Page 178 of Romancing in Rot

Let them rip through every door, every cage, every monster wearing a human face.

Every step strips another piece of me clean. Fear burns away. Panic burns away. Even anger sharpens into something colder.

The mall waits ahead, red in the dying light, ugly and huge and full of people who think they know what hunger looks like.

They don’t.

Not yet.

THIRTY-FOUR

WELCOME TO THE THUNDERDOME!

CLAIR

They drag us out of the cage like we are cattle.

One guard grips my arm hard enough to bruise, his fingers digging into the skin above my elbow, while another keeps one hand on Poppy’s shoulder, steering her in front of him like I won’t rip his throat out with my teeth if he so much as jerks her too hard. Poppy keeps her chin up, but her face has gone paper white, and every few steps her eyes dart toward mine like she’s checking to make sure I’m still there.

My skull pounds from where Russ hit me, each pulse of pain rolling behind my eyes and down the back of my neck. My ribs ache from the fight in the woods, my bad leg drags if I don’t focus, and every step sends heat through the old scar, but Poppy is walking in front of me, alive and terrified, and that means I stay upright.

I catch her eye as we move and give her the smallest nod I can manage.

Hold on.

We move through the mall corridor toward the open center court, and every step makes my stomach turn harder. The smell gets worse as we go. Smoke. Grease. Sweat. Blood. Something sweet and rotten cooking too long over an open flame.

The hallway opens into the center of the mall, and my brain refuses to take in what I’m seeing. People crowd both levels. They hang over the second-floor railing, packed shoulder to shoulder beneath dead store signs and flickering lights. They line the first-floor walkway in a loose, hungry circle around a wide-open space where the old fountain used to be. The fountain is dry now, cracked down the middle, filled with trash, bones, and dark stains soaked too deep into the tile to ever come out.

And everywhere, people are eating.

A man sits cross-legged outside what used to be a pretzel stand, gnawing on something held in both hands. At first, my mind reaches for the only normal shape it knows. A turkey leg. A ham hock. Something from before, something sold at a fair with napkins and sticky fingers. Then I see the fingers.

Small bones stick out where the wrist should be. The skin has blistered and split from heat, curling away from the meat in blackened strips. Grease shines on the man’s chin as he tears off another piece with his teeth. Strings of flesh stretch from the limb to his mouth before snapping against his lips.

Someone has skewered strips of flesh onto metal rods and propped them over a barrel fire. Fat drips into the flames with little hissing pops, and every time the fire flares, the crowd cheers.

Near an abandoned smoothie kiosk, a severed foot sits on a stained cutting board.

The toes are gone.

My stomach folds in on itself.

Poppy makes a gagging sound, and I shift as much as the guard allows, putting my body between her and the worst of it.

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.

But there is nowhere safe to look.

The crowd starts yelling when they see us. Stomping. Laughing. Whistling. The sound rises into the dead air, bouncing off the glass ceiling and broken storefronts until it feels like the mall itself is screaming. Someone throws a bone into the open court. It skitters across the tile and stops near my boot with a wet smear.

The man in the coat, Bryant, stands near the center of the open court, smiling like a game show host in hell.

Russ stands beside him.

My steps falter.

He is close enough to the leader to look protected, but not close enough to look important. That figures. Russ always did like power best when he could stand near it and pretend some of it belonged to him. His arms are crossed, his face carefully blank, but his eyes track me, then Poppy, then the guard’s hand on Poppy’s shoulder.