by Lukens, Mark
The Dragon moved silently through the living room. He was even closer now. Right beside her. She could smell his clothes, some kind of cologne he wore, the food on his breath.
“Yes, I know all about them. I know about Dawson, that fucking traitor. I let him and his rat friends come to you. I let him bring some of you back to me. I’ll take care of them, and then I’ll get to you. All of you.”
Emma needed to get away. She got up to move. She could hear the planes flying overhead, jets roaring past her condo building. She heard the bombs in the distance—they were bombing Washington D.C. She got up from her chair, ready to bolt, not even sure where she was going to run to. She remembered in that split second that the windows had bars installed over them and sheets of plywood. She’d had them installed a few weeks before the Collapse because she’d known something terrible was coming. She had tried to convince her mother that they should run, but like right now, she had no idea where to run to, no idea where a safe place would be. The terrible thing that was coming would blanket the land, blotting out the sun, covering the world, leaving no piece of the earth untouched.
The Dragon grabbed her forearm before she could get away from the chair, before she could bolt in panic. His grip was like iron, his long and slender fingers wrapping so easily and completely around her arm. There was no way she could get free now, no way she could run away.
The Dragon pulled her closer to him, yanking her off balance for a moment.
“I know who’s coming,” he said. “Luke and Max. Dawson and his traitors. They’ll all get a big surprise.”
Suddenly the Dragon let go. Emma felt like she was falling. She expected to hit part of the recliner, or maybe the edge of the table, definitely the floor, but she was just falling and falling.
She jumped awake.
Someone had their hand on her arm.
The Dragon.
No, it was Josh.
“You okay?” he whispered.
She swallowed hard. They were still driving. Everyone was quiet. She nodded.
“Bad dream?” he asked.
She nodded again. She felt like telling him about it, telling him that Luke, Max, and the others with them were heading for something terrible, tell him that the Dragon knew they were going to Avalon, that he’d known all along. But she didn’t say anything—she just let Josh hold her.
“Sorry,” Emma told him in a soft voice into his shoulder. “I fell asleep for a minute.”
“More than a minute.”
“How long?”
“At least an hour.”
It hadn’t felt like it had been that long.
The dreams came rushing back to her, the ache of loss when she was with her mother again, when she was in her old condo where Ray had lost Kim, where Vanessa had begun to turn. And then the fear when she’d sensed the Dragon near her, the helplessness about Luke, Max, and Phil. And then the falling afterwards. But now she realized that she hadn’t been falling in the dream; she’d been floating in the darkness toward something, something that was pulling her.
Avalon?
Maybe. She was pretty sure she could feel the pull of the place. She didn’t want to reach out for it now like she had in her dream, but she let herself open up to it. She could feel it. Not as strong as the dream had been, but she could feel that they were on the right path.
She let it go, closing off that part of her mind, afraid the Dragon might lock on to her again. What did it matter now? The Dragon had already locked on to her while she’d been dreaming and there was nothing she could do about it now.
But something nagged at her about the dream. The Dragon had said that he knew where they were going, but he hadn’t said the name of the place—he hadn’t said the word Avalon. Maybe he didn’t know; maybe he knew that they had run, but he didn’t know exactly where. It was a shred of hope to hold onto, but just a shred. She prayed that Luke would survive, that he would succeed in killing the Dragon, but after her dream she didn’t have a good feeling about it.
CHAPTER 28
Jo
“Jo, you need to get up here,” Lisa said from the walkie-talkie. Lisa was spotting from the roof again. She spent so much time up there, sometimes twelve hours at a time. Jo had offered to switch her out with other spotters, but Lisa insisted. She said she felt better up there, in the open air. She felt safer watching, knowing what the rippers were doing, able to see the Dark Angels if they came.
But right now Lisa sounded very scared.
“What is it?” Gil asked Jo. He was right next to her on the air mattress in her office. They had been spending some time together, getting to know each other, but taking their time. “Dark Angels?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Jo answered as she got up to her feet, grabbing the walkie from her bookcase and pressing the button on the side. “Lisa. What’s going on? Is it Dark Angels?”
Max, Ray, Luke, and the rest of them had left for Hell Town hours ago. She’d been on the roof watching them leave. She’d seen the rippers go after their convoy, abandoning the pickup truck and whatever tiny slivers of human meat and blood remained in the hopes of new food escaping the store. But she’d also seen some of the rippers rush the parking lot of the store. They had surrounded the building. She, Gil, and Wade had picked a few of them off with rifles, hoping to back them up. And it had worked a little. Some of them had dispersed. Others were in the woods behind the store, more of them than usual. But she was sure they would scatter eventually—they usually did.
The rippers had pushed on the steel mesh behind the glass doors. A few had grabbed onto the chain-link fencing at the back of the store, shocking themselves, thrown back. Some had tried again to climb the walls of the building up to the roof, some even climbing on top of each other. But they could only get so high, and the bullets dissuaded them before they got too organized.
Gil had been worried about the rippers, afraid enough of them might push against and snap the chain mesh doors blocking off the area where the sliding glass doors had once been. He was also worried they would short out the batteries hooked up to the fence in back.
They hadn’t done it yet, she’d told Gil.
Now Lisa’s voice scared Jo—something was really wrong.
“It’s not Dark Angels,” Lisa said.
Good. Jo breathed out a sigh of relief. She’d had brief visions of the Dark Angels waiting just down the road, ambushing the convoy and then coming to the store to attack.
“It’s the rippers,” Lisa said. “They’ve moved away from the front. They’re in the back now, a lot of them in the woods.”
“They’ll stay away,” Jo said. It was the same thing she’d told Gil.
“They’re attacking the fence from the woods.”
Jo didn’t say anything. She just held the walkie in her hand, listening to the static coming from it. She looked at Gil, meeting his eyes. He looked worried. He had never stopped looking worried.
“They’ve got some big piece of a tree, like a log or something,” Lisa said. “Five or six of them are carrying it. They’re shoving it against the fence like a battering ram.”
Jo still didn’t answer. She held Gil’s gaze.
“They’ll get through,” Gil said.
“Tell me if they get through,” Jo told Lisa.
“They’re . . . they’re beating the fence pretty hard,” Lisa said. “It’s not going to last. It’s really bowing in now.”
“Hang tight,” Jo told Lisa. “I’ll be up there in a minute.” She set the walkie down while looking at Gil. “They’re using wood so they don’t electrocute themselves.” She thought of Ray’s warning, that some of the rippers would eventually learn to do that. It would only take one of them to try it, to show the others, for all of them to understand. Now they seemed to be working as a small team with one goal in mind: to get inside the store.
“They’re going to get inside,” Gil said. “It’s just a matter of time. We need to get on the roof. All of us. Do you have any rope ladders?�
��
Jo’s mind was reeling, but she forced herself to calm down, concentrating on Gil’s ice-blue eyes. Rope ladders . . . he was asking her about rope ladders. She nodded.
“We’ll need them to get off the roof,” Gil said.
She saw the unfinished sentence in his eyes: If we can ever get off the roof.
Jo had a few of the rope ladders stocked in the housewares area, right next to the hardware section—they were rope ladders for two-story homes in case of a fire. She always worried that they might all have to get up on the roof, maybe even eventually escape from the roof, so she’d stashed the rope ladders where she could find them.
Rifle shots cracked from the roof, sounding distant down inside the store. Lisa and the other spotters were already firing at the rippers storming the fence. The shots might slow them down, but other rippers were going to take their place. Gil was right; they were going to get in soon.
Gil seemed to identify the grim outcome in Jo’s eyes. “We need to get as many supplies as we can on the roof,” he said. “Starting with some of the tents so we’ll have places to store food and water. We’ll all have to work together quickly.”
Jo nodded. He was right. Even though she’d always been ready for this scenario, she found that she couldn’t move for a moment. She held out hope that the spotters could hold the rippers back with the gunshots, that the fence would hold and the rippers would just give up. But even if that happened, they still needed to get some of the supplies up on the roof just in case.
She picked up the walkie and pushed the button. “Lisa, are you pushing them back?”
“I don’t know,” Lisa yelled back a moment later. “I hit one of them. But there’s so many more coming. There’s a lot of them in the woods now.”
“Just keep shooting. Aim carefully. Don’t waste bullets.” We may need them later, Jo thought but didn’t say it. She knew that she and the rest in the store weren’t as good at shooting as Lance, Dale, Tamara, Tyrone, Crystal, and Zak had been, and definitely not as good as Luke. But they would have to try; they would have to take their shots carefully, while everyone else loaded the emergency supplies up onto the roof.
Jo and Gil left her office and rounded everyone up. Most were at the tent city, antsy and tense—they’d heard the gunshots on the roof. Jo explained the situation to everyone, the gravity of it.
Brooke’s eyes widened in alarm. Kate held her hand.
“They haven’t gotten through the fence yet,” Jo told the small crowd. “But we need to be ready in case they do.”
CHAPTER 29
Kate
Kate knew Jo was trying to downplay the danger of the rippers getting in, claiming that she didn’t think the rippers would get through the fence, or into the store if they happened to tear down the fence. Jo claimed she just wanted them on the roof just in case the worst happened. But Kate saw the fear in Jo’s eyes. And she felt the fear in Brooke, the energy of that fear thrumming through her hand like live electricity.
The monsters were getting in . . . the monsters were going to get them.
Gil took over for Jo, splitting people up into teams, giving them tasks to complete, telling them which supplies to grab first and take to the roof.
“Start breaking down the tents,” he said. “Roll them up. Make it easy to carry them. We’re going to need to get them up the ladder and onto the roof.”
“Come on,” Kate told Brooke. “Let’s help. We’ll be a team.”
Brooke went along willingly to their tent to help, but she wasn’t fooled by Kate’s cavalier attitude about getting the supplies together—she knew how close the monsters were.
“The rippers are getting in,” Brooke said as she watched Kate begin to dismantle the tent. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement, a fact etched in stone. She stared at Kate like she was daring her to deny it.
Kate wasn’t going to deny it. She nodded. “They’re trying, yes. They’re not in yet, but we need to be ready. And we need to hurry.”
Brooke didn’t move.
Kate kneeled down in front of Brooke, who was close to tears now. She took the girl’s hands in hers, looking into her eyes. “We just need to do what Gil and Jo say: get everything we can on the roof. We’ll be safe on the roof. They won’t get us on the roof. They can’t get up to the roof. You believe me, don’t you?”
Brooke nodded. She needed no further spurring; she was ready to help.
Kate took a duffel bag out from the tent. “We need to pack up the clothes we have and anything else you want to take. Put your drawing tablet in here.”
“What about Tiger?”
Kate froze for just a second, then she looked around. The cat wasn’t inside the tent. He wasn’t anywhere around. “Uh . . . we’ll need to get that carrying case for him. Remember the one Crystal let us use when we first got here?”
Brooke wasn’t going to let herself get distracted. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. We’ll find him.”
“We have to take him up to the roof. We can’t leave him.” She was on the verge of panic, her voice rising.
“I know. We won’t leave him down here. We still have plenty of time.”
Do we?
As if punctuating her sentence, gunshots sounded from the roof.
“We need to get the tent down first,” Kate told Brooke.
Brooke looked around, trying to spot Tiger in the store. Kate was afraid Brooke was going to run off at any second, searching for the cat.
Kate pulled down the flexible metal rods holding the tent up. She left the sleeping bags inside and rolled the whole thing up like a giant burrito, tying it in place with ropes. Right now it wasn’t about neatness, it was about speed.
Gil rushed over to Kate, full of nervous energy, but not panicking just yet. “You’ve got your tent ready?”
Kate nodded. She saw that others had formed a line at the bottom of the ladder attached to the scissor lift, handing items to each other and up the ladder like a line of ants. Someone reached down from the skylight to pull the items up onto the roof. It was a slow process, but the only one they had for now.
“We need to get those tents up there,” Jo told the people in line. “Get them set up on the roof. We’ll get packs of bottled water and boxes of food up there next.”
Kate watched the tent she’d just given to Gil transported down the line, one guy handing it to the next woman in line, then to a man at the bottom of the stairs. A rope with a panel of wood attached to it was being built to pull up cases of water to the skylight.
More gunshots sounded from the roof. Kate swore she could hear the roar of the rippers out there, but maybe it was only a phantom nightmare sound from her imagination.
Gil, working well with Jo, was already peeling a few people away from the line to push shopping carts down the aisles, loading them with drinks, water, juices, cases of sodas. Two other people, Hendricks and Irma, were down the aisle of food, loading their carts with bagged and boxed food.
“No canned food,” Jo called out. “If the rippers get in they won’t be able to get the cans open. We might be able to get the cans later. Just the bagged and boxed food for now.”
The older man, Hendricks, was already back with his cart full of drinks, ready to load the cases onto the platform of wood so it could be pulled up.
Kate was mesmerized by how the people were working together as a team, even though they couldn’t be sure if (or when) the rippers were going to get inside the store. If the rippers got through the fence (and if they were ramming it with a large trunk from a fallen tree, it would only be a matter of time), it wouldn’t take them long to get through the rollup doors, probably ramming it with the same logs. Kate was worried once the rippers got inside that everyone down on the floor wouldn’t have enough time to get up the one ladder to the roof.
She tore her attention away from the people loading up supplies.
Brooke was gone.
“Shit.”
Kate hurried away f
rom where the tent city used to be, a good portion of the tents gone now and already up on the roof or on their way there. Tiger usually wandered off toward the other side of the store where the hardware and housewares were, the less populated part of the store. Those areas of the store had been rearranged before Kate had gotten here, the doors to the garden department permanently blocked off. Maybe Tiger was looking for a way out of the store, or maybe he was hunting for rats and mice. Or maybe he just wanted some quiet time away from the people in the store. Kate didn’t know where Tiger had gone to, and she knew it could sometimes take hours to find him. And right now they didn’t have hours.
But first she needed to find Brooke.
“Brooke!”
Kate rushed down the aisles that still held products shoved together. She walked past the sporting goods area, past the gun cases that were empty now, all the weapons and ammo distributed among them, the rest stashed in Jo’s office.
“Brooke!”
No answer. Kate continued deeper into the store, farther away from the skylights in the middle of the building. It was murkier. Kate thought about getting the flashlight out of her pocket.
A noise. The shuffling of sneakers on the floor. Kate rounded the corner, around a mostly empty set of shelves in the area where the pharmacy used to be, passing shelves of hair products, soaps, razors, shaving creams. This was also near the pet section. Maybe Tiger liked to come to this area because he could smell the little pebbles of cat or dog food that had been dropped on the floor and swept under the bottom of the shelves. They had found Tiger in this area twice before.
“Brooke!”
“I can’t find him,” Brooke said. She stood in the darkness at the end of the next aisle where the pet section officially began. Most of the shelves were still stocked up with bags and cans of pet foods, kitty litters, pet carriers, leashes, dog and cat toys (they’d gotten a few of the toys for Tiger, but he didn’t play with them very much), and other products.
“We need to go, Brooke. We need to get on the roof.”
