Chapter 8
Cade frowned. “We’ve all done bad things. If it’s my judgment you’re worried about, I don’t have much of a leg to stand on. You said it yourself.”
The images of her last days with Claire flashed through Asha’s mind.
The fear they both felt, cast into a wilderness that nothing in their lives had ever prepared them for.
The shock and ache at the loss of everything and everyone they knew, and the knowledge that they had no time to grieve. Survival wouldn’t allow it.
It was enough to make her shudder and avert her eyes from Cade’s. She couldn’t tell him the story if she saw him looking at her with that piercing stare of his.
“At first, we were just scared out of our minds,” Asha said haltingly.
“We had no food, no water, nothing to really help us survive beyond a flashlight and some blankets that Claire brought. I had nothing but the clothes on my back. Then, hunger and thirst set in. We drank from a stream that made us sick. We didn’t know to boil the water. ”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cade nod. His expression was unreadable.
“We holed up in an old barn,” she continued. “For a couple days, we were so sick that we couldn’t move. On the third day, we felt well enough to walk. I think we both knew that if we didn’t, we’d die there.”
She took a hard swallow. “We found this old, abandoned factory. At least, it looked abandoned. We were desperate for supplies, so we stopped. All went to hell in a matter of minutes, though.”
Asha bit her bottom lip and took a sharp inhale as more images resurfaced: a horde of young men. Dirty and dressed in rags, carrying clubs and bats. Fierce, angry, and worse—hungry.
“But it wasn’t abandoned, right?” Cade eventually prompted, and she shook her head to clear it.
“No,” she replied. “There were…strange men there. They looked something like Old World depictions of cavemen. One of them—seemed like the leader—was wearing this weird necklace. All these small, off-white beads, lined up in a row. Took me a minute to realize they were human teeth.”
She heard Cade inhale sharply before he said, “Cannibals.”
“You know about them?” Asha asked, hating how her voice shook.
He nodded. “Had some run-ins with them. They attack settlements from time to time. From what I gather, they move in packs and breed like rabbits. Wouldn’t have thought that people would go feral so quickly after the end, but a lot of them were born into it and never knew anything else.
I always wondered if maybe the powers-that-be might’ve…
tipped the scales towards them never recovering. ”
Asha frowned. “What do you mean? Powers-that-be?”
“Whoever runs the Delta,” he answered, like it was nothing. “They keep civilians in the dark about it, but they always had some new science experiment going on. I only knew a little more because of my position, but it doesn’t take much imagination to think they may’ve had something to do with it.”
Unsure how to process that information, Asha filed it away for later.
“Anyway, they chased us, and we ran for our lives,” she continued, trying to take deep breaths.
“I barely even remember that part because I just…panicked. Never been so scared. I couldn’t think clearly, so I picked a direction and ran as fast and as far as I could.
I was almost to the chain-link fence around the property before I even realized that Claire wasn’t with me, and that the cannibals had stopped chasing me. ”
Cade’s eyes had softened, and she hated how damn understanding he looked. She didn’t deserve it.
“They caught her,” he said quietly.
Asha hugged herself, shaking like a leaf. “Yeah. I doubled back and saw them grab her. She tried to get away, but there were too many. They dragged her by her hair, and…”
She was quiet for long enough that Cade said, “Did they kill her?”
“Definitely,” Asha replied, her chest swelling with shame. “I didn’t see it, though, because I left her there.”
There it was: the awful truth that she’d been trying too hard to suppress. She was a coward, and she hadn’t lifted a finger to help her friend.
“Even now, I don’t totally understand why I did it,” she continued, her lips trembling.
“And why I spit in the face of a man who tried to sell me, when just days earlier, I choked at the most crucial moment. All I can come up with is…ordinary men, I can handle. They weren’t ordinary men.
They were like animals, and I didn’t know what to do, and—”
“You did exactly what you should’ve done,” Cade broke in crisply. “For a civilian compound woman with no training and no weapons, you did the only thing that made sense for your survival. The only thing you’d have achieved by helping her is your death.”
“You wouldn’t have done it, though,” she said, a little brokenly. “You wouldn’t have frozen up like that and abandoned Leo, or Dom.”
He folded his arms over his chest, straightened to his full height, and fixed her with a steel grey stare.
“I’m a soldier, darling. I was assigned at eighteen and served for a decade before I left the Delta. It’s my job to run towards the danger. That’s not something I was born with; it’s years of training that you don’t have. Leo and Dom have the same training. We’re not a fair comparison.”
There was a long, tense moment where Asha wasn’t sure what to say.
Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been this.
She’d thought he would scoff at her, tell her she was a silly girl who wasn’t prepared to face the realities of this world.
She wasn’t sure how to interpret mercy coming from a man who lived in a place like this.
“Why do you live here, with these people?” she burst out. “You obviously know how to survive. Why would you settle here with Angel, if you’re…not like him?”
Cade considered her for a moment before answering.
“It wasn’t my first choice, but it became the logical one.
At first, when we left the Delta, we were just trying to get by.
We moved around a lot, hunting and trapping for food and sleeping under the stars.
But winter was coming, and we needed somewhere to settle. We eventually found Ashburn.”
“Ashburn?”
“An abandoned fishing village,” he answered.
“It was secluded, out in the middle of nowhere, and had a bunch of cabins that were in decent condition. It was on a lake, and the fish meant we wouldn’t go hungry.
We fortified it, planted a garden, and even recruited a couple dozen residents from the Post that spring—people who could help us built it into a proper settlement.
It wasn’t much, but it was a good enough home. ”
“The Post?” Asha asked, frowning.
“It’s a Wastelander settlement up north,” Cade said. “Only a hundred-and-fifty kilometres or so from the Delta. It’s independent, not owned by gangs. Some good people there. But it didn’t matter, because the winter after that, there was a plague that wiped them all out.”
Asha gave a small gasp. “All of them?”
“Yeah. I don’t know why me, Leo, and Dom didn’t get sick. Only thing I can figure is that, coming from the compound, we must’ve been immune somehow, or just damn lucky. But nobody else was. It was…grim, for a long time.”
She softened. “I can imagine. Do you think…I mean, I don’t know if it’s possible, but…that it was the virus that caused the Fall? I know they told us it’s extinct, but they also told us that there were no Wastelander settlements.”
Cade’s brow furrowed. “I guess I don’t know. They didn’t have the classic neurological symptoms, but then again, none of us ever saw someone afflicted with it before. It’s possible, I suppose, that through our implants, we’re immune somehow. But…”
“But they always said there was no vaccine and no cure,” Asha finished. It was an unsettling thing, to realize everything you knew was questionably true. Sorting through propaganda was never an easy exercise.
“Yeah. Hard to know the truth.”
“So…what happened after that?”
“None of us wanted to stay after that,” Cade continued.
“Probably stupid in retrospect, but at the time, we were demoralized. We’d worked hard to build a decent life on the outside, and it was torn apart so quickly.
We decided to be nomadic again—move from place to place, seeing where we ended up.
We traveled south because we knew there were more settlements here, especially near the old capital. ”
“And that’s when you met Angel?”
“Yeah,” Cade said bitterly. “About eight months ago, we ended up in a skirmish with some of the members of a rival gang. Angel was there and saw what the three of us were capable of. So, he made us an offer: become his special forces group, and we’d have a decent place to settle, food to eat, and more.
We weren’t starving, but winter was coming, and we knew how quickly that could change. ”
His lips twitched. “He dubbed us the Blackguard because of our black military uniforms, and because he wanted us to sound intimidating. He let me pick out some of his better fighters, and we trained them as best we could. We’ve been here ever since.”
Asha let out a breath. “Not your best decision, was it, soldier?”
Cade shrugged. “Not my worst, either. My job is to make the calls that keep my guys alive. I did what I had to do at the time.”
There was an uncomfortable silence where Asha wasn’t sure what to say.
Cade was hard to pin down. She wanted to villainize him, to write him off as a willing participant in the horrors in this awful place.
At the same time, however, he was the only reason she wasn’t either dead or servicing every man in the Nest. He’d admitted he found her desirable, and he certainly could’ve taken advantage of her in her weakened state, but he hadn’t made a move.
If anything, he’d tried to put her at ease as much as possible.
But it was also his fault that she’d ever been in a position to be raped by Angel.
He’d miscalculated how much Angel would enjoy cuckolding him, holding something over his head, because Angel wasn’t a rational man who would negotiate in good faith.
He was an amoral psychopath who saw his power as an opportunity to inflict cruelty with impunity.
He enjoyed it. Cruelty wasn’t a side-effect of his reign; it was the whole fucking point.
“So, what makes you think Angel’s going to let you have me this time?” she said acerbically. “What’s stopping him from holding me over your head again as a prize for whatever stupid thing he wants you to do next?”
Cade’s expression darkened. “I’ll handle it. There’s supposed to be a welcoming party tomorrow night…and I plan to give him a gift he won’t forget.”
“Well, I wish that made me feel better,” Asha said with a sigh.
His expression softened slightly. “I wish it did, too.”
The tension between them didn’t lift, and for a moment, they stared at each other in silence. What a fragile thing trust was, Asha thought. Even its beginnings could be shattered in a single second.
Cade was the first to break the staring contest, clearing his throat awkwardly. She followed the black snake on his arm with her eyes as he unfolded his arms.
“So…you had a husband, back at the Cave?”
“Yeah,” Asha replied, not keen to discuss Eric. “Not like we had much choice, right? I’m guessing you had a wife, too?”
“Eventually,” he said with a small, rueful smile. “In the military, you can apply for delays on spouse assignment. I always figured they allowed it because when you’ve got less to lose, you’re not as worried about dying on the job.”
For some reason, the thought of Cade having a wife at home bothered her. She pictured him going home after a long day on patrol to a kiss and dinner on the table with the perfect wife—her exact opposite. Ugh.
“Why are you making that face?”
Asha rearranged her features carefully. “I’m not making any face.”
“You wrinkled your nose,” he said, amused. “Interesting.”
“I wrinkle my nose all the time,” she insisted, irritable. “Ever considered that you repulse me?”
“Nope,” Cade said with a grin, and she rolled her eyes, which just made him laugh. He really was the most irritating man she’d ever met.
“Tell me about this wife you abandoned, then,” Asha said, folding her arms. “Did you think of her before you decided to run off?”
Cade sobered. “That would’ve been a waste of time, since she’d been dead for weeks by that point.”
I really do have a terminal case of foot-in-mouth disease, don’t I? she thought helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” she said, gentling her tone. “I shouldn’t have assumed. What…happened to her?”
He hummed, as if trying to sort out what to tell her and what to keep to himself.
“I said there was an uprising at the Delta,” he said. “My wife—Janie—was part of it. I didn’t know at the time. I only found out because it was my job to help put down the rebellion. Violently.”
He looked at the floor, suddenly seeming distant. “She was shot by someone on my squad. We didn’t know it was her until later. We’d only been married a year.”
“That’s awful,” Asha murmured. “Did you love her?”
You care about this way more than you should, she told herself, but there was no heat behind it.
She felt bad for him, put in a position where he might have to fire on his own wife without even knowing it.
That’s what compound life is like. No constant conflict, but everyone is still pitted against everyone in the end.
A single report could get someone sent to “re-education”, from which nobody returned unscathed—physically or emotionally.
Cade gave a sad smile. “‘Love’ is a tough word in a government-arranged marriage. We got along, and she was good to me. Most of the time, though, neither of us were home enough to do much more than fuck and go back to work. Granted, we both liked that just fine.” He chuckled at Asha’s wrinkled nose. “You’re doing it again.”
“I am not,” she argued, even though she was. “You’re even worse than my husband. He, too, was an annoying ass who didn’t know when to quit…for different reasons.”
Cade’s amusement didn’t fade. “I hope to live up to his legacy, then. Big shoes to fill.”
Asha gave him the most irritated look she could muster, but something about the humorous glint in his eye made mysterious warmth stir in her belly, the way that sunshine did after a long bout of rain.