Page 86 of Eden's Joker

Tyler didn’t return for the rest of the night after I made my request. Nor for the rest of the following day. At dusk, Scorpio brought me my dinner and wouldn’t answer my questions or say much beyond that I should stop asking so many. He also reiterated that we are not friends. I don’t think he meant it. His eyes as he looked at me told a completely different story.

But what use is that?

I sat in the window of our bedroom all night, watched as the men that had been gathering in town moved out, becoming tiny dots of light in the hills surrounding this place. One of those lights is Tyler… or Joker, as I’ve started calling him in my head. Tyler is my lover, Joker is the guy who still wants revenge on my family. But as much as I want the two to be different… to not want the first over the other, I love them both.

The room smells of candle wax and all the love we made in this bed, in this room and in this house. It will have to last a lifetime. Because we’re not from the same world, we’re not “friends” as Scorpio put it. We’re just a product of a plan gone bad… a plan that will still get realized as it was originally thought up. And that plan is the annihilation of everyone I ever loved. How can I exchange all of them, my whole family—the people who cared for me and loved me since the day I was born—for the love of one man?

I can’t, that’s how.

No matter how much I want all of them, I have to choose too.

The moon has long since set and the lights in the hills have all gone out. The town below is dark and quiet, a ghost town for real, just as it was when Tyler first found it.

This town was founded by outlaws and meant as a place where they could hide from persecution. Safe Haven, they’d named it. I found a diary among the books in the library, written by one Robert Hightower. He’s the one who built this house and buried his wife and three children in the cemetery Tyler likes to visit. He’s the one who founded this town after killing and defrauding some people. Instead of facing justice, he gathered up his family and his closest friends and relatives and convinced them thathiding out in the desert was the only possible future for them.

The children died of a fever that tore through the rest of the town as well, the wife died a little later of grief. That’s probably how Robert died too, but there’s no mention of that in the diary. Only pages and pages of self-blame for the fate that befell his family, and his slow descent into madness. He wanted to hide from the world and justice here. But justice came for him in the form of losing his whole family and having his life shattered.

I was going to show Joker the diary, make him read it and makeTylersee what happens to men who single-mindedly pursue a cause that has no real hope of ever bearing the kind of fruit they want it to. When all this is done, he’ll be sitting alone in this house, just as lonely as when he started. More so. Revenge is a fire that burns bright or cold, but once it burns out there’s nothing left.

I’ve come up with so many ways to tell him that while sitting alone in this big empty house.

But none of them will do any good.

Sunrise is starting, coloring the black sky beyond the hills a serene, translucent white. I have no doubt that it will set on a land colored crimson with blood.

I will not be waiting in this empty, sad house for Joker to return.

But that’s as far as all my thinking and fretting and philosophizing got me.

A shot rings out in the distance, echoing over the dark and rolling hills, growing louder. Making me shake and hurt like I’m the one who was hit. It’s followed by many more, each louder than the last.

I have to stop this battle. Even if it means being its only victim. Which is probably what it will take. Because the truth is, I can’t live without my family. But I can’t live without Tyler either.

46

Joker

They came with that impenetrable darkness that’s always blackest right before dawn. Tore through my first line of outer defense with an ease I should’ve predicted but hadn’t. Screams, gunshots, and the hollow thumping of boots on arid desert ground was all I could hear for the longest time. Until I longed for the silence of sharing a bed with Eden, the town quiet below our house.

The Devils have experience, training and usually Lucifer himself on their side. They’ve also been hoarding their weapons, not selling to anyone since the war started. I didn’t have enough night vision goggles to go around to all my men, the Devils probably had spares on them. But the sun has risen, now wiping out at least that advantage of theirs.

A new scent rose with the dawn too. Metallic like copper, salty like the brine in the air by the sea. It rose from all the blood I know was spilled in the darkness.

I’m with my men in the second circle of defense. Sarge is by my side, Scorpio, and Razor too. Manic and Doom are aways to my left.

I still hear the thumping of boots, the odd gunshot, faint screams of the men dying for this vengeance. I’m not fooling myself into thinking that very many of those are from the Devils. But they will be.

The next two rings of defense are made up of my men. We’re well rested, since this is only our second battle in this war, and we’re all committed.

“This fucking wait is killing me,” Scorpio hisses beside me. Or maybe his voice just sounds like that because his teeth are chattering from lack of alcohol all night.

“Keep your eyes on the horizon,” I tell him. “They’ll be here any moment.”

The echoing gunshots and other sounds of battle have been growing progressively louder. And now that the sun has risen, I can also see some of the carnage this dawn brought.

Dead men lying on the hillsides, in ravines, their blood soaking into the greedy, parched, desert soil, coloring it black.

I see men running to safety, getting gunned down, getting stabbed, getting killed.

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