Annihilation: Green Fields #12 by Adrienne Lecter

Annihilation: Green Fields #12 by Adrienne Lecter

Author:Adrienne Lecter [Lecter, Adrienne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2019-11-10T00:00:00+00:00


Chapter 12

I remained soaking in the by-now cool water of the tub I had commandeered after the girls had wrought chemical warfare on my hair, and after rinsing it until the water ran clear again, had also braided it up once more, cutting down any maintenance I’d have to do for the foreseeable future to simple dunks, unless I decided to get drenched in gore again. They’d seemed disappointed when I wasn’t ready to follow them quite yet on their mission to get some food, get high, and get laid, but were quick to reassure me that it was okay for me to want some alone time to decompress. In Adalynn’s case, I had a feeling like she knew exactly what I was talking about—but if she could feel the beacons, she was probably not going to be around by winter herself. I didn’t ask, but I got a sense that she knew exactly what was in store for her—and her devil-may-care attitude seemed all the more genuine for it. Maybe I should simply take a page from her playbook and be done with overthinking everything.

But as I slid into the tub until the water was up to my chin, and then deeper so that my entire head was submerged, cutting me off from the rest of the world, I couldn’t help but face the truth: I was hearing it, too, that roar in the distance. Not just hearing it, but feeling it thrumming deep inside my bones. That final, eternal rage that I knew I would eventually succumb to, throwing off the last vestiges of what little remained of my humanity.

What surprised me was the realization that I wasn’t afraid of it anymore.

I couldn’t help it; in my mind’s eye it was as if I was suddenly standing in front of the embodiment of all that—a feral warrior, uncompromising, ready to face her end with her head held high—and as such things go, it could have been so much worse. It was easy to imagine her cocking her head to the side and smirking at me. “Really, this is what you’re shitting your pants over?” she’d say. It really wasn’t. And with loss so fresh in my heart, being able to divorce myself from all that didn’t sound so bad, either. What remained was something akin to grief—for those I’d leave behind, for whom I couldn’t cushion the blow, but that had always been one of humanity’s cruxes. We all die, and we seldom get to say our goodbyes first.

My lungs were slowly starting to remind me that I wasn’t quite there yet and thus needed some oxygen to keep fighting the, if not good fight, then the fight that needed to be fought. But I didn’t quite want to let go of that pervasive sense of tranquility yet that, slowly but surely, pushed the roar in the distance farther back until it had almost subsided, little more than a low-grade buzz that I was barely aware of, if I concentrated on it.



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