The Dead Saga (Book 4): Odium IV

by Claire C. Riley

  Everything has been Jessica’s fault. Every death. Every drop of blood that’s been spilled. It’s her fault.

  I take a step forward and crouch down so I can look her in the eye properly. “The baby was a deader and it chewed its way out of her.” I let that stew for a few moments, watching her pupils dilate in horror. And I enjoy every bit of it before I give the final blow. “When I found Hilary, she was dead, with her dead baby still hanging from her rotten cooch. Her husband, Deacon? You remember Nova talking about him, right? He’d gone insane from the grief and killed a bunch of people, so—”

  “Stop it, Nina,” Michael says quietly, reaching down to grab Jessica’s hand, but she shoves him off.

  “—that thing inside you,” I continue, feeling hateful and cruel but not being able to stop myself, “That thing is dead, and it’s going to kill you at any moment.” I stand back up, watching as Jessica crumples into a ball, crying from both the pain of what’s happening and the pain of knowing.

  I turn away from her. I want out of this room. I don’t want to see what happens next, because by the sounds of it, it’ll be any minute. And as the image of Emily-Rose comes to my mind, I can’t help but hope that it’s excruciating for Jessica. Emily is gone, and Jessica is still here. The world is a fucked-up, twisted, backwards place.

  I hear footsteps, but I don’t turn to look until the hard edge of Ashley’s gun is digging into my spine.

  “I didn’t say you could leave,” she says.

  “I didn’t say I was going to stay, yet here we are, right?” I reply.

  “Can you help her?” Ashley asks as Jessica’s wails of pain rise and echo around the small room. I look over at Steve, who’s staring in horror. Some of the other Forgotten members have come into the room too—Mike, Shane, and another face that has haunted my dreams for the past few months, but I look away from them all. Ignoring the screaming of Jessica, and the fear and horror on everyone’s faces.

  “Can you help her?” Ashley yells louder.

  I shake my head but still don’t turn around. “No, no one can help her now. She brought this on herself, and now the reaper has come for his payment.”

  Jessica’s screams rise louder and I squeeze my eyes closed, wanting it to stop. All of it.

  “There must be something we can do,” Ashely says, sounded genuinely concerned.

  I turn around to look at her, taking in her ashen face and the look of disgust she’s giving me. I shake my head again.

  “You can look at me like that all you want. This was her doing, not mine.” My gaze falls on Jessica. She’s on her side, her arms wrapped around her middle. Michael is talking to her and wiping her hair back from her face as she stares up at him in agony.

  “Do something for her!” he yells to Ashley. “She’s fucking dying over here.”

  Blood is pouring from between Jessica’s legs and she’s holding one hand between them, as if to hold back whatever is coming. I still feel no sympathy. Instead, Mikey’s words are ringing in my ears.

  She’s gone, Nina. Emily is dead.

  “The only thing that you can do for her is put her out of her misery,” I say, feeling traitorous to Emily.

  No one had been able to help Emily, to put her out of her misery as she was eaten alive. As the man she loved devoured her. She had suffered at his hands, and I hadn’t been there to protect her. I realize that I hate myself as much as I hate Jessica—blaming both of us, and not just her. Perhaps that’s the real reason I sacrificed myself to the Forgotten: I want to die. To take that as my punishment for leaving Emily behind.

  Jessica’s scream rips through the air and Ashley’s gaze is fixed on mine. I watch her make a decision—the grit of her teeth and clench of her jaw before she turns around, takes two steps forward, and shoots Jessica through the head, killing her instantly. Her screams are silenced immediately, but it isn’t that simple. Not really.

  With her screams abruptly cut off, the tearing of her flesh as the deader baby rips through her, making its way into the big wide world, is more than audible. Michael falls on his ass in his haste to get away from it as it bursts from between her legs in a spurt of blood and gore. Its mewling and gargled growls are loud in the shocked silence it has created of its audience.

  It turns its head to look at Michael, its small, deformed arms and legs writhing on its tiny, devilish body. Behind me someone is retching, in front of me Ashley is silent, and inside of me, a small piece has just died.

  Ashley raises her hand, but it’s shaking so much that the shot she fires misses and bounces off the floor. She fires again, but that one misses too. She takes a step forward, and I silently pray that she won’t miss this time, because I’m not sure how much longer I can stand here watching this nightmare. Her finger is on the trigger, but her arm is still shaking.

  I think of Hilary, of the injustice of what happened to her. And I think about Emily, her death forever on my conscience. And then I think about life, and how fucking unfair it is for everyone. We shouldn’t have to live like this, but we do. I don’t want to be the cruel person that I can feel myself becoming. It’s not what Emily would have wanted.

  I step forward, closer to Ashley. “Let me,” I say, my words barely audible, but she hears me all the same. “Let me do this for her.”

  I still hate Jessica, but somehow I get it now—here as she lies dead, and her monster baby writhing on the bloody ground between her thighs. I get it. For Jessica, the baby had meant hope. Hope of a future. Hope of something better. Hope that gave her something to live for, something to fight for. I don’t have that now; not now that Emily is gone. She had been my reason for existing, for pushing forward when everything seemed lost.

  I hate Jessica because she made me lose everything, but I also understand why she felt the need to have a baby by any means necessary. Besides, everything happens for a reason. Without Jessica getting knocked up with deader semen, we wouldn’t have looked for Hilary and Deacon. We prevented many deaths. We put that entire family out of their misery. There was some justice to all of this. And this story ends now, with Jessica.

  “Please, let me do this,” I say again.

  I hadn’t been strong enough to do it for Hilary; Nova had done it. But I’m strong enough, and hard enough, to do it for Jessica. For myself.

  Ashley hands me her gun, but pulls out another one from her hip and aims it at me. I can’t blame her. It isn’t the normal thing to hand a gun to your prisoner to kill a zombie baby.

  I take the gun, still warm from her grip, and I step closer to the baby before kneeling down behind it. Michael hasn’t taken his gaze off of it until now. And he scoots backwards until his back hits the wall behind him as I aim the gun at the back of its head. My hand isn’t shaking, but I’m not at ease with what I’m doing either. It is, however, necessary.

  The baby continues to squirm in the gore around it, its deformed arms and legs writhing amongst the mess. It must sense me behind it, because it starts to turn toward me, so I squeeze the trigger before I have to look it in the eye. Its brain explodes in a flurry of pink and gray brain matter that escapes out the front of its head.

  I sit back on my haunches, feeling numb and barely registering as Steve takes the gun from my hands. The room is silent, revulsion rolling off all of us.

  I’m not sure how long I sit there before I feel someone’s hand on my shoulder. When I look up I see that it’s Ashley. Her expression is hard again. The soft misery which encapsulated her only a few minutes before is gone, and now she’s all business again.

  “We need to talk,” she says.

  “I won’t tell you where he is,” I reply, my words coming out broken.

  “I know,” she says in return. Her gaze falls to the bloody mess in front of us. “I know.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “So, what now?” I say, my gaze on my hands in my lap.

  We’ve all retreated away from the baby death room and are back under the glass globe ceiling. Turns out that’s wher
e Mattie’s been all along. They didn’t kill him, but they did beat the crap out of him for information. He looks in pain and seriously pissed off, but his wounds are being tended to by a cute-looking brunette, so I’m certain he’ll be all right. My face and body are aching from the beating I took, but it’s nothing compared to the heavy heart I have, so I quietly refuse any offer of help. Mike and Steve still have guns at their hips, but they aren’t aimed at me and Michael, which is always great.

  “What now?” Ashely repeats my question back to me and I look up. She’s looking up at the blue sky beyond the glass. “I’m not entirely sure. Things can’t go on like this,” she says, and I nod in agreement. “That was…the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen.” She looks back at me and I nod again. “You’ve seen this before?” she asks, her face pinched in revulsion and confusion.

  “Yes. There was a compound that was testing on people. They impregnated a woman there, for whatever fucked-up reason. It ended the same way as this.” I swallow, feeling sick as I think of that place. I don’t mention that Michael knew anything about it, and when I glance over at him, I see him watching me, his gaze full of gratefulness.

  “We need to take that place down,” Ashely snarls, anger leaking into her. “We can’t let this happen again.”

  “It’s already gone. Everyone was dead by the time I found it.” My thoughts coil around the memory of the deader with green sludge leaking from its brain. It’s something I had forgotten about until now. What did it mean, I wondered. Is there some type of new deader out there? What capabilities does it have? Is it stronger? Faster? Or was it just coincidence? “But there may be more places like that.”

  “Okay, so we’ll find them,” Ashley replies. “We’ll find them and end whatever it is that they’re doing. Everyone deserves to die for doing that…” Her words trail off into nothingness, but when they come back they’re filled with rage. “What is wrong with people?” she yells.

  I sit up straight, not having the answers she’s looking for.

  “Is there not enough death and horror in the world without people doing this to each other?” She pushes her chair back as she stands up, and it flips and falls over. “I just don’t get it!” she yells, cracking her knuckles and coming around from the back of the desk.

  “You’re not much different,” I reply, my voice even and steady as I wait for a bullet to enter my brain. “The things the Forgotten have done to others…you’re just as bad.”

  Ashely glares at me, her mouth twisting in anger. “We’re nothing li—”

  “You’re every bit as bad as those scientists, only you know the outcome of the things you do. You shoot someone, you kill them. You torture them, you break them. You tear families apart and you chase people until they have nowhere left to run to. You are every bit as bad,” I grit out. And damn it feels good to finally say it. To have someone to say it to. It isn’t that Ashley isn’t as scary as Fallon was, or that I don’t believe she would kill me in a heartbeat; it’s that I know I have to say these things now or die with them bottled up inside of me.

  Ashely opens her mouth to respond, but then she closes it again and looks around at her fellow Forgotten members as they watch this entire thing unfold. They’re followers, just like she had been. And they had followed their leader through hell so they could survive. They had obviously felt that they owed him something for protecting them and keeping them safe. But he’s gone now, and maybe they can start again.

  “Those people behind the walls, they are not protected. They are tortured, and starved. They are beaten, and raped. And all in the name of survival.” I stand up and take a step toward her.

  Mike pulls out his gun, his expression determined, but Ashley holds up a hand to tell him to stop, and I take that as my cue to carry on.

  “These people are you, and me, and every other survivor out there. They are not your enemy, they’re the victims. The true enemies are the undead, and they are winning this war. Things happened at that compound where the experiments were taking place. I saw things, and I don’t know the outcome of them yet, but I have a feeling that whatever they created there is worse than what we’ve seen before.” I turn to look at the group of Forgotten members, and to Michael and Mattie. “We’re all going to die if we don’t stop this,” I plead, my voice breaking.

  Do I want to die? Yes.

  Am I tired of fighting, and of the death that surrounds me at every turn? Yes.

  But am I ready to give up on this world, on the few survivors that are left? Do I truly believe that we’re all as bad as the rulers from behind the walls? That there’s no coming back from it? No changing for the better?

  A leopard doesn’t change its spots. That’s how that old saying goes.

  But could mankind?

  The Forgotten are whispering between themselves, their gazes moving to Ashley as she thinks over what I just said. And God do I hope I’ve said enough. I get that she hates me for killing Fallon. And maybe that’ll be my exit from this world. I’ll take that with my chin held high, as long as it means they stop fighting against the friends I have left. As long as they try to help people instead of killing them.

  Because I’m not lying—it doesn’t have to be like this. We can help people. We can build something together and protect instead of murder and maim. We can make life worth living once more. And isn’t that we all want in the end? To live. To survive. Those are our most basic instincts, and everything else is just irrelevant bullshit.

  I turn back to Ashley, seeing her gaze move over the crowd of Forgotten and then to me. I don’t wait with bated breath or worry for my own life, because this is it now. It’s this or nothing.

  “You have to be punished for killing Fallon,” she says.

  I roll my eyes. “Haven’t we all been punished enough? I killed Fallon, and you killed Melanie. We killed one of yours and you killed one of ours. This isn’t tit for tat, Ashley, this is life or death. And if you’re so easy to dish out the death card, then what gives you the right to have the life card in your hand?”

  The corner of her mouth tugs. “He used to say that,” she says. “That this life was all about tit for tat. And now here you are telling me the exact opposite. It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

  I shake my head. “Not really. It’s just basic human nature. We’re all made from the same skin and bone, and we all want to survive. And we can. You just have to let it happen. Become more than he was. Be better.”

  I want to sit down. I’m suddenly so tired of all of this, I would happily welcome a gun to the back of the head so I could sleep forever. I long to go back in time and remember fully what life was like worrying about bills and paychecks. When my main concern was if Ben had fixed the back gate or not. And yet here I am, arguing for her to let us all live. To use her group for good and not bad. It’s just too much.

  I look down at my feet, my forehead pinched in frustration.

  “Okay,” she finally says. “You’re right.”

  I look up at her. She isn’t smiling, but she’s relenting. She looks over at her group, nodding as she thinks over what’s going on in her own mind, nodding as she agrees with whatever those thoughts are.

  “She’s right, though I don’t like to admit it. Maybe Fallon was wrong.”

  The group begins to whisper loudly amongst themselves. Some look happy about where her reasoning is going, and that gives me hope. Others look seriously annoyed by it. And I have my eye on one particular man.

  Ashley holds up her hands and hushes everyone. “We started this group because we wanted to survive, because we were the forgotten ones. Left behind to die. And we were angry.” She shakes her head. “And we had every reason to be angry for that fact. Well, there are others out there that are in the same situation as we once were. The people behind the walls are just some of them. We looked on them as though they were the enemy, but this isn’t the first time that I’ve heard the exact opposite. What if Fallon lied to us all this time? What if his own jealousy and madness
convinced us that these innocent people were the enemy when really the enemy had been living with us all this time?”

  Ashley walks around the room, looking at the faces of her people. The Forgotten, always so angry and bloodthirsty, so ready for revenge, now look solemn and confused. I look at Michael and Mattie, who are watching me appreciatively. I give them a small smile.

  “Let’s do something different. What have we got to lose?” Ashley says, and voices rise from the Forgotten in agreement. “Let’s stop the mindless killing and instead try living. I know that I’ve seen enough death since this all began. Haven’t you?”

  They all cheer again, and my heart swells at the realization of what this could mean.

  No more running.

  No more hiding.

  We could help those people behind the walls. Save them from the brutal dictatorship.

  I just need to find Mikey.

  Ashley turns back to me, a small smile on her face. And damn she looks like a huge weight has been lifted off of her shoulders. Like the hardness of her responsibility—of the anger that Fallon had made her live with, had been pulling her down and aging her. “That good enough for you?” she asks.

  I look out on the faces of the Forgotten, over the men and women that had stood by Fallon and done as he asked no matter what the consequences. I forgive them. I have to, because if I don’t, this will never end.

  There’s just one thing I have to do before I finally let it all go—the hate and the anger and the rage that have fueled me since they captured and tortured me all those months ago. One thing, that might disrupt this entire plan, yet I can’t move on unless I do it.

  I look at Ashley, stepping close enough so that we’re face to face. I smile, knowing that I still have a thin scar at the corner of my mouth where Fallon had cut me that very first time I met him. Knowing that all of this happened because of him. Ashley smiles wider and holds her hand out to me, and I reach out to shake it, but at the last moment I grab her gun. She jerks back but it’s too late, and her eyes go wide.