Page 9 of Genesis (Alter Arlo #2)

TIME TO BE SELFLESS

CADOC

I’d turned into a serial killer. My style.

Bullet to maim them. Wide eyes to watch me while I taunted them. A gaping mouth to come in. A cigarette to watch them bleed out. Then Zade burned them. Sometimes they were still alive.

I’d become attracted to insanity. Chased that shit on the regular. Craved a bit of depravity, and wasn’t afraid to sink into it. Lord fucking help the next person who drew my romantic attention. They better be a madman because I’d kill anything less.

“Why aren’t you lighting him the fuck up?” I asked Zade with an unlit cigarette between my lips, my cock still softened in my cargo pants, and the thrill of the kill buzzed in my blood.

He pointed ahead. There was a cluster of houses all around us, and we currently stood in the driveway of one of them. “Someone is out there.” His voice had turned ghostly the past few days; we’d been wandering the grey area for weeks. “Someone is following us.”

Well, they could fucking come at us. I gave zero fucks about death, and after all this time, it might be fun to actually fight someone for the right to live.

I knew we didn’t deserve it,but we’d take it anyway because we’d become greedy fucks who took what we wanted in this newly depraved world. We became the worst part of the world.

I looked around, listening and watching for a sign.

Peering through the darkness, I saw nothing and heard even less.

Zade had been doing more drugs lately, so he often saw shit that wasn’t there, but I believed him.

Someone was watching us. Zan, probably. Judging our lifestyle choices and condemning us all the way from Synner’s Lake.

Even if the people Zade saw were his own demons, he still felt watched, so I’d take his words in the literal sense and help him fight whatever came at us.

But then real movement happened before my eyes.

The unlit cigarette stuck to my bottom lip as I screamed.

A bullet tore through the flesh of my upper arm, and Zade shoved me to my ass.

While I bled out, he took action. He wasn’t a sharpshooter by any means, and he typically saw doubles instead of singles, but he knelt in front of my sprawled body and fired round after round into the darkness.

Fuck him for having all the fun.

I shoved myself to my knees and grabbed the back of Zade’s Punisher hoodie, dragging the two of us into the shadows of the house we were beside.

He barely stopped shooting, and as soon as we had some cover, we both fired back.

Pops of staccato gunfire and whizzing bullets filled the air, but a chaotic frenzy filled my soul.

This was life now, and I fucking loved to hate it.

“To the left,” Zade said, turning on his knee to fire in a different direction. “We need an exit plan here, Dire!”

Yeah, yeah, I was working on it. When two men came up behind us, I spun and shot them both in the throats. Zade killed two more to the left, and then I was yanking on his hoodie, forcing him to move because we were drugged madmen and we wouldn’t get that lucky a second time.

“Come on, Enge!” I laughed for some deranged reason.

We ran. As we ran, we killed anything in our path.

Zade used to give a fuck about being a murderer, but he no longer had that affliction.

Life and death were both precious, and we sat on the sharp edge between the two.

Living while dead. Unalive but not fully deceased.

It was an art form we’d perfected through nothing but anguish and pain, and in Zade’s case, anger.

Fuck, he was an angry guy. Sometimes, I thought he loved being angry because it meant he was still capable of feeling something.

Not even the drugs he’d been doing had dimmed his anger.

We kept running, and by the time we got to safety, the cigarette between my lips was drenched in drool, my smoker’s lungs bitched at me, and Zade threw up all over my feet. Then he popped another pill and kept on fucking walking.

“We gotta talk about your drug dependency, Enge,” I said as we walked through another forest.

“Fine. Let’s also talk about your perverted dick coming in the mouths of half-dead humans.”

Okay, so no talking then.

We walked through the night until my lungs quit and his body failed. By the time we holed up in the garage of a house, we both collapsed on a pile of old tarps. I lit the smoke because I didn’t want to waste it, and Zade snorted something from a dime bag.

“We just gonna keep living like this?” he asked, sounding more tired than I realized.

Guilt hit me then. He was doing this for me.

Zade wanted to be in Genesis, building some sort of new life for himself, but instead, he’d stuck with me so I could kill off my crazy with literal murder.

I should quit. I should have quit long ago—weeks ago.

There was no staunching my crazy because crazy was who I was now.

Zade needed somewhere he could calm down and process his grief, get through the loss of his entire family, and do it in relative safety, yet here I was, dragging him through the hell of the grey area just to get my rocks off.

I sucked in nicotine and listened to the tarps crinkle under our weight. “You wanna go back to that city now? Genesis?”

He looked at me. Zan looked at me. Zade looked at me. They both looked at me, judging the fuck out of my choices and reminding me I was a worthless piece of shit. “You all murdered out?”

Didn’t think I ever would be. In all honesty, if the world went back to normal, I’d forget how to live in it. I adapted to this and I couldn’t convert back. “We got to do what I wanted. Your turn now.” Selflessness—something I’d only ever done for Zan.

Zade snorted more powder, and I felt Zan’s ghost bitch-slapping me to make him stop. I took the baggie from him, but he was too far gone to fight me on it at this point. “Where do you think her body is?”

Raped, pillaged, and dumped. That’s where. “Her soul, or whatever, is with Zan.” His name hurt, but I liked the pain of it.

“Am I a bad brother for not looking for her?” He rubbed at his eyes before squinting one closed in an attempt to see straight.

“We’d never find her. You were a good brother, Enge. To both of them. All the shit you suffered through…” Deep drag. Burned lungs. Pain.

He kept rubbing at his eyes. Maybe he was crying and didn’t want to be. “I feel dirty. Everything I’ve done… that’s been done to me… I need a cleanse. Someone to sanitize me.”

As his words slurred and his voice dimmed, I let him pass out in peace.

No idea what he snorted, but it sure as shit wasn’t coke.

When he was dead to the world, I rifled through his pack and dumped all the powders.

The pills might be useful at some point, like right now.

I took one of the Dilaudids to help with the burning sting of the bullet graze in my arm, and then stared at Zade.

He’d hate me for ditching his drugs, but if he wasn’t more level-headed, we’d never make it back to Genesis alive.

Protect my brother.

Working on it, Zan. But fucking how? How was I supposed to protect Zade from his own mind? His agony ate him alive, and the only thing he had left to fight it off with was his anger. Which would win?

In the dead of night, with Zan’s body double drooling next to me, I cried. And I didn’t stop until the sun came up and reality came back into focus. Zan no longer lived in the same world as me.

I love you, Cadoc. Don’t stop.

I crinkled the receipt in my fist before doing my best to smooth it out and preserve it.

I knew Zade had a family photo, but I wasn’t strong enough to look at it yet.

I wasn’t strong enough for anything anymore.

I’d tried to murder my way through the grey area as some sort of fucked up revenge against the new world that took him from me.

It hadn’t helped. It never would. This was my new personality.

Hatred, shame, grief, and self-loathing.

Somehow, I’d find a way to cover it all in nonchalance and playful quips, but not today.

For Zade, I’d go to Genesis. Because the sad fact was, he’d never get better with just me as company.

Misery fed on misery, and we were two miserable fucks in a miserable world.

He needed other people, different perspectives, someone and something to give him purpose in a life he was still debating on living.

He needed someone to pick him, and even though I had, he’d never believe me.

I fucking pick you, Zade. But because I pick you, I gotta take you somewhere safer. For once in my fucking life, I had to be heroic. Didn’t think I had what it took, but if I could get him there and vet this Dante guy, maybe that’d be enough.

Two weeks later, we stood haggard, broken and bleeding, leaning on each other just to keep upright. In the distance, Genesis stood like a row of piranha teeth choking smoky breath into the grey sky.

“It’s different now,” Zade said, voice destroyed from withdrawal and crying. “They’ve got a wall built now.”

Good. “You’re sure that’s where you wanna go?” I double-checked.

“My crew…”

Yeah, I’d been selfish to drag Zade with me.

He would have done a lot more healing if he’d just gone to Genesis with his crew in the first place.

They’d be better at comfort and support, and fuck, he needed that.

No part of me wanted to live in a walled-off community with some dictator, but I’d do it for him. Reluctantly.

“Alright. Let’s fucking go then.” I stepped out of the bush.

Zade latched onto my jacket and pulled me back. When I looked at his deeply troubled eyes, I broke just a little bit more. “Let’s…”

“You need to go there, Zade.”

“You’re coming with me though, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah.” I fucking hated promises. Hated keeping them. Fuck you for making me promise, Zan.

“I can’t yet.”

I tilted my head, studying him. Trying to read his stupid mind. “Why?” He’d never find Amelia’s body, so he had to let that one go, no matter how much it hurt.

“Can we just go to the lake one more time first?”

My chest cracked open to spill out all my hurt. “Y-yeah.” Fuck you for breaking, voice. Without another word, I walked in the direction of Synner’s Lake, unable to stand there and let him watch me break again.

We found ourselves sitting amongst the rubble and ashes of the cottage we’d burned down. I thought seeing it again might fill Zade with regret, but he only stared at it with dead eyes and then plopped his ass on the ground to stare at the lake.

Grief hit hard in the dead of night. Then again, it hit hard at all times.

Synner’s Lake was now the only tie we had to Zan, and I knew we’d be visiting it for however long our lives lasted.

A watery gravesite in the middle of turmoil, surrounded by rocky cliffs and a burned-down cottage.

It wasn’t what I pictured as the eternal resting place of the man I loved, but it was the best he’d get.

Even in death, I failed him. At least it gave Zade somewhere to visit.

I guessed he’d visit Amelia in the darkest parts of his newly re-broken soul.

Zade had always been ruined because of what their dad did to him. He had lived through hell since the moment their mom walked out on them, and if there was one thing I could do for him in this next phase of life, it’d be to put him back together without him knowing I was doing it.

“We’re going to Genesis tomorrow?” I double-checked, wanting to know where his mind was at.

He nodded, but said nothing. He just sat in his anger and his agony.

Zade fucking hated me. I sort of hated him, too.

He had a reason to hate me, and that reason was his blame for Zan’s death.

I didn’t really have a justifiable reason to hate him.

My fury towards him came because of what he looked like.

A forever taunt. A forever flaunt. He got to walk around in the body mine craved, and for that alone, I’d hate him.

Being near him would mentally fuck me up forever, but maybe I wanted to be messed up.

I was a masochist because my dick sometimes got hard when I saw him change, and the fantasies in my head sometimes blurred his attitude with Zan’s body.

I couldn’t help being sexually attracted to the body, but I’d never act on it.

Couldn’t. Zan would haunt me, and Zade would hate me more.

I wouldn’t mind being haunted…

“Give me something,” Zade said. “One last night. Let me get high as fuck and say goodbye to my twin, Dire.”

The lake rippled in warning. Zan didn’t want me to give him drugs, but Zan wasn’t here in the flesh and Zade didn’t deserve to feel the full weight of all his anguish.

I’d saved a bunch of pills and the vials of liquid, so I shuffled around in my pack and tossed him the baggy of mixed pills. “Don’t die.”

Or do. Whatever you need.

He took a few and swallowed them with a bottle of water. When he looked at me, his eyes were blood red, so I shuffled through my pack again and handed him Zan’s glasses. He put them on and blinked a few times. “Take some.”

I wasn’t a fan of drugs, and now that I wasn’t actively trying to off myself, I didn’t overly want to do any.

One of us needed to stay alert to protect his drugged ass.

There weren’t any more bombs or outside forces, but the grey area still wasn’t safe.

Rebel groups, vigilantes, terrible people, other communities, and even cannibals lived out here now.

We’d run into enough of them over the past month.

“Please.” His voice cracked, wobbling all over the place. “Please.”

Goddammit. I snatched the baggie. “Fine, but this is the last time. Tomorrow, you get your shit together.”

“Don’t act like you give a fuck, Dire.”

Zan gave a fuck, so I was forced to give a fuck. I swallowed down two random pills, and when Zade looked at me with sad eyes, I swallowed two more. Hopefully none of them would encourage my mind to hallucinate him being his twin.

Neither of us needed that shit.