90 DEADLY DAYS (WEEKLY UPDATES RETURNING THIS DECEMBER)

Chapter 36

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Chapter 36

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Dread and fear tape our lips shut. Eyes wide and slick from tears, we struggle to hold on to a disintegrating past and a failing future. Everything skids and stumbles down a slide to eternal ruin, including our own waning hopes. What's left?

What's to say in a few more seconds of breathing toxic, deadened air filtering from dingy, Xaron clouds, my heart won't stop. Butcher won't die?

Like a medic on the battlefield, I sterilize Butcher's steaming wound burbling its own blood and pus. Peering through horrified eyes at withered flesh, my conscious revolts and shrinks back from reality, praying for release from continued horror. Anyone would swear shrapnel ripped half the skin off and tore out quivering, rosy and plump inner tissues. What remains slithers into a slimy, lumped, blistered body that screams at the eye. I need to stomach the sight to clean it up, but hot acid already churns up my esophagus. Butcher remains quiet through it all, so quiet that I nervously check his pulse.

Once white bandages surround the mutilation and blood turns them pink, his eyes roll back and his head slumps.

He looks so childlike.

I cradle his faintly stubbly cheek, wanting to hate him so much. And yet, the same hesitation after Kerry's menacing mutt died—the one that took an ugly chunk out of my thigh—resurfaces. Seeing what's happened, seeing another's mortality, it takes the bullets from your guns. You stand there wondering if you guessed the whole world wrong. Later you'll remember you didn't. Later you'll remember what they did. Later you'll lose your mistaken pity.

My fingers lightly brush a slight cut he made when shaving with his dagger.

I reassure myself. Once he revives—and he will, I doubt death could take a warrior like this so easily—the malice will flush back. He'll be just another soulless, ugly creature I forget the sun shines on.

But my gut still cramps. The truth slaps me, hard.

All that talk of killing him would've come to nothing. I couldn't kill a man. If I could, I would've gathered up my sack and ran. But deep down, my soul knew the tentative, human-hopeful inside me would win.

"I will do it. I swear," I say. "Just not this way, it's too unfair."

Something deep within laughs.

It wasn't too unfair even though he bound you? Even though he forced you?

I shift anxiously, moving into colder shadows far from wounded warrior. His nostrils flare softly and relax with every muffled, hoarse breath he takes. I take it all in—the vulnerability, the violence contained in thick fists. Why doesn't anyone understand? Should I deny what makes me human? By denying the human impulse to ease the pain of another, won't I be the same as him?

The deepness within laughs until tears drown those dark depths and sorrow crowds the hollowness.

Pathetic.

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I set a flaming match on twiggy sticks. The pile blooms to a modest fire in the center of the room, casting fevered light on craggy rock walls. Heat returns even though it's too late. My toes and lips went blue hours ago. Skewering the last of the Fynx, I char it to the color of coal. Acidic smoke cools to ash in chilly air. The fire grows stronger cooking the meat, pushing out more invaluable heat into our hollow space. Butcher coughs. His nearly clear orbs reappear.

My fists clench.

"Water," he rasps.

I hand him the bark gourd full of melted snow. He breaks through the sheet of ice that's developed on the surface. Seeing the ice, a question forms on his brow.