Page 70 of Calico Descending

Hand in Neela’s, we run through the camp, dodging the fights.

More flashes of white in the distance bring us to a halt, and I twist around, searching the camp for a way out. Fires crawl over the tents, as if deliberately set aflame by the unseen invader I’m hoping to spot in the crowd.

Valdys is nowhere in sight.

One of the marauders bumps into us, but quickly scrambles off into the darkness. All I hear is a scream beyond the perimeter of the camp, over the chaos trapped within.

I catch sight of Titus chasing after two marauders, and when I spin around, I’m greeted by the beady eyes and translucent skin of a mutation. It pounces toward us, and squeezing Neela’s hand, I jump back.

A massive figure steps in its path, and I look up to see the back of Valdys. He wrangles with the creature that swipes at us, snapping its maw.

“Get to the truck!” he calls over his shoulder.

I don’t want to leave his side, but as I turn around, there’s nowhere to hide here. Scattered amid the dwindling number of marauders are all three Alphas and the occasional mutation.

Taking Neela by the arm, I skirt around Valdys, who wrangles the creature to the ground. The two of us run into the darkness, eyes trailing over the terrain I can hardly see beneath my feet. My lungs burn as I race blindly toward the mountain, in search of the truck. I catch sight of it up ahead and push speed from my legs, dragging Neela behind me. Cold metal hits my palms as I damn near slide into the driver’s door and scramble with the handle to open it. Neela and I climb inside and lock the doors. Hands gripping the steering wheel, I take a moment to breathe and settle my nerves. Beside me, Neela wheezes too, her palms pressed into the dashboard.

I turn my head to see, from this distance, the blaze of fires, where all the tents have succumbed to flames. The occasional gunshot that echoes over the screaming tells me some of the men are still alive. I scan the camp in search of Valdys, and see him tear away the head of a mutation, tossing it behind him as he moves onto the next, like a warrior.

“If Cadmus hadn’t ... “ Neela sniffles beside me, and I twist back around to see her shaking her head. “After what they did.”

Tears fill my eyes, as I pull her into me. “I know.”

“I thought Calico was worse.” Her body jerks with a sob.

As I stare off at the chaos outside, I’d be inclined to agree with her. But I know what we saw was the worst of it.

It has to be the worst of it.

A minute later, and Neela settles beside me. “Cadmus saved us.”

I’d like to believe that. I’d like to think it was my pleas that broke him from whatever trance in which he seemed to have fallen, but the look in his eyes, after he killed those men, told me his mind was still trapped somewhere else. It told me whatever he saw while killing them wasn’t the same thing I saw.

Something thumps the back of the truck, and my muscles stiffen. The shouts are familiar, Cadmus, and the truck shakes, as if something is wrestling with him in the back. I snap my attention back toward the driver door, exhaling with relief when Valdys strides up. Through the window, I watch him glance to the side and shake his head, and I unlock the door as he approaches. When he slides in beside me, he looks beaten and weary. Battered with new cuts and gashes.

“Cadmus … is he?”

A flicker of a frown dances across Valdys’s face, as he shakes his head again, and when the screams from the back fade, and the truck settles, he fires up the engine. The lights flick on.

At the crash of shattering glass, I twist around to Neela’s teary-eyed face. No more than a breath later, she’s yanked through the passenger side window on a harrowing scream. I lurch to reach out for her, but too late, as a mutation pounces off into the darkness, with her body dragging behind it.

“No! No!”

A hard yank snaps me backward, as a second flash of white takes up the width of the window. Screams rip through my chest, when a claw reaches in, swiping for my legs. Valdys stretches across, taking hold of it, and cracks it in half with his bare hands. The mutation screeches and recoils only briefly, before reaching in again. The moment it grips my leg, its body is yanked back, and it releases me.

I scramble back against Valdys and peer through the window, where Titus wrestles with it in the dirt. In the distance, I see no sign of the other mutation that ran off with Neela.

Panic throbs in my chest, as Titus takes hold of its skull and rips it clean off it’s body, and I scan for Neela again. “We have to find her! We have to!”

Covered in blood and bits of flesh, Titus opens the passenger door and slides in beside me. “You’re not going to find her.” The grave tone of his voice tells me she’s either dead, or close to it. “They’re just like Ragers. It’ll find a nest and …. Either way, there’s no saving her now.”

The tug in my throat is a sob that I swallow back.

“Would you have left me?” I turn to Valdys, my body quaking with the will to keep from breaking down. “Would you have bothered to come for me?”

Valdys stares off a moment, and jaw clenched, he throws the truck in gear, heading in the direction Neela was taken.

The darkness of the desert whips past the window, as I sit between Titus and Valdys, and when the truck slows, I scoot forward, noticing an object lying in the dirt. A scrap of our yellow uniforms. At the foot of a small mountain, Valdys brings the truck to a stop and opens the driver door. I set to follow after him, but a thump hits my chest.

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