Page 47

Thud.

I pick up my pace, wondering if it could be a signal from one of the refugees. They might have arrived ahead of us, then set something up to catch our attention. Hope sparks in my chest, but I ruthlessly snuff it out.

Hope can be a soldier’s greatest ally…or his worst traitor.

In front of the open whitewashed barn door, shallow ruts riddle the ground. Wagons would pull up here, load, and then roll away. The entrance isn’t in view, but a man’s tanned, dirty arm swings out of it, wrists and hands flexing in a tossing motion.

Once we step around the corner of the barn, we’re met with the smell of punctured intestines. Shit, bile, and blood.

The person making the racket is a young man with a wide brimmed hat. Old blood stains his lace-up shirt. Four metal prongs stick out of his stomach, fecal material dribbling from them. I gape but immediately regret that action when the stench of offal and decay hits my tongue. I’ve never seen anything like this before and pray never to again. The scene is morbid even for a battlefield… In a village barn, it’s even worse.

A strangled cry from behind me whips me around. Esme’s throat convulses, and her eyes round.

The man walks forward, then mimes tossing an object in the air. His job done, he pivots to go back to the pile of hay on the barn floor. The blood-crusted handle of the pitchfork sticking out of his back hits the wall of the barn.

Thud.

He bounces back, swaying slightly. But his dull eyes don’t flinch or narrow. Nothing about him shows he feels any sort of pain at all as he mimics scooping up a load of hay on his imaginary pitchfork while the real one dangles off his back like a grotesque tail. Dried bits of crimson flake off the puncture wounds on his neck and wrist. That creature got to him, and maybe the woman in the yard too.

The poor fucker walks forward again. Toss. Turn. Thud. Walk. Scoop. He’s still trying to complete whatever task his absent mind thinks he needs to finish.

I block his path and hold my hand up.

His eyes don’t track me, focused instead on an invisible scene. As soon as I touch him, all his movements cease. Dusty arms fall to his side, where the fingers uncurl.

I broke his loop, so he stopped functioning.

Behind me, Esme coughs before spinning and racing out. Retching follows.

The poor kid’s dull, flat eyes slice into my chest, but I can’t think of how to help him. A gut wound is the worst way to go. If he’s still in there at all, he’s in unimaginable pain. “Let me help you with that.”

He doesn’t respond as I grab him by the sides of his head and snap his neck. A puppet with his strings cut, he collapses. The handle of the pitchfork rattles on the ground. Then the world goes silent again. I stand over him for a moment, this man whose name I’ll never know. His eyes stay locked on that same invisible spot in the distance. Puncture wounds reminiscent of the ones on Mira dot his neck.

Maybe death was what he was staring at the whole time.

My hands don’t shake as a normal man’s would. After last night, after Stark, after everything, they should tremble. But they’re steady. I whisper a quick prayer to Nyc, the only one of the gods I still like after everything that went down, then exit the lifeless barn.

It frightens me that my hands don’t shake.

I learned to kill before I even reached double digits. Back then, I still experienced remorse afterward. Their faces would haunt me for years. Now, I don’t bother to remember the numbers, let alone what they looked like. What kind of man am I that I can’t remember? Not a man at all, perhaps.

Esme leans against one of the wagons half filled with hay. As I approach, she jerks upright.

Ignoring the question in her eyes, I head back toward the road. “Let’s go. There’s nothing for us here.” I can’t do a thing for the kids I saw through the window. Snapping their necks might ease their pain, but they could also last long enough for a cure to be found. Killing kids or abandoning them to their deaths are two of the things that would still haunt me.

Esme has to jog in order to catch up, but she stays behind me as we leave the village. I don’t glance back.

For the rest of the morning, we travel in silence, passing gray fields decorated by a few dirt-covered people who may as well be scarecrows. The woods have fared better than the fields against the Withering, and whenever we exit the fields and enter the forest, life returns. Animals go about their normal springtime routines underneath the safe canopy of the trees. I watch squirrels chase each other through the branches, chittering about their simple squirrel wants.

The second village isn’t as bad. Twenty buildings form a wide oval with an empty clearing in the center. Each one is painted white, with signs added on a handful that mark them as businesses.

The place is abandoned. No doors or windows ajar, and not a single horse or wagon. There is, however, one old man sitting on a porch with blood on his neck, smoking an unlit pipe and staring with vacant eyes. More dark, dry blood stains the long sleeves of his shirt. An orange cat lies in the sun, tail thrashing. I can’t tell if the animal’s affected or not.

It’s a cat, after all.

The old man takes a big, shuddering breath.

I freeze.