The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series) (15 page)

Or at least I liked convincing myself I was.

Of course Elish didn’t even flinch. “Just because Lycos is dead, does not absolve him from what he had done while living. This stunt, this foolish belief he had before he died, almost got us all encased in concrete for eternity. Grieve for him all you wish, I don’t begrudge you that, but don’t insult your own intelligence by trying to sell him to me as some sort of angel. He was neither, and neither was his husband.”

“Yeah, well, neither are you.”

“Did I ever try to convince any of you different?” Elish seemed amused. I glared at him and debated opening my mouth to get pissed at him further but I shut it. What was important was looking for Killian and trying to challenge Elish was distracting from that. So I clamped it shut and carried on.

I was surprised that Elish didn’t try and pick at me some more. I glanced over at him and saw that his eyes were fixed forward. I looked to see what he was staring at.

It was a small derelict cabin a few yards off of the highway.

Then the smell hit me.

“Something dead is over there...” My heart dropped, without thinking I broke into a run. The sweet and putrid smell of rotting flesh crawling up my nostrils. Though this time the languid smell didn’t seep and claw at my brain, it clutched onto my emotions and filled them with apprehension.

Killian... what if I was smelling Killian’s body.

I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t need to look, I knew it was Elish, running just as fast as me.

Inside I could feel every one of my muscles constrict and tighten around themselves, gripping my bones so tightly I was half-expecting them to snap under the weight. Such emotions used to be foreign to me but now, whenever Killian was in danger that deep sepulchre of madness seemed to bubble up to my surface. It was becoming harder and harder to force it back down.

Though the oddest feeling of all was the darkness taking over corners of my mind, corners that used to collect light. Because though the flame where I held my love for Killian continued to grow, the places where my boyfriend’s presence did not touch grew darker and more cold. Instead of my sporadic, fleeting emotions being spread over my body, they were slowly being chased to a single crowded room.

He had always been my lantern in the darkness.

When I saw the rotting carcass of the carracat I could physically feel the weight get lifted off of my shoulders. I rested my hands on my knees and didn’t bother to hide the relief on my face. I could tell from the lurch in Elish’s heart we were experiencing the emotion together.

“Wait...” As I was staring down at my boots I saw something... prints...

“That’s Deekoi’s paw prints,” I said. I looked around and when I saw the boot prints in a small patch of remaining snow I swore and to my own inner madness I started to laugh. “And boot prints... boot prints... they were here!”

Elish’s purple eyes widened, and his jaw tightened. Wordlessly he turned from the rotting carcass and walked onto the cabin porch and then inside. I followed him.

We both stepped inside the old, musty cabin and looked around.

The floor looked disturbed, someone had made a bed beside the pot belly stove. My eyes scanned the garbage on the floor and stacks of crates trying to find any sign that some of it was new.

Then I saw it, and so did Elish: bloodstained cloth... used as bandages.

Elish leaned down and picked it up. He brought the bandage to his nose and I watched, feeling almost coy, as he closed his eyes in relief.

“This belonged to Jade,” Elish said quietly. “He was here.”

But what about Killian?

“Jade would not have left him,” Elish replied simply, even though all I had done was look around the room; he seemed to know what I was thinking. “If the snow had remained we would’ve been able to track them easier, but it doesn’t seem like they’ve veered off of the road.”

I was still looking for any sign of Killian. He would have written me a note or something, that seems like the type of thing he would’ve done. But there was nothing, just disturbed trash, a few prints here or there, and a blood-soaked strip of cloth.

I kicked an old coffee can with my foot, spilling cigarette butts of an unknown age over the floor. I left after that; I had nothing more to say and we had no reason to remain here.

Once I was back outside I started to quickly walk down the highway.

Now more than ever I felt aware of my surroundings. The black trees and sheer cliffs offering nothing to me but places of ambush, or places where Perish could be stashing Killian. If he was tied up and gagged... how could he hear me?

But the dog...

I started doing the soundless whistle as I picked apart and analysed every rock and rusted out car. Then, with Elish keeping pace with me, I started to climb the cliffs to our left to get a better view. I also kept my nose alert for any fluctuation in smell.

We got into our regular routine after that, the adrenaline filling both of us. Elish stayed on the highway always on watch and I scaled every bluff I could find to survey the landscape.

To our benefit there were a lot of sentry points right beside the road, hills sheared in half by blasts of dynamite to make room for the highway. Leaving their many layers of hardened sediment exposed and naked to the elements.

But there was nothing, even a couple hours after finding the small cabin I still could see no sign of them, but was that a good thing? If Perish veered off of the road there was no telling where they could be... or where he could be taking them.

“As for now, I do not know,” Elish replied when I had asked him that question. Darkness had banished another day into oblivion, leaving the both of us with only our night vision to aid our trip. There was an unspoken agreement between the two of us that we would not be resting much this evening. Though whether that stemmed from hope or just fear, I don’t think either of us wanted to know.

We walked at a quick speed the entire night, only resting for an hour before we were back on our feet. The sun was just peeking over the hills when I started to notice chunks of compacted snow and scrape marks, all lined up perfectly one after the other.

Elish was also eyeing them curiously. “That is out of place, but what it is... I am unsure of.”

“It looks like something was being dragged, something heavy,” I said. Once more I looked ahead of us, then let out another silent whistle. “We have to be gaining on them. Killian wouldn’t be able to keep up this speed. Jade wouldn’t either if he was nursing a head injury.”

Elish nodded his agreeance but that left us with no relief, only more questions. “Keep climbing... keep your eyes peeled. And I will say this now... if you see Perish, snipe him. I know you have the skills to hit only him. Kill first and ask questions later.”

I liked how this man thinks, and my sniper scope would allow me to see further ahead than my own vision would. I started climbing up the incline to our right and started scaling the first thick tree I could find.

Elish was just a small figure below me when I got to the last usable branch of the tree. I used my height to look over the grey landscape around me.

“I see a town,” I called down to Elish. There were clusters of structures everywhere but this one not only had a wall around it but it also had smoke coming from the houses inside. There was also a single paved road leading right up to the gate. “The road that goes to it should only be a couple miles ahead.”

I looked down and saw Elish staring back up at me. “They would need supplies... but I’m unsure if Perish would’ve even known this town existed. Though we’ll check it out; we’ll be needing supplies ourselves if we want to keep up this speed.”

My eyes picked up other buildings in all the cardinal directions but none of them looked occupied. I wanted to check them out once we got back to the highway though.

I climbed down the tree before letting myself drop the rest of the way. Then with a skid I slid down the embankment and back to the highway. Elish was already starting to walk down the road, more broken up and cracked than the previous areas. It was rough going, though there were no carts and no more bosen to slow me down.

But still we were faster than them... I just hoped they decided to stop in that town.

We both carried on down the highway, still meticulously checking out the forgotten cars though nothing was ever found in them but chewed up seats and bare metal coated in rust. We didn’t find any more tracks either but that was expected, the lower we walked the more the snow disappeared. In all respects it was gone.

Like we had thought there was a single road branching off of the highway, immediately bending into a thick thatch of trees. It was taking us west, though neither of us knew the town’s name. Elish didn’t even know, which I wasn’t overly impressed with.

“Lots of colonies sprout up. Unless they register themselves with the ACL and become blocks there is no way to know where they are, what their names are, or how many people have taken residence,” Elish commented after I voiced my displeasure with him.

“So chances are Perish wouldn’t know where this road leads...” I sighed and glanced behind me at a bullet riddled highway sign we had just passed. It was advertising the Coquihalla highway and how many kilometers it was. It looked like we were officially over the mountain.

Elish looked down at the pavement we were walking on, half-covered in gravel washed up from a small river we could hear to our right. “This road is newer... the pavement that is. It was made after the Fallocaust. This colony was made to attract merchants, or at the very least travellers going to Melchai. It would be a newer town, perhaps only four or five years old.”

“So it’s not Melchai?”

Elish shook his head. “No, I am familiar with Melchai. That town is another two weeks by foot if you stick with the highway.”

This peaked my interest. “How do you know Melchai?” I offered him an quil which he took, and lit one myself. I don’t think I could handle everything right now without them. It was bad enough my drug suitcase was missing and Killian had my heroin. Though at least getting killed had detoxed my body. Still though... I hated being sober.

A puff of smoke erupted from the red ember as Elish took his first drag. Though it seemed odd to see Elish smoking my hand-made cigarettes, he wasn’t the robe-draped, sparkly clean god I had seen in the greyrifts. Elish was now dirty like the rest of us; his long blond hair tucked into his grey duster, and his hands caked in ash and dirt. He even had a short beard now which made him look even more rugged. I don’t think I would have recognised him if I saw him in Skyfall.

It made me feel more at ease to see him become a greywaster. Not only was there the familiarity aspect, but it just showed how, deep down, his appearance and how he presented himself to me didn’t matter when his husband’s life was at stake. Elish Dekker was a bona fide greywaster now, with dirt-caked nails and wood-fire smelling, ratty clothes.

“Sanguine is more familiar with Melchai than I. It is a strange town. Sanguine spent some time in it as a child,” Elish explained. “He had no good things to say about it, but apparently it has grown to be a farming town. It used to be full of meth addicts apparently.”

“But that means... Sanguine was given to a greywaster? Isn’t that dangerous, especially for such a rare scientific abomination such as him?” I asked. I had never personally met Sanguine but the pictures were enough for me to do a double take. Though his facial features were normal, the normal chimera hotness anyways, his eyes were deep blood-red and his teeth like piranha fangs.

“Yes, but Silas wanted him to grow up with a hard nose, he wanted him to be strong. Silas decided that if he survived he would come to Skyfall the tough-as-nails bodyguard he had designed him to be.” Then a faint smile could be seen on his lips. “Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as such. Sanguine is a rather sweet man, though confused and is still confused to this day. He fights with himself every day over whether he wants to be good or bad.”

“Which is why you swayed him?”

“I have not swayed him; he is just extremely intelligent and decided to align himself with us. Though he is one of the ones who does not want to see Silas die. I had to promise him I would help Silas, not kill him.”

Interesting. “And you agreed to this?”

Elish nodded. “I agreed to help Silas and I have a perfect way of helping him.”

“By killing him?”

“Of course.”

I laughed and saw the corner of Elish’s mouth raise. It felt strange to laugh, even though it was more of a scoff than a laugh it was still more than I had done in a long time.

We carried on down this one-lane, newly-paved road and in a little over two hours we started to see the walls in the distance.

It was the same type of walls I had seen in Aras, made up of anything that offered a thick shell of protection: medians, raised pieces of pavement, old cars, and chain-link fence. It was stacked two men high and from the looks of it seemed like it was in a constant state of being improved.

There was a rusted, iron rung gate that was unguarded but as I looked closer I couldn’t see a lock on it. This place seemed to be almost the size of Aras but in the same vein it was obvious that the town had only been really broken in over the last couple of years. Everything still had that green feel to it, the feeling that they hadn’t perfected anything but building a small wall. I could take over this place in a second.