The Suicide King Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 3)

by Quil Carter

  I paused and looked around the deserted parking lot for at least a pity laugh but there was nothing. Assholes.

  I pushed Killi through the parking lot and back to the quad. Since I didn’t want to leave Killian alone in the house just in case he woke up (like fuck if I knew how immortality healing worked) I had just bungee-corded the shopping cart to the back of the quad. It had worked out pretty well, but a couple times I had gone too fast and he kinda, well, tipped over and rolled off of the road. I might’ve added a few more injuries to his already healing body… I don’t think I will be sharing that with him.

  I didn’t want him to wake up alone. So sue me! We needed food!

  Carefully (very carefully) I rode with Killian towed behind me back to the house I had chosen for us to live in, at least for the time being. It was a nice little rancher with a backyard that even had a rusted swing set (the chains were too rusty for one to swing on though, and, no, I didn’t figure this out by trying to have a swing… I swear). It had two bedrooms and a nice, but completely destroyed, kitchen, and furniture that was preserved enough for us to sit on as long as there was a blanket over everything. The blankets were because the stuffing was a bit buggered and the fabric that covered it was all scratchy.

  All in all it was pretty fucking fancy, and it was on a nice street with a bunch of other nice houses; probably about a ten minute quad ride from a highway that would lead us deeper into the badlands. I think Killian would be impressed with my choice of house. And if not? Well, we could move, real estate prices were excellent here.

  I drove up the dusty grey road, black trees and leafless bushes around us. About a block up we had a river for us to drink from and I’d already gotten us quite a few containers of water. My Geigerchip had broken long ago but I had a feeling that if any non-immortal ever drank this water they would be glowing. It was good for immortal consumption though and I hadn’t grown tentacles yet so that would be our life source. Plus those weird deer-things drank from it too, so when I eventually decided to start killing them it’d be easy pickings.

  I picked up my resurrecting prince and carried him through the threshold of our new house. There was a living room to the left of me which had our blanket and sheet-draped couch and chairs, and a nice coffee table too for our drugs and stuff. The kitchen was to the right; I’d cleaned the counters so it was free of the dusty ancient crap but now it was covered in all of the things I had scavenged. Me and Killian’s room was down the hallway with new blankets on it that I’d washed for us, and the spare bedroom had all of the shit Perish had loaded on the quad.

  I kept all of Perish’s stuff in that spare bedroom and had closed the door. I really didn’t know how Killian was going to react when he saw it and I didn’t want the triggers right in front of him. I knew eventually he’d tell me everything that happened between the two of them, but I just fucking wanted us to be happy for a while before we tackled it.

  My mouth downturned as I unpacked all of the food I had scavenged. There was a lot of happiness inside of me, bordering on being giddy, but whenever I thought of what we’d both had to go through to get to this point… my stomach soured and twisted into knots. Killian had been on the road with Perish for months and I knew I was going to have to be the supportive boyfriend when he told me what had gone on.

  I knew without a doubt that Perish had raped him at least once. I knew because I had found the evidence in that house before I unleashed my first sestic radiation pulse from the sheer agony of it. I had prepared myself for that already and had accepted that it had happened. There wasn’t anything I could do about it… Perish was dead.

  There was no part of me that was planning on telling him what happened while I was in Nero’s custody. Those weeks of my life sat like an infected ulcer inside of me, and whenever my mind brushed on it, it opened and leaked its pus and fetid liquid all through my body. When I had been on the road with Elish, and then Jade and Big Shot, I’d managed to bury it deep inside of me. But my lack of people to talk to, and lack of distractions, had unburied that corpse and now it sat rotten. It was like it was waiting for me to bury it again but I didn’t have the tools to do it without getting its disgusting, rotting stink all over me.

  It had helped when I’d told Elish what had happened to me. I never said it to him but it had, and it had brought me closer to him too. He understood and… he’d even told me a story about something that had happened to him as well. I think that night, leaning up against those black trees on the Coquihalla, I had gone from just being Silas’s assassin to being Elish’s friend.

  And I had considered him a friend, and not in the same way I thought of Reno as a friend… but someone that I actually saw as my equal, that I respected as someone I could learn from.

  I… I really had liked my time with Elish. Things had been tense, and we had both been worried about our respective partners, but besides all of that… I’d fucking had a blast with him.

  My lips pursed, even in my own mind thinking of that made me flush. Why? Because thinking of Elish would eventually lead me to the kiss we’d shared.

  No, not just a kiss. I had been on the ground with my hand sliding down his pants.

  I took in a deep breath and shook my head. We had our engineering to thank for that, he said. I guess I’d have to tell Killian that part at least, just because it wasn’t well… the same as what Nero had done to me, and Perish to him. If I hid that from him it would mean I saw it as something else and I didn’t.

  When everything was unpacked, I moved Killian from the shopping cart to the living room couch and I laid him down with a blanket over him. I put my ear against his chest and found myself smiling when I heard his heartbeat again. Then, with a kiss on the cheek, I tried my best to make that stupid cake.

  The first thing I did was put the hard-as-rock icing into a bowl and pour water in it, then some oil just because I had it. I set that on the table to try and… I don’t know, dissolve? And I opened up two things of cake batter and poured some water and oil into that too. I mixed it up with an old rusty whisk, and when I tasted it I was rather thrilled that it tasted pretty good. Edible at least.

  I walked to the back door, where a fire pit I had lit was. We didn’t have any power here obviously but I had made a small brick oven which would have to do. I had harvested our bricks from the next door neighbour, which amusingly enough, had inside the house dried up, shrivelled corpses. Both of them were in the bed with a gun between the two of them. So it looked like the Jones’s had committed suicide together. That was kind of sweet. I stole their gun though; they wouldn’t be needing it.

  That was another amusing thing about being in the untouched plaguelands. All of the corpses were still where they had died. I don’t think there were any remaining pre-Fallocaust corpses in the greywastes, since the Fallocaust had happened so long ago. I guess eventually some scavenger got desperate or else the ash covered everything. I had seen shrivelled up, brown skeletons inside of buildings but even then you couldn’t be sure if they were pre-Fallocaust or post-Fallocaust. Here there was no doubting the types of skeletons I was finding. It was like walking into some morbid museum. I couldn’t wait to show Killian all of this neat shit. Who else got to experience all of this stuff? It didn’t look like the rest of the chimeras ever cared to venture out there, everything was preserved the way it had been left.

  While the cake was baking I stirred up the half-dissolved icing. It was all thick and tasted kinda stale but it was sweet. Killian loved sweet things and I had been hoarding candies for him which had preserved nicely in the plaguelands. My poor boy was skinny and sickly when I had seen him in the brief time before he had died, but I was hoping he would resurrect a little healthier. I didn’t know how it worked though. I wish I had asked Elish more about this sort of stuff but all of my questions had been about how I, as a born immortal, worked, not so much a mortal made into an immortal.

  Well, we had forever to figure it out at least. It had been five days since Silas had released
that sestic radiation, five days since the lab had exploded. He had been healing quickly in my opinion at least.

  In truth, I was going a bit nuts only having myself as entertainment. All I had to kill the days were books and scavenging, and scavenging had been difficult the last two days since I was worried Killian would wake up. Even before his heart started beating it was a concern because I just didn’t know how quickly he’d resurrect after it started going again. The last thing I wanted was for him to wake up alone in a strange place. The kid was going to be terrified of everything enough as it was, on top of not knowing what the fuck was going on.

  I really missed electricity, every book I found was shit or something I’d read a thousand times. If I read one more chapter of Harry Potter I was going to shove the sword of Gryffindor through my eye. Didn’t these fucking people read anything else?

  Forty-five minutes later (thanks to a wrist watch Perish had left for Killian which was mine now) I checked on the cake. It was a bit crispy but good enough, so I took it inside and poured the icing all over it to make it tasty.

  I was slightly disenchanted by the fact that my icing immediately melted from the heat of the cake and then turned into a shiny glaze, but I wasn’t Martha Stewart so I let it go. After everything was all settled in the baking department, I sat down in front of the coffee table and started preparing us both drugs.

  It had been a difficult thing to do but I had only been swallowing opiate pills, no heroin or anything like that. The only reason I had for this was because I kinda wanted to wait until Killian woke up so we could take our first hit together. It would hit us both like it was our first time and it was something I wanted to share with him. And if he was all spooked and scared when he woke up it would be a good way to calm him down too.

  So I prepared us both needles and laid them out on the coffee table and swallowed two yellow Dilaudid pills myself. No one would be surprised to hear that one of the first places I had raided, when coming up to my first town in the plaguelands, was a pharmacy. I had gotten myself a pretty good supply of opiates and even Xanax and Valium and their generic cousins in case Killian planned on flipping out more than I had prepared for.

  I would miss my drug suitcase, just like I’d miss the other sparse possessions I’d had to leave behind, but it looked like we weren’t at risk of running out of anything. We literally had almost the entire earth’s supply of shit to keep us fed, drugged, and watered for the rest of time.

  After everything was completed and I’d eaten myself a dinner of ramen noodles mixed with a can of flaked chicken, I sat down on the other end of the couch with Killian scrunched up beside me. I was reading some Conan comics I’d found and shoving gummy candies into my mouth. It was a peaceful evening in a land of grey, but unlike my life in the greywastes, I laid beside my boyfriend with the subtle confidence that it would stay quiet and peaceful.

  And then my silence was broken.

  It was just starting to get dark outside when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. My head shot towards Killian and I bore witness to his mouth opening to take in a sharp breath. I stayed as still as I could, not knowing what to expect; I just stared at this frail boy as he started breathing on his own.

  When several tense minutes had passed I, with slow movements, got up off of the couch and knelt down beside him. With a smile on my face, I raised a hand and brushed it over his pale skin, now showing a redness to his cheeks which highlighted his rosy lips. The colour had returned to his skin and it was now warm underneath my hand.

  I couldn’t believe it when I realized how nervous I was. The entire five, almost six days, of being out here my life had been waiting for him to wake up and look at me with those beautiful blue eyes… and now that it was about to happen I felt like a giddy teenager.

  I forced down the vibrating nervousness with a deep breath and continued to lightly stroke Killian’s chin. A part of me still couldn’t believe that he was about to come back to me. I thought, as I held that dying boy in my arms, that he would disappear from my life as swiftly as he had come. That I would be bound to live an eternity only having the love of my life for several short months before the chaos had split us in two.

  Now he was coming back… holy crap, he was coming back.

  Did Killian feel this way the first time he’d watched me resurrect? At least I wasn’t expecting him to go rampaging through the house chasing down Elish’s cicaro with a butcher’s knife.

  I pulled my hand away when I heard a small whimper break through Killian’s lips and watched intently, but with my heart a beating drum, as he moved his head to the side. His brow creased as he scowled but still his eyes were shut.

  “Killi?” I whispered, the excitement in my voice made me smile wider. I was acting like such a giddy idiot. “Killi Cat? Open your eyes.”

  Killian scowled further before slowly… slowly he opened those blue eyes. They squinted a few times before focusing on me, and when they saw me, they widened.

  “Reaver?” he whispered, an expression on his face so shocked it was like he was seeing a ghost instead of me.

  I’d replayed in my head, many times, what our first moments together would be like. In some of my daydreams I kissed him, in other ones I held him tight to me and hugged him until I heard his bones break.

  But all of those stupid fantasies washed away from me when he said my name. All I found myself doing was staring at him, feeling like his voice had wiped me clean of my senses.

  He stared at me and I stared back, our eyes locked like two meeting laser beams. I was looking at him like I had just found him laying here only seconds before, even though I’d been waiting for this moment for almost a week.

  I knew I had to say something. I knew I had to make my mouth move. Why wasn’t my tongue doing anything?

  Then finally I managed to grab a fleeting handful of senses, but it wasn’t enough to make me form a complete sentence, or even say something loving to him. All that socially-inept Reaver’s mind allowed him to do was stare at his boyfriend and say back:

  “Hi.”

  Killian looked at me confused, then he slowly raised a hand and brushed it against my cheek. I smiled at him as he did this, and my own hand rose to lay on top of his.

  “Hey, baby,” I said to him in a soft voice. “Everything is okay, alright? Everything is just fine… are you feeling okay?”

  Killian slipped his hand out of mine and looked down at it; he scowled again before looking at his hip which was covered in the pair of blue jeans I’d dressed him in. He put his hand on the area of his side that had been charred burnt before, once again, making eye contact with me.

  My beautiful boy looked right into my eyes and I could see the confusion start to drip away, but it wasn’t replaced with joy like I had been hoping.

  The signs came in quick succession, one after another: the wider eyes, the tightened lip, the shuddering breath... and finally…

  Killian burst into tears.

  I was wondering how long I’d have until he cried. Honestly, I was surprised he’d lasted this long.

  With a choked laugh, I gathered Killian up into my arms and squeezed him. In response Killian wailed into my shoulders, clinging to me like a baby monkey and clenching me to him so tightly I was sure he was trying to make us into one person.

  “Shhh, it’s okay,” I soothed. I rubbed his back and let him unleash himself onto my shoulder. I knew he was just overwhelmed and confused. With me those emotions translate into rage and madness, but I knew on Killian it would manifest itself into tears. Pretty much every negative emotion Killian felt translated itself into crying. I didn’t mind.

  When he had soaked my shirt in tears and his crying had been reduced to whimpers, I patted his back. “All cried out?”

  Killian sniffed, and even though I didn’t know it was possible, he tightened his hold on me. “Where are we?”

  “In the plaguelands,” I said to him, keeping my tone gentle. “You’re immune to the sestic radiation. We
have nothing to worry about, no one can survive the radiation where we are.”

  Killian pulled away, his deep blue eyes red and puffy from crying. I recognized those beautiful eyes but damn did he look different. He was mostly bald now from the explosion and what hadn’t fallen off was patchy and brittle. I think eventually we might just shave it off so he could start growing it new.

  He was still beautiful though.

  “I’m… immortal?” Killian said in a hushed voice. When I nodded at him his brow creased again, before his lip stiffened.

  “Is Perish dead?”

  I paused. I had been dreading that question… I didn’t want to get into Perish. I wanted to enjoy the first few minutes of being with my boyfriend, without having to tell him that Perish had killed himself.

  I honestly didn’t know how I felt about that man. A part of me hated him with a fiery passion for what he had done to Killian, even though I know it was supposed to have been Sky’s O.L.S fucking his brain – but another part of me wished I could’ve gave him a hug and told him thanks for… for doing what he had done. For giving me my boyfriend back, immortal.

  Honestly my mind danced around lying to him, but I knew I couldn’t. So I nodded and gently wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes. “Yeah, baby… Perish died. I’m sorry.”

  Killian was still as I rubbed away the tears, then to my surprise his eyes hardened.

  “Okay.”

  I blinked and now it was my time to furrow my brow. “Okay?” That was a strange, un-Killian response.

  Killian broke his gaze from mine and looked around the house. “Is anyone else with us? Does anyone know we’re here?” He sniffed and slowly got to his feet. I watched him, the confusion clear on my face, but I remained silent. I didn’t understand this subdued reaction but like fuck if I wasn’t going to run with it. Denial did me a lot of bad after Leo and Greyson had been killed, but it had also saved me from literally having a nuclear meltdown.