Lycan Fallout (Book 2): Fall of Man (26 page)

“Are you in such a rush?” she asked. I saw the brimming of a tear in the corner of her eye.

It hadn’t dawned on me at first what she was talking about. “Oh…suicide? No, not me. Just helping out the only way I know how. Can you do anything for the pain?”

“I could,” she stood. “But I won’t. Maybe next time you’ll think before you try to kill yourself.” She walked away.

“I’m sorry, Azile.” A mouse, farting underwater, would have been louder.

“You should be,” she answered, never turning back to look at me.

Bailey came up over the lip of the wall. “How’d that go?”

“About as well as you might expect.”

“Come on; let’s have someone look at your injuries.”

I was going to tough it out and then decided I didn’t want to. At the bare minimum, I was going to take a few glasses of liquid painkillers before I came back up.

“What about the battle going on?”

“We’re in a holding pattern right now. Everyone heard the commotion you had going on. Plus the ones who saw it will have pause to reconsider their actions.”

“Still think we’re going to lose?” I asked as she helped me down the stairs.

“BT was right about you,” was her answer.

“You know that can mean so many different things. Right?”

“I know.”

“I love women and their banal responses.”

I was in the, for lack of a better term, or a true term at all, doctor’s office. Although, calling the guy that brewed the beer a doctor was like calling the guy that invented Twinkies a dietician.

“You don’t look too bad.” He was poking and prodding at the hole in my back that was trying its best to close up, no thanks to him.

“Where’s Mathieu?” I asked Bailey after I asked for, and actually got, a sudsy drink.

Now that I wasn’t in the heat of battle I didn’t want to have to think of the men I had just sent along their new journey. Men who, had they been asked, probably didn’t want to fight. I don’t think it is in the genome of the average man to fight in a full-scale conflict. Again, that is something that is reserved for those obsessed with power and the accumulating of it.

“He is tending to the wounded. He has proved to be a valuable field doctor,” Mullen, the bartender, answered for Bailey.

“Anyone would be accomplished next to you,” I told him.

“I’ll take the beer away.”

“Did I ever tell you how brilliant I thought you were?”

He scoffed.

“You might want to think about cleaning those hands before you go jabbing my thigh,” I told him.

“I’m not going to lie and say I understand what’s happening in your body, but I wouldn’t doubt that within the next hour you even remember being shot.” He was bending over, trying to get a better look at the exit wound in my leg. 

“Oh, I’ll remember,” I assured him. Just like I would the faces of those men I’d just shot, they would all be indelibly etched into the folds of a mind that could never forget; the looks of terror or anger plastered on their faces as they looked down the barrel of their demise. I was halfway through my third mug of beer when the shouts of alarm started anew. Bailey was out the door like a rocket. I was slow to get up and even slower to shuffle.

“Should you really be going out?” Mullen asked.

“No, now help me.”

He came over and braced me up, which was not easy considering I did not have a good side to brace. I’d been shot in the left shoulder and the left leg. He could not get under my right side because it hurt to put the pressure on my left leg and he could not put pressure under my left arm for obvious reasons. He ended up getting behind me and placing his hands on my hips.

“I hope this isn’t as weird for you as it is for me,” I told him.

“It is.”

“Thank you,” I told him when we got back outside.

“You good?”

“I am as long as this wall stays here.” I was leaning up against it.

“Call me if you need me to come help you again. I’ve got to go back and tend to a few people.”

“Thank you.” We both stopped to look at a burgeoning fire that had found its way to one of the shops. Hardware, I think. People were rushing towards it with pails of water. Odds that they were going to be able to put out a burning wood building with a bucket brigade were not good. The opposition had decided to up the ante by sending in fire-laden bolts. It was this time’s version of a nuclear bomb—it could be that crippling to a town manufactured mostly from trees.

“That’s not good,” Mullen noted before heading back in.

“Not good at all,” I echoed. I noticed that men were coming down off the walls to assist in the fire quenching duties. “Bailey!” I got the shout out I was looking for, but unfortunately it felt like someone had dragged fifty grit sandpaper along the lining of my throat. “Bailey!” I somehow notched it up a few more decibels.

I’d got her attention. “Get your fucking men back on the wall!”

She looked at me, not understanding, but when I pointed to the makeshift firefighters, she got it. Before the order could be executed, blood-curdling screams intermingled with cries of surprise and lastly came the sounds of shots being fired. Yeah, we had guns, but these people weren’t really soldiers. When the fire started, half of them had left their post to aid in putting out the danger. Of the half that remained behind, most had turned to watch what was happening. The enemy had taken advantage of this lapse in judgment by coming closer and firing arrows and bolts, killing more of our defenders. There was no way I could attain an accurate count, but anything was grievous when you were already less than a force of two hundred. By the time our army figured out what was going on, the damage had been done. We’d repelled them this time but at some serious cost. The dressing on my leg was soaked through with blood by the time I got to Bailey on the wall.

“Bailey, you spread the orders to your people that the next one to leave his post not on a stretcher has to answer to me.”

I thought for a second we might be headed for a pissing contest, and we both knew who was going to win that particular challenge; luckily, she deferred. I placed my back against the wall and, as gingerly as I could, I slid down so I was sitting with my back to the enemy. My leg was throbbing much worse than my shoulder, which only felt like it was being set on fire and a hot poker shoved in it.

“We lost another seventeen,” Bailey informed me when all the stations reported back in.

“Round up a militia,” I told her as I wrapped my hands around my thigh in a desperate bid to squeeze out the pain.

“A what?”

“Get some townsfolk, give them a gun, show them the basics, and get them up on this fucking wall.”

“They’re not trained. They won’t know what to do.”

“Fuck, Bailey, from what I’ve seen, none of these people know what to do.”

I might as well have just hit her with an uppercut to a fully exposed jaw. Her eyes grew wide from my insult. I don’t think I would have been all that surprised if she grabbed me by the ankles, got some torque going and tossed me off that ledge. Oh, I’m sure there were all sorts of things going through her mind, and she wanted to unleash them like hungry hounds to a steak.

With more dignity than I could have been able to muster, she swallowed down that big, bitter bile and nodded. It was curt and her lips were pursed but she did as I said. She did not have much room to argue, and as much as she might like to, as is the nature of almost every female that walked the planet, she would bide her time. Us in-fighting only jeopardized her people even more, and that was something she could not stomach.

Surprisingly, of the three fires that had been started, two had successfully been put out before too much damage could be recorded. The third, a storage shed of some sort, had been the sole casualty. I closed my eyes. It appeared the coalition against us was going to take a little time before they made their next move. My short-clipped dreams for the most part revolved around things happening to my leg or shoulder. At one point, I think a skimobile pulling a surfing Nicole behind it had run over my leg. In another, Tommy and I had been playing racquetball, and he’d hit the ball so hard that it had lodged into my shoulder. I remember even asking him if that counted as a point.

When I startled awake, I realized it was sometime early in the morning—around three a.m. if I had to take a guess. Azile was standing next to me, looking over the battlefield, her long hair and red cape billowing out in the breeze behind her. Every once in a while, the wind was so brisk as to cause her garment to make a cracking sound.

“I see you’re awake.”

I don’t know how the hell she saw that I was awake. She wasn’t looking at me and her hood was up shielding the side of her face and subsequently, her eyes from me. The pain in my shoulder was nearly negligible and my leg merely felt like I’d suffered a charley horse.

“This your doing?” I asked, referring to my well-being.

“You’re welcome.”

“I was getting to that. I was just making sure.” I placed my hands at my sides and pushed up. Expecting pain, I received nothing noteworthy. “Sometimes this vamp shit pays off.” I was now standing next to her. “And yeah, the witchcraft as well.” I was moving my “damaged” arm around in ever-expanding circles, waiting for a jarring torment to make me stop. I received a twinge for my efforts.

“You know what you did was exceedingly foolish, right?”

“You’ve known me long enough, Azile, to realize this is just how I work. I don’t do this shit on purpose. Wait, maybe I do. I mean, it sounds like the greatest idea ever until it’s over and then I have to kind of reevaluate what I was thinking.”

“How many times, Michael, must you reevaluate before you begin to get it right?” She was looking at me now. A sort of melancholy brought the corners of her mouth down ever so slightly. I reached out to stroke her cheek, her eyes closing as if in acceptance of my gesture before she pulled away. “I watched you get shot. Do you know how hard that was for me?”

“Just imagine how hard that was for me?” I retorted. Someday I might figure it out. Really, I might—I mean I more than likely have the capability. Today, however, was not that day. At least I knew when to change tactics. “It needed to be done. They had to be shown that they could take some casualties. If you haven’t noticed, this has been a particularly one-sided affair so far. This shit keeps up, and we’re not going to be around to worry about the Lycan. My boys had been infinitely more versed in warfare than these people.”

“You could have trained them.”

“Don’t put this on me, Azile. I had no idea they were farmers hiding behind guns. They held up well at Wheatonville, I mistakenly thought the same would happen here. Maybe I should have realized it would be much more difficult to take on an enemy that did more than just run headlong into a spray of bullets. They can’t even be trusted to stay at their posts. At this point, I’m thinking it might be wise to capitulate to the enemies’ demands. The loss of life for this town could be insurmountable.”

“Perhaps, but we’re not quite there yet.”

“Do you have some holy hand grenades that you’re holding back?”

“Nothing quite that explosive.”

“What I wouldn’t do for some piping and fuses.”

“Like a pipe bomb? You know how to make pipe bombs? What else aren’t you telling me?” Azile prodded.

“I was a prepper; of course I know how to make pipe bombs. Any chance you can conjure some special supplies for that?”

“Not really my specialty.”

“That’s a shame.”

“There is something I can do, Michael. It’s distasteful but it can be done. I’ve been wondering all night if it is a morally acceptable thing to do. Even if it is, I question whether I have the right to ask you to do it.”

I was going to tell her that this sounded like something right up my alley but I could see the toll this was having on her. Whatever it was, it was not something she relished performing. “Tell me, Azile. We’ll walk through it together.”

It didn’t take all that long for her to tell me; and yeah, she was right, it was distasteful. A Pop-Tart smothered in asparagus and liver wouldn’t have tasted as bad.

“I’m ready when you are,” I told her.

“Are you sure?”

“The way I see it, Azile, we have three options. We continue on like we are and get our asses handed to us before this time tomorrow night. We surrender and give them what they want. Or we try your way. There’s a good chance your way will save the most lives. They’ll have to pull back once they see what you can do.”

“As soon as it starts I won’t be able to hold it for much more than ten minutes, fifteen at the most.”

“That’s not much time.”

“How long can you do it for?”

“Wait. What are we talking about?”

“Right now? Right now
that
comes out of your mouth?”

“Is there ever a bad time for a joke?”

“Yes, Michael, there is.” She sighed.

“That’s a time I don’t ever want to have the displeasure of being in.”

“Obviously.”

***