The Relic (Cradle of Darkness #2) - Addison Cain Page 0,62

Harvard, full scholarship.

Then the bombs fell; cities were wiped away in a blink. She’d been camping with friends. Friends who were all dead now, or being whored. Or died being whored. She didn’t know.

Couldn’t think about it too hard. Just like she wouldn’t think about who the corpse might have been.

Because whatever existed before was gone.

The dark ages were back with a vengeance, and City. City was a cesspool. Didn’t matter which one. No sanitation, roving gangs always fighting for territory, the only way most women might make a buck was on their backs.

And considering the extreme increase in violence against women once the world went to hell, there weren’t all that many women left.

So fuck City. And considering the types she’d kept up with since the fall, fuck men in general.

John wasn’t so bad. But if he looked at her with that puppy stare one more time, she just might pop him in the mouth.

Leaning against a crumbling stone side rail, she watched John pick through the corpse's pockets, wondering when someone would be doing that to her. And boy would they be disappointed. She had nothing others would find valuable in her pack—the pack itself faded from the blue it had been when new. Torn here and there. Empty of supplies. Heavy, because no matter how bad things got, both volumes of Nelson’s Textbook of Pediatrics went where she went.

He flipped the corpse over to rifle through what rotting tatters might conceal, the body seeming to smile up at her.

Eugenia didn’t smile back.

“We need to get moving.” Or this was how she was going to die.

On an endless stone bridge in dangerous, unknown territory, seeking water that was so close she could taste it. Going mad from the sound of tainted drink just a few feet away.

No different than the other bodies they’d found on the road. The whole bodies, the bloated bodies, the dried bodies, and… well... the bits of bodies left after wild dogs found supper.

Man’s best friend wasn’t so friendly once it started starving.

Which was a pity. Eugenia had grown up with such a great mutt. She still liked dogs. And they liked her too… for a snack.

Killing that first pup in self-defense had been harder than knifing a man trying to get into her pants.

And they all tried.

Which was precisely why she’d been forced to leave her former accommodation, again, and make her way south to new territory.

Where she’d picked up John wallowing on the side of the road. Where she didn’t make small talk but shared her supplies.

Everyone held on to something from the past.

John’s seemed to be a sense of optimistic stupidity.

Eugenia’s was sheer stubbornness and an undying sense of anger that—thanks to a shit president and a fucked-up world—all her dreams had been blown to ash. All her hard work, all the sacrifices she had made to achieve her goals… useless.

Two years of med school did not make one a doctor. A medic, in theory. Which had been handy when there was nothing to trade. But a medic with tits wasn’t safe.

She learned that lesson in the first disease-riddled settlement. AKA, the shanty town of Wellspring.

Pretty name for an awful place.

And in the years since, there wasn’t any place she wandered by that wasn’t awful. Might as well pick one and plant her flag. Give up on her life as a vagrant. Live where sewage collected on the streets and everyone was sick from dirty water and improper hygiene. Try to make things better.

But, if they didn’t get moving, she was going to die on that long, stone bridge, never knowing air conditioning again. John would probably take her stuff and die a mile or two up the path. Another traveler would loot his corpse. Just as she had looted bodies for years and pretended not to cry.

There wasn’t any moisture for tears now. No point in regrets. But still, that kernel of anger festered, because her perfect future had been stolen by power-mongering boneheads. And six years of living a hard life had not broken her as quickly as it had the others.

Which was unfair.

Why care anymore? Why keep looking for a good place and good people?

“Do you see that?” John, wasting precious energy, waved his arm toward a portion of the lake obscured by dead trees.

“Yup, it’s water.”

“I didn’t think the stories were real, but I’ll be damned. They even got power!”

Electricity was only in City, and even there it was hard to come by, spotty, and cost more