Erik

The tables turned in no time. Bullets were flying from the two girls with deadly machines buzzing in their hands. I watched in both awe and terror as I stepped back with my hands instinctively cupping my ears. One, two, three raiders were put down. The sight of blood spraying in the air was repugnant. It stopped altogether when the third Blackmask was splayed on the dust bed. Gabriella and Jessica exchanged glances as if they were linked telepathically and agreed on when to withdraw their weapons.

"We have more ammo to spare," Jessica triumphantly yelled, blowing on the muzzle of her revolver.

"Yield," Gabriella simply ordered.

The men who were now either shot dead or cowering behind their motorcycles had their own weapons abandoned on the ground. Those who were left alive held their hands up as a motion of surrender and got on their knees even though no one had forced them. With their leader gone and having no chance against firearms, it was probably the best for them to listen to the ones with more power and of course, bullets. I could observe the sizzling internal chaos dying down amidst the gang. The fray was over.

"Please...no more," one of them spoke up. It was Smite. The man who had beaten up Soeun for giving him a graze on his thigh. I heard Soeun softly scoffing behind me, in Josiah's arms.

"We'll consider it on one condition," Jessica started. She walked up to the raider and pointed the tip of her gun at the man's head. "Willing to listen, or get busted?"

"Please," he squeaked. I was amazed at how the six-foot tall man could turn into a trembling ball with no dignity left in him before a woman he and his group had threatened to cut open in cold blood. In other words, Jessica was a badass.

"Alright, you coward. The only rule is never in your life dare follow us or seek revenge. If I ever see any of your hideous masks showing up in my sight, I will personally sever your head along with your mask and shove it up your ass. Understood?" She bellowed, cocking her head to one side. Man, I really liked this girl's audacity.

The Blackmasks nodded frantically as they collected themselves together and reached for their bikes. Jessica didn't allow that, though. "You got no tongue?" She slammed the butt of the gun on Smite's forehead. He lost his balance and fell on his back, grappling the dirt to scurry away from the terrorizing figure.

"Y-yes," he answered. Satisfied, Jessica swirled the revolver once in her hand out of habit and retreated back to us.

We were obliged to stay in that site of bloodbath until every last one of them were gone from our sight, leaving behind their fallen comrades. It did not seem like they were 'one body' as the now deceased Fynna Sharde had said after all. Solidarity could not be spotted from the fleeing backs of the masked bikers. Seeing them disappear completely, Mikhailov led a very blanch Nikole into their car and I turned my gaze away from the bodies while Ash emotionlessly retrieved one of the motorcycles from the dead raiders as her ride. Josiah and Soeun were resting on the ground, propped against the second trailer. Gabriella was fidgeting with her rifle like she had no idea what to do with it or what to do with herself in general.

"What now?" I asked to no one in particular. Everyone was in fact totally spent from the drama.

"I say we have some serious conversation," Josiah solemnly suggested. Right. There was still a lot that they didn't know. There was a lot that I didn't know.

"Not here, please." Soeun sighed. He looked sickly pale.

"Yeah. Let's take this somewhere else," Jessica agreed.

"There's an empty department store three miles from here," Ash spoke out of the blue. She was already seated on her dashing motorcycle smeared with crimson liquid and starting up the engine. Her thumb was pointed over her shoulder where the road stretched on all the way to the faint horizon. It was the opposite way from where the Blackmasks had fled to. She was a wanderer; though none of us were yet sure of her credibility, not one person objected to her suggestion as nobody else knew the geographical characteristics or (ravaged) amenities around this region better than this former raider.

"Tell Mikhailov to follow us there, then," Jessica said. "Lead us, Pink."

"I am Ash."

"Sorry, it slipped." Jessica shrugged and walked toward me. "I missed driving that car." She smirked and leaned in to say those words in my ear.

"I'm driving," I fought as I reached for my car key in my pocket. Well, I tried, because there was nothing there. I made a face at Jessica's impish twinkling eyes. She was holding it in her hands. An unwelcome déjà-vu.

"Jessica," Gabriella called. And the brunette instantly turned her attention toward the woman and handed the key back to me.

"Brie." Jessica's voice was calm all of a sudden like her playful persona had been replaced. Whenever she referred to her previous lover, a nostalgic atmosphere appeared to overcome her.

"I'm not going with you," Gabriella proclaimed.

"Hell yeah, she's not," Soeun chimed in from the doorway to his trailer. Josiah quickly clasped his hand over the boy's mouth.

"Soe, don't," he whispered.

Both Jessica and Gabriella ignored him. I watched intently from the side as the two closed their distance for a talk. I didn't know what to feel about Gabriella Izabel. The very first impression I had received from her was definitely not the most convivial kind; she had literally poured showers of pellets to us with every intent to maim or kill. In the process, Jessica had suffered a near-death experience which quite roused a strange feeling within me for her-which I was still striving to figure out if it was emotional attraction or mere spark of comradeship. In any case, despite her coming to our rescue in dire tidings, the accompaniment of Gabriella Izabel was certain to ignite some kind of dissonance inside our group. I was curious about how Jessica would react.

"Where will you go?" She safely tucked the revolver in the holster hidden in her jacket. She had somehow changed into her original attire during the ride unlike me.

"Does it matter?" Gabriella took off her glance from her ex.

"It kind of does," Jessica curled her ponytail once with her finger. "You're alone."

"I don't think I need your sympathy, Jess." There was an upsurge of pique in her tone. She adjusted the strap attached to her rifle and hung the weapon on her back.

"Brie, I don't pity you. I just want time."

"For what?"

"For things to mend, goddamn it." Jessica waved her hand in the air, expressing the suppressed exasperation and desperation. I could see it even without possessing any psychic ability.

"It's irreparable." Gabriella sounded exhausted. "We're irreparable."

"At least hear what's happened at the department store. Listen to what we can offer and then decide," Jessica pleaded. I scratched the stubble growing on my chin and shifted my gaze to the ground. There was an itch coiling my guts. The plea in her voice was not entirely foreign as it had shown itself when she defended me in the presence of Jerome King and his gun, but something was a little different in this case. God, I was wishing this itch was not equivalent to jealousy. I would not allow it.

Gabriella seemed to ponder this option for a while. Her eyes were fixed on Jessica's face and she was chewing her purple lip with hand stiffly grasping the rifle strap. I secretly wished she would decline; this 'Brie' at the moment was neither friend nor foe, but still closer to a foe. It was difficult to erase the memory of explicit acrimony flashing across her pupils when her gun was pointed at my chest.

"Okay," she said, however. "You win this time. But don't expect me to stay for long. I...I've lost purpose. I don't belong anywhere."

"Let me give you purpose." Jessica sounded excited. I kind of hated it.

"So let's go now, please?" I clapped my hands and interposed. "The stench doesn't do any good for my stomach."

"Patience, darling," Jessica turned to me and spread out her palm. I was confused and hesitantly overlapped it with my own, to which she let out a burst of boisterous laughter. "The key, jackass." My face heated up in embarrassment as I virtually smacked the key into her hand. "Follow Pi-I mean, Ash," she said to Gabriella, walking toward my Cadillac. I followed her while I unzipped the suit I had on me and angrily pulled out my arm from its heavy protection. I promised to myself that I would not let myself bend to Jessica anymore. This would have to be the last time.

All the while tracing her steps like a subordinate mongrel.

***

The looks of the massive, wrecked building once home of extravagant luxuries were empty alright, as Ash had said. We packed some of our belongings up in backpacks and marched inside the deserted department store, examining every corner of the walls and glass show windows sinuously overgrown with moss and ivy. The main lobby branching out into five different hallways gave us enough space to settle down with the sunlight shining right through the broken glass ceiling to shed us with yellowish radiance of the setting star. There were benches and rock-like seats so several of us took a sitting on them while the rest plopped down on the ground. Now it was time for the 'serious talk'.

"So what the hell happened?" Brie opened up the conversation, reclining against a rusty pole with her arms crossed.

Jessica and I delivered the incident of hunting for Leroy Dawson, finding him feasted upon, fighting the two monsters leading to the demise of Jerome King. Ashlee added some unfiltered complementary words here and there to help recounting the abominable scene which made Mikhailov frown displeased and cover his niece's ears. Of course, Nikole gently shoved her uncle's hands away. Jessica also added the history of the misunderstanding between Gabriella, their mutual "friend" and herself, explaining the reason behind the animosity the gray-haired woman had previously practiced upon us. Gabriella even offered a feeble apology though she confessed she acknowledged how it would not suffice. We didn't necessarily respond to it.

At last, we took out the items retrieved from Dawson's possessions; a map, a journal, and a document. Laying them out on the ground, the rest of the party immediately gathered together around the precious trophies and handed them to one another among themselves to get a closer look at them. I kept my mouth shut about one particular word standing out amongst the unintelligible writings on the document; Eden. Partly because I was in the process of figuring out whether it was a hallucinatory experience or not. Mostly because I wished not to talk about her in front of the group, yet. I had a hunch that once her existence was uncovered, consequences would follow, though there was no rational explanation to it. Maybe it was just a selfish decision that was accompanied with a tad bit of guilt that I was not being wholly honest in spite of formerly reprimanding Jessica of concealing certain information.

"Are we...then continuing this journey?" Nikole anxiously inquired.

"Of course we are," Jessica answered before I had the chance to.

"But we are under watch, Sica! And we don't even know how they're doing it!" Josiah voiced in anguish.

"Nothing's been done to us yet, though." Soeun tried to prove a point. "I mean, if they were unhappy with you two having a train behind, they would have acted upon some kind of regulation, wouldn't they?"

"Right." Nikole nodded. "There must be a reason the EC...P is letting us follow you."

"Don't be silly, Nikole. They will never let us enter the city. For goodness' sake, we should never have left," the doctor growled, though he composedly stacked their bags together for Nikole to lean against. Her crutches were cast on the ground and Nikole had her legs elevated on a piece of granite that must have fallen from the crumbled wall.

"She's got a point. Soeun's got a point, too. We now know that the ECP thing is real. If they're fine with us traveling as a whole, it might be fine for us to stick together as a group." I bit on my nail, crouching on the bench.

"Well, I don't like being monitored is all," Illya Mikhailov argued.

"You like monitoring yourself," Jessica huffed.

"Remember, Miss Garcia. It was me who saved your life."

"I think I thanked you enough for that." Jessica cracked her knuckles.

"I found something," Ash interrupted the heating up argument. All heads turned to look at her reading something from Dawson's diary.

"What is it?" Josiah asked.

"Last line from the third to last entry. 'Erik Becker with commoners. Do not interfere.'" Ash monotonously read it out loud.

A complex layer of silence fell upon the eight of us. The two short lines could connote many things, albeit expressed quite straightforwardly. We searched for an answer in each other's eyes and remained speechless until Gabriella ripped an opening through the veil of uncomfortable tranquility.

"It means it's okay to continue."

"It's okay to continue, she said," Jessica repeated. Then she bored a hole into Gabriella's face with her enthusiastic gaze. "All eight of us."

"Not eight." The doctor held up his hand. "Consider me and my niece out of this group."

"And where the hell exactly are you planning to go?" Soeun asked.

"Back home, of course," Mikhailov plainly stated.

"As I said many times before, there is no home left for you, Doctor." Josiah could not sound a thousand times more fatigued than he already was. He had had to say these words over and over again to get the man out of the dying facility. Here he was, revisiting the old argument like the gravity called Illya Mikhailov was continuously pulling him back toward it.

"Illya, I won't go back," Nikole protested decisively. "I'm going to Elysia."

"Seal the discussion," Jessica suddenly stood up from her seat and pointed at each and every one of us. "None of us here have a permanent home. None of us here have anywhere to go. All of us here are in need of a new refuge, whether you need a new identity, a new job, a new face, or a renewed healthy body. In the Wasteworld? In this crap of a fuckland infested with cheap bars, ruins, lawless raiders and hell, even mutated monsters? What life have we got? What future is there for us? All we know at the present is that there is this one slice of chance that we can for once in our lives acquire a new one, and if you aren't up for it, I say that chance will never come your way again. Are you all seriously thinking this-this life is a real one?"

"...No," I quietly answered. My life would be incomplete...without Eden. "She's right. We need to continue. Elysian City Patrol as we know it-though I personally know hardly anything about it-is not our enemy. As long as I am their so-called asset, they should be friendly. We should move on."

"And if it goes wrong?" Mikhailov entertained the possibility.

"Can it? When things are already wrong?" Jessica countered. He failed to make a smart comeback to that and pursed his lips.

"I still don't know if I should join," Gabriella spoke up. "I tried to kill you. I don't know what to do or feel anymore." The pain in her face was real. For the first time, I felt sympathy toward the woman. The smudged makeup defiling her originally winsome face made her outer appearance piteous even more.

"You'll get to have a new life in Elysia, Brie. Maybe even a new someone to actually rely on," Jessica soothed her. The fact that they were all of a sudden on peaceful terms instigated numerous questions in my mind. "Anybody opposing to her joining the team?"

Surprisingly, no one lifted a finger to oppose. Even Soeun who had shown flagrant umbrage an hour ago. So it seemed that we all had arrived at a tacit agreement on what to do with our journey along with what to do with Gabriella Izabel. The new team was formed; Jessica, Josiah, Soeun, Mikhailov, Nikole, Ash, Gabriella, and finally, me, the Asset. It was much bigger of a team than what it had originally started out as. Two might have been a difficult number to hack our way through the devastated Wasteworld and reach the city of supposed bliss.

"It's over now. And it starts today. We're moving as a group, and we'll sure as hell get to Elysia." Jessica concluded with a confident smile. I looked up at her with a lopsided grin and nodded once.

***

It was in the dead of night, and I was 'taking a walk' along the aisles of emptied home supplies until I took a seat on a bed in fairly moderate shape. The bed was the kind displayed in front of the show window, twin size with a blue sheet. There was no pillow or blanket; people must have stuffed those in their carts too as the apocalypse knocked on their doors.

From the chest pocket of my button-up shirt, I pulled out a faded photo. It was the last and only keepsake I had of Eden, my music and my torment. She was like a god to me in my early childhood; in every pleasant memory that I kept in my brain, she was always there, ever smiling, ever brilliant. But that was not the end of my reminiscence. There was a special link I shared with her. A special link with her-

"Who is she?"

Jessica's soft yet husky voice interrupted my personal moment. I was wildly upset at first and would have yelled at the brunette out of spiteful anger, but the moonlight highlighting the contour of her undoubtedly beautiful countenance did some sorcery to contain the malicious speech behind my lips. Her long eyelashes creating a shadow under the two glowing eyes calmed my uncontrollable emotion. I felt safe-safe enough to confess finally.

"It's my older sister," I said.

"Oh," she sighed. "What's her name?" Was it my imagination, or did I sense relief in her tone?

"Eden. Eden Becker."

"That's a pretty name," Jessica remarked. She made no further comments, which lessened the building anxiety in me by a great degree. "And I'm relieved." So it wasn't my imagination.

"That what?"

"That it isn't your girlfriend or anything. A hidden wife or something of that sort," Jessica sat on the bed next to me and her hands found their way around my neck. My hand, too, naturally wrapped her waist as I laughed.

"I'm not that kind of guy."

"Yeah, you're the dumb blond. Pretty Boy. Jackass," she whispered in my ear and giggled. "Erik."

The doubt that had been consistently niggling at my conscience, the doubt that this feeling I had for the girl lying on top me was nothing more than a simple connectedness or sexual desire, dissolved at that moment. I smiled into her neck as we shamelessly mingled once again having the moonlight as our sole companion to watch over us.

***

"Is Eden well?" A woman's voice rang out from the speaker surrounding the vast chamber. There was a sense of elegance, the sort found in aristocrats of the past, laced in every diction and tone of it.

"We detected some errors at times but otherwise running good, ma'am," the worker replied. He was nervous, looking into the giant screen unfolded before him. The owner of the voice was piercing him with her sapphire blue eyes.

"What exactly are those errors, may I ask?" She took off her glasses and gently set them down on the table beyond the screen.

"Nothing serious, ma'am. It's really not worth your—"

"What are those errors?" The woman insisted, this time more authoritative and menacing than before.

"W-well...," he started. There was sweat beading on his temples. "Detection of foreign frequencies, but we can't tell if it's coming from the outside or going from within. But, but I assure you, ma'am, it was only for a millisecond. Must have been some freq disturbance."

The woman with blue eyes sat back and ruminated this subject for a few seconds. Then she leaned forward again, clasping her hands together and throwing a dangerous glance through the screen.

"Investigate it," she ordered.

"Ma'am?"

"You heard me," she uttered each syllable with heavy stress.

"I'm sorry, ma'am. We'll definitely take a look," the worker answered as he fumbled for a handkerchief to wipe his sweat away.

"Do better than that. Bring to me precise reports on those 'errors' and remember," she paused briefly, scrutinizing the man's face.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"Always keep track of Erik and Jessica Garcia."

"On it." He nodded enthusiastically and rubbed his hands. "Everything will be run accordingly to your plan," the man muttered with anxiety. "Yes, it will, Doctor Becker."

Selenae Becker smiled pleased and turned off the connection with a flick of her hand.

------

Hello, I'm back with a long new chapter! Hope this was a good one.

Please vote and/or comment if you read and enjoyed this book! Thank you so much. See you next Friday lovelies<3