The Dead Saga (Book 3): Odium III (14 page)

Stupid hope was going to get me killed.

Nova fidgeted uncomfortably in her seat, finally pulling her knife out of one of her many pockets and her gun out of another. She stabbed the knife into the dashboard and threw the gun into one of the pockets in the door.

My eyes glanced across at the gun, and I took a heavy breath filled with relief. I was safe. I was in serious amounts of pain at the moment, but I was safe. She had saved me. And she was right, I needed to get my shit together, because I was alive and so many others weren’t. For that I should be grateful. I took another steadying breath to calm myself.

I turned in my seat to look at her. “There were gunshots,” I said.

“So?” Nova replied.

I frowned. “You said that there were no deaders at our camp.”

Nova huffed out an annoyed breath. “So what? What’s your point?”

“I heard gunshots. What did you shoot, if not deaders?” I looked at the side of her face as I spoke. The words left my mouth as I realized exactly what she had done. “No,” I murmured. “Please, no, Nova,” I begged her, but I knew it was pointless.

Her expression didn’t change and she didn’t flinch at my words. Her eyes left the road long enough to look me in the eye. “You know, in certain countries they kill babies that are born different. They kill them before the placenta is even delivered.”

I stared at her open-mouthed, not sure what response she was looking for from me.

“That thing should have been killed when it was born, Nina. It had no right to live. He had no right to let it continue on in this world.” She looked away from me. “We’re trying to rid the world of this evil, after all. I just did my bit in ridding a little of it today.”

My heart beat in my chest, the heavy thud of it making me feel dizzy and sick. There were no words to speak, nothing to describe what I felt for her or what I thought about her actions.

“You killed them?” I breathed out, the cab spinning.

She didn’t reply, but I watched her hard features tense even more, her jaw grinding.

“How could you do that? They were leaving, Nova. They weren’t our problem anymore.”

“They did leave,” she said harshly. “They left this mortal coil, and good fuckin’ riddance to them.” Her mouth puckered into an ugly shape, and I felt the bile rising in my throat. “We did him a favor. He’d thank me if he could.”

“Who are you?” I asked, repeating her earlier sentiment. “This isn’t you, Nova. You don’t go around killing people. Not like this.”

But when I thought about it, what did I really know about her? About her brother and sister? Her sister had infected God knows how many people and tried to kill me. Her brother was the biggest asshole ever, the silent brooding type that screamed “I’m a secret serial killer,” and then there was Nova. I’d thought she was good, but she was just as messed up as the rest of them.

I turned in my seat, still clutching the bloody T-shirt to my wound. I couldn’t stand to look at her anymore, and even though she had saved my life back there, I knew that I didn’t trust her anymore. The sound of Joan’s singing echoed forth to us as she suddenly began another rendition of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer,” and for once I was glad for it. Because there was nothing left to fill the ever-deepening void of silence between Nova and me.

“Giving me the silent treatment won’t change anything. You have to know that what I did was for the best, Nina. You can’t be that fuckin’ stupid.” Nova’s voice had risen to an all time high, and I swallowed as I struggled to control my rising panic and worry. “Answer me!” she screamed, slamming on the brakes.

The sudden stop had me flying out of my seat and slamming my weak and broken body into the small footwell of the truck. I cried out, my hand slipping from my wound. Fresh blood began to pump from the bite mark. I looked up gasping as Nova glared down at me, her lips twisted in a vicious snarl.

“Look how far the high and mighty Nina has fallen,” she growled out, clenching her knife so tight her knuckles went white. “You’re so fuckin’ self-righteous.”

“Your snoring pisses me off.”

I ignored Melanie’s droll tone for what felt like the tenth time this morning. That woman didn’t ever have a nice word come out of her mouth. She was beautiful, but goddamn she was a bitch. She made even Nina look like a saint.

Nina.

My frown deepened when I thought about her. I’d never met someone who frustrated me so much. She was stubborn, mean, grumpy, moody, she was untidy and hated to be told she was wrong—the list of her faults was endless. She had all the traits I disliked in a person, all the things that I normally ran from, yet, buried down deep, there was a softness to her.

This apocalypse, and all its shit had tried to destroy the person Nina had once been, but every now and then I would catch a glimpse of that woman, and goddamn she was anything but mean. This crazy, bitchy woman that refused to let me forget about her was so kind and generous she would have made Mother Teresa blush with shame. She just hated anyone seeing that side of her; she saw it as her weakness. There was something more to her than what she let everyone else see, something that I had forgotten about through these long years since the plague of zombies had risen. When I thought of Nina, I remembered to smile. I forgot the pain, and I began to believe that there could be a life for me after all—a life more than this, at least.

“I hate it when you bite your nails. It’s disgusting.”

I glanced sideways at Melanie, her words cutting through my thoughts. She wasn’t even looking at me. She was staring out the windshield, watching the road ahead and listing off the reasons why she didn’t like me.

Nice.

Bitch.

But I was glad for the distraction. Thinking about Nina was a one-way path of self-destruction. We were over, and she would never forgive the fact that I hadn’t trusted her, because trust was everything to her.

I stopped biting my nails, noticing that they were shorter than they had been in a while. It was something that Nina had hated, too, and I’d tried to stop doing it. I guess since we weren’t together anymore, I had restarted that old habit.

“You chew ridiculously noisily. It’s like listening to a pack of wild animals eating a rotting carcass.”

“A rotting carcass?” I said without humor.

Melanie mimicked what I think was supposed to be me eating, and I huffed out my annoyance and turned away from her, listening to her bitter laugh.

I grabbed my knife from my waist, my nostrils flaring, and began sharpening it in an effort to stem my irritation. It wasn’t working.

“I hate that noise. It’s annoying. Just like you.”

I gritted my teeth and continued to scrape the blade against the rock over and over, intentionally being as loud as possible. I was a people person—everyone liked me. But not this bitch.

I had no idea why she disliked me so much. Granted, she hated everyone, but she had a particular distaste for me that she, for some reason, felt the need to vocalize.

“And I also hate—”

“All right! Enough, Melanie,” Michael barked out. “We get it: you hate him.”

Melanie huffed. “I hate you too, pretty boy, don’t think you’re any different.” She closed her mouth, silencing her latest insult, and I stifled my laugh.

Michael had been more of a broody asshole on this scavenge trip also. He had barely said a handful of words to either Melanie or me for the whole day. Something had gotten up his ass recently, but I didn’t know what. At first I had thought that it was because he felt awkward about me coming on this trip, considering I had thought he and Nina had had a thing while on their trip. But after first night confrontations I had learned that that wasn’t the case. In fact, he had laughed at the mere suggestion of it.

“That bitch?” He had barked out a deep laugh that made me want to permanently make it so he could never laugh at another thing again. “No, man, just no. She’s a special kind of crazy just for you. Besides, she hates my guts. I mean, really hates my guts.” He held up his hands in mock defense, though the cut in his eyebrow that I’d just put there proved he shouldn’t have been mocking me.

I didn’t know what to think about that. Nina had refuted my claims that she and Michael had had a thing, but I hadn’t believed her. I knew she had been keeping something from me and I had jumped to a conclusion—the wrong conclusion. I had used my own moral standards on what could have been wrong instead of seeing the woman that she was. I was a cheating bastard, always had been—except with her. I had assumed that she was the same as me, with no moral compass, but she wasn’t. She was better than me. She always had been.

As the days had gone on, I had felt shittier and shittier for the way I had spoken to her and the things I had accused her of. The image of hurt flashing across her features right before she slapped the shit out of me was one I couldn’t forget. Yet my own stubbornness had me keeping my distance from her and treating her like an asshole to make sure she never wanted me back. She deserved better than me. I was just a street thief, someone who had killed hundreds of innocent people in one of the walled cities. I was scum. I was worse than scum—I was the shit that came out of scum.

I ran a hand along my scruffy beard, wondering if scum actually did shit.

“I hate it when you scrub your beard like that.”

Melanie’s irritated voice interrupted my thoughts, and a growl of annoyance left me before I could stop it. Up until now I had managed to nearly always ignore her pissy words and continuous bitching, when really what I wanted to do was put a knife to her throat. But I hadn’t. Because my silence annoyed her more. Now I had risen to her bait and I could hear the satisfaction in her laugh.

“And I hate growling. You’re not a dog, are you, Mikey?” She laughed without humor.

Anger built in my stomach, low and throbbing, and I breathed through it, struggling to keep ahold of my temper. I would not give in and give her the satisfaction of a response. But damn this bitch to hell. I had never hit a woman before, but at this point I had no problem with killing one. Besides, the jury was still out on if she was a woman or not. She was more like the spawn of Satan, and I had read once that they were hermaphrodites.

“I need to piss,” I said instead, looking past Melanie toward Michael.

Her smug grin fell when she saw she wasn’t getting under my skin—at least she thought she wasn’t.

“Pull over.”

“We can’t stop here, we’re coming up to the road of the damned. Those crazy bastards will kill you in a blink of an eye,” Michael said seriously.

“‘The road of the damned!’” I said over-dramatically. “Sounds serious.”

“It is. They don’t screw around. The last trip I took, they threw a woman in front of the truck to get us to stop.”

I turned in my seat to look at Michael, but he didn’t return my stare. “And we use this road because?” I prompted. Because clearly it was insane to keep traveling the same road that could get you killed. It was like making the same mistake over and over again, without learning anything from it.

“Because it’s either this road or a twenty-mile detour to where we need to go,” Melanie replied with a roll of her eyes, like I was the dumbest asshole to ever walk the planet.

“Here we go,” Michael said. “Guns at the ready. And remember, we do not stop for anything.”

I lifted my gun from my lap and stared out the window, seeing nothing but trees. The air was tense in the truck, but I couldn’t see what they were afraid of. I looked back to Michael and Melanie, noting that they both were indeed looking quite worried, and I tried to have the same emotion about all of this. But for the most part, there seemed nothing to fear.

A small bang hit the roof of the truck and I flinched and raised my gun up to the ceiling. Another one hit shortly after, and a large rock rolled down the windshield and onto the hood.

“What the hell?” I mumbled.

“They’re above us, Michael, get us out of here!” Melanie yelled as what sounded like a hundred angry fists began barraging the roof of the truck.

A rock hit the center of the glass, a large crack forming, and I prayed that it wouldn’t implode on us. Michael had sped up, and I wound my window down and looked out and up, seeing that, sure enough, people were indeed in the trees, their arms laden down with rocks that continued to throw down on us. A heavy rock narrowly missed my head and I ducked back inside.

It was too dangerous to try and shoot them down, as rock after rock hit the truck, denting it and almost smashing the glass. Cars were rusting at the side of the road and I briefly wondered if these were the vehicles of past victims.

“Hold on,” Michael yelled, as if knowing something we didn’t.

Seconds later, what could only be described as a small boulder landed on the hood of the truck, and steam hissed up around the impact mark. If that did serious damage to the engine, we were royally screwed.

Michael didn’t stop, he didn’t slow, and he didn’t bother to shoot at anything or anyone. He drove like a madman to get us the hell out of there, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the extra twenty miles to get to our location would be worth it. Because this was madness.

The anger I felt as we passed them intensified as I realized what Nina had already gone through to not only get to the mall, but also get back from it. Shit, it was no wonder that she was quiet when she came back. No wonder she had seemed a little colder, a little emptier. I had accused her of cheating, when she’d only been disturbed by what she had seen.

Sometimes it was easy to forget that she had been in a walled city, protected—if you could call it that—from the horrors of this world. Her harshness, her meanness, was a perfect shield to deflect anyone from trying to hurt her again. Yet I knew I had done it—hurt her. I was an asshole. A total fucking asshole.