by Keri Lake
“You’re still trapped in that place, aren’t you? Every night when you close your eyes, you see it, don’t you?”
Swallowing a gulp, he nods and exhales an easy breath, releasing my arm. “I see Brenin sometimes. Strapped to a chair, just like they had me. Cutting him open, just to test his tolerance to pain. Abusing him in unspeakable ways.”
“What ways?”
He shakes his head. “What happened won’t change anything.”
He’s right. Just as I don’t want to tell him what happened to me there, I couldn’t bear to hear his stories, either. The scars tell me enough.
“Your pain is my pain.”
Casting his gaze from mine, he clenches his jaw. “I can’t think about that. Someone hurting you that way. I’d kill anyone who laid a hand on you again.”
“They’re still doing this. They view you as savages out here. Tainted and expendable. A poisonous race that could make them inferior. They think the second generation exposed to the organism is weaker. That we are weaker. It’s why they wanted to kill me. It’s why they kill all the women. To keep them from having more abominations. The people inside the walls have no idea this goes on. They don’t want to know. Ignoring it means they survive.” Propped up on my elbow beside him, I trace a finger down his hairline, gathering sweat from his skin. “There’s a sickness in this world, and it’s not the Dredge. We need to build our own community. Out here.”
“There aren’t enough resources. Whatever isn’t fire-gutted from the bombs has been destroyed by looters. And if we did, Legion would mount an army to attack us and take everything.”
“Then, we’ll leave this place. Go somewhere else.”
He shakes his head. “We’re all that stands between people out here and the Legion. If we leave, they’ll continue to raid and murder until all that’s left is their own perfect utopia. They’ll use us as guinea pigs and weapons.”
“Szolen isn’t going to just give up his empire. And the manpower he has is bigger than any army out there, including yours. You don’t have enough people. And I don’t think you want to sacrifice the ones you have.”
“What do you suggest I do? Stay holed up in some underground tunnel, collecting the remains of their raids?” There’s no aggression in his voice, no accusation. He’s genuinely asking. His hand cups my face, blue eyes smoldering with conflict, like turbulent waves. “What do you want?”
As if the decision to wage war is up to me.
In truth, I want to steal away with him. The selfish side of me wants to repeat the same words Papa said to me days ago, that survival means being alone, and the two of us surviving alone, together, would be so much easier. But I don’t tell him any of that. “I want to survive. With you. And the others. We don’t need Szolen to do that.”
“I’ve searched this desert for eight years, Wren. There’s nowhere else. Nothing can offer the safety and security these people are looking for.”
“Then let’s go beyond the desert. Papa says out east there’s another compound, just like Szolen. One that welcomes survivors.”
“And what if he’s wrong? What if there’s nothing? What if it’s overrun by hostiles?”
I sit up from him with a frown. “Why are you backing yourself into a corner?”
“Why are you so against taking over Szolen? You once hated the community.”
“I hate the disillusionment. Living in a fantasy.”
“Disillusionment? The world around you is dying, and you’re worried about being duped? You haven’t lived out here, where food is scarce and life is hard.”
My eye twitches at that, and I flex my fists to tamp down the anger stewing in my blood. “I’ve done all right out here.”
“For a day? Maybe a night? And when things get too frightening, you can go back to your safe wall.”
My fists tighten. “You have no idea what I’ve done. What I’ve been through. How I survived.”
“I don’t doubt you survived. You’d have to be a fool to starve during a feast, while the rest of us scrape in famine.”
“Fuck you. I came from the same place as you. At least you still have family. I have nothing. Nothing!”
He grips both sides of my face, yanking me to the mattress, and as he crawls over top of me and holds me there, he stares at me with the kind of fury that could destroy an army of formidable men. His body trembles, jaw shifting with his anger. “You have me. Me.” He slams his lips to mine, his mouth corking my fight, and my muscles soften with his kiss. “I’m sorry. For what I said.” Forehead pressed to mine, he holds my face, stroking his thumb across my lips. “My only objective from this day forward is to keep you alive and at my side. And I’ll kill a thousand men to do so.”
His words disarm me, just as his silence once had. The fury dissipates, settling with the sincerity in his eyes.
“Then, let me help you. I’ll get you access inside.”
“No. I’ll find another way.”
“I’m not the weak girl you knew. What I was is not what I am now.”
“You weren’t weak then.” He falls to the side of me, his arm wrapped possessively across my stomach. “But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to throw you to the wolves and see what happens. I’ll find another way.”
I trace the shell of his ear with my fingertip. “They fear you, you know. You could lead them.”
“Fear doesn’t lead. It enslaves.”
“Still, they would follow you. I would follow you.”
“I wasn’t designed to lead, Wren. I was designed to kill. And when the time comes, if it comes to that, I won’t hesitate, in order to survive.”
Chapter 35
The rocky outer wall of the mine presses into my back, as I sit on the ground thumbing through Papa’s journal in the shade. Beneath the notes, the photographs, the technical scientific terms that I can’t begin to pronounce, there’s a story, an undercurrent that gives insight into a man who remained an enigma to me, up until his death.
It begins with the untimely loss of his daughter, and the ice-cold chains he fastened to his heart. The early notes reflect his pain, his anger. His refusal to acknowledge that the patients he’d been tasked with cutting apart were once human.
But while his perceptions turn my stomach, it’s easy to see how he could’ve gotten swept up into the lies, the mindset of those who worked in Calico. Ragers destroyed his family. His life. He held his only child, a young girl who loved books as much as I did, while she fought and spoke in tongues about wanting to crack his skull open and eat his insides. And it was he who administered the poison that would render her eternally silent.
In the beginning stages, the Ragers are like mental patients. Sociopaths. And by the end, they become single-minded animals. That’s how Papa viewed them. Nothing but animals. Soon, his views would extend to those who carried the disease – the second generation, who, at the time, he felt didn’t deserve the world.
As I read on, I learn how much I reminded him of his daughter. How a single glance down at the book I clutched in my arms, when I first arrived, saved me from those incinerators.
I lift a page that’s folded and taped inside the journal, revealing a picture of Papa with Doctor Ericsson, Szolen, and two men I don’t recognize, dressed in military uniforms. It appears to be older, with worn edges and discoloration. Behind them, a digital screen mounted on the wall reads October 19th, 2016 and the time.
Before the bombs hit. Before Dredge was unleashed onto the world.
The pages that follow hold diagrams and sketches of the organism. They describe a common virus fused with a prion that’d been excavated from soil. Natives who once lived there were known to be cannibals that snatched travelers, killing them in violent ways, the evidence found in a cave filled with skulls and bones.
I pause my reading for a moment at a flash of all those skulls lined in Rhys’s room, before continuing on.
The journal lists measurements and terminology that I vaguely recall from my time spent in the la
b with Papa. And when I reach the end of the notes, chicken scratch at the bottom of the page seizes my attention.
Anti-prion protein PrP ab623418
Isotype: IgG
Clonality: Polyclonal
The number is recognizable—the one tattooed on the back of Six’s head.
“He did find a cure,” I whisper as I stare down at the page.
Below the notes is a quote from the bible: So shall it be at the end of the world: the angels shall come forth, and sever the wicked from among the just—Matthew 13:49.
“You’re Wren.” The familiar voice peels me from my reading, and I lift my gaze to Red, standing over me with a cigarette dangling from her fingertips. “That’s your name.”
“It is.”
Her chin dips toward her chest, lips pressed into a hard line, and she shakes her head. “I honestly thought he made you up. A side effect of all the … shit he went through. But here you are.”
I don’t say anything to her, but instead close the cover of the journal and tug my knees close to my chest.
“Rhys doesn’t talk about Calico, except for the girl who saved his life.” Her cheeks cave as she sucks the smoke into her mouth, before blowing it off to the side. Back in Szolen, Jessie sometimes smoked tobacco rolled in her own homemade hemp paper. The faint skunky scent on the air tells me they probably make their cigarettes the same way out here.
“I didn’t save his life.”
“Stop with the modesty. I’ve seen his scars. Heard his nightmares. We’ve all seen his moments of rage and anger. If you hadn’t found him, he wouldn’t be here, simple as that. He’d be part of that gray cloud of smoke that haunts the sky.” She swipes at her nose and sets her hand on her hip, flicking the ash. “I’m sorry for the punch. I just …. Rhys may be a scary bastard, but he’s protected all of us. Me, Tripp, Trinity.”
I’m guessing Trinity is one of the handful children running around the cavern. “Your daughter?”
She nods. “Legion raided our hive a few years back. Killed my little boy and girl in front of me.” Double-blinking and shifting her jaw is a poor attempt to fend off the tears welling in her eyes. “Left me for dead. That’s when the Ragers came, feeding off the bodies left behind. I managed to corner myself in the utility closet of an abandoned clinic. They were beating and rattling at the door, trying to get in. And then, after one of the longest nights of my life, the beating and rattling stopped, and the door opened to Rhys standing there. The Ragers wouldn’t come near him.” She looks out over the desert and back to me. “I’m not one to keep another woman in chains, but he told me not to let you leave. He specifically ordered me to watch you. And I figured … there had to be something about you. Something important ‘cause he ain’t never asked me to do that before.” She drops the cigarette to the ground and grinds her boot into it. “You could’ve run, but you didn’t. Thanks for what you did back there.”
“It’s okay. Leanna.”
“Lea.”
“Lea,” I echo, resting my elbows atop my bent knees. “Rigs said he has blackouts?”
“That’s what we call them. It’s when his eyes are open, but he ain’t there. Something takes over, and he just …” She shakes her head, brows pinched to a frown. “He’s not Rhys anymore. Those are the times I wonder if I’d be strong enough to kill him myself.”
“What happens in the blackouts?”
Her eyes level on me, with a grim darkness that sets my teeth on edge. “Ever see a man flayed alive?”
Swallowing a harsh gulp, I shake my head.
“I have.” She blinks hard and rolls her shoulders. “Rhys didn’t so much as flinch at the screams. And that’s how I knew something evil was inside of him.”
“So, Rigs brought me here as some kind of distraction for him?”
“I guess. I dunno.” She shakes her head, toeing a small hole in the dirt with her boot. “I don’t know what distracts a man like that. If we didn’t chain him, poor bastard would probably slice his own skin off.”
“Has he ever killed a woman?”
Lea shakes her head. “Not since I’ve been here. Damn near every woman here has offered herself to him. In these times, that’s quite a fortune falling at your feet.” A chuckle escapes her seconds before her lips tighten, and a small part of me wants to ask if she’s ever desired him that way, but I don’t. “A man who can walk among Ragers, even if he’s a little crazy and a whole lot scarred, is a man you respect. And that respect has made him a catch for any female out here on her own.” Tipping her head, she toys with a red bandana tied to her belt loop. “I think he must’ve been waiting for you, though.”
“What makes you say that?”
Her eyes soften, lips kicked up as she stares down at me. “Because I have never seen that bastard smile the way he did this morning, when Tripp asked if you were still here.”
I haven’t smiled in a long time myself. My heart wants to trust the wholeness since having found Six again, but my mind tells me happiness is temporary, and to be wary of it. It tells me that pain hides in the shadows and to keep my guard up.
“The other women. They’re here for the men?”
“We have a rule. The women choose. In all cases, she chooses, and if she doesn’t choose, she’s welcome to stay, or leave. No one here is a slave, but everyone has a job. For some? It’s keeping the men happy.”
“But they’re traded. Like property.”
“As I said, every woman chooses. It’s how we survive and protect the ones we love out here. Remember that.”
“I get it.” And I do. Hell, I bartered myself to save a little girl. But I chose to do that on my own. “As long as they are given a choice.”
She turns to leave, but before she takes the first step, I sit forward.
“Lea.”
She spins around, and I glance to either side, making sure no one’s standing in earshot.
“You got any … Queen Anne’s?”
Her brow furrows, and my stomach sinks. “He’ll want you to have his baby. You know that right? It’s what they all want out here. Some kind of future.”
I watch the children running around the open yard, too skinny and covered in dirt, while the adults watch over them with guns strapped to their bodies. “I’m not ready yet.”
“You’re never really—”
“Please. Just … do you have any, or not?”
Stuffing her hand into a satchel at her side, she pulls out a small square of cloth, unfastens the twine, and dumps a few seeds into my palm. “Chew them thoroughly. It’s the oil in the seeds that prevent implantation.”
Whether, or not, its effective remains to be seen. I heard some girls in Szolen ended up pregnant, anyway.
“Why do you give these to the others?”
“I told you. It’s their choice. It’s why I’m giving these to you now.”
Staring down at the seeds, I nod. “Thanks.”
Rhys leads me down the path I took just two days before, where Ragers ambushed us. The thought of what could’ve happened sends a shiver down my spine. We pass the dark stain on the limestone, I’m guessing where they fed on the older woman, that’s dried in the harsh sun. The only evidence that the woman ever existed.
We come to a stop beside the tinaja, which has since grown shallower, and Rhys pulls me into his body. Lips crushing mine, he slides my shirt up my belly, until it dances over my hardened nipples, and I’m forced to raise my hands into the air. He tosses it to the side, along with the canteen I brought. Next, he unbuttons my pants, shoving them to the ground, and I kick them away, standing naked before him. Crossing his arms over his body, he lifts his shirt over his head, then removes his pants, and kicks his clothes away.
Taking my hand, he leads me into the water, which cools my hot skin, the second I dip my foot in. Even with whatever has evaporated from the top, the water is deep enough that it comes to about my neck and Rhys’s chest.
“They say this tinaja was formed after the bombs hit. It rained f
or days after. We’re bathing in the desert’s tears.” Rhys pulls me into him, and his wet body slides across my skin as he lifts me, wrapping my legs around his waist. His erection presses into me, but he doesn’t breach my entrance.
I glide my hands over his skin, washing away the sweat there. I noticed the other day that the women bathe outside of the water, only dipping long enough to cool off.
Without warning, Rhys lifts me up onto the edge of the tinaja, to one of the flat shale-like rocks sticking out like a platform. The water splashing over the rock cools the scorch against my bottom.
He spreads my legs and buries his head between my thighs. Dragging his nose across my sex, he smells me, and I can feel his fingers digging into my hips with the growl that rumbles in his chest. He reminds me of an animal savoring the scent of its prey before the kill. The stubble of his beard flinches my muscles, and I moan at the prickle. The first sweep of his tongue sends my hips forward, and he holds them down, pressing his thumbs against my folds like he’s peeling back a ripe fig for the soft fruit inside.
“Oh, God, Rhys,” I whisper.
The sensations collide inside of me, and I tip my head back toward the sun, taking in the heat, the cool water, and his tongue dancing across my sensitive flesh. My body tenses, breaths stiff, and just when I think the heat is too much, he jumps out of the water, crawling over top of me. His cool, wet body soothes the burn, and he guides his tip inside. With one hearty thrust, he fills me completely, his hard length pushing against my tight walls.
“You belong to me now, Wren. Promise me you won’t leave.”
“I promise.”
“Say it. Say you’re mine.”
“I’m yours, Rhys. I won’t leave you.”
“You’ll bear a son, or daughter, for me. My own child.”
“Isn’t it a bit soon to be talking kids?” The question makes me inwardly chuckle, but when I look up at him, Rhys isn’t smiling, at all.
He’s dead serious.