The Dead Saga (Book 6): Odium VI

by Riley, Claire C.

  I reached over, putting my arm under both of his, and I hoisted him upwards before starting to walk, taking the left junction like he’d said. God, I hoped it was the right way and he hadn’t forgotten. Drag’s left arm was reaching out and his fingers slid over the damp walls of the cave as we walked. My body burned with the burden of carrying his dead weight with me, and I wanted nothing more than to drop him and just run. Everything in me was telling me to do that, my muscles aching as I forced myself to keep carrying him, taking it one slow step at a time. I was half-starved, my mouth and body ravenous for water, my mind terrified of the possible torture we’d be given if we were found, and my weakened muscles aching as I continued to walk with Drag.

  The torch on the wall next to me flickered as we passed, and I glanced at it before pausing in my steps. A light breeze hit my cheek, and either death was breathing on me or we were near the exit of that hellhole. I sped up, pulling Drag along with me. We came to a corner and I leaned him against the wall as I looked around it cautiously.

  Three Savage women were standing by the exit, their backs to me. I had no idea why they would be standing there or why the door to that hellish place would be open like that, but I wasn’t sticking around to find out why.

  I looked back at Drag, knowing that he was going to be no good in helping me.

  He blinked sluggishly. “You got this shit handled?”

  I nodded and he smiled, revealing bloody teeth.

  “Get us outta here, brother.”

  “I’m working on it,” I whispered.

  “They’ll be armed,” he said, trying not to cough as blood filled his mouth. Now, closer to natural light, I could see the whites of his eyes were more yellow than white, red veins clawing toward the centers of them.

  “I know,” I replied, pulling out the small metal pole I’d found among the belongings in the room earlier. It was rusted to the point of sharp metal splintering off and digging into the palm of my hand. It hadn’t saved whoever had once had it, and I had no idea what it had once been, but it might just be the thing that kept me alive that day, if I was lucky.

  I rolled my shoulders and checked around the corner again. The women were still standing there, their bodies like statues as they stared out at the world beyond the walls. I could only see two of them then, so I was guessing that the third was just outside the door. Either way, if I was being honest, I didn’t hold out much hope of living through the next couple of minutes. All I could really hope for was that they’d kill me right away and not keep me.

  “Don’t fuck this up,” Drag grunted, and I scowled at him, almost laughing loudly when he grinned at me. “I need a fuckin’ cigarette,” he said.

  “You can have it when we’re out of here,” I replied.

  “Atta boy.”

  I rolled my shoulders again and stepped around the corner as quietly as I could, taking each step slowly and cautiously. My heart beat against my ribcage, trying to free itself from its confines as I tried not to breathe too loudly, hoping to take one of those psychos out before they heard me approaching.

  Of course I was shit out of luck and one turned, a gasp catching in her throat as I swung the metal pipe at her head. She ducked, drawing the attention of the other Savage woman. I swung again as she came at me, a long dagger in her hand.

  “I’d shoot you, but it would be a waste of a bullet,” she hissed. “You’re already dead.” She licked her lips, her eyes wide. “And I can’t wait to taste your flesh.”

  The other woman joined her, both of them moving in synchrony as they pressed toward me, blades in hands.

  “I’m hungry,” the other one said with a grin.

  My stomach burned in anger and fear and I gritted my teeth and swung again. She ducked once more, but that time I predicted it and I backhanded her chin with the metal pole, catching her by surprise. She yelped and stumbled backwards as splinters from the metal pole cut into my hand and I felt the warmth of my blood trickle between my fingers.

  She was dazed, a gash across her chin allowing blood to flow down her neck. She held a hand to it and stared at me with hate in her eyes as the other one pressed forward. She was shorter than the first one, thinner too, and I took a chance that I would be stronger than she was and charged forward, shoving my shoulder into her stomach as I bent low and took her out like I was the quarterback of a football team and she was the only thing holding me back from scoring the winning touchdown.

  She grunted as she fell backwards with me landing on top of her, and I grabbed for the knife in her hand, but she gripped it tightly, so I held her wrist while she writhed under me and I smashed her hand against the ground until she finally let go of the knife.

  I didn’t even hesitate as I grabbed it and slammed the blade through her heart in one hard thrust. She grunted and then stilled, and I pulled the blade back out and stood up quickly as the other Savage woman ran at me. Her screams tore through the cave so loudly that I knew more of them would be coming right away.

  She swung with her knife as I swung with mine. Hers slashed across my chest, barely drawing blood, but I had the longer reach and mine sliced across her chest, carving through her leather vest and leaving a spray of blood in its wake. She cried out as she staggered backwards, dropping her knife as she pressed a hand against her chest to stop the blood flowing. I watched her in horror and hatred as fear flooded her features and she looked down at the blood running between her fingers.

  “Finish her,” Drag grunted behind me.

  He was leaning against the wall as he slowly made his way toward me and the exit. I started toward her, ready to finish it as the Savage woman’s gaze moved between us, her expression panicked. She reached behind her and pulled out a small handgun, a sneer on her face.

  I froze, thinking that was it, that she was going to shoot us both and be done with it. I kinda welcomed it too, because I’d rather have gone that way than any other. Quick bullet to the brain and let it all be over with. But then she put the gun to her own temple and pulled the trigger without warning.

  The sound of the gun was loud in the small, hollow space and I flinched against it, my muscles poised and tense as they waited for the bullet to hit me and not her. But instead of the piercing pain I expected, I watched as her body hit the ground with a thud and I blinked and stared down at it. Sweat dripped into my eyes as I watched a puddle of blood begin to form under her prone body.

  “She dead?” Drag grunted.

  I turned to him. “Yeah. She just shot herself in the head.” I looked back at her, wondering why the hell she’d done that. Why not go down fighting?

  He spat on her still body. “She made herself edible to them. She knew she was over and sacrificed herself for her people.” He sounded almost in awe of her. “Now that’s loyalty.”

  I looked back down at her and knew he was right. It was sick, and I hated it, but he was right.

  “Get her gun and let’s go,” Drag said, coughing up some blood. “Get me the fuck outta here.” He swiped a hand down his face, and for a second I thought he was going to throw up; his body convulsed, and he heaved as he leaned over. But then he stood back up and glared at me.

  I nodded and took a breath before stepping toward the dead Savage woman, and grabbing the gun from her grip and checking for bullets. There were only three shots left in it and I couldn’t find any more on her, but it was more than I’d had before. I took her knife too, and turned to see the other Savage woman starting to twitch on the ground.

  “She’s coming back,” I said, nodding toward her.

  “Good,” Drag replied. “I hope she tears them all apart.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Mikey

  I went over to Drag so I could help him to stand up properly, and I led him toward the exit of the cave. The day was bright outside, the freshness of the trees around us and the earthy scent of the forest hitting me all in one go. I could have cried at the relief I felt at being outside, at seeing daylight and trees and life again.
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br />   “Ain’t got all day,” Drag grunted.

  “I know, I know,” I agreed, leaning him against the wall just outside so I could try to push the boulder back in place to block the Savage zombie from getting out, but it worked on a pulley system that seemed to work from the inside, and since neither of us wanted to stick around I decided to forgo that plan and just get us the fuck out of there.

  Around us, high in the trees, were deaders strung up, guts hanging loose from their bodies as birds pecked away at their insides. I tried not to look at them, pretending they weren’t there, but as I grabbed Drag again and we started walking away from the entrance, the sounds of things dropping from the deaders made it all very real.

  I wondered briefly where the other Savage woman had gone, but as long as we were moving further away from that place and she was nowhere to be seen, that was all that mattered. At least for the time being.

  It was slow going since I was practically carrying Drag at that point, but there was no way I was leaving him behind, despite him being practically unconscious and a dead weight in my arms. We’d come too far together for me to just dump him there and make a run for it, despite the fact that trying to save him might get us both killed. Drag may not have turned into the best man in that world gone mad, but we shared something now. We’d seen things that you couldn’t take back. And that bonded us like no other bond could.

  I wanted to get him back to his people, if only so he could say goodbye to them. I wanted them to know he’d done everything he could to get back to them, and that even at the very end he hadn’t stopped being who he was. Death was a strange thing, different to every one of us. Some looked upon death and broke down. Others turned hard and bitter. People like Nina turned into heroes, brave until the end. But Drag—he’d stayed one hundred percent authentic, and I respected the hell out of him for that, if nothing else.

  As it was, I had no choice in the end. I couldn’t get him back to his people.

  Drag suddenly grunted and cried out in pain. And as he opened his mouth to cry out as death clawed at his insides, blood exploded from his open mouth like a fountain. His arm fell from around his stomach and I realized that the blood had seeped right through the T-shirt I had tied around him and was pouring out from him.

  “Stop!” he called out, blood pouring from his nose and eyes. “Stop,” he coughed and choked, and he pushed at me until I let him go. He fell to his knees on the dry forest floor, gasping in pain and trying to catch his breath as blood continued to pump from him. So much blood for just one man. So much blood that I knew it was too late for him.

  I fell beside him and turned him onto his side so the blood could come out of his throat easier. It wouldn’t save him—he was beyond that—but it might make his death more comfortable. His hands clawed at my arms and his hollow gaze somehow found mine.

  “Need you to do somethin’ for me, Mikey,” he mumbled, his eyes rolling in his head and his teeth bloody. “Fuckin’ important, okay?”

  “Okay, okay, just tell me.” I looked around us knowing that by then the Savages must have known that we had escaped and were looking for us. I grabbed at the knife I had stolen, ready to finish it for Drag and hightail it the hell out of there.

  “Nitro—he’s my kid brother, you know?” he said, but before I could reply his body started to convulse and shake on the ground.

  I grabbed at him to try and hold him still, and after a couple of seconds he did. His eyes were closed, his forehead pulled in in a deep frown.

  I couldn’t smell the forest then, or nature, or the earth. All I could smell was blood and death, and if I made it out of there alive, I knew it would be a long time before I smelled anything but that.

  “What about him?” I asked. I didn’t know anything about his kid brother other than what Butcher had told me and O’Donnell: that he’d been a traitor.

  Drag was twitching, and a sigh escaped his bloody lips before going still. I quickly checked around me as I waited for some sign that he was still alive. My knife was poised, ready to end him before he turned into one of the dead and tried to kill me himself.

  Drag coughed and gasped as he sucked air into his dying lungs.

  “Thought you were gone,” I said.

  “Can’t get rid of me that easily,” he replied. He was trying to move but I pushed him back down with little effort. “Fuck, maybe you can,” he chuckled darkly. He opened his eyes and looked up at me, though there was no way he could see me anymore. Across his eyes was a thin film of white, meaning he was already one of the dead and he had no business still talking to me like he was anything but.

  “It’s time, Drag,” I said, hearing branches breaking in the distance. The Savages were coming for me and death was coming for him. “It’s time to go.”

  “Nitro,” Drag said seriously, his face creasing in pain. “Get him to Shooter.” He closed his eyes, squeezing them tightly like he was trying to blot out the pain of what was happening to him.

  “I don’t know what that is, man. What’s a shooter?”

  “Not a what, a he. Get him to Shooter and tell him I’m fuckin’ sorry. Tell him I’m sorry for it all.” Drag’s face tightened in pain and anger and then he started to convulse again, his body shaking uncontrollably.

  I pushed him onto his back and he arched upward so high that I scooted back from him, afraid that he was going to reach for me.

  I held the knife above his forehead as his eyes opened back up, making me flinch. I wasn’t sure if he was still him or he was one of the deaders then, but I didn’t wait to find out. I slammed the blade down into his forehead, feeling the blade snap off as it slammed into the bone. I let go of the knife, the handle falling beside his head as Drag continued to move. Slowly waking up into his new life. His new nightmare.

  The blade hadn’t gone in deep enough to penetrate his brain, and I was out of time to do anything more to help him. I stood up as he grunted, his head turning in my direction.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to him, and took off.

  I owed Drag nothing, and yet I owed him everything. He’d gotten me into that mess, but equally he’d gotten me out of it too. I knew I’d never forgive myself for not finishing him off properly like he deserved. But there was nothing more I could do without giving my position away to the Savages that were following. My only hope was that he would manage to kill some of them.

  I ran for what felt like miles, the trees continuing on in every direction and making me feel like I was going in circles. Perhaps I was. I heard the Savages behind me at times. Felt their icy presence close enough to me that I thought it was over for me. And I also heard their screams as Drag took at least one of them down, getting his revenge in the only way he knew how. In blood and pain.

  I ran until there was nothing left inside me. No energy, no willpower, nothing. I was empty of anything and everything but my own survival. I could have been running in circles for all I knew, but I was still moving, still going, still surviving, and that was all that mattered. I couldn’t think about where I was going, or what would happen next, because all that mattered was the next second, the next breath, and the next foot forward.

  The trees up ahead were almost like a mirage as I broke through them, and my feet hit asphalt and not dirt, and I staggered forwards a couple of steps before falling to my knees. Everything hurt, my muscles throbbed and burned, my body was empty of food and water and energy, but I somehow found the willpower to stand back up and keep running—though it was more of a stumbling jog at that point. I was drenched in Drag’s blood and my own sweat, dirty from the caves and the forest and full of fear that the Savages were going to find me, but I kept on going.

  Every time I felt like stopping, like taking the gun and putting it to my forehead like the Savage woman had, I heard one voice, and one voice only that kept me going. That forced me not to give up, to keep moving—Nina’s.

  She hadn’t given up, and neither would I.

  It wasn’t a time for quitting and giving up
. Even as deaders stumbled out of the tree line and began following me, I refused to stop. Because it was a time to find that place buried deep inside us that demanded we survive. I thought I had tapped into it before, but I hadn’t. But as I ran along the highway, with deaders following in my wake and the ghost of Drag taunting me, I found that dark place and I kept on going.

  I stumbled and fell to my knees, barely getting up in time before a deader grabbed the back of my shirt. I couldn’t shoot it in case the Savage women heard, and I didn’t have the energy to fight it, so I pushed it away and stumbled onward, its snapping jaws close behind.

  I’m not sure how long I ran for, how long or how hard I pushed myself for, but I know I was mumbling to myself as the sound of vehicles—bikes and trucks and cars—sounded out in the distance.

  I looked up ahead, begging for the vision I saw to be real and not some mirage. And then the vehicles stopped, and the doors opened, and I continued moving because that goddamned deader was still right behind me, so close I could smell its deathly stench.

  I could barely speak as I looked up and saw a man climbing out of the truck, his long hair and beard surrounding him and making him look more animal than human. A cigarette hung loosely between his lips and he stalked toward me like a man ready to meet his death.

  I flinched and held up the gun in my shaking hands as he barged past me and slammed a small hatchet into the deader’s skull, ending it.

  “Mikey?” a woman’s voice called out.

  I blinked away tears and sweat and dropped to my knees, too exhausted to do anything else. I had to be dead. It had to be a dream. Because she couldn’t be really there.