Page 33 of The Pale Rider
“Jade vouches for you. She says if your friend acts up, you’re banished.”
The gate swung open, and Meremoth took us through. California wasn’t like what I could barely remember. Bombs wholly destroyed some buildings. It looked like they were coming together and slowly rebuilding, but it was a process. I remembered the city I woke up in. All the grass was dead, and the landscape seemed barren. It looked like they were trying to change this because I could see some green peeking through all the brown.
Aeron told me gangs overran Los Angeles, but it sounded like just one gang, and they were doing their best to keep California running. There was almost no litter on the street like there was everyplace else we went, and if there had been broken glass, it was already cleaned up.
I could see some people were using cars, but most people on the street were using bicycles or rollerblades. I didn’t see a single person on horseback like we were, and Aeron’s crazy horse got some strange looks because that thing was enormous. I think Aeron enjoyed getting stared at, and so did the horse. I swear that fucking horse was preening under all the stare.
We were still a long way away from Los Angeles. I had no idea where we would sleep until Aeron pulled the horse up in front of a hotel. You could get a hotel room in California during the apocalypse? What the ever-loving fuck?
Aeron didn’t stop at the front desk. He led me straight down the hallway to a room. He pulled a keyring out of his pocket and unlocked the door.
“Um, Aeron? Why do you have a hotel room?”
“It was one of the first things the Forsaken started rebuilding when they took over. A lot of the living lost their homes, or the living conditions were so bad they couldn’t stay there. There aren’t enough skilled people to rebuild that many houses at once, so they focused on the hotels first. They gave the displaced rooms while they started on the houses. They are trying to do as many things as solar as they can, like this hotel. Be grateful we’ve got power while we are in California. You can take a hot shower.”
“And wash my clothes. I’ll bet I reek to high heaven right now.”
“I like your smell.”
“If that’s your way of flirting, my stink is not the way to my heart.”
“Go shower and wash your thongs. I’ll see if I can scrounge up something better than mystery cans for dinner.”
I didn’t care if it was hot. I hadn’t showered in four days, and I didn’t want to talk about how long I’d been wearing my last clean pair of panties. I went running towards the shower like I was dying of thirst in the desert. Who knew when I would get to shower again?
Chapter 20
I
’ll say this for the Forsaken. They were running California pretty smoothly, given everything that was going on. Aeron was able to negotiate no one getting assigned my old apartment and getting hotel rooms in all the cities he had asked for in exchange for the advice he had given Jade, the leader of the Forsaken. Aeron was spreading the word about the bottled water among the survivors. He told me Leif thought people with AB negative blood were somehow immune to the mutations that the supplement caused, but he hadn’t been able to study prolonged exposure to it among AB negative people.
I had to ask about Jade. She was running a pretty tight ship here. What they had built in California was nothing short of amazing.
“Jade? That was her stage name. She used to be an exotic dancer, and she saw some shit before all this went down. She’s a little badass. She’s probably ninety pounds soaking wet, and all of California fears her. She’s a pussycat if she likes you.”
I let out this little growl. Was I jealous of Jade? Did I even have any right to be? Aeron and I only knew each other online before. We’d only kissed once this entire time and snuggled when we slept. I had zero claims over him, but it seriously bothered me that while I was in a coma, he possibly flirted with this woman to get all these perks in California.
Aeron just smirked at me like he could read me like an open book. He was totally getting off on this. I wanted to punch that smile right off his cute, arrogant face.
“Jade is a lesbian, Speedy. She’d probably cut my balls off with a rusty knife if I even hinted at having sex with her. And I don’t want to have sex with her. You’re cute when you’re jealous.”
“Shut up,” I said, throwing the pillow at his face.
“No, seriously. The greatest shortstop of girl’s fastpitch softball on the West Coast is jealous over little old me. A guy could get an ego.”
“I think you had a fat head way before we met in that chatroom.”
Aeron threw the pillow back at me.
“Yeah, I totally did. I will hit the shower. Answer the door when there’s a knock. It’s dinner.”
Room service during the fucking apocalypse? Why were we leaving California again? Couldn’t we just hole up here instead of going to murder someone? Even if the president was the major shareholder of Armilus, how was killing him going to make any of this better? There were walking corpses and a desolate landscape. Canada and Mexico were no more and got swallowed by the United States. He was running all three now. What more could he possibly want?
Aeron had those answers, and I wasn’t sure he would tell me. I tried to focus on remembering. I needed to put together the pieces of what I remembered for a bigger picture. I had all these memories of a faceless father that I hated, but I never saw my mother once.
Big question. Why did I end up at two research facilities in my life? I knew the second time, it was to keep me hidden in a coma. Why not kill me if I was somehow involved in all this? What was the purpose of all the tests when I was a child, and why did they need me terrorized to do them?
I couldn’t remember much about those tests to know how long they were done. All I could remember was the night I ran. I remembered that night in a dream back in Washington State. My adrenaline was pumping, and I had planned the entire thing. My father kept me locked in my bedroom at night. I could only ever leave the house to go to the exclusive all girl’s private school he had me enrolled in, and I had to come straight home.
