“You read?” he asked her.
“Read?” She sounded incredulous. “That’s some question, now.”
He waited.
“I used to. Pretty sure. I remember turning the pages… Most of my past is just a ball of fuzz.”
Hmmm. He’d made her think too. “We have to get your memories back.”
Those red-flecked eyes contemplated his. “That would be nice.”
Her eyebrows curved above those eyes like elegant wings. All those curves on her, every single one, they were beautiful.
Vargr drew a deep breath and kept on walking. He really had a problem. Not enough females to fuck was going to make his balls burst. Wow. I’m a poet too.
“My fave books right now are Musashi, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and I have War and Peace but might never get it read. Too big.”
“You have a library?” She wriggled in his arms, sitting up a little.
“A few.” He grinned. “One of the good things about an apocalypse is no one complains when you nick their books.”
“Uh-huh. I like that. Looking on the bright side of life. No library fines…”
The hours passed as he threaded through the corridors of a resort with an open atrium that appeared to go far up above. Maybe to the top. Were those twinkling stars? Nervous, he jogged faster past an empty swimming pool filled with the leaves of fake plants and some crunchy-brown real ones, smashed glassware, and a few clothed skeletons. The GLs and their human minions didn’t do much at night, but he’d hate to be proved wrong by being shot.
He had just decided it was nearly one AM, by the old time, when she spoke.
“Are we there yet? You know, I can walk. I’m all recovered.”
“How can you be?” He stopped, frowning at his pretty parcel before hefting her into a slightly better position. The bandage showed where her shirt had slipped up her midriff. This could still prove fatal. Would she show signs yet, if it was infected?
Carefully she probed the bandage where the darkening blood stain showed on the white wrapping. He’d wrapped her entire stomach to hold the wound dressing in place.
“See. It barely hurts.” She grunted but pressed harder. “I’d rather walk. I can’t see what we go past like this.”
This was a new area for him also, for he never took the same route back when scouting. So many hundreds of stories of scraper, so many paths. The more he learned the better.
His map… He’d neglected it. Nothing stirred in this broad, balconied terrace that skirted several tiers of shops. Here too there was a high ceiling, but it merely arched to a fluted point and went no higher than an extra two stories. Nothing scuttled here either. Whatever that noise had been, they’d left it behind.
He set her on her feet, made sure those sandals she wore were on level floor, and watched her for signs of fainting. “I will check that wound.”
Mouth downturned, she waggled her head and poked it herself. “I’m good.”
His protective instincts flared. “I will check it.”
“Hmmm.” Her mouth pursed, and her tongue poked at the inside of her cheek, then waggled at him.
He frowned but refused to acknowledge her insolence.
One of those things the nanites amplified was his need to protect and keep things in order, especially those who were under his jurisdiction. Fighting such instincts had proved difficult in the past, so he’d given in. Besides, it gave him gratification.
Cyn counted as someone in his jurisdiction. He raised an eyebrow at her before finding and opening the book of maps.
Impossible to map everything and this was only one area, but he tried.
With tiny marks, he sketched in the resort and atrium with the long corridors too, noted the shop areas, put red dots where food stores might be, and the direction—even when the sun wasn’t visible, or the stars, or when the buildings curved away from parallel, he could sense direction. He drew the compass mark, closed the map book, and returned it to his pack.
“Now. Show me.”
Gently he unwrapped the bandage, rolling it away so he could re-use it on her. Except when the wound was revealed there was nothing save a bright red pucker. Jesus H. In a few hours, he’d bet on that being gone too. Vargr went to one knee to study her abdomen more closely. He placed his hands to either side, above her hips, and was amused at the slight tremor that ran through her and that small gasp.
“You are quite something.” He rose, dropped the roll of bandage and the stained wound dressing. “It’s almost healed.”
She finally leaned over and looked. “Well, fuck me dead.”
He snorted. They could bond over cursing. “You.” He waggled a finger. “Are going to help me keep this a secret. At least until I’m sure it will be okay to tell others.”
“Why?” she asked, wide-eyed.
Because there were hot heads in the tribe who might interpret this wrongly. Because he needed her to find his sister. Because he liked her. Because this might mean many things. “Because I don’t know what people will think you are, and they might decide to execute you, just to be careful.”
“But I hurt a Ghoul Lord! I escaped.”
“Mmm. And some will ask why you were allowed to escape. That will lead to complications. Your strangenesses are too much in one go. Secret.” He lay his finger across his mouth and found himself wishing to do the same to hers—that bee-sting cuteness to them made him ache to kiss her.
Cyn nodded. The scarlet eye motes swirled, kinked. “Sure. Lips are zipped. So how much do I say?” She put a hand on her hip and popped out that hip.
Red was traditionally used to signal danger. Beware, I bite. And her posture made him wonder at her bravado. He sure hoped he had this figured.
They ran through the best approach, what to reveal of her, as he’d called it, strangenesses, then decided they may as well have a meal while they were halted.
A small market store a few doors along was unlooted. Canned cold soup was one of his staples nowadays. He offered her a selection of soups, some jerky, a chocolate bar, and a packet of vegetable chips, then he popped a vitamin and gave her a couple.
“No need for table manners.” He slid down the glass wall onto his butt, feet facing the balcony edge and waited for her to do the same. “Dig in.” He waved his spoon. Favorite metal one. Plastic ones were everywhere on shelves, but you had to keep some sense of decorum.
His spoon was a memory in a way. An anime character decorated the handle.
“Yum-my.” She grimaced at the can of chicken and vegetable soup she’d pried open, tossed the vitamins in her mouth, then washed them down with bottled water. “Do vitamins still work? Don’t they expire?”
“Everything is expiring or expired, luv. Even gasoline. Batteries. Cans are exploding and rusting out. Everything. We forge on and hope. Besides, the nano-machines made us tough buggers. I’m thinking we don’t need them anymore. I take them just in case.”
“And me?”
He smiled at her. “You, I don’t know. You’re tough too. Resistant to the Lure. We’ve no way to measure this stuff. I’m hoping dearly you have some key to defeating those ass-wipes on the top floor.”
“Yeah. I suppose I am unusual.” She shrugged and looked into space, past the edge, and he was sure it wasn’t the footwear store across the way that made her look so thoughtful.
The way she swelled out the front of her shirt and the squash of her rear where it snuggled into the angle of store and concrete, just those gave him a hard-on, and her mouth. Always her mouth. He was having fantasies of kissing it, and more.
Thing was, he didn’t want to ruin this. Beasters had libidos multiplied by two of any human. It was why he steered away from mating with lure-affected humans. Selfish, maybe? Unleash that desire and he wasn’t sure he could stop. Especially with her. He’d seen over-the-top aggression, territorial behavior, and he understood why. The need ran deep in beasters.
He wanted her thinking he was friendly, not some voracious animal.<
br />
Besides, she might try to stomp on him, which he’d not allow. That made his dick twitch—thinking about how he’d rebuke her, hold her down…
Vargr shook his head, sighed. “Let’s eat.”
By the time he’d emptied two cans, she was hugging her knees and waiting for him. The questions started.
“What’s it like, this tribe of yours? I find it weird that you call yourselves a tribe.”
“Uh-huh. Good question.” The truth, she’d want that, deserved it. “We called ourselves a tribe because it seemed the best word. It was a comfortable word. We’ve had enough of being an army, or a beast horde as our creator called us.”
“Doctor Nietz?”
“Yes, him. Taken up there like most of Earth’s population.” He jerked the spoon in the ceiling direction. “Couldn’t save himself, or so we heard. Rumors. Gossip. There’s not much left of hard evidence after the mess of those end times.”
“End times mean the end of the world. This is not that.” She waved her own spoon vaguely about.
So certain? “I suppose not.” Not yet. He shifted his back to get more comfortable, tossed the rubbish over the edge just to hear it bang and clatter as it bounced off the walkways below. “Okay. The tribes are the label that all of us who have contact have settled on. We still have a few short-wave radio comms. They can skip a message right round the world if we try hard and tell the other tribes to pass it on. So we know a bit about each other. Small groups in their hundreds, with a few in the thousands, are what make up the tribes. We each picked a name based on our building quarters. Makes us feel at home.”
He shrugged at her sound of disbelief. It was true.
“Look at it this way. Buildings are what we had left, to scavenge in, live in, hide in. Miles and miles and fucking miles of them, all empty, except for the ghosts.” She frowned at him. “Joking. No ghosts. Go out into the few large land reserves, or onto the piles of mostly radioactive rubble and you doom yourself. The GLs seem to zoom in on those and pick up strays, take them up to the top. The Lure is strong where there is nothing to insulate you.”
“Hide and hope the Ghoul Lords leave you alone, there’s nothing else?”
“We tried and we died, the first year or two after we were made. The top floor, the Lure grabs us too, and they make us dead so fast.” He’d barely escaped the carnage, had been lucky and fallen, had flown away. “Corpse heaven, up there.”
“And humans? You said some survived with you?” She threw her own garbage past the edge, and they paused to listen to the bangs then the prolonged silence that followed.
“No squeaky rats today.” Sometimes he heard them.
“I remember rats.”
He shot her a look. Funny thing to say. Until he recalled her memories were mostly toast.
“You asked about humans. Here’s what has become of them. We chain them up or hobble them… if they need it.”
“That’s fucking drastic. Jeez. Horrible.” Cyn pushed to her feet and went to the railing, peered down, giving him yet another opportunity to see her gorgeous ass. The tan leggings glued to every dip, crease, crevice and curve.
He’d never knock back that view. Had an urge to walk up and drag them down past where the butt cheeks merged with her thighs. And that led to heaven between her legs. He clenched his jaw, feeling the rising thunderbeat of unnatural lust that all beasters suffered.
Not me.
Vargr grinned at his own morality in this most uncouth of times but drew his legs up to hide his hard-on.
She turned to face him, leaning her back and arms against the stainless steel. “Okay. Tell me why.”
“Even on the very lowest stories, the Lure gets humans in daylight. Higher up, more so, but we’re never sure who will start clawing past everyone to climb. Some of them get violent and kill. Only one partial cure for it and not all opt in. So, we hobble.” A few were opted into the cure just because a beaster took a fancy to her, or him. “Sex with us temporarily lessens the effect of the Lure.”
“Seriously? Sex? How?”
“The biotechies did studies. They see into blood.” Which he still found crazy. “The little nanite critters in our blood are in our come too. An STD for the ages. Our jizz nanites circulate in humans after sex. It cures the Lure until the human immune system kills the nanites. There’s a way to make the effect last longer, and that’s by fucking a human who is very Lure-affected. It creates some sort of mental and physical bond.”
More to the point, it made it impossible for the human to actually fuck any other beaster, or the beaster any other human. Though a lot of distant lusting still went on. The bond went both ways. There’d been a lot of deliberate claiming of attractive nubile females. He’d steered clear of that. Seemed wrong, somehow.
There were pros and cons, he understood that. Just, seemed wrong.
“Why can’t you inject humans with your blood? Intravenously. Wasn’t that how you were given it?”
“So you do remember some of your past?”
“Odd bits, yes. Facts come to me more than things I’ve done.”
“It was how we got them, but we don’t have the know-how. It’s not simple. We were given other drugs too. There are some medics and a few doctors across the world, but no one who understands nanomachines. An injection of pure beaster blood, into their veins, makes humans dead.”
“Damn.” She sucked in her lower lip, chewed. “You’d need to cross-match, or maybe extract a plain culture of nanomachines. Or both? And you took drugs? I suppose you’ve had years to think about it.”
That sounded so very science-y. “We have, yes. I’m not sure every human wants to be one of us, either. You know? Do you remember what work you used to do, Cyn?” She shook her head. It might come back to her. “You’re the only new person who’s arrived at the tribe for about three years. Everyone is either up there, with us, or dead.”
“Crap. I know it’s true but crap.”
“Yeah. Hard to take in.”
He checked himself for a moment, wondering if he should warn her of the overrevved desires rampaging through most beasters. Nah. He’d watch her, make sure she had options, if she wanted them.
“That’s just fucked up. And the children?”
“Nope.” Sadly, he shook his head, then he unkinked his legs, rose to his feet. “Gone. All of them, and none born since the Ghoul Lords took over. Extinction is inevitable for that reason alone. Humans don’t screw each other anymore and get pregnant, and we can’t seem to make babies either. The nanites haven’t made us infertile, but beaster jizz does not impregnate humans. The female beasters are very few, but some have beaster mates. Still zero offspring.”
“Jizz is such a filthy word.”
Chuckling, he joined her at the railing, unable to help the smirk as he looked down at her, this feisty yet seemingly naive girl. “Semen? You prefer come?”
“Ugh. How ‘bout I feed you some. Let’s keep going. You can tell me more as we go. Though I doubt I’ll stay with your tribe long. I want to find out who I am. I won’t do it by sitting still.”
What the fuck? A small amount of panic stuck its head up and waved to get attention. What. The. Fuck.
“You think you’d be safe out here, alone? There are more monsters than the GLs. Besides, I… we, need you. What you are seems unique. You may be humanity’s best hope. Our only hope.”
His sister’s. If she lived.
“Oh, screw that. Me? I’m nobody. I’ve decided. I’ll stay and say hi, then I’m going.”
Was he hearing this right? It was ridiculous. Who was she to think that she, a female whatever-she-was, could survive alone? What person of any sort would want to?
Which made him realize he really did not know who or what she was. Had he spilled vital info to a Ghoul Lord minion?
That was a stupid thought. She was just a dumb, if physically augmented, girl.
“You’d die.”
“Pfft! With this world empty, why would I?”
&nbs
p; “There are monsters, unstable buildings, radiation, and other tribes that won’t have a man like me who will help you be safe and stop other beasters taking you just because they want to!”
“You?” She spun to face him then walked backward with her hard eyes on him, as if she’d burn him up at the least excuse. “And then there’s me. I’m fucking strong, fast, resistant to the Lure, and I can heal up wounds like nothing ever happened to me. Be wary of me. Be careful of who you try to fuck. Because I can fuck you up, babe.” Such a serious face on her.
She turned and stalked away.
Her logic stumped him. How did you argue with stupid? She was nobody but also all of that? How could she not see she was special?
He followed, jaw tight. The floor made thumping noises as he stomped, he was that riled. His wings ruffled out then settled in an untidy way, as his body urged him to launch and grab her.
Hell. He should upend her, strip her pants down, and spank that pretty ass. Or shoot her.
Which?
Decisions, decisions.
Chapter 5
They’d both calmed down. Not that she was changing her mind.
Vargr walked beside her, his bulk keeping her in the shadow of stray moonlight as they passed rooms to the left. Within those rooms, huge windows opened onto a strange landscape. Miles away, she glimpsed mountains plagued by the jutting outlines of scrapers that poked at the graying, twinkly sky. Dawn approached. Closer in, beside this scraper they walked through, there seemed nothing, no buildings, just stray wisps of cloud.
“What happened out there?” Cyn halted, wondering if her eyes deceived her.
“There? I’m guessing you don’t mean the apartment. That quarter collapsed. It’s possible there was a nuke some distance away that weakened the foundations. You can’t see it from here, but parts of the buildings still stand.”
“Wow. Kinda fascinating.”
“That tens of thousands died?” He sounded perplexed.
“No. Not that. Though I suppose death has its own fascination. The destruction… that.”
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