Chapter 58 Gedeon #2
“Your choice.” I cracked my knuckles to loosen them up, and my fist connected with his crooked nose. A satisfying crunch severed the thread of his silence.
A nose for a nose.
He had touched Kali’s, and I was damn sure about to make his worse.
Blood streamed from his nostrils and flowed into his mouth as he raised his head high.
“You’re not as good as you think. Not everyone at your contemptible compound thinks your principles are proper.
They know the right way. Humanity must survive.
And if that means taking what we need by force, so be it. ”
Zion snorted, tapping the blade on his thigh hidden by a pair of mottled sweatpants. “Hilarious, honestly, that he was abandoned here by his comrades. Their own green-banded commander, who should be expanding their population, was left for us to play with.”
His bloodshot eyes darted between Zion and me. “You have no idea what’s waiting for you.”
I crouched down before him. “That’s not what I asked.” Pinching his nose between my thumb and middle finger, I twisted the cartilage, breaking it further.
His scream accompanied the pleasant sensation of the flexible tissue giving way and twisting as I wished it.
Having decided to do something useful, I picked out dirt from under my nails while he yelled his favorite profanities, each curse word only spurring my imagination on how I was going to fracture the rest of his bones and cartilage.
“Tell me what I need to know, and I will let you go. Who told you where those we took from the Matching lived?” He didn’t need to know that letting him go meant letting his life leave the pathetic shell of a body he occupied.
He bared his reddened teeth, his blood soaking the collar of his uniform. “You steal our people, we take yours.”
Approaching us, Kali remarked, “He’s disgusting.” I stood up to flank her left side, and she glared at me. “How long is this going to take? You said he’s mine.”
“I did.” She had come at the perfect moment. “We will take him to the underground. Zion can demonstrate how to manipulate the pain points of a human body, and I will teach you a few useful things about their skeleton. Is that good enough?”
Her smile warmed me. “Deal.”
Stepping over the mutilated corpse clad in a uniform, a knife stuck in his left eye, the steel disappearing in depths of clotted blood, and a shoulder twisted out of its socket, as if trying to detach itself from the evil rooting in another puppet of Ilasall’s military, I waved Ezra and Ava over from the other side of the street where they were directing our teams on clean-up duties.
They trudged over to me, careful not to trip over the squishy bodily remains littering the road, their flesh as cold as the asphalt under my boots.
“What’s the count?” I cracked my neck. Dull pain pulsed under my right shoulder blade and my left side, right under the ribs, ached in addition to the quickly increasing swelling under my eye from a punch I had taken. For the next couple of weeks, I was sure to be colored in bruises.
Ezra rubbed his forehead, smearing the red specks staining his tired face.
“We don’t know exactly yet. More than two hundred dead of ours, more than fifty of theirs.
About a hundred taken. More wounded.” He freed his longer brown hair from the hair tie and re-tied the bun low on his nape.
“She’s making a list,” he said, indicating Kali with his chin.
Across the street, Kali helped Eislyn get an injured man to rise, his leg obviously broken. Dorvan. One of the shop owners who had been abused by the self-made mob months ago, now threatened by Ilasall.
Unfazed by the consequences of the first battle of an impending war, instead of taking a lead on whatever needed to be done, Kali pulled out a notepad from the pocket of Zion’s leather jacket she was wearing, hurriedly scribbled something down, most likely Dorvan’s name and condition, and moved on to another wounded, a teenage girl cradling her wrist, her hand hanging in an unnatural position.
It would take at least a few days to have the exact number of our losses, but the odds were not in our favor.
We were running out of time. A noose was tightening around my neck, and the Head of Ilasall was walking around me in concentric circles, closer and closer, waiting for me to take that final step into the snare that would secure the knot and the rope would pull me high up, my body swinging from a thick branch of an oak, the sounds of my suffocation a song of destiny awaiting our compound and likely the other two.
Peter was cunning, inventing one clever tactic after another, knowing just the right buttons to push to cause the exact right amount of pain to steer us into doing what he wanted.
He knew everything about us, thanks to the rat hiding in plain sight.
“What about the trucks?” I asked, my thoughts straying, summoning a visual of another funeral to host, where I would have to stand stoically near the blazing fires, where the cloying stench of burning flesh would drench me in heaviness together with the wails of families and friends of everyone we lost tonight.
“Most got away. We managed to hit the tires of three. Eli is checking to see if we can fix them up and use them ourselves.” Grimacing, Ava warily stretched her arms up. “I think my ribs got bruised.”
Ezra waved at the makeshift bandage secured around her right thigh. “Your leg has been shot and you’re worried about your ribs?”
“It’s just a graze. The bullet didn’t even go into my leg. And Eislyn stitched me up.” She tapped the half-soaked cloth, likely a strip of someone’s pink t-shirt. “There’s no time for rest, so I figured this might help to keep the stitches from tearing.”
“I still don’t understand how you’re standing.” Ezra squatted to check the pulse of a curvy figure lying face down in their own puddle of blood—obviously dead. But you always checked nevertheless.
“If you had to live with cramps and headaches every month since your first period, you’d understand.”
“Eislyn gave you some painkillers?” I asked, navigating around the three bodies of our neighborhood schoolteachers lying on top of each other on the crumbling sidewalk.
Their ashen faces and empty eyes called me back into the void that had kept me its lone prisoner for years, each tattoo on my back another brick in its impenetrable walls.
“How many soldiers have we taken alive?”
“Nope. She didn’t have any to spare. Lack of meds in general.
But either way, I wasn’t lying in bed. Too much work has to be done,” Ava said, rolling her eyes at Ezra waving her off and hurrying to help Amari lug a corpse himself.
They pulled it away from the middle of the road, clearing it for the others who would come to pick up the dead for incineration.
“We have six soldiers restrained,” Ezra told me, wiping his palms on his dark purple sweater stained in dirt and bodily liquids.
“That’s it?”
“You can’t say no to people killing them.
It’s like saying hey, you’ve shot my family, but I’m going to let you go,” Ava grumbled.
“Eli has taken all the six to the underground. No one has the balls to go there. If you need us, shout,” she said, nudging Ezra to join Jayla in helping our med team at the end of the street.
“We have to go! I have to get her back!”
I spun around to find Zion and Amari holding a writhing and yelling man, barely younger than me, one of the workers behind the bar at Vice.
“Why don’t you listen?” Ryn shouted, thrashing in their grasp. He ceased resisting as I strode to them. “Please, you have to listen,” he pleaded.
These things never became easier. “Ryn, who did they take?”
“My wife,” he cried out, desperation etched in each syllable.
A wife, a loved one, a sister. There was no difference. The incessant call for revenge could churn anyone’s insides. It could spin your senses into a whirlpool, creating an endless cycle of torment and agony. A loop with no exit, no light, no end.
“I’m sorry.” I repeated what I had said more than a decade ago to the others. “But we cannot go after her.”
His face went slack. “I have to,” he whispered.
“We will not repeat the mistakes of the past,” I said, my voice level, calm. I could not display a sole sign that this conversation had stirred up the memories I would have given anything to create anew. “Whoever we would send, they would not return.”
“You don’t understand!” Ryn tried to break free, and Amari reluctantly called for the med team. Eislyn cast one look at the man, ordered her assistant, and Jayce hurried over.
If Ryn didn’t calm down, we were going to have to physically restrain him. Shortage in meds meant sedation was not a viable option.
Zion took a deep breath. “I’ll talk to him.” Roughly scratching his chest, the flakes of caked-up blood flew off his skin, only to be replaced by the red paths his nails had left, as he motioned with his head. “Go. Find a way to sort this mess out.”
Leaving him to handle the distressed husband, I rolled up my sleeves and gritted my teeth at the tattoo curling around my forearm—a mark of a person whose main responsibility was to make calculated decisions without second guessing, without thinking about who you had to sacrifice.
Allowing myself one last look at our people swarming the streets, working tirelessly to restore them to a peaceful state or consoling the falling apart men and women kneeling near those they had cherished, I invited their sorrow into my muscles, using it as fuel to get through the night.
Together with the clean-up teams, we hauled Ilasall’s soldiers into piles and lined up our own dead on the sidewalk for their families and friends to find and identify before they began to rot.
But while my fingers dug into the clammy flesh, my body ached from the blows it had sustained, and my muscles burned from carrying the heavy corpses, my mind whirled.
You could not call this night the start of our war with Ilasall. It was an attack we had provoked ourselves, and one they used to take payment for our audacity to meddle in their business and to set a bait for me, a push for retaliatory action.
But rushed decisions and recklessness brought deaths, not victory. Not freedom.
We were far from ready to launch our forces onto the city, and the Head of Ilasall was betting on it. His scheme was as clear as day—it was the same one I would have set up in his place.
I had to find a way for us to survive the upcoming years before we grew into a formidable army set on destruction, giving rise to a civil war in his domain.
The dead I heaved blurred together as each wrinkle, each angle of a cheekbone, each curve of an eyebrow formed only one face.
The Head of Ilasall.