We, the Forsaken

By Laken Cane

Copyright © 2017 Laken Cane

All rights reserved.

The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, association with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. Ebook copies may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share with a friend, please buy an extra copy, and thank you for respecting the author’s work.

For more information about the author, you can find her online at

www.lakencane.com,

www.facebook.com/laken.cane.3,

www.twitter.com/lakencane,

www.amazon.com/author/lakencane

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

About Laken Cane

Acknowledgments

Special thanks go to Racheal Chapman, my virtual assistant, who manages my Facebook author page and lets me know when my website needs updating or is missing links or needs new pages! She also reads my books before they’re released and gives me solid suggestions to make the books stronger. Oh, and she sends me the best homemade peanut butter fudge ever. And though we’ve not met in person, I think of her as a very good friend. Love ya, Rach!

And for the extra help, the conversations, the unending support, and the friendship, extra special thanks to Kelly Eurton Reed, Jo Dawson, and Tammy Lawson Sullivan.

Also my thanks to this new round of beta readers. Thank you for your help, encouragement, enthusiasm, and support. You guys are amazing:

Tanya Collins, DeLane Corbin, Jordan Doner, Sam McMullen, Amanda Shelledy, Starla Stimmer, and Idelisses Medina Torres. I hope I didn’t forget anyone!

To the readers who follow me into every new book I write, you guys are everything. Thank you.

To those of you who leave reviews and spread the word about my books, thank you.

I wish I could name every single person who has offered me support, melted my heart, touched my life, and made me so very glad I’m a writer. I truly love you! I hope you know how much I appreciate you. Thank you!

Chapter One

My mother was a writer before the world ended.

She always wrote each main character’s goal, motivation, and conflict on an index card and pinned it to a corkboard on the wall in front of her desk.

I think of myself like a character in one of her books. I have my goal, motivation, and conflict written on a paper and tacked to my wall. I look at it every morning when I get up and every night before I go to bed.

There’s not a lot on it, but it is everything.

Goal—to stay alive.

Motivation—I want to live.

Conflict—everything wants to kill me.

My days are challenging. Sometimes I think about ripping that paper off the wall. Sometimes I think about ending my story.

But I won’t.

I have to finish it.

I learned something about myself by reading my mother’s books.

I really, really hate cliffhangers.

And I refuse to be one.

I wasn’t scared of the great beyond, but I wasn’t ready to go there.

Really, who knew? Maybe this was the great beyond. Crowbridge might actually be my afterlife. Maybe I’d died and hadn’t realized it.

When I thought of the town like that, though, it was hard for me to breathe. The sky seemed too close, and I was sure if I tried to leave Crowbridge, I’d find an invisible wall there to keep me inside.

I told myself I was glad of the new status quo. In the world before, bad things happened every single day. It’d been a shit world. My sister had been killed in that world.

This one was better now that most of the assholes had died.

That’s what I told myself.

I rolled off my cot with more energy than I could ever remember having before the world ended—a short two years ago—then grabbed a bottle of water to drink while I peered at the goals, motivation, and conflict note.

I had always been a creature of habit.

I dressed methodically, pulling on a t-shirt, a warm button down shirt, and worn jeans. I laced up my boots before shrugging into a protective vest that would help deflect the blades or—if the attacker was completely stupid—a bullet.

No one used guns. They were too loud.

Noise brought the mutants, and if there was anything worse than an attack from a deranged human, it was the attention of a mutant.

That’s not to say I didn’t carry a loaded pistol. I did. But I would take that gun out only if I had no other choice. Only if I had to use it on myself. Because by then, noise wasn’t going to matter.

I slid blades into the pockets of my vest, buckled on a belt to which I added more knives, a flashlight, a lighter, and a small container of bear spray. The bear spray was protection against hungry, wild animals who figured a lone girl would be an easy meal.

 I walked to the boarded over picture window and looked through the cracks between the plywood. Not a mutant or baddie in sight.

Still, my stomach tightened as I geared up and then walked to the back door in my kitchen. I suspected that feeling would never entirely go away.

Outside my home was danger.

But I sort of liked that feeling, because it was something. An emotion in the endless, heavy silence. Sometimes I felt like it would smother me, that silence.

No one cared.

No one cared if I sometimes went a little crazy and huddled in a corner with a blanket over my head.

No one.

Literally.

There was no one left to care.

This wasn’t the house I’d lived in when everyone started dying, but I’d chosen it later because of its cellar—the door was in the back porch floor and easily hidden by a heavy rug—and because it was closer to town.

And because none of my family had lived or died inside it.

It was mine now.

I took a deep breath, gave my pockets and sheaths a habitual pat, picked up the machete leaning against the wall, then opened the door.

I locked the door, then turned to grab my bicycle.

Every day I did this.

Every day.

What else was there to do?

I’d have gone crazy long ago if I’d been too afraid to leave the house. I had to be out in the world.

Yes, I was afraid.

But the fear let me know I was alive.

Going to town gave me a purpose, and I needed that. I needed that badly.

I had a few goals when I made my runs.

One, get more water. I took cases and gallon jugs of water every time I went to town, then stored most of them in the cellar. I also had two fifty-gallon drums out back in which I collected rain water for bathing and bathroom purposes.

The water in town was nearly gone. I’d broken into houses to get water before I’d started in on the water in the mall, which was the only reason there was still a few cases left in the stores.

I also kept an eye out for a dog—preferably one that wasn’t rabid or wild. I would have killed for a pet. A companion. I adored dogs. One time, I’d seen a cat, but it wouldn’t come to me when I’d called. A dog, though. A dog would come.

Too bad the pets hadn’t been able to last long. They’d been killed, eaten, or had starved to death, poor things. Some of them roamed the streets in packs, wild and dangerous. They were why I carried the bear spray, mostly.

I lifted my face to the sun, breathing deeply of the fresh, cool air. Sometimes I had nightmares that I was trapped in the cellar and couldn’t reach the sun.

That almost scared me more than the thought of encountering a mutant.

I peddled out of the yard and into the street, tuned to the sounds—or non-sounds—of the area.

In my world, silence mattered.

It didn’t just matter. It was essential.

My legs enjoyed the workout the bike gave them as I peddled up a short hill. The world was quiet, still, lonely.

The same as it always was.

No baddies, wild dogs, or mutants in sight.

Perfection.

I coasted down the small incline, grimly vigilant. I wouldn’t relax until I made it back home. That was okay. Relaxing was for safe people. And dead people.

The road to town was as familiar to me as my own face. It wasn’t blocked or bloated with stalled cars from the before—no one had been trying to escape Crowbridge when they’d died. They’d gathered supplies—the town had, unfortunately for me, lost a lot of its supplies long before the world ended—and boarded up their homes, then locked themselves in their basements and cellars and panic rooms—as though that would protect them from the sickness. The killing flu.

And they’d died there.

Oh, there was the occasional car, of course, but no piles of stalled or wrecked vehicles with the dead hanging out open doors.

Then after the disease had started wiping out all the people, the mutants had come.

Who knew how any of it had started?

I sure didn’t.

I’m sure someone knew—maybe the US government, though they’d denied it completely—but for most of us, it was like death. No one really knew what came after death, and no one really knew what had brought the disease and the mutants.

Maybe the mutants had unleashed the sickness, but who’d unleashed the mutants?

It took me sixteen minutes to reach the mall. Not that Crowbridge had much of a mall.

I pedaled slowly down Main Street, my head swiveling, the whirr of tires on asphalt the only sound in the crisp, early fall air.

There wasn’t a lot left, but the mall still contained a few supplies. It made me happy. Once I’d emptied the stores of their remaining supplies, what would I do every day?

There was a grocery store, a pharmacy, a Dollar Store, a small electronics store, a Taco Bell—I never went in there anymore—and a farm and feed store.

Someday, I’d have to find another town to get more supplies. Someday, when the mall had given me everything she had to offer, when she gave a last, gasping breath and fell over and died, dried up and depleted…

I smiled as the memory of my mother’s voice echoed inside my mind.

“Teagan, you are so melodramatic.”

“I guess I got that from you.”

I would have been a writer. I’d have been just like her.

And she was gone.

The world became blurry suddenly, like a vicious gust of rain was blowing against a window. But the rain was in my eyes.

Miss you, Ma.

When the time came to find another town, I’d have to start completely over. Leave my home with its boarded up windows and closed off rooms, my cellar, my familiar streets.

I was young—sixteen. If I didn’t die, I would eventually run through my stock.

But that was a worry for another day.

I parked the bicycle in front of the grocery store—where it would stay. I’d have to walk back home, and let me tell you; pushing a heavy, full cart up even a small incline was not easy. But it had helped me develop some muscle over the last two years.

I’d get water and some goodies first, then head to the farm and feed store.

I pulled my machete from its sheath and put it in a cart, then pushed the cart to the water. I tossed in two cases—there were only three cases left—before heading to the canned food. It was good that I shopped every day, because who knew when baddies might find my town and steal the few supplies that remained?

I’d also taken cartload after cartload to the back of the mall, where I’d previously buried over a dozen airtight containers. Over time, I’d filled every one of those containers.

Each trip to the mall, I took as much as I could get in as little time as possible. It wasn’t a good idea to linger.

I’d encountered a lone mutant in Crowbridge on a couple different occasions. Those were not memories on which I liked to dwell.

I hurried down the aisle, turned the corner, and then, I caught a glimpse of something that made me lose my breath.

The shadowy dimness inside the shop made the world outside the huge front windows seem especially bright. And in that brightness stood one of the mutants, staring into space, head tilted, listening.

Listening, maybe, to me.

I dropped to my knees a mere second before he turned to peer at the store windows. I was panting, and when I realized it and tried to slow my breathing, I panted harder. I couldn’t get enough air into my tight, constricted lungs.

Lovely time for one of my stupid panic attacks.

I threw back my head and stared at the ceiling as a giant hand squeezed my lungs and there was only a tiny straw through which I could draw a teaspoon of air and I could not breathe.

I could not breathe.

I was going to die. Maybe it was a heart attack. Or a stroke. Even young people had those and with the stress of everything…

Shit shit shit.

The mutant would hear my gasps and wheezes, surely he would. Their hearing was insane—and that was the reason a girl couldn’t use a gun to shoot one of the sons of bitches and the reason she couldn’t drive a car.

Because the mutants would hear.

And this time I was really dying.

That’s what panic attacks did.

They made me believe I was dying.

I held on to that realization with everything I had. I wasn’t dying. The panic attacks just made me think I was.

My chest loosened gradually—when I could breathe again I was lying on my side, my hands at my throat, and little silver spots danced in the musty air of the store.

I got to my knees, slightly dazed. I peered around the cart, then swept the parking lot outside the windows with a worried gaze.

I didn’t see the mutant.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t there somewhere. Maybe he’d sneaked into the store while I was trying to figure out how to breathe. Maybe he’d sidled to the windows, cupped his eyes with his long, pale hands, and had spotted me writhing on the floor.

I stood carefully and reached into the cart for my machete. I had blades in various places all over my body, in my boots, the pockets of my vest—and I’d also stashed bigger weapons all over the stores I frequented.

One could never have enough weapons.

I left the cart where it sat and slipped quietly to the end of the aisle, fully expecting a mutant to appear suddenly, grinning, waiting…

I glanced over my shoulder constantly. I couldn’t let one of them sneak up behind me. Where was he?

I liked the little thrill of leaving my house each day, but the terror I felt at that moment…that was a bit much.

The mutants didn’t seem to have any lovely weaknesses or convenient boundaries like sensitivity to sunlight or an inclination to shuffle along like zombies on TV.

Nope.

From everything I’d heard before the world ended and from my own experiences, they were very difficult to kill. A person couldn’t kill them by stabbing them or shooting them or clubbing them to death.

But a person could decapitate them.

That was the main reason I liked machetes. A sharp machete would take off a mutant’s head with a couple of well-placed slashes.

The mutants were just like humans in some ways. They resembled humans physically. Most of them wore clothes, though I’d seen a couple of them that seemed confused by clothing. I’d once seen a tall, bald male mutant wearing a lacy, pink dress that barely covered his butt.

It would have been funny had it not been so terrifying.

But in other ways, they were not even remotely human. They didn’t seem to have feelings. They had no heart. At all.

Their preferred food source seemed to be raw, screaming meat. Sometimes they’d tear their victims apart and gobble them down like raw chicken.

Yeah, I’d watched both of those things happen—some of them on TV before it’d gone down, and some in real life.

I’d heard the screams.

I’d had the nightmares.

There were two different types of mutants—those who wanted to eat a human, and those who wanted to catch a human. I had no idea what they did with their catches.

They didn’t use guns. They used blades—though it wasn’t because of the noise firearms made. It was because they liked their meat alive. Bleeding.

At least, that’s what I believed.

A dead human was a useless human.

So unless I couldn’t outrun one or was caught in the middle of a mob of them, then I was safe.

Safe.

LOL.

Smiley face.

I missed the Internet and texting and doing things with my friends.

But right then there were more important things to miss—like the days when the monsters were only in the movies and a girl had a mother to protect her.

Those days were gone.

I found my hidden machete and slipped it from its hiding place, wincing when its contact with a can of juice released a metallic snick into the silent air.

What was better than a machete?

Two machetes.

Just as I stood, the weapons in my hands, I caught movement through the huge front windows.

I saw two things. Two very bad things.

A small girl, a tangled mass of dark red curls hiding her face, stumbled slowly by the wall of windows.

And right behind her, his tall, pale body towering crookedly over her tiny one, the mutant lifted his hands and prepared to snatch his dinner.

Chapter Two

Horror burst from me in a thoughtless scream. “Robin!”

It wasn’t my sister. I knew that.

Robin would have been my size. My age.

My twin.

And Robin was dead.

I reached the exit doors before I was aware I’d even moved. I shot through them, opening my mouth for another scream, praying I wasn’t too late.

I had to save the child. I had to save her.

I’d left one to die.

I wasn’t leaving another.

Maybe I thought saving her would make up for Robin’s death. Maybe I was just that insane.

Maybe I’d get us both killed.

But there was a child, and I would fight for her. I would protect her.

Even if it killed me.

I ran like I did in nightmares—slowly, so slowly, with my feet sinking into quicksand as I slogged weakly on, opening my mouth for another scream.

I had no words, just sounds.

But the sounds got his attention.

He whipped toward me, his head tilting precariously upon his skinny neck as he studied the newer, bigger threat.

The bigger meal.

I needed to shut the hell up.

One mutant I could possibly take. I had two machetes. I had knives. I had desperation.

I could take him.

But if I kept screaming, it would draw other mutants.

And then neither I nor the little girl would have a chance.

“Run,” I screamed at the child, but she slid down the wall and then curled up on the pavement, her face hidden behind her hands.

I knew her terror. Her exhaustion. Her confusion.

The thought flashed through my mind that I wasn’t actually okay in this new world. I understood my pretense.

And I couldn’t allow that thought. No.

That truth might have shattered me.

I didn’t hesitate. With my machetes up and ready, I ran at the creature.

He leapt back when I swung, and my blade cut through the air, barely missing his chest. But I wasn’t exactly a stranger to fighting the mutants—and I had adrenaline lending a hand.

He came at me fast, no fear in those cold, yellow eyes, no sounds coming from his half-open mouth.

I dropped one of the machetes.

I caught a glimpse of large, crowded, sharp teeth, and then I fell to my knees, yanked the small dagger from my belt, and drove it into his groin.

His eyes widened slightly, and he leaned over, grabbed the handle of the knife, and wrenched it from his flesh.

Seconds. It all happened in seconds.

Instead of flat coldness, his eyes now held hunger. Raging, ravenous, consuming hunger.

That’s what pain gave them.

When fighting a mutant, death—preferably theirs—needed to happen quickly. Before they got hungry. Before they got angry.

That was when the mutants ate humans.

They were like people out of their minds on meth. They felt no pain, no fear, and there was nothing but death in their eyes.

When the hunger roared over them, it was as though they had to consume whatever was before them, and they had to do it immediately. They couldn’t help themselves.

I couldn’t believe it was fear—I doubted they were able to be afraid.

He flew toward me like a pale missile, his hands bent into claws, desperate to end his hunger. And if he got those hands on me, I was dead.

Not because his hands were some sort of magical conduit of heart-stopping poison, but simply because they were so very strong. He’d grab me, then he’d sink his teeth into my flesh, and then I’d die.

But pain made them foolish, distressed, and frantic, and that was good for me.

It was how I fought them—smart or not.

Hurt them, make them lose their minds with that pain and hunger, and then I could stand back and wait.

I held the machete like a baseball bat, almost, waiting for him.

He saw no weapons or resistance—only food. He leapt at me, and I swung.

Blood and a milky white substance flew from his throat, and his head fell nearly to his chest. I kicked him in the stomach, and when he stumbled back, his clawed hands reaching beseechingly for me, I followed him and swung the machete once again.

His head smashed against the pavement like a mushy coconut, and there it lay.

His body joined it a couple seconds later.

I drew back my booted foot and kicked the head. As it rolled across the parking lot, I shoved my machete back into its sheath, then ran to the child.

I knelt beside her, then reached out to squeeze her shoulder. “It’s okay now. I killed it.”

She didn’t move.

She wasn’t dead—I could see her chest moving, and her exhalations rasped dryly against her hands.

“Little girl? Come on, now. You can go home with me.”

Nothing. It was like she didn’t even hear me. And other than her breathing, she didn’t make a sound.

I glanced around, my eyes narrowed against the bright sun. I saw no movement, but it was only a matter of time before another mutant found us. They traveled in groups—and even when one strayed from his group, the others weren’t usually far away.

I stood, then leaned over her small body. “I’m going to pick you up, kiddo.” I hoped that once I lifted her up, she’d come out of her shock and be able to walk again. I had a cart to shove home.

If it came down to it, I’d grab a wheelchair from the front of the store and push the kid home, then come back tomorrow for the cart.

It looked like it was going to come down to it.

But when I slid my hands under her and grunted with the effort of lifting her lax body off the pavement, she came to life.

She flapped like a fish on a line and slipped from my hands. She landed hard, but was up at once, and she didn’t make a sound as she reached out to take my hand.

She still didn’t look at me, but with her head down, she tugged gently at my fingers.

I left the spare machete on the ground and began walking beside her.

“Where are we going?” I let go of her long enough to transfer her hand from my right hand to my left. “Are you hurt?”

As soon as I’d slid my fingers out of her hand, she’d stopped walking.

I asked her no more questions. I needed to listen for enemies, and I had to be more careful than ever. I now had someone to protect.

She wasn’t going to answer me anyway.

We walked all the way across the parking lot and around to the back of the mall. Halfway to the end, she stopped beside one of the huge dumpsters that sat against the buildings. Some had been toppled over, but most of them sat exactly as they had before the world ended.

A little rustier, maybe, and splattered with brightly colored bird dung. I knew before she pointed at one of the dumpsters that a person had taken cover inside.

And that person had probably sent the little girl for help.

I heard a quiet, strangled sound inside the metal box she’d pointed out.

“Shit,” I whispered. I pulled a knife from my belt and handed it to the child. She stared at it for a second, then grabbed it. It disappeared somewhere inside the bulky coat she wore.

“No,” I told her. “Keep it out in case you need it while I’m…” I gestured at the dumpster. “While I’m dealing with this. And let me know if you see anyone coming, you hear me?”

She nodded.

I swallowed hard, leaned the machete against the side of the dumpster, then grasped the lid. Maybe there was another kid in there.

Maybe the little girl was a decoy used by a gang of baddies…

I pushed up the lid.

I cringed as I lost my grip on it and it banged against the side of the filthy container like some sort of hellish dinner gong for monsters.

When I glanced down at the girl, she was staring straight ahead, her big blue eyes empty, one finger to her lips.

Shhhh…

“That’s some creepy shit,” I muttered, a little pissed off.

Fear did that to me.

I didn’t need my flashlight—the sun lit up the interior of the dumpster. I grabbed the side of the container and peered somewhat reluctantly into the depths.

The smell wasn’t that bad. I mean, it was bad, but it wasn’t the sort of smell that usually came from dumpsters. Everything in it must have had a chance to…fade, I guess. Or maybe the woman inside had simply chosen one that was slightly clean.

The woman.

She was staring at me. Her eyes were wide with terror or pain or both. Her face was so pale it had taken on a greenish cast, and her parted lips were broken and bloodless.

She rested on a high bed of what appeared to be old newspapers and half full garbage bags. Bloody, filthy blankets were tangled around her tortured body, but her bare legs stuck out like white sticks covered with oozing sores.

“Help me,” she said. Her voice came out in a gasping half-scream, as though her pain was so large she could barely speak.

And I believed it was.

Once my mother had written about a corpse that’d been dragged out of the river. She’d described the character’s bloated, ripe, discolored body…

And that’s exactly what this woman’s belly looked like.

I recoiled in shock, but after chewing my fingernail for a long moment, I once more peered into the woman’s bed.

She was in the process of giving birth.

But the baby must’ve been stuck. Even as I watched, the woman’s belly rippled and I could have sworn I saw the tiny imprint of a face pressing against her flesh.

She screamed, but her screams were almost silent. Her mouth opened wide in the mask of pain she wore, and her eyes stayed full of awareness and the worst horror I’d ever seen in my life.

I was young, but I’d seen horror.

I’d seen pain.

Just not like this.

She didn’t cry. Maybe she was too dehydrated to cry. Likely she was beyond crying.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “So sorry. I’ll take care of your little girl if you…if you can’t. And the baby,” I added, quickly. I doubted the infant would survive the birth, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

For one second, the look of relief on her face was stronger than the pain. But only for a second.

“This…monster,” she whispered. “Not baby.”

“Hold on,” I said. I looked around, found a bucket, then turned it over and stood on it so I could lean over and get closer to the suffering woman. “What about the baby?”

She grabbed her stomach with bruised, dirty hands, arched her back, and screwed her eyes shut. The only sound that emerged from her gaping mouth was a high-pitched wheeze. Her skin stretched across her sharp cheekbones so tightly I was sure it would split like her dry lips split as she silently screamed.

Her swollen stomach was going to burst. It would have to, if that kid didn’t find its way out soon.

I wanted to cover my ears and close my eyes but I remained stoic and strong and stayed with her. It was the least I could do.

Finally, she exhaled a breath that seemed to go on for five minutes—a long, wheezing end of life breath, and then spoke. “Kill me. Kill it.”

I tried to swallow but my throat was too dry. “Your man is dead?”

She shook her head violently. “No man, no man. Just them.”

I drew back. My stomach began to hurt and my heart was beating so fast I couldn’t breathe. “What do you mean?”

“They did this.” Her voice was louder with its rage and remembered horror. “This baby is one of them. You have to kill it. And…”

“What?” I whispered.

She held up a shaking hand for me to hold and God help me, but I couldn’t bear to touch it.

I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

“Don’t let them catch you,” she said, her raw voice as shaky as her fingers. “They won’t keep you for food. They’ll do to you what they did to me. You’re old enough.”

Before I could even process her words, she threw back her head and began clawing at her distended belly. Her agony was unbearable.

“Ahhhh,” she cried. “Ahhhh.”

I lifted my machete, because there was nothing else to do for her. I couldn’t save her, and I would not leave her in that dumpster to die on her own in hours or days or however long it took her to die.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“I…”

“Kill it,” she begged. “Kill it. Kill us both.”

And she didn’t stop begging and crying and pleading. She didn’t stop until I drew back my machete and began to chop up her belly and the thing tearing its way from her body.

And her.

I don’t know how long it took me to gain control of myself. I just don’t know.

When I managed to stop, the sun was in a different place, the woman was lying in bloody chunks, and the little girl was gone.

Chapter Three

I climbed out of the dumpster. I didn’t remember going inside it. I didn’t remember much of anything after that first slash.

Just…killing.

And the sounds of the thing inside her dying. I remembered being terrified that it was going to climb out of her body, leap at me, and climb inside me to finish growing.

I’d killed a human woman.

Killing a human was vastly different than killing a mutant.

“They’ll do to you what they did to me.”

The mutants were impregnating women. Making more of themselves. Deliberately and with thought. Raping us.

I bent forward and threw up. My head was bursting with pain and my vision was obscured with a reddish haze.

I was not okay.

And the woman’s child, the little girl, she was gone.

I slipped behind the dumpster and knelt down, hiding until I could regain control of myself. I took a deep breath, then another, and I just kept breathing until I could think.

“I have to find the girl.” But I couldn’t search for long. I had to get my cart home before the day headed toward dusk. At night, everything was worse. It would become pitch black, and the mutants and other baddies seemed more inclined to wander the night than the day.

They came out in the sun as well, obviously, but the night…

The night belonged to nightmares.

I searched the ground, looking for anything that might lead me to the child, but there was nothing.

“Little girl,” I called, but only once, as the sound of my voice froze my blood. Now that I knew what the dead lady had known, I was terrified.

How quickly things could change.

And if I hadn’t been aware of that, what else was I blissfully ignorant of? What else was going on in the world outside my relatively untouched town?

“Just give me a minute to get used to it,” I told no one.

That’s what I needed. Every time something new—and horrifying—happened, it seemed less awful after a couple of days had passed.

After it sank in and the newness was gone, I’d be okay.

I wouldn’t think about what had happened, what I’d learned, what I’d done, until I returned to the safety of my home.

Sometimes when I was kid I’d wished with everything inside me that I had the power to be invisible.

I wished that now.

I walked back the way I’d come, bloody machete in my hand. I checked the dumpsters. One of them had become the laboring lady’s coffin. I didn’t want one of them to become the child’s.

The sun was almost hot, though summer was over and fall had come. Winter wasn’t my favorite season anymore. In the winter, everything was gray. Summer with its yellows and greens and warmth and longer days made my mood less heavy.

Winter was when I went a little mad, and I did not look forward to it.

But it was coming, whether I wanted it to or not.

Having some company would make those long, cold months much less dreary.

“Little girl,” I yelled.

I heard a sharp, metallic clank in the distance, and immediately I stiffened and closed my mouth. I didn’t yell again.

I didn’t believe I’d find the kid. Most likely she’d bolted when she’d witnessed me chopping up her mother, and she wasn’t likely to return for fear I’d do the same to her.

I kept an eye out on my way back to the front of the mall. The mutant’s body and head were still spread across the parking lot, along with vivid splashes of his blood. My spare machete still lay where I’d dropped it.

The air was still and silent and held a heaviness I was accustomed to. It usually meant I wasn’t alone—that baddies were near. My baddies radar had become super sensitive over time, and even if I didn’t always come face to face with the enemy, I never doubted they were close. Not when I felt them this fiercely.

There were baddies other than the mutants.

And I needed to get my ass home.

I hurried back into the store and grabbed my cart. I didn’t worry about carefully choosing items to take back with me. As I pushed the cart toward the exit doors, I grabbed whatever presented itself.

Outdated chips, two containers of old fashioned oats, a box of aluminum foil, cocoa, canned meat, and magazines with celebrities on the covers. I stood at the doors for a long moment, and when I saw nothing sinister, I took off.

The sound of the loaded cart’s wheels was loud enough to make me cringe, but I’d made this trip hundreds of times. The only difference today was I’d decapitated a mutant and met a little girl. I’d killed a pregnant woman and her…child.

And I just needed to get home.

I was heading for a breakdown.

Halfway home I started shivering, and five minutes later my body was shaking hard enough to rattle my teeth.

“You’re old enough.”

“You’re old enough.”

I gave an unintentional sob and ran harder, faster.

I would hear that woman’s voice, her words, in my nightmares for years to come. I had no doubt.

“Just let me make it home,” I begged, and I ran on.

I wasn’t about to abandon my cart. These carts of supplies were my life and I wasn’t leaving it. I had to get something out of today’s horror. I was keeping my damn cart.

No matter that I was sobbing and panting and shaking and moaning. No matter. I would make it up the hill. I would make it home.

I lost her, Robin. I couldn’t save her.

Run. Just run.

So I ran.

My boots slapped the pavement—the sound was too loud though I couldn’t hear very well over the roaring in my head.

Something at my back shoved me along and helped push me up the little hill. Fear, anxiety, the sharp feeling of something watching me. Chasing me.

Dozens of grackles few into the tree and house across the street, but I didn’t look at them long. They reminded me of the mutants with their pale yellow eyes. They sang harshly, grimly, and I ran faster to get away from them.

I’d never seen anything so wonderful in all my life as the door to my house. I’d made sure nothing screamed “survivor inside!” from the exterior—the windows were boarded over, sure, but so were most of the other houses in the area.

From the outside, my house looked like all the others. Abandoned.

I shoved the cart around the house and into the backyard, then pushed it up the wooden ramp and onto the screened porch.

I wrestled the cart into the kitchen, then turned to shut the door and secure the six deadbolts that helped me feel safe. I left the cart standing in the middle of the kitchen floor and rushed to my bed, which was simply a cot in the living room.

I threw myself onto it, yanked the covers around my body and over my head, and I let my fear escape.

It burst from my mouth in agonized howls, from my eyes in rivers of water, and from my brain in little sprays of insanity.

I didn’t want to be here.

And I wanted my mother.

I wasn’t sure which horror had sent me over the edge. Killing the woman? Losing the child? Being informed that the mutants were creating little baby mutants? Or the dark memories I’d desperately smashed down and buried that had burst free with the arrival of the little girl?

Robin?

I’m here.

Don’t leave.

I won’t.

Was it possible to have survivor’s guilt if the tragedy happened when you were only six years old?

I hadn’t forgotten. I would never forget.

I could still feel my sister’s terror when she was dragged away. I could still remember how it felt to fight my way free of the stranger’s grip, and I could still remember the pain I’d felt when my little finger had snapped in the struggle.

I could still see her face and her eyes, could still see her mouth opening in a scream that never came because of the hand that clamped over her face.

And I would never forget the relief I’d felt that I’d escaped.

I’d stopped running after a minute. I’d turned around to watch as the man hauled Robin into his car and sped away.

Leaving me on the street.

Safe.

I’d abandoned her.

Robin.

I’m here.

When the knocking first registered on my consciousness I jerked, then stilled, then leapt from the bed when it came again.

Someone was out there. Someone was at my back door…knocking. Mutants didn’t knock. Baddies knocked.

I crept through the kitchen and to the door, then peered through the tiny peephole. I was unable to suppress a gasp at what I saw waiting. “Holy shit.”

It wasn’t baddies at my door.

It was the girl.

She stood silently, unblinking, solemn, and alone.

“Little girl,” I whispered. I lifted my shirt to scrub my face, and then I began the process of unlocking the door to allow her inside.

Maybe I’d lost her, but that was okay.

Because somehow, she’d found me.

Chapter Four

“Do you need anything?” I asked her, once she was ensconced on the couch. I’d fetch another cot tomorrow, if she wanted, or she could continue sleeping on the couch.

Obviously she’d followed me home. I had no idea why she hadn’t shown herself as I’d walked. Perhaps my crazy run and sporadic sobs had scared her and she’d simply wanted more time to observe me.

She held a bottle of water in one hand and a box of crackers in the other, and seemed uncertain about how to manage to either eat or drink. She stared at the crackers until I took the water bottle from her and set it on the coffee table.

Finally, she reached into the box and pulled out a cracker. The poor thing was hungry—who knew how long it’d been since she’d eaten?

I spread peanut butter on crackers and dropped them onto a plate, then opened a can of juice and poured her a cup. “Here you go,” I said, and put the crackers and juice on the little table. “Eat up.”

She never looked at me, and she never said a word.

She didn’t quite trust me yet. She wanted to. She needed me.

Just as I needed her.

“I’m glad to have company,” I told her. “It does get lonely. I can’t find a dog. Do you like dogs?”

She continued munching, giving no sign that she heard me. She stared straight ahead, her face expressionless.

“I’ll take care of you. Just like your momma took care of you before she died.”

Nothing.

“She was your momma, wasn’t she? Doesn’t matter. I’m your mother now. Well,” I amended, “more like your big sister, I suppose.” I walked to the bar and got a bottle of water. “My name is Teagan Shaw. What’s yours?”

Nothing.

“What were you when the world ended…four or five years old? This all probably seems normal to you, doesn’t it? Do you remember anything from before?”

Finally, she looked at me.

I waved. “Hello.”

After a second, she lifted a hand and returned the wave.

I grinned. “Do you want something else to eat?”

She didn’t smile, just chose another peanut butter cracker and ate it, but she’d slowed down. Her stomach wouldn’t hold much.

“Oh,” I said. “I have a present for you, kiddo. I’m going to have to think of a name for you if you won’t tell me what yours is. I can’t keep calling you kiddo or little girl, right?”

I babbled as I pulled a box from under my bed. When I glanced at her, I was pleased to see her watching me, her gaze a little less blank and a little more interested.

I pulled a doll from the box. “For you.” I carried the doll to her and placed it on her lap. “Do you like her?”

It was one of those heavy, floppy dolls that looked like a real baby—I’d gotten it from one of the houses I’d searched. When I’d first seen it lying there in a tiny crib in what was obviously an adult’s bedroom, I’d thought it was a dead infant.

I’d taken with me, because I was looking ahead. If I got desperate for someone to talk to, a doll that looked real was better than nothing.

You have me.

I know, Robin. Always.

The kid wasn’t impressed.

After a look of horror, she shoved the doll off her lap.

I scooped it up and tossed it back into the box. “That’s okay. I’ll find you something better. I don’t have any toys around here, but I’ll find some the next time I go out.”

She turned her head, her little body stiff with displeasure.

Maybe she associated the baby doll with the one that’d been inside her mother. Maybe she’d seen a baby die. Whatever her reasons, she did not play with dolls.

I caught myself tearing up every few minutes. I never would have believed finding someone to spend my days with would affect me so much, but God, was I happy to have her.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” I told her, when we were lying in the darkness trying to sleep. I wouldn’t make a run tomorrow. Not only because I still wasn’t over what had happened that day, but because I didn’t want to leave her alone—and I wasn’t sure I should take her with me.

I’d have to rethink my routine.

She said nothing. The kid was not exactly a talker.

“Everyone dies,” I murmured. “Everyone and everything. The sooner we wrap our brains around that notion, the better off we are.” I wasn’t really talking to her.

That night the sound of her breathing lulled me into a vaguely uneasy sleep, and when I started awake sometime before dawn, I sat up and stared into the shadowy darkness to make sure she was really there. That I hadn’t dreamed her.

I drifted back to sleep, and the next time I opened my eyes I found the child standing beside me, still and silent.

I shrieked and shot up, a hand to my chest. “Don’t do that. You scared the crap out of me!”

“Get up,” she said, unfazed by my dramatics.

“I’m glad you can speak.” I threw my legs over the side of my bunk. “What do you need? The bathroom?”

“Time to go.”

“Go? Go where?” I cleared my throat, ashamed that my voice was hoarse and my heart was beating so rapidly. She freaked me out.

And that was something I needed to get over in a hurry. She was a kid. Just a kid.

She still wore her pants from yesterday, but I saw that she’d donned one of my old shirts. It hung on her small frame—I wasn’t a large girl but she was tiny.

The Johnsons had lived three houses down from this one, and they’d had two small girls. I’d search their house later today for some clothes for her.

She turned away and walked toward the door. “Hurry up.”

I stood. “Hurry up for what?”

She said nothing.

I put my hands on my hips. “We’re not going anywhere until you tell me.”

She stopped walking, and her shoulders lifted with the force of her sigh. “To town.”

“Why?” I grabbed a bottle of water and drank half of it in one gulp. I had a bad feeling the little girl thought we should go back and see to her mother. Maybe she had no idea the woman was dead. “We have everything we need here.”

I hoped she hadn’t gone to peer into the dumpster after I’d left. After I’d hacked her mom into chunks and pieces.

“They’re coming.” Her voice was quiet, hollow, and completely certain.

I shivered. “Who is coming?”

“The mutants.”

And then I understood. “You and your mom escaped them, didn’t you? After they…did what they did to her, she took you and ran.”

She nodded.

There was a story in those eyes. Eyes that should have been innocent but were full instead of knowledge and darkness. She didn’t elaborate.

“They’re coming this way?” I whispered.

Again, she nodded.

“A lot of them? And don’t nod. I need words, little girl. A bunch of mutants are coming here?”

She started to nod, then stopped. She looked up at me with her huge, sunken, old eyes. “A cluster of gods. They’re coming.”

My legs weakened and I was sure I was going to piss myself. “A cluster,” I whispered. “Of gods? That’s what they’re called? That’s…a cluster. That’s a group of them?”

A cluster of gods.

Oh, those words.

They sent terror right though me. I leaned against the bar. The mutants were forming…clusters. Were they growing in intelligence, or had the few I’d been up against been particularly stupid?

“I don’t like this.” I rubbed the goose bumps off my arms. “I don’t like this at all.”

“Here.”

She was standing beside me, her hand out. I hadn’t heard her move.

“Here,” she said again, when I made no move to take the crumpled paper in her hand.

I took it, finally, gingerly. It’d been wadded tightly into a ball, and I opened it carefully, then put it on the bar and used my fingers to smooth it out. It was an ordinary piece of notebook paper, its edges tattered and worn. The top left corner was missing.

I read the words aloud, then silently. Over and over, as my mind fought against accepting what my eyes were seeing.

The gods are making more of themselves.

The next words had been smeared so badly they were indecipherable.

--ing women to carry their babies and both for food.

Gods are unkillable.

Run. Hide.

“Shit,” I whispered. I looked down at the little girl. A little girl who’d spent time inside the…the cluster, who’d been exposed to the mutants. “I call them mutants.”

She nodded. “Everyone does. But the big mutants are the gods. The bosses.”

Before everything had shut down and we still got the news on TV and the Internet, the monsters had been called mutants.

No one had called them gods.

No one had mentioned clusters.

But now…

Things had changed.

And we were facing mutants who wanted to rule our world, to rule us, to be gods.

“They’re…intelligent, then,” I said. But really, it was a question.

She nodded. “The gods are.”

“What’s your name, kid?” Because suddenly there was nothing more important than concentrating on something else. Anything else.

“Sage.” She stared up at me, and then tugged my hand. “Let’s go now.”

I shook my head. “No. Hell, no. We’re not going anywhere. If they’re coming, we’ll stay right here until they’ve passed through.”

“They’ll stay for a long time. We have to take everything we can before it’s gone.”

“We should leave. Leave town.”

“They’re too close.”

“How old are you?” Because she no longer sounded six. She no longer looked six, at least not when I peered into her eyes.

“Eight,” she said. “My mother says…” She paused, then straightened her shoulders and continued. “My mother said I was born a hundred.”

“You’re awfully small for an eight-year-old.” I closed my eyes, then blew out a breath and looked at her. I took her bony shoulders and squeezed gently. “I’m sorry. I’m being a baby.”

She’d been through some bad shit, yet there she was, urging me to hurry into town so we could grab supplies before the cluster of gods arrived to steal, eat, or destroy them all.

“Sometimes they search houses for people before they leave.”

“Awesome.” I grabbed a bottle of pain relievers from the shelf beneath the bar and swallowed two of them with a long drink of water. “You’re sure we have time?”

“My mother said we have to get everything before they do. We have to.”

“Okay, hon, calm down. You’re sure there’s time?” I asked, again.

“Yes.”

“All right, then. I believe you.” But I didn’t. How could she know how much time we had? How could she really know?

She couldn’t.

But she was fixated on going to town—her mother had made sure she understood that she should stock up on supplies. Had made it seem like the most important thing in the world.

She was right, though. If the mutants were going to take or destroy everything in their paths, we needed to get what we could before they arrived. Then we’d hide out until they left.

And then…

Mentally, I shrugged.

Then we’d see.

I wanted the mutants to march on and leave me and Crowbridge alone. But life as I knew it had changed. The world had shifted—again—and I had two choices.

I would either learn to live in it…

Or I would die.

Chapter Five

Sage wouldn’t have stayed behind had I tied her to a chair. In the end we walked back to town, and though she didn’t show it, I could feel her anxiety.

I wondered if she could feel mine.

After what I’d learned about the mutants—the gods—I knew I’d never walk outside the house with as much nerve as I had in the past.

With as much innocence.

I didn’t bother weighing myself down with more weapons. I had my machete, the usual blades, and the emergency pistol.

If it came down to me against a cluster, my only small chance at survival was running. Barring that, I could always shoot myself.

Part of me wished I’d never met the kid and her tormented mother. I’d like to have remained blissfully ignorant a while longer.

We didn’t speak the entire walk.

Sage’s disinclination to talk appeared to be contagious. I had no desire to say a word.

I had let her pick out whatever weapons she wanted, and the first thing she’d taken had been a long, silver chain which held a small but heavy bejeweled dragon.

“Oh,” she’d breathed, her eyes wide. “Can I have it?”

When I’d shown her that its wings and tail were actually tiny, detachable blades, she’d been further enchanted with the hideous piece of jewelry. No dolls for Sage. She wanted dragons and blades.

After she’d dropped the chain over her head, she slid some knives into her pockets, then chose a small, uncomplicated revolver to carry.

“I know how,” she said, tersely, when I looked at her askance.

I’d shrugged. “Whatever makes you feel safe is okay with me. Just remember if you shoot it, they’ll hear.”

She slid the gun into a pocket of the too-large, thin coat I’d given her. The days were still too warm for the bulky, heavy one she’d worn. “I won’t shoot it unless they’re about to take me.”

“It’s good to have a plan,” I told her. I patted my pocket. “I have the same plan. Better dead than captured.” I hesitated. “You know bullets won’t kill them, right?”

“I don’t want it to shoot them.” She made her hand into the shape of a gun and put her outstretched index finger to her temple. “It’s for me.”

We didn’t speak again until we reached town. I scanned the area constantly, moving slowly, checking for sounds, movements, voices.

“Can they talk?” I asked her, once.

“They absorb us.” She replied with the automatic blankness of someone repeating something they’d been told. “They learn what we know.”

“So they can talk.”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “Most of them. Some of them can’t because their brains are hurt. They’re not good absorbers. Some of them are dumb.”

Those must have been the ones I’d experienced. They hadn’t seemed particularly intelligent or thoughtful and I couldn’t imagine one of them speaking.

It was my turn to hesitate. “How long did they have you?”

She didn’t answer, and I didn’t push.

We went first to the grocery. “In and out,” I said. “Fast as we can. We’ll fill one cart—no way you can push one back home.”

“Get a car,” she said, and frowned at me, like I was the stupidest person she’d ever seen.

“You know noise brings them running, Sage.”

“The orphans will know the gods are coming. They…hear each other. In their heads. They won’t be here to hear us because they’ll run to meet their masters.”

“Orphans?”

“The…” She gestured, searching for the right word. “The loose ones. The ones that can’t absorb. The dumb ones.”

I put a hand to my chest and stared at her. “There are different types of mutants?”

“Yes. The gods are smart. You can’t run from them and you can’t kill them—not even with that machete. They’re too fast and strong. All you can do is hide.”

I stared at her. “How old are you, again? No way you’re eight. No way.” I didn’t really want to think about what she’d just told me.

Her eyes sparkled for a second and she lifted her chin. “I’m wise. It’s why I’m called Sage.”

“How did your mom know you were going to be so sage?” I grinned at her, but she wouldn’t look at me, and she didn’t reply to my question.

The kid was unbelievable, there was no doubt. But the mystery of Sage made me uneasy.

“The forsaken,” she went on, “will unite. They’ll rebel. Someday.”

“The forsaken—you mean the loose ones?”

She curled her lip, then thumped her chest with a small fist. “We, the forsaken.”

Holy shit. I stared at her, my mouth open. “Sage…”

“Get a car,” she said, and something about her stiffness, her absolute stillness, freaked me out.

“Are they coming?” I whispered, a hand to my stomach.

“I told you they were.” She frowned at me.

“I mean like now.”

She shrugged. “We should hurry.”

There was a row of homes across the highway from the mall. “Come on,” I said. “There are cars in nearly every driveway. The keys will be inside the houses.”

We rushed across the street to the homes. “Pick one,” I told her.

She immediately pointed at a black SUV. “That one is big.”

“Good choice.” I picked up a rock and knocked out the glass beside the front door, then reached in to unlock it. Once inside, I found the keys in a tray in the entryway, but as I turned to leave, Sage hurried deeper into the house.

“What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Supplies.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. Didn’t matter where we got supplies, as long as we got them. I followed her into the kitchen, and she began filling a bag as I fished a cardboard box from the pantry and loaded it with as much as I could carry.

I worked quietly and quickly, concentrating on the task, as did Sage. At the back of my mind was a niggling worry about the girl. I wasn’t sure what it was, other than the fear that she’d get hurt or I’d lose her or something horrible would happen and I’d be responsible for another child’s death.

It bothered me. It was like a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite grasp. It danced teasingly just out of my reach.

The house was full of goodies and I wanted them all. Before the little girl, I hadn’t reached the point where there was nothing left. I thought I’d had time.

Time had run out.

Now fear of losing food and supplies combined with the sharp terror of the incoming group of mutants made me a cringing, fearful person who couldn’t wait to return to my home where I might be safe.

Might be safe.

“Do you know where they came from, Sage?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

I paused. “You don’t know anything at all about them?”

Again, she shrugged. “I think in the ground.”

Then she refused to say anything else about it. Probably whatever she’d seen and heard was a big ball of confusion in her mind, and she wasn’t sure of anything.

We cleared out the house with grim determination, making several trips to the car before we were finished. Afterward, we climbed into the SUV and for only the second time in two years, I drove a car.

I wasn’t very good at it, but I’d gotten some experience driving when I had to help cart corpses to the burn piles. When the world went crazy, those who were able and sane pitched in to help those who weren’t.

We found only two more houses holding anything of value, and then we gave up on the houses and went to the mall.

We loaded the SUV down with everything we could get in. By the time we were ready to leave, there was barely enough room for the two of us to squeeze in.

Sage was surprisingly capable. She didn’t need to be told what to do—the kid grabbed a cart and threw everything in that she could reach, then left the full cart for me to shove to the car while she loaded up another one.

She was small, but she was strong and fast.

And when I roared down the highway toward home, not one mutant appeared.

“We’ll go back for more tomorrow,” I said, as we unloaded the car.

Sage nodded. “Okay.”

“How long before they get here, do you think?”

“I don’t know. Not today.”

“Like three or four days?”

“I don’t know.”

“But how long do you think, Sage?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded like a child—a grumpy child—which relieved me in a strange way.

I shoved canned food into the pantry. “We’ll go back tomorrow, then we’ll lie low and wait for the mutants to pass through.”

“The gods. The mutants aren’t as scary.”

“Whatever.” I turned to face her, my hands on my hips. “How long will they stay in town for their little pillaging and plundering party?”

“A long time.”

But what was “a long time” to an eight-year-old? When I was that young, a day was an eternity.

“Until they get everything they want,” she added, making things a little clearer.

“Sometimes,” I told her, “I think about loading up a car and just driving. But I couldn’t drive forever, could I?”

“I’m hungry,” she said.

I sighed. “Okay. Let’s finish unloading the car and then I’ll make some dinner. Deal?”

“Deal.”

But she looked pale and tiny, and her hands shook when she handed me a can of green beans.

I opened a can of milk, grabbed a box of sugary cereal, and poured them into a huge bowl. “Go sit down and eat, honey. I’ll take care of the rest. Won’t take me long.”

She didn’t argue. She sat on the couch, and before she was halfway through her cereal, she fell asleep.

It’d been a very productive day. I finished unloading the car, locking the door behind me each time I brought in another bag or box of supplies.

I’d learned to be careful.

Not because of the end of the world, though. I’d learned to be careful long before the world ended, and locking a door was a habit I wouldn’t shed anytime soon.

After I’d filled the pantry, I clicked on the battery-powered lights in the cellar, then carried the rest of the supplies down to the well-stocked room.

There was one thing left for me to do, and I wanted to get it done before nightfall. I left Sage a note just in case she woke up and found me gone—though I doubted she could read it—and then I hurried to the Johnson’s to find her some clothes.

I was back home in less than twenty minutes, carrying two bags of clothes and shoes I figured would come close to fitting her.

I stopped at the couch, then leaned over to kiss her forehead before falling into my own bed. It’d felt good working all day. Had made the time pass quickly.

Having company didn’t hurt.

But that night I dreamed of mutants and blood and pain and Robin, and when I woke up, sweaty and disoriented, I decided no way in hell were we making a return trip to town in the morning.

Because in my dream, the mutants had me. Worse than that, they had Sage.

So we weren’t going back to town.

She was mine now. My kid, my sister, whatever.

My responsibility.

And I was not going to let anything happen to her.

But by the light of day, my decision to stay home disintegrated beneath the brightness of the sun, the very clear realization that we’d need every bit of the supplies we could find, and the insistence of the strange little girl.

Chapter Six

The sound of the car engine made my stomach clench. It wasn’t a loud car, but the town was even quieter. Any sounds that weren’t birds or wind stood out in all that quietness.

That day, even the birds were silent, and the wind didn’t blow.

I took a deep breath and pushed it out slowly, hoping my anxiety would go with it. “It feels different.” I looked at the kid. “This day.”

She said nothing.

I was pretty sure she could feel the difference in the air, same as I could. Maybe more.

She wasn’t a regular kid. Obviously.

And she’d already gone back inside her shell.

“What’s wrong, Sage?” I asked.

She kept her face turned toward the window and never said a word. I hoped that when we got to town and started working, she’d cheer up a little. Her silence made me nervous.

Funny how quickly I’d gotten attached to the sound of another person’s voice.

I didn’t speak again until we reached town, and then only to caution her to stay alert and let me know the second she heard, saw, or felt anything at all.

She gave me a terse nod that sent her red curls into her face, and then with a weary sigh, she grabbed a cart to begin the long process of once again filling the car with supplies.

When we were finished with the grocery store, we’d head to the pharmacy and then the farm and feed store. I wanted to get everything that was left—not that there was a lot.

“I’ve been lucky,” I said, “that this town hasn’t been looted or burned by roaming humans. There haven’t even been many mutants here.”

She didn’t reply, but I knew what she was thinking.

That was about to change.

We sat in the car and had our lunch. “After we eat,” I told her, “let’s go to the pharmacy and clean it out.”

She nodded. “Get medicines.”

“Yes.” The child could use some vitamins. “I’ll get some gummies for you.”

She looked at me blankly.

I pointed across the street at a cute red car sitting in one of the driveways. “When we need to switch out this car, we’ll take that one. I like red. It’s bright and cheerful and…”

“What?” she asked, when I trailed off.

I reached out to turn the key in the ignition, and then, I groaned. “The gas tank’s almost empty!” It simply hadn’t occurred to me to check. “Damn it.”

“Drive fast so we can get home before the gas runs out.”

I laughed. “Okay, honey. I’ll drive fast.”

She nodded.

I sighed. “I’ll drive as far as I can, then return for the stuff when I have another car. One with gas.”

She climbed from the car to stand in a patch of sunlight.

I downed the remainder of my water then joined her. “Let’s go.”

“You go. I want to stay in the sun while I can.”

Her words hit me in the stomach and knocked the breath from my lungs. I couldn’t have said why, but her voice, her words, and her eyes held something so dark and ominous I knew without a single doubt she was seeing either the future or her past.

And either way, it was grim.

“Get medicines,” she repeated, softly.

I ran for the pharmacy, wanting to get it over with. I barreled through the doors and grabbed one of their little red carts. I didn’t take time to see if what I pulled off the shelves was anything we’d really need in our dismal future. I was quite certain we’d need everything.

I was relieved when Sage decided to join me. She stood just inside the doors, peering out, her shoulders stiff, keeping watch.

“Bandages,” I muttered. “Vitamins. Pain relievers. Cough drops.” I talked because I could not stand the silence. It was too heavy and hurt my stomach. “Scissors. Tape.”

I turned around to toss the items into my cart and nearly tripped over Sage, who had quietly moved from her post and now stood stiffly behind me.

“Shit,” I cried. “Don’t sneak up on me like—”

“They’re coming,” she whispered.

The tape and scissors dropped from my grip and fell to the floor with a clatter. “What?”

Without taking her stare from me, she lifted her hand and pointed toward the wall of windows.

I thought I heard my neck creak as I turned my head to follow her pointing finger.

I couldn’t move, not at first, but finally I forced my body to unfreeze and I ran to the windows. There was nothing in the parking lot.

“Sage, come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

She shook her head. “It’s too late to run.”

“Oh, honey. It is never too late to run. Now get the hell over here. I’m not leaving without you.”

She didn’t move. Her eyes were huge and sunken in her pale, thin face. A face full of doom. She was frozen to the spot, too terrified to move.

I knew exactly how she felt.

I rushed to her and grabbed her arm, skinny and small through the sleeve of her thin coat.

As we ran toward the SUV I darted glances around the parking lot, the street, and even the yards of the houses across from the mall. I saw nothing.

But they’d arrived. I heard them.

Just as we reached the cover of the car, I caught movement from the corner of my eye.

The first of the mutants appeared around the bend. They strode purposefully down the street, their walk and constantly swiveling heads quick and eager.

I dropped to my hands and knees, and Sage, her back against the car, slid down to the pavement. I scrambled to the back of the car so I could keep the intruders in view.

“Teagan,” she cried. “Don’t let them get me.”

She’d never sounded more like a child.

“Never,” I promised, fiercely.

I knew it was a promise I could only keep if they kept walking and didn’t see us. But we were in the parking lot of the mall, and they were going to raid the mall.

More of them appeared behind the first group. In seconds, the street was full of stomping feet and the air was heavy with muffled voices. The first group might have been scouts—they never stopped swiveling their heads as they searched the area, and they were quiet.

They were tall and skinny, the scouts, with darting heads and twitching limbs. They resembled the mutants I’d faced, but were different in certain ways. They were more observant, and even their strange, jerky movements were faster than I’d ever seen a mutant move.

Maybe even faster than humans.

And what scared me almost more than anything else…

They were laughing, joking, talking.

And one of them, a female mutant, was singing. Singing.

“They absorb us. They learn what we know.”

I’d never seen those types of mutants. Not once.

“What should I do,” she sang, her voice as pure and sweet as a child’s. “The day is through, and I’m still waiting. Waiting for you…”

I closed my eyes for a long second and tried to gain control of my galloping heart. A piece of gravel was grinding into my left knee, and the small distraction of that pain helped me focus on something besides the complete and utter terror roaring through my brain.

I continued to peek around the back of the car, and in the next second, I saw them.

The gods.

There was no mistaking them for the scouts or the orphans. They barely resembled the lesser mutants.

They strode down the street, tall and swaggering and big, some of them almost leisurely jogging as though their energy was too much for walking.

Their hair was dark and tied up in topknots, and the ends of the thick strands spilled over broad shoulders. Both the male and female gods were larger than the other mutants—likely they got the biggest share of the food.

Unlike the scouts, the gods seemed almost relaxed. They didn’t search the area obsessively, they weren’t stiff or erratic or twitchy, and they talked. With each other.

They talked. And they laughed.

In their midst one god rose above them all, but only because he rode a horse. He looked the same as the other gods. Same hair, same huge body, same relaxed manner.

Farther behind the first group of gods came more gods, all on horseback.

“It’s like a Halloween parade,” I whispered. “A hideous parade of monsters.”

And then…

Then I saw their captives.

Behind those swaggering gods came a small knot of humans. Women, all with huge, swollen bellies, all naked. All I could think of through the buzzing of horror in my mind was that soon the humans would freeze to death if they were denied clothes.

That’s what I concentrated on, because if I didn’t, I was afraid my mind would shatter.

Cords or ropes of some sort snaked from thick collars around the women’s necks, and appeared to be connected. Even as I watched, one of the women stumbled and fell to her knees, and the woman directly behind her was pulled down as well.

A mutant grabbed the first woman by her hair and yanked her to her feet. The second woman rose hastily but clumsily—even from the distance I could see the grimace of pain on her face.

Or maybe I just imagined that part.

Farther down the procession were human men. They appeared in worse shape than the women, if that were possible. I saw limbs hanging at awkward angles and even from the distance I could see their bodies were bloody and battered.

Blood, wounds, filth.

And so very much despair.

I wanted to cry, but I was too shocked. Too scared.

What I was seeing…that horror was beyond tears.

I saw no little kids. Thank God, I saw no little kids. So what did they do with the half mutant, half human babies after they were born?

One of the scouts gestured and began jumping up and down as though his excitement were too extreme to control. Then the other scouts joined him in his strange dance, jumping and shrieking like crazed monkeys.

I duck-walked to Sage, who still hid her face against her bent knees. “Time to go, little girl,” I said. Past time.

She didn’t move.

“Now, Sage.” I could feel her terror, but fear was okay. Being taken was not. “Get in the car.”

She looked up, finally. “There’s no gas.” She reached up to put her little hands on either side of my face. “They can run forever. They’ll catch us when the car stops. We can’t let them hear us.”

I put my fist against my lips. Already, I could hear them marching across the grassy area that led straight to the parking lot. “My God,” I whispered. “What have I done?”

Sage sniffed, and tears overflowed from her huge eyes. “I’m scared.”

I didn’t care how old she looked or what age she said she was. Her eyes were not those of an eight year old. Her eyes were ancient. And she knew things. She’d lived with the gods.

And she was terrified.

We had two minutes, at the most. “Trust me, Sage. I’ll take care of you.”

She put her hand in mine and didn’t make a sound as I dragged her to the doors of the grocery store, just a few yards from the car. I planned to go through the store and out the back doors, then we’d run home like we were on fire and we wouldn’t come out again until the gods were gone.

Please, God. Please.

Adrenaline lent me wings, and we flew down the aisles toward the back of the store. The doors were not locked—I’d gone out back a dozen times. I just needed to reach them.

Please…

The mutants shoved through the front doors, hooting and laughing like a mob of drunken humans. And that made it even more frightening.

Because they were so not human.

Then the doors were there. Right there in front of me.

I slammed through them, Sage’s hand still in mine. I dimly realized I was squeezing it too tightly but I didn’t ease up.

I couldn’t.

Once outside, I had to slow down. I couldn’t run blindly and let my panic fling us into the long arms of the mutants.

Still holding Sage’s hand, I flattened myself against the building and tried to be still.

My wildly beating heart fluttered like a trapped bird against my rib cage, and blood roared through my ears so loudly I could barely hear anything else. I took a deep, deep breath, then another, and another.

When I was a little calmer, a little quieter, I closed my eyes, and I listened. Thumps, screams, and roars came from inside the store, but not just the store. An unending line of mutants still marched down the street, and they were invading homes as well as the other shops.

Invading Crowbridge.

My town.

And there wasn’t anything at all I could do about it.

I began creeping away from the building. If we made it to the field at the back of the store, we could slip through the tall, concealing grasses and circle around gradually to the wooded area that would lead us home.

It would take longer. A lot longer. But I didn’t care about that.

Any minute the mutants could leave the store. Any minute they could rush curiously to the back of the store—perhaps the scouts would check the area. Maybe they’d want to check the dumpsters.

All I knew for sure was that we had to get out of there.

I glanced at Sage. Her face remained expressionless, her eyes…hopeless.

“We need to run now,” I told her. “Don’t stop for anything.”

She nodded.

We kicked off and began running, bits of gravel and debris crunching beneath our shoes. Ordinarily I would have been more careful and quiet because of their tendency to hear every little thing, but I didn’t have to worry about that now.

They were making too much noise to hear the sounds two humans made while running away from them.

We made it to the field and rushed into its welcoming, sheltering arms. The ground was softer and kinder than the asphalt of the lot, and I immediately breathed easier as the tall, dry grasses shielded me from sharp mutant eyes.

“Stay right behind me,” I told her, and used my machete to part the dense weeds and tangled undergrowth as we crept ever onward.

The sounds of looting became dimmer the farther we walked, but images of tortured, pregnant humans flashed continuously through my mind.

We’d escaped the mutants. For now.

But there was a lot of distance between us and home, and I didn’t believe for one second that we’d seen the last of the terrifying cluster of gods.

Chapter Seven

 I began to believe we might actually make it home. There were no sounds other than singing birds and the occasional crack of a dry stick or twig beneath our cautious steps. We crept through the woods, silent and watchful.

“Soon,” I murmured, finally. “We’ll be home very soon.”

She didn’t reply.

My fingers trembled when I reached up to touch my tingling lips. The skin between my shoulder blades itched as though the mutants were right behind me, ready to pounce and do horrible, unspeakable things to me.

My mind buzzed and my legs, weak and shaky, wanted to fold beneath my weight. I’d known terror since the end of the world, but this was something more.

I almost screamed when Sage shot out a hand and wrapped her fingers around my wrist. “Shhh,” she said. “Listen.”

I stopped walking and stood still, barely breathing as I peered into the shadows of the bleak woods. The day had become overcast without me noticing—understandable since I’d been occupied with surviving the mutants—and the tall trees seemed to lean and sway as they watched us creep through their darkening domain.

Suddenly everything seemed like a threat.

“Shhh,” Sage repeated.

I held my breath as I listened. I wanted to ask her what she heard, but I didn’t dare speak. I could hear nothing but the insidious whispering of the leaves as a breath of wind rippled through them.

But maybe that wasn’t what I was hearing at all. Maybe the leaves rustling together was actually the gods whispering.

I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing. The last thing I wanted was a full blown panic attack making us more vulnerable than we already were.

“Humans,” Sage whispered.

I opened my eyes. “What?”

“Humans are coming.” She tossed a look over her shoulder. “And mutants from there.”

“Mutants are in the woods?”

“Yes. Can you feel them?”

“Son of a bitch,” I muttered. “Yes. Yes, I can. Mutants behind us and baddies in front.”

“The mutants are gaining on us,” she said, her eyes wide. “If we don’t hide now, we’ll be caught in the middle of both of them.”

“Then let’s hide,” I said, calmer. “And let the bastards catch each other.”

Sage didn’t hesitate. She ran to a tree, then jumped and grabbed a low hanging branch. “Come on,” she hissed, and began to climb like a little monkey. “This is how we escaped them the first time. They never look in the trees.”

The humans might, though.

I started to grab a branch and hoist myself up, but my weapons were in the way. I was wearing too many of them.

I yanked my machete strap from over my head. I tossed it away, then threw two of my smaller knives after it.

When the humans and mutants moved on, I would fetch the weapons.

I followed her up the tree. The trees I’d just imagined were out to get us suddenly became our refuge.

Sage was fearless and nimble and practically flew from branch to branch, higher and higher, until finally she straddled a sturdy branch, wrapped her arms around the trunk, and waited for me to join her.

Before I could climb as far as she had, I heard the voices. Human voices. The baddies. Human baddies were usually bad news.

“Human beings now have the freedom to be whatever they want. To do whatever they want. There are bad people in the world. People who’ve been fettered by society, Teagan. Who’ve been chained by laws and rules and fear. That ends now. Some of these people will live on.”

My mother had already been stricken with the flu when she’d talked to me about the baddies of the world and what would happen when they were freed from their chains.

As if I didn’t already know.

I’d learned that lesson when I’d been six years old and a man had taken my sister.

As she lay dying, fading quickly, she’d made one last plea. “Kill yourself when I die. I can’t bear to leave you here alone. Take the sleeping pills. Take them all.”

“I will,” I lied.

When she’d died, I’d wrapped her in a sheet and buried her in the shallow grave I dug in the backyard. Then I’d found a different house.

I hadn’t been quite…sane, exactly, after my mother died. The trauma from the terror of the invading mutants, the disease, the death, the grief…

No. I hadn’t been quite sane.

I still wasn’t. I’d never again be the girl I was.

I’d accepted that.

And I didn’t trust anyone.

I glanced up at Sage and found her watching me. She put a finger to her lips.

I nodded.

The baddies were almost directly below us.

Carefully, I looked down through leaves that were just changing colors, grateful that it wasn’t so far into fall that the trees were barren.

I clutched the tree in a death grip as I imagined sliding off the branch and falling on top of the baddies. I closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness to pass. When I had control of myself, I peered down at them once again.

I saw seven humans. Six men, one woman.

And even though I knew better, part of me wanted to reach out to them. Part of me wanted to be with those of my own kind. To be taken care of. To belong to a group.

Part of me wanted to warn them about what was coming.

I didn’t move.

The baddies—funny how I thought of them as baddies even though I didn’t know if they would hurt me, not for sure—were not loud or boisterous.

Finally, one of them said, “Wait. Hear that?”

Terror exploded in my chest. Even when I realized it wasn’t me they heard—I wasn’t making a sound—the terror didn’t dissipate. Because it meant the mutants had arrived.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths before you pass out and hand yourself over to them.

“Shit,” one of the men said. “It’s them. Grab the bitch.”

The woman didn’t even scream.

I couldn’t see her well. The view was mostly obscured by the limbs and leaves, but I caught a glimpse when one of the men grasped her arm.

She stood with her head down, silent. She didn’t struggle or fight them or her fate in any way. She simply waited.

She’d given up long, long ago. She knew no one was going to save her.

Most likely if she’d been able to, she’d have killed herself.

The mutants flooded the area, surrounding the humans.

“Chill,” one of the humans said. “We’re collectors.” He shoved the woman away from his group. “Caught one for you.”

Wait. What?

The humans and the gods had been communicating? Human men were hunting human women to give to the mutants? That couldn’t be true.

How could that be true?

“Collectors,” another man said, thumping his chest. “That’s us.”

The mutants were all scouts, though I thought I caught a glimpse of an orphan hanging back behind them. The orphans were easy to spot. Their movements were slower and there was just something off about them. They were like…dead mutants who’d been brought back from the grave with part of their brains missing, and it showed. They held themselves a certain way. Even their walk was different.

The scouts spread out, surrounding the humans. They were dressed in regular human clothing—jeans, jackets, tee-shirts, boots. Some of them wore baseball caps. Some of them were bald. They didn’t look that different from humans.

But there were differences. Their yellow eyes, their sharp fangs, their insanely pale skin. Yes, they were different.

“Murdering bastards,” I whispered, but only to myself.

They completely ignored the woman.

She wasn’t going anywhere.

Then something happened that shocked me so much I nearly lost my grip on the tree.

A mutant spoke.

Even though Sage had informed me they could speak, that they learned from us, it hadn’t really sunk in. Even though I’d heard rumbles of their voices as they’d marched down the street, even though I’d heard one of them singing…

I somehow hadn’t imagined them standing around conversing with humans.

The mutant’s voice was rough and raw and gravely, and it took me a moment to comprehend his words. I understood why immediately. Their mouths were crowded with too many teeth and sharp fangs.

“Find more,” he ordered. “More.”

“Yeah,” the human replied. “We’ll find more, and we’ll hand them over when we run into a cluster. We know the rules, dude.”

Human men had a deal with the mutants. Find women, and the men—the collectors—could live. It didn’t explain why I’d seen male prisoners with the cluster in my town…though I guessed those men had refused to “work” for the mutants. Maybe they’d fought the gods.

I felt myself pale as I considered the other reason the mutants would have male prisoners. Food.

And the human collectors…

Those men were turning on their own kind. They made me sick. They made me furious.

But I was a helpless human stuck in a tree, just trying to stay alive. I couldn’t fight the bastards on the ground. I couldn’t save the woman.

I’d been sheltered for two years in my tiny town. I’d had no idea what was really going on out there in the world. That blissful ignorance was over, and the town was no longer mine.

I glanced up at Sage. She pressed the side of her face against the bark and stared down at me, but her eyes were empty and unseeing. When things got too scary, she found a way to shut down. To escape somewhere inside her mind.

Maybe she’d teach me how to do that.

If I lived long enough to learn.

Below, one of the mutants beckoned to the human who’d spoken—the leader of the little group, it appeared. “Come here,” he said.

The man didn’t move. “You have the lady. We need to get back to our search.”

“Come,” the mutant insisted. “You can go back with us to get your reward.” He gave a very human-like shrug. “Or you can die.”

“Fuck,” the human muttered, but he walked toward the mutants.

The other five humans drew closer to each other but said nothing. Their fear was almost a physical thing, and seemed to waft up from the ground to surround me.

When the human was beside him, the lead mutant spoke again. “We do not need so many humans.”

“Kroog says we do,” another mutant argued. “Food for our masters.”

So I was right.

We’re food and baby growers.

I shuddered and tightened my grip on the tree.

The leader snorted. “The gods shouldn’t have first choice with them all. We do all the work and I am hungry.”

“The gods will die without them,” one of the scouts muttered.

“There are plenty of humans to go around,” the leader scoffed.

“Mischa said—” another mutant started.

“I’m leader of this group,” the first mutant said. “Are you challenging me?”

The second scout backed up a step. “Not challenging. But I’m not a rule breaker. Our masters—”

The first scout stared at his argumentative friend. “You’re a coward.”

He rushed the mutant who’d sassed him, and he was fast. The second mutant turned to run, but one of the others shoved him so hard he flew backward and collided with the leader.

The leader didn’t budge—didn’t take a step back or stumble or so much as grunt with the impact. He stood like a stone wall and when the other man slammed into him, he tore out the other man’s throat.

With no fanfare, no words, no hesitation.

The injured mutant stumbled backward, his hands to his throat, and the leader followed him. He rode him to the ground, and then he pulled a blade from his side and with excruciating, purposeful slowness, he sawed the mutant’s head off.

He jumped to his feet, spattered with milky mutant blood. He shook the blade at the group, who stood watching in absolute silence.

“Someday I will be like a god,” he shouted, “and I will not need a blade to relieve you of your heads. Are there other challengers?”

No one said a word.

I felt a warm, spreading wetness between my thighs and realized I’d peed my pants—at least a little. That was a secret I’d carry to my grave.

And then, while the humans milled in terror, the leader spoke once more. “Feast,” he said, softly.

Just that one word, but the tiny knot of humans immediately broke apart, lifted their guns, and began to shoot. Wildly, though. So wildly a bullet tore off a chunk of bark not two inches from my leg.

They didn’t care that the sound of their guns would bring mutants. The mutants were already there.

The man who’d led the humans turned away.

The scouts didn’t seem to notice they were being shot--the bullets didn’t slow them. When humans shot mutants, it was simply force of habit. Habit and panic.

The humans fell quickly beneath the force of the mutants and their own desperation.

I pressed my forehead against the bark and closed my eyes, but I couldn’t shut out the shrieks of the humans. I couldn’t shut out the sounds of flesh tearing and bones snapping as the mutants fell upon the men in a frenzy of unstoppable rage and hunger. They did as their leader had ordered.

They feasted.

And high in the tree, I wondered if this were really a world in which I wanted to exist. I should have listened to my mother.

I should have killed myself.

I concentrated on the comforting thought that I still had that option.

It wasn’t too late to die.

Better I should do it myself than to wait for a mutant or a god to do it for me.

Chapter Eight

We stood on the ground with the dead spread out around us in bits of discarded flesh and splintered bone. The air was tight with despair and darkness and heavily scented with metallic blood and freshly gutted carcasses.

For me, the world had changed once again.

The mutants had disappeared with their full bellies, their human collector, and the tormented female prisoner, on to meet up with the cluster from which they’d splintered.

I didn’t know what the lead scout had done with the woman. Or to her. I hadn’t taken my face away from the hard, rough bark until long after the mutants had sated their hunger and stomped away.

Maybe I should have watched. I could have stayed with her in her anguish, but that wouldn’t have helped her and would only have hurt me. Perhaps they’d simply led her away, back to the camp. Perhaps they’d raped her as I sat high in the tree, trying to lose myself in my mind the way Sage did.

“We’re lucky,” Sage said.

I took my stare off the gleaming white leg bone of one of the men. I’d fixated on the bits of meat still clinging to it, and tried to reconcile that bone with the living, breathing human who’d stood there less than an hour ago.

“Lucky,” I said, scornful and angry and afraid. “We’re lucky.”

She pointed at the bone. “That’s not my bone. It’s not your bone. That makes us lucky.”

“We’re not lucky, Sage. We’re stupid for clinging to this awful place. We need to give the world to the gods and see if we’ll be lucky in the afterlife.”

She said nothing, but she stared at me. Her eyes, dark and sunken in her pale, skinny face, were accusing.

I looked away. “Let’s get home before the assholes decide to come back.”

“They won’t come back. Once they return to the cluster, their masters will keep them there, celebrating, maybe birthing a baby, getting drunk.”

I stared, bemused. “They get drunk?”

“The love to get drunk. They do it a lot.”

“Alcoholic mutants,” I muttered. “I don’t know why I’m surprised.”

“They get drunk on milk.”

I just shook my head.

“They’re like humans, only…” She paused.

“Only what?” I walked a few yards away, my stare on the ground. I couldn’t find my machete. It didn’t matter. I had others.

“Only worse,” she said.

“How they hell do they pack supplies with them, Sage? And what do they do with them? They eat us. Why do they want our crackers and beans and medicine?”

“There are wagons,” Sage said, falling into step beside me. “And Mother said the longer the mutants are here, the stronger they become. And more like humans. Sort of.”

For some reason, she seemed more relaxed than I’d ever seen her. Almost…cheerful. I stared at her, my mouth open. “Are you serious?”

She nodded. “They absorb.”

“Alcoholic killer mutant sponges,” I said. “This is unreal.”

“The wagons carry the supplies and some of the humans. If you’d kept watching, you’d have seen them at the end of the line. They don’t just eat people. They…”

She stared into her memories, and seemed to forget she’d been speaking. For a second, she was lost somewhere in her past, and was no longer there with me.

“What?” I pressed. I squeezed her arm, gently. “Come back.”

She looked at me blankly, but she looked at me.

“They don’t just eat people,” I reminded her. “Go on.”

“Okay.” She paused for a moment, as though trying to remember what she’d been about to say, then finally continued. “Humans are a…” She frowned hard, searching for a word she’d been told and forgotten.

“Delicacy?”

“No…mutants have to have humans to survive.”

“A necessity?”

“Yes! That. The hunters aren’t supposed to eat humans they find. They’re supposed to take them to the cluster where the gods do their tests, get their picks, and decide what to do with the rest.”

“Tests?”

“The gods figure out what the humans are. I don’t know more. I’m too young.”

I swallowed past the dryness in my throat. “And what do they do with the rest?”

She shrugged. “Lots of stuff.”

I stepped over a rotted log and glanced at her. “So the group just now, they went against their own rules?”

She nodded. “If he finds out, he’ll torture them.”

I swallowed. “He?”

She didn’t look at me. “The leader of this cluster. His name sounds like Kroog.”

The same name the scouts had mentioned.

“How long did they have you, Sage? How long?”

She didn’t say anything.

I opened my mouth to repeat the question when she finally answered me. Sort of.

“A long, long time,” she replied. “Just about forever.”

It was the first time she’d spoken with such…deadness.

I shuddered. I shouldn’t have forced her to think about such bad times. But really, would she ever not be thinking of those times?

I wondered what they’d done to her. What she’d seen.

Why she continued to fight for survival.

I didn’t ask.

We walked out of the woods, jumped a ditch, then climbed a slight incline to the highway. We both kept watch for sneaking mutants, but all was quiet.

The woods continued on the other side of the highway, and we hurried into them. The house was close now.

“We’ll be home in ten minutes,” I said. I had to keep reassuring myself.

She took my hand. “We’ll get there.”

“Yeah.” And then what?

Really. Then what?

I wanted to cry, but I didn’t dare. If I started crying, I’d never stop.

Besides. Crying took too much effort.

We slipped toward my house, stopping every few minutes to listen. The fact that we’d taken a circuitous route home and a more cautious approach made the trek a lengthy one. But we’d made it.

Then just before we stepped out of the dark woods, Sage grabbed my wrist. “Wait,” she whispered.

I dropped to the ground, and Sage immediately followed suit.

Together, we crept to the edge of the woods and peered out. I could see the back of my familiar house.

I could also see the three humans who stood before it.

So close. We were so close.

Three males, I thought, though the shorter one in the knit cap and bulky coat could have been a girl. She carried a baseball bat, of all things.

They appeared to be young, but I couldn’t really see their faces well enough to be sure.

 One of them leaned against the building, his head swiveling as he kept watch, and two others studied the path that led to the screened back porch.

One of them said something to the others, but his voice was quiet and I was too far away to pick up his words.

They had weapons—normal weapons—but each one of them also had what appeared to be tanks strapped to their backs with hoses that led to large water guns.

I looked at Sage and frowned. “Are those squirt guns?” I whispered.

She wrinkled her nose.

Even as I watched, one of them stopped squinting at the ground and with his hand on his weapon—a long, wide sword of some sort—he slowly opened the porch door, and he and his friends disappeared inside.

They wouldn’t be able to get into my house easily—the back door was reinforced and I’d secured it with about a million locks, but if they wanted in badly enough, they’d find a way.

They knew someone lived in that house. The mutants wouldn’t have taken time to study the ground or check the back for extra locks or look for signs that a house was inhabited.

But humans…humans would.

I bit my bottom lip, abruptly furious. I wanted to leap from the ground and blast them to hell with my gun. I wanted to beat them to bloody pulps and scream as loud as I could while I hurt them.

I pushed my face against my folded arms, panting, full of hatred. Full of rage. I realized only when I felt the itching wetness that I’d chewed a little too deeply into my lip.

I wanted to explode.

I was losing my mind.

I honestly wasn’t planning to do anything. It was dangerous, foolish, and I knew doing anything because of my feelings was a bad idea.

I knew that.

But it was as though someone lifted me and launched me at the intruders. The trespassers. The snooping human assholes I wanted so badly to hurt.

Sage screamed, but by then I was already halfway to the strangers. I rushed them, realizing a little too late that I was missing my machete.

I clawed for the revolver in my pocket.

I had five bullets in the gun. Surely I could kill them with that many chances.

Unfortunately I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to practice, and my aim was not great.

But my determination and my rage, those were everything.

I felt like I could kill them from sheer will alone.

I could think them dead.

And if I couldn’t and they killed me…

Well, wasn’t that what I wanted? Wasn’t that what I wanted as I ran toward my house, snarling, clenching my gun, full of death and rage and such a huge amount of sadness and pain and unending, black despair?

And terror. Always, the terror.

Yes.

Kill me.

Kill me.

An image of Robin’s face was in my mind, but that image wavered and the pregnant women were there instead. The women in the grip of the gods. The woman I’d slashed to death.

I was in hell, and I wanted out.

I couldn’t do it myself, but I wouldn’t have to.

And then…

My heart stuttered as I saw something much worse than the three humans trying to gain entry to my home.

“Mutants,” I screamed.

The world slowed down—or maybe my thoughts sped up—and I saw everything. I felt everything.

Sage’s shout echoed mine, her high voice that of a child but loud and commanding anyway. “Mutants!”

They poured from the shadows and around the house, at least a dozen of them.

But they weren’t the mutants I’d fought. They weren’t the orphans, as Sage called them.

The scouting mutants had found us.

Maybe they’d tracked Sage and me through the woods.

Maybe they’d tracked the three people who even now were leaping from my porch, yanking their enormous water guns from their holsters.

I pulled the trigger three times before I hit a mutant—shot him in his eye. An accident—or lucky shot—but it didn’t matter. Guns weren’t that big a deterrent to the mutants.

Still, it made him hesitate, and as he reeled backward, his hand to his eye, one of the humans hit him with a stream of water.

I caught a familiar scent and realized immediately what the humans were shooting from their water guns. It wasn’t water.

It was alcohol.

The kind of alcohol a nurse rubbed on your arm before she stuck a needle through your skin.

Alcohol.

When the forceful stream hit the mutant, it stopped him in his tracks.

His scream was unearthly, eerie, and utterly heartbreaking. I dropped my blades and put my hands over my ears, and only the fact that Sage threw herself against me kept me from running to him.

That scream.

 I went down.

Every awful thing that had ever happened was in that scream. Every agony, pain, break. That scream made them…human.

“Oh,” I whispered. “Oh, no.”

And I cried with him. For him.

“It’s their death scream,” Sage whispered, her voice wafting into my ear, my mind, my heart. “Shut your mind.”

I latched on to her voice. To her words, frightening as they were. They helped me shut out the mutants’ screams as the toxic alcohol melted their faces and ran in burning tracks down their bodies. I looked around, horrified, watching as the alcohol ate their flesh like they’d been dipped into vats of acid.

The screams echoed inside my mind, and would, I was sure, follow me into my dreams.

Their very screams were weapons—at least against me.

Sage didn’t seem as affected. Maybe she’d heard them before and had hardened herself to them. The three humans didn’t seem bothered, either.

They ran, dodged, and sprayed the alcohol, and kept the mutants away from me and Sage.

Dizziness overtook me and a blanket of black descended, and when I screamed, only a groan emerged.

Then, there was nothing.

My last thought was a prayer, really, and it was similar to Sage’s plea to me.

Don’t let them touch me.

Don’t let them get me.

Chapter Nine

“Teagan? Can you hear me?”

Sage’s voice seemed far away and echoed slightly, and I frowned, trying to remember what had happened. The ground was hard and cold beneath my aching back and a heavy scent of cooking meat hung in the air. My stomach growled. “I’m not dead?”

Sage leaned closer and I realized my fingers were trapped in her small, cold hand. “What?” she asked.

“I’m not dead.”

Her grip eased. “No.”

“You should be.” The voice was young and sounded almost amused.

I opened my eyes, and needles of pain shot through my eyes when the hazy light hit them. I squinted and finally, the world came into a fuzzy sort of focus.

I struggled to sit up, and someone grabbed my arm and yanked me to a sitting position. That was when I realized I had the worst headache of my life.

“What happened?” I lifted a hand to wipe at the wetness on my lower face, and my hand came away covered with blood.

The three people I’d meant to kill were standing around me, arms crossed, unsmiling. The ground was littered with smoking bits of flesh and charred bone.

“The death screams hurt you,” Sage said. She glanced at the three strangers. “And they have found a way to kill the mutants.” Her voice was filled with wonder.

“You’re welcome.” The speaker was a teenage boy with a quick smile and deep brown eyes. He gave me a quick wink when I looked at him, but it was difficult to see him as breezy, cute, or harmless.

For one reason, he was a stranger. And he was male. And…

His face was filthy, his eyes sunken, and he looked like it’d been a while since he’d slept or seen a meal. The other two were no different.

I frowned and looked away, and my glance landed on the girl beside him. She was around twenty or so. A gray knit cap covered her hair, and a bulky coat—too heavy for the early fall—hid her body. If she were trying to pass as a guy, she wasn’t succeeding. Her features were too delicate. Her lips were full, her lashes thick and long, and her face was heart-shaped and pretty, despite the grime.

She didn’t smile, and no hint of friendliness lit her blue eyes. “You nearly got us all killed.” She whirled her baseball bat like a baton.

I cringed. She’d hammered nails into the end of that bat, and I was sure she was going to hit me with it.

A man stepped up beside the two others. Maybe he was thirty, maybe fifty. His hair needed cut—and combed. His face was rough with a short growth of gray and black whiskers, and lines radiated out from the corners of eyes so emotionless and light they looked like translucent green glass. A long scar dissected his upper lip, and he had another that streaked across his forehead and traveled down to his left eyebrow. “We need to get out of here. There will be more of them.” A trace of contempt crept into his voice. “You can’t use guns in this world.”

And suddenly, I remembered.

I cried out and rolled away from them, scrabbling for my weapons, but my pockets and sheaths were empty.

They’d taken my weapons.

I ignored the pain in my head and grabbed Sage’s upper arm, dragging her away from the strangers.

“Stop,” Sage said, pulling away from me. “Stop.”

I backed away, still patting my pockets obsessively, as though that would make my weapons reappear.

The three strangers didn’t move.

“They won’t hurt us. Calm down.” Sage reached out to pet my arm, like I was a skittish, fearful animal. “Shhh. It’s okay.”

I began to shiver, then the pain in my head became too much for my stomach and I turned away to dry-heave until finally the nausea passed.

The boy who’d winked at me held up his hand. “She’s right. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re human, same as you.”

“So what? The humans I’ve seen are as bad as the mutants.” But I knew if they’d wanted to hurt us, they would have already. I still wasn’t going to trust them—of course I wouldn’t trust them. But I calmed down.

Strangely enough, I felt…better. Less depressed.

I wasn’t alone. Suddenly taking on the awful mutants seemed less daunting.

“Why did their screams do that to me? Why weren’t any of you hurt by them?”

The older guy crossed his arms. “We’re used to them. Killing the bastards is what we do.”

I put my arm around Sage’s shoulder. “She calls the big ones gods.” I expected them to be as shocked as I’d been.

He curled his lip and pinned me with his emotionless stare. “What does it matter what they’re called?” He put his hand on his water gun. “What matters is that they die.”

“I’m Caleb Kelly,” the boy said. He nodded toward the older man. “That’s Richard Connor, and she’s Lila Stone.”

I lifted the edge of my jacket to wipe away the blood still trickling from my nose. “So after I hear their death screams a few times, they won’t hurt me like this?”

They glanced at each other, and there was uneasiness in their faces. “We don’t know,” Caleb said, finally. “We’ve never seen anyone hit that hard by death screams.”

“They didn’t hurt any of you? Ever?” I took a step back, automatically, as though their immunity was somehow a bad thing.

“It hurt us,” Richard Connor said. “In the beginning.” He gestured at my bloody face. “But not like that. None of us bled or fainted.”

“Gave us headaches from hell,” Lila said. “And made us a little soft for a while. Not enough to keep us from blasting the ugly fucks, but still.” She shrugged. “After a while, we stopped feeling the pain.”

The older man, Richard, pointed his chin at my house. “This one yours?”

I hesitated. I did not want three strangers in my home. My safe place.

Sage squeezed my fingers, and when I looked down at her, she nodded. “Let them in. We can’t survive without other humans.”

“You saw what the humans did back in the woods,” I told her. “You know what the men are doing.” I glanced at the man, then the boy. “You saw.”

“These ones are not the bad guys,” she insisted.

“How do you know?”

“Teagan,” she said, her voice soft. “They’re starving.”

“You have food in there?” Caleb asked. He rested a hand against his belly.

“It’s not up for debate,” Lila said. “Move your ass and open the fucking door. We need a place to crash while we’re in town helping you clear out mutants.”

Sage began walking toward the door, still gripping my hand. “It’s okay. Let them in.”

I still felt the mutants.

More of them were heading our way. And when they saw the dead littering my backyard, they might start kicking in doors. Searching for us.

I was shivering so violently I could barely speak, and sensations like electric shocks shot through my body every few seconds. I wasn’t thinking clearly and I knew it. Pain, hot and red, shot through my skull and the light, fading though it was, hurt my eyes. My stomach was rolling, I was thirsty, and I just needed to lie down.

And the mutants were coming.

“Follow me,” I told the small group.

They had saved my life, after all. They’d saved Sage.

And I did not want to be alone. Not anymore.

Once we were inside, I shut the door and locked it, then leaned against it as my head swam. I was nearly certain I’d caught a glimpse of a mutant just across the yard right before I’d shut the door.

“Oh, my God,” the girl whispered.

I’d never heard such awe in a person’s voice. I turned to look at her, curious.

“Oh my God,” she said, again.

 She and the others were staring at the food and cases of water stacked against the walls. As I watched, they walked slowly around the room, dazed, touching the supplies.

If they thought the kitchen was incredible, they’d faint if they saw the cellar.

“Help yourselves,” I said, and almost before the words were out of my mouth they fell upon the food like starving wolves. “I don’t understand. Why are you guys so hungry?”

The girl, her cheeks bulging in her thin face, looked at me, her eyebrows up, eyes wide. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

I shook my head, mystified. “What?”

“There is no food,” the older man said, opening a can of beans with his knife. “The towns have long since been looted—if not by other humans and animals, then by the mutants.” His stare was hard. “There is no food.”

I pointed at a drawer. “There are can openers. And you can use that camp stove to heat your food.” I didn’t believe there was no food. No supplies. I just didn’t.

They saw it in my face.

The boy, surrounded by packages of cookies, jumped to his feet, then began shrugging off his tanks, unbuckling his belts, and finally, ripping off his coat. The other two ignored him, even when he lifted his shirt over his head.

I put my fingers to my mouth when he waited, shirtless, staring at me. His chest was caved in, and his ribs stood out in sharp relief like a picture of a starved dog I’d once seen. His cheekbones were sharp, his eyes sunken and ringed with darkness, and his lips barely closed over his teeth. “There is no food.”

I nodded, trying to keep my tears in check. “I’m sorry.”

Satisfied, he pulled his shirt back on—thank God—and sat back down to finish his meal.

“I had nothing else to do for two years,” I told them, opening a bottle of water, trying to control my emotions as well as my nausea. “I’ve gone out every day for supplies. Only orphans have been in Crowbridge.” I frowned. “Until now.”

“You got lucky,” Richard said, finishing his beans. He tossed the can in the garbage, then began taking off his gear.

He unstrapped the tanks from his back, then took off the belt holding the squirt guns—the one on his right hip was large, but the one on his left hip was small. A backup, probably.

“I’m going to make some dinner,” he murmured, and smiled at the thought.

“Alcohol,” I said, wiping sweat from my face. “That’s seriously what kills them.”

He ignored me and began looking through my stock, pulling out cans and packages as he searched.

“Other than slicing their heads off—which grow back, for all we know, if they’re taken care of—it is the only thing that kills them,” Caleb said, his mouth full. “And we’re not even sure they know what it is we’re spraying them with.”

“What do they want?” I asked. “What is their purpose?”

“We don’t know.” He stared into the distance and his sparkly brown eyes became flat and serious. He looked immediately older. “We don’t really know, do we?”

“To survive,” Richard said. “They want to survive. Just as we all do.”

“Do you know they’re impregnating human women?” I rubbed my arms. “I…” But I couldn’t tell them that I’d slaughtered one of those pregnant women.

“Of course we know,” the girl said, angry. “We were out there fighting them while you hid in this house with your bed and your food. You don’t know what it’s like out there. Richard’s right. You’re fucking lucky.”

I swallowed three Tylenol tablets. “I’ve been out there. You don’t know me and you don’t know what I’ve seen.” I rubbed my throbbing temples, then looked at Richard. “What are you doing?”

“Making dinner.” He frowned at me. “I just told you that.”

Sage took my hand. “Come lie down, Teagan. You’re sick.”

“Kid’s right,” Caleb said. “You look like you’re about to pass out again. We’ll wake you when it’s time to eat.”

I shook my head. “I’m not hungry.”

And all three of them stared at me when I uttered those unthinkable words, their stares full of envy, disgust, and a little bit of hatred.

I didn’t want to sleep while my house was full of strangers, but I was sick. Bad sick. The mutants’ death screams had done something to me, and I was recovering much too slowly.

Sage followed me into the living room, and after I’d unbuckled my belts and fell into bed she leaned over and pulled the covers to my chin. “We should stick together,” she murmured. “Whenever we find humans who are nice, we should add them to our group.”

“Nice? Lila’s an asshole and the other two are male. They’ll probably hand us over to the gods tomorrow.” But in spite of my misgivings, my heart was lighter. The three strangers were the reason. I hadn’t quite realized how lonely I’d been.

And they had killed a dozen mutants almost easily.

“Maybe they could be nicer,” Sage agreed, “but they won’t eat us or make us have their babies. That’s nice enough for me.”

I fell asleep to the unfamiliar rumbling of deep, quiet voices and the occasional hushed laughter, and though I fetched a knife from under my bed and slid it under my pillow, I was more comforted by the company of my new friends than I was by the cold, meager protection of the blade.

Chapter Ten

Alcohol would kill mutants.

Alcohol was our defense—better than clubs, blades, anything. Alcohol killed the mutants. And with that knowledge, with the alcohol, hope was born.

When I woke up, I remembered floating sporadically to consciousness during my sleep, and hearing the strangers talk and laugh and eat. Sage’s melodic laugh echoed dimly in my memory, and though I’d never heard her laugh, I knew it belonged to her.

She was happier in the group than she had been with just me. It was understandable. Safety in numbers and all that.

I sat up, yawning as I stretched. My sleep had been sweet and uninterrupted by nightmares, something I’d needed since…forever.

“Sage,” I called. “Sage?”

I stood, wincing as my full bladder threatened to explode. I hurried toward the bathroom, nearly certain I was alone in my house. It had that dead silence that only came from an empty home.

Twenty minutes later I was back in the living room, washed, combed, and wearing fresh clothes. “Sage,” I yelled, then headed for the kitchen to see if she or the others had left me a note.

There were no notes, but a large water gun sat on the table with a pack of tanks beside it. Someone had written my name on a Post-it note and stuck it to the gun.

My stomach tightened with excitement. It was like Christmas morning. Grinning, I hefted the gun, then put it back down and turned toward the small pot of stew sitting on the camp stove. The stew was cold, but I didn’t care.

I grabbed the pot and a spoon, and began shoveling stew into my mouth. I was ravenous.

I wasn’t much of a cook. Actually, I wasn’t any kind of cook. I heated food up on the little camp stove in the kitchen, but never made anything unique. Whatever was in the can was what I ate.

I took a quick drink of water, then finished off the stew. I could almost close my eyes and pretend I was at the dinner table with my mom and Robin, having one of Mom’s home cooked meals.

Mom had loved to cook. Robin would have taken after her in that department. She’d always been the one playing with the Easy-Bake oven while I raced around the cul-de-sac on my pink and purple trike.

I didn’t like to cook. I didn’t like cleaning up much either, but after I finished the stew, I took time to wash out the pot and my bowl, then sat them in the drainer to air dry.

My headache was gone, my mind was clear, and my usual anxious energy was strong. I had to get out of the house.

Richard and his gang had better take care of Sage. They shouldn’t have taken her in the first place, but I wasn’t upset. Most likely they’d gone to raid the houses on the block for alcohol.

I strapped the tanks to my back, then grabbed the water gun holster and buckled it around my hips. After I’d pushed the water gun into its holster, I grabbed my vest off the hook by the door, then picked up one of the ten machetes leaning against the wall. In the living room were six more. I’d stashed another dozen of them in the cellar, along with other weapons—swords, knives, slingshots, bows, even some guns.

When the guys had left, they hadn’t locked the back door. That just pissed me off. They’d taken the extra keys I’d put on hooks by the kitchen door--so why would they have left the doors unlocked while I lay unconscious in the living room?

I stepped out through the door and onto the porch, but hesitated when I started to lock the door. What if Sage got separated from them and couldn’t get into the house?

In the end, I left the door unlocked.

Richard, Lila, and Caleb had carried in several gallon jugs and placed them against the walls around the back porch. Some of them were completely filled.

“Alcohol,” I whispered. They’d been busy.

I chose an extra-large canvas bag from the pile in the corner. I’d need something to put bottles of alcohol in. Despite my energy, my muscles were a little stiff.

Because of everything I’d found—the extra water gun, the containers of alcohol, my nearly exploding bladder—I began to realize I’d slept longer than one night.

I shut the porch door gently and stepped out into the backyard, inhaling deeply. It was almost cool enough to make me go back inside for a heavier jacket. The yard had been freshly covered with a blanket of leaves. The air smelled wet and the ground was damp. Sometime while I’d slept we’d had some rain, and fall had come for real.

And I had a new purpose.

Searching for alcohol would become one of the most important things I ever did.

I patted my new mutant-killer, almost surprised at how much more confidence the gun gave me. I’d seen what it could do. I was going to stock up on squirt guns. It couldn’t hurt to have backups.

Slipping from backyard to backyard, tree to tree, shadow to shadow, I stayed alert for sounds of mutants in the area as I watched for Sage and the others.

I went into a two-story halfway down the block, figuring I’d work my way back up both sides of the street until I was once again home. If these homes didn’t net me much alcohol or any water guns, I’d try the houses in the opposite direction.

There were no sounds in the house. It was unlikely a mutant would be lying in wait, but there could easily be baddies. Raiding, healing, sleeping, hiding…

But the house was dusty with disuse. Sure, there could have been a human hiding in a closet or under a bed, but the house just felt empty. I hoped it wasn’t my wishful thinking.

I found eight bottles of alcohol—most of them only half full—before I neared my house again. I’d also found eleven squirt guns. Only one was large and similar to the one I wore at my hip. The others were the tiny, cheap toys that I could stick in my pockets and pull out if I were desperate.

The next house was a tall, skinny house with peeling green paint and a rickety porch. The place had belonged to a horrible cockroach of a man named Bertram Riggs and his wife, a thin, quiet woman named Bonnie. They’d had six kids, so surely there’d be a few water guns, as well as a couple bottles of alcohol.

Every time I’d seen those kids, they’d sported a bruise, cut, or swollen lip. My mother had said their father had a temper. Baker County Children Services had been there dozens of times. Didn’t seem to matter how many times they took the kids away.

They always came back.

Any house with that many banged up kids would surely have a lot of alcohol.

I went upstairs before checking the lower floor. The upstairs always made me nervous, and I was eager to get it out of the way first.

There were three bedrooms. The kid’s rooms held few toys, but I did find two plastic squirt guns. I looked around the room, wondering if the faded brown stain on the wall was blood, and if the splintering hole in the cheap door had been put there by a child’s head.

I closed my eyes.

Sorry, Robin.

As always, guilt and grief rose up to choke me and for a second, I couldn’t get air past the lump in my throat.

I couldn’t wallow in the cold, painful past. How many times had I told myself that? The problem was I didn’t seem to know how to dig myself out.

I took a deep breath and left the oppressive kid’s room. I’d check the bathroom, then head downstairs to the kitchen.

As I stood in the small bathroom, rifling through the medicine cabinet, I thought I heard a distant sound. A crack, like someone had hurled a bottle at a metal traffic sign.

I listened for a moment longer but when I heard no other sounds, I tiptoed from the room. There was almost too much silence. The old house held its breath, watching as I crept down the carpeted stairs, harsh odors rising up to greet me as I descended.

Mustiness. Rot. Blood.

Death.

I missed Sage’s company.

I pulled my machete strap over my head and clutched the weapon as I stood at the bottom of the stairs, my head tilted, listening.

There was nothing.

No sounds, no movements, no creaks.

I slung the strap of the canvas bag over my shoulder, patted my holstered water gun, then walked through the living room with a bit more determination. A bit less fear.

Dust covered the furniture, the walls, the drapes. Lacy cloths like thick, dusty cobwebs lay on the backs and arms of the sofa and chairs, and braided rugs were everywhere.

It made me inexplicably sad.

I walked on to the kitchen.

And then, I heard voices.

I dropped my bag and pulled my gun from its holster. Silently, quickly, machete in one hand and gun in the other, I walked to the window and peered through the dusty, splattered glass.

The hair on the back of my neck stood at attention.

My heart beat like a hummingbird’s wings, and for one second I swayed as dizziness washed over me.

Then I saw Richard Connor and his two companions walking down the street.

“Shit,” I whispered, and shoved the water gun into its holster. I grabbed the bag and bolted from the kitchen, then slammed out the front door and across the yard.

“Hey,” I called. “Wait!”

They had their water guns up and aimed at me almost before the words left my lips. I wasn’t afraid they’d attack me. I barely even considered it.

My heart was being squeezed by a giant fist of fear, and it had nothing to do with Richard Connor and his friends.

The three of them stood staring at me, eyes narrowed, bodies stiff, weapons ready.

“What did you do with her?” I yelled, as I raced toward them. “Where is she?” I swiveled my head wildly, searching the yards and the street, terrified.

Because I saw Richard, and Caleb, and the angry Lila.

But Sage…

Sage was not with them.

Chapter Eleven

“When we left this morning, she was sitting on a chair beside your cot, waiting for you to wake up.” Richard’s voice was calm—cold, even—but there was a spark of worry in his odd, pale eyes.

I paced the floor, chomping away at my fingernails, worried sick. I believed them. At least, I wanted to. They couldn’t have traded her to the gods—they’d have traded me as well. “Where the hell is she?” I whispered. “Where did she go?”

I stopped pacing abruptly. “The door. Did you lock the door when you left this morning?”

“No,” Richard told me. “Sage said she’d lock up after us.”

I sat on the couch—Sage’s bed—and buried my face in my hands. She’d been missing since that morning. “They have her.”

“Why do you think that?” Caleb asked.

“For all we know, you killed her,” Lila said. She sat in a chair across the room, unloading the bag she’d filled from their raid.

I ignored her and strode toward the kitchen.

“Where are you going?” Caleb asked, following me. His voice was carefully friendly—cheerful, even—but the look in his eyes was almost as cold as Richard’s.

I wasn’t sure why he thought he needed to hide himself behind a façade of jovial blandness, but he wasn’t quite to the point where he could disguise what was in his eyes.

Richard was, but Richard was older. He’d had more time to harden his shell.

“I’m going to find Sage.”

“You can’t go out there by yourself. Hang on. I’ll go with you.”

I stopped walking. “You will?”

He grinned. “Yeah. She’s a sweetheart.”

I heard Lila snort. “Yeah. You’re going for the kid.”

Caleb’s stare didn’t waver. His smile remained firmly in place, but there was a flicker of something I didn’t recognize deep in his eyes.

Richard walked into the kitchen and strode by both of us without a word or a glance our way. He grabbed his water gun, shoved it into its holster, then walked out the door.

I raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“Ready?” Caleb asked.

“What’s her story?” I asked him, once we were out of the house and walking down the street.

“Lila?” He shrugged. “She’s…angry.”

“I figured that much out for myself.”

“What about you,” he asked. “You lived in Crowbridge all your life?”

“Yes. After everything happened, I found a different house to live in, but this is my town.” I paused. “Where were you this morning? Did you go into town?”

“We got as close as we could, then spied on them with binoculars. There are a lot of them. This cluster is bigger than any I’ve seen before.”

I swallowed. “Do you think they have Sage?”

“I don’t know, Teagan. It’s a possibility. But why would she have left the house in the first place? She was a smart kid.”

“Is,” I said, a little too loudly. “She is a smart kid.”

He nodded and looked away. “Yeah.”

The sun was beginning to drop as the day faded, and the air was getting chillier. I hated to think of Sage being out there by herself, cold, alone. Maybe she’d fallen and hurt herself and couldn’t get back home. Maybe she was trapped. Maybe she’d broken a leg or knocked herself unconscious.

Maybe a dark, horrible human had kidnapped her.

“Shit,” I whispered.

I wanted to yell her name, but I couldn’t. The mutants seemed to be hanging close to their cluster, but who knew when a pack of scouts might head this way? Still, we had the alcohol guns. Maybe a yell wasn’t a bad idea.

I patted my gun. “How did you find out that alcohol would kill them?”

He smiled, and it made his eyes sparkle in the evening light. “Lila discovered it, actually. She’d been injured and was pouring a bottle of it over the wound. A mutant surprised her and the first thing she did was fling the alcohol—bottle and all—at the asshole.”

“That was lucky.”

“Very. From then on, we’ve been spreading the word and gathering as much alcohol as we can find. In every town, we fill drums with it before we move on.”

“For those who come after.”

“Yes. We tape notes to the drums explaining. We also have people making the stuff.”

I frowned. “People?”

“We’re everywhere.” His voice was full of something I finally recognized as pride. “You haven’t seen us, but we exist. This is our world—not theirs. We’re going to take it back.”

I studied him. His face was open and almost innocent with his shiny brown eyes and quick smile.

Before the world ended, he could have sat behind me in algebra and I wouldn’t have noticed him. He wouldn’t have been remarkable back then.

But now he was. How many teenagers were left? Not many.

“You can trust me,” he said. “You can trust all three of us.”

But trust was an unfamiliar concept. The word sounded strange when I whispered it to myself. Trust?

No. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Halfway down the block, I caught a movement from the corner of my eye.

“What?” Caleb asked, when I stopped walking and stared into the deep shadows of the porch across the street.

“I thought I saw something.”

He slipped his gun from its holster. “Where?”

I slid my own gun free and jogged toward the house. I knew he was hissing at me to stop, but his voice wafted away like fog and I wouldn’t have listened to him anyway.

It was Sage. It had to be.

I needed it to be.

Caleb ran beside me, and I sped toward trouble with more abandon because of him. I knew he’d help me with whatever threat happened to show itself.

I also knew that was a sort of trust.

I wasn’t alone, and there were people who’d help me, people I could maybe depend on.

The feeling, now that I allowed it in, was indescribable.

And it was scary. But trusting someone was always scary.

“Aim for their eyes and throats,” Caleb said, quietly. “Takes them out quicker.”

I darted to a skinny tree in the front yard and stared at the porch, squinting so hard I gave myself a headache. My eyes began to burn with the strain.

“If it were mutants, they wouldn’t be hiding,” I whispered. “Mutants don’t hide.”

“The orphans don’t,” he agreed. “They don’t have enough sense to hide. But the scouts and the gods. They know to hide.”

“How do you know so much about them?” I hissed. Was I the only person in the dark? Even Sage knew more than I did. Of course, she’d been their prisoner for God knew how long, but still.

“I’ve been fighting them for two years,” he said. “I learned.”

I felt heat climbing my face at his exasperation, but I squared my shoulders and said nothing. I’d been alone. I hadn’t left town to join others or fight mutants because…

I just hadn’t.

“Sage?” I called, but too quietly. I cleared my throat. “Sage! Is that you?”

Before I could decide whether or not to leave the tree and climb the porch steps, Lila, baseball bat in her hand, jogged past me.

“What the hell?” But when I looked around for Caleb, he was gone. He’d slipped away and even as I cowered behind the tree, I caught sight of him sliding around the corner of the house. He made his way toward the porch.

I stepped out from behind the tree. “Assholes,” I muttered, but not loudly enough for anyone to hear.

“What do you have up there, Lila?” he asked.

She materialized from the deep shadows of the porch, something in her arms.

My heart leapt and I holstered my gun, then sprinted toward her. But I realized after a few seconds she wasn’t carrying Sage.

She was carrying a dog.

A starving, injured dog.

I ran up the steps and wrapped my arms around it, barely noticing Lila’s quick withdrawal when I got into her space.

“Hey,” she muttered. She practically shoved the dog at me, then backed up a couple of steps. “Take it, already.”

“Oh, honey,” I murmured. “Sweet boy. I’ve got you.” I walked back down the steps to sit on the bottom one, cradling the injured dog on my lap.

He wasn’t very big, probably because he’d been starved most of his life. His light brown fur was intermittently marked with splotches of black, like spilled paint on a worn, wrinkly blanket.

His eyes were pale and calm, and made me think of Richard Connor. His thin face was marred by a couple of fresh wounds and some scars, though he wasn’t very old. Three or four, maybe.

“How’d you know there was a dog on the porch?” I asked Lila.

She’d fetched her bat, and twirling it gently, she walked down the steps to join me. She leaned against the wall. “The porch rails on the left are broken. I saw him. He was limping and when I got to him, he was huddled in a corner.” She stared down her nose at me, and though she obviously cared about the dog, she still hadn’t warmed up to me. “He’s going to need some fixing up. You might as well be the dog doctor.”

“Since I’m not good for anything else,” I said. But I really didn’t care what she said or thought. I was going to doctor the dog. “Come on, baby boy. I’ll take you home.”

“What about the kid?” Lila asked.

I closed my eyes and squeezed the dog. Sage.

“Look what I found on the porch,” Caleb said. He jumped down the steps and when he stood on the ground, he held up a long, silver chain on which a bejeweled dragon dangled.

“What is that?” Lila asked. She pulled off her cap and began digging at her skull like a colony of lice had taken up residence in her short hair.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, and reached out to yank the chain from Caleb’s grasp. “It’s Sage’s necklace. She was here.”

Lila put her hat back on. “And?”

I closed my eyes and blew out a hard breath. “I know why she left the house. I know what she was doing when she was taken.”

Chapter Twelve

I took a deep breath, but it did nothing to calm me. “She followed the dog here. She knew I wanted a dog.” I squeezed the dragon so tightly it cut into my hand. “She left this here hoping we’d eventually find it.”

“Hoping we’d find the dog,” Lila said. “Kid was a softie. Just like you.”

I curled my lip. “Says the girl who carried the dog off the porch.”

She shrugged.

“Teagan, take the pup back to the house. We’ll do some tracking, see if we can find any footprints. Knowing the kid, she’s left us a trail of breadcrumbs that’ll lead right to her.”

I was sure he was trying to comfort me, but I couldn’t be comforted while Sage was out there. “Where are you?” I murmured.

“You know where she is,” Lila said. “She’s in town. The scouts have taken her back to the gods.”

I shuddered. “We don’t know that for sure. Could be baddies.”

She rolled her eyes, then looked at Caleb. “We have to decide if we want to go after her.”

I stood, the dog in my arms, Sage’s necklace in my fist. “Of course we’re going after her.”

Neither of them said a word.

“You said you fight the mutants,” I said, sneering, dangerously close to tears. “Did you mean you fight the occasional orphan while you’re running away?”

Caleb met my stare. “We’ll attack the cluster. We go in to kill, not to rescue.”

“This time you’re going in to rescue.” I clenched my teeth together so hard they began to ache. “You’re going to save Sage. You can kill the cluster another time.”

“We can’t just walk in and take her back. You do understand that the mutants are dangerous, don’t you?”

“I understand that perfectly well—which is why we have to go in and get her. We’re not leaving her with them.”

“If we see her while we’re fighting and the opportunity presents itself—”

“No. Just sneak in and find her. Once she’s safe, you can go back and melt the assholes. Or leave them alone. I don’t care. I just want Sage back.”

Lila jumped to the ground. “Kill the gods, or save the girl.”

“Save the girl,” I said. “Caleb? Save the girl.”

He smiled his quick smile. “Save the girl, then kill the gods.” But his eyes didn’t smile.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“She’s probably already dead,” Lila said. “And we still have to run this by Richard.”

“He can’t stop you if you want to go,” I said. “Can he?”

“Us,” she said, turning around long enough to toss me a glance filled with glee. “This is your idea. She’s your friend. If we go, you’re coming too. Time you learned about the real world.”

“I wouldn’t think of staying behind,” I said. “And there’s no way in hell Richard can stop me.”

“Teagan, take the dog home. We’ll be there soon.” Caleb’s gaze lingered on my lips, then he met my eyes once again.

He reached out and squeezed my arm, his touch gentle but heavy at the same time.

I couldn’t breathe for a second as my stomach tightened. It’d been…forever since I’d had that feeling.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Lila said. “Are we going to look for the kid or not?”

Clutching the dog, I hurried away.

Richard was in the kitchen when I walked in with the dog in my arms. He didn’t even glance at it. “I found your cellar.”

I set the pup on the floor, avoiding Richard’s stare as I got a bowl from the cabinet. I poured the quiet animal some water, and stood back to watch as he lapped it up. “You hungry, boy?”

“You should have told me,” Richard continued.

I opened a can of Spam for the dog, then cut the meat into chunks. I had bags of dry dog food in the cellar. I’d need to haul one of them upstairs. “I had no reason to tell you. They belong to me.”

“This is a good place to settle down. The supplies are ours—not yours.”

“Settle down?” I gaped at him. “In Crowbridge? I thought you guys were hunters, not looking for a place to live.”

He put a pot on the camp stove, then began opening cans of vegetables. “The plan is to find a good base, one we can stock and fortify. Rebuild. Farm. People will come, eventually. We can’t roam forever, searching for monsters to kill.” He shrugged. “At least, not all of us can.”

I said nothing, just watched him. He was taking over, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

He turned to look at me. “You did a good thing, stocking up the cellar. You really have no idea what it’s like out there.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it, unsure. “You seriously want to build a compound here?”

“This is the most untouched town I’ve seen in nearly two years.” His face relaxed a little, and his stare softened as he gazed over my head at something only he could see. “There’s something about this place.”

“Where did they come from?” I asked. “The mutants. Were they here all along?”

He focused on me, then hesitated, as though sorting through what he should say. Or maybe he was only gathering his thoughts. Maybe he simply didn’t know.

“I have some theories,” he said, finally. “And not just because of the things I’ve seen over the last two years. When things started going bad…”

As he talked, I pulled a blanket from one of the totes stacked against the wall, and made a bed for the dog. I watched him as he turned in circles—limping the entire time—before he finally sank to the blanket with a tired, wheezing sigh.

“What theories?” I asked, finally, when Richard didn’t continue.

“I don’t think they’re some government-created soldiers or lab monsters a group of scientists lost control of. And I don’t think they’re monsters who’ve hidden from us since the beginning of time.”

I sat on the floor beside the dog, my heart beating a little too fast. “What do you think they are?”

His voice was soft, his eyes emotionless, and I could see pain in every line on his face. “I don’t think they’re from here.”

“You mean…like, aliens? From a different world?”

“Yes.”

I put my hand to my mouth. “Aliens?”

“A different kind of alien.”

“What does it mean, though?” I whispered.

“It means they might eventually go back. When they’ve gotten whatever it is they came for, they might go back home and leave us to rebuild our world.”

I started nodding and couldn’t seem to stop. “We were killed by aliens. They killed our families. Ruined our lives. People who never belonged here came in to destroy those of us the flu didn’t take.” I stared at him. “Did they bring the flu?”

And for the first time in two years, anger—rage—started to smother my fear.

He knew exactly what I was feeling. He knelt in front of me and waited for me to look up at him. “That’s why we hunt them. Why we kill them. Keep hold of your anger, girl. You’ll need it when you take on your new job.”

I twisted my trembling fingers together. “What job?”

“Hunting.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want to hunt.”

He smiled. “You will.” He stood, then walked back to finish making dinner. “You’re young, able-bodied, and sane. You and those like you will spend your lives sending the mutants to hell. You want a purpose, don’t you?”

I widened my eyes, then nodded. “Yes. Yes, I really do. But—”

“And when you need to touch base, this town will be waiting for your return.”

I climbed to my feet, then grabbed a bottle of water. My mouth was so dry I couldn’t swallow. “I’m no hunter.”

“I can read people,” he said, his voice almost pleasant. “And you are a hunter.”

“Why should we kill them if they’re going to go back anyway?”

He glanced back over his shoulder at me. “Teagan,” he chided. That was all, just my name, and tendrils of shame snaked through my body.

“I don’t want to leave Crowbridge,” I said, pacing. Fear made my stomach ache. “You can’t make me.” I was aware, very aware, that I sounded like a petulant child.

“I don’t mean to make you do anything,” he said, patiently. “I’m telling you what I see you becoming.”

“I’m not chasing the gods.”

He shrugged. “We’ll see. And thank you.”

I stared at his slender back. His messy dark brown hair snaked over his collar, stringy and dull. “For what?”

“For helping me decide what to do. We’ll start by planning an attack on the mutants who’re in town before they decide to come looking for humans. We’ll kill as many of them as we can. When that’s done, if we’re still living, we’ll begin creating a place where we—humans—can start over.” He stirred the simmering vegetables and when he spoke again, his voice was so distant I knew he was not really talking to me. “I’ll need you and the other two to spread the word as you hunt. Post signs along highways, send people here. I’ll—”

“There’s one thing we have to do first,” I interrupted. “Before we do anything else. We have to rescue Sage. We’ll sneak into their camp, find her, and bring her home.”

He rested the spoon on the countertop, then turned toward me, slowly and deliberately. He crossed his arms. “No. We’ll attack, and we’ll keep an eye out for her while we’re there.”

“First of all,” I said, immediately angry, “there’s no way you can attack that many mutants without getting killed. Did you see them? There were at least fifty of them that I saw before I ran. Gods, orphans, scouts. They have other human captives, too. Not just Sage. And we’re going to get them out of there. After they’re safe, feel free to go back and get your ass kicked.” I strode to him and poked him in the chest. “But until we get Sage back, you’re not attacking anyone.”

He said nothing, just watched me. Watched me like I was an unreasonable two year old throwing a tantrum.

“You stay here if you want,” I told him. “But Caleb and Lila are going with me. We’re going to save that little girl.”

“We have to kill as many of them as we can,” he said, calmly. “You’re responsible for the girl. You go in after her. The rest of us will attack the mutants.”

“There are three of you,” I said. “Why would you think you could take them on? What makes you believe you have a chance?”

He smiled. “Because I’ve done it a hundred times before. I know what I’m doing. And the mutants will help us.”

I stared, completely confused. “How?”

“The mutants are like vampires.”

The word slithered through my mind like a snake looking for something to bite. Vampires…

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“Their sleep is like a coma. Nothing can wake them. When they sleep, they’re vulnerable. And that’s when we get them. That’s when we go in and douse them with our special holy water.”

I hadn’t known.

I hadn’t known anything. “They…sleep?”

“Yes, they do. And that, Teagan, is when the gods die.”

Chapter Thirteen

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Caleb, after he and Lila came back. “Why didn’t you tell me the mutants go into a forced sleep? That they’re like vampires that way?”

“Not just that way,” Lila said, but she grabbed her bowl of stew and left the room before I could question her. Which was fine with me.

“Talk to Richard,” Caleb said.

“I did. That’s why I know about the sleep.”

“They use it to recharge. If we were to capture one of them and somehow force him to stay awake, we think he’d implode.”

“But I’ve seen them in the daytime as well as night.”

“Here’s the thing. Each cluster is made up of two different groups of mutants. One group sleeps during a one hour window at night, and one group sleeps for one hour during the day. That way there are always mutants guarding the cluster. But.” He lifted a finger before I could interrupt him. “We’ve found that the nighttime awake cluster always has fewer guards than the daytime awake cluster. Maybe ten awake to fifty asleep. And their sleep coincides with our two o’clock. Day and night.”

“That’s our chance,” Richard said, walking into the kitchen, “Our window.”

My mind was spinning. “This is good. This is great.”

They smiled at my excitement. Maybe they were secretly laughing at me, but that didn’t bother me. The possibilities.

“So we can just wait for the nighttime cluster to sleep, then go take them out,” I said. “I’ll search for Sage while you guys are hosing the bastards down.” I clapped my hands, which startled the dog.

He lifted his head, gave a snort, then went back to sleep.

“Teagan,” Caleb said. “You know it won’t be that easy, right?”

“It doesn’t have to be easy. It just has to happen.”

Richard leaned against the sink. “Okay,” he said, finally. We both ignored Caleb’s look of surprise. “We’ll go in to kill, you’ll go in to rescue the girl. You understand you could be captured?” He paused. “You’ll have to stay calm.”

“Right,” Caleb said. “You can’t go into the cluster and freak out.”

I lifted my chin. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about killing the mutants. They’ll be too busy to care about me.”

Richard’s smile was slow in coming, but when it did, it lit up his eyes. “I told you you’re a hunter. Might as well get your feet wet now.”

“Hunter,” Lila called from the other room, incredulous. “Are you fucking kidding me? She’s a princess—not a badass.”

“She’s a hunter,” Richard said. He didn’t raise his voice, but the living room was just beyond the kitchen doorway. She heard him. “You and Caleb will teach her everything she needs to know.”

Lila came into the kitchen and slung her bowl into the sink. “I’m no one’s teacher, and I’m for damn sure not a babysitter. She’ll end up getting us all killed. She’s no hunter. She’s prey. Fucking vanilla scented prey.”

“You want out of the group, Lila?” Richard’s voice was calm, but it was deep, dark, and very angry. Lila seemed to have that effect on people.

She stiffened. “No.”

“Then you’ll help the new girl out, won’t you?”

Caleb said nothing, just stood against the wall and watched us all like a lab tech observing a cage of rats.

Lila slammed past me and stomped back into the living room, but she didn’t say a word.

“They may leave soon,” I said, when the silence became too heavy. “When will we go to town?”

“Probably two or three days,” Richard said. “They weren’t preparing for the trip when I watched them this morning.” He pointed his chin at the binoculars on the bar. “We have some time.”

“But how will I find her?” I put my fingers to my stomach as it began to burn. “They could have stashed her anywhere. In one of the shops or tied to a tree. Maybe she’s with the pregnant women…”

“There are two wagons—one with supplies and one with people.” He looked at me. “If they have your girl, she’ll likely be in the slave wagon.”

I lowered my hand and blew out a long breath. “Where are they traveling to, Richard? Do you think they have a place in mind or are they just wandering the world aimlessly, looking for…food and women?”

“I’ve been following them for two years and I haven’t figured that out. Now that I’m setting up a central hub here, I probably never will. But you three will.”

Caleb straightened. “Central hub? Now? Here?”

Lila crept back into the kitchen, a hand to her stomach, her eyes too wide in her pale face.

Richard nodded. “There are more supplies and untouched homes here than in any town we’ve seen in months. It’s time. You three will hunt mutants and lead people here. Put up signs.” He looked at Caleb, then Lila. “It’s time.”

They looked like the world was coming to an end—again.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked. “Crowbridge is a great place to settle. It’s a good place to farm.” I waited, but they said nothing. “It’s a good place.”

“We’ve been together almost since the beginning,” Caleb said. “And…”

“And now the band is breaking up,” Lila finished. Her flippant tone couldn’t hide her sorrow.

“I’ll be right here,” Richard told her. “And you’ll be back.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”

The silence was harsh. I expected them to hug, to shed a few tears, to say some sort of goodbye even though the parting had yet to happen.

They did none of those things.

Caleb sniffed, then walked to the table to pick up his water gun. When he began pouring alcohol into the chamber, then his two tanks, Lila joined him.

Quietly, they began to prepare their weapons.

“Fill your tanks, Teagan,” Richard said. He sounded weary.

“They’re still full. I haven’t used them.”

“You’ll always need extra—if you come across a large group, you can run out of alcohol fast. Fill some tanks, holster a machete, and…” He shrugged. “Get ready to fight.”

“Get ready to die,” Lila growled.

I walked to the table. “I’m not dying.”

“Without these you might.” Richard handed me a tiny plastic bag. “Put these in before we enter their camp.”

I poured the items out, and could feel myself paling. “I’d forgotten,” I whispered.

Earplugs.

Lila laughed. “An infant. You won’t last five minutes out there.”

The mutants’ death cry disabled me. Maybe this time wouldn’t be so bad, but I couldn’t take a chance that it would.

Richard walked toward the living room. “They won’t shut out the screams completely, but they’ll muffle them. You’ll do fine.”

“Thanks,” I told Richard.

 “I’m going to sleep,” he said. “Wake me in two hours. Tonight Caleb and Lila can take you to get in some hunting practice.”

Caleb nodded.

“Going to pop your cherry,” Lila told me. “Fun, fun. God, I hate newbies!”

In just a couple of nights, I’d be in the midst of the gods, fighting for my life and searching for Sage.

I stared down at my earplugs and water guns, unmoving.

Earplugs and alcohol against dozens of mutants. Of course, it helped that most of them would be asleep.

“Change your mind?”

I snapped my head up at Lila’s voice. “No.”

“Scared?” She smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m scared.”

“You’d be stupid not to be scared,” Caleb said. “I’m afraid. Every damn time we go to face them, I’m afraid. If you become a hunter, you will always be afraid.” He looked up from his work and met my stare. “Can you handle that?”

An image of the pregnant woman I’d killed came out of nowhere and slammed into my brain. I cried out and staggered backward, forgetting, for one second, where I was.

Caleb was suddenly in front of me, gripping my upper arms. “Are you okay?”

“She’s fucking brain damaged,” Lila said, steadily filling her tanks. “Told you.”

I pulled away from him. “I…” I swallowed hard, then took a deep breath. “Just bad memories.”

He nodded. “Will you be all right?”

“Yeah. Yes. I’m fine.”

I looked down when something pressed against my legs. The dog stared up at me, his brow furrowed.

“Awww.” I knelt and wrapped my arms around him. “It’s okay, boy. I freaked you out, didn’t I?”

“Give him a name.”

I glanced up at Lila, surprised. “What?”

“Give him a damn name.”

I stared at her a moment longer. I settled down on the floor, my legs crossed, and pulled him to me. “What should we call you, little guy?”

Names meant something, and no matter how much of a hurry Lila was in for the dog to be called something other than boy, I wasn’t going to rush it.

“Teagan,” Caleb said.

“Yes?”

“How old are you?”

I ran my fingers over the dog’s thin body. I’d cleaned him up and washed his wounds, but there wasn’t much else I could do. His leg didn’t appear broken, despite his limp. “Sixteen. How old are you guys?”

“I’m eighteen,” he said. “Lila hasn’t ever said. I figure she’s around thirty or forty.”

Lila snorted. “It’s none of your business how old I am.”

“She’s twenty,” I told him. “Twenty one, maybe.”

Lila lifted an eyebrow. “Who the fuck cares? Really. Who cares?”

“Just curious,” Caleb said.

“Nosy, you mean,” she told him.

He grinned, then sobered. His eyes were solemn when he looked at me. “You did good. Fourteen and alone when shit went nuts, and here you are with a setup like this, house full of supplies. You did a good job.”

I smiled down at the dog, ridiculously pleased. “Thanks.”

“Let’s get back to work.” He grinned at me. “I’m taking you out tonight.”

“Yeah,” Lila said. “Our Caleb is a real good time. Taking you to see A Gathering of Mutants. I hear there’ll be lots of alcohol.” She cackled at her own wit.

I got to my feet, ignoring them both. I wasn’t afraid of tonight, really.

But the thought of walking alone into the gods’ camp loomed over me and left me dark and filled with doom.

I was sure that fear would become terror when we entered the camp, and I could not let it incapacitate me.

I was going to get Sage.

And I was going to face the gods.

But first, I was going to go with Caleb and Lila and find out what it was like to deliberately seek out a mutant.

I was going to hunt.

Chapter Fourteen

The evening sun was drooping tiredly in the sky when we left the house. Caleb and Lila were both subdued and I was glad of their solemnity. I didn’t want to be the only one with fear lying like a cold fist in the pit of my stomach.

“You will always be afraid. Can you handle that?”

I really wasn’t sure I could.

Once upon a time I’d enjoyed the little thrills of fear and adventure as I’d bicycled from my house to town each morning.

But that’d been when I was living in relative ignorance. Blissful ignorance.

Seemed like a million years ago.

Stay with me, Robin. I need a friend.

I’m here, sister.

Her body had never been found, so my mother hadn’t given up the idea that Robin was somewhere alive. Waiting for us.

I knew she was dead.

I felt it.

I felt her with me. She couldn’t be with me if she were still alive, could she?

Could she?

But what if…

No.

Robin was dead. No matter what I wanted to believe or hope for.

She was with me.

The bulky water guns and alcohol tanks were heavy and uncomfortable as I jogged down the streets, Caleb on one side of me and Lila on the other.

“Do we lure them to us?” I asked. “Or just hope we get lucky?”

“It depends,” Caleb said. “Today, we’ll see who we can lure out.” He flashed me a smile. “We’ll use Lila for bait.”

“Or we won’t,” Lila said.

“Come on, Lila. Be a good sport,” he told her. “I’ll take my turn next time.”

“Whatever.”

It seemed crazy to be putting ourselves in danger, deliberately hoping for a mutant to pay us a visit, but pretty much everything about being a hunter was crazy.

I squeezed the gun I carried. There was another one in a holster at my side. It didn’t seem like enough.

“Try here,” Lila said. She walked across the street and leaned against a streetlight, then winked at me. “You’re looking a little pale, precious.”

“Why are you always such an asshole?” I asked.

“She’s like a seven-year-old boy,” Caleb said. “The more she likes you, the more she’ll torment you.”

“Awesome,” I muttered.

Lila looked away. “Get out of here. Let’s see what we can entice in.”

Caleb tapped my arm. “Come with me.”

We jogged across the street and then slipped to the side of the house directly across from Lila. “You’re on,” Caleb called to her. “Hit it, fresh meat.”

“Why don’t we just shoot a gun?” I asked. “That will always bring the mutants.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “but we don’t want to bring every mutant within two miles. We only do that if we have a lot more hunters and a few badass traps waiting.”

“Oh.”

In the next second, Lila screamed, and even though I was ready for her to make some noise, I jumped and shrieked—not nearly as loudly as Lila, but still.

Caleb sighed.

I didn’t look at him. I was too embarrassed.

We waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Finally, Caleb pushed away from the wall. “We’ll try somewhere else.”

Lila met us in the middle of the street, and we walked on.

As we walked, I found myself waiting for Sage to run toward us. She’d have some story about how she’d been taken, and how she’d escaped, and how she found me once again.

It’d happened once. It could happen again.

“What’s wrong?” Caleb asked me.

“Just thinking about Sage.”

“How’d you find her?” Lila asked.

“She found me, really.” I told them about Sage’s pregnant mother—but not what I’d done to her. I also told them about killing the mutant, and then losing the child. “I heard a knock on my door and there she was.”

“Strange kid,” Lila said.

“Yeah. Super smart. God knows what she went through before they escaped.”

“Seems strange, though, doesn’t it?” Caleb asked.

I frowned. “What does?”

He shrugged. “Her whole story, I guess. And now she’s missing again.”

I fell silent. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, and I didn’t care. I knew Sage—he didn’t.

“What happened to the mother,” Lila asked. “And the unborn mutant? You kill them?”

I couldn’t breathe for a moment.

“Teagan?” Caleb said. “What did—”

Lila stopped walking and held up a hand. “Shhh.”

I stuffed my earplugs in immediately. I tasted metal on my tongue as I listened, barely breathing. “Should we hide?”

“Hell no,” she said. “We didn’t come here to hide. We came here to kill.” Then she jerked up her gun, spun around, and began spraying something behind me.

“Shit,” I cried, and just that quickly, we were surrounded.

“Back to back,” Caleb said, calmly. “Keep your cool, Teagan, and aim for the face.”

We made a sort of triangle, and then, there was no time for anything but shooting and staying alive.

There were five of them in front of me, but I caught movement farther down the street and realized more of them were coming.

“Die, motherfuckers,” Lila screamed, and I could hear joy in her voice.

Lila loved what she did. Caleb might be scared every time he went hunting, but Lila wasn’t.

Someday I might be like her. Fearless.

But right then, I was scared out of my mind.

I shot in a spraying arc, but the mutants were fast.

“Is it my imagination,” Caleb asked, “or are they—”

“Faster,” Lila finished, breathless.

I would probably have screamed if I’d had the breath for it. The mutants kept coming, and as they died, they screamed.

And as they screamed, they brought more mutants.

We were outnumbered badly—every time we killed a mutant, two more took his place. And we were caught right in the middle of them all.

“We fucked up,” Lila screamed.

We were in hell. The mutants kept coming, despite the fact that they were burning, melting, and dying in agonizing pain. Their screams began to blend together into one earsplitting, brain scrambling shriek, and though my earplugs softened the sound, they could not shut them out.

But I couldn’t succumb to the screams. I had to fight. I had to kill.

Even if I didn’t want to. Even if I wanted to throw my gun down and rush to comfort the suffering mutants. It wasn’t me. Their screams were simply messing with my mind.

The streets were overflowing with the creatures—they hit us from all sides, and though I knew there couldn’t possibly be as many as my crazed mind perceived, there were still way too many of them.

Their faces loomed large in my tunneled vision. They looked too human, suddenly. Their eyes were wide and full of panic and rage and their bloodless faces were paler even than usual.

The dying writhed on the pavement, hands to their melting faces. Some of them lifted their scorched arms, reaching beseechingly for help. But there was no help.

Not for them.

Caleb, Lila, and I stood in our little circle, dousing the mutants until all around us they lay dead and dying—and finally, despite their rage and hunger, the living mutants began to fall back.

“We’ve got this,” Lila muttered.

“We need to get back home,” Caleb said. “Start walking. Slowly. Teagan, make us a path. Lila—”

“I know what to do.”

Breathing hard, I began sidling back down the street. I sent a jet of alcohol anytime a mutant got too close, but only two of them dared. “We’re low on alcohol,” I whispered.

“They don’t know that. Keep walking,” Lila said.

“They came from town,” Caleb murmured. “What are they doing out here?”

“Searching for humans,” Lila replied, calmly. “And now that they’ve found us, they’re not going to give up.”

“Then we’ll have to go after them,” I said. “Hunters hunt. We’re not going to sit around waiting for them to find us, are we?”

“No,” Caleb said, and I heard a smile in his voice. “No, we are not.”

“We need bigger tanks.” I picked up my speed just a little. We’d driven the mutants back, and though I caught occasional movements from the shadows of houses and behind parked cars, not one of the bastards came closer.

“We have them,” Lila said. “We just didn’t think we’d need them tonight.”

“If they start using guns…”

“They don’t want us dead,” he replied. “They can’t eat or use or knock up corpses.”

“But I’ve seen them kill people.”

“Yeah,” Lila said. “By eating them. They didn’t kill them and then eat them, did they?”

“No.”

“There aren’t enough of us left for them to throw away,” she said. “They won’t outright kill our asses.”

“Sage told me that the scouts aren’t allowed to eat us. They have rules, and they’re supposed to take us to the gods. Then the gods decide what to do with us.”

“The orphans kill,” Caleb said.

“Yeah, but the orphans are all dumb as rocks,” Lila told him. “They don’t have any impulse control, either.”

Finally we began jogging home, and halfway down my street I saw Richard waiting, his hands at his sides, watching us come.

I had a sudden feeling he’d known we were in trouble, and waited patiently to see if his hunters would survive the fight.

He’d had to have heard the death screams.

“Why didn’t he come to help?” I asked, looking at Caleb.

Caleb looked away, but Lila surprised me by answering.

“If you’re not strong enough to survive a fight, then Richard doesn’t believe you deserve to live,” she said, then sent me a smile that chilled me almost as much as her words had. “It’s a hard world. We have to be harder.”

“That’s…” I swallowed hard, then continued. “That’s insane. And that makes him an asshole.”

“Nope,” Lila said. “That makes him right. Only the strong survive. This is no place for the weak.”

Then she ran on ahead, whooping as she gave Richard a high five and hurried on to the house.

I couldn’t meet his eyes when I walked by him. Neither of us said a word. When he held up a hand for me to slap, I pretended not to see it and left him standing on the street with Caleb, his heavy stare burning holes into my back.

Chapter Fifteen

I lay awake, my arms under my head, staring into the darkness. I couldn’t sleep. I was still keyed up over the close call we’d had a few hours earlier and worry over Sage ate at me. Every time I closed my eyes I saw her face.

She’d been trying to get me a dog. She’d wanted to do something sweet for me and some asshole had taken her. I couldn’t bear to think about her in the hands of the mutants once again.

The horrible, terrifying mutants.

The others sloughed off the encounter like it was nothing to worry about. Just another day in a world of mutant fighting.

It had rattled me.

Richard seemed to think I’d get used to it, and I know they were all amused by my lack of experience and my fear. I’d been sheltered.

I got that.

But ever since I’d met Sage, things had gotten rough—starting with me killing her mother. My life had changed.

And not for the better. Except I wasn’t alone. That was better.

The others slept soundly—Richard and Caleb bedded down in thick sleeping bags on the kitchen floor, and Lila took over the couch. Just until Sage came back—then Lila could get her own sleeping bag.

“What are you over there blubbering about?”

I lifted my head from my pillow, peering into the shadowy darkness at the couch. I’d left two battery powered lights on—they were small but gave enough light so that we wouldn’t kill ourselves if we had to get up in the middle of the night.

Sometimes the darkness was so oppressive it smothered me, and my fondest wish was for the days when lamps and ceiling lights were the norm. I would never take something like that for granted again.

“I thought you were asleep.” I winced when my voice came out nasally and thick.

“Who can sleep with you over there moaning and sobbing? What’d you do, run out of eyeshadow?”

I sniffed, wiped my face, then grinned. “You’re a bitch.”

“Go to sleep, Teagan.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Then be quiet so I can.”

I turned to my side and closed my eyes, but sleep didn’t come.

“I’m scared,” I said, ten minutes later. “I’m afraid I’ll never find Sage. I’m afraid to spend the rest of my life fighting mutants. I’m afraid they’ll catch me.”

She sat up. “There’s a big possibility you won’t find the kid, that you will spend the rest of your life fighting, and that the mutants will catch you. There’s also a big possibility that you will find her, that you’ll spend your life fighting the bastards and saving people who can’t save themselves, and that if they do catch you, you’ll make them regret it.”

I stared at the ceiling, trying to imagine what it’d be like to be Lila Stone.

“It’s all in how you look at it.” The cot rattled when she jumped onto it. She crossed her legs and then patted my arm. “So until you lose the fear and learn how to live in this strange new world, I’ll help protect you from the big bad muties.”

I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. “Why?”

She shrugged. “I was like you once.”

I squinted at her. “I don’t believe you were ever afraid.”

She scratched her nose, pursed her lips, and looked away. “Oh, I’ve known fear. But I realized that no matter how afraid I might be, shit’s going to happen anyway. So I decided to be a badass instead.” She grinned and spread her hands. “And here I am.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not that easy,” I said, dryly.

“Fake it. Before you know it, you’ll be pushing yourself into sick situations just to get that delicious little thrill of fear. It lets you know you’re alive.”

I nodded. “Thanks.”

“Sleep now. If you wake me up again, I’m gagging you and locking you in the bathroom.”

I slid back down in the bed and turned to face the wall. “Goodnight, Lila.”

I drifted to sleep sometime later, smiling.

The dog’s barking shattered the silence, jarring me out of a dream I couldn’t quite grasp but I knew it’d involved Robin—her laughter seemed to hang in the room when I jerked awake.

In the next second, something shattered upstairs, and I realized it was the sound of glass breaking. At almost the same time, I heard sounds like wood splintering, then thumps—and then the house was on fire.

Smoke began to roll in from the kitchen, and Richard, Caleb, and the dog rushed into the living room.

“They’ve found us,” Richard said. There was no panic in his voice, but his movements were sure and quick. “We need to get out of here now.”

“The hell?” Lila asked, thickly. She jumped from the couch, grabbed her weapons, and then ran to help Richard yank the plywood off the living room window. Going through the door would have taken too much time—not only were thick boards nailed over it, but I’d shoved a heavy wardrobe in front of it, and the wardrobe was now filled with clothing.

And they’d be waiting at the back.

I yanked on my jeans, shoved my feet into my boots, then grabbed my water gun off the coffee table.

The dog’s barks became excited yips, and I heard Richard’s calm voice giving quiet orders to Lila and Caleb.

The house was on fire. Smoke billowed in from the kitchen, the upstairs—even though I’d boarded it up, there were cracks.

“Grab what you can,” Lila yelled. “Hurry.”

I grabbed my belt and buckled it around my hips, then yanked my bag from where it hung over the back of a chair. I held my breath as I shoved two tanks into it, then slung it over my shoulder, and ran to the window.

Richard smashed through the glass with a hammer, then motioned us through. “Let’s get out of here.” His voice was cold, but even so, I could hear his despair.

The supplies. The kitchen, the cellar.

We’d lose them all.

And that was almost more than Richard could bear.

I breathed past the sudden lightheadedness. “The alcohol on the back porch?”

“It’ll burn. It’s lost. Everything is lost.”

“They’ll be out there, waiting,” Lila said.

He nodded. “Yes.”

I buried my fingers in the now quiet dog’s fur. “Let’s go, boy.”

Caleb went through first, then stood outside the window with his gun up, waiting for the attack that was coming.

“Go, Teagan,” Richard said.

I kicked the shards of glass from the bottom of the old window, then picked up the dog and sent him through before following him out.

The street was on fire. Smoke poured from two of the homes directly across from my house, as well as the ones on either side of us. Flames shot into the sky from houses farther down the street. The night was painted orange and gray and black, and sounds I hadn’t heard in two years—crashes, bangs, explosions—added to the confusion. It was too loud. All of it. The sights, the sounds, the smells…

The fear…

It was all too loud and my brain wasn’t quite sure how to process it. Over the last two years, I’d been exposed to quiet sounds and the same everyday scenes. The vividness of my surroundings at that moment was extreme and overloaded my senses.

Richard, Lila, and Caleb jumped off the porch, ready to fight, watching for the enemy we knew was lurking.

Waiting.

And then, almost before I could bring my gun up, the mutants attacked.

But not just the scouts or the orphans.

It was much worse than that.

The gods had come.

Chapter Sixteen

The enormous gods emerged suddenly from the gray smoke, visions of doom atop wild, screaming horses. They shouted their wrath with thunderous voices, their faces hidden behind silver masks, long hair flying.

 The huge mounts seemed to exhale smoke when they raced toward us, and the ground shook beneath my feet as I stood there, filled with dread, shock, and wonder.

I’d never in my life seen or imagined anything so beautiful.

The gods were not like the scouts or orphans, and they had come prepared. What seemed like dozens of them was, in reality, six—some part of my mind registered their numbers, even as I noted their armor.

Streams and sprays of alcohol would not hurt them.

“Run,” Lila screamed, her cry louder, even, than the shrieks of the horses. The gods had leveled the playing field.

We scattered, and I thought I heard Caleb yell as I raced down the street, intent only upon escape.

I held my gun. There would be vulnerable spots in the recently created armor.

There had to be.

The dog stayed at my side for a moment as we ran, then he swerved off, raced through a yard, and was gone. I hoped he’d stay safe.

I hoped I’d see him again.

One of the gods crossed the street in front of me, and as I stumbled to a halt, his horse reared, pawing the air.

I turned around to run but found my way blocked by a dozen scouts—they spilled over the yards and then stood on the street, jumping with excitement.

Clicking, whispering.

Unlike the gods, they wore no armor, and without a second’s hesitation I began shooting. I had no earplugs to help muffle their agony.

I could barely pump the trigger—it was like a thousand pound weight I had to move with one cold, slow finger. But alcohol shot from the barrel and the mutants fell back, some of them screaming, some of them running away.

One of them—a female; a tiny part of my mind fixated on the fact that she was female because female mutants weren’t as numerous as males—stared over my shoulder, her stare wide and questioning. Not of me, though.

She was asking the god if it was okay to run from me.

I realized that fact a millisecond before the god grabbed the back of my shirt and plucked me from the ground.

I didn’t drop my gun. I might have, such was my fear, but my fingers were locked in a death grip on the toy, and I couldn’t have opened my hand had it saved my life.

A god had me.

I shot him. Alcohol ran in rivulets down his mask, but he didn’t so much as flinch. I couldn’t even shoot him in the eye—he was simply too fast.

They had learned.

Absorbed.

And they were protected.

I, however, was not.

He twisted the gun, almost breaking my wrist before he wrenched it from my grip. He tossed it to a scout, then turned his attention back to me.

He held me with one massive arm, easily, almost gently. To him, I was a puny, weak human, and he had my kind for breakfast.

Literally.

At that thought, I went a little crazy.

Screaming, I began to struggle. Biting, kicking, punching, I did everything I could to fight him. To break his hold.

If I didn’t escape him, I would die, or I would become one of his pregnant, tormented prisoners.

I had to escape.

He held me with one hand and with the other, he grabbed my throat. Hard.

“Stop struggling or I will kill you,” he said. Then, as I redoubled my efforts, despite him tightening his grip on my throat, he muttered, “Butcher.”

I raked my nails down his hand, then grabbed his fingers and tried to pry them loose. I had a squirt gun in my belt—it was tiny, but it was full. If I could yank it out, I could at least spray his bare hands.

Every other part of his body was covered. I heard the crackle of plastic when I hit his arm. The gods had either sewn plastic—thick contractor bags, maybe—into their clothing or had simply taped the plastic around their bodies before donning their clothes.

My fingertips slid through the warm slickness of his blood as I continued to desperately claw his hand, but he seemed not to notice.

Facing him wasn’t like facing a mutant—it was like facing a strange, unfeeling machine that would slowly squeeze the life from me as I struggled.

Though I couldn’t really see his eyes or his expression, I felt the coldness in his stare. I felt the hatred.

I wondered if he could feel mine. Probably not. Probably all he felt was my terror.

I went for the gun in my belt.

There wasn’t a chance in hell I would go down without a fight. Not only because it didn’t occur to me, but because I was in a dark, mad place, and I was going to make sure I killed him, escaped, or died.

Those were my choices.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I acknowledged that the world was on fire. That the craziness was really happening.

Everything that happened then was reflexive. My brain was on autopilot, but that was okay. It knew what to do despite the screaming madness of my mind.

I grabbed for the squirt gun with one hand and a blade with the other. I knew exactly where they were. There was no searching or scrabbling about—I simply reached down and yanked free both weapons.

I imagined his eyes widening when I stuck the knife blade through the fabric of his shirt and through the plastic beneath it, and further still into the vulnerable flesh hidden beneath the layers.

Seconds, that’s all it took. I stuffed the gun through the rent fabric, and I pumped the trigger hard and fast.

And finally, he dropped his hand from my throat.

I could breathe again.

He drew in a quick, sharp breath as he began to burn beneath his clothing, as the plastic began to melt into his flesh.

It was that exact moment a bullet whizzed by my face and pierced his skull.

“Shit,” he murmured, and it was such a human thing to say that I paused.

I fell from the horse and landed on my ass so hard I was sure something broke. My teeth clacked together and I tasted blood from the bite I took from my tongue. But I was alive.

Then Lila was there, yanking me up, screaming at me to “move, move!” and I was running into the darkness, free.

Free.

Free of the god.

Richard sprayed the mutants who dared linger, then followed us out of hell.

I turned to look back only once, but the god was gone.

“I won, you bastard,” I whispered.

And I was a little less afraid.

Lila led me through yard after yard, down alleys lit not with fire but with dawn, and finally, she pushed open the door to a small one-story and we rushed inside, then fell to the floor, exhausted, injured, but alive.

We’d faced the gods, and we’d survived to talk about it.

Three of us had, anyway.

“Oh no,” I murmured. “Lila, where’s Caleb?”

She took a deep, hitching breath, then put her fingers to her mouth.

“Lila?” I crawled to her and grabbed her wrist, pulling her hand away from her lips. “Where is he?”

“Taken,” she whispered, finally. “The gods took Caleb.”

Chapter Seventeen

“I’m getting used to their screams.” I yanked open the cupboards, searching for something we needed more than food at the moment. Water. “They hurt, but they don’t disable me anymore.”

Lila picked glass from the back of her hand with a pair of tweezers and ignored me.

I’d lost my bag somewhere in the night—I couldn’t remember losing it, but when the urgency of the previous hours lessened, I realized my bag was gone.

There’d been two bottles of water in the bag. My mouth was so dry it felt like I was chewing on a pile of wool. My throat hurt when I swallowed, which wasn’t surprising considering I’d been choked by a god.

“We’ll have to find water,” I said.

Richard walked to the door.

“Where are you going?” Lila asked.

“To find water.”

“We have to go after him, Richard,” Lila said.

“We’ll discuss it when I get back.”

“We’ll get both of them,” I told her, when Richard was gone. “Sage and Caleb. We’ll get them back.”

“How do you feel?” she asked. “Mentally.”

I paced, though I was so exhausted I could barely breathe. “Good. I feel good. I’m not so afraid anymore.”

“Because you faced them. You were captured, and you escaped.” Her grin was white and wide through the soot on her face. “Now you can start your journey into badassery.”

I laughed, then flinched and touched my throat. “Ouch.”

“I bet that’s what he said when I blew his head half off,” she said. “How was that for a good shot?”

I smiled. “I’m glad you’re here, Lila.”

“Well, yeah, I bet you are. You’re going to owe me big time.”

“I already do.”

“True.”

I laughed, then grabbed my throat again. “Ouch! Stop making me laugh.”

“Gah. You are such a girl.”

I went to peer out the window. “Did you see my dog out there?”

“Nope.” She slapped a bandage on her hand, stuffed her tiny first aid kit back into her bag, then stood. “Let’s get some sleep. We’ll need to rest before we go get our friends back.”

“The mutants are not going to give up, are they?” I said, walking with her into the living room. “As long as we’re here, they’re going to try to take us.”

“Yes. Good news is, they don’t want us dead. They just want us.”

“For food and breeding. What lovely things to aspire to.” I threw my hands up and twirled around on the living room floor. “Oh I so want to live with the mutants.”

She didn’t smile. “You’ll probably end up getting that wish sooner or later.”

“If I do,” I said, marveling at my giddiness, “promise to come rescue me again, will you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “If I’m alive, girlie, I’ll rescue you every time.”

“Then you can have the couch. I’ll take this rather uncomfortable looking chair.”

She threw herself onto the couch, turned over, and was snoring in sixty seconds. It took me a little longer. I wanted a blanket, but didn’t want to go upstairs to find one. I was thirsty. I was full of nervous energy.

But finally, I managed to quiet my mind and drifted off into an uneasy sleep. I was awakened what seemed like five minutes later by the back door slamming.

“Water,” Richard called.

“Food?” I asked hopefully, when my stomach growled. I was already beginning to understand why Richard and the others had been so awestruck when they’d walked into my stocked house.

“Yes,” he answered, when Lila and I walked into the kitchen. “This town still holds a few surprises.”

“Not for long,” Lila said. “The mutants will take what they can. They have to feed their prisoners to keep them alive.”

I rubbed the grit from my eyes and took the bottle of water Richard offered me. He looked worse than ever—he hadn’t bothered washing his face, his hair was stringy, and blood from a cut on his cheek painted the lines of his face.

He caught me staring at him and met my gaze calmly. “Eat something. You’ll need your strength for tonight.”

“Two o’clock,” I said. “When the gods sleep.”

“We don’t have enough weapons to go after them,” he continued. “We’ve lost the alcohol. We’ll have to spend the day searching the houses for more. If we can’t gather enough today, we’ll push the attack back to tomorrow night.”

Lila opened a box of crackers and began spreading peanut butter on them. “Eat, Teagan.”

After we ate, we split up and began searching the houses. The gods had burned some of the houses on my old street, but the others were untouched. For now.

Nearly every house I entered netted me at least one bottle of alcohol. If the others were doing as well, we’d have enough.

We hadn’t discussed the fact that the mutants—at least the gods—were protecting themselves.

The important thing, at least to me, was getting our people back. If we killed some mutants along the way, awesome. If not, there’d be other opportunities to fight.

I just wanted Sage safe.

And Caleb, of course.

I cast the heavy dread and fear aside. There was no room for it.

But that night, as we prepared to leave the house, it came sneaking back.

“Scared?” Lila asked, as she weighed herself down with alcohol tanks, blades, and guns.

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I’m going to do what I have to do, afraid or not.”

“That’s called courage.” Her eyes shone when she smiled, and excitement made her face glow.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It is.”

Richard had become more taciturn than usual, and barely said two words. Lila told me he was always that way before a big fight.

He was also depressed over losing the supplies.

Maybe later I’d tell him about the containers of supplies I’d buried out behind the mall. Maybe.

We jogged down the street, with only the stars and moon lighting our way, and then we cut off into the woods.

The woods were like us. Silent, grim, and dark.

Hushed, as though they held their breath, waiting to see if we’d bring the fight into their sheltering arms. To see if we’d survive the night.

My stomach was tight, my breathing harsh, and my chest seemed too small to contain my swelling, thudding heart. Fear and anxiety were heavy burdens that took up residence in my mind and refused to budge.

Robin was with me as I ran. I felt her in the back of my mind, and in my heart, though I’d heard her less since the new people had found me.

Robin?

“I’ll protect you, Teagan.”

Then we were there. Too soon. Much too soon.

The mutants’ cluster loomed before us like a tiny, sinister town, and we crept into it like the intruders we were.

I pulled Robin’s memory around me, and with Sage’s little face in my mind, I crept into the gods’ camp, my gun out.

The crackers and peanut butter I’d eaten sat on my stomach, thick and sour. I was glad I hadn’t eaten anything else.

It seemed like the town was on fire, but it was only the huge bonfires the mutants had built at intervals along the street and in the parking lots. The place was lit up like a carnival.

Smoke, black and gray, rose into the sky. It smelled like they were burning plastic along with wood, and it burned my nose.

I prayed I wouldn’t cough, but as I crept into the edge of camp, the smoke almost got the best of me.

Richard and Lila veered off—they had a different job to do.

And I was alone.

The camp sprawled across the street, spread out in chaotic disorder. But not far from me, the dark outline of the wagons stood tall and unmoving beneath the brightness of the crescent moon.

Richard had drawn a map of the layout of the camp, and I knew where to go and what to do. But there were mutants everywhere, and a singsong voice in my mind told me they were going to see me, catch me, and eat me as I screamed.

Luckily, most of them were asleep.

It was safer for them to lie in as many different places as possible—Richard had said they didn’t sleep in big piles or even close to each other, to make killing them more difficult.

The awake mutants gathered around campfires, some of them speaking words I understood, interspersed with clicks and sounds I was sure had never come from a human mouth.

They laughed uproariously, talked, yelled…just like humans at an overly crowded bar on a Saturday night.

I counted at least four gods in the mix, though most of the mutants were the regular scouts and a few of the skinny orphans. The gods were without their armor, and why wouldn’t they be? They’d never believe we were stupid enough—three small, puny humans—to attack them on their own turf.

One of them, standing impossibly close to the fire, lifted what looked like a gallon jug and began gulping the contents. When he finished, he belched, which caused more outbursts of laughter.

I put my hand to my mouth, reeling with the thought that the mutants were not only learning from us, they were becoming us.

I clenched my gun so tightly it cracked.

It sure seemed like there were more than twenty of them awake. More like forty. Maybe there’d been more of them in the cluster than I’d realized.

Richard would have known, though.

He and Lila had made alcohol bombs, and they’d use those intermittently placed bonfires to their advantage.

“We’ll fight, you’ll rescue.”

That was fine with me.

I pressed my back against a tree, waiting. I kept darting looks around the tree from the mutants to the wagons—it wasn’t hard to see the one that contained the prisoners.

The sides had been built high, but the back was protected only by a tailgate type door. The mutants were secure in their belief that the prisoners would not try to escape. I wasn’t sure why.

Sage and her mother had escaped, after all.

There were also two mutants guarding the prison wagon.

I heard a horse whinny, and close by, someone cleared his throat.

And I heard moans.

The smell of human and animal waste was strong. Not even the burning plastic scent could mask it.

“God,” I whispered, and my hands began to shake as the reality of the situation hit me.

One of the mutants stiffened suddenly, and held up a hand to halt the conversation. They fell immediately silent, and in the next second they all began sniffing the air.

They smelled the bodies melting. Burning.

They smelled mutant death.

And then, the death screams began.

I hadn’t planned to wear the earplugs, but when the screams started, I changed my mind. I dug them from my pocket, then almost immediately dropped one.

“Shit fuck!” I leaned forward, trying to catch sight of the earplug. I screwed the one I had into my ear, then squatted and ran my hand over the ground.

It was lost forever. One would have to do. I stood, my legs as weak and fluttery as paper.

The two mutants watching the wagons finally rushed away, and that was my cue.

I darted out from behind the tree, cradling my big gun across my chest—it wasn’t attached to tanks on my back, but I had two water bottles full of alcohol in case I emptied my gun. I sprinted for the prison wagon.

I reached the wagon in seconds, but it took me at least a minute to unhook and drop the tailgate.

I leapt into the wagon, then understood why the mutants didn’t mind leaving the prisoners in an unenclosed wagon.

They were roped together and couldn’t move. The ropes were thick and short, and some of the humans were bound so close they couldn’t even turn their heads to look at me.

Their wrists were tied behind their backs.

Eight of them, all bound together. Bleeding, beaten, and one man, I saw, who appeared to be dead. The smell from the pitiful group rose up to surround me in a cloud of horror, and I just stood there, frozen, staring.

I saw neither Sage nor Caleb.

“Where are the pregnant women kept?” I knelt beside the first man, put my gun in the straw covering the wagon floor, then yanked a sharp blade from a sheath at my side.

The rope was twisted around his neck so tightly it sank into his flesh, and even in the darkness I could see blood on the rope. Still, I had to try.

I pulled a different knife—one with a serrated blade—and began to saw at the rope.

He cried out, and I could see there was nothing behind his eyes but fear.

“Shit,” I cried. “Shit!”

If I got him free, I’d give him the blades and let him free the others. I had to hurry. I had to find Sage.

“Please,” someone whispered. The voice was as raw and rusty as a death rattle, and it slithered down my spine with cold fingers of something so bad that it had no name. “Please.”

I grabbed my gun and jumped to my feet. My boots sank into something thick and mushy, but any revulsion I felt was buried quickly beneath the awfulness of those poor people and their situation.

“Where are you?” I asked, softly. “Hello?”

“Here.”

I pulled my tiny flashlight from my pocket and clicked it on. Sounds began to penetrate the shocked haze in my mind—thumps, bullets spraying, and finally, screaming.

Death screams.

I burst into sobs, then hurriedly shut my mind to the screams. I couldn’t allow myself to hear them.

“Here,” he said, again.

I worked my way through the bodies, stepping carefully, shining my light over each person until…

“Oh, no,” I murmured.

The person who’d spoken wasn’t a man. He was a boy. A boy maybe twelve years old—it wasn’t easy to tell beneath the grime and blood covering his face.

His hair was short and dark, his eyes huge and sunken. His cheekbones were almost sharp enough to cut my finger when I touched his face.

I tried to put my fingers between the rope and his throat, but the rope was wrapped too tightly.

“Oh, no,” I said, again. “Oh, God.”

“Get me loose,” he said. His lips were cracked and bloodstained, but almost as pale as his face. “Get me loose.”

I tugged at his rope. “Okay, honey. I’ll try.”

Someone behind him wheezed suddenly. A laugh, maybe. “You can’t.”

We had one hour. One hour to kill the mutants and get out of there before the others woke up. I knew Richard would kill every sleeping mutant he could find, but he would never be able to find or kill them all.

And if they woke up while we were still in their camp, it would go badly for us.

“In and out,” Richard had said. “We fight and kill the awake ones, then find and kill as many of the sleepers as possible before the hour is up. Then we get the hell out before they come after us.”

“Help us,” someone else begged, and suddenly the wagon was full of pleading voices.

Time was running out.

“Please don’t let me cut him,” I whispered, and began to saw at the rope around the child’s neck.

“Cut me loose first,” the man next to him said.

But I ignored him and holding the flashlight in my mouth, I sawed, and hacked, and held my breath.

“He’s not strong enough to cut us free,” the same man cried.

He was probably right, but I couldn’t stop. I had to free the boy. I’d free him and hope for the best. “I’m sorry,” I murmured.

And finally, the ends of the rope parted, and the boy took a deep, hoarse breath, and he was smiling.

Smiling, even in his situation.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Vito.”

I nodded. “I’ll remember. I’m Teagan.”

Cutting the rope from his wrists went much faster, and when he was free, I handed him the knife. “Which one of these men will help the others, Vito?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Danny, in the back.”

“I’ll get his neck, you get his wrists, okay?”

“Yes.”

Danny was waiting. He was nearly indistinguishable from the others. He was restrained, filthy, and beaten. But he wasn’t broken.

“Help them when you’re free,” I told him. “I’ll try not to cut your throat.”

“I’d rather have my throat cut than this,” he said. “Do what you can. Vito will stab me in the heart if you can’t get me loose, won’t you, buddy?” He laughed.

I shook my head, unable to comprehend how they could still laugh. Or talk. Or function.

I cut him free.

Terrified with every second that passed that the mutants would find me, that the gods would awaken, and that I would never have enough time to find Sage.

“I’m looking for a little girl and a new boy,” I said. “Do you know where they might keep them?”

“Girl, really?” one of the men said. “Do we look like we see anything but this shithole?”

“Alcohol,” I told them. “It kills them.”

But they were no longer listening to me. They were begging Danny and Vito to cut them loose or kill them.

I grabbed my gun and got the hell out of there. I leapt off the wagon, and though I could no longer hear them, I imagined I could.

I could still hear death screams, and flickering flames lit up the night. Everything bounced around in my skull like ping pong balls and all I could see was hell.

Fire, smoke, death.

“Sage,” I screamed. “Sage!”

A melting mutant ran toward me. His shirt had burnt into his skin as the alcohol ate away at his flesh, and his eyes were wide and demented. I could feel his desperation, and I knew if he got his hands on me, I was dead.

Or worse.

I didn’t run. I brought my gun up and I pulled the trigger. A stream of alcohol burst from the barrel and hit him in the throat. I didn’t stop, though.

He fell to the ground, twisting and screaming, his body smoking, and still, I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop.

I knew I was wasting my mutant-killer, but I couldn’t stop.

Then Lila appeared out of the smoke, her face covered with soot and blood. I saw her mouth moving and I knew she was screaming at me to find the kid, find Sage, but I stood there like an idiot and sprayed alcohol on a dead mutant.

She shoved me.

The gun flew from my grasp about three seconds before I hit the ground hard enough to shake the crazy loose, and the sharp, immediate pain from my already damaged tailbone brought my mind back to the matter at hand.

She plucked my gun off the ground and threw it at me, hitting me in the chest. “Find the fucking kid,” she screamed. “You have thirty minutes.”

Thirty minutes.

Shit.

“Okay,” I murmured. “I’m okay.” I pulled a full bottle of alcohol from my belt and poured it into the gun with surprisingly steady hands. Then I turned and ran toward the other wagon. Where else would she be?

But I knew they could have stashed her anywhere—if they’d been the ones to take her in the first place. Human baddies could have gotten her.

And in the back of my mind a quiet voice told me that I was never going to find her.

Sage was gone forever.

Chapter Eighteen

The second wagon was full of supplies, and despite everything that was going on, part of me wanted to get into the driver’s seat and drive those horses, the wagon, and the supplies out of there.

No bodies were in the wagon—alive or dead.

I ran into the grocery store, and tripped over a sleeping mutant who lay right inside the doorway. I screamed before I could control myself, but he never moved.

I scrambled to my feet and wiped blood from a cut on my face. I had no idea where it’d come from. It didn’t matter, really, but my mind wanted to fixate on that injury.

I had another flashlight in my belt, so I pulled it free and clicked it on, then I pointed my gun at the sleeping mutant.

He didn’t move as I sprayed him. And when I moved on, I found another, and another, and another.

I watched their skin blister and burn with a grim, almost psychotic satisfaction I’d never felt before. I destroyed the ones in my path, but I knew there were others, probably all over the store. Everywhere, there were others.

And I had yet to see a sleeping god.

I sprinted down the aisles and deeper into the store, every sense I had on high alert. The beam of my flashlight bobbed as I ran. It lit up a path for me, but made the shadows even more ominous. I felt spotlighted.

My running footsteps were loud and echoing on the hard floor, and my breath could have been a bellows.

 Despite the noise I was making, I heard the prisoners.

The pregnant women had been herded into the back storage room and left there on the hard, cold concrete floor. They were connected and restrained by ropes and by collars around their necks.

The collars were thick and heavy, but I had strong blades almost sharp enough to cut through stone. I could cut through a collar.

They moaned. That’s all they could do.

But their moans were like winds sweeping through the store, rising and falling, gentle and harsh.

There were fourteen of them. Fourteen pregnant women.

Fourteen dead women.

I could free them, but then what? They were carrying mutant babies. They wouldn’t survive the births of those monsters. Still, I would give them whatever chance I could.

I began to cut them loose, panting and frenzied, agonizing over the fact that there was still no sign of Sage or Caleb.

And any minute, the gods were going to wake up.

I averted my eyes from distended bellies and broken bones and terror filled stares. I closed my mind to the fate that awaited me if the gods woke up.

Their moans were almost as painful to hear as the mutants’ death screams.

“I beg you,” I said. “Be quiet.”

They fell silent so abruptly it was disorienting.

In that horrible silence, I cut them free.

One at a time.

Each slash of the knife, each slice, took an eternity. Sweat gathered on my forehead, then ran down my face in itchy rivulets. Some drops caught on the tip of my nose before falling off with plops I could almost hear.

I cut the collar from the first woman, then hacked through the rope binding her arms. She grunted and scurried into a dark corner to hide as I continued on to the next one.

They couldn’t hide from the gods. Not there. But I didn’t know what else to do.

“Ah,” one of them murmured, when I sliced into her arm in my hurry.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “So sorry.”

The third pregnant prisoner was a young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, and she made no sounds at all. When I looked at her, flashlight in my mouth, her eyes did not sparkle. There was no life in them at all.

When she was free, she simply fell over.

I took a moment to squeeze her cold hands. Later, I would cry. Right then, there was no time.

And I went on to the next woman.

I cut too fast. I hurt some of them, though I doubt I caused them any pain that was stronger than the agony the gods had given them.

By the time I was done my heart was broken, and my throat hurt from the thickness of tears I could not allow myself to shed.

They sat there, those women, free from their bonds but too resigned, too injured, and too pregnant to run.

I stood. “Come on. Come with me. I’ll take you out of here.”

But no one moved. In the shadowy light they stared at me with hollow, hopeless eyes and broken minds.

“Get up,” I whispered. “Please get up.”

One of them smiled at me. I think it was a smile. Her gaze was soft, and she understood. I know she understood. She tried to wet her lips with a swollen, pale tongue, but it was too dry to do anything other than scrape her split skin.

“Thank you,” she whispered. And she held out her hand.

“God.” I broke down, but just for a second. I sobbed as I handed her my alcohol gun. I pulled a smaller one from my belt and gave that to her as well.

And then, I placed the blade on her lap.

She nodded.

I turned and ran, but my feet were slow, my legs heavy.

Her haunted eyes stayed in my mind as I sprinted through the store and slammed through the doors at the back.

I had to get away.

Not only because the gods were stirring, but because I needed to get to a safe place before I lost my shit.

I heard the gods roaring, and maybe I heard a scream as my people tried to escape the awful mutants who’d taken over our world. Maybe.

Maybe I didn’t.

I ran faster than I ever had, sick with disappointment and guilt and awful, awful despair.

Sage was lost.

Probably, she was dead.

Maybe I’d never see her again, but I would never give up searching for her.

Not until I found her cold, dead body and had proof she was gone forever.

I couldn’t seem to save anyone, and deep inside, I felt like Sage was my last chance to…to do something. To redeem myself.

To prove that I was worthy of the life I’d been given.

Why wasn’t I back there in that cold storage room, pregnant and doomed?

I was always escaping while other people died.

Maybe I hated myself a little for that.

I had been spared, surely, for a reason. I could no longer hide. I could no longer cower in a house of supplies as the world crawled on, full of murderous mutants and pitiful humans.

I ran to our temporary new home and slammed through the back door.

Then I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor, my mind chaotic and confused.

I wasn’t sure why I was there.

I had no real recollection of the run home. I vaguely remembered falling to my knees and vomiting nothing, then curling up on the ground until my position made me think of the babies inside the doomed pregnant women.

Mostly, I remembered running.

Richard and Lila were still in town, fighting. I’d left them there. I’d slunk home like a coward, leaving them to fight while I hid inside my house. Just as I’d always done.

I hadn’t even found Sage, and I’d barely even thought about Caleb.

Or freed the men in the wagon.

Or saved the horribly pregnant women.

I threw my head back and moaned, because the sorrow was too big to hold inside.

Then, as some of the pressure inside my skull eased, I hurried to the table and grabbed a machete and another bottle of alcohol.

I shoved an extra blade into my belt, drank a bottle of water, then headed back out. I didn’t think about it.

Thinking too much was one of my problems.

I was a different person when I left that house.

Just slightly.

But different.

Better.

I jogged down the dark street, listening, watching for movement as I went back to search the shadows for a child I couldn’t let go of.

She’s not me, Teagan.

I have to save her.

Save yourself, sister.

I did that once. Not doing it again.

I’d thought the mutants—even the orphans—would be occupied in town, fighting my new friends. So when one raced from a yard toward me, his hands up, I gave a quick, involuntary yell of shock before bringing up my gun.

I was vulnerable, exhausted, and heartsick, and his death scream hit my brain with a violent, vicious malevolence.

He couldn’t hurt me. He was dying.

But as I stood there on the pavement, shaking my head to dislodge the confusion and pain their screams carried, I caught movement behind him.

Mutants.

And not just one or two.

Dozens.

A new group, I figured, on their way to join the cluster in town.

I ran backward, moving my gun from side to side as I sprayed them with an arcing stream of alcohol.

But there were simply too many of them for one girl with one gun. They surrounded me.

And those death screams.

“Shut up,” I shrieked. “Shut up!”

And in the midst of that chaos, another threat appeared. A pack of dogs, wild, starving, and unafraid, threw themselves full force into the fight. They were there to eat, and they didn’t care if they ate mutant or human.

Some of the mutants turned to meet the dogs—they yanked knives, machetes, and swords from their sheaths, and they fell upon the dogs as viciously as the dogs fell upon them.

But the other mutants—the scouts—ignored the dogs.

They came for me. Some of them died before they could reach me, but unlike the simpler orphans, the scouts were canny and quick.

For a brief second I thought longingly of the bear spray I’d once carried—not that it’d hurt the mutants but it could save me from the wild dogs. As if that was something I needed to worry about.

A mutant ripped the gun from my grasp, then used it like a club as he rammed it into my face. I heard my nose crunch, and there was a second of hesitation before blood spewed forth like an explosion of water from a busted water hose.

The sounds were deafening. The dogs with their snarls and growls and screams of pain, the mutants with their clicks and death screams and yells. It was too much. Overwhelming.

One of them caught me as I fell backward. He held me under the arms, his bony fingers digging into my soft flesh. Digging, clawing, pinching—a vivid image flashed through my mind of him tearing the ribs from my body, then using his teeth to strip the meat from my bones.

They would eat me. They would devour me.

Or maybe they wouldn’t.

Maybe they’d plant a hideous baby inside me.

They swarmed me, a dozen growling, screaming mutants, and I knew I was about to die. One way or the other.

Then, with the curious moon watching, one of the scouts grabbed me by the throat. “Mine,” he told the others, as his nuzzled my skin. He inhaled deeply. “You smell of my master.”

He opened his mouth, wide enough that I heard the crack of his jaws, and the moonlight glinted off his fangs.

His face, almost familiar in its humanness, loomed larger and larger in my vision, and then, he struck.

His teeth sank into the side of my throat, and just as the death screams had battered my heart and mind, his bite seized everything that was left.

My body.

My soul.

My blood.

I flew through centuries of memories and emotions and thoughts. Knowledge and hatred and pain battered my brain. Images of death and birth and rebirth flashed through my mind.

And I knew why it was forbidden for a mutant to bite a human without killing that human. I understood what the mutants were.

No, they were not aliens.

When the killing, unstoppable flu had wiped out most of the human race, the mutants had risen from the earth to take their place. To take their turn.

They were not mutants.

And they were not like vampires.

They were vampires.

Just not the vampires of storybooks.

I struggled against my attacker, and with his memories flooding my mind, I drew a breath that almost didn’t end. I released it in a scream.

The scream was mine, but it was his, as well.

It was a weapon.

It was everything.

He’d given it to me.

And as I died, I released it into the air, the town, the world.

My scream.

My death scream.

Chapter Nineteen

When he ripped his teeth from my throat, the memories, thoughts, whatever they were, ended abruptly.

At once.

The screams stopped, as well, but I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about dying, about becoming pregnant—though none of the mutants had raped me—and about how Richard looked with his lips pulled back from his teeth, his eyes wild and raging as he, Caleb, and Lila raced toward us, guns up.

Caleb.

They’d rescued Caleb.

They hadn’t seen me. They weren’t there to save me. They were there to kill the group of mutants. Perhaps they thought I was back in town, caught in the cluster of gods.

As I watched, a dog—or was it a wolf?—huge and shaggy, leapt at Richard. I saw it sink its teeth into his shoulder, and then, I saw Lila.

Her eyes widened when she spotted me, and she raced toward me and the mutants who’d attacked me, shooting as she ran.

The mutant who’d bitten me arched and screamed as a stream of alcohol hit the back of his head. It ran over his forehead and face, sizzling as it burned a path over his skin.

Alcohol soaked me as well as the monsters that surrounded me, but it didn’t hurt. I lost sight of my friends as the mutants began falling. One of them, maybe the one who’d bitten me, fell on top of me.

He stared at me as his entire face crisped and blistered, and I swear I saw something inside his eyes. Confusion, pain, defeat.

He tried to rise, but his injuries were too severe.

I shoved him off me and scooted away from the growing pile of melting, smoking mutants, but it took three tries before I could stand.

I scooped what seemed like handfuls of blood from my face and my eyes and flung it away. My mind screamed at me to run, but my body was slow to listen.

Lila rushed toward me, shooting mutants as she ran, and grabbed my arm to drag me away. “Run,” she yelled.

She’d lost her knit cap and her dark hair stood up all over her head. It was strange how different she looked without her hat. I was moving and thinking sluggishly, and had to mentally slap myself to get my thoughts away from the stupid hat. Or lack of stupid hat.

I tried to pry her fingers from my arm. “Help them,” I said, but my voice was raw and hoarse and I knew she couldn’t understand what I was saying.

She glanced at me, then did a double take. There was something in her eyes I didn’t like. Something that scared me.

But there was no time to question her.

I stumbled and fell to my knees, clumsy and disoriented. When she hauled me once more to my feet, there was nothing in her eyes but impatience.

The world tilted and spun, and I groaned weakly as my stomach turned inside out and spewed its contents onto the ground. “I’m sick,” I managed.

“No shit.”

And then my dog came out of the shadows. He slunk toward me, limping, and nuzzled my hand.

“You’re back,” I whispered.

I’m not sure how Lila got me home—I wasn’t conscious for most of it. There were flashes of light and then darkness, then back to light, and I knew it was because of the bite.

His bite would have killed me, had my friends not interrupted. The mutants would have devoured me.

They didn’t leave their bite victims alive. Ever.

Such a thing would get them punished severely. I’d seen it in his memories.

But those memories I’d seen when his teeth were inside me began to drift away, and I was no longer sure of anything.

Lila dumped me on my cot, and I tried to look up at her, but my eyes wouldn’t focus. “You saved my life again,” I whispered.

She leaned over and pressed her nose against my crushed, swollen one. “You were bitten by a dog, do you understand me? A dog attacked you. Didn’t it? Do you hear me, bitch?”

Then pain roared through my body. Red, unfamiliar pain. Pain so intense it followed me into the blackness when I passed out.

“Do you want to live?” someone whispered, and the whisper echoed in my mind, bouncing and twirling, over and over.

I thought it was Robin, until I remembered she was dead.

Lila, then.

Someone screamed, and I tried to tell them to shut up. Their screams hurt my ears. But I couldn’t speak, or open my eyes. I could only feel.

I couldn’t fight my way out of the darkness. The suffocating darkness.

But then, there was light.

No, not light.

Fire.

I was on fire.

Burning. Melting.

Dying.

Even through the flames I could hear the screaming.

And then Robin pulled me from the flames.

We stared at each other until finally, I lifted my fingers to touch her face.

I see you.

You can let me go now.

I can’t let you go. You’re part of me.

Always. But you can let me go now.

I can’t. Oh, God, I can’t.

Shhh. Don’t cry. It was never your fault, Teagan.

I didn’t save you. I didn’t help you. I just watched him take you.

It was never your fault.

I didn’t help you!

It was never your fault!

But I—

It’s time for you to let me go.

I can’t.

She peered into my eyes. You’re not alone anymore. You don’t need me now.

I’m so sorry.

I know.

She stepped back, and her smile was exactly as I remembered. Sweet. Happy.

Robin’s smile. My smile.

She was free…or would be, if I could force myself to release her.

I opened my mouth, finally, and dragged in a deep, sucking breath of air. I fought my way to the surface knowing one unquestionable thing.

I was not the same.

My pain was too much for tears.

Richard, Caleb, and Lila leaned over me.

“Teagan?” Caleb asked. “Are you okay?”

“What happened?” Richard asked.

His face was pale and what looked like three days’ worth of whiskers sprouted from his weathered skin. But his eyes, they were the same.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m okay.”

Caleb straightened and shot me a smile that wasn’t even a little bit amused. “You scared us, girl.”

“More trouble than you’re worth,” Lila muttered, and there was a warning in her eyes as she stared at me.

I pushed myself up, then swung my legs over the bed. “What happened?”

Richard crossed his arms. “What do you remember?”

An image of the mutant’s teeth flashed into my mind and I jerked, as though he were right there in front of me. “I was bitten.”

Richard nodded. “Your neck is torn up.”

I felt the bandage on my neck then slid my hand up to another blood-soaked bandage on my temple. “How long was I out?”

“We just walked in,” he said.

“She was out for only a couple of minutes,” Lila said. “I slapped some bandages on her after she passed out.”

Richard sat beside me on the cot and took my hand. “Tell me what you remember.”

“I…” I glanced at Lila, but she was staring at her feet. “I went to search for Sage. I stumbled into a group of mutants and a pack of wild dogs. I wasn’t there long.”

“What bit your neck?” His eyes were steady, his voice gentle, but…

“A dog,” I said. “Or a wolf. I saw one attack you seconds before I was hit. I guess I wasn’t paying attention.” I smiled. “Lila saved my life.”

Lila lifted her eyes to meet my stare, but her face was carefully blank.

“How did she do that?” Richard asked.

Lila’s fingers tightened on the bat she held over her shoulder. “I—”

“I asked Teagan,” Richard said, mildly.

I swallowed. “Can I have some water?”

“I’ll get it.” Caleb turned and walked toward the kitchen.

“Please,” Richard said. “Go on.”

I shook my head, then flinched at the pain and put my fingers on the bandage around my neck. “A dog the size of a small car was busy tearing out my throat, Richard. I’m not sure what she did. I heard a yelp, opened my eyes, and there she was. The dog was lying on top of me. I think she hit it with her bat.” I didn’t look at her. “Then she yanked me up and bullied me into walking home. I don’t remember much of the walk here, or anything else until I woke up and you guys were here.”

He watched me, saying nothing, until Caleb handed me a bottle of water. Finally, he stood. “Get some rest.”

“Richard?”

He turned back. “Yes?”

“How’s your shoulder?”

“I’ll be fine.”

Then he turned and strode into the kitchen.

I stood, realizing only then how violently I was trembling.

“What’s going on?” I asked Lila.

She glanced at Caleb, then shook her head. “What do you mean?”

“Why was he questioning me like that?”

“He wanted to make sure you weren’t bitten by mutant,” Caleb said.

“What if a mutant had bitten me?” I asked. Because I had been bitten by a mutant, and I really, really wanted to know what that meant. I wasn’t sure why Lila had warned me to lie, but she knew Richard better than I did.

Then I caught a whiff of blood, vomit, and piss, and wrinkled my nose. “What is that smell?”

“That’d be you,” Lila said, dryly. “You reek.”

“We don’t know what being bitten means,” Caleb said. “Not for sure, but we think—”

“Let’s let her get cleaned up,” Richard interrupted, sticking his head around the doorway. He and Caleb stared at each other for a long moment before Caleb nodded.

“Sure,” he said. “Are you hungry, Teagan?”

The thought of food turned my stomach. “Thirsty,” I said, and touched the thick bandage on my neck. My nose throbbed as well, and I pressed my fingers against it, wincing when a flash of pain lit up my entire face. “I think my nose is broken.”

“Better than being dead,” Lila said. “You’ll get used to a little pain.”

“I’m going to get some dinner,” Caleb said, and left the two of us alone.

“I’d better get cleaned up,” I said.

“Change this bandage while you’re in there,” Lila murmured. She touched the bandage on my neck, then gently tapped my head. “But this one…”

I frowned. “I don’t remember hurting my head.” I kept my voice to a murmur, following her lead.

She glanced over her shoulder then leaned close to whisper in my ear, “Rub some blood under the bandage on your head.”

I nodded. “I don’t feel well, Lila.”

Again, a warning sparked in her eyes. “You’ll be fine. Don’t be such a girl. It’s just a dog bite. Take some ibuprofen.”

“Why didn’t you want them to know I was bitten?”

“It’d complicate matters. You need to keep your business to yourself.”

I looked around. “Hey. Where’s my dog?”

“So he’s your dog now?”

“Where is he?”

“In the kitchen. He didn’t seem too concerned.”

“I’m going to get cleaned up.” But at the doorway, I turned back to face her. “Lila. Thank you.”

She sniffed, then shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. I found some lights and put them in the bathroom. There’s a first aid kit and some washcloths, as well. Couldn’t find any clothes that’d fit you.”

She’d been busy, and I’d been out a lot longer than she’d told Richard and Caleb.

“You found Caleb.”

She nodded. “He’s got a story to tell us. Hurry back.”

I shut the bathroom door and stared at my reflection in the small mirror, trying to figure out what was different. I looked the same, except for the fact that my cheekbones stood out a little more and my eyes seemed to sink back into my skull.

The skin around my eyes was already turning blue from the blow the mutant had given me. Tomorrow, my upper face would be one big bruise.

My nose was swollen, my nostrils rimmed with flaking bits of dried blood. “Gross,” I whispered, and dipped a washcloth in the bowl of water waiting.

But before I washed the blood from my face, I took the bandage off my neck. It looked like a dog bite. Torn, bloody flesh gaped raw and red and when I actually saw how bad it looked, it began to hurt more than ever.

I grabbed a small square of gauze from the first aid kit and wiped my neck and face with it. When it was good and bloody, I stuck it to my temple.

“Ewww.” It wouldn’t fool Richard if he decided to actually look closely, but if he just peered under the bandage, all he’d see was the bloody pad. Maybe he’d think it was a wound, maybe he wouldn’t. Other than banging my head off the wall and hoping for a knot and a bruise, there was little I could do.

I taped the bandage back over it, then re-bandaged and taped up the bite wound.

My face was pale, and my lips were dry and peeling. I was bandaged, battered, and bruised, but it was still my reflection staring back at me in the dusty mirror.

But something…something was different.

I peered at myself, squinting, trying to figure it out.

And finally, I got it.

Robin. Oh, Robin.

She didn’t answer. There were no echoes of laughter, no reassurances, no whispers.

My eyes were like dark pieces of glass, and if I looked deeply enough, I could see the shards of my broken heart swimming in a pool of unshed tears.

Because my sister was no longer with me.

I’d let her go. Forever.

And I told myself nothing else was different. I was unchanged.

I allowed the lie.

Tomorrow I’d face the truth.

Right then, the truth was more than I could bear.

Chapter Twenty

When I finally left the bathroom and walked into the kitchen, they were sitting at the table waiting for me.

“Sit,” Richard said, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. He frowned at me. “Unless you need to go lie down.”

I slid into a chair. “I’m fine.” I shoved my hair behind my ear. “I’m glad you’re okay, Caleb.”

He nodded, but didn’t meet my gaze. Maybe he was unhappy with me running away instead of trying to find him.

I couldn’t blame him for that.

I clasped my hands and stared down at them, and tiny tendrils of shame snaked through my belly. Being part of a group meant taking care of that group. How many times had Lila helped me?

Caleb was paler than usual. Nearly every inch of his face was bruised or cut. They’d beaten him. Who knew what else they’d done? I wasn’t going to ask.

“Caleb said the gods kept him isolated from the other prisoners—probably because they had no time to deal with him. He heard things.” Richard gave Caleb a nod. “Continue.”

“Here’s what I think,” Caleb said. “The gods rule. The lesser mutants—what we call scouts and orphans—are like the gods’ children, and are pretty much treated that way. The gods aren’t nice parents. I saw a god strip the flesh from a mutant who, from what I heard, had eaten humans without permission.”

I’d been hiding in a tree with Sage when that had happened. I squeezed my hands and listened. We needed to learn everything we could about the mutants. That was how we’d defeat them.

Not mutants.

Vampires.

I frowned as a dim memory slithered through my mind. When I was bitten, had one of the mutants said they were vampires? Was I imagining things?

I couldn’t remember.

“I think when they first arrived they were messed up,” Caleb continued. “Confused. They weren’t as strong as they are now. Over the last two years, they’ve gotten stronger, smarter, and are relearning what they are. And I think they’ll keep growing.”

“Why would you think that?” I asked him. “Did they sit around their bonfires telling stories?”

He and the others stared at me.

“What’s wrong with you?” Lila asked. “He’s just telling you what he thinks.”

“Because what he thinks means nothing. We need to know for sure. If he’s guessing, then he’s probably wrong and we don’t need wrong. We need facts.”

“Your guilt is making you angry,” Richard said. “And we don’t have time to coddle you. Let it go and listen to him.”

“Yeah,” Lila chimed in. “He was there. He knows shit.”

They were right. “Sorry.” I paused. “Caleb, I’m sorry.”

“You tried,” he said. “Right?”

I nodded.

“Okay then.” He flashed me a grin, grotesque and eerie in his battered face. He looked at Richard. “We know—you know—that a mutant can bite a human and turn him or her into something…like them.”

Richard flinched, then nodded. “Even worse.”

What happened to you, Richard? What did you see? I wondered about his past, but again, it wasn’t something I could ask. Especially not then.

“Here’s what I saw,” Caleb said. “Orphans dragged a half dead human before the leader of the cluster. This god was a big man named…” He shook his head. “Some strange name, I can’t remember, exactly.”

“Kroog,” I said. “His name is Kroog.”

“Yes! Maybe…” But he frowned, thinking. “It seemed like they called him something else, too.”

“Master?” Lila asked.

“Sure. But something else. Maybe a last name or—”

“It doesn’t fucking matter.” Richard rubbed his face. “What did they do to the human, Caleb?”

Caleb glanced at Richard. “Yeah, sorry.” And he grinned.

At that moment, I understood something about Caleb. He was insane. His time in the cluster had made it harder for him to hide.

The madness darted through his eyes like long, fast worms, rushing to drill through his brain. His insanity was hard for me to grasp. He appeared so normal. But I felt it.

I felt it.

And that wasn’t right.

I inched my hand toward my neck and caressed the bandage, my thoughts on the bite. What the hell had it done to me?

Was Caleb right? Was Richard right?

Was I becoming worse than a mutant?

“Teagan?”

I focused on Richard, immediately dropping my hand.

Lila pushed her chair back and strode to the cabinet above the microwave. “Catch,” she told me, and tossed me a bottle of aspirin. “Take a few of those. They’ll help with the pain.”

Her face was carefully blank.

I opened the bottle and shook the tablets out into my hand, then dry swallowed them. “Thanks.”

“Anyway,” Caleb said, impatiently, “the god didn’t bite the human. He took a blade and cut the man’s wrist. Then he licked the blood from the wound, and closed his eyes, thinking about it. The mutants were jumping up and down like they couldn’t wait to hear what he’d say.”

“What’d he say?” Lila asked.

“He said the human was food. As soon as he said that, he pulled the injured man to him and began to…”

“What?” I asked, breath held.

“He sank his teeth into the man’s throat and he drank his blood.” Caleb’s voice was suddenly sober, and a thrill of fear ran through it. “They can’t change everyone by biting them. They taste them first to find out.”

“Vampires,” I whispered. “They’re not like vampires. They are vampires.” I pushed my hand into my stomach as it began to burn.

“Not mutants?” Lila looked at Richard, confused. “They’re not mutants? They’re not aliens from a different planet?” Her voice rose with each word. “You said—”

Richard slammed his chair back so hard it turned over and crashed to the floor. “What’s the fucking difference,” he yelled. “Vampires or aliens. Do you want to know what the real mutant is? Do you?”

His eyes were wide and wild, and I shrank back against my chair.

“Richard—” Lila started, but he interrupted her.

“The real mutants are the humans turned by these motherfuckers.” He nodded, quickly, and pointed at me. Unintentionally, I hoped. “That’s the truth of it. The gods are not the mutants. Their underlings are not the mutants. The turned humans are.”

Caleb put his fist to his mouth and tried unsuccessfully to stifle his glee.

“Shit,” I whispered. Slowly, carefully, I began to slide from my chair. I needed to get away from the group of crazy surrounding me before it was too late.

But Richard turned his back and sighed. “I apologize. Caleb, shut up.”

Caleb hushed immediately.

Lila looked at me, but when I met her stare, she looked away.

“We don’t know what they are, really,” Richard said. Once again, he was calm, cold, and dark. “All we have are guesses, as Teagan said.”

I tried to wet my lips but my mouth was too dry.

He shrugged. “I guess they’re close to how we think of vampires. But where’d they go? Where’d they come from? Were they hiding all this time, waiting for the world to end so they could come up from hell and have this shitty place all to themselves?”

“What about how they…turn people?” I had to ask. I could be one of the turned. “You’re saying you think some people can’t be turned, and they use those people as food sources? That’s why they gather the men?”

“What about the women?” Lila asked.

“We know what they’re using the women for,” I told her. “Maybe they don’t want turned humans. Maybe they kill…” Oh God, how close I came to saying, “Us.” “Them,” I finished. “Maybe they immediately kill those humans who can be turned, because those humans are somehow dangerous to them.”

My hands were icy. I stuck them under my shirt and tried to warm them against my skin, but all that did was make me colder.

I was right. I knew I was right.

And in the end, who knew what I’d become?

A mutant, maybe. I’d become a mutant.

“I don’t think the lesser mutants are able to tell the difference,” Caleb said. “They don’t know the difference between a food source and a human they might turn with their bite. When they’re out, if they bite a human, they have to eat him so he can’t turn.”

“And that takes food from the gods,” Richard said. He sighed. “So it’s forbidden for scouts to bite humans. They bring them to the cluster for testing.”

“Sage told me the gods tested the humans,” I murmured. “Now I know why.”

Caleb nodded. “That’s why the mutant was skinned. He disobeyed and ate some humans.”

“So the mutants can’t survive without us,” Lila said. “That’s why they don’t shoot us or cut our heads off. They want to keep us so they can drink our blood. They really are vampires.”

The children they fathered were them.

The turned humans were their enemies.

And the rest of the humans were just food.

I gave a sudden, quick sob, then stood. “I don’t feel well. I need to lie down.”

They all stared at me.

Lila, with a spark of fear in her eyes, Caleb, with his head tilted, a half smile on his swollen lips, and Richard, soberly.

Did he suspect that I’d been bitten by something much worse than a dog? I didn’t know. The look in his eyes wasn’t really suspicious. It was solemn and tired.

I wanted to scream at them that I was still me, that it was not my fault, that I would not hurt them.

All I could do was whimper and scamper from the room, terrified. Not of them. Of me. Of what was happening to me.

And I hated the mutants—the vampires, the aliens, whatever the fuck they were—with everything I had been, was now, and would ever be.

Hatred consumed me.

But that was better than the terror.

Chapter Twenty-One

Two nights later, I was beginning to feel a little more optimistic. Nothing horrible was happening to me. I hadn’t begun to grow fangs or crave blood or anything else that would suggest I was turning into a…mutant.

What was left of the cluster had disappeared by the time Richard went back to check. He’d informed me that the back room of the supermarket was full of dead pregnant women, but that he saw only three dead men in the wagon. The others had escaped. At least, that’s what I told myself.

Maybe the remaining gods had gone on to join another cluster and reevaluate how they could let a few humans destroy them. Maybe they lurked still, waiting for the right time to strike us.

The air was still not free of mutants or the impact they’d had upon it. Some of the shops and homes still burned—several homes on my old street had succumbed to the spreading fire set by the mutants—and I doubted Crowbridge would ever stop smelling of smoke.

“Why is the town suddenly so full of mutants?” I’d asked.

“The gods seem to send some sort of SOS,” Richard told me. “Groups and stragglers may wander in for months to come.”

“Do you still want to set up a base here?”

He hesitated, then shrugged. “Maybe I’ll keep searching a while longer. Keep hunting mutants.” He hadn’t looked at me. “Supplies in this town have dwindled to nothing. We’ve spent the last two days searching homes and you saw what we found.”

I nodded. Not a lot. Some canned food, some oil, first aid, batteries.

But now the homes were empty and Richard wanted to move on.

What a way to spend a life. Killing sleeping mutants. Destroying gods.

The thought depressed me.

By dinnertime the next evening, I was ready to eat. More than ready. But I was not really ready to leave.

It was my town.

Richard and Caleb and Lila were my new family. If they didn’t kill me, I’d stick with them. I had nothing else.

If I kept the secret of my bite, everything would be okay.

“You seem different,” Caleb said, handing me a bowl of stew. “How are you feeling?”

I inhaled deeply, uncaring that the bowl was nearly hot enough to put blisters on my palms. “I’ve never smelled anything this good,” I said, then took another long sniff.

“I said, you seem different,” Caleb repeated. “How are—”

“I heard you.”

He flashed a grin, then shrugged.

“She’s not talking about it,” Lila said. Then she frowned. “How are you feeling?”

I sighed. “Can I just eat, please?”

She crossed her arms and stared at me.

“Fine.” I placed the bowl on the table with exaggerated care. Richard spooned hot food into his mouth and never once looked up from his bowl.

“In the last couple of weeks, I’ve learned all sorts of new things—you know, like how mutants make human women pregnant—and I sliced and diced a woman who was suffering too much to live.

“I lost a little girl. I found new friends. I snuck into town and walked away from tortured humans without doing a whole lot to help them. I was attacked by mutants, chomped on by a frigging dog…”

I took a deep breath, then thumped my chest. “I’ve lost the little bubble of relative safety that I had here for two years. I’m just now healing from the attack, and I’m weak and still a bit confused. I have no idea what I’m doing. At all.” I lifted my chin. “So if you really want to know, I feel like shit. A big pile of shit. Now will you both please shut up and let me eat my dinner?”

Lila pursed her lips. “You talk too much.”

Caleb laughed. “Leave her alone, Lila.”

I pulled my bowl to me and began eating with as much gusto as Richard. “God, this is good.”

“Richard’s a great cook,” Lila said. “Doesn’t matter what you hand him, he can make something good out of it.” And there was just the tiniest bit of hero worship in her tone.

She believed Richard had made her into something good.

I paused with my fourth spoonful halfway to my mouth. I sat it down, gently, and touched my belly.

“Are you okay?” Caleb asked.

“Funny feeling. It hit me all at once. I guess I’m just full.”

Richard hooked a finger in the rim of my bowl and dragged it across the table. “Don’t want it to go to waste.” And he proceeded to eat the rest of my stew as he fell back into his silence.

Then Caleb said the very thing that I’d been obsessing over. The thing that scared me almost more than losing Sage had scared me.

“The bite of the mutant. We need to talk about that.”

They all looked at me.

I shivered and rubbed my arms. “I wasn’t bitten by a mutant! I was bitten by a dog.”

Richard lifted an eyebrow. “He wasn’t accusing you, Teagan.”

I put my cold hands against my hot cheeks. “I thought…”

He blew a tired breath out and ran his hands over his face. “The bite.”

My stomach tightened and my head began to ache and I was pretty sure I didn’t really want them to tell me. I didn’t want to know.

“You seem different.”

I felt different.

And not just because my beloved sister no longer lived inside my mind. There was something else.

“I’m scared,” I whispered. I hadn’t meant to, but what I was thinking slipped through my lips.

“It’s a scary world,” Caleb said. He moved his hand across the table to take my cold fingers in his.

“Have you ever seen a human bitten by a mutant, Teagan?” Richard asked.

“How could she see anything?” Lila asked. “She’s never left this godforsaken town.”

I ignored her and shook my head.

“I have,” he said.

I took a drink of water. “And?”

“Before we found out that alcohol would kill them,” Caleb said, picking up the story, “we came upon a group of scouts—armed—attacking a small camp of humans. We couldn’t do much. If we used our guns and there were other mutants in the area, we’d all die. If we did nothing…” He dropped his gaze to the table.

“We did nothing,” Richard said, “for a while. We waited and watched as the mutants dragged the humans from their tents and…” He glanced at Lila, who remained strangely silent. “And began to slaughter them. In the end, neither of us could stay hidden. We rushed them, guns in one hand and blades in the other. You know guns don’t kill them. Guns only bring more mutants.”

He fell silent for a few unbearably heavy moments, his gaze distant.

Finally, I could stand the silence no longer. “What happened?”

He met my stare. “One of the victims was alive. Before the mutants could recover from their wounds, I threw him over my shoulder and we got the hell out of there.”

“What happened to the man? He died?”

Richard nodded. “Eventually.”

“How?”

“Richard killed him,” Lila said. She rose from her chair, carried her bowl to the sink, and walked out the back door.

“Why?” I asked them, mystified. “Why did you kill him?”

“Because he was bitten, Teagan, and he lived.” Richard’s voice was soft, but his stare was hard. Very hard. “He was becoming one of them. Worse than one of them.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said, nodding. “He was changing.”

I swallowed. “He attacked you?”

“No,” Richard said. “But it was a matter of time. We could see him changing.”

I looked at the door through which Lila had just disappeared. “Why’d she leave?”

“She doesn’t like to relive it,” Caleb said. “The man we killed…”

“Yes?”

“He was her father.”

“Oh, my God.” I put my hand over my chest. “How awful.”

I understood then why Lila had kept my secret.

I knew about guilt. I knew about redemption.

By saving me, she was making up for what had happened to her dad. Yeah, I understood that.

“Lila,” Caleb said. “She’d run away from her camp two days earlier. That’s what saved her. When we found her, she was injured and—”

“Not our story to tell,” Richard interrupted.

Caleb’s cheeks reddened. “Sorry.”

“Anyway,” Richard continued, “you want to know about the man who was bitten. What the bite did to him. What it changed him into.”

“Yes.”

“He started getting stronger. Hungrier. Meaner.” Richard kept his stony stare pinned to mine as he spoke, and I wondered if he could see the truth in my eyes. “Darker.”

“He got faster, too,” Caleb added.

“Like the mutants?” I asked.

“No,” Richard said. “Like the gods.”

I swallowed, trying to dislodge the cold lump of fear in my throat. “How are the gods different from regular vampires?”

“Mutants,” Caleb said.

I tore my stare from Richard to look at him. “What?”

“You called them vampires.”

I frowned at him and turned back to Richard. “So? How are they different?”

“You realize I’m figuring this out as I go along,” Richard said. “Don’t you? The only way to find out the truth about them is to ask them.”

I sighed. “Yes, I guess so.”

“The gods are more powerful,” Richard said. “That’s all I know for sure. And I think that as the months march on, they’re going to adapt and…find themselves. Then they’ll be forces to fear.”

“You don’t think they’ve accessed their full power yet.”

“No,” he said. “I do not.”

So many questions. And we had the answers to almost none of them.

 I realized that Caleb still held my hand, so I pulled away from his grasp and twisted my fingers together.

“In the beginning,” Richard said, his voice low, almost hypnotic, “they were not nearly as bad as they are now. They were nearly human in their confusion.”

“Oh,” I murmured, my eyes wide. “You were their prisoner, weren’t you?”

Caleb looked at the tabletop.

Rage like lightning flashed through Richard’s eyes and for a second, I was terrified of him. Terrified.

There was something in his eyes so awful I couldn’t bear to look at him.

I shoved my chair back and stood, reaching automatically for weapons I wasn’t wearing.

He calmed almost immediately—soothed, perhaps, by my fear.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

But I had no trouble hearing the lie in his voice.

Richard would hurt whoever he needed to hurt.

I could barely breathe. Not just because of what I might be or what I might become, but because they—my friends—might kill me because of it.

They were not really my friends.

And I was not safe.

I slid my fingers to the bandage around my neck, but dropped them when I looked up to find Richard watching me.

I’d been told more than once that my face was an open book, and anyone could read it.

I hadn’t yet learned to wear a mask of impassivity. I hadn’t yet learned to hide behind cold, blank eyes.

Not yet. But I would.

I backed away from them. “I’m going to bed.”

“Goodnight,” Richard said.

Caleb stood as well. “I’ll come with you.”

I frowned. “No. I’m going to sleep.”

He tossed me a grin. “I read a mean bedtime story.”

I hesitated.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s a hard, cold world. There’s nothing wrong with taking pleasure when it’s there for the taking.”

If he’d been someone else, I might have agreed. I’d have taken his hand and led him to my bed. But he was not someone else—and he scared me a little too much.

I shook my head. “No.”

I could feel him watching me as I crawled into my sleeping bag.

When I got a chance, I decided, I would slip away.

Because I had been bitten by a mutant.

And I was different because of that bite.

When they found out, they’d kill me just as they killed the mutants.

Just as they’d killed Lila’s father.

Chapter Twenty-Two

When I woke up, Lila was sitting in the chair beside my sleeping bag, watching me.

I sat up and slid my hand under the cover, feeling for the sheathed blade I’d stashed there. “What time is it?”

She tapped her baseball bat against the bed. “Just past dawn. Let’s go search for Sage.”

“What?”

She lifted an eyebrow. “I found tracks last night, on the edge of town. Whoever has her is moving slow, but they’re moving. I’m sure this town’s mutant infestation slowed them down.”

I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and placed the blade on my lap. “Humans? Humans have her?”

She stared at the blade before meeting my eyes. “Yeah.” She nodded toward the blade. “You thinking I’m going to murder you in your sleep?”

“I was thinking you might try,” I said, calmly.

“You’re like an infant, Teagan. I wouldn’t have to try very hard.”

My whole body tensed. I said nothing.

“Are you coming or what?”

I stood. “Let me get dressed.”

She nodded.

As I walked toward the bathroom, I heard Caleb and Richard in the kitchen, their voices low, and the comforting clink of silverware as they ate their breakfasts.

When I returned, washed, dressed, and a little more cheerful, I brought with me a bottle of lotion. “Moisturizer,” I told Lila. “Want some?”

She snorted. “God, you’re such a fucking girl.”

I shrugged and put the lotion on a table, then followed her into the kitchen. “And you’re such a bitch.”

She laughed. “Grab a protein bar and let’s get out there. We’re wasting daylight. You’re like a turtle, you’re so slow.”

“I’m too much of a girl, I’m too slow…is there anything about me you actually like?” I grabbed a protein bar and ripped open the package. Surely there was. She’d saved my life. And every moment that she kept her mouth shut, she continued to save it.

Her smile slipped, and she ran her stare over my face. “No.” But her voice was soft.

“Good morning,” Richard said, putting his plate in the sink. “Lila tells me you’re tracking Sage today.”

“Morning,” I mumbled.

“Lila has been busy,” Caleb said. “Do you want some help?”

Lila shoved a blade into her belt, looking at no one. “We’ve got it covered.”

“I don’t mind,” Caleb told her.

She straightened and turned to glare at him. “I told you—”

“I need you today, Caleb,” Richard interrupted. “I want to do a run on the other side of town.”

Caleb shrugged, but his disappointed gaze lingered on me. “Okay.”

I took an enormous bite of my protein bar, then shrugged into my protective vest. The vests were as plentiful as candles. When the world had begun to go bad, everyone had started stocking up on them.

Lila watched me quietly as I buckled on my belts. I pushed a water gun into the holster at my side, then slid my arms into the straps of the bag holding extra alcohol.

Lastly, I began loading up on blades, flashlights, and other things I might need while on the road. I shouldn’t have made it so obvious that I wasn’t coming back, but the supplies were worth the risk.

If Richard had been telling the truth, there weren’t a lot of supplies left out in the world.

“Jesus, Teagan. We’re not leaving the country,” Lila said.

“You never know what might happen out there.”

I pulled another bag off a hook on the wall and began filling it from the pile of supplies on the table we’d shoved against the wall. Packages of food, a couple bottles of water, extra weapons, first aid kit, whatever else I could fit in there without weighing it down too much.

“For fuck’s sake!” Lila put her hands on her hips and shook her head.

“You act like you’re never coming back,” Caleb said.

I laughed. “I like to be prepared.”

“If you have to fight,” Richard said, “you’ll be at a disadvantage with too many weapons and supplies. Leave the bag.”

It sounded more like an order than a request, but when I looked at him, he smiled. “Think of me as your teacher.”

“And her keeper,” Lila muttered. “God knows she needs one.”

I paused with a bottle of aspirin halfway to the bag. “No supplies? We may have to track her for miles. And what if we find her in a camp of baddies? We’re going to need some things.”

“If we find her in a camp,” Lila said, “we’re coming back here to get Richard and Caleb to help. We can’t attack a camp by ourselves. I’m not looking to get us killed.”

Dammit. I did not want to leave without a bag of supplies. If I had my way, I was going to get as far away from Crowbridge as possible.

Start over.

Start over with people who didn’t know that I’d been bitten by a mutant and think that meant they should automatically kill me.

I sighed and reluctantly left the bag behind as I followed Lila out the back door. I was glad Richard hadn’t made me empty my belt and pockets. I was halfway afraid to grab a machete from beside the door, but when I did, he said nothing.

I was just being paranoid. If Richard wanted me dead, he’d have killed me himself already.

“Come on, boy,” I called, but when the dog got up from his bed in the corner and walked toward me, Richard held him back.

“He’s not well enough to track,” he said. “We’ll take care of him.”

There was nothing I could do about that, either. Richard would keep the dog, and they really would take care of it. Not even Caleb, in his insanity, would hurt a dog.

So I left him there.

“Thanks for doing this, Lila,” I said, once we were outside. The air was crisp, almost cold. A fresh carpet of colorful leaves covered the ground. Overnight the trees’ branches had become a little barer.

Soon winter would come and the moon would crash the party a lot earlier in the day. I was not looking forward to early darkness.

Lila pursed her lips, shrugging. “I liked that kid. I want her safe.”

“Wow.” I grinned, but I was touched that she cared. “I didn’t think you had a heart.”

She lifted her chin and blanked her eyes immediately. “I don’t.”

I noticed she had a long, thin scar along her jawline.

Without thinking, I reached out to touch it.

She flinched, but held still as I traced the scar with my fingertips. “How’d you get it?”

“Doesn’t matter. It happened long before the world ended.” She looked away. “It doesn’t matter now.”

She stepped back and snatched off her cap—a red one—then ran her hand over her close cropped hair. Without another word, she rested her baseball bat on her shoulder and jogged through the yard.

I didn’t want to think about mutant saliva running through my bloodstream, wreaking havoc on my system, but as we strode down the street, I realized my body wanted to run. To fight.

I had so much energy I could barely contain it, and I was jumping out of my skin. Regardless of Lila’s assessment that I was a slowpoke, my insides were shaking like jelly, and I would have liked nothing more than to release that excess energy.

It seemed like the very air had woken what was inside of me.

I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. I was me, simple as that.

Teagan Shaw.

Whatever happened, whatever came, I was not going to become someone else.

Right, Robin?

“Richard and Caleb,” I said. “They’re afraid I’ll…”

“Turn.”

“Yes.”

And the mutant’s face flashed into my mind. His mouth opening, his fangs, his eyes, his lack of any sort of humanity. The pain, the memories, the screaming…

I slapped a hand to my throat and stumbled as the memory became too vivid. I felt his teeth digging into my throat. I felt his rage. I felt his hatred, his…jealousy. I felt his hunger.

“Teagan! You’re okay. You’re fine.”

When the memory receded, I came back to reality crouched on the ground, my machete beside me. Lila bent over me, frowning, her hand on my shoulder.

“I will never be fine again,” I told her. “None of us will.”

Maybe they weren’t like the vampires of fiction. Maybe they weren’t like the vampires on TV, handsome and sexy and romantic, but yes.

They were vampires.

Sort of.

And I’d been bitten.

“Thing is,” she said, “the rest of us realized that two years ago.”

I stared up at her. “Do you think it’s true what the guys said? That a bitten person becomes the mutant?”

She sighed and knelt beside me. “I think it means you’ll become…modified. Not human, not mutant, but something more. Something just as dangerous as the gods.”

“The gods…”

She looked into my eyes, and hers bore no judgment. “You feel it, don’t you?”

I didn’t want to admit it, but I needed someone to know. I needed someone to tell me what to do.

I nodded. “Yes,” I whispered. “I feel different. I feel…” I tapped my chest. “I feel it growing inside me.” I burst into tears.

She pulled me into her arms. “Teagan…”

I buried my face against the warmth of her throat, wishing I could stay there forever. Wishing I could forget what had happened to me.

“You have to go,” she said. “Richard will figure it out, and he’ll kill you. His hatred of the mutants consumes him. He’s not exactly himself anymore.”

“Was he their prisoner?”

I felt her shrug. “Richard doesn’t tell me what he was or wasn’t.” She pushed me away from her. “I couldn’t get much, but when I went out this morning I stashed some supplies in a bag for you.” As I wiped my eyes, she stood, then pointed. “At the base of the third tree. Now get going.”

“Come with me.” I didn’t want to wander the world alone. I didn’t want to face what was happening inside me alone. I just…

I didn’t want to be alone.

She hesitated. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I owe him. Richard isn’t a bad person. He saved my life. Twice. And I fucking owe him. I belong in his group, hunting for him, helping him build. I’m being a traitorous fucking bitch right now and if you don’t go, I’ll...just go, Teagan. Fucking go.”

I backed away, nodding. Shivering. Alone.

Always alone.

“If you find Sage before I do,” I said, my teeth clacking together, “tell her I looked for her. Will you?”

“Yeah.” She turned away, her stare on the ground. “I’ll tell her.”

I straightened my spine. “Goodbye, Lila.”

She strode to me, hooked a hand around my neck, and slammed her mouth against mine. She softened the kiss as I stood there, unmoving, surprised.

Finally, I leaned into her kiss. I lay my fingers on her cheek, then slid them around to grip her neck. It’d been so long.

So long since the world had ended and there was no one to touch, no one to kiss, no one to care. And now…

There would be no one again.

She pulled away, finally, and rested her forehead against mine. For a long, long moment we just breathed.

“Go,” she said, finally. “Go make the world a better place, Teagan.”

I turned around and started toward the tree she’d indicated, my eyes full of tears I really didn’t want to shed in front of her.

I’d only taken a few steps when her voice stopped me.

But she wasn’t calling me back.

“No,” she screamed. “Teagan, run!”

Richard and Caleb loped toward us. Richard pulled a sword from the sheath at his side, and Caleb held a machete in each hand.

Caleb ran around behind me as Richard took the front.

They’d come to kill me.

“Take off, Lila,” Caleb called. “One chance.”

I thought I heard her sigh, and then, she lifted her bat.

She stood alone, her and a fucking bat against two men with blades.

No. Not alone.

I hefted my machete and ran to stand at her side.

“The girls against the boys,” I whispered, and tried to smile. I was unsuccessful. I had no gun, or I would have shot them, mutants or no mutants.

Richard sprayed me with alcohol, but when I didn’t burn, he threw his gun to the ground and ran at me, his sword in both hands.

“Richard, don’t,” Lila screamed.

“You betrayed us, Lila,” he said, and finally, there was emotion in Richard’s voice. “You broke the rules.”

She spread her feet and held her baseball bat like she was getting ready to hit a homerun. “Match me,” she said. “At least do that, motherfucker.”

I had no idea what she was talking about until Richard stopped, dropped his sword, and drew a club from a sheath on his back. I’d never seen it before, and wished I hadn’t seen it then.

It was polished mahogany in some places, worn dull and colorless in others. He’d used it a lot—or someone else had. Metal bits gleamed from the bulbous business end.

He gave her a nod. “I did promise.”

Caleb crept closer. I hadn’t seen him drop his blades, but he held a club similar to Richard’s in his grip. His was black and as grim as his face.

He hadn’t made it out of his teens yet, but he was not a boy. He’d grown up when the world ended.

But I didn’t really know him. Maybe he’d grown up before the world ended.

“Lila,” he called. “You don’t have to die. No sense in both of you going down. It’s not going to help her. Get the fuck out of here.” His voice broke halfway through his words, but he continued on. “Please, Lila. Don’t make me.”

“If you kill me,” she said, gently, “that’s on you.”

“I can’t live with that,” he cried, but he took another step toward us, his club up. Ready to kill us—her—despite his reluctance. Despite his pain.

Despite his love for her.

“Rules are rules, Caleb,” Richard called. “We can’t keep people we can’t trust. She was dead the minute she tried to help a turned one escape.” He smiled, and there was a gleam of admiration in his eyes. “And she knew that.”

“Good luck, Teagan,” Lila said. “If you see your chance, run like the wind. And don’t look back.”

“I will if you will,” I said.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Run.”

Without hesitation I kicked off, running as fast as I could toward the tree line.

And I was faster, there was no doubt.

But I heard a sound, and I turned back.

A crack, loud and sudden in the crisp fall quiet, like a tree branch breaking. Like a gunshot.

Like a club meeting someone’s skull.

I turned back.

Richard swung his bludgeon again, and it hit Lila’s bat, but she never made a sound as the shock of that hit would surely have jarred her all the way to her brain.

She stumbled back, then swung her baseball bat, and her blow hit Richard on his mauled shoulder.

I’d forgotten Caleb in my concern for Lila.

“Lila,” I yelled.

She jerked her head around to look at me, her eyes widening one second before something hit the back of my head with enough force to crack my skull.

I hit the ground hard, my brains scrambled, and for one second I could neither see nor hear anything.

Then I heard screaming—not mine, but Lila’s, her voice high, angry, and desperate.

I turned sluggishly to my back, my vision returning with my hearing. Caleb stood a couple of yards away, his face blank. His eyes, though, they were filled with hatred.

“You’ve killed her,” he said.

I scrambled backward, then stood, and realized I’d dropped my machete. I couldn’t take my gaze off Caleb long enough to look for it. Perhaps if I kept him locked in my stare, he couldn’t get near me.

But he could.

Despite all the energy I’d felt inside me earlier, my dull, stunned mind refused to let me move.

He lifted his club again and swung at my head.

I cried out as the bat connected. The world tilted, changed colors, and briefly darkened so much I couldn’t see anything at all.

“Wait,” I said, or tried to say.

Blood was in my eyes, and maybe my ears. For a while, all I could hear was a roaring, rushing sound, like a waterfall. Like death running to greet me.

I crawled away, a few yards away, before I felt the baseball connect with the back of my skull. I didn’t know why I was still alive.

Except I did.

The blow drove me forward and I landed face first on the hard ground. My blood mixed with the earth, and I swear I saw smoke rising from where my blood sank into the ground.

“God,” Caleb screamed. “Why don’t you die?”

I saw Richard drive Lila back with his superior strength, with his greater experience. I saw her glance at me, and I saw Richard’s club hit the side of her head so hard her face caved in.

Blood hung in the air as she flew backward.

Her bat flew from her grip, spinning through the air to land with a solid thud on the hard ground. Almost close enough for me to touch.

She lay motionless.

Richard stood over her for a long moment, his head bowed, and then, he started toward me.

But I was turned. Changed.

Different.

And I would not die.

All it took was for me to accept it. To embrace it.

To realize that yes, I was something more. I had been bitten, I had been turned, and I was going to live, no matter how many times he slammed the bat into my head.

I didn’t know how they’d killed Lila’s father. Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they’d wrapped him in barbed wire and buried him deep in the ground. Maybe he lived even now, awake and aware, buried alive in darkness forever.

That was the thought that got me moving.

I rose in a seamless, smooth move, and my body hummed with strength. With power. Would I now be sensitive to the alcohol, now that I was…changed? If Richard tried again, would I burn? Would my flesh melt over my bones as I died in agony?

Maybe.

But I would not find out that day.

I wiped the blood from my eyes and faced them, and we stood like that, staring at each other, for an eternity.

Richard had his sword, and Caleb had tossed his club away and reclaimed his machetes.

I couldn’t move my face. If I could have, I would have smiled.

Maybe they saw death in my eyes, or the mutant blood, because Caleb stumbled back a few steps, and Richard flinched as he looked at me.

And I was no longer afraid. I was numb, but I was not afraid.

I leapt toward Lila’s bat, scooped it from the ground, then turned just in time to block Richard’s sword.

I was changed, true, but whatever I was, I was new. I didn’t know, really, what to do. What I could do.

But I was full of wrath.

Still, I was only one girl with a baseball bat and they were two men with blades. I stayed and fought for one reason.

I could not leave Lila there.

I could not leave her for the animals, or for Caleb and Richard to touch or bury or cry over.

Fuck them.

I would get her justice.

Or maybe I just wanted revenge.

Richard swung his sword as I was trying to block Caleb’s machete, and that time, he had better luck.

The sword cut through my upper left arm, sinking in like a knife through butter, coming up hard against bone.

I screamed.

Somehow, I blocked Caleb with the bat, though I had the use of only one arm. Richard stood still for a long moment, just watching me. He knew I was caught. He knew I was dead.

By the time I decided to run, it was too late.

They lifted their blades.

I turned anyway—at least I’d try.

But as I turned, a blade bit into my back. I felt it like a hard shove, and then pain. Burning. Another blade slid through my right leg, and I went down.

I turned to my back to face them, unwilling to let them chop me into pieces when they couldn’t see my face. Let them look at me.

They faltered, both of them, but only for a moment.

“Rest, Teagan,” Richard said. “Close your eyes, sweetheart.”

I couldn’t speak.

There was nothing to say, anyway.

They lifted their blades.

Let them kill me. Don’t let them bury me alive.

I whispered a quick goodbye to Sage, and I kept my stare pinned to Richard’s.

“I’m ready,” I said.

Richard nodded and as one, they lifted their blades.

It was my time to die, and I was ready to go.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Then, I saw movement behind the two men.

Mutants.

They rushed over the ground like ghosts, silent and deadly, drawn there, maybe, by my screams or the sounds of the fight.

The slaughter.

And I didn’t warn the two humans. Let the mutants kill them. Let them do what I’d failed to do.

Richard and Caleb spun around, fingers scrabbling for their guns, but too late.

Much too late.

I scooted backward, Lila’s bat held in a death grip.

Two of the orphans spotted me, and voices clicking in some sort of communication I couldn’t understand, they raced toward me.

Somehow, I made it to my feet. I dropped the bat and tried to yank the water gun from its holster, but I was injured, slow, and clumsy, and the mutants were upon me in seconds.

My cut leg refused to support me and I fell backward.

They swarmed me, then. Not just the two orphans. Most of them. All of them, maybe. Richard and Caleb were silent.

Maybe they were dead already, torn to pieces by the group of mutants. But probably, some of the mutants had carried them off to be tested by the gods. I had no way of knowing.

I screamed again.

Don’t be such a girl…

But I couldn’t seem to help myself.

They snatched me from the ground, the mutants, and even through my fear, the clicking of their…voices, or whatever the hell it was, infuriated me.

They’d eat me, of course. They’d feast on me until there was nothing left but clean, white bone.

The bite was shit.

I wasn’t better than I had been.

They peered at me, heads tilting, yellow eyes full of curiosity, and I couldn’t do anything. I was cut, bleeding out, and now that the adrenaline was wearing off, I was in agony.

“Do it, then,” I screamed. “Bastards!”

As though they’d been waiting for permission, they bit.

But not me.

They bit themselves.

Almost as one, they lifted their arms, hands, and wrists to their mouths and bit down. Hard.

Blood spewed, covering me in a crimson, milky tide.

They did attack me then, sort of.

They slapped their bloody arms against my wounds—worse, they pressed their bite wounds to my mouth, and forced their nasty, hot blood inside me.

I struggled. I did.

But I was weak from blood loss, and they…

They were strong. So very strong.

In the end, their blood spurted down my throat, and though I vomited it back up almost immediately, it didn’t matter. They fed me more.

Force fed me mutant blood.

Would I have healed on my own, had they left me alone?

Possibly. Probably.

But the blood wasn’t just about the healing.

The blood was about finishing the initiation.

Knowledge floated in with the blood, but the images were too fast, too alien for me to process.

Then I considered something so horrible, so black, that I screamed and kicked until they lowered me to the ground.

What if that was how they impregnated women?

They dissipated like misty dream creatures.

One moment they were there, clicking, feeding me, holding me, and the next, I was on the ground and they were gone.

I scrambled to my feet, looking wildly around, my heart beating like an angry drum. Everyone was gone.

Why had they healed me, if I was the enemy? Why had they fed me?

I was healed. Almost completely.

I raced across the ground to Lila, then fell to my hands and knees beside her, sobbing. They hadn’t taken her.

They hadn’t taken her, or eaten her, or torn her apart. They hadn’t touched her.

Why?

Maybe they’d known she was my friend.

But it was only because a dead human was useless to them. I knew that. I just didn’t want to admit she was gone.

I let my tears fall, unchecked, as I stretched out beside the girl who’d saved me, who’d died because of me.

Maybe she’d really wanted to die.

At one time or the other, didn’t we all?

I wish I could say she looked at me. That she smiled and told me she’d be okay.

That she was alive.

But she lay on the ground, blood covering her delicate face, her eyes half open and dull and lifeless. The spark was gone.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

I climbed wearily to my feet, and for the next couple of hours, I piled rocks on her body. Afterward, I stood at the rocky grave and sang a couple broken verses of Amazing Grace.

It seemed like the right thing to do.

I picked up her bat. It was mine now.

I walked to the bag she’d packed for me and hooked my hand through one of the straps. And then, with the bat resting on my shoulder, my machete in my hand, and the bag looped over my arm, I walked away.

Richard had said I was a hunter, and I was going to prove him right.

A girl had to have a purpose.

First, though, I walked back to the house. I had a dog to get.

I opened the back door and he rushed out, as though he’d been waiting for me.

Perhaps he had been.

I left the town for the first time in two years, and I didn’t once look back.

Maybe I’d find Sage out there somewhere. I wouldn’t stop searching.

And I wouldn’t stop killing mutants.

No matter what I became.

About Laken Cane

The coffee addicted urban fantasy writer Laken Cane lives in Southern Ohio with her genius son, two Yorkies named Daphnis and Lexi, and one Golden named Chloe who rules them all.

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From the author—

Authors need reviews like vampires need blood! If you’ve enjoyed this book, would you consider rating it and reviewing it on Amazon.com?

Thank you!

Laken

Books by Laken Cane:

The Rune Alexander series (Urban Fantasy/Horror)

1.   Shiv Crew

2.  Blood and Bite

3.   Strange Trouble

4.   Obsidian Wings

5.   New Regime

5.5  Shadows Past (Rune Alexander Christmas short story)

6.    Wormwood Echoes

7.    The Witch’s Daughter

8.    Killing Land

9.    Kill Switch

10.   Book 10 is in progress

The Waifwater Chronicles. (Paranormal Romance, witch)

1.     UNBREAKABLE

2.     In progress

The FORSAKEN series: (YA Paranormal Post-Apocalyptic)

1.     We, the Forsaken

2.     A Cluster of Gods, in progress

As always, Laken loves hearing from her fans! If you’d like to contact her personally, you can contact her through her various social media sites or email her directly at laken@lakencane.com