He’s right, goddamn it. I rub my hand over my forehead. “Well I’m giving new orders. Get out of here, boy. If your mother’s still around, tell her to get you out of Charlotte.”
The kid scrambles to his feet and takes off.
Jacobs raises his rifle, and I give his shoulder a shove. “That was an order, Private.”
He glares at me. “Jesus, Jax, what are you doing? They’re a bunch of goddamn cannibals!”
“That would be ‘Sargent,’ not Jax. Did you not hear me? No kids. Someone that age has no idea what he’s eating.”
Jacobs seethes. “I’m reporting this, Sarge.”
I thin my lips. “I’m reporting your repeated refusal to follow orders. I’m watching you, Jacobs. Now get moving. We have this entire block to cover.”
Shit. This deployment to Charlotte is my one chance to get out of security detail, and I can’t afford to fuck up here. If I can’t control my squad, no way is the Arc going to give me more responsibility.
Three hours later I’ve scored two kills and Holub one. Jacobs holds the best score at four.
It’s my job, I remind myself. I don’t give a shit if I kill a bunch of flesh-eating freaks. As far as I’m concerned, the moment they took their first bite out of a human, they became bullet bait. Little kids, though. I mean, little ones. They don’t get to choose. I’m a sick bastard, I know that, but not when it comes to children.
We’ve been sent by the men in the Arc, a top-secret complex built into Mounts Craig and Mitchell in North Carolina. So far as I’ve been able to figure out, a bunch of old-moneyed bastards got wind that something was going down with Yellowstone long before it happened, and began construction. Then they proceeded to save the right people. Billionaires like themselves, scientists and engineers with staggering IQs, and anyone else they liked.
I got lucky. I ran into one of them during the bombing of Atlanta and gave him an armed escort to the mountains. In return he allowed me and my companions to serve in their exterior security detail. I’ve never been inside the Arc, but they gave us a comfortable bunkhouse and three square meals a day, so I considered myself luckier than most. Now that they’ve deployed me to Charlotte, they’re giving me a chance to prove myself. This is the first city they’ve tried to reclaim. Provided it’s a success, they’ll send me on to the next city at a higher rank. Right now I oversee four teams of men, three to each team, and we wipe out the freaks in the former Elizabeth, Cherry, Dillner, and Myers Park areas. Problem is identifying where the hell we are. Right before the US government fell, they bombed Atlanta and Charlotte in an attempt to contain the rising cannibal problem. Now all that remains are some high-rise towers uptown and a vast area of half-demolished buildings in the surrounding neighborhoods. Our maps are useless.
We approach a block of offices and banks. Some of these still stand, a testament to the contractors who spent the extra bucks to build something decent.
I point to one of them. “Jacobs, take that bank. I bet a vault makes a great place to hide.”
Probably impossible to break into as well, so that should get rid of the shit bag for a while.
He shifts his stance and scowls at me. “I’m not going in there alone. What if they have weapons?”
“You’re wearing a Kevlar vest.”
“Fuck that.” He spits. “There could be a dozen people in there.”
“Get your useless ass in there or I’ll shoot you myself.” I jerk my head. “Holub, go with him.”
“Sure. You okay by yourself, Sarge?” Holub has no problem killing kids, but apparently he still respects authority.
I raise my eyes to the sky—a dark gray mass of clouds that never clears. “I’m good. I’m headed to the office building over there.”
Jacobs looks me up and down, then pivots and heads for the bank. Holub follows.
The peeling sign on the front of the four-story office reads NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF AGRICULTURAL ENGINEERS. The windows are all smashed, and from the debris spilling out the east side, I’d bet it took a direct hit. This wouldn’t shelter anyone, not from the cold anyway. I almost move on to the next building, but I pick up a soft thump.
I gotcha, you flesh-eating prick.
I move quietly, careful not to step on any broken glass or pieces of brick, and peer into each window. Through the first one, I observe a large hole in the ceiling, and a patch of sky is visible. I was right, the east wall is half-gone, and with half the roof missing, the interior is lit by an unusual amount of light. When I get to the fourth window, I come to a halt. A mess of useless computers are piled in one corner. Paper and files are strewn about the edges of what I estimate to be a fifty-by-fifty-foot room. The center space is clear except for one slight figure. She’s dancing. Ballet, not that I know much about that shit. It has to be with those sweeping hand motions and dainty pointed toes.
It’s…well, beautiful. I haven’t seen anything but snow, weapons, and blood in five years. I almost forgot things like this existed.
But she’s a scrap. If there’s someone out here other than a soldier, I’m to shoot it. I can’t afford any more exceptions, not after that kid.
I position my rifle against my shoulder.
I didn’t know anyone’s back could bend like that. She crosses her hands like butterfly wings and draws them to her chest, and at the same time she sinks low. It’s like fucking art. Every movement is perfectly smooth. She moves like liquid; each posture, each step flows into the next.
I take a breath and adjust my stance as she does this leap that makes her tits bounce. My dick twitches. Bouncing titties, no bra. I’m in heaven. Actually they’re pretty average, but with the rest of her so tiny, it’s hard to miss ’em.
Her waist is small, and the ass on that bitch is fucking phenomenal. I’ve got a raging boner. I’d definitely hit that.
Such a waste. She’s dirty, and her hair hangs around her in actual strings. I remember passing the homeless back before the Ash. They stank like old piss. She’s got to be just as bad, if not worse. Just another scrap.
I raise my rifle.
How can anyone balance like that? How can she raise her leg that high without popping a joint? I peer through the scope and find her face. She can’t be more than twenty. She’s thin to the point of being gaunt. High cheekbones, arched brows, and a small, pointed chin, and those lips… Jesus. Full and soft looking. I can easily picture those lips wrapped around my cock.
How the fuck am I supposed to shoot that?
No way. I blow this, and I can forget ever rising above sergeant. I went to Cornell, goddamn it. On scholarship. I roll my shoulders and reposition myself. Peering through the scope, I take aim at her head. She’s just rising from some bendy thing, and her smile reveals a crooked tooth. She’s not perfect. She’s not even human. She’s a canni—
The dancer spots me and freezes.
The breath stops in my chest as I look into wide blue eyes, so dark they’re almost navy, framed by the thickest set of lashes I’ve ever seen. She recoils with this pleading, defeated look on her face. I can’t move. I fucking can’t move.
It’s happening.
My heart slams against my chest, and the hair rises on the back of my neck. I clutch my hands around my weapon, but I have no intention of firing. I’m fixed on her, the sweet outline of her tits, that graceful bend, and those eyes. I’m not just hard. I’m gone. I need to fuck her. I need to run my tongue over those peaks; I need to feel her legs wrapped around me. I need to bury my cock in her so deep she’ll never forget she’s mine.
Jesus Christ. Not again.
CHAPTER TWO
Amelia
Never count on anyone taking care of you. This advice came from my father, and it’s the only thing I carried with me into the Post-Ash world. That and my dancing. Ballet is something I could never give up. It’s the only thing that brings me peace. It’s the only thing that lets me feel hope—even if it’s false hope—that something in me remains human.
It also keeps
me flexible. Being able to contort myself through tricky places helps me ditch the occasional pursuer.
The east wall is rubble, and there’s a hole in the roof. I come to this place so I can dance in the light without the risk of being seen. I set my pack down, shuck my coat, and take off my boots. I stretch, and oh man, does it feel good. Once I’m nice and limber, I dance. I begin with all the eagerness of someone who’s been trapped inside a hovel for the last two weeks. Five minutes after I start, I achieve a perfect jeté, leaving me feeling free and exultant. But I’m hungry and I don’t have much energy, so I go adagio: the graceful, slow stuff. I work diligently to keep my movements controlled and properly executed. There’s no such thing as a sloppy ballerina; they call those former students. I’ve been dancing since I was four, but I haven’t had a lesson in years. Before the Ash my instructors said I had a future, and I so desperately wanted to be a ballerina. Every twelve year-old girl does. Dad put his foot down and said no. A dancer’s work feeds her soul. A grown-up’s work puts food on the table. That’s when he said that thing about not relying on somebody else to take care of you.
Turned out Dad was right. My arches and turnouts never were good enough, and ballet hasn’t fed me yet. It did save my life a couple of times, like that day I got chased by taints—that’s what we call cannibals: the tainted. They chased me all the way up to the roof of a building. There was nowhere to go but down. Or over. I took a running leap, jetéed to the roof of the next building, and got clean away. Those years of practice did pay off, but they still haven’t earned me a single scrap of food.
This is one of my favorite places to dance. The hardwood floor is dinged and scratched, but its privacy suits me perfectly. I lose myself in the moment, but never so far that I’m not listening. Allowing anyone to know where I am could, and probably would, be fatal. If not from taints, then from those strange soldiers that started prowling around a couple of weeks ago. They’ve been gunning down anything they see. Not just taints—everyone. Why? But even if the soldiers hadn’t come, I’d still have to worry about other survivors who are just as hungry and desperate as I am. At any time I could be followed to my hiding place and murdered just for my stuff. I’ve removed my boots so I don’t clunk around, but I’ve got three pairs of socks separating me from the ground. If I have to bolt, at least there’s something on my feet.
Otherwise I wear nothing more than a double pair of leggings and a long-sleeve T-shirt. It’s twenty-seven degrees outside, and I’m sweating.
I dance and awareness fades. I dance, and once again I’m just a girl, not some starved leftover of a shattered world. I dance or I die.
And then I see it. I’m staring down the barrel of a rifle, and the soldier behind it looks back at me through his scope.
I don’t scream; I learned early on that screaming brings more trouble than it’s worth. My heart may pound and my legs may feel like collapsing, but I never break eye contact. Something primitive in the back of my brain tells me to run for it, but I wouldn’t even get three feet before he dropped me. This close, with a gun like that, he wouldn’t miss.
He adjusts his stance, never taking his eyes off me. I can’t tell how long we stay like this: motionless, staring, both of us seemingly undecided. I flick a glance at the gaping hole in the outer wall of the next room. What is he waiting for? If I run, will that make him decide to shoot? I suck in a breath, and slowly I straighten.
A fraction later he lifts his head slightly, and I get the impression of dark hair and a five o’clock shadow. For half a second his jaw flexes. Twin parallel lines etch between his brows as he frowns. I flinch as he adjusts his grip on his weapon, and a terrible, stinging this is it spiders through my veins. Any second I’ll be splattered across the meaningless files. The Wester name dies with me, and no one will even care. I’m wound so tight, if so much as a pebble dropped, I’d pee myself. I always knew this would come. I just didn’t think it would be today. I square my shoulders and lift my chin. I’m not ready to die, but I won’t beg either.
So when he lowers his rifle, I just stare at him. He jerks his head toward the shattered wall, and I finally get it. Faster than you can say thank you, Jesus, I grab my coat and pack and I’m off.
I’m halfway down the debris-filled sidewalk when something sharp digs into my foot. I left my boots. My boots! The adrenaline rush keeps me running. If I take the direct route, as only an idiot would do, I could be back in my hole in ten minutes. I dart from corner to corner, peering around each for any sign of movement. I study the streets, the fallen debris, the windows high above, and when all seems clear, I bolt through to the next block. Anyone could be up in those buildings watching me. Coming here during the light was more than just careless; it was stupid. I can dance perfectly well in my basement, but I had to get greedy and search out light. My heart still pounds, and my back burns like there’s a target carved in my flesh. I don’t know how long I run, but it feels like hours.
Time to me is a forgotten concept. There are no more clocks, and there isn’t enough sun to mark the passage of morning to afternoon. We have what seems like endless dark time; obviously that’s when it’s too dark to see. Eventually it grows light enough that it could be a Pre-Ash day, if that day had a blizzard in progress, three inches of snow falling an hour, and heavy sooty-looking clouds. Light by Ash standards; ugly for Pre-Ash world.
My socks are soaked through, and my feet are freezing. I get tired of looking out for taints, soldiers, and other random threats, so I duck into the ruins of a convenience store. It’s picked clean, of course. Even some of the shelves are gone. I slide under the counter.
Only then do I collapse my head in my hands and let the shaking begin.
He let me go.
Whoever he is, he’s the best human friend I ever had. The only friend since the Ash began, and he’ll probably shoot me next time.
Who are these soldiers and why are they hunting us? Are they American? I’m not even sure if there is an America anymore. Probably not when you figure no one’s come to help us in the years since they bombed Charlotte. All I know is a bunch of heavily armed military types showed up a couple months ago and took over an old block of apartments. They also set up a couple dozen prefab buildings, all in just a few weeks’ time. Once the building stopped, the soldiers started shooting everyone—even non-cannibals like me.
Every so often I catch the soft crunch of footsteps. Hearing is my best sense. I can pick up a cat’s purr a block away. Well, maybe I’m not that good, but there’s not much that escapes me. I stay where I am until the fall of dark is halfway complete. Only then do I risk going home.
Home is the shattered remnants of an old church. When they bombed Charlotte, they didn’t seem to mind what they hit so long as they destroyed it. The only things they didn’t bomb were the high-rise towers. I squeeze past a narrow opening between two fallen walls, pick my way along the twists and turns in the rubble until I find the basement stairs. Most of the basement is fine, actually. No light so far inside, but I’ve grown used to that. When I first found the place, I scored some candles. They’re long since gone, of course, but I’ve replaced them with LED lights powered by copper wire, nails, and bottle caps of water—you know, homemade batteries. My home is not the open basement. It’s the wreckage in the corner. Part of the upper floor collapsed into the first floor, which dropped heavy stonework and concrete slabs all the way to the basement. I slip through another crack, and there he is waiting for me. Charlie. The only one I trust, the only one I love. I draw the black-out curtain across the crack and power a couple lights.
Charlie meows anxiously, trots past my pathetic garden of vegetables, and drops a rat at my feet.
“Good boy!” I speak softly, but immediately he begins to purr. I stroke his thick coat before I pick him up and hold him to my heart. After I drop a couple of kisses on top of his head, I set him free and plop down beside him. I divvy up the treat. The meat goes to me and everything else to Charlie. He seems to find this a fai
r arrangement because he keeps coming back. If he wasn’t feeding me like I was his kitten, I’d have starved a long time ago. But even with this meat and the few scraps of broccoli, squash, and kale I grow under the LEDs, it’s not enough. I’m pretty much a thousand calories from starving to death at any given time. These days there aren’t many scraps of food to be found. Every crevice has been searched, every can of tuna claimed. There are only two places where I know there’s food. The taints have it—plenty of it, but don’t eat what they call food. The soldiers, now—their garbage is filled with food wrappers and empty cans. They have real food. It would almost be worth breaking into one of their apartments to see what I could get. It’d be no more dangerous than anything else I do. Every day I face the chance of getting eaten by the taints, shot by the soldiers, or starving to death. I’d rather die fast than little by little.
I build a tiny fire. Charlie meows at the scent of roasting meat, and I worry that the smell will attract someone. As hungry as I am, though, I risk it. After the feast I dig out my diary and write about that soldier with the five o’clock shadow. He could easily have shot me. Why didn’t he?
Eight folded blankets make up my pallet; I lie down and pull six more over me. Nightmares invade my sleep pretty much every night, and sometimes I scream. In a world where survival depends on my ability to go unnoticed, this is not a good thing. Before Charlie settles over my chest, I gag myself with several strips of cloth I keep in the box beside my bed. This is Charlie’s cue to make bread on my tummy and offer me his butt.
Who are these soldiers? Who sent them, and why are they killing us? It’s not for the meat. Sometimes they just leave the bodies where they lay. I clutch Charlie closer, and he squirms. I’m worried. And hungry, so very hungry.
I hope you enjoyed your preview of Five O’Clock Shadow, another Stand Alone novel in the Snow and Ash Series. This title will be available for pre-buy on July 30, 2016. Books 1 and 2, The General’s Daughter and Stolen Melody, are already available for purchase.
The Other Brother (Snow and Ash Book 3) Page 22