Page 18 of Genesis
But then real movement happened before my eyes. The unlit cigarette stuck to my bottom lip as I screamed. A bullet tore through the flesh of my upper arm, and Zade shoved me to my ass. While I bled out, he took action. He wasn’t a sharpshooter by any means, and he typically saw doubles instead of singles, but he knelt in front of my sprawled body and fired round after round into the darkness.
Fuck him for having all the fun.
I shoved myself to my knees and grabbed the back of Zade’sPunisherhoodie, dragging the two of us into the shadows of the house we were beside. He barely stopped shooting, and as soon as we had some cover, we both fired back. Pops of staccato gunfire and whizzing bullets filled the air, but a chaotic frenzy filled my soul. This was life now, and I fucking loved to hate it.
“To the left,” Zade said, turning on his knee to fire in a different direction. “We need an exit plan here, Dire!”
Yeah, yeah, I was working on it. When two men came up behind us, I spun and shot them both in the throats. Zade killed two more to the left, and then I was yanking on his hoodie,forcing him to move because we were drugged madmen and we wouldn’t get that lucky a second time.
“Come on, Enge!” I laughed for some deranged reason.
We ran. As we ran, we killed anything in our path. Zade used to give a fuck about being a murderer, but he no longer had that affliction. Life and death were both precious, and we sat on the sharp edge between the two. Living while dead. Unalive but not fully deceased. It was an art form we’d perfected through nothing but anguish and pain, and in Zade’s case, anger. Fuck, he was an angry guy. Sometimes, I thought he loved being angry because it meant he was still capable of feeling something. Not even the drugs he’d been doing had dimmed his anger.
We kept running, and by the time we got to safety, the cigarette between my lips was drenched in drool, my smoker’s lungs bitched at me, and Zade threw up all over my feet. Then he popped another pill and kept on fucking walking.
“We gotta talk about your drug dependency, Enge,” I said as we walked through another forest.
“Fine. Let’s also talk about your perverted dick coming in the mouths of half-dead humans.”
Okay, so no talking then.
We walked through the night until my lungs quit and his body failed. By the time we holed up in the garage of a house, we both collapsed on a pile of old tarps. I lit the smoke because I didn’t want to waste it, and Zade snorted something from a dime bag.
“We just gonna keep living like this?” he asked, sounding more tired than I realized.
Guilt hit me then. He was doing this for me. Zade wanted to be in Genesis, building some sort of new life for himself, but instead, he’d stuck with me so I could kill off my crazy with literal murder. I should quit. I should have quit long ago—weeks ago. There was no staunching my crazy because crazy was whoI was now. Zade needed somewhere he could calm down and process his grief, get through the loss of his entire family, and do it in relative safety, yet here I was, dragging him through the hell of the grey area just to get my rocks off.
I sucked in nicotine and listened to the tarps crinkle under our weight. “You wanna go back to that city now? Genesis?”
He looked at me. Zan looked at me. Zade looked at me. They both looked at me, judging the fuck out of my choices and reminding me I was a worthless piece of shit. “You all murdered out?”
Didn’t think I ever would be. In all honesty, if the world went back to normal, I’d forget how to live in it. I adapted to this and I couldn’t convert back. “We got to do what I wanted. Your turn now.” Selflessness—something I’d only ever done for Zan.
Zade snorted more powder, and I felt Zan’s ghost bitch-slapping me to make him stop. I took the baggie from him, but he was too far gone to fight me on it at this point. “Where do you think her body is?”
Raped, pillaged, and dumped. That’s where. “Her soul, or whatever, is with Zan.” His name hurt, but I liked the pain of it.
“Am I a bad brother for not looking for her?” He rubbed at his eyes before squinting one closed in an attempt to see straight.
“We’d never find her. You were a good brother, Enge. To both of them. All the shit you suffered through…” Deep drag. Burned lungs. Pain.
He kept rubbing at his eyes. Maybe he was crying and didn’t want to be. “I feel dirty. Everything I’ve done… that’s been done to me… I need a cleanse. Someone to sanitize me.”
As his words slurred and his voice dimmed, I let him pass out in peace. No idea what he snorted, but it sure as shit wasn’t coke. When he was dead to the world, I rifled through his pack and dumped all the powders. The pills might be useful at somepoint, like right now. I took one of the Dilaudids to help with the burning sting of the bullet graze in my arm, and then stared at Zade. He’d hate me for ditching his drugs, but if he wasn’t more level-headed, we’d never make it back to Genesis alive.
Protect my brother.
Working on it, Zan.But fucking how? How was I supposed to protect Zade from his own mind? His agony ate him alive, and the only thing he had left to fight it off with was his anger. Which would win?
In the dead of night, with Zan’s body double drooling next to me, I cried. And I didn’t stop until the sun came up and reality came back into focus. Zan no longer lived in the same world as me.
I love you, Cadoc. Don’t stop.
I crinkled the receipt in my fist before doing my best to smooth it out and preserve it. I knew Zade had a family photo, but I wasn’t strong enough to look at it yet. I wasn’t strong enough for anything anymore. I’d tried to murder my way through the grey area as some sort of fucked up revenge against the new world that took him from me. It hadn’t helped. It never would. This was my new personality. Hatred, shame, grief, and self-loathing. Somehow, I’d find a way to cover it all in nonchalance and playful quips, but not today.
For Zade, I’d go to Genesis. Because the sad fact was, he’d never get better with just me as company. Misery fed on misery, and we were two miserable fucks in a miserable world. He needed other people, different perspectives, someone and something to give him purpose in a life he was still debating on living. He needed someone to pick him, and even though I had, he’d never believe me.
I fucking pick you, Zade. But because I pick you, I gotta take you somewhere safer.For once in my fucking life, I had to beheroic. Didn’t think I had what it took, but if I could get him there and vet this Dante guy, maybe that’d be enough.
