Eternal Refuge

by Annabelle McInnes

  She was going to do it! She was going to be free! Little Kira, the woman who survived an apocalypse but still couldn’t cook was going to escape evil and find the men she loved, all on her own!

  Until another vehicle rumbled over the horizon on a black snake made of tar.

  The sky rumbled, and let it burden free.

  Rain hammered the truck, the windshield and her vision washed in water.

  At the ugly presence on the horizon, her truck faltered, and the exhaust backfired. The engine wheezed before it stopped entirely.

  Her luck had just run out.

  She screamed in frustration, banged on the steering wheel, turned the key. But the wretched thing had given up, fled to greener pastures and left its host to fend for herself.

  The glass at her side was smashed and they were on her. Dragged through a window, she screamed. This time, she couldn’t hold it back. It was instinctual. The terrible, visceral fear erupted out of her mouth and reverberated through the trees. Their strength was significant, their weight crushing. She was on the ground in the mud as the rain fell while their bodies pushed the breath from her lungs and squashed her, attempted to pry her legs apart.

  She struggled, screamed again. She reached up, teeth bared and bit exposed skin. A man howled and threw his hand back in an attempt to strike her where it would hurt.

  ‘What the fuck is going on here?’

  The man on top of her stilled. Both he and his companion turned as four men exited the truck that had been the precursor to her end.

  There was a brilliant flash of hope. Maybe these newcomers would save her, find her heart and home, shield her from the two that planned to steal her soul. But when her eyes caught them, she knew instinctively that these men were no heroes. Malice and cruelty were written on dirty faces. She would find no safety with them. Her heart faulted and tripped because of it.

  Four car doors slammed. Each thump jarred her, shocked her with electricity. It sang a song of terror. She had to escape.

  When the man that lay upon her pulled himself upright, she rolled and, by the grace of divine intervention, she stumbled to her feet before anyone had a chance to thwart her trajectory.

  Then she ran. Her boots were loud when they hit the tarmac, water splashed with every step. Each footfall was accompanied by a shout. She screamed out the only two words in the entire English language that meant anything to her at the time. Euan. Nick. There was a glimmer of hope in her predicament. The more time these monsters took with her, the longer the men she loved had to find her.

  She screamed their names with every particle of oxygen in her lungs. She screamed until she was hoarse, until only sobs passed her lips.

  There was chaos behind her, but she paid it no mind. She simply ran. She didn’t look back. She didn’t dash into the landscape at her sides. The scrub, trees and uneven ground would hinder her path, slow her down. She needed speed and …

  A truck behind her revved.

  Nope, she needed trees.

  She was quick, nimble, but not as fast as a vehicle. The distance they made up with their engine consumed any she had won with the efforts of her legs. They didn’t need to go into the scrub, they simply required the head start to be mute. Despite the adrenaline, she waned, each step a little slower than the last. She stumbled and they pounced.

  A body hit her in the back.

  She went down with a tumble. Already bruised from her earlier scuffle, her hands bound, she could not lessen the impact. She hit the ground with a painful cry.

  The gravel tore at her skin. The dirt filled her mouth. Mud soaked her clothes. They tumbled and rolled. She struggled. She kicked. She clawed.

  But it was not enough.

  They were upon her. In the mayhem of hands and fingers, she thought it was all of them. They pulled at her clothes, tore at her boots, her hair. She screamed, but no one paid her any mind. It was over, she was tired. Fear was a motivator, but a body could only last so long.

  Then, shots fired. Two rounds exploded into the air. There was a perfect moment where Kira felt profound relief, Euan and Nick had come to save her. She was going to be free. But it was destroyed, smashed, when an unfamiliar man prowled over the hoard that swamped her tiny body. He was a tower of anger and evil. Lank blond hair that dripped onto broad shoulders. Ratty clothes of greys and green covered a pale body. Eyes the colour of moss and mould held hers for a heartbeat before he scanned the men that surrounded her.

  He lifted his gun, cocked his head and without further thought, shot them, one by one, even as they attempted to escape.

  A sob accompanied the flinch as each bullet rung out. Gore splattered her clothes, her skin, her face. It mingled with the mud and the rain. She trembled as the bodies of four men tumbled to the ground.

  Kira was surrounded by corpses that twitched in their demise. There was blood with death. So much blood. Tears leaked from her eyes unheeded. Her body vibrated unchecked. White skin was painted red, black, pink, brown. Blank, her mind was blank. Somewhere inside, her conscience wailed, but all she could do was stare, and wait.

  ‘There are rules, and consequences for breaking them. Understand?’

  Kira nodded. What else could she do?

  The man crouched. Kira cringed back. The glint of a blade caught her focus. It dripped with water from the sky. In her shock, she could do nothing but watch as the man bent and sliced the rope that bound her hands.

  She bit back the yelp as the blood rushed to the appendages. Her fingers tingled and she rubbed them, only to realise she was rubbing the blood of the vanquished into her skin.

  The blond man turned to his one remaining companion. ‘Radio Parker. Tell him we have found him a little blonde queen.’

  Chapter 17

  Nick

  The hammer of his heart was almost as loud as the drum of his boots. Each step forward took him another step closer, but he had no notion of the path they took. No understanding of their speed, their intentions, their destination. They were an enigma, a shadow that held the last remnant of light in a world of blackness.

  To find them was akin to an impossibility. Rescuing Kira, reuniting with Euan? An unfeasible task. He was more likely to find luck waiting out the end of the humanity, in the hope that the murkiness that tarnished almost every man’s soul would evaporate when age and malnutrition took them.

  Despite the hopelessness, Nick jogged on. When the clouds finally released their burden and drenched the land with water, he cursed but didn’t slow. He was banking on the car failing under the modifications that had been made in this weather.

  He was depending on Kira’s fortitude. Her tenacity. Her will to see herself free, and not simply wait for the knight to save her, even if she knew that those knights would attempt to rescue her with everything that they had available to them.

  But Nick would not be caught up in the modern thoughts of feminism. The facts were brutal. Despite her courage, she was smaller. Despite her brilliance, she was weaker. Despite her agility, she was outnumbered.

  Nick knew the simple mathematics. He himself had battled that equation and failed.

  It didn’t matter how clever, brave or strong a person could be. When those odds were stacked against them, they were fucked.

  The wind picked up and the trees by the road swayed. Water sluiced down their branches, their bark turned black. The wildlife was absent. No birds were visible, no animal scurried in the undergrowth that lined the crumbling tarmac. All beasts had found their nests and burrows to wait out the deluge.

  The puddles under his feet grew. The water filtered through the cracks in the tar where the tree roots had forced their way through one of the last vestiges of mankind. They encroached and they consumed. Green grass sprouted through the gaps, a vibrancy in contrast to the black and grey that surrounded it.

  The rain continued to fall. Nick huddled under his waterproof poncho and jogged on. The water dripped down the edge of his hood and into his eyes. He ignored it like he ignored the stin
g in his arm from the bullet wound, the blisters that formed on his feet from his wet socks, his cold fingers, and the terror that churned in his stomach.

  A sudden urge had him quickening his pace. A tension in the air. Nick heard a noise that didn’t fit with the natural surroundings under the patter of the rain. He pushed his hood back and jogged a little faster.

  There it was again.

  A scream.

  Kira.

  Nick ran. His legs sped without conscious thought. He threw off the poncho and discarded his backpack. They were inconsequential in relation to Kira’s life. He pulled his knife from his belt. He sped along the road as best he could. He avoided the fallen branches, he jumped over the cracks. He skidded through the mud.

  Another scream alighted with the wind. This time he heard his name. He heard Euan’s name. He heard her panic, her fear, her fright. It was a declaration to him, a blast of hope even if it was laced with dread. She lived. She was whole. He could save her.

  The surge to answer her call almost consumed him. To yell her name back at her. To tell her that he was close. That he would find her. That she just had to stay alive, the rest they would fix, together.

  Then there were gunshots.

  At first, two blinding slaps to his optimism.

  Nick’s body ricocheted as though he was the one that had been hit. He stumbled, tripped, righted himself before he hit the tarmac. His hands slipped on the hilt of his knife. He dropped the weapon. When it hit a puddle, he imagined that the water that splashed out morphed into blood. Kira’s blood.

  There was silence. Nick raced on.

  Then four more claps of terrible thunder.

  His heart thundered. It reverberated faster than the effort needed to keep him moving. His terror was so significant that he tasted it. Bile, ash and salt. A combination that made him gag. He swiped his knife from the mud even as he ran. His body moved with a speed that was startling. If she’d been shot, he would never get to her in time before she bled out.

  But that was not the only risk she faced. In the silence, they could be hurting her. She could be gagged, pain may have stolen her voice. There were no more screams. No more cries of his name, of Euan’s. There were no pleas for mercy, no desperate wails, shrieks of pain or howls of torment.

  The sound of the pouring rain was all around him. It thundered in his ears. It stole the edge from his senses. He couldn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear anything!

  Then the rumble of the truck. He was close. So fucking close. He sped on. Knees pushed high with every lunge, feet stretched out long. His breath surged, his mouth was parched despite the rain. His hand was slippery on the weapon. He ran, and he ran, and he ran.

  He rounded the corner and he saw it. Two trucks. The one that had stolen his Kira. Steam billowed from under its bonnet. The other new and in far better condition.

  It didn’t shudder and shake as it took off. Its engine roared, even over the hammering of the rain, it pulled out smooth, and moved before Nick could react.

  It wouldn’t have mattered. He was too far. He would never reach it.

  Nick slowed. He tasted salt and water. He shuddered from the loss and from the cold. He had stopped. The white line in the road ran between his stationary feet. There was an infinity between him and Kira. He couldn’t breathe.

  He’d lost. A-fucking-gain

  Movement caught his eye. He flicked the knife in his hand until the blade pointed towards the aggressive sky. A twin to Euan’s bowie, the eleven inches of razor-sharp steel and angry saw-back would see any living man tremble.

  Four bodies. Three lay motionless in the mud. Rain hammered their clothes until they stuck to emaciated torsos. They already resembled decomposing corpses, pulled into the earth to be consumed by Mother Nature. More skeletons to add to the hoards that remained unburied after the fall of mankind.

  But one still trembled, and Nick recognised him as the man that had forced Kira into the back of the truck. In that moment, he felt a terrible pleasure. A wonderful brilliance that bloomed through his chest. His lips tipped up and a rush of gruesome greed splashed through his muscles.

  He was going to do it. He was going to enjoy it. He closed his eyes, breathed in. His fist tightened on his weapon. Joy unlike any he had felt before sung within him.

  The steps he took to the twitching body were measured. When he stood over the man, the grin that split across his face was inhuman. Maybe he was no longer man. In that moment, he certainly felt like a predator.

  It gave him a vile sense of pleasure.

  When the man in the mud registered Nick standing above him like the warden of death, he flinched. Despite the bullet that had clearly lodged in this throat, he registered Nick’s intentions. Wild, dying eyes roamed Nick’s face before he travelled down his body. He saw the knife in Nick’s hand and his already pale skin turned yellow with sickened terror.

  Nick had been the one to send Rodgers to his maker that terrible day. In that moment, he hadn’t concerned himself with what had surrounded him in that room, only that the man known as Death needed to die.

  Memories of what he had done to him, how he had hurt, tormented and brutalised him had made the effort to pull the trigger easy. There had been no second-guessing. He had simply seen, then shot.

  But once that evil had fallen to the blood-soaked floor, he was able to take in the rest of the tiny, smoky room. It was then he realised that the carcass that swung from the roof on a meat hook was the man he loved, the man he adored, the man he worshipped and revered. It had been shocking. The horror so bright he thought the earth beneath his feet had opened and the devil had kissed his hand in a promise of pain and suffering. Euan had been mutilated. He had been tortured for nothing other than to pleasure another man’s sick sense of need. Once he had gotten over the shock and realised the bleeding body still lived, he had been too overwhelmed to understand how a man could do that to another living thing.

  In this moment, Nick understood.

  He crouched. He stared into wild, wide eyes of the man he would kill. He saw everything, and he did everything in slow motion. A terrible reducing of time and intentions. The man’s face was destroyed. His throat oozed blood with every heartbeat. When he worked his jaw in an attempt to breathe, the gloss of bloody teeth could be seen through his gasping lisps.

  ‘Does she live?’ Nick asked. His voice sounded strange even to him. Firm, unwavering. Stoic.

  Like Euan’s.

  The man tried to roll away, and Nick lashed out. The knife embedded in the flesh of the man’s shoulder and pinned him to the ground. The gurgling howl that erupted out of that gaping wound in his face was revolting.

  ‘I’m not going to ask again.’

  The man’s eyes rolled back. Nick took the time to look towards the sky. Clouds of grey and green, of yellow and white twisted and twirled as they continued to eradicate the heaviest of the water they held in their arms. The wind whipped up and Nick’s sodden hair flicked his cheeks, into his eyelashes. His gaze returned to the man in the mud.

  He waited.

  The wheezing breaths slowed. Each gurgle a little longer after the last. Nick pushed the hilt of his knife further into the shoulder of the man and bent down until he could smell the blood.

  He held blue-grey eyes. The man nodded.

  A thundering heart. A relief that was physical. Nick’s shoulders slumped and his body hunched. His knees were in the dirt. The knuckles of his free hand held him upright. ‘Did you hurt her?’

  At that, the man answered too quickly. The shake of his head was too eager, too nervous.

  Nick breathed in deeply. The air was tainted with the scent of blood, of waste, of stinking wet clothes and death. He licked his lips, tasted the remnant of his tears and with a jerk, pulled his knife from the man’s shoulder.

  But it was no reprieve.

  He held the blade over the man’s left eye. He could envision it, the slow precision as it eased into the mutilated face. He could feel what it would be li
ke to embed a blade into flesh and bone. He lifted the knife, held it aloft.

  And did nothing.

  Euan would not want him to kill. The big man had worked so hard to ensure his soul remained clean of intentional scars. This was not a burden he needed to bear. He was angry, he was scared. But in this, he would remain whole.

  That disgusting gurgle was back. Until it wasn’t. Cut short by time. Not Nick.

  Nick stood, a changed man. He stood a man that had one intention. One reason to breathe, one reason to move forward.

  Kira lived. He didn’t know what had been done to her to have her scream his and Euan’s name in such desperation. But he did know he would save her from it.

  His eyes travelled towards the horizon. The road stretched out before him. Black bisected with a white line. Edged with nature. It was his yellow brick road home.

  His backpack lost, his knife his only weapon. Nick narrowed his eyes, spat at the feet of the body of the man and stalked to the steaming truck that took Kira.

  Chapter 18

  Euan

  The rain had stopped. A tiny fire flickered and wavered. Wet wood cracked, popped and hissed as it dried, to be consumed by the flames. Darkness surrounded him, the night all-encompassing. Euan had stopped only because he could no longer see his way. But he used the time wisely.

  Cleaning tools for his Glock lay in pieces by his feet on a waterproof poncho he had used to keep the rain off his shoulders. He slipped the brass cleaning rod into the barrel with caution, any nick or ding could impact the accuracy of the weapon. Euan was exceedingly careful.

  The sliver of sound as the rod moved in and out of the bore was comforting. So were the items he used. A cleaning brush, cotton patches, solvent, degreaser, lubricant and protectant were going to ensure that the weapon he held in his hands was a perfect killing machine.

  Six gunshots today. What that meant, who had shot them or their consequences were unknown. The sounds, his hesitation, the shot of adrenaline, the decision not to investigate and to continue forward played havoc on his mind. They repeated, over and over, until he questioned everything, and knew nothing.