The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 2) (42 page)

“Reaver, don’t kill the standing one, I think he’s blind. He’s done nothing but follow the group, he didn’t hurt me,” I said over the gunfire. “Just leave him be, he won’t hurt us.”

Reaver gave me a look of disbelief before he shot another round into the crawling ones. I saw a fountain of blood appear where one of their eyes used to be. “You got to be fucking kidding me?”

“Please?” I pleaded. I heard him growl before he let off another round. The standing one still swaying towards us, he was so close I could see a squirming rat clenched into his boney hand, its eyes bulging out like small raisins.

The fact that his head didn’t explode meant Reaver listened to my pleas, though the ones surrounding him were dropping like flies, reduced to nothing but human-like shrieks and flailing twisted limbs.

Then the beep, the beep I recognised from Perish’s lab back in Donnely, with a shout from Jade we both fell back until, with an audible sigh, the metal door locked and pressurized. I turned the flashlight back on and quickly scanned the white walled hallways, much like the Donnely lab, that surrounded us.

Reaver dropped down to his knees at this point, and Perish’s corpse slid off of him. I looked at him and cried out in shock as I saw part of his scalp had been ripped off of his head. A moment later a surge of guilt flooded to me for not noticing how bad it was before. The black had masked the blood that had been falling from his head wound, and Perish’s body had hid the rest.

“Baby? Are you okay?” I put the kerchief that had half fallen off of his head over his scalp and held it.

Reaver’s face was red and his breathing laboured, the energy it had taken to carry Perish, run though the cisterns and fend off the kreiger creatures had zapped him.

Reaver gave me a tired nod and looked up at Jade. “Can you get power in this thing?” he rasped.

I shone my light at Jade but lowered it as his eyes squinted. “This is all shit Perish should know about... but I’ve turned on the power in our shelters in the greywastes I have an idea. Just stay here until the lights come on, there is no way those mutants can come in here. We’re absolutely safe.”

Reaver nodded and I put some pressure on his head.

“Come here, sweety. I bet this place has a ton of bandages and antiseptic,” I said.

“I’m okay, I just need to catch my breath... we didn’t all get to be carried like princesses.” Reaver gave me a smirk. I playfully gave him a nudge before I put my arms around him. He patted my hand before he rose to his feet and leaned against one of the shiny white walls. “We made it, that’s all that matters, are you sure you’re okay?” He put a hand on my chin and tilted my head up and to the side.

“Yeah, I’m perfectly fine; I’m more worried about you and Perish...” I looked down at the dead scientist, his blood-streaked face turned to the side. I shuddered seeing that his eyes were still open, staring off into oblivion. “A neck break won’t take long to heal, right?”

Reaver lit a cigarette and nudged Perish with his foot. “Not sure, I never asked Elish... the pet should know though. Fuck, I need a drink.”

And at that cue, and with the vice around my heart unclenching, the lights turned on, then the sound of the vents above us as they circulated dead twenty-year-old air.

I shut the flashlight off and looked around, feeling the anxiety coiling around my chest start to loosen. Not only being inside and safe, but the entire place smelled like Donnely, and though my experiences there had not been positive, I had felt safe there from the greywastes... just not safe from the person inside it.

Reaver, with the cigarette clenched in his teeth started down the hallway and I followed him. Seeing for the first time the smoke damage on all of the walls, though besides that I couldn’t find any signs of fire. This place didn’t look like it had survived an inferno; the labs underneath the building in Kreig must have stretched out beyond the walls.

I glanced in each of the Plexiglass windows, seeing an operating room, metal slabs lined up in rows like some sort of morgue, several bedrooms, and finally a living room-type area.

I directed Reaver onto a cold musty couch, covered in a thick layer of dust but still holding an outline of an old magazine that had stayed where it was set down. I left him with his cigarette and met Jade who was coming back down from a narrow hallway off to the left.

“Where are we?” I asked him. He handed me one of our duffle bags which had held medical supplies and started walking towards where we had left Perish.

“I don’t know, but I can smell charcoal towards where the generators are, and there is a thick metal door where that smell is. I think this place was isolated from the inferno, perhaps in case they ever wanted to rebuild.” I helped Jade drag Perish into the living room before I found a blanket to drape over him.

“Will we be able to get into the burned areas?”

The cicaro shook his head no, before he got out Elish’s laptop and plugged it into the wall. “There would be nothing there, it’s all incinerated. Elish told me this place had been locked off beforehand, by Lycos himself. When the alarms started going off, he pushed Greyson into this area and went into the labs to get the baby. Greyson escaped into the sewers we were just in, and Elish found him. Elish went inside through the actual building on the surface and brought Lycos and the baby back out.”

I wetted a rag and started washing Reaver’s wound. My boyfriend glanced up at Jade. “Why would Leo do that? Wouldn’t I have just come back after I was burned?” He winced as I put antiseptic on his head, before he tilted his head up towards me. “Just put some loose stitches in it Killi, and then help Jade. Scalp wounds get infected quickly. I’m offing myself before bed.”

I looked at him in stricken horror, even with the knowledge he would be back by morning it still terrified me, but he didn’t have a single care to give over it. He turned his attention fully to Jade as the cicaro started to talk further. Elish’s cell phone now plugged into the wall, and his own medical kit laid out in front of him in a perfectly organized fashion.

“Actually yes, you would’ve come back,” Jade said. He got up and walked to the other side of a divider wall and I realized there was a small kitchenette behind it. I heard him take something out of a cupboard. “With a thousand tons of rubble above you, and six inch steel doors trapping you inside, on top of that no one even knowing you’re alive. You would’ve grown up surviving on nothing but your own immortality, dying every couple of days from starvation or dehydration. You would spend an eternity like that, not knowing anything else.”

Reaver froze and so did I; my hand still holding the rose-stained wash cloth.

“Seriously? Holy fucking shit,” Reaver mumbled. “I never even thought of that, Jesus fuck. I guess I do still have shit to watch out for.” My boyfriend winced as I put the first stitch into his head, his scalp was split open like an overripe fruit and I had to squeeze the two parts together to knit the thick flaps of skin back together.

Jade started bandaging his own wounds, mostly a road burn on his face and a few pocked bite marks on his leg. “When the Crimstones took me, their plan was to blow up a building in the West End with Elish and King Silas inside of it. If the skyscraper collapsed on them it could be months before we got the big machines to dig them out. I can’t imagine being stuck in some place with no air, no room, and no stimulation, waking up only to die hours later.” Jade let out an animated shudder. “I just hope they aren’t planning an encore, Elish has enough on his mind taking down our Ghost King; he doesn’t need this on his plate too.”

A silence filled the room after Jade said those words. I busied myself stitching Reaver but I could tell he was deep in thought, thinking about Reno probably and this group that had apparently taken him. We had a lot to think about and a lot to do. I hadn’t had a chance to explore this place yet. I didn’t even know where the computers could be.

I moved onto Jade when I was finished with Reaver and gently peeled back his pant leg. Nothing I couldn’t take care of, I had cleaned and bandaged more than enough deacon and deacdog bites in Aras and these ones weren’t much different. While I did that Reaver started to explore the small apartment lab, his M16 in hand.

I wrapped the last piece of gauze around his leg and gave it a pat. “There, I’ll check on it in the morning and give it another clean. At least we have a good amount of time down here until Elish comes and gets us. It’ll heal nicely.”

Jade rubbed his leg and sipped the cup of tea he had made for himself, halfway through bandaging him the kettle I didn’t even know he had put on the burner started to whistle. He was a lot like his master in that way. Jade always had a mug of tea in his hands when he was in the greyrifts bunker and when he was outside of the apartment he had a cigarette.

I took my own mug of tea and started to walk into the kitchen to see if we had any old cans of food we could scavenge but I hadn’t even stepped onto the linoleum when Jade spoke.

“You were amazing as shit with that scorprion, kid.”

I turned around, a bit taken aback. I noticed Jade was staring forward; his brow furrowed like it was physically painful for him to praise me in such a way. At least he had stopped sulking like he had been on the way to Kreig.

“You’re so... small, innocent, meek little thing who cries too much... but then all of a sudden you turn into this bad ass jumping on the back of this giant radiated insect... you’re like some sort of shapeshifter.” Jade’s yellow eyes glanced towards me. “Maybe your aura is toxic, weighing you down, but I think if you remained that little ray of sunshine I met in Tamerlan... you’d be dead by now.”

I gave him a small smile, taking out some old dried pasta from a dusty white cupboard. “Reaver’s trained me well, and he keeps me safe... but not safe enough that I don’t learn some things along the way, even if he’d rather put me in a bubble.”

Jade’s brow furrowed even more, he took a sip of his tea and I saw his mouth twitch. “Elish was smart to hook you up with Reaver. If you would’ve been Garrett’s pet... your life would’ve been easier, until Silas killed you of course, but you wouldn’t have learned anything.” He shrugged and got up, right when a chill went down my spine. The same one I got whenever I was reminded just how long Elish had been planning the events that were unfolding right now.

Well, at least the question as to who I was going to be sold to had been answered, I had always thought it was one of the cruel ones like Nero, but apparently it was the nicest out of all of them. I think I would have gotten along great with Garrett. But that was just another path I would never see the end of; my heart belonged to my dark chimera, the Scourge of the Greywastes, and the future murderer of King Silas.

I was counting down the days to where I saw Silas actually die... life would be a lot better after that, for everyone. Even some of the chimera family it seemed. I wonder how many of his brothers Elish had been able to sway, Garrett for sure, but what about the brutes? Or the other ones who ran the council in Skyfall? I know Elish wouldn’t be doing any of this unless he had amassed at least a small following of his siblings.

“I’m going to start looking for those computers, you making us some din?” When I nodded, he nodded back, then motioned towards the suitcase. “I have suicide pills in there; don’t let Reaver convince you to strangle him or anything. Those pills will knock him out and by four a.m, he’ll be fixed, another grand Skytech invention.” And with that Jade disappeared into the halls, leaving me with the food and the dead scientist.

I was just dishing us up some meatless spaghetti sauce and noodles when both Reaver and Jade came in, snipping back and forth like they were annoyed at something. I served them their plates and sat down on the couch with Reaver; Jade taking the armchair.

“Well, this lab is safe, we have that going for us,” Reaver said bitterly, stabbing the noodles and shoving them into his face since he still had the manners of a cave man. “But we have no computers, I dug up some lab plans in a dusty old office and it looks like on the other side of that metal door isn’t fire and destruction, it’s Leo’s old office. The doors that lead to the blaze are way off on the east end, which explains why this place was so fire free.”

I groaned, this wasn’t good news at all. “Any idea how to get in?”

“Well...” I looked over as Jade started to talk, and noticed with a bit of amusement that he was carefully wrapping his spaghetti noodles onto his fork, in the neatest most mannerly way possible. The contrast between these two chimeras was fascinating and curious in so many ways. And since Jade was from the slums you could bet it was Elish that taught him these impeccable manners.

Jade went on, “Reaver’s brilliant suggestion was to blow it up with C4, even if we’re underground and there is tons of dirt and metal above us. My idea is to wait for Perish to wake up, and if he doesn’t know... we can wait for Elish to come back and get us.”

Reaver rolled his eyes; to him every problem could be solved with C4.

“That sounds like the best idea, once Perish wakes up we’ll have more information.” I looked over at the still dead scientist; I wondered if his body had started heating up yet. “Are you going to tell him about how he acted, Reaver? Or his real age?” I thought it would be important for us to start getting our stories straight.

Reaver nodded, already finishing off his food. “Yeah, I’m not going to lie to him and Jade wants to pick his brain a bit. If Perish starts getting that broken head of his to tick and realize shit is missing, Jade’s job will be easier.”