Rhett has come to kneel in front of me, blocking the view of the snake and its hissing. I am aware of him, but I do not see him. I feel his touch gently pushing my hair from my face, but it does not move me. I am finally drowning from this new world and I hope my last breath is soon.
“You need to eat,” he pleads.
His voice is whisper-soft with his concern. Even as I hear him, he does not reach me. He sighs, sliding down to the cold, tiled floor to sit with his back to me. We both stare at the crumpled discarded cotton shirt on the floor, afraid of it with the memories it holds.
“He was a good kid. Real good. A little cocky with that ego of his when it came to the girls, but a good kid. How the girls loved his attention. That smirk of his could drop panties for miles,” Rhett chuckles with his memories. “Not just white cotton either, he had everything from G-strings to silk. Until he met you. One look and done. You put up a good fight. Had him chasing his own tail like a whipped puppy. That boy would go out with us, brawl all night or whatever we had to do, then return to the bar to stare all moon-eyed at you. Funniest shit I had ever seen.”
“Why are you telling me this?” My voice is harsh and gravel-filled, interrupting his memory lane.
“One of us needs to talk.” He shrugs as if it is nothing more than a discussion over what to have for breakfast, not the burial of my soul.
“I don’t want to talk.” I stare at the grey shirt and I can see Lawless in it.
“Then you will listen.”
I wonder if Rhett is seeing him, too. “I don’t want to listen.”
He wore it just two days ago. I am the one that took it off of him. “I knew he was going to do it. I saw it on his face. The way he handed his bag to Marxx, I knew. It’s my job to keep him safe. It was supposed to be me. To stand by him, you know, when it gets real. That is my job,” Rhett says.
I do not want to listen, but Rhett ignores my request. I don’t want the details. I have seen him die plenty in my dreams from last night to fill me with enough wet, red details but I listen. He kept watch over me, now I keep watch for him.
“The little punk knew I wouldn’t let him go. He clocked me right in the face. Sent me down for just a second to distract them all. Then, just like what J.D. said, he ran out there. Just ran right the fuck out there. Never looked back.”
Rhett holds his head between his bent knees as the memories take him. He is shielding his eyes as if he could hide from what he is seeing. I know he can’t. You cannot hide from your own demons. They are yours and you own them as much as they own you.
“They were on him so quickly. Soon as he ran out, they ran after him. Hell followed him. Hell followed him all the way down. There was nothing I could do. I promise you, there was nothing we could have done,” he is almost pleading for some forgiveness. I have no words of comfort to give him. I am selfish in my own mourning and I do not have the energy to carry another. I hold my words behind my locked jaw, gifting him with only my silence. “I’ll sit here as long as you need. I won’t let anyone near you until you are ready. As long as it takes, Helena,” he tells me this, as another man told me something so similar only days ago.
“Why?” At the sound of my voice, he twists around to see me. “Why what?” His voice is soft with concern again as he stares at me. I must be having a very bad hair day.
“Why are you doing this? Before all of this, you never said a word to me. I was taught to steer clear of you, for my own good. Guilt that bad?”
I did not mean for the words to come out this rough, but they have. He flinches from their implications, and for a second, I feel my own guilt before a cold numbing wave washes over me again. “Part of it,” he says, returning to staring at the wall ahead of us. “When you first came to us, you were what, fifteen? Sixteen? Just a kid. Kids don’t last long in our world. Shit, grown adults don’t always last long in our world. We aren’t about people pleasing. You come in. You earn your spot and you keep earning it. It doesn’t ever stop. It breaks people down.
J.D. breaks people down.” He smirks his twisted smile of enjoyment. “The things we do. Tears some of them right up. Only a real few really make it inside. Where it counts. Where the trust is earned.”
He stalls with a chuckle before continuing.
“Like Law. You wouldn’t believe the bets that boy had against him. We put him through so much just to watch and laugh at him. He did it all though. Not saying he didn’t bitch about it, but he did it. No matter what you needed. No matter how mad he was with someone. If he was needed, he did it.”
Rhett sighs, rubbing his face with his hands. I guess I am not the only one whose memories ride them now.
“Now seven years later, here we are,” he breathes deep before starting again. “Still here. Still together. Still fighting. Fighting things, a little differently than I thought we would ever be, but still fighting. I’ve watched you grow up. Maybe your life should have been more proms and parties than bar fights and stitches, but you stuck with it. You’ve earned your spot, Helena, and you keep earning it. You’re a pretty girl. Smart. Stubborn, a little too stubborn. Before all this, with their social norms on age, would I have enjoyed our games?”
He pauses, letting the question float between us while he debates it.
“Yeah, probably.” He shrugs, unashamed in his lack of care for society. “It’s all changed now. Who knows what the rules are? If there are even rules. I sit here not out of guilt, but because I care about you. Plus, you have this soft little moan you make in your sleep that does it for me.”
I can see the smile on his face without him having to look at me. “Perv,” I say, nudging him with my knee, and even as I try to fight the smile, I lose.
“Takes one to know one, Sweetheart.” He does turn to me now wearing the smile of his that lures so many women to their doom. “You ready to go down and get some food?”
“No,” I tell him, feeling myself fading again as my smile leaves me. “…but you’re going to anyway.”
His smile has left us now, too. He understands me so well. “…but I’m going to anyway.”
A little too well.
Chapter 51
I walk to the gallows would have been easier than walking to the cafeteria. Eerily, with the many sad faces around me, it feels the same. Rhett parts the crowd, which has grown the way well-wishers do at the most inappropriate times. Marxx walks behind me, keeping them from overtaking me with their sad eyes and the need to touch me, giving me false comfort as they gain their own. It is hard for them to think of someone they saw as being so formidable lost to us. It brings their own fears of their fates too close to their surface. If one of us can fall, then what chances do they have?
Every step we take holds a visual ghost for me. The phantoms are the strongest in the suffocating stairwell where so many moments were shared. Fate is strangling me with dawn upon us. The sun reaches every dark corner, forbidding me to hide from her.
“Just keep one foot in front of the other,” Marxx encourages me, as the distance grows between Rhett and myself with each failing step of mine.
Rhett has gotten too far ahead. The darkness of my mind with its black grief slams into me with the fact Lawless should be between he and I. It clenches everything in my body with the force of a fist colliding with a wall.
“I can’t breathe,” I whisper.
Marxx wraps his arms around me, helping me to sit upon hearing my words.
He holds my back against his chest, rocking me with his body, telling me, “Yes, you can.”
I shake my head as panic sets in with the sensation.
Rhett backtracks, running to where Marxx and I sit. He catches my head in his hands, steadying it so I am forced to look at him. “You can do this. Just look at me. Breathe with me,” Rhett is chanting, and I fight the dark shadow holding me a prisoner to hear him.
Together Rhett and I focus on filling our lungs with patterned inhales and exhales and nothing else. Slowly the pain subsides as the panic leaves me. My
numbness penetrates the space it once filled, and I feel weaker with its cold blanket around me.
“That one wasn’t so bad.” Marxx helps me stand when my sagging body disobeys me.
“That one?” I ask him.
I feel as if I am walking on quicksand. Each step could be my last should it suck me below forever.
“You’ll have more. Each time a little less till there are no more.” Marxx’ hands rest on my waist and guide me down the stairs behind Rhett once again.
I want to ask him what it is he is talking about, but with the numbness chilling me and Rhett unable to look at me as he collects himself, I lack the energy to care. Besides, every time I ask a question the answers just get worse. Perhaps I should save some answers for later, before I am so far into them, I have none to spare. When the noise from the cafeteria hits me, I have a lot less than just answers. I have lost all my bravery to continue.
At what point is it okay for me to go running off screaming, regretting my decision to do this? The answer? Five minutes. Now, six minutes passed, I am fully regretting not running off screaming back up the stairs. I have a good idea of what I would scream, too.
Breakfast is painfully silent as we all feel his loss. There are muffled condolences as people go by. Each time I begin to breathe normally, someone leans in to remind me of what I cannot forget. It’s a vicious cycle of my endless regrets, brought on by those who only mean well with their soft touches and silent nods. That is normally how bad things happen. People always mean well. When Rhett has reached his breaking point, his glares keep even the sincerest at bay.
“We should hold a funeral,” Aimes says as she is making her idea of art again on her plate.
I have no clue as to what it may have started out. I have no clue what it is ending up as either.
With no one agreeing with her, she pouts harder, taking her emotions out on the artwork.
“We should do something. It’s Larance,” she whispers his name like a Catholic at Mass, holding it sacred upon her lips.
“We will.” Of course, the Preacher’s son would volunteer, as the rest of the men sit stone-faced and sour with their grief.
“Tonight. Around the fire. He would like that.” Aimes’ masterpiece of oatmeal, and something thicker, is clumping from her abuse.
“He’s dead. He doesn’t care what we do now. He’s gone.” J.D.’s anger is startling among such levels of silence.
I almost welcome his rage. It feels more real than the sad faces and long stares of the sheep.
“It’s not for him. It’s for us.” Chapel attempts to calm the beast beside him. It only propels J.D.’s rage deeper.
“You want to do something? You want to ease that suffering of yours? You want to paint the facts of what happened to him all pretty-like? Then get off your padded assess and get out and kill them things instead of holding up here like cowards. He died a man. The rest of us, we are just gonna die. There is your pretty little fact,” J.D. says. His voice carries through the cafeteria with the depths of his anger.
The families closest to us huddle their children to them with protective arms. Some begin to whisper as the fears they have been thinking all morning long are now in vocal form floating around them. Soon, the room becomes alive with the whispered hissing of fear and the many different reactions it causes around us.
“You want to light a nice pretty fire? Gather all around it? Share your precious little memories? Tell yourself his death was worth it? That he lived a long and full life? That these sheep are worth more than our man?” J.D. is staring into the souls of the men around the table. He sneers as he says, “Then you go right ahead. Go right ahead. Don’t be looking for me to be standing out there. I know the real truth. This whole place just got a whole hell of a lot weaker without him. We keep getting messed up and they keep sittin’ safe and pretty behind these walls. We are done.”
J.D. stands, staring at the many frightened faces around us. They clutch their children tight to them, trying to protect them from his anger. Tiny wide eyes peer around shoulders with an innocent curiosity.
“Yeah, you hear me,” he shouts to those staring at him. “All of you do. We are done. You want your supplies? Then you take your candy asses out there. You want your high fences all safe so you can sleep at night? Pick one of your fat bastards to go out there. And tell me,” J.D. pauses with the heat of his anger to chuckle with his thought, “tell me how when food is in such a high demand, so many of you are so fucking fat? I got your weight loss plan right here. We gonna gather all of you up, tie you together and say run. You run for your lives for a day or two. Dangle you fat bastards out there for those things while we stroll around watching it all.”
He laughs now, fully lost in his mental image of the event. One of us should stop him. By one of us, I mean one of the men. I am enjoying the show. My own small laugh joins with his. Yes, I’m a bad person. I’m becoming okay with it.
“Oh man, I would sell tickets to that shit. Watching your upper crust, with your still pressed linens at the end of the world, running for your over-priced lives. It would be golden,” J.D. says.
He turns to me, taking my laugh as an endorsing agreement. “What is it you say, Hells? The cherry? The cherry would be to see how many of you sheep would actually run or just stand there cryin’ and pissin’ on yourselves. Yeah, that would be the cherry.” The laughter dies from him as suddenly as it came over him now as he looks to us. His steel eyes burn with the pits of his rage. “So, if you want to throw a little going away party, you go right ahead. But me, I know our man died for nothing. These sheep, they don’t even care. They will kill us all off before they lift a finger for themselves.”
“He died for us. He died so we could make it home. Don’t tarnish that.” Chapel stands, staring at our leader and trying to edge him down.
“Yeah man, I guess he did. I guess he did.” J.D.’s agreement is more unsettling than his rage.
I know there are more hidden thoughts in his mind to that statement than he is expressing. The way his eyes roam the room only proves it. The Devil may walk the earth outside, but he may have his match waiting for him inside.
“Whatever you are thinking, don’t.” Chapel is also watching the stillness slide over J.D.
Predators do that before it goes graphic. The prey must be located and watched for weakness. There is a lot of pretty, pretty prey around us for J.D to pick from.
It is not the sheep that his need to destroy something lands on first. It was so fast and sudden the room erupted with the shock of it. Even our men, so well attuned to the shifts around them, missed the clues reminding them why we should always fear J.D.
J.D. swings, fully connecting his fist with Chapel’s face, knocking him to his knees. His head bounces off the table as Chapel succumbs to the force, so unprepared for it and the damage it does. Blood already pools between his cupped fingers holding his face.
Our leader hauls Chapel up and onto the table by the vest they love so much, pinning him to the table on his back. J.D. tugs on the vest as if he is looking for something that he can’t find before securing Chapel to the table. This time, he uses Chapel’s throat to press him to the table and leans in, keeping his words between those closest to him.
“I don’t see a rank on this vest of yours. There is just your name, son. You ain’t earned the right to talk to me. I give it to you. Which means you sure as hell don’t have the right to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do. You ain’t nothing more than a chair warmer around my table. You got me, son?” J.D.’s voice is viper deadly. One wrong move and he will strike with poison so deadly it will cripple Chapel.
“Yeah, I got you. Want to call a vote?” Chapel’s question is acid to the other man’s poison with his bleeding nose still spilling forth.
“There ain’t nothing to vote on, son. Unless you want me to call it on your place by my side?” J.D.’s threat hangs heavy in the air. “I’m just a seat warmer, remember? I’m not by your side.”
Chapel shoves J.D. off him, tired of the threats, he does not flinch under the steel eyes upon him the way so many do.
Rhett steps between the two when Dolph and Richard arrive. Their added presence will only intensify J.D.’s needs to force Chapel into submission. That is the one thing Chapel will never do again, and as he stands toe-to-toe with J.D., we all know it.
“If you two want to play touch-my-ego, we need to go else- where,” Rhett tells both men as he watches the area around him. Dolph and Richard have noticed the room’s anxiety and it is not hard for them to figure out the source. It’s a visual tennis match with the residents watching the two groups from their sidelines.
Make it three groups as Ross and Leslie stroll in.
It is a piñata of a morning, as I get beat from all angles. Tie a rope around my neck and hang me in a tree. Let’s just call this done already.
Ross is showering Leslie with his support as the woman sags with her movements. Her sobs are evident with the amount of shoulder motion she portrays. Ross’ smile is nowhere to be found with his mouth moving so rapidly to smother her in comforting words. Ironically, watching them, my smile is firmly in place. Funny the things we find amusing when we feel we have nothing left to lose.
“You have got to be kidding me. Skankerbell is totally not trying to sponge. Shiv her, Rhett. Shiv her!” Aimes demands as our ever-darling pixie once again shares with us her true feelings about the situation.
“Don’t tempt me,” Rhett mutters, watching the two who have seated themselves across from our table. “I already promised Law that coward would die for what he did. I am about ready to cash in that chip.”
Dawning (The Risen Series Book 1) Page 37