The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series)

THE FALLOCAUST SERIES

Book Two

The Ghost and the Darkness

Volume 2 of 2

By Quil Carter

© 2014 Quil Carter

All Rights Reserved

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or in any means – by electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without prior written permission.

The second half of this book is dedicated to Jon and Ashkan. You both have been there from the very beginning, since before Fallocaust was even an idea in my head. Not once did you two ever waver in your love and support and it is because of your constant encouragement that I am seeing my dream come true.

Thank you.

Chapter 35

Reno

I leaned my back against the door, my face buried in my hands. I wiped my hands down and looked at the large picture windows, seeing nothing but grey, rocky mountains in front of us.

Another secret base of Elish Dekker. Though as he carried my dead best friend through the grey carpet halls and into the freezer down the stairs, he reminded me that this was the same one he had originally brought us to.

I hadn’t remembered, blood loss did that to a man. But I was glad for this small oasis in the grey desert. Where my friend could heal, recover, and rise up from the ashes.

My mind had been in a thousand different places over the last several days but in the end they all focused to one point in time, one single event that I had had the horror of witnessing.

When I had barged into that storage room and saw Nero raping Reaver.

I had frozen, my feet glued to the spot. All I could do was stare, my mouth open in a soundless scream. Caligula and Nico had charged ahead, shot Nero and tried to retrieve Reaver...

All I could do was stare.

My best friend. I held a respect for him that I held for no one else. I loved that man, more than any person in the entire world and seeing him like that, with his eyes black, staring pits as he snarled at Clig and Nico. He had a madness in him I knew would not disappear with his death.

And his hand. Fuck, his hand.

Reaver had chewed his own hand off to escape Nero. And it wasn’t only that... the cigarette and cigar burns, the blood draining out of his backside, so many bruises, cuts, and welts.

How many times had Nero killed him? How many times had he raped him?

I glanced up as a mug edged into my vision.

Elish was looking down at me. Tall, crystally, god-like Elish. I took the tea with thanks and swirled it around in the cup.

“Do they make opiate tea?” I asked him as I smelled it. It smelled like chocolate cinnamon.

Elish took a sip and shook his head. “No, this is chai. It is soothing and will relax you.”

Ice Man turned from me and took out the remote he was always glancing at, before sighing and placing it back into his robes.

“Looks like you need to relax too,” I commented. I got up and sat on one of the couches. Elish sat down on an opposite couch. It was just the two of us here. Caligula and Nico had left a couple days ago so the Falconer wouldn’t be missed. They were returning as soon as Reaver woke up.

“I am fine,” Elish said back.

They would be returning as soon as possible because... because, well... we didn’t know where Tinky and Biter were.

As soon as we got Reaver in the freezer the two of us immediately flew to Kreig. After flying above the city and the surrounding towns we still hadn’t found anything. Until Clig left, Elish and I had been taking the plane over the towns but... we hadn’t picked up Jade’s tracker.

It was kind of sad... and in a way it scared me a bit. When we failed to get a signal Elish was adamant that the batteries must be dying in his tracker. He flew all the way back to the greyrift apartment for new batteries then we returned. When we still didn’t get a signal he kept telling me that surely there must be something wrong with the device. He commented that it had gotten wet at one point and then told me that perhaps it had shorted out while he was using his lightning touch. So we went to the outskirt towns and looked on foot, but there was still nothing.

It really was heartbreaking to watch. He kept bringing the device out of his pocket to check it, again and again.

But no signal, the tracker was silent. All of its little icons showing N/A and NULL. No beeps, no chimes... nothing. Jade was out of range, and that thing had like a twenty mile range on it.

The day Clig and Nico left, I think Elish realized... the boys were gone. They had left the outskirts of Kreig where Elish had told them to stay.

We didn’t know where they were. Killian, Perish, and Jade were out in the greywastes, alone and without Reaver to protect them. And we couldn’t get an idea as to where they were until Reaver woke up.

Elish took another sip of his tea, before he rose again and went to the window. He stared at it for exactly nine seconds before he walked over to the bedroom we had moved Reaver into.

Poor guy, he’d rip my face off with his bare hands if I brought attention to it... but I knew Elish was scared right now. He hated to admit it but that dude really loved his little husband.

I turned on the television and started sorting through his DVDs to see if I could find something good. I looked over my shoulder when I heard his soft footsteps.

“Any change?” I asked.

“He’s still breathing comfortably, it will be any time now,” Elish replied. “I wish I would have thought to ask Reaver before I dispatched him from his pain. It’s unlike Jade to stray far...”

I shrugged. “You made Reaver his temporary master though. So if Reaver wanted to go somewhere he’d have to follow.”

“Yes, I was hoping Reaver would be intelligent enough to stay put... he’s unfamiliar with the area. Lycos says he never ventured farther than Gosselin, yes?”

I nodded.

Elish carried on, “So I see no reason why they would travel far. That tracker has twenty miles of range, which means –”

Elish’s lower lip tightened, I finished his sentence for him.

“ – it means they’re not only far away. They’re
really
far away.”

“For all I know they’ve been on the road for over a month. For all I know Kessler already has them, knows everything, and Silas is stalking my heals at this very moment.”

This made me do a double take. I stared at him as he, very tensely, brought his tea back to his lips.

“You... you really fucking think that?”

“No, I have no reason to, but what Silas pulled in Aras, disguising himself as a greywaster, that alone should shed light on just who we are dealing with,” Elish said. He made himself sit back down and I popped in a DVD I deemed adequate. “He’s a mastermind.”

“Well, so are you at least, and not as batshit crazy.” I started dishing out my little drug supply, doing a hell of a lot more of them than I used to, but I justified it. After I laid out my lines of Dilaudids and snorted them up my nose I offered the sniffer to Elish.

He stared at me like I had just offered him a stick with a dead rat on the end and shook his head. “I do not indulge myself with such things.”

I rolled my eyes. “You can be all hard ass all you want but it’s just the two of us. I don’t give a shit, and you know I don’t give a shit. That’s why we get along.” I stood up. “I need to take a piss anyways. If you wanna do them while I’m gone I won’t say anything when I come back.”

After I took a leak I ducked into Reaver’s bedroom to check on him.

My best friend was laying where we had put him. On a comfortable bed with his head resting on a pillow. I had been able to wipe the blood off of his face but the rest of his body was rather bloodstained .

It was fascinating to see that his hand had knitted back to his arm. With just some twine and a hook they had been able to put it back on, and with that it just... fused back with his body. Apparently you had about half a day to stitch their limbs or whatever back to their bodies before they started to rot.

Because he wasn’t awake to rip my hand off, I stroked his warm cheek and just appreciated that I was back with him. That at least when he woke up he could be with someone he tolerated.

I belonged with Reaver... that was my place in the world, near him or helping him...

It had been three days since I had left Garrett. It had also been three days since Garrett had called Elish hysterical, and three days since Elish had told him, for me, that I was going to be gone until Reaver recovered.

I had left the room when he took the call and when I had returned Elish had said nothing to me. That was the easiest way to go about it. I knew Ice Man understood and if Garrett didn’t that was his problem. My now ex-fiancé had held me in his apartment against his will when Chally had told me where Reaver was. He had tried to prevent me from rescuing my friend and... Reaver came first.

Before anyone.

Feeling brave, I leaned down and kissed my friend on the cheek and ventured back into the living room area.

Just as I thought... the lines of yellow powder that I had left behind were all gone.

I passed out on the couch; I always had a knack for being able to sleep anywhere I wanted. When I woke up the lights had been turned off and the television too. Elish was also nowhere to be found so I assumed he went downstairs where his own suite was. It looked like it was early morning; even though the blinds were drawn on the big windows I could see the first hints of daylight through the cracks.

I got up and started towards my bedroom when I froze.

Reaver’s bathroom light was on.

A wave of anxiety washed through me which I banished immediately. Feeling angry at myself for being wary I walked into Reaver’s bedroom and looked around before slowly walking to the bathroom. I could hear water lapping; I think he was taking a bath. Couldn’t blame him... I remember when Bridley –

I gasped when I saw him.

Reaver was kneeling in almost a foot of red bath water covered in pink bubbles. He was savagely scrubbing his skin with what looked like steel wool. Almost his whole body was bright pink with angry red scratches all over it. His inner thigh and his backside were the worst, with puffy, crimson lesions that dripped blood into the rosy water below.

“Fuck! Reaver NO!” I screamed. I ran over and ripped the steel wool from Reaver’s hand. Though as quickly as I did, he snatched it back and started roughly digging the scrubber into his skin. His chest rapidly rising and falling as his breath bordered on hyperventilating.

I tried to take it again and when he tried to snatch it back I held it above him.

“GIVE IT TO ME!” Reaver suddenly screamed. His tone manic, uncontrolled... not the tone I was used to. It immediately made tears sting my eyes. He was deep into it... I had been too... there wasn’t a word for the crazy state you fell into after getting tortured and raped but I knew that’s where he was.

“You’re okay... it’s okay... I know...” I took in a deep breath and held out my hands to try and calm him down. I thought back to the painful time after Bridley raped me and remembered my almost obsessive need to clean every inch of my body. “I know you want to get clean and we have a lot of soap. But, baby, you can’t scrape your skin off...”

Reaver turned away from me; he grabbed a normal bathtub scrubber beside him and started desperately washing his already angry, swollen skin. My heart shattered as I saw the pain in my best friend’s eyes. They were wide and depthless, fixed in an almost permanent state of shock.

Then he stopped and I saw the scrubber fall from his fingers into the pink water below him. He stared down at his hands, scratches and lesions all up his arms, down his stomach... in some places so concentrated his skin looked like red sandpaper.

I looked down and groaned. Through the water I could see patches where he had scrubbed his groin raw, chunks of his pubic hair gone and replaced by red.

Then I made the mistake of looking behind him. His backside was even worse and I didn’t even want to see what state it was inside. I... fuck, I should have at least washed the cum out of him but I... I didn’t want to violate him anymore.

“Baby...” I whispered after he had been quiet and still for more than a minute. Staring in shell-shock at the faucet of the tub. I had never seen his black eyes more wide, more staring.