Page 13 of The Black Rider
Of course, right when Leif said that, I could hear that telltale wail of Rage Heads calling others. Were we supposed to get under the table? What was the protocol here for Rage Heads storming the city? Because Leif and Aeron were still mowing their way through the salsa, like there couldn’t be a horde of Rage Heads bursting through here shortly.
Men and women carrying guns went running past us as the wails got louder.
“Shouldn’t we be doing something about that?” I asked.
“These walls are three feet of concrete, and they can’t climb. Booby traps and pits surround them. This happens every day. They can smell us in here. They either step on a mine, or they fall into one of the pits. They aren’t the brightest things on the planet. I’ve captured one and studied it. The only active part of their brain that is left is the pituitary gland,” Leif said.
Aeron leaned back in his chair and sipped his margarita.
“That’s why you have to go for the head.”
I shrugged and scooped another mouthful of salsa in my face hole. If they weren’t worried about the zombies outside of the wall, I would enjoy my meal. Of course, right when I thought that it sounded like someonewasworried about the zombies because I heard gunfire and more explosions. I instinctively ducked, even though I knew it was all outside the wall. We were pretty far away from the wall, but if a rotten leg could just fly right over, who knew about bullets?
“Relax, Speedy. Most everyone here who wasn’t already military was either trained by Dice or trained by someone who was.”
I would have to master the utter boredom of our waitress. She came out with our desserts, and even though it was the apocalypse, she just had this look on her face like she’d rather be looking at her Instagram feed, even with all the wailing and exploding going on.
I didn’t remember it being like this on the road, but Aeron kept us pretty far away from people. It wasn’t like this in Gabriel’s Haven, and I didn’t remember it being like this in California except for when we were about to leave, and those gangs tried to break in.
“Why does it seem like there are more attacks here than anywhere else we’ve been?”
“Isaiah knows this was our base before he made his big move. Most people don’t have televisions anymore but have managed to get their hands on a radio. Many people didn’t agree with Mexico becoming a part of the United States in both countries. Isaiah plays to the more, shall we say, xenophobic gangs by telling them we don’t want to share here, but he doesn’t have the resources to make us. He’s got this pretty nasty radio show where he promises food if everyone can just drive the Rage Heads to Mexico and let them kill everyone while his scientists come up with a way to kill the Rage Heads. He’s just trying to keep us busy and run down the clock,” Aeron said.
“Let’s not talk about Isaiah. Come on, this is a date, and you haven’t even touched your dessert,” Leif said.
“Honestly, this is the weirdest date I’ve ever been on,” I confessed.
“No, it’s not,” Leif said. “You told me you went out with one of your softball fans, and he started crying when you got mad he refused to let you order for yourself. He made a scene, and then his mom showed up and yelled at you for upsetting him.”
I got a flash of memory and cracked up laughing.
“Darth Karen! She yelled at me, and then she demanded a manager give them both free food because I upset him. She was definitely right up there with exploding corpses.”
I dug into my dessert and realized something about Leif. He wasn’t just the polar opposite of Aeron in demeanor. Aeron would have volunteered nothing about my past because of how they took my memories from me. He only added information when I remembered something.
Leif just gave me a small nugget of something, and I remembered it. My memories didn’t all come flooding back at once, and I was just sitting here, shoving this delicious chocoflan in my face like things weren’t exploding a few feet away.
That was when it hit me. There was no playbook for this. Aeron was being careful simply because he didn’t know what he could and couldn’t tell me. Theythoughtmy blood could end this, but they didn’t know.
Isaiah threw a big wrench into all of this by raping an angel and having a child. I needed to find out what was on that flash drive from the lab and why he didn’t just kill me because I was one big wild card to just be kept alive.
And I was coming for him.
Chapter 11
T
hat was honestly one of the best meals I’d ever eaten even before the apocalypse. The only meals I could compare to it were the ones Miss Mabel cooked, but I’d just learned she was half angel, so she was probably putting some sort of magic in her cooking that I didn’t know about. Fuck, I could draw the future, and Satan took my memories. Who’s to say my pot-smoking Nephilim neighbor didn’t have some angelic gift with an Instant Pot?
If my father had the worst of humanity directing Rage Heads here, then I would have to get used to explosions and gunfire. It sounded like they knew how to manage it. That awful wailing stopped by the time I finished my chocoflan, which was pure sin in my mouth.
I knew we were on a time table, and I desperately wanted Smurfette to meet my father’s brains, but Aeron and Leif seemed to think we could take one night just for a date. And after that meal, I wanted to as well. I guess I wasn’t exactly normal before the apocalypse, but I wanted to pretend things were as normal as possible for me tonight.
Watching movies with the Horsemen of Pestilence and Death. Yeah, I was just going to pretend they were Aeron and Leif, my online boyfriends, and they didn’t seek me out because they were trying to see if I was working for my father, the Antichrist. Yeah, we were just going to watch movies like we were three ordinary people in an online relationship. God, even that sounded fucked up.
Leif just seemed to expect us to all sleep in the same bed, and for some reason, Aeron seemed okay with that. At some point, the two of them were okay with both being my boyfriend. Was that an Aeron and Leif thing, or did all angels share women when they came to Earth? I clearly liked them both at one point and must have been okay with it too. I couldn’t remember exactly, but apocalypse me had potent feelings about cheating. There were things I couldn’t remember, but I still had opinions on almost everything that had been thrown at me. Was it cheating if we all knew and were okay with it?
Of course, Leif’s TV and DVD player were in his bedroom. The fact that we could even watch DVDs with everything going on was pretty fucking amazing. I’d slept in the same bed with Aeron, and we’d snuggled plenty of times. Even though there was a lot I couldn’t remember about Leif, I just felt this connection with him. This didn’t have to be weird. That bed was gigantic enough for all three of us to lie down and watch a movie without things getting awkward.
