The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 2) (39 page)

Perish turned away from me, his jaw tight, but he didn’t say anything else.

My mood plummeted; I felt my throat clench and a burning behind my nose. I mumbled an excuse to go scout and started walking towards an alleyway.

I ignored Killian’s worried glances and walked away from the group. I knew they would be just fine. This place was empty.

When I was out of sight I leaned up against the decaying brick and lit a cigarette. I took several long drawn-out inhales before I carried on.

Fuck, I missed those two.

What I wouldn’t give to talk to them… I had been avoiding talking to Leo and Greyson my entire life. Now I’d give my left arm to just sit down and have a beer with them.

I swallowed the growing lump in my throat and started walking to the other side of the barren alleyway. Nothing blocking my way but a few fallen ventilation pipes.

I needed more drugs – that was all that was keeping me together right now.

“Hey, Reaver? I want to come with you.” My mouth twitched to the side as I heard Jade’s voice behind me. I sighed before I waved him over, not even turning around. The cicaro had been sulking and sad since his master had dumped him on me, barely saying a word unless spoken to.

At least I knew he would be quiet then.

I expected Killian to trail and then Perish, but I only heard the light footsteps of the cicaro. Killian and Perish would be fine, they had Deek with them who would alert them of anything, and I would be able to hear it.

Jade stood several paces behind me as we emerged from the alleyway and didn’t say another word. This knocked my opinion of the kid up a few pegs.

The road in front of us was empty; it was obvious this town had been evacuated. There were few rusted out vehicles and no army vehicles to be seen. Only the looming ghosts of dead structures that did nothing but remind me of how small we were in this town and how many things could be hiding from us.

The grass and plant life seemed to grow a little bit more around here too, which I think added to the decay of the town. Though still yellow it was thicker and stronger than greywaste grass. More of it had forced its way through the concrete than usual, making breaks in the pavement that reminded me of the broken patterns that lay at the bottom of dried lake beds.

I turned to my left and saw the broken remains of several shops. Their windows shattered with pieces of glass still sticking up like upside-down icicles, surrounded by plaster and the threads of a ripped up carpet. I clicked Jade over and started walking towards it.

“How are your eyes?” I asked him. I kicked a piece of the glass away with my boot and tested the raised platform behind the display window.

“Same as yours.” Jade tested the metal door handle, I could hear the rusted metal protest as he tried and pulled it. He looked into the store, and I saw his body stiffen. “Let’s go in, I need to talk to you about something.”

Oh great… he better not get all Killian on me. I might have judged him wrong.

Jade pushed the door the remainder of the way open and walked in. I followed him keeping my hand in reach of my M16.

I coughed and so did he, this place was coated in several layers of dust and ash, with a faint odor of must and dirty socks that seemed to stick in your throat.

I took an inhale of cigarette smoke to get rid of the taste and started quietly walking up and down the isles. This place I suspect had once been a corner store though not much remained. A lot of chewed up paper and plastic, radrat eaten I think. It covered almost all areas of the steel shelving, dripping down onto the shelf below in thick streamers.

I tried to unwedge a piece of the chewed up paper but with the dust and whatever dew had soaked into it, it was a solid mass. I lifted it up anyways and threw it on the floor. If needed be this would make excellent fire starter.

“Reaver, you know how I have that aura thing right?” Jade was behind me, I could hear him start to rummage through the mounds of paper. There was an odd metallic twanging noise that sounded whenever you wrenched a piece off of the metal rungs.

“Uh huh.” I kicked away a few more bits of paper and motioned for Jade to follow me. There was nothing here, just the remains of paper packaging and plastic. No food at all. I sprinted out of the building.

“I’ve been picking up things off… Reaver, stay still for fuck sakes, this is important.”

I jumped out of the store window display and started to sprint in the direction I knew Perish and Killian were going before ducking into another shop.

Jade growled at me but kept pace, unless he wanted to get left behind he had no choice. I didn’t want to get too far away from Killian. I was only giving myself a few minutes in each shop before I moved on; loitering would only lag us behind and then we’d lose the group.

“There is something seriously wrong with Perish.”

I stopped and turned around. I gave him the most ‘are you fucking retarded?’ look I could muster.

Jade’s yellow eyes were white in my night vision, almost transparent against his eyeballs. He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve been seeing things over the past two days in him. It seems to almost explode in my brain when he starts talking about our brothers, his research, and most importantly: King Silas.” Jade looked around the new shop we were in; an old restaurant with chewed up red benches and ripped out plastic tables.

His boots crunched against the plaster, the only noise besides his low-toned voice. “I’ve seen him… not just the Perish we know now, I think I am seeing glances of when he was normal. Just… hints of it.”

“So what? I’m sure he wasn’t born retarded.” I tried to shrug it off. I walked through the restaurant dining area towards the bar, kicking a fallen lamp over with my boot.

“
Elish was always smart, even when he was a baby. When he was four he could already play piano better than me,
” Jade recited. Perish had just said that a few minutes ago when we were talking. I still didn’t understand why that was a big deal though. When I didn’t give him the shocked reaction he so dearly wanted I heard his boots grind into the dirty floor as he followed me.

“Reaver… how old is Perish?”

“Sevent…
Ohh.
” And there it was, the realization. I felt like the idiot in that moment.

I turned around and leaned my hands against the bar. The kid had my interest now. “Perish says he’s seventy-one, but Elish is ninety, almost ninety-one. Basically Perish is lying about his age?”

Surprisingly the cicaro shook his head. He took a seat on a wooden bar stool and leaned his arms against the bar. “No, he isn’t lying, that’s the thing. Perish believes that’s how old he is. Someone, I’d give you one guess who, tampered with his memory. That’s what made him the way he is. I bet you anything the memories he lost was when he was normal.”

Jade let out a breath, he slid off of the bar stool. “Elish wanted me to use my abilities on Perish, but I think Elish already knew this information. They all must have, unless Silas made Perish disappear for twenty years after first gen was born. Even more since Perish would appear to be the age he is now.”

“So Elish wants you to dig in deeper and find out why Perish’s head was buggered with? Why Silas did all of this?”

Now it was the cicaro’s turn to look shocked. I started putting up bottles of vodka for us to share later, and also dug out a couple cans of maraschino cherries.

“You really think so?” Jade’s tone held an edge of surprise to it. I don’t know why, Elish was always up to something. For someone sick of Silas’s games he sure did enjoy playing his own.

I threw our findings into a bag and started leaving the bar, Jade trailing behind me with a troubled expression on his pale face.

“Elish was a part of the first generation… Elish, Garrett, Ellis, and Nero. If Perish is older than them… it means there was another generation before them? Why would Silas hide that from us? Elish taught me that Silas created the first generation on his own with the help of several scientists.”

I felt my jaw clench, there was no mistaking that I had reached my threshold for this conversation. Talking about my chimera brothers always fouled my mood. They were a group of maniacs whose life goal was to make my life miserable and the life of my partner.

I decided to cut the tendrils of curiosity before I made it worse.

“I really don’t care about all this chimera politics, I just want to find out how to kill the fuck and get Aras back. That’s really all I want, nothing more. I don’t want to be a part of this family.”

“Well, Elish wanted me to sniff around Perish’s mind for a reason.”

“Then have at it, it’s not my problem.”

I hopped through another bare window frame, the cicaro still following me. “So you’ll be fine if I keep trying to get information from his mind?”

I shrugged, not even bothering looking through this building, it looked like an auto shop. I jumped back out and started walking down the street. I wanted to meet back up with Killian and Perish now. I suppose we would be having energy bars, tact, and maraschino cherries for dinner tonight.

“You do what you need to do, bud. Like I said I just want to find out this information for our cause and get the hell out of here.”

I heard a crack as he opened a bottle of hooch and a shudder. “Alright, I’m going to do what I need to do to figure him out. That’s why I am here in the first place apparently.”

I turned around to grab the bottle from Jade when my face froze in shock.

Behind Jade was the most fucked up looking creature I had ever seen.

It looked like a human, but it was a monster. It had a large, jutted-out jaw and a wide, lipless mouth with two small holes for a nose. Its eyes were nothing but shiny black slits and it was covered in soft, almost scale-like grey skin.

It shuffled rapidly on all fours, its body swaying from side to side like a lizards; it was coming towards the two of us and fast.

I drew the M16’s scope up to my eye; the cicaro only a foot away from me.

“Jade, fucking don’t move,” I said making my voice an even level.

Jade’s mouth dropped open; he looked at me in shock. I aimed my gun at the swiftly approaching creature now only twelve feet away from us.

I pulled the trigger and braced myself for the kickback. I watched as the bullet whizzed past Jade’s shoulder and hit the creature right between the eyes just meters away from where we were standing.

I quickly turned around, scanning the buildings around us. I took several paces and swore, feeling the hair on my neck bristle. There was something off in the air; it was starting to smell strange. The same smell that had seeped into the first building I had looked in: stale rot, dirty socks and sweaty unwashed humans.

“Jesus fuck, I thought you were going to fucking kill me,” Jade gasped turning around and seeing the creature. “What the fuck is –”

“Big rule, Jade,” I snapped, my eyes trying to analyze every part of the overwhelmingly huge city around us. “Make sure there are none left and then ask stupid questions.” My head jerked as I saw a flicker of grey in one of the apartment buildings but it was just a tattered curtain.

I clenched my teeth and swore.

Jade held his AK 101 and started looking around as well, but a moment later he shook his head as if dismissing the idea that there were more and walked towards the dead one.

I hissed at him and my hand twitched to shoot a few inches away from his head just to show him how stupid he was for going near it, but I refrained. I gave one last survey of the area before jogging up to fetch my pet. Even with the silencer on my M16 the city’s building echo would give it away to the boys. Though in movies silencers were quiet little snaps of noise, in real life they still made a good racket.

“It’s like a lizard human,” Jade whispered shaking his head in awe. The lizard thing lay dead on the pavement in a pool of thick blood.

I pulled Jade away but my eyes were still fixed on it. I paused for a moment to take this creature in; I hadn’t seen something so fucked up since Perish’s splices.

There was no doubt it was lab-made, and well-made at that. Its veiny arms and legs were bent in an odd fashion, assumingly to be able to move fast on all fours, with unnaturally long fingers and toes like that of a frogs. All of this covered with tallowy-grey skin that showed off black veins like they were corpses.

Jade poked its lipless, mouth with the barrel of his gun. Its jaw slacked, revealing several rows of needle-sharp teeth imbedded in pinky green gums; its tongue was even pointed.

Then another noise, almost like sandpaper being scraped together.

I turned around quickly, sure enough, crawling out of one of the unboarded-up shop windows, was another one.

A snarl spilled from my lips. I aimed my gun and was about to fire it when Jade’s AK 101 went off in a different direction.

I sniped the one I saw first before turning to the cicaro, just in time to see another one of the lizard-humans stumbling forward – its right arm completely blown off. It started to scream and snarl as it twisted around on the ground, blood spraying from the arm stump like a hose. The human-like sound filled me with a grisly thrill but my attention was elsewhere. I had to warn Killian and Perish, they would be seeing them soon. I kept expecting to hear gunshots in their direction or the deacon dog’s howls.