Twisted World: A Broken World Novel (13 page)

There I dropped her on the bed, and when her head flopped to the side for the second time, there was something about it that hit me as wrong. I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around the situation, though. People didn’t sleep this soundly. Not without drugs of some kind. Only, there were no drugs in this house. I knew because I’d torn the place apart looking for any credits that might have been hidden away by my parents. And I seriously doubted that Mom had left the apartment so she could buy some. She was way too freaked out to risk going out there. But what other explanation could there be? Nothing that I could think of.

I closed my eyes and exhaled. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I muttered as I headed out of the room, shutting the door behind me.

In my own room I stripped, leaving my dress on the floor when I crawled under the covers. The bed was warm and inviting, and my body heavy with the need to sleep. But my brain was humming. Thinking about my new job, coworkers, and most of all Donaghy. The fighter. The convict. The person who had saved me and had a scar just like my father’s. For some reason, I couldn’t get him out of my head.

M
y guards were
on my ass to walk faster the whole way back to the Regulator’s house, and even though I was so tired I could barely lift my feet, I kept my pace slow. The last thing I was going to do was give these assholes what they wanted.

The walk was kind of nice, too. Atlanta was silent but active. The apartments we passed hummed with life even though there was really no audible noise. I couldn’t explain it, really. I just knew that there was a peacefulness to this city that didn’t exist in DC.

There it was never silent. The population was restless. Waiting. Like everyone slept with one eye open, either looking for their chance to get out or expecting someone to try and slit their throat in the night. Almost an entire year I spent there, and not once did I wake up feeling rested.

Here, though, it was different. And it wasn’t just because of my temporary room in that mansion. This was a real city. It may have been depressing at times, and it was definitely oppressed by this shit show of a government that had sprung up, but the people here had a fighting chance.

We made it back to the Regulator’s house, which was silent and slightly cold compared to the rest of the city, and the second I set foot inside I was ready to crawl into bed. Here I had it slightly better than my guards, which was something special. They had to curl up on mats outside my door while I got a real bed. Usually, it would be the other way around. Me sleeping on the floor while they got cots.

“Up the stairs,” the younger of the guards said through a yawn. “And you better sleep in again. I’m dead tired.”

I didn’t miss how bloodshot his eyes had looked when he picked me up at Dragon’s, or how vacant his companion’s were. The older man hadn’t said a word since we left the bar. Whatever he was on must have been some strong shit.

I trudged up the stairs, not because these assholes wanted me to, but because now that I was in the house, I couldn’t stop thinking about how soft that damn bed was. Honestly, I could have died in it and been happy.

The creak of hinges made me pause at the top of the staircase, and I held my breath when footsteps pounded down the hall in my direction.

“Jackson?” The booming voice was familiar, but in my tired state it took me a moment to figure out where I’d heard it. This morning when I was in the kitchen, this asshole and the dude who had sounded like he was talking out of his nose had discussed some serious shit.

The memories were enough to wake me up.

“No,” I said, the word almost getting caught in my throat.

The man came into view, and the second I saw him I almost busted out laughing. His voice might have been deep, but he was small. Almost a foot shorter than me and probably not much taller than Meg. His shoulders were broad and he carried himself like he owned the world, but I knew without a doubt that I could take him down with one punch to the gut.

He stopped in front of me and the light from downstairs was just bright enough to illuminate his face. His son resembled him a lot, although younger and a hell of a lot bigger. They had the same good looks that would make most women spread their legs without a second thought, and an air of importance that probably made men follow them with no questions asked.

“You must be the fighter.” He blinked while he searched for my name. “Donaghy?”

I cleared my throat. “Yeah.”

The Regulator stuck his hand out. “Good to meet you. My son told me about what happened in the bar. Horrible business. I have a mind to shut the whole entertainment district down, but you wouldn’t believe what a resistance I’ve gotten to that idea. It’s a damn shame.”

I stared at his outstretched hand for a second too long and his eyes clouded over. Like his son, this man gave off a creepy vibe, only it wasn’t as intense as Jackson’s.

“Thanks,” I said when I finally took his hand in mine. “I appreciate the room.” My tone came out less enthusiastic than I wanted, but the Regulator didn’t seem to care.

“Anytime.” He dropped my hand and looked past me, past my guards and down the stairs. “I thought you were my son.”

“Haven’t seen him,” I said even though he wasn’t asking me where Jackson was.

The Regulator nodded twice, his eyes still looking past me. When he waved to the hall at his back, everything about him was dismissive. “I’m sure you’re tired.”

“Yeah,” I said, moving past the small man with my fists clenched. “Thanks.”

The Regulator didn’t answer, but I didn’t give a shit.

Staggered and shuffling footsteps followed me to my room, and before I’d even had a chance to open the door, both of my guards had plopped down on their mats. Briefly I considered giving the older one a kick in the gut as payback for this morning. He probably wouldn’t even remember it in the morning. Instead, though, I turned toward my room.

I froze when the sound of the front door opening cut through the silence in the house. My own door was cracked, allowing me to hear it a second later, the Regulator’s deep voice echoed up to me.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Out,” Jackson snapped at his father.

“Don’t raise your voice to me,” the Regulator said.

His son sighed. “I’m not trying to fight. It’s late. I’m tired and I had a shitty night.”

“Fine.” Footsteps moved through the house, getting closer. “I met the convict you brought to my house. Honestly, Jackson, I know why you thought it was a good idea, but it wasn’t. His guards are so wasted he could plow right over them, then slit our throats while we slept. You need to think things through a little better in the future.”

“Shit. I forgot the asshole was here.” The footsteps stopped. “Well, he can go back to Dragon’s tomorrow. I’m starting to think this whole thing with Meg has been a waste of time.”

“The girl isn’t cooperating?” The Regulator’s voice was as cold and hard as stone.

“I know you think we need her name, but I don’t know if it’s as important as you think it is. She isn’t even related by blood, and I’m starting to think she isn’t going to cooperate anyway.” Jackson blew out a deep breath. “Tonight she made it pretty clear that she doesn’t want me, and I think there may be someone else.”

Something inside me tightened. Meg. They were talking about Meg again. What the hell did she have to do with anything, and what exactly did this prick have planned for her?

“We have to get her to see how much she
needs
you, that’s all. It has to hit home just how bad her circumstances really are. And how much worse they can get.”

“Exactly how are we going to do that?” Jackson asked. “Things are shitty enough. After the last couple weeks, I expected her to be begging me for help at this point, but she hasn’t asked once.”

A crack echoed through the house, like the Regulator had slapped his son on the back, and a second later the footsteps started up again. “You leave that to me. I know exactly what to do. She’ll come around. There are very few people in this world who will hold onto their pride in the face of starvation and death.”

“If you say so.” Jackson’s voice was doubtful, but not upset at the prospect of Meg facing whatever the Regulator was referring to.

The footsteps drew closer, so I backed into my room, shutting the door carefully behind me.

At first listen, the conversation sounded like a normal father son talk about unrequited feelings, but I knew better. Something was up. I wasn’t sure what had happened between Meg and Jackson tonight, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the conversation I’d overheard this morning. When I replayed it in my mind, the uneasiness in me grew. Something was off about that man, but he wouldn’t hurt Meg. Right? What would be the point? Sure she was well connected, and he’d said something about needing her, but she couldn’t be anyone that important. She was too young and obviously broke. She should have been nobody.

Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was about to happen. As long as I was here, I’d have to keep an eye on her.

T
he sun was barely
over the horizon and I was dragging my feet thanks to my late night. Even half asleep the memory of everything that had happened over the last two days flipped constantly through my mind.

Donaghy’s blue eyes flashed through my mind, and my stupid heart did a little dance. The fighter was a nice distraction, which I more than needed at this point in my life, but that was all. The tattoos on his back, and the sweat that beaded on his muscled chest after a victory against the zombies, his—

“Holy shit, Meg, you need to get a grip,” I whispered to myself as I pulled my work jumpsuit out of the locker.

The last thing I needed right now was the complication a schoolgirl crush would bring to my life.

“James!” My boss’s voice echoed through the room.

I jumped and spun around to face him, my jumpsuit still in my hands and Donaghy still swimming through my mind.

Hanson scratched his round belly as his brown eyes moved over me, almost like he was trying to size me up. His thin hair was plastered to his sweaty scalp, moist and dark and so sparse he might as well shave it off.

The corner of his mouth turned down just before he said, “Get some leather on.”

The jumpsuit turned to lead in my hands, becoming so heavy I had a hard time holding it up. “Leather?”

Hanson rolled his eyes like I was the dumbest person he’d ever spoken to. “You heard me. We got a weak spot and I need to send a crew out to fix it. You take the lead.”

He walked away before I’d had a chance to respond. Not that I would’ve had anything to say to that. Me take the lead? I was the newest person on the maintenance crew and he’d never sent me outside the walls before, let alone had me
lead
anything. It seemed like he would want to put someone more experienced in charge.

I was like a robot as I put my jumpsuit back in the locker, and the automatic movements continued when I headed for the office. The turn of events had my mind spinning in circles. Before Dad disappeared I’d had a cushy job that didn’t require much effort. It had paid just enough credits to give me a little extra spending money—being second in command behind Parvarti, Dad had made a good living. Even though I’ve known for the past couple years that I needed to get started on an apprenticeship, deciding what I wanted to do with my life hadn’t been as easy as I’d thought it would be—there weren’t a lot of options in a post-apocalyptic world—so I’d been dragging it out. Floating through life. I’d thought I had plenty of time to decide.

Then Dad disappeared and Mom stopped going to work, and I had to figure something else out. An apprenticeship at the CDC didn’t seem like a possibility anymore, not with Joshua gone, and the idea of working with Al and Parvarti had hurt too much. Plus, starting out at the bottom of a career like that didn’t pay as much as some of the dirtier jobs did. People who didn’t have the desire or aptitude to continue their training chose one of the many menial careers the settlement had to offer: maintenance, undertaker, or runner. They were all dirty and dangerous at times, but the majority of their duties were mindless. Of all the menial jobs in the settlement, the maintenance crew paid the best. Mostly because it is the least desirable.

So that’s what I did. Last week when I’d realized that I was reaching the end of the credits Dad had stashed away, and that Mom wasn’t going to come around anytime soon, I’d gone out and gotten a job on the maintenance crew.
Me
. Megan Hadley James, niece of the infamous Angus James, niece of the Judicial Officer, and best friend to the Regulator’s son. It didn’t seem real. The boss—that asshole Hanson—had looked at me like I was nuts when I’d told him who I was, but it was real nonetheless, and now I was about to be sent
out there
. Outside the wall that had kept me safe for the past twenty years. For all the times I’d imagined what it would be like to grow up in a world that had no walls, this was the last thing I thought I’d find myself doing.

Locating the leather wasn’t tough. There was a shelf in the office lined with jackets and pants, and I dug through them until I found some that would work. They were big on me, even over my other clothes, but that was to be expected. I had a feeling it wasn’t normal for them to send a twenty-year-old girl who was barely over five feet tall out to patch a hole. Especially one who had never set foot outside the walls before.

Why the hell had he picked me?

Once I was covered in leather, I headed out of the office. Already my skin was slick under the clothes and the sun was barely up. In the distance, an orange glow had begun to spread across the sky. Soon, it would light everything up, bringing with it a heat so intense that it would take my breath away and cover every inch of my body with sweat.

I found my boss by the truck. At his side stood four men dressed in leather, all of them towering over me. The expressions on the men’s faces told me that they didn’t understand what the hell was going on any more than I did.

The boss waved at me impatiently. “Let’s go! You move that slow out there and you’re going to be zombie chow.” Something flashed in his eyes that made me slow instead of walk faster. Almost like me becoming zombie chow was
exactly
what he had in mind.

“Shit,” the guy in front of him muttered as he turned and headed for the truck. “You put her in charge and we might as well kiss our asses goodbye.”

I moved faster even though inside my chest, my heart was beating to a rhythm that reminded me of the background music to a horror movie Jackson and I had watched last month. Something wasn’t right here.

“Why are you sending me out?” I asked when I stopped in front of Hanson.

He scratched his stomach while his eyes focused on a spot just above my head. “Always do. You’re new, but you gotta get your feet wet sometime.”

He had a bad poker face and he knew it. Funny thing was, he didn’t seem to give a shit. I couldn’t question him without getting canned, and we both knew I needed this job. Which put me in a
damned if I do, damned if I don’t
kind of situation.

I wanted to argue, but my head told me to keep my mouth shut. This man wasn’t interested in what I had to say.

When I turned away, I found the rest of my crew waiting at the truck. None of them looked very thrilled about what we were about to do.

“Who did you piss off?” the guy in the driver’s seat asked when I slid in next to him.

He was probably close to thirty, which meant he had been around ten when the virus hit and most likely had memories of the world as it was before. Even though every now and then I found myself longing for the past, most of the time I was glad I didn’t really know what I was missing.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

In the second row, the other two guys stared at me, the same question swimming in their eyes.

“You obviously pissed somebody off or you wouldn’t be here.” The driver lifted his eyebrows as he reached for the key already dangling from the ignition. He turned it, and when the engine roared to life, my stomach dropped. “My suggestion: figure out who it was and be sure you kiss their ass from now on unless you want to end up dead.”

Ice coated my body inside and out. “What do you mean?” I repeated. I should have been able to come up with something—anything—else to say, but I couldn’t. My brain wouldn’t focus on anything long enough to form another sentence.

All three of my crewmembers looked at me like I was nuts.

“He means,” the guy behind me said. His eyes were small and beady in his thin face, but they got even tinier when he narrowed them on me. “When they want to get rid of someone, there’s only one way. Zombies are the way. It’s always zombies.”

I exhaled and sat back when the implications of what he was saying slammed into me. Someone was trying to kill me. It was the thought that had been nagging at the back of my mind since Hanson told me to grab leather, but one I couldn’t really get a grasp on. It was ridiculous. I was nobody, and there was no reason—at least as far as I knew—to take me out. I was so insignificant that I could barely pay my rent. Really, the only thing I’d ever had going for me in this life was my last name, and that only got me so far. Usually the attention it gave me was awkward at best.

I was in the middle of mentally listing all the ways that I was nobody when the terrified expression in Al’s eyes came screaming back. A sudden shiver ran down my spine, shaking my body so much that the driver shot me a worried look as he slowed in front of the gate.

The note. This couldn’t be about the note, could it? No. That was nuts. A crazy old man had slipped it to me in the street. For all I knew, he was a member of The Church and he thought he was fulfilling some kind of prophecy. I hadn’t listened to many of their teachings, but now that Dad had disappeared, I had no doubt in my mind that a carving of him would eventually pop up next to the one of Angus. They probably thought it was some sign of the end of times or the second coming of my uncle. Who really knew what those nut jobs were thinking? Not me.

Still… The note was the only thing I could think of that might be connected to this. Jackson and I had argued last night, but we were friends. He wouldn’t let something happen to me just because of one little fight. He wasn’t his father.

I was gnawing on my lip as we drove through the gate, leaving the safety of the walls behind us. The outside had fascinated me for so long that even though fear had taken root in my stomach, I found myself leaning forward to get a better look. Up close, the houses were even more run-down than I’d thought. The ones closest to the wall had been picked apart, and what was left looked more like the skeleton of a house than an actual building. Windows and doors had been removed, and siding pulled off. Basically anything people could use to make the living conditions in New Atlanta better had been stripped away years ago. Inside these homes, I doubted there was a single piece of furniture left—and probably not many walls either.

The truck bounced down the road, the tires dipping into potholes and cracks left behind by years of weather and neglect. Weeds taller than me had sprung up in the middle of the street, and even a few trees, meaning we were constantly having to swerve to avoid them. My stomach rolled with every turn of the truck, but I wasn’t sure if it was from the movement or what I was about to face.

“What do we do out here?” I asked as the driver slowed so he could squeeze between a rusted out car and a tree.

“There’s a weak spot in the wall, so we have to fix it.” The driver looked my way and shook his head. “You know you’re not taking point on this, right?”

The laugh I let out was so high-pitched I sounded like a boy on the brink of puberty. “Don’t worry about that. I have no interest in getting us all killed.”

“You can take orders?” the driver asked.

“Like the best of them.”

All three men nodded.

When we pulled to a stop, my already uneasy stomach turned inside out. My moist skin heated up, making the leather cling to me. It squeaked with every move I made.

The guy behind me tapped on my shoulder and I turned to find him holding out a gun. His beady little eyes made me uneasy. “You can shoot, can’t you?”

“Of course.” I felt more secure the second my fingers were wrapped around the weapon. “My aunt is the Judicial Officer.”

Three pairs of eyes snapped my way.

“What?” The driver blinked at least ten times.

“The JO. Parvarti.” They just stared at me. Maybe they weren’t making the connection. It wasn’t like we held any kind family resemblance. “She’s not my real aunt. She was out there with my parents before they came to New Atlanta. Months on the road made them a family, so she’s like an aunt.”

The silence that followed was loaded and thick, and yet another shudder shook my body. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of my face while I waited for someone to say something.

“Who are you?” the driver finally asked.

“Megan James.” My name came out as a whisper, but it was loud enough to make my heart beat faster.

“Shit.” The blond guy in the back hadn’t spoken this entire time, but when he swore, it drew my attention his way. He didn’t say anything else, though. He just shook his head.

“Axl James was your father?” the driver asked.

“Yeah.” I looked back and forth between the three men, but they all looked away. “What?”

“Nothing.” The driver turned and shoved the door open. “We have work to do.”

They were hiding something from me. Just like Al had been yesterday when I showed him that note. But what? What did these people, and my Uncle, know about my Dad that they weren’t sharing?

I pushed the questions aside as I stepped out of the truck. Later. I’d ask later. Now, though, I needed to focus on what we were doing so my boss didn’t get his wish: Me ending up a zombie snack.

“You can cover us while we work?” the driver called as he lowered the tailgate and started pulling supplies out.

“Yeah.”

I put my back to them and tightened my grip on the gun. The wind blew, but it wasn’t refreshing. It was thick and humid and hotter than a damn oven. Thankfully, though, it wasn’t laced with the scent of death.