Those Who Lived: Fallen World Stories by Megan Crewe Read Free Book Online Page A

course, if all Michael wanted was Nathan dead and his own hands clean, he could have sent someone along he knew had killed before, who’d have no qualms about doing it again. Instead, he’d picked me.
    My smarts. Nathan’s brutality. What I’m most interested to see is how that contrast plays out. As if this was some bizarre sort of test. Testing me, testing Nathan. Testing what we stood for? Throw us into the fire and see which of us better withstood the heat.
    He wanted me to win. From the way he’d phrased his remarks, I was pretty sure of that. Michael had never shied away from brutality to enforce his demands before, but with the sort of people this organization attracted and the sort of people they’d clashed with, the urgency of pulling everything together in the midst of the pandemic, he might not have seen another option.
    He’d been a cop, in his former life. The things he’d done to get this far might not sit well with his conscience. Why else leave the brutality to guys like Nathan and Chay when he could? Maybe he’d like to rely more on ingenuity and less on violence to get things done. Maybe this, me and Nate in Toronto, was his trial run: removed enough from him that he could displace most of the responsibility if we—if I —blundered it.
    I had no idea if I had enough ingenuity to maneuver Nathan as well as I’d contrived Kaelyn’s safety. Given the gun, Michael didn’t either. The brutal option, if I needed it.
    There wasn’t any getting out of his test now. I tossed the pistol on the bed, figuring it should go in the rucksack last so it’d be within easy reach if I needed it before we’d even made it to Toronto. It was still lying there when Zack knocked and I called him in. He ambled over and slid his arms around my waist from behind. I felt him noticing the gun, tensing.
    I laid one of my arms over his, clay brown against freckled white. “Just in case,” I said.
    “Hmmm,” he replied, with a kiss to the base of my neck. He’d been there when Nathan went off on me for talking to the prisoners, before I’d come up with my plan for Kaelyn’s escape; had seen the purpling scrape along my ribs where Nate had introduced them to the edge of a table, after. “I guess that’s what we signed up for, being here.”
    Zack hadn’t really signed up for anything. I’d volunteered myself, with some idea what I was getting into, when I’d made it to Toronto looking for answers and seen the extent to which Michael had taken control. But Zack’s mom had been given the impossible choice of either supporting Michael’s efforts or wasting away in a locked room somewhere, and Zack had stayed with her—for her protection, I suspected he thought, though her expertise protected him more than the other way around. She worked long hours in the labs, helping manufacture the vaccine, but she’d arranged that Zack would never be assigned to leave the training center’s walls, where the infected and the hostile survivors who hadn’t joined the Wardens wandered.
    She’d offered to come here when Michael had asked some of the doctors to travel south and I’d already requested a transfer so I could follow Kaelyn. Because she knew Zack and I would want to stay together. And now, a couple months later, I was turning around and heading back.
    Maybe they’d follow me again. I’m not disinclined to reward a job well done. But that possibility hardly felt tangible right now.
    “I’m sorry,” I said, squeezing his hand.
    Zack made a scoffing sound. “For what? Not arguing with Michael over this? I’d rather take you alive and in Canada. We’ll make sure it’s not forever. I’ll survive somehow until then.”
    I nudged him with my elbow at his teasing tone. “Just keep on keeping your head down, all right?”
    “I should be the one saying that to you,” he said. “Look at you moving up in the ranks. One step from king of Toronto! You know what they say about power.”
    “Absolute power corrupts