Damage & Decay

Chapter 40

Part Four: Family Business

"Fear is only as deep as the mind allows."

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Nix fell asleep with her head in his lap. Eren stayed awake for another couple of hours, stroking her hair and staring into the infinite star field that stretched above him. After that first scalding kiss, there had been others. And then there had been more tears as the full reality of their loss hit Nix. These tears were quieter, though. They weren't the tears of shock and denial. They'd already been through that storm. These were the deep, heartbroken tears of acceptance.

Their lives had changed. Their worlds had changed. As he sat there stroking Nix's hair, Eren had the weird feeling that if he turned around, he would be able to see yesterday and the day before that, all the way to the point where he had decided t apprentice with Armin. It had been at that moment that his footfalls had diverged from the sane and predictable course of his life. He wished he could call out to the Eren o ten days ago and shout a warning not to come this way. Take the job at the pit, work for the German locksmith, get a tower job with Levi. Anything but this.

As he thought about it, Eren felt sickness creeping into his mind, making ugly questions form like tumors.

Would all of this have happened if I hadn't taken that damn job with Armin?

And worse yet . . .

Would any of it have happened?

On a deep level he knew that these thoughts were stupid and wrong. Charlie and the Hammer would have stull come after Armin and Pixis and Nix's mom.

Wouldn't they?

He also knew that the guilt he felt was no different than the guilt Nix felt for having told Zak about her mother knowing Mikasa. Things said and done innocently should never be used as weapons. There was guilt here, he finally decided, but it all belong to Charlie.

Just thinking that name made fires ignite in the pit of his stomach.

For the first time in his life he wished that Armin was here to help him make sense of it. Armin. Eren had hated him most of his life and had just started to like him--even if he didn't quite understand him--and now the zoms had gotten him.

The sudden realization that Armin was not only dead but was probably a zom was like a punch in the face. Eren closed his eyes and found that old, memory of Mom in her white dress with red sleeves, handing him to Armin, screaming at Armin to run, and Armin running away, leaving her behind. Armin the zombie hunter. Armin the coward.

Armin the zombie. Would there be a new Zombie Card? Two weeks ago Eren might have thought that was funny. Or appropriate.

Now the horror of it was bigger than the night that loomed around him. He remembered the argument they'd had when Armin had showed him the old man and the girl in the waitress uniform.

"It's not the same. These are zoms, man. They kill people. They eat people."

Armin had said, "They used to be people."

Now Armin was one of them. He tried not to think of what Armin's last few seconds had been like. The Hammer's shotgun blast had caught him; Eren had seen the blood fly. Had the blast killed him? That would have been kindness. The alternative was beyond horrible. Falling down into the mass of them, covered in blood. Whit hands clawing at his skin, rotting gray teeth biting into him, tearing at him . . .

Armin did not deserve that. Eren was unsure if Armin was a coward or had ever been  a coward. He doubted his own memories of First Night, or, at least, of what those old memories meant. No matter what, thought, Armin did not deserve what had happened to him.

He shivered and Nix stirred restlessly.

Looking at her dragged his mind into another room of thought. That kiss. With Nix?  Nix, of all people. It was absurd, impossible. They'd already come to that hurdle back in town, and they hadn't been able to climb it together. It was dangerous and wrong to fall in love with a friend. It was complicated things. He and Levi had once sworn that they would never ever fall for a girl they knew. A bold claim in a town as small as Mountainside. Now . . . Nix Riley lay asleep on his lap, and he swore he could still feel the warmth of her lips on his.

He tugged the battered and sweat-stained Zombie Card from his shirt pocket and looked at the Lost Girl. A dagger of guilt stabbed him beneath the breastbone, and he quickly glanced down at Nix. He could see her eyes move under her closed lids and knew that she was dreaming. A soft cry escaped her parted lips, and it was filled with jagged pieces of emotion. Hurt and loss, despair and terror, but also rage and defiance.

Eren brushed a strand of hair away from her cheek.

His stomach turned with confusion and conflict. Even now, after that incredible kiss he and Nix had shared, when he looked at the picture of the Lost Girl, he felt an almost physical impact. The desire to find and protect Mikasa was every bit as strong now as it was when he'd first turned over her card on the porch at Lafferty's General Store, and that made as little sense to him now as it did then. He didn't know  this girl. Even Pixis and Armin hadn't really known her. Even if she was still out here somewhere, she was nothing and no one to him. And yet . . .

And yet.

He studied the card for a long time, even as exhaustion dragged on his eyelids. Nix groaned again in the private hell of her troubled sleep. Eren looked from Nix to the Lost Girl and back to Nix.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Then he stretched out his other hand, and for the second time, he opened his fingers and let the wind take the card. It blew high into the air, tumbling over and over again, its pasteboard face flashing with silver starlight, and then it dropped into the darkness below.

Eren bent and kissed Nix's cheek. He leaned back against the wall and stared at the night and drifted off into a sea of stars.