Drake didn't say anything. He simply stood in front of Shayla and held her immobile while Cya whimpered behind him on the ground.
“We need her,” he repeated. There was an emphasis on his words that I didn't understand. Cya had screwed up royally, that was for sure. “We
can use
her.”
“We need a new radiator,” Kennedy spoke softly from behind Cya. “I can't fix this bus without new parts.”
Shayla opened her mouth and then shut it abruptly. She stared up at Drake through tear-filled eyes and shook her head. “You can't be serious? It would be suicide to go to Ra-Shet now, with
this
.” She jerked her chin at Cya's huddled form.
Ra-Shet?
I was confused. I'd never heard of Ra-Shet before.
Drake shook his head no and gestured to Cya. “She has value, Shayla.”
“Not enough.” Shayla shook her head, visibly angry and frustrated. “We're not in a good position right now.”
“We don't have a choice,” Kennedy said. “Unless you're willing to deal with the Church of Chaos.”
Jeb turned to face me, a look of confusion and surprise on his face. It was clear that the others had forgotten about us for the moment. “Church of Chaos?” He mouthed the words at me silently. I shrugged my shoulders and turned my attention back to the conversation. We could figure out the meanings of words and phrases later on. My gut told me something extremely important was being decided outside the bus.
“No,” Drake scowled. “The Church's prices are too high.”
“The Church wants weapons,” Shayla said flatly.
“Like I said, they want too much.” Drake didn't look at Cya this time but I got the distinct feeling his words had something to do with why he felt we still needed her. I wondered if Drake was going to make Cya trade her weapon to this Church of Chaos in exchange for the parts to fix our bus. I wondered if she could make up for causing Conner's death so easily.
Cya halfway sat up. “My skin is burning,” she moaned.
“You deserve worse than that,” Shayla spat at her before turning her attentions back to Drake. “Going to Ra-Shet is a mistake. We'll make fools of ourselves.”
Drake opened his mouth to reply but Kennedy cleared his throat, loudly, and interrupted him. “We need a radiator,” he said purposely looking directly at Jeb and me. I took an involuntary step backwards as his cold blue eyes landed on me. “We can't haul cans back to the Cube without the bus.”
Drake and Shayla followed his stare from Cya to us and nodded.
“We need cans,” Drake said calmly. He looked at Shayla as if he was wondering if she was going to challenge his statement the way she had earlier on the bus. Shayla glared at him for a moment and then down at Cya again.
“We need cans,” she agreed. The smile she pasted across her angry features sent chills from the top of my skull to the tips of my toes.
I hadn't realized that Drake knew about my years working on the hospital ward until he handed me an overstuffed duffel bag of medical supplies from somewhere in the back of the bus and charged me with treating Cya's wounds. Jeb was ordered to take over guard duty on top of the bus while Kennedy and Drake finished their work on the ailing engine. Shayla burned the bodies of the new zombie and Conner. I couldn't help noticing that she searched her fallen lover's body and pocketed all the weapons and valuables before she dropped the match on his shirt.
Cya slapped at my hand the second time I attempted to apply a bandage to her ribs. I grabbed her wrist roughly in one of mine. “Quit,” I told her. Cya had dissolved into a sniveling, snotty mess as I made her remove her thin, shredded t-shirt so I could rub burning alcohol on the bloody scrapes she'd gotten when Shayla had yanked her off the roof of the bus.
“You're hurting me,” she whimpered. Her reddened eyes were filled with misery. I strongly suspected her ankle was severely sprained or even broken due to the heavy swelling and deep purple and black bruise that had formed around the joint, but she kept insisting it was fine and wouldn't let me anywhere near it.
“If I don't get the dirt out of your cuts you could get an infection,” I told her.
“I don't care.” She crossed her arms over her bare chest.
“I care,” Drake's voice came from behind me. I hadn't even noticed him come back into the bus. He was standing in the aisle putting a box of tools back into the storage box under the second seat from the front. “We can't risk you getting an infection. We don't have any medicine.”
“You all want me dead anyway.” Cya hiccuped and more tears ran down her cheeks. “Don't you?”
“Of course not.” Drake smiled gently as he stepped up beside me and sat down on the seat next to us. “What happened to Conner was an honest mistake. We don't blame you.” He took Cya's hand in his own. “We've all made mistakes. Horrible mistakes. Being a Scavenger is a scary job and we have to take a lot of risks in order to get the supplies the folks back at the Cube need to survive. You just have to remember that everyone is counting on us. You can't let yourself be held back by a single mistake.”
Cya was staring at him in hopeful disbelief. “You don't hate me?” There was so much hope in her voice I could scarcely look her in the face. He did hate her. All of them hated her. I was sure of it after I'd watched them have that strange conversation outside less than two hours ago.
“No, I don't hate you.” Drake smiled warmly at Cya. The sunlight reflected off of his golden hair and cast his face in a warm glow. He looked so much like the hero lover Julie and I had always made him out to be in our fantasies that I wondered if I had misunderstood the undertone of the conversation between Drake and Shayla. “Let me take care of you.”
“You won't hurt me?”
“Of course not.”
“Am I going to be okay?” Cya asked.
I frowned and stared down at the alcohol soaked rag in my hand. I remembered the way Drake had said we needed Cya. It hadn't sounded friendly to me but today had been a bad day in an otherwise shitty year. Maybe I was reading things into Drake's words that weren't really there.
He certainly looked kind enough right now as he took the alcohol soaked rag out of my hand and gently began to wipe dirt out of the abrasions on Cya's skin. She closed her eyes and let him run his hands all over her petite, well-proportioned frame, including the damaged ankle that she had refused to let me touch.
Drake frowned when he saw how severe the swelling was in the joint but he didn't say anything negative as he gently began to massage Cya's injured leg. “You'll be just fine,” he told her. She looked up at him with pure adoration.
“You promise?” she asked.
“I promise.” Drake took Cya's dainty little hand into his own and squeezed her fingers affectionately. “Go ahead and get dressed, it’s almost time for dinner.”
He turned to face me. “Thanks for taking care of her.
I nearly opened my mouth to tell him that I hadn't been of any real use but the intimacy in his eyes stopped me.
“You're going to be a real asset to the Scavengers,” Drake said as he leaned across the seat and planted a quick and completely unexpected kiss on my cheek.
The pressure of someone standing on the edge of the seat I was using as my bed jarred me back to full consciousness just when I had finally managed to doze off. I sat up abruptly to see a man's shining black leather boot resting against the edge of my seat. It was attached to a long, muscular leg wearing tight blue jean pants.
“Sorry,” Drake said as he adjusted his grip on the trap door that led onto the roof of the bus.
“It's okay,” I told him. “I can't sleep anyway.”
He hesitated for a moment and then smiled gently at me. God the boy was beautiful. My cheek suddenly burned with the memory of the quick kiss he'd unexpectedly put on my skin earlier in the day.
“Come talk to me.” Drake issued the invitation so quietly I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. Then he held out his right hand to me, palm up, and I processed that he was asking me to go up onto the bus's roof with him. I looked around the inside of the bus to see that Drake and I were the only two occupants who weren't dozing fitfully on the hard vinyl seats.
I nodded and took his hand. He pulled me onto my feet and a moment later I found myself sitting on the rusted roof of the Scavenger's bus. The air around us was smoky from the burned corpses and the woods were silent. I took a deep breath and choked on the air. Drake turned and frowned at me with a concerned look on his face. I shook my head at him.
“I tasted fire for months after the brickyard burned. I have horrible dreams of flames and charred skin when I sleep and I wake up with ghost smoke smoldering in my mouth.” I wasn't sure why I was confessing my worst nightmares to a man I barely knew other than by reputation but I wanted him to know that I wasn't the zombies that were bothering me. “I should have known the Scavengers would burn the bodies of any zombies we encountered and killed.”
“Turning flesh to ash is the only way to make certain a zombie is truly gone,” Drake confirmed. He was scanning the woods around us with a practiced eye.
I nodded at him. I knew the why and I knew the how of it. For some reason it hadn't occurred to me that, by trying to escape the burning ghosts of my job in the hospital ward, I'd be jumping both feet first into my reoccurring nightmare of flaming corpses.
I'd been the one to decapitate and burn Julie's corpse after she had turned. She'd made me promise that I would stay with her while she died. She'd said it would be too embarrassing for anyone but her very best friend to see her turned into a zombie. It had hurt so badly to watch her turn into a charred monster, but I'd stuck with her out of love. She would have done the same for me.
“The truth is that I've killed hundreds of zombies within the very predictable clinical setting of the hospital ward,” I told Drake. “Dr. Zeb normally knew ahead of time when a patient was likely to die and he'd order us to chain them to their beds in preparation for the change. Once the patient stopped breathing it was a simple matter to use one of the three long blades we kept on the south wall to decapitate the body. The gurney men would then remove the body from the hospital ward and take it down the hall to the pit for burning. On particularly bad days the smell of burning flesh would fill the halls of the hospital ward but most of us learned to ignore it. The smell had never really bothered me until the brickyard fire.” I shuddered involuntarily and Drake surprised me by putting his arm around my shoulders. He pulled me against his chest. I snuggled into his warmth without meaning to. I'd felt so alone lately it was an incredible comfort to have someone to lean on. I pushed my earlier misgivings about Drake out of my mind. He'd been kind to Cya when we'd been talking in the bus. He'd been nothing but friendly during dinner while he'd been discussing his plans of searching the surrounding area for the parts we'd need to repair the bus as soon as the sun came up.
“The brickyard fire really upset you, didn't it?”
“I knew a lot of the people who died.” The truth I'd kept so close to my chest and hidden behind a smile while I worked in the hospital ward spilled out of me before I realized what was happening. “I grew up in Block E and the fire happened on our day. The only reason I wasn't there when the explosion occurred was because the hospital ward was shorthanded that day and I'd been asked to work. My best friend was burned in the fire. I had to watch her die slowly in the hospital ward while I changed her dressings and prayed she'd start to recover. I stood there and watched a lot of people I cared about die. I couldn't do anything to help. It was awful.”
“I'm sorry.” The sympathy in Drake's voice sounded genuine. He rubbed the flat of his palm up and down against my spine. His touch was gentle and deceptively soothing.
“I had to get away from the hospital ward,” I confessed. “Every time I walked down the hall all I could think about was who had died in what bed and how many times I'd watched loved ones turn into monsters.” I didn't realize I was crying until Drake stroked his thumb across my cheek and wiped my tears away.
“You agreed to join the Scavengers to get away from the hospital?”
“You made me an offer I couldn't refuse,” I admitted. “Julie died and then less than 6 months later my parents up and disappeared from our apartment. I have no one left. I needed to get away before I went crazy. You offered me a way out and I took it.”
“I saw you as an asset to our team.” Drake ran his index finger across my jawline and tilted my chin up so that I was looking directly into his dark eyes. “I'm glad you decided to join us.”
I moved my mouth but my tongue was suddenly so dry that no words would come out. I forced myself to nod instead. My heart was beating itself silly against my ribcage. I didn't know how I would ever manage to keep breathing when my mouth was only inches away from Drake's.
His lips were soft and tasted like mint when they brushed against mine. The pressure of the kiss was deliberate as Drake traced his tongue against the edges of my lips. His arms wrapped around me and turned my body into his as his lower lip invaded my mouth.
“Relax,” Drake whispered in my ear as his hands slipped across my back. “Haven't you ever been kissed before?”
I hadn't, but this didn't seem like the ideal time to bring up that my only sexual experiences to date involved rubbing my tongue all over a pillow I was pretending was Drake while Julie compared my efforts to the kisses we'd seen in the movies the Powers That Be occasionally showed during major holidays and celebrations.
Instead, I slid myself slightly forward and aimed my lips for Drake's. He met me halfway and before I knew it my tongue was in his mouth and his tongue was working its way down the back of my throat. I couldn't breathe very well but I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy a moment I'd always thought would be spectacular. I was alone in the dark with Drake Bledsoe, kissing him on top of the Scavengers' bus. The night air was crisp and a little bit damp. The birds in the forest were chirping and faint strands of music were coming from somewhere off in the distance.
I froze mid-kiss. Was I really hearing music? Drake's tongue was still exploring my mouth but I stopped reciprocating as I focused all of my attention on the faint melody coming from somewhere to the left of the bus. I pulled away from Drake abruptly and wiped his spit off my chin without really thinking about it.
“Pilar?” Drake was obviously surprised I'd pulled away. “What's wrong?”
I held up my fingers to silence him. I tapped my finger against my right ear indicating he should listen. His expression immediately changed. He jumped up from his sitting position and grabbed hold of the knife on his belt.
The music stopped abruptly and someone in the darkness laughed.
“You better show yourself,” Drake demanded angrily as he stared into the woods. I reached for my machete and was horrified to realize I had forgotten it inside the bus. It was lying next to the seat with my jacket. And my gun.
“What are you going to do if I don't, Drake?” The laugh echoed again. I could almost see the silhouette of a man's shadow next to the base of a fat tree 30 feet to our right. “Stand on the roof of your busted bus all night and make threats?”
“How did you...?” Drake let out a low growl of annoyance. His shoulders relaxed slightly and he changed the grip on his knife from a stabbing hold into a throwing grasp.
“I could smell you.” The shadow man took several steps into the clearing and I gasped.
Zombies weren't supposed to be able to talk.
He laughed again and took another couple of steps towards the bus until he stood tall and strong and decidedly on display in the moonlight. He spread his arms and looked directly at me. Or, at least, his left eye focused on me. The right eye was milky white and distinctly dead in appearance. It had been bisected with a thick, nasty looking ridged scar that sliced through his features in a straight line that started at his square jaw line and ran across his cheek, through his eye and eyebrow and turned into a thick streak of gray-white hair that ran through his otherwise jet black waves. The eye that was watching me was the coldest, cruelest shade of blue I had ever seen. His nose was perfectly straight and his smiling lips were thin. A section of the lower right hand side of his jaw appeared to be missing. A chunk of flesh on the left side of his neck was wrinkled like a badly healed burn and it ran under the collar of the black leather jacket he was wearing. He had a cross bow strapped loosely to his shoulder and an assortment of weaponry hung from a belt that dangled off his slender hips. I guessed he was taller than Drake by a couple of inches and his shoulders were significantly slimmer. I got the impression of lean muscle and speed as he twisted to face me squarely. He couldn't have been more than a couple of years older than I was.
“Don't trust him,” the mutilated stranger told me bluntly as he jerked his chin towards Drake.
“Excuse me?” I blinked at him in stunned horror. The injuries and scars on his body were those of a zombie and yet the way he was standing and speaking were definitely not the mannerisms of one of the dead.
“Go away,” Drake practically spat the words at the stranger. “You have no right to be here.”
“I think you're forgetting your manners, Drake.”
“You don't know a damn thing about manners.” Drake adjusted the grip on his knife and stepped forward to the edge of the bus as if he were preparing to throw the weapon.
“No one has ever claimed that I had any manners. It was awfully rude of me to interrupt you when you were trying to suck that poor girl's face off, wasn't it?” Zombie boy chuckled again. “I was just a little concerned that you had indulged in too much of the forbidden bounty.”
Drake growled again as he raised the sharp blade into throwing position.
“Go ahead. Throw it.” Drake's tormentor held his arms out so that he made a bigger target. He made no move for any of the weapons that dangled from his belt. I counted at least four knives, some wicked looking barbed circles I'd never seen before and one medium sized sword. “I really could use another knife,” he taunted.
Drake stood frozen. His handsome face had become a mask of fury and the snarl that escaped his throat made me take a step backwards. The hand holding the knife dropped back down to Drake's side without releasing the blade. “What do you want?” Drake demanded.
“Want?” The tone implied there was nothing Drake could possibly have that the monster would want.
“Why are you here?” Drake clarified.
“Thought you might enjoy some music so you could serenade your latest lover.” He laughed again and reached into the front pocket of the leather jacket. I tensed, expecting to see a weapon. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding a small rectangular piece of metal. He raised it to his lips and blew the faintest bit of air through the harmonica. I recognized the beginning bars of a melody my father had used to sing me to sleep with when I was a little girl. A wave of homesickness hit me so hard I thought for a moment I might collapse.
I forced my attention onto the man who was holding the instrument. I focused my gaze on his blank, white eye until the urge to cry was replaced with the slightest stirrings of fear.
“Stop that!” Drake hissed at our tormentor. “You'll draw them to us.”
“There aren't any of the dead nearby. If there had been, you already would have attracted them with all the screaming you did earlier.”
“I didn't scream,” Drake snapped.
“Your girls did.” He shifted his single good eye to me. “Was it your first zombie?”
“I wasn't one of the ones screaming,” I practically spat the words at him. I surprised myself with the vehemence of my own defense. He hiked up one of his jet black eyebrows and I was startled to realize he was coldly handsome if I didn't look at the disfigured side of his face. “Really?” he asked.
“It doesn't matter who was screaming,” Drake cut in abruptly. He put one of his hands on my shoulder and pulled me back away from the edge of the bus's roof. He placed himself squarely between me and the stranger. “You shouldn't be here.”
“I go wherever I want to. You seem to like to forget that you're the one crawling around like a pitiful little worm in the middle of my valley.”
“Your valley?” I couldn't hide my shock at the tone of his words. I didn't know who this man was or how his existence was even possible but I'd had enough of his blatant scorn and disrespect. “Do you realize who you're talking to?” I demanded. “We're Scavengers. We were appointed by the Powers That Be. We don't just follow the law of the Cube. We are the law of the Cube.”