by Laken Cane
Chapter Twenty
When I finally left the bathroom and walked into the kitchen, they were sitting at the table waiting for me.
“Sit,” Richard said, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. He frowned at me. “Unless you need to go lie down.”
I slid into a chair. “I’m fine.” I shoved my hair behind my ear. “I’m glad you’re okay, Caleb.”
He nodded, but didn’t meet my gaze. Maybe he was unhappy with me running away instead of trying to find him.
I couldn’t blame him for that.
I clasped my hands and stared down at them, and tiny tendrils of shame snaked through my belly. Being part of a group meant taking care of that group. How many times had Lila helped me?
Caleb was paler than usual. Nearly every inch of his face was bruised or cut. They’d beaten him. Who knew what else they’d done? I wasn’t going to ask.
“Caleb said the gods kept him isolated from the other prisoners—probably because they had no time to deal with him. He heard things.” Richard gave Caleb a nod. “Continue.”
“Here’s what I think,” Caleb said. “The gods rule. The lesser mutants—what we call scouts and orphans—are like the gods’ children, and are pretty much treated that way. The gods aren’t nice parents. I saw a god strip the flesh from a mutant who, from what I heard, had eaten humans without permission.”
I’d been hiding in a tree with Sage when that had happened. I squeezed my hands and listened. We needed to learn everything we could about the mutants. That was how we’d defeat them.
Not mutants.
Vampires.
I frowned as a dim memory slithered through my mind. When I was bitten, had one of the mutants said they were vampires? Was I imagining things?
I couldn’t remember.
“I think when they first arrived they were messed up,” Caleb continued. “Confused. They weren’t as strong as they are now. Over the last two years, they’ve gotten stronger, smarter, and are relearning what they are. And I think they’ll keep growing.”
“Why would you think that?” I asked him. “Did they sit around their bonfires telling stories?”
He and the others stared at me.
“What’s wrong with you?” Lila asked. “He’s just telling you what he thinks.”
“Because what he thinks means nothing. We need to know for sure. If he’s guessing, then he’s probably wrong and we don’t need wrong. We need facts.”
“Your guilt is making you angry,” Richard said. “And we don’t have time to coddle you. Let it go and listen to him.”
“Yeah,” Lila chimed in. “He was there. He knows shit.”
They were right. “Sorry.” I paused. “Caleb, I’m sorry.”
“You tried,” he said. “Right?”
I nodded.
“Okay then.” He flashed me a grin, grotesque and eerie in his battered face. He looked at Richard. “We know—you know—that a mutant can bite a human and turn him or her into something…like them.”
Richard flinched, then nodded. “Even worse.”
What happened to you, Richard? What did you see? I wondered about his past, but again, it wasn’t something I could ask. Especially not then.
“Here’s what I saw,” Caleb said. “Orphans dragged a half dead human before the leader of the cluster. This god was a big man named…” He shook his head. “Some strange name, I can’t remember, exactly.”
“Kroog,” I said. “His name is Kroog.”
“Yes! Maybe…” But he frowned, thinking. “It seemed like they called him something else, too.”
“Master?” Lila asked.
“Sure. But something else. Maybe a last name or—”
“It doesn’t fucking matter.” Richard rubbed his face. “What did they do to the human, Caleb?”
Caleb glanced at Richard. “Yeah, sorry.” And he grinned.
At that moment, I understood something about Caleb. He was insane. His time in the cluster had made it harder for him to hide.
The madness darted through his eyes like long, fast worms, rushing to drill through his brain. His insanity was hard for me to grasp. He appeared so normal. But I felt it.
I felt it.
And that wasn’t right.
I inched my hand toward my neck and caressed the bandage, my thoughts on the bite. What the hell had it done to me?
Was Caleb right? Was Richard right?
Was I becoming worse than a mutant?
“Teagan?”
I focused on Richard, immediately dropping my hand.
Lila pushed her chair back and strode to the cabinet above the microwave. “Catch,” she told me, and tossed me a bottle of aspirin. “Take a few of those. They’ll help with the pain.”
Her face was carefully blank.
I opened the bottle and shook the tablets out into my hand, then dry swallowed them. “Thanks.”
“Anyway,” Caleb said, impatiently, “the god didn’t bite the human. He took a blade and cut the man’s wrist. Then he licked the blood from the wound, and closed his eyes, thinking about it. The mutants were jumping up and down like they couldn’t wait to hear what he’d say.”
“What’d he say?” Lila asked.
“He said the human was food. As soon as he said that, he pulled the injured man to him and began to…”
“What?” I asked, breath held.
“He sank his teeth into the man’s throat and he drank his blood.” Caleb’s voice was suddenly sober, and a thrill of fear ran through it. “They can’t change everyone by biting them. They taste them first to find out.”
“Vampires,” I whispered. “They’re not like vampires. They are vampires.” I pushed my hand into my stomach as it began to burn.
“Not mutants?” Lila looked at Richard, confused. “They’re not mutants? They’re not aliens from a different planet?” Her voice rose with each word. “You said—”
Richard slammed his chair back so hard it turned over and crashed to the floor. “What’s the fucking difference,” he yelled. “Vampires or aliens. Do you want to know what the real mutant is? Do you?”
His eyes were wide and wild, and I shrank back against my chair.
“Richard—” Lila started, but he interrupted her.
“The real mutants are the humans turned by these motherfuckers.” He nodded, quickly, and pointed at me. Unintentionally, I hoped. “That’s the truth of it. The gods are not the mutants. Their underlings are not the mutants. The turned humans are.”
Caleb put his fist to his mouth and tried unsuccessfully to stifle his glee.
“Shit,” I whispered. Slowly, carefully, I began to slide from my chair. I needed to get away from the group of crazy surrounding me before it was too late.
But Richard turned his back and sighed. “I apologize. Caleb, shut up.”
Caleb hushed immediately.
Lila looked at me, but when I met her stare, she looked away.
“We don’t know what they are, really,” Richard said. Once again, he was calm, cold, and dark. “All we have are guesses, as Teagan said.”
I tried to wet my lips but my mouth was too dry.
He shrugged. “I guess they’re close to how we think of vampires. But where’d they go? Where’d they come from? Were they hiding all this time, waiting for the world to end so they could come up from hell and have this shitty place all to themselves?”
“What about how they…turn people?” I had to ask. I could be one of the turned. “You’re saying you think some people can’t be turned, and they use those people as food sources? That’s why they gather the men?”
“What about the women?” Lila asked.
“We know what they’re using the women for,” I told her. “Maybe they don’t want turned humans. Maybe they kill…” Oh God, how close I came to saying, “Us.” “Them,” I finished. “Maybe they immediately kill those humans who can be turned, because those humans are somehow dangerous to them.”
My hands were icy. I stuck them under my shirt and tried
to warm them against my skin, but all that did was make me colder.
I was right. I knew I was right.
And in the end, who knew what I’d become?
A mutant, maybe. I’d become a mutant.
“I don’t think the lesser mutants are able to tell the difference,” Caleb said. “They don’t know the difference between a food source and a human they might turn with their bite. When they’re out, if they bite a human, they have to eat him so he can’t turn.”
“And that takes food from the gods,” Richard said. He sighed. “So it’s forbidden for scouts to bite humans. They bring them to the cluster for testing.”
“Sage told me the gods tested the humans,” I murmured. “Now I know why.”
Caleb nodded. “That’s why the mutant was skinned. He disobeyed and ate some humans.”
“So the mutants can’t survive without us,” Lila said. “That’s why they don’t shoot us or cut our heads off. They want to keep us so they can drink our blood. They really are vampires.”
The children they fathered were them.
The turned humans were their enemies.
And the rest of the humans were just food.
I gave a sudden, quick sob, then stood. “I don’t feel well. I need to lie down.”
They all stared at me.
Lila, with a spark of fear in her eyes, Caleb, with his head tilted, a half smile on his swollen lips, and Richard, soberly.
Did he suspect that I’d been bitten by something much worse than a dog? I didn’t know. The look in his eyes wasn’t really suspicious. It was solemn and tired.
I wanted to scream at them that I was still me, that it was not my fault, that I would not hurt them.
All I could do was whimper and scamper from the room, terrified. Not of them. Of me. Of what was happening to me.
And I hated the mutants—the vampires, the aliens, whatever the fuck they were—with everything I had been, was now, and would ever be.
Hatred consumed me.
But that was better than the terror.
Chapter Twenty-One
Two nights later, I was beginning to feel a little more optimistic. Nothing horrible was happening to me. I hadn’t begun to grow fangs or crave blood or anything else that would suggest I was turning into a…mutant.
What was left of the cluster had disappeared by the time Richard went back to check. He’d informed me that the back room of the supermarket was full of dead pregnant women, but that he saw only three dead men in the wagon. The others had escaped. At least, that’s what I told myself.
Maybe the remaining gods had gone on to join another cluster and reevaluate how they could let a few humans destroy them. Maybe they lurked still, waiting for the right time to strike us.
The air was still not free of mutants or the impact they’d had upon it. Some of the shops and homes still burned—several homes on my old street had succumbed to the spreading fire set by the mutants—and I doubted Crowbridge would ever stop smelling of smoke.
“Why is the town suddenly so full of mutants?” I’d asked.
“The gods seem to send some sort of SOS,” Richard told me. “Groups and stragglers may wander in for months to come.”
“Do you still want to set up a base here?”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “Maybe I’ll keep searching a while longer. Keep hunting mutants.” He hadn’t looked at me. “Supplies in this town have dwindled to nothing. We’ve spent the last two days searching homes and you saw what we found.”
I nodded. Not a lot. Some canned food, some oil, first aid, batteries.
But now the homes were empty and Richard wanted to move on.
What a way to spend a life. Killing sleeping mutants. Destroying gods.
The thought depressed me.
By dinnertime the next evening, I was ready to eat. More than ready. But I was not really ready to leave.
It was my town.
Richard and Caleb and Lila were my new family. If they didn’t kill me, I’d stick with them. I had nothing else.
If I kept the secret of my bite, everything would be okay.
“You seem different,” Caleb said, handing me a bowl of stew. “How are you feeling?”
I inhaled deeply, uncaring that the bowl was nearly hot enough to put blisters on my palms. “I’ve never smelled anything this good,” I said, then took another long sniff.
“I said, you seem different,” Caleb repeated. “How are—”
“I heard you.”
He flashed a grin, then shrugged.
“She’s not talking about it,” Lila said. Then she frowned. “How are you feeling?”
I sighed. “Can I just eat, please?”
She crossed her arms and stared at me.
“Fine.” I placed the bowl on the table with exaggerated care. Richard spooned hot food into his mouth and never once looked up from his bowl.
“In the last couple of weeks, I’ve learned all sorts of new things—you know, like how mutants make human women pregnant—and I sliced and diced a woman who was suffering too much to live.
“I lost a little girl. I found new friends. I snuck into town and walked away from tortured humans without doing a whole lot to help them. I was attacked by mutants, chomped on by a frigging dog…”
I took a deep breath, then thumped my chest. “I’ve lost the little bubble of relative safety that I had here for two years. I’m just now healing from the attack, and I’m weak and still a bit confused. I have no idea what I’m doing. At all.” I lifted my chin. “So if you really want to know, I feel like shit. A big pile of shit. Now will you both please shut up and let me eat my dinner?”
Lila pursed her lips. “You talk too much.”
Caleb laughed. “Leave her alone, Lila.”
I pulled my bowl to me and began eating with as much gusto as Richard. “God, this is good.”
“Richard’s a great cook,” Lila said. “Doesn’t matter what you hand him, he can make something good out of it.” And there was just the tiniest bit of hero worship in her tone.
She believed Richard had made her into something good.
I paused with my fourth spoonful halfway to my mouth. I sat it down, gently, and touched my belly.
“Are you okay?” Caleb asked.
“Funny feeling. It hit me all at once. I guess I’m just full.”
Richard hooked a finger in the rim of my bowl and dragged it across the table. “Don’t want it to go to waste.” And he proceeded to eat the rest of my stew as he fell back into his silence.
Then Caleb said the very thing that I’d been obsessing over. The thing that scared me almost more than losing Sage had scared me.
“The bite of the mutant. We need to talk about that.”
They all looked at me.
I shivered and rubbed my arms. “I wasn’t bitten by a mutant! I was bitten by a dog.”
Richard lifted an eyebrow. “He wasn’t accusing you, Teagan.”
I put my cold hands against my hot cheeks. “I thought…”
He blew a tired breath out and ran his hands over his face. “The bite.”
My stomach tightened and my head began to ache and I was pretty sure I didn’t really want them to tell me. I didn’t want to know.
“You seem different.”
I felt different.
And not just because my beloved sister no longer lived inside my mind. There was something else.
“I’m scared,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to, but what I was thinking slipped through my lips.
“It’s a scary world,” Caleb said. He moved his hand across the table to take my cold fingers in his.
“Have you ever seen a human bitten by a mutant, Teagan?” Richard asked.
“How could she see anything?” Lila asked. “She’s never left this godforsaken town.”
I ignored her and shook my head.
“I have,” he said.
I took a drink of water. “And?”
“Before we found out that
alcohol would kill them,” Caleb said, picking up the story, “we came upon a group of scouts—armed—attacking a small camp of humans. We couldn’t do much. If we used our guns and there were other mutants in the area, we’d all die. If we did nothing…” He dropped his gaze to the table.
“We did nothing,” Richard said, “for a while. We waited and watched as the mutants dragged the humans from their tents and…” He glanced at Lila, who remained strangely silent. “And began to slaughter them. In the end, neither of us could stay hidden. We rushed them, guns in one hand and blades in the other. You know guns don’t kill them. Guns only bring more mutants.”
He fell silent for a few unbearably heavy moments, his gaze distant.
Finally, I could stand the silence no longer. “What happened?”
He met my stare. “One of the victims was alive. Before the mutants could recover from their wounds, I threw him over my shoulder and we got the hell out of there.”
“What happened to the man? He died?”
Richard nodded. “Eventually.”
“How?”
“Richard killed him,” Lila said. She rose from her chair, carried her bowl to the sink, and walked out the back door.
“Why?” I asked them, mystified. “Why did you kill him?”
“Because he was bitten, Teagan, and he lived.” Richard’s voice was soft, but his stare was hard. Very hard. “He was becoming one of them. Worse than one of them.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, nodding. “He was changing.”
I swallowed. “He attacked you?”
“No,” Richard said. “But it was a matter of time. We could see him changing.”
I looked at the door through which Lila had just disappeared. “Why’d she leave?”
“She doesn’t like to relive it,” Caleb said. “The man we killed…”
“Yes?”
“He was her father.”
“Oh, my God.” I put my hand over my chest. “How awful.”
I understood then why Lila had kept my secret.
I knew about guilt. I knew about redemption.
By saving me, she was making up for what had happened to her dad. Yeah, I understood that.
“Lila,” Caleb said. “She’d run away from her camp two days earlier. That’s what saved her. When we found her, she was injured and—”