4.3
By the time we arrived back at the campsite, we found that everyone else had woken up. My eyes drifted in Eve's direction a few times as we were packing up the tent, but she never even glanced at me.
We departed, and our pace was the fastest it had ever been. After only a few hours of travel, though, Blake stopped us.
Through the unusually flat ground, a few massive pines sprouted up between smaller ones. The area seemed like a merging of the normal forest landscape and the places that Eve liked to take me.
"Alright, everyone." Blake addressed us in a serious tone, even more businesslike than usual. "We're entering the town area. Needless to say, be careful."
Imagining what we might encounter, I felt my heart beat a little faster. I wasn't afraid, though; instead, my fingertips tingled with excitement. I couldn't wait to see what the day would bring.
Now, we moved forward with far more caution. Everyone in the squad was on high alert. Occasionally, we would pass by the ruins of an old house, so it was clear that people had lived here at some point. Unlike in Hoodsdale, where every building seemed to be connected in some way, we only saw individual houses, each one distinctly separated from the others.
It was a peaceful, sleepy town.
Wait a minute… I peeled my eyes off the ruins. Where the hell are the rogues?
Peering through the trees, I tried to get eyes on at least a single enemy.
Maybe we aren't deep enough into the town yet…
I turned to Blake to ask him about it, but his knotted forehead and paranoid glances convinced me otherwise.
Someone behind me gulped down a series of rapid breaths.
I turned to see Nikki lagging behind the rest of us, looking far worse than Blake.
I swear I could see her entire eyeballs, and each one of her inhalations was a little more jarring than the last. Her chest heaved and rattled, and her arms stuck straight down like a zombie's, each one noticeably shivering, even from my viewpoint of some thirty feet away. The sweat on her face sparkled.
I stared at her–I couldn't help it.
Is she sick or something?
"Ehhhh–huff–Something's here–huff–Ahead of–huff–us."
It sounded like she'd been sprinting for an hour straight.
I looked up ahead only to find that, as before, nothing was there.
Ever since the first day I'd spent with the squad, I'd wondered if there was something about Nikki that I wasn't aware of. First of all, she didn't seem to serve any purpose. Blake was a logical man, so it would be surprising if he was dragging her along for no good reason.
Second, when that disheveled man came staggering into the clearing on the first day, she'd announced his approach more than a minute before he'd actually come into view. Was that a natural ability, or did she have some sort of elemental "Authority," as Blake called it?
Regardless of the reason, the others did not take her concern lightly.
Blake stopped walking. He ran his hand over his face and through his hair, completely perplexed. "Are there other rebels here?" he muttered to himself.
He cocked his head to the side and held his chin in his hand. "Do you think we can continue, Nikki?"
"Maybe…" she murmured reluctantly before adding, "a little."
I was sure there were an infinite number of places she would rather be.
We kept going, now practically running. Oddly enough, Nikki, who had been lagging behind, was now leading the group and pushing the pace. The house ruins started showing up more often, until it appeared we were in an area that was, at some point in time, densely settled. Still, we hadn't encountered even a single rogue.
Nikki put on the brakes. "Uhh… no, no. We have to stop." Her voice was urgently strained, and she stood like a statue, gazing straight ahead with a blank, wide-eyed stare.
Blake didn't hesitate. "Okay. Jelani, come with us."
I followed Blake and Nikki as they turned to the right and ascended a small hill. Corvus and Eve stayed behind.
After around 100 yards of climbing, we approached a large boulder, and, as the two of them made a beeline for it, I realized what was happening. They crouched behind the rock and beckoned for me to follow, but I stopped where I stood.
"I'm not hiding," I said, mostly to Blake. "I'd rather go down with them and fight, if that's what's going on."
"Not today," Blake said with a shake of his head. "I would let you if this was going as planned, but now, I'm not certain of what will happen down there." He spoke in a steely voice, and it didn't sound like he would accept a compromise.
Agh. How bothersome, I thought.
I had no intention of sitting around behind a rock. I'd already determined that I wasn't going to be idle out here. While I was alive and had the opportunity, I wanted to improve as much as I possibly could.
I took a step away from the rock and down the hill, but Blake lunged out, grabbed my shirt, and roughly pulled me back.
After stumbling on my heels, I snapped around to face him. "What the hell?"
Our faces were no more than a few inches apart.
"Shhh," he hissed, raising a finger to his lips.
Turning his head, he squinted off into the distance–the boulder was just short enough to see over the top.
I was about to throw his hand off me and charge down the hill, but then he did something that caught me off guard.
"Ahh," he softly sighed.
For the first time that day, his face softened.
I looked out in the same direction as him, but there was nothing special to see. It was a calm day, and everything was still. Anything moving among the frozen image of the ruined town should have been immediately visible.
What could Blake have seen? Maybe it was only a sign of something that I wouldn't be able to recognize. I stained my eyes ever harder, desperately wanting to figure out what had been plaguing Nikki and Blake to such an extreme extent.
There.
In the far distance–a tiny movement between trees. It disappeared again, and it was so far away that I couldn't have possibly made out what it was. I wondered at how Blake had seemed so sure of himself a moment ago.
I stared without breathing, anxiously awaiting the next time it would show itself.
There.
Through a thin sliver between two trees, I saw another flash of it, this time a little more clearly. It was tall, probably around the height of a person, but I still had no idea about its length or what sort of being it was.
Woah. If that thing has the dimensions of a four-legged animal, it's gonna be huge.
I had an image in my mind of a six-foot tall wolf with massive fangs and red eyes.
Still, even if it is massive, I realized, it doesn't have any guns, and guns always win.
I then realized that if I had run down the hill when Blake and Nikki first hid back here, I would have been completely unarmed. Blake pulling me back might have been a good thing.
Where are Corvus and Eve? I wondered. I scanned the base of the hill, but they were nowhere to be found.
Yeah, I told myself, there won't be a problem.
Eve was a formidable opponent, and I was certain that Corvus was as well. There was simply no way that a rogue animal could stand a chance against the two of them.
Suddenly, though, I remembered something. This town, which should have been packed full of enemies, was completely empty. Something wasn't right.
Could that thing have cleared the area? I wondered.
Since we hadn't seen any dead animals among the town's ruins, it seemed more likely that they'd all just left, or maybe they'd never come in the first place.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek. Maybe it claimed the whole town as territory? Sure, a typical rogue wouldn't pose any major threat, but maybe this was something different.
It emerged from behind a house, and my thoughts went blank.
"What the hell…"
There weren't four legs–there were two. It was of human form, but it was evidently not like the rest of us.
A skeleton?
I could think of no better way to describe it. If one carefully removed all the skin from a human, leaving the muscles, tendons, and bones exposed, they would end up with something similar.
On top of all this, we no longer had the advantage of guns.
The skeleton carried a camo carbine, just like the ones we used in the military. This was no ordinary rogue, if it could even be called a rogue at all.
It strode between ruins with an unsettling smile on its face; of course, that was really just how skulls looked. Oddly enough, even though the rest of its body seemed to have all the usual muscles, its head had hardly any at all, leaving every inch of bone exposed.
"Get down, Jelani," Blake whispered. He and Nikki were both crouching low, fully shielded behind the rock.
"Hell no," I whispered back. "I want to see this."
Being dragged behind a rock to hide was bad enough, and I wasn't about to sit down and lose my chance to even watch.
"It's your risk," he replied solemnly.
Honestly, I thought, they won't even know if it's coming at us. It's probably less risky for me to look than not to look.
I turned my eyes away from Blake, and I found myself staring directly down the barrel of a gun.
The world went still for a moment as reality registered in my mind.
I dropped to the ground as quickly as was humanly possible–no, perhaps even more quickly.
BANG
Simultaneously, a shot rang out through the ruined town. I twisted my head, which was pumping full of blood, to look at the tree trunk behind me and the round bullet hole in its bark, exactly at the height of my face.
I hunched awkwardly behind the rock, palms drenched in sweat, shoulders unsteady, and vision sharper than it had ever been.
That… was close…
Of course, that thing was probably coming up the hill at that very moment, so the danger had only just begun.
"What should we do?" I frantically whispered to Blake.
In just a moment's time, we'd been thrown into the spotlight, and my instincts told me that I needed to act immediately, or else I would be killed.
"Nothing," he replied calmly, no longer in a whisper. "You should be able to watch now, if you want."
I stared at him in disbelief, too shocked to even formulate a thought.
BOOOOOOOM
The gunshot thundered all around us. Even the ground shook, and I had to press my hand against the rough surface of the boulder to steady myself.
Holy…
Curiosity getting the best of me, I craned my neck to peek around the boulder.
As I'd imagined, the skeleton had climbed partway up the hill, but it was now lying motionless on the forest floor.
Its arm twitched, and it dragged itself to its feet. The gun had never fallen from its grasp.
Turning its head, it exposed the side of its skull, which had been completely shattered. It took a step, and a few more fragments of bone dislodged themselves, tumbling out of the wide hole in its head.
…How is it still alive? I wondered in awe. Actually, was it even alive in the first place?
It changed its course, now heading along the hill instead of up it. At the very least, it was no longer coming for us.
While I watched as it moved towards our right, something else caught the corner of my eye. I had a brief internal debate, and, despite my reluctance, I just had to see what it was.
But no matter how hard I stared, I couldn't make anything out among the massive trees and rotting buildings.
I'm probably just paranoid, I concluded. I would have been calmer if I was fighting instead of crouching there fretting about it.
I was about to return my gaze to the skeleton when I saw it again. Something about the terrain had changed, like a tree's shadow shifting slightly; a discreet blot of darkness on the sunlit hill.
I squinted, and then I saw him.
It was Corvus, slinking through the trees, with huge, lunging steps. When I saw how fluidly he threaded his way across the ground, I wasn't surprised that I'd initially thought he was nothing more than a fleeting change in the light.
He loped along behind the skeleton at a frightening pace, rapidly closing the gap between the two of them.