Seraphina's Revenge: A Rebirth In The Apocalypse Novel

Chapter 338: It Couldn’t Last Forever

Lachlan’s blue skin had already started to creep under his fingers at the wrist—an early warning system of the thing inside him.

He ignored it and fed the energy outward.

A thin line of lightning knifed across his palm as he flexed and let the charge hiss into the nearest bit of metal.

It kissed a falling finger in midair and popped it clean off its trajectory like a splinter and sent it spinning in another direction. Finally, the finger’s fall made an absurd sound: a wet, precise drum on the hood then silence.

"Nice," he said, voice dry. "I’m liking this new trick."

Lachlan grinned again and shrugged as if it had been a party trick.

The truth was much simpler: it had felt right. It felt steady. Secure. Like the world had stopped shaking for once and everything finally made sense.

The truck’s interior filled with the smell of iron and the softer smell of rot.

Blood slicked the leather; a hand slid across the console and left a print that looked like a map.

Everything sounded amplified: the slap on metal, the whisper-slick of a hand sliding down glass, the thump of something heavy hitting the trailer behind them.

"Windows up," Zubair said again. "Shut them all this time."

They were shut.

Well, except for the one that was broken.

Sera licked a finger and drew it across the corner of her mouth where blood rain had smudged against her skin.

She didn’t look guilty.

Instead, there was a slight smile on her face, like she was remembering a flavor that she hadn’t hand in a while but knew and loved. "This tastes different," she said after a moment. "Saltier than I remember, and without the added taste of fear to sweeten it. They must not have seen this coming."

Elias did not look at her.

Outside, the rain became heavier. Blood teemed down like they were caught in the middle of a massive thunderstorm.

But the body parts never stopped.

A whole arm with a man’s dress shirt sleeve still buttoned to it bounced off the mirror, taking the thing down with it.

A fist, closed and furious, pelted the cab and left a smear across the passenger-side window.

A skull cracked on the road...no eyes, and its mandible missing...and rolled around for a few minutes like a tossed coconut, catching light from the truck’s headlights and reflecting it back.

A half-grown ribcage thumped past the tailgate and littered the asphalt with pink tissue that unhooked itself and trailed in the truck’s wake like toilet paper on someone’s heel.

Then, suddenly, from outside, a voice rose through the storm...thin, ragged, and barely human.

For a moment it almost sounded hopeful, like a cellphone catching one bar of signal before dying again. A whisper, maybe a prayer, carried through the wind.

Then the truck rolled past something reaching from the darkness—a hand, pale and slick, its fingers clawing for the wheel’s shadow. A diamond still clung to it, catching the headlights with a flash too bright for something so dead.

Everyone ignored the crunch of bone and diamond as the truck’s tires rolled over it.

The rain kept coming in a macabre wave.

Organs, hands, a foot with a boot still clenched—each impact a punctuation.

Once, a child’s shoe hit the roof and stayed, nailed fast as it got caught on one of the two broken antennas. The next time the truck drove over a limb, the shoe bounced and slid off in a smear.

Bits stuck to the grille like barnacles. Zubair kept the speed even; too slow meant being a target, too fast risked losing control on slick gore.

"When does it stop?" Elias asked, and the question was purely practical.

"It stopped before," Alexei replied with a shrug. "We survived before. We survive again."

"Not an answer," Elias shot back.

"No more than the rain is," Alexei said. "Haven’t you learned? In this new world, you don’t get answers anymore. Adapt and survive, my friend, or refuse and die."

Lachlan’s laugh came out thin. "Shut up, bookworm. Either you’re going to start singing or I will." He made a show of pulling a handful of chocolate from his pocket and throwing a piece at Sera. "Here. Treat."

She caught it without looking and bit. "Doesn’t matter if we’re soaked," she said around the sugar. "It’s still chocolate."

"Of course it is," he said. "You’re an optimist of the worst, friendliest order."

All around them, the sky continued its savage work.

A palm slapped the windshield and left a ghostly handprint that made Alexei’s fingers itch.

Zubair slammed the brakes for a breath to let a mass hang off the hood and fall, and the air filled with a new sound: organs slapping tin and slithering away across gravel.

The truck lurched, the trailer shoving, and the whole convoy breathed out as one ugly animal.

"Do you think it’s just people?" Elias asked. He didn’t want the implication in the air.

Sera shrugged. "If not people, whatever the night is now, they want what people had."

The night—no, the thing that marked night—kept pressing at them.

It had rhythm now, almost thought-out.

The impacts came in sets: a barrage, a pause that let them breathe, then another.

The four men argued about whether to put a tarp over the cab. But not a single one suggested that they turn back.

At one point the truck took a hit that drove a shard of bone through the headlight and sprayed the instrument panel with a geyser of something warm.

The impact caused the light to die with a hollow thunk.

Zubair cursed, low, but still, he didn’t stop.

They were still moving when the largest piece of the night fell.

It was the body of a woman, probably no more than 150lbs, but her brown hair was tangled with blood and flesh. The side of her face that hit the windshield revealed a gaping hole in her cheek as her green eyes continued to stare forward sightlessly.

The weight was enough to splinter the front windshield, but not so much that it broke it completely.

The wipers did not clear everything, tangling up in her bright red sundress as it tried to clean the blood off. Zubair planted his left foot, his hands white at the knuckles, and turned the steering wheel to the right quickly.

The jerky movement was enough to have the body sliding off the front window and hood, the dress tearing away from where it had been trapped under the wipers.

A quick jerk to the left, and the truck found its groove again.

They drove on into the crimson weather, the world around them a theatre of sudden, obscene rain, and the road stretched ahead like an open mouth.

The dark had snapped down without warning; the night was a thing that ate the sky and spat out pieces of what had been.

But everyone knew that the night couldn’t last forever.