Degenerates: Badlands Next Generation Page 6

  “What the fuck was that?” Butcher asked as we all twisted around, lights shining back the way we’d come.

  “Sounded like the entry doors,” Luce answered.

  I silently agreed, but there wasn’t anyone or anything there.

  “Great. It’s haunted,” Cameron sarcastically remarked.

  “Not haunted, but a little girl watching us from the end of the hall,” Annie stated in a quiet tone.

  She was already pulling her shotgun from the restraint beneath the acolyte robe.

  What? I turned back around, shining a beam of light ahead of us. Oh, come thee fuck on. I thought the second I saw a kid with what looked like a goddamn machete in her hand.

  A baby deer mask covered her face, which I assumed meant she was one of these ‘Stags’ since there were tiny antlers on the front of it.

  “The blood on her blade is fresh,” Luce pointed out.

  “Hell to the no, no,” Cameron sang beneath his breath, making Luce and Butcher chuckle.

  “Um, hi?” I called to the little girl, unsure what else to say. I’d never been great with small kids.

  “What are you doing? Don’t talk to it,” Butcher whispered.

  “What are you doing in here?” I asked, ignoring him and slowly inching forward.

  I had to be cautious; I knew being a child didn’t make her any less dangerous than I was. Dad taught me how to bleed people out nice and slow when I was ten, which was considered late by most standards.

  She giggled, like a tiny possessed demon, pointed to the left hall, and then proceeded to dart up the stairs, disappearing into the dark.

  “Did you guys notice her lack of flashlight? Kinda feel like a giant pussy now,” Cameron joked.

  Annie scoffed at him and surged ahead of us. I stayed right behind her, slowing when she held a hand up for me to wait.

  She checked right, and then looked left. “It’s nothing,” she said after a minute, dropping her arm.

  “So they’re here still.” I started moving forward again. “Where do you think they’re keeping…?” I trailed off when I finally saw what the little girl had been pointing at.

  “That’s what you consider nothing?” I asked Annie, gesturing to the body strung up above a door labeled Gymnasium.

  She shrugged, “This isn’t anything special.”

  “There’s your fresh kill,” Butcher said to Nyx after they rounded the corner behind me.

  I shined my light over the man’s body, or what remained of it. Both his hands had been severed clean off, leaving bloody stumps in their place.

  A rusted chain held him up by his broken legs; both had shiny white bone piercing through his skin.

  If none of that killed him, his death would surely have been caused by the removal of his head, which was nowhere in sight. A thick pool of darkening blood was on the floor beneath him, no sign of the appendage.

  There wasn’t any particular smell that came from killing like this, mainly just the metallic scent from all the blood being spilled.

  “There is no way that kid did all this on her own,” Luce said.

  “I’m honestly more concerned with where his head is because that gremlin didn’t have it,” Cameron replied.

  “She isn’t alone,” I began.

  “Nope—and whoever is in here with her more than likely has who we’re looking for, and they know we’re here now,” Luce finished.

  “We need to split up and cover more ground. Annie and I can follow the kid; you guys decide who goes left and right.”

  Without waiting for them to agree, I started up the stairs with Annie, leaving them to debate amongst themselves.

  At the first landing, a symbol was painted on the wall in blood. There were two straight lines in the center of a circle with an S overtop of them.

  That was a tag, them claiming this school—probably this town—as their own. Couldn’t have been a coincidence they decided to do it only after we arrived.

  “Hm,” I humphed, knowing Dad would take it if he wanted it regardless of their marker.

  Moving quietly wasn’t much of an issue, however, when I reached the top level and saw the various overturned desks, fallen lockers, and overall debris I knew fast would be.

  Stepping over a moldy, fallen floor tile, I cautiously moved past the first open classroom, and then the second. Another bang, this one with a resounding echo, came from somewhere further down the hall that I couldn’t see.

  A child’s soft laugh followed it.

  “Creepy bitch,” I muttered.

  In the midst of approaching yet another door, a massive figure stepped out from inside one of the classrooms, a second following after him/her. Like my acolytes, it was hard to tell gender due to their clothing. They were wearing robes like Annie’s, but a dark maroon instead of black.

  On their heads were skinned deer faces, equipped with much bigger antlers than the little girls.

  Each held a melee weapon—one a meat cleaver—another what looked like a chain turned whip.

  I stopped in my tracks, immediately going on defense as the one closest lifted something in his hands’.

  He said something in a foreign tongue and then threw it.

  The flashlight fell away as Annie grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me sharply to the left, both of us catching a glimpse of a severed head sailing past.

  Not a second later the figures launched themselves in our direction. I lurched backward, narrowly avoiding being snatched up.

  “Behind me,” Annie bit out, shoving me aside and damn near tackling the Stag right in front of us.

  “What the hell, Annie?” I yelled at her, intercepting the Stag swinging the meat cleaver while she struggled with the other. It took strength I didn’t even know I had to stop the thing from lodging into her head.

  The Stag laughed at me, a long and bitter sound, swinging around so that I had to let go of their arm.

  Nearly falling over a desk, I righted myself, laughing when I jumped back again. “You gotta do better than that,” I taunted with a giggle, dodging another swing. A whoosh of air buzzed in my ears as the blade almost took the nose from my face.

  The Stag advanced, forcing me further down the hall and away from Annie.

  As I did my best not to lose a limb, all I could think was that this would have been a prime time to have my fucking gun.

  I wasn’t a huge person so what I lacked in size and strength I had to make up for in other, usually non-logical ways. So I waited for the man to swing again, ducking when he did, and rushing forward.

  I slammed into his middle, feeling something abnormally hard under the robe he was wearing. Not expecting me to go on offense, the man lost his footing and went down, taking me with him.

  Straddling his torso, I slammed his wrist above his head holding him in place, trying to force him to let of the meat cleaver.

  “Drop it!” I demanded.

  The Stag hissed at me like a fucking cat and began to writhe. He bucked and twisted trying to dislodge me, his Bone-y mask clacking across the floor the entire time, forcing me to avoid being struck by an antler.

  I ground my teeth and tightened my thighs around his hips. Adrenaline pumping through my veins gave me an added edge and numbed my previous ache.

  Annie’s shotgun went off once, and then a second time, bringing with it the explosion of glass and an intense ringing in my ears. I flinched in response, and the man took immediate advantage.

  He rose all the way up with me still very much clinging to him and slammed me into a locker.

  Chapter Six

  Sex

  The knock came at nearly two in the morning.

  My eyes flew open, looking straight up at the raised ceiling. Darrian had turned onto her side sometime after we passed out, placing her ass against my thigh.

  “Z!” Maliki harshly whispered from the other side of the door.

  Sitting up, I tried not to jostle Rin too much as I got out of bed.

  “One sec,” I told him, grabbing a pair of sweats from my dresser and pulling them on.

  “What’s up?” I asked after unlocking my door and slipping into the hall.

  He ran a hand through his hair, stress, and aggravation rolling off his shoulders.

  “Malik?” I questioned.

  “Gwen took off. We got into it, and I went to sleep. Woke up and she’s gone, man. Demon went after her. Marcus went after him. I just got word where she was going.”

  He stopped pacing and stared at me as if I were supposed to know what the fuck he was talking about.

  “And?” I prodded when he didn’t get the hint that I wasn’t a goddamn telepath.

  “District 9,” he seethed.

  I couldn’t have heard that correctly. That fucking bitch knew better.

  The place wasn’t safe to be in for long periods. The smoke that came from underground was toxic.

  “Why would she go there?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Gizmo followed her until he knew where she was heading, then came back.”

  “How long ago?” I asked him.

  “An hour, maybe two.”

  I ran a hand over my mouth, nodding. “Get some shit together and grab Trix. Have her get the prospect and Tobias. We need to get Demon and Marcus.”

  I purposely didn’t mention Gwen. She would get down on her knees and beg to come back before I let her return to my home. I stepped back into my room, shutting the door behind me, and flipping on the light.

  “What’s going on?” Darrian groggily asked, slowly sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

  “I have to head out. I’ll be back in a few hours,” I responded, swapping my sweats for drawers and denim.

  “Can I come?”

  Pausing, I looked up from where I’d been digging for a shirt.

  “If you’re ass is ready to go in five.”

  I grabbed a shirt and pulled my chiseled weapons box from the back of my drawer.

  I told Grizz if I wasn’t back in four hours help Meg keep shit together until I returned with Demon.

  I didn’t want to wake her over this.

  She’d question why I wasn’t dragging a bunch of my Venom with me, and I would give her the same answer I always did—overall, bigger was of course better. But when you were trying to be discreet and were ten times more lethal in a smaller group, you stuck to a smaller group.

  Waiting for me at the truck was everyone who’d been with me earlier with the exception of Rin. We left quickly. With there being a sole entry point into Copperfield, we made the drive across city limits in record-breaking timing.

  “You’ve got be fucking kidding me,” I said, staring at the Baphomet sigil on the two vehicles already parked right outside.

  “What are they doing here?” Trix asked.

  “More than likely trying to tag it,” Darrian answered her, not bothering to hide the disdain she felt for the Savages.

  “You think Romero sent his kids to tag this place in the middle of the night?” Ace questioned.

  Knowing this was Adelaide and the others she had been with, he made an excellent point. Come to think of it I never questioned what the fuck that girl had been running from, but I didn’t give a shit why they were here or what they were doing.

  The closest thing I had to a little brother, and one of my Venom, was supposedly in this slum somewhere. Demon and I needed to have a chit-chat about when it was acceptable to try and protect someone and when it wasn’t. That’s the only reason he would have gone after this bitch.

  I lifted my skull mask over my mouth and nose, making sure it was tight, passing a bandanna version to Ace before I hopped out of the heavy duty and walked right up to the large SUV, placing my hand on the hood.

  “It’s cold,” I stated, now going over to Luce’s heavily armored Jeep, “So is this one. They’ve been here a minute.”

  I briefly glanced at the blood on the front of the Jeep’s grill guard, not waiting for any of them; I walked off, crossing the town’s threshold. The fog was thickening, not a good sign.

  “Pick the pace up,” I called back to them.

  The four of them caught up within minutes. Ace wasn’t able to navigate the terrain as easily as we were, but he kept up well enough.

  I smirked when he cursed and stumbled over a doll I had stepped over just a second before.

  “You guys have something against flashlights?” he bitched after he’d nearly tripped for the fifth time.

  “We can see just fine,” Tobias answered bluntly.

  I kept quiet; this was a good exercise for him now that he was in. He still had a bit more to do before I let him have his brand, but thus far he’d been doing okay.

  “Where do you think they’d go?” Maliki asked as we came to an intersection.

  Before anyone could answer him, a resounding bang came from our right, immediately another followed in its wake. Shattering glass accompanied the second.

  “This way,” I replied, changing course.

  “The school,” Maliki noted, keeping pace with me.

  I nodded once, searching the front of the building for any sign of a broken window. Due to the fog, I didn’t immediately see it, but my hearing as good as it was I picked up on some type of struggle happening on the upper level.

  We reached the depleted school just as another piece of glass shattered, this time a lot more obvious where it’d come from. A body flew through a window almost directly aligned with our current path, rapidly falling to the ground below.

  It hit with a loud, bone shattering crack, blood immediately pooling beneath whoever the Stag was.

  “Oh, shit,” Ace breathed, staring at the contorted body with a giant hole in its torso.

  “Let’s keep moving,” I said, walking around the broken corpse.

  The doors on the school groaned loudly as we pushed through them.

  “We got people everywhere,” Maliki noted, doing his sense bullshit.

  “Trix.” And that’s all I needed to say.

  “Me and you are going right,” she told Tobias, immediately heading that direction when we reached the end of the hall.

  “I’ll go down?” Ace more questioned than stated, his tone uncertain.

  “I got you,” Darrian answered him, grabbing his elbow and guiding him to the staircase leading to the lower level.

  I moved ahead with Maliki, removing Adelaide’s gun from my waistband.

  Neither of us paid more than a second’s attention to the body strung up and blocking entry into a gym, or the marker fresh on the wall.

  At the top of the stairs was a fallen flashlight pointed down the hall.

  “Get off!” Adelaide’s voice carried from the far end, followed by two bodies hitting a locker.

  I focused on the sound, proceeding forward, maneuvering around all the bullshit in my way.

  She came into my line of sight just as the Stag she was grappling with, which was either a giant woman or a man twice her size, nearly tossed her ass clean down the hall in the direction I was coming from.

  There wasn’t a clear shot for her acolyte to take.

  I could see her watching the two of them and trying to determine how to intervene.

  Adelaide made a sound of frustration but otherwise remained steady on her feet until the large fucker swung what looked like a meat cleaver.

  Narrowly avoiding her face being taken off, she jumped backward and tripped over a desk right in my path.

  I easily caught her with one arm before she could hit the floor. Not saying a word, I passed her off to Maliki and then continued on my way.

  I slipped the gun back in my waistband, deciding to handle this shit-bag the fun way.

  The Stag must have been feeling suicidal, or maybe he knew I was going to be sending him to an early grave no matter what he did because the motherfucker swung at me next.

  His gender was confirmed by the breath he heaved before swinging it.

  He was fast.

  I was faster.

  I caught his arm before it could come near my face. Grasping it tightly, I twisted with an extraneous force, hearing the bone pop and grind as it began to turn under pressure.

  A bellow of pain came from beneath his mask.

  Pussy.

  Catching the meat cleaver as it fell from his fat fingers, I used it to knock the deer mask from his head.

  Flipping it around by the handle and making sure my grip was tight, I slammed the rusted blade right between the man’s eyes. A guffaw left his mouth; he stumbled backward, grabbing at the knife lodged in his face while slowly sinking to the ground.

  Advancing, I Ignored the bits of blood that flew back, jerked the blade free, and then repeated the motion until his features began to split in two—mouth, nose, and forehead all parting like the sea.

  When I was finished, my chest was slightly heaving from exertion and blood dripped from my mask.

  I glanced over at the acolyte watching me closely while making her way back to Adelaide.

  Not the least bit worried about what she thought she might do to me. I turned back to my princess, now forcibly sitting at Maliki’s feet, and smirked.

  Chapter Seven

  Septem

  I sat on the filthy floor—not by choice—catching my breath.

  My anger and exhaustion were momentarily forgotten when the man who threw me like a ragdoll yelled in pain. Not a second later he was on the floor with his face being hacked apart.

  There was a squelching sound as the meat cleaver’s blade cut into cartilage and tissue—a soft clinking noise when it hit bone. I watched, wishing I could see the blood flowing from his face to the floor.

  With my flashlight having rolled off to the side of the hall, the only light being emanated was a dull glow.

  When the Venom finally stopped, I tried to stand, just to be pushed right back down on my ass by the man behind me.

  “Let me up,” I demanded, glaring at whoever stood above me.

  He simply laughed, so I supposed that meant no.

  Hearing the other man’s slow and steady approach, I looked anywhere but at him until I didn’t have a choice. He stopped right in front of me, ignoring Annie altogether.