She tried to walk past him, but he grabbed her arm, stopping her. He tried to mumble some kind of apology. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did. You meant every word.” She looked down at his hand that was still restraining her. “Is this how you treated Misha?”
Something flared in his eyes. “What about the way she treated me?” He looked like he was about to say more, but he let go of her arm abruptly.
“Maybe if you had treated her with more respect, she wouldn’t have done what she did.”
Now Beck was the one who looked shocked. “You knew?”
“I knew,” she admitted. “She was your wife, Beck. Your wife. She deserved to be treated better than the way you treated her. That’s why she was unfaithful to you. But it’s too late now to change any of it.”
Beck paced like a caged animal. He had developed a strong aversion to being penned in, conditioned, no doubt, by tragic events of the past that had taught him that walls and fences
could be deadly. So he was always leery of such things. He had no delusions. There was no place that was completely safe.
In the distance, lightning still pulsed with an intermittent fury in the blackness beyond the high, confining fence. Thunder muttered a low warning. It was a far away, restless sound that matched his own sleepless agitation. One storm was ending. Another was building. But this one was inside of him. There was no peace for him. No contentment. But there were regrets. There was remorse. And rage. Which was far easier to feel than the other emotions. But that rage was like a poison in his veins. It seemed to probe at his very soul. Once, he would have known that he had to exorcise those things or writhe in the torment of a living hell that could consume him. Once, he would have realized that he was a victim, burdened by the weight of a responsibility far too heavy for him to carry. For he had crossed the spectrum until he stood at an opposing ledge, morphing from peace keeper to war-monging barbarian in an unfairly short period of time.
He had crossed too many lines to go back. So many that the delineations had blurred beyond his ability to make rational, unbiased judgments. He had steeped himself in madness and grief in the past and then come back again, with the uncompromising conviction that this was not a world for dialogues or negotiations. Conciliations and compromises wouldn’t work. Those things had failed miserably. Just like prayers. Only fools still believed, while he himself remained unaware that he had lost far more than he could ever have imagined.
He still thought logically, but his thought processes were driven more by primal, animalistic urges and instincts. The constant surges of adrenaline, perhaps, had permanently changed circuits in his brain. Certainly, thinking processes changed in extreme environments and under extreme conditions. PTSD? Everyone in the group probably had it to some degree.
But where could the healing begin, if there ever could be any healing? If there was such a place, they hadn’t found it yet. Life had become a constant, daily adjustment to a whole new set of stresses. Would they find a way to cope? Or would they all inevitably break under the strain?
It was not in him to trust anymore. Trust, he felt, had gotten too many people killed. And just like his trust, he had discarded his faith long ago. Yet, ironically, he continued to shake his fist and blame some unseen presence for all that he had lost in the world, including his own naïveté. It had taken him a long time to suppress his old frailties. And his weaker emotions. Not to mention the foolish morals he had clung to so religiously in the past. Now he welcomed his darker side, perhaps a little too well.
As if his trust hadn’t been dangerously shaken already, Lathan had left him. So he retreated even further into his own isolated darkness. And stayed insulated there.
He had exiled Macayla. But that was because she was guilty of mutiny. Treason. Hadn’t those things always been punishable by death? He knew full well that by banishing her, he had most likely condemned her to a lonely, violent death. To justify that he had to go even further out onto the crumbling ledge of his psychosis. That was enough for him. That had been the final, rending straw.
His thoughts shifted rapidly as they were wont to do, another thing that had become necessary for survival.
Parisa had opened old wounds again, till they were raw, till they were bloody. He had allowed himself to react to Parisa only on a purely primitive level. It had been a long time, and his internal urges and frustrations were screaming for another kind of physical release. Through sex. He already knew that he could relieve some of his tension in that way. Parisa had been married, though she still didn’t know if her husband was alive or dead. She probably didn’t care one way or another. He had known both her and her husband before everything had fallen apart. It had been a violent, abusive relationship. Even though she had been alone for a long time, she still held him off. Maybe it was that very thing that made him lust after her even more.
Somewhere in the back of his mind was a nagging thread of knowledge that persisted despite his efforts to cast it out. Wesh had done the same thing. Lusted after another man’s wife. And Beck had decided that Wesh had to die.
Just like Cain, Beck had slain his brother and it sometimes seemed that he, too, bore his own mark for all the world to see. Had he not suffered and lost everything? Had he not cried out that the punishment was too great for him to bear?
He stood in the yard with his shirt unbuttoned and the wind pressing against him and baring his chest. His flesh was white in the restless, intermittent flashes of lightning. The dying storm was just an illusion, he knew. It wasn’t really ending. It was just raging somewhere else. Furious. Violent. Powerful. And just like the jagged forks of lightning that rent the very heavens, there were searing cracks along the seams of his own psyche.
Damn it all to hell, he raged silently. Impotently.
And then he laughed out loud at the irony of it all. Hadn’t that already happened? Weren’t they in hell now?
He shuddered when the full impact of his emotions rippled to the surface, for the ones he let rule him were the darker passions, the destructive ones. A jeering, bitter laugh came out as half snarl, half growl when he realized that he had broken nearly every commandment. Or was about to. But he had no regrets about any of them.
In a world overrun by hunters, he had convinced himself that he had to be the stronger, more lethal hunter. Their very existence depended on that. There could be no human weakness to get in the way of the group’s survival. As time went on, he relied more completely on his deeper animal instincts. He thought, acted and reacted like a predator till he had adopted the same creed of ruthlessness for which he had once banished others from the group. He, too, had crossed too many old boundaries. He couldn’t go back.
Maybe Lathan leaving was the best thing for the group. Beck had enough to think about. He did not want to have to fight Lathan, too. Oh, he understood that scarcely-veiled, accusing look. Lathan was always judging him. Lathan was always challenging his authority. The others had been watching their clashes, he knew, and he couldn’t afford to look weak.
There had been a change in Lathan ever since Adyson had gotten her claws into him. Lathan didn’t instantly obey him without questioning his decisions the way he used to. It was beyond irritating. More than that, it was bad for the group. How far would Lathan dare to go in defying him? If he ever did come back, that is. Beck really didn’t know. He hadn’t expected Wesh to rise up against him, either. He shouldn’t have underestimated him, because eventually he had to put a stop to it. Yeah, look what had happened to Wesh.
Beck took Farran’s hand and turned it over. He placed a small plastic bag in the middle of her palm and closed her fingers around it.
Looking into her eyes, he said, “That’s how we’re going to do this. That’s how we’re going to maintain control when someone gives us trouble. We don’t have prisons anymore. We don’t have courts. But we still have to have justice.”
Farran was still listening as she held the bag up to the moonlight and frowningly inspect
ed its contents. Farran had recently come here with Malise, so both women were still relatively new to the group. But Beck had been drawing Farran further into his confidence lately. From what he had already learned about her, it never occurred to him that she would question him, no matter what he said to her. She was nothing if not loyal to him. She had proven it in many ways.
“That,” Beck said, indicating the bag and what was inside of it. “Is going to give us all the edge that we need against a- perpetrator. You feed small amounts of that to someone over a period of time, and they become so messed up in their head, they don’t know what’s real and what isn’t. Then it’s easy to do what has to be done.”
When Farran didn’t comment right away, he asked, “You’re still with me on this, aren’t you?” He looked closer at her. “I can trust you with this?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
She looked back at him, surprised that he would even question her loyalty. Hadn’t he already told her that he trusted her as he trusted no one else? Why he had suddenly picked her to be his confidant, she didn’t know. In the end it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Beck had chosen her.
He shook his head there in the darkness, nodding as if he had seen something in her eyes that satisfied him. “We have to make hard choices sometimes,” he said, repeating the same phrase he had said to her many times before.
“Are you sure it will work?” she wanted to know.
“I’ve seen it work in the past,” Beck assured her. He gave her a single dark, lingering glance, and then he turned his face and stared off into the darkness for a while as if he was envisioning something only he could see. Farran sat watching his profile, waiting for him to explain further.
“My brother, Wesh, would have killed me a long time ago if I hadn’t used that on him. I couldn’t just sit around and wait for him to stab me in the back when I was least expecting it. Wesh was trained to fight, the same as I was. And he was good at it. Maybe better than me. I needed an edge.”
“You poisoned your brother?” she finally asked wide-eyed. “With this?”
She was shocked, but she also knew that he valued loyalty above all else. And she was willing to yield up everything, even her very soul, to prove herself to him. A hard choice, maybe, but a woman chosen by a leader sometimes had to make sacrifices.
Chapter 8
After they had eaten dinner and darkness had fallen, Dalin stretched himself out on the carpeted floor before the fireplace. He had let Cayla have the sofa right next to him. “Let’s get some sleep,” he said after a prolonged yawn. He stretched out leisurely, feeling confident that he had taken enough precautions to keep them safe for the night.
It wasn’t too uncomfortable on the floor with a pile of blankets under him, he decided. And they wouldn’t be cold. They had endured plenty of cold, teeth-chattering nights already where they only had each other’s body heat to keep from freezing to death. It was something he especially hated. Sleepless nights spent shivering out in the open without a blanket, while you kept one eye open for hunters, didn’t prepare you for what the day ahead might hold. But they should rest well tonight.
Macayla heard Dalin’s sigh in the darkness of the cabin. She brushed her hair back from her face, looked over the side of the sofa and watched him intently in the moonlight. It wasn’t like Dalin to be awake in the middle of the night, unless, of course, there was a good reason for it. He was lying on his back with one hand resting on his forehead, obviously about as far away from sleep as she was.
“Are you worried about tomorrow?” she asked.
He was always worried, but no sense in letting her know that.
“I just want to make sure I’ve thought of everything.” He had to give her something more than that, so he said, “I was thinking about what you said earlier. About going west. It could be different there. It’s something to think about. I agree that we need to stay out of the populated areas.”
“I know some people who are still waiting for the government to come and save them,” she said. “But look how hard it is to make it here. What do you think it would be like in a crowded city with hunters everywhere and gangs there already organized and armed before this even started?”
He agreed with her. “It’d be like a war zone. Hell, you think the politicians wouldn’t already have their own private army in place? If they had something worth taking, they would have already been prepared to do what they had to in order to keep it.”
“I’d like to think there was a place where this nightmare was over,” she sighed. “Or nearly over. But sometimes I think it’s never going to end. Not in our lifetimes. I don’t like the times when I feel like that because it’s easy to get to the point where the only way to deal with it all is to shut everything down.”
It was true. She had come to the point where she usually didn’t even think of the future. She lived only from moment to moment, refusing to look ahead because looking ahead could become seriously depressing.
“Is that how you dealt with things when you were alone?” he asked her.
“There have been times when part of me feels so numb that it frightens me,” she admitted. “And other times it just makes me feel sad. But to live without any emotions at all- Isn’t that what a living death really is?” After a pause, she asked, “Do you think the hunters feel any emotions?”
“No. I think that part of them is dead, too.”
“Then they deserve to be at peace,” she said softly.
“Ah, you mean as in rest in peace.”
Her eyes, beautiful in their translucency even in the moonlight, were still steadily watching him. “Maybe,” she said. “But I wish we didn’t have to kill them.”
“Sometimes there’s no one else to do it but us,” he said.
“It gets easier, doesn’t it?”
“It never gets easier,” he answered quietly. “You just shut your mind to it.”
She thought about that. “I’m not as good at it as you are.”
He didn’t know if she meant the killing or shutting his mind down. He went for the easier answer. “You’re about as handy with a knife as anyone I ever saw.”
“Too handy?” she queried.
“No. You just do what has to be done. We all do.”
“Sometimes I wondered if I contributed enough to the group.”
“I’m sure you kept something alive in the group,” he said.
“Is that an actual compliment?” He heard the almost breathless quality in her voice. The surprise. “I’m speechless.”
“That’s good, because I was starting to worry that you were going to talk me to death. We need to get some sleep so we can get an early start.”
She ignored his light sarcasm and said, “With any luck, we’ll have good weather tomorrow. That will help. I don’t like travelling in the rain.”
“We’ve been lucky so far, but there is such a thing as crowding luck too hard.”
“What brought you here in the first place?” he heard. She didn’t usually ask him questions about his past.
After a silence, he said, “I came here from Virginia looking for my brother.”
That must have been hard for him, Addy thought. It was hard to find people that were missing. Sometimes it was impossible. Sometimes you never knew what happened to them and that could be a hard thing to live with.
“How long have you been looking?”
“Since the beginning.”
Cayla knew there was a good chance he might never have answers. She had unanswered questions of her own.
He drew a deep breath, bent one knee and stretched the other long leg out. Outwardly he showed no sign of emotion, but inside she knew that emotion ran deep. Even in the darkness she saw his brows come together in a frown.
“I’m not looking anymore,” she heard him say very softly. She did not fail to notice the shadow of pain that ran through his voice.
“I’m sorry.”
It was a revelation to Cayla seeing this sid
e of Dalin. It was one that he had never allowed her to see before. She realized that behind the hard, inflexible exterior that he presented totheworld, to her, behind that mask of indifference was something far deeper and far more profound than she had realized. That something less stern might have ruled him had his life been different. And had the world allowed it.
“Those men from the death cult- ” she said quietly. “Do you think they’re lost because of their choices?”
“Lost?”
“You know.”
“Their choice is to catch people and then kill them. They’ve put a lot of effort into it. So if that’s makes them lost, then I guess that’s what they are.”
“How do you know they’ve put so much effort into it?” she asked. “And that they kill them.”
“I saw signs,” he replied, hoping she would not question him further.
“You know,” she began in the darkness. “A lot of people will probably get caught in their trap. Like we almost did.”
Dalin didn’t reply. He knew too much about the kind of men who were responsible for the gruesome things he had seen yesterday. He wouldn’t tell her about the shackled, beaten thing that had once been a human being. Or the woman who had also obviously been so brutalized that it had sickened him.
The lines about his mouth were tight with unexpressed emotion in the darkness. And Cayla could not see it in the darkness, but there was a murderous glint in his eyes as he recalled all he had seen. She was right, he thought to himself. A lot of people would get caught in their trap. Had there been any survivors, he knew he would be wrestling right now with a decision to go back and rescue them. But there hadn’t been any survivors. And he realized that that was probably for the best. Just as much for them as for him. As for Cayla, he would have to leave her behind, alone and on her own, if he did go back because he wouldn’t expose her to any more danger. But there was no need to go back now.
Deadrise (Book 4): Blood Reckoning Page 8