King Eden

Chapter Thirteen: Sleep

Wasteland travelers told stories about the Battle of Camp Isaac. Sometimes, I still hear the Aurelian Capitol staff talking about it. The force Titan sent after me was a lot bigger than the few hired guns Thief and I were fighting...well, fleeing, I guess. The tales say there were dozens of Palladians waiting in the forest and the hills. When we reached the barricade and crashed, they ambushed Isaac's forces. Saint's brave soldiers met Titan's head on with no regard for their terrible odds. Horses and salvaged ammo against light guns and tanks. It was a massacre, but we still came out on top. We showed Pallas that day that Cyrus was a force to be reckoned with.

Yes, we the malnourished wasteland wretches with worms in our guts, half-insane from corruption and the opium we take just to make our aches and pains easier to deal with, we were the ones who stood up to Titan's pampered aristocrats and their pukes.

That's not what happened at all. Saint told me later the fight lasted a couple of minutes. Titan's mighty army consisted of a dozen bounty hunters who were just as hungry and sick as any other thug from Cyrus. Camp Isaac's guards gunned down most of the bastards. The rest decided their lives weren't worth a paycheck, tucked tail, and ran.

There were still casualties at the camp. The dreg hounds killed horses and dragged their riders across the asphalt. The camp's snipers took care of the hounds before things got too nasty, but two of Saint's calvary men are still out there with their guts all over the place.

I never saw the inside of Isaac. As soon as I was stable enough, they transferred me to Zoar so that I could be the Empress's problem. Saint didn't want anything to do with me now I had a bounty on my head.

The Empress liked me. I recovered in a personal room rather than a bed in one of the warehouses where hundreds of wretches suffered toward their last days. Zoar was a safehouse for refugees while the world was tearing itself apart. Before that, it was a slaughter house. There were a lot of ghosts in those warehouses. Judging by the Frog's remains at the camp, I should have been one of them.

I watched bugs visit the lights in the ceiling. They came from a window that I made the nurses open for me even though it was against the rules. An enclosed room is too much like a cell. They had worked so hard to keep the place sanitary. There wasn't a speck of dust other than a bit of dirt below my shoes which someone had saved for me and placed under a chair. These people understood how sacred a good pair of boots could be.

I wanted to scratch at the stitches in my arm where they pulled out pieces of the windshield. There was a bruise under my left eye in the shape of a half-moon. I didn't feel great, but would survive. I had cuts, bruises, a sore neck, and some stiffness everywhere. My right ankle made a crunching noise when I moved it but I was pretty sure it was doing that already.

There was a yellow bruise on my side in the shape of South America and it throbbed every time I took a breath. I watched the drip for a while, listening to the moths bounce off the lightbulbs. I wanted to cry but was too drugged to figure out how to do it. Part of me wanted to keep sleeping since I was so tired, but whenever I closed my eyes I saw the wreck again, Thief crushed and bleeding. Sometimes I dreamed a dreg hound had its teeth in her neck and was dragging her onto the road. I was trapped by my seatbelt and couldn't help her.

I had dreams like that a lot. They were mostly flashbacks. Sometimes they were way more violent versions of what actually happened. Like the dog dragging Thief across the asphalt, for example. Usually it was a replay of Colossus or the chase through the Rooster's Crown. No matter the situation, I was never able to save the people I cared about. And every time I woke up from those dreams, I felt like I didn't deserve to have good people in my life. I just wasn't good enough to keep them safe. If I had been a better wife, mother, or friend, and if I hadn't been so weak and stupid, then I wouldn't have lost them.