Page 62 of The World Undone

Bishop shot him a dark look. “Other than Greta, you mean?”

Darius snorted. “Obviously.”

“Vincent,” Bishop answered, voice clipped. “He was one of our best scouts. Came back with a fresh shipment of supplies for the med center today.” He paused for a beat, then shook his head. “Between the two of them, we’ve taken a big loss. We have healers, but none as adept at the practice as Greta. She was special.”

She was. There’s always been something a little—more—about her. An omniscience that used to annoy the fuck out of me when I was a kid. She could always see through my shit better than most—and she was one of the only people capable of bossing Atlas around.

Darius shrugged before continuing on with his march. “There you have it, then.”

“Meaning?” Bishop pressed.

“Meaning,” Darius drew the word out, like he was growing impatient with Bishop’s inability to keep up, “that your pal Vincent likely got himself killed on his scouting mission and gave the hitchhiker a nice fleshy vehicle to ride back in. Guessing he was human, because he didn’t last long. And that’s when the shade took over your nurse.”

“And the patients?” I asked. “How’d they end up in the basement and how’d my dad get loose? And where did the poison come from? Isn’t it usually from those wendigo-like creatures? The flesh eaters? Do shades usually work with them? Or do you think one of those creatures took my dad?”

“As brilliant as I may be, I don’t have all the answers.” Darius met my eyes, but looked away, like he was itchy or uncomfortable for some reason. “I’m working on a theory. I’ll let you know when it’s better developed.”

Something about the way he said that, the flatness in his voice, convinced me that I wouldn’t like whatever new theory he was shaping.

I picked up the pace, desperate to find my dad. We needed a win. Even a small one.

It took longer than I’d initially imagined to find him. It was a full hour of all-out running before we came into a small town.

The five of us stopped dead in our tracks when we got onto the main street.

“Fuck,” Atlas whispered, stealing the only word I was capable of forming at the moment.

The trail we’d been following had thinned out over our hike. For the last twenty minutes it had been nothing more than a drop or two of blood every ten feet or so.

But this? This was a bloodbath. A twin to the basement scene we’d left behind for the others to clean up. Maybe even worse.

“What the hell happened?” Bishop asked. Any aggression and anger he felt towards Darius was gone, cannibalized by the horror of the sight before us.

There were at least six or seven bodies strewn about the street, all in varying levels of attachment. The only faces in sight were dead, eyes lifeless as they stared up at the sky. An abandoned arm hung awkwardly in a broken window, the meat caught on a particularly sharp shard.

Screams and cries echoed from a few of the closed-up shops, where the humans were likely bunkered down and hiding.

Gunshots rang out, coupled with grunts and clashes in a hardware store at the end of the block.

“No,” I muttered, unwilling to accept that this was the handiwork of my father. This looked more like the set of a zombie movie. “This wasn’t him.”

I repeated the sentence to myself, over and over—half mantra, half prayer.

Please, for fuck’s sake don’t let this be at my dad’s hands.

Darius glanced at me briefly, and the look of pity reflected in his face made me want to punch it.

Even if giving him a broken nose would only result in my own.

I shook my head and followed the sounds of commotion. This wasn’t my dad. I refused to believe that he was capable of something like this, no matter what the hell was wrong with him.

Atlas was turned into a werewolf—and Sarah. They never once did anything like…this.

Unless—could he be possessed by a shade too?

My stomach dipped at that, because I knew what that meant if he was. He was already dead.

No. I refused to let myself believe that our luck was this trash, that my father would come all this way, go through all of that pain, just for his story to end like this. The world couldn’t possibly be that cruel.

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