Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
PHOENIX
“Are you fucking kidding me, Ben?” The angry voice drew my attention, swerving me from the path I’d been walking.
I was out scavenging, scouting to see if there was anything worth seeing around this shithole of a town I grew up in.
Up until three seconds ago when I’d heard the voices shouting from a building to my left, I’d thought not.
“Why would I be kidding, Aubrey? Fuck, is that even your real name?”
“Don’t you fucking touch that, Ben, I’ll?—”
The loud pop pop pop of gunfire drew me up short. If there was a dead body, there was shit to take. Hell, if there was a big enough dead body and it was fresh… Well, my group was always hungry.
Why waste the meat ?
“Oh, fuck you , Aubrey .” The voice was in pain, and when I rounded the corner, I finally spotted who was speaking.
Two men. One was tall and broad, with blond hair and blue eyes. The hand clutching his side had a pair of dog tags dangling from bloody fingers.
It was the smaller man who caught my attention, though. I knew without asking that he’d killed before. He had that look in his eyes—the fury, the pain, the determination. Yeah, he’d killed before, and it was obvious that he was willing to do it again.
His eyes were the greenest things I’d ever seen—viridian blazes of agony hidden behind a mask of danger and death.
“Give me the tags, Ben.” My gaze dropped to his bloody fingers. Order tags. The same as the ones around my neck, which I’d stolen off a dead body four years ago.
“Fuck you. You don’t deserve them. You didn’t earn them.”
Those green eyes went dark, and the gun he held in his hand lifted, aiming squarely at the chest of the man in front of him.
“Fuck you. I’ve been through more than you’ve ever thought about seeing.
I’ve taken everything your shit Order could dish out, and I still joined up because—” He cut off, the choked sound at the back of his throat full of razors and secrets, but his hand holding the gun didn’t waver. “Give me the tags or I’ll shoot you.”
“You wouldn’t?—”
The sound of the gunshot rang in my ears, and I idly noted that I probably wouldn’t want to take him back to my pack after all. He was clutching his stomach and there was every chance his intestines had been perforated with that second shot—what a waste.
He was probably too big for me to easily lug anyway. I was over six feet and all muscle, but the asshole standing across from the green-eyed man was just as big.
I could have cut off a part or two, but…
“Don’t question what I’d do, Ben. You don’t know shit about me.”
“We’ve been fucking for over a year, Aubrey.”
I watched in fascination as Aubrey leaned forward, snatching the dog tags.
“That doesn’t mean shit. I’m done with the Order.
I’m done with all of this.” His eyes narrowed, and he looked the injured man up and down once before shaking his head.
“I’m done with you. Go ahead and tell Ryker you were right .
Tell him my entire life was a lie. Just remind him I’ve been with you for years, and I’ve killed more men than our entire squad put together.
” Aubrey’s eyes dropped to the blood pooling between the soldier’s fingers. “Let him know I won’t hesitate.”
I fucking hated the Order. They weren’t any better than the raiders who traveled the lands—the only difference was that they took what they wanted when they wanted it with weapons they’d stolen a long time ago and used to establish power.
They were raiders with authority and a badge, and that somehow made them right when they burned down little towns and took their food and water.
Not to mention I’d heard rumors about them taking entire groups while they were alive. I could only guess what happened to those people.
“You can’t just leave , Aubrey.” There was a soft desperation in Ben’s voice now, and I watched in fascination as his fingers clenched on his stomach. “What are you going to do? Follow that fucking letter you keep tucked beneath your pillow?”
Aubrey froze, and from my hiding place I saw the small burst of pain that crossed his features a second before he schooled them and turned back to the bleeding soldier behind him. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Some resort on the coast? Do you really think you’ll find what you’re looking for there? You’re miserable, Aubrey, and you’re always going to be miserable. You’re always going to be alone. It’s no surprise there’s blood on that letter. It’s the same blood on your hands. You killed?—”
Another gunshot rang through the air, and the soldier fell with a bullet hole through his head. Blood and thicker things leaked from the back of his blown-out skull as his body twitched on the ground.
Oh.
Oh.
The expression on Aubrey’s face as he slipped the gun into his pocket and carefully rifled through the dead man’s clothing was blank, emotionless. If there was hurt in his eyes, it was buried so deep beneath ice that it couldn’t touch him.
In that moment, I knew I was born to make him melt.
The problem with existing in a world where you always got the things you wanted came when those things thought they had autonomy.
Strength .
When was the last time I wondered if something might actually put up a fight ?
When was the last time I felt like a person was a challenge?
I watched that challenge turn on his heel and start away from the dead man at a jog, pulling his gun again as he did.
He held it like it was a security blanket and not a deadly weapon… and I knew.
He was a challenge that would be more than worth the blood that came with it.
It was like Aubrey courted death. He went out of his way to brush against it, leaving gifts in the form of dead bodies in his wake—little love letters that begged for attention.
Death couldn’t have him. I was a jealous man, and he was mine.
That didn’t stop him from cutting his way through the ruins of the city like he meant to leave his name written across every surface in blood—proof that he’d been there that would only last until the next storm, when death mixed with the rain and it all washed away.
Everything always turned red in the end.
I stalked him in silence for the rest of the day, fascinated by the way he moved, the way he seemed to dance with death, the way he sought the worst of the worst—raiders, infected, the beasts that had been so corrupted by the rain that they were rabid enough to attack.
Aubrey went after it all with a pistol, a knife, and grit .
There were times when I thought I was going to have to intervene, where I was sure his determination would waver and his stamina would fail him.
Whatever rage had fueled him to shoot his lover seemed to be a bottomless ocean, waves that he could pull from endlessly.
It washed across his exhaustion and drew it out to sea, and Aubrey kept moving.
By the time he finally started to slow down, he’d actually looped through the city and started toward the edge of the old roads where my group was waiting for me. We’d holed up a few miles south of the old train station that ran along the shoreline.
He paused where the road diverged, and I didn’t miss the way his shoulders shook when he wiped a bloody hand across the street signs.
T ain to Par dis
The letters were faded, half scraped away by time and weather, and he dropped his head against his knuckles and took a shaking breath.
“I can do this.” Aubrey’s voice was softer when he wasn’t threatening someone, almost melodic in its melancholy. He holstered the gun he’d been holding and brought his free hand up to the dog tags he’d killed his lover for, blowing out another breath. “I can do this.”
He was so focused on his little pep talk that he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. Maybe it was the adrenaline draining out of him, mixed with the fact that he’d lost more blood than he should have and he was somehow still standing .
Or maybe it was that look I’d seen in his eyes—he was stalking death because he wanted to catch it.
Or he wanted to be caught. That was fine.
I could catch him. I could be death, if that was what he really wanted.
At least I knew I’d be good at it.
He turned at the sound of my approach, already pulling his gun back out of its holster, but I wasn’t the danger he needed to pay attention to. The creature slammed into him from the side.
It had been human once. It was the inevitability that came for us all.
It was fast, its skin mottled from time or rain, and the fingers that tore at Aubrey were splintered bits of bone where it had clawed at dirt and stone before. He let out a low shout, turning his gun from me to the rabid and flipping it in his hand to crash the barrel against the thing’s skull.
Probably smart. Where there was one, there were often more. And this one had latched its fingers into his side and started digging. By the time they’d turned enough to rot, they were mindless, fueled by rage and base instinct.
Sounded like every other person I’d ever met; the rabid ones just lived outside the constraints that held the rest of humanity back.
The rain that fell nearly seventy years ago started an infection that stole that away, that left us all wondering if this was going to be our fate. To eat—to be eaten.
I didn’t miss the wash of blood that appeared, staining the light gray tank top he wore, and he didn’t miss the way I moved. His eyes lifted to me, and I saw it then .
I’d been right.
Some part of him wanted to die, because there was something in his expression close to bliss, to acceptance.
“No.” The word spilled from my chest as I pulled the axe from my back and brought it down in a hard swing that met rotten flesh.
The thing holding him dropped, and Aubrey fell to the ground.
He glanced up at me through dark hair, and the blood on his face could have been his or any of the people he’d killed throughout the day.
Shit, it might have belonged to Ben . With streaks of crimson across his eyes, he almost looked like he already belonged by my side—a raider like me, painted up and blood-soaked.
Fuck, imagining one of the collars I had strapped around my belt wrapped around his throat made my body ache, my cock perk up.
He’d have to earn that, though. Only good dogs got to wear a collar.
“Who the fuck are you?” He tried to drag himself to his feet as he said it, but his hand flew to the wound at his side and he swayed as he stood, his lashes fluttering shut as shock, injury, and exhaustion finally caught up with him.
I caught him before he fell, and wondered if he heard me when I answered his question.
“I’m exactly what you’ve been looking for.”