The Lair by Emily McKay

ahead to realize we would have to take that same precaution with the fallen on our side.
    We had no way of knowing who—if any of them—would have the regenerative gene. We had to be sure that the people who died today, stayed dead.
    I would do it myself. Every cell in my body rebelled at the thought. It made my stomach wrench and my skin crawl, but I would do it. Because I couldn’t ask anyone else to do it for me. Because I had to be sure. And because I was the leader.
    This job—this horrific job—fell to me and no one else.
    Besides, the deaths of those thirteen people . . . their blood was on my hands. If I’d been here, I wouldn’t have been able to stop it, but I damn sure could have fought. I couldn’t have saved all these lives, but I could have saved some of them.
    Yeah, the girl I loved was safe, but at what price? Even worse, part of me was glad Lily had been shot.
    If she hadn’t been shot then she would have been here this afternoon when the Ticks attacked and I knew how she would have reacted. She would have jumped right into the fight.
    It was one of the things I loved about her—her complete refusal to back down from a fight, even one she had little hope of winning. What if she’d been one of these Greens who had died senselessly? The thought literally made it impossible to breathe. It crushed me.
    “You okay?”
    I turned to see Merc walking out of the caves. “Should I be?”
    Merc didn’t meet my gaze. “No.”
    “You and Taylor didn’t run into any trouble?”
    “We only got here about ten minutes ago. Taylor’s fine.”
    I nodded, but didn’t comment. Thank God Taylor was alive. As horrible and unthinkable as this was, Base Camp couldn’t function without Taylor. This attack might break us. I knew that, but without someone to keep what little electricity we had up and running, we would all be dead.
    Merc nodded toward the bodies. “I figured . . .” He gestured and only then did I realize he held an ax in each hand. The blades gleamed in the weak afternoon sun. He’d just sharpened them.
    “Yeah,” I said, because I couldn’t say anything else aloud. I held out my hand, palm up. “I’ll do it. Just keep the parking lot clear for a while. But I’ll prepare the bodies for disposal myself.” Besides, if I did the work alone, no one would notice when I puked my guts out midway and cried like a friggin’ baby afterward. “You go on in, Merc.”
    Merc slanted me a wtflook and handed me one of the axes on his way to the bodies.
    Merc wasn’t the kind of guy who talked a lot, but he followed orders and never hesitated to step up. Even to do what had to be the crappiest job on earth.
    Back in the Before, before this whole nightmare began, I never would have conceived that my job description would have included chopping the heads off my murdered friends.
    I’d sworn to protect these people. Some of them were just kids. Kids I’d personally rescued out of Farms. And now, they were dead and it was my job to defile their bodies. I couldn’t even bury them afterward.
    As cold, hard, and rocky as the land was up here, it would take days to dig enough graves and there were too many bodies for a funeral pyre. We couldn’t afford to burn that many trees. The absolute best we could do was load all the bodies into the back of one of the trucks and drive up to a nearby ravine and drop them over. Even though I would never have asked Merc to help, I was glad he was there.
    All those times I’d played “Assassin’s Creed”—all the times I’d thought how badass it was to swing a sword—all those points I’d racked up, none of that could have prepared me for the first swing of the ax. This wasn’t the first time I’d done this, but it never got any easier.
    We worked in silence. It was gruesome, terrible work. No matter how many times or how many ways I told myself that it had to be done, that it was honoring the human this body had been, I still hated it. It made me feel like