The Future Without Hope (2 page)

Chapter 4.
The Nature of Waiting

WAITING IS THE
WORST. It’s what takes all our time, chewing away at the hours. Collin sleeps,
and it worries me, because the infection is burning through him and I can’t do
a damn thing to stop it. I can’t do anything but wait for the Order to decide
what to do with us, and for the infection to run its course.

I try to cling to
what he said because the waiting is killing me. We rattle though the fading
night, and light pricks weakly at the gaps in the roof. Rusty gaps—a good
fucking way to catch tetanus, but if it keeps me from being bitten, I’ll take
it.

Because even
though it’s a truth I don’t
want
to
face, there is no denying it. Not really.

Collin will
change, and Finn can’t protect me—not from my brother or from the Order.

It’s easy to
hear the conviction in my brother’s voice. But as the train rattles into the
night, taking us farther from 1 and Finn, it’s hard to hold on to the belief. I
lean against the train wall while Collin dozes, and I let the fear come. I’ve
been too buried in that fucking drug cocktail Kenny gave me to feel it much
before.

But it’s a big
ass world and there is nothing working in Finn’s favor. His influence and the
strength of his name isn’t what it was, and the Order will close their doors to
him, without Omar’s help.

I know Finn.
Even without knowing what happened between him and the Black Priest, I know he
would rather die than ask Omar for help.

The question
is—will he let me die before he does?

Part 2.

The Rage of Loss.

Death is our new
world. And death breeds fear. With very little effort, fear can morph into
rage.

Sawyer Russell-

Rage is my natural
state of being.

Finn O’Malley-

Chapter 1.
Promises Broken

IT TOOK TWELVE
HOURS TO DECIDE SOMETHING WAS WRONG.

It took eighteen
to decide I wanted nothing to do with it.

Twenty-eight to
realize I had no choice.

Thirty-six to
realize I might have fucked up too badly to fix it.

I will protect you.

It’s the only
thing I ever told her that mattered. She focused on shit that means nothing—my
name and my family, my war record and Kelsey. But in the end, the only thing
that mattered was the promise I couldn’t be bothered to keep.

Was it for the
best? She was an emotional handicap, a memory. A way to redeem—

Fuck.

I can’t do that.
Can’t put that shit on her. And I can’t break the only promise I’ve made in
seven years because I don’t want to face her. I grit my teeth.

After ERI-Milan,
promises became temporal things. Mothers promised their children easy, painless
deaths. Husbands promised to never turn. The government promised to keep us
safe.

Father promised
we’d go home.

No one keeps
promises. Not those misguided ones made in love. Not the ones whispered to
those clinging to a fucking idiotic hope.

Not the ones
that were lies before they were told.

Why should this
promise matter? I swallow hard and stand, reaching for my weapons. The house on
the edge of the wall is a memory—a relic of a life I left behind. It’s not my
place anymore. It hasn’t been since before Kelsey died. This entire Haven is a
memory and I feel like I’m a ghost walking the walls.

Isn’t that how
you should feel, when everyone is dead but you?

Not everyone.
Not Nurrin. I hook my katana over my shoulder, and leave the room.

She isn’t dead.
I refuse to believe that. She’s too stubborn to die—she’d still be arguing
about it. A savage smile ticks up my lips and I leave the house of memories
behind.

Chapter 2.
Closed Doors

HERE’S THE THING
ABOUT A WAR HERO—no one knows what the fuck to do with them in peace time.

The real problem
isn’t that doors were closed in my face—it’s that these fucking idiots in 1
thought we weren’t at war. How do you convince yourself of that, when the dead
are screaming at the door? How do you live with your head that fucking deep in
the sand?

I don’t know why
it surprised or annoyed me. 1 has always been very good at ignoring the
obvious.

After the third
inquiry about a missing girl is met with a blank stare, I swallow my pride and
go where I should have from the start.

The white house
was built for the Buchman family when ERI-Milan broke out and swept the nation.
It wasn’t the White House—it didn’t even pretend to be. It was a two bedroom
shotgun guard house that was appropriated from the warden and painted white to
cover the graffiti. With a flag planted in the front yard, and the first family
inside, it became the de facto headquarters for the new world government—or the
American one.

We still don’t
know much about what happened beyond our borders.

The streets are
still and quiet—only the distant screams of infects provide an eerie
counterpart to the night. The small café’s and stores with second hand
clothing—boutiques to amuse the wealthy bored in 1—are closed and shuttered against
the night. The vice club will still be busy, but the apartments are quiet and
so is the homes in the neighborhood.
 
It
means I’m unobserved as I move through the streets, approaching the white house
quietly.

I know he won’t
talk to me. But I’m running out of time and options.

Four of his guards
are patrolling the house—two lean near the door, while the other two make lazy
sweeps of the perimeter. There will be at least one more inside.

The thing about
guards is that they only think so far ahead. And these don’t expect an attack
by the person Kendall has known his entire life. He’s changed—we all have, in
the years since the East fell—but not so much that I believe he’s anywhere but
Kelsey’s old bedroom.

I wait patiently
in the shadows as the guard makes a pass around the backside of the white
house, and then I dart across the moonlit lawn. A scream from the Wall breaks
the night, and I can hear the muttered agitation from the guards as I push up
in a jump, catching the windowsill and pulling myself up. I hang there for a
moment by my fingernails, the weight of gravity pulling on me as I dangle. I
take a breath, and shove upward, straining for the handhold in the brick.
Splinters dig at my nails and I hiss furiously as I scrape against smooth
stone.

I lunge up
again, and my fingers catch in the small handhold.

I hang there,
suspended between the top of the window frame and a precarious stone ledge, and
it occurs to me that doing stupid shit is one thing I am very good at. I bare
my teeth in a grimace and pull up hard. Tiny shards of rock dig into my fingers
as I swing up, scrambling for the windowsill of the second floor window. My
feet kick hard once against the glass below me, but it holds and gives me just
enough leverage to pull myself up and through the open window.

Andrew
 
always liked to have the windows open. He
said the wind made him feel less trapped. Less afraid.

It was a stupid
fucking delusion, but I liked the man well enough. A lot of people need
delusions to keep going, back then. Most people still do.

I let out a
disgusted breath as I roll to my feet. Too many years patrolling the wall and
out of recon have me rusty and I can't afford that right now. I unclip my knife
and hold it, blade flat against my wrist, as I creep through the house.

There’s a guard
sitting outside the closed door I know leads to Kelsey’s old bedroom. For a
moment, I am caught between then and now, memories overtaking me. How many
times have I crept down this hallway, while Kenny and Buchman slept a few doors
away and Kelsey paced and worried in silence?

I hit the guard
with the hilt of my knife, a vicious blow that contains more of my anger than
he probably deserves. It appeases a petty part of me and I roll my shoulders,
pulling my gun before I ease the door open.

There is
something almost wrong about finding someone you hate passed out.

Kenny is
sleeping, his mouth parted and snoring slightly. He’s surprisingly alone—I
don’t know if that irritates me more than it pleases me. Where the fuck is she,
if she isn’t here?

I kick the bed,
hard enough that Kenny startles awake, his eyes flying open. I lift the gun,
and give him a manic smile, all the rage I’m feeling spilling into that one
expression.

Fear flickers in
his eyes, just for a moment, but it’s enough to convince me he knows something,
and that makes me want to cut him open and toss him over the wall.

I swallow hard,
tamping down on my rage. It won’t do me any good right now.

“What the hell
are you doing, O’Malley?”

“Where is she?”
I ask, my voice a soft noise. He goes still, and that fear flashes again. I saw
this little jackass grow up—I can read fear in him and right now he’s scared
shitless.

His voice is
sharp and biting, though. “No fucking clue. Maybe she finally got smart and cut
her losses.”

A fist of doubt
squeezes tight but I shake it. “Nurrin doesn’t give a fuck what it takes to
find her brother—and she knows I’m the best chance she has of doing that. She
wouldn’t disappear. Where the fuck is she?”

Rage twists
Kenny’s face, “Maybe she’s dead. Maybe you kill all the women you make promises
to.”

I move fast,
faster than he can react. Because when shit get real, this is the truth: Kenny
is a soft politician. He isn’t a solider, has never Walked, and others kill for
him. When it comes down to it, I have blood on my hands and no problems shedding
it. Especially his.

“What the fuck
did you do to her?” I snarl, pressing a knee into his chest and my knife to his
throat.

He glares up at
me, his eyes furious and mutinous. “Fuck you, O’Malley.”

I lean down, and
whisper, “If she’s hurt, if anyone has so much as looked at her wrong, I’ll
fucking flay you. I’ll skin you slow and feed you to the goddamn horde. Do you
get me, Buchman? I don’t give a fuck who the hell you are.”

Fear is stark in
his eyes, and I push down harder on the blade, until blood wells under it and
his eyes bulge and he squeaks in alarm. A pitiful noise from a shitty excuse of
a man. Then I jerk back, and he takes a deep breath.

“Find me the
information I need. Stay the fuck out of my way—I swear if I come back, only
one of us will walk out alive.”

“You could go to
prison for threatening me,” he says.

I laugh, and
turn, a deliberate insult. Kenny doesn’t have the balls to attack me, even with
my back turned. “You fucking arrest me. I’ll still kill you.”

Without waiting
for him to respond to that, I slip out of the bedroom, down the hall. At the
end, I turn back and shoot his door. The noise echoes, and I hear him cursing
as the guards outside shout at each other. I duck into the hall closet Kelsey
used to hide me in when Buchman surprised us by coming home early, and wait for
them to pound into Kenny’s room.

Then I slip out
and into the night, letting the darkness take me as 1 comes awake to the sound
of gunfire and the screams of the dead.

Chapter 3.
Favors and Friends

I KNOCK ON THE
DOOR, and wait for the querulous voice of Claire to reach me. She isn’t
sleeping—the light is her living room is on. And Clair has insomnia—she has
ever since she survived the siege of New York, when the dead swept the city
like sewer rats. They killed sixty percent of New York City before the evac
teams could clear it. We didn’t bomb it, but only because at that point, we
knew it didn’t do any fucking good.

If the dead get
up and walk, what good does a bomb do, but create more of the problem? Atlanta
taught us that, and we are still paying for the mistake of dropping dirty bombs
on American soil.

The door swings
open and Claire stares at me from behind the barrel of a surprisingly clean
shotgun. I lift one eyebrow. She stares for a long heartbeat, just long enough
for me to worry, and then the barrel dips, and she relaxes, stepping back a
little. “What the bloody hell are you doing?”

I take the
silent invitation and step inside, closing the door behind me. “I need help,” I
say softly.

Claire’s eyes
widen and her mouth drops open. In the twenty years since the zombies rose,
I’ve never once asked her for help. I’ve come to her with and for information.
Once, I got drunk and passed out in her living room. And I ran from 1 and her
and all the memories of everything that couldn’t be changed.

But I’ve never
said those three words to her.

“What happened?”
she asks, her voice shaking.

“Nurrin is
missing. She went to dinner with Kenny and she never came back.”

“How long ago?”

“Three days.”

Claire turns
wordlessly and limps into her kitchen.

She doesn’t limp
much anymore—it came from a break when Da was moving the ex-pats from Chicago
to 1. A small horde caught them outside Des Moines and she broke her leg in the
skirmish. She hated that little handicap—coming into 1 on crutches instead of
her own feet—and she worked hard to cover that perceived weakness when her leg
healed enough.

“Sit down,” she
says, her accent thick. She ignores the tea that is usually so close at hand
and pours two glasses of Scotch instead. She slides one to me and sits heavily
in the chair. “Sit
down
, Finn.”

Knowing that
appeasing her is the best way to get what I want, I obey.

She sips her
Scotch for a moment, and then blinks at me. “Why was she with Kendall?”

“He’s been
courting her since we arrived.”

“He suspects
she’s a First,” she murmurs, softly. To herself. It draws my spine straight and
I glare at her. She gives me a dismissive snort. “Stop posturing, O’Malley.”

“Why the fuck
would Kenny care if she’s a First?” I demand.

“Because he’s in
the Order’s pocket. They put him in that pretty white house. We all ignore it
because he’s a Buchman, and we like the familiar. But he doesn’t make it a secret.”

I sit up, my
eyes narrow. “Why the hell haven’t I heard about this?”

“Because Kenny
knows how you feel about the Order. Not everyone outside of 1 tolerates
them—hell, not everyone here does. But we understand they’re a necessary evil.”

“Where would
they take her?” I demand.

She shakes her
head, “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to get any info on the Order—they keep
their own secrets. No one will trade on them.”

I
give her a skeptical look and she slaps the table, making the Scotch jump. “I’m
not lying to you, O’Malley. I’ve never done that, and I’m not going to start
now over the fucking Order. You can accept that and I will do what I can to
help, or you can be a distrustful ass and chase your own goddamn tail.”

I
glare at her for a long minute, and then mutter a curse. She relaxes, the
tension I hadn’t noticed slipping from her abruptly.

“I
can’t break another promise, Claire,” I mutter, grabbing the Scotch and tossing
it back.

She’s
staring at me sympathetically when I bring myself to meet her eyes. “This isn’t
a repeat of Kelsey,” she says, softly.

She’s
right. It isn’t. This is a whole new kind of fucked up.

“Will
you reach out? Find out what you know?”

Claire
gives me a slightly offended look, her lips tightening as her brows furrow. I
nod, and stand, leaning down to drop a kiss on her forehead. When I reach the
door, she calls after me. “What will you do? If they have her, what will you
do?”

I
glance back. She’s standing in the doorway to the kitchen, backlit by the
rising sun and the kitchen lights. She looks impossibly old, in a world where
the old don’t survive.

“Whatever
it fucking takes.”