Page 185 of Cold-Blooded Creatures
Malaya continued. “She asked me if I’d be willing to talk with them as I’m barely more than a year older than them and went through the Matching, uh, sorry, the auction, most recently. She suspected it might be useful for them to talk to me. So sometimes I sleep here and chat with them about what I, ahm, actually went through. It’s very different compared to the stories they feed to us in schools.” She shrugged.
Not every citizen got as lucky as Malaya—freed from their claws twice.
Lucky. Disgust built deep in my throat.
“He’s awake,” Zion piped up.
I left Kali to care for Malaya and strode to the lanky soldier on his knees, his hands cuffed behind his back and strips of his torn uniform shirt looped around his ankles as cuffs, rendering him immobile and unable to stand up.
“Should I carve a pretty pattern or two into him to motivate him to speak?” Zion pressed the tip of his knife under the man’s clean-shaven, dimpled chin. “He’s probably the one leading this operation.” He pointed to the circular golden patch embroidered on the right shoulder of the man’s black and dark green uniform. A sign of a squadron leader, a higher-up who pulled the strings controlling their smaller military groups, such as sections, which consisted of several crews. “I doubt he’ll be willing to talk without…stimuli.”
“How did you know?” I asked the soldier, his sweaty brown hair plastered to his scalp. Green-banded or not, they should assign high-ranking positions to those who had sufficient gray matter in their brains, not those who refused to wear standard-issue helmets their subordinates donned. “Who told you this was where we kept them?”
He spat toward my boots, his aim far from what I would deem acceptable as the streaked-in-red blob of saliva reached the crack in the asphalt instead of my shoes. A leader or not, he should keep up his training regime to avoid humiliating himself like this.
“Your choice.” I cracked my knuckles to loosen them up, and my fist connected with his crooked nose. A satisfying crunch severed the thread of his silence.
A nose for a nose.
He had touched Kali’s, and I was damn sure about to make his worse.
Blood streamed from his nostrils and flowed into his mouth as he raised his head high. “You’re not as good as you think. Not everyone at your contemptible compound thinks your principles are proper. They know the right way. Humanity must survive. And if that means taking what we need by force, so be it.”
Zion snorted, tapping the blade on his thigh hidden by a pair of mottled sweatpants. “Hilarious, honestly, that he was abandoned here by his comrades. Their own green-banded commander, who should be expanding their population, was left for us to play with.”
His bloodshot eyes darted between Zion and me. “You have no idea what’s waiting for you.”
I crouched down before him. “That’s not what I asked.” Pinching his nose between my thumb and middle finger, I twisted the cartilage, breaking it further.
His scream accompanied the pleasant sensation of the flexible tissue giving way and twisting as I wished it.
Having decided to do something useful, I picked out dirt from under my nails while he yelled his favorite profanities, each curse word only spurring my imagination on how I was going to fracture the rest of his bones and cartilage.
“Tell me what I need to know, and I will let you go. Who told you where those we took from the Matching lived?” He didn’t need to know that letting him go meant letting his life leave the pathetic shell of a body he occupied.
He bared his reddened teeth, his blood soaking the collar of his uniform. “You steal our people, we take yours.”
Approaching us, Kali remarked, “He’s disgusting.” I stood up to flank her left side, and she glared at me. “How long is this going to take? You said he’s mine.”
“I did.” She had come at the perfect moment. “We will take him to the underground. Zion can demonstrate how to manipulate the pain points of a human body, and I will teach you a few useful things about their skeleton. Is that good enough?”
Her smile warmed me. “Deal.”
Steppingover the mutilated corpse clad in a uniform, a knife stuck in his left eye, the steel disappearing in depths of clotted blood, and a shoulder twisted out of its socket, as if trying to detach itself from the evil rooting in another puppet of Ilasall’s military, I waved Ezra and Ava over from the other side of the street where they were directing our teams on clean-up duties.
They trudged over to me, careful not to trip over the squishy bodily remains littering the road, their flesh as cold as the asphalt under my boots.
“What’s the count?” I cracked my neck. Dull pain pulsed under my right shoulder blade and my left side, right under the ribs, ached in addition to the quickly increasing swelling under my eye from a punch I had taken. For the next couple of weeks, I was sure to be colored in bruises.
Ezra rubbed his forehead, smearing the red specks staining his tired face. “We don’t know exactly yet. More than two hundred dead of ours, more than fifty of theirs. About a hundred taken. More wounded.” He freed his longer brown hair from the hair tie and re-tied the bun low on his nape. “She’s making a list,” he said, indicating Kali with his chin.
Across the street, Kali helped Eislyn get an injured man to rise, his leg obviously broken. Dorvan. One of the shop ownerswho had been abused by the self-made mob months ago, now threatened by Ilasall.
Unfazed by the consequences of the first battle of an impending war, instead of taking a lead on whatever needed to be done, Kali pulled out a notepad from the pocket of Zion’s leather jacket she was wearing, hurriedly scribbled something down, most likely Dorvan’s name and condition, and moved on to another wounded, a teenage girl cradling her wrist, her hand hanging in an unnatural position.
It would take at least a few days to have the exact number of our losses, but the odds were not in our favor.
We were running out of time. A noose was tightening around my neck, and the Head of Ilasall was walking around me in concentric circles, closer and closer, waiting for me to take that final step into the snare that would secure the knot and the rope would pull me high up, my body swinging from a thick branch of an oak, the sounds of my suffocation a song of destiny awaiting our compound and likely the other two.
