Love and Decay Read online

  “Why do you hate this place?” I asked quickly, deflecting the focus off me.

  I felt him withdraw a bit. It wasn’t so much that he visibly pulled back, but the tension in the air lessened. I could breathe easier. I could stand straighter without the crushing force of his aura wrapping so around me. I could look at him without feeling like I was about to go blind.

  But even as he pulled back, my spirit deflated and I hated myself just a little bit for ruining the moment.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be close to Miller again or touch him or talk to him or open up to him. I just didn’t trust him. Miller had been my world once upon a time. He had been my only friend and my only confidant. He had been the only thing in my life that wasn’t family. And I had cherished him… worshipped him… counted on him.

  Then he disappeared and I was left alone for the first time in my life. It didn’t make sense since nobody else I loved had abandoned me. In fact they were these super human caretakers that would have done anything for me. I knew that. I felt it in their love for me. I felt it daily.

  But without Miller I didn’t have a friend. I had family that was obligated to love me and scientists that wanted to experiment on me. I had Santi, but that wasn’t even close to what Miller and I had. And everybody else in my life were either grownups or babies. I was alone in this middle of the road, a place that felt lonelier than anything else in my life.

  And besides that, Miller had been different. I had loved him just as fiercely. I had expected to always love him that intensely. And when he pulled back and abandoned me, it was the first time I had ever felt that kind of neglect.

  It was the first time I had ever truly been shown the harsh realities of life.

  I had seen plenty of bad things over my life time, but what Miller did wasn’t born from an infection or evil men or the elements.

  That had been Miller’s choice.

  Miller had chosen to leave me.

  He had betrayed me in a way.

  And I wouldn’t trust him again.

  I could not.

  Because if he did it to me a second time… If I gave him my trust and my friendship and whatever else he was demanding from me and he left me again… I would never come back from that.

  He looked over my head at the expansive valley of desert beyond. Speckled hills dotted the landscape and horizon. To the left a wild cacti field painted the ground with the palest green. To the right rocky, lay uneven ground and tumbling vegetation.

  A shaky breath left his chest before he answered, “This place is full of my biggest regrets. My dad should have died here. And I should never have let you go. I should never have let those men take you from me.” His gaze returned to mine. “This place is like one giant failure for me. Failure after failure.”

  I shook my head, shocked that he felt this weight of responsibility. “Miller, there was nothing you could have done. In either scenario. You thought your dad was dead. And as for me… I… I… I wasn’t your responsibility-”

  His fingers landed on my lips, silencing me. “I’m going to stop you right there because that’s just not true.” He leaned in until I felt his breath on my cheeks… on my lips. “You are my responsibility, Page. You’ve always been. Since the very first time I saw you.”

  I shook my head, unsure what any of his words meant.

  His lips brushed my forehead, just above my eyebrow. I shivered in the cooling night air and tried to remember how to swallow. “You were so innocent that first night. So pure. Young. Tiny. Good. And you were so sick. Everything that I wasn’t. And your brothers… I had never seen anything like it before. They would have done anything for you. They would have died for you. I decided that night I would die for you, too. If those guys, your brothers, if they thought you were worth dying for, then I wanted to know that kind of dedication, too. I wanted to care for something that much. I wanted to protect something other than me for once. And I did.”

  “What are you talking about?” I whispered against his fingers.

  “You were at my old house,” he explained. “Your brothers had found it somehow. And you were sick. You were so sick. I thought… I thought if I could just make you better, if I could just get you medicine then maybe I wasn’t as worthless as my dad thought I was. Maybe I would make a difference. Maybe… maybe I would matter.”

  Hot tears pricked against my eyes so suddenly I didn’t have a chance to stop them from falling. Miller noticed them immediately. I could never hide them from his sharp gaze.

  I couldn’t hide anything from him.

  He cradled my face in his hands and wiped them away with his thumbs. “Why are you crying?”

  His question only made me cry more because he didn’t know. Even after so much time with my family, he still didn’t know. “Miller, you do matter.” I sniffled and held his cagey gaze. He was trying to pull away again, recede back to that dark place he’d convinced himself owned him. But it didn’t. He was light. He was filled with light and goodness. “You matter to me.”

  My words seemed to shock him. He jerked back while his expression flickered with confusion and disbelief. “Page,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t let you go back there. He’s going to try to take you from me.” He dropped his forehead to mine and the heat of his body penetrated every one of my pores. His eyelids slammed shut, shuttering his expression. “I won’t let him. You need to know that I won’t let him.”

  “Matthias?” I asked because I wasn’t quite sure. “He won’t do anything to me, Miller. I promise.”

  Miller shook his head and pain flashed over him. “Not Matthias.”

  I wanted to keep pushing him. If he could demand answers from me, I could do the same. I needed to know what he was thinking or what he was so concerned with. Urgency pulsed through me even while my body reacted to Miller’s touch as though it had been waiting for this all along.

  As if I was finally waking up…

  As if I was finally coming alive.

  I wanted to sigh into him. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and press myself against him until I couldn’t tell where I ended and he began.

  This was everything I had been missing for years and I couldn’t believe he’d kept it from me for so long.

  I lifted shaky hands to press them against his chest. He flinched at my touch, the thin material of his shirt barely a barrier against the combined heat of our skin.

  He leaned down, skimming his face against mine. I felt everything in that moment, his heat, the rough scrape of his longer-than-usual beard, the corner of his lips, the pressure of his fingers as he held me tighter, closer…

  “Save me, Page Parker,” he whispered.

  My heart stopped. My breath caught. I thought for a heady second I would just burst into flames. This was a cataclysmic moment between us and I knew nothing would ever be the same after it. It was like the entire world stopped in orbit… in its very rotation and we were suspended in time… in this moment… in each other.

  And I never wanted to leave.

  I could have stayed like that forever.

  Instead, the reality of our broken world came crashing back. Painfully.

  Something sharp and heavy hit the back of my head. I made an inelegant grunting noise and fell against Miller. His entire body snapped to attention.

  Gone was the softer side of him.

  Gone was our intimate moment.

  Back was the warrior that would protect me and my family no matter what the cost.

  “Page, can you stand?” he gritted through his teeth.

  I made another sound that wasn’t quite a word, but I managed to stand up. My vision blurred from the piercing pain in the back of my head and I felt the warm flow of blood trickle through my braid and down my neck.

  Damn it.

  I pulled my blade free of my harness before I even turned around. Miller did the same thing, cursing low and threateningly.

  I spun around expecting a Zombie horde. Or at least one Zombie.

&
nbsp; “What the hell?” I gasped, unprepared for the rotting humanity in front of us.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Miller growled. To the line of bedraggled humans in front of us, he shouted, “Stand down or I will kill you.”

  They held fist-size rocks in their pasty hands and stared at us like they couldn’t wait to murder us. Their once tanned skin had been discolored and now turned sickly. It looked paper-thin from where I stood, as if I could just brush my hand over it and it would turn to ash. The rich coffee color had turned a weak pale and sallow.

  This fierce bunch in ragged, filthy clothing, despite their trembling, looked able to murder anyone that opposed them. There were at least fifteen of them in front of us. I didn’t know if they’d found the others yet, but this didn’t look good.

  For us.

  “They are human, right?” I asked Miller.

  He kept his eyes fixed on our new enemies. “Just barely.”

  Reconciling them with humanity proved hard. They reminded me so much of Feeders. And yet their eyes were clear and their limbs intact. They stood there, baring blackened, rotting teeth. The looks on their faces terrified me more than anything. They appeared like they wanted to devour us… like they were as addicted to human flesh as any Feeder…

  “No,” I hissed. “The cannibals? Seriously?”

  Miller’s body froze in place, signifying a new level of rage and power. “Harrison!” he yelled. The booming sound made the cannibals jump with surprise. Many of them seemed off balance, flailing and tipping from side to side. They took a step toward us. “Hide the children!” Miller continued to shout. “We’ve got company!”

  And then war erupted.

  Miller and I didn’t have another chance to think or talk or plan. They attacked us and we were forced into battle. Sure, it wasn’t our usual kind, but the outcome would be the same no matter what.

  They would kill us and eat us.

  Or we would kill them and earn the right to live one more day in this godforsaken world.

  They were armed with rocks and sticks. We had blades. But there were more of them and they were rock experts. They pelted them at us, aiming for our heads.

  Miller and I had to duck out of the way and use our arms to cover our heads. The rocks still found places to land though, cutting at my bare skin and bruising me everywhere.

  Miller stepped in front of me, taking the brunt of the abuse. His arms banded around my body, holding me tightly against him. I felt sick with worry about him. If they killed Miller with a rock, I was going to fillet every single one of them. I couldn’t even wrap my head around the idea of losing Miller. And especially not in this way… Not because of rocks and stupid cannibals. Not when we were this close to our destination.

  “They’re going to run out of rocks,” I yelled to him over the battle cries of fifteen depraved men. “Then we attack.”

  I felt his head bob against my back, agreeing with me. His chest heaved and his arms flexed, turning human muscle into supernatural steel.

  These men ate people to survive. They were as bad and dangerous as anything in this world.

  And yet they had never met Miller.

  They had never had to face someone so dangerous… so determined to keep those he cared about safe.

  They didn’t know he was a weapon, honed by the apocalypse, sharpened by loss, grief and sheer, raw determination.

  They didn’t know they were about to pay for their sins against me.

  A single hesitation between rocks was all it took for Miller to push off me, spin around and attack.

  I followed him because… well because I couldn’t let him get all the glory. Our blades were ready in our hands and our will to survive had never been stronger.

  No matter how many things I had killed over the years, no matter how common place it should have been in my life, it was not. And it was only made worse by having to kill something still human.

  Something that should know better.

  I told myself that this was practice for the Colony. I stood on the brink of war. I would have to get over this sooner or later.

  Or maybe I wouldn’t.

  The cannibals were as savage as they came. They didn’t speak to each other and for a second I feared they had developed telepathy. They seemed to understand each other without using words.

  We attacked their front line, but they quickly spread into a circle surrounding us. They reeked foul and wrong. Their pungent scents drifted through the air and turned my stomach. I wanted to reason with them, offer them life if they let us keep ours.

  But Miller didn’t believe in peaceful negotiations.

  He lunged forward, swinging his blade with deadly accuracy. The cannibals pulled out thick, deadly clubs and long sticks that were sharpened at the end. They didn’t hesitate or cower from us. What they lacked in finesse, they made up for with brute enthusiasm.

  Our blades jabbed at tough wood, occasionally catching a cannibal in the flesh. We were as anxious for blood as they were. I wondered if they would drop down and start eating their dead the same way Feeders did. Would they use their rotted teeth to tear into fresh flesh too? Or would they wait to drag them back to their caves and cook them first?

  The thought sickened me, but finding differences between these monsters and the normal, everyday kind I usually fought was hard. Both were addicted to flesh. Neither should exist. And yet this was my reality. My life.

  The only one I’d ever known.

  I acutely remembered the time when I was a child and we’d wandered unknowingly into the cannibals’ caves. We thought they meant to help us. We were wrong.

  We’d just barely made it out of those caves alive and now, the second we stepped back into the Mexican Territories, we were face-to-face with this nightmare again.

  I realized the fire had drawn them out and signaled our arrival. We should have known better than to announce our presence or trust our surroundings. But we’d all breathed a sigh of relief when we’d made it back to friendly territory. We had been expecting Diego, not these monstrosities.

  Frustrated, I swung harder, faster. We hadn’t even been worried about Feeders because we knew they were kept locked up here. We should have known better.

  Nothing was easy in this world.

  Not even dinner.

  As my blade cut through the gut of a man ghostly white and ripe with red blood, I tried to keep from flinching. His skin had yellowed and a fine sheen of something gooey spread all over him. But he was still human. His brain should still work. His conscience should still speak up.

  Or maybe not.

  Even before he fell to the ground, his eyes stared blankly ahead. His drawn face remained expressionless and unconscious to the pain.

  My heart beat faster the longer I was exposed to these unnatural anomalies. They closed in on us, tightening their circle and working in unison to beat us with their clubs and stick us with the pointy end of their handmade spears. We dodged the blows as best we could and stabbed and cut whenever possible. But we were outnumbered.

  “Where the hell are your brothers?” Miller shouted over the battle.

  I was just about to answer him, when Harrison spoke up from behind us. “We just wanted to see what you two were made of,” he yelled.

  Miller growled something creatively profane.

  King’s chuckle floated down to us. I glanced up and saw him standing on a large boulder. “We were getting reinforcements!” he explained.

  Miller looked up just as a shadow fell on our tight circle of death. A man appeared. His smooth face contrasted with the rough beards on either side of the battle. His dark hair was peppered with gray, but it didn’t make him look old. Instead, he gave off a distinguished vibe.

  I squinted at him. The sun set just over his shoulder, blocking a clear view of his face and his identity.

  But Miller somehow relaxed and grew more alert simultaneously. He took a step back, hiding me from the man, but his blades dropped to his side and his shoulders relaxe
d.

  The man shouted something in Spanish and the cannibals jolted to attention. They stepped back from us, lowering their weapons and glancing around the clearing with cautious eyes. The man shouted again, telling them to leave now.

  I didn’t think they would listen. But they did. I felt their eyes take us in for one long moment, mourning the meal they had set their hopes on. Then they turned in unison and ran off. They loped off together like a pack of wolves, lifting their faces to the sky as if they could scent the air.

  I turned to the man on the rock. “Thank you.”

  He stared at me. “Who is this?” He directed his question at King.

  I resented his question immediately. I could answer for myself. “I’m Page Parker,” I told him with all the pride that sentence demanded. “Who are you?”

  Despite the shadows over his face and the burning sun over his shoulder, his wide smile split his face and flashed down at me. “The little girl?” He laughed as if that were the funniest thing ever. “Well, child, you should remember who I am then.” I raised an eyebrow at him. Waiting. “Diego,” he said. “And I just saved your life. Again.”

  Chapter Two

  Diego was my most blurred memory of our time in Mexico. I remembered Luke and his family with clarity. I had no trouble recollecting my time with the slavers or the cannibals. Both had been traumatic enough to imprint on me for life. I could close my eyes and imagine every detail of my kidnapping.

  But Diego? Apparently he’d been the least threatening of all our Mexican adventures.

  Although that wasn’t exactly true. He’d run the Mexican Territories for a decade. With our help, he’d taken out all of the other overlords and claimed this land for himself. People feared him. Zombies obeyed him. Even the cannibals fled.

  His rule was almost as legendary as Matthias’s and my family’s friendship with him just as notorious. My brothers had dropped his name all over South America and it had worked. People listened to the threat of Diego. They quaked in terror. And jumped to please us because we were associated with him.