Page 27 of Darkness I Become
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Cade nod. His expression was unreadable.
“We holed up in an old barn,” she continued. “For a couple days, we were so sick that we couldn’t move. On the third day, we felt well enough to walk. I think we both knew that if we didn’t, we’d die there.”
She took a hard swallow. “We found this old, abandoned factory. At least, itlookedabandoned. We were desperate for supplies, so we stopped. All went to hell in a matter of minutes, though.”
Asha bit her bottom lip and took a sharp inhale as more images resurfaced: a horde of young men. Dirty and dressed in rags, carrying clubs and bats. Fierce, angry, and worse—hungry.
“But it wasn’t abandoned, right?” Cade eventually prompted, and she shook her head to clear it.
“No,” she replied. “There were…strange men there. They looked something like Old World depictions of cavemen. One of them—seemed like the leader—was wearing this weird necklace. All these small, off-white beads, lined up in a row. Took me a minute to realize they were human teeth.”
She heard Cade inhale sharply before he said, “Cannibals.”
“You know about them?” Asha asked, hating how her voice shook.
He nodded. “Had some run-ins with them. They attack settlements from time to time. From what I gather, they move in packs and breed like rabbits. Wouldn’t have thought that people would go feral so quickly after the end, but a lot of them were born into it and never knew anything else. I always wondered if maybe the powers-that-be might’ve…tipped the scales towards them never recovering.”
Asha frowned. “What do you mean? Powers-that-be?”
“Whoever runs the Delta,” he answered, like it was nothing. “They keep civilians in the dark about it, but they always had some new science experiment going on. I only knew a little more because of my position, but it doesn’t take much imagination to think they may’ve had something to do with it.”
Unsure how to process that information, Asha filed it away for later.
“Anyway, they chased us, and we ran for our lives,” she continued, trying to take deep breaths. “I barely even remember that part because I just…panicked. Never been so scared. I couldn’t think clearly, so I picked a direction and ran as fast and as far as I could. I was almost to the chain-link fence around the property before I even realized that Claire wasn’t with me, and that the cannibals had stopped chasing me.”
Cade’s eyes had softened, and she hated how damnunderstandinghe looked. She didn’t deserve it.
“They caught her,” he said quietly.
Asha hugged herself, shaking like a leaf. “Yeah. I doubled back and saw them grab her. She tried to get away, but there were too many. They dragged her by her hair, and…”
She was quiet for long enough that Cade said, “Did they kill her?”
“Definitely,” Asha replied, her chest swelling with shame. “I didn’t see it, though, because I left her there.”
There it was: the awful truth that she’d been trying too hard to suppress. She was a coward, and she hadn’t lifted a finger to help her friend.
“Even now, I don’t totally understand why I did it,” she continued, her lips trembling. “And why I spit in the face of a man who tried to sell me, when just days earlier, I choked at the most crucial moment. All I can come up with is…ordinary men, I can handle. They weren’t ordinary men. They were like animals, and I didn’t know what to do, and—”
“You did exactly what you should’ve done,” Cade broke in crisply. “For a civilian compound woman with no training and no weapons, you did the only thing that made sense for your survival. The only thing you’d have achieved by helping her is your death.”
“Youwouldn’t have done it, though,” she said, a little brokenly. “You wouldn’t have frozen up like that and abandoned Leo, or Dom.”
He folded his arms over his chest, straightened to his full height, and fixed her with a steel grey stare.
“I’m a soldier, darling. I was assigned at eighteen and served for a decade before I left the Delta. It’s my job to runtowardsthe danger. That’s not something I was born with; it’s years of training that you don’t have. Leo and Dom have the same training. We’re not a fair comparison.”
There was a long, tense moment where Asha wasn’t sure what to say. Whatever she’d expected, it hadn’t been this. She’d thought he would scoff at her, tell her she was a silly girl who wasn’t prepared to face the realities of this world. She wasn’t sure how to interpret mercy coming from a man who lived in a place like this.
“Why do you live here, with these people?” she burst out. “You obviously know how to survive. Why would you settle here with Angel, if you’re…not like him?”
Cade considered her for a moment before answering. “It wasn’t my first choice, but it became the logical one. At first, when we left theDelta, we were just trying to get by. We moved around a lot, hunting and trapping for food and sleeping under the stars. But winter was coming, and we needed somewhere to settle. We eventually found Ashburn.”
“Ashburn?”
“An abandoned fishing village,” he answered. “It was secluded, out in the middle of nowhere, and had a bunch of cabins that were in decent condition. It was on a lake, and the fish meant we wouldn’t go hungry. We fortified it, planted a garden, and even recruited a couple dozen residents from the Post that spring—people who could help us built it into a proper settlement. It wasn’t much, but it was a good enough home.”
“The Post?” Asha asked, frowning.
