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Flies buzzed around the body as I exaled like the first, but he was er, the skin charred from where they’d burned the wound closed It lay beside hi with all of his fingernails that had been pulled out at the roots The guy was shirtless, and ht on the ink of his chest

I felt the bile begin to rise in the back of my throat, but I sed it down

No way

It wasn’t possible

He died

The explosion took him from us just as it had Warden

Yet…

I knew that ink Had been with his with the cross in the middle in memory of his parents

Blinking to clear my vision, I looked at the man’s face A beard I’d rarely seen on my cousin mixed with blood and fuck knehat else His face was pale, his lips cracked, blood dried on an open gash Part of his left ear was ot bored One eye ollen closed, pus oozing out of it

None of that explained the scent of rotting flesh, though

Donati lifted the body, shifting it to show me and the others the blistered and blackened skin of his back where ots feasted on the decayed flesh

The bile threatened again until I felt someone behind me Donati carefully replaced the body back on the table at the sa from my cousin’s lips as Matt pushed past me

“Tanner!” He screa his arm “Tanner? How are you here? Oh fuck, what did they do to you?”

I should have pulled hio upstairs, and not allowed him to look at his brother’s

dead body like this But I was unable totruck, where Tanner and Warden had burned to death after the blast of the bomb nearly leveled the compound People saw him in there Raider saw him before the blast knocked him on his ass