The Lair

CHAPTER TWELVE

Carter

We drove for a while in total silence. I stared mindlessly out the front window. Lily stared out the side window. I could tell from the way she toyed with the fabric of her hoodie’s sleeve that her arm was bugging her. She wouldn’t want me to notice, but I’d had plenty of wounds myself. With a close call like that, you were tempted to poke at it. To reassure yourself that it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.

Hell, it was all I could do not to demand she rip off the bandage and show me Dawn’s sutures. I had been in the room when Dawn had cleaned the wound and started stitching it up. Hell, I knew it wasn’t bad. But I wanted to see it. To assure myself.

But I didn’t touch her. I didn’t even talk to her.

What was left to say?

We might have driven all the way back to Base Camp in silence, except the satellite phone rang.

The sat phone ringing wasn’t anything to take lightly. Only a handful of people even had phones, let alone the number to this one. Sebastian had a phone. Base Camp had five others: two that stayed at camp, two that went out with teams that worked the Farms, and one that was used on food raids. The phones were a luxury item. No one would use one if it wasn’t an emergency.

When it started ringing, Lily just looked mutely at the duffle bag holding all the food-raid supplies—the sat phone included.

“Pick it up,” I told her.

She dug through the bag with her good arm, and found the phone only to stare at it for a second before fumbling to answer it. She pressed the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

The expression on her face as she listened said it all. Hell, the fact that anyone had called at all said it all.

I slowed the truck to a stop and set the brake, anxiety churning in my gut. Lily met my gaze as she handed me the phone. For just a second, she cradled my hand in hers.

“Tell me.” Hearing it from her would buy me at least a few seconds to process whatever happened before I had to talk to whoever was on the other end of the line.

Her eyes were wide with shock and fear made her voice tremble. “Base Camp was hit.”

“Gun-toting psychopaths?” I didn’t really believe that’s who it was, but at least if the attackers where human, Base Camp might have had a chance.

But Lily shook her head. “Ticks. They attacked an hour ago.”

“During the daylight?”

“It wasn’t a full pack. Just three.”

“Casualties?”

“Thirteen. Two Elites and eleven Greens. They were cooking lunch out in the yard. The Ticks got nearly everyone who—”

Lily broke off, squeezing her eyes closed. I took the phone from her, and braced myself to hear the rest from whoever was on the other end of the line. From whoever had lived to tell the tale.

I started driving again as I listened to Merc’s sit rep. Merc described the attack in terse, emotionless sentences.

Jesus, it had been a bloodbath.

I drove fast and hard to get back to Base Camp as quickly as I could. So that I could get there and assess the damage myself. So that if other Ticks attacked, I would friggin’ be there this time. And so that I wouldn’t have to be here in the truck with Lily any longer than necessary. Because I couldn’t stand to see the disappointment in her eyes any more than I could stand to hear her quiet tears.

Lily threw herself from the cab of the truck as soon as it stopped in the parking lot outside of Base Camp. I hadn’t even set the brake yet and she was already running for the cave.

She hadn’t said a word after the phone call, but I knew she’d want to get to McKenna as quickly as possible. She’d need to verify with her own eyes that the girl was okay. It didn’t have anything to do with needing to get as far away from me as possible. Probably.

Still, it took everything in me to let her go.

Maybe she hated me right now. I could live with that. What I couldn’t live with was how many things had gone wrong today. I was still reeling from the sight of Lily being shot. And I couldn’t even begin to process the attack on Base Camp.

I climbed out of the cab more slowly than Lily.

I tucked the keys into my pocket and tried to tamp down my nausea as I surveyed the damage. When I’d left that morning, there had still been patches of snow and ice around the parking lot. Drifts of bright white near the tree line, piles of gray slush that softened during the day and refroze each night.

Now, there was blood everywhere. The bright splatter of red, hot enough to burn holes in the snow. The rivulets of pink, where the slush had melted and washed away carnage like a grisly river delta. The stench of blood and death and panic hung in the air, suffocating me.

Thirteen people. The loss was unthinkable. Unimaginable. This was the carnage of defeat. Of disaster. It smothered me.

Someone had covered the bodies with sheets, trying to mask the horror, but the result was ghastly. On TV when someone covers a corpse, the body is laid out like an Egyptian mummy. The shape beneath the cloth still looks human. Like someone tucked into bed with the sheets drawn up too high.

This looked nothing like that. Blood had seeped through the cloth, mimicking the appearance of the blood-splattered snow. The bodies beneath the sheets were twisted, broken, and misshapen. The bodies of the Ticks had been covered, also. They were set apart slightly—out of respect for the dead, I guess. But I would have recognized them anyway. There was nothing human about them, just a pile of hacked-up limbs. The survivors here hadn’t taken any chances that the Ticks might regenerate.

And they hadn’t yet thought far enough ahead to realize we would have to take that same precaution with the fallen on our side.

We had no way of knowing who—if any of them—would have the regenerative gene. We had to be sure that the people who died today, stayed dead.

I would do it myself. Every cell in my body rebelled at the thought. It made my stomach wrench and my skin crawl, but I would do it. Because I couldn’t ask anyone else to do it for me. Because I had to be sure. And because I was the leader.

This job—this horrific job—fell to me and no one else.

Besides, the deaths of those thirteen people . . . their blood was on my hands. If I’d been here, I wouldn’t have been able to stop it, but I damn sure could have fought. I couldn’t have saved all these lives, but I could have saved some of them.

Yeah, the girl I loved was safe, but at what price? Even worse, part of me was glad Lily had been shot.

If she hadn’t been shot then she would have been here this afternoon when the Ticks attacked and I knew how she would have reacted. She would have jumped right into the fight.

It was one of the things I loved about her—her complete refusal to back down from a fight, even one she had little hope of winning. What if she’d been one of these Greens who had died senselessly? The thought literally made it impossible to breathe. It crushed me.

“You okay?”

I turned to see Merc walking out of the caves. “Should I be?”

Merc didn’t meet my gaze. “No.”

“You and Taylor didn’t run into any trouble?”

“We only got here about ten minutes ago. Taylor’s fine.”

I nodded, but didn’t comment. Thank God Taylor was alive. As horrible and unthinkable as this was, Base Camp couldn’t function without Taylor. This attack might break us. I knew that, but without someone to keep what little electricity we had up and running, we would all be dead.

Merc nodded toward the bodies. “I figured . . .” He gestured and only then did I realize he held an ax in each hand. The blades gleamed in the weak afternoon sun. He’d just sharpened them.

“Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else aloud. I held out my hand, palm up. “I’ll do it. Just keep the parking lot clear for a while. But I’ll prepare the bodies for disposal myself.” Besides, if I did the work alone, no one would notice when I puked my guts out midway and cried like a friggin’ baby afterward. “You go on in, Merc.”

Merc slanted me a wtf look and handed me one of the axes on his way to the bodies.

Merc wasn’t the kind of guy who talked a lot, but he followed orders and never hesitated to step up. Even to do what had to be the crappiest job on earth.

Back in the Before, before this whole nightmare began, I never would have conceived that my job description would have included chopping the heads off my murdered friends.

I’d sworn to protect these people. Some of them were just kids. Kids I’d personally rescued out of Farms. And now, they were dead and it was my job to defile their bodies. I couldn’t even bury them afterward.

As cold, hard, and rocky as the land was up here, it would take days to dig enough graves and there were too many bodies for a funeral pyre. We couldn’t afford to burn that many trees. The absolute best we could do was load all the bodies into the back of one of the trucks and drive up to a nearby ravine and drop them over. Even though I would never have asked Merc to help, I was glad he was there.

All those times I’d played “Assassin’s Creed”—all the times I’d thought how badass it was to swing a sword—all those points I’d racked up, none of that could have prepared me for the first swing of the ax. This wasn’t the first time I’d done this, but it never got any easier.

We worked in silence. It was gruesome, terrible work. No matter how many times or how many ways I told myself that it had to be done, that it was honoring the human this body had been, I still hated it. It made me feel like a goddamn serial killer and I just freaking hated it.

It helped, somehow, knowing Merc hated it, too. We both threw up more than once, but we worked quickly and were finished loading the bodies into the back of the truck within an hour.

Afterward we cleaned up the best we could. Out by the tree line, the dirt was sandy and there were a few dry patches. We used that to scrub off most of the blood so that we wouldn’t waste precious soap. We had both worked barefoot—shoes were too difficult to clean and too hard to come by if they were ruined by blood splatter—and despite the cool weather, we both stripped off our shirts and scrubbed them in the dirt, too. Sand absorbs a lot of blood.

A little bit off in the woods, we had set up a primitive bathroom. Water, which we pumped up from Bear Lake, was stored in a tank. There were tubs for washing up and a gravity-fed shower. There was very little privacy, which didn’t matter much because it was too miserably cold for anyone to linger out there. Usually, people signed up for time in the bathroom weeks in advance. Today it was predictably empty. I washed out all my clothes myself and Merc did the same. I put my jeans back on wet.

The last thing we did before going in was shovel buckets of sand across the stains in the parking lot. It helped. A little. The stains would fade slowly, from the concrete and from people’s minds, but covering up the blood made it possible to pretend today hadn’t happened.

I couldn’t look anyone in the eyes as we walked back into the caves. I thought about what Lily had said about the Roman generals who led the charge into battle, who were the first to kill and, if need be, the first to die.

After today, that didn’t seem like bravery or even stupidity. Charging into battle seemed smart, because the general who died in battle never had to bury his own men.

Because this was the stuff you never got over. This was the stuff that haunted you until the day you died. The stuff you never thought you could do but did anyway, because if you didn’t do it, who would?

But through it all, through the horror and anguish, through the bitter cold and aching muscles, I felt this awful relief, because at least Lily hadn’t been there. Because as hard as this was, there was nothing on earth, no fear great enough, no horror bad enough, no promise binding enough that would have given me the strength to do this to her.