Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 86

More will come. If you fight, you will draw more blood.

Keep it in. Keep it at the back of my mind. Tuck it like a petulant child at the corner. Don't listen to it!

No, the woods! You don't have to kill them. Run.

I looked at the woods. I could...

Yes...

But to abandon them...

Survival of the fittest. No longer of the old...everything before is dead.

No! I refused to be frightened any longer. I'm done with the running, to fear these sick people and these psychopaths, for them to reduce me into a monster like them. They had been in our tail from the start. Maybe it's time to face them head-on, vector, and human alike.

No, you will not survive. Keep running. You are not like the others. You are a survivor.

I am.

You are.

But many had abandoned others for the same thing, and I had seen how people shoved into such hard choices. Nat. Bobby. Joe. The Katingers. The entire country for dropping a bomb on a city that had survivors in it, hoping to be rescued, unbeknownst to them that the people they trusted had already abandoned them the minute the pin dropped. I had seen it in Albany and General Clemons, building up those walls to not only keep the monsters out but the refugees too, treating them like animals, made them as an other.

You can still stop killing by running away. The woods are there, Bren. Go to it.

There were other ways to survive. Not this. Not watching and leaving people to die all the time. Not the running and always looking behind your shoulder for the next bloody fight.

You can still survive. They can't. Run away.

Stop it.

Your so-called friends will abandon you, sooner or later.

But if there's a chance, even if it's small, I had to take it.

No...

Yes. You're right. I am nothing like them. I am nothing like the others who had made these choices. Fear was a force of nature, mindlessly destroying everything on its path and others let it guide them. I refused to let it tell me to abandon my friends. I hadn't from the start.

Then, you'll kill more. You'll kill, and kill, and kill...

Tuck it away. Keep it hidden.

You'll kill these men. Them who have brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers...Kill! Kill! Kill! How many, Bren? How many will you take? How many will be enough?

I ran faster, whacking a vector stumbling into view. He was dead without noticing me.

More deaths...Dead. Dead. Dead. Gone. See? Who will you become, Bren?

Two vectors entered my periphery. One saw me right away.

Great.

I slid between them, quickly kicked the first against the car, driving the hatchet on the other underneath his chin in a sickening crunch of a broken jaw and flying teeth. He dropped to the ground in a heap of blood.

Who will you become, Bren?

I whirled around, driving a high kick that sent the first vector spiraling backward. His head connected against the hood of a car, and blood splattered onto its surface. He didn't move after.