Page 7 of Genesis (Alter Arlo #2)

“No. It’s fine.” I lit the fifth cigarette. “You need them, too. I mean, not too. You just, you need them. Fuck.” Zan was dead. Past tense. No longer here. My eyes closed, trying to wrap my head around that.

Zade sighed, but it came out angry. “I’m not him. Sorry about your luck.”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You thought it.”

“I can’t fucking help it!”

“And I can’t fucking help that I look like this!

” He grabbed the box of crackers and the jar of peanut butter and took them to the couch.

A plume of dust rose up when he crashed down on it.

That had nothing to do with the months of war that’d been going on and everything to do with a cottage that lacked any cleaning, even before the rebellion.

“I know. Fuck, I know.” I couldn’t help that I thought it, though. That body was the same as the one I loved, and even though I hated Zade as much as I reluctantly felt attached to him, the body would always turn me on. I was attracted to it, no matter who was walking around in it.

“So what now?” he asked again, trying to change the subject.

I stayed in the kitchen to smoke cigarettes and keep my distance from him. “I don’t fucking know. You can leave and do whatever you want.”

He scoffed.

Yeah, we were stuck together. We both knew it now. “We can just stay here.”

“Smart,” he snarked at me, crunching on a cracker. “A place you came to die. Fucking failed at that too, but fuck it, let’s stay and see if you can accomplish it.”

“Says the asshole who tried to follow me to death.”

“Zan. Not you.”

“Amelia?”

His sigh was even angrier this time. “Amelia.”

Zade had lost his whole family. Amelia’s mom died in the first bombings, not that she was worth a lick of salt, but it had hurt Amelia.

Now Zade was left all alone with me, and we fucking sucked at depth.

We sucked at being near each other in general, and now it was all worse because there was so much pain and resentment.

We were fucked, but we were bound together because life was a bitch and she loved making me her bitch.

“What happened with your crew?” I asked, lighting yet another cigarette. I didn’t know what I’d do when I ran out of these things, but they seemed essential to life right now.

“They’re staying in some place called Genesis. Used to be Branshaw, the city.”

“Why didn’t you go with them?”

His shoulders slumped as an answer. Yeah, he couldn’t leave pathetic old me behind. Fuck, we were sick. Stuck together without wanting to be together. Thanks, Karma.

“Didn’t look good?” I asked instead.

“Yeah, it looked good. Met the guy who runs it and he said we were welcome back if I could find you. Sully and Andi said it’s a decent place, and we’re going to have to eventually settle somewhere if we want to stop running. At least Genesis is close to…”

Synner’s Lake. I sucked in hard, burning my throat with nicotine and fire. “So go.”

“Come with me.”

I shook my head. I wasn’t ready yet. Confinement and grief weren’t a good match for me, and if I had to conform to some prick’s rules and ways while spiralling into the depths of despair, I’d go insane and probably kill his whole city just to see if it’d abate my pain a bit.

Putting me and my misery behind a wall was like throwing a schizophrenic person into total darkness with only their mind.

Genesis couldn’t be my padded cell and Zade couldn’t be my straight jacket. Not yet. I needed to implode first.

Since I’d fucked up suicide.

“I’ll meet you there.”

Zade scoffed. “No, you won’t.”

No, I wouldn’t. I’d put more effort into killing myself and hope he never found my body. It’d be easier for him to think I just left. That way, he could go on living his life with the belief I was out there somewhere, still breathing, so he never failed his promise to his dead twin.

“You still wanna die?” he asked, turning around and punching my heart with those glasses. “Still have a death wish, or is it all out of your system now that you’ve failed?”

Staring. Those eyes. Those glasses. That hair.

That fucking body. I craved to hear Zan yell at me, glaring at me like Zade was doing now.

The only difference between this body and that one was that Zade held more anger, and it showed in the way he carried himself. I hated that it was still attractive.

I swallowed and put the smoke between my lips. “I want to die.”

A curt nod. “Then let’s fucking die. I won’t kill you because of a promise and you won’t kill me because of your promise, but we can kill ourselves in front of each other.

” He stood up, leaving the peanut butter on the end table.

“Drugs. Let’s do them. You’ve always hated drugs, so it seems a fitting way for you to die, and this time, when you inject yourself with whatever you can find, I’ll make sure you pump enough into your body to actually die. Then I’ll do double.”

Tempting, but he was fucking with my desires. The prospect of death didn’t seem as alluring when he was trying to follow me there. I wanted to die; I wanted him to live.

“You don’t have a dad anymore, Enge. No one to mentally fuck you up. This is the first time in your life you’ve been free. Live it.”

“No one to mentally fuck me up?” he huffed, pointing at me. “You are the literal mind-fuck of my life, Dire.”

“Well, like you said, I’ll be dead soon. So…” I shrugged. “What happened to you being the reaper of my life, huh? You said you’d follow me everywhere to make sure I was fucking miserable.”

“I don’t have to follow you for that. You’re miserable all on your own.

” He walked into the bedroom and came back out with the case I’d found loaded full of drugs.

“I’m too fucking tired to… I can’t make you any more miserable than you already are.

” He shuffled through packets of pills, bottles full of liquids and powders, baggies of coke and other shit, and vials of tar-like resin. “Which of these will kill me?”

All of them, if done in the right amounts.

I knew the right amounts. I grew up watching my mom kill men with overdoses.

Which all just made me very aware that I had the knowledge and the skills to kill myself with drugs, but I’d failed four times.

Maybe I was more afraid of death than I thought I was.

I’d even held a gun to my head while I was high as fuck, and I still never pulled the trigger.

I was a coward.

“Fuck it. I’ll do them all.” He opened a baggie of pills and took two, and then he snorted something, took another pill, and eventually, I stopped him. Didn’t know why.

I did know why. “I promised him, Enge. I promised him.”

He could get fucked up if he needed to, but I couldn’t watch him die.

Protect my brother.