Epilogue – Part 2
Merrick
Several years later...
The whole area was walled off from the rest of civilization with shock wire. It existed as the antithesis of order and control. His older brother, Nothonal, had created the perfect home for the condemned and the depraved.
He didn't know the name of this dirt floored, mold encrusted shack. It was owned and run by a lowlife alpha who oversaw some of the fights in the pits. The place's appeal was not in the rotgut alcohol it sold, but the show of a sad little woman sitting in an iron cage behind the makeshift bar.
Head shaved, likely because of lice, she was always naked and shivering with the cold.
A half-starved, sterile omega breeder, she cowered in her cage, her head down and arms wrapped around her body.
She wore a metal shock collar outfitted with a GPS system, as well as cuffs on her wrists and ankles.
Her owner rented her out by the hour. Any who wanted to use her had to leave weapons at the bar, not because she was dangerous—she leaked her slick for whoever growled at her—but because she was suicidal and had tried numerous times to end her own life.
Merrick thought about helping her do that.
It had been easy to get into Sector 2. No one cared if you went in.
One just walked through a door and went through the tunnel from one world to the next.
There was no law here. It was all might makes right, and every fight was to the death.
Slum lords reigned like little vicious kings.
Every vice was readily available, although the quality of those vices was often dubious.
All drones were slaves here. There was no charade of them working off their debts. Breed owned all the drone flesh. And without an Administration, there was no registry. People born here lacked tattoos.
Most of the women born in this sector were sterile.
There was some kind of herbal concoction sold on the street that alphas could buy to give to babies that sometimes prevented the virus that caused female ovaries to shrivel and the womb to fill with cysts, but there was no vaccine, no proven medicine to address the issue.
There was no mandatory five year school for breed, nor a thirty year king's plan for alphas. There was also no electricity, no modern sewage system. The water had to be farmed, and there was very little decent food.
It was a sector for outlaws and the banished. Once you entered, it was said to be impossible to get back into the rest of the eleven sectors.
Merrick had been returning from his hunt for Sasha when he'd seen a full phalanx of Kane's enforcers walking down the street toward Dover's End. He’d always assumed his brother knew where he was and figured he had finally decided to execute him for his desertion of the King's Army. So, Merrick hid.
News that Kane had killed Maura and seized control of the pub spread quickly through the streets as the most interesting thing to happen in Sector 10 in years.
Merrick thought he could stay in the sector, hiding in the warrens until Kane lost interest. But then his bastard brother had sent in hunters.
Merrick had to go where Kane couldn't follow. The enforcers would sniff him out otherwise.
Much later, he was thumbing through newsreels on a barely working data pad when he saw his exalted, perfect older brother had formally bonded with an omega breeder.
There were photos of a beautiful woman with wild, just-from-bed-hair down to her waist, wrapped in a dirty looking sheet and standing in front of Kane, who held her shoulders in his hands.
She was marked up good, black and blue from the bottom of her ears to where the sheet covered a magnificent pair of tits.
And she was proud. Head high, shoulders back, not ashamed or afraid. Fierce.
That was how Merrick recognized her, like a punch to his solar plexus. It was fierce little Sasha, who wasn't afraid of anything. He’d never known another female who could match that look.
Whenever Merrick had beat a drone for incompetence, Sasha had been there, always ready to take the blows in the drone's place, a hard glint of determination on her baby face.
Merrick had sisters who’d always used a pout and tears to get their way. They’d begged piteously at the most minor of threats. But Sasha only wept for others.
After her maturation, Sasha looked like pictures Merrick had seen of her mother before Edin Dover had ruined the woman. Wrapped in that sheet, he saw big night sky eyes, lips made for cock sucking, and curves that made his hands shake.
She should have been his. She no longer looked anything like the soft, innocent child that had been living and working at Dover's End. This wasn’t the little girl who gently coaxed and encouraged the entire staff into doing her bidding. But he knew. He knew it was the same omega breeder.
Kane had Sasha. He had bonded her. Vid headlines blared that people had witnessed her give him her breeder’s blessing, that it was real, that it could only come from a true bond, that Kane would live forever—long live the Warlord Constantine Kane and his Bride-Mate, Lady Sasha.
Mistakes plagued Merrick's life choices: Ignoring his father's advice, leaving the King’s Army, spending all his credits on whores and alcohol, and finally tormenting the little breeder girl who unknowingly tormented him.
Losing her.
He had done many bad things. Stupid shit. But he couldn't bring himself to rape a child. No matter what her smell did to his head. No matter that her attitude—defiant, proud—when it shouldn't have been, sang to his heart. No matter that she despised him.
His father had warned him that he'd never know true self-control if he didn't do his time in the King's Army. The whole point of the military was to train alphas to control their beasts so that they could work together and not destroy themselves or anyone else.
Even his father would be proud of Merrick for not sneaking into that little breeder girl's room and fucking her senseless. He deserved a damned reward. He deserved her.
He'd been unable to break her, to show her he was bigger and badder. And she had escaped him.
His heart howled.
He threw himself into the madness of the loss.
There were few ways for an alpha without affiliation or pack to make credits in Sector 2.
Merrick soon found himself in the fighting pits, testing his strength against other alphas and creatures from the Un-lands.
He came close to death many times, but always healed.
His mother's love still reached him, her blessing a boon other men lacked.
He fought until he was more animal than man. He fought to prove his strength to himself. He fought until no one would challenge him.
He fought until he’d earned his self-respect back.
The hulking shape of his friend, Bezeck, sat down in the chair across from him, interrupting his thoughts. It creaked under his weight.
While not fat, Bezeck was wide. Short for an alpha, he made up intimidation points with his frightening, powerful appearance.
They'd met in the fighting pits and had become friends after Merrick nearly killed himself winning the match. Bezeck, although having lost, had come out of it fairly unscathed after falling unconscious to a chokehold.
At such an insulting loss, he’d hunted Merrick down for a rematch. When he found the other man with a concussion and several broken bones, he'd laughed at the absurdity of it and declared them friends.
"Did you hear?" he asked, pulling a massive pack off his back and setting it beside him. Bezeck was big enough to carry a house on his back.
"Hear what?"
"The First Administrator's bond-mate has brought another omega into the world. Their third girl, I believe." Bezeck watched him carefully.
He knew Merrick's story. More than a few drunken nights together had loosened their tongues over the years. Merrick had spent a lot of time jealous, angry, and grieving the loss of something he had never had.
Time passed. He grew less emotional.
But his brother’s happiness still made him want to kill.
"I'll leave them to their happiness. We have our own destiny to make, my friend."
Bezeck’s smile showed his stained brown teeth. "Good answer."
"Are you ready to do this with me? You have made a life here. There is nothing where I'm going."
"Stop askin' me that, friend. I had a house and a couple of slaves. Sold the house, takin' the slaves. You got the transport. Let's go, already."
Cut off from the trade and prosperity of the rest of the eleven Sectors, Sector 2 had only one resource for survival: the Un-lands. The Unlivable, Unredeemable, Unlawful, Un-Lands.
The 12 Sectors, where King Rhineholth had established his regime over a hundred years ago, were a part of a larger continent.
His King’s Army loosely patrolled the shattered cities and devastated lands around the sectors, taking out roving bands of wild drone cannibals, feral breed, and any other living thing that posed a threat.
While the sectors were their own, self-sustaining environment, the Un was dangerous and full of unknowns.
Brave scavengers, or scabs, went out into the Un-lands and brought back resources for trade. They found things from before the great devastation, bringing back animal skins, fruit from ancient orchards no farmer had been able to propagate, and treasures from the past.
The scabs told stories of wild breed tribes that had children. They hadn't seen the children, but they had heard them, smelled them. Breed children.
It could be a myth.
But it was a treasure worth hunting. If there were breed children, there were breeders. Uninfected, healthy, wild breeders.
Merrick had lost his chance with Sasha.
He had screwed up his chance in the 12 Sectors.
But there was hope in the Un, and he was going to find it.
Merrick handed the keys for the transport to Bezeck. "You know where it is. Could you load your stuff, your drones, and keep it running? I need about twenty minutes." He considered, a sneer on his face. "Maybe fifteen."
Thinking of Sasha, Merrick had his eyes on the girl in the cage.
If Bezeck felt surprised, he didn't show it. He knew Merrick never paid for pussy.
"I'll be ready in ten," Bezeck said, heaving his bulk upward.
Ten minutes later, with all their bridges burned, they left the 12 Sectors.
Merrick made sure the breeder cage would stay empty.