Lex Talionis Read online

  “I may not be able to fathom out your stove, but I guarantee you don’t know how to do any of the stuff I’ve done since I got up this morning.” She tips her head to the two bottles of purple liquid resting on top of the log. “Juice?”

  Alex rubs his eyes, looking twice to make sure it’s not some sort of mirage. “You didn’t make actual juice …”

  “Wild berries grow wherever there’s water,” she informs him, pausing to toss him one of the bottles before returning to her badger.

  While he takes the cap off and scrutinizes the contents before taking a sip of the crushed blueberry and blackberry combo, she slices and dices the meat, leaving nothing behind but the carcass and a few useless scraps. Once all the good meat has been separated, she cuts it up into bite-sized chunks and skewers the pieces onto three sharpened sticks. From beginning to end, Alex is staring at her.

  “Hungry?” She smiles at him.

  Before answering, his gaze flits over to the badger’s head. Blood from its severed neck is dribbling down the side of the log, slowly coagulating. Its mouth is open, its tongue hanging out, its eyes dull and glazed over.

  “Not so much anymore.” He yawns and gets up, ruffling both hands through his thick mop of salt-and-pepper hair, scratching at his stubbly face.

  “City boy.” Silver laughs. “I reckon you’d die if you were stuck out here in the wild without me.”

  “I reckon I’d want to die if I were stuck out here without you.”

  He takes a few more gulps of juice and cracks synovial gas out of his shoulders. Shirtless, dressed only in a pair of black army pants, Silver admires his form in her periphery. He’s less than a decade away from fifty, but his physique shows no sign of succumbing to middle-age. His chest is well-defined, his shoulders and arms are strong and muscular, and … he catches her eyeballing him.

  Oddly and unreasonably shy, she diverts her gaze back to the task at hand: resurrecting the campfire. She’s already erected a spit out of sticks, raised above a collection of dead leaves, twigs, and dry moss. There’s only one missing element: flames.

  Alex crouches beside her. “Why are you being coy?” He plants a kiss on the side of her head. “It’s not like you to be that way with me.”

  “You know why.” She takes out her gun, removes the magazine, and expels one round from it. “Things are different now—they have to be.”

  “You’re still my wife.”

  “And you’re still infected.” She breaks her multicolored irises away from his shockingly violet ones. “I can’t let you touch me.”

  Concentrating on her quest for fire, she pinches the expelled round between her teeth and puts the gun back together, then re-holsters it. Alex moves closer, and she can feel the warmth from his body radiating against her, giving rise to a suspicion that he won’t be so easily dissuaded from intimacy.

  Indeed, he has no intention of giving up that readily. He moves her ponytail out of the way and kisses her neck, hoping to entice her into something—anything.

  “There’s still plenty we can do if we use our imaginations,” he whispers against her ear, quickly following his words with another soft kiss.

  Alas, his coaxing is to no avail.

  “Why tease ourselves?” Silver angles herself out of his reach. “That’d only make us both crazy, and I don’t wanna risk …” She looks down, sighing. “I just don’t want to forget where the boundary is between us, that’s all.”

  To that, Alex says nothing—and she’s glad of it. This isn’t the conversation she wants to have right now, when all she can think about is food. Hoping he’ll let it drop, she carries on as if the subject had never even come up.

  Using the tip of her bloodstained hunting knife, she pries open the bullet casing, being careful not to lose any of the gunpowder inside. Then, she sprinkles the powder selectively over the moss and leaves beneath the spit.

  All she needs is a spark.

  It’s been a while since she’s tried to start a fire this way, but she nabs two nearby stones and begins cracking them together over the moss.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Just one spark, that’s all it’ll take.

  She keeps at it, and on the eleventh strike, a flicker of orange leaps from the stones and sizzles on the gunpowder, generating one small flicker of a flame in the moss.

  Bingo!

  Silver discards the stones and cups her hands around the tiny flame, sheltering it and blowing on it gently, willing it to catch.

  And it does.

  The flame grows and spreads, and she piles more moss and twigs onto the heap, nurturing it until it blossoms into a roaring campfire again.

  “You’re quite the resourceful survivalist,” Luka compliments her from the other side of the fire, still tucked up in his emergency blanket, his green eyes shimmering in the firelight.

  She hadn’t realized he was awake, but she should’ve known he wouldn’t be able to sleep through the racket of two stones being bashed together over and over again.

  “Yeah, well, when you’ve been the places I’ve been, you figure out how to fend for yourself pretty quick,” she replies, resting the skewers above the fire.

  Beside her, Alex, disappointed by her rejection of his loving advances, digs through his hold-all of stuff and pulls out a new packet of cigarettes, eagerly tearing into it and yanking one out. He lights it using a fiery piece of moss and sucks the poison deep into his lungs, holding it there for several seconds before exhaling.

  He hasn’t been able to go without a morning cigarette for as long as she’s known him, but his nicotine addiction might soon be in jeopardy. They have no way of knowing whether or not cigarettes exist in this country, never mind how available tobacco is, or even if it’s legal.

  “How many of those do you have left?” she asks without sympathy.

  “A couple packs.”

  “You’ve been smoking like a chimney lately. How long will they last? A day? Maybe two?”

  By her count, he’d been going through thirty or more per day in recent months, but he’s probably not aware that she’d noticed. For one reason or another—including accusations of infidelity on both sides—their one-year marriage hadn’t exactly been plain sailing, and they’d been on the verge of implosion at least half the time.

  “I’ve been meaning to cut back.” He takes another drag, deliberately downplaying the severity of the problem.

  “I’ve been nagging you to cut back, but I didn’t think you’d listen.”

  “I hardly have a choice now, do I?”

  At least he knows the writing’s on the wall.

  “They’re not good for you anyway.” Silver turns the skewers on the spit. “You know that.”

  “I’ve been smoking since I was eight,” he grumbles. “Cut me some slack.”

  “A bad habit’s still bad, even if you’ve been doing it for thirty-five years.”

  “Or twenty.”

  She clenches her jaw. Was that a thinly veiled jab at her drinking? She could get into it with him about how the problem—if there was one at all, which she’d only recently been willing to concede—wasn’t constant, and that she’d had some periods of sobriety during the course of the last two decades since they first became romantically linked.

  But she holds her words back. His snark is her punishment for not sneaking off with him to stroke his cock in the bushes, and there’ll probably be plenty more to follow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  After successfully cooking and consuming the badger meat—the leftovers wrapped up in some old hemp cloth that Luka found in the bottom of his backpack—Silver puts out the campfire, the last dregs of it still offering a faint warm glow. Waiting for the boys to finish scrubbing their bits and pieces in the stream, she passes the time twirling a pair of military dog tags in the dissipating firelight, watching them twist and spin, dangling from their permanent place wrapped around her wrist.

  They belonged to her father, the retired General of the Hunter Di
vision—Amaranthe’s army. He was killed only a few days ago, in a street filled with smoke and fire, the air thick with the stench of napalm.

  The British invasion of Amaranthe had many casualties, but she only cares about that one. She felt him die in her arms, but she can’t shake the disquieting thought that maybe he could’ve been resuscitated.

  If she hadn’t passed out from the fumes.

  If Alex hadn’t dragged her away.

  If.

  If.

  If.

  There are too many of those. If she hadn’t been betrayed by her friends. If she hadn’t gone along with their demands. If they’d fought for their freedom instead of capitulating to a foreign army.

  “There was nothing you could’ve done.” Alex appears over her shoulder, reading her mind.

  “There’s nothing I can do now, that’s for sure.” She picks herself up off the ground and pats herself down, brushing away dirt and leaves. “If you boys are ready, we should get a move on. It can’t be more than a few hours walk to the city, and it’d be nice to get there before lunchtime.”

  “Expecting a banquet?”

  “Eager to get out of the boonies and into someplace civilized. We haven’t seen another living soul since we’ve been here. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Alex shrugs. “We got lucky, I guess.”

  “You call this luck?” She folds up her emergency blanket and stuffs it inside her hold-all. “Man, you have some low expectations.”

  “We landed in the middle of nowhere. Would you rather we’d come crashing down on top of some poor family instead? It could’ve been a lot worse. As it is, nobody got hurt.”

  “I’m not sure the pilot of our helicopter would agree with that statement. He’s lying dead in a ditch with his head half lopped off.”

  “Fine: no civilians got hurt.”

  Civilians. Ugh.

  Silver stifles a groan, realizing that she’s a civilian now, too. She has no badge, no authority to carry a weapon, and no control over anything. All she has left are her dog tags, a pair of Hunter Division boots, her old Hunter Division uniform, and a Kevlar vest crammed into Alex’s hold-all. She’d been wearing the latter until she came to the conclusion that she was lugging around an extra ten pounds of weight for no reason whatsoever, and sneakily offloaded it on Alex when he wasn’t looking.

  Alex is still wearing his, though. Now fully dressed, he’s tip to tail in Hunter Division duds: the boots, the combat pants, and a black shirt beneath the Kevlar. The emblem of their government—an Omega symbol—is embroidered on the front, next to his name and rank.

  Alexander King.

  Hunter General.

  He’d only occupied that role for a day or two before they left Amaranthe, but you can bet your ass he’d put it on his résumé anyway. Being in control of an army is a pretty big deal in a world where survival so often depends on your ability to defend yourself—and your people—from the myriad outside forces that would seek to destroy or conquer you.

  So it’s not surprising he doesn’t want to take the uniform off—none of them do. They’d all opted to wear their uniforms when they left Amaranthe, and have yet to shed their emblems in favor of the plain clothes they also brought, no matter how pointless that might be.

  Silver flicks the emblem on Alex’s Kevlar vest. “Why are you wearing this? Are you worried about being shot at by an angry squirrel?”

  “No, but Missus Badger won’t be very happy when she finds out what you did to her husband, so you should probably put yours on, just to be safe.”

  “Meh. I’ll risk it.”

  “Are you sure? Did you see the claws on that thing?” Alex curls his fingers into talons and hisses at her, pawing at her shoulder.

  Success! He makes her smile.

  “Stop it, you weirdo.” She shoves him lightly in the chest.

  When she pushes him, he catches a glimpse of a small, angry purple bruise in the crook of her elbow, where a needle might go, and he draws out her arm to inspect it.

  “Did it hurt?”

  “It wasn’t pleasant.” She extricates herself, quickly slipping a Hunter Division black shirt on over her tank top. “But then, I didn’t expect three hours of stem cell therapy to be particularly enjoyable.”

  She snatches her hold-all off the ground and tries to walk past him, but he grabs a fistful of her shirt and holds her back.

  “I’m not gonna give up, you know.” He locks eyes with her. “I’m not gonna pretend I don’t want you just because we can’t …”

  He lets his words trail off. Luka is ambling back into earshot, and he doesn’t want to let any of the cracks in their relationship show. Not so long ago, he’d caught Silver in Luka’s bed, and putting the memory of that out of his mind hasn’t been easy, despite Silver’s insistence that nothing unseemly happened.

  “Stop giving Luka the stink eye,” Silver chastises him, her voice hushed. “I don’t want to walk a million miles with the two of you behaving like a couple of starving mice fighting over a piece of cheese.”

  She shirks herself free and turns her back on him, smiling at Luka. She understands why Alex is jealous of him. He’s several years younger, and he’s been a fixture in her life since they were both four years old. He was her first kiss, her first blowjob, her first boyfriend—almost her first for everything. Her virginity was the only thing he was denied, because she saved that for Alex.

  “I hope nothing peed in that stream.” Luka ruffles his wet, sandy blonde hair, totally oblivious to any residual hostility emanating from Alex. “I dunked my whole head in there.”

  Kitted out in standard Amaranthe Police Division garb—black pants and shirt, nothing fancy—he looks almost as dashing as Alex.

  Almost.

  Not quite.

  He’s just as strong, fit, and virile, but his ego tarnishes the otherwise yummy package, and Silver takes care not to let herself forget it.

  “Have you two princesses finished preening now?” She slings her hold-all over her shoulder. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  She’s not wrong.

  After an hour and a half, they’ve passed nothing but trees and fields. Following the water all the way out of the forest, traipsing along beside one reservoir after another, they keep heading westward, stopping every so often for Silver to pee.

  The fields seem to stretch on forever. Grass grows untamed, along with large patches of bright yellow rapeseed, purple lavender, and sky-blue linseed. Once farmed crops, these plants now grow wild wherever they happen to pollinate, splashing the countryside with color.

  The land is more beautiful than anything they’ve ever seen before. Outside of books, that is. Pink foxgloves grow beside the cracked tarmac of the main road they’re following, and bluebells flourish under light tree cover by lakes and streams, carpeting the ground in a wash of powder-blue petals. Dandelions are everywhere, and Silver makes a mental note of it. If push comes to shove, the dark green leaves, and even the buds, can be boiled gently and used to make a very nutritious, hot salad.

  Onward further, and the fields finally give way to ruins. On either side of the road, the shells of buildings lie abandoned and crumbling. Ivy has overtaken much of what remains, and crows are nesting in the tops of dilapidated chimneys. Everything appears to be slowly sinking into the earth, being reclaimed by the soil.

  For the first time, their surroundings start to look somewhat familiar. In places, Amaranthe’s prison district looks exactly like this: a forgotten world that can be heard sighing as the wind bristles through the treetops, the bricks and mortar taking one last breath before resigning themselves to their demise.

  Bar this, all seems quiet until …

  Clip, clop, clip, clop.

  Silver stops dead and forces the boys to do the same.

  A hundred feet away, an unhurried creature with a reddish-brown coat and a white underbelly wanders out from an old garage and onto the road, picking at weeds and the odd tuft of grass. Its
hooves beat loudly against the ground with every slow step, and its short fluffy tail flicks back and forth, trying to swat away flies that it can’t quite reach.

  It’s large, with skinny legs and radar dish ears which swivel immediately at the sound of Silver’s sharp draw of breath. It stops eating and turns its narrow head, staring at the lonely travelers for several seconds without moving a muscle.

  In time, it sniffs the air, trying to decide whether or not it should flee. Then, at the sound of a distant gunshot, it panics. It sprints away from them with unexpected agility and leaps off the roadway onto a dirt track before disappearing into a copse of trees.

  Silver’s heart hammers. “What the hell was that?!”

  “Gunfire?” Alex looks around, wondering where it came from.

  “Not that.” Silver smacks him, then points to the spot where the creature was standing. “That!”

  “A deer, I think.” Luka kneels to study the hoofprints. “A herbivore. Perfectly harmless.”

  “Says you,” Silver snorts derisively. “That’s what it wants you to believe, then you let your guard down and it eats your face.”

  “No way. Look at this.” He clutches her shirt cuff and pulls her down, making her give the prints another once-over. “It has hooves. All animals with hooves are herbivores—that’s a fact.”

  “That was a fact.” She crouches there, shoulder to shoulder with him. “Who says it’s a fact anymore, huh?”

  Luka laughs. “You’re an idiot—that’s a fact.”

  Silver suppresses the urge to wrestle him into the dirt, and is about to respond with something characteristically sharp and biting when she feels Alex giving her an ‘I’m-watching-you’ glare and thinks better of it. He’s always had a very low tolerance for anything he perceives as flirting between the two of them, even before the bedroom incident. In his view, Luka’s forever been one step too close for comfort.

  For the sake of not provoking him, she lets the moment pass and they walk on in silence. Every now and again, he offers to carry her hold-all, but she adamantly refuses to let him help, her responses becoming gradually more and more agitated.