When was the last time I felt like a person was a challenge?
I watched that challenge turn on his heel and start away from the dead man at a jog, pulling his gun again as he did.
He held it like it was a security blanket and not a deadly weapon… and I knew.
He was a challenge that would be more than worth the blood that came with it.
It waslike Aubrey courted death. He went out of his way to brush against it, leaving gifts in the form of dead bodies in his wake—little love letters that begged for attention.
Death couldn’t have him. I was a jealous man, and he wasmine.
That didn’t stop him from cutting his way through the ruins of the city like he meant to leave his name written across every surface in blood—proof that he’d been there that would only last until the next storm, when death mixed with the rain and it all washed away.
Everything always turned red in the end.
I stalked him in silence for the rest of the day, fascinated by the way he moved, the way he seemed to dance with death, the way he sought the worst of the worst—raiders, infected, the beasts that had been so corrupted by the rain that they were rabid enough to attack. Aubrey went after it all with a pistol, a knife, and grit.
There were times when I thought I was going to have to intervene, where I was sure his determination would waver and his stamina would fail him. Whatever rage had fueled him to shoot his lover seemed to be a bottomless ocean, waves that he could pull from endlessly. It washed across his exhaustion and drew it out to sea, and Aubrey keptmoving.
By the time he finally started to slow down, he’d actually looped through the city and started toward the edge of the old roads where my group was waiting for me. We’d holed up a few miles south of the old train station that ran along the shoreline.
He paused where the road diverged, and I didn’t miss the way his shoulders shook when he wiped a bloody hand across the street signs.
T ain to Par dis
The letters were faded, half scraped away by time and weather, and he dropped his head against his knuckles and took a shaking breath.
“I can do this.” Aubrey’s voice was softer when he wasn’t threatening someone, almost melodic in its melancholy. He holstered the gun he’d been holding and brought his free hand up to the dog tags he’d killed his lover for, blowing out another breath. “I can do this.”
He was so focused on his little pep talk that he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings. Maybe it was the adrenaline draining out of him, mixed with the fact that he’d lost more blood than he should have and he was somehow still standing.
Or maybe it was that look I’d seen in his eyes—he was stalking death because hewantedto catch it.
Or he wanted to be caught. That was fine.
I could catch him. I could be death, if that was what he really wanted.
At least I knew I’d be good at it.
He turned at the sound of my approach, already pulling his gun back out of its holster, but I wasn’t the danger he needed to pay attention to. The creature slammed into him from the side.
It had been human once. It was the inevitability that came for us all.
It was fast, its skin mottled from time or rain, and the fingers that tore at Aubrey were splintered bits of bone where it had clawed at dirt and stone before. He let out a low shout, turning his gun from me to the rabid and flipping it in his hand to crash the barrel against the thing’s skull.
Probably smart. Where there was one, there were often more. And this one had latched its fingers into his side and starteddigging.By the time they’d turned enough to rot, they were mindless, fueled by rage and base instinct.
Sounded like every other person I’d ever met; the rabid ones just lived outside the constraints that held the rest of humanity back. The rain that fell nearly seventy years ago started an infection that stole that away, that left us all wondering if this was going to be our fate. To eat—to be eaten.
I didn’t miss the wash of blood that appeared, staining the light gray tank top he wore, and he didn’t miss the way I moved. His eyes lifted to me, and I saw it then.
I’d been right.
Some part of him wanted to die, because there was something in his expression close to bliss, to acceptance.
“No.” The word spilled from my chest as I pulled the axe from my back and brought it down in a hard swing that met rotten flesh.
The thing holding him dropped, and Aubrey fell to the ground. He glanced up at me through dark hair, and the blood on his face could have been his or any of the people he’d killed throughout the day. Shit, it might have belonged toBen. With streaks of crimson across his eyes, he almost looked like he already belonged by my side—a raider like me, painted up and blood-soaked.
