Page 71 of Marked for Extinction
I saw red. He just admitted they were in cahoots this entire time.
Pushing myself up to my knee, grinding my jaw as I made it to my feet, I leaned on my good leg and brought the rifle up, looking through the scope.
He lay there, with his arms behind his head in between the corpse of a bloodsucker and the corpse of a human, whistling the same taunting tune Katherine did in that damn underground dungeon.
I let out a shot right beside his head, but he didn’t flinch. Instead, he turned to his side holding his head up with his hand, elbow against the ground.
“Vik, Vik, Vik. One thing you’ve always underestimated about me was my determination to finish. Seems I’ve come to acquire something very special in my dealings with the other side.”
“I always knew you’d be a traitor to humanity,” I snarled.
He barked out a laugh. “And yet here you stand, one accused of the very same. Brother, if anyone is a traitor, it’s you.”
He wasn’t making any sense. I always fought for the people, fought for the resistance. Did my best to keep people alive despite the statistics. It wasn’t until Katherine that I turned my back on the lies here.
“You truly are blind, aren’t you?” he taunted again.
“What are you talking about? I can see you just fine through this scope. Try me, Leonard.”
He shot to his feet in an instant, his face contorted in fury. “Leonard died the moment that bitch Ruby left him to rot, pining over something that was never real to begin with.”
“Then you and I have something else in common,” I said as I let out another shot, right for his fucking head. He rolled away and kicked one of the dead bodies in his place. The bullet landed with a thud as he got to his feet and leaped in my direction, knocking the gun out of my hand, taking us both down to the ground.
“Ahhh!” I screamed as his knee hit my right shin, right at my compound fracture. I clawed his face as he grinned widely down at me with a wildness in his eyes.
“You would have made the perfect subject, Vik. You and Katherine. She was a failure, but you? Oh, you turned out better than I had hoped.”
I punched him in the jaw and he grabbed me around the neck, throwing me to the side. One of the dead bodies fell on us as we continued to grapple on the ground. A shot rang out in the air but whizzed by our heads as we refused to let each other go.
Biting onto his shoulder, I punched his balls making him wheeze and fall over away from me.
“Vik!” came Carson’s voice.
“Shit, I think they ended up over there!” Amir’s voice followed.
Otis was still rolling on the ground as I pushed myself up to my feet once more with more difficulty than the last time.
“You should have stayed where you were, Leonard,” I gritted out, dragging my leg behind me. I leaned over one of the piles of bodies and pulled the hilt of a midsized knife from one of the corpses. The smell of old blood was overpowering as I wiped the blade against my pants.
I took another step closer to him as he rolled onto his front, groaning in pain. Bringing up my blade, I swung it down only to stab through his forearm as he used it to shield himself as he slowly got to his feet.
“You didn’t think it would be that easy, would you, little brother?”
He cackled as he pulled something from his pocket and stabbed me in the hip. It was a syringe with the longest fucking needle known to man.
I hissed, pulled the blade out, roaring and plunging the blade into his bicep as another shot rang out and pierced his abdomen, crimson blooming faster than any natural flower. Leonard’s eyes widened as he lost his grip on the syringe and fell to the ground, face first.
“Fuck!” Carson called out.
“Who took the shot?” Amir asked.
I fell to my knees beside my brother as I grabbed the metal syringe and pulled it out. I couldn’t tell what the contents were because the barrel was empty. Tossing it aside, I groaned as I fell on top of my brother, fatigued from the constant pain of my fracture.
Multiple footsteps came running toward me but my body was running out of energy.
Turning my head to the side, my vision blurred in and out until the closest person finally came into focus. Like the vision of an angel, the red haze of the fires behind her on the trees made her hair glow as if she was of another world.
“Vik! Don’t you fucking die on me, Vik!” Inés cried out. She had a rifle in her hand as she fell to her knees beside me. Didn’t she know that she deserved more than a man whose life brought nothing but destruction in his wake?
