Love and Decay, Volume Eight (Episodes 9-12, Season Three) (26 page)

I opened my mouth to argue, but he stood up
and walked away before I could. My heart squeezed again and I would
have started crying had there been moisture to spare.

I tried to keep the anger at bay, but I felt
abandoned and dismissed. I knew Hendrix was hurting, we were all
hurting. I knew he was tired and hungry and thirsty. I knew he was
disappointed with life and angry at God, but I hated that he took
it out on me.

We
were
partners. We were in this
together whether he wanted to accept my help or not.

My stomach churned with my emotions and I
tried not to let this moment hurt too deeply. We were at our worst
physically and emotionally. I
tried
to understand where he was coming from.

I jumped out of my seat when frantic barking
put Lennon’s screams to shame. A pack of wild dogs raced down the
street in front of our temporary shelter. They yipped and growled
at something they chased.

My tired, abused heart started pounding in my
chest. The dogs were running from something. I could hear the fear
in their barks. I moved with the Parker brothers toward the front
door. A picture window had been boarded up at one point, but we
could peek through the slots and notches in the wood.

We couldn’t see anything at first through our
limited visibility, but the snarling and barking grew steadily
louder.

“What the hell?” Harrison mumbled next to me.
He reached for the knife in his back pocket and brought it in front
of him.

I pulled out my knife and pressed the flat
side into my thigh, reassuring myself I had some protection. We ran
out of firearms a few weeks back and hadn’t been able to find
anything to replace our arsenal. We’d picked up an assortment of
weapons along the way, but everything we had with us was hand-held
and meant for hand-to-hand combat.

We weren’t the worst fighters alive, but it
was always better to kill a Feeder from a distance.

In fact, that was my motto for life.

Footsteps pounded the pavement and joined the
cacophony of animal sounds. My stomach twisted with more nerves. If
we had to engage in a fight, it would get bloody.

I didn’t want to get bloody. I was filthy and
smelly, but I wasn’t covered in Zombie carnage for once.

Shouting joined the footsteps. I couldn’t
reconcile the voices with the world I lived in. They didn’t make
sense.

I hunched over and tried to get a better view
of the street. Everyone leaned in
with
me. I wasn’t the only one confused.

They ran in front of us and I stared with
wide eyes at a pack of small boys and girls. Children. They were
younger than the Rat King’s army and just as dirty as we
were
if not more so. Their faces
were streaked with black marks and their black hair caked with
dirt. The tangled clumps hung in matted curtains in front of their
small faces. Their clothes were torn and tattered, barely hanging
onto
their
small
frames.

But they weren’t emaciated. They weren’t
starved and barely hanging onto life.

Their short limbs were
corded
with
strong
muscle and their feet moved swiftly across the
cobbled street. They were fast, faster than the pack of wild dogs
chasing them.

The dogs gained on them while we watched.
Their snouts dripped with drool and their eyes gleamed
ferociously.

It struck me how strange it was to see
animals, even if they were rabid. For the most part wildlife of all
kinds had vanished when the infection swept the planet. Living
things of every species disappeared into hiding.

In our worst moments, when the starvation had
become too much over the last few years, I had often wondered what
I would do if I came across something I could kill and eat. But
there had never been an opportunity. We had never been given a
chance to hunt something down and learn how to eat from the
land.

The kids and dogs disappeared around a corner
and we let out a collective sigh of relief. But even as I started
to relax because they didn’t discover us, an uneasy feeling of
disappointment started to creep in.

They were children, running from dogs that
wanted to tear them to pieces.

I should do something.

I turned my head and met Harrison’s wide-eyed
gaze unexpectedly. I had meant to find Hendrix, but when I saw the
same turmoil mirrored in Harrison’s expression, I knew I wasn’t the
only one struggling with this moral dilemma.

“We can’t help them,” Hendrix announced in a
low voice.

I looked
to
him and saw him watching us carefully. “But-”

“We have our own people to protect, Reagan,”
he reminded me gently. “We can’t save everyone.”

His words caught in my throat. That was the
root of my unease. I wanted to save them. I wanted to save
everyone. But it kept getting me into trouble. I kept getting
us
into trouble.

I nodded and tried to let the good reasons
for staying out of this settle in me, but they wouldn’t. I knew
there was Page to keep safe, Lennon to protect, that we were all at
our worst and dangerously too exhausted to be sharp and quick
enough.

“Reagan,” Hendrix murmured, stepping closer
to me. His arm wrapped around my waist and drew me to his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered
against
my ear. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I was an asshole. But I’m not
trying to be one now. I’m trying to keep us as safe as I can.”

I breathed in deeply and tried to agree with
him. “I forgive you,” I said instead. Still those feelings of
anxiety spun in my blood, prompting me to go after the kids. The
dogs snarled and snapped in the distance and my chest fluttered
with frustrated panic.

A child’s shout bellowed through the air. It
sounded pained and tortured. I jumped in Hendrix’s embrace and I
felt his body stiffen next to me. When another scream
rent
the air, I jerked again and looked up at
the man I loved, the man that had been caring and compassionate and
sacrificing up until his brother died a few weeks ago.

Harrison moved toward the door, “Hendrix,” he
pleaded. “They’re kids.”

“Don’t,” Hendrix ordered.

“What if it were Page?” Harrison challenged.
“Or Miller?”

The breath Hendrix pushed out of him was
filled with bitterness and resignation. “Fine,” he finally allowed.
“But if you die, that’s on you.”

“They’re dogs,” Harrison chuckled with an eye
roll. “Pretty sure I can handle them.”

“Pretty sure they’d eat your face if they got
the chance,” Hendrix retorted, but he moved toward the door, taking
my hand as he went. “Nelson, stay with your wife. Page, Miller,
Adela
and Tyler, you stay
too.”

Miller had been the only one moving with us
toward the door. The rest of the group knew this fight wasn’t for
them. Tyler hadn’t even bothered to get up to investigate the
commotion. She still sat in the corner of the room with her knees
pulled to her chest and her chin resting on top of them. She stared
at her feet and didn’t acknowledge that any of us was leaving or
that there was
danger
or that
anything existed beyond her own pain.

I turned away from her, not able or willing
to let her grief seep into my own emotions right now. I had a
mission and a purpose and she would debilitate me if I let her.

I knew this because it happened so often. My
grief for Vaughan was a beast inside of me. Hendrix’s grief for his
brother fueled my painful thoughts and aching heartbreak. But it
was Tyler’s utter desolation that shattered me. Tyler’s and
Page’s.

Harrison led the way through the door. King
and I followed him with Hendrix tight on our heels. The air was
cool and thin in the mountains of Colombia. I was almost
immediately out of breath as we crept along the side of the
buildings, moving as quietly as we could toward the sound of
blood-curdling screaming and ferocious dog sounds.

All four of us carried various styles of
knives. The last several weeks had forced me to be proficient with
this new weapon and learn how to be deadly.

I steeled my nerves and determined to kill
heartlessly. It should have been easy to take the lives of animals
after all of the killing I’d accomplished over the last three
years, but it wasn’t. In fact, it went against everything inside of
me.

I killed people because they deserved death
or because they would kill me first if they got the chance. But
animals were innocent in this world. They were victims of brutality
and evil, just like me.

And they were rare.

I had just convinced myself that those
feelings were beyond foolish when we turned the corner to an alley.
I staggered to a stop and felt my mouth drop open from
surprise.

“This can’t be real,” King muttered next to
me. I barely heard him over the high-pitched whining of the dogs
and the battle cries
from
the
children.

I watched in horror as one of the children
jumped on the back of a dog trying to run away and snap its neck
with a fast twist of the child’s arms.

“No,” I hissed. I immediately brought my
knife up and jabbed it at the child. “Stop!” I shouted before I
could talk myself out of it. “
Por favor, stop
!”

Six pairs of black eyes lifted to meet mine.
Their lips curled back from their yellowed teeth, their feral
expressions darkening in defense. I took a step back, intimidated
by them.

They were too young to be this threatening.
And yet, I felt their savageness, their untamed aggression that
could kill dogs and stand up to armed adults.

One of them had a dog in a chokehold. The
animal whimpered and cried in fear. While the child looked at us,
he took a
pocket knife
and slit
the creature’s throat.

The whining stopped.

I felt sick to my stomach.

The same little boy stood up and the animal
dropped to his feet. He opened his mouth and launched into Spanish.
We couldn’t understand a word he said.

“English,” Hendrix said when the child took a
breath. “We speak English.”

The children
canted
their heads at us, clearly not understanding
Hendrix’s words. They looked disturbed like this. We had somehow
stepped into a horror movie where these children ran the streets,
murdering anyone they stumbled upon.

“
No
comprendo
,” I tried. Adela had taught us lots
of Spanish over the last few weeks, but at the moment that was the
only thing I could remember. “
No
comprendemos
.” We don’t understand.

The children moved toward us. I tensed and
held my knife with a better grip. I didn’t know if I had it in me
to kill a child, but I planned on being prepared. If these wild
things attacked us, I would not give up my life so they could go on
living theirs.

They moved slowly, with calculated steps.
They didn’t trust us
any more
than
we trusted them.

Hendrix showed them his knife; Harrison and
King followed his example. The children didn’t seem to care though.
They were more fascinated with our presence than our threat of
danger.

The original child started speaking again and
I gesturing at the animals. He had a different accent than Adela
and while I could pick out some words, most of what he said flew
over my head.

“We don’t understand,” Hendrix said louder.
“
No se
.
No
comprendo
.”

The boy turned to one of the little girls and
spoke quickly, gesturing at the dog at her feet. She looked at him
for a moment, deciding whether to listen, but finally bent down,
crouching over the dog.

She mumbled something in Spanish before
mimicking chomping noises. My brows furrowed and I tried not to
laugh. What in the world? She picked up the dog’s leg and pretended
to eat it.

Oh.

Oh.

“This is why they’re not starving,” King
concluded.

The wheels in my head started turning as the
puzzle that was these children and these poor, dead animals started
to come together.

They killed the dogs and ate them. They ate
the animals because they had to. They somehow
goaded
the dogs into chasing them, trapped them
in this dead-end alley and killed them.

Their bodies told the story of a tough,
hardened life, but these were not sickly,
dying
children. These little kids had learned
survival.

Even if it made my heart hurt.

These children couldn’t have been older than
eight or nine and yet they’d managed to do what we couldn’t.

And now my pride hurt.

The little boy pointed at Hendrix’s tummy and
murmured, “Mmm…”

I pressed my lips together to keep from
smiling. I still didn’t trust these kids, but they were less
threatening now that I knew they weren’t killing the dogs for
sport.

“
Mamá
?” Hendrix
asked? “
Donde
está
tu
Papá
?”
Where is your father?

“
No mamá
,” The little boy said.
“
No
papá
.” He
said more, but we couldn’t understand his language. He turned to
his friends and said something that put them into motion. They
swooped down and snatched the dogs they’d killed. The animals were
mangy and bloody, but the children didn’t notice as they threw them
around their necks to carry back to wherever they came from.

The little boy said something to us again and
gestured for us to follow as they walked from the alley. I shared a
shocked look with Hendrix.

“They want us to go with them?” I
whispered.

“Yeah, to take us back to their den and
murder us,” Harrison answered.