Darkness I Become (The Wastelander)

Chapter 1

Drowning was a choice.

That’s what Asha’s father would’ve said in her situation.

When you can no longer keep your head above water, just paddle harder, and if you can’t—because of exhaustion, or pain, or because you just don’t have the will to keep on fighting—that’s your fault.

You should’ve tried harder. When you opened your lungs to water, it’s because you were weak.

Spoken like someone who’s never had their head held underwater, Asha thought bitterly. Sanctimonious prick.

Now, lying beneath the smooth surface of the water in a filthy old bathtub, she opened her eyes and wished she could drown. That might be preferable to what awaited her above. The last few days replayed in her head like a distant, horrible dream that she couldn’t wake up from.

Four days ago, she’d been living in the safest place that still existed, thirty years after the world ended: The Cave. A secure, walled compound where laws, schools, and technology still existed. A bastion of hope amidst a post-apocalyptic Wasteland.

Until they came, in black masks painted with gold eye symbols.

She’d just gotten home from work when it happened: a colossal, ear-splitting bang that set her teeth on edge.

Peering out the window of her small townhome, she saw black smoke rising from the centre of the compound—an explosion of some kind.

It was a strange juxtaposition with the trimmed curtains and floral pillows of her small living room.

Quiet, contained domestic tranquility crossed with sudden, inexplicable chaos.

Her husband wasn’t home yet, and if she was being honest, she hadn’t even thought of him at that moment.

Instead, she stared in shock as screams started to fill the air, and demons dressed in black descended on her neighbourhood, gold eye emblems emblazoned over their black masks.

Her neighbour down the street—a kindly older man called Dylan—was the first to die.

At the explosion, Asha watched him step out of his house in confusion.

Two of the gold eye masks advanced rapidly up the street, guns in hand.

A second later, she heard another loud bang, and then Dylan was lying face down in the middle of the street.

A river of red began to flow out from underneath him.

It was hard to process what she was seeing. For a second or two, she simply stood there at the window, stunned. No one told her what it would be like to see the life she’d always known suddenly shatter apart, all in a fraction of a second.

Her shock cost her, however. The two men in masks turned their heads in her direction and spotted her in the window. For a split second, neither party moved. Then the one on the left raised his rifle.

Asha screamed as she threw herself to the floor, narrowly avoiding the bullet that blasted through her window, showering her with glass.

She scrambled across the floor towards the kitchen at the back of the house.

Meanwhile, the men pounded on the front door.

She breathed a momentary sigh of relief that she’d always been that person who reflexively locked doors as soon as she got home.

But it wouldn’t hold them off for long. Asha heard the splintering of wood as she clambered to her feet in the kitchen, and she flew to the back door, where she made her escape into the tiny yard.

It wasn’t much more than a patio and a comically small patch of grass lined with shrubbery, but the fence was only knee-high—easily climbable.

She raced for it and vaulted over, right into her neighbour’s thick, untrimmed rose bushes.

Thorns pricked her all over, and Asha winced, but knew she couldn’t afford to stop.

Her thoughts were racing as she crawled along the line of rose bushes, using them for concealment.

All around her were sounds of chaos and slaughter: screams, gunshots, heavy footfalls of people fleeing for their lives.

Where can I go? She thought, her heart pounding in her ears. She didn’t know if the masks were all over the compound, or where they’d come from. More than that, she wondered, why is no one stopping this?

The Cave was heavily militarized. It was necessary to protect them from the Wastelanders outside its walls, and it made no sense that so far, she’d seen little to no signs of resistance.

Asha decided to try to reach her mother’s house. She lived just down the street, and she worked for the government. She’d know what was happening.

Asha managed to move forward through people’s backyards, using shrubbery and patio furniture to conceal herself as best she could. She thanked her lucky stars that her pursuers had obviously been diverted and weren’t actively chasing her anymore.

Another stroke of luck: nobody was searching the yards yet, probably because they were too busy killing people in their homes. The thought chilled her blood, and she had to push it down to keep going. She had to shut out the screams and the growing stench of death or she’d never make it.

She finally climbed over the fence into her mother’s backyard. The yard itself appeared undisturbed. Asha dared to approach the back door of the house and peer through its window. The house looked empty. She tried the knob, but it was locked.

Cursing under her breath, Asha trembled, trying to decide what to do.

There were no sounds from inside the house, and her gut told her that her mother, for whatever reason, wasn’t home.

She could try to break in and hide there, hoping no one would notice her…

or she could keep moving, try to find someone else she knew.

Hiding and waiting for help to come was tempting. But it would also make her a sitting duck. Some primal voice inside her whispered, No one is coming. We’re on our own.

Because based on everything she’d ever been taught, an attack like this should not have been possible.

The compound had complex alarm systems for intruders, and the military ran rapid-response drills for Wastelander attacks.

There was no response at all, as far as she could tell.

No emergency sirens. No firefights. Just slaughter.

So, something had gone terribly wrong. Worse than she could possibly imagine. And she didn’t know what it would mean—she couldn’t have, not then. But she knew, deep in her gut, that staying meant certain death.

Claire. The name of her best friend came to her mind as easily as breathing. She lived a couple blocks over, and her husband was an emergency room doctor. He might know more about evacuation efforts, or where to find help.

Heart in her mouth, Asha charted a course to Claire’s house through people’s yards, praying to every God she didn’t believe in that her friend was alive.

Asha resurfaced, coughing, as a short, ugly man with a handlebar moustache banged open the dilapidated wood door.

“Get the fuck out!” he yelled. “You’ve been at it long enough.”

She flailed uselessly in the rusted old tub, trying to cover her naked body, but the short, toothless man who’d entered the room just laughed.

“No secrets between us, sweetheart,” he said, grabbing her cheek. She recoiled, but he held fast. “We’ll be getting to know each other much better soon.”

She didn’t think about doing it; she simply reacted. She turned her head and sunk her teeth into his hand. He tasted like dirt and something salty she didn’t want to think about.

He roared with pain and released her, then cupped his bleeding hand and examined the distinct tooth marks in his flesh.

“Bitch,” he bit out. “Don’t know where you came from, girlie, but you’re about to learn your place.”

Asha gasped in surprise and pain as he grabbed a handful of her black hair and pulled, forcing her out of the washtub.

He threw her to the floor, still naked and soaking wet, and pain lanced her side as he kicked her in the ribs.

She doubled over, trying to protect herself with her arms, but the second kick didn’t hurt any less than the first.

“Don’t get carried away there, Pike, or no one’ll want her,” a gruff male voice said from the door. “No good if she’s all roughed up before auction.”

Auction? Asha snapped to attention. She hadn’t been told anything about these men’s true intentions since they’d kidnapped her a day ago. She’d been wandering through the dense forest with nothing but the clothes on her back, desperately searching for food.

When she at last spotted a rabbit roasting over an open flame, all good sense abandoned her.

The smoky scent of sizzling meat was dizzying.

She’d gotten sick from drinking the water from a stream a couple of days prior, causing her body to empty itself of every shred of nourishment via painful vomiting and diarrhea.

She’d eaten nothing in a week and was dangerously dehydrated.

But of course, when she’d approached the campfire, she’d walked right into Pike, and into this waking nightmare that refused to end.

Four smelly, grimy Wastelander men had tied her up and forced her to walk for what felt like forever, until her legs gave out and they were forced to feed and water her, lest she not make it to wherever the hell they were going.

Any questions about where they were taking her earned her a sharp slap across the cheek.

They led her to a much larger campsite, where more brutish, dirty men greeted them. Asha hated the way they openly leered at her.

“Such a pretty one,” a man with greasy hair and missing front teeth crooned. “Such lovely skin…like polished copper.”

She recoiled as his clammy, meaty hand touched her cheek, leaving behind a mysterious oily substance that she hastily wiped on the sleeve of her worn winter jacket.

“She’s a prize,” Pike had replied, showing off several blackened, rotting teeth. “Never seen one like her before. So untouched. So pretty.”