Two miles felt like twenty. We stopped for rest at least ten times because, even starved, the damn beast weighed a ton. I didn’t know why I was helping him. Should’ve left his ass out there. It wouldn’t be the first time I left a wounded beast in the desert.
Dad and I lived away from the communities, or really from any breathing thing other than one big fat orange cat we named Bowser. Dad knew something was amiss when beasts started planting a forest near our shelter. I convinced him everything was fine because we were underground and the beasts worked above us. He limited our travel around the mountain, but we stayed in the shelter when we should have moved.
One July morning, when water reserves at the shelter ran low, I went to wash up at the lake. It was like any other morning. And then it wasn’t. I didn’t see the beast man there, probably because I wasn’t looking. Probably because Daddy had always looked out for me.
My dad joined me at the lake.
The beast advanced, and Daddy fired his shotgun.
Even wounded, the beast attacked him. I was screaming, begging for Daddy’s life. Once done with my dad, the beast threw me over his bike and took off into the skies. At first I fought him, then I realized I’d fall off the bike if I didn’t calm down. Daddy had gotten him in the chest, and blood gushed out of his wound. I’d dug my fingernails into it.
He’d lost control of the bike. We descended, and he called for help. I still remember his bright hazel eyes as they pleaded with me not to leave him out there. It was strange. He seemed more concerned about my safety and me being left alone in the middle of nowhere than with his bleeding wound. I hadn’t listened to him. That son of a bitch had killed my daddy. Or at least I thought he had, until Reagan had mentioned she’d seen my father.
I hoped it wasn’t a random man she’d met, a man who had a daughter named Sienna. I hoped it really was my father, alive and looking for me.
Shortly after the beast and I landed, he’d lost consciousness, and I robbed him of everything I thought I could use, then left him to die. Since I wasn’t sure he had died, when I reached the Beast City with all its glorious tech, I kept a low profile. I looted, although I didn’t even know what to do with the golden coins I’d stolen from the beast, until Dewlyn, a girl who offered me shelter, found me, and we split the looted goods.
She took me to a safe house under a shop in Beast City where I met a bunch of other girls who had escaped the beasts. It was the first time I’d ever had girlfriends. It felt great, but didn’t last. Dewlyn had paired with Vice, Alpha Beast’s brother. She couldn’t be trusted. I put her in the same do-not-trust category as one of my girlfriends from the shelter, Patty, who had invited the crazy Men of Earth into our shelter. They came with trucks and asked us to come with them, and when I refused, they drugged me and loaded me up. But karma got them. Their truck broke down on the way to Texas, and we ended up at a traveling circus where I met Reagan, one of the performers. She ended up with Mayhem, but I’m not sure how, because I escaped the circus and found this community. Back then, it was still just a community of humans, but then the beasts came.
I shivered thinking about the night when Hunters of Mayhem came in.
Boy, they were silent.
By the time I’d woken up in the morning, they’d already taken over the community. A rude awakening.
A spear hit the dirt in front of my foot and jarred me into the present. Oh, we’d finally arrived. I picked the spear out of the ground, and threw it. It hit the community wall, snapped into two, and fell.
“That’s the second one you broke,” Cole said. “Zarik’s gonna be pissed. You’ll have to work with no dinner.”
I grunted and wiped sweat from my brow. If only the boy knew. Zarik would make me bathe him, braid his hair, shave him, that sort of thing. I wouldn’t skip dinner. Although I didn’t like living with the beasts, I had to stick it out here until Daddy found me or I found a way to get back to my bunker on Big Bear.
The leather ties dug into my palms, and with a grunt, I dug my feet into the dirt and pulled. Cole did the same, and when Zarik came through the gates in search of his spear, I dropped the beast we’d dragged.
Zarik approached and scrubbed his beard. “Who’s that?”
“One of yours.”
He shook his head. “Not.”
“Well, he ain’t human.”
“Ain’t ours either.” He crouched, shook the beast by the shoulder, and said something in Tineyan.
The beast answered him. Zarik scrubbed his jaw again, knelt, and sniffed the beast’s hair, then straightened to his full height. He grinned and said to me, “You peed on him.”