The Queen of Traitors (The Fallen World Book 2) (3 page)

Chapter 4

Serenity

Infection’s beginning to
set in.

My hands shake as I unravel the gauze over my arm. A shiver racks my body. I need to see just how bad it is, but I don’t want to. My skin’s already swollen above and below the bandages. It won’t be pretty.

I hear nothing from outside the walls of my prison. If soldiers are watching, they’ve decided not to interfere.

My eyes burn, and as I remove layer after layer, I can tell I’m worse off than I thought I was. A foul smell emanates from my bandages, and it gets stronger the more I unwind.

The last layer of gauze is the worst. The material’s fused to the wound. I clench my jaw as I peel it away. The pain blazes so brightly my vision clouds. I can’t stop the agonized cry that slips out. My breath comes out in pants. Sweat beads along my forehead. With a final tug, I remove the last of the bandages.

I’d prepared myself for the savage sight of my injury, but it’s still hard to look at. Blood and puss cover the wound. The dirty skin around it is so swollen it looks ready to burst.

Reaching over to the untouched tray of food I received a short while ago, I grab the cup of water. Taking a fortifying breath, I pour it over the wound.

As soon as the first drop hits my skin, the pain explodes. My teeth are tightly clenched, so my cry escapes as a hiss of air. My vision clouds again, and I’m blind for a couple seconds as I fight to stay conscious.

The empty cup slips from my hand, and I spend the next several minutes shivering and clutching my arm to my chest.

In the hallway outside my cell, I hear raised voices. They sound panicked, and they’re getting closer.

Don’t let the enemy see your weaknesses.

I need to rewrap my arm. The thought tightens my stomach.

Reluctantly I crawl over to the discarded bandages. Using my teeth, I rip off the soiled section of cloth. The agony’s even worse this time around, so bad that I have to pause twice to vomit. The wound doesn’t want to be bound, and my cheeks are wet by the time I’m tying the knot.

BOOM!

The earth quakes, and I nearly fall on my injured arm. I brace myself against the wall. I glance above me.

The voices in the hall turn to shouts.

BOOM!

The door to my cell opens. A soldier runs in and grabs me, cursing the entire time. I scream as he squeezes my injured arm. Before I consciously decide to hit him, my good arm shoots out and slams into his nose. I hear it crunch, and he cries out, releasing me to clutch at it.

The time for compliance has long since run out. If I don’t want to die in this prison, now’s my chance.

While he’s distracted, I grab his gun from its holster. Flicking off the safety, I cock it and shoot him in the thigh. There’s no hesitation to my actions. No uncertainty.

He howls, falling to his knees. I watch him dispassionately, and my lack of reaction terrifies me.

As he writhes on the ground, another soldier begins to enter my cell. I clench my jaw against the pain in my arm as I lift the gun and fire. The bullet clips him in the shoulder.

Not only can I injure without remorse, I know how and where to shoot a man without killing him.

I shake my head, more than a little curious just what kind of ball-busting broad I was before I lost my memories.

Before the door can click shut, I force my way out, ignoring the burn of my injuries as I step over the man and push my feverish body into action.

BOOM!

My back crashes against the wall. The fluorescent lights flicker.

Out here I hear shouting and the echo of dozens of pounding footsteps. Somewhere in the distance, rounds of gunfire go off.

A uniformed man runs past. Only after he passes me does he pause to glance back. I point my gun at him.

“Keep moving,” I say.

This one is either smarter or less courageous than his comrades because he does.

I need to get out of here before someone decides I’m worth the trouble. I begin to jog, clenching my teeth against the pain in my calf. I hook a right, then a left, following the sounds to their source.

In the chaos, no one I pass stops me, though several of them pause when they recognize my face. The gun in my hand seems to deter them from doing anything more.

BOOM!
The screams increase in number and volume.

The lights flicker again. We’re going to lose electricity soon. I welcome the possibility. At the moment, I’m too recognizable.

Ahead of me, people herd into a stairwell and from my vantage point, they seem to be descending the stairs. Most, but not all, wear fatigues. I hesitate. Either escape or shelter is down there, but so are my enemies.

Making a spur-of-the-moment decision, I head into the mass of people, keeping my head ducked.

We shuffle into the stairwell, and the current of bodies tries to drag me down the stairs, but I don’t want to go down. I want to go up.

It’s as I try to extricate myself that I get noticed.

“Hey,” a soldier next to me says, bending to peer at me, “are you … ? Shit, it’s Queen Lazuli,” he says, more to the people around him than to me.

People look over, and the murmurs begin.

“Queen Lazuli.” “It’s the queen!” “Someone grab her!”

I straighten; no use hiding now that my cover’s been blown.

Just as the first hand reaches for me, I raise my good arm in the air, the one holding the gun. I aim it at the bare bulb lighting the stairwell, and then I pull the trigger.

The bulb shatters, and the stairwell goes dark. Around me, the crowd shouts and covers their heads.

“The next one goes in someone’s brain!” I yell over the noise.

People fall away from me like I have the plague.

Pushing myself the rest of the way through the crowd, I head upstairs. No one else tries to stop me, too intent on saving their own lives.

The higher I climb, the more distinct the noises of battle become. I can hear shouted orders and the thump of machine gun fire—the kind that’s mounted to a vehicle rather than a person. It’s louder, you can hear the force of the kickback.

Again, I wonder how I knew that.

I lean heavily on the metal bannister as a series of shivers course through me. My eyes burn. It probably doesn’t matter whether I manage to escape or not. I’m pretty bad off. I give myself another day before my fever takes me completely, and then it’ll be up to Mother Nature to decide my fate.

The next floor is where the noise is loudest. Ground floor. I brace myself for the onslaught of soldiers, readying my gun, but the only people who enter the stairwell carry injured men, and they have no time for me.

I follow the stairs up two more flights to the top. All’s quiet here.

Running on instinct, I slip out.

I understand immediately why no one’s here. Building materials, broken furniture, and a couple bloody limbs litter the ground. The floor outside the stairwell slumps, and less than twenty feet away from me, it’s crumbled away completely. In several places fires sizzle. I welcome the heat against my feverish skin.

The place got firebombed. No wonder nobody’s here.

Beyond the gaping remains of this building, another building smolders across the street, lighting up the dark night. Between the two, I hear more than see the fighting. The air is filled with hazy smoke, and it smells like gunpowder and charred bodies.

Hell has come to earth.

The whine of a jet shakes the building as it swoops by, and I grab a wall for support.

My stomach clenches at the noise, like it knows something I don’t.

It does.

When the explosion hits, the sound consumes me. It shrieks across my skin and as my body’s thrown back, the last thought I have is that out of all the ways I thought I might die, this one’s the most preferable.

I fight against
consciousness. Everything already hurts. I don’t want to face it.

My body doesn’t give me a choice. I moan as I stir.

I’m on fire. I must be.

The fever’s fully set in, and I’m being cooked from the inside out.

I peel my eyes open and lick my chapped lips, tasting soot and plaster on them.

Where am I?

Trash and debris litter the ground I lay on. I remember the mad dash I’d made up here and the sounds of fighting.

All’s silent now.

The rays of early morning light stream in from the gaping hole, and my throat tightens. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen since I can remember.

I crawl to the edge of what remains of the room, where the floor drops away. I lay directly beneath a beam of that early morning light. It touches my skin and all the depravity of this place can’t ruin this moment. I close my eyes as a tear trickles out.

I’m not going to die here. Not amongst my enemies.

I crawl back to the stairwell, grabbing my fallen gun from the debris. I must’ve dropped it during the explosion. Shakily, I push myself to my feet and tuck the weapon into the small of my back, flicking the safety on.

Everything hurts. God, does it hurt. I won’t allow myself to focus on the pain or the unsettling silence.

When I make it to the ground level, nothing stirs. Only the dead live here now.

I make my way towards what must be the front of the building, ignoring several bodies that are slumped against the wall or splayed out along the floor. The bombs missed this section, and the front door ahead of me is still intact.

Only a fool would head towards the carnage, but I’m beyond playing it safe.

I step into the light on shaky legs. I blink away some of the fever-induced haze to take in my surroundings.

The pink rays of dawn touch scattered bodies. Dozens of them. Maybe hundreds. The morning light doesn’t seem so peaceful anymore.

It’s just like my first memory, only worse. A sea of soldiers surround the building I just exited. All dead. I don’t even hear moans or their death throes.

My skin prickles, and I can’t say it’s from my fever this time.

Someone attacked them so thoroughly that none survived, and none of the living have come to collect them.

The king.

They’ve been picked off like fish in a barrel. It’s not just from the explosions either. Their bodies are riddled with bullets, and some look bloated, their vacant eyes bulging from their sockets.

Snow hits me, tangling in my hair, and I’m distracted from the graveyard of bodies. It’s snowing. Only, heated air blows on me like the devil’s breath.

I catch a flake in my cupped hands, cradling it like I’ve captured a butterfly. I open my hands wide enough to peek at my find. It’s gray and paper thin.

Not snow.
Ash
.

I glance above me. The sky looks bruised, as do the clouds. And it smells … it smells the way hell should smell. Of sulfur and spent kindling.

My gaze moves from my hands to my feet. Between bodies, piles of the ash swirl like fallen leaves. Up my eyes move. Up, up, until I see mounds of rubble and tilted phone poles. Crumbling streets, some with large sinkholes, stretch off towards the ruins of a city.

My carefully crafted memory never showed me this. It wouldn’t know how to string together so many awful sights.

None of the skyscrapers are completely intact. Some looked chewed upon, like a giant creature came, got a taste, and found it lacking. Others look like they’re decaying, slowly shedding their sleek chrome exteriors and tinted windows for steel cables and concrete skeletons. One skyscraper looks as though someone took a giant axe to it and felled it like a tree. Its upper half leans against another.

Then there are the gaping holes between some of them, like some of these behemoths have already collapsed.

Do people still live there? What sort of existence must they eek out?

I take a few more steps forward. The sight of this world—my world, the one I don’t remember—robs me of breath.

The drone of an engine has me tearing my eyes away from the ruins and towards the sky. In the distance I can make out several aircrafts.

I was wrong to think there was any safety in the silence. The jets are not nearly done with this place. I begin to move, though all I really want is to collapse.

I catch sight of a military vehicle partially buried beneath the rubble. I stumble over to it. As I get closer, I can hear the low purr of an idling engine. The machine gun responsible for the earlier noise is welded to the bed of this vehicle. The body of a soldier slumps over the weapon.

The driver side window is shattered, and when I open the door, another body tumbles out.

I’m numb to the sight of death. I step over the dead soldier without giving him a second glance and hoist myself into the car.

The key’s already in the ignition, so all I have to do is shift the car into reverse and press on the gas to get it going. I hear a sick thump as the body in the bed of the vehicle hits the metal wall that separates us. More sick thumps come as I drive over the bodies littering the ground. I white-knuckle the steering wheel as each one jostles my injuries and shakes my unsettled stomach.

My hands tremble, sweat drenches my clothes, and self-preservation alone sustains me. I maneuver the car out of the graveyard, and then I floor it.

The vehicle tears down the street that leads into the city. Wind gusts through the shattered windows, whipping my hair around my face.

I can no longer see the encroaching aircrafts, but there’s no way I escaped undetected. The streets I drive are utterly abandoned. I’ve made myself a target simply by being on them.

Now that I’m free of my captors, I could simply pull over and flag down one of these jets. They’re likely the king’s. But I have no way of knowing whether they’d recognize me. They might mistake me for an enemy and gun me down.

And then there’s a larger matter of returning to the king. If I want to live, he’s my last chance. But what would a depraved king want with an injured, soon-to-be amputated woman who has no memory? I can’t imagine I’d like whatever he has in store.

No, better to die on my own terms than to live on his.

A bottle of amber liquid rests on the seat next to me, and I grab it, unscrewing the lid and lifting it to my nose. The astringent smell of alcohol burns my nostrils.

I bring it to my lips and take several swallows. I grimace at the taste and my stomach roils. But in its wake, a pleasant warmth spreads down my throat, taking the barest edge off the pain.

Once I get the chance to stop, I’ll pour the rest on my wound. At this point, I doubt it will do much good—the arm probably has to go—but I’m too desperate not to try.

Close up, the city is even worse off than I initially thought. I have to swerve around piles of rubble, and at one point, turn around and take an alternate route altogether. The structures that rise on either side of me have been tagged, and bullet holes riddle many of them.

There’s so much evidence of civilization, and yet I see not a single soul.

A sound like thunder rises up behind me. When I glance out my side view mirrors, I see a helicopter heading straight for me. It quickly overtakes the vehicle, before banking left and circling around.