by Rie Warren
“We’re not gonna report them.”
“Nah.”
“Ever.”
“Nope.”
“They’re your family,” I added.
“Part of it.” He slunk forward, only his eyes and lips uncovered. He rounded my waist with his forearm and brought me up sharp. “Half my life. You’re the other.”
“How’d you get Leon out?”
“I used the ‘Cutler’s mah daddy’ card.”
“Why the hell would you take that risk?”
“For you.” He bent toward me. “But if I catch that boy askin’ to give you a blow job one more time, all bets are off. I’d do the same for you.” He held my face in his hands, coming away caked in more mud.
Again with the gut check. “I don’t want you saving me.”
“You worry too much.”
“You don’t worry enough.”
“So, we gonna stand here until our dicks fall off and fight about it? Or are we gonna do somethin’?”
“You ready?”
“Affirmative.”
We doubled back. It took us twenty minutes to catch up with the first crew of Corpsmen, the ones most uninjured by our little TNT tête-à-tête a week ago.
I signaled the numbers—five—and we circled to their rear.
The pouring shitstorm worked in our favor, rendering night visors null and void and noise undetectable. They were spaced out beautifully—at least they’d been taught that much—scoping back and forth through the thick woods.
At the end of the column, I tackled the rear guard without a sound, cold cocking him into oblivion and dragging him into the underbrush.
Blondie leapfrogged ahead and pulled the same number on the next soldier, his actions impressive and dangerously choreographed.
By the time we got to the lookout, we’d left a trail of his four comrades scattered behind. Tapping him on the shoulder, I flashed him a white smile amid the sea of black that was my warrior face, bringing my hand down on his wrist before he could grip his pansy-ass blaster.
Blondie’s palm smothered the trooper’s mouth while I asked, “We gonna have a problem with you, soldier?”
He shook his head, as much as he could from its position inside Blondie’s heavy forearm.
“Good, because I need you breathing and talking.”
He went over Blondie’s shoulder like a rag doll, and I took one of the knocked-out douche bags on each of mine.
Blondie made our prisoners all nice and comfy with their hands and feet bound, their eyes blindfolded, and their mouths gagged while I fetched the last two twats.
Once everyone was tied to his own deluxe tree trunk, I hunkered in front of soldier number five, pulling a corner of the gag from his mouth. “Name?”
“Rast.”
Fitting. Rast had a rat face. He looked exactly like vermin, the kind I had in my apartment, instead of a big blond dog or a goldfish.
“How many approaching, Rast?”
“Seven.”
Pulling my KA-BAR along my palm, the metal pearling under freezing drops, I repeated the motion across his cheek. “That wasn’t the original number. You need a mathematics lesson?” I flicked my blade over a few body parts he probably wouldn’t miss—an ear, his nose, a finger—counting as I went.
He stuttered, “Twenty-five in total, b-b-but now it’s twelve. Twelve took a hit. One of them had other orders.”
“Twenty-five’s an odd number.”
“We were joined by a latecomer.”
My eyes narrowed, but I didn’t have time to question further. His D-P blared, “Need your position, Rast.”
My forearm collared his neck and I sank beside him. “You give these coordinates and not one bit more and I won’t slit your throat from ear to ear, soldier. You know your numbers now?”
A quick learner—even if he couldn’t count for shit—he relayed the position, and I replayed the same move I’d started the night with, a crunching blow to his head sending him to la-la land.
The echo of heavy boots beat toward us. Things worked so well the first time, we went with the same welcome-party greeting.
One, two, and three down.
That’s when things got a little hairy. Guns swiveled back, the sheen of wet bayonets showed up ahead, and the remaining four fuckers descended on us. I used my beloved KA-BAR in defense, knocking back gun barrels and slicing aside stabbing attempts.
Hand-to-hand got real fun as Blondie and I stood back-to-back, offering hurt with our hurtling fists and the hard heels of our boots. The sleet didn’t roar loud enough to mute the meaty blows. Taking a massive fist to my cheek, I staggered sideways, spinning away from Blondie.
A foot crashing into my chest threw me onto my back and far above a face distorted by rain looked down on me. He wasted no time pulling his firearm, one of those useless plastic blasters. I wasted even less wrapping my arms around his thighs and pitching him over my head like I was tossing a bale of hay onto a pallet. His short flight ended in a disjointed landing, headfirst into a tree. Bonelessly, he dripped down to the forest floor and lay unmoving like a sack of soiled shit.
Jumping to my feet, I whipped the water from my eyes and halted with my hand half across my brow. Right then I rethought our decision to engage but not to kill.
Our old friend the lieutenant held his blade to Blondie’s throat, steadily exerting more pressure until a drop of blood welled over the sharp edge, joining the rain in a red-colored river. “You wanna save your boyfriend?”
I focused on Blondie, the knife, and the cunt’s intent. I nodded.
“Throw your knife down, kick it away, and lose the weapons.”
Done deal.
Only thing was, Lieutenant Unlucky wasn’t counting on my left-handed trick. While he pulled Blondie toward my KA-BAR, I lifted the extra strapped behind my back and sent it whizzing toward them. The point made contact, spiking Lieutenant’s neck. He gurgled while Blondie ducked from his arms, came up behind him, and jacked my knife clean of the cut to another agonized scream.
Blondie aimed the blood-splattered shaft to his jugular, held my eyes, and sliced another clean line, dropping the man dead.
Cool, in control, and utterly lethal.
Fucking hot.
The rest went down like limp dicks.
Confiscating their supplies and weapons, we sorted through what was usable and secured the rest in a hidden location. Their D-Ps we destroyed. Blondie got his operational long enough to contact Hatch at Chitamauga, sending the details of the prisoners and their whereabouts. Whether or not the soldiers survived the next week or so out here, I didn’t give a flying fuck.
His eyes pinched shut between his thumb and forefinger, Blondie shook his head. “Nah. No, not a good idea, man. Just tell her I love her. Yeah. Tell her Cannon’s okay.”
He ended the transmission, pulling me close, his cold nose against my throat. “We gotta go.”
Running again, this time to warm up, I was hoping to outpace the foul weather, maybe find some frigging shelter or sunshine or something other than the howling rain making waterlogged soup inside our boots.
Muscles burning and eyes blinded, I had to take my mind off this hell. “You were good support back there.”
I caught the blue tint of his eyes when he winked. “Not bad yourself. Told you I was more than a corporate whore.” He panted beside me, feet pounding in time, but his next words were tender as his caresses. “Needed to have your back this time, big man.”
Rain matted his hair and ran into his mouth with every word spoken. My heart wheeled in my chest as I slowed down. “How do you come up with that stuff?”
His arms rounded my shoulders, and I walked into his hug. “It’s all you, Caspar.”
I ducked my head from his intensely personal stare. “I’m not good enough for you.”
“Got that right. You’re better than me.” The brush of his lips along the side of my throat was the only heat to be found in this godforsaken forest. “’Sides, can�
��t believe you threw your precious knife into the mud like that.”
“It was either that or watch you get your throat slit.”
“Glad you’ve changed your priorities.”
“You got no idea,” I whispered into his neck,
We forged through the sleet until it made a dark mane of Blondie’s hair. Our clothes were heavy, and we could no longer speak through clattering teeth. Finally, we broke free of the forest and faced a huge, squat building enclosed by two rows of pitchfork iron fences. “Fort Knox,” he breathed.
I stopped short, revisited by nightmares.
My teeth started a new rhythm, chattering with more force.
Walking on, Blondie tested the iron barbs, eyeing the fence as if he were about to vault over. “C’mon, big man.”
Along the square roofline speakers sat at even two-meter intervals. Rusty with age and disuse, they were the same as the ones that had once rung with the execution announcement. The placement of the dimmed halo lights was similar, too, to those radiating around the Quad in Epsilon. It had been a nighttime event, the Quadrangle opened to the public and filled with the ferocious atmosphere of brainwashed hate.
My knees buckled. “I’m not going in there.”
Blondie returned to my side. “Didn’t hear you, honey. What?”
Words stuck in my throat. “No. I can’t.”
“Can’t what? Look, you’re turnin’ blue, for Christ’s sake. It’s been abandoned for a long time.” I filtered out all but a few words. “Safe…shelter…rest…”
Close to passing out from pain, I reeled to the ground. All my running from the past and living with a barricade of razor wire between me and my feelings—me and life—had been pointless. One look at this place brought back a ghost I’d never laid to rest.
All it took was Blondie beside me, shaking me, grabbing my face and shouting at me. He seemed to have a way to make my heart crack apart with the eye opener that this mission, this trek was gonna end down the same heartbreak road as before, despite my best defensive maneuvers.
Here I was, face-to-face with the one damned memory I’d been running from, combined with the fucking thing I had no control over.
My heart.
I gagged. “I cannot go in there.”
Chapter Fourteen
Blondie wouldn’t be stopped. He hoisted me over the fences, chanting, “Just let me get you warm, big man.”
He pulled some high-tech shit on the bronze locks of the double doors, making me wonder why he hadn’t done the same on the gates instead of heaving me over.
Forty thousand and some odd hectares of former Fort Knox land had been left to Mother Nature after the mass destruction of the Purge, yet the interior of the last intact building—the Gold Depository—was Company clean. This one building, which had safe-housed the first of the Company’s bullion and the last of the former United States of America, sat pristine and polished like a lopped-off pyramid amid a scavenged wasteland.
All but a few halos were turned off, and those few stabbed my body just the same as the deep brown of his eyes—soft, teasing, and laughing—until they’d become mere slits at the end.
The half-light of the stormy night shaded into the stronghold, lending to its eery atmosphere. I had my own specter keeping me company in the empty tomb.
The rain pounded outside.
Echoes of our boots resonated on marble floors, then silenced.
My heart rate resumed, raced. The way it had with the bass music my last time at the Amphitheater, my first time with Blondie.
I found a corner and sat, shuddering from cold and adrenaline, memories and fear.
A fireplace would have been handy, but I figured there wasn’t one. That didn’t stop Blondie as he went to work on a stack of Territory newspapers piled on a lone titanium desk. The broadsheets were from before the world went completely digitized. They were crumbling, unread, out of place.
I focused on the innocuous details: Blondie busting the dry slats of a wooden chair across his knee. The way he huffed his hair out of his eyes, eyes that searched for me.
Clapping his hands together, he bounced on his heels and tried to strike a light. “Gonna get you warm, Caspar.”
I tried to ignore the pain driving me down with the same piercing pressure as the sleet outside until my neck was squished into the corner and my knees were at my chest.
I couldn’t get warm.
I’d never get warm.
On the desk, newspaper relics curled in on themselves. I hadn’t seen a broadsheet for such a long time; they’d been banned since the Plague. Lunging for one, I pulled it across my lap, tail ends of phrases coming away in my hands. Plague! Viral contagion. Stay inside. Breeders unite!
Rubbing my hand over pages, underlining hateful words, I concentrated on the black mark of ink on my palm and the pads of my fingers spreading to join the stain in my soul.
Blondie blew into the fire he built in the middle of the barren floor, the stigma spreading—sparks, ash, scattered words. When the newspapers burst into flame, a batch of burning headlines caught my eyes: Thousands Dead. Don’t Be One of Them. Embrace the Straight.
I’d represented all of that knowing I was not a single part convinced, simply because I was weak enough to need some semblance of family after mine died. My stomach churned. The only thing to force down was my empty gut, and I kept swallowing the burning acid.
Blondie wisped his fingertips over my face and hauled me onto his lap. “What’s goin’ on?”
My throat was dry. “You said your Leon.”
“Did I? I don’t recall.”
“That day, when Leon was taken to the brig in Alpha, right after I was assigned to you, that’s when you said it.”
“It’s just a figure of speech. I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.” He turned a confused expression on me.
The slush of foul weather outside and the fire hissing at our feet were the only sounds around us until I made myself speak. “What you said, what you implied was belonging with someone, caring for someone. Before you, I’d spent too much time alone, making sure none of that shit happened to me again.” The fort surrounding us made all the memories rush back at me. “I was in Epsilon, at a training camp. I’d never wanted to return to that Territory. In my head, Erica lived on, but once there I couldn’t escape the fact she was dead. Then I met someone.”
His jaw tightened; the comforting caress of his hands up and down my arms ceased.
“I never had Leon, never wanted him that way. He wasn’t mine, but Alejandro was.”
Blondie dipped his eyes, but not before I saw the pain scuttling across the deep blue of his irises. “Alejandro?”
The possessive, painful feelings dredged up from my past bore down on me. “My Alejandro. My lover. My first love.”
He took his hands from me, first from my shoulders, then from my chest where breaths cranked out of me. His hands slipping down my thighs, he stood up and withdrew to the opposite wall. A look of twisted hurt made mealtime of his handsome face.
“You wanted to know this,” I said.
He shook his head, planting his feet in front of himself. His hair streamed wetly down to his shoulders, his big body steaming from the fierce fire beside him. “Don’t think I do anymore.”
I wouldn’t be shut down. “Alejandro was beautiful and brave in a way I’d never seen. He had no allegiance. Not him.” I spared a look at Blondie. I wished I hadn’t. He looked as sick as I felt.
Yet I couldn’t stop my smile. “He wasn’t a Corpsman. He had ties only to himself and then me. He was half rebel, half Freelander, and completely mine.”
“Caspar, please don’t—”
I couldn’t stop my confession, no matter his plea. “I met him during my off time. He lived on the edge of poverty, same as Leon and Evangeline. But hardship didn’t touch him. He was tall, true, and hard bargaining. I’d been in need of a pick-me-up.” I curled my fist in a stroking motion. “My hand wasn’t cutting it a
nymore. I just went trawling for a toy, a cock sleeve or something. Hell, I didn’t know. It was my first time going to one of those gigs. I never imagined I’d come away with a man.” I chuckled. “He overheard me haggling and stopped me from taking out my money, saying, ‘Think we can get you something better than that, Papi?’
“One look and I was a goner. His eyes dark brown, his skin deeply tanned, he damn near glowed. I was a couple years older, but when he invited me back to his place, I felt so fucking unschooled.
“It was a squat, pretty much like mine but overflowing with stuff. Every corner, every table piled with crap—and a lot of damn tables. I was always knocking into one of them, making a mess of his collections of old photographs and his formations of film canisters and ancient cameras. He’d always grin and say, ‘No mas.’
“A photographer, he used cameras going by the names of Pentax and—he really laughed when he showed me these others—Canon. His thing wasn’t landscapes but men. Pornography, the Company labeled his artwork. That first day he kissed me stupid, then asked to take my picture—not to sell, but to keep. I was so fucking into him, I said yes. Being with Alejandro, naked while he snapped my shots, was one of the most erotic experiences of my life.”
I closed my eyes but didn’t miss Blondie’s agitated groan. I wouldn’t torture him. I wouldn’t tell him all of it. I thought of lying with Alejandro in my arms, his short black hair silky against my chest, his head always resting over my heart so when he talked to me in low Spanish words, they were imparted on my skin, seeping into my spirit.
“Man, I was such a fucking romantic with him.” A short laugh escaped me. “Sappy as hell.” The time I made him stay still for hours so I could map his body, his muscles, his scent like those spices, Blondie’s spices. When I was done loving him, I’d washed and covered him carefully before bringing us the forbidden street food he loved, little cakes called magdalenas, empanadas, olives, tapas of all kinds. I fed him one by one.
Rubbing my hand down my face, I stayed in that memory, just for a minute. It was better than the ones to come. “We laughed so much, pretending the risk to our lives didn’t exist. We loved so hard. He called me dulce.” I’d blushed all the way to my hairline when he told me what that meant; for him I was sweet.