Eagle
I should have killed it right off the bat. I shouldn’t have just stood there, letting it come at me over and over again, desperate to rip into me but without the strength to actually do so.
But I couldn’t help it. The boy—the rotter—was no more than seven years old, his features more preserved than most of the rotters who had been outside and exposed to the elements. He’d been trapped inside the small, broken-down farmhouse all these years, surrounded by the bones of his family scattered throughout his home. Ravenous, he continued to live on, pacing the floors and clawing at the walls with an insatiable appetite for death.
The boy lurched forward again. He tripped over the broken leg of a chair and fell toward me, his teeth snapping furiously. I swung out with very little force, my gloved fist softly connecting with his emaciated chest, sending him stumbling backward again.
You didn’t see a lot of rotters this young. The children had been the first to go, too small and weak to fight off their attackers. Usually they were people the child had loved and trusted, his parents, friends, or neighbors. The children hadn’t understood, hadn’t realized until it was too late, and by then, there was nothing left of them.
But this one, this boy, he’d been bitten, a large chunk of grayish flesh was missing from his arm. His family, I guessed, had been unable to kill him, even after he’d attacked them.
“E?”
Marcus, the man who’d gutted my wildcat’s man and left him for dead, appeared on the opposite side of the living room. A mangy-looking motherfucker whose disgusting appearance was as filthy as his appetite for mayhem, he glanced between me and the rotter, his expression curious. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Nothing,” I snarled in response. “What the fuck are you doing?”
The rotter, having noticed new meat, had switched direction and shambled toward Marcus. Entirely unperturbed, Marcus raised his crossbow and sent a handmade arrow slicing through the boy’s thigh. The leg folded and although tripping him, didn’t do much to deter the boy from reaching Marcus. Laughing cruelly, he raised his bow again, pointing an arrow at the boy’s other leg.
I pulled my trigger and the bullet pierced the boy’s right temple and flew out the other, killing him instantly. He fell backward, landing hard on the floor. His wide-open eyes, clouded over with infection, now trained lifelessly on the ceiling.
“They aren’t fucking toys,” I ground out.
Marcus’s eyes met mine, his features pinched in confusion. “Everything okay with you?”
Pulling my blade from my belt, I sent it soaring across the room, embedding it into the wall directly next to Marcus’s head. Wide-eyed, he glanced at the blade and then back to me.
“Don’t ever fucking ask me that again,” I growled.
Without a word—a damn good thing for Marcus—he nodded once and disappeared.
I stared after him a moment before glancing back down at the boy. Stepping forward into the living room, I knelt down beside him and grabbed hold of the arrow before yanking it free. It came loose easily and released a gush of thick black liquid. After tossing the arrow aside, I dragged my fingertips over the boy’s eyelids, closing them.
I didn’t know why I did it; I’d never done it before, usually not caring one way or another and content to let the rotters live, rather than giving them mercy. Unless they gathered in a sizable horde, the rotters posed no real threat to me. They weren’t fast anymore, the majority of them rotted to the point of putty. Mostly, like everyone else, they were just in my way.
Gritting my teeth, I stood up and surveyed the room. This was the fourth house we’d hit, collecting what we could—clothing, bedding, dishes, whatever we could find that was still worth something today. I hadn’t been out scavenging for supplies, other than vehicles, in a long time, and now that I was out again, I remembered why I’d stopped.
Being inside a home full of pictures and furnishings of a well-lived life, of a family, I couldn’t stomach it, didn’t want to remember it. Like everything else good that had been swept from our lives, I wished the homes, the pictures, and the memories would have gone too, disappeared like everything else had.
I’d had a house like this once. Not a farmhouse, but something bigger and better. A row home in a thriving city, but a home all the same. Full of pictures, laughter, the television blaring, and the smell of home-cooked meals ...
“Fuck this,” I muttered, then turned around and headed for the front door. Kicking it open, I descended the porch, taking all four steps at once and marching back toward the three pickups parked out front.
I climbed inside my own truck, a monster four-wheel drive with a 6.2-liter V-8, a full backseat, a covered bed, and rigged with everything I could manage to find and fit on it necessary to survive in the wild, if it ever came down to that. Iron bars were welded over the windows, a steel-covered grill fitted with ax blades protected both the front and rear lights, metal plates were hung over the wheel wells, and heavy-duty floodlights were affixed to the roof. I always kept a healthy supply of canned and dry food along with water in it at all times, enough to last me a month. Ammunition, spare tires, and fuel as well.
After rolling down the driver’s side window, I spat out a wad of foul-tasting saliva through the bars, still tasting the fuel I’d siphoned earlier from two deserted minivans we’d come across. Who knew if the fuel was even still good, but more often than not it was, and fuel, much like women, was worth its weight in gold these days.
Glancing down at my gloved hands, I pulled the leather from my fingers and stared at my dirty palms. I was itchy with all sorts of shit I didn’t want to feel, emotions I hadn’t had in so long, and never wanted to feel again.
Wildcat—Evelyn—the bitch had gotten under my skin something fierce. These feelings weren’t something I was going to easily wipe away with a fuck and a drink. The woman had caused a ripple in the carefully constructed existence I’d managed to whittle out for myself, a ripple that for some fucking reason was sending me into a tailspin.
Suddenly nothing felt right, least of all me. I was losing control. And for a man like me, who was barely in control to begin with, even I knew it was a dangerous thing to lose what tenuous grasp I had left on it.
Gripping the steering wheel tightly, I clenched my hands, my dark knuckles whitening the harder I squeezed.
Get your shit together, I told myself.
You’ve never had your shit together, a familiar voice answered.
