by Keri Lake
A helmet covers his head, reminding me of something out of the Greek warrior books my mother used to read to us as children. Cast in iron, it covers his face completely, offering nothing more than holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth.
He hardly looks human.
Recalling the order not to look him in the eye, I lower my gaze, momentarily distracted by his meaty thighs that taper down to muscular calves and long, but sturdy, feet. The boys here are thin and tenuous, and I’ve never seen one so brawny and robust.
Healthy.
Masculine scents linger on the air, sweaty and metallic—ones that hit the back of my throat and water my mouth on instinct. It’s a smell I’ve been conditioned to crave as much as food. One I smell on my uniforms and in my bedsheets, and the weight of it, bearing down on me, is more than I can stand right now. I swallow back the saliva and clear my throat. “Food. For you.”
He steps forward, and in spite of the instruction given to me by Medusa, I step back.
“Don’t move!” Medusa’s whispered voice is more of a raspy croak.
Halting, I keep my eyes glued to the floor, the dishes rattling so hard, the lid comes off the plate on the tray, crashing to the floor where it spins like a wobbly top. Clamping my eyes, I shudder at the clatter it makes.
The tray flies out of my hand, knocked away by a hard force, and my eyelids shoot open to find the manbeast looking right at me. Though I can’t see his expression through the mask, the tight clench of his fists tells me he’s pissed. At me?
Panic bubbles in my chest, and I wonder if he’ll slam that fist square in my face. If I’m lucky it’ll knock me to death before he decides to rape me.
Taking another step toward me, he seems to be approaching with caution, and when the cold metal of his helmet hits my throat, I can practically hear my pulse hammering through my veins. They smell fear. I know that. Some say it’s as much a part of their diet as the dead carcasses they feed on--another rumor. Of course, if their lips are sewn shut, that doesn’t make any sense, I suppose.
I can’t let him know he terrifies me, or it’ll incite him to provoke a steady stream of fear, like an addiction. Lifting my chin, I grind my jaw, waiting for him to finish smelling me. When he pulls away, I do exactly as I’m not supposed to, and look him square in the eyes.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I whisper, but the gulp I swallow back betrays those soft and shallow words.
Before I can so much as blink, a thick palm grips my throat, sending me flying backward, until the concrete wall slams against my spine, shooting lightning bolts behind my shuttered lids. While held just up off the floor, I scratch at his hand that crushes my neck, trying to release the oxygen that lies trapped beneath it. Stars float before my eyes, the urge to breathe tugging at my chest for one sip of air. His eyes don’t so much as blink behind that iron mask, as he watches me suffocate.
“Valdys …” I can hardly push the words past his throttling. “Please.”
He finally blinks and releases my throat.
The floor crashes against my knees when I crumple, coughing and wheezing to catch my breath. I suck the air into my lungs, desperate to replenish the lost oxygen, and cough again.
Valdys retreats back into the shadows of the room, and I steal the opportunity to crawl toward the door.
“Let me … out! Let me out!” I slow my hard panting breaths to keep from passing out and rub my neck where the phantom sensation of his grip still lingers.
The door clicks, and I push up from the floor, not bothering to look at Medusa for fear she might see the elation across my face of knowing I failed.
Once back inside the elevator, Medusa presses the button to the main floor, which is about six stories above where we are, and for the first time in the last three minutes, I can breathe normally again.
She crosses her arms, and in the reflection, I notice a smug sort of smile. “I’ll report back to the doctor with the results.” Perhaps she gets something out of failed interactions. A pat on the back. A turkey leg. Permission to turn something to stone. “He’ll be quite pleased.”
At that, I whip around to face her, all the confusion pouring out through my frown. “Pleased? I failed.”
“On the contrary. You passed with flying colors.”
“What? How the hell do you determine compatibility after what just happened?”
Her brows wing up with the slight cock of her head. “He didn’t kill you.”
Chapter 3
Four years ago
* * *
Intense heat warms my face, and the smoky scent of burnt wood fills my nose. I squint my eyes open against beams of sunlight pouring in from the window, and lift a hand to shield my face. Still heavy with sleep, I raise my head and find Bryani clutching me, while she sleeps beside me. As flashes of the night before filter into the dark haze, my heart pounds a heavy thud of anguish. Dread sinks to the pit of my stomach, and for one moment, I hear the sound of my mother’s scream reverberate through my skull.
My muscles tighten as I gasp. Momma.
I glance up toward the window above me and listen for the clicks and growls of the Ragers, but all I hear is the deceptive happy chirping of birds. There’s a need for me to stay right here with Bryani, but staying anywhere too long is dangerous. We also need food and water.
It’s better to travel at night, when it’s cooler, but that’s also when the Rager’s are most active. The day is when they seem to move slower, their bodies just as prone to the heat as ours.
With a light shake to her arm, I wake Bryani.
Her brows pinch to a frown, just before her eyes shoot open, and she jolts upright. “Momma!” As though momentarily disoriented, she looks around.
There’s an emptiness on the air, a thick, suffocating cloud of anguish and fear that we’re forced to breathe in this morning. My sister pushes to her feet, and stumbles through the building, calling out for our mother, like a lost little lamb. Denial, I’ll bet. If she really wants to know what happened, all she has to do is look out the window at whatever remains.
I gather up our packs, which hold minimal supplies--an empty canteen, four sticks of jerky that won’t last beyond tomorrow, and a knife. Ignoring my sister’s crying, I roll up the blankets and stuff them into the packs, before handing one off to Bryani.
“You don’t even care that she’s gone?”
“I do care. But we need food and water soon, or we’ll be dead, too.”
“I’d rather die a thousand times from dehydration than go out there again with the monsters!”
“They’re gone, Bryani. We can head west. Maybe we’ll hit another hive before nightfall.”
“You don’t care! If you did … you’d at least try to bury her!”
“Bury what!” My anger snaps before I can reel it in. I spent the entire night on a razor’s edge, waiting to crack and break down, and here it’s my sister who’s finally prodded my rage. “They probably took her bones!”
Tears stream down her cheeks, and she drops her gaze from mine, accepting her bag with the same apathy that she’s undoubtedly accepting her circumstances.
“Save your tears. You’ll need the fluids when the sun is at its hottest.” I don’t want to be cold to her, but my mother’s death made me the unfortunate shepherd of my sister, and I refuse to fail her. Pausing a moment, I do my best to remember life at ten years old, the innocence and naivete of such an age, but four hard years of surviving has turned my heart far too stony to empathize with her. Still, I will myself to be softer. We both lost a mother, after all. “We’ll see what’s left and bury her.”
Offering a tearful nod, she wipes her wet cheeks and slides her arms through the shoulder straps of her pack. Taking her hand, I lead her toward the door and set my palm on the knob, pausing to catch my breath. Whatever lies on the other side is what’s meant to be, and I can’t go back and change anything.
I couldn’t stop her.
The door is heavier than before, and my arm nearly buckles
under the weight of it as I push it open onto dust carrying on the wind. One quick sweep shows no signs of Ragers, and I pad quietly along the side of the building, until I reach what was once the main road through Palm Springs.
About twenty yards away lies a carcass, ravaged to the point where I can only identify small patches of skin and flesh over the bones of it. Auburn waves of her hair, matted with dirt and blood, flutter with the breeze. Air hitches in my lungs, each breath sawing in and out of my dry throat, as the two of us approach it. Bryani whines behind me, tugging back on where I clutch her hand, like she can’t bring herself to get closer.
I don’t force her, and let her go, but I keep on. With a sob knocking at my chest, I allow my feet to carry me closer, until I’m standing over what’s left of my mother. Beside her mutilated arm lies a broken string of beads--the bracelet Bryani made her a year ago.
Before I can stop it, my knees hit the dirt, palms flat in front of me, while the acid burn of bile pours from my mouth and splashes onto the ground. My stomach pulses with the threat of more, in spite of my head telling me to stop. Another round shoots up into my sinuses, and I heave, as it exits my body. A cold and clammy sensation settles over me, and both my chest and stomach feel hollow. As empty as my heart.
Breathing hard through my nose, I push up and resign myself to the task of burying her.
Glancing around the rubble and ash of buildings that surround us, my sights land on the broken half of a fallen street sign. I hustle across the faded lines of what used to be a road to retrieve it, and tap it along the ground, searching for soft sand, until I find one in a small patch just outside of the halo of my mother’s blood.
The metal bites into my hands, while I dig away at the dirt, but an hour later, I’ve managed a mostly shallow grave. Blood coats my palms where cuts and blisters burn from the dusting of sand and grit there.
With her pants torn away, my mother’s leg is completely exposed and already crawling with small flies. Taking her flayed ankle in hand, I go to drag her toward the nearby grave, but pause at a tearing sound. Before I realize what it is, I’m holding my mother’s torn limb in hand. Stringing meat and bone dangle from my grasp, the sight of which makes me light headed.
Another round of bile fizzes in my throat, but I set the back of my hand to my mouth to cap it, swallowing past the lump, and toss her leg into the grave. Instead of dragging again, I fall to the ground beside her, setting my hands against the most flesh-covered parts of her body, and push her across the dirt. Most of her face is eaten away, and only one eyeball remains intact, a visual that’ll haunt me for the rest of my life.
Over the edge of the hole, her body crumples into the grave, and palms plastered to the ground, I clamp my eyes shut, not wanting to look at her disheveled body carelessly tossed away. Not my mother. The woman who held me all hours of the night, when I came down with a fever. Those same arms carried my sister and I across harsh desert terrain, with little food, or water, when we were young. The same woman who held off three Ragers with nothing more than a shovel, to ensure my sister and I could scale the fence as we fled our hive.
“I’m sorry, Momma,” I whisper, grabbing the street sign from beside the hole.
With weakened muscles, I push the dirt to cover her, feeling relieved when I can no longer see her body. This is when Bryani finally comes to stand beside me, and kneels down at her grave. She presses the beads of the bracelet into the soft dirt, in the shape of a cross, over her grave.
“Why did she do it?” she asks, her voice thick with tears. “Why did she think she would live?”
“She wasn’t right, Bree. They get loopy when they’re first bitten. Remember Sanchez?”
He was an old man who fixed things in our hive. He built traps around our camp to keep the Ragers out. One night, he stumbled through the camp, talking jibberish, and attacked a man from our hunting party. Members of the hive managed to subdue him, and that’s when they found two bite marks on his arm. They took him out past the hive, to the open desert, and returned without him. I’m pretty sure Sanchez is the reason our hive was raided, though. When he died, no one bothered to build new traps.
“Sanchez was crazy, anyway.”
“Maybe so, but he’d never have attacked anyone.” With a sigh, I stare down at my mother’s grave, still feeling lightheaded. It hasn’t yet fully hit me that she’s gone. It will, when the shock wears away, and the memories begin pouring in. For now, I need to put as many miles between me and this grave as I can, because when the pain finally catches up to me, I know it’ll crush the life right out of me. “Are you ready now?”
Wiping away the tears, she nods and places a hand on Momma’s grave. “Faith, hope and love.” My mother was always religious, but not overly so. She believed in God as much as she needed to, and taught us the Bible in a way that didn’t make us resentful.
As a nurse, before the Dredge hit, her beliefs had always been rooted in science, but she somehow made room for the idea of Creation. In her eyes, the Dredge was God’s punishment for all of us being so stupid. For letting politicians decide what mattered most in the world. For society losing sight of things that were right under their noses, while they were busy posting pictures of themselves. Selfies is the term my mother always used. Bryani and I used to laugh at the visuals she planted in our heads, of people stopping to take pictures of themselves besides various things. Dangerous things. Like a man who apparently took a picture beside a Rager early on in the outbreak, and had half his face bitten off. He didn’t bother to post the image, because he died immediately, but according to my mother, about ten versions of the tragedy, recorded by nearby witnesses, hit what she referred to as the Internet--another concept I can’t fully grasp.
Life before the Dredge is one I don’t know, so for me, this is merely evolution. Finally getting knocked off the top of the food chain by a bigger predator. In our world, it’s kill, or be killed. There’s no time to take pictures.
Swiping up my pack from the ground, I note the position of the sun in the sky. I grab a fallen tree branch, about three feet in length, and mark it’s shadow in the dirt, labeling each side west and east. “We keep the sun at our backs,” I tell Bryani.
“What if the other hives won’t take us?”
Her concern isn’t unfounded. It’s dangerous to approach another hive, as quite a few will kill on sight, especially those who’ve spent too much time out in the Deadlands. It’s not just the other hives, either. Marauders, too, comb the desert, for women, in particular, because women happen to be in short supply these days, thanks to Ragers, who capture, rape and ultimately kill them. It’s why the horde came after the three of us. Three women roaming the desert is about as dangerous as my mother throwing herself to the Ragers the night before.
“Then we keep going, until we find one that will.”
Chapter 4
Present day
* * *
Female subjects are assigned Champions with whom they are compatible. And compatible apparently means: the Champion didn’t strangle said female completely to her death.
Medusa leads me to one of the two chairs in front of Doctor Ericsson’s desk. He’s the Chief Medical Officer at Calico, the lead researcher in charge of this particular wing. The one man in this craphole who scares me more than anyone else. Alpha Project seems to be his baby, and the slimy, bright smile on his face tells me he’s elated by the news of my meeting with Valdys.
Hands rubbing together, he reminds me of a child asking his mother for a peek at the gifts she’s brought home for him. “Tell me. Tell me everything.”
On the screen behind him, an image of Valdys holding me by the throat has been paused, as if there was something notably thrilling about that part of our meeting. It’s striking how small I look beside the beast. How completely fragile and at his mercy.
“There’s nothing to say that you haven’t already seen.” A flare of pain hits the base of my throat where tender bruising marks the evidence of my encounter
with him, and I flinch, running a finger over the red band left behind.
“You realize he could’ve snapped your head clean off. Like a dandelion!”
I suspect the only reason he didn’t had to do with the fact that I broke one of many rules, by using his name.
“He didn’t. Which is the first step in binding.”
I glance over to Medusa and back to the doctor. “Binding? What is that?”
“Every detail about your encounter with the Champion was a threat. The food you offered him. The way you smelled. The fact that you are female. He trusts no one but his handlers, and the research staff, of course. It’s how they remain obedient. Loyal.”
Bastards. They threw me into a lion’s cage expecting that I’d get eaten alive.
“He kills without conscience, or remorse, which is why we had to modify you a bit.”
“Modify me?” For four years in Calico, I’ve been used as a guinea pig. Poked with needles every day. Examined by doctors. Constantly watched. Constantly monitored. Fed certain foods, separate from the other subjects in this place. Separate from my sister, even, who works on the obstetrics wing of the hospital, helping to care for and deliver babies. Never once has anyone bothered to explain to me what these tests were for, and if I so much as asked, well, I only asked once. That night, I underwent electrotherapy that rendered me immobile for two days. There’s a slight bit of hesitation in asking now, but I almost get a sense the doctor is coaxing me into the question. “What did you do to me?”
“You recall, back in the room, when he sniffed you?”
I do, and I was fairly certain he was getting off on the terror pulsing through my veins in that moment. “Yeah.”