11. RAVEN

11

RAVEN

NOW

It takes two days to prepare everything, and I’m about done with this basement. I can’t imagine how long these kids have been here. The walls are claustrophobic. Any loud sound coming from upstairs makes all of us instantly freeze in our spots, then Ali and I pick up the crowbars we keep by our blankets, motion for the girls to go behind the bathroom curtain, and we crouch by the door.

Occasionally, it’s Candy. The other times, it’s nothing. This scenario repeats itself several times a day. The rest of the time, the girls tell us stories, read their book. We all watch Ali pray. I might learn his prayer by heart by the time we escape this freaking place.

The first surprise is when we hear footsteps on the stairway and expect it to be Candy. But when the door swings open, four men walk in.

Shit.

Grabbing the crowbars, Ali and I jump to our feet, and my first instinct is that I can take them, despite them being armed, AKs strapped to their backs, though none in their hands.

One holds his palms up right away. “Easy, mate. Candy sent us.”

He is tall and heavily-built, but all muscles. Camo clothes, T-shirt, baseball hat. Short-cropped beard and heavy brows. He reminds me of someone.

The other three guys are shorter but equally strongly built. Similar clothes. Their hands are on the handguns in their waistband holsters.

“Shepherd,” the tall guy says.

So, that’s Butcher’s cousin. I see the similarities, but one thing is drastically different—his eyes. Not that cold cunning gaze I’m used to being confronted with when I have meetings with Butcher. This guy is calm as he takes steps deeper into the bunker, his palms still out in front of him.

And then comes an introduction. You’d think an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but Shepherd couldn’t be more different from Butcher. Younger, too, probably in his mid-thirties as are other guys. They smell like tobacco and leather. Their skin is darkly tanned. Their shoes are dusty like they walked through a desert. They talk in low voices.

The most peculiar thing—the girls don’t seem to be afraid of them. In fact, when one of the guys tosses the ball to the youngest and says, “How are you, Cammie?” I instantly let my guard down. Well, at least to a point.

The cots sag under the men’s heavy bodies as we all sit down to recap what happened and discuss my plan.

“We are in,” says Shepherd. “I don’t have many men. Maybe eight of us. And we’re not going into the quarters. Candy is right. It’s a death wish. We have to live in this town, and I don’t want Butcher to know I’m involved. We’ll protect you. We’ll create diversions for Butcher’s gang to ensure you get to their mansion. Inside, you are on your own.”

“Weapons?”

Shepherd gives us a list of guns and ammo he can spare, including a couple of grenades.

“If you go in by yourself, you can’t carry much. But you need an exit plan,” he says.

The next pleasant surprise is Candy. She brings a pouch that holds fifteen bullet-shot syringes.

“Loaded,” she announces.

“With?”

“I’m not a doctor. I asked for the fastest result. He said the paralytic activates within seconds if injected in the neck vein or anything close to the heart. The fastest one he has. But also, the duration is short. About ten to twenty minutes.”

“Perfect.”

“And if word about this gets out…” She doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Right.”

She passes me the belt to strap across my chest, and a needle and thread. While we talk, Ali gets to work and turns the strap into an old-school bullet bandolier that holds the syringes instead of bullets.

“That’s better for fast access,” he says.

“Brilliant, thank you,” I tell him, surprised and grateful.

Shepherd and his men leave, and Ali finishes making my belt, which I study in admiration of his sewing skills.

The bullet-shot syringes became popular after the Change for the fast medication intake. The bullet shot looks like a large, long plastic bullet with a switch button on one end. The other end has a hidden needle. Put one end of the bullet against the skin, press the button on the other end—the needle pops out, piercing the skin, and automatically injects the medication. This smart tool was implemented when millions needed anti-radiation shots as fast as possible.

I might be out for a kill, but many men around Butcher probably don’t deserve to be collateral damage. Hence the reason for using the paralytic.

Ali and I wait until it gets dark—the clock tells us so.

It’s almost ten in the evening when Candy finally shows up again, smelling like booze and cigar smoke. Except she’s not drunk. Her expression is slightly vicious.

“I had to get rid of some customers. Currently, there’s no one upstairs. We should move.”

My heartbeat spikes threefold when we take the stairs. Candy tells us there are multiple cameras in Venus Den. But she leads us through the bar and the storage unit and toward the back door, the way we came in ten days ago, that doesn’t get tracked on the video footage.

Outside is dark and muggy, but I breathe in with my full chest. It feels like freedom, though what I am about to embark on is a death wish, indeed. But I’m ready. My wound throbs but is healing nicely. I can move pretty freely. The bruises on my face are almost gone too. I might have lost some flexibility during the stay in the bunker, but I’m not going to an important fight at Carnage. Let’s hope that weapons and syringes will do most of the work.

Adrenalin pumps through my veins as we crouch across the back street into another smaller building, someone’s house, abandoned. We exit through the front door, but instead of going out onto the street, we go through a garden, then between the broken panels in a fence that separates it from the next house, and duck into a tool shed at the back.

There’s a constant thought that this might be a trap, that Candy might sell us out for her own safety’s sake. Anything is possible. But when I see Shepherd and two other men and a bag with guns on the floor, I feel relief.

“My other guys are scattered outside.” He gives Ali a radio and an earpiece. “It’s on vibration mode. Turn it on and strap it to your shoulder.”

Two minutes later, the radios are tested by other guys waiting in the shadows across several other streets. I have a gun tucked into the duty belt Shepherd gave me. Another one is in my hand. Three magazines are clipped to my bullet-belt. So are two grenades.

Shepherd passes me a lighter and a small pack that looks like matches.

“Firecrackers,” he says.

“For what?”

“For distraction, if needed. Harmless but helpful.”

I tuck them in my pocket.

“Be safe,” Candy warns. “I’ll be here as soon as I can when you get back. Don’t set foot anywhere else on return. Lay low.”

With that, Ali and I take one of the streets while Shepherd and his guys creep away to be with the others.

The town looks like ruins, no better than Ashlands’ slums. The atmosphere of desolation gives me chills. I’ve lived in places like this, worked the streets in worse neighborhoods. I’ve always wanted to get away from this—poverty, decay, pervasive morals. The déjà vu hits me so hard that I want to twist inside out.

The stench is so bad I can almost taste it in my mouth. Foul, sour, bitter, rotting—all at once. It clogs my nostrils, and I hold my breath, the way you do as a child, like that ever helped to keep the stench out of your system.

The streets are dark and quiet, but there is a strange buzzing of danger that comes from the occasional open doors and brightly lit basements, sinister laughter, gunshots, and screams that poke the heavy night air. The smell of the ocean salt mixes with the garbage teeming with rodents and decomposition, and I curse inwardly as Ali and I shadow the side streets.

A quiet rustling makes Ali raise his palm and freeze, halting me.

A glow comes from an overturned dumpster by the side of a boarded-up building.

“Git!” someone snaps, and a dog runs across the road. “Hurry up,” the female voice says. “Grab the bucket and let’s go.”

Two figures, a female and a child, leap out of the dumpster and into the darkness behind the house fence, their echoing footsteps disappearing into the night.

“Jesus,” I say on an exhale, gritting my teeth.

Even after the Change, Port Mrei was all right. The world war didn’t turn it into this dump, Butcher and his gang did. It’s mostly men on the main streets, day and night, cocky ones with guns, drunk and high ones with cans of beers, playing cards. Others looking for trouble and something to steal.

The hunched-up figures, like shadows, scurrying here and there are those looking for food or, like the family we just saw, looking for leftovers in dumpsters.

I’m in the mood to fuck something up. Anger rises in me like a wave, but I can’t afford to give in to it. It’s not a game. I need to locate my target and get rid of it. So I think about Maddy. I can’t afford not to see her again. This has to be done fast and smoothly.

Love can save one man but ruin a thousand. A man in love can build a kingdom but can also destroy an entire world. Mac said that once. He occasionally talked about women, though never about his relationships. But he sure knew the true scale of the disaster that love can cause.

Me? I happened to fall in love with the daughter of one of the most powerful men in the world.

They say vampires are triggered by blood thirst. A taste of blood can turn them into beasts. It’s the same with affection. I was raised in an emotional vacuum. One taste of what it felt like to be loved, and I’m insatiable.

Am I reckless? Maybe. But this isn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been here before, with someone who looked at me and saw hope, strength, their personal Jesus. It shakes you. The resurrection has become your mundane, but you never thought that you could be so important to someone else. You've been buried in mud and slime so many times that gutters became your second home. Yet this one person looks at you with awe like you've come to save them.

Exupéry said that we become responsible, forever, for what we've tamed. That goes for your monsters and those we choose to care for.

That was little Emily, who held my hand when she was happy and snuck to sleep in my room when it was stormy outside. She didn't care for my bruised knuckles and what it took to get the money to buy her Christmas presents, or what they called me on the streets or how vicious my punches could be. To her, I was a hero, the one who tried to put powdered sleeping pills into our foster father’s bottle to get him to pass out. I did only what my teenage self thought I could do. To her, that was the most anyone had ever done.

And now I have Maddy. I won’t make the same mistake. I’m not a teenager. And my revenge is served cold.

The reason the West got so fucked by the rest of the world and all the nukes was because the West had gotten comfortable. It got fat. It got lazy. It got slow and too diplomatic, rolling in butter for decades while the rest of the world was in constant wars, priming and training for the biggest one.

And that’s Butcher’s gang. Those motherfuckers used to be fearless. Now, they think they are a king’s entourage, rolling in dough. They are becoming lazy—I count on that. So, I will take them out one by one.

Can I justify killing for revenge? When it comes to law, no. But Mac said that laws and justice are not always the same thing. And Mac is the wisest man I’ve known.

Ali and I move slowly in the shadows of the buildings. Granted, Port Mrei is one fucked up shadow.

Ali slows down to be behind me. My solo show is coming up.

I hear Shepherd’s men—shooting, sabotaging. They are not inconspicuous. They are a bit angry, thinking they have a stake in this place. That makes all the difference. I wouldn’t have jeopardized their safety. But Shepherd offered to help. His men were eager to go.

So be it.

We have one agreement—they are protection, my plan B. Let’s hope I am capable of pulling off plan A on my own. And that is, to find Skiba.

The noise grows louder as we change streets and get closer to Butcher’s headquarters, a mansion surrounded by many houses occupied by his men. The noise is obvious—while the rest of town is afraid, shriveling into themselves, these fuckers are celebrating, something, or nothing, or just partying.

Ali and I halt at the back of a fence around a dilapidated shop and peer into the street.

I’ve never had so many enemies in front of me. Dozens of men are scattered along the street, on the balconies of the houses, as well as probably inside. But most of them are careless and sloppy, high on power. Many are ready to shoot just for the hell of it. They are a mob. And I’ll have to deal with all of them to get to just one.

This time, I’m ready.