Page 126 of Juniper Unraveling

“Then let’s go beyond the desert. Papa says out east there’s another compound, just like Szolen. One that welcomes survivors.”

“And what if he’s wrong? What if there’s nothing? What if it’s overrun by hostiles?”

I sit up from him with a frown. “Why are you backing yourself into a corner?”

“Why are you so against taking over Szolen? You once hated the community.”

“I hate the disillusionment. Living in a fantasy.”

“Disillusionment? The world around you is dying, and you’re worried about being duped? You haven’t lived out here, where food is scarce and life is hard.”

My eye twitches at that, and I flex my fists to tamp down the anger stewing in my blood. “I’ve done all right out here.”

“For a day? Maybe a night? And when things get too frightening, you can go back to your safe wall.”

My fists tighten. “You have no idea what I’ve done. What I’ve been through. How I survived.”

“I don’t doubt you survived. You’d have to be a fool to starve during a feast, while the rest of us scrape in famine.”

“Fuck you. I came from the same place as you. At least you still have family. I have nothing. Nothing!”

He grips both sides of my face, yanking me to the mattress, and as he crawls over top of me and holds me there, he stares at me with the kind of fury that could destroy an army of formidable men. His body trembles, jaw shifting with his anger. “You have me. Me.” He slams his lips to mine, his mouth corking my fight, and my muscles soften with his kiss. “I’m sorry. For what I said.” Forehead pressed to mine, he holds my face, stroking his thumb across my lips. “My only objective from this day forward is to keep you alive and at my side. And I’ll kill a thousand men to do so.”

His words disarm me, just as his silence once had. The fury dissipates, settling with the sincerity in his eyes.

“Then, let me help you. I’ll get you access inside.”

“No. I’ll find another way.”

“I’m not the weak girl you knew. What I was is not what I am now.”

“You weren’t weak then.” He falls to the side of me, his arm wrapped possessively across my stomach. “But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to throw you to the wolves and see what happens. I’ll find another way.”

I trace the shell of his ear with my fingertip. “They fear you, you know. You could lead them.”

“Fear doesn’t lead. It enslaves.”

“Still, they would follow you. I would follow you.”

“I wasn’t designed to lead, Wren. I was designed to kill. And when the time comes, if it comes to that, I won’t hesitate, in order to survive.”

Chapter 35

The rocky outer wall of the mine presses into my back, as I sit on the ground thumbing through Papa’s journal in the shade. Beneath the notes, the photographs, the technical scientific terms that I can’t begin to pronounce, there’s a story, an undercurrent that gives insight into a man who remained an enigma to me, up until his death.

It begins with the untimely loss of his daughter, and the ice-cold chains he fastened to his heart. The early notes reflect his pain, his anger. His refusal to acknowledge that the patients he’d been tasked with cutting apart were once human.

But while his perceptions turn my stomach, it’s easy to see how he could’ve gotten swept up into the lies, the mindset of those who worked in Calico. Ragers destroyed his family. His life. He held his only child, a young girl who loved books as much as I did, while she fought and spoke in tongues about wanting to crack his skull open and eat his insides. And it was he who administered the poison that would render her eternally silent.

In the beginning stages, the Ragers are like mental patients. Sociopaths. And by the end, they become single-minded animals. That’s how Papa viewed them. Nothing but animals. Soon, his views would extend to those who carried the disease – the second generation, who, at the time, he felt didn’t deserve the world.

As I read on, I learn how much I reminded him of his daughter. How a single glance down at the book I clutched in my arms, when I first arrived, saved me from those incinerators.

I lift a page that’s folded and taped inside the journal, revealing a picture of Papa with Doctor Ericsson, Szolen, and two men I don’t recognize, dressed in military uniforms. It appears to be older, with worn edges and discoloration. Behind them, a digital screen mounted on the wall reads October 19th, 2016 and the time.

Before the bombs hit. Before Dredge was unleashed onto the world.

The pages that follow hold diagrams and sketches of the organism. They describe a common virus fused with a prion that’d been excavated from soil. Natives who once lived there were known to be cannibals that snatched travelers, killing them in violent ways, the evidence found in a cave filled with skulls and bones.