Eat the Ones You Love (The Thirteen Book 2) (12 page)

“This is what happens when you don’t give a fuck,” said Benji.

“These aren’t people,” said Trix. “They’re just a different kind of rotter.”

They made it across the room to an elevator, filled with a mess of bodies. Jenny knew they were dead even before she smelled their stench. A dead girl no older than 14 had her face turned toward them, eyes blank and green sludge coming out of her mouth. They passed the elevator without speaking and entered a stairwell. It was dark and Jenny had to navigate around the bodies lying on the stairs.

“Hey, fuck you,” said a woman.

“No, fuck you,” said Trix.

“Fair enough,” said the junkie.

“Fighting for survival sounding better to you now, cheerleader?”

“Piss off,” said Jenny.
 

They peered into the second floor offices, and they could hear the moans and a rhythmic banging against a wall from a couple in the throes of sex. Up here, too, bodies littered the floor. A woman sitting on the floor, smoking a cigarette, noticed them and blew smoke out her nostrils.

“Ain’t no life here, man.”

“We’re looking to trade,” said Jenny.

“Sex? You pedos?”

“Fuck you, bitch,” said Trix.

“You want sex, top floor,” she said. “Everything else, asshole is up on the fifth. But he don’t trade with just anyone.”

“We’re not just anyone,” said Jenny.

“I used to think that too,” she said. She turned away from them and took another drag. “We’re already dead anyway.”

They walked up to the fifth floor.
 

They could smell the blood before they got there.

SIXTEEN

As they walked into the corridor, Jenny tasted copper in the air. The blood scent was so thick, even Trix didn’t smell the Living woman until she had a knife to Jenny’s throat. She yanked Jenny back with a stringy arm. She was strong.

Trix laughed.

“Don’t come near me or your friend is dead,” she rasped, her mouth next to Jenny’s ear. She was wet with something sticky and the knife dripped something down Jenny’s neck.

“We just came to find some gas,” said Jenny.

“Bitch, you picked the wrong person to threaten to kill,” said Trix.

“Shut up,” said the woman. She pulled Jenny backwards, towards an office door. Trix and Benji looked at each other. The sun filtered into the room, a wide-open space like the lobby had been, executive offices, no doubt. Stacks of boxes piled against the wall. A table in the corner was piled with packages wrapped in yellowing newspaper. One was unwrapped and overflowed with a brown powder. In the light, the woman seemed to get a look at them for the first time.

Trix stepped into the light and smiled with her small gray teeth. “You see us now, don’t you?”

A man lay face down in the middle of the room, in a puddle of blood. The woman’s breath came ragged.

“It’s you,” she said. But pulled the knife tighter on Jenny’s throat.

“Lady, you don’t know what you’re doing,” Benji said. “You can’t kill Jenny. She’s already dead.”

“Oh yeah?” said the woman. “I can feel her heart beating real fast.” She had a barely discernible Spanish accent and smelled like sour sweat. Like fear.
 

“Oh, that’s because she’s hungry,” said Trix, unconcerned. “Who’s this asshole? Friend of yours?”

“What?” Jenny could feel the woman’s heartbeat on her back, her hands shaking on the knife.

“Take the knife away,” Jenny said, “or I’m going to fucking kill you.”

“You have no power right now,” the woman hissed.

“She has more than you can imagine,” said Benji, inspecting the powder. He dipped his finger into the brownish powder and put it to his tongue. He made a face and spat. “Ugh. What is this? It tastes like rotten shit.”

“Is there any diesel?” Jenny asked.

“Shut up,” the woman said, her movements frenetic.

Jenny sighed and reached up, taking hold of the woman’s wrist. She pulled it tighter against her own throat.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

Jenny felt the blade pierce her skin. She kept pulling, the woman fighting her, trying to pull away. Blood dripped down her neck, her own and that of the poor dead bastard on the floor. She pulled the knife deeper. She was touching metal to her windpipe now.

“No!” the woman grunted.

“Stop showing off, cheerleader,” Trix said. “I don’t see any gas.”

Jenny let go of the woman’s hand and she staggered, her back hitting the doorframe.

“You’re them,” she gasped. “The Thirteen.”

“Has
everyone
heard of us?” said Trix.

“I just came from Expo,” she said.
 

Jenny wiped her neck. The woman was older, skinny, but muscular, with cinnamon skin and deep brown eyes. Her hair was dark but going gray in streaks, and pulled back into a tight ponytail. Jenny could see the pulse jumping in her throat.

“Are you going to kill me?” she said. She had one hand on the door handle.

“Why’d you kill him?” said Jenny.

Her eyes flicked to the corpse on the ground. “Because he’s filth.”

“Did you just walk through the same shithole we did?” said Trix.

“The addicts?” she said. “The sex fiends? The Dregs of humanity no one wants to think about?”

“Yeah, them,” said Trix. She moved some boxes. One fell and some cans rolled out. “Fuck, nothing but food,” Trix said.

“He took my daughter,” said the woman. She curled her lip looking at the dead man. “I was a vendor. I deal with people like him all the time. They don’t mess with me because they know me. I can take care of myself. He took my daughter. Couple of weeks ago. Sent some fat assholes and shot me up full of something. He should have killed me. Took me a while to find out where she was. They took her in Seattle and brought her here.”

“Good riddance,” said Benji, and spat on the man.
 

“You’re a vendor?” said Jenny.
 

“What else would I be doing in a place like this? I trade on the Black.”

“Why?” said Jenny. “Why not Expo?”

The woman laughed a dry husk of a laugh, then met Jenny’s eyes.

“You really think it’s safer at Expo?”

“They have rules,” said Jenny.

“I heard about you,” she said. “You’re the one with the great big boyfriend everyone’s afraid of, yeah? The one who killed to protect you. The guy you saved after he died.”

“How do you know all that?”

“These Heathens talk like old women. Yap, yap, yap. All gossip. You’re a legend already,” she said. “You’re their favorite. They all want to follow you.”

“Not anymore,” said Trix.

“Just because one got killed doesn’t stop them from wanting to be a part of your story,” she said. “It just makes some want it more. Danger and excitement.”

“It was an accident,” said Jenny. “He didn’t mean to.”

“So the big, bad boyfriend has teeth now,” she said. “Too bad. Shit happens. The Heathens ran off to Expo, but they tell the story and others want to be a part of it. People give them booze to talk about it again. The story gets bigger and crazier and brighter. Soon you’ll either be the Big Bad Wolf or Superman. It all depends on how they tell the story. Fuck the Heathens. They don’t have rules. It’s a joke. They’re worse than these bastards living in filth. At least you know what you’re going to get here. The Heathens, they keep it a secret. They’ll trade you for stuff, but if they want something, they’ll take it. If they want you, they’ll take you. It’s different when you don’t have the Big Bad Wolf to protect you.”

“Jesus,” said Jenny.

“I have to go,” she said, backing towards the door. “Are you going to stop me?”

“You said you have connections,” said Jenny. “What kind of connections?”

She shrugged. “I can get anything.”

“We need diesel. Can you find us some?”

“How much?”

“Enough to get us to New York,” said Jenny.

She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you going to New York?”

Jenny looked away. “I have my reasons.”

“Fine, I can’t help you,” she said. She started to open the door.

“My mother,” Jenny blurted out.

“Fuck, cheerleader. Don’t tell her that.”

Jenny ignored her. She had the woman’s attention. “My mother is Anna Hawkins. She’s in New York.”

The woman stared at her for a moment. “Hawkins?” she said. “The plague doctor?”

“Yep. That’s the one.”

“And you are going to what? Find her? Protect her? This woman who started this shit?”

“I’m going to kill her.”

“Oh.” The woman looked from Jenny to Trix to Benji. “Just the three of you?”

“Four,” said Jenny. “There’s one more. He’s…incapacitated.”

“You’re going to kill her? This isn’t some joke?”

“No,” said Jenny. “I’m going to make her tell me where my sister is. And then I’m going to kill her. She’s killed hundreds of children.”

“I know,” said the woman. “She killed my son.”

“Holy shit,” said Trix.

“It was many years ago,” she said. She gave a deep hard sound that may have been a sob, but sounded much deeper. “Now all my children are dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Jenny said.

“I’ll take you to New York,” she said. “I have a vehicle, a big one.”

“What do you want in return?” said Jenny.

“Nothing,” she said. She looked toward the hall and looked back again. “But I have to do something in the basement first.” She met Jenny’s eyes. “You come, too? I don’t know why, but I can’t look at her alone.”

“Why are you doing this for us?” said Jenny.

“Because you’re going to kill Anna Hawkins, who killed my Roberto,” she said, her brown eyes growing hard and cold.
 

“Will you come with me?”

Jenny frowned. “What’s in the basement?”

“Please,” she said, taking Jenny’s hand. The woman who had seemed so strong before looked fragile now, looking out into the hall. “I can’t talk until I finish it.”

“First tell me your name,” said Jenny.

“Robin,” she said offhandedly. “Robin Velasquez.”

“Okay, Robin. Let’s go to the basement.”

They didn’t speak. Jenny followed and Trix and Benji stayed behind to rifle through the dead man’s stash. Robin stepped heavily down the stairs as if heading to her own execution. Jenny pulled her to the side when she almost stepped on a track-marked arm or a suspicious-looking puddle. She didn’t look up or around at Jenny, just kept her eyes forward. As if she were afraid that she’d get lost if she took in her surroundings.

“What’s in the basement, Robin?” Jenny finally asked around the second floor. The woman didn’t answer for a very long time. Jenny gripped her knife tighter and glanced behind her every few seconds. Robin was shaking, her knife clipped into a sheath on her hip. The sheath was leather with markings on it as if from a child’s drawing. She touched it from time to time, one finger stroking the leather. Finally at the main lobby Robin reached back and grasped Jenny’s wrist. Her hands were cold.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” she said. “I don’t know if I can see her.”

They stopped, Robin looking at a door set next to the stairwell. It was marked with a big letter B.

“What are we doing, Robin?”

Robin touched her chest gently, her fingers right over her heart.

“Ending this,” she said quietly. “Stopping the nightmare. Her nightmare.”

She reached out and pulled the door open. The smell of death wafted up and Jenny pulled her shirt up over her nose as they descended. Robin didn’t seem to notice. A tendril of hair had come out of her tight ponytail and pasted to the side of her face. Jenny looked at her and realized it wasn’t stuck there with sweat, but with tears. Robin was crying without making a sound.

“Robin, your daughter who was taken. You said that’s why you killed him.”

She didn’t take her eyes from the stairs. Light was filtering up from somewhere, a dim light was visible in the dankness below. A smell of earth and mildew and rotters filled her nose.

“Yes,” she said, breathless. “Her name was Amy.”

“Was?”

Robin let out a shaky breath, her lip quivering, then gave a curt nod.

“Was,” she repeated.

A moan, metallic and wretched, came drifting up. The smell of death grew stronger. And mixed with the mildew and dirt and decomposition Jenny smelled something else, plain as day. Sex.

“What the fuck is this place?” Jenny said. But they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Robin had her eyes closed, afraid to see. The rotter moans grew louder. Jenny forced herself to look. They were in a large cellar, the cement floor cracked and stained. An old furnace that hadn’t been touched in a decade took up half the room. The other half of the room contained a mattress and a large round mirror, almost five feet in diameter, on a stand. The mirror was aimed at the bed and Jenny realized that it was used to reflect the light from the window onto the bed. She gagged, but made herself look, her hand tight over her mouth.

The thing on the bed had once been alive, but was nothing but a husk now. She’d once been a girl, barely a teenager. Her hair had been dark like her mother’s. She was tied to the bed spread eagle, the ropes loose and the skin on her wrists and ankles rubbed down to the bone. She wasn’t wearing clothes.

“Jesus Christ,” said Jenny. Robin opened her eyes and opened her mouth in a sob that was too deep for sound. She stood frozen like that for what seemed an eternity, the tears pouring out of her eyes, her face frozen in grief. And finally when the sound came, it was otherworldly, so powerful that Robin fell to the ground, not even bothering to catch herself. She couldn’t look away, her eyes locked to the rotter on the bed who was once a girl named Amy. Robin gasped for air and then made a noise like she had tried to scream, but hadn’t had the energy or breath to complete the act. She kicked weakly at the ground, still staring. Jenny saw that she was holding the knife now, both hands grasping it like a crucifix.

The thing on the bed, the rotter who used to be Robin’s daughter, thrashed feebly on the bed, just as weak as her mother. She snapped her jaws at them, looking around wildly. Jenny realized her head was strapped to the bed so she couldn’t move it, the bare mattress beneath her stained with decomposing skin and fat and meat. And more.