was how.

  Shooter’s eyes flared with lust as I untucked my hair from down the back of the cut. “Looks real good on you,” he said, his voice thick and heavy with desire. He reached out, his fingers tracing the property patch and his eyes raising to meet mine. “Love this on you.”

  I swallowed again. “This doesn’t change anything,” I said, and a slow grin rose on his face.

  “This changes everything, darlin’,” he replied darkly.

  He grunted something else that I didn’t quite catch and then took my hand as he led us out of the room. We headed to the front gates where everyone was waiting for us, an army of men and bikes lined up and ready to go.

  Michael was nowhere to be seen and my heart ached for him. Had I just gotten him killed? Was it my fault that he wouldn’t stay and let the Highwaymen help? Or was it his? The waters got a little muddy when I tried to place blame for any of the deaths in his family. If I were being honest, I’d have to admit that I was at least partly to blame for both Rachel and Nova’s deaths, but his? I think that was all on him.

  It didn’t stop the guilt though. Bitch that she was.

  All eyes were on Shooter and me as we strode toward his bike. He climbed on and pulled on his helmet before holding out a helmet and waiting for me to do the same. I felt hesitant and unsure, like by wearing the cut and getting on behind him I was committing to something I wasn’t exactly sure of yet. And yet I didn’t really have a choice.

  Gauge’s bike was next to Shooter’s, and I felt his glare on me but refused to look at him. Instead I pulled the helmet on and sat down behind Shooter, my arms automatically going around his waist, and I was pretty sure it was him and not just his bike that rumbled to life.

  “This doesn’t change anything, Shooter,” I said again as the large wooden gates opened.

  I felt his chest rise and fall and another chuckle escaping him. “You keep telling yourself that, darlin’,” he said, and then he was pulling away, leading his convoy out into the dead world beyond his walls, toward a meeting with the Rejects that would probably end in blood and violence.

  At least I was comfortable with that.

  At least I understood that.

  The thing between me and Shooter, I had no idea on.

  I held onto Shooter as he led the convoy out of the Highwaymen’s HQ and back out into the world beyond, my cheek pressed against his firm back, my hands gripping his waist as he took the bends with expertise and skill. Behind us a group of twenty men followed, their bikes noisy in the deathly quiet world. We would be attracting attention from every deader for miles around, no doubt, yet none of them seemed to give a damn.

  Those men, the Devil’s Highwaymen, ruled these roads. They were their own makers and their own destroyers, and I began to truly understand them as we drove toward the meet. There was no look of fear or worry on any of their faces as we passed reaching deaders, the stench of death infiltrating our senses as only a rotting deader could.

  Above us the sun continued to blaze, burning down on a world that it pretended to love. And I wondered about mankind, and if we could ever come back from this disaster. If there was even anything left worth fighting for.

  At every turn there was death and destruction, hate and anger. A new villain at every corner, each deadlier than the last. If we continued on this way we’d obliterate ourselves. No need for the second coming; we’d all be dead long before then if we kept on this way.

  I found myself holding onto Shooter tighter, feeling his muscles bend and twist as we rode, and I realized that despite all of it, the hell that we were living in, I felt safe with him. Safe and almost content. It was something I had never felt with Mikey.

  With Mikey there was always worry.

  With Mikey there was always death and running.

  With Mikey there was always now and not forever.

  And I realized, as I rode with Shooter, that finally I wanted a forever. I didn’t want just a now. Or a tomorrow. Or a next week. I wanted more. I wanted to live. I wanted to grow old.

  But who did I want to grow old with?

  Chapter Seven

  We rode back into suburbia like we owned the place. Like the streets didn’t belong to the dead anymore and we were the rulers of this broken world. Burnt-out storefronts stood with hunched backs next to the littered sidewalks, and cars, long since torn apart by fire or violence, lay still and silent on the cracked and broken roads.

  It had been so long since I’d been back into that world, with real streets and the ghosts of lives once lived, that I struggled for a moment to breathe. My muscles tensed as we passed an overturned baby carriage, the material rotten and dark. Bones lay picked clean on the ground, tattered clothing caught on broken fences billowing in the breeze. Litter flew up into the air as we drove by, and the rumble of the Harley Davidsons sounded out loudly, bouncing off the empty buildings on either side of the road.

  We passed banks and cafes and grocery stores. Car washes, florists, and small clothing boutiques. The sights made my head spin. It was all so normal and all so unreal. A few deaders shambled among the ruins of the dead town, their arms reaching for us as we passed by them. Their jaws snapped and they moved to follow us, cloudy gazes seeking us out.

  Shooter’s bike slowed as we came to a more vacant part of town, where buildings were boarded up on either side of the roads, though pre- or post-apocalypse I wasn’t sure. We came to a stop in front of a tall set of heavy metal gates, locked shut by several heavy-duty padlocks.

  Shooter pulled off his helmet and hung it on the bars as he reached into his cut and pulled out a set of heavy-looking keys. He tapped my hand and I released my grip on him and climbed off the bike, allowing him the room to do the same.

  He strode over to the gates, looking up at the faded sign above the gates and staring at it silently for a moment. I looked up too, reading it and wondering what significance it held to him. The Hardy & Sons Auto Repair sign was almost illegible, but Shooter stared at it like it had been freshly painted only yesterday. And though his shoulders stayed rigid and his back firm, something about his demeanor told me that that place had broken his heart once upon a time.

  The low rumble of engines was still behind me as Shooter unlocked the gates and Gauge walked over and helped to push them open. They squeaked on rusty hinges and I winced and looked both ways to check for deaders, my nerves finally getting the better of me. A couple were in the distance, but too far away to worry about for the time being.

  I stepped out of the way as one by one the bikers rode into the grounds, parking over by a tall wall where a couple of older bikes sat silent and waiting. My gaze found Shooter and he jerked his head, motioning for me to come inside. I checked the street again, watching the heat rays rising up from the warm ground, and then I walked inside, allowing Shooter to ride his bike inside and Gauge to close and loc
k the gates behind us.

  I moved to Shooter’s side automatically and followed him as he walked across the concrete grounds stained with faded blood and riddled with old bones.

  This place held a heavy air of death, the feeling practically pungent in the air. I glanced up at Shooter, but he was too busy taking in his surroundings, his hard gaze looking both lost and found in his dark homecoming. I found his hand with mine and he gripped it hard, his gaze finally meeting mine.

  “You okay?” I asked, my voice soft so no one would hear me.

  “Yeah,” he replied, looking away as we continued to walk. “Lotta memories here is all.”

  We reached a door, locked again by another padlock, and he shuffled through the ring of keys until he found the right one. He unlocked it and pulled it open, and I swear it wasn’t the scream of hinges but the scream of a thousand deaths that echoed out from inside.

  He turned and looked at the other bikers, their normally hard stares looking just as lost as Shooter’s.

  “Brett, Max, you two are on the gate. Spearhead, Balls, you two go check out the rest of the grounds, make sure everything is still as secure as when we left it.” He stopped and looked around him briefly before looking back at them. “The rest of you are inside with me. We need to pull the weapons from stores, clean the guns, load ’em up ready. Everything looks the same as the day we rode outta here, but you never know…It’s been a long time, brothers. Keep your eyes and ears open and let’s get this place secured and ready for the Rejects ASAP.”

  Everyone mumbled an “okay” and then Shooter looked down at me.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded, and a slow grin blessed his handsome face. He pulled out his gun and headed inside, and I unsheathed my machete and held it tightly in my grip as I followed him into the musty building, the light only infiltrating some of the way in. Boards covered every window, sealing the building from damp and death, and the smell of stale cigarettes, beer, and oil hit me like a slap of reality.

  If I would have closed my eyes and stood still, I had no doubt I would have been transported back to another time, in a day when that place had been filled with family and brotherhood, happiness leaking from the walls like a leaking water pipe. But those days were gone, I realized darkly, watching Shooter’s large frame move through the dark room.

  Shooter had gone deeper into the darkness, and the other men had taken off in different directions to make sure everything was still secure. Some had moved to the windows and had started to pull down the boards. I almost wished they hadn’t.

  Decomposed bodies littered the floor. Empty forms, now barely bones, and moth-eaten clothes lay on the ground. They mostly looked like bikers, given the dusty cuts they were still wearing, but some were women, their skeletal mouths hanging open like they were still gasping for their last breath. But the one thing that remained the same on all of them was the entry wound in each of their foreheads, putting them—and keeping them—dead and out of their misery. Death could not reclaim those men and women for its own.

  Light filtered in, and with each window uncovered a new horror came into view. Violence was at every corner; at every junction a new body lay on the ground, dismembered, disemboweled, torn apart by hungry demons demanding their vengeance in the form of violence and blood.

  I swallowed down the bile that rose in my throat. They were old deaths, nothing new, nothing fresh, and yet it felt like it had only happened yesterday. Like when the doors had been closed, the horrors had been locked inside until now.

  “Missed this clubhouse,” Backtrack said, running his hand over the top of a dusty table.

  The mood was somber as we all reconvened in the center of the room. Highlander moved to the long bar that ran across one full wall of the place, his hands stroking along dusty bottles of liquor until he found what he wanted. He slammed the bottle of whiskey on the bar and all eyes turned to him as he unscrewed the lid.

  “To our brothers,” he said, lifting the bottle and taking a long swallow of the amber liquid and slamming it back down. “Hope you’re all smiling up from Hades, ya bastards,” he laughed darkly.

  Gauge moved toward him and picked it back up. “For Bobby.” He swigged the drink before staring into its amber contents. “And for all the women I’ve ever loved.” He took another swig and then slammed it back down and Backtrack moved forward, lifting the bottle up.

  “For my old lady, Cindy.” He took a long drink and passed the bottle on to Spearhead, who had just come back inside with Balls.

  “For Miner, crazy bastard that he was.” He drank a mouthful down and then handed the bottle to Balls.

  “For my mom, God rest her soul.” He took a swig and then raised the bottle back up, his gaze moving over us all. “For C-Dog, I hope you’re finally at peace, brother.” He took another swig and put the bottle back on the counter.

  One by one each man went up and did the same, swallowing down a shot of whiskey in the memory of their fallen brothers or old ladies. Shooter was the last to step forward. He eyed the almost empty bottle of whiskey with a mixture of disdain and sadness before finally picking it up. He stared at it for a long time in silence. We waited, each of us wondering who he would drink to—his old lady, a family member, a friend, or one of his brothers. For some reason it felt important.

  Shooter took a long swallow of the whiskey, drinking until its contents were gone, and then he lifted the empty bottle to the air, his dark gaze going over us all.

  “To—”

  The door to the clubhouse swung open and Brett came in. “We got company,” he said, interrupting.

  Shooter looked somewhat relieved and put the bottle back down on the counter. He headed to the door and we followed him, heading back outside into the baking heat and sunshine with a thousand death kisses upon our skin.

  I heard them before I saw them; the groans and growls of the dead were at the gates, their dead flesh scraping along the bars of the gates as they reached for us, sheaths of it sloughing away and falling to the ground.

  “I want these meat sacks gone,” Shooter ordered, and he looked over at Gauge. “Quietly. We don’t wanna draw more attention to us yet.”

  “The dead are gonna know we’re here sooner or later,” Gauge replied.

  “Let’s make it later then. Small groups like this we can take. Any more and we’d be overrun or trapped in here. There weren’t that many in town, from what I could see, so this might be just a pocket of them.” Shooter tucked his gun into the back of his jeans and pulled out his knife.

  “I agree. Couldn’t see many in town as we drove, so I’m thinking we’ve just attracted a couple. If we can keep them like this, it’ll be manageable,” Backtrack said, falling into step with Gauge and Shooter.

  We made our way over to the gate, and though it was a big horde, it was more than manageable. I wondered, as the men hacked up the dead, how many of those rotten faces they recognized. How many of those people had been friends, or neighbors, or just customers to the garage. Or maybe none of them were and all of those people were long gone. I hoped so. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than living forever as a constantly starved zombie.

  Backtrack, Balls, Max, and Brett were hacking at the deaders through the fence as Gauge looked around the garage, his hard stare taking in the place.

  “Need to make a watchtower of some sort,” he rumbled out.

  “Agreed,” Shooter said. He pointed to the roof of the main building. “We can get a base up on the clubhouse for starters. You can see for miles around up there.”

  Gauge laughed. “Got some good memories of being up there, Prez.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Jolie and I used to go up there all the time. She loved to look at the stars, and the view was fucking perfect.” He smiled, but it fell before it reached his eyes. “I’ll get to work on it.” He walked away, yelling orders at some of the other men about getting wood from the shed and cleaning guns.

  Shooter looked back at me, almost like he
’d forgotten I was there. His hard features softened when he saw me. “You okay?” he asked.

  I shrugged, feeling like I was intruding, the weight of his cut heavy on my shoulders. “Yeah.”

  He nodded an okay and started to walk away. When I didn’t immediately follow—mainly because I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to—he turned back to look at me. “You comin’ or what?”

  “Sure,” I said with a nod, and walked to him, my stride matching his as we headed back inside the dark clubhouse.

  Back inside, the smell of death was fighting for leadership with the smell of stale beer, and I grimaced. Windows were being opened and fresh air being let in. The bodies had been moved somewhere else, thankfully, and it was looking more and more like a real place instead of a horror movie set.

  I looked around us and could quite clearly imagine a younger Shooter there before the apocalypse. Before the dead stood up and destroyed the world. I imagined that he was much the same back then as he was now. Still with the frowns and the scowls and the moodiness. But I bet there had been a lightness about him too. A side that no one but his old lady would have seen.

  “I wanna’ show you somethin’,” he said, and started walking again.

  I followed him down a long corridor, passing dark rooms and stained floors until we came to a closed door with a lock on it. He pulled out the keys and found the right one before unlocking it and pushing the door open.

  He moved inside and I followed him, looking around as my eyes grew accustomed to the dark. Shooter headed to the single window and began to pry away the wood that had been nailed to it. It came off with a scream of torture, splinters of wood landing on the ground at his feet, and I blinked at the sudden intrusion of light.

  It was a big room, with pictures of bikes and bike rallies and mostly naked women hung all over the walls. The room was tidy, barring a small pile of clothes in one corner. To the left of the room was a large, unmade double bed. I was so busy taking in my surroundings that I didn’t notice Shooter move behind me, his arms wrapping around my middle. He turned me in his arms until we were face to face, his warm breath on my face and his fingers gripping me tightly.