Page 3 of Hell Breaks Loose

“Do you, Marco Alejandro Vice, take this woman to be your wife?” A quaver in the priest’s voice ripples through the crowd, a shiver of doubt. An omen.

“I do.”

“And do you, Hellena Michaels, take this man to be your husband…?”

1

GAVIN

Black ichor.

The sludge I find myself wading through again, trying to find my way to higher ground.

Crimson inking out into muddy brown.

A dozen new cuts and scrapes, the most recent less the ones that are slowly healing. Keeping my wounds clean is the biggest struggle. Everything is muck and filth, murky water and rotting vegetation, wooden structures soaked in floodwaters.

Blue and purple fade to green.

The bruises under the layer of soot coating my skin start to fade from the torrent of water that nearly drowned me. After hours of hanging onto a tree branch, my arms gave out, but the flood was ebbing by that point.

Still, it carried me through the canyon, out into the lowest part of town near the docks.

Where I’ve been trapped for nearly two weeks.

Trying to find a path out toward the edges of town, or to the part of town that wasn’t devastated by the reservoir collapsing.

And at every turn, I’m hunted.

By fucking psychos.

Blinking rapidly, I force a few breaths into my lungs, triggering an automatic jolt of adrenaline.

Haven’t slept more than an hour at a time in days. My body has reverted to those days in service, soldiering. Staked out for days as a merc.

Years of consistent, comfortable living have made it a harder adjustment, but the constant fear of being murdered has a way of making or breaking you.

“Chin up, Gavin,” I mumble, just to hear someone’s voice.

And then I’m running again, the scuffle of bare feet, the grunts of breathless desperation way too close behind me for comfort.

Once, I would have stood my ground, fought my way through.

But these nutjobs are barely human. And they swarm.

Most of them used to be drug dealers, users, the lowest tier of the Holy Ghost gang that ruled over the docks and rattier areas of Sanctum Harbor. Now, something has shifted.

The loss of civilization, the loss of power and water and food, has turned them into feral packs of wild animals. There’s more to it than that, though.

A smell that has nothing to do with their lack of hygiene emanates from their pores.

It’s a sour, acrid smell.

A smell that tells me someone is feeding these fuckers drugs. Drugs that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It makes them prone to suggestion, voraciously hungry, hyper-violent, and savagely manic.

The only part of them that remains lucid is their anger.

Their hate.

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