He could see the light, just out of reach, far enough away that he could dream of touching it, but he would never make it. His throat was burning, a pain so great that there was no room for anything in his mind.
He wasn’t thinking about moving, he was a body driven purely by instinct. Some animal part of his mind understood that the table meant survival. It meant he would be able to walk out of there, and not die to the bleeders.
In his hand he had a knife, and across his left arm, there were a myriad of scratches including a deep one, just shallow enough to have not cut the vein. The other scratches were far deeper, and had at this point already scabbed up.
It took a little less than half of a minute, but in his mind, it felt like an eternity, and then he was pulling himself up from the ground, groping around blindly for the needle, the needle that could take away my pain.
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Olivia ushered me into her medical tent, where on the bunk next to me an unconscious man sat. I assumed it was the other person Muramasa had spoken about. I nodded at the man and asked, “What happened to him?”
“He broke his arm. I had to put him under so I would be able to realign it. He’s sleeping off the rest of the meds right now. How about you?” She asked, handing me a small white pill. I popped it into my mouth and swallowed it effortlessly.
She raised an eyebrow and I shrugged. “I’ve been taking painkillers pretty much every single day for the last eight years. I have a stash at home, something called Darlimus. I don’t know if it’s damaging my body, or anything like that, all I care about is that it doesn’t hurt anymore.”
Olivia cocked a brow, and said, “Well, it must be some sort of nerve damage or chronic pain. Where does it hurt?”
“My throat. Constant never ending pain. I remember how it happened. I was in a building, it was a stupid mistake, but there was a bunch of barrels of gasoline, and I fired a bullet at a bleeder that was right in front of them. I missed, and hit the barrels. There was an eruption of fire, it knocked me out, but I think I got some fire in the back of my throat.”
She raised both eyebrows this time and said, “You breathed in fire, and survived? Now I know how you managed to fight Muramasa. You’re the luckiest man alive.”
“Not lucky enough apparently. You still shot me.” I grinned trying to make a joke, but apparently, it was still something that haunted Olivia, because she sat down on the bed with the big man and started to cry.
I was immediately standing, and then I felt randomly woozy, and I sat back down again, this time holding my temples with both hands. Olivia saw this and smiled through her tears, then said, “I didn’t know you were still yourself. When you came back and you killed those Screechers, it was the first time in two days I’d felt something other than fear. I was hopeful. And then I thought you turned. And I thought you were going to attack me! Or Zack. And- and I panicked. And I’m sorry, I’ve spent the last ten years regretting that decision every single day…”
“Olivia, you have nothing to apologize for. I know why you did what you did, and you never need to apologize to me again. I will do what I promised you I would. I will protect you.” Olivia stood up, and went to hug Robin, but he lifted up his hand. “But I won’t love you.”
Olivia jerked backwards as if slapped, and he stood up, not so much threateningly as resignedly. “You burned that bridge years ago. Not when you left because you didn’t want to sit around waiting for the letter that told you I was dead, but when you left me for dead with that house collapsing all around me.” I pulled up one of the corners of my shirt, and showed her a large blotchy red scar. “That was from when the roof collapsed on top of me, and a piece of rebar went through my stomach. I can’t trust someone who did that to me. At least not enough to love them.”
I stood up, and pulled my shirt back down. “So thank you for the medicine. Now I have to find a way to kill the horde of Bleeders around this building without a loss of life.”
I moved to open the tent flap when Olivia grabbed my wrist and said, “What happened to you? I don’t remember you being this angry, this… this…” She struggled to find the right word.
I bent down, and put my face right in front of hers. “Dangerous?” I asked.
“No. Broken. You were never this broken, even after everything your father did… your mother did. You were whole. You were scratched admittedly, but you were whole. What happened that could have broken you after all of that?”
“You happened.” I hissed. “I fought my way across half the world to find you, I murdered people to get to you. Not in the heat of battle, not accidentally, I planned it out. I slaughtered innocents. Because I believed that you were worth protecting. I still do. But worth loving, no. I won’t do that to myself again. You, you broke me Olivia. Something that even my drunkard bastard father couldn’t do. My failure of a mother. They couldn’t break me. And you did. Congratulations.”
I wrenched my wrist from her hands, and walked outside, where on the side of the tent, Zack stood waiting. I started walking quickly out of there, getting away from him. From her. But he chased me and when he caught up he asked, “Why do you hate her? What did she do to you?”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
I turned to look at him and laughed. “I don’t hate her kid. I love her.”
“So why all that then?” He gestured to the tent. “Why did you do that to her, if you love her?”
“How much did you hear?”
“Uh, the part where you said, dangerous.”
“Go ask your mother. I’m not the person who should be having this conversation with you. She did this, and she should explain it.” I turned away, and started heading for the fire escape.
“You didn’t answer my question, you know. I don’t know if that’s a trick of yours or something, but it didn’t work.” I smiled, then quickly wiped it off my face as I turned to look at him. “You really want to know why all of that was necessary? Because I can’t love her. Because if I love her, I can’t save her.”
“Why not?”
“Because then I’ll be the man she sees when she looks at me. And maybe I want to be that man. But I can’t. Because if you and your mother are going to live, I’m going to have to do things that, if she still thought I was that man, would break her. And I can’t do that to her.”
The kid contemplated this for a moment then said, “She’s stronger than you think.”
I turned away. “No one’s that strong.”
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Inside the tent, the big man had woken up, and he saw Olivia sitting on his bed crying. “Hey, Olivia… What’s wrong?”
She looked up in surprise. “I wasn’t… Nothing.” She dried the tears off her face, then said to him, “How do you feel John?”
“Crappy. But I’m alive. That’s what matters isn’t it. I’ll get better.” He smiled.
Olivia laughed, a sound like a songbird. Her brown hair fluttered as the wind came through the tent, and then settled down again. John smiled. “I haven’t seen you laugh in years. Did you remember something? Did something good happen?”
Olivia’s smile faded slowly, and she said, “That depends. What do you think is good?”
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I sat down on the wall, my eyes focused on the horde below us, who seemed to have forgotten why they were here, though they still hung around, their mouths open wide, blood dripping down their bodies. A never ending sea of blood.
I growled to myself and pulled out my unstrung bow, and then looked at Zack. “Hey kid. Do you have any string? Or rope. Rope would work too.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, we got a bunch of rope. Why?”
I put my bow down next to me and swung my legs off the edge of the building. “Can I have some? Like a foot of rope should do the trick.”
The kid shrugged again and went off, coming back a minute later with a coil of rope in his hand. I grabbed it from him and pulled out my knife, grabbing the rope and holding it in my hand for a moment, then isolating a single strand to work with, and pulling it out. I slowly unwound it, going around and around the main body of the rope, until the smaller rope popped loose, and I plugged it into my bow. It snapped immediately, drawing a line of blood just under my eye.
I cursed and reached into one of the multitude of pockets on my shirt pulling out a pair of sunglasses, then going at it again. This time I wound two of the smaller ropes together, and then tried. It held for about a second, but when I tried to pull back on the string it snapped in my hands, once again drawing a line of blood across my face.
I skipped three and went straight to four, which allowed me to pull it back somewhat, but as soon as I tried to pull the full draw it snapped, striking the glasses lens and leaving a crack like a bullet hole. I jerked back in surprise, and then shrugged, and went to six ropes. It held, but I could see it snapping, so I added another two. By now the string was far too thick for the end’s of the arrows to fit around, but I’d fought with unideal odds before, and this was going to be far more simple than fighting my way across the entire country, with nothing but a PVC pipe.
Like so many of the people here, I’d been forged in fire. I was made in the heat of the apocalypse, the man I was before was simply a mold, the material that made me was the thoughts I kept to myself. The talents that I exhibited, even from such an early age.
When I was about ten, I took a martial arts class, I think it was Karate, but on the first class I had, they were doing sparring, and since we were brand new we were given the option to either try it out, or sit on the sidelines and watch. I elected to try it, and so I went with one of the more experienced people there. He was fifteen, and had been training there since the age of seven.
I only knew a single move at the time. The basic punch. But as he coached me gently, he showed me a move, and immediately after that, I taught myself how to do one of the moves that the black belts were doing. I thoroughly beat the boy. He became one of my best friends, even after the apocalypse. He was dead now, the man who had taught me how to fight was gone.
But I remember his face in the first class, and I remember the face of the instructor. After that I went with someone who was more experienced. And so on. I beat everyone there until I got to the black belts.
To be fair, I didn’t stand a chance, but I still put up a fight. I lost of course, these were men who had been training their entire life. BUt from that day on, every class we had, I would go up to the man who I had lost to, and I would fight him again. And again. Until I could beat him. And then I moved on.
It got to the point where I elected to not do sparring when I went into tournaments on account of the fact that I would win any fight I went into, until I became a black belt. It took me four years. Four years to go from the first belt, until I was a master. And then I did sparring.
I decided to have some fun and not use my hands to block or attack, and only used my legs. Even with that limitation, it wasn’t much of a contest. So the judges put me up into the next bracket. I won every fight.
From the day I was born to the moment that I saw the dead walk, I knew I wasn’t normal. I knew I didn’t fit into the mold the world made. I made my own mold, one that fit me perfectly, and then I went from the child I was at the beginning of this apocalypse, to the monster I would become.
And now, if I wanted to survive, it was time to unleash the monster. Release the chains that held him back. With my bow in hand, I turned to Zack who had been watching me this entire time and said, “Tell your mother if I’m not back in two hours, to leave.”
He frowned and said, “Where are you going?”
“To do what I do best.” I smiled at him, and unbeknownst to me, the blood that had been dripping down from the multiple cuts on my face, fell onto my teeth painting one side fully red, the color of blood. I did see him pale, even before I said, “Kill.” I turned away, and with one final deep breath, I leapt from the roof of the building.