by Amy Braun
It was kind of hilarious. It literally stepped into open air, pivoted forward, and landed flat on its face with a loud smack. I couldn’t stop the snigger that escaped my lips. Then the corpse started to push itself up. Its face was flattened from the fall, its nose pretty much crushed into its head. That didn’t stop the Plagued from continuing to stand and lumber toward me.
I drew the machete over my shoulder and started walking for it. There was another sudden smack behind me as another Plagued collapsed into the pool. Then another on my left. Another behind me. I was quickly becoming surrounded. I grabbed a knife from my belt, looking for the one that would reach me first.
The sharp, deep twang of a bowstring was barely audible, but I saw the arrow well enough when it flew four inches from my face into the eye of the first Plagued that had fallen into the pool. It dropped instantly, unable to recover from the hole punched in its brain. Too bad three more had collapsed into the pool when I wasn’t paying attention.
Since I still had some distance on them, I turned and kicked out. My foot landed in the stomach of the Plagued on my left, knocking it back so I could take on the other two. I drove my knife into one Plagued’s head, then dragged it around so its friend couldn’t bite me. I reached over the back of my dead meat-shield, and stabbed the machete into the face of the next. There was a wet crunch behind me, like someone just punched their hand through a pumpkin. I snapped my head to the right, watching a Plagued drop like a bag of rocks thanks to the arrow sticking out of its skull. Now that my line of vision was cleared, I could see over the ledge of the pool to the balcony of the building behind me.
The archer locked eyes with me. He dropped his bow unhappily.
“Goddamn it, Avery!” shouted Simon. “You know how long it took me to make that trap?!”
I would have given my brother shit for making more noise to draw the Plagued with, but it was a little late for that. I swung around, driving my heel into the head of a Plagued sneaking to my back. I pinned its skull in place with my boot so I could put my machete through the left side of another Plagued’s skull, and watched it exit the right side. Then I stomped down, and shattered the cranium of the unlucky bastard under me.
“Bitch at me later!” I yelled back. “Get me out of here!”
“You’ve got powers!” Simon retorted. “Use them!”
There had to be a dozen Plagued surrounding me now. They weren’t making much noise, but I could see their rotting, weathered faces and smell the sourness of death coming from their open sores.
“I just walked fifteen miles to find you! Pull your own weight for once!”
Simon’s laugh was bitter and harsh. I couldn’t see him anymore. I didn’t know if he was still shooting arrows into the Plagued, or if he was just watching me shove them around like I was the unfortunate asshole in a zombie mosh pit.
“That’s rich, considering you clammed up halfway through!”
My temper became a lit fuse reaching the powder keg. I could have drained myself with my powers to permanently kill these undead bastards, I could have cut them to ribbons with my blades, or I could have let them bite me and poison themselves. But human bodies were fragile, and I had worn mine out from lack of food, running, fighting, facing a demon, and trudging all the way through two cities to find my brother. I was not in the mood for Simon or his shitty truths.
I punched two Plagued and kicked another, snarling as they reached out to grab me. I knocked down their arms and shoved out my hands, feeling smoky power tear out of my fingertips. I flexed my fingers and stabbed out whips of fume, letting it enter their mouths and work its way into their dead brains. I sent the smoke into their skulls, and gave them a fever of one hundred and seven.
Stretching my power the way I was, I could only infect six of them. Even as their brains started melting and they dropped like flies, I could feel myself weakening. When I finally let go, my vision went dark and I pitched forward. I caught myself before I blacked out, but it didn’t matter when the Plagued dog-piled on top of me.
The weight of so many bodies crushed the air from my lungs. A putrid mix of sour rot and dead blood filled my mouth and nose. Rough, stubby fingers pushed aside my rucksack and blunt teeth dug into my back. The Plagued couldn’t infect me, and I felt them convulsing as my blood poisoned them, but they were too stupid to figure out I was killing them for good. All they tasted was flesh, and they wanted as much as they could get.
I tried to move, to form some smoke, anything to get the undead fuckers off of me, but I couldn’t so much as twitch under all the literal dead weight. I fumbled for my weapons as flesh was pulled from my back. I gritted my teeth as they gnawed on my back, shoulders, and legs. They shivered as they ate me, fighting the venom in my blood for a few more mouthfuls of flesh.
I hated being in a human body. The agony of being eaten alive made it so fucking hard to think. Every time I tried to work up a plan, a Plagued would clamp its teeth into my body, putting down the pressure and pulling until my skin was stretched like a tough elastic band. Agony electrified my brain and stopped me from remembering what I was trying to do.
The only way to get out of here alive was to let go, and not care about how much more power I would lose. I relaxed as much as possible and breathed deeply, letting the black smoke of disease mix with my blood and filter out of my pores. The Plagued started collapsing off of me, poisoned the instant my smoke touched them, with more taking their place. The bastards were oblivious to the venom I was putting in the air. They’d walk through fire to get their dinner.
But then they stopped. I heard the dull thumps of bodies collapsing, though they didn’t sound as heavy as they should have. The last set of Plagued teeth unlatched from my back, and I was finally free. I let go of my power and nearly passed out again when the hurt train arrived. This must have been what going through a meat grinder felt like. There wasn’t an inch of me that didn’t feel like it had been gnawed on. Even though the bites wouldn’t kill or turn me, they still burned and throbbed. Now I was going to have to use the last of my skills to heal myself.
My arms wobbled when I pushed myself up. I slid my knees up to get better leverage. I lifted my head slowly, but still felt some vertigo. I blinked and looked over my shoulder to figure out why I’d escaped becoming a three course meal.
Simon was standing at the far end of the pool, his hands swirling with white smoke. His eyes were black chasms even as he called his power back. Simon was the smallest and least intimidating of all of us, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
He let the white smoke slip back into his skin and sighed. I glanced down at the bodies of the Plagued. Calling them leathery skeletons was now more accurate. When Simon unleashed his smoke, the vapors touched the Plagued and evaporated all their bodily fluids. Blood turned to dust in their veins, the heart, lungs and brain dried out, the spinal fluid turned to sand. The body lost half its weight in a matter of seconds, until the skin became thick parchment and clung to the bones like saran wrap.
Simon saved my life by starving the dead. How convenient.
He blinked as he came back into himself, watching me with an expression that was almost concerned. I focused on standing up. I got to my feet, only to get a head rush and nearly topple over again. Simon took a few quick steps toward me, stopping in his tracks when I swiveled my head to give him a death glare.
“Fuck off,” I growled.
He looked hurt for a second, then glared right back. “I saved your life, asshole.”
“After you let me get turned into a chew toy. Thanks for that, Sime.”
“I didn’t actually think you’d get bitten,” he defended. “Why didn’t you fight them off?”
I whirled fully, staring at Simon with furious, blazing eyes. It was a serious effort to hold in my power and not lash out at him. Given what I was, I could do severe damage to him. I could even kill him.
I wasn’t at that point, but I was getting there.
“Because I haven’t eaten
in three fucking days and walked fifteen fucking miles to get here! And that was after I faced off with some Soulless and fucking Vance!”
My voice could have rattled the walls, but I didn’t think that was why Simon flinched. Vance’s name freaked him out as much as it did when I saw the demonic jerkoff.
“Vance was out there? With Soulless?”
“That’s what I said,” I spat. “And yeah, he’s still Ciaran’s go-to-bruiser-slash-prankster. Know what trick he tried to pull on me? He said that they were looking for souls.”
Simon squinted, not understanding the same way I hadn’t. “But nothing here has a soul. Everyone’s dead, or they’ve given their souls to the demons.” Sure enough, he processed the same thoughts tumbling through my head. “Unless…”
His dark eyes practically popped out of his head.
“Yeah,” I remarked, lowering my voice. “Unless.”
For a long time, Simon did nothing but stare in my direction and think. It gave me the chance to really take in his appearance for the first time since I last saw him. He wore an oversized burgundy hoodie and heavy blue jeans to make himself look bigger than he really was. A camouflage printed compound bow was looped over his back next to a quiver of arrows. In reality, Simon’s human body weighed about a hundred and twenty pounds. He had the height, but not the muscle. His dark brown hair looked like it had been caught in a wind tunnel. Simon was older than me, but he looked like a fourteen year old that never left puberty. The one similarity we had was our eyes. They were the same constantly shifting tone of darkness. Right now, they were the same color as graphite. He was a mixture of nerves and relief, the same way he always was. Simon was always worried about something. But he was still the only brother I sort of got along with.
Simon ran a hand through his shaggy mess of brown hair. “I wasn’t going to let anything happen to you,” he admitted. “You know that, right?”
Damn him. Hearing shit like this kept me from punching him, and reminded me of how alone I’d been. Judging from the sincerely depressed look on his face, I wasn’t the only one feeling it.
But he wasn’t getting off that easily.
“Whatever. How the fuck do we get out of your shooting gallery?”
Simon stepped to the side and let me see the collapsible metal ladder unfurled over the edge of the pool. I grabbed my weapons and stomped over to it, forcing the tough guy act on even though my human body was screaming at me to take it easy.
“You should take it easy,” Simon told me as I started to climb up.
My brother wasn’t a mind reader. He just knew me too well. Just like he knew I’d glare at him once before climbing up the ladder without help. I pulled myself back onto the resort grounds and debated detaching the ladder from where it was planted in the ground by the poolside. I wouldn’t mind leaving Simon trapped in the pool with a bunch of corpses for a timeout.
By the time I made up my mind, Simon was climbing up the ladder. I sighed internally and waited. He was about as graceful as a newborn calf with a whiskey-filled brain, but at least he got to his feet.
Simon stared at me hesitantly, like he didn’t know what to do now that he’d seen me again. Of the four of us, we were the only two that could tolerate each other. Kade had a superiority complex that was only outsized by his arrogance, and Logan was as sociable as a cactus dripping with cyanide. At least Simon and I could stand in front of each other without wanting to depress or kill one another.
He observed the tears in my clothes, the blood and grit on my face, hands, and arms. His graphite eyes sparked nervously.
“How far away was Vance?”
“He jumped me on the highway a few hours ago. He did his disappearing act before I could kill him. I kicked the shit out of his Soulless, so he might be getting new party crashers. I have no clue where he’s going, but something tells me he’s gonna give Ciaran a status update.”
Simon’s eyes flashed again. He was scared. Couldn’t say I blamed him, though I was more worried about the possibility of live humans running around this patch of wasteland. Simon glanced around as the sky continued to darken. Night was always the hardest time of day. We had to find a place to hole up and get as much half sleep as we could, just in case Plagued got hungry, Soulless became restless, and demons wanted to play pranks.
“Let’s get inside,” Simon said. “I’m starving.”
The moment he turned his back and walked away, I couldn’t help it. Simon’s irony never failed to make me smile.
Chapter 3
Living in a fancy resort after the Tribulation wasn’t as luxurious as you might think. Sure, there was no shortage of rooms, if you don’t mind that half of them have rotting bodies in them. Yeah, the views are great, if you like staring at endless amounts of sand. There are tons of supplies and amenities, if you don’t mind that half of them are broken or expired.
Being inside the Ravella made me feel about as glamorous as a five dollar whore that just did a face plant into pig slop.
Simon picked the biggest, most expensive suite in the whole hotel. Made sense to me. It wasn’t like there were creditors to check if his deposit was going to bounce. The suite’s pale yellow walls continued to leech their color. All the photos and frames were covered in dust. The edges of the sofas were fraying and the sides of the tables were scuffed. White sheets were tossed lazily onto the mattress, and the bathroom smelled like mold. Past the tattered curtains, I could see handprints on the windows where someone had been watching the massacres underneath them. There wasn’t any luggage or clothes in the suite, so the handprints must have been from Simon. I wondered how much he had seen while he was living here alone.
While my brother set down his bow and walked into the dining room and started rifling around, I turned from the window, tossed my rucksack onto the floor, and dropped ass first onto the couch. For all its plush appearance, it didn’t feel as comfortable as I expected. Though that could have been because I felt like road kill.
Shifting again, I pulled my machete over my head and set it on the dusty carpet floor. I brought up some black smoke, rubbing it between my fingertips until there was a deep blue glow in the center. Then I pulled down the collar of my shirt and placed my pointed fingers over my heart.
Not everything I touch gets a disease. Sometimes I can take them out of people. I know everything there is to know about human anatomy, and can either fix or break it. I can cure someone’s cancer as easily as I can infect their lungs. I can mend splintered bones or drain their calcium to make them as strong as paper. It just takes a bit of time and finesse. So healing the bites and bruises of my meat-suit wasn’t hard. It would exhaust me, but doing it slowly would keep me from passing out.
I closed my eyes and let the magic flow over my wounds, feeling the skin on my back tightening together and the throbbing pain of my bruises fade away.
After we split up, the first thing I did was try to find a cure for the Plague. I knew the Bosses Upstairs had abandoned us while humans went the way of the dodo, but I figured I could fix all the lives I broke. I mean, it was a virus I created. I knew it inside and out, my motor-skill killing disease with hints of rabies. One bite instantly inflamed the brain, spiking your body temperature until you thought you were melting. The next step was delirium. You assumed everything and everything you saw wanted to kill you, so you acted on self-defense and attacked it first. The harder you fought, the more you pushed your body, the hotter the burn in your muscles. After six hours, you lost the ability to speak and your heart rate jumped to the speed of a hummingbird’s. By then, your insides felt like Mount Vesuvius the day it decided it hated Pompeii. Every inch of you burned and when you threw up, it felt like someone was grabbing your stomach and trying to pull it out of your throat. Your lungs were heavy with tar and your heart tried to escape your chest. Finally, at eight hours, your body gave up. Your brain shut down and your heart stopped working. You dropped where you stood, and it was lights out before you hit the ground.
Four hours later, you got up and started walking around again. I designed the Plague so it would spread like fire in a gasoline soaked forest, but even I was shocked that it moved so quickly. And I sure as hell wasn’t expecting the moral repercussions of it.