by Sean Platt
The scalp tore off, and the mutant’s jagged maw sank onto Wolf.
He managed to raise the other hand just in time, thrusting his fingers into the mutant’s ebony eyes.
It screamed as Wolf dug deeper, forcing its head back and away from him.
The mutant rolled off of his body.
Wolf tore at its face, ripping wet flesh from its eyes and cheeks, revealing bloody fatty tissue and muscle braided with vines.
He wanted to vomit, but the others were moving on him.
His knife was still in the alpha’s gut, and his sword carried off by the other mutant that Wolf had stabbed in the head.
Two on one, without any weapons.
He scrambled to his feet as they slowly approached, their twitching bodies making him think the fuckers were about to strike when they weren’t.
“You don’t want none of this,” Wolf said.
One of them growled, something between nightmare and human.
Wolf kept backing away, wondering if he could outrun the fuckers.
He barely dodged a swiping claw. Raised his fists, ready.
Their faces were soft; maybe he could debilitate them with a good punch in the nose. Or one through the back of their skulls. Wolf had never minded a mess.
But watching their jerky movements, he kept thinking he’d misjudge the motion, find a mouth in a different place than it should be, then lose a hand.
They tried to circle around him, but Wolf kept retreating, their dark eyes making it difficult to tell exactly what part of him they were looking at, or what they might want once their claws stopped missing.
His back hit something hard and metal. Must be a car.
One of the creatures saw it as their chance and charged, reaching out to swipe at his gut. Wolf grabbed its wrists and wrenched them hard, using the mutant’s momentum to slam it head first into the car’s window.
The glass crackled like a spiderweb in every direction, not giving Wolf any useful shards to use as a weapon.
He turned as the other mutant came at him.
But not quickly enough.
The creature was on him, knocking Wolf backwards.
He brought up his hand to block the monster from biting his face.
The creature bit right into his forearm.
He screamed, but couldn’t shake loose as the teeth sank deeper in his skin to rain blood from his wounds.
A stabbing pain in his stomach.
He looked down to see the creature’s claw buried in his stomach.
Wolf cried out as the monster dug deeper. He ate pain for breakfast, but this was a buffet. He was pinned against the car and the other mutant was pulling itself from the window.
Two on one and Wolf was trapped, the mutant maw still clamped on his left forearm.
Wolf kneed it in the nuts, but the creature didn’t register the pain.
And it wasn’t budging.
The other one slid up to his left, mouth opening as it closed in on Wolf’s neck.
A blade pierced through the monster’s head to his right.
What the fuck?
Brother Truth materialized out of thin air, holding his sword.
The monster let go of Wolf’s arm just in time to feel the truth of his blade as it pierced his chest.
Wolf’s arm, now free, was gushing blood. Maybe too much of it.
His vision blurred at the edges.
And then he fell to the ground.
Wolf woke up in an apartment inside The Ruins. The place was, surprisingly, perfectly intact — save for the vines and leaves growing in and out of the walls.
He looked down at his arm. The bite had healed, except for dark spots where the skin had broken.
He looked around and saw Brother Truth sitting in the corner, eyes closed.
“You sleeping?” Wolf yelled.
The monk’s eyes shot open, the briefest glimmer of panic as he flinched for the hilt of his sword before recovering his cool and frowning at Wolf.
“So, that’s your fucking power.” He laughed. “You can turn invisible? You should’ve told me you could Sue Storm that shit earlier!”
“Are you okay to move?”
“Right as rain.” Wolf stood and saw his knife and sword by the bed where he had been sleeping. He gathered then sheathed his weapons. “So, what the hell were those things?”
“Ravagers.”
“And you couldn’t have given me a PSA before?”
“I’m surprised you haven’t seen them. You do come into The Ruins a lot, after all. Weren’t you telling me about all the things to watch out for?”
“Well, I ain’t ever seen that shit before! What the fuck are they?”
“They’re changed by what’s in here, but unlike the others who lose their minds, these are more hostile.”
“And how many more you figure we’ll run into on our way to this temple, assuming your dude is even there?”
“I have no idea.” Truth shook his head. “But we need to move soon.”
“Why?”
“Because we don’t want to be here when it gets dark.”
“And why’s that?”
Brother Truth stared at Wolf as if he had forgotten the answers.
“What? I’m not the expert. You monks worship this shit.”
“We just don’t want to be in here after dark. It gets worse.”
“And how long we got?”
Brother Truth wasn’t wearing a watch. But he closed his eyes and said, “We have an hour.”
“Fucking perfect.”
Twenty-Nine
Johan Pascal
Pascal was lying next to Val in bed, naked and sweaty.
While most of her was in shadow as she stared at him, the pale blue moonlight bleeding through the bedroom window spilled across her smile.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re pretty good at this.”
“What? Sex? Thanks, I’ve had a little practice.”
“No,” she laughed. “I mean, yeah, that too. But I meant how you were with Charlotte today. I … I guess I’m just not used to your nurturing side.”
He turned away.
“Are you blushing?” She reached over and touched his cheek, turning him to face her.
“No.” Pascal smiled, despite his best efforts.
“I knew it, you’re just a teddy bear.”
Then she kissed him, looking into his eyes differently than before, as if seeing him for the first time. He considered Olivia’s question.
Don’t you want to start a family again?
How long before you allow yourself to live again?
“She had a good day today,” Val said. “This is the first night she’s closed the door before going to bed. She might even sleep through the night.”
“Good. She deserves a peaceful sleep.”
“She and Elijah got along so well.”
“He’s a good kid.”
“You’re a good kid,” she teased, kissing him on the nose.
He kissed her softly on the mouth, content in a way he hadn’t been in a long while, not since before the world disappeared in a blink.
Maybe he could be happy again.
Maybe he and Val could settle down.
Maybe Charlotte, if she wanted to, could even be part of their family.
He felt Val’s warmth against his skin, and wanted the moment to last him forever.
He closed his eyes, head to her chest, falling into her heartbeat as it carried him gently away.
Pascal woke to a scream coming from down the hall.
Charlotte!
He threw on his pajamas and raced out of the room. Val was right behind him, throwing on a robe.
He burst into Charlotte’s room and flicked on the light to find her sitting on the bed, knees folded to her chin, eyes bulging wide and tears streaming down her cheeks, screaming without pause at the top of her lungs.
Charlotte saw him, then leapt up from the bed and into his arms.
He held her as sobbed
against him, repeating something over and over that Pascal couldn’t make out. She sputtered several times before he finally understood. They … they won’t stop.”
Charlotte’s pain cracked something inside him. Val stood in the doorway, crying. He met her eyes and she started crying harder.
Val came over to them, but Charlotte flinched as she sat on the bed. That sent Val to her feet and retreating from the room.
Charlotte kept soaking his chest, crying against him.
Pascal wanted to take her pain away. But the only way he knew to ease her suffering was an invasion.
Charlotte kept shaking. “I just want it to go away.”
“It’ll be okay,” he said, holding her tighter.
“No, it won’t.” She pulled out and away from his hug. “Every time I close my eyes, I see them. I feel them.”
Don’t do it. Give her time to heal on her own.
Charlotte dug her nails into her arms hard enough to draw blood. “I just want it all to go away.”
He put his hand on hers, gently pulling it from her arm. “You’re hurting yourself.”
“I don’t care!” She dug her claws back in and started digging harder. The blood was now pooling. How long before she did real damage?
“Charlotte …”
She couldn’t hear him through the pain. She dug deeper and cried louder, blood still gushing and pooling.
Pascal grabbed her hand.
She looked up at him, eyes looking crazed, biting into her lip and bringing crimson liquid to that.
“What if I could make it go away?”
She stopped biting, confused. “What do you mean?”
“What if I could make you forget?”
“How?”
He raised his hand. “I have powers. I can see inside people’s heads. I can also take their memories … and erase them.”
“Erase them?” Charlotte looked like she wanted to believe but couldn’t.
“Yes. Just the bad ones, not all your memories.”
“How?”
Don’t do it. Val will be pissed. Just go get her, she’ll know what to do.
But Charlotte had flinched when she sat. Pascal was the only one who could get through to her when she was like this.
Give her more time.
Pascal stared at the blood running down her arm and onto the sheets, wondering how long before the girl did serious damage to herself? Was she suicidal?
Her pain was unbearable. Before the world ended, his best friend, Clara, had killed herself. She’d suffered abuse and post-traumatic stress. If he’d had this power before The Event, he could’ve saved her from the torment.
“How would you erase them?” she asked again.
“Easy. Do you want me to?”
“Just the bad ones?”
He nodded. “Just the bad ones.”
“Yes.” Charlotte wiped the tears from her cheeks.
Don’t do it!
Go get Val.
No, Val can’t help her now. Not as quickly.
He put his hands to her head and closed his eyes. He’d look first, then decide whether to erase the memories or consult with Val.
It might be something she could heal from. Maybe the girl’s torment had more to do with watching her father die than any abuse suffered in The Slums.
He closed his eyes and focused, his palm on her warm head.
Then Pascal entered her memories.
He watched as the bandits attacked her father. One of them, a thin man with long white hair, was the Alt bandit he’d seen in Kanjo’s memories. The man burned Charlotte’s father alive right in front of her.
Her terror was an inferno under his skin.
She cried in both the memory and real life, reliving the horror as Pascal made it new. The men took her. She’d kicked, screamed, clawed, and fought her best. But she was no match for so many of them.
Then he saw what came next, when she was brought to The Slums.
He experienced the memories in one horrifying flash of pain and horror.
She cried out as she relived it alongside him.
Screaming.
Val was probably coming, frightened by the symphony of grief.
He had to act fast. Not just to keep Val from stopping him, but to relieve Charlotte of her most treacherous memories.
He focused on the core, finding his way to the terrible, twisted knot, almost a physical manifestation in her psyche.
He absorbed it, erasing the worst of those memories away.
Once wiped, Pascal breathed a pair of words into her mind.
Relax.
Sleep.
He lowered her head onto the pillow with both hands, then let go.
Now her memories were in him.
He hadn’t experienced the murder of Charlotte’s father and her rapes as a bystander. He was her in those memories, and those events had now also happened to him.
Pascal was still trembling inside.
Tomorrow Charlotte would remember only the parts she needed to make sense of her present. She’d know her father died and that he and Val had kindly taken her in. But she would forget the men’s atrocities, at least for now.
Pascal struggled to focus.
What do I need to do next?
He looked at her arm and the blood.
Oh, yeah.
He left her room, heading for the bathroom and bandages to treat her wounds.
Val was on him immediately. “What happened?”
“Hold on.” On his knees, fumbling under the sink for the first aid kit. “Damn it,” he said, smacking his head a second after grabbing the kit.
He walked back to Charlotte’s room with Val right behind him.
She saw Charlotte asleep, her bloody arms staining the sheets. “What the hell happened?”
“Just wait,” Pascal said, trying to focus on wrapping them, and recovering from what he just witnessed.
But how does anyone recover from this?
He’d felt guilty at first, like he was violating Charlotte’s mind, but seeing what he had lifted from her, Pascal felt no guilt at all.
He should have done it sooner.
Pascal grabbed the kit and blood-soaked wipes, then left her room, shaking. He replaced the kit under the sink and bumped his head again.
He finished scrubbing his hands with hot water and looked up in the mirror to see Val staring from the doorway behind him. Frightened or mad, maybe both.
“What did you do, Pascal?”
He shook his head. “You know what I did.”
Val kept staring. But he couldn’t look at her. The blood was off of his hands, but they still felt dirty. He felt dirty.
He got undressed and stepped into the shower. Yanked the curtain closed so he wouldn’t have to look at her, nor she at him.
“Why did you do it?”
“You weren’t there. You didn’t see what happened.”
“She needed time to process it.”
“No,” Pascal said, ripping the curtain aside. “There’s no processing that. What’s the point of having this gift if I can’t help people forget this shit?”
“You really don’t think this will manifest in some other way?”
Truth was, Pascal didn’t know. He hadn’t thought that far out, but wasn’t willing to admit that right now.
He closed the curtain and kept washing his body. No matter how much he scrubbed, he couldn’t get the feeling of being unclean off of his body or out of his mind.
Val sighed.
“If you’re going to beat me up over this, can we please at least save it until the morning?”
She didn’t answer, and when he got out of the shower he saw she was gone.
So he went downstairs, got two beers from the fridge, and started drinking.
Thirty
Slum Lord
Slum Lord stood naked in the red glow bleeding from The Baxter’s blinking sign outside his bedroom window, staring out at the rainy night and the street below. It was
after midnight and the weather was poor, but the world was still alive with motion and noise, people getting drunk at the bars, music radiating from the clubs, heavy traffic in and out of the brothels.
The Slums never slept, and thus rarely went quiet.
Sasha, however, was asleep in bed behind him.
Sebastian felt jealous. His mind was spinning with an abundance of things left unsettled. He didn’t like uncertainty and loathed too many variables.
He had to be careful if he was going to take out Hobarth. He needed to know who of The Six was allegiant to the pimp and whom he could count on.
He donned a suit and left his room, heading downstairs to the bar where the crowd was listening to the dulcet tones of the sultry redhead known only as Miranda singing alongside Old Tony’s piano stylings.
They were singing a classic from yesteryear, though Sebastian wasn’t sure of its name. The sense of nostalgia was heavy, regardless.
Funny, he thought, walking through the bar and to the kitchen’s entrance, how I’m nostalgic for a world and time that never embraced me.
But it wasn’t the period he missed so much as his younger sister, Corrina. She was fourteen, three years younger than him, when The Event happened. They grew up homeless long before The Slums had existed. She had been preyed upon by men who’d robbed her of her innocence while he was out trading cash for survival.
He saved up enough from prostituting himself to send his sister to a boarding school. She didn’t want to go, didn’t want to leave him, so he was forced to tell her that she was a burden that had been holding him back.
It broke his heart when Corinna left thinking he didn’t love her, or want her around. It broke again when everybody outside their corner of the world disappeared in an instant.
Sebastian had doomed rather than saved her. And worst of all she died thinking that her brother didn’t love her at all.
The cooks ignored him as he opened the wine cellar door.
He clicked on a blinking red light, then descended the stairs, passed the many rows of bottles, and headed for the last wall-mounted stack.
He reached behind one of the bottles, found the secret switch, and unlocked it.
He slid the shelf aside to reveal a secret doorway.