Damian Cross: Almighty Apocalypse System

Chapter 5

Then she moved to his left arm and did the same thing.

Damien lay on the floor with both legs broken and both arms broken and blood pouring from his mouth and his nose and cuts all over his face, he could not move, he could barely breathe, every inch of him was on fire with pain so intense that his body kept trying to shut down just to escape it.

Clara handed the bat back to the guard and smoothed her dress with both hands like she had just finished something ordinary.

"Good," she said quietly. "Now I can forgive you for wasting my time."

Damien stared at her through the haze of pain and shock and he could not believe this was real, could not believe this was the woman he had been married to for four years, the woman he thought he knew.

How did he let them trick him like this?

How did he not see it coming?

He was so angry, so devastated, so destroyed that he could not even form words anymore, all he could do was lie there and shake and bleed and wait for whatever came next.

Richard looked down at him and nodded to the guards. "Get rid of him."

"Where?" one of the guards asked.

"The frozen pits," Richard said. "The graveyard on the east side, no one goes there, throw him in and let the cold finish what we started, he will not last thirty minutes."

The guards moved immediately, they grabbed Damien by his broken arms and dragged him across the floor toward the back door, every movement sent fresh pain shooting through his body and he screamed again but no one cared.

They threw him into the back of a black van and slammed the doors shut, the engine started and the van pulled away from the Whitmore estate and drove out into the frozen wasteland beyond the city.

Damien lay in the back of the van with his broken body sprawled across the cold metal floor, every breath he took felt like knives in his chest, his legs were useless, his arms were useless, blood pooled underneath him and soaked into his torn clothes.

He knew this was the end.

He knew he was going to die out here in the cold with no one to help him, no one to even know what happened to him.

The van stopped.

The doors opened and freezing wind rushed in and bit into Damien's skin like teeth, the guards grabbed him again and dragged him out into the snow.

The frozen pits.

A massive stretch of abandoned land on the eastern edge of the city where the apocalypse had hit hardest, where entire buildings had collapsed under the weight of ice and snow, where bodies from the first wave still lay buried under frozen rubble because no one had bothered to dig them out.

No one came here, no one survived here.

The guards dragged Damien to the edge of a deep pit filled with ice and frozen waste and they threw him in without a word.

Damien hit the bottom hard and his broken bones screamed and his vision went black for a moment, when it came back he was lying on his side in a pile of frozen garbage and broken metal and ice.

He could not move.

He could not feel his fingers anymore, the cold was already creeping into his skin and spreading through his body like poison, his breath came out in short shallow gasps and every time he tried to inhale the frozen air burned his lungs.

He was so cold, so tired, so angry.

"This is how it ends," Damien thought, his mind starting to drift. "This is how my life ends, in a frozen pit, alone, betrayed by everyone I trusted."

He thought about his mother, how she had died begging for help that never came, how she had frozen to death in a small room while the Whitmore family sold the ring that could have saved her.

He thought about his father, who died the day the apocalypse struck, who never got a chance to fight back.

And he thought about Clara standing over him with a bat in her hands, breaking his bones one by one without a single shred of guilt on her face.

"I will never forgive them," Damien thought, and even though his body was shutting down, even though the cold was wrapping around his heart and slowing it down, that anger stayed sharp and clear. "If I could survive this, if I could live through this, I would make them pay for everything."

But he was not going to survive, his eyes started closing, his breathing slowed.

The cold pressed in from all sides and wrapped around him like a blanket made of ice.

"This is it."