The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series) (25 page)

Then another gunshot and a flash of grey from Elish’s overcoat. I looked over as the merchant struggled in front of me and watched Elish put a hand over the bodyguard’s face.

Then the bodyguard started shrieking and I didn’t understand why until I saw the smoke start to pour from his face. As the bodyguard struggled and screamed I could hear the crackling of burning flesh.

“Where did you get that ring?” I snapped, pressing the barrel further into the merchant’s throat. I could smell burning flesh start to tantalize my nostrils, both from the red hot gun barrel and Elish’s thermal touch.

“What fucking ring?” the merchant cried.

“Put him on the ground,” Elish suddenly barked. I looked over at him and saw him drop the bodyguard. His face was holding a black hand print on it, even his eyeballs held wrinkled black bits from where Elish’s hand had laid.

I dropped the merchant and kicked him down, before hearing a crack as Elish snapped the bodyguard’s leg with the fire poker he carried around. At this gruesome display the merchant started screaming and sputtering. I kicked him again and drew my combat knife.

I kneeled down and straddled him, feeling an intoxication hit me that was stronger than the alcohol.

Now this, this I missed.

“That ring… the claw ring,” I snarled. I dug the tip of the knife into his throat. “Where did you find it?”

“He sold it to me for a fucking ammo belt!” the merchant snapped, his eyes bulging from fear. He looked over at the bodyguard who was cursing and spitting at his injured leg.

Elish was already on him. With the poker dragging against the greywaste dirt he walked over to the bodyguard and raised it. “Where did you find that ring?”

“Fuck you!” the bodyguard snapped. “I’m fucked now thanks to you, Skyfaller. Go fuck yourself.”

“So you don’t know where he found it?” I said to the merchant.

The man shook his head, looking relieved. He raised his hand and put it in front of my face. “Just fucking take it and get!”

Since you asked me nicely.
I got my combat knife and grabbed onto his finger. Knowing what I was about to do he started to scream and pull away, but I kept my grip strong and sawed his finger off with my knife. I put the finger into my pocket and opened his throat with a quick slash.

I rose and walked over to the bodyguard Elish was standing over, hearing the sounds of gurgling as the merchant choked on his own blood behind me.

I brought out the finger and handed the ring to Elish. “That’s Jade’s?”

Elish took the ring and held it in his hand. He nodded and slipped it into his pocket before roughly shoving the tip of the poker into the bodyguard’s chest. Not enough to penetrate, but enough to slam him backwards onto the greywastes’ floor.

“Do not make me ask you twice,” he replied coolly. “You may think you have nothing to lose; that, either way, you will wind up dead. But my creation beside me has a knack for drawing out one’s demise. I suggest you tell me what I want to know, or I will hand you off to him.”

I didn’t want to wait for an answer. I raised my boot and stomped it down on the guy’s other legs, feeling my own patience start to trickle away from me.

The bodyguard screamed and continued swearing, grabbing his broken leg and rolling onto his side.

“Where did you get this claw ring? Where did you find it?” I demanded. I started to circle him, the burning darkness forming and growing inside of my chest. The fact that this man may have been near Killian, may have seen him, was filling me with rage. The same madness that had taken over me when I was interrogating those legionaries, when my future boyfriend had gotten kidnapped and sold.

The bodyguard coughed, a drip of spit falling from his mouth. “It doesn’t matter, asshole. I found it where no human could survive. A motel that’s been swarming with ravers.”

A silence fell on both of us, though not the silence that can only be felt by your hearing. A dark, depleted silence. One that left you frozen in place, like every sense inside of you had been wiped out.

Ravers… he had found it in a ravers’ den?

A scream broke my lips. Before I realized what I was doing I picked up the bodyguard by the throat and thrusted him to my face.

When he saw me all his bravery slipped away. He stared back, his brown eyes wide and now filling with fear.

“Where!” I snarled before shaking him hard. “Where’s the ravers’ den?”

The bodyguard’s eyes shut; his broken legs dangling underneath him. I was holding him up off the ground. I growled and shook him again, trying to keep him from passing out.

Then Elish’s hand came into my vision. I saw him grab onto the bodyguard’s neck and a moment later I heard an electric snap reverberate off of my own hands.

With the electricity the bodyguard opened his eyes, sweat dripping down his already badly burnt face.

“They’re dead, it doesn’t matter.”

“Where – are – they!” Elish bellowed. His hand snapped around the man’s throat.

“Fine, go find their bones in the ravers’ shit,” the bodyguard said through gasping breaths. “Cobbleton Motel. If you follow the road we were on, you’ll find it.”

Cobbleton? The townspeople in Mantis had cleared that out over a week ago.

There was a burning glint in Elish’s eyes that mirrored my own, overflowing with an adrenaline that told me he was thinking the exact same thing I was. I felt my body become encompassed in static-like energy. One that coursed through me, bringing a feeling I felt unable to control.

That darkness that covered my eyes, and filled my body with a black energy like I had felt in the greyrifts. The one drawn from the torture I had endured under Nero’s hand. It commanded me to hurt; it commanded me to draw blood. It rushed into me, pushing bloodthirst in and forcing my sanity out.

I screamed and like an over-fueled engine my body suddenly became alive. Before I had time to stop myself I grabbed onto the merchant’s head and pulled it from Elish’s grasp. But I didn’t stop there; I could never stop there. It wasn’t in my nature, it wasn’t in my makeup. Stopping this madness wasn’t a language the darkness inside of me spoke.

Elish’s hands slipped down to the man’s underarms, and he held them steady so the bodyguard was standing upright. I held onto the man’s head and with a shuddered breath, like the quickened gasps before an orgasm – I started to twist.

The cracking of his neck bones reverberated through my own hands, tickling and massaging the dark, macabre feelings I had come to embrace. A rush of pleasure, no longer just bordering on sexual, flowed through me like greywine, and as I ripped the bodyguard’s head off of his body with a rough jerk of my hands, I felt like I was going to climax.

Blood started squirting through the neck, tightening it like a corkscrew before the blood spilled onto me and Elish. Then suddenly the skin broke away and the twisting became easier. I wrenched it back and forth and heard a maniac laugh roll from my lips.

I gave the head one last hard twist, severing the spine from the skull, and watched the blood flow from the shredded stump.

My breath became short. I felt like my chest was twitching and tightening under this odd feeling. I watched with my mouth open, inhaling and exhaling, as Elish dropped the seizing corpse onto the ground.

Then something happened. Something I didn’t expect or see, and in the heat of the moment – didn’t understand.

Elish grabbed my chin and kissed me.

He kissed me.

Something stirred inside of me, a dangerous mixture of alcohol, bloodlust, and relief. It twisted and infiltrated my body and lit up my mind with such a brilliant light I found myself opening my mouth and accepting his lips. I didn’t know what was happening, but as we fell backwards onto the greywaste ground, our lips locked, kissing deeply, I had never fucking wanted this to continue so badly in my life.

Elish was on top of me, his hand slipping up my shirt. Everything was happening so fast my brain didn’t even have time to start screaming at me. It was too drowned in the whisky and too busy trying to slowly process just what the fuck was happening to the both of us. I was going by reflex and emotion alone – and that feeling was making me slip my hands down his pants.

My body wanted him in a way that, in the dark areas of my brain, scared me. Because I knew just how he would take me.

Then it wouldn’t just be Nero, it would be someone I trusted.

Reaver, what – the – fuck.

Before I could pull away, Elish pulled away first. He swore, his breathing as ragged as mine, before he got up.

I quickly scrambled to my feet, and as I felt the trance-like feelings start to drain from me I looked around the greywastes bewildered. Cold reality was a bitch. It snatched me from the warm lust ruling my mind and tossed me right back into the frozen jaws of reality.

I saw that Elish had the same surprised look on his face, but when I made eye contact with him it disappeared as quickly as it came.

“Let’s… never speak of that again,” Elish said. His voice was cold but he spoke the words too quickly. I knew then what had just happened had taken him off-guard too. “That is… our engineering is to blame for that. Let’s go and… throw that whisky away while you’re at it.”

My eyes looked around the broken up parking lot we were in, desperately seeking out a distraction so I didn’t have to talk to him. I spotted the merchant’s caravan and I walked over to it. My mind reminded me that it might have drugs and I accepted that as a good enough reason to raid their bags. I needed something to numb what Elish and I had just done.

Behind me I could hear chopping noises. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Elish hacking some meat off of the bodyguard. Dinner, I gathered.

I wiped my mouth and tried to swallow down the queasy pit in my stomach.

What the fuck, Reaver?

No, shut up. You get hot after you kill people and apparently so does Elish. It’s our engineering and you’re both bordering on drunk as well, so don’t make a deal about it.

It happened and it wasn’t important. I tried to push it out of my head and started going through bags, throwing the ammo I wanted into one of our knapsacks and any light food we could carry.

“Oh, thank the gods,” I murmured when I came across a small plastic container. I opened it up and found small baggies full of pills and powder. I dumped the entire container into the bag and also the one that held medical supplies.

I turned around as Elish put a large chunk of flesh into a sack. “He said follow the ro-” My drunken mind stopped talking as soon as Elish threw a pill at me. I caught it and looked at it before giving him an inquisitive look.

“It’s Intoxone, a Skyfall drug that will sober you up. I carry a supply for when my cicaro’s drunken antics start to become more annoying than amusing. Swallow it so we can start to sprint. I want to get to that motel before dark in case there are still ravers there,” Elish said.

I was briefly thankful he was using his regular cold voice with me. I didn’t want it to suddenly become weird between us. I wasn’t that type of person and I knew neither was he, but emotions were running high at this point.

I would take his lead and forget it ever happened… it was blood, alcohol, and engineering.

Killian is going to scream so loud Skyfall will hear it.

And Jade? Well, Jade is going to rip out both of our throats, that I’ll put money on.

Running helped us not have to think about it, so we ran, we didn’t just sprint, we ran. As Elish and I kept pace with each other I could feel the alcohol leave my system one hard step at a time and by the time we saw the cluster of structures in the distance, standing in grey ruins against the rocky terrain behind it, I was completely sober.

With the liquor gone my emotions came back. I was looking forward to stifling them with drugs because I was starting to feel a clench inside of my heart. And it wasn’t even about what happened between me and Elish… it was because I didn’t know what we were going to find in that motel.

The smell hit me like I had ran through an invisible wall of rancid meat, and as we ran closer I could see the outlines of heads on spikes and crucified arians. Soon the dirt underneath our boots was littered with chewed bones and half-buried trash, pounded into the ground by the ravers’ feet.

The motel had been a ravers’ pit, that much was obvious. Everything was putrid, half-rotten carcasses, shreds of soiled clothes, and the occasional pile of wood taken from buildings or black tree branches. The crucified men were rotting from their crosses, uneaten flesh hanging like curtains from their greasy bones, falling to the ground in a pile that was buzzing with black flies.

The entrance to the motel was open and exposed. The doors were gone and only a gaping hole that promised nothing but more grisly gore. Two crucified heads stared at us on either side of these doors, staring at us with vacant eyes and open mouths with a backdrop of spray-painted graffiti behind them.

But none of these were our boys. I looked over at Elish who was rolling a torso over with his fire poker.

“These bodies are over a week old,” I replied, and as the torso flopped onto its back, a cloud of black flies burst into the air, buzzing angrily at our disruption of their laying grounds. “And they’re not all eaten.”