The Dead Saga | Book 7 | Odium 7

by Riley, Claire C.

  “Smile sweetly and pretend that everything is okay?” I sniped, my words dripping with sarcasm. His expression darkened further and I rolled my eyes at him. “You don’t scare me, Gauge, so you can quit the macho bullshit.”

  He opened his mouth to speak and then stopped himself, giving another shake of his head. “You saved these men. Don’t that mean anythin’ to you?”

  “Oh my God, I didn’t save anyone, Gauge! I nearly got myself killed is what I got. Butcher died, Drag died, Scar died, people were eaten, homes destroyed, Adam is apparently still missing, Phil is missing, Michael is gone, and Mikey is living his happily ever after with O’Donnell God knows where. But me, I’m barely surviving, so don’t put anything or anyone else on my conscience because it’s already overflowing.” I was barely breathing as my angry words fell from my mouth. “I don’t save people, don’t you see that? People die around me, and those men in there had no other choice than to follow Shooter because there was nothing left of the Rejects after I happily hacked off Scar’s head! They didn’t choose this any more than I did.” I threw my arm up in the air in frustration, my anger flaring even brighter when there was only one arm to lift.

  “Nina,” Gauge started.

  “I need to go,” I said, my words hard and solid, like something unmovable, even though inside I felt the opposite. I felt like liquid, crashing against the banks, losing a little of myself every time.

  “And what about him?”

  I frowned. “Who?”

  “Shooter.” Gauge pulled the stub of a cigar from his pocket and lit it before holding my gaze steady in his. “He’s been patient enough, don’t you think?”

  “He can let me go anytime he wants.”

  Gauge laughed without humor. “You and I both know that ain’t true.”

  I dragged a hand down my face. “I’m just trying to survive here, okay?” I said, my anger subsiding a little at the mention of Shooter. Because Gauge was right: he couldn’t let me go, no matter how much I pushed to try to make him. He couldn’t and he wouldn’t. He loved me and it was killing him.

  “So is he,” Gauge replied. “So are all of us. I know you lost a lot—way more than just a fuckin’ arm, okay? And I know you’re hurtin’ about that. But you’re alive, aren’t you? Can’t you see that? You’re alive, and everyone is waiting for you to come through this, whether you like it or not.”

  I felt the power of his words penetrating my skin like needles; they hurt, but they were also a relief in some sick kind of way. Believe it or not, being mean and angry all the time is exhausting work. I wished Shooter would give me more of the drugs that knocked me out. I wished I could go back to the day my arm was taken and I was left with a needle full of it so I could let it burn through my veins long enough to block out the pain while I blew out my own damn brains.

  “Gauge! Church, now!” one of the nomads I recognized as Battle yelled out from the main clubhouse.

  I looked around at him, watching as he went inside, and then I turned back to Gauge. His stance was all two hundred and twenty pounds of don’t-give-a-fuck muscle, but we both knew that was a lie. That man did give a fuck. He gave a lot of fucks, actually. Sometimes so many fucks that he was all out of fucks and Shooter had to order him to go find his woman to get fucked so he could find some more fucks to pep him back up.

  It was all very fucked up.

  Much like our fucked-up weird non-friendship.

  “Do you really have a lead on the Savages?” I asked, trying to keep the hope from my voice.

  “Yeah, but that’s not why I want you there,” he said.

  I nodded. “Highlander promised me cookies earlier.”

  Gauge frowned and look confused.

  “I want coffee from you,” I demanded.

  His cigar was all but gone. Any more and he’d burn the tips of his fingers, but that didn’t stop him from taking another long drag of it, his dark, moody gaze holding mine. When I didn’t waver in my demand, he threw the butt of the cigar away and stormed past me with a grunt of “okay.”

  “Okay?” I quirked an eyebrow at him in annoyance. “Just okay? No, asshole remark? No comeback. NO telling me to go screw myself and that this isn’t a Starbucks?”

  Gauge sighed and dropped his cigar butt on the ground before dragging a hand down his face. He stared at me deadpan.

  “What do you want from me, Nina? I said okay to the coffee, alright. Now just...” he shook his head. “I’ll meet you over there.” He turned and walked away and I stared after him in disbelief.

  Coffee and cookies, all in one day?

  What sorcery is this?

  4.

  Nina

  Shooter had barely taken his eyes off me since I’d walked in with Gauge. I purposefully sat myself at the opposite side of the room and in the corner so as not to disturb things and to keep out of everyone’s eyeline. Apparently no one had gotten the memo that I wanted to be a shadow and not in the spotlight, because people kept on turning to smile at me like I was a painting in the Tate Modern or some crap.

  I’d never seen so many happy bikers before. It was a little nauseating.

  “How’s the food supply doin’?” Shooter asked, his gaze flicking briefly toward Backtrack and then to me again.

  It was embarrassing the way he was staring. Anyone would think we hadn’t shared the same bed last night. That we weren’t an actual thing and that I was just some woman he was lusting after and he was my crazed stalker. In fact, if he didn’t stop staring at me I was going to have to leave the room because my cheeks were getting hotter than a pan of boiling water.

  “Not too bad. We raided that warehouse downtown and found a bunch of stuff that hadn’t spoiled—canned stuff. The fresh crops out back are starting to look good. The trade with that little farm proved worthwhile, and thanks to Nina’s chickens the egg stock is real good.” Backtrack glanced over his shoulder at me, acknowledging that I was in the room with a single nod. “Not to mention that Thanksgiving is coming along and she’s been fattening up some of them.”

  With his stare came twenty more, and it took everything in me to not snarl at them.

  “The chickens doin’ good?” Shooter asked me, and I nodded. He knew they were. We’d talked about them the previous night. He seemed pleased, the creases around his eyes lessening with his happiness that I was there and finally interacting once more. “Crank, Sketch? How’re the weapons comin’ along?”

  “Good—way quicker now that everyone knows what they’re doin’,” Crank replied.

  Crank and Sketch were what Shooter and some of the other bikers called nomads. They were part of the club, but they belonged to no particular charter, or something. I didn’t really understand the mechanics of it, to be honest. It seemed pretty stupid since there weren’t exactly charters anymore anyway. There was just the Highwaymen. This group of Highwaymen. The rest were likely dead. But the nomads liked to believe they were still free to roam wherever their hearts took them.

  Besides all that, I liked the nomads. They were different from the main group of bikers. They didn’t seem to have the same restraints as the rest of the group, and maybe because of that, they seemed a little less burdened. Apparently they’d been working with some small pockets of people across the country, trying to help people survive.

  It was admirable, if nothing else.

  They’d been brought in to build up Shooter’s army against the Savages. They brought food and weapons with them, which was a great help. But better yet, they’d learned to make weapons up in those hills and had been showing others how to build and use them too.

  “Finally,” Shooter said, turning his attention from me and toward Gunner, “how are Amara and the baby?” And then he smiled—a genuine, heart-warming smile.

  The rest of the group quickly followed, including Gunner.

  Jesus, who knew a group of big alpha males could get so excited about a baby?

  “Yeah, I thought she was smiling at me yesterday, but Amara said it was just
wind,” Gunner said, and everyone laughed. “I still think she smiled because she recognized my voice.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t just straight up shit herself at the sound of your voice,” Highlander said with a loud laugh that everyone copied.

  Gunner, the biggest man I’d ever seen, blushed, his sad gray eyes taking in his family around him with happiness. The room erupted into laughter and he went bright red. Even I managed to find a small pocket of happiness inside of me. Of course I quickly covered it up and let the blackness fall back over me.

  “All right, all right,” Shooter said with a laugh, slamming his hand down on the round table. “Let’s get to business then, shall we?”

  “Super,” I said. “Are we going to talk about them now?” I asked, breaking the euphoric atmosphere.

  The laughter ceased immediately, and silence descended as all eyes were back on me. I hated it, but I was deadly serious in my question. It was all well and good making sure we had enough food and weapons, and that Amara’s baby was doing well, but what about them? The Savages. The goddamned psychos that hunted people down and ate them alive. That sold human beings like cattle. That had cut chunks out of our friends and made them eat it.

  “We’re getting to it,” Shooter said, a warning to his tone.

  I stood up and walked forward until I stood at the table. “Finding them is the most important thing right now.”

  “No, survival is the most important thing,” Balls said to my left, and I turned and glared at him. “The last time someone went up against them, they lost all of their weapons, their president, and their fucking pride.”

  “Pride?” I snorted a laugh. “Pride doesn’t do you any good if you’re dead, my friend.”

  “It has to be done right. We need to make sure we all survive this,” Balls deadpanned.

  “Oh, you want to survive, do you? Oh, okay, and how well do you sleep at night knowing that they’re out there somewhere? Hunting people down, cutting them up and eating them! Do you sleep like a baby or are you like me and wake up every hour with a scream lodged in your throat because all you can think about is these people eating people? That right now, they’re out there with people chained up in the dark waiting to die.”

  I was losing it.

  I knew I was, and I really wanted to not lose it in front of these people, but it was so hard not to let go. Not to give in to the rage and the terror that lived inside me. A part of me had died when Scar had taken my arm, and to fix the hole left behind I had replaced whatever it was with the desire for revenge.

  Logically I knew I hated the Savages for the disgusting things they did; I mean, who wouldn’t? Eating people kinda went against the right and wrong of everything we’d ever been taught, right? It went against society in every capacity. But I knew a lot of my anger toward them stemmed from the fact that Scar was already dead and I had nowhere to put the anger I felt toward him. I couldn’t exact my revenge. I couldn’t make him pay in the form of a slow but brutal death. I couldn’t exactly re-kill him. Highlander had made sure of that when he’d put a bullet through his brain after I chopped off his head.

  So all I had to go on was the Savages.

  I needed to find them and kill them and make them pay for—well, pay for everything that sucked in my life. Even if some of it was misplaced anger. It was better I kill them than myself, right? I mean, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to survive, right? And that’s what everyone kept telling me to do: survive, live, get through this, it’ll get easier… blah fucking blah.

  I was still waiting for the easier part to come, because so far nothing about any of this was easier.

  “I’ll go get that coffee for you,” Gauge said from his place next to Shooter.

  My heart was beating heavily, my breathing erratic. I nodded and tried to get control of myself.

  One of the bikers, stood up and nodded toward his chair so I sat down in it, leaning my head against my hand as I tried to stop myself from crying or shouting or freaking the fuck out completely. A couple of minutes went by and a mug was placed in front of me. I opened my eyes and looked over at a steaming cup of black coffee in awe. There was no milk, obviously, and probably no sugar either, but I didn’t care. Coffee was coffee and we didn’t come by it very often. My gaze lifted to Gauge, who was sitting back down, and I nodded a thank you.

  I lifted the cup to my lips and took a long sip of it, and by God it was the best thing I’d tasted in a long time. I sighed and the tension in the room dropped a little. You’d almost be forgiven in thinking that my woman-on-the-edge routine was freaking out these big burly alpha males.

  “We’ve got a lead on them, we think,” Shooter finally said when he’d decided I wasn’t about to self-combust in anger, drawing my attention back to him. “We’re going to head out tomorrow and scout some things out, maybe grab some supplies while we’re on the road too. If it’s them, we’ll come back, call for backup from the others, and then we’ll head on to the location as one big fucking gun-toting family ready to send those crazy bitches to ground.”

  There was way too much for me to focus on in that sentence, so I started with the first thing.

  They had a lead.

  The second thing was that he had been intending to go on a scouting mission without me. I was pissed off about that, but I put it to one side for the moment because the most important thing in all of that was that Shooter was intending to call for backup from the others.

  The others, meaning NEO.

  NEO, meaning Aiken, Timbo, O’Donnell, and all the others that had come to our aid when we’d first set out to kill the Savages.

  I should have been focusing on survival, on the fact that we might have the Savages pinned down and dead within a week, but instead, all I could think about was that Mikey might be there.

  My Mikey.

  My Mikey who thought I was dead and was now living his happily-ever-apocalypse-style-after with O’Donnell.

  No wonder Shooter hadn’t mentioned anything to me. I wouldn’t have mentioned anything to me either, if I was him. He’d done so much to make me his, and yet deep down he knew that I would always be Mikey’s. He would never fully have me the way Mikey did, or the way Ben had. I was with Shooter, but my heart was with another man and he knew it.

  “Okay?” Shooter said with a heavy sigh, his blue eyes on mine. I nodded okay, not trusting myself to speak. And he nodded back and looked to Gauge to talk about the next thing on the list.

  The meeting continued, but I was only half listening to what was being said. Apparently the little scouting mission had already been discussed the day before, and plans had already been put in place.

  Five people were leaving the next day, heading in the direction of the last known sighting of those Savage bitches. Shooter had picked the crew and I wasn’t one of them. I gritted my teeth, my jaw feeling tight as I looked over at him.

  I wanted to go with them, and he had known that. Looking at him now, I could already tell that he was prepping his argument against this happening, but it didn’t matter. I was going whether he liked it or not.

  *

  “All right,” Shooter said, slamming his gavel down on the table and bringing the meeting to a close, “get the fuck out of here and get back to work.”

  Everyone stood, including me, and started to file out. When I reached the door, Gauge blocked my way, looking over his shoulder toward Shooter. After a weird little back-and-forth dance and some sidestepping, I found myself on the wrong side of the door and trapped in the room with Shooter as Gauge gave me an almost sympathetic look as he closed the door, trapping me inside.

  Shooter stood up and headed toward the wall of windows that partitioned the little room—or what the bikers called their Chapel—and the main clubhouse, closing them one after another to give us some privacy. As he walked, I noted how long his hair had gotten, how much broader he seemed to be; his creased shirt was stretched against his hard muscles, and his hair now reached past his shoulders
. When he turned, I saw that the gleam in his eyes wasn’t there anymore either. I’d missed so much these past months, it seemed. Guilt sung a siren call inside of me, but I knew logically, other than being lost in my own physical and mental pain, I hadn’t really done anything wrong…right?

  Or was I trying to convince myself that?

  He frowned, his eyebrows pulling in. “I don’t have the energy to argue with you, Nina,” he said, his voice low and deep.

  “So don’t,” I countered.

  He walked toward me, stopping as we came face to face. His large hand reached out to cup the side of my cheek in a gentle gesture that wasn’t like him at all. He looked at me differently these days, I realized. He looked at me like I was something, or someone, that was broken. Fragile. Like one of those porcelain dolls older people used to have. I hated that, because I was anything but fragile.

  If anything, I was less fragile than I used to be.

  I was harder, meaner, and I just didn’t give a fuck anymore.

  “You can’t come out there with me, Nina,” he said, giving a shake of his head. “You’ll end up gettin’ yourself and all of us killed.”

  “Stop being so dramatic,” I started, but he let go of my face and headed back to his chair at the head of the table. I followed him with my gaze as I tried to control my anger.

  “You’re too rash,” he said, sitting down and lighting a cigarette.

  That was another thing I’d noticed too: he was smoking again, and he wasn’t even trying to hide it. That wasn’t the issue though. The issue was that I didn’t care that he smoked anymore. It seemed stupid now really. We were all going to fucking die anyway, right?

  “You love how rash I am,” I said with a shake of my head as I tried to downplay his comment. Mainly because that wasn’t the truth. Shooter hated how rash I was.

  “You’re reckless and unstable. You don’t think, you just do,” he said, his gravelly voice speaking his concerns.