Strain

by Amelia C. Gormley

  “I’m fine,” he repeated, grateful that Darius couldn’t see the way he squeezed his eyes closed against the wave of longing that small touch aroused.

  He wanted to press himself against Darius and breathe in his scent until he felt like he could face the world again. But nothing had changed since that first night in the chapel. It was bad enough Darius was doing all this to save Rhys when he really didn’t want to, and was even trying to be nice about it. He didn’t need Rhys turning into a big baby on him.

  He was alone. Everyone was gone now, even Father Maurice. Everyone except Jacob, and that was worse than being alone. He needed to get used to that. Pull his weight. Don’t complain. Don’t do anything to make Darius and his people think he’d be more trouble than he was worth, or that Jacob was right about him.

  Numbers meant safety. Survival. Especially if the numbers were trained soldiers with weapons. Rejection would get him killed, just like running off must have killed Gabe and his parents.

  “I’m okay.” He sat up and reached for his clothes. “I’ll go get our rations for breakfast.”

  He left before Darius could ask him any more questions.

  He was sore again that day, but Rhys couldn’t bring himself to mind. They left behind that empty town and the site of the tragedy that had taken so many lives for so little reason. As they marched on, his body still sang with remembered pleasure. His heart raced as he recalled those breathless moments when his life had been in Darius’s hands, and he couldn’t recall why he was supposed to not feel excited by it. Or he could, but he couldn’t seem to make those reasons actually matter.

  As the suburbs yielded to farmlands along a crumbling two-lane highway, he finally found the courage to ask the question that had been plaguing him since they’d heard those muffled gunshots.

  “Why did they do it?”

  Walking beside him, looking as hard-edged and cool as ever, Xolani frowned. “You mean this particular group? Most likely, they didn’t want to be held accountable for whatever they might have done to the people who were with them unwillingly. They destroyed everything, even the babies, rather than face the consequences. Fucking cowards.”

  “You say that like this isn’t the first time.”

  “It’s not. Sometimes single survivors who have been isolated too long panic and kill themselves. Once with a small group. Never a colony this size.” She puffed her cheeks, blowing out a breath and tugging on her braid. She looked off into the distance and some large bird—what was that? A falcon? Hawk? Turkey buzzard?—skated across the sky, searching for prey in the weed-choked fields below.

  “So many years cut off from everyone else, not even sure if there is anyone else, it does something to people. The last thing they knew, they ran away from the world because the world was dangerous. Being anywhere near other people meant they risked getting sick or being attacked. I think eventually that’s all they remember, that the world is dangerous. That people are dangerous. They think coming out of hiding or allowing anyone near is certain death. Maybe they just can’t handle the idea of things changing once they finally feel safe. Or maybe they just go crazy. We’ll never know.”

  Rhys swallowed hard, nodding. “I think that’s what Father Maurice started doing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He wasn’t always in charge. When we left Montana, it was more equal. He was pushy and bigoted, but we could argue against him. By the time we’d been at the monastery a few years, though . . .” Rhys bent and picked up a chip of broken asphalt, slinging it to the side into an overgrown field that had clearly once been farmland. Parts of it were now covered in massive blackberry brambles, especially at the edges, where they sometimes spilled over onto the road, snagging at Rhys’s clothes. They had tried to walk one residential street that had been so overgrown and covered by the uncontrollable vines that they’d needed to find another way around or risk the thorns scraping the Jugs and exposing their dangerous blood.

  Rhys turned back to Xolani. “He was the only one with a gun. The rest had either broken or run out of ammo. He said anyone who wanted to ‘forfeit the sanctuary’ was welcome to leave the monastery, but if they stayed, he intended to see that we lived righteously, as God meant us to do, and that meant he’d be making the rules, seeing to it we kept God’s law. None of us could stop him, especially not with Jacob watching his back. Not unless we were willing to try to get that gun. Though—” Rhys grinned broadly “—my mom did threaten to stab him in his sleep.”

  Xolani laughed. “Your mom sounds like a lady after my own heart.” Then she sobered. “But it’s a hard step to take, making the choice to kill someone.”

  “I said threaten.”

  Her dark eyes went flinty. “Don’t ever make a threat you’re not willing to carry through. The other guy just might be.”

  Rhys shivered and looked away. “Anyway, he started getting weirder and weirder. Laying on the religious stuff a lot thicker. Acting like we were the only people left in the world. Talking about Cady being the new Eve. It was creepy.”

  “Being cut off from the world can do that to people. It removes what grounds them, what keeps them somewhat connected to reality. It’s easy in those circumstances to get paranoid. Or power hungry.”

  Silence fell, punctuated by the scuff of their feet on the crumbling blacktop, the rhythm occasionally broken as they sidestepped a clump of weeds sprouting up through a crack. It was shaping up to be a hot late-summer day and in the distance, mirages shimmered where the road met the horizon. In a moment when no one spoke, Rhys could hear the distant shriek of the bird that had wheeled overhead.

  When had he gotten used to the eerie quiet of a world with no one in it?

  “Do you find many survivors?”

  “A few dozen a year.” Xolani pulled a large knife out of a sheath on her hip and fished a whetstone out of her pocket, honing the blade as they walked. The scratching helped fill the vast and empty silence. “More if we’re sweeping larger cities. We detach two squadrons to escort them back to Colorado Springs in batches, one in the spring after the mountains thaw, and one in the fall before they get snowed in again.”

  “I heard Darius mention the clean zone in Colorado Springs. Why there?”

  “Cheyenne Mountain. Back before the batteries ran out on the satellite radios and everyone had used up all the fuel cells, a lot of survivors were in contact that way. The doomsday-prepper types all knew the locations of various underground government installations and broadcast the info. They were looking for safe places to wait for the plague to pass, like NORAD.” Rhys blinked at her in confusion. “Oh, uh, that’s the North American Aerospace Defense Command. It used to be a critical installation a century or more ago, but other, more modern facilities had taken over. Still, it was a big hole in the ground, essentially a huge bunker, and people flocked to it.”

  “That’s how so many survived?”

  Xolani flipped the knife in her hand once and returned it to its sheath without even looking at it. Somewhere behind them, a low voice began to sing a song Rhys thought he should have recognized but couldn’t remember.

  “It wasn’t as easy as you make it sound, but in the end? Yeah. Now they’ve got a large perimeter established around the city, trenches lined with razor wire, with rusty scrap metal cut into points or sharpened wood stakes where they ran out of wire.” Xolani shook her head with a soft snort. “There’re two levels of that. Like that colony we just found, there’s one route in and out of the clean zone, and the entrance is heavily guarded. When new people arrive, they’re greeted by armed guards in hazmat suits who process them and assign them housing in the outer perimeter. They pass three months of quarantine there—that’s on top of already being quarantined up to six months after we find them—then they’re allowed inside the inner perimeter.”

  “Then what?” Rhys watched the dust rise beneath his feet. Weird. He’d never thought about how traffic had kept dirt from building up on the roads.

  “Most of them work f
arming crews. They’ve razed a lot of the unused property and turned it into farmland. Everyone has a garden in their yard, and they’re expected to grow their own food as best they can. They’ve got chickens in the city and herds of cattle outside the perimeter. Hunting parties are permitted in and out since the region has been swept clear of revs. Everyone works to keep what’s left of society going. And we bring them more survivors when we can. If we can.”

  Xolani’s mouth tightened in a grimace, and Rhys gave her a worried look. “It wasn’t your fault they killed themselves.”

  She blinked at him, then scoffed and cuffed him on the back of the head. “Shit, kid, I know that.”

  “I just thought maybe since it was your operation, you might . . .” Rhys flushed and looked away, muttering. “Never mind.”

  She shook her head. “Nah. That operation would’ve gone tits-up on Darius or anyone else in charge, and frankly, I’m not the kind of person to dwell on shit like that. No, it was just talking about the clean zone. We’re not allowed past the outer perimeter.”

  “The Jugs?”

  She nodded, looking out over the waving yellow grasses of the fields. “Yeah. Like you saw yesterday, all it takes is a cut and we become dangerous to anyone we come in contact with. When we deliver the civilians we find, we’re not allowed within fifty yards of the checkpoint.”

  “So you save them, but you can’t ever have a home with them?”

  She sighed. “We’re home with each other, Rhys. We’re not a part of that anymore, and neither will you be. Someday . . . someday when we’re done patrolling for revs and civvies, we’ll probably set up a permanent base somewhere, sort of like what we have at Fort Vancouver. We’ll make our own settlement somewhere out of the way where we’re not a threat to anyone. But that’s a long way off in the future.”

  Rhys hung his head, watching the cracked asphalt pass beneath his feet again. It seemed terribly tragic to him that the Jugs should be exiled when they were protecting the people who had exiled them.

  They reached a small community hospital in the early afternoon. The sun was high and the heat oppressive, especially when they had to stand around while Kaleo and Toby hacked through the ivy climbing the building to find the doors. Everyone’s clothes clung to them, dark with sweat, and the dusty interior of the hospital was a gruesome relief. Faded scraps of banners declaring the hospital under quarantine still clung to the barricades and outer doors. Rhys’s mother had explained to him that when the plague had begun to get bad, the National Guard had cordoned off the hospitals treating plague victims, condemning not only the sick people, but the doctors, nurses, orderlies and even the people working in the gift shop and cafeteria. Anyone who tried to escape was shot.

  The air inside was stale and rank. The bodies of the last patients were mostly skeletal, lining the halls and filling the rooms to overcrowding. Even if anyone had been allowed in or out of the blockade, there had never been enough manpower to inter them properly.

  Or perhaps, by that time, those victims hadn’t had any family left to claim the remains.

  Rhys allowed himself a moment of smug satisfaction that Jacob lost his lunch at the sight of the corpses covered in dust, hair, scraps of leathery skin and stringy sinew. Rhys managed to contain his gorge, just barely, which was good because otherwise Xolani might lecture him about being underweight again.

  They made no effort to burn the bodies. It would have taken too long to collect wood for a pyre large enough. They would have to remain where they were, a haunting remnant of a world that no longer existed.

  What supplies they couldn’t carry, they left behind. Darius marked the coordinates of the hospital in a logbook he kept for the reclamation crews. By the time they had finished scavenging, the sun was low enough that Darius declared they would camp near the hospital. Rhys would have preferred to be far away from that grisly place, but he said nothing. Titus and Jamie did another circuit of the area with the infrared scanners to make certain there were no revenants who might attack in the night. No one wanted to sleep in that giant mausoleum, and the nearby medical office buildings had been converted into overflow space for the hospital and were just as bad. So for the first time, the Jugs set up camp outdoors, in a field outside the hospital campus. They pushed rusted-out cars from the parking lot into a large circle to form a barricade around the campsite, moving them with ridiculous ease.

  It was far too hot to require a fire, but Gina had shot another deer while the rest were inside. Jugs required a lot of food, Xolani explained, to fuel their enhanced performance. Thus when they made camp, it was around a large fire that threw far more light than the lanterns they usually employed when they slept indoors. Rhys settled onto his bedroll with the sickening certainty that tonight he would not even be afforded the semi-privacy of darkness.

  He lay awake, waiting, knowing at least one of the Jugs would approach him, sooner or later. After first watch had taken positions and everyone else had settled in, he saw Bailey look his way and swallowed something that hovered between relief and disappointment. At least with Bailey, he could be quiet. He could keep from humiliating himself with the sort of vocal responses Darius dragged from him. But the part of him that craved the near-agonizing intensity of what had passed between them that morning couldn’t help but wish Darius was approaching instead.

  Drawing into himself, Rhys dropped his gaze to the ground and pushed down his pants and underwear. He rolled to his knees and grunted softly as Bailey did what he wanted to do. When it was over, Bailey sighed in annoyance, and the partial erection Rhys hadn’t been able to avoid quickly flagged.

  “You’re a nice kid, man, but I gotta say, this ain’t workin’.” Bailey fastened his belt with irritated jerks as Rhys righted his own clothing. “We finally get some fresh meat around here, and it turns out one of ’em is a smarmy asshole and the other might as well be a plastic doll.” He patted Rhys’s shoulder awkwardly. “I get that it sucks, kid, and I wanna help you out, but I don’t know how much longer it’s gonna be worth it, feelin’ like I’m forcing someone who doesn’t want it. That hits me all wrong, after what I went through with Charlie Company.”

  “I’m sorry.” Rhys’s face burned. He curled into a miserable ball on his bedroll and tried to ignore the unwelcome wetness down the cleft of his ass.

  He didn’t know how much time passed while the flickering of the campfire threw dapples of light around the circle of bodies settling in. His troubled mind had just about quieted enough to sleep when he felt someone drop to one knee behind him. His heart leapt into his throat as Darius grabbed his shoulder and rolled him onto his back with a brusque pull.

  “Please don’t,” Rhys whispered desperately even as his cock filled, and his skin ached for the feeling he remembered from that morning.

  Darius didn’t answer. He merely dragged Rhys’s pants roughly down his legs and tossed them aside, then made quick work of his own fly. He hauled Rhys toward him with his arms wrapped around Rhys’s thighs and pushed into him—already wet and loose after Bailey’s attentions—with an abrupt thrust. Rhys cried out, his shoulders coming up off the ground with the combined pleasure-pain of that intrusion, but Darius gave him only a moment to adjust before he began plowing into Rhys at a brutal, rough pace, jerking Rhys into each thrust with that grip on his thighs.

  There was no hope of staying quiet. No hope of not responding. His shouts filled the night air, underpinned by Darius’s low groans and the slap of Darius’s hips against his ass. He didn’t even know if anyone awoke or heard them. All he knew was that lightning sizzled through his body each time Darius rammed into him, and it was better than he thought he could possibly bear.

  With a final deep thrust and a groan, Darius shuddered and pulsed inside him. Rhys stared up at him, dazed, panting, yearning. His balls hurt, they were drawn up so tight, so ready to let go. Darius leaned down over him, grabbing a handful of his ragged hair.

  “You ain’t no plastic doll, boy,” he growled, inches away from R
hys’s lips. “You just need to be handled right.”

  His other hand wrapped around Rhys’s cock and began jacking, and his teeth nipped firmly at Rhys’s bottom lip before traveling down Rhys’s throat and closed over the spot where the knife had nicked him that morning. Rhys came with a howl, surging through Darius’s fist.

  Darius’s dark eyes seemed to burn with their own fire in the flickering light as he held Rhys’s gaze captive. He reached for something, and when his softening cock slid out of Rhys, the cold, graduated ridges of the plug replaced it, sliding in easily.

  “Get dressed, and get some sleep.” Darius fastened his pants and walked back to his own bedroll farther away from the fire.

  Burning with shame, Rhys pulled his clothes back on and curled up on his bedroll again, feeling so alone it ached.

  “Convenient when the wildlife pitches in,” Darius heard Toby quip as he fired two shots into the head of a fallen rev, blasting the back of its skull off in a small fountain of bone chips and blood. A pack of five revs had been facing off against an angry moose defending her calf when the squad found them. One had already been trampled and the others had been easy to take out, distracted by the cow’s pummeling hooves.

  “Shit!”

  Kaleo, who’d nearly been trampled by the moose when she’d decided her rescuers were another threat, rolled in the grass with the rev that had already been on the ground when they’d arrived. Distracted by the other revenants and the moose, and assuming it was down for the count, no one had delivered the coup de grâce. The rest of the squad formed a semicircle around Kaleo, their weapons aimed, waiting for an opening that would keep them from hitting Kaleo. He finally got the clearance to slug the thing and throw it off, but before anyone could fire, Kaleo jumped on it again and began pounding it with fists as powerful and punishing as the moose’s hooves.