Dela's Hunters (The Harem House Book 1) Read online

  Dela’s Hunters

  by Charissa Dufour

  © 2017 by Charissa Dufour

  All rights reserved.

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  Chapter One

  Dela stared at the dead zone. Outskirts of the enormous city had been picked through in the decades since the Great Extinction, meaning anything of value waited deep within the city. But nothing was valuable enough to risk life and limb unless you were desperate. And Dela was that desperate.

  She adjusted her pack and trudged on, heading into the concrete jungle. As she walked, dodging sinkholes and trees grown through the old pavement, she wondered how man had built such structures. In the new towns—or the few old ones small enough to still be in use—no one tried to build over two stories. Not being an architect, she couldn’t fathom why they couldn’t replicate the buildings that touched the sky.

  There were still people alive who remember the before days. Couldn’t they teach the younger generation how? Then again, the post-extinction population didn’t warrant such buildings. If it did, she wouldn’t be alone.

  Dela stopped at an intersection, looking up and down the street for any sign of life. Like every other street she had checked, there was nothing but the wind rustling the trees and blowing trash around. Dela rolled her eyes. She didn’t even know why she looked anymore. She was the only one in the big city. Everyone else was smart.

  At the next intersection, she spotted an interesting building. The first floor appeared to have been a store—a bloody big one by the amount of wall-to-ceiling windows that had been bashed in. She stepped over the fragments of glass and began digging through the piles of trash. As she looked up from one pile, she started, nearly screaming. It took a second look to realize the human shape wasn’t actually a person. Her only guess, upon closer inspection, was that they used the statue to display clothing. There were two or three more laying around the store.

  She didn’t need clothing and moved deeper into the store, hoping to find something else worthwhile. From what her grandfather had told her, the streets had been flooded with looters right after the illness swept around the entire planet. Dela guessed that had been when the windows had been broken and most of the store’s merchandise had been plundered.

  Dela tried to imagine the place as it had been before the Great Extinction—the electric lights on, the displays bursting with pretty things, and people flooding the floor. She could see the lights and the stuff, but it was hard to imagine all the people.

  Dela had been born forty years after the Great Extinction. She had never seen more than four or five people congregated together at one time. Granted, a lot of that stemmed from her gender. Never mind the pretty things in the forgotten store—women were the most valuable entity on the planet. In the more archaic villages, women were traded like cattle or kept in whore houses. In the larger towns where law had returned, women were married off to groups of men—to increase the genetic pool. The problem was, the women birthing baby after baby were only producing more boys. Girls came maybe one in ten times, making them worth more than gold.

  “Hence the being alone,” Dela muttered to herself. “I just gotta find Quiq.”

  Quiq, her adopted brother, had gone into the dead zone in the hopes of finding supplies. It had been nearly three weeks since he'd left her side.

  She should have gone with him. He could only do so much with one hand—the result of a thieving incident gone wrong. Dela never should have let him go into the Dead Zone alone. Admittedly, she hadn’t known what the Dead Zone was like, but still. She looked around the store and frowned. Thus far, the Dead Zone didn’t seem that dangerous.

  Why then hasn’t he returned?

  She rounded some sort of display case and flinched. A skeleton leaned against the backside of the counter. Upon closer inspection, it looked like the person had just fallen asleep at their post and never woke again. Dela doubted it had been that painless. Her grandfather’s stories had been something out of a horror story.

  Those few who hadn’t been sick had taken up lawlessness with a vigor, killing more of the precious few who were healthy. In the end, something around ninety percent of the population had died over the course of the week, the majority of those coming from the big cities—now known as the Dead Zones.

  This would not be Dela’s last skeleton.

  Lath eyed the repaired fencing, questioning the wisdom of leaving the horses behind. Oh, he understood the reasoning. Horses didn’t belong in the city, on paved streets and limited to minimum feed, but leaving them back meant a long walk for all of them. The other concern was that the horses would break free from the paddock before they returned. It had plenty of feed and fresh grass—being beside a stream—but their horses tended to be flight risks.

  “You coming, Lath?” Gareth called from down the street.

  “Yeah.” Lath hoisted his pack onto his shoulders and trudged after the others.

  Adrian kicked at a stone. “Worried about something?”

  “You mean other than leaving our horses behind, going into the Dead Zone, or working with our competition?” replied Lath.

  Adrian, part of the rival team, gave him a grin. “Yeah, other than that.”

  Lath rolled his eyes. “This is crazy. We’re crazy for doing this.”

  “Our source is good,” Gareth said, not even looking at his partner or the other two men; his eyes were already sweeping their surroundings for any danger. “The girl going into the Dead Zone is young and pretty.”

  “Which is why you brought us in,” said Mason, speaking for the first time.

  Lath gave a snort of laughter. “We’re not dumb enough to go into the Dead Zone alone.”

  “Man,” added Adrian, “this chickadee better be worth it.”

  Always the serious one, Gareth replied, “The fee for her at our Harem House will be worth the trouble, even split four ways.”

  Adrian grunted. “So long as none of us die.”

  “I’m sure the stories are hyped up,” replied Lath.

  “Well, in a few days we’ll find out,” Gareth said.

  Lath smiled to himself. Gareth was never one to worry about the ‘ifs’ or ‘maybes’ of life. Growing up with him had been interesting, to say the least. As children, Gareth had been a smaller version of himself—just as willful, just as focused, and just as serious. If anything, adulthood, and the heartache therein, had made him more rigid. Still, all that resulted in one hell of a Hunter.

  Mason and Adrian were a different story. He didn’t know them well, only meeting when their paths crossed in one of the towns with a Harem House. He had no idea what had driven them into the lives of Hunters.

  Every man who worked as a Hunter had their own story for why they did it. While glamorous for the brief moment when you returned to town with a catch, the lifestyle itself was far from enchanting. They lived on the road, without any place to call home and no one to call family. No one but the man you worked with, the man you called partner.

  Lath did not have a noble reason to work as a Hunter, nor did he have some heartache in his past. Instead, he worked as a Hunter simply because Gareth did. As it had always
been, Lath followed Gareth. Lath didn’t resent Gareth for their lot in life. It was just normal to him to walk in the footsteps of his friend.

  Now, Lath followed Gareth into the Dead Zone and, for the first time, questioned his friend’s wisdom. At least Gareth agreed to his idea of teaming up with another pair of hunters. Whatever was in the Dead Zone, they were safer with numbers. Hopefully, four was sufficient.

  As they walked deeper into the large city, the houses, or what was left of them, were closer and closer together. Having been raised on a ranch, he couldn’t imagine living in a house so close to another person’s home. Then again, there were a lot of things about the old way Lath didn’t understand. As the city became more compact, they stopped at the intersections, looking up and down the side streets.

  A few blocks in, Gareth held up his fist, causing them to stop. “Dogs.”

  Lath looked over Gareth’s shoulder to see the pack of wild dogs.

  “You think we can just slip past them?” Adrian asked, simultaneously pulling his sidearm from his holster.

  Lath and Mason pulled their knives. Lath had no interest in wasting a precious bullet on a dog, even if said dog was in a pack. The dogs, gnawing on what looked to be another dog, stopped their activity. One lifted its head, blood dripping from its large maw. It sniffed the air, slowly turning its head in their direction.

  “That would be a no,” Mason said in response to Adrian’s question.

  Before they could respond, the other dogs took notice. Their pack alpha gave one yip before they all took off, leaving their half-eaten dinner to rot. Adrian raised his gun and fired once, hitting one of the frontrunners in the shoulder. The dog stumbled, tripping up his companions.

  “Save the bullets,” Gareth snapped, drawing his own knife.

  Adrian glanced at the other man. “Are you serious?”

  Gareth didn't get to reply. He jumped forward, slashing his knife downward. The frontrunner didn’t have a chance to dodge the sudden attack. Gareth’s blade cut into the dog’s face and neck, quickly taking it out of the fight.

  As the dogs worked to surround them, Lath turned his back on Gareth, barely touching his partner. They had fought like this before, back to back to protect their flanks. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mason and Adrian doing the same thing. The dogs snapped at them, looking for a weak spot in their formation.

  Lath kicked with his thick boots, striking a dog in the face just as Adrian slashed, striking the dog as it flinched away from Lath’s kick. Mason, with a knife so long it might as well be a sword, was having better luck slashing at the dogs. With his great reach, he took out two more of the pack. It wasn’t long before the rest of the pack wised up and fled.

  “Anyone hurt?” Gareth asked before Lath had even caught his breath.

  The rest of the men shook their heads.

  “Let’s keep moving.”

  “Never one for breaks, eh?” asked Adrian.

  “Our information says she’ll be at the southern hospital. We hump it, we can get there by morning.”

  “She really thinks after sixty years there’s going to be anything worth scavenging at the hospital?” asked Mason.

  “It doesn’t matter what she thinks she’s gonna find. It matters where she is.”

  “Always the romantic,” replied Lath, smiling at his friend.

  Chapter Two

  Dela eased the door open a crack, pausing to listen. She had spent the night in a small closet inside some sort of office building. Her grandfather once told her men and women were paid to just sit at a desk and write things down. Dela couldn’t believe people enjoyed such an existence—not that she was living the high life herself.

  When she didn’t hear anything other than the wind, she pushed the door open the rest of the way. She grabbed her pack and crawled out from the closet. She couldn’t find anything of value in the office building, having searched most of the previous afternoon. Annoyed with her waste of time, she slung her pack over her back and headed toward the stairs. She left the door propped open for light and made her way down to the first floor.

  Dela stepped out into the street as a gust of wind sent a spray of sand into her face. Dela turned her back to the wind, blinking as the tears cleared the sand. With her back to the wind, she dragged her goggles off her forehead and onto her eyes.

  Her grandfather had called the area they lived in Texas. He even said the Dead Zone had a name too, but she couldn’t remember what. With her goggles in place and her hood pulled up over her head, she set out again.

  After half a day’s walk, she finally spotted a blue sign. The edges were rusted away and the coloring had been scrubbed down to the barest minimum from sixty years’ worth of sand, wind, and rain, but she could still make the “H” and the arrow.

  When she had asked Quiq how he could possibly find the hospital in the labyrinth of the city, he told her about the blue signs. More than once she wondered how he knew about the blue signs. She assumed he had heard it from Granddaddy. Like any logical person, Dela had asked Quiq what he thought he would find in the hospital after all the intervening years. Quiq didn’t really answer, just said that was where he was going.

  Dela would never have gone after Quiq—she knew the rules—but it had been weeks, and weeks of loneliness had changed her perspective. Now, she was prepared to risk the Harem House itself to find him. He was her brother, for all intensive purposes. Her parents had found him when he was three years old and raised him as their own. She couldn’t leave her little brother lost in the Dead Zone.

  She turned the corner and stopped. It only took a second for her brain to register the threat. She ducked back around the corner of the crumbling building, pressing her back against the concrete, her breath coming in gasps.

  Men.

  “Shit,” she hissed to herself.

  Dela glanced back and forth, looking for a hiding place. The building at her back was far from secure. Much of it had crumbled to pieces. Dela refused to enter it. The brick building across from her was still standing, with even a few windows still intact. It rose two stories up and looked older than the taller buildings. Dela wondered how something older could be more durable.

  Ducking low, she skittered across the street and ducked into the alcove of the doorway. The front door had been boarded up, blocking her entrance. Though the nails were rusted and the plywood well-rotted, she doubted she could dismantle it without the men hearing her.

  A few curse words came to her lips, but she bit down on them. Dela glanced up and down the building, spotting a window with half the glass missing. She raced to it, scanning the opening as she slid to a stop. The missing portion of the glass was on the bottom, leaving a triangle-shaped shard stuck into the upper portion of the frame.

  “Great.”

  She slipped one foot through the hole, ducking under the remaining portion of the pane. She straddled the thick wall of the building, her left foot searching for the floor. Dela adjusted her body, ever aware of the ax hanging over her head. It would be just her luck that the frame holding the glass would lose its grip with her underneath it.

  Dela looked inside, wondering where the damn floor was. She peeked inside. Her foot was a mere centimeter from the floor. She slid sideways through the window, carefully pulling her right foot with her. Just as she dropped down below the opening, she spotted the men rounding the corner.

  “Unbelievable,” she muttered as she crawled under the windows.

  Dela had no idea what sort of building she had stumbled into. The room she occupied was large, with wide open spaces. Waist-high poles stood in lines, some knocked over. Flimsy walls stood near the back wall, making little nooks. Along a side wall, a long bar ran across the entire length. Dela couldn’t figure out how someone was supposed to get behind the bar without jumping over it. She didn’t give it much thought but crawled across the large room to the make-shift rooms. Inside each one she found desks, chairs, and moldy paper.

  Crawling inside one, she hid
under the desk, balling herself up and tucking her head between her knees to hide her light colored skin. As an afterthought, she pulled her hood up to cover her silver-blond hair and hid her face again.

  The building sat in silence. Dela waited and waited, working to keep her breathing shallow. As the time dragged on, her heartbeat picked up, hammering around her chest. Sweat formed on her forehead and began making its slow way into her eyes. She kept them squeezed shut, knowing any minute the men might search the building.

  It was an agonizing wait, but sure enough, she heard the crunch of glass breaking underfoot.

  A voice followed. “You sure you saw something?”

  “Positive. This is the only easy access to a building. Whatever it was must have gone in here.”

  “It was probably just another dog,” replied the first voice.

  “No. It was human. It might have been a boy, but I don’t think so,” countered the voice that had supposedly seen her.

  Dela heard sounds of them tipping over stuff and more glass breaking underfoot. As they drew nearer to her hiding place, panic set in, and she was moving before she realized it. Dela bolted from under the desk and out of the little room with the fake walls.

  “Hey!” a voice called from behind her.

  Dela glanced over her shoulder out of reflex, her body slamming into the exterior wall, sending her tumbling into the window she had climbed through. Her head hit the remainder of the glass, shattering it. Little bits of glass rained down on her, along with a few drops of blood.

  Her hand flew to her forehead as she scrambled out the window, receiving more cuts for her efforts. Once past the window, she raced down the street. At the first intersection, she glanced over her shoulder to see the four men escaping the building through the same window. She picked up her pace, her pack bouncing uncomfortably on her back.

  Turning down the side street, she kept running as a stitch formed in her side. She spotted a large swath of land with rusted lumps. As she got closer, she realized they were cars—emphasis on the “were.” She raced into the lot, weaving in and out of the cars. Once she was a few rows in, she dropped to the ground and crawled under the nearest lump of rust, narrowly avoiding a bad cut from a dangling piece of metal.