Page 21 of Taken (After the End #6)

Pam, glib as ever, prattles on, “The most credible information I am able to share is that the incoming species are insectoid in form, though larger than the insects you may remember from the old world.”

All the blood leaves my body in a whoosh. All the little scabbing incisions the beast decorated my neck with tingle. My toes curl in my raggedy boots. “How big?” I squawk.

“The incoming species is moving at approximately eleven miles per hour…”

“I don’t give a shit how fast it’s moving, Pam. What is it?” I screech, picking up my pace and bolting.

“With a small head, glossy, flat body and six legs attached to a thorax, they most closely resemble the old-world cockroach, though are approximately the size of a German Shepherd.”

She’s talking, but I’m hung up on that one single word. So hung up that when she finishes speaking, I repeat it back to her in a screech. “They?”

“Yes. There appear to be somewhere around eighty of them.” I pump my arms harder, but Pam’s cheery voice cuts into my panic.

“I would recommend heading for the rocks to your east, rather than to the Sucere Chamber. You may stand a better chance of survival seeking shelter on the rocks than being caught on land and, by my calculations, you will fall short of reaching the Sucere Chamber by half a mile or more if you maintain your current speed and should the incoming creatures not change trajectory.”

“Holy horseballs, Pamela! I am going to fucking kill you!” I shriek, veering dramatically east, toward the jagged cliffs drawn there in charcoal against the lightening sky.

“I understand your…frustration…Rhen. However, I do not have a physical body which you can take out your aggression…”

“PAM, SHUT UP!” I scream bloody murder at the thought of being overtaken by a horde of roaches the size of dogs. I don’t know if they’re carnivorous or violent or if they’re nice as puppies and rainbows, but I do. Not. Give. A. Flying. Horseshit.

Scuttling through the walls and under the floors of every house and apartment I ever lived in, there was no escaping roaches in the old world. There’s no escaping them now. Because of course cockroaches made it, and given their new and improved size and their numbers, they seem to be thriving.

The sound of my breath sawing in and out of my lungs is louder than the sound of their movements behind me…for a little while. But after five, maybe ten minutes?—who knows! My goddamn Pam watch doesn’t actually tell time!—the clicking behind me grows loud enough to drown out my breath, my thoughts.

“Pam?” I gasp into my wristwatch, the flat gray face just a piece of plastic with some sensors built around the edges and a speaker built into the top. “Do you think the roaches eat people?” The clicking sounds get louder in the pause. “Pam?” I squeal.

“I am calculating whether answering you truthfully will help increase your speed and ensure the longevity of the mission, or if I should rather obfuscate my response.”

“Pam, are you shitting me?” I’m crying out right now.

She doesn’t respond.

Pam doesn’t fucking respond.

“Am I gonna die?”

“The rocks are incoming. It appears you will reach them before the creatures reach you.”

“But they’re still coming toward me?”

“Yes…Rhen,” she says just as the small rocky protrusion—like a tooth poking out of the earth, one that belonged to the carcass of an immense beast—gets near enough to touch. “You have approximately three minutes before they overtake you. I suggest you seek higher ground, quickly.”

I hit the rock, my palms slapping against the cool, almost cold surface. My hands roam all over it, seeking purchase anywhere, but find nothing.

“Pam, what makes you think they can’t climb?” Pam doesn’t answer with the same speed she usually does and I know in that moment, in that brief pause, that I’m going to die. “Pam!”

“At their size, given the sheer ascent, it is unlikely they will be able to scale the stone…”

“I CAN’T SCALE THE FUCKING STONE, PAMELA!

” I can’t get up the rock. My heart is pounding.

The boulders are smooth all the way up. I don’t have a weapon.

I didn’t even bring my water pitcher this time.

I slap the rock with my palms, circling around the boulders again, but find them just as smooth all the way around as I did the first time. I have no options left.

I turn my back to the stone and take these gasping breaths that hurt my lungs.

Each inhale makes the rope tied around my body strain against my skin.

I want to explode in every direction. Because the first rays of that damning sun glint over the horizon and cascade over the backs of way more than eighty roaches.

There are a hundred—hundreds—of cockroaches the height of my knee and as big around as Pam said they’d be.

The closest one to me is a soccer pitch away and I’m shaking so badly I can taste my thoughts.

One is louder than the rest. I voice it, given that this will be my last chance.

“I’m sorry, Pam. I didn’t mean to yell at you.

It’s been really…good knowing you,” I say to my wristwatch between ugly, wet wails.

My nose is running and my eyes are leaking and my spit has the texture of molasses.

I’d have thrown myself to the ground and begged the roaches to knock me out first before they start devouring me if I thought they’d understand but I don’t think they would.

I don’t think they think much of anything what with their tiny fugly heads and their disgusting little mouths and their black shiny carapaces and HOLY FUCKING CANNOLI, I HATE ROACHES.

I swear half the reason I ended up joining the Sucere Project—aside from the obvious “help humanity” and “my parents are already dead blah blah”—was the silence of the Chamber when they brought me to it.

No more bombs. No more hurting or watching people hurt.

And no more roaches crawling under my bed as I was fighting for a few moments of peace every night.

Some people ate roaches by choice. Some people ate them out of desperation. I’d have rather starved. And now, I’m going to be torn apart by the little fuckers.

The big fuckers.

I hug my arms around myself tight as they close the distance between us by half, by half again…until they’re less than five paces away—human paces. I close my eyes, brace for carnage…

A loud THUD shakes the earth and I fall into the stone behind me, my skull knocking against rock.

I remain plastered to it, my scraped-up palms shielding my eyes from impending death.

I relish the darkness. The scent of the dry sand and soil beneath it.

The encroaching warmth from the sun that has yet to chase away the chill.

The sound of the horde of roaches overtaking me.

The shuddering breath that leaves my lungs and lets me know I’m still breathing.

And then the horrific screech that lets me know why.

I open my eyes.

Lacchus is spread out before me in his largest shape.

One of his clawed feet is sunken through the back of a roach, its split-in-half body still wiggling around his enormous scaled leg.

He reaches underneath his armpits to two slits in his scaled skin along either side of his ribs.

From them, he withdraws twin blades. They look like daggers on him, but for my size they would be swords.

He cuts at the next roach that launches itself at him, splitting it in two halfway down.

It falls to the side, reduced to a smattering of clear and brown goo that leaks all over the place.

I slap my hand over my mouth to contain my shriek, but Lacchus still flinches and looks over his shoulder at me.

I point. “Watch out!”

He turns a second too late and one of the roaches stabs its pincers into his side. Wait—do roaches even have pincers? These seem to. And those pincers cut like knives. He lifts his knee up into its tiny head and stabs underneath the shell of the creature, into its thorax.

He cuts and cuts and cuts until the creature falls to the side and then he keeps cutting and fighting until six, seven, a dozen more of the creatures are dead and the rest finally release these shrill titters and clack away, splitting around us and the useless goddamn rock, disappearing behind it and then reappearing toward the southern skyline.

Lacchus steps forward, moving like he’ll chase after them, but stops.

He lowers his body into a crouch and emits three shrieking sounds, each one layered atop the next, but with varying intonations.

When he’s done, he waits for a few bated breaths until eventually, someone far, far away shrieks back.

He relaxes about a hair, no more than that, and then tenses up times three as he goes back to stabbing the injured, twitching roaches on the ground, hacking them to pieces until he’s finished. Then and only then, he turns to me.

He releases a shriek not quite loud enough to explode my eardrums, but enough to make me drop to the ground on my knees, my hands on my ears, my lips bitten bloody between my teeth, tears in my eyes and wetting my cheeks.

He charges towards me, not at all looking like he’s interested in rutting me into nirvana, but like he’s more interested in ripping my head off my neck, tearing my arms off my torso and picking his teeth with my bones.

I squeal, wipe my face on my tattered sleeves and hold up my hands—my first mistake.

Because he reaches between my outstretched hands to my chest and the rope slung across it.

He grabs the rope and uses it to haul me into his chest. He hunches over me, his eyes blazing yellow, his slitted nostrils flaring wide.

The blue-green scales on his face ripple back toward his hairline, and his horns extend to their angriest length, towering high over his head and mine.

He sheathes his blades—a good start, if you ask me, but nobody’s asking me shit in this moment.

My gaze drops down with the motion, and I gasp and point at the disgusting black…

antennae? Pokey things?…sticking out of his skin.

They’re huge! Big as goddamn tree branches!

But he doesn’t react at all to the fact that he’s just been stabbed. He’s not even batting an eye.

Instead, he bats my outstretched hand to the side and advances on me, blotting out the shimmery early morning sun with his size. He slams his fists into the rock behind me and I feel dust particles and bigger chunks crumble against the impact.

I stand very small and sniffle, tears wetting my face again, my lips all swollen and hot. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have run.”

He starts to speak, a low brogue punctuated by shrill shrieks.

I don’t have to know what he’s saying to know that I’m being berated.

He could have given tia Bernadita a run for her money.

I struggle not to cower, my jaw working, my knees shaking, but when I try to drop down and beg for mercy, he grabs my rope and hoists me back up, punches the rock, grabs my jaw.

I stop trying to respond. I just shake to pieces and wait…

wait for the moment his hold on me relaxes even a little bit…

and the moment it does, I jump against his chest. I tackle him, looping my arms around his neck.

I dangle there because he doesn’t touch me.

I don’t know if he knows I’m trying to give him a hug because he doesn’t move at all.

Or maybe, he doesn’t want to hug me. I cry silently into the scales on his neck, shaking out of a primal fear I don’t even understand.

And a gratitude that I very much do understand.

In the old world, people didn’t do nice things for each other often and they never acted selflessly for strangers.

But this male here, now, in this moment that I know time will quickly forget, he comes for me again and again.

And he doesn’t know who I am. He doesn’t even know my name.

And I might have been the last person listed in the Sucere Project—the person of least significance to the continuation of the human race—but the strongest male I’ve seen in this world doesn’t seem to think so.

He must have a reason to keep me. When he looks at me, he must see something of value.

“Thank you,” I say, voice half sob, half laugh. “Thank you, Lacchus. I’m sorry. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. I promise I won’t try to run again.” Hands—big, clawed hands—delicately scrape down my ribs before settling under my ass and lifting me up until we’re face to face.

I touch his, stroking my hands over his forehead, watching in fascination as his eyes close. He leans into my touch and his chest trembles, the scales on his cheeks lifting in patches. I smooth my hands over them.

“I promise, Lacchus,” I assure and reassure again and again. I lean into his ear and brush my lips over the place where a lobe would be if he were in his other dark-haired form. “But…” His fingers that had been kneading my ass still. “There’s one thing I need to do first.”