The Pale Rider

by J B Trepagnier

  Aeron nipped at the tip of my nose.

  “No, I’m saying after the orgy, you will want to keep us and will have to get a bigger apartment.”

  “Go to bed, Aeron.”

  I didn’t even know his team. I was developing pretty strong feelings for Aeron, but I also knew I had pretty strong opinions on cheating.

  I was not having an orgy in the Oval Office. I didn’t care what that painting said. I was probably just high when I painted it.

  Chapter 33

  W

  e actually did it. We managed to travel through a bombed-out landscape with mutated corpses who wanted to eat us with just a sword, a blue baseball bat, and a crazy horse. We didn’t do it alone. Gabriel’s Haven helped, and so did the entire state of California. That right there told me the world was still worth saving. I’d been scared, hungry, and dirty, but the worse thing that happened to me was a long line of stitches in my arm.

  Still, I was nervous. Did I have some sort of online relationship with Leif like I did with Aeron? I couldn’t remember anything about my chats with Leif. If he had been looking for me as hard as Aeron and we had something going, he would be excited to see me. And I would crush him by not remembering a single thing about it.

  It was easy remembering with Miss Mabel. All I had to do was see that kind, beautiful, lined face, and I just remembered. I didn’t have that with Aeron or Leif. I’d never met them in person. The only way I remembered things with Aeron was when he told me something, and it triggered a memory. I was pretty sure that kiss that unlocked some of my memories was our first kiss, but I couldn’t even make logical sense of how I remembered things.

  As much as I wanted to chit chat when we rode before, I just wanted silence right now. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. When they were driving needles into my skin and taking my blood, they did everything they could to terrorize me. There were always flashing lights and had recordings of screaming playing. They couldn’t even hear my tiny screams because they were playing it so loudly.

  I just knew they weren’t doing that because they enjoyed torturing children. There was a purpose. Wouldn’t the same thing need to happen to make a cure? I didn’t know the first thing about the science behind any of this.

  I noticed the landscape started changing the further we got past the burned zone and closer to San Quintin. San Quintin didn’t just set up a wall around the city. They’d booby-trapped everything within the vicinity.

  I saw some same wood traps with sharp spikes. I also noticed Meremoth wasn’t walking straight. He was walking like a drunk horse.

  “Aeron, I know you’ve got a weird horse, but what is he doing?”

  “They covered the pits. They’ve got deep pits dug all over the place to trap Rage Heads, murderers, and thieves. That was my idea. The big wooden pikes were Leif’s design.”

  “But we saw them in Washington State.”

  “Because I taught this to the good people. Some wicked people saw and built their own. Armed soldiers will meet us when we pass that crumbled statue. Don’t worry. They are on our side.”

  “Are they going to Lady Scientist me like your friend Martinez?”

  “He’s an ass, but I’d trust him at my back in battle. Don’t make any sudden moves when we get close to that statue. They will shoot to kill if they think you are a threat.”

  I had a healthy appreciation for not getting shot to death, so I tried to lay Smurfette across Meremoth, where she was less visible. I was holding my breath when we got to that statue. All I could see was a pair of legs. The rest of the statue was in rubble by the base.

  Don’t ask me where they came from. They just sort of appeared out of nowhere, but ten soldiers surrounded us with guns pointed right at my chest.

  “State your business!”

  “I need to get this woman to Leif. She’s part of our team.”

  This young kid, who couldn’t have been more than sixteen and seemed pretty trigger happy, raised his gun.

  “Who are you, and how do you know Leif?”

  “Who the fuck are you that you don’t know me, Sparky?”

  A man stepped forward and lowered the kid’s gun for him.

  “It’s fine, Javier. Aeron fought in the war, and he’s on Leif’s team. You just don’t remember because you hadn’t joined up before he left.”

  “Sorry,” the kid grumble.

  “This girl is why you’ve been gone so long?”

  “She’s the missing piece, so you need to protect her with your life, and if I find you disrespecting her, I’ll throw you through a wall.”

  One man snapped to attention. He was all soldier.

  “Men, we have a mission. Escort the princess to the castle and save the kingdom.”

  Okay, and apparently a video game geek, but I could work with that. It was like this fucking military parade as they led us safely through all their booby traps. We finally got to the fence, and they took it just as seriously as California did. It was made of sheet metal and barbed wire, but San Quintin took it a step further. There were pikes at the top of the fence, and they had stuck heads on them. Some of them were Rage Heads based on the red eyes that were getting a white film over them, but some of them looked human.

  “Do we want to go in there, Aeron? They’ve got human heads on pikes!”

  “Your head only goes up there if they are making an example of you. All those human heads belong to murderers, cannibals, and rapists.”

  Was that supposed to make it less gross? If I got inside these walls and people were wearing body parts as trophies, I’m not sure I could make myself stay. What if Leif ended up this total psycho?

  “Calm down, Ariel. We are safe here. None of these men will hurt you, and you know Leif.”

  “I don’t remember a fucking thing about Leif!”

  “But, you might when you meet him.”

  Our escorts led us all the way to a pristine white building that didn’t look like it had been through a war. Aeron helped me off Meremoth and unloaded the saddlebags.

  There was either solar power, or they got the power grid working here too because the front doors slid open, and air conditioning hit me right in the face. The sun was still out, and I was sweaty and nasty. I had a layer of soot all over my face from running through all that burned territory—way to make an excellent first impression.

  I wanted to kiss Aeron when he led me down to an area with group showers. I just wanted to get clean, but this was apparently to decontaminate ourselves before we went further inside. I planned on decontaminating myself under this hot water and a fresh bar of soap until someone made me get out. I had exactly one pair of clean underwear left, and I couldn’t wait to slip it on.

  I was enjoying my shower so much, I wasn’t even paying attention to the hot, wet naked guy next to me. Aeron was watching me, though.

  “As much as I’m enjoying watching you play in the water, we do need to go meet Leif.”

  I turned and took in Aeron in all his wet, naked glory. My mouth went dry. Fuck, did he ever look beautiful. And his cock was hard and standing right at attention from watching me shower. What I wouldn’t give for some shower sex right about now. One day, Aeron and I would get our moment, and I had a feeling it would be epic.

  “Little Aeron doesn’t look like he wants to go meet Leif.”

  “Are you calling my junk little, Speedy?”

  “No, it looks like a fucking baby arm, but it’s pointed right at me.”

  “The apocalypse is a huge cockblock, Ariel. We can either sneak away and have sex, or you can go meet Leif and find out some answers you’ve been asking me.”

  Why couldn’t we do both?

  Chapter 34

  I

  decided not to go straight for the cock option, even if I was a little mad about it. If I remembered right, I was twenty-six when I got kidnapped, and I slept a long time. I was too old to be shirking responsibility to get laid. I was too old to be having sex with Aeron because I was nervous about meeting
with Leif. Plus, when Aeron and I took that step, I wanted it to be special.

  As soon as we stepped out of the bathroom, someone showed up to take all our dirty clothes. Were they going to wash them for us? How sweet. Washing your clothes during the apocalypse was pretty complicated, and if you got rank while wearing them, sometimes they were still rank when you put them back on after washing them. I’m still not talking about the few pairs of panties I had.

  Aeron grabbed my hand and walked me over to an elevator. There was no up button, just a pad. Aeron’s fingerprint was what opened the door. I wasn’t sure how I felt about getting into an elevator at the end of the world, but when I mentioned that to Aeron, he said it was the only way to the lab.

  We went down instead of up. We went way down. Was this lab underground? When the doors opened, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. There was lab equipment, sure, but there was also satellite tracking, computers, and it looked like someone was diagraming something on the wall.

  I couldn’t see anyone in the lab. Where was the mysterious Leif?

  “Speedy!” I heard someone yell.

  Someone came flying at me and practically tackled me with a hug. This had to be Leif. He was just as huge as Aeron with black hair and black eyes. He had a ring through his septum and another through his eyebrow. Leif spun me around and set me down.

  I had no idea what he was doing when he fell on his knees in front of me. He grabbed my hand and kissed my knuckles.

  “Milady, the Horseman of Pestilence is at your service.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Aeron smacked Leif on the back of the head.

  “I haven’t told her about that yet. There’s still a lot she doesn’t remember.”

  He didn’t need to tell me. I’d known this entire time, and I’d denied it to myself. The horses I kept painting, Meremoth’s behavior, the blackened corpses at the gate. I knew, and I kept denying it because I didn’t want it to be true.

  I had been traveling with and had fallen in love with the Horseman of Death.

  I hope you enjoyed Book 1 of End of Days. This is a slow burn series and we will meet a new harem member in each book. In the next book, which will be out as soon as I finish Monster Whisperer, things will heat up between Aeron and Ariel, secrets will be reveals, and we’ll get to know all about the dark, mysterious Leif.

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