Page 14 of Bad Blood

No.

My vision went fuzzy, and I thought I heard a voice.

Maybe all the bad blood would drain away, and I could be normal again.

A Corrupted to my left growled, and I turned my fading sight to the familiar corpse.

“Thirty,” I whispered. “We almost made it.”

At least I wouldn’t die alone.

Chapter 2

Cain

It was a good day to die alone.

The sun was out, birds were singing in the trees, the leaves were a gorgeous array of reds and browns and oranges.

I wasn’t going to get a better day than this.

“Should I do it today?”

Every day I contemplated doing it. And every day, I’d decide to do it the next day.

“What do you think, Bernard?”

I looked over at the tree near the bank of the river, but Bernard didn’t answer because he was just a face I’d carved into the bark.

“Yeah, you’re right. I should just do it tomorrow.”

Always tomorrow.

But Luna needed me. I couldn’t leave her behind. Dad might not be here anymore, but Luna was, and I couldn’t leave her. Sure, she could probably take care of herself on her own, but I was all she knew. This was the only home she’d ever had. I’d found her when she was just a puppy, and to leave her like that would be…

Wrong. The worst thing I could do.

But the emptiness was going to swallow me whole at this point, and it felt like there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.

After Dad died, the loneliness came.

It was like a living being, slinking in the shadows at first. Always there at the edge of my vision, in the corner of my eye, but never front and center, never clear.

And it would whisper to me at night, when the day was done and there was nothing left to do. Where sleep often eluded me, as if it was working in tandem with the loneliness, cornering me in a state of in-between where my thoughts could race freely but my body was too exhausted.

Whispers became doubts. Fears. Regrets.What ifsandmaybesandshould haves.

They sank into my pores, slid into my bloodstream and flowed with the beat of my heart. They hummed and fizzed and pumped life into those doubts and fears and regrets. Gave them a home. Made them beat louder than anything else.

The loneliness was a parasite, climbing into me and taking control.

No, it was a virus. Like the one that plagued mankind. It burrowed into veins and vessels and cells and destroyed them from the inside out.

But unlike the virus, it was a slow death. A necrosis of the spirit.

Worse than that, it was my determination to pretend the loneliness didn’t exist that contributed most to my decay. If it was just a specter that haunted me, it wasn’t real. If it wasn’t real, I was fine.

I needed to be fine. I didn’t have a reason why, just the simple words that had been given to me since I was a child. Those final words he’d left me in his letter.