The Risen Series | Book 5 | Defiance

by Crow, Marie F.

  “Feel better?” I ask Marxx, as he too walks away from me.

  Marxx shrugs with his back to me. He calls over his shoulder, “I’d rather hear that shit than his shit. At least one of the two are actually useful when they are making noise.”

  I have to smile as he tells me this. There is something warm and fuzzy feeling when you’re not the only one who hates someone.

  “You do so love to prove him wrong,” Aimes says over my father’s and my chat when I finally climb in the truck beside her.

  “Every girl needs a hobby,” I return, still blessing those around me with my smile.

  Slipping my sunglasses over my amused eyes, I start the truck and follow the leaning forms out of yet another parking lot, of yet another building, on yet another attempt to find some form of a life for us. The sun is dancing behind the trees, peeking out with a strobe light of flashing as it rises in the sky. The weather isn’t as biting with winter admitting its defeat, but still, we only crack the windows. As I’ve learned, nothing dares Karma like fully opened windows.

  I’m following behind everyone. I’m lost in the peace of our trip, not really having to focus on the road ahead of me. Traffic is a thing of the past. Even the guys are enjoying the freedom of being able to spread out as they follow behind the Jeep. They lean, tilting their bikes into lazy formations. Rhett continues to harass Dolph, edging closer than needed with dramatic maneuvering just to see if he can spook him. When Dolph finally steers J.D.’s large monster into Rhett’s latest attempt at bumper bikes, it’s Rhett who jerks first, and the three of us in the truck laugh louder than we have in a long time.

  “You think they will ever really get along?” Paula asks me.

  “Well, Rhett hasn’t shot him, yet,” Aimes offers. “It’s a pretty good sign.”

  “If Dolph were in real danger, Rhett wouldn’t be dicking with him. Teasing is a good sign in their world. It’s when they ignore you, you have to worry,” I tell her.

  “You think he was serious about what he said last night?” Paula’s voice says with more curiosity than worry.

  “Rhett or Laws?” Aimes asks. “Or are we back to Dolph?”

  “Both. Rhett and Lawless,” Paula answers.

  “As much as Law idolizes J.D.,” I add to help direct the conversation, “he also hates him. J.D. was supposed to be this hero; someone who could control the world and keep it under his thumb. What J.D. did, Law can’t figure out how to deal with it. It’s like when kids learn their favorite hero is just a man in spandex with all of the same flaws and faults as their real parents. They still want to believe in the hero, but somehow it just feels a little less.”

  “Who was it for Conroy?” Aimes asks.

  She has been doing little pushes like this since the day in the neighborhood when we discovered Travis’ hanging tree. She hasn’t asked outright, but she wiggles her finger into the wound to see if the bleeding is still rampant, or if it’s slowing. The blood she pools depends on the day and my mood. So, she keeps testing and I keep avoiding giving her what she’s after.

  “The Flash,” I answer. “He was one of the slowest kids on his baseball team. He so wanted to run like The Flash. I bought him shoes with the character on them for one of his birthdays. He was convinced he ran faster when he wore them. Law even ‘lost’ a race with him wearing the shoes because they made him so fast.”

  The truck is silent with the mood swing. Glancing at the women sitting beside me, I stare into the eyes of April. She is watching me like a doll, unmoving and uninterested. There is something dark in those brown eyes that disturb me. If an abyss could stare back at me, it is.

  “Helena!”

  Aimes’ scream jerks my head forward to the windshield, but it’s not what is ahead of us that has her screaming. A man is running full speed at the side of my truck. He throws himself at my door, standing on the foot rail and clutching the thin space between the glass of the rolled down window to support him.

  His eyes are wild, with constricted pupils staring at me from a bloody ruin of a face. He is balancing on the runners of my truck with one hand desperately pulling on the old-styled handle to open the door. I went from staring at an empty abyss to a pool of fear.

  He keeps shouting, “Let me in!” at me in my dazed state.

  Without any real idea of what to do, I press the brakes hard, jerking the wheel to spin the large beast. She squeals with the abuse to the tires. She shimmies to a stop, blocking the crazy man from the rest of the group. The random act slung the rest in the truck to the far passenger side, leaving only myself close to the deranged stranger who has fallen to the street.

  Before I can open my door to demand answers, the answers appear. Through the same overly thick tree line he had suddenly appeared from pours the very things we keep running from. In every stage of decay, they rush from the trees after the man they were chasing. Their combined sounds bring the hair on my arms to attention and my knees to something weaker than water. I won’t be able to block the men on their bikes if they reach us before we are ready.

  “My name is Jeremy,” he tells me. “You can’t let me die! You can’t! My name is Jeremy. I’m a person. I have a family. Let me in, damn it! You can’t just let me die!”

  The man is pounding on my window again with my indecision of what to do. His hands are leaving bloody prints where they pressed against the glass and his desperation turns into something more when he sees I am not opening the door.

  Balling his fist, he slams it into the glass. The skin of his knuckles breaks, leaving more gore to the already streaked glass like a mosaic of punishments. The thick glass just vibrates, mocking his attempts. He glares at me through the mess he has made. For a moment, I see a glimpse of the real person behind those eyes and it’s not fear peering out at me anymore.

  When the man rears his fist back again, he crumples with the sound of a gunshot ringing through the air. Marxx is already turning away from where he was standing to shoot the man in the leg. Jeremy is screaming on the ground, clutching where his kneecap used to sit.

  Aimes puts it together faster than I do. “Shit,” she says in a long exhale of a breath.

  “Let’s go!” Marxx shouts, setting a bait for the Risen who are rushing towards the scent of blood. Marxx knows, as well as we do, the scent will rip them to pure animals.

  “Hells?” Aimes whispers, as if the men could somehow hear her over their already retreating Harleys.

  I say nothing. My eyes are lost as they bounce from the man on the ground to the already blood-caked crowd rushing towards him. Once upon a time, like some dark fairy tale, I would have jumped from my seat to try to save this stranger. I would have risked my life and potentially those around me for him like some lost heroine looking to prove her worth. Shelia learned with her life the lesson of what happens when you help strangers. I almost learned with mine what happens when you let strangers help you. Neither she nor I will ever receive a happily ever after.

  “Hells?” she whispers again, stressing my one syllable name a little harder than needed.

  There is already a gap forming between my truck and our group. It’s in reverse proportion to the space between the demonic army and us. I close my eyes, praying for forgiveness for what I am about to do.

  “My name is Jeremy! You can’t just let me die!” He keeps screaming over and over at me, hoping me knowing his name will taunt my morality into action.

  He is watching me with his wide eyes of terror and pain. He can’t believe what I am about to do, or what has been done to him. I know Jeremy will join Carol tonight in tormenting me. They will dance with my past sins and I will be awed by their cruelty.

  “April,” Aimes sadly whispers, “hide and seek.”

  The little girl closes her eyes with the hidden code expressed. I wish I could join her. I wish I had thought to close my eyes many times, on many things, I can never now unsee.

  Turning the wheel as tightly as I can, I maneuver my warhorse to catch up with those who hav
e already left. The screams grow more hysterical as I pull away. His pitch only slightly changes when the Risen starts to descend upon him.

  They tear into whatever flesh they can reach first like hounds from hell. They don’t try to kill him. His suffering is of no thought to them. They are only there to feast. Pulling and severing his legs and arms like a stuffed doll, they almost fight among themselves for any scrap of dripping meat their fingers touch.

  He is not screaming anymore. The sound is one long wail of suffering; a pitch of sound that tears at your soul as if it, too, had fingers to scoop your body clean. It calls my bluff before I am even aware of it. Pressing the brakes hard, the truck lurches as if confused why I am commanding it to stop.

  “Hide and seek,” I whisper to very silent women beside me.

  Aimes mutters under her breath, slinking down where she sits. Paula wraps the already blind April in her arms, bending her head over the child to further protect her in some way from what I am about to do.

  I keep my eyes on the grinning skulls staring back at me with the men stopped and confused. Aimes and I once had a conversation about the skull. We had wished for Chapel’s Arch Angel, but this is not a world for angels anymore. This is a world for skulls with their silver tear and empty, black eyes.

  I don’t check the mirrors. I don’t think at all as I push the truck too quickly into reverse. My action causes the large tires to skip a beat as if to ask me if I’m sure about this. I’m not, but when has that ever stopped me before?

  It’s a confusion of collisions when the truck finds them. The metal bumper decapitates the ones bent over the body as if they were birds of carrion. The sound of their skulls hitting the truck sounds like large pieces of hail raining down on a tin roof. The tires bounce, almost slipping in the trail of carnage they leave. I don’t ease the pressure from the gas pedal until I have mowed my way completely through the crowd as if I were parting a sea. It’s a very red sea with what I have done.

  The man no longer wails. Jeremy is nothing more than wide-flung pieces of thick meat between what the Risen started and what I ended. My tires found his head, silencing him forever with a simple feel of a bump as if he were nothing more than a log in the road, but he was once so much more. He was a person like us; trying to find a life in a world built around death. His name was Jeremy and I killed him.

  I pay no attention to the few Risen who are left. They are broken, or paralyzed, with their unfeeling, immortality-like bodies. They can’t stand. They can’t move. They aren’t my problem. Pushing the drenched tires back through the many shades of my red sea, I head towards those waiting for us.

  Conroy loved The Flash with his bright red suit and wit-filled banter. He loved how he could run, always there to save the day with his speed. The Flash was the hero Conroy always wanted to become. I’m glad Conroy never saw this world as it stands because there are no heroes anymore, you can’t outrun death, and the color red is getting a bit overused. We are all just people with flaws and faults trying to outlive the memories of our parents and those we have lost.

  Chapter 6

  I was right about Carol and Jeremy. Standing here, staring out another set of windows as the sun rises, in yet another house that isn’t ours, I had volunteered to take back-to-back watches to avoid them. They make me almost miss Margaret and her schoolyard of murder-covered best friends forever. Even Ashley with her destroyed flesh, pink pajamas, and her taunting of my failures would have been better than watching what Carol had done to Jeremy and what both have done to my few hours of sleep.

  She tore him into mutilated pieces as he screamed his name, begging me to help him. I didn’t. He kept reminding me he was a person just like myself, and just like myself, Carol destroyed him for her pleasure while I watched. I’m sure a therapist would have an award-winning novel built around the many hidden revelations I could bring. Their replaying of my many deep-rooted issues has left my knees weak and my stomach sour. I can still smell his copper-like blood and feel its warmth on my body as it splashed me with Carol’s brutality.

  I sensed him before his arms slipped around my waist. I relax into his heat, enjoying the feel of his lips against my neck. These little moments are all Lawless and I are allowed anymore. Somehow his silence and his arms are more comforting than any words or anything else we could exchange.

  Lawless adjusts his body to support us both on the bench seat of the bay window. I don’t resist his gentle urging to relax, letting him become an anchor to hold me steady amid the ravaging sea of my dreams. By the way he tenses for a brief second, I think it is as much as a shock to him as it is to me when I nestle into the length of his body.

  He rests his face on the top of my head, whispering, “You should try to sleep while we can. No idea what today will hold for us.”

  “The same thing it holds for us every day, Pinky. Risen taking over the world,” I whisper back.

  He does a short exhale of a laugh with the memory of old childhood cartoons.

  Lawless says to me, “I’d be happy to be the sidekick for a while.”

  “You don’t have to call all the shots alone. Not even J.D. did that.”

  I can feel his shoulder shrug from where I am resting on his chest with what I have said.

  “And who should I ask?” his voice rumbles.

  It’s my turn to shrug. I’m not really the one to give advice, considering how very little I listen to it. If you want me to kill something, fine. If you want me to help guide you through to the light, nope. Darkness doesn’t come with a roadmap. It’s a touch and feel your way out of this type of situation and my touchy-feely is running dry.

  “Do you remember when I fell out of my bedroom window?” I ask him.

  I can feel his body adjust to my question. He’s wondering where this is going. Am I such a time bomb?

  “Yes,” he answers stiffly. “You were leaning out to help sneak me in.”

  “Me and windows, never the best of friends,” I tease, wishing to ease down his apprehension. “You jumped right down after me. You didn’t even think about it.”

  He shrugs, still tense and nervous, saying, “Wasn’t that far if you didn’t go headfirst.”

  “You snuck me to my car to take me to the hospital. We were both too nervous to tell my parents I was hurt.”

  “Mr. Hawthorn, hi, yeah, I’m going to need to take Hells to the hospital. You see, Sir, she slipped out of her window as I was trying to sneak in to get me some,” Lawless teases. “Yeah, can’t imagine why I didn’t knock on the door.”

  “Anyway,” I say, with a gentle nudge of my elbow to his ribs, “It wasn’t J.D. who sat with you all night. It wasn’t Rhett, or Aimes, or even Chapel.”

  “It was Marxx,” he says, silently.

  “It was Marxx,” I repeat.

  His body goes still as his thoughts overtake him. I sit, just as silent in his embrace, letting him work through the very touchy-feely darkness.

  “I’m worried about Marxx,” he confesses.

  “He was never the teddy bear type,” I offer from the warmth of his chest.

  “He was never the enjoy killing type, either.”

  “I don’t think he enjoyed what he did to Jeremy.”

  “Jeremy?” Law asks, mentally running through the laundry list of names we have developed.

  “The guy today. His name was Jeremy.”

  Lawless sighs, letting the air out as slowly as possible. It’s amazing the weight a name can give to a victim. Until you have a name, it’s just another dead body. Once you place a name to the face, everything changes. They become human and that is something becoming rarer by the day.

  Lawless murmurs after a moment of thought, “No, maybe he didn’t enjoy it, but he didn’t even think about it. That’s more of Rhett’s deal. Marxx was always there, but he never swung first.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  I can feel his body stiffen hearing my question. His thumb has started keeping a tempo with whatever thoughts he
is having as it taps against my arm where he holds me. I know he is trying to avoid saying what is on the tip of his tongue.

  “I want to stop losing the people I love,” he finally says, with a tone like a cold shadow over a grave.

  I know what he is saying. Death is not only stealing those around us. Life is doing her fair share of damage, too. When Death takes someone from you, he leaves you with only the memories of what they were. When Life takes someone, she lets you keep the shell. She leaves you with not only the memories, but also the pain of those memories, as she forces you to watch their decay.

  “There was never any guarantee about that before any of this started,” I tell him.

  “No, I guess not,” he says, with a sigh again. “There just seems to be less of everything now, including any guarantees.”

  “Things will even out once we find somewhere to call home again. When we can finally let our guard down some, Marxx will settle whatever is eating him.”

  “Maybe,” Law shrugs again. “Any ideas of where that might be?’

  “Somewhere far out from any towns or residences with lots of space. If there is anybody left, they won’t be clumped up in their townhomes. Too much risk. Too much paranoia.”

  His thumb slows as his thoughts do, but he says nothing.

  “We could try what Peyton's group did with the crypts. Rhett will love that,” I say.

  I can feel his smile as his mind runs with similar thoughts. His thumb is caressing my arm now, running little patterns of circles and ovals instead of the drum-like tempo. Still, he says nothing.

  “They said they had supplies they left behind. Not sure why they are running with us if they have stuff stored away, but it’s a thought,” I keep offering to the suddenly one-sided conversation.

  Lawless still says nothing and I fall into silence as well.

  “What if it doesn’t?” he finally asks me.