My Apocalypse Rescuer (Wild Apocalypse Protectors #7)

Chapter 1

one

Avery

It’s been four years since the outbreak. Three since the Iron Wolves burned Clearwater to the ground, and I rebuilt it from the ashes.

The family at our gates looks exactly like every other desperate group I've turned away since then. Father supporting an injured wife. Teenage daughter hovering close, eyes too old for her face. That particular desperation of people who've been running for days.

"Please," the father begs. "Just one night."

I stand on the elevated platform above the main gate, rifle across my arms. Forty-three lives depend on me making the right call.

Something feels off about the daughter. The way she moves. The way she won't meet my eyes. But something always feels off. That's what keeps us alive.

"Check them for weapons and bites," I call down to Harry. "One night. Gone by dawn."

Three years ago, the Iron Wolves burned this place to the ground while I screamed into the radio for help that never came. We saved ourselves. Twenty-three survivors became forty-three through hard choices and harder walls.

Hard choices like locking the gates when people were still outside, screaming to be let in while zombies tore them apart. Lisa, fifteen years old, pounding on the metal until her fists were bloody. I can still hear her voice.

Please, Avery. Please.

"The new family's been processed," Harry says later. "Daughter won't stop asking questions."

My stomach tightens. "Post extra eyes."

"Already done."

This is why I trust Harry. Paranoid keeps you breathing.

I take my midnight perimeter walk alone. The walls are higher now than they were three years ago. No one gets in unless I allow it. No one gets left outside unless I choose it.

The east fence catches my attention.

Scraping. Metal on metal. Someone is climbing over.

I raise my rifle and signal the nearest guard with a whistle. My heart pounds with fury. Someone dared breach my walls.

The infiltrator drops into our compound near the generator building. Fast. Quiet. Skilled. My guards converge and he fights back—but here's what makes me hesitate.

Non-lethal moves.

He takes down two of my people with strikes that drop them without killing. Deliberately pulls his punches. Uses positioning instead of weapons. Like he's trying not to hurt them.

We corner him against the generator's metal siding. Six rifles aimed at his chest.

My finger hovers over the trigger, but something stops me. He could have killed my guards. Didn't. If he wanted us dead, he'd have come in shooting.

"Hold fire," I call out. "I want to know why he's here before we waste the ammunition."

"Hands up."

He complies immediately, and the moonlight catches him full-on.

Oh.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. The kind of build that says military training and hard living. Dark hair that needs cutting, a jaw shadowed with stubble. His face is all hard angles and sharp focus—the face of a man who's seen too much and survived through it all.

But it's his eyes that get me. Even with six rifles pointed at his chest, even knowing he might die in the next thirty seconds, there's no panic there. Just assessment. Calculation. And underneath it all, something that looks like bone-deep exhaustion.

I know that exhaustion. I wear it every day.

"I'm not here to hurt anyone," he says. His voice is rough, controlled, with an edge that suggests he's spent years giving orders and expecting them to be followed. "I'm here for the girl."

My professional detachment wavers for half a second. His voice does something to my spine, it makes me stand straighter, makes me aware of the space between us.

I crush the feeling immediately. "What girl?"

"The teenager you let in tonight. Her father is a raider who leads a big bunch of them. He uses the call name Old Hawk. He's using her to scout your defenses."

Old Hawk. I haven’t heard the name before. This guy was probably lying through his teeth.

My grip tightens on my rifle. "That's a serious accusation."

The invader keeps talking anyway. "Her father runs a crew of about fifteen. He's sent daughters into settlements before. They map the layout, identify weaknesses, and then the raiders hit hard at dawn."

His voice is steady. Certain. Along with an urgency that feels personal, not professional.

"And you know this how?"

"Because I've been tracking them for three weeks. Followed them here when I realized," He stops. Something crosses his face. Recognition. Horror. Pain so raw I almost lower my rifle. "When I realized this was Clearwater."

The way he says the name. Like it's carved into his bones.

"You know this settlement?"

"I know what happened here three years ago." His voice has changed. Rougher. Rawer. "The Iron Wolves attack. The distress call."

Ice floods my veins. We broadcast on every frequency that night. Begged for help. No one came.

"A lot of people heard that call," I say carefully. "No one responded."

"I heard it." He meets my eyes, and I see guilt and grief and a kind of devastation that I recognize because I carry the same weight. "I was forty miles out, tracking a different target. I heard you screaming for help, and I made a choice."

"What choice?"

"I chose not to come."

For a moment I can't breathe, can't think.

Anyone, please. We're being overrun. Please.

And this man, he heard me. He heard me screaming and he walked away.

"You heard us dying," I say, and my voice is steadier than I feel, "and you kept walking."

"I was too far to do anything. I thought you were already lost. I thought…

" He stops, jaw tight. There's a muscle jumping there, tension radiating through his whole body.

"There was another settlement. Children.

I thought I could save them instead. By the time I got there, they were already gone.

Evacuated two days before. I saved no one that night. "

The pain in his voice is real. I know real pain when I hear it.

"Countless people died because help never came."

"Yes." Just that. No excuses. No justifications. Just the weight of a choice that destroyed him as much as it destroyed us.

I should kill him. Every instinct says pull the trigger, end this conversation, bury another ghost. My finger tightens on the rifle.

But he climbed into my settlement to warn me. Knowing what he'd done. Knowing I might execute him for it.

"Why are you here?" I ask.

"Because this time, I'm not walking away.

" His voice is steady despite the six rifles pointed at his chest. Despite the fact that he knows I have every reason to kill him.

"I can't undo what I did. Can't bring back the people who died because I made the wrong call.

But I can help you survive what's coming. If you'll let me."

"Why should I let you do anything except bleed out in my yard?"

"Because I'm right about the girl, and you'll need my help to survive what's coming. And because killing me won't bring back the people you lost."

I stare at him in the moonlight. This man carries that choice like I carry mine. Who looks at me like he sees past the walls and the rifle and the leader who makes hard choices, straight through to the woman who still hears screaming.

I don't want him to see that. I don't want to see the same thing reflected in his eyes.

"Put him in the holding cell," I tell Harry, not taking my eyes off the stranger. "Double guard. No one talks to him until I say."

"And then?"

I look at the stranger one more time. See the guilt carved into every line of his face. The exhaustion that matches mine. The way he's standing there like he expects to die but came anyway.

I recognize it, because I see the same thing in my mirror every morning.

"Then we find out if he's telling the truth." I lower my rifle slowly. "And I decide whether saving my settlement is worth working with the man who left us to die."

As Harry hauls him away, the stranger looks back once. Our eyes meet across the compound, and I feel a jolt of connection.

I turn away before he can see that it affects me.

Before I can admit that it already has.