8.

They passed by the end of the road and split apart. Santi, Chloe, and Hana broke off from the group and started to head North. The countryside was nothing more than wilted and dead vegetation with little to see besides barren fields. The interstate was nothing but abandoned cars and skeletons. They pushed up further and further away from Homebase and toward where Daniel’s relay team had been wiped out.

The beatles could have killed them. That was always a concern when working far away from the succor of high ranking fighters. Or it could have been the Apostate covering it up. Santi liked to think it was most likely the Apostate. If it had been the new enemy, they wouldn’t have tried to cover it up with the beatles. There would have been heads on pikes and fires and bloodshed up and down the interstate corridor.

That didn’t preclude the warlord and her bloodlusted cursed warriors weren’t in the region. They just hadn’t found anything to kill and parade around,yet.

The first hour was spent in a leisurely jog as they headed closer and closer to the mountains that separated California from Nevada. The towns grew thin and scattered as they kept moving further up. At the second hour mark, Chloe finally broke the silence.

“Delilah seemed pretty interested in you,” her voice was neutral, no hint of her mood as they moved.

“Yeah.” Santi was treading dangerous water.

“She’s pretty.”

“You think so?”

“I do. Don’t you?”

“Was busy being cursed and whatnot. Didn’t really look. You should ask her out if you think she’s pretty,” Santi threw it back at her. Chloe looked at him with a shocked face.

“You’d be ok with me asking someone out?”

“You’re your own person.”

“Ok. Then I’ll ask out the person I want to ask out.”

“Good.”

“It’s you.”

“Even better,” Santi could feel a bit of a smile break on his face.

“That a yes?”

“Enthusiastic, yes.”

“What’s our first date?” Chloe asked. They had never broken their stride but Hana had pulled ahead of them to give them a semblance of privacy.

“You asked me out. It’s on you.” Santi was smiling widely now as Chloe was looking at him with a bit of mischief in her eyes. She was enjoying the back and forth.

“Well, I’ll have to think about it then.”

“You ask me out and don’t even know where you want to take me? I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.”

“Oh, I’m quite serious about this. Not exactly like I can take you out for a Friday night dinner and movie combo.”

“I always thought that was a flawed date. It should be movie and then dinner,” Santi said, glad to have something to talk about while they moved.

“Why’s that?”

“You have something to talk about during dinner. You can get to know a person by how they think about a movie.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes. I took my movies very seriously.”

“I would have never thought you were a movie bro.” Chloe looked a mixed of perplexed and disturbed as if she didn’t understand how she could have missed something like that.

“What about you? What did you like to do before, well, this?” Santi didn’t know her well, didn’t know any of them really. For the last months they had been living in a state of constant fighting and killing, living on the edge of survival.

“I like movies myself. Primarily horror and romcoms.”

“Really? That’s a fun combo.”

“Not going to say anything about it?”

“What would I say about it?”

“That it’s girly or cliched or something like that.”

“I love romcoms. They’re hilarious and easy to watch. Makes me happy watching them.”

“Figured you’d watch some deep, indie movies with hidden depths.”

“Oh,no. I’m an idiot. Can’t figure out the hidden depths of things if they’re staring me right in the eye. I like action movies, comedies, and anything else that’s entertaining.”

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

“If we had any type of electricity I’d have to take you up on watching a romcom.”

“I would have loved to watch romcoms with you,” Santi smiled at her and felt for the first time in a long time, light and free. The heavy depths he had been swimming in seemed to, for a few moments at least, have lightened.

“Hey, I see something coming up? Smoke.” Hana spoke up and Santi turned to look toward the horizon. There was a thin tendril of smoke rising and Santi felt the depths pull him back down as his heartfelt smile slid away.

“Alright. Hana, can you go and take a peak without being seen?”

“I hope so, otherwise I’m in the wrong line of work,” Hana said. Her camouflage wrapped around her and she disappeared from sight.

“Just me or does she seem more communicative without Daniel around?” Santi asked Chloe.

“I think she feels a bit disrespected by that question. You wouldn't have asked Daniel that would you?”

“Probably not. I’m used to him being a sneaky fuck though. She’s just become a sneaky fuck though. Class wise anyway.”

“Trust her to do her job. Should we stay here, or keep moving up?”

“Let’s push a bit further up. Stay on the interstate though.”

They moved slowly, giving Hana time to look without encroaching on her. The smoke was miles away, but with their ground eating stride it wouldn’t take long to reach it. The two companions shared a silence, broken at times by discrete looks at each other as the new shared closeness seemed to alleviate a bit of the tension that had been there.

They went for another mile before stopping, the smoke clearly from a large fire with how thick it was. It was a multitude of plumes all intermingling together as they raced upward, forming one giant pillar.

Santi tried to rack his brain if they’re had been a town or camping ground in that direction but he couldn’t remember. If he was lucky it was the horde of cursed warriors. He could slip in amongst them, kill Mercy, and then be free of the curse in only a few hours. He had a feeling they were catching the tail end of something.

Hana came back two hours later. She was a bit wan, green around the gills as she walked up to them. Santi waited as she leaned back against the guardrail, hands on her knees as she looked up to them.

“There’s nothing living up there,” she reported. Santi started toward the fires. Whatever had spooked Hana was something he needed to see. The last few miles flew by as he hit his full speed, having left the two women at the mile marker as Chloe had passed on seeing what it was that had Hana so shaken.

He came up to it and was taken aback. It had been a trailer home. Or at least it had started off that way. It had spilled out of its confines, fifth wheels, camping trailers, tents, and any other type of semi-movable housing deployed all around.

Gas stations and convenience stores were posted around the edge of the community. A few more permanent houses had been placed around with small fences marking out their territory.

Corpses littered the ground. Partial bodies, broken limbs, blood and gore painting every inch of the ground. The trailers burned, some already smoking ruins while others were still ablaze. The small house was nothing more than a charnel, the picket fence standing unstained in a mimicry of normal life.

Santi walked the edge of the perimeter of the slaughter. He tried to understand what he was seeing. This had obviously been an encampment of some size and likely some power. They had managed to stay safe against the animals and monsters out here. It hadn’t been enough.

Santi could see the burnt remnants of where skills and spells had splashed against concrete or a building. The feel of spent mana was in the air, the hints of crazed pain and lust that called to his own curse. Mercy had come and paid a call. The prisoner had said she had done the same thing to his home. Join or die and then burn down the town.

Santi could see how she would roll through Homebase and its environs. There were a hundred or more Acolyte warriors in the warband, more than enough to slaughter what few fighters of strength Homebase had outside of Santi’s team. He’d have to thin the horde, trimming the fat from them like he had with cyclops rift.

His heart beat a flutter at that thought. Of the continuous skirmishes, fighting and killing in a contest of a few vs. him. He’d revel in it, his speed and strength greater than theirs, his heart singing as he spilt the blood of his foes like water during the rain.

Santi stilled and focused on his will. The strength that had let him come back from the original timeline. To see the world whole again even when he knew it was ending. He purged himself of the desire to kill and fight. It took time but as the bloodlust wore off he could feel the effects of the curse more strongly.

It was an aura that drifted and rose with the smoke, that glittered in the coagulating blood, sitting on the corpses of the dead. No longer lost in its heady aroma, he could feel how it was different. It was no longer suffused but a separate entity that sat ugly and bloated.

Santi walked away, circling around the town as he searched for tracks. The ground was dry and hard, holding little in the way of footprints. The passage of so many was impossible to miss. He found where they had come from the Northwest and where they had left heading Northeast. Blood drops on the ground showed their path, heading toward the mountains.

Santi followed for a ways, traveling with ease as he searched for where they could have stopped or if there was any who had been left behind. He needed more accurate answers than what the single prisoner had given him.

For a mile he went further up, stopping in the shade of a copse of trees. He drank a bit of water, but other than that there was little for him to do. He’d go back and get Hana and Chloe and chase after the group, trailing them as they went further towards the mountain.

“I see you’ve managed to get yourself cursed,” Duncan’s voice rang from his left. Santi whirled, blade extending to slice apart a thick tree. No blood flowed, though the tree slowly toppled over, crashing to the ground with a thunderous boom.

“While not polite, I do understand. Now that you’re no longer enraged, may I come out? Or are you going to try to kill me?” the shadows reverberated and pulsed and even with [Air Current] Santi couldn’t tell where he was. It wasn’t like with Daniel who simply cloaked himself in the shadow. The Apostate was one with the shadows, a much higher affinity than whatever Daniel had.

“No promises. You did kidnap my sister.”

“You cut off my arm. I think that’s fair enough.”

“And my father?”

“I had no part in that. Abraham committed that crime and he paid for it with his life.”

“Why are you talking to me and not trying to kill me?”

“I can ask you the same. You’re reasonably intelligent and much more powerful than I gave you credit for. You can understand what a curse of this magnitude, spreading in the way it is, can be viewed as a greater threat than our little grudge?”

“I wouldn’t call what we have little,” Santi said dryly, still searching for wherever it was that the assassin was hiding.

“It is compared to what a curse like the one spreading can do. It’ll eat this area dry. Killing and growing like a plague. We need to break it and neither of us have the numbers to do it alone.”

“I’d think I could do a decent job of it.”

“This is why I said you were reasonably intelligent.”

“The old enemy of my enemy is my friend gambit. Then we go back to killing each other when Mercy is killed?”

“Is that the leader’s name? Mercy?” the shadows chortled, a dry sound of amusement. Santi could picture that laugh in a conference room talking about the sales figures for a quarter. Not the laugh of a man who had tried to sell the world out.

“I thought it was a bit apt too.” Santi allowed a smile to brush past his lips. He was cold inside, ready to move at a moment's notice.

“There’s a few killers left. I’ll give them to you in exchange for helping me purge the curse. You’re already planning on doing it, might as well coordinate so it’s done right,” Duncan continued after his laughing fit passed.

“Alright. Come out, I promise not to kill you immediately.” The promise of the last of the traitors was too sweet to dismiss out of hand.