The Dead Saga (Book 3): Odium III Read online

  Nova grumbled something under her breath and slammed on the brakes. The truck skidded to an abrupt stop, and she dragged the handbrake on and jumped out of the truck. I followed her out, both of us marching to the rear of the truck, where the warbling was coming from.

  Nova opened the door and glared in. “SHUT UP! You shut up right now or I’ll leave you here. Do you understand you, crazy fuckin’ woman?”

  I raised an eyebrow at her back. I think Nova needed to take a good long look in the mirror at who was actually the crazy one here, since she was the one screeching like a banshee.

  Joan came further forward, her face leaving the shadows. She smiled down at us pleasantly. “Are we here?”

  “No, we are not, and you will not be making it back to our base if you don’t shut the hell up!” Nova continued to yell, her shoulders rising and falling with each panting heavy breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” Joan mumbled apologetically. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Both Nova and I exhaled loudly, the anger leaving us in one great big gust. She was just a lonely, crazy old bat who needed a friend, not us yelling at her. I felt pity for her, because who knew? Maybe I’d be just like her one day soon.

  “I’m glad that you’re sorry,” Nova said, and began to turn away.

  “I pooped,” Joan replied with a blink.

  “You what?” Nova and I replied together.

  “I pooped in the corner. Are we here?” Joan smiled at us again.

  Nova turned back to look at me in disbelief. “She shit in the truck.”

  I had no words.

  “Dude, she shit in my truck!” Nova pulled out her gun, flipping the safety off. “I’m shooting her.”

  I grabbed at her arm. “Do not shoot her!”

  Clearly Crazy Pants was back and Joan had checked out for the night. This wasn’t her fault—not that I wasn’t seriously pissed that she had crapped in the corner of the truck and possibly defiled everything, because I was.

  “Let’s set up camp for the night. We could all do with the break.” The smell from inside the truck wafted out to me and made me retch, and Nova glared at me even more.

  “Fine, I won’t kill her, but you’re cleaning the damn truck out,” Nova snapped and stomped away.

  I looked back at Joan. She was like a naughty puppy, playful and mischievous and with no idea of the damage she had created or the havoc that she was wreaking around her. She smiled and blinked, and then her nose scrunched up and she hastily climbed out of the back of the truck.

  “Something smells back there,” she said as she passed me.

  I ground my teeth together to stop myself from yelling at her. At the moment, the old me and the new me were fighting for supremacy. It would be easy to give in to the old me, but I really didn’t want to be that asshole anymore. Besides, Crazy Pants wouldn’t give a shit what I said anyway. So instead of cursing at her and saying all the horrible things I wanted to say, I took a deep breath, climbed into the back of the truck, and began searching for her crap.

  And it was, just as she had said, in the corner.

  *

  The baby made all sorts of noises that I couldn’t put words to. They weren’t exactly growls or hissing, or gurgling, but a combination of all of them. It didn’t seem to be rotting—not like a typical deader did—but by God, it stank. Between the demon baby and Crazy Pants, our little camp smelled bad and so did the truck, which was why we had all decided to sleep in the open. We had strung cans up around our camp to alert us of any deaders stumbling upon us, but in all honesty, the stench coming from the baby would automatically dismiss our location to deaders. They wouldn’t smell our humanness above the smell of death that clung to that thing.

  Still, first thing in the morning I was making at least Joan wash up in the small creek I could see on the map. I could and would get rid of her stench, even though I couldn’t get rid of the baby’s.

  Earlier we had tucked into another meal of ration packs and the rest of the deer I had killed back at the scrapyard. The meat of the deer was dry and chewy but it was better than slurping all of our food down from a packet. We needed more meat now, though—fresh meat—and Nova had promised that when daylight hit she’d do some hunting.

  She was great at it. She knew how to track and skin any animal, how to get the very most from every kill so that nothing went to waste. We hadn’t starved so far on this trip, mainly thanks to her, because other than my deer kill, I couldn’t see that I had done much to help with anything. Between me catching the flu and my newfound conscience, I had been pretty useless so far. My cold had abated a little with the help of the medicine Nova had found, but it was still there nonetheless. My head and muscles ached, my eyes stung, and my sinuses felt painfully swollen. I tried to ignore it and not mention how sick I felt after Nova’s nasty comments at the compound about how weak I was, but now that we were settling in for the night and the day’s adrenalin had worn off, I had to recognize how truly awful I felt.

  I was on first watch while everyone but the zombie baby slept—because of course that thing wasn’t sleeping. I stared at it for hours, its weird growls and stench getting in my head and making me feel haunted. The poor thing never stood a chance, and I think that was one of the things that I was struggling with the most. It was a monster, an abomination, but it should have been a sweet, chubby-cheeked baby. It was heartbreaking.

  I sneezed again, and my brain felt like it was clanging around inside my head. I needed to get back to base so I could rest properly, and I needed to keep rehydrating if I was going to flush out this nasty flu anytime soon. Which meant I needed to pee more often because I was drinking so much. It wasn’t just exhausting, it was hugely inconvenient.

  I rested my head back on the tree I was leaning against and listened carefully to the noises of the forest. It was pretty quiet, with just the wind in the trees. No owls hooted; clearly they had learned long ago that noise drew the deaders to them. Nova snored—loudly, I might add. Joan was surprisingly quiet, a welcome respite after today’s singing. Perhaps she wore herself out with all the singing, I thought, smirked to myself.

  Deacon’s breathing was even and calm, though I knew he wasn’t truly asleep. I knew he didn’t dare sleep for fear of what Nova would do to his dead spawn. Me, he somewhat trusted, but not Nova. And I couldn’t blame him. Something had snapped inside her since we arrived at her old compound and seen the destruction there, and of course Deacon and his dead baby hadn’t helped the situation. I understood why she’d changed, how she had adapted because of her warring emotions, but I was also surprised by it—by how broken she had allowed herself to be. Maybe that made me a judgmental asshole, but I was still surprised.

  I tried to let my thoughts drift to things of unimportance, but of course everything held importance these days. The simple things that we used to take for granted, the things we used to waste—all of them now meant so much to us. Every little thing from the past meant something. Just like Nova’s photograph of her family. Some things seemed useless, but they weren’t. Not really.

  Things could break us and make us in the blink of an eye. I wondered if that photo had broken Nova, if she could come back from this and be like the woman I had first met. I truly hoped so, because none of this was her fault, no matter how much she blamed herself for it. Only Rachael could be accountable for her actions, and that bitch was dead now, so I considered the slate clean.

  I thought of Mikey and Emily-Rose, wondering what they would be doing right then. Would Mikey be safely back from their scavenge mission yet? Would they be sleeping, curled up comfortably in their beds, the duvets wrapped tightly around their bodies to shield them from the cold? Or perhaps Mikey was on guard duty. Did he miss me? Did he miss the space I used to occupy in his bed? Because I missed him.

  I finally let myself feel the things I had been denying myself. I missed his warmth, and the way that his strong arms wrapped around me would force me closer to him, and the protection that he wanted to give to me r
egardless of whether I needed it. I loved his smell, the muskiness and sweat that always seemed to be on him. It was both manly and just plain Mikey. But most of all I missed his kisses. The way his full lips had owned me completely, making me forget to be a bitch and just become a woman again—a woman I had forgotten all about somewhere along the line. He made me feel complete. He made me feel feminine, and he took away the loneliness that had devoured me since this nightmare began.

  But I had let him go. I had let my own stubbornness get in the way of whatever it was that was developing between us. I had been scared and anxious, and had masked all of that with the pretense of protecting everyone at the base because of Michael’s threats. I had been a coward, to both my own heart and his. I could see that now, and I could finally admit my mistakes. I was an asshole.

  For not the first time in twenty-four hours, I found my eyes filling up and I rubbed at them to stop the tears from falling. I wanted to believe that my tears were just because of the flu that continued to lay heavily on me and make me feel even more exhausted and therefore weepy, but I knew that was a lie. I scoffed at myself. I hated this part of the new me—this teary-eyed wreck of a woman. It was pathetic. I was pathetic. It’s a good thing Mikey and I had split up, because we were never going to last anyway.

  My heart still panged for him, though, and the loss was acutely harder when I didn’t get to see him on a daily basis. It made me feel all the more weak and angry. Especially knowing Mikey had probably moved on to the next woman by now. Perhaps they were sharing his bed tonight, her keeping him warm and giving him the closeness he so desperately wanted—the one thing that I had found so hard. I bit down on my lip, sucking in a breath at that thought. But then I forced my chin up, refusing to be this pitiful sap that I seemed to become whenever I thought about Mikey. He made me weak. He made me believe that things would get better, that possibly I deserved better. But I didn’t, and things would always be like this.

  Mikey gave me false hope, and for that I wanted to hate him just as much as I cared for him. With his false hope he had set me free; he’d brought me back out into the world, kicking and screaming and fighting. I needed him to know how much I thought of him. How grateful I was for what he gave me without even realizing it. If I ever saw him again, I hoped I’d remember these things to tell him, because he deserved to know. No matter who he might be sharing his bed with now, he needed to know that he was right. And I was wrong.

  Now I just had to pray that both he and I made it back from our separate destinations to see one another again.

  SIXTEEN.

  Morning sun broke through the trees and woke me. Actually, the rain was what woke me—that and the nightmare of greedy hands tearing at my clothes to get to my warm skin underneath. I retched and sneezed as I woke, the feeling of thick fingers both imagined and not, still fresh in my mind. The rain pelted my face as it slipped between the leaves of the trees. It was icy cold and I gave a series of loud sneezes before I had even the chance to properly sit up.

  “A-tissue, a-tissue, we all fall down!” Joan chirped next to me.

  I righted myself. During the night that shall now only be called “The Night of Self-Loathing and Needing to Constantly Pee,” Nova had come to sit with me. She still seemed like she had a fire up her ass, but she at least seemed calmer than she had all day. She’d sat with me and smoked for a while before I’d finally decided to get some sleep myself. But instead of retreating to the now-aired-out truck to get some shut-eye, I’d stayed by her side.

  Maybe it was the way she had continued to glare at Deacon while he slept fitfully after exhaustion had finally sucked him under. Or maybe not. Because yeah, she was calmer, but her eyes still held their deadly intent. I trusted her less now than I had earlier. That realization made my heart hurt even more.

  Joan sat down next to me, her expression sad and thoughtful, and I was brought back to the present.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, stretching out my back.

  Joan shook her head miserably. “Sometimes it comes back to me.”

  “What does?” I realized that this was Joan talking now, not Crazy Pants. I had come to the conclusion at some point yesterday that she wasn’t totally crazy, but she also wasn’t quite there anymore. I think trauma had taken a lot of her mind, which I couldn’t blame her for. I was only surprised more people weren’t like her. She was two people, and had purposefully fractured herself to cope with this world, and would flip from persona to persona depending on the desperation of the situation.

  She was Crazy Pants who was stark raving bonkers and did whatever she pleased without worrying about the consequences. And then she was Joan, and this was the real her. She came in drips and drabs and mainly reminisced about the past, telling us tales of her husband and life before the infection. I somehow preferred Crazy Pants to Joan. At least Crazy Pants didn’t make me feel so depressed.

  I leaned in closer, breaching her personal space and getting nearer to her than I really wanted to. That sounds heartless, but she still smelled of actual shit, so judge me all you want. But still, the more compassionate side of me wanted to offer her what little comfort I could.

  “Everything.” She looked up at me, her expression distraught. “Everything comes back, Nina, and it hurts so much.”

  It was the first time she had used my name, and it sounded strange coming from her. Her eyes twinkled with unshed tears and I knew she was going to lean in for a hug. I braced myself for it—for the snot I could see starting to dribble from her nose, for the way her scent of shit and dirt would cling to my clothes. I opened my arms and waited for it because I was trying my hardest to not be a total bitch these days, and this would be an un-bitchy thing to do. She continued to stare at me for several moments, and just as I was about to tell her to give me a hug because I was feeling like an asshole with my arms opened wide like I was replicating some kind of biblical image, she stuck her tongue out at me and blew a raspberry. Spittle splattered my face, and I gagged as she stood up and moved off to squat behind a tree without another word.

  I blinked uncertainly until I heard her grunting loudly.

  “Oh for God’s sake!” I hissed and stood up on shaky legs.

  I looked around, not seeing Nova anywhere but finding Deacon sitting in the truck, his face looking down, still fixated on the baby in his arms. His mouth was a thin line of anger, frustration, and sadness. There was no way out of this shitty situation. I was trapped between a crazy woman who was endlessly shitting and a depressed man carrying around a zombie baby. I pinched the bridge of my nose, hoping for some relief, but the meaningless gesture brought me none.

  A crack to the left of me had me drawing my katana and turning, only to find Nova coming out of the trees.

  “Easy, tiger,” she said without emotion. She held up a snake and something furry that I couldn’t distinguish in her hands. “Breakfast.” She grinned.

  I forced out a smile. “I was sleeping and you left.”

  “I was close by. Besides, I gave Joan a signal to call me if there was trouble.” Nova squatted down and began to build a fire.

  “A signal?”

  “Yeah, a signal.”

  “Dude, that’s not cool. She doesn’t even know what day it is—you can’t rely on her to give you a signal. You should have woken me.” I forced my voice to stay calm and not raise in anger. But it was hard.

  Nova let out a frustrated breath. “You wanted meat, I brought you meat. Stop whining. Joan would have signaled me, trust her.”

  As if on cue, Joan came back from around the tree. I was unimpressed to see that she was sniffing her fingers.

  “Joan, what was the signal to call if there was danger?” Nova yelled to her while simultaneously looking at me obnoxiously.

  Joan stopped sniffing and looked at the ground for a moment before looking up with a smile. “I had to slide to the left, slide to the right, cha-cha-cha!”

  She even did the dance.

  I blinked at Nova, waiting to see
if this was the signal she had given, but after an awkward five seconds Nova burst out laughing.

  “Okay, okay, point taken!” She laughed harder and turned back to the fire. “She fuckin’ cha-cha’d.” She shook her head, her long, greasy red hair, dangling down her back in a matted ponytail, swayed from side to side.

  “It’s not funny,” I chuckled back. And it wasn’t funny. At all. I could have been eaten in my sleep! But hearing Nova laugh again, and seeing Joan cha-cha in the middle of the forest in this super tense weird ass situation was as bizarre as it was humorous, and I couldn’t help a small smile from slipping out. “Wake me up in future, okay?”

  “Okay,” Nova replied, still laughing. “I promise.”

  I walked over to the truck, stepping over the deader alert traps we had set and opened the door. The smell hit me like a brick to the face. The stench of death was getting stronger. Deacon’s eyes met mine with angry force, almost daring me to say something about the smell of death. His eyes were shadowed by dark rings underneath, and the whites of them were red from lack of sleep. A light sweat covered his pale brow, but he stared me down defiantly. I swallowed down the bile in my throat and tried to breathe through my mouth, but I knew it was no good. There was no way that Nova was getting in this truck with that thing. I blinked uneasily, not sure what to say. Luckily, he broke the tension first.

  “We’ll get in the back,” he said calmly, pre-empting what I was going to say to him but was struggling to find the words for.

  I nodded awkwardly. “I think that would be best.”

  I held his gaze, trying not to let my eyes drift down to the wriggling bundle he held, but it was impossible. He looked away first, and together we looked upon the face of death in his arms.

  The baby should have been a sweet, rosy-cheeked miracle, but instead its skin was gray and sallow, almost translucent in appearance, enabling us to see the dark lines of disease beneath its papery thin skin. Its hairless skull was misshapen, an odd angle to it, and its eyes stared back at me unblinking. Foggy and full of death, they were wide with hunger. It made the same noises it had been making all last night and yesterday, but upon seeing me it grew louder, as if it had grown accustomed to Deacon now, and knew that he was there to protect it. I, on the other hand, was food.