CADE
Blood.
The iron-rich smellfilled my nose, and it might have taken over it if it wasn’t for the screaming. I could smell smoke and gas and dirt and?—
A gasp choked me as I shot up, clutching my chest and looking around wildly as I looked for?—
For what?
Oh, right. The gun that wasn’t there.
A shudder ripped through me, and I clutched my chest to steady my breathing as I looked around. It was the first thing I’d ever been taught; get your bearings, get the lay of the land, then figure out what to do.
I wasn’t home, but I was at the home away from home I’d grown accustomed to. The place paid for by other people, the place that was supposed to help me, to heal me. It was a stupid and overly hopeful idea, but it was… Well, did it matter?
I was at the Arete Resort, a place for men like me, who’d been broken and battered, thrown against the uncaring rocks of life. People who were messy, afraid, or just so screwed up theycouldn’t function. I mean, the kind that could function enough to get through life and what it threw at them, but weren’t really living… were they?
I sat up, looking around the room, taking a deep breath to remind myself I was alive. I was in control. Like every other private room for guests, as they called people like me, my room was quiet and soundproofed. My bed was shoved into the corner with some shelves built into the wall that I could use as I wanted, shelves under the bed, a private bathroom, and a small kitchenette in the opposite corner.
I groaned and rubbed my forehead as I got up and walked to the kitchenette to grab a bottle of water from the small fridge. It was too cold to down comfortably, but it was something I could hold on to. Too cold meant it was real, which meant I could wrap my senses around it. I could hear soft waves, one of the few sounds that helped me sleep, coming from the speakers. I’d set the system to play it when I tried to sleep.
There was almost no smell in the room, but at least the smell of blood and burning flesh was gone…because it wasn’t real.
Ithadbeen real, that much was for sure. I couldn’t count the number of times I had smelled that combination. Death had followed me for years now, death I had caused, and death that had been caused around me. Death had become such a fact of my life that it felt goddamn strange for it not to be a steady presence.
Now it was just the memory that followed me.
“Get it together, Cade,” I muttered, splashing water on my face, holding onto the sensation and finding it helped. Honestly, anything that wasn’t the horror of part dream, part memory, was better than standing around, gawking like an idiot.
I missed Clay.
I missed my team.
I missed the life I’d had before.
I missed thepersonI was before.
The sudden wave of despair and heartache that hit me forced my eyes to close, and I stood there, unable to do more than try to hold back the tide as the water ran from the faucet. I knew what it was; it wasn’t the first time I’d had the sensation that the walls were closing in, well, the actual walls. The walls inside my head felt like they were falling apart, cracks both large and hairline spreading, threatening to undo every piece of work and effort I had put in for years building them.
The things those walls held back were mean, had teeth and claws that could rend and shred if they were allowed to get their hands on you. Which was what they wanted; to crawl out from the dark corners of my mind I’d created to contain them, where their sharp edges and the poison that dripped from their teeth could be used to destroy. People talked about the monsters and demons that lived in your head, but that never covered how dangerous they could be. It never addressed how they constantly lurked, stalking in the shadowy corners of your mind, ready to find your weakest moment before?—
“Stop,” I told myself, surprised at how loud my voice sounded in the confines of the bathroom even with the steady spray of water that had been on for…I didn’t know how long it had been on now I thought about it.
Frowning, I flipped the water off and stared at my reflection for the first time since waking up, focusing on the details of my face and body in another attempt to distract myself from the chaos in my head started by the dream I couldn’t remember clearly. I had a flat, too broad face and figured I was stuck like that until my middle school gym teacher told me all I needed to do was to grow into it, then pointed me toward weightlifting. She had been kind of a bitch in the way she’d said it, but it was hard to argue with how right she had been. Once I’d started putting on some muscle, my broad features looked strong, almost handsome…in a brick wall kind of way.
The brick wall comparison was even more apt when you considered the flaming red hair that, if allowed, grew thick from the top of my head, peppered my jawline but never quite connected to the red shadow of a mustache I never allowed to grow. There were thick patches of it all over me really, and since I’d never been one to bother trimming more than my beard and my groin, it coated my arms, my chest, and a scraggly path down to my waist and over my stomach. It used to be pretty damn noticeable on my legs too, but now it was just one leg; the other was long gone.
Well, the flesh and blood leg was gone. I now had a fancy replacement made of…I couldn’t actually remember, but they’d told me at some point. What mattered was that it fit comfortably on the stump where my leg had been, and it let me walk around. Honestly, if it were possible, I’d consider chopping off the other one. The fake leg treated me better than my real legs ever had. But Uncle Sam would not coveranotherexpensive procedure and leg just because I liked the artificial one better.
Okay, well, staring at my scarred torso and the black circles under my green eyes wasn’t all that distracting, and if anything, it was making things worse.
Standing around would not help, so all there was left was to go for a walk. The soft thump of my prosthetic formed a familiar beat as I walked out of the bathroom and threw on some clothes. This wasn’t my first stay at the Arete Resort, and so far, I’d stayed out of trouble, but I didn’t think they’d appreciate it if I walked through the facility in my underwear…again. I’d been really out of it the first time I’d slept the night here, but I didn’t think that excuse would work again.
Which was a shame; I kind of liked not having to wear clothes all the time.
Making sure I was presentable for… I checked the time; four in the morning. I walked to the door. The entire facility wasrigged with a computer system that had some sort of artificial intelligence. I didn’t know if it wasactuallyan AI in the sense of, like…the Terminator or whatever, but it was what the guy who kept everything running, Reggie, called it. As far as I could tell, it was just a jumped-up system, but it was pretty smart, or at least, from what I’d heard. I rarely used it, not because I hated it like some people but because I didn’t need a computer to tell me when things were going on when I’d been here enough times to have events memorized, and I didn’t need a schedule because I did the same things at the same times all week.
Stepping into the hallway, I wasn’t surprised to be met with silence; it was still the middle of the night. Not that it meant I couldn’t run into someone; there were night owls here after all. There were plenty of insomniacs as well, but that came with the resort being for men whose minds and lives were falling apart or already had, and who came here to be better people. Not that the staff ever used the word ‘better’, something about avoiding the idea that there was something wrong with us. There was something wrong with every one of us in the program, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, but the staff tried not to point that out.
