The Butchers Read online

  He comes unstuck fast. “Shit. Take Mo. Run!”

  He bolts toward Corra and starts trying to untie her.

  Clutching Mo, I watch him struggle futilely with ropes that won’t unknot. Even if he does get her untangled, she’s unconscious. Dead weight. We’ll all die if we don’t go now.

  “Ten minutes,” Nessa says, a sick sort of glee in her voice. She punches a button and an old song blasts from the ceiling’s speakers, echoing creepily around the walls.

  The female voice warbles. “Tell me it’s not true, that I was meant to be with you. Tell me it’s not the end, that this was never just pretend.” Violins play.

  “Clay!” I call desperately. “There’s no time. Please!”

  He looks up from where he’s digging at the ropes. When his eyes lock on mine, it’s like he understands. With a tortured look, he leaves Corra and runs toward me. “Give me Mo.”

  I hand her over as he drops his guns.

  We run.

  Through the halls and into the stairwell. Down six flights of stairs to the bottom floor. Clay races with Mo held to him, and I do my best to keep up. My heart is pounding. I keep waiting to hear the explosion and see all this concrete come down on us. Crushed.

  We get to the main floor door, and I run around him to pull the stairwell door open. I yank on the handle. Locked.

  “It won’t open!” I say, pulling like a maniac.

  “Eight more minutes,” Nessa’s voice echoes in the stairwell, full of glee.

  He hands me Mo and yanks on the door handle, veins straining on his neck. It won’t budge.

  “Open the door, Mother!” he screams up into the stairwell.

  “Tell me it’s not the end,” a woman sings.

  Panicked, I hug Mo tight. If we can’t get out, we’re dead. “What do we do?”

  Clay thinks for a minute, pulls out a gun I didn’t know he had from his waistband, and aims. “Stand back.”

  I move to the corner of the stairwell and shield Mo with my body.

  The gun goes off, impossibly loud in this small space. Glass breaks. When I turn around, he’s smashing through the remaining glass on the small window and reaching through to feel around on the other side of the door.

  “Is it working?” I ask.

  Gritting his teeth, he inserts his whole arm in now. “I can’t reach.”

  Leaning up to the hole, I do the only thing I can think to do. I scream.

  “Doc! Doc, are you there?”

  The hallway on the other side is dark and empty. With the music drowning out my voice, it’s unlikely anyone can hear me.

  “Doc, help!” I scream. “There’s a bomb.” I bang hard on the door.

  “Seven minutes,” Nessa’s voice taunts over the speakers. Then the music clicks on again.

  A face appears from behind the far wall. It’s the young girl, the one that came out with Doc. I stick my face to the hole, hope rising like a flood.

  “Over here. Please help us. We need to get out. There’s a bomb.”

  The girl stares at me with wide, confused eyes. She makes no move to come this way.

  “Listen, if you don’t get us out, we’re all going to die. Do you hear that music? That voice? She’s a madwoman. She’s started a timer on a bomb.”

  The girl takes a step closer.

  “Look, I’m one of you,” I say in desperation, shifting Mo’s weight to hold my ankh brand up to the window so she can see. “I’m a Breeders girl. Can you help me?”

  At this, she starts coming forward. Soon, I can hear her scrabbling against the door. When it pops open, I cry out with relief.

  Clay and I burst through the doors. I hand Mo to him and take the girl’s hand. “We have to run, okay? We have to get out of here as fast as we can.”

  “The others,” she says, her face starting to show she understands the horror of what’s about to happen.

  “We’ll warn them. Take us.”

  “Six minutes,” Nessa says through the speaker.

  Running at top speed, the girl leads us to the common room. In it, Doc, the other women and Desdemona are staring up at the speakers. Their heads turn to us as we run in.

  “We need to go. Now!” I wave them all out.

  “What about the guards?” Desdemona asks.

  “Five minutes,” Nessa says. “You really need to get a move on Clay. The blast area is much bigger than you’re imagining.”

  There’s no time for anything or anyone else. We all realize it. Turning, we head toward the only doors I remember—the broken front doors Desi and I came in.

  We run out of the room and down the hallway. The doors are ahead, but is there time?

  Nessa seems to have stopped giving a countdown. Now she’s singing along with the music through the speaker. “There was a day and a time . . . when I thought you could be mine. But now that day is gone, gone, gone.” She stops, coughing deeply into the speaker. “Clay,” she says, sounding drunk now. “You were a beautiful baby.”

  “The doors!” I say, spotting them. “There!”

  Just as I’m sprinting through the open metal frame, Clay and Mo at my side, I hear Nessa say, “Well, that’s it, friends. Give my love to my grand monkey. And Clay, I did love you. In the end, I always did.”

  We’ve barely reached the parking lot when it happens.

  There’s a terrible explosion behind us. A penetrating wall of sound, starting from the hospital and cresting over us like a wave. The ground beneath us bucks, causing me to stumble and fall. Then there’s a terrible rumbling that grows and grows.

  The sound of things crashing, things breaking apart, is so loud I can feel it in my chest. When I look back, I see charges detonating in a sequence along the base of the hospital. Pops of fire and light and sound.

  The building starts to come down.

  It falls down first, shortening by a full floor. Then, in seconds, things start to come apart. Bricks begin to tumble in sheets. Sections topple. The whole thing starts to fall sideways.

  Clay pushes me forward, still holding Mo. The smoke is starting to billow, burning my throat. A terrible heat rolls over us like a wave. “Keep running! It’s all coming down!”

  Around us, chunks of debris start to fall. Huge pieces that smash into the ground, exploding apart into sharp shrapnel that cuts and gouges. The ground continues to rumble, and the smoke is making it hard to see. There’s a terrible smell of burning. And I swear I can still hear the music playing, though I have no idea how that’s possible.

  We tear forward, into the smoky haze. I can’t see where I’m going, and twice I stumble and fall. I keep looking for Clay, holding Mo and making it somehow through the smoke and debris.

  Running out of the parking lot and through the open gate, we finally come to a stop across the street. I’m sucking in long gulps of contaminated air and hacking up my lungs. I stumble over to Clay and Mo.

  “Okay?” I ask, inspecting them both.

  He drops to sit on the pavement, Mo in his lap. His face is dark with grim and ash. There are bits of plaster on his hair and clothes. Nodding, he looks up at me. “You?” he asks between coughs.

  I look around. Desi runs up, still holding her bow, but her quiver is gone. Her sand-colored outfit is covered with gray plaster dust. She pulls off her face mask, sucking air. “Jesus. Your mom is a psychopath.”

  Clay says nothing, but hands me Mo and forces himself to stand. “Who else?” he manages. “Who else made it?”

  We turn and look through the rolling clouds of smoke. No movement.

  “All those people,” I whisper. “The women.” Doc, I think, but don’t say. I hated him, but I didn’t want him dead.

  “She killed them,” Clay says bitterly, wiping at his face. “She killed all those people.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “It’s not your fault.”

  “I should’ve stopped her. I should’ve made her turn off the bomb.”

  “You know she never would’ve done that. She was a crazy person
. When she made up her mind to do something, she did it.”

  He stares at the leveled remains of the hospital. “Why didn’t she just kill us? Why give us time to get out?”

  I stare at the destruction, too, my heart heavy. There are so few people in the world. Any destruction of life is such a waste. Then I think about what she said. “She wanted you to get out. She still loved you. Even in her twisted way.”

  His pinched expression seems to take this in, but he doesn’t respond.

  “Hey,” Desi says, standing up. “Someone’s coming.”

  Slowly, through the smoke, a figure is emerging. No. Two figures. Clay grabs his gun. I watch, hopeful, conflicted.

  It takes a while to identify the limping figures covered in dust and ash. They’re holding each other and clearly injured. Both are small. Petite.

  “Doc,” Clay says, standing up.

  He’s right. It’s Doc and the girl who helped us unlock the door. He’s the one limping, the girl supporting him. There’s a cut, bloody and filthy, on his head.

  Clay walks up to him. I stand where I am, stewing. I didn’t want him dead, but now that he’s here, I don’t know what to do with him.

  Together, the three of them hobble to where we are. Clay helps Doc to sit on the curb beside me. Up close, Doc looks bad. His nose is still swollen from where I punched him.

  He looks at me through red, irritated eyes. “You survived. I was worried.”

  I nod, my jaw tight.

  He points at the girl, coughing. “This is Sissy. Sissy, this is Clay, Riley, Mo, and . . . I forgot your name.” He looks at Desdemona.

  “You can call me Desi,” she says, pulling her face mask back over her features.

  “Right,” Doc says. “So . . . the hospital is gone.”

  We stare at the rubble that used to be the last great hope of humankind.

  “I’m glad it’s gone,” I say.

  “There was a lot of valuable information inside,” Clay says, staring. “All destroyed.”

  Doc coughs and wipes his eyes. “Maybe it’s better it’s gone. It was dangerous.”

  Clay takes off his hat and brushes dust out of his hair. Then he sets it back on his head in a determined way. “No sense in talking about it. We need to get the hell out of here before the Butchers come to see what all that noise was.”

  Desi looks up, pointing a finger. I look where she’s pointing and see a rooster tail of dirt.

  Someone is coming.

  She picks up her bow. “It looks like we might be too late.”

  Riley

  I track the dust cloud with my eyes. She’s right. Someone is coming.

  Looking around at the members of our group that remain, things don’t look good. No one’s in any shape to fight, let alone run. But if it’s the Butchers, we’re dead where we stand.

  “We have to hide,” Clay says, getting up and gathering others up with him. “Now.”

  “What about Auntie, Ethan, and Betsy?” I ask.

  “I’ll sneak back when I know you all are secure and make sure they’re okay. But let’s hustle. They don’t need to know we were ever here. They aren’t looking for us. They’re trying to see what’s left of the hospital.”

  Hefting Mo’s sleeping form into my arms, I follow Clay. Even though she’s small, my arms are exhausted, and I’m starting to worry about how limp she is. Nessa said she fixed her, but she seems the same. So many worries, I don’t know which to tackle first, or if I can even do anything about any of them.

  We move as a group, trying to find the best hiding spot in the shortest amount of time. Looking around, there are abandoned buildings everywhere. We choose one that looks the sturdiest and darkest. This building has five standing stories, all in bad shape. We walk through a doorless frame into a dank and dusty interior. Whatever business this used to be, the remnants of it are long gone. There’s been much more scavenging here in the city than any other place I’ve traveled. The rooms we enter have no furniture, no scraps of wood or bits of paper. Even the walls are gouged open, wires and pipes pulled out like someone picked the bones out of a carcass and left the skin. The only thing that remains is a cracked tile floor and the ceiling, once decorative with moldings and ornate carvings, now half-crumbled.

  With little time to look around Clay leads us up several flights of stairs to the fifth floor, picking a west-facing room so we will have an unobstructed view of them coming and what they are doing at the hospital. We sit down in a dusty corner. The only items in this room are the wood floors, plaster ceilings, and trash blown in from the open windows. In one corner an old bird’s nest withers to dust. On one wall someone has spray painted words it takes me a while to sound out: “Leon’s. Take at your own risk.” A red arrow points down. It’s anyone’s guess what Leon was hiding up here. All I do know is Leon is probably dead.

  Clay hunkers down, keeping his eyes above the window frame and watching the approaching dust. I set Mo on my jacket and crawl over beside him. “Do you think Auntie will have sense enough to hide them?”

  Clay’s face tightens. “If she hears them coming in time. I better run down there and get them somewhere safe.”

  I nod, not wanting him to leave, but knowing that leaving those three to the Butchers is a terrible idea. He starts to get up, and I put my hand on his arm. “Clay, are you all right? Your mother . . .”

  He tightens his shoulders. “Not now.” He gives me a peck on the cheek, makes sure I’ve got a gun and ammo and leaves.

  Only now do I look around at the others. Boy, we’re a ragtag group. Desdemona looks lost without her arrows. She keeps running her hand forlornly over her bow. Clay gave her one of his smaller guns, and, this time, she accepted it, but she’s set it on the floor beside her like it offends her.

  Doc looks rightly miserable, the clotted blood on his forehead gruesome. And there are trails of moisture on his cheeks through the plaster dust like he’s been crying. But when he looks at me, I look away. I just can’t with him. He betrayed me. I don’t care what his excuses were.

  Sissy looks small and still in shock. Her eyes pop strangely out of her skinny face, and her fingers keep running nervously up and down her white hospital gown. She’s not pregnant, or at least doesn’t look it, but she has the ankh brand. She was one of them before the Butchers hit. How she escaped capture all this time and made it out of the hospital I’ll never know.

  But when I think about the hospital, all I can think about are the people we didn’t save—Corra, who betrayed us too, but died an awful death, the nanny and the pregnant woman, all their lives cut way too short, the guards we tied up and then left to die. And then there’s Clay. How must he be feeling? If it was my mother who pushed the button, I’d have some serious guilt.

  Desdemona comes to sit beside me, watching the dust cloud grow bigger and bigger. They have to be at the hospital now, though with the rubble in our way, we can’t see the cars or how many.

  “That was a rough one.” Pulling down her face mask, she runs her hand over her face and through her dark hair. “What happened?”

  “Nessa happened. She is . . . was a sociopath; she would have done anything to advance her medical research. She was also batshit crazy. I guess when the Butchers came they injured her so bad she was dying. So, instead of passing her research on, she blew it all up.” I make the symbol of a dust cloud expanding with my hands. “She decided it would be fun to take as many of us out with it as possible. Said there was no point to life.”

  “Huh,” Desdemona says, absorbing the information. “So she’s dead. How’s Clay feel about that?”

  “Considering he tried to kill her once, I think okay.” But is that true? Is anyone ever okay when the woman that gave birth to them dies? My mother’s death still haunts me every day.

  Desi examines her face mask, brushing more dust away. “And the Butchers are back because . . .?”

  “Because Nessa had something they wanted. Some information about building weapons or something. She w
anted to destroy it as well as herself and the whole hospital. I’m sure they’re back to see what’s left.”

  “We’re what’s left. Think they’ll know we escaped?” she asks.

  “There’s a thousand abandoned buildings in this city. No way they’ll check every one. And why would they?”

  “If they knew there were women up here,” Sissy chimes in.

  Desi looks over at her. “And why would they know that?”

  Sissy shrugs, walking her nervous fingers up and down her legs. “They know things. When they came in, it was like they could smell where the girls were hiding. They stalked through the place like hunters, yanking open doors and ripping girls out by their hair.”

  “You were there?” I ask.

  Her big eyes shine with unshed tears as she answers. “My mom put me in a laundry bin and covered me with dirty diapers. She thought it would keep them away. It did. They took her though. When she went, she was screaming.” Trembling fingers pick at her clothes as she stares off into space. Doc puts his arm around her.

  “Sissy,” Desi asks. “Did they take your mother? Is she with them now?”

  The tears finally fall down her dirty cheeks. “I looked through all the bodies I could find after they were gone. I didn’t see hers.”

  “They might have mine, too.” Desi stares hard out the window, her hands gripping the handle of her bow tight enough to snap it.

  Their mothers might be alive, taken as a sex slaves to brutal men. But now, another worry is blooming in my chest. What if these two decide to go rogue and attack any Butchers they see? They could give our position away and put us all in danger. Sissy probably wouldn’t, but Desi has this look on her face that I don’t like. And now I can see people moving down among the rubble. At least two men are there, sifting through pieces of the hospital. Who knows how many more are on the other side or waiting in the car?

  I put my hand on her arm gently. She startles as if she forgot I was sitting beside her. “We’re going to sit here and be quiet, and they’re going to go away.”

  She grinds her jaw but doesn’t argue. And her hand goes slack on her bow.