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

by Quil Carter

  “I know, you said that…” Gage said slowly, “but that does not justify it.”

  “You’ll understand one day,” Theo replied, following my footsteps to the porch. “He’s not well, and he’s rather extreme at times. He can be…”

  “… a monster,” I said bitterly. I wanted Gage on my master’s side so I held nothing back. We had to have Gage secured. He was powerful, extremely powerful, and he would be a formidable ally to have in my master’s pocket. “He takes out his misery on us, and Sanguine was unfortunately in his crosshairs.”

  “Sanguine was in his crosshairs for freeing Gage,” I heard Theo say defensively. “With all due respect, new friend, we have no idea who you are, or how dangerous you are. Silas does. I will not judge my master when we do not have the full story. Gage says himself that he’s dangerous and we saw that from him burning down Olympus.” I looked at Theo when I felt his eyes on me, and sure enough, he was giving me a piercing look. “You would do well to remember that, dead boy. There is no need to suck up to him. We see that he’s a kind-hearted man, but if you’re going to assume Silas encased him for no reason, you will only prove your own arrogance.” Theo turned and nodded his head to Gage. “No disrespect intended. You’re intelligent enough to see that this is no personal attack, aren’t you?”

  Gage put a hand on the splintered door frame, swollen to the point where it had separated from the nails and now resembled needle-like teeth in open jaws. “I do, Theo,” he said simply. “But I just wish Silas helped me, not condemned me to that madness.” He walked into the house and his hands stuffed his pockets again.

  Theo and I both followed. The familiar stench of must and mould hit my nostrils, and because the roof had sunken in at the far side of the house, I also smelled that soured aroma of fabric and wood that had been continuously wet and re-dried again and again. This was a familiar thing to smell in Moros, and it brought me right back to my old home.

  But even though Moros was a slum, with garbage clinging to the edges of the sidewalks, forgotten furniture left to rot in the alleyways, and old cars that had been stripped down to their frames, Moros’s houses were nothing compared to this pit.

  Maybe not a pit, maybe a radrat’s nest. At the end of the hall, in what I think was the living room, were piles of what had once been boxes; some stacked against windows nailed shut and walls of warped panelling puffed out like broken piano keys. The boxes that were now so disintegrated their contents stood alone, some even keeping the shape of the boxes by re-hardening into a compacted cube. In between these rotting boxes was furniture, so rat-chewed and destroyed they were just rusted springs and gnawed wood, some with the occasional scrap of fabric, clinging to their frames like the shreds of clothing on a decomposing corpse.

  I walked in and passed a microwave, the inside of it speckled with black and the bottom had a dried yellow stain of what I assumed was rat piss. My eyes rose when I caught a beam of light, and saw that the living room eventually led to a kitchen with a hole in the ceiling. The kitchen cabinets had fallen down on their faces and almost disintegrated, and the linoleum curled up like clawed hands, clenching in their grasp dirt and garbage, none of it recognizable but several broken plates and a fork reflecting in the light.

  My nose wrinkled and I turned from it. When I saw Theo standing at the end of the living room looking down a flight of concrete stairs, I felt my heartbeat jump.

  “He’s down there, isn’t he?” I said slowly. I scanned the living room, now also seeing a television underneath a fallen curtain, its gold rod now the home for multiple spider webs, and when I didn’t see anything living inside this garish dump, I walked to him.

  Gage was on the third step, and he wasn’t moving. There was a white door at the bottom of the stairwell with a thick metal pipe held in between two metal hooks. That was what was keeping the door closed; no padlocks could keep a chimera inside.

  “Are you going in, or…?” I glanced at Theo. “I know him and we’re friends, but… I don’t know if it should be me.”

  Like our glances were going in a circle, Theo looked back to Gage. “I’m not immortal and I’ve heard horrible stories about Sanguine’s psychosis.” Then he filled his lungs before letting out a long sigh. “But I love Sanguine and he loves me.” And with that, Theo turned and started descending the stairs too. He even walked past Gage so he was in the front, and gently removed the metal bar from the door.

  He tried the handle, and we all held our collective breath. When there was a click from the lock unlocking, the tension didn’t dissipate – if anything it tripled.

  Theo held the metal rod in his hand and cracked the door open.

  “Sanguine?” Theo whispered. He peeked inside but, to my alarm, he gasped and shut the door.

  Without a word, Theo started running back up the stairs, his face blanched and his copper eyes bulging. “I’m done,” he called back to us. “I’m done. Fuck this.”

  My head turned to the closed door when I heard a low, demonic growl come from the other side of it. It sent a chill up my spine, and I exchanged collective looks of horror with Gage.

  But I snapped out of it just in time to grab Theo. “No, you’re staying,” I hissed and grabbed the metal rod from him. I held onto him by the collar of his leather jacket and looked at Gage.

  “You can heal him?” I asked.

  Gage nodded. All of our heartbeats were messes, drums beating out of sync, each one trying to challenge the other to see who could rip out of our chests first. I tried to calm mine down but it was like talking down a rabid dog.

  “What did you see?” I said to Theo. I took a step towards the door; Theo stepping too but his feet were dragging. “Is he… is he chained?”

  “Yes,” Theo said in a thin voice. “He looks chained.” The chimera made a nervous noise when I grabbed the handle and pushed open the door.

  “Sanguine? It’s Jade,” I called. “We have someone here to help you, okay? We’re going to bring you home.”

  Another growl sounded, another threatening growl just seeping warning. It was doing what it was supposed to do, a hand felt like it was grabbing my chest and squeezing it. There was no way someone wouldn’t feel fear from that eerie, animalistic sound.

  I gathered up all of my bravery and pushed the door open. Then, with Theo and Gage behind me, I took a step in and was immediately hit with a wall of overwhelming stench, one of rot, sewage, and many more smells that made my eyes water. I mentally compartmentalized it and took one more step in.

  Then Theo pushed the door all the way open… and the light illuminated what could only be a demon.

  I’d never seen anything like it and I knew as I looked at him, that it couldn’t be Sanguine. There was no way this thing could be Sanguine.

  Two eyeballs with red irises lay bulging in a slab of red, marbled meat that was his face, the whites of them so prominent they looked painted on. They were staring at me, fixed with intensity on my face, above two slits where his nose should’ve been and pointed teeth stretched into a smile.

  But Sanguine wasn’t really smiling. Nausea washed over me when I realized that his lips were gone, his exposed red gums blending in perfectly with the raw flesh on his face.

  He’d… picked off all of the skin from his own face.

  Then his eyes moved, looking from me to the men who were cowering behind my body, and I realized that the reason why his eyes were bulging so much… was because he had no eyelids.

  He’d torn off his own eyelids. They now glared, unblinking and seeing all, through a mop of greasy, stringy black hair.

  When I looked down, the vomit rose to my throat and I had to force back the gag. His arms were resting on the corner of the bed on either side of him, they had been chewed, not just gnawed on, chewed like a beaver trying to bring down a tree. There was normal, pale skin on his elbow and several inches below, then mangled pink and red flesh, hanging tendons that hung like a curtain down two white arm bones shining as white as his lidless eyes. Both arm
s were like this, the left one even had bite marks on the bones.

  “Kill him,” I suddenly cried; the reality of what I was seeing suddenly hitting me, throwing me out of this temporarily paralysis over the horrible sight in front of me. This wasn’t a monster, this was Sanguine, funny and loyal Sanguine who everyone in the family loved. What had he done to himself? What had Silas done to him? “Theo. Theo, you have a gun. Put him out of his misery!” Tears sprung to my eyes.

  I turned around to snatch the gun I knew Theo had in his holster – but he was gone. Only Gage was behind me, and the look on his face was akin to the one I knew was on mine.

  “Gage, get Theo,” I yelled, unable to control my own voice. “Get–” Suddenly Gage gasped and recoiled. He grabbed my shoulder and tried to pull me to the stairs, and at the same time I heard a raspy wheeze and the sound of shuffling.

  I looked just in time to see Sanguine lunge at me, his unattached chain trailing behind.

  Sanguine grabbed my shoulders with his hands and I was thrown backwards; my head smacking up against the stairs and the concrete edges digging painfully into my back. My hands flew up and locked against his shoulders, and I tried to push him away, but then I felt him pull me up, only to smash my head against the steps again.

  Sanguine screamed right into my face, his pointed teeth never more menacing and demonic than they were when shown through those lipless teeth. I found myself stunned, just from the horror of his appearance. I felt like I was in a living nightmare, something like this man couldn’t exist in this reality.

  No, no, it’s Sanguine. Sanguine’s sick.

  “Sanguine!” I screamed. The demon chimera’s bulging eyes focused right on me, his teeth separating to accommodate rasping, heavy wheezes, ones that smelled like the rot of the room he had been imprisoned in. “Sanguine, it’s Jade!” I started to struggle madly, the fear controlling me and commanding me to get away from him at all costs. “It’s me.”

  The visible muscles in Sanguine’s face contracted, and the growl returned. His eyes flashed with insanity and I felt his hands on my shoulders tighten.

  I knew what was coming. I didn’t know how, but I knew, and it was what saved my life.

  Because just as Sanguine’s skinned face, teeth bared and open like a bear trap, lunged for my neck, my arm went up. I shielded my neck with it, and Sanguine instead sunk his teeth into it and clamped them down.

  I didn’t even feel the pain, the adrenaline coursing through my body temporarily disabled the receptors, but I could feel the pressure and the feeling of his teeth scraping against my bones. I pushed back, trying to get him off of me, but when the awkward angle he had me in prevented me from doing that, I instead punched him in the head.

  Sanguine’s crimson eyes rolled up to my own, so bulbous and protruding I didn’t know how they were staying in his skull. He looked like a zombie, something that shouldn’t be alive. With him closer I could see just how bad his masochistic injuries were. It looked like he’d skinned his own face off in chunks, there were shreds of flesh hanging off of it, some dried to leather, others red from still working blood vessels. This monster wasn’t Sanguine, this wasn’t the chimera who had taken me under his wing in Moros, who I shared a majority of my DNA with.

  I broke our eye contact and looked to see blood trickling through his teeth and down my arm. I tried to wiggle out of his grasp, but suddenly Sanguine wrenched his head to the left, trying to take my arm with it, but he only succeeded in scraping his pointed teeth along the skin, like a rake scraping against soft dirt.

  I screamed, the pain finally making itself known. I pulled my arm back and saw Sanguine bear his teeth at me. I scrambled away and tried to pull myself backwards up the steps. The demon chimera watched me, and slowly began to advance.

  “Gage?” I yelled, desperately crawling backwards up the stairs. I tried to focus my empath abilities to stop him, but the panic that was a hurricane inside of me had my mind racing to remember how to do it. My mind had been crystal clear the night that Kessler ambushed us, but now it was in overdrive, madly off in all directions.

  “Theo?” I was too scared to turn around and make a break for the stairs. He was too close to me and I knew he’d be on me in an instant. The way he looks added an entirely new level of fear. If he looked like normal Sanguine, I would’ve been able to fight tooth and nail, but I was face-to-face with a living, breathing ghoul, and it was tapping into the prey sides of my primal instincts.

  “Get out!” I suddenly heard Gage yell, his voice shrill with panic. “Get the hell out of there. I… I can’t control him. He isn’t responding to me. Quick, go, Theo’s coming with a gun.”

  Sanguine’s eyes shot to the top of the stairs, and he snarled at Gage. Then, like Gage’s words were the magic spell to switch my fight to flight, I suddenly was filled with a shot of liquid energy, and an intense drive to get the fuck away.

  I shot up like a jackrabbit and started running up the stairs.

  “Duck!” I heard Theo yell. “DUCK!” But I wasn’t fucking ducking. I lowered my head and continued running, then to my horror, something slammed down on my back.

  My senses were knocked out of me when I hit the stairs, the edge of the top step meeting my forehead, shooting stars and bright lights into my vision. And before I even got a chance to scream, I felt pressure and a stinging pain in my neck… and then gunshot after gunshot.

  The sounds of the gunshots overwhelmed my brain. I shut my eyes, a throbbing pain pulsing in my head like my heart had been transplanted inside of it. Even with my eyes shut, however; I could still see flashing white lights, as if the pain currently pooling and multiplying to other parts of my body had manifested into a visual hallucination.

  Then something I dreaded, and didn’t even know was coming until it was too late. I felt the familiar pull on my body, followed by the light warning tremors that felt like someone was pinching small threads from my skin, and then the crescendo… a full-blown seizure.

  What happened after was a blur of white-washed reality and the continued influx of pain, but I did recognize something familiar, the glowing staticy aurora that was Gage’s healing abilities. I was more conscious of his presence this time, and I caught glances of his face, grave from intense concentration; but every word spoken and everything done to me seemed like it was happening on a movie screen, with the audio being played in an adjacent room.

  Finally, I came-to on the floor of the Falconer. I felt warm hands remove themselves from my head. “He’s waking up,” Gage said, the relief palpable in his tone.

  “His… his fucking injuries stopped bleeding just like that?” I heard Theo say, amazed. “You can heal people with that?”

  I squinted and was still for a moment to try and get my bearings. “Stay still for a moment,” Gage said, then he addressed Theo. “I can’t really heal wounds… it’s kind of difficult to explain. The radiation kind of… stops the wounds from bleeding out, it kind of cauterizes them I guess you could say. He’s not healed and he needs to go back to Skyfall.”

  “No.” I suddenly shot up, but I regretted it when a rush of dizziness and throbbing filled my vision with red. Gage steadied me, and so did Theo. “I need to get to Elish,” I said. “I’m not going back to Skyfall.” I managed to look at Gage, his expression was grave, his odd-coloured eyes full of concern and apprehension. “You said you would come with me.”

  “I think you should go with him, new friend,” Theo said. He had a wrapped bandage in his hand and a bloodied towel. I was relieved to see a white sheet covering a body just three feet from me. Sanguine was dead, and he would resurrect and hopefully be okay. “You’ve been lucky that Silas has been too depressed to dispatch people to look for you, but that will change. I will not tell him I saw you, but if he asks… we have our loyalty and I am loyal to my king. It’s best I don’t know where you’ll be going next. Jade, you said Elish might be in the northern greywastes?”

  I had until I was told that Killian had died, and that Reaver
was trapped under the flaming rubble of the plaguelands lab. Now it was just a theory I was putting too much faith in.

  But where else could he be? Elish had many secrets and the few I knew about were in the northern greywastes and Aras. I think I knew Elish wouldn’t go to Aras. Too many bad memories.

  So the only one I could grasp onto, no matter how vague… was one of the last things he’d told me.

  To go to a town called Garnertown and ask where the town Mantis was and to find the man who founded it.

  I looked at Theo. “Can you drop us off at Garnertown. Do you know where that is?”

  The relief I felt when Theo nodded shot what was left of my dizzy disconnection out of my body. I got to my feet with Gage’s help and turned to him.

  “Come with me,” I said to him. “You’ll be safe with me. I’ll protect you. I’ve survived in the greywastes before, and we’ll find my master soon.” I turned back to Theo. “Give us a month and come back to Garnertown. If we’re not there… we found him. Please, Theo, can you do this for me?”

  Theo’s mouth pursed and moved from side to side, then slowly, but hesitantly, he nodded. “For you, dead boy, I will keep your secrets. Jack may be awake by then and if I am back in Cardinalhall, chances are I will be deployed in the northern greywastes anyway to look for Kessler.” Theo walked past me and the sounds of rusted gears soon followed, then a slam as he closed the Falconer door. “We’ll be in Garnertown in no time at all. I would take one of the packs and fill it with supplies and clothing. I will be dropping you off but I will be staying in the plane for the night and leaving in the morning. I will be telling anyone who asks that I went to visit a friend of mine in Greenbase and it would be odd for me not to spend the night. He’s quite attractive.”

  “But… we will be going back to Skyfall eventually?” Gage asked. He looked at the white sheet. “I don’t want to be gone from Skyfall long.”

  I nodded. “I know you want to talk to Sanguine, but he’s going to be resurrecting for possibly a month.” This was a lie, it would probably only be a week or so, but I needed him to go with me. “How about you go with me now, and Theo can pick you up in a month? Sanguine will be awake by then.”