In the Ruins (Metahuman Files #2)

Prologue

RAGE AGAINST THE DYING

“Make them stop!”

The words came out broken, in a voice worn raw from endless screaming.

He almost didn’t hear his sergeant’s plea through the throbbing in his head and the grinding agony ripping through his own body.

But he could see her face where she lay within reach—lips peeled back in a painful snarl, tongue bitten through, blood a crimson scatter over her teeth, the shape of the words she mouthed in a forgotten prayer.

He slid his hand through the dry, dry dirt of a city long since abandoned by people and reclaimed by the earth with the help of scorching desert wind and an implacable heat.

He didn’t know how long it had been since they lost the battle, but the sky overhead was no longer black, while the horizon burned with false dawn.

He found his sergeant’s outstretched hand with shaking fingers and gripped it with a strength he shouldn’t have.

When she screamed, he heard it in his mind, the sound like waves crashing against the shore in the far distance, breaking against the bones of his body.

Make the voices stop!

He heard nothing but the wind and her gasping sobs and the quiet click in his ear he only vaguely grasped the meaning of.

The world spun around them, but he didn’t close his eyes.

It took everything he had to remember how to communicate beyond wordless, agonized screams. When he finally spoke, he didn’t recognize his own voice.

“Requesting medevac.”

Her fingers—broken now, and he didn’t know how that had happened—moved weakly in his grip, grounding him. Her bloodshot eyes kept looking at him with less and less sanity in their blue depths, and he swore he would not lose his sergeant like this.

Not like this.

“We’re still alive.”