The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 2 (The Fallocaust Series) (49 page)

I nodded, though a lot of what he was telling me I didn’t understand and I was too tired to search my memories for the answers.

So I followed him, tired and exhausted. Each step was painful and had been painful for days but I found my feet easily taking me towards the grey hill. I didn’t know what he was going to do to me in there but that was the last thought on my mind. He promised me comfort, food, a warm place to sleep. In my mind that was all that mattered and it was those promises alone that made me sprint to the door with my captor and friend.

Perish grinned and I saw a grey metal door in front of us, scorched black but still holding the same yellow sign we had seen when we were crossing the border.
Keep out, by order of Skytech
.

“Sky put that on, the last time he was here.” Perish brought out the same set of keys he used to unlatch my collar and slipped a key with a Sonic the Hedgehog cap on it into the lock. He turned it and laughed when it opened. “There we are… there we are, Killian. We’re here. We made it.”

Perish stepped in first and coughed into his hand. There was rustling before he clicked a flashlight on. He shined it down and I saw that this room was only the size of a closet, below my feet was a hatch with another lock on it. Spray painted on the hatch with pink paint were the letters
SPS
.

Perish closed the door until all that was lighting this musty underground room was the flashlight. I stepped away as he unlocked the hatch and started climbing down what looked like a ladder.

I hesitated but followed him; slowly I climbed down each cold rung, feeling the rust come off in my hands making me sneeze and cough.

My body jolted when my foot hit the floor. In the darkness I had had no idea if the floor was ten feet down or a hundred and ten. It appeared to be about twenty feet from the hill above us.

Perish took my hand and started walking with me through the darkness. I shone the flashlight around and saw we were in what I could only describe as an unfinished basement. Wall-to-wall concrete, dirty floors stained with oil and paint, and rows of dusty boxes and crates all stacked on top of each other.

There was another door. Perish dropped my hand and I stood beside it with the flashlight. The scientist walked into the darkness and I heard the sound of rusty hinges and him murmuring to himself.

Then there was light. I squinted my eyes and swept the room as two long florescent lights flickered on above us. In the distance I heard the roar of a generator and the vents above us kicking in.

“Wow, everything still works, can you believe it?” Perish chuckled smacking the dirt and dust away from his hands. “I managed an email out to Mantis back in Kreig. I wanted to make sure this place was functional and look… it is. My old lab. I spent so much time here.”

“Who’s Mantis?” I coughed again into my jacket. Perish opened the door he had left me beside and laughed again as he looked inside. He looked… giddy. I don’t think I had ever seen him so happy.

“He’s a friend of mine, a dear friend of mine. Wow, come look… it’s dusty, but it’s mine.”

I peeked my head in and was struck by just what I was seeing.

A hallway leading to a large living room, the furniture covered in sheets, further back I could see a clear glass separating the farthest wall. Behind that wall I saw lab equipment, machines I didn’t recognise, white walls… an entire laboratory just behind the living room.

And a kitchen off to the left, and bathrooms, and bedrooms. I walked in and tried to take it all in, feeling my nose burn and my heart jump just from the sheer relief that I was out of the greywastes.

Perish walked ahead of me, his boots leaving trails on the carpet underneath my feet. He opened up a glass door that led to the lab portion of the apartment and looked inside. “Everything is here. Mantis updated everything. Okay, well, we don’t have much water just enough for drinking and one bath. We don’t have a hot water tank either, it’s tapped dry… there is next to no drinkable water in the plaguelands unless you filter it but, well, Mantis again.”

I stayed in the living room and tried to pull on a sheet that was covering a couch but I didn’t have the energy. Instead I just sat down on it and watched Perish as he disappeared into the lab, before coming back with several huge blue containers. I could hear water swishing in them. He then lit the stove and put some water into a metal pot before sliding it onto the hot element.

The couch was comfortable even though I felt bad for the marks I was leaving on the sheets. I was filthy, but still it was a relief to have something soft under me, so I leaned against it and closed my eyes.

Without realizing it I fell asleep. I think it was a combination of both exhaustion and just feeling safe for the first time in months. I was finally indoors, in a place that had electricity, water, and safety from the elements. The slaves were also gone, it was just me and Perish now and there was a familiarity in that which comforted me.

I woke up sometime later to Perish softly shaking me awake. Immediately my eyes snapped open, confused as to where I was with the usual nightmares still driving shotgun in my mind.

“Shh, it’s okay, sweety. Wake up,” Perish whispered.

I looked at him and my eyes widened as I saw how much he had changed. When I had fallen asleep he had a thick beard, a dirty rugged face, and his duster and clothing were filthy and smelling of rot and sweat. He was a greywaster down to the gun on his back and the kill count under his belt.

But now… I recognised this man. I mean, I wasn’t crazy enough to have forgotten him, but… seeing how he looked now just solidified the connection between Perish Fallon and Dr. Perish Dekker. The man I had met on the streets of Donnely, he looked like him.

To my surprise I felt a smile come to my lips. He was a familiar face, a friendly face. It was like he had come here to rescue me. He was my tie to the life I had led before Mr. Fallon had taken me.

Dressed in a crisp lab coat, freshly shaven, clean and smelling like fragrant soap, Perish smiled with me, though I couldn’t understand the sadness in his eyes. He reached a hand up and traced my cheek before saying with the same smile. “Hey, lovely boy, you slept for quite a few hours. I got a lot done while you were resting. Want to take a nice bath? I only used a small amount of water; I saved the rest for you.”

I let him help me to my feet but when I took a step I stumbled. My bloodied and blistered feet had taken a turn for the worse. Or maybe the survival instinct inside of me, the one that kept me going in the greywastes, was gone. I didn’t need it anymore; I didn’t need to push myself to make it another mile… I could relax.

Perish helped me into a large blue bathroom with blue-grey tile, his hands gentle, and his touch soothing and slow as if not to spook me. He walked me over to the bathtub with several inches of steamy water and started to undress me.

There was a small shred of me left to feel uneasy with him undressed me like this but I was too worn-out and dazed to do more than just wish he wasn’t. Honestly, I didn’t care. He had seen me naked, he had sucked my dick and I had done the same to him, over and over again. If he was going to bend me over and fuck me, so be it, at least I was warm and in a nice environment. It would be a lot better than being raped in a burned-out building surrounded by slaves.

Perish removed all of my clothes. He swore when he took my boots off and took in a sharp inhale of breath. “Fuck, look at those. Don’t worry, Killian. I’ll wrap them for you before we go to sleep tonight. I have medication here too, the kind you always liked to take. It’s old but I remember Rea… I remember most of the pills you took were scavenged anyways.”

I looked down at my feet, feeling a sick knot inside of my stomach when he put my leg on the top of the ceramic tub. The back of my foot was rubbed raw to the point were there was an obvious groove from my shin to my heel. My toenails had turned black too from the radiation, and as I glanced at the sock Perish was holding I saw two of my toenails crusted into the grey fabric.

“It… it will be over soon,” Perish whispered to himself and with that self-resolution he took a deep breath and put the smile back on his face. He reached up and grabbed a bottle. I perked up when I saw it was pink, I loved that colour.

Perish squeezed the bottle into the bath water and handed it to me. “Okay, have a long bath. I’m going to get dinner ready.”

“Okay.” I looked down at the bottle and saw it was Mr. Bubble. I didn’t trust that big smile on Mr. Bubble’s face though so I turned the bottle around. “Thank you.”

Perish paused; he looked at me strangely before leaning down and kissing my cheek. “The fact that you’re thanking me after everything we’ve done to you says a lot in itself. Please, Killian just – trust me. I know what’s best for you; I know what’s best for both of us now.”

He turned to leave.

I looked up from the bottle and turned to him. “Are you going to kill me?”

Perish stopped in the doorway, he didn’t turn around. “W-wash up, Killian. It’ll be all over and done with soon. You did your part, you survived the journey here, leave the rest up to me and Sky.”

Chapter 57

Jade

Reaver walked ahead of us, Elish walked beside me. It seemed my master knew sooner than I did when a cluster headache was about to come. He caught me as soon as the pain ripped away my reality and near him I stayed until the worst of the pain had subsided.

There was nothing but guilt inside of me for being a burden on my master and my travelling companions. I had been doing everything I could to numb the pain that seemed to have taken permanent residence in my brain.

Elish had control over my drugs but he had been liberal with them since he had come and gotten me. I was hopped up on morphine and Dilaudids with a bit of Xanax. The Xanax didn’t help my headaches but it did help my mind calm down.

Reaver himself had been popping Xanax like they were candy, on Elish’s urging as well. Everyone including Elish had been walking on eggshells with him now, not just because he blew up a house with his store of radiation, but because he was even more on edge since Garrett had called us.

Lycos’s deception had gone deeper, deeper than Elish had known and in the end that stupid chimera and his husband might have Killian’s blood on their hands.

Because now we knew… Killian was in danger; Killian was with a bona fide psycho.

Reaver had been silent when he heard the news, but quickly he disappeared into the greywastes and didn’t return until we made camp to have our four hours of rest. When he eventually slinked back into our camp he was stained with blood and holding a dead baby urson cub in his arms.

The mother urson was too much effort to carry apparently, but the babies were good roasting size. We put it on the spit after Big Shot skinned it and had a good meal while Reaver drugged himself into a deep sleep from a mixture of Xanax and Oxycontin. Drugs and murdering things, that was Reaver’s way of coping with situations. Though that being said, what else could he do?

That evening I was sitting beside Elish. He was picking meat off of the shank of the urson cub and handing me pieces. Big Shot and Deek had collapsed beside the fire already asleep. Their preferred method of eating didn’t require cooking so they didn’t need to wait for it to be done.

“Remember potato fries?” I leaned my head on his shoulder and took a thick piece of meat from him. It tasted weird, it had an aftertaste that held the same stale, musty aroma that the irradiated bear seemed to carry with it, but it wasn’t altogether bad.

Elish handed me another piece. “Yes, I also remember tea, hot showers every morning, and not having to worry about the world ending again. I wish I could throttle Lycos’s neck right now for his stupid decisions.”

I swallowed down my foot and watched the fire crackle and snap. “He seemed really desperate to keep Reaver safe from Silas.”

To my surprise Elish shook his head. “No, not from Silas, from me. Lycos didn’t want me to have him; he wanted to pretend Reaver wasn’t the man I had engineered him to be. Lycos believed he could love the darkness out of him, while my approach was to train him to control that very darkness.”

Elish’s face hardened and I knew what he was thinking.

“You’re doing a good job,” I said supportively. “Sure he blew up a house but it could have been worse right? At least he hasn’t killed all of us.”

My master’s expression didn’t change, if anything the creases that appeared on his face whenever he was frowning, deepened. “Yes, though it still puts me in a difficult position. Though the dog and the half-raver are disposable, I would be rather annoyed if he killed you in an explosion. You might be immune to the radiation but once the radiation catches something on fire your skin will burn all the same.”

The entire world might change, our lives might change, and hell, even we might change… but if there was one thing that would always be the same it was Elish having to downplay his feelings for me.

But I knew him and I loved him even if he’d rather swallow a hot iron bar than admit he loved me in front of someone.