My Five Beast Wives Want Me Dead in the Apocalypse

Chapter 3 PART 1

The staircase emptied into a corridor that smelled like a slaughterhouse left open in the summer heat. Dim yellow lights buzzed overhead, casting everything in a sick, flickering glow.

Iron cages lined both walls, each one holding something that breathed too loud and moved too fast in the dark. The roaring had stopped the moment Kyle and Riley reached the bottom step, and the silence that replaced it was somehow worse.

Kyle saw her before his brain could catch up to his eyes.

At the far end of the corridor, inside the smallest cage, Vivian Cross sat with her back against the iron bars and her knees pulled to her chest. Blood covered her like a second skin. Her black hair hung in thick, wet ropes across her face, and through the gaps in that curtain, two amber serpent eyes locked onto Kyle with the still, patient hunger of something that had already decided how it would kill him.

His legs stopped working.

It was not fear, not the regular kind. Something pressed down on his entire body from the outside, a weight that started at the top of his skull and crushed straight through to his ankles. His lungs flattened. His vision narrowed to a single point, and that point was Vivian's unblinking stare. The basement walls seemed to close in around him, tightening like the coils of something enormous and cold.

"Kyle, don't look at her eyes!" Riley grabbed his arm and shoved herself between them, breaking his line of sight. The pressure released instantly, and Kyle crumbled forward, gagging, his hands on his knees. "Her Ability is illusion based. She projects pressure through eye contact. If you freeze up like that again, you're dead before I can do anything about it."

"That was an Ability?" Kyle wheezed, spitting bile onto the concrete floor. "I thought the building was falling on me."

"Pathetic." Vivian's voice drifted from the cage, low and raw, scraped down to something barely human. "You sent me here to be eaten alive, and you can't even stand up when I look at you. I've seen dying rats with more spine than you, Kyle Cole."

Kyle opened his mouth to answer, but the sound that came out was just air.

A deafening crash cut through the basement. Three cages down from Vivian, something massive slammed against iron bars with enough force to buckle them outward. A second hit. A third. On the fourth impact, the cage door exploded off its hinges and skidded across the concrete floor, throwing sparks in a wide arc.

The thing that stepped out was a bear, but wrong. Four star mutated, easily eight feet tall at the shoulder, its brown fur patchy and split open in places where bone plates had grown through the skin like armor. Its eyes were milky white and furious, and its jaws hung open wide enough to fit a man's entire torso inside.

It swung its head toward Kyle and Riley and charged.

"Get behind me!" Riley shoved Kyle backward and planted herself in the bear's path, both hands raised. Pale blue light pulsed from her palms, but it was soft, thin, flickering. Healing energy. Not a weapon. Not a shield. Just the warm, useless glow of someone whose entire power was built to mend broken things, not break them.

The bear hit her like a truck. Riley caught its open jaws with both hands, her feet sliding backward on the wet floor, her arms shaking under the weight. Blue light sprayed from her fingers and scorched across the bear's muzzle, but it did nothing. The beast shook its head and threw Riley sideways into a row of cages. She hit the bars hard, bounced off, and rolled to her feet with blood running from a cut above her left eye.

"Run, you useless insect!" Riley screamed at Kyle as the bear rounded on her again. "Find somewhere to hide!"

Kyle stumbled backward, tripping over his own feet, and his spine collided with cold iron bars. A hand closed around his ankle with a grip like a steel trap.

He looked down.

Vivian's blood slicked fingers were wrapped around his leg, her face pressed between the bars, her amber eyes burning up at him from inches away. A thin, cracked smile split across her lips.

"Running from a bear." Her voice was almost a purr, soft and dripping with poison. "This is how you die, Kyle. Screaming and crawling on a basement floor like the cockroach you are. I want you to know that I'm going to enjoy watching it happen."

A terrible, animal shriek echoed down the corridor. Riley hit the ground again, and this time she did not get up immediately. The bear stood over her, one massive paw raised, ready to come down and end it.

Kyle looked at Riley bleeding on the floor. He looked at Vivian's hand around his ankle. He looked at the bear, and something inside his chest broke open, not courage, not bravery, just the raw, ugly desperation of a man with absolutely nothing left.

He dropped to his knees in front of Vivian's cage.

"Please." His voice cracked on the word and he did not care. "Please help us. I know what he did to you. I know what I... what this body did to you. And I know you want me dead. But Riley is out there dying right now because of me. She doesn't deserve that. She never did anything to you."

Vivian's grip on his ankle did not loosen. Her eyes did not soften. "Why should I care if the cat dies? She stood by while you sold me. They all did."

"Then let me give you what you actually want!" Kyle grabbed the bars of her cage with both hands, his knuckles white, his face so close to hers he could smell the blood drying on her skin. "Divorce. The second we get home, I sign the papers. You and Riley both. You walk free. No more bond. No more burial law. No more me."