“We have to learn to let go so many times,” she whispered, half yielding to the unshed tears that still needed to be released. “It never gets easier.”
You just buried the pain deeper inside. You just hardened yourself a little more on the outside. Her mother. Her father. Her sister. The thought of never seeing any of them again, or any of the others, seemed unbearable at the moment. She still didn’t know what had really happened to them.
She closed her eyes, dangerously close to breaking down again. Not knowing what was worse, falling apart or trying to keep it all inside.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever see any of them again,” she said so forlornly that Gage’s heart ached for her. He knew there wasn’t anything he could do to make her feel better. The harsh reality was that there were few happily-ever-afters in this world. He had observed Addy closely over the past few days. She was strong, and she had courage or she wouldn’t have survived this long. But courage only went so far in this world. She was entitled to her tears. Denying that would be less than honest.
Addy knew that Lathan might already be dead, too. She had waited so long for him to come back. When he had not returned, she realized that not only was it possible that she would never see him again, equally distressing was the thought that she might never know what had happened to him. Not knowing was the worst. It was like an endless sentence of uncertainty. Did you mourn? Or didn’t you? Did you hope? When exactly did you finally give up?
“I never thanked you,” Gage heard her say.
At his questioning look, she said, “For saving me.”
“You’re forgetting that you kind of saved me along the way, too.”
It was true. She had been an asset to him. They both knew they were lucky to be alive. In this world second chances were rare and you quickly learned to be grateful for any kind of chance at all.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” she asked.
“I taught martial arts before everything fell apart,” he answered her. “Then when I had nothing but time on my hands, I practiced it. It was one way to work out my frustrations.”
“It probably kept us both alive.”
He shrugged. He couldn’t imagine leaving her to die, with or without his martial arts experience.
“There are plenty of the wrong kind of people out there,” she went on. “It’s nice to know they’re not all bad.”
In spite of all he’d seen, he, too, chose to believe that good people still existed.
“I know what it’s like to be alone and needing help and help doesn’t come,” he said. He stared at her a moment before he said quietly, but with resolution, “If he’s out there and he’s looking for you, nothing - not the rain, not the darkness, not the uncertainty - none of that will keep him from finding you.”
Chapter 6
Lathan closed the gate and took off his clothes. Once he was naked, he climbed the ladder and then dropped down into the water. It was warmer than he had thought it would be. Not as much of a shock as he had anticipated.
Lots of houses had swimming pools and some of these were relatively clean. Virtually all of them had fences around them. It afforded privacy and kept the hunters out. Usually. Occasionally they would see a hunter floating around in a pool, flailing about and splashing aimlessly, but it was rare to encounter one. Except for the ones with the hunters in them, pools were generally a lot cleaner than a pond and you didn’t have to worry about an underwater hunter coming along unexpectedly, like the one that had scared the hell out of him once. So he took advantage of the pools whenever he could.
He turned the shampoo bottle upside down and shook it hard to help gravity along. Then he squeezed the plastic bottle. The pearlized, lime-scented shampoo coiled into his upturned palm. He lathered his hair, shoulders and chest with damned near half the bottle. Getting clean was almost a necessity. He couldn’t stand the blood spatter from the hunters staying on his body, or the putrid pus and slime that came along with it. The sprays of dark blood would quickly crust in your hair and congeal on your skin and clothes. The hunters were decayed corpses. Hell, they smelled like rotten meat. Who knew what kind of bacteria they carried. So he bathed every chance he got. As for clean clothes, they weren’t hard to come by. Almost every house had packed closets. You had your choice there. You could change ten times a day if you wanted to. And no need to worry about doing laundry, either. Clothes were disposable these days.
Apparently Beck and some of the others had gotten so used to the filth that it didn’t seem to bother them. They’d had to kill some hunters that morning and Lathan had left Beck sitting by himself with a bottle of whiskey. Blood had splattered all over Beck’s face. It had been thick around his mouth and nose, and it had dried into hard black streaks in his hair and beard.
Lathan shook his head when he thought about the blood caked under Beck’s finger nails and staining his clothes. He grimaced when he thought about the small black clot clinging to Beck’s beard stubble and hanging there like a dried-up beetle. Maybe Beck didn’t realize how bad he really looked. Kind of ghoulish himself. But then, maybe Beck never bothered to look in a mirror. That was hard to do sometimes for all of them.
Lathan still wondered if it was possible that they could still become infected. They had drenched themselves in blood so many times that it seemed they should have turned already if it could happen. It was just one of the things that still remained a mystery, like the big question of what had started all this in the first place. People had all kinds of theories but no one knew for sure.
He frowned as he thought more about Beck. Something was happening to him, had been happening for a long time. It seemed that, at times, Beck was given over to temporary fits of madness, when a kind of rage took over him, when a truly terrifying look came into his eyes. At those times, he seemed to glory in the killing, the savagery, the blood lust. And then there were other times when he looked confused, even afraid. That was just as frightening to witness as the rage. Maybe moreso.
The drinking was another bad sign, and the drugs, but Lathan knew it was just a symptom of something else, something that was potentially far more dangerous for the group. Beck went off more and more by himself, too. Just disappeared without a word. Once he was gone for two whole days, leaving them all wondering if he was ever coming back. Those were hard times for the group, when they were left floundering aimlessly like that. They didn’t know if they should appoint someone else as a leader.
Misha had always kept Beck stabilized, but now Misha was gone. The more Lathan thought about Beck, the more troubled he became. He had decided that Beck was in the grip of some kind of mental decline. Any kind of diagnosis would just be meaningless words now because there were no hospitals or doctors, and no magic pills to make things any better. Of course, the kind of guilt and grief Beck was carrying around, not to mention the responsibility he’d taken on, would be a heavy burden for anyone.
Dusk was settling around him as he got out of the pool. In the distance the landscape seemed greyer as a thin mist hung over everything. Gradually the horizon blurred and the scent of rain grew heavier. The very atmosphere seemed to be thick with a mantle of gloom as he thought about Addy. She was always in his thoughts. He had told her that if they were separated, he would look for her.
“I’ll come find you,” he had promised her.
He wasn’t going to just forget. .He was going to do everything in his power to find her. It ate at him day and night, not knowing if she was even alive. Worse yet was not knowing what she was going through right now. He couldn’t dwell long on those thoughts, however. It disrupted him too much inside. He was prey to a kind of helplessness that he had never felt before. He fought it, knowing he had to get it under control no matter how impossible that might seem. Or it was going to destroy him.
Wherever Addy was, he hoped that she was in a safe place. That she was warm. That she had enough food to eat.
He still saw her in his mind the way he would always see her. Down by
the pond in the early morning sunlight right before he left her. Her palms had been pressed together, and her hair had seemed like a golden halo in the trembling light of dawn.
She had looked up to see him standing there, and she had smiled shyly. “I’ll be waiting here for you,” she had told him in the softest of voices, “And I’ll be praying that you stay safe- when you’re out there.”
Beck’s plan was to drink himself into oblivion. He couldn’t get away from it all if he didn’t. Misha was back. And not just in his dreams. And Wesh? Wesh was a walking, talking nightmare.
Wesh’s voice came at him out of the darkness. “I tried to walk away from her, but the woman can haunt you. You know that’s true, Beck. You know it better than anyone. She can drive a man to murder. But then you already know that, too, don’t you?”
Beck didn’t want to hear anymore, but Wesh was relentless.
“See, Beck, you do know that we were hot and heavy even before the SHTF. Your marriage had been falling apart for a long time and you didn’t even realize it. You probably still don’t know how close you were to losing everything. You were so wrapped up in yourself that you ignored her most of the time. You didn’t make time for her. Didn’t make her feel like she mattered. Then Misha turned to me and I thought things would take their natural course and I’d have her to myself. But it didn’t work out that way. And she was into me, Beck. Really into me. She couldn’t get enough- ”
“Don’t tell me that,” Beck burst out, clutching the bottle tightly in his fist.
Wesh shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you that. You already know it’s true.”
“It’s a lie,” Beck said, taking another drink and trying to repair the breach. But somewhere deep inside he knew it was the truth.
“You’ve kind of liked it all along, haven’t you? Hacking up walking corpses, I mean. And you’ve been known to take your frustrations out on the living, too. Not just Misha. But Macayla, too. You’ve got blood on your hands, Beck.”
“That’s not killing. That’s- survival.”
“You can call it whatever you want.” Wesh’s voice ended in a low, raspy growl. “I don’t blame you. I’ve killed, too. To protect the ones I love. Which happen to be the very same ones that you called your loved ones.”
Beck finished the last inch or so of whiskey and then, with a quick flick of his wrist, tossed the bottle away. It shattered somewhere out in the darkness.
Wesh breathed out a sigh of foul air. “You’re going to look like me eventually, Beck. There’s no way out of it.” He laughed quietly under his breath as he watched Beck’s reaction. “If I were alive right now, you’d tear me to pieces, wouldn’t you? It’s not comfortable being this close to death, is it?”
Wesh sat half in shadow, one pale eye glittering an accusation in the moonlight. He shook his head slowly, and said, “You killed me. Your brother. And for what? Because of Misha? Or because I questioned your decisions? Look at Lathan. He’s gotten a lot stronger. You know he has. He’s been questioning you, too.” Wesh gave him a sly look with that predatory, colorless eye. “Maybe because you still keep making the wrong decisions.”
Beck didn’t want to hear it. He got abruptly to his feet as he felt it coming over him again.
The helpless slide into madness, the inability to stop the descent.
“I did what I had to do,” he defended, clenching his hands into tight fists at his sides. “You were fucking my wife,” Beck told him bluntly as if that explanation alone sufficed. “You wouldn’t have stood for it. And you wanted me out of the way, too. It was just a matter of time before you tried to get rid of me and take away everything that was mine. Like you always did. So I got rid of you first. It was the only way the group could survive.”
“You mean you had to let Misha die when we both know you could have saved her?” Wesh’s voice became a raspy snarl. He had stood, too, and now, without warning, he was holding a knife to Beck’s throat.
“Why don’t you kill me and get it over with,” Beck sputtered behind clenched teeth. “Isn’t that what you really want? Revenge?”
One corner of Wesh’s disfigured mouth drew back into something that didn’t even come close to a smile. “That would be too easy,” Wesh whispered in Beck’s face, dragging out the word “easy” on a sickening, ragged breath between black, rotted teeth.
Beck stared into the mirror, barely recognizing himself, confused because he was suddenly alone, holding the knife to his own throat.
Macayla glanced at Dalin who was silhouetted against a leaden sky. He remained standing in the kitchen doorway as she walked into the room. His arms were folded against his chest and he seemed, for the moment, to be lost in his own private thoughts. But not so lost that he didn’t acknowledge that she was standing there.
“Mornin’,” he said quietly without turning around.
She murmured a greeting back at him. Still watching his profile, she stood barefoot on the wooden floorboards a while longer, a pair of shoes dangling by their laces in one hand and dry socks in the other. Then she sat down and began to pull the socks on.
She was less talkative than she usually was. She had awakened just a short time ago after dreaming again of the maddeningly repetitive, half-empty place she was compelled to return to. In the dream she was always saddened by the run-down condition of the house, but the worst part of the dream was that she was completely and utterly alone. Everyone she ever knew was gone.
There were days that were harder than others, and this looked like it might be one of them. Maybe it was the gloomy weather that was so depressing. Or maybe it was the feeling of the dream that lingered and accounted for her mood. There were still things she kept locked away in a deep dark place that no one ever saw. She tried to shake it off and concentrated on the here and now. They lived in a dangerous world and a day could change everything. If you wanted to survive, you remained vigilant. No matter what you felt like, you had to find a way to stay strong. That’s what you did when you were part of a group. Even a group of two. Other people counted on you for their survival, too.
After she finished lacing up the shoes, Cayla opened cabinet doors and checked to see what they might have missed. It had been dark last night when they’d found this place. They’d discovered a gun that had been hidden away in a canister in the kitchen along with some ammunition. It was a good find. They also found some warmer clothes, which they needed badly because the weather was getting a lot colder at night. As for food, they had to make do with a few crackers for breakfast. They would have to find more substantial nourishment sometime during the day. If they were lucky they would find something. If not, it wouldn’t be the first time either one of them had gone hungry.
“I always wanted to travel,” she said half to herself as she opened a drawer. “For as long as I can remember, I thought I wanted more out of life than what my very ordinary existence offered.” She sighed deeply. “I just wasn’t thinking this.”
“None of us were thinking this.”
“I find myself missing my old home,” she went on. “I wish I was there now. You get to know a house by how it feels in all the different seasons.” She paused a moment. “You know. Summer feels different than winter. And spring feels different than fall. But they all feel like home.” She sighed deeply. “It seems like a lifetime ago since I was there. And a lifetime since I believed in happy endings,” she added. “I stopped believing in fairytales,” she said as she stood beside him. “Ever since- ” She broke off abruptly.
He glanced down and finished for her. “Ever since the world got turned upside down and you lost everyone and everything you ever cared about.”
His blunt statement caused her to swallow heavily. But she nodded. She used to find it annoying to no end that Dalin had an almost uncanny ability to anticipate her unspoken words and thoughts. At the moment, however, she found it almost comforting. Maybe because it was the closest she had come to sharing her deepest thoughts with another human being in a very long time.
Dalin didn’t know himself why he had to be so harsh with her sometimes. But he did know that he was hungry as a wolf and he knew she must be, too. It was a safer distraction and so he turned from the doorway and concentrated on getting breakfast ready. It was a lot less disruptive than thinking about Cayla, especially when she was as close to him as she had been a minute ago. He had felt her warmth seep right through his clothes as she stood looking out the door with him. He would have preferred being alone at the moment so he could re-group, but she walked across the room to help him with the food. He disciplined himself against staring at her as he often found himself doing. As he had been doing just a moment ago.
Luckily, they had found a small supply of canned goods so they wouldn’t go hungry today. He handed her a can opener and started reading the labels on the cans.
“I didn’t lose everything,” she said under her breath without looking up. “I still have you.”
He suspected she was being sarcastic, and the half smile that followed her words confirmed it.
He handed her a can of peaches.
“So you have a plan ready for today?” she asked as they sat down at the table.
Dalin picked up his fork and speared a wedge of peach. Going along with his plans was the closest she ever came to “obeying” him. She always cautiously maintained some semblance of independence, even if it was only a token of independence. Relying on someone else was risky business in this world. You could find yourself alone and on your own at a moment’s notice and the emotional toll could be devastating.
Cayla wasn’t like some women who would blindly follow a man even if he treated them badly. Cayla couldn’t abide abuse of any kind. She’d set off on her own more than once after he had been brutal with her. He knew now that she had been setting boundaries and he had a growing respect for her for that. She wasn’t about to trade in her self-respect because she was afraid of being alone.
Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Page 6