Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Hot blood drenched Raven’s hands. It slicked her fingers. The knife slipped out of her hands and clattered to the flagstone.
Rex staggered backward. His face went slack with astonishment. He dropped his gun. His eyes were sunken in his gaunt face, his pallor ashen. He clutched his neck with both hands, frantically attempting to staunch the dark red blood gushing from the wound.
Damien’s flashlight swung in a wild panicked arc, throwing garish shadows everywhere. His wide gaze darted from Rex to Raven and back again. “What the hell? What’d you do?”
“Shoot her!” Rex croaked.
In the darkness and harsh light, Damien’s expression was grim, unreadable. He dropped the flashlight and swung the barrel of the gun toward her. The gun barrel was pointed at her chest. “Raise your hands.”
Fear surged through her chest. The whittling knife lay on the path a yard from her feet. The blade glistened dark with blood. Rex’s gun lay even further away. Her hunting rifle was on the ground somewhere behind her, and the tranq gun couldn’t help her.
By the time she went for it, Damien could shoot her a dozen times.
“Raise your hands!” Damien ordered. His flat voice was terrifying.
Raven went very still. She lifted her blood-drenched hands into the air and fixed her gaze on Damien. “You don’t have to do this.” Her voice trembled. Her body felt numb, disconnected from her brain.
“You little—I’ll kill you—!” Rex took a step toward her and stumbled. He gasped, half-choking, still clutching at his throat. “What’re you waiting for, Damien! Kill her!”
“You have a choice, Damien,” Raven said. Her voice sounded high and distant, strange, like it belonged to someone else. “Please don’t do this.”
Rex plucked at the spurting hole in his neck. He sank to his knees. His breath came in shallow, rapid pants. “Kill her and get me to Gomez! He’s got the med kit—shoot her, damn it!”
Damien hesitated. His rifle wavered. His body was taut, his face hard as stone. Once again, his gaze flitted from Rex to Raven and back again. Something flashed in his eyes—uncertainty.
Raven waited for the bullet to the chest. This was it. This was how it would end, how she would die here, alone in the fog and the cold and the darkness.
No. She would not give up. Not until her last breath. Maybe if Damien’s rifle wavered just a bit more. Maybe she could dive for the knife, or dart for the trees.
Her gaze never left that gun.
Blood bubbled from Rex’s lips. His skin had lost all color. He attempted to stand but toppled to the ground with a groan.
Rex’s hands tightened over his throat. A thick dark puddle of blood spread beneath him on the flagstone. “I’ll kill… kill her myself… you stupid, worthless—”
“No,” Damien said. His voice was firm. His expression cleared like he’d decided something. He shifted and aimed his rifle at Rex. “You won’t.”
Rex sputtered incoherently. A look of betrayed shock crossed his agonized face. He made several choking, gurgling noises as he tried to speak, but no coherent words came out.
Damien didn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t need to.
Rex’s eyes rolled back in his head. Within a minute, he ceased moving. He stopped breathing, stopped everything.
Damien lowered the gun barrel several inches, but he kept his finger on the trigger guard. He let out a soft curse and sucked in his breath. “Is he dead?”
“Yeah, he’s dead.” Raven’s legs turned to jelly. Dizziness washed through her, but she fought to remain standing.
Her mind took several seconds to process the rapid change in circumstances. Damien still held the gun, but he wasn’t acting like he was going to shoot her with it—probably.
She wanted nothing more than to sink to the ground, curl up into a ball, and weep with relief and horror simultaneously. She couldn’t. Not yet. She was still in danger.
Damien had a weapon. She didn’t.
She took an unsteady step backward, toward the hunting rifle lying where it had landed when Rex knocked it from her hands. Her backpack lay crumpled on the flagstone beside the gun.
In one swift move, she crouched, seized the rifle, and leaped to her feet.
Damien tightened his grip on the handgun. He started to swing it in her direction, wariness and apprehension on his face.
She lifted the rifle slowly but kept the barrel aimed downward. “I’m picking it up. That’s all.”
He nodded tightly. “You were supposed to run,” he said, his voice accusatory. “You weren’t supposed to still be here!”
She trembled all over. Her voice shook. “I was running. Until you caught me.”
“That was out of my control. I thought you were already gone, so it wouldn’t matter how hard we looked. You were supposed to be gone. That’s not my fault.”
A fresh jolt of anger gave her the strength to keep standing. She bared her teeth. “You were there. I saw you. You were shooting at the wolves. Shika, Echo, and Titus are dead.”
His face darkened. “I had no choice.”
She gave a furious, disbelieving snort.
“I shot at them—I didn’t hurt any of them myself. I swear it.”
“Once again, you were there and did nothing. You might as well have killed them with your bare hands.” At the mention of hands, she remembered her own. Dismayed, she stared down at the blood staining her fingers, her fingers clutching the gun.
The blood of the man she’d just killed. In self-defense, but still. She was a killer now. Like an animal caught in a trap, willing to gnaw its own paw off. Willing to do anything to stay alive.
Acid burned the back of her throat. She wiped her hands fiercely on her cargo pants. Dark streaks marred the cloth. She let the anger rise up, let it drown out the grief and fear and revulsion. “And Gizmo? What’s your pathetic excuse for murdering him?”
“Rex shot him first. He was suffering. There was no way he would have survived that. I put him out of his misery, and you know it.”
In some small part of her brain, she knew Damien’s shot was a mercy killing. He’d ended Gizmo’s suffering. All the same, she hated him with a blazing intensity. Seeing him standing there next to Dekker and Vaughn while they killed Shika and Titus and Echo—it had felt like a betrayal.
She barely knew this guy, and yet, in this bewildering, hostile new reality, she’d thought she had an ally. She’d been desperate for a friend.
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Look, I can’t act weak, okay? I have to play a part. If I don’t, they’ll abandon me—or kill me.”
“So what? Just leave.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Looks that easy from where I’m standing.”
His gaze dropped to Rex’s body, then swiftly snapped up again. He met her eyes. “Ivan Vaughn is my uncle.”
She stared at him.
“My dad’s brother.”
“Your last name is Vaughn,” she said dully. “Damien Vaughn.”
“He came for me.” His voice was strained, his eyes hooded.
“Please, you have to understand. I lived in Alpharetta, a suburb of Atlanta, with my parents and two little sisters.
I am—was a sophomore at Emory University, studying engineering.
I… I wanted to design cars. Atlanta was one of the first cities to fall.
It was hit hard and fast because of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
“Almost three hundred thousand passengers a day passed through that airport, spreading the virus with every cough and sniffle and sneeze. People masked up immediately, they did the usual social distancing stuff, schools and businesses shut down, just like the other pandemics. This one was different. It is different. It’s a super-virus like no one has ever seen before.
It took out just about anyone and everyone. ”
“I know.”
He continued like she hadn’t spoken. “Early on, we sequestered ourselves, even when we ran out of food, even when the water turned off. We heard sirens all day long. And then we didn’t.
My mom made us separate into our bedrooms, into different parts of the house.
She divided the food, water bottles, and toilet paper, and she had bought tarps and duct tape and sealed up the ductwork, and all around our doors and windows.
She said if one of us had already contracted the virus, maybe the rest would survive.
We didn’t want to do it like that, but she insisted.
My mom was small but fierce. It was awful.
Hearing them getting sick, one by one. The vomiting.
The moaning in pain. The weeping. I was in that house with my dead parents and my dead little sisters for days. ”
He didn’t look at her, didn’t meet her gaze.
He stared off into the mist, eyes glazed and distant, recalling the horror.
“I thought I was going to die, too, just like them, the fevers, the coughing up blood, writhing in agony, my insides melting like jelly. But I didn’t.
I guess my mom’s actions saved my life.” His voice went hollow. “Lucky me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. It was genuine. What a useless word. The most useless word ever invented. She could see the grief etched on his face, sharpening his features.
“I was trapped in that death house for five days, three days after I’d run out of anything edible.
I was afraid to leave, afraid to contract the virus, obviously, but also because of everything else that was happening, with all the rioting and the mobs.
People were so scared, they panicked. Some of them had watched their entire families suffer and die within days.
They were out of their minds with panic and grief.
In some places, especially the big cities like Atlanta, people started killing other people.
By then, the cops were dead or had fled.
There was no one to stop anyone from doing whatever they wanted.
They were robbing their neighbors for their food, shooting them if they fought back.
They killed anyone who coughed or breathed wrong.
Everyone was so afraid. It was like… like everyone went crazy, all at once. ”
Raven shuddered. “That’s awful.”
“It was… apocalyptic. And then my uncle came,” Damien said. “He fought his way through a riot and dragged me out of that house, and he saved me. I’m alive because of him. I owe him everything.”
Damien wanted her to sympathize with him. A part of her did. Another part remained hard as stone. “He sounds like a real winner, your uncle.”
“He’s a criminal. I know that. I get that. But—he’s not as bad as you think. He has a code. He doesn’t usually kill women and children.”
Incredulous, her eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “Usually?”
“Trust me. There are worse alternatives.”
She remembered the look on Dekker’s face back at the pharmacy. His flat black eyes as he blew Carl’s face off for no reason at all. How he’d looked at her like she was a meal to be consumed, or trash to be disposed of.
“Do you think any of that matters to Carl? To all the other people he’s killed?”
Damian’s jaw pulsed. Emotions flitted across his face—anger, resignation, something like sadness. “I’m not your enemy.”
“Hard to believe from where I’m standing.”
“I could’ve shot you just now, but I didn’t, did I?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I told you. I’m not a killer.”
But I am. She pressed her trembling hands against her thighs. They wouldn’t stop shaking. “And yet I still find that hard to believe.”
“I’m just trying to survive like everybody else. That doesn’t mean I like what I have to do.”
She regarded him with narrowed eyes, still wary. “I don’t understand you.”
He gave a helpless shrug. “I do what I can to help, when I can.”
“As long as it doesn’t cost you anything. Right?”
He glanced away, stiffening, that muscle in his jaw pulsing. He turned and met her gaze. There was an odd look in his eyes. Part angry. Part ashamed. “You’re right. I’m a coward.”
“Then we agree on something.”
“Maybe.” There was no sarcasm or defensiveness in his voice. Only a weary resignation. That shadow of shame again. “I guess so.”
Something squeezed in her chest.
“I didn’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then prove it.”
“Okay. I will.” He holstered his gun, then lifted both hands, palms out as if beseeching her to trust him. “I am, see? Like I said, I don’t want to hurt you.”
Yeah, right. She didn’t believe it for a second. She couldn’t allow herself to believe it, believe him. Could she? Her weapon lowered a fraction.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Unless your Uncle Ivan is around, you mean.”
“No, I won’t. I swear it. Not even then.”
“How noble of you.”
He winced. “Touché.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“I get that, but you can. I swear it, I’m on your side.”
She didn’t trust him. She despised him. Didn’t she? Shouldn’t she? He was one of the murderous Headhunters. Yet he’d been true to his word. He hadn’t ratted her out back at the lodge.
He’d also stood by and watched his friends shoot the wolves. He’d done nothing when Rex took her hostage. And yet. He’d refused to shoot her, had turned his gun on Rex instead.
Conflicting emotions roiled inside her. It made no sense. She didn’t understand it, didn’t understand him. His very presence was disorienting, discomfiting.
He was a Headhunter. He was dangerous.
She should kill him right now, while she had the chance.
His weapon was holstered. She held the rifle in her bloodied hands. If she was quick enough, she might get off a shot before he did.
It was the smart move. The right move.
Raven lifted the rifle and pointed it at Damien.