I snub him and stare ahead.
The crimson has settled, the firelight softer now that my sight has adjusted, and I see the road for what it is.
A highway, littered with streams of cars and trucks and lorries, all frozen in the snow.
I squint against the hot glares of firelight and look ahead at the city.
And this…
This is acity.
Not a large town, this is exactly the sort of place Bee and I avoided for the entire fucking blackout.
That memory is instilled in me, the instinct to turn around and go the other way, to never go into a city.
There are people surviving in there.
Only to a desperate idiot is that a good thing.
My legs move slower with the city looming ahead, as if my muscles are suddenly made out of lead.
The draw of the tether keeps me from falling behind, and I can only move towards the place I don’t want to go.
The highway turns into a bridge with legs planted in a river, and beyond that is a still-standing horizon of concrete. The signs that are erected along the border of the highway are so thick with snow that I can’t read them, can’t make out the name of the city we’re encroaching on.
This unit isn’t the first to come here.
Half of it has already been destroyed.
I thought we just walked a highway, getting closer to when the road arches into a bridge—but it was once more than that.
I look over the roads, left and right, where the dust of a city borders us.
Debris and rubble and ash, that’s all that remains of a place that was probably built with concrete and steel. But those otherworldly fires eat through fucking anything.
A fate that inches closer to the remaining half of the city, over the bridge.
The closer we get, the more tension prickles over the unit—but it grows beyond what I know.
In the trek that burns my legs and aches my glutes and numbs my feet, there was a soft irritability growing from a patient silence. In all the towns and farms we’ve stopped at, that the warriors have destroyed, that excitement in them never reached a level likethis.
Guttural growls rumble down chests all around me, hisses catch at the back of throats, snarls curl in the air.
It’s more than excitement, than tension—it’s the brink of exhilaration and release.
A city like this offers so much more to them than all the little settlements that have been in their path since I joined them.
This energy zaps all around me, nips at my flesh—and alarm bells are ringing through me.
I go rigid in the current of bloodlust; my shoulders set, my legs drag with stiffness, even my breaths start to ache, like they just want to pin somewhere in my chest.
A quiet returns to these predators.
The snarls and hisses dissolve into a hum that feels like static through the unit. Their bootsteps are soft, leathers slinking in the dark stroked with crimson firelight, until we are finallyonthe bridge.
With the river rushing directly beneath us, and that pulsating anticipation tenses every step closer to the city border, the tug of my torn wrist winces through me.
Courage fails me; I don’t lift the glare to the cold gaze I feel scraping over my face, I aim it at the leathers moulded over a muscular chest.
