Love and Decay, Volume Eight (Episodes 9-12, Season Three) (27 page)

Hendrix ignored his younger brother. “I think
they want to share their food with us.”

My stomach growled as if it sensed the
upcoming meal.

“I’m not eating
that,”
King declared. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s not like we can be picky,” I argued.
“We have to eat. We can’t go on like this.”

“We haven’t even looked around,” King pointed
out. “There could be a gas station with something or a grocery
story. We could find mountains of food. We don’t know yet.”

“If there were mountains of food, I don’t
think those kids would have learned how to kill dogs,” Hendrix said
finally.

He had a point.

“We need to think about Page,” Hendrix
continued. “And Lennon. We might be able to hold out for something
more appetizing, but Lennon needs food now and Haley has nothing to
give him. We need to do something.”

The leader of the kids stood at the edge of
the alley and shouted something at us. I couldn’t be certain, but I
was pretty sure he told us to hurry up.

“We need to go with them,” Hendrix said
finally. “It’s not much, but it’s more than what we have now. We
can’t give up when we’re this close.”

“You trust them?” King threw his hands in the
air. “They
just killed dogs
, Hendrix. They killed dogs like
they were born to kill dogs. They could attack us. They could kill
us just as easily.”

Hendrix’s jaw ticked when he answered, “I
didn’t say to put your weapon away, now did I? Stay smart. Stay
alert. But we’re going with them. That’s final.”

“Vaughan wouldn’t have gone,” King finished
petulantly. He crossed his arms over his chest and tilted his
stubborn chin. “He wouldn’t have risked it.”

Hendrix took a step forward, shaking with
rage. He’d jumped from zero to sixty in a second and my fear for
King’s life shot up just as quickly. “Vaughan’s not here, King. So
he doesn’t get to make the decision, I do. And I say we’re going
with them. And we’re going to eat that goddamn dog until our
strength is back and I can trust that we’ll survive the night.
All
of us. This isn’t up for
discussion. This is what’s happening. Get on board or get
lost.”

“You don’t mean that,” Harrison said quickly.
He turned to King, “He doesn’t mean that.”

Hendrix didn’t say anything. He stood over
King and waited for his little brother to get it.

The little boy shouted more forcefully. The
kid had reached the end of his patience, but Hendrix didn’t back
down from his brother.

“If something happens, it’s on you,” King
finally said. “You’re responsible. I’m not carrying this shit if it
goes south.”

Hendrix shrugged. “I’m aware, King. I carry
this shit. I carry everything.”

I swallowed past a thick throat. I realized
something at
this moment. I should
have seen it sooner. I should have realized how close Hendrix had
gotten to breaking.

But this was what he believed. He thought
everything was on him, that every mistake or tragedy was his fault
or his responsibility. And now I could see how close to the edge he
teetered.

Somehow since his brother died, Hendrix
decided that he was the only one that could save us and the only
one that could burn us.

And it was killing him inside. He was
unraveling and I had been blinded by grief and exhaustion.

King seemed to realize this too because with
a gentler voice and wisdom that didn’t seem to fit him, he said,
“Okay, Hendrix. We’ll go with them. We’ll eat dog.”

Hendrix’s shoulders dropped an inch. “Keep
your weapons out.” He took my hand and tugged me along after the
little boy.

At the edge of the alley, Hendrix held up one
finger in a gesture for the gang of
dog
killers
to wait. We hurried back to the little house and
knocked on the door. Nelson opened it, wielding a knife and a surly
expression.

“We need to go,” Hendrix said quickly. “We
found dinner.”

Nelson leaned over him and raised an eyebrow.
“What exactly did you find?”

“Kids that kill dogs,” King muttered.

“We’re going with them,” Hendrix spoke
over
King. “We’re going to see
where this goes.”

The people in the
house moved quickly because that’s how we’d been conditioned to
behave, but I could see that nobody trusted this situation or the
children that were now streaked with blood and carrying what was
once considered a household pet.

“What if they eat them raw?” King pressed.
“Has anyone else thought about this? I’m not eating raw dog. I’ll
just go ahead and die first.”

“Maybe they’ll know where the research
station is,” Haley suggested with Lennon curled into her chest. He
had stopped crying by now and had passed out from hunger.

Hendrix was right. This wasn’t the easy
decision, but it had to be done. Lennon wouldn’t survive if Haley
couldn’t feed him.

And that wasn’t an option.

The kids watched in wide-eyed fascination as
the rest of the group filed out of the little house. They grew loud
with their foreign conversation. They pointed at Lennon and laughed
raucously. Some of the little boys also pointed at Page and said
some things I didn’t catch.

Adela did though. She snapped at them in
Spanish, giving them a piece of her mind. Whatever she said shut
them up. They looked at her wide-eyed, clearly not expecting any of
us to speak their language.

I couldn’t help a small smile. She glared at
them until they cowered from her.

When she caught me staring, she gave me a
small shrug. “They are ill-mannered,” she said simply.

“Do you think we can trust them not to try to
kill us?” I asked softly, careful that Page didn’t overhear.

She nodded slowly. “They are surprised by us.
They compare us to people on a hill. I’m not sure what that means,
but I think they are speaking of adults. I don’t think they see
many grownups. They speak very crudely. They haven’t had someone
watching over them in a long time.”

I glanced over the rags and general filth of
the small group and found myself feeling sorry for them. On one
hand, it was incredible they’d managed to survive this long. On the
other… I couldn’t imagine being their age and having to fend for
myself. I kept picturing Page by herself in this world and how
vulnerable she would be to all of the different evils that lurk
around every corner.

I shuddered and tried to dispel the images of
what would happen to her without us.

“Let’s go,” Hendrix announced. And then for
my ears only, he said, “And hope we don’t all die.”

Chapter Two

We followed the kids with dogs slung over
their shoulders. Their small hands gripped the front paws and the
back
paws
, jutting their elbows
out with casual ease.

They led us through the streets of Bogotá
with a confidence that baffled me. The sun started to set over the
distant mountains and my nerves shot up with the awareness of the
coming darkness. But these kids didn’t acknowledge any approaching
danger. They barely acknowledged us as we followed behind them,
knives at our sides.

“Aren’t they afraid of Feeders?” I asked
Adela in
a low
voice when I
couldn’t take their indifference anymore.

She walked beside me with Page squeezed
between
us,
and frowned. “I’ll
ask,” she offered. When I nodded, she spoke up gently to the kids
in front of us. Some of them glanced back at
her
but soon turned forward with a shrug.

No, apparently they weren’t worried about
Feeders.

Their leader shot a grin our way, then jerked
his chin toward the center of town. His response seemed to appease
Adela and I wondered what he could have possibly said to have put
her at such ease.

“He says the people on the hill took all of
the Dead. These people on the hill hunt for them and drag them back
to their hill or something. He says they probably eat the Dead
because they don’t kill dogs like the children do.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “There are people
that eat Zombies? Is he sure that they’re not Feeders, too?”

She translated for me after she’d asked that
question. “He says that they’re people like us. Some of them are
white, some are brown, but they’re our size. They don’t have red
eyes.”

“And they eat Feeders?” My disbelief was
obvious
.

She asked him again, just to make sure that
he knew what she wanted to know. He laughed, but eventually
answered her. “He says he doesn’t know what they do with them. But
they take them back to their castle and the Dead don’t come out
again. The city is mostly cleaned from the Dead. The people have
made sure of that.”

“What in the world?” I sighed. “What does
that mean? More cannibals?”

“The scientists.” Haley snapped her fingers
to drive home her point. “They hunt down Feeders and take them back
to their castle? Otherwise known as a research facility?
Maybe?”

Hope bloomed so quickly in my chest, I didn’t
have the chance to shut it down or tell it to wait. Could they
really be talking about the research facility? Could we really be
so close?

We turned the corner and a blast of heat
washed over my skin. I blinked against the strange intensity of it
and when I could finally make out the blaring but contained fires,
I smiled for the first time in weeks.

Fires. Three of them.

They were burning in barrels with turned over
crates surrounding them. Blue tarps from old fruit and vegetable
stands had been tied high in the air. They created a tent of sorts
without sides or doors. Tattered, dirty blankets were shoved to one
side of the space, scattered over lumpy mattresses and case-less
pillows. These children lived here, in the open air.

I looked around with open-mouthed awe. I
couldn’t reconcile what I saw with the reality I had lived with for
the last three years.
These fires didn’t
just warm the air and cleanse the leftover scent of rotting flesh
and a decaying world, they signaled something with deeper meaning,
they told the story of something that had been niggling at me for
weeks.

The fires brightened the darkening sky and
announced our presence. They were a lighthouse in the black night
and a symbol of humanity. The beds left out in the open showed
indifference to the dangers I knew existed and a lack of fear
for
what could happen in the
middle of the night.

These kids weren’t afraid of
Zombie-related
consequences. They weren’t afraid
of warlords stumbling upon them or cannibals hunting them. These
children lived in a way that we never had.

Or at least hadn’t in a very long time.

We sat down around the fire and I let the
smell of burning wood become healing incense for my soul. Could we
really be okay here?

Could we really be safe?

Adela had already engaged their little leader
in a conversation. So I sat next to Hendrix and waited for her to
translate for us. He took my hand and wrapped my fingers
with
his strong, firm grip.

Leaning his head toward mine, he whispered,
“I’m sorry.”

I turned to face him and found myself deep in
the intensity of his blue gaze. “You already apologized.”

The smallest smile lifted the corners of his
lips. “I need you to know that I meant it. I need you to know that
wasn’t me earlier. I was possessed or something.”

I melted a little with his sincerity. I
didn’t expect perfection from him and I certainly knew we were
never going to be a perfect couple. But we loved each other and
that was all I needed. Plus, it was nice to know that I wasn’t the
only one that could mess up.

I ran my free hand along his scruffy jawline
and smiled up at him. “Maybe not possessed. Maybe just
stressed.”

The breath he let out rattled in his chest,
full of emotion and pain. He let go of my hand to hold my face with
both of his. He dropped his forehead to mine and closed his eyes.
“It hurts,” he whispered. “Every second of every day. I don’t know
how to make it stop.”

Tears immediately fell from my eyes. I had no
chance of stopping them… not when his grief hit so severely.

“I don’t know either,” I whispered, my voice
broken, my heart shattered. “But things will get better.” I pressed
my hand to his heart. “
This
will get easier.”

His lips brushed my forehead and I felt his
gratitude to my core. I didn’t know if he believed me, but he
wanted to. I wanted to, too. We had been in so many bad situations
before, but we’d finally found our bottom.

We couldn’t live like this any longer. We
couldn’t survive this kind of pain and the rottenness of this
world. Something had to give.

“His name is Santi,” Adela spoke in English
again and pulled our attention to her. “He says the people on the
hill control the city. He is poorly educated and I have a hard time
understanding him, but I think they haven’t seen a Zombie in a very
long time. I asked him why they don’t go live with the people on
the hill, but he didn’t answer me. I am convinced that these
people
are the scientists you are
looking for, though. He says he will show us the way, but he will
not go inside with us.”

“Why not?” Haley asked. She rocked Lennon
with determination, in an obsessive way that tugged at my
franticness. We needed solutions now. We couldn’t wait.

“He’s afraid of them,” Adela explained. “And
I do not know why. He won’t say.”

New nerves clawed at my stomach. I didn’t
know how to take that. Should we be afraid too?

I looked at my friends, my loved ones. They’d
sacrificed everything on this journey. We’d lost so much and nearly
lost even more. Was it worth it to finish this? Was it worth our
lives to save others?