“Then we’ll all die right here, right now,” I stated simply, because it was the truth. Both of them were acting like there was a choice to be made, but there was no choice. The deal had been made, and we had to stick to it or face the consequences. I didn’t like it any more than they did, but it was still the only way to survive.
“They’ll kill you before we’ve even made it back to the clubhouse, Nina,” Shooter said angrily, giving a shake of his head like he thought I was stupid.
I took a step back toward Tyson and the group of terrifying masked children. “No, they won’t. I’ll be fine. Come back with a van so we can take Crank’s body back home and bury him.” I turned and headed to Tyson’s side, and the children swarmed me.
Little hands touching me, stroking me. Fascinated by my blade, by my arm, by me. I guess they hadn’t had a mother in so long they were excited to have me there, if only for a few hours.
“Nina,” Shooter growled.
I turned back to him, my composure calm despite my raging heart. “Go, and be quick. No plans, no tricks, no reinforcements. Just water, food, toys, and books. I’ll be waiting.”
“Yes, go,” Tyson said, and I realized now how old he actually was. Not a child anymore at all, but at least nineteen or twenty. He was a man, but his frame was small and his weight slender, so he pulled off the look well. I wondered if the other kids here knew this about him, or if they thought he was just a kid like them. “I’ll keep Nina busy.” He reached out to touch me and I snatched my arm away from his grip.
“Let’s get one thing straight: I will cut off your arms and legs if you so much as breathe wrong,” I snarled. “You don’t touch me, not ever. Got it?”
The fire flared to life inside me, and this time it wasn’t just anger or fury at what had just happened—it was survival. I wanted to survive this, I realized, and it was the first time that I had wanted to survive anything more than just finding the Savages and killing them. I wanted to live. I wasn’t ready to die; not just yet.
It was good to find that strength within me again, and I clung on to it like a life raft.
Tyson was startled by my sudden aggression, since I’d been the reasonable one up until now, and I watched him recoil from my violent words like he’d been slapped across the cheek by his mother. The shock wouldn’t last long though.
I looked back at Shooter and Highlander, seeing fury and rage radiating from them in waves. They didn’t want to leave me there. In fact, they would both have happily gone down in a blaze of glory, killing as many of those little monsters as they could, but it would have been pointless. A waste of life and death, blood and grief colliding to finish us all.
“Please, go,” I said, softening my tone, “but hurry back.”
Highlander’s gaze washed over the herd. “Ya touch a hair on her head, and I’ll rip ya a new arsehole, ya fuckin’ got me?”
His accent was thicker than I’d ever heard it before, no doubt his rage and grief making him lose control. Shooter was holding my gaze steady in his.
“We’ll be back for you,” he said to me before finally looking away to stare at Tyson. “And we’ll be back for our brother too. You touch his body and I’ll burn this fuckin’ place to the ground with all of you inside.”
“Don’t forget the bike,” a little girl next to me said to Shooter. “He said there was a bike.” She nodded toward Crank’s dead body. She sounded happy, excited, not terrified or sad. Not any of the normal things that a child her age should have felt after seeing someone gunned down in front of them. She was no more than eight or nine and she was already immune to the trauma of life and death.
That was probably the most frightening thing of all.
These children were our future and yet there were no real emotions in them. No empathy, no concern, no fear for the future. They were just excited by the prospect of a new bike and hungry for cake.
“Go,” I said, the word almost sticking in my throat.
Because I didn’t want them to leave me there with those monsters, those unsavable children of the apocalypse. I wanted to leave with them. I wanted to feel the wind on my face and the sun on my skin and a deader on the end of my machete. I didn’t want to be left in that dark, dark place. But it was the only possible way out.
“Go,” I urged.
Shooter nodded before taking one last look at Crank and turning away. He was strong, he understood that this had to be done, even though he hated it. If he could, he would have stayed himself, but I was right and he knew it. The club needed him. Those men needed him. They would fall without his guidance, and for that reason alone, this was the only option. Highlander followed, but I could tell it was taking everything in his body to not turn his gun on the kids. He was more reckless, and perhaps if Shooter hadn’t been there he would have died for his cause, but Shooter was his president and he had to be protected at all costs.
They left, and my heart sank as the door closed behind them.
I stared into the darkness for several minutes, the room silent around me. We were so far into the warehouse that I couldn’t even hear the roar of the bike engines, but I hoped that they made it out okay. I hoped that they were already on their way back to the clubhouse, and I hoped that they came back quickly.
My gaze strayed to Crank on the ground, and I moved toward him. No one stopped me, not even Tyson. I knelt by his side and placed my hand over his eyes, pulling his eyelids closed for the final time. He was still relatively young, no more than forty, his face still gripped by youth despite his skin being sun-bleached and tanned, despite the hard life that he’d lived. I didn’t know Crank very well—hardly at all, really—and it seemed unfair to him that I was the one to be by his side, guarding his body from brutality. He flinched, the throes of afterlife crawling back into his body, and I quickly took out the knife from my belt, rolled him onto his side, and as the first throaty growl left his throat I stuck the blade into the back of his skull and into his dying brain, killing him for the second time.
I laid him back down, closing his eyes again while trying to ignore the cloudy whites of his deader eyes. Death was ugly on us all, but on his beautiful face it seemed even crueler.
I hadn’t noticed that some of the children had come forward, but they surrounded me now, their masks tilting from side to side as they inspected me, their little dirty hands stroking my hair and touching my arm. I kept myself still, not wanting to startle any of them. These were unpredictable foes and I had no way in knowing what they would do to me. What they would deem acceptable.
“Can you read me a story?” one of them asked, though I couldn’t tell which child had spoken.
I breathed deeply, a chill in my bones at the softness in the tone. I tried to remind myself that they weren’t just children anymore, but unpredictable killers that would slaughter me at a moment’s notice and not bat an eyelash.
“Do you have a book?” I asked, my voice abrupt, and I readjusted to soften it, mimicking the one that had spoken.
The masks were creepy as hell—white but dirt-splattered, red-and-black mouthed expressions painted on each of them. I felt like I was in a Slipknot music video, but this wasn’t my claim to fame, only my claim of near death.
“No,” Tyson replied, and was that longing I heard in his tone? Oh my God, did the little bastard want a bedtime story too?
It was hard to remind myself that he wasn’t a child. That he was a man hiding behind that mask and he’d doomed these children’s souls.
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to calm down and not show my anger toward him or anyone else. To not show how utterly freaked out I was by these weird little kids.
“Then I’ll make something up for you I guess,” I said, clearing my throat. “Sit down then,” I urged, my mind scrolling back through the years to stories from my own childhood. It was hard; I hadn’t thought that far back in a really long time. I normally stopped when I got to the day the world ended. There wasn’t much point in remembering further than that, b
ecause all it did was break my heart and shatter my resolve.
But I did now.
I thought back to being a little girl in bed, waiting for my mom or my dad to read me a bedtime story. The softness of my bedspread. The scent of my mom’s perfume. The starry nightlight turning and splattering my world with soft yellow stars.
As Crank lay dead beside me, his blood drying against the concrete ground, I remembered the little girl I had once been. She seemed like a stranger to me, so far removed from who I was now. But inside she was the same—deep inside. She cared for people. She loved deeply. She hated injustice. And she loved stories of good and evil, wrong and right.
“Once upon a time,” I began, lost in time, “there was a little girl…”
16.
Mikey
O’Donnell lifted a hand up to stop us in our tracks. It stayed like that, frozen in mid-air, for several long moments before she finally lowered it and turned around to look at us.
“Nothing but dead cats,” she said, a grimace on her face.
“But the smell…” Freddy began, each word a grimace.
“Well, there’s lots of dead cats.” She hesitated. “And a dead body, but the cats ate the body and then they ate each other, and then…” She shrugged and stepped to the side so Freddy and I could see, and we both retched at the same time as we looked upon the horrific scene of a decomposing body, half eaten, and a mound of multicolored fur, slowly rotting away.
“I’ll wait out here,” Aimee said, turning and walking away, and if I hadn’t been so concerned with not breathing in the toxic scent of death, I would have laughed and taunted her for being such a wimp.
As it was, I didn’t want to open my mouth because I didn’t want the scent of dead cat and rotting corpse to infiltrate my mouth. From past experience, I knew that it was a taste unto its own and that it stuck worse than superglue. Everything you ate for the next week tasted vile, like the scent had burned itself onto your tongue, and you thought it would never go away. Every bite of food was death. Every breath was death. Every time you talked, it was death. Until finally, mercifully, your taste buds recovered and your tongue came back from the brink of death and everything went back to normal.
So yeah, I let Aimee leave with only a small grin and an eye wiggle. She scowled and I turned back to the room. At first I couldn’t quite make out what I was looking at. It seemed like a blanket had been thrown over the body to protect its dignity, but then my eyes began to distinguish the small tears down the arms, the missing fingers, the stray bits of flesh scattered across the pharmacy floor as the cats had tugged to pull away parts of the now very, extremely, one hundred percent dead person. And then there were the cats themselves, their fury little bodies all in different states of decay. Some were bloated and fat, like they had died recently and were filling up with noxious gasses, ready to pop. Others were nothing but a pile of tiny bones covered by a thin blanket of rotting fur. And eyes—there were so many eyes on top of the dead body. A mound of furry warmth with a hundred eyes staring out of it. Little sharp fang-like teeth, and googly eyes staring up at me hatefully. Withdrawn, skeletal, a death glare from the underworld as they protected their kill like we were in ancient Egypt and the body was their pharaoh.
I heard the rumble of Freddy’s stomach from behind me and I tore my horrified gaze away from the body to look at him. The kid had gone pale—like really pale, and he was pale already. Skin practically translucent, lips green. He put a hand to his mouth and turned and ran from the room, and I heard O’Donnell chuckle.
“Man, do you think they ate them alive?” I asked, turning back to look at her.
“Probably,” she replied without hesitation. “Probably brought the cats in here thinking it would be safe from the dead and then couldn’t leave, and when the food ran out, the cats turned on them. Bet it was seriously brutal too. And painful. Can you imagine the horror…the terror of going through that? I mean, death by the dead looks painful, but it’s relatively quick depending on where they start or how quickly your body goes into shock. But this…this would have been slow, and painful, and by the looks of how starved they are, it was prolonged for days.”
“Like the cats knew that to keep themselves alive, they had to keep the person alive,” I mumbled with another grimace.
“Exactly. Man, cats are seriously smart. I always thought they’d take over the world once we were gone, and well…I’m only partly wrong.”
She said it so coldly, so matter-of-factly that it made me frown. I mean, this person had died horrifically and it wasn’t like I knew them. They could have been a murderer or a priest or a hooker, for all I cared or knew, but to be so blasé about their death and the killers left behind…
“Yeah, I guess,” I said, turning to look around the room.
I took the place in, finally noting the toppled-over bottles and boxes of medicines on the shelves. There really wasn’t very much left—maybe some aspirin and some eye drops. Nothing hugely useful given the end of the world circumstances, but if there was nothing else then I’d scrape the shelves bare regardless, because you never knew what you were going to face. I was guessing that someone had already broken in at some point and stolen most of what had been in there—probably pre-cat savaging—but that didn’t mean anything: there was always more to find if you knew where to look, and luckily I knew where to look and what to look for.
A storeroom, or a delivery that hadn’t been unboxed, the contents going unnoticed in their plain brown boxes. A lockbox built into the walls or floors, holding the most valuable drugs in to prevent meth heads breaking in and stealing it.
The dead body and mound of cats were mocking me though, a mutilated pile of death and fur, and my stomach was rolling as I stared at it, noting more and more eyes staring back, different shades of fur. Small tears and bitemarks on putrid, gray flesh.
“I can’t look at that anymore,” I said, and turned my back on it, and I was pretty sure I heard O’Donnell chuckle and call me a pussy. I bent low so I could examine the lower shelves and check for lockboxes. I’d seen small towns have those before—small lockboxes built into part of the pharmacy where they stored the most expensive drugs.
I pushed the remaining bottles aside as I moved around the room, feeling O’Donnell’s stare on me the whole time, wondering what I was searching for as I examined each shelf, moving things on the floor to check that it hadn’t been built into that. I eventually found it by the corner of the man-and-cat mound. Of course I did. Wasn’t that just my Goddamn luck.
“Under here. We need to move…this,” I said with a heavy sigh. I’d gotten somewhat used to the smell, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t still smell it, just that I was pushing past it to get done what needed to be done. I also did not want to have to touch the pile of fur and bones, but knew I had to if I was going to get in that box.
“What is it?” she asked, coming over to help.
“Lockbox,” I said, trying not to open my mouth too much. “If it hasn’t been raided already it should have the good stuff in it.”
My fingers reached into the fury mass, a mixture of revulsion and delight as my hand gripped hold of a large bone, sticky goo washing between my fingers, and yet the back of my hand was brushed with silky soft cat fur at the same time. I shuddered and tried not to think about it as I reached into the mass with my other hand and found something else to hold on to. O’Donnell took the top of the mass and together we began to drag it out of the way.
Goo smeared across the floor, maggots and flies erupted from the center of the dead cats, and a stench that made even O’Donnell make a weird retching noise swallowed the room. I slammed my mouth shut and tried to take as small breaths as possible, but it was all kind of pointless because I was going to be tasting that shit for the rest of my life, never mind the rest of the week. The cats had died really recently—like within the past couple of days—hence the goo and rot; the body was maybe a week or two old, hence the stench.
Eventually we mov
ed the pile far enough away from the hole that I could see the full combination keypad and the rotting rug that had been over the top of it and I slowly withdrew my hands from the furry goo pile. Slime and rot dripped from my hands and vomit clawed its way up my throat as a farting noise exploding from the center of the carnage, making the smell even worse.
O’Donnell eyeballed me, urging me to hurry the fuck up. No doubt she was doing those weird calculations in her head right about then on what our chances of survival were, and by the look on her face, mine were getting slimmer the longer I took. I searched for something to wipe my hands on, finding a pile of clothes under the pharmacy desk, and I dried them—for what little good it did—before moving back over to the safe. I pulled out my tools and set to work as O’Donnell stood up and searched the room for anything that might have been missed by looters the first time around.
I unscrewed the top of the compartment so I could get to the wires underneath. Of course there was no electricity to this thing anymore, so the combination lock wouldn’t work, but I could easily bypass that. I dug around in the wires, inspecting all the screws and connectors, and ten minutes later I had it open.
I was glad we’d gone to the effort too, because whoever had recently succumbed to the cat a la carte had had the good sense to lock up a shit-ton of useful drugs—antibiotics and steroids and a whole host of long-named drugs that I remembered from my thief days were expensive but never really knew what they were for. But I knew they were expensive, and really useful—at least to someone. Hopefully to Stormy.
I swung my bag around and loaded as much inside as I could, and then O’Donnell dropped her bag next to me and did the same thing, until both bags were heaving with little white boxes and bottles, and the lockbox was pretty much empty.
Standing back up, we both backtracked out of the room, closing the door behind us and finding Freddy and Aimee standing guard by the front door of the pharmacy. Freddy turned at the noise we made and put a finger to his lips, and both O’Donnell and I stopped walking momentarily before hurrying forward as quickly as we could.
The Dead Saga | Book 7 | Odium 7 Page 12