My mind whirls. I don’t know where he has come from; I could’ve sworn the coast was clear. In fact, I would’ve bet my life on it. I did bet my life on it, it would seem.
“Mason Storm,” Abby says. “I knew I smelled shit.”
“Drop your weapon, traitor,” Mason Storm says. “Drop it, and you’ll get a painless ride to the Overlord.”
“I know better than that,” Abby says.
Lilly’s lips are peeled back, her teeth bared like a dog that’s about to attack. I try nodding toward them. This doesn’t work, thanks to the death grip this man has me in, so I try talking. The words are wispy, barely audible.
“Listen to him,” I say.
Lilly and Abby hear me. Understand me.
“We killed a few of your men,” Abby says.
“All’s fair in war,” Mason Storm responds. “I didn’t like them much anyway. Besides, I killed the old man who brought us here.”
“I didn’t like him much, either,” Abby says.
“Then we’re fine. All is well,” Storm says.
“No, it’s not,” Lilly replies. Her voice sounds so pained, so angry, that I almost don’t recognize it. She hates this man without knowing anything about him. Hates him because he is part of the District. Hates him because he has me in a headlock. Hates him because she knows he’ll take her captive. “We’re not going with you. Not alive.”
“I’m afraid my orders are to bring you back alive, ma’am, and I never stray from my orders. Not in my twenty-year military career, and not since I’ve been in the Overlord’s employment.”
“That’s a huge conflict of interest, then,” Lilly says.
I try shaking my head again. It’s not easy, and neither Abby or Lilly looks my way. They’re caught in a deathly staring contest with Mason Storm.
“I’m sure it is,” Storm says, “for you. But for me, I don’t believe in such things. I believe in getting the job done by any means necessary. Even if that means—”
I see the Black Knights creeping out from the shadows of the abandoned buildings. I make a noise of warning, but it just sounds like a dry cough, so I point, but by the time I do this, a skinny woman with sunken eyes, and a man nearly seven feet tall jam their guns into Lilly and Abby’s backs.
“Well, even if that means I have to play dirty,” Storm finishes.
Abby looks over her shoulder. For a split second, I feel like she’s about to do something stupid, like fight back, but that passes as soon as she drops her rifle. Lilly does, too, though I can tell it takes a lot of willpower to do so.
“Good, good,” Mason Storm says. “The Overlord wasn’t lying, was he? You are all certainly smarter than you look.”
20
We are thrown into the back of an SUV, but it is not roomy. Our hands are bound together with duct tape. Our captors stand outside the vehicle.
“How many are left?” Mason Storm asks. His voice drifts in through an open back window.
The seven-footer answers. “Just us, boss.”
“They got Charlie up in the parking deck, and Freeman and Granger were cut down in the initial attack,” the woman says. She has a voice like a pirate. Or a lifelong smoker. “Grimes hit the wall over there. Broke his neck.”
Abby smirks.
Mason Storm says, “Well, they’ll pay for this.”
“I know, boss,” the seven-footer says. “I know.”
The door opens. It’s the woman that crawls into the back seat. She looks at us like we’re some sort of roadkill as she points her rifle in our faces. The seven-footer sits in the front. Mason Storm drives.
I wonder if this woman really has to watch us. I mean, what could we do? We’re tied up, weaponless. Not even our words could cause harm.
I can also tell this woman wants us dead. We killed her friends, her teammates, and she wants nothing more than to put a bullet straight through our heads.
The SUV lurches forward, going over the pothole-filled roads with ease, gently rocking us back and forth. I lean my head on Abby’s shoulder. She gives me a mean look out of the corner of her eye, but I ignore it. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good sleep; I figure now’s as good a time as any.
So, with the SUV gently rocking back and forth, and a crazy woman from the District pointing a gun in our faces, I close my eyes and drift off into unconsciousness.
It is much needed. It is good.
What wakes me up is the crackle of a voice over the speakers of a shortwave radio, coming from the front of the SUV. I open my eyes, and the world all around us is dark. Pitch black. The headlights don’t do much to cut through this darkness. In the ended world, there is no electricity. No street lamps. No traffic lights. In all this blackness, not even the stars and moon have much to say.
The voice on the other end of the radio does, however.
It takes me a moment to decipher the words, but I do. A man is telling the seven-footer that they need to divert toward Indianapolis, Overlord’s orders, a pit stop in the name of a city I don’t recognize because the District has renamed it.
We’re to meet with the Overlord there.
My stomach bottoms out, feels packed with slithering snakes. The Overlord. This will be my chance.
I turn toward Abby. Her eyes are wide; she knows, she understands the significance of the voice on the radio, she understands the stakes.
The radio crackles again, turns off.
“He must have some really messed up stuff planned for them,” the seven-footer says.
“He always does,” Mason answers.
“How do you do it?” I ask, breaking my silence.
I see Mason’s eyes flash in the rearview mirror. They’re illuminated green by the lights on the dashboard. It makes him look like an alien in a low-budget sci-fi movie.
“Do what?” the seven-footer asks.
“Len,” Mason says quietly. I hear the strain in his voice, even over the rumble of the engine.
The woman in front of me snarls, shoves the gun in my face. I don’t fold. Metal bites into my cheek. I know she’s one bad bump on the road from blowing another hole in my face, but it’s the furthest thing from my mind. The number one thing is getting Lilly, Abby, and myself out of here. Alive.
Abby gives me a warning mumble, one I choose to ignore.
“How do you call him ‘the Overlord’ with a straight face?” I say.
“That’s his name,” Len, the giant, replies. “He don’t have another name that I know of, does he, Mason?”
Mason shakes his head. To me, he says, “You’d better keep your mouth shut, Jupiter. Or Helga is gonna make your trip a lot more uncomfortable.
I don’t think it’s possible for this trip to get any more uncomfortable.
I keep quiet for the rest of the ride. I lean my head back, my body all cramped, and close my eyes, knowing sleep won’t come as easily as before, not with the one-eyed man on my mind like he always is.
21
Whatever it was—the lull of the wheels going over the rough terrain, the dark, the near deadly urge not to look Helga in the eyes—it worked, because I wake up a few hours later.
The sun shines. I have no idea what the date is, or even the month, really.
What wakes me up is the car door slamming. Mason has gotten out. He leans back, his fists pressing into his spine. Through the open door, I hear his bones crackle.
Len is out of the car, too. He’s holding the huge assault rifle with three fingers; it looks like a toy in his massive hands.
I look around. Helga hasn’t gotten out yet. She seems content with just staring at us with her weird lazy eye.
We seem to be in some sort of city. We’re surrounded by tall buildings, some withered and some outright obliterated, their burned metal shining in the sun. There’s a bridge behind us covered in sandbags and guard towers. The towers are populated by soldiers that look like specks from here as they mill about.
“Where are we?” I ask Abby.
She shakes her head.
“They call it Viper,” she whispers. “The whole place is an arsenal.”
Through the front windshield, down a stretch of fractured blacktop, I see a gate supported by rusty poles. Two men are standing there with dazed looks on their faces. Blackness lies beyond the gates, and seeing that fills me with a sudden sense of dread, like looking into a bottomless pit you know you’re about to get thrown into.
Mason smiles and raises a hand to one of the guards. The guard raises a fist back. Some sort of sign? Maybe. Len busies himself with kicking a very old soda can around the street’s gutter. The clanking noise the aluminum makes as it scrapes against the fractured concrete is ear-grating. It sets my teeth on edge.
A few minutes pass as Mason and the guards chat it up. Heads nod, rigid postures collapse in bouts of laughter, and the guard on the left even takes to slapping his thigh. Mason must be a funny fellow with lots of jokes to tell. I guess he saved them all for after our trip. I’m glad for that.
Abby seems a bit more alert now, her eyes aren’t as heavy with sleep. Lilly continues snoring away; we don’t wake her, figuring that any rest one can get with both eyes closed is good rest.
Mason whistles. Like an obedient dog, Helga turns her head and peers through the dusty windshield. She gets out, offers a lazy-eyed glare at Len, who’s still kicking around the soda can like it’s the World Cup, and comes around the back of the SUV.
“Prison,” Abby whispers. “This is a prison. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard about it. They call it ‘the Viper Pit’.”
“A prison? I thought they’d be past that,” I say.
“Part of their rebuilding of society.” Abby rolls her eyes. “We gotta get outta of here. It’s torture.”
“I’d imagine.”
The backdoor hisses as Helga pops it open. The smell of sewage and smoke hits my nostrils, as well as something else I can’t put my finger on, something that is sicker than usual.
Helga has her gun trained on us. Her gaze, for the first time, seems relaxed, the lazy eye even lazier. Something tells me she knows for a fact that we’re not stupid enough to try anything right now. We’re outnumbered and outgunned.
But what lazy-eyed Helga doesn’t realize is that ever since this dreadful event, the apocalypse, started, we’ve been outnumbered and outgunned. Abby and I—Lilly, too, only more recently—have had worse odds.
Just as I’m about to look over at Abby and give her the nod, the ‘let’s kill ‘em’ nod, she flies out of the back like a pissed off spider monkey.
Helga doesn’t see it coming.
She stumbles with the force of Abby’s hit, and I can’t really do much of anything besides sit there and stare. I wonder to myself, When is Abby going to stop surprising me? Just when you think you know a person, right?
Helga cries out, loud and hoarse, and this unholy sound wakes Lilly up like she’s just had a bucket of ice cold water dumped over her head. Helga’s gun goes off. No one gets shot, but the sound sends a flurry of birds from the sagging telephone wires all around us.
Next thing I hear are Len’s lumbering footsteps as he rushes over to the scene. The can crushes beneath his huge boots.
Time to move, I tell myself.
It’s not easy, with my hands tied behind my back, but I launch at Len with my shoulder. I fly through the air for what seems like a solid minute before hitting him in the side. He cries out, mostly with surprise, I think, but he stands his ground.
The ensuing impact is like hitting a brick wall. My neck cracks, and I bite my tongue hard enough to draw blood. Then the hard concrete meets me when I land, and Len picks me up with his massive hands.
Gunshots come from behind us. Pieces of the road spray everywhere, sending up rock dust that coats my bloody tongue. I feel the heat of the bullet right by my ankle. More rushing footsteps. Then Lilly shouts as she joins the scuffle.
Len slaps her away, and she goes flying into the back bumper of the SUV before hitting the concrete. I think she hits it hard enough to give her a concussion, or at least knock her out, but she’s back up and running at the giant almost instantly. Her teeth are bared, and her eyes are wild with the fight. Len lets me go so he can fend off another hit from Lilly, but she never reaches him.
Mason and the other guards pile on top of her, pin her down.
Same goes for Abby. And me. Our little coup has backfired.
22
“Admirable,” Mason Storm says. Len holds me back while Helga has Abby. The two guards are holding Lilly. She still bucks and kicks, trying to get free.
“Save your energy, Lilly,” I say.
She doesn’t listen, of course.
“Wish we could just kill ‘em now,” Helga says.
Her breath smells rotten…or maybe it’s just the city we’re in. It’s all broken and worn. I reckon this place was hit with a nuclear bomb, back at the onset of the disease, an attempt at a mass eradication. Thinking this brings a tingling to my flesh. I can practically feel the radiation.
“Me too,” Storm says, agreeing with Helga’s sentiment. He grins. “But we can’t. Don’t worry, they’ll be well taken care of.”
She chuckles at this.
Len starts rocking on his heels, which, by proxy, rocks me. “Don’t make me go down there, Mason. Please.”
“You won’t, big guy. You won’t,” Mason assures him.
“It’s not that bad,” one of the guards says with a smile. The other guard hits him, and they both begin laughing.
“Take them down, please,” Mason tells the funny men. I hate how lively his eyes are, how smug his face is. He turns to the guard with the beard, and says, “No mess-ups. They’ll be here soon, and if you mess up, you’ll have the Overlord to answer to. Never mind me.”
The bearded guard’s smile fades, turns into a grim line, and his flesh pales, making him look like some deep sea creature that has never seen the light of day. “No worries, sir.”
Len pushes me forward, and the bearded guard catches me. My hands are behind my back, but I could head-butt him, maybe get his gun somehow…fall to the ground, and loop my arms under my legs. It would be hard, but what else do we have going for us? As soon as I try this, though, the Knights would be on me. I don’t think they’d kill me; they’d just beat me to within inches of my life.
It’s not worth it. I’ll wait until I’m alone with the guards.
“We might need a third. You know, less risk,” the other guard says.
He’s younger. Has stubble on his face that’s patchy. Probably won’t grow fuller because of the radiation, but he’s too stupid to realize that it’s killing him, changing the makeup of his DNA as we speak.
Helga steps forward before Mason can answer. “I’ll go.”
“Thank you, Helga,” Mason says.
So the guards and Helga are behind us now, driving us forward to the gate. I hear a button click from below me, probably a remote on the guard’s belt, and the gate slides open with a rusty squeak.
“This’ll be the last time we see each other, I’m afraid,” Mason Storm says. “So to the traitor and her accomplices, I say goodbye.”
“Fuck you,” Abby says.
That’s that. End of conversation.
The guards prod us on into the darkness. The steps are made of stone, but most of them are broken and wiggle beneath my feet. There’s a terrible smell down here, one I’m all too familiar with: the stink of corpses. They’re certainly not old, though. Decomposed corpses have their own stink. This is fresh.
Fifteen years ago, this smell would’ve been a punch to the nose. I would be doubled over and spilling my guts all over the steps. But it’s not now. And I’m not. I’m used to this smell, and I hate that.
My eyes begin adjusting to the darkness. There’s a slight, greenish glow the farther we go on, like the walls themselves are laced with radioactivity.
“Welcome to Hell,” the guard behind me says.
I say nothing. Neither do Abby and Lilly. We all know that the true Hell is a
ll around us. One doesn’t have to go down a steep flight of stone steps to find it; just look at the ruined landscape of what was once America, smell the bodies thick in the air, see the laughing faces of skeletons stripped completely of their meat.
We come to the opening at the bottom of the stairs, except it’s not open; stone has fallen and clogged up this particular entrance.
“Nuclear warhead hit the city thirteen years ago,” the bearded guard says. “This place has one entrance, and one entrance only. You can’t escape.”
“We’ll see about that,” Abby challenges.
“Shut your mouth, traitor,” Helga says. She raises a hand and strikes Abby in the back of the head.
Anger erupts through me, and I lunge forward. The guard rips me back before I’m even three feet away from her.
Helga grins. “Lucky that’s all she gets, Jupiter.”
“Move to the right,” the guard says.
I don’t, so he forces me that way.
Here in the greenish shadows is a rudimentary staircase made of piled junk.
“Up,” he orders me. “You do something funny, I cut off a finger. You hurt me in any way, I cut open your ballsack and take your right testicle—I’ll leave the other one dangling there. Got it?”
I don’t answer, just go up the staircase. The junk sways and creaks with our combined weight.
“Same goes for you two,” the other guard says. “You do something funny, I cut off your tits. You hurt me, the blade goes up your vagina. I’ll make sure to twist it, too.”
More creaks and groans from behind me as they mount the staircase. About a dozen steps later, we come to an opening. It’s a hatch made out of twisted and melded together metal. One part is bronze, another is pure black. Looks like a manhole cover and the metal grille of a Mac truck. Part of the aftermath of the blast, no doubt.
The hatch hangs open. From the opening, the smell is so much worse. It stings my nostrils, tries to choke me. I feel my throat swelling, getting tighter, and I’m breathing a bit heavier.
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