Strain Read online

  Darius sighed. “You don’t want to see what’s out there, son.”

  “Darius.” Xolani spoke from behind him, and Darius almost jumped. Shit. He’d been so distracted by the kid, he wasn’t even watching his six. “Kaleo and Gina are reporting the rev still at large isn’t in the building or courtyard. Jamie says Titus is out on his bike. He suspects the last rev ran off from the pack, and Titus gave pursuit. We’re still looking for clothes, but for now here’s a blanket our survivor can wrap around himself.”

  Darius reached back to take the scratchy woolen blanket. “If you promise not to bolt, I’ll let you loose so you can cover up.”

  The tips of the kid’s ears turned red, and he gave a stiff nod. Darius eased his weight off him and stood back, proffering the blanket. Avoiding Darius’s eyes, the survivor wrapped it around himself, then opened the door and dashed out.

  “Fuck this noise.” Darius threw up his hands in defeat. “It ain’t my job to baby the civvies.”

  He heard Xolani sigh. “The profundity of your compassion makes me weep.”

  “They teach you those big words in med school?”

  “Taught me a few short ones, too. The kind with four letters. Want to hear them?”

  “Go saw some bones or something, and get off my ass.”

  She snorted and brushed past him, following the boy out the door. Growling, Darius went after her.

  The survivor was standing before a row of four blood-soaked blankets lying over the victims Darius had seen in the weed-filled courtyard on his way into the monastery. One blanket-covered lump was the size of an adult. Another was only a foot and a half long, and from beneath a third trailed long, tawny hair that was nearly the exact shade of the kid’s own. The fourth blanket lay over someone not much smaller than the girl.

  For all his professed lack of compassion, Darius sent a mental thank-you to whichever of his people had thought to cover up the mangled bodies. That was probably Joe.

  Xolani stopped a few feet from the survivor, giving him space. “You have a name, kid?”

  The boy stared down at the lumps with an almost eerie lack of expression, as if he’d simply shut down. “Rhys Cooper.” There was no inflection in his voice. He might as well have been a robot.

  “Good to meet you, Rhys. I’m Xolani, and the big guy who was manhandling you is Darius.”

  The kid nodded, not speaking. He didn’t even glance her way.

  “She was your sister?” Darius wasn’t sure what Xolani thought she was doing, prodding him to talk about it like that, but better her than Darius when the bawling began.

  The young man nodded again.

  Xolani’s voice softened. “Was that her baby?”

  Another wordless nod.

  “Who was the father? The old man? There, under that one?” Xolani’s question came a little cautiously. Darius grimaced, aware of what she was really asking. It wouldn’t be the first time adolescent siblings cut off from the world had turned to each other when the impulses of puberty took over. It also wouldn’t be the first time a patriarch had made a harem of the girls in his group.

  Delta Company had pretty much seen it all.

  The survivor shook his head. “No, it was—” He looked up from the bodies at last, glancing back and forth between them and Xolani. “Wait. If that’s Father Maurice, where’s Jacob?”

  “These are all we found.”

  “He’s Father Maurice’s son. Late twenties? Tall, longish brown hair and beard?”

  Xolani shook her head. “We’ll keep searching.” Her eyes flicked to Darius, and he nodded curtly. They couldn’t leave an unaccounted-for—and possibly infected—survivor running around.

  “I’ll tell the rest of the squad to be on the lookout.” Darius turned toward the building, glancing back over his shoulder. “We’ll start gathering wood to burn the bodies. Two piles. One for the revs, the other for the casualties.”

  The boy turned his head, looking at Darius with that almost-empty expression. “There’s wood in some of the damaged rooms. Broken furniture. Old timbers that fell in the last earthquake when part of the roof collapsed. You can even use the pews from the chapel, if you can find a way to break them up. Just leave the orchard alone. Someone might come along and need it for food someday.”

  Darius couldn’t help but be impressed with the kid’s composure. Most survivors they found would have been hysterical by now. Of course, there was always the distinct possibility he’d melt down at any given moment, but so far he’d kept his head fairly well.

  Fucking shame the boy was toast.

  Darius nodded and went back inside. Encountering one of his men at the door, he paused. “Kaleo, do another scan of the whole building. We’ve got a civvie at large.”

  “On it, Big D.”

  Darius checked the rooms until he found the ones where the roof had collapsed and gathered up fallen beams and boards, easily snapping the ones that were too long before heading back out to the courtyard.

  Would Xolani break the bad news, or was she going to make him do it?

  As Darius emerged with his armful of wood, Titus came through the gates, on foot, hauling a blood-splattered civvie by the collar. His motorcycle was nowhere in evidence.

  “Had to chase this pecker down.” He spat into the dirt, flinging the guy away. Darius frowned. Titus didn’t usually give a shit about most people enough to dislike anyone, much less handle a survivor so roughly. “That last rev went tearing after him. Would’ve caught him, too, if I hadn’t taken it out in time. Now I gotta haul my happy ass a half mile back to get the corpse and my fucking bike from where I dropped it to save this dipshit.”

  “This the guy you said was missing?” Darius asked, trying to remember the kid’s name. Rhys Cooper. Right. As if it mattered. It was never a good idea to get too familiar with the civvies, and especially not with one who was already exposed.

  “Yeah.” The kid sounded like he was chewing glass. Darius glanced at him to see his mouth twist in scorn as the newcomer got a look at the lumps beneath the bloody blankets. The man bent over, spewing his guts up.

  “Whose blood is that on him, Titus?”

  “Fucked if I know. Could be rev. He might’ve caught some splash when I blew a hole in the thing.”

  Shit. “Well, get him over to the pump, then.”

  With an irritated grimace, Titus dragged the civvie—who was still retching practically on top of the bodies—to the spigot at the base of the windmill-driven pump. These survivors had gotten lucky; they’d had indoor plumbing and showers, albeit cold ones. Titus dropped the guy onto the ground and opened the faucet while Darius jogged back inside for the soap he’d used on the kid. Just as he reached the doors on his way back out, he heard a reedy voice scream something and then shouts and the sounds of a fight.

  Fuck. This day just kept getting better and better.

  Cadence and Caleb were dead, and Jacob had managed to live.

  Didn’t that just suck? If the revs weren’t going to chase and kill Rhys the way he’d intended, the least they could have done was gone after Jacob instead.

  Rhys spared his so-called brother-in-law a disgusted look when he keeled over and began puking, then went back to contemplating what had been the last of his family. In a moment he’d start moving again. He’d help gather wood so he could do the proper thing and lay his sister and nephew to rest. The prevailing wisdom from back when the plague first began was that revs weren’t above scavenging fresh graves, so cremation was the best way to spare a loved one the indignity of becoming carrion.

  He heard the guy in charge, Darius, bark something about getting Jacob washed off, but Rhys couldn’t be bothered to care. If the Rot took Jacob, Rhys wouldn’t waste any tears. Jacob had agreed readily enough, after all, when Father Maurice had tagged Rhys to be bait, writing him off to save their asses.

  “Don’t know why we’re bothering,” he heard the grizzled guy over by the pump—had Darius called him Titus? What was with the Roman names, a
nyway? Was it a theme? Jesus, why couldn’t he focus on a single thought?—grumble to the woman who’d introduced herself as Xolani. “More trouble than this shit stain’s worth. It could just as easily be the girl’s blood as the rev’s. They were on her when the fucker ran off.”

  It took a moment for the words to make sense, and then everything went hot and cold all at once. Sweat prickled and chilled as it erupted from pores all over Rhys’s skin. He could feel it running down his back to the crack of his butt. He clenched, like that flushed, crampy moment when your entire body seized up just before the first wave of a bad case of the runs. He whipped his head around to stare at Jacob.

  “You ran away?” This was it, then. This was what it felt like to lose his mind. Wow. You really do snap. Rhys was pretty damn sure he felt something physically break inside him. “They were being attacked and you left them?”

  Then he was flying at Jacob, the half-healed cracks on his knuckles breaking open as he swung his fists. He drove Jacob out of the pump’s stream and into the muddy soil beneath it, screaming obscenities and trying to pummel him with far more rage than skill. Only Jacob’s shock and the insane force of Rhys’s anger gave him any advantage; he certainly didn’t have the stature, weight, or skill to take down Jacob otherwise.

  “Get off me, you cocksucker!”

  “You left them!” Spittle flew from his lips, and he didn’t care that he was screeching. His arms flailed, fists driving toward the body beneath him. He couldn’t even see Jacob for the red rush of fury blinding him. “I’ll kill you! You left them!”

  Jacob managed to flip them, driving the breath from Rhys’s lungs as he hit the ground. He didn’t bother to throw a punch; he just grabbed Rhys’s head and slammed it against one of the bolts on the thick steel pipe coming up from the well. Rhys saw stars, though he kept swinging blind punches toward Jacob as blood trickled down the side of his face and into the shredded, mud-churned bed of moss beneath him. He growled and snarled—sounding, he realized in some disconnected portion of his mind, like a revenant himself. His upper lip and chin were wet, and he wasn’t sure if it was from the pump or if he really was foaming at the mouth. “I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!”

  “What the fuck is going on here, Titus?”

  He barely heard Darius’s roar before Jacob bashed his head against the pipe again. Then everything went black.

  His head throbbed, and his scalp stung above his left temple, followed by a gross rasp of something tugging on his skin. Rhys tried to bat it away, and someone grabbed his hands.

  “Hold still, Rhys. I’m almost done suturing. You couldn’t have stayed out of it a few more minutes, could you, kid?”

  That was a woman’s voice. For a mad moment, he thought it might be his mom. But no, it was that olive-skinned lady with the thick braid. Xolani.

  “Did I kill him?” He blinked up at her, and she came into blurry focus. He lay on the floor surrounded by green tile. The bathroom. The light coming through the windows was too damn bright. It felt like daggers stabbing him in the eyeballs.

  She snorted. “No, though not for lack of trying. I take it that guy’s not a friend of yours?”

  “Father Maurice made my sister marry him. If you can call it that. Said they needed to be fruitful and multiply, like the Bible commands.”

  “Ah.” Another sting and a tug, and then something snipped. “There. All sewed up. You’re gonna have a fucking wicked headache for a while. You’re probably concussed.”

  He tried to lift his head, and it felt like it might fall off his shoulders. “Ow.”

  “Yeah, come on.” Her arms slipped under his shoulders and helped sit him up as though he weighed nothing. “If you think you can stand, you can take a quick shower. Darius has sent Jamie and Titus back east to Newberg on their motorcycles to find some clothes for you. They shouldn’t be long. I can get you another blanket in the meantime.”

  Rhys looked down and groaned. The sound made his head hurt worse. For the second time that day, he was naked in the presence of strangers, his skin covered in streaks of drying mud.

  “How long was I passed out?”

  “Maybe half an hour. We’ve got most of the wood gathered and have started burning the revs, but we decided to wait for you before we lit the fire for the others. We need to do it soon, though. It’s almost evening, and we have to secure the gate before dark.”

  “Okay.” Rhys swallowed and looked away until his eyes stopped stinging. His mouth tasted metallic, and if he’d had anything in his stomach, he might have puked.

  “What happened to your knuckles? That’s not all from trying to punch out that other guy.”

  Rhys looked down at his bloodied hand, red meat showing raw through cracked, bruised skin.

  “Doesn’t matter. Won’t be happening again.”

  “Think you can stand? Otherwise, if you want to sit in the shower, I can turn it on for you while I go find a blanket.”

  “I can stand.” With her help, he pushed himself to his feet and staggered into the shower. The shredded remains of his clothing still littered the bottom of it. Jesus, his jeans must have really been threadbare if they’d managed to rip wet denim off him like that. He leaned against the tile of the mildew-spotted wall and let Xolani turn on the cold spray.

  “I’ll be right back. Try not to fall over.”

  Nodding hurt too much, so Rhys just grunted and began scrubbing off the mud. The longer he was on his feet, the steadier he felt, until he got brave enough to bend over and pick up a clean scrap of his T-shirt to use as a washcloth.

  She came back a moment later with another blanket like the one he’d lost when he attacked Jacob. Rhys turned off the water and wrapped it around himself.

  “Interesting couple of marks there on your hips and thighs. Last time I saw a set of bruises that looked like that, they were on a guy who’d been beaten with a cane.”

  Rhys flushed but said nothing, clutching the blanket tighter.

  “The old man had a cane beside him where he died.”

  He glowered and stomped out of the bathroom, trying to ignore her when she followed.

  “I noticed that guy you tried to clobber the shit out of wasn’t wearing rags like you were.”

  “Yeah, well, he didn’t outgrow all of his clothes,” Rhys muttered. “I was twelve when we got here.”

  “And how long ago was that?”

  “Seven years.” Why was she following him, much less asking all these questions?

  “So, it was—what? Just you and your sister, and Jacob and his father?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right, there was a kid, too. Who else was here?”

  He sighed in annoyance. He shouldn’t be so unfriendly to her—after all, she did help save his life and stitch him up—but he really wished she’d stop probing for information about things that weren’t any of her business.

  “My mom died a couple years ago,” he answered shortly. “We think it was cancer. She had some, uh, lumps. Gabe—Gabriel—ran away about a year before that, and his parents went to try to find him and never came back. Guess they must all have died, too.” Rhys grimaced, trying not to think of why Gabe had run off. “The eleven-year-old boy you found out there today was Gabe’s little brother, Jeff. When they went after Gabe, they left him behind here, where he’d be safe. There was another family, too, in the beginning. The Merkles. Holly got appendicitis, we think. Her dad committed suicide. Her mom was stung by a bee. Now we’re all that’s left. Anything else you wanna know?”

  Xolani shook her head and took his arm without asking, helping him down the stairs. Her grip was really strong, but then, her shoulders were broad even though she wasn’t tall, and she had a solid, muscular build. A scar ran down her cheek, a light line puckering and pulling at the skin and making her look tough. Even without it, she wouldn’t have ever been called pretty. Darius was a lot bigger than her, but something told Rhys that if it came down to a fight between them, she could probably hold her
own.

  And she didn’t try to apologize or sympathize as he cataloged their losses. He appreciated that.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a jerk, and you’re being nice and all, but my head hurts, and can we just not talk about all that?”

  “Okay,” she said with perfect equanimity and fell silent.

  Darius was outside—along with some of the others whose names Rhys hadn’t gotten yet—standing beside a large pile of scrap wood. Father Maurice, Jeff, Cady, and Caleb were lying on top of it, and Rhys swallowed hard seeing them just draped limply like that with their throats torn out. On the far side of the pyre, Jacob was watching him with eyes that glittered with hatred, but Rhys couldn’t be bothered to care. All he could do was stare at the dark gold of his sister’s blood-matted hair hanging down.

  When he drew near, he could smell kerosene fumes.

  Darius grabbed a length of wood and lit it from the fire still burning the remains of the revenants. But before he could touch it to the other pile, Jacob lifted his head and intoned, his voice loud and dramatic, “Dear Lord, we commend to you these loved ones: my father, wife, and son . . .”

  No mention of sister or nephew, of course.

  “Oh, shut up.” Rhys snatched the torch out of Darius’s hand and set the pyre ablaze. The last damn thing he needed to hear was about God and heaven and salvation. After a moment of glaring, Jacob continued droning on, but Rhys didn’t hear the trite platitudes over the roar and crackle of the flames.

  He stood there staring into the embers long after everyone else, even Jacob, had drifted away. The wind blew smoke in his face, stinging his eyes. He watched it burn until the bodies were charred beyond recognition and the disgusting smell of seared flesh had stopped twisting his empty stomach, making him gulp against dry heaves.

  “It’s getting late, son.” He turned when Darius spoke behind him. “We gotta close the gates, so you need to get inside. Not safe to be out in the open after dark. My people brought some clothes for you.”