Strain

by Amelia C. Gormley

  He fell asleep with his head on Darius’s shoulder, tucked under his chin. The yearning for tenderness that had stirred within him was sated. He might never experience the sort of devotion Kaleo and Schuyler, or Titus and Xolani, or Joe and Toby had, but this was close enough for the time he had left. Darius brushed one last kiss to his forehead, a barely perceptible whisper of a caress, just enough to tip the corners of Rhys’s mouth up into a smile before sleep overtook him.

  “What’re you doing, boy?”

  Rhys started at the sound of Darius’s voice behind him. He’d ducked around a building when they stopped for lunch and had his shirt halfway up his chest. He jerked it down, smoothing his hands over it.

  He dried his palms on his jeans. “Nothing.”

  Darius folded his arms across his chest as he stared at Rhys for a long moment. Rhys couldn’t help the way his heart began to race. It had been three nights since he and Darius had begun having sex again, and it was better than he could ever remember it being, except perhaps during those last few days at Fort Vancouver before Jacob had taken his hostages.

  Maybe even better than that. Without the burden of necessity getting in the way, they could just enjoy themselves.

  But now Darius looked troubled. “Go on. Take off the shirt.”

  Rhys hung his head and obeyed. In the distraction of everything else in the weeks since they’d left Fort Vancouver, they’d stopped doing the routine inspections, which was why he’d slipped away, trying to check himself for the bruised patches of the Rot.

  He should have known Darius would notice.

  Darius’s blunt fingers were gentle as he laid a hand on Rhys’s shoulder and lifted his arm to check underneath. First one, then the other. His fingers brushed over Rhys’s skin, raising goose bumps despite his dread.

  “Now the pants.”

  He remembered how he’d blushed in those early weeks after they’d left the monastery, each time Darius saw him nude. Now it felt completely ordinary to push his jeans and underwear down to his ankles in Darius’s presence. Darius dropped to one knee in front of Rhys, gently pushing his cock and balls aside to check his groin and inner thighs, turning him to inspect beneath his buttocks.

  Darius wasn’t trying to be sexual in the least, and yet Rhys couldn’t help but twitch in response. He closed his eyes and kept his breathing slow and steady, knowing the reaction was inevitable and strangely at peace with it.

  Darius stood before Rhys made it to half-mast.

  “No spots.” He squeezed Rhys’s shoulder, and Rhys bowed his head with a sigh of relief. Darius’s hand moved from his shoulder to his neck, the touch shifting from a reassuring pat to something more caressing. Rhys turned his head in an invitation Darius didn’t hesitate to accept, cupping the back of Rhys’s neck and kissing him long and slow. Then he pulled back and shook himself. “Get dressed, boy. We gotta get moving.”

  They hadn’t been on the road half an hour when the sight of buzzards in the distance led them to the mutilated corpse of a woman outside an empty house.

  “Shit,” Bailey muttered, looking ill. “I recognize her. She’s one of the civvies we recovered when we were sweeping Portland.”

  Kaleo spat a bitter curse, and Rhys went cold.

  “Revs got her?” Darius asked.

  “Hard to tell, but I suspect so.” Xolani knelt by the body, checking the various wounds. “An animal would have dragged her to someplace more sheltered to eat.”

  “Wanna bet Houtman’s up to his old tricks?” Titus damn near growled. “Throwing someone to the wolves while he makes his getaway?”

  Rhys felt a flash of fury, seeing Cady in the woman’s mangled features for a split second.

  Toby frowned. “He’s armed to the teeth, and he’s a Jug. Why didn’t he just kill the revs?”

  “Because he’s a fucking coward.” Titus spat on the dust-swept pavement and stalked away.

  “Every delay puts that asshole a little farther ahead.” Darius pushed himself up, away from the body. “Burn the remains, but do it quick. We need to get moving.”

  Rhys nodded, swallowing hard against his nausea, and began gathering up brushwood.

  The second week of their pursuit moved into the third, and Darius could feel Rhys’s frustration. He kept trying to push himself harder and faster while he was still recovering from his injury and illness, and Darius and Xolani took turns chiding Rhys into accepting that he wasn’t going to be able to match the Jug’s pace, no matter how hard he tried, and he’d only hurt himself trying.

  “You were right,” he told Darius with a hangdog expression one night in camp, sitting in a ball on his bedroll with his chin on his knees. “I shouldn’t have come along. It’s just—”

  “I know why you needed to come, boy. If I hadn’t agreed, you wouldn’t be here.”

  The reassurances only went so far. What did help Rhys feel like he wasn’t holding the squad back was that he noticed a bicycle hanging from the beams in a half-collapsed garage.

  “Now why the fuck didn’t I think to look for a damn bike?” Titus looked disgusted at his oversight. Jamie located oil for the chain and inflated the tires, which had thankfully escaped being gnawed on by rats. The result was that they were able to pick up their pace that day and the next, easily keeping up with Rhys as he pedaled. The boy endured it without complaint, but he moved stiffly that first night and gave a pained moan, flinching away, when Darius tried to touch him.

  Amused, Darius treated him to a massage, during which Rhys fell sound asleep before Darius could enact the second half of his plan, which would have involved a blowjob.

  The third morning after finding the bike, somewhere near the California-Oregon border, a scream split the air, shrill and feminine. It sounded eerie and out of place in the half-desert sagebrush and scrub pine ranch country they were passing through. The wind distorted the cry so they couldn’t tell which direction it had come from.

  Kaleo and Toby went on immediate alert, moving in circles, sweeping in all directions with the infrared scanners.

  “Where is she?” Darius snapped when they had nothing to report.

  “Not close enough for a signature yet.” Kaleo glared at his scanner as if willing it to yield answers.

  “I’ve got footprints here!” Jamie knelt on the shoulder of the two-lane highway. “That mailbox up ahead. I think the drive there goes to another ranch set back from the road.”

  With their weapons ready, they followed the trail to the long dirt drive that rose over a low hill and disappeared west of the highway. Here, the footprints were obvious for all to see.

  “They made camp at the ranch overnight.” Kaleo looked grim and wired, clutching his rifle far too hard. He handed his scanner off to Bailey and took point without instruction, beginning down the drive.

  “Back in formation, Kaleo!” Darius barked, just as Toby shouted, “I’ve got signatures. Looks like two humans, straight ahead past that hill!”

  Kaleo took off, leaving the rest of them to sprint after him.

  A woman and a man were staggering down the long drive at a limping run. The woman cried out when she saw them, and by the time they had caught up with Kaleo, the two survivors had dropped to the ground, gasping.

  “I hit him . . . I hit him . . .” She nearly sobbed for air. They were both bloodied and bruised. As Rhys caught up, Xolani examined a lump on the side of the man’s scalp, from which blood trickled down the side of his face.

  “Gabe? Are you okay?” Rhys asked desperately.

  “Rhys?”

  Dark blue eyes blinked open, and a wide smile split Rhys’s face.

  “We have to go!” the woman begged, bent double clutching a stitch in her side. “I don’t think he’ll be out long.”

  “Where is he?” Kaleo’s tense question preempted Darius’s own inquiry.

  “Fall in line, Kaleo.” Darius gave him a hard stare that Kaleo barely seemed to notice.

  The woman took a long drink from the canteen Toby offered he
r. “The main house.”

  “What about his weapons? Does he still have ammunition?”

  She nodded, her eyes huge and bulging with terror. “He’s crazy. He ate Tia.”

  A ripple passed through the squad, followed by utter stillness.

  “Say that again?” A chill prickled up the back of Darius’s neck as he remembered the mangled corpse they’d found days ago.

  The woman’s face crumpled. “We were . . . we were going to try to escape. She was supposed to lock him in a room and then we could grab the gun, but he was too fast. He caught her and he . . .”

  “He was like a revenant,” Gabriel said, looking up at them. Rhys turned green. “He tore her throat out, and then he just began ripping her apart with his teeth. Like some kind of animal. He started eating, and when he was done, he just . . . stopped. Looked at us, blood all over him, completely calm again. Grabbed his gun and told us to go.”

  Darius looked to Xolani, whose eyes were tight at the corners. Her scar was white against her Mediterranean complexion. She shook her head, for once looking completely confounded. “I . . . have no explanation.”

  “Could he be a rev?”

  “We’ve never— Revenants aren’t sentient, Darius. We all know that. Their verbal and reasoning abilities shut down. They’re driven purely by predatory instinct. This isn’t—”

  “Then what is it?”

  She looked at Rhys, then met Darius’s eyes again. “We were going to use the Alpha strain to give him immunity to Beta or Gamma, but what if . . . what if he got both? What if his limited exposure to Alpha wasn’t sufficient to immunize him entirely against Gamma? Or perhaps continuous exposure is required to maintain immunity, or maybe it’s a new mutation. I don’t know!”

  “Who the fuck cares?” Kaleo glared at them. “It doesn’t matter what he is. We shoot him. He dies. Problem solved. So let’s go before he gets away.”

  Still conscientiously keeping his distance, if not as much as protocol required, Rhys looked so pale Darius thought he might faint. “So what am I going to become?”

  “Nothing.” Darius snapped his head around to give Rhys a stern look. It chilled him to the bone to see just how shaken Xolani was. Of course, if Houtman had become some new sort of monster, he was a monster she had been involved in creating. But then, so had Darius, and that knowledge sat like a cold stone in his gut. “You’re gonna be just fine, boy. Bailey, give Kaleo his scanner back. Kaleo, you, Xolani, and Joe, take Rhys and the others back to the highway and wait there. Find cover if you can. The rest of you, with me.”

  “But—” Darius saw the furious argument rise to Kaleo’s lips, but he had Kaleo by the collar, slamming him back against a fence post before it could take shape. The half-rotten wood creaked and splintered with the impact.

  “Whatever problems you got with your role in making Houtman what he is, you deal with them on your own time, soldier. Right now, you get your ass back in line and follow orders. Got that?”

  Kaleo’s eyes still burned with rage, but he gave a brusque nod, and Darius released him. Taking his weapon in one hand and the scanner in the other, he gestured the others to follow him, Xolani and Joe helping to get the exhausted and injured hostages upright.

  Rhys remained where he stood, looking from Darius to Xolani and then to the hostages uncertainly. “I’m not— I can’t— I shouldn’t be near them.”

  Xolani sighed. “Don’t worry, Rhys. There’s no way these two haven’t already been exposed. You’re no danger to them. Come on, now. Help me take care of them.”

  With a nod, Rhys followed her. Darius turned as his squad began moving carefully down the lane, though he knew he’d see Rhys absorbed in caring for his friend. But Rhys had stopped, falling behind the others, to stare back at Darius. His eyes were huge with fear. Darius tried for an encouraging smile, and after a moment, Rhys’s lips curved in response, before he bowed his head and walked away.

  Gabe groaned as Xolani helped him to sit at the base of a tree in the greenbelt on the opposite side of the highway from the ranch. The huge bruise on the side of his head continued to seep blood.

  The sight of it worried Rhys. “What happened to him?”

  “Fucker pistol-whipped him last night,” the female hostage answered, slumping against another tree. “Nearly caved his skull in.”

  Gabe chuckled, the laugh coming out of nowhere, as if he were delirious. “He got pissed off when he couldn’t get it up to rape me.”

  “Lucky you.” The other survivor snorted.

  Xolani dug in her pack and swabbed at Gabe’s scalp wound with gauze pads. “He might have a concussion. I know who this guy is, but what’s your name, honey?”

  “Emilina Cruzado.” The survivor extended her hand. “Emmy. Some of your people found me around Troutdale a few months back. I’d been sheltering in a truck stop.”

  Xolani shook hands with her before turning back to tend Gabe. She kept her voice mild and conversational. “You were sexually assaulted?”

  Emmy shrugged, sighing. “Not much of an assault. When Jacob explained the situation, I decided it wasn’t worth dying for. Tia held out, same as this stubborn cabrón.” She jerked her head at Gabe.

  Rhys gasped as if the wind had been knocked out of him. “What?”

  Gabe laughed, a bitter smile twisting his bruised face. “I decided I’d rather die than give him the satisfaction. Emmy was a lot smarter than me.”

  “Gabe—” Rhys’s voice broke, his throat tightening. “Xolani?”

  She shook her head, meeting his eyes directly. “It’s been almost three weeks, Rhys. There’s nothing we’re going to be able to do if he’s been infected.”

  “What about me?” Emmy asked tightly. “Am I going to go crazy and start eating people, too?”

  Xolani bowed her head. “I don’t know. Clearly our experiment in prophylactic immunity has encountered some unexpected variables. We’re going to have to keep you under quarantine until we’re sure. It’s too late for you to go back to Colorado Springs with this summer’s group, anyway. We’ll have the winter to figure it out.”

  Emmy nodded, dropping her gaze. “You should probably know I’m pregnant. I was involved with another one of the survivors back in the quarantine. I had just started to suspect when we were kidnapped.”

  Xolani sighed, closing her eyes. “Shit. I’m sorry, honey. You’re going to need to abort.”

  “What? Why?”

  “In the best-case scenario, you’re infected with Bane Alpha. The virus doesn’t cross the placental barrier, which is probably a good thing if you consider the possibilities involving a fetus or infant or, God forbid, a toddler with a Jug’s strength. But neither do the antibodies, and Alpha mutates to Beta when it’s blood-borne and exposed to air. Childbirth involves blood. Jugs can’t have children. We learned that the hard way. They’re infected with the Rot the moment they’re born.”

  Xolani’s expression was sympathetic but not wounded. Either she hadn’t been the Jug to learn that lesson first or it didn’t bother her as much as Rhys thought it might. Who had it been? Schuyler? Gina? Maybe even Jamie? Or had it been someone he hadn’t met yet?

  Now Kaleo’s remarks about Jug females made much more sense.

  Emmy fell silent, pushing off the ground and walking away, her back to the rest of them. They let her have her privacy until she sniffed and wiped her face.

  “So he’s going to take that from me, too.” Her eyes were bleak when she turned back to them. “Great. Just great. Well, if we’re going to do it, it’ll need to be soon.”

  “Of course.” Xolani nodded. “Once we get to someplace we can camp for a few days safely so you can recuperate.”

  Gabe held out his hand reassuringly, and Emmy took it, squeezing back. Before anyone could say anything else, though, Kaleo’s head snapped up.

  “I’ve got a contact at the edge of the scanner’s range. Can’t quite determine what it is. It’s large enough to rule out most wildlife, but it’s low to the ground.
I can’t make out the shape so I’m not sure it’s human. Stay down. I’m going to try to get closer and get a fix on it.”

  He looked to Xolani for confirmation—apparently Darius had gotten through to him—and she nodded her approval of the plan, urging Gabe and Emmy to get low near the base of the trees. Xolani, Joe, and Rhys all crouched, their weapons covering Kaleo’s progress deeper into the greenbelt. Rhys wasn’t certain what possessed him to move, except for the notion that it was best that they not be all clustered together in one clearing if something hostile came along. Staying low, he crept carefully to squat behind the first large tree Kaleo passed, and then the next. A glance to his left showed that Joe was making a similar covert advance on the far side of Kaleo.

  Rhys barely contained a scream when a shotgun blast exploded in the silence. Kaleo’s neck erupted in a fountain of blood, painting the undergrowth in a crimson spray almost to Rhys’s feet. Rhys pressed his back against the trunk of the tree, covering his mouth with his hand. He tried to still his rapid breathing, hoping he hadn’t been seen or heard.

  “Don’t move! Drop the fucking gun!” Jacob’s voice was rough and hoarse, as if he’d been shouting a lot. Rhys froze, unsure whether or not he was the one being addressed, but a quick glance around the back of the tree that hid him showed Joe slowly rising, setting his gun down and lifting his hands. Joe very carefully looked anywhere but in Rhys’s direction.

  Shit. Ducking back into his concealed spot, Rhys glanced down to see Kaleo’s infrared scanner, splattered in blood, near his feet. If Jacob came looking for it, he’d find Rhys for sure. But if Rhys tried to move it, Jacob would hear him. All he could do was stay still and hope Jacob didn’t think to claim the scanner.