Page 6 of The Black Rider
“Hey!” Aeron said, tickling the shit out of me. I shrieked and tried to shove him away. “Mabel is tiny for a Nephilim. They used to be known as giants. It wasn’t like I could fight back and hurt her!”
I shoved his hands away and moved closer to Leif, who wasn’t in a tickling mood.
“I never would have forgiven you if you hurt Miss Mabel. I’m not a giant either. I’m tall, but I’ve met many people taller than me. And I don’t think I have super strength either.”
Aeron poured a shot and leaned back into the sofa.
“Yeah, you do. When your adrenaline got pumping on the road, I saw it. You were just focusing on fighting to live, but not even a steroid-enhanced athlete could have fucked up those men at the tent the way you did.”
“Haven’t you noticed you hardly ever get sick, and you heal fast? I see that bandage on your arm. The only reason I brought you here instead of seeing a medic is that I know it’s going to heal right up and not get infected.”
“You must be a special kind of crazy, Leif. What I got cut with was probably filthy, and Aeron stitched me up in a burnt out building with a needle and thread. There could be all manner of nastiness swimming in my veins right now.”
“Oh, I’m totally insane, but I’m also right. It’s time you stopped thinking of yourself as some mere human and started thinking of yourself as a superhero. You’re mostly angel, baby, and you will help us stop the end of the world.”
That part was still a little hard to accept, so I changed the subject.
“I’d still feel better with some antibiotics and a doctor looking at my arm.”
I was learning the Horseman of Pestilence was a tremendous flirt, right from that explosive introduction. He grabbed my hand, and his lips brushed my knuckles.
“You don’t remember this, but when we talked on the phone, I promised to give you anything you wanted when we met. If that’s a doctor, then let’s go get your arm checked out.”
Aeron was so irritable and grumpy when we met because he didn’t want my memories to come flooding back and I lose my mind. I would admit to not liking him at first. Leif was the total opposite. He was always touching me and flirting with me. He was like Aeron a lot in how they both tried to take care of me and make me as comfortable as possible during the apocalypse.
My memory loss was hitting me hard. They cared about me, and I cared about them once. We called ourselves boyfriends and girlfriend, even though we had never met.
They were still operating on all those feelings, and I couldn’t remember them at all.
Chapter 6
A
s Leif walked me through the building, I was still marveling that places like San Quintin, California, and Gabriel’s Haven could exist based on what I saw when I set foot outside that hospital. The Rage Heads were everywhere. Basically, if you weren’t the same blood type as me, you were walking around as a cannibal corpse and that my blood type was a pretty narrow portion of the population.
It was pretty amazing people had come together to rebuild. Sure, there were shitty people out there who survived becoming a Rage Head. I killed a few of them with Smurfette because they were willing to trade me like a Pokémon card for not killing Aeron.
I wasn’t ready to process I’d done anything to them with Smurfette that a normal girl of my size could have done if she was fighting for her life. I didn’t just want to see this doctor to make sure my fucking arm didn’t turn black and fall off. I wasn’t ready to believe I had angel blood. Was there even a medical test for that?
Because deep down, I knew they were right. Even when the entire team came down with the flu, I never got it. There was this massive virus that practically shut the entire world down before all this. I self-quarantined and didn’t go out. I did what I was supposed to do, but I didn’t get sick.
I had a flash of memory as we walked down the halls. Sometimes, if we were playing a rival when I was playing roller derby, things got nasty as far as body contact went. I took some ugly spills and elbows in unfortunate places, but I was always fine the next day, where some of my teammates were still limping.
Then, it hit me. That was why they called me Speedy. It wasn’t because I was faster than anyone else on the team. It was because every time someone knocked me down, knocked me clear across the ring, or I took a softball right to the face, I didn’t need to sit on the bench, go to the hospital, or miss a game. I popped right back up and was ready to continue to the game.
Speedy meant speed healing.
My roller derby and softball team saw it way before I did, and they gave me my nickname based on it. What was I going to see when the doctor took my bandage off? Now, I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see the doctor. I just wanted to pretend like I was a perfectly normal shortstop who ran a tattoo shop. But I was never normal, was I? I painted the future.
Leif led me to a different wing of this big white building. It was surprisingly sterile for the apocalypse. Everyone seemed to worship Leif here. They snapped to attention as soon as they saw him, and I was sitting in an exam room in minutes.
I asked to go in alone. Aeron and Leif had been an excellent support system to me this entire time, and I was glad they ended up being the good guys, but I needed to do this alone. Did the people here know who they were? Aeron and Leif could have answered my questions better than a human doctor could, but I wanted a human doctor because I had questions. It was probably human medical technology that kept me in my coma, though I was guessing my memory loss had something to do with my father, and that was why it was so dangerous to give me information all at once.
An older man with a kind face came in. He held out his hand to me.
“I’m Doctor Gonzalez. Aeron and Leif explained to me you were in a long term, medically induced coma. If you don’t mind, I’d like to look at more than your arm. Being in a coma, then ending up out there, has probably been hard on your body. Is that okay with you?”
Was that okay with me? I should have been asking that question as soon as I woke up. If I had been flat on my back and pumped full of drugs for that long, my muscles should have atrophied. I should have hit the floor when I tried to stand. I was shaky, but I made it to the door, and not ten minutes later, I was fighting my way through a horde of Rage Heads. Why wasn’t that weird to me at the time?
