Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (6 page)

Soon the fire was going and the pot was starting to simmer. It smelled so delicious I wanted it more than anything. On top of that I saw one of the bags had many more cans inside and bags of things too. It looked like these greywasters had food and water and everything, even guns.

I wanted it… I needed it or else I was going to die of thirst.

At the mention of water I swallowed through my dry throat and wished I could move objects with my mind. I would move the white water pack right to my mouth and I’d drink as much as I wanted.

I looked at my own bucket and wondered if they would trade with me like Nan did sometimes, but even if I did trade I would only have one can of food and I’d be thirsty again tomorrow.

This is why people ate each other in the greywastes, because an arian human had enough meat on them to last someone like me for months, and they had blood I could drink too. If I could kill all of them then I could dry the meat like Nan did and eat like a king for an entire year I bet.

Then I paused and looked down at my bucket. I got a dangerous idea, so dangerous and bad it made me put my hand over my mouth to hide my smile.

It would be so bad… but I was bad. If I was evil and bad like everyone said then why couldn’t I do bad things? The bad guys in the books always did awful things to get what they wanted and they were always the ones with fancy underground lairs and cool super villain technology.

Okay, Sanguine… I mean Sami. Okay, Sami; you can do this!

I held onto the poison pellets and looked around where I was hiding. All around me were bricks from the half-fallen walls and most were crumbled into nothing. The only other thing was a few boards leaned up against an empty window, that was it.

I picked up a rock and weighed it in my hand. I peeked my head out of the half-fallen wall and spotted an area near the parking lot where there were a bunch of rusted out parked cars. These cars were in even worse shape because a bit of the second-storey wall had fallen onto them making its own roof over the parked vehicles.

I gripped the rock and waited until the greywaster man had his back turned. Then I quickly planned out a good route to the pot which was only about five of me’s in length away. Once I was confident I threw the rock as hard as I could towards the rusted out cars and the fallen wall.

The rock pinged against a car roof before pinging again on a wall, and settling between a car and a truck. As the man jerked towards it, I picked up a handful of the poison and watched intently.

The man grabbed his gun and was quiet as he listened; I was quiet too. My heart gave a pitter-patter as he started slowly walking towards the row of cars; his gun out and pointed at the cars.

As soon as he disappeared behind a heap of debris I made my move. I ran on my tippy toes towards the pot and dumped the poison inside, then, without even looking to see if he had seen me, I ran back to the apartment building but this time I went inside so I could hide better.

It was so dark inside of here but my night bright kicked in and I could see better. It smelled too like musty dry. It was so dry that the paint on all the walls had started peeling off like a sunburn and it was flaking on the ground. Even the floor had started warping and I had to watch where I stepped; in some places I started to sink so I ran quickly to the stairs.

The stairs had collapsed in some places but I jumped over it and finally got to the top. I was a bit scared though because some entire floors in the apartments had fallen through and it looked unstable and dangerous. Though I was light and I kept to the edges and didn’t touch the middle of the sinking hallway. I pretended it was made out of quick sand and I was Aladdin in the desert. Though instead of trying to get the genie lamp I was waiting for the desert nomads to die.

My hand found the knife I had stolen from the dead man I had slept next to. I was going to have to work fast to make sure their meat didn’t rot but if I worked real hard I could jerky them all. Too bad I didn’t have any salt but that was just for fancy jerky.

I walked into an apartment with a smashed open door and thankfully this one had a good-looking floor, just a bit of a dip but in that dip was a big television set that must be as heavy as me so if that TV hadn’t fallen through I should be good.

I walked in and stepped onto the dirty green carpet. I then shifted myself over a tipped over dresser and a couch that looked like it might’ve been used as a barricade. I hoped over everything and found a window to look out of.

The greywaster man hadn’t seen me! He was back at the pot now smoking a cigarette, though what was weird was that this cigarette had a blue tip to it instead of red. I was even more excited for them to die now, they had magic cigarettes!

Just seeing him smoke that made me want to try one again, even though it made me almost throw up. I think I would have one after for celebration if my plan worked.

So now I waited. I didn’t have anything to do so I looked around the apartment and to my surprise there was a kid’s room in this apartment! It was a blue room too so it belonged to a boy.

Immediately I found army men, a Conan the Barbarian action figure, and some McDonalds toys so I sat in that room and played Second Cold War which is what Nan said the big war was before King Silas killed everyone. I pretended Conan was King Silas and the army men were the Canadian soldiers and I had a Dr. Robotnick toy from Sonic and I pretended he was the president of the world. He died from being hit in the head by Conan-Silas. I didn’t know if that was what happened but I couldn’t find any weapons for Conan to hold so now that’s what happened.

I kept playing for hours and when I finally remembered I was supposed to watch the greywasters, the sun was way high in the air and shining down through the window now. I quickly put my favourite toys into the bucket and ran into the main area of the apartment.

They were still alive! Ugh! But the soup pot was empty at least and they were all relaxing by the fire talking amongst themselves. I was disappointed but I shouldn’t expect the poison to work right away like in movies; at least they all had some. I went back to playing with my toys this time going back and forth to check and see if they had dropped dead yet. Eventually they went out and about to scavenge but I stayed put since they had left their bags stashed behind a debris wall. If they didn’t come back by the next morning I’d go corpse hunting I guess. I had a good nose on me.

I played and read until it got dark. Once I made a nice bed for myself and settled in for sleep I checked on the greywasters one more time. They were all back and had some tins lined up on a median; they were all eating and I was disappointed to see they were still healthy. I had put a lot of poison pellets in it and they didn’t even look sick. My throat was aching with thirst it felt like it was on fire and I couldn’t open a tin because I didn’t want to make any noise.

I fell asleep on a bundle of clothes and blankets I had found inside the bedrooms. I didn’t like any of these floors so I stuck to the wall closest to the door. I wrapped myself up into a comfortable little nest and tried to ignore the pain inside of my throat.

In the middle of the night I was woken up with a start. It was the sound of gagging, high-pitched gagging. I jumped up and crawled to the window and looked out onto the parking lot.

They were all spread out with pools of wetness around them that looked shiny and purple. I held up my hand to shield my eyes from the fire light since it messed up my night bright and tried to see what was happening to them.

Wow, it was blood! One of the greywasters turned around and had blood streaming from all of his holes. His eyes were bleeding, his nose and mouth, and even his ears. I looked to another one keeled over and saw he even had blood on his pants! He was bleeding out of his butt!

I giggled and held my hands over my mouth. I jumped up and down on the spot; I was so excited, this was so great! My mouth watered just thinking about their warm blood and the real water too. There was still a fire I could make some steaks as I drained their blood into the bucket. I would have to find more buckets too to hold the blood I couldn’t drink. This was going to be all night and all day work but I was excited to start right now.

As they all started throwing up blood and writhing and dying like the ants I killed, I went over Nan’s recipe in my head: cut off all the fat or it will make it rancid and slice into thin strips, dust with salt if you have it and hang on a rack inside Nan’s outside oven made of bricks. Then store in a cool dry place.

I picked up Barry and put him on the windowsill so he could see; I balanced my chin on my hands and grinned as the greywasters started dying; blood dripping from their faces and into the pools of foamy red throw up.

I might like it out here.

When I entered the parking lot everyone was dead or close to being dead. The first thing I did was drink my fill of the water from the white plastic backpack, it tasted so good but I was smart enough to just drink a glass. I didn’t want to throw it up and I had blood to drink too.

I emptied my bucket and dragged one of the bodies towards the median they had put their cans on. It was hard work but I got his feet over the median and his upper half, but I wasn’t strong enough to get his entire body upside down. I got out my knife and I started sawing through the guy’s neck.

It was hard work, a lot harder than it looked like in the movies. I cut and cut and it took me a long time to get the head off but I did. And though the bucket was a bit tilted, I got his bleeding head stump in the bucket to drain.

I looked behind me at the other three and let out a tired sigh. I wanted to jerky all of them but I didn’t know if I could before the meat rotted. It was night time and just edging towards the cooler months but once the sun hit I knew I would be screwed.

With a forlorn sigh and a lot of annoyance I gave up on saving all of their blood and just spent the time cutting off everyone’s heads so they could drain into the parking lot. Even that was exhausting. I cut off some thigh meat and put it into a thin frying pan one of them had tied to their backpack, and sat down with a glass of blood and one of the blue cigarettes I had seem one of them smoke.

I lit the cigarette and took a small drag, not a big one like I had before that made me cough. I took a small one and smiled as the blue ember lit up.

This smoke tasted a lot smoother than the cigarettes I had found on the dried out man, and it made my head feel dizzy and light. When I was done I dug around and found a different pack of cigarettes, but this one had a red ember and the smoke that came off of it was green.

I smoked that cigarette and suddenly… I got lots of energy.

These smokes must have drugs in them, they were making my heart race and my body jolt around like I had drunken some of the merchant’s instant coffee. I took advantage of that and started gathering bricks from the apartment building behind me and making myself an oven out of them for the jerky drying. I worked the entire night smoking cigarettes and taking small breaks to eat and drink. By the time morning was on the horizon I had the first jerky strips in the oven and everyone drained. I knew I wouldn’t be able to jerky all of them before they rotted though.

Instead I got a brand-new idea. Since I was lonely and I only had my toys I could make new friends. Before I decided to sleep I moved the three bodies without their heads and propped them up around the fire. I put their heads on their laps so they could watch the fire burn and I even gave them back their cups they had used for drinking water.

When everyone was propped up with their heads in their laps I curled up by the fire and drew a blanket over me. I felt a little less lonely now that I had other people around. If I closed my eyes I could pretend they were the boys in the dorm room or even Nan.

I shut my eyes tight and let the fire warm my face. I settled in for a long nap, my stomach full of water and meat and my body aching and tired from my long night’s work. I slept with my new assault rifle beside me with plans to try it out tomorrow, and my brand-new friends watching me sleep.

Cory the greywaster

Cory wiped the sweat from his brow and looked around though his eyes were stinging. If he was smart he would just take off the duffle bag on his back and find something to tie over his forehead but he wanted to keep moving until he reached the small shanty town he had spotted in the distance. He needed some basement he could take a nap in, the sun might be grey and on most days, clouded, but it was still searing the greywastes with its heat.

Cory, a man in his early thirties, had been a nomad for over a year now since ravers had killed his family. Now he wandered from place to place doing odd jobs for a bed to sleep in or some food and water to keep him going. He hadn’t been to this particular town for over two years but he remembered that though it was in bad shape, it still had adequate shelter and a spring of water in the sewers underneath.

He shielded his eyes before taking a long drink of water; he put the water bottle back into his bag and continued on his long and lonesome journey.

Soon the structures came closer, the lonely apartment buildings still standing high as if they held a false hope that the world would be repaired, and many shops and businesses with their windows boarded up and their contents now gutted to feed the humans still walking the earth. This was the greywastes and this is what it had to offer.

Cory’s shuffling movements were the only sound here but he was used to that as he was used to talking to himself when the loneliness took him. Once he had a wife to talk to and a young son he had named Max, now only the ghosts of his old life kept him company and they rarely talked back.

He looked into a rusted out Volvo and scanned the inside for any suitcases or plastic bottles he could salvage but there was nothing; though he didn’t expect there to be anything since this place had been run through by greywasters too many times. This shanty town was too close to the big town, Chilko Lake, and only a few miles away from the main road the merchants used to get to Chilko. So though it may not see visitors often it did receive more than the shanty towns and neighbourhoods in the north and east directions. All abandon towns close to blocks or settlements had been almost picked clean of anything in canned form.

Though there was still water. The thought of that made Cory take another drink, he had Dek’ko tablets to make the water drinkable and Iodine pills to back up the radiation the water would undoubtedly be filled with. He was all set and looking forward to spending a couple days out in the open greywastes. Then if he found something worth selling, he could go back to Chilko and drink himself into a blissful stupor for a few days.

There weren’t many comforts in the greywastes but one could always count on booze and good drugs and since there wasn’t a woman to warm his bed those were the only things Cory had now.

The greywaster visually checked out the structures around him and noticed that several of them had collapsed since he had last been here. The wood seemed oddly preserved in the greywastes but the ones that were built with cheap materials seemed to be starting to crumble now. His grandmother used to tell him stories about what it was like when she was a girl, the radiation had just become tolerable by humans with the public release of the Geigerchip and there were riches everywhere in the greywastes. Thousands left Skyfall to find a free life in the greywastes, though what they found was something much different.

Cory paused as he saw a slumped over figure he hadn’t noticed before. His nose twitched as he got closer, smelling a faint whiff of rotting flesh.

A corpse wasn’t at all an uncommon thing to find but one that looked like it hadn’t been picked or eaten was a small treasure in the greywastes. Corpses meant the possibility of water, better clothing, weapons, cigarettes, and hopefully the right sized shoes.

With a quick glance around he cautiously approached the dead man. He reached into his jacket pockets but was dismayed to see everything was gone.

Almost everything.
Cory saw the rotting corpse had a bottle of red juice, possibly Kool-Aid. Though sugar was hard to find to sweeten it even the sour fruity taste was a welcome change from irradiated water.

Cory cracked open the bottle and smelled it. He took a taste of the warm liquid and felt his lips pucker. Yep, that was Kool-Aid alright, cherry flavour though it was sour cherry now. Cory drank it happily and started taking off the man’s jacket. His jacket had gotten ripped at the sleeve and back by a scaver he had killed for food a few days ago and this one looked like it was in better condition.

He put the jacket on and zipped it up before stuffing his old one into his backpack. Then he pulled off the man’s shoes but was disappointed to see his were in better condition. Still though he could get a bottle of bathtub whisky for the pair so he tied the laces around his backpack and started carrying on down the cracked paved road.

Too bad the dead greywaster was rotten but, well, what are you going to do? If he had only been a day or two earlier he could’ve had himself a good meal. Hell, if it was winter he would’ve had months of food he could’ve kept frozen.

But such is the greywastes.

Cory checked out a few more buildings before stopping to take another drink of the red water. Though to his surprise… he was starting to get a bit dizzy.

The greywaster sat down and wiped his sweaty brow with his jacket sleeve. He blinked hard and took a longer drink, copping up the dizziness to dehydration.

But it started to get worse. Cory slid down the median so he was sitting on the ground and grimaced. He looked around before stumbling to his feet but he wasn’t standing for long. A moment later the water bottle fell from his hands and after one more stumbled step – Cory fell to the ground too.

The first thing Cory was aware of when he started to come to was that he had a pounding headache; the second thing was that he was unable to move.

The third was the heavy smell of rot; so strong it seemed to crawl up your nose and ravage one’s brain.

Cory opened his eyes and looked around to see where he was but everything was a blur. An anxious chill went through him when he realized he was bound and tethered inside somewhere, though he must still be in the shanty town.

“Hello?” Cory croaked. As his senses started to come back to him the distinct and stifling smell of rot got stronger. He squinted his eyes to focus them but as the room came into view he wished that he had been struck blind.

All around Cory were dead bodies in various stages of decomposition; they had all been propped up against pieces of furniture in a shoddy semicircle focused on the center of a child’s bedroom which held different toys. Each one of them was green and black with rot and some even moving with maggots and buzzing with flies. It was a horrific sight which momentarily struck the greywaster dumb.

“Hi!”

Cory jolted and looked to the source of the voice. He was surprised to see a small child with shoulder length black hair in the doorway, wearing sunglasses and a kerchief that covered his mouth. The child couldn’t have been older than eight, though children’s ages were hard to tell in the greywastes since most were on the verge of starving.

“Why am I bound?” Cory demanded. He looked behind the young boy, his face lined with fear and his eyes wide. “I want to speak with your mother or father; why do they have me tied? Why the fuck are there bodies everywhere?”

The boy put his hands behind his back and shifted from side to side. “Can you read?”

Cory stared at him; he wanted to snap at the boy for dodging his question but he had to remember where he was and that he was bound and unable to move. If the parents were listening in on this conversation they wouldn’t take kindly on him scaring the boy.

“I grew up in Blackbay near Skyfall I can read fine…” Cory said slowly; he blew a puff of air to try and get a buzzing fly away from his face. “Now I answered your question, boy; you can answer mine.”

The boy jumped up and down and ran past him, stepping on a ripe pair of fingers from one of the corpses which sent an even stronger smell of rot into the air. Cory cringed as the squished fingers started to leak rotting black fluid onto the ground; wondering if he was going to be the next corpse.

“I’d like to speak to your parents,” Cory demanded. “I want to know why I was drugged and brought here. Boy? I’m talking to you,” Cory raised his voice as the boy with the sunglasses and kerchief over his mouth turned around with a book in his hand.

“I don’t have any parents.” The boy’s tone suddenly became sad. “I’m here alone.”

The boy is here alone?
Cory looked out the window and from the looks of the structures in the distance he had to be on the second-storey. This gave the greywaster a small shred of hope that he could get out of this alive.

“You drugged that Kool-Aid didn’t you?” Cory said slowly.

The boy nodded and laid the small novel down on Cory’s lap. Cory struggled to try and see if he could get out of his binds to snatch the kid but he was tied up tight. From the looks of the corpses around them, propped up like he was, no one had been able to break the boy’s binds.

“Yeah, I did… someone a few months ago had this drug that made this girl he was travelling with act all sloppy and stupid and then she passed out. He played with me for seven days before he died. The lady choked on her puke and died… she’s right there.” The boy pointed to a corpse with stringy brown hair and a pink tank top now stained with many layers of putrid liquid.

“P-play with you?” The horror was starting to burrow itself inside of Cory. What had once seemed like a plus having a child be his captor was quickly starting to turn in a different direction. This little boy seemed nuts, and why was his face covered?

The boy nodded. “Sometimes they can’t read so they tell me stories. Will you tell me stories?” He laid down on the middle of the dirty carpet where the toys Cory had spotted were, and picked up an action figure. He looked up and though he was wearing sunglasses Cory knew the boy was staring at him.

“How… how long have you been an orphan for?” Cory stammered. “How long have you been here for?”

The boy made his action figure walk over to a toy soldier, who promptly got stomped on by what Cory thought was a Conan the Barbarian figurine. He bashed the soldier a few times before looking towards one of the corpses, a younger-looking man who once had blond hair though it was rancid and matted with rot.

“How long have I been here for, Taylor?”

Cory stared at the kid as he was silent, looking intently at the dead blond-haired one.

“That’s right, many many months but I have been an orphan forever,” the boy replied, turning his head away from the corpse. It was like he was… pretending they were still alive.

The greywaster could only stare in shock. “And how old are you?”

The boy looked at the blond-haired one again. Cory noticed ‘Taylor’ was missing his left arm and his thigh looked like it had been carved off in places.

“I am seven.”

This kid… he’s lost it.
Cory’s own son had been five when he had been eaten and he knew the boy wouldn’t have lasted two nights in the greywastes, but this kid had been alone for an entire year?

Cory looked around at the corpses, four of them propped up and all focused towards the center of the room where the boy was laying down. In the depths of his fear and anxiety he felt a flicker of paternal feelings towards the kid. Being a father himself it strummed a different string in his heart to see this kid, obviously mad, all alone out here.

And undoubtedly lonely.

“Have you been… kidnapping greywasters and making them play with you?” Cory asked, his words coming slowly in hopes that the kid would give him an answer.

“Sometimes they don’t play and I starve them.” The boy’s forehead creased as he said this. “Other times I chop off their limbs and make jerky; I have lots of jerky I even found salt on three of my friends.” He pointed to another corpse but his eyes were still fixed on his toy. “He’s one of the salt-friends. His name is Diaz, the blond one is Taylor, the woman is Nina, and her husband is Charles. What’s your name?”

He’s referring to them in present tense now… wow.

“Cory…” Cory replied. He tried to make a personal connection with the boy; it might be his only chance. “What’s yours?”

“My friends call me Sami; my enemies call me Sanguine,” the boy replied. “I’ve never met a Cory before. I’m glad you can read, maybe after we can play army men.”

“If you can untie me, son, I can play with you.”

Sami paused and shook his head. He drew his kerchief down slightly and Cory could see a red scar that started down his ear went zig-zagged to his neck; then he held up his arm and the greywaster could see another patch of red from a less healed scar that still held a flaking scab. “I let Joshua go to play with me and he chased me around and swung a board at me, then he threatened to fuck me in the ass. I don’t know what that means though, do you?”

Cory stared at him; the boy stared back and his forehead creased again.

“Well?”

“I… uh, it means… kill you – he was going to kill you.”

“Ohh.” Sami nodded. He rested his chin on the dirty carpet and flicked away a beetle larva that had started crawling towards his toys. “That makes sense. I killed him and he’s dead outside now so I guess I fucked him in the ass. I killed him by ambushing him. I bit his neck.”