Bertram, or Bertie as the worst of the bastards at the accounting office used to call him,
crouched on the ground feeling just like the office nerd he had once been, picked on, abused, made fun of. He held the edge of his cape against his broken nose, smearing the blood that wouldn’t stop, feeling the night wind cut right through him. The dramatic flowing cape with his bare chest beneath it didn’t seem like such a good idea at the moment. It was damned cold up here. He fought hard to keep himself from shivering. Remembering his audience, he didn’t want to look like he was afraid. Or weak.
For a moment he had weakened, but all his seething passions, the rage and the frustration and the hate that he had carefully nurtured over the years came boiling to the surface. The lust for power that he had felt slipping through his fingers came back with a vengeance, with such force that his whole body trembled. Ignoring the pain and the blood streaming down his chin, he screamed, “Find them.”
In the darkness his voice echoed and re-echoed from the stone walls of the pit far below him. A kind of madness seemed to seize him as he repeated the order, again and again and again.
Chapter 3
Lathan was alone on the porch. Only quiet sounds surrounded him. The occasional sigh of the wind in the trees. The steady drip of moisture from brimming leaves. And a mourning dove that kept repeating its mournful cry in the big sycamore tree in the yard.
Heavy drops of rain fell suddenly. They made a hard ticking on the leaves around him. Then just as suddenly as the rain came, it stopped. In the early stillness, a slight wind lifted dark wisps of hair from his collar and blew a loose strand across his cheek. His eyes, narrowed with the intensity of his thoughts, reflected the leaden sky behind him as he rubbed his hand slowly across his beard-shadowed chin.
It was an overcast day and daylight was slow in coming. The air was heavy with the scents of wet leaves, damp earth and rain. And another smell that was becoming all-too-familiar. Pot.
“Quiet out there this morning,” Beck said as he stepped out onto the porch behind him and squinted out across the mist-veiled landscape. “Sometimes it seems like the whole world is a graveyard,” he commented next.
Bringing the heavy smell of pot to Beck’s attention, Lathan indicated the house next door with a slight jerk of his chin.
“Kind of early for that, don’t you think?”
Beck looked over in the same direction, but he didn’t answer.
“It doesn’t bother you?” Lathan asked.
Beck maintained his silence, so Lathan tried again. “This isn’t who we started out to be. It’s not who you started out to be.”
It was true and they both knew it. But since the two new women had come into the group, anything went. Drugs, alcohol, whatever they could get their hands on. And the sex was out there in the open all the time, not exactly hidden behind closed doors.
They both looked over at the wooden fence surrounding the yard next door when they heard a loud splash, squeals and raucous laughter. Mader Stokes was apparently still getting acquainted with the two new members of the group. Really acquainted. The women had brought a large quantity of pot with them and they were liberal in passing it around, probably because sharing guaranteed them permission to stay with the group and to do what they wanted.
Beck settled himself in a porch chair. He tilted his head back and drank straight from a half-empty whiskey bottle.
“You think that’s a good idea?” Lathan asked Beck, nodding once at the bottle.
Beck took another drink and grimaced at the burn of hard liquor. “I think it’s a real good idea.”
“That’s not going to make things better.”
“You’re wrong, Lathan. It does for a while. It’s about the only thing that does help.”
“And what if something happens while . . . ”
“Something is always happening,” Beck broke in testily. “Do I have to be responsible for it all?”
Beck lowered his voice with a slight display of remorse. “It takes the edge off,” he grumbled. “We all need that. Nothing we do should make a difference to you anyway,” he went on. “You’re leaving.”
Pretending that the subtle slur had not been intentional, Beck looked towards an opening in the fence where Mader Stokes was sitting on the pool deck and talking to one of the women. Mader had a black leather headband tied around his forehead. He also wore wide leather armbands on his wrists. The torn, faded jeans and the greying beard on his cheeks made him look like an aging biker. The leaves from the sycamore cast shadows on his rough features as he grinned at something Malise had just said.
“He’s always got his mind on one thing,” Lathan said.
“He is a wolf with women,” Beck agreed softly as he watched Mader.
Beck’s thumb slowly tapped the bottle as he continued to watch the two of them. After Beck’s lips curved into a faint smile, he surprised Lathan by saying, “Women have been exchanging sex for protection since the beginning of time. There’s nothing new in that.”
“That’s a pretty cynical way of looking at it, don’t you think?”
“Cynical or truthful?” Beck’s gaze moved slowly down Malise’s provocatively-clad body. “You can’t blame Mader.”
Not true. Mader was to blame for a lot of things. He had been growing more and more confrontational and belligerent lately, until he was openly defying Lathan. Mader answered to no one except Beck, and he didn’t seem to give a damn about anyone or anything. He did pretty much what he wanted, whenever he wanted. He strutted around with an irritating, in-your-face attitude that got on Lathan’s nerves more and more as time went on. And Mader's new, aggressive sexual behavior often passed the boundaries into outright perversion.
As for Beck, it seemed that he was already looking for a replacement for Misha. He had been spending more and more time following Parisa Audain around.
“You’re okay with everything that Mader does?”
“I’m not his keeper,” Beck said with a careless shrug. “Mader can do whatever the hell he wants to. As long as- ”
“As long as he’s useful to the group,” Lathan finished. He had heard all this before. “And you don’t mind Elias and Dacota being exposed to all that?”
Lathan firmly believed that an excess of drugs, sex and alcohol was going to bring the group to ruin. Maybe not right away, but somewhere down the road.
Beck sighed as he stared into the distance. “Kids are exposed to a lot these days. That’s just the way it is. I’ve told you before, the world is not the way it used to be. This is a war, Lathan, and everyone has to contribute something. It’s not about emotion or morality. We can’t be weakened by those things. It’s about surviving. Plain surviving. Besides,” he added thoughtfully. “It’s been a long time.”
“A long time for what?” Lathan asked.
“Are we supposed to live the rest of our lives like monks? If they’re willing, what’s the harm? Don’t tell me that you and Addy weren’t- ”
“Don’t say it,” Lathan warned him.
Rick’s last commentary was to huff out a cynical breath before he lifted the bottle to his lips.
“Before I leave, I wanted to tell you that I think you should consider moving on, Beck. You should find a better place than this. It's too dangerous here. There are too many weak spots. We started out reinforcing this place, but we’ve stopped doing that.”
Lathan already knew that Beck was averse to leaving the small fenced-in subdivision. It was as if something had a hold on him here.
“You mean I should think about running away?”
Lathan frowned and said, “I’ve thought a lot about this. There’s nothing here. And there are too many negatives in the group now. Enid can barely get around. She needs a safe place to recover. So does Payden. You’ve got a baby to think of now. And the boys. As for Mader, he’s plain trouble walking, but at least he’ll listen to you. You need to find a place that is defendable. Before the group gets unexpectedly uprooted again. If I’
ve learned one thing, it’s that running isn’t living.”
“We don’t have much choice there,” Beck said without looking up. “And we have looked for a safe place.”
“We go in circles. We never leave this area.”
Beck slanted a glance up at him. “You know how I feel about that. The roads will be death traps. They’ll be the perfect ambush, set up by anyone who wants to take what we have.”
“All the roads can’t be covered,” Lathan tried reasoning with him.
“But some will be,” Beck said.
“We have choices, Beck. We just have to make the right ones.”
“Not necessarily. In a way, we’re just walking corpses, too. Dead inside. We’re cursed.”
Cursed?
“Is that what you think?” Lathan asked with a frown.
“You haven’t figured that out yet? Adam and Eve didn’t listen to the rules,” Beck went on. “So they were cursed. Cain slew Able, and he was marked. Hell, the whole Bible is full of curses. We’re cursed, too. No matter where we go, we can’t get away from it. We’d be fooling ourselves if we thought we could.”
“We can’t think that way. We have to keep thinking that there’s something out there- ”
“You mean like have faith?” Beck interrupted and blew out a scoffing breath. “I prayed to keep my family safe. Look what good that did.”
“Your stepsons are safe.”
“They're motherless. What kind of a life is that? And how long do you think they’ll keep being safe?”
“They’ll have a better chance if you make the right decisions. You need to think things through. That’s the only way to stay alive.”
Beck looked up slowly. Clearly, he resented Lathan questioning his decisions yet again.
“All I’m saying is that we can’t afford to make any more big mistakes.” Lathan went on, knowing he was treading on thin ice. Beck could be volatile, even violent, when drunk. And if he wasn’t drunk already, he was close to it. “That’s the only way you’re going to have any kind of future.”
“Future?” Beck looked confused, as if he didn’t really understand the concept. “I’ve made the decisions I have to make.” Beck’s look was almost challenging, but he shook his head after he took another drink and started talking about the past like he was still lost there.
“We’re wanderers in a desert, Lathan,” he went on. “Forty years. That’s how long Moses led the Isrealites through the Wilderness. It was more than a generation. Do you get what that means?”
But Beck wasn’t an inspired leader, Lathan thought. Like Moses, he was a reluctant one. And, at times, he did exhibit the same kind of rage that Moses had struggled with. Lathan had seen Beck chase down a man who had stolen some food from him. Beck had shot him in cold blood, just like a dog in the street. It bothered Lathan then. It was still bothering him.
“You’ve done your best to lead these people- ” he began, but Beck cut him off again.
"Maybe I'm tired of the job,” he growled. “Why do I have to be responsible for everyone and everything?
"Because you were a leader before all this started. Because these people had faith in you."
“Faith?" he scoffed again. "I gave that a try once, but where did it get me? Even before everything fell apart, my relationship with Misha was in trouble. I did a lot of praying then. I’m sure Misha was- seeing Wesh before all this even started. Hell, long before that. How do you think that makes me feel? Wesh was my brother.” Beck muttered a low oath. And then, because he was drinking, he said things that he might normally have kept to himself. “He always had a thing for Misha. He never told me that, but I knew. And eventually Wesh’s jealousy got the better of him. You don't think that eventually he would have killed me to get me out of the way? That’s why I had to . . . ”
“We’ve all done things we regret,” Lathan broke in. “But that’s over now.”
“Over?” Beck echoed. He frowned at the near-empty bottle in his hand. "Even if you do find Addy, you really think you got a shot in hell at any kind of a normal relationship?” He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Not in a world overrun with flesh hunters. The sooner you realize that, the better. You’ve got to have realistic expectations, Lathan. Otherwise you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment. But- ” he added. “There is one thing I have learned about human nature from all this. People have been carving out territories for themselves and taking what they want. We need to protect our own, too. If that means being ruthless, then that’s a choice we have to make.”
“So, you do have a territory in mind?” Lathan asked, surprised that Beck had gone that far in his thoughts without including him.
Beck leaned back in his chair and gave Lathan a half-drunk, half-mysterious look, but he still didn’t share whatever plans he might have.
“Whatever you decide, these people need to believe there is hope,” Lathan told him. “You need to give them that.”
“Hope for what?”
“Just hope. Isn’t that enough?”
“I thought so once. But I know better now. We’re on a sure course,” he assured Lathan drunkenly. “A sure course.”
“To where exactly?” Lathan asked, hoping to learn something more of Beck’s plans.
“To the same place we’ve already got one foot in.”
“Where the hell is that?” Lathan questioned, annoyed that they were going around in circles again.
“What you just said,” Beck replied, drinking deeply from the bottle to finish it off. “Hell.”
“You really believe that?”
“Don’t you?”
Lathan didn’t have an answer.
“What about the ghosts, Lathan? Doesn’t that prove what I’m saying?”
“Ghosts belong in the past, Beck.”
“Yeah, but they won’t always stay there.”
It was silent out there.
“Like a tomb,” he heard a disembodied voice inside his head whisper.
Used to the voices now, Beck merely agreed. Sometimes, it was true, the whole world did seem like a vast, unending graveyard. There were no lights. No traffic. No sounds, save for the wind that mourned through the trees, and, of course, the faint rustling and the snarls of the flesh hunters, the living dead that occasionally wandered too close in their hunt for something alive.
How long had it been, he wondered, since the whole world had crashed and burned? Time had become a vague concept, one that was hard for him to hold onto. It just slipped away quietly, like grains of sand in some surreal hourglass. There was just darkness now.
It must have been like this in the beginning, when the first humans had been banished from the garden and their hearts were heavy with loss. Or maybe after the earth had been flooded in the time of Noah. Only now it was flooded with the undead because the human race had been virtually wiped out. Again. He couldn’t help but wonder if it was some kind of divine punishment.
And he? He was trapped in a nightmare world. Or maybe he was trapped in someone else’s nightmare. He just wanted to wake up and go home. Be with his loved ones again. But he couldn’t do that. And it wasn’t like he didn’t know that with every fiber of his being.
Maybe during that last fight, a gunshot really had lodged inside his head, because sometimes it did feel like shards of glass had exploded inside his brain. Because sometimes the darkness seemed to be seeping through his existence like ink bleeding through water. That is, when he wasn’t drifting aimlessly, wasn’t numb, or tangled up with his maddeningly elusive, or perhaps delusive, thoughts.
The cold wind continued to blow against him out in the open where he sat hunched over in brooding solitude. His threadbare coat offered little resistance to the wind. The driven rain stung his face till it felt numb, or nearly numb, as cold replaced the warmth one frigid degree at a time. But he barely noticed the cold. In fact he welcomed the raw feel of it because it meant that he was alive, even if it meant that he could also feel the cold seeping deeply into the very marr
ow of his bones. He preferred to concentrate on that, and not on the desolation that had hollowed out his soul. Not on . . .
Everything he had been trying to escape. Everything that threatened his meager existence. For life, he had found, could be tenuous at best. It could be extinguished in a solitary, unguarded moment if he was not careful.
There were times when he had to be alone like this to try and keep himself from falling even deeper. Even still, sometimes it was a desperate struggle as he felt himself sliding close to the edge of a very frightening precipice. If he should let go, if he should fall, he did not know if he would survive intact. Or, in fact, if he would survive at all. Yet some kind of instinct kept him going. Hopelessly, perhaps, but it was all that he had left. The alternative, the fall, was too terrifying for him to contemplate. So he clung with a kind of pathetic desperation because he did not know what else to do.
It felt like there was a wall standing between him and something dark, something that threatened to wash over him like a black, engulfing tide from which there was no return. The wall had kept him safe until now, but there were holes perforating the wall and things were leaking through those holes. So much filtered through now that he almost panicked when he realized that he could not go on like this forever. That it had to come to some kind of conclusion.
A night bird screeched in the deep shadows of the woods, startling him. An answering scream echoed in the hollow. It was like metal sliding against metal, high pitched and intrusive. Some prey had just yielded up its life, no doubt, and the night became a little lonelier. A little more desolate. His guilt had been a poison in his veins for too long, he decided. A burden too heavy to carry. How long was he going to go on in this state? Enough days of pain had etched themselves across his existence, robbing him of life one moment at a time.
Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Page 3