The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series) (42 page)

He looked at me and then Perish. “Perish, just… put him out of his misery before he becomes a fucking raver. If his mind does that switch in the middle of the night and you’re not fast enough he could kill us all.”

Perish put a protective hand over my chest. “He’s too weak to become a raver; he’s going to die.”

“Either way, he’s toast. For fuck sakes, just have some mercy in you.” Danny coughed into his jacket. I saw blood speckles. “You’re almost at this lab, just let us go. Killian’s going to die out here; we all are.”

I’m going to die out here? My eyes widened and I took a step back. I searched Danny’s face like Perish had told me and felt a percussion of anxiety go through me. I squeezed Perish’s hand and bit my bottom lip. Was he right? Had Perish been right? Had it really been Danny who abused me?

Killian’s going to die out here.
What if he kills all of us? Perish was my only comfort, the only source of comfort I had. He had held me and… and I had recognised that touch.

His eyes had become blue but hadn’t they been black? A deceptive black, like coffee, such a dark rich brown.

Not blue.

But his mind had changed; his eyes had changed too, I guess.

“Killian isn’t leaving my side, never,” Perish said acerbically. He squeezed my hand back. “I’ll kill him tomorrow and we can have a good meal out of him.”

“And what about us?” Danny coughed again. “Come on, just… just let us go, man.”

Behind him Teejay had his hand on Edward’s shoulders, giving them a supportive rub. These strange slaves. Who had been trying to overpower us. Who had been trying to kill us.

Danny reached out to touch me but I shied away, my heart jumping to my throat. He withdrew his touch and stared at me. “Killian? Are you still in there?”

“Killian? Hello?”

“He’s fine,” Perish said. “Get Edward up; we have more ground to cover.”

Danny’s face darkened, the lines in his face prominent with the dirt that covered every crease and crevice. He took a step away from Perish before narrowing his eyes at me. I didn’t like that look, it made me move myself closer to Perish.

“Be careful, Killian,” he said before turning away from us and walking back to Edward and Teejay.

Perish tsked. “See, Killian? Did you watch his face? Look at how much hatred he has in him. Did you see that when he looked at you? When he told me he wanted to take you away? I could see it in his face, didn’t you see it?”

“Did you see it, Killian?”

I… I had. I had seen it.

Danny walked away from us, his worn shoes revealing large purple sores on his heels, bleeding and weeping fluid onto the ground. He may have been weak, but…

Danny turned around and I shrunk back. He made eye contact with Perish and said to him in a dead raspy voice,
“I’m going to fuck him, as soon as I kill you, Perish.”

“Perry!” I cried. I turned around and Perish held me tight to him.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” Perish whispered.

Hadn’t he seen it? Hadn’t he heard him? I had… hadn’t I?

Hadn’t I?

I let out a sob, though to my horror Danny’s voice sounded again in my head.

“Killian, are you still in there? We’re going to fuck you tonight, all three of us. We’ll fuck you, and then we’ll eat you. I bet you’ll taste nice.”
The tones of his voice struck my brain like a sonic boom, blasting away what remainders of my mind I still held. They hit me in quick succession, one after another, pounding against me, pounding against me.

“It’s okay, I won’t let them hurt you,” Perish soothed. “I’ll protect you, everyone might want to hurt you but I won’t, okay?”

“Okay,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes tight as Danny’s threats spread like a virus through my mind. “Promise?”

“Of course, sweety.”

That night I slept in Perish’s arms and he held me tight against him. He put his arms around me and drew me close, and I slept smelling his shirt and his neck. My own bandaged hand was on his side and the other bent underneath me so I could use it as a pillow. In my head were the nightmares that had become more my reality than the objects around me, but whenever I woke up I was with him, so I think I was okay.

I think I was okay because when I woke up he shushed me and kissed me until I fell back asleep. He called me Silas in the middle of the night, but I didn’t mind. Sky came out at night; I was used to that now. He had stopped being cruel to me at least.

No… that was Danny.

Wasn’t it?

There were no more Geigerchips going off, no more buzzing hornets underneath my skin to keep me up. Maybe I had ripped it out of my own flesh, I wasn’t sure. There weren’t many memories my mind let me keep, just the present hell I was now in.

“My feet hurt,” I said quietly to Perish the next day. I had asked Perish if we could walk behind the slaves now, I didn’t want my back to them.

“We’re almost there, love.” Perish beamed at me. He seemed to have a lightness to him this morning, I think it was because we were getting closer to our destination but I wasn’t sure. He had pointed out a slab of metal a few hours ago that was nothing but a melted, deformed pool. Perish had said this place had once been a city but it had melted.

“I can rest then?” I massaged my throat as it cracked; my bare skin was so chapped and red.

Perish’s face turned into a frown; he looked in front of him then lowered his voice. “If we make it… I think the slaves want to kill you soon.”

I froze and Perish stopped. “W-what? They do?”

Perish nodded, his face heavy with concern. “Didn’t you see how Danny was looking at you this morning? They can’t stop looking at you, Killian.” He leaned down and I felt his hot breath against my ear. “They’re trying to decide who gets to break you in first. No one wants blood and someone else’s cum. It’s going to happen soon, they’re going to kill me and fuck you, Killian.”

“No!” I choked. I wrenched my bandaged hand away from Perish’s and shook my head back and forth. I stumbled away but my legs became like rubber. I fell to my knees, still shaking my head. “No, they won’t… that’s….” My eyes closed. I was so confused; I didn’t know what was happening anymore, or what to believe.

I looked at my hands, grey from dirt with brown circles from where my fingernails had bled through. “I… I’m…”

“Get up, Killian. We’ll be there soon,” Perish said soothingly. “I’m sure I can overpower them, but it only takes one to kill me. Then you’ll be theirs to pass around.”

“You just can’t trust anyone anymore, Killian.”

“Just me, you can only trust me. Everyone else is out to deceive you, out to betray you.”

“Not me though, Killian, not me.”

Bodies in the water,

Bodies in the basement.

Killi bee bee bee.

I raised my head, still no tears, no liquid, no nothing. I raised my head and saw the slaves all staring at me, their eyes fixed on me and their faces blank. They were like canvases, blank canvases, but they had all once been painted on, before someone had took a scraper to their faces.

Now we were all empty, all blank.

Perish brought me to my feet and kissed my cheek. I didn’t move until he pulled on my hand, encouraging me to walk like I was a stray bosen.

I let him lead me and I followed, my bandages wet and squishing between my toes. I scanned where we were walking and said to Perish, “Are we close?”

Perish turned around and nodded. The terrain was slowly changing, though not really the terrain, what we were walking on had changed.

Melted metal was now underneath our feet, lumps of it like what remained of a toy soldier after you put it in the microwave. When I brushed aside the dirt I could see it, warped and deformed and holding ash in its wrinkly crevices. It was surrounding us, some disguised as hills from the wind sweeping the ash onto it, others completely invisible until you walked past it. This place had once been engulfed in a fire so hot the city had bowed to it. How could a fire be this hot? How could it do so much damage?

“It took twenty years to cool. Sky had somehow rigged it to burn after he was gone,” Perish said to me in a subdued voice. “It took twenty years for Silas to accept that Sky had really died.” He looked ahead, to the metal sculptures and broken roads and dropped his voice. “He would go in there, and burn himself so badly I would have to put him out of his pain. Then once he resurrected he would go back in, picking up boiling hot metal with his bare hands, burning himself alive in the heavy duty equipment he would salvage. But he was gone… Sky had died, I knew he had. The last act he had entrusted me to do, so I knew – my brother was dead.”

“Why?” I asked him. “Why did Sky want to die?”

Perish’s face tightened and I saw a glisten in his eye, a shred of humanity I hadn’t seen in a long time.

“Because Sky knew he was a bad person and he hated himself for it. He was cruel to Silas, the man who loved him more than anything, and he was tired of hurting him. Even though Silas took his abuse and loved him all the same… Sky couldn’t stand the man he had become. He explained this to me and after years of watching him slip into his own insanity I finally agreed to help him kill himself. We found a way, and we did it.”

Then like an old engine starting, my mind turned over and I remembered something from long ago.

“But you removed his O.L.S?” I asked. “You wanted to keep some of his memories?”

Perish nodded. “Greg removed our brain pieces and put them into his invention. Our O.L.S’s held both our memories and our abilities. He removed mine so I wouldn’t know how Sky died, so Silas could never have that information.”

“And Sky? Why did Sky have his removed?”

“Because I couldn’t let go of him. I told him it was the only way I’d agree to do it,” Perish answered. “I loved that man. He was my twin; it was our jobs to protect each other, to make the right decisions when the other was no longer capable of doing it.”

A hand rested on my head and a soft stroke of my hair, or what remained of my hair. I had ripped most of it out and the radiation was going to take the rest, just like the slaves.

Slaves…

I looked ahead at the corpses, walking slowly ahead of us, hunched over with their weeping wounds spread all over their body.

“And why are we going to the lab?” I whispered. “What are you doing to me?”

Perish continued to rub my hair, soothing long strokes like he was touching expensive fabric. Up and down, soft and loving. Painting images on me, both body and soul, that I knew would follow me until the end of my days.

“Oh, Killi Cat, my Killi Cat… it will all be over soon, I promise.”

“I promise, Killian.”

“It will all be over soon.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry for what Sky made me do but we had an agreement, an agreement.”

“But I love you.”

“I love you, Killian.”

Chapter 53

Reaver

I often wondered if he was scared. I often wondered if he had lost hope. By now it had been months since I had seen him. Months since I had held him on my lap as we watched the town of Mariano through the window.

If I had known that would be the last time I held him, the last time I would lay down with him until he fell asleep – I would have treasured every moment. I would have –

My life was full of regrets now, and if I wasn’t filling that dark void with the toxic substance that was me second-guessing my decisions, it was torturing me with the images of my boyfriend, alone with Perish.

What was I going to find when I found Killian? In what state would my boyfriend be in? He hadn’t even had a proper amount of time to recover from Silas’s mental games before all of this happened. We didn’t have long at all in the greyrifts apartment and then all of this happened. Killian was going to be a wreck… what if I couldn’t get him back this time?

This thought brought a frown to my lips. No, I was overthinking this again, I needed Killian to be alive, that was it. That was the only thing I should be hoping for, that Killian was alive. Everything else I could handle, death was final for a mortal, death was the only thing I didn’t know how to fix.

I looked behind me and saw Elish walking beside Jade and Deek. The pet was riding on top of the dog, Elish’s hands steadying him by holding onto the canvas vest Killian had made for the dog long ago.

Jade was slumped over, his face creased in pain and his heartbeat racing.

Elish had a hand on Jade’s shoulder, rubbing it in a caring manner the chimera reserved only for his pet. The blond chimera and the man I saw as a friend hadn’t left his pet’s side. Just like I would’ve never left Killian’s side if it was him I had found with the ravers. I didn’t think any different of Elish for showing this side to me, in a way I felt honored that the cold chimera was this comfortable around me now.

Though perhaps, like me, he didn’t care what side we showed each other. It wasn’t about us; it was about the boys we loved. And I understood that, which is why I was patient with Jade’s weakened state. Though I wasn’t too nice about it in the beginning after I took a couple days to cool off from my adventure with the ravers, I had become a bit more understanding.