Page 48 of King

“Did you know we were going to need this?”

“It’s best to be prepared,” he said.

“Okay there, boy scout.”

He chuckled as he pulled it out of the bag and threw it over both of us. The cold was still there but it was slowly dissipating, the shaking coming under control.

“Now what?” I asked after we drifted around on the water.

“Now, we paddle to shore.”

I looked everywhere for land but I couldn’t see it. We were in international waters and nowhere near the city.

“And how long will that take?”

“As long as it takes,” he replied, taking the oars that had been in the raft when it inflated and pulling them into the hooks on the side of the raft. I sat under the blanket as Percy rowed us home.

I thought of going home to Halen and to the garden, to the underground kingdom he ruled over. That was my kind of heaven.

“Don’t look now,” I heard him say after a few minutes. “But I think we’re in for a rough day.”

“Why?”

I turned to see what he was looking at only to feel the fear sneak up on me. Lightning and dark clouds off into the distance. Already, I could feel the waves starting to get high and choppy.

“How long until it gets here?”

“Not long,” he said, distracted. “Stay low, the waves will most probably take the raft but we may be able to swim to some kind of shore if I keep going.”

I felt my heart rate speed up again, my stomach churning in turmoil. I was never going to see Halen again.

Chapter Eleven

Halen

Thearmyhelicoptersflewover us as we stood in the middle of the city. The streets were quiet, too damn quiet.

Rusty ran out of the hotel, the one that was usually full of people with his hands in the air.

“The fucker evacuated the city,” I kicked the closest thing to me, feeling the pain radiate up my leg. “We need to move or we’ll be toast.”

“No one has seen or heard from Percy or Paisley,” Ren said after hanging up the phone. He’d run through every single contact he had. “And there was a warning issued for the city from Charles. He still has a lot of high class contacts in the government. They’re throwing everything they have at this city. He told them there is a flesh eating virus rampant in the city and it needs to be contained.”

The government were brutal when it came to diseases that spread quickly. They’d rather get rid of the problem before try to cure it. I knew about the bombings in Africa decades ago, and I had no doubt they would do the same here.

“Well we know Paisley and Percy aren’t in the city,” Ren said. “We should go. This city is going to blow.”

I was going to lose.

I was going to lose everything.

“Evacuate everyone down here, now. I have a few things I need to get.”

Ren was hesitant but he nodded and set about evacuating my kingdom. So many had trusted me with their happy lives down here and now I had to uproot their lives because of a war with my brother.

He was so fucking selfish.

That bastard had gotten near everything from our father, including, it seems, his sick and twisted way of life. Why couldn’t he leave the city and go and find his own demented paradise elsewhere?

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