Redemption
Defiance - 2
by
Stephanie Tyler
Dedication
For the bad boys who love the good girls.
I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind
I’m just twenty-two and I don’t mind dying.
In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die—though that does happen—it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.
Chapter One
Got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind
Mathias
You ever think about what you’d put on your tombstone? I signed to Bish as George Thorogood and the Destroyers sang in the background from the portable CD player.
He answered without blinking an eye. “You think we’d have tombstones?”
It’s a hypothetical conversation, Bish.
“Fine. All right...how about, ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil because I’m the evilest motherfucker in the valley.’”
Not bad.
“Your turn.”
Sniper. Tattoo artist. Superstitious bastard.
“I’d date you,” Bish offered.
It’s a tombstone, not a dating profile, man. Besides, you’re not my type.
“Don’t sell me short. You never know when we’ll be the last two left on earth.”
Fine, but you’ll carry the babies.
Bish laughed. He didn’t often, but, hell, it was a good sound. “I’d keep the same thing for my dating profile but I’d add big feet.”
I laughed silently. Definitely a good addition for any grave.
“Nothing more needs to be said. Except the fact that we don’t need tombstones yet. And fuck dating.”
Bish and I’d turned twenty within a month of each other, Aries and Pisces, respectively, and I felt much older, but how the hell did older feel? What was twenty supposed to feel like?
“I’m thinking most twenty-year-olds haven’t killed as many people as we have,” Bish said thoughtfully, because I’d been talking without realizing it, my hands signing a hundred miles an hour. I swear, half the time Bish read my mind instead of my hands, which isn’t that odd considering I could pretty much do the same to him.
Not like we did it for sport.
“No?” Bish asked, caught the look on my face and said, “No. Right. Definitely not.”
Fucking psycho.
“Do I have to remind you again that burning the bones was your special psychotic touch?”
They always did it on Supernatural. Keeps the bad luck away.
Bish nodded. Whether he believed my superstitions or not, he went along with it, because we’d lived like brothers since we were eight years old. “We haven’t killed anyone in a month.”
That’s a good thing, Bish.
He furrowed his brow like he was trying to decide if I was making a joke. People sometimes thought Bish was born without a conscience. I know they’re wrong, or else I wouldn’t be alive, because I’ve annoyed the piss out of the man more times than I could count. Just say, right, Bish.
“Right, Bish.”
I closed my eyes and went back to absorbing as much sun as I could.
“Mathias?”
Yes?
“You know I’m lying, right?”
Right.
“Just checking.”
Based on shit like that, most people wouldn’t realize that Bish was as much my keeper as I was his.
The rocks under my back were warm. I was nearly dry from our last jump in the lake that was freezing cold but not as murky as it should be. Ever since the Chaos happened, the world as we knew it was pretty fucked. The sun was still out for its bimonthly showing, already twenty minutes over its two-hour allotment for this part of the country. The satellite that punched a hole in the atmosphere was strong—supposedly developed by scientists who’d feared this happening but hell, we wouldn’t know for sure—and I figured that maybe constant use and the fact that three years had gone by since the Chaos hit was clearing the atmosphere of unwanted debris that made it seem like night was the only flavor in town.
Bish and I had run off and joined the military at sixteen after we’d lost everything in the Chaos. Bish’d never had a lot of tolerance for cowards and, in this brave new world, there was no room for them. Bish and I took action, sometimes more than we should’ve. So far, it had only helped us.
I rested my arms over my head, trying not to appear as restless as I felt. All day, I’d been fighting off a hinky feeling, but I hadn’t said anything. I didn’t want to ruin my day—our day—in the goddamned sun.
So far, it hadn’t. Our clothes were spread out around us, our weapons near—Bish’s rifle was actually hanging off his neck to the side—“So I don’t get tan lines,” he’d explained—and our van was parked in the trees, close by but camouflaged.
Once the atmosphere swallowed the sun again, the chill would hit quickly, and the darkness would shadow everything here. We were nearly three hours from Defiance—three hours post-Chaos was really an hour trip pre-Chaos, but the state of the roads and the dearth of lights and gasoline didn’t make for easy road trips anymore.
But right now, the heat bit into my skin and I wasn’t moving until the last of it disappeared. Then the skin on my back prickled as heat and premonition mixed, and I opened my eyes, fully expecting to see a rise of white smoke in the distance.
“Something you want to tell me?” Bish asked as I continued to stare into the distance.
I dreamed about that fucking copperhead again, I told him.
“At least I know what’s been fucking you up today,” Bish murmured, more to himself than to me. “And that dream’s not a bad one.”
Bish was right. I’d dreamed I’d killed that same damned snake only two times before last night. Once, the night before Bish showed up on my porch; the second, the night before we were ambushed with our team nearly a year ago...and again last night.
According to my father’s superstitions, killing a snake in your dream means victory. Triumph. Not an everyday kind of victory, but a triumph. Something that changes the course of your life forever.
Something that changes you.
“Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” Bish asked, even though he knew why. What he meant was, “Why the hell didn’t you warn me?”
Maybe it’s nothing, I told him, even as the scream cut the air sharper than a knife’s blade, shattering the peace with its terror. When I looked at him in the rapidly fading light, I knew he’d dreamed of that damned snake too.
I was on my feet, wet shorts dragged on, weapon in hand as I threaded my way through the trees as the sun began to fade. Bish would follow after he dressed and covered our tracks.
This was déjà vu. Not the screams, but the scent of danger. Me, running through brush and ducking down to see what was happening.