Demitria Lunetta - In the End

They’re guards, not Scrappers. How did they make it out here without the Floraes finding them? They must’ve followed us close enough to be protected by the emitter. I’d have seen them, though. Had they just gotten lucky, riding in the wake of the emitter?

I look down at Pete. “Tank must be here, too. He’s . . .”

“Right here, cupcake.”

I turn to find Tank standing ten feet away, a rifle leveled at me. His nose is swollen, his face purple. He looks like a monster, not a man.

“If you fire that gun,” I tell him, “the Floraes will find you and they’ll kill you.”

Tank harrumphs. “We’ve been trailing you since you left Fort Black and you two haven’t shut up once. I don’t see what all the fuss is about with the Floraes. If it’s this easy to avoid them, I could be a Scrapper. It ain’t that hard.”

It’s pointless to reason with him, so I try to pull my gun, but Tank doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. I’m on my back before I hear the crack of the gun echo through the air, pain exploding from my chest where the bullet hits my synth-suit, the wind knocked from my lungs.

I hear Brenna cry out, “No!” as Tank laughs.

“Drop it, girlie,” he says to Brenna. Her knife falls to the ground next to where I’d been standing. She takes a step back, but Tank yells for her to stop. “We ain’t in Fort Black anymore, and this ain’t the Arena. I could kill you now and no one would ever know.”

I can tell he’s getting closer by the sound of his footsteps on the loose gravel of the parking lot. “You killed my buddy Pete, and I’m all tore up about it, so I need some cheering up. I was also looking forward to what I was going to do to cupcake there. I know you’d rather fight men than be with one, but we’ll see how much fight you have left after I’m through with ya.”

The pain in my chest is subsiding. My lungs scream for oxygen, but I make myself draw in a silent breath instead of gulping in air. I wish my gun were still in my hand. I turn my head slightly, but I don’t see it on the ground. It must have flown off, out of sight, when I fell. But as soon as Tank’s familiar foul smell hits my nose, I jump up, onto him, going for his rifle.

“What the . . . !” he screams. He’s shocked that I can move, that I’m not bleeding to death on the ground, so I do manage to get a hand on the gun, but he just covers both my hand and the rifle’s action with his enormous mitt and clamps me tight to him with his other arm.

“You ain’t dead ?” he says, grunting. “Oh, cupcake, you’re gonna wish —”

A pair of arms wrapped around Tank’s neck cuts off his words, along with his oxygen. He needs at least one arm to fight Brenna off, but he’s not giving up the rifle. He heaves me aside with his other arm and starts clubbing away wildly over his shoulder with it. He throws me too hard, though: Both the rifle and I are torn out of his grip. I hit the dirt on my back again, this time accompanied by a horrible crack.

I sit up and see that Tank has stopped struggling, and Brenna has stepped away from him. Both are looking with shock at Tank’s left shoulder and the spreading bright-red bloom on his dirty white shirt. He places his hand over his heart and looks up at me, confused. I stare at the rifle, still in my hand. The gun either fired accidentally when I dropped it, or I pulled the trigger without even realizing it. Tank stumbles to the side, almost falling. He gives me one last look of pure hatred before loping into the distance, leaving a trail of blood behind him.

I hop up, trembling. Suddenly the feel of the rifle in my hand is repulsive. I set it down on the ground, then, spotting my own Guardian gun, grab it. I look at the place Tank disappeared to in the distance. I’ve never shot a person before. I’ve killed Floraes, though, but it’s just not the same.

“Are you okay?” Brenna asks.

I shake my head. “He’s going to die out there.”

“Good. He should die.”

I try to tell myself that he’s a murderer and deserves to die. But what does that make me?

“You’ve never killed anyone before, have you?” Brenna gives me a look that’s almost motherly. It’s so out of character, it jolts me from my trance.

“I did. A long time ago.” I don’t recognize my own voice, it’s so eerily calm. I lick my lips and try to recover. “When everything first happened and I was just trying to survive day to day. I was alone and then had finally met another survivor. But he was going to hurt me, so I rigged a car alarm and set it off. The Floraes got him.”

“Well, Tank was sure as shit going to hurt you too,” Brenna says, her moment of tender concern gone. “He thought he did kill you. . . . Hell, I thought he killed you. Why aren’t you dead?”

At the mention of me being shot, the pain floods back to my breastbone. I touch the hole in the sweatshirt I am wearing over my synth-suit and wince. Pete pounded my chest with a knife, but the bullet was ten times worse. I’ll have bruises upon bruises. I cough experimentally, sending a sharp pain through my ribs. It stings when I move, but I don’t think there’s any internal damage. I may have lucked out again.

“It’s that ninja suit you wear, isn’t it?” Brenna asks. “Where can I get one of those? That might be even more useful than that Florae repellent sound thing you have.”

The emitter. I frantically scan the ground for my pack, spotting it a few feet from where I’d left it. Someone must have tripped over it during the scuffle. I spring over to it, my chest burning as I bend over to grab the emitter. I let out a groan.

The emitter is broken in two.

It takes a few seconds for the fear to hit me, but when it does I can’t move.

“That doesn’t look so good,” Brenna whispers, looking around. “You think it still works?”

I stare at the broken emitter, my legs heavy. I’ve relied on it so much these past few months. Now it’s gone. We’re sitting ducks.

I will my limbs to work and quickly sling the pack over my shoulder and, ignoring the pain that shoots through my ribs, spin in place with my gun. “We need to find shelter, now,” I hiss. Two loud gunshots had gone off. Maybe there weren’t any Floraes around to hear them. Maybe we’re still okay.

Yet out of the corner of my eye, I catch a flash of green streaking across the parking lot.

The world seems to slow. And now I see it—a Florae. It rises slowly over a car. Its eyes are milky and unseeing, but its ears—or earholes—are a hundred times sharper than our own. I know it’s heard us. And if one has, there will soon be many more.

Brenna and I look at each other. Our instinct, of course, is to run. But that would only make things worse. We’d go in different directions, and the Florae, with all its inhuman speed, would hunt us down in seconds. Our only hope is to stick together.

The two of us stand there as if time has stopped. I wish I could sign to her, like I did so many times to Baby. I hold up a hand to try and convey we should be still. She shows me she understands with a small, stiff nod.

And then everything happens at once.

I raise my arm and shoot the creature with my silenced Guardian gun before it can figure out exactly where we are. It falls, but there’s no time for relief. Another appears to our left from another car, attracted by the minimal noise. I turn to Brenna and put my fingers to my lips. She again nods her understanding.

We can make our stand here; there are plenty of abandoned cars to hide behind. But I don’t know how many are coming, and they could attack us from any direction. It would be pointless to use the rifle, as the sound of the shots would just bring more. They are only a few now, and far enough away for us to find someplace where we can be quiet and wait for Them to disperse.