Nothing.
There was nothing anywhere.
I didn’t know how long I drove, only that I’d eventually run out of gas and had to stop to fill up on the side of the road. I must have been noisy about it because a couple of rotters shambled out of the underbrush, nearly catching me unaware. I spent a good half an hour putting them down before backtracking in the direction I’d come. But instead of passing by Purgatory, I pulled out a map and went down a few side roads headed north. When I still hadn’t encountered a single living thing, I decided on southwest, which led me to another version of the same.
Nothing. Nothing but countryside speckled with the occasional rotter, and small towns, all but abandoned and picked clean. Autumn could be anywhere. Hell, she’d probably escaped the guards already and was long gone.
Still, I kept driving, turning down unfamiliar roads, scanning long stretches of overgrown farmland and the bursts of forest between.
Nothing.
Now I was seated on top of a pharmacy counter inside a drugstore in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere. The shop had long ago been picked clean, and now housed a couple of cat-sized rats and a leathery-looking rotter swinging from the ceiling with a noose around its neck.
It was still alive, but without any sort of muscle mass and a nearly petrified body, the thing could barely move other than to track me with its cloudy eyes.
Lifting a bottle of wine I’d found beneath a fallen display case, I raised it in a toast to the rotter and took a healthy swig, grimacing at the sugary-sweet taste of it. Staring at the dirty floor beneath me, I spit out the wine, then tipped the bottle over and watched as the contents poured out to mix with the grime and dust and dirt below.
“Like black blood,” I muttered, and then I laughed, loud and long and full of bitter resentment.
I was a fool. Not once, but twice I’d fucked up, first with Wildcat and then with Autumn, both women I hardly knew. And all for what? For this. For nothing.
What the fuck had been my plan exactly? To chase Autumn down, and then what? Force her to stay with me? Like I’d tried to do with Wildcat? Because that had worked out so well.
I laughed again and whipped the bottle at the floor. It shattered, the force of the impact causing shards to fly upward. Lifting my arm, I barely had time to cover my face before bits of glass, large and small, sliced through my skin.
And I kept laughing, because the pain was all I had left.
If only your uncle could see you now, the voice said, its tone distinctly patronizing.You know what he’d call you?
“Yeah,” I ground out. “He’d call me a fucking pussy. He’d tell me to stop acting like a little girl and suck it the fuck up.”
Be a man, he’d always said, and if your britches fall down, you pull them the hell up and keep moving.
“What the fuck have I been doing all these years?” I shouted.
You call this being a man? You’ve been hiding! Feeling sorry for yourself, and hurting others because you can’t face what you did!
I jumped down off the counter and stalked through the store, the broken glass crunching beneath my boots and spilled wine splashing up around me. Turning in a circle with my fists clenched, I stared up at the ceiling.
“I HAD NO CHOICE!”
You had a choice. You could have waited; you could have given it some time.
Nostrils flaring, I shook my head. “There wasn’t time. There wasn’t any fucking time! It was too goddamn late!”
And whose fault is that?
My words caught in my throat as my stomach burned. “It was too late,” I said hoarsely. “I was too late.”
You were too late!the shrill voice said, accusing me.You killed us! You killed them!
“Not my fault,” I whispered, shaking my head. “I had to do it. I had to. It wasn’t my fault.”
But it was; it was all my fault. I’d left them there alone. And those words,you killed them, those goddamn motherfucking words, they pierced right through the heart of me, flooding every inch of my body, thickening my blood and rattling my bones.
Those words ...
• • •
