The Future Without Hope (10 page)

Chapter
4
. Explanations

SOMETHING
HITS ME, and I jerk upright, scrambling for a knife. Nurrin is standing a few
feet away, my weapons on the desk next to her. I find the wet rag she threw and
toss it to the floor.

She’s
changed out of the ridiculous clothing of the order, and into something that
fits her a bit more—black jeans that hug her ass and sit a little low on her
hips, and a close-fitting top. I can see bruises on her arms, snaking up under
her shirt. They make my hands clench in anger, and I’m reminded I haven’t
killed the bastards responsible for this.

“What
did you do to find me?” she asks, softly. She’s looking at the ground, her wet
hair hanging down to hide her face, but I know that question cost her.

“The
same thing you did to survive, Nurrin,” I say. Her head jerks up, startled, and
I force a smile. “What I had to. And there is no judgment in that.”

She
bites her lip, and nods sharply. Straightens away from the table. “Can we trust
Omar?”

“Of
course not,” I say, immediately. I roll to the edge of the bed, and her gaze
skates over my naked chest for a moment, before she flushes and looks away
again.

“Why
do you hate him so much?”

I
drop my bag on the bed and pause, staring at her. “What did Kenny tell you?”

She
shrugs, looking uneasy. I know why. The last thing we had done, before she was
kidnapped, was fight over her underhanded ways of getting information. To call
her on it now—

“Look,
I get it. I get why you went to Kenny.”

Her
gaze jerks up, startled. “You aren’t mad?”

“Of
course I’m mad,” I snap. “But I get it. I’d have done the same in your
position. It was shitty and underhanded, and I can’t blame you.”

Her
eyes narrow. “You’re being too nice.”

I
laugh, and pull a shirt on. Her eyes skate low over my abs as I tug the shirt
down, and I smirk when her gaze comes back up.

“See
something you like?”

“Biological
needs, O’Malley,” she says coolly. Smartass.

“So?”
I nudge, refocusing her.

“He
didn’t tell me anything. He drugged me and babbled about your mother. Claire
wouldn’t tell me anything that matters—not about Kelsey or Omar. And I’m tired
of being only one on this fucking train that doesn’t know what the fuck
happened.”

I
stare at her for a long moment. I’ve risked my life for her, and watched her
grow up from a spunky, spoiled brat to a hard edged, determined woman who
survived the shit the Order had to dish out. And losing her drove me to a
violence even Kelsey’s death didn’t achieve. There’s something to be said for
that.

“Kelsey
was my best friend,” I say, softly. The words catch in my throat. I swallow
hard, not sure I can get all of this out, but knowing I don’t have a lot of
options. She deserves this. “Omar was our squad leader, but she was the one we
all followed. It wasn’t just that she was the president’s daughter—it’s that
she threw herself into every fight like there was no way to lose.” I pause.
“Until she did. Omar led us into a mission that we knew was suicide, but he
promised we’d all come home whole.” There’s more. She can look at me, and my
volatile past with Omar, and she’s smart enough to put shit together.

She
knows damn well that there’s more to it.

But
I can’t go deeper than that, not right now.

With
Nurrin, maybe not ever.

“So
why are we trusting him now?” she asks, and I let out a breath. Because even if
it is a question, it’s one I can tolerate.

“Because
it was the only option. No one in 1 was telling me shit, and the longer you
were gone, the more desperate I got. So I got the Order’s attention, shook the
tree a little, and Omar is what fell out.”

“How?”

I
look up at her, and she shivers at whatever she sees in my eyes. Bites her lip
and looks away. No one is okay with the kind of violence I embraced, to get her
back. Even knowing why, I can’t expect her to be able to swallow it.

Her
eyes narrow.

“I
killed Order priests and priestesses until they finally took notice,” I say.

She
stares at me for a long tense moment, and I don’t know if she’ll bolt or if
she’ll accept this—me.

Nurrin
shifts, and tosses me a stick of dried fruit. I catch it from the air and stare
at it as she busies herself strapping on her weapons.

Her
gun—the one I used to kill the Order—she hesitates over, and glances back at me
once.

“It’s
yours,” I say, and she nods once, shoving it into her holster and tucking a few
throwing stars into her pocket. A shiny garrote wire wraps around her wrist.

She
looks savage and beautiful, and like the girl I’ve come to know—not the one I
watched and resented in Hellspawn, but the girl I’ve been forced to get to know
and trust in the Wide Open. I swallow hard, a rush of arousal fighting the
absurd pride I feel for her.

I
have a hard time trusting. After Kelsey, it was almost impossible. I trusted
one person—Collin—to watch my back. To protect me.

But
I trust her.

“Omar
is waiting for us,” Nurrin says, and she holds out my katana.

It’s
not acknowledging what I did. She won’t. But I know what she is doing, and I’ll
take it. I stand, and slip the sword over my head to rest on my back. “Then we
should go. It wouldn’t do to keep the High Priest waiting.”

I
can feel her laughter, a small puff of air on my back as I step out of the
little room that has become ours, with her on my heels.

Chapter
5.
The Mad Priest

“WE
CAN TAKE BACK THE EAST.”

Behind
me, Nurrin makes a choked noise. I don’t blame her much. It’s an idiotic claim,
even if Omar does have the best intentions and goals.

He’s
always been a fanatic. When we found him in the Stronghold, I thought he had
channeled that passion into the cult. Stupid, deadly, but in the end, not my
problem.

Now
I realize I was wrong. He was still fighting the same war he had been ten years
ago. But we lost it ten years ago, and we’ll lose it now.

“We
can’t.” I shake my head, “You know we can’t—and even if we could, the loss of
life is too extreme. We can’t afford to have another few million lives tossed
aside for a coast we can’t keep.”

“As
long as we let them have the East, we’ll never put this disease to rest. We’ll
keep hiding behind our walls until there is nothing left. Until the walls fall
and the hordes take every last uninfected life on the continent. You know it’s
coming—fuck, you told us about this shit.” Omar is glaring at me, and I
straighten, away from the wall I’m leaning against.

Holly,
sitting next to Omar, stiffens, a little, and I smirk at her. Little apocalypse
baby can keep on thinking she’s fucking big enough to hurt me.

Nurrin,
miraculously, stays quiet at my side.

“We
can’t do this, Omar. You know its suicide. We fought this war before—it’s not
our fight anymore. It’s no one’s fight.”

“We
never should have conceded the battle,” he snarls.

I
remember the day I heard we were conceding—the day Buchman took us aside and
told me and Kelsey we were pulling out of the East.

Fast
and clean. That’s what we were told. The evac would be flawless—trains were
being specially designed, and we’d move out en masse. Without leaving anything
for the zombies to chase, we had a chance to contain it.

Some
would wander into Wide Open territory near the Havens. We expected that. What
was left of the Marines—and by then, that was a handful of a once strong
force—were tasked with keeping the unofficial border.

It
was a crazy plan. After ten years, and hundreds of thousands dead, to leave it
all behind—to say, “Fuck it. We can’t win this one.”

It
was the only option, and I hated Buchman for taking it. Because it was the
coward’s way out, and the politicians’. They didn’t lose men on the field. They
didn’t watch friends get bitten, and eat a bullet because they refused to
change. They didn’t clear dead towns, torching preschools of infected children,
monstrous in their fury and hunger.

They
didn’t fight the fucking war. They tallied the numbers and when it swung too
wildly out of our favor, they said, “Fuck it. Come home.”

And
like mindless sheep, we did.

It
was
clean, for the most part. The
promise to extract quick and easy was kept—it was possibly the only time in
history that the military did something efficiently.

There
were two places the evac didn’t go as planned—a small foothold in Tennessee was
overrun a few hours before their planned extraction.

And
Columbus.

Nurrin
shifts next to me, and I blink, focusing on Omar. Pushing my memories and my
dead into the past where they belong.

“Nothing
has changed, Omar,” I say, evenly. “There are too many of them and too few of
us. We can’t secure the land we clear. It’s the same problem we faced ten years
ago.”

Omar
glances at Holly and she shifts, opening a small computer.

Before
the world changed, they were common—everyday accessories that everyone used.
And then the world fell apart, and we lost that.

We
lost so fucking much.

She
twists the computer, and I stare at the screen.

“For
the past two years, we’ve been sending in small parties—units of three or five
black priests—to monitor.” She clicks a few keys and the map changes, narrowing
in on the west coast—the Havens.

“The
red shows the uninfected. The black are zombies,” she says.

It’s
slightly terrifying, watching the black masses moving outside the Haven walls,
not pushing. Not threatening.

In
small groups they aren’t. But they never stay in small groups. That’s where the
trouble always comes.

“This,”
Holly says, “is the East.”

The
coast is almost empty. A few small, black clusters near New York and scattered
in the south. Enough that they would need to be dealt with. A surprisingly
large red cluster in Florida. But not the widespread horde I expected. I stare,
and then I glance at Omar.

“What
happened?”

Omar
smiles, coldly triumphant. “They died.”

Nurrin
pushes off the wall, and I can feel her vibrating with suppressed emotion. I
give her a sharp look, and her lips thin, furiously. Then I refocus on Omar.
“They’re already dead, Omar. That’s their defining characteristic.”

“But
they don’t stay dead, right? They come back and spread the infection and that
was the problem with the war because when the enemy stands up and takes a bite
out of you, it’s hard to win anything.” Omar’s voice goes up in question, and I
nod, grudgingly. “Except that we aren’t dealing with that. We know how to kill
them, and the force we take in will be better at it than the mass army we took
ten years ago. And the infects are at the disadvantage this time.”

I
point at the little map, with its blinking, empty space. “Where did they go?”

“We
left,” he says. “And the infects had nothing to feed on. And ERI-Milan reacts
to outside stimuli—to the things in its environment.”

“Right.
Which was the second problem.”

That’s
why we didn’t win. Why we couldn’t. Because we all carried ERI-Milan, and when
an army faced a horde, it changed—in everyone. It mutated, adapting to the new
emotions in the brain and the external stimuli. It’s what spelled out our end
when the Army clashed with the horde in Atlanta, twenty years ago, and it
defeats us even now.

ERI
worked because it changed to meet the moods and emotions of the host.

ERI-Milan
damns us because of the same thing.

The
infects changed us. And even now that we know how to kill them, we can’t fight
them in large numbers without risking the same thing that spiraled out of
control so long ago.

“Finn,
the East could be what saves us,” Omar says fiercely. “Gives us a place to
retreat to—you know we need that, with the Havens falling. And this—this is
winnable. It wasn’t ten years ago, but they’re dead—they’ve decayed and starved
to death. We couldn’t win and we left it to them. But conceding then, that
doesn’t mean we have to forget our roots forever. We can take it back. We can
take it all.”

I
stare at him, and I shake my head. Because looking at this, I could believe
him. And it’s still a lie. That’s what’s terrifying. That even knowing what I
know of Omar and the way he works, even knowing that he’s manipulative and
always hiding something—usually something hella important—I want to believe
him.

So
many of us who fought for the East never got over the loss. We couldn’t,
really.

Everyone
thinks that the zombies changed everything. They did. But it’s not about a
single event that changes shit. Every generation has that. Every country has
that. A moment in time that is a clear point, that marks before and after.

The
zombies were ours, and it wasn’t for a generation or a country, it was for the
world. But what came after—the way we allowed every goddamned thing to be
changed—that is the worst part of this new world. The way we fought a battle we
should have won, and gave up, because fear said we had to.

I
straighten, away from the wall and Nurrin, and turn. There is too much going on
for me to keep chasing my thoughts, here. I need a little space, to think. And
that’s when Omar drops the coup de grace.

“ERI-Milan
can be cured.”

Part
7.

The
Truth Of The World

Truth
is rarely written—its exposed in the world.

Unknown-

The
truth is that this is it. We can’t get away from the infection. We can’t win
this war.

Finn
O’Malley-