The Dead Saga (Book 3): Odium III

by Claire C. Riley

  I stopped biting my nails, noticing that they were shorter than they had been in a while. It was something that Nina had hated, too, and I’d tried to stop doing it. I guess since we weren’t together anymore, I had restarted that old habit.

  “You chew ridiculously noisily. It’s like listening to a pack of wild animals eating a rotting carcass.”

  “A rotting carcass?” I said without humor.

  Melanie mimicked what I think was supposed to be me eating, and I huffed out my annoyance and turned away from her, listening to her bitter laugh.

  I grabbed my knife from my waist, my nostrils flaring, and began sharpening it in an effort to stem my irritation. It wasn’t working.

  “I hate that noise. It’s annoying. Just like you.”

  I gritted my teeth and continued to scrape the blade against the rock over and over, intentionally being as loud as possible. I was a people person—everyone liked me. But not this bitch.

  I had no idea why she disliked me so much. Granted, she hated everyone, but she had a particular distaste for me that she, for some reason, felt the need to vocalize.

  “And I also hate—”

  “All right! Enough, Melanie,” Michael barked out. “We get it: you hate him.”

  Melanie huffed. “I hate you too, pretty boy, don’t think you’re any different.” She closed her mouth, silencing her latest insult, and I stifled my laugh.

  Michael had been more of a broody asshole on this scavenge trip also. He had barely said a handful of words to either Melanie or me for the whole day. Something had gotten up his ass recently, but I didn’t know what. At first I had thought that it was because he felt awkward about me coming on this trip, considering I had thought he and Nina had had a thing while on their trip. But after first night confrontations I had learned that that wasn’t the case. In fact, he had laughed at the mere suggestion of it.

  “That bitch?” He had barked out a deep laugh that made me want to permanently make it so he could never laugh at another thing again. “No, man, just no. She’s a special kind of crazy just for you. Besides, she hates my guts. I mean, really hates my guts.” He held up his hands in mock defense, though the cut in his eyebrow that I’d just put there proved he shouldn’t have been mocking me.

  I didn’t know what to think about that. Nina had refuted my claims that she and Michael had had a thing, but I hadn’t believed her. I knew she had been keeping something from me and I had jumped to a conclusion—the wrong conclusion. I had used my own moral standards on what could have been wrong instead of seeing the woman that she was. I was a cheating bastard, always had been—except with her. I had assumed that she was the same as me, with no moral compass, but she wasn’t. She was better than me. She always had been.

  As the days had gone on, I had felt shittier and shittier for the way I had spoken to her and the things I had accused her of. The image of hurt flashing across her features right before she slapped the shit out of me was one I couldn’t forget. Yet my own stubbornness had me keeping my distance from her and treating her like an asshole to make sure she never wanted me back. She deserved better than me. I was just a street thief, someone who had killed hundreds of innocent people in one of the walled cities. I was scum. I was worse than scum—I was the shit that came out of scum.

  I ran a hand along my scruffy beard, wondering if scum actually did shit.

  “I hate it when you scrub your beard like that.”

  Melanie’s irritated voice interrupted my thoughts, and a growl of annoyance left me before I could stop it. Up until now I had managed to nearly always ignore her pissy words and continuous bitching, when really what I wanted to do was put a knife to her throat. But I hadn’t. Because my silence annoyed her more. Now I had risen to her bait and I could hear the satisfaction in her laugh.

  “And I hate growling. You’re not a dog, are you, Mikey?” She laughed without humor.

  Anger built in my stomach, low and throbbing, and I breathed through it, struggling to keep ahold of my temper. I would not give in and give her the satisfaction of a response. But damn this bitch to hell. I had never hit a woman before, but at this point I had no problem with killing one. Besides, the jury was still out on if she was a woman or not. She was more like the spawn of Satan, and I had read once that they were hermaphrodites.

  “I need to piss,” I said instead, looking past Melanie toward Michael.

  Her smug grin fell when she saw she wasn’t getting under my skin—at least she thought she wasn’t.

  “Pull over.”

  “We can’t stop here, we’re coming up to the road of the damned. Those crazy bastards will kill you in a blink of an eye,” Michael said seriously.

  “‘The road of the damned!’” I said over-dramatically. “Sounds serious.”

  “It is. They don’t screw around. The last trip I took, they threw a woman in front of the truck to get us to stop.”

  I turned in my seat to look at Michael, but he didn’t return my stare. “And we use this road because?” I prompted. Because clearly it was insane to keep traveling the same road that could get you killed. It was like making the same mistake over and over again, without learning anything from it.

  “Because it’s either this road or a twenty-mile detour to where we need to go,” Melanie replied with a roll of her eyes, like I was the dumbest asshole to ever walk the planet.

  “Here we go,” Michael said. “Guns at the ready. And remember, we do not stop for anything.”

  I lifted my gun from my lap and stared out the window, seeing nothing but trees. The air was tense in the truck, but I couldn’t see what they were afraid of. I looked back to Michael and Melanie, noting that they both were indeed looking quite worried, and I tried to have the same emotion about all of this. But for the most part, there seemed nothing to fear.

  A small bang hit the roof of the truck and I flinched and raised my gun up to the ceiling. Another one hit shortly after, and a large rock rolled down the windshield and onto the hood.

  “What the hell?” I mumbled.

  “They’re above us, Michael, get us out of here!” Melanie yelled as what sounded like a hundred angry fists began barraging the roof of the truck.

  A rock hit the center of the glass, a large crack forming, and I prayed that it wouldn’t implode on us. Michael had sped up, and I wound my window down and looked out and up, seeing that, sure enough, people were indeed in the trees, their arms laden down with rocks that continued to throw down on us. A heavy rock narrowly missed my head and I ducked back inside.

  It was too dangerous to try and shoot them down, as rock after rock hit the truck, denting it and almost smashing the glass. Cars were rusting at the side of the road and I briefly wondered if these were the vehicles of past victims.

  “Hold on,” Michael yelled, as if knowing something we didn’t.

  Seconds later, what could only be described as a small boulder landed on the hood of the truck, and steam hissed up around the impact mark. If that did serious damage to the engine, we were royally screwed.

  Michael didn’t stop, he didn’t slow, and he didn’t bother to shoot at anything or anyone. He drove like a madman to get us the hell out of there, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the extra twenty miles to get to our location would be worth it. Because this was madness.

  The anger I felt as we passed them intensified as I realized what Nina had already gone through to not only get to the mall, but also get back from it. Shit, it was no wonder that she was quiet when she came back. No wonder she had seemed a little colder, a little emptier. I had accused her of cheating, when she’d only been disturbed by what she had seen.

  Sometimes it was easy to forget that she had been in a walled city, protected—if you could call it that—from the horrors of this world. Her harshness, her meanness, was a perfect shield to deflect anyone from trying to hurt her again. Yet I knew I had done it—hurt her. I was an asshole. A total fucking asshole.

  TWENTY.

  Rotting zombies
littered the mall parking lot—both alive and dead, though thankfully most seemed to be finally dead. We drove up to the access entrance around back, and Michael and I climbed from the truck, taking out the few zombies that were milling around the fence as if they were waiting for it to open so they could go to work. We pulled the fence out of the way, allowing Melanie to drive the truck through the opening, and we pulled it back closed behind her.

  She shut the engine off and jumped out, her typical “keep the hell away from me” expression firmly planted on her bitchy little face.

  “So, we piled a lot of the gear that we couldn’t take with us last time right by the entrance. But it’s still worth investigating other places,” Michael said seriously, walking toward the employee entrance. “This place was hardly touched, so there’s a lot of useful stuff.”

  “Dead inside?” Melanie asked, pulling out two guns.

  “Not anymore. There was a large group of them, but we got rid of them last time.” Michael looked at us both with a serious frown. “That being said, keep alert. There could be some trapped. I had one stumble out of a changing room last time.” He shook his head. “Scared the crap out of me.” He had the decency to smirk at that.

  Michael was supposed to be the tough guy of the group—at least that was the image he liked to project to everyone: moody, broody, and untouchable—so it was nice to see a little humility from him.

  “We’re staying tonight, right?” I replied, following him as he made his way to the door.

  “Yeah, no point heading back now, we’ll be traveling in the dark. No sense in that. Shits dangerous enough out there.”

  “Good, I’m ready for some food and shut-eye now,” I replied, rolling out my shoulders. My back was aching after being trapped in that truck for so many hours, my ears ringing from Melanie’s shrill voice.

  “Stop being such a Polly pissy pants,” Melanie snapped, and stomped past me and Michael, her shoulder barging against mine. “There’s no real men in this world anymore.”

  I had taken one step toward her retreating back, raising my knife, when Michael placed a hand on my chest.

  “Don’t give her the satisfaction,” he said, and moved past me.

  I knew he was right and I breathed out a heavy breath and followed them both to the door.

  “No one else has been here since last time,” I noted with a frown. “Do you think that’s weird? I think it is.”

  Michael looked around, but I couldn’t tell if he was frowning more than usual or just the same. His face generally just looked pissed off and irritated.

  “No one had been here before us either,” he noted. But his voice held some concern.

  Melanie rolled her eyes. “There just aren’t a lot of people left anymore,” she said dramatically.

  I thought to the group at the roadside, the desperate measures they went to in order to steal people’s belongings. They murdered their own people, as well as others, for that crap. If there were places like this left untouched out there, then why did they go to the effort and loss and not just come here? It made no sense—unless there was more to them than we’d originally thought.

  I stared hard at Michael, pouring my worries into him. He seemed to be thinking the same thing, but it was something we would have to consider some other time, when we weren’t right out in the open like this.

  The door had been held closed with piles of bricks, the lock clearly busted out, and we moved the rubble out of the way and made our way inside. It was quiet, the darkness oppressing as we made our way down a long corridor without windows. I was tense; the journey had been long and hard, thanks to Melanie’s constant bitching and my own demons eating away at me. My katana was held firm in my grip as we came to the end of the first corridor and took a right, pushing open large double doors that led into the heart of the mall.

  The roof was a dome made of glass, and the sunlight streamed in. The glass was all still intact, keeping the entire place airtight. Though cold in there, it was warmer than outside, and in the summer months, I bet it would be downright cozy.

  The air was still and silent, and I looked around with another frown. Melanie moved straight off out into the open, a handgun in either palm. She cocked her head both left and right before she moved off to the left, passing the pile of gear that had been pre-gathered when Nina had been here. I took off to the right, still wary, but feeling more relaxed now with sunlight streaming in.

  There was something about the dark in an apocalypse that freaked me out. Hell, it freaked everyone out. I had never been afraid of the dark, not even as a kid. All those times my father had locked me under the stairs for getting into trouble at school had taught me that there was nothing to fear in the dark but yourself. But after the apocalypse, there actually was something to fear in the dark: zombies. Those mean bastards thrived in the dark, and one wrong move could get you killed.

  Everyone was afraid of the dark these days. The dark released its nightmares upon you.

  Michael said this place should have been completely clear, but to be careful—and I couldn’t agree more. I had seen it happen one too many times: a zombie hidden away and taking everyone by surprise, turning a whole group before you could even blink. That wasn’t going to happen to me. If I was going to die, it was going to be somehow heroic. I had messed up every part of my life so far, and everyone else’s that I had touched; the least I could do was die doing something right. Maybe if I died being the man my father had said I could never be, just maybe it would make up for everything I had screwed up.

  I carefully made my way from one end of the mall to the other, passing shops filled with useless items that held no meaning in this world anymore. It was hard to believe that this used to be what made the world go ’round—money and the crap you bought with it. I had never worked retail, but I had a girlfriend who once worked in a clothes store in one of these big malls. She had loved the staff discount, but hated the pretentious assholes she had to serve all day. People that looked down their noses at her because they could afford the latest trends and she couldn’t. People that stayed in five-thousand-dollar-a-night hotels and ate caviar like it was going out of fashion. People that thought they were better than everyone else. I’d hated people like that, which was how my hatred for the rich had begun. The stories that she had told me each day—how they had sneered at her or spoken down to her and there hadn’t been a damn thing I could do about it—that’s the part that frustrated me the most. I had been out of work at the time, scouting the jobs section every day, pounding the pavement, but there was nothing out there. And it killed me. I had wanted to tell her to tell them to stick their jobs up their fat asses, and that we didn’t need their money, but we depended on her salary to live.

  One day a rich woman wearing a fur coat and a diamond necklace got caught shoplifting by my girlfriend. My girlfriend had told me how she had seen her shoving a silk scarf into her handbag, and when confronted about it, the woman had kicked up such a fuss that she had to be dragged into a back room. Apparently she had been one of the store’s best customers, and they didn’t want to lose her business. They’d let her off for her theft, and my girlfriend had lost her job for embarrassing the customer. The thing that pissed me off the most was the thought that this stupid rich bitch could’ve afford whatever the hell she’d wanted. She didn’t need to steal; she’d chosen to.

  It had been the end of our relationship, and my girlfriend had moved back in with her parents a month later, leaving me with a large rent bill. I’d hated rich people even more from that day forward. They had ruined my life one way or another for as far back as I could remember.

  I passed a jewelers and couldn’t stop myself from looking inside. It was, after all, part of my nature: I was a thief—or at least I had been at one time—and a damn good one too. I had started out working jewelers like this, stealing five-thousand-dollar watches and diamond necklaces from people as they left the stores, hoping that one day, one of the women I’d stolen from would be the on
e that had ruined my life. It was like getting my revenge for what had happened to me and my ex. As my skills grew and my name moved among the underground, I had quickly moved on to actually breaking in and taking things myself. It saved time, and besides, I was damn good at it.

  Surely it would be criminal to ignore such a skill.

  Like a magpie, my eyes instantly landed on all the feminine jewelry—diamond tennis bracelets, pearl necklaces, and emerald earrings, each of them worth more than an average blue-collar worker had earned in a year. There was nothing more attractive than seeing a woman naked, barring a diamond necklace draped between a set of heavy breasts. Nina would look beautiful in something like this, but there was not a chance she’d wear it. Maybe before the infection she would have loved such an item, but not now. Shaking free from my memories, I went on back to find the others.

  I found Melanie inside an outdoor goods store, where she was trying on various boots. I looked down at my own boots, deciding a new pair was a good idea. My current ones were a mess—old and a size too small. It would be good to find boots that fit me for a change.

  Melanie huffed, mumbling something incoherent under her breath, and I turned to frown at her.

  She looked up at me with a scowl. “Is there a problem?”

  I chuckled at her bitchiness and shrugged. I had to give it her: her insults were creative. And I would have told her so if I thought she’d accept the compliment. I turned back to the rows of mismatched boots and ignored her grumbling. They didn’t have the ones I wanted in my size, so I went to the back of the store and headed into the stockroom in the hopes of finding some there. The door had been busted in some time ago, the handle swinging uselessly, giving me the impression that the living had been here at one time or another.

  It was dark with no lights on, and I propped the door open and began rummaging through shelves and shelves of boxes until I found the ones I wanted in the right size and carried them back into the main store where there was some light. I sat down, dragging my old stinking boots off my feet. They smelled so bad, even I grimaced and I threw them as far away from me as I could get them.