Page 17 of Awry
Berserker Breaker gets a hand around my neck, lifting me off my feet.I shoot him in the eye with the last bullet.The gun is either empty or it jams.Being shot point-blank in the eye finally makes Breaker stumble.But he just grabs my hand and the gun in one massive clawed paw, snarling and spitting all over my face.Then he crushes my hand around the gun, breaking every bone and mangling the weapon at the same time.
I scream.
I can’t help it.
I can hear Presh screaming too, though she’s still gagged.
Breaker tightens his grip on my throat, holding me at eye level.The eye I shot out is already healing.My kicks are weak, ineffectual.I can’t breathe.He presses his face to my neck, inhaling deeply.
“I’m going to eat you,” he says, words mangled by a jaw that no longer aligns and vocal cords that aren’t wholly human.
He can talk in his berserker form.Shape sentences.But I’d always been taught —
“Fuck you,” he says.“And eat you.At the same time.Steal your essence.Become … more.”
He’s already ‘become more.’The idea that his club has allowed a berserker to fully manifest, to continually exist— that they’ve maybe even nurtured and condoned that existence— is unbelievable.Chilling.
Still dangling me by the neck, he swipes viciously clawed fingers across my belly.Shredding flesh and internal organs.I nearly black out from the pain.Then he tosses me on the ground.
I can still hear Presh.She’s … trying to crawl closer?Trying to reach me?
It draws his attention.“You next, princess.”
He leans over me, one hand braced beside my head, the other poised to … do whatever he wants to do.Whatever I can’t stop him from doing.Luxuriating in his kill, he inhales harshly to pull my scent deep within his lungs.
I’m bleeding everywhere.But somehow, pathetically, I still manage to pull myself away from him on one arm while holding my guts in with the other.Though that arm isn’t quite working.
Even this wounded, I can still see the snub of the single line of his essence, his life force, his fate.And even dying, I can still feel the tug of theknowingcoaxing me backward, just a few more inches.
Breaker’s dick is limp, long, and blackening.It’s covered in pustules and sores that I have no doubt are also spreading up his stomach and down his legs.The parts of him that aren’t fur covered, that haven’t transformed.
Muta’s poison is spreading.But that poison might take fifteen to thirty minutes to take down a shifter like Breaker— and who knows how much longer to quell a half-transformed berserker.
Presh doesn’t have that long.
I don’t have that long.
I’m dying.
I have maybe two minutes.
And after I’m dead?
Breaker will slaughter Presh.No matter what his original orders were.He’ll eat us both.
And then he’ll slaughter everyone in the area, up and down the coast until someone powerful enough comes along to put him down.
It’s my hazy understanding of those orders — the guidelines around Presh’s kidnapping — the faint tug of theknowing, and Chains trying to lightly dissuade Breaker from raping me, that have me dragging myself back over Chains’s still-prone body as Breaker pauses to tear the rest of his clothing off.
I assume the spreading pustules are hurting him.He’s only immune to fire and iron, not Muta’s amped-up venom.
I collapse over Chains.And I reach … I reach through the eddy of theknowing…
Breaker comes down on me hard.His claws burrow into my torn-open guts.
Fuck.I scream.
The sight and sound of the beach, the rainy gray sky, and Presh’s ragged sobs get even hazier, dimmer.
