In the storm, all she could see was that he was white and needed a haircut and a shave. The rain had plastered his hair to his head, and he looked like he’d just been fished out of a pond, but the urge to go to him seized her.
He stepped inside the inn, the same way she had entered.
She scanned the woods, then stared at the toppled dirt bike. That other engine still roared out in the woods, and the last thing she wanted to do was to draw attention to herself, give her presence away, but she felt too sick to fight back or even hide very long if the rider was determined to find her.
Maybe he’s only checking this place because he figures you’d need shelter. He’s just guessing. He doesn’t know you’re here.
Maeve closed her eyes, felt the rain on her face and drizzling down the back of her neck, under her collar. She stepped out from hiding at the corner of the stone building, took another step, watching the darkness where the rider had vanished inside the inn, and then she bolted for the dirt bike. In her mind, she had already reached the bike, stood it up, straddled it, and kick-started the engine. Simple tasks. She counted them off in her head—lift, straddle, start up, give it some gas. Get the fuck out of here.
The driver darted his head out through the doorway. Silent, he watched her bolt through the rain. For the first time, she heard her own footfalls and knew they had given her away, that even with the rain and distant thunder, her boots on the trail had been too loud. If she’d gone quietly, she might have made it, but she’d wanted to rush, to get as far from here as possible, quick as she might.
He ran.
It took her only three more steps to realize he would intercept her, that she would never get on that bike before the rider could get his hands on her. In the back of her mind, a small voice tried to reason with her, tell her that maybe he wasn’t after her at all, that he only thought she intended to steal his dirt bike and wanted to stop her.
But the man kept silent, and his silence told her that he had no questions about her identity or her intentions. Maeve knew only one choice remained to her, the same choice she’d made hours ago. She veered into the woods and kept running. Numbness spread through both of her feet. The pain in her throat returned. She coughed and wheezed.
The dirt bike roared to new life behind her.
Branches snagged her clothes and scratched her skin. One whipped across her cheek, stinging only an inch from her eye, and she felt blood trickle down her face like hot tears. The trees seemed to blur. Somehow, off the trail now, her feet managed to miss the roots. She scrambled over a fallen tree, jogged to the right. Through blurred vision, she saw more gray light and knew she had started shifting back toward the gorge.
The engine roared louder. Her chest burned. Her legs, so tired from her hike already, quivered with every step, ready to collapse beneath her. In the midst of the trees, she came upon a ridge of massive rocks carried here by glaciers millennia before, nearly piled one atop the other.
She heard the dirt bike engine whine and glanced over her shoulder. The bike shot from the trees fifteen yards away. Maeve reached into a place inside of her that existed only for survival. Rage lived there, along with sorrow. She ran along the stone ridge, searching for a place to climb, telling herself she could outpace the rider, that he’d have to leave his bike on this side and if she could get on the other side before he managed, she could still get away. But of course she’d forgotten about his gun, and now that she remembered, she knew she couldn’t climb, couldn’t give him such an exposed target. She would have to keep running, make it to the edge of the gorge and hope there was some other way.
Abruptly, she came to an opening between two of those ancient, glacial stones and ducked into it without hesitation. As she ran, coughing up thick black spittle, she knew.
This is useless. Where could she go, weaponless and on foot, where this man could not find her?
The path between the stones ended. Dark, rainswept forest stretched ahead. Behind her, she heard the dirt bike roar into the passage, engine echoing off the walls. Just to her right was a fallen sycamore tree. It had blown down in a storm, its whole root system exposed. Branches had smashed against the stone ridge, several snapped off and others hanging by bark and fiber.
Maeve grabbed a broken branch, four feet long, thick as her wrist. The dirt bike engine roared over her left shoulder. She turned and swung the branch like she was aiming to knock the son of a bitch out of the ballpark. The thick, bare end of the branch caught him under the jaw. He came halfway out of the saddle, managed to keep one hand on the bike, which made him swerve straight at the fallen sycamore.
The front wheel hit a rut, twisted hard to one side, and the bike bucked the rider. He flailed as he flew through the rain. Maeve could only watch as a jutting, broken branch impaled him and he slumped over it, hanging like a scarecrow from the fallen tree.
She didn’t even have the strength to scream.
The driver gasped, sucking air. His left arm began to shake as blood spilled from around the branch and down his leg, soaking through his trousers. Bloody froth spilled over his lips as he continued to try to breathe, and he turned his head to stare at her. His mouth moved as if he wanted to speak, and Maeve realized she needed to know whatever he could tell her.
“Who sent you?” she asked, approaching him, trying not to get too close. “What’s happened at home? What are they saying … about me?”
As she took another step, his gaze shifted to her hands. Maeve had never seen such terror. He might have been dying, but what he feared more than anything was the idea of her touching him. In his fear, he began to snarl words at her in a language she thought might be Russian.
Tears welled in her eyes, slid down her cheeks, hot amid the cool trickles of rain on her face. Emotions warred within her. In their midst, one feeling burned the brightest, a gnawing she had felt earlier but which now seemed to inflate inside her. Her fingers flexed of their own accord, and she took another step closer, studying his scruffy beard and sodden clothes. Blood and rain dripped from his dangling feet.
Her aches and weariness seemed to diminish as she took another step toward him. The rider twitched and coughed, choking on his own blood. Somehow he mustered the strength to shake his head, to plead with her to stay away. Maeve lifted a hand, reaching toward him, basking in the breeze and the rain and relishing the thought of what it would feel like to take what she needed from him.
Like the driver at the parade had done.
Like she herself had done to her mother and Logan.
He would die, anyway. What difference would it make if she hastened him along? It might save him hours of anguish. In the back of her mind, a little voice pleaded with her to back away, but the other voice had grown louder. Like the drone of highway traffic or the whirl of a ceiling fan, it had become white noise, but she realized it had never left her. The presence shifted inside her skull, whispering, tempting her with promises. Touch him. It’s the only way. The sickness in you …
Maeve knew the rest.
Her hands shook. She stared at the man, watched the blood and rain sluice off his boots, and noticed the gleam fading from his eyes. No, the voice inside her said. Shaking, yearning, she reached for him. One of her hands caught the back of his shirt, and images seared through her mind, flickers of the death she’d witnessed and the ones she’d caused. Her mother’s throat had turned black. Her brother’s eyes had gone blank and dull, vacant and unknowing.
“No!” Maeve screamed. She threw herself backward, staggered. Her gut twisted, and she breathed through her nostrils, forcing herself not to vomit. Instead, she turned her back on the dying man. She started back through the passage nature had cut into the stony ridge, but the roar of the other dirt bike rose abruptly, as if it had just found the path that would lead to her.
Maybe it had—maybe the driver had found the first dirt bike’s trail.
She turned and rushed past the impaled man. As she darted into the trees, she spared a backward glance and s
aw that his eyes had glazed over. His body hung lifeless, all his muscles slack, and a part of her was relieved.
But the other part screamed inside the cage of her bones, enraged that she had let that life go to waste.
She staggered into the woods, numb with horror and guilt and fearful of the conflict between her head and heart. She ran as best she could, half listening to the dirt bike engine coming closer. Through the trees, she could see the edge of the forest and knew it had to be the gorge. She had to hide, had to be quiet. If the second rider couldn’t hear her, no way would he find her in this rain with no trail around. She turned left, heading north, sixty or seventy feet from the edge, searching for a felled tree to shimmy under or a cluster of low bushes to crouch within.
The sound of the rain vanished.
Though she kept running, the noise of her footfalls went away.
Even the growling engine went quiet.
Maeve stopped, breathing hard, the only sound the thump of her heartbeat in her chest. Her back felt strangely cold, as if winter had peered across the seasons all the way to July and caught her in its gaze. But she knew it wasn’t winter—it was something else. She turned to look and saw a figure wrapped in rough white cloth and draped in another layer that billowed around her, sheer and translucent. Red and black fluid dappled her shroud, stains peppered the cloth where it touched her body. Her hair had been shorn to mere inches and jutted at all angles, ragged and filthy. A leather mask had been tied across her face, cut and stretched to resemble a hawk or some other bird of prey, complete with jutting beak. The leather had been stained a deep crimson, the dark shade of blood that has begun to pool.
No rain touched her. The storm wind gusted the opposite direction from the unfelt breeze that billowed her funereal garments. Maeve stared at her, slowly shaking her head, backing away from the gnawing hunger she felt emanating from the thing in the woods, this thing that she knew had followed her. She would have screamed, but she knew that somewhere the other rider still hunted her.
At this thought, as if the vision could read her mind, the masked woman smiled. Her teeth were rotten and bleeding, her lips covered in sores.
The instant Maeve made the decision to flee, the noise rushed back into the world. The rain, the wind, her boots on the dirt, and that dirt bike growl, which now, thankfully, seemed farther away, as if the rider had lost her trail, if he’d ever had it to begin with.
She ran two hundred yards or more before she staggered and rested against a tree. Struck by a fresh bout of coughing, she spat blood and black bile. Little spots of blood welled from the pores on her arms, and the rain washed it away.
I’m dying, Maeve thought numbly, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
And maybe it was. Dying seemed like precisely the right thing to do.
12
Rue stood by the window and watched the street outside the Sinclair house, pulse racing. She felt sure she had seen a figure out the side window, looming just beyond a tangle of shrubbery, but when she’d rushed to the window for a better look, there had been no sign of anyone. She darted around the first floor of the house, peering through window after window, but spotted nothing out of the ordinary. Rue had never been paranoid, but she could forgive herself today.
She made her way back to the living room and peered out the front window, wishing she had someone to share her fears with. The only other person in the house was Ted, but he was lying down upstairs after too much whiskey and too much pain, and giving him something else to fear was the last thing she would do to him.
Once in a while, a car passed by. Two doors down, on the other side of the road, a kid played basketball in his driveway in the rain. Tall and thin, tank top and shorts soaked through, he moved methodically back and forth across the pavement, taking shot after shot and sinking most of them. The kid focused so much on his shooting that it was as if he didn’t notice the rain, and apparently he had the same attitude toward the quarantine. People in Jericho Falls weren’t confined to their homes. The older folks would likely be at the supermarket, stockpiling in fear, not knowing how long the quarantine might last. She figured most of the younger residents were going out of their minds. No cell service, no texting, no Wi-Fi. It had all been cut off on purpose. The teenagers in town wouldn’t have thought about landlines, but those had also been jammed.
“Quarantine,” she muttered to herself.
This wasn’t any quarantine Rue had ever heard of. She couldn’t call her boss, couldn’t call the governor’s office to complain, couldn’t see what people might be saying on social media. Anyone who wanted news would have to head to the town hall or the police station and find someone willing to talk. Rue had already made that trip once. The police station had been virtually abandoned aside from Len Kaminski’s aunt Carole, who always worked the front desk, and a young cop named Burlingame. The moment she saw that, Rue knew she had wasted the trip. Aunt Carole and Officer Burlingame proved capable of only two responses—“I don’t know” and “We’ll ask the chief when he’s back”—neither of which helped in any way.
The only place she could think of where she might actually get some answers was Garland Mountain Labs, and she wasn’t quite ready to make the trip over there again. With communications in town virtually silenced, all her nascent little paranoias had grown to full size. The world had already seen the video clip, so what were they trying to hide? If they weren’t trying to cover up the event itself, the moment Project: Red Hands got out of control, then why didn’t they want the locals talking to each other or to anyone else? Could it really all be about Maeve? Were they that worried that someone would hear from her or try to help her?
Or did they expect worse things to happen in Jericho Falls? Things they didn’t want the rest of the world to see?
The thought chilled her, settled deep into her bones. Rue watched the kid down the street shooting baskets and knew that whatever happened, she could not be like him, could not pretend the rain wasn’t falling, that they weren’t cut off, virtual prisoners of the devious pricks at Garland Mountain.
Something moved outside the window. Rue craned her neck to look sidelong across the front yard and saw a fat wild turkey ambling across the lawn. Another followed, and then a third. The little parade moved with an odd dignity as they crossed to the opposite side of the street and cut between houses before vanishing into the garden behind an old federal colonial. Growing up here, Rue had seen all sorts of animals in the wild, but turkeys had always been a particular fascination to her. They were contentious, inexplicably awkward birds. As a girl, it had occurred to her that she had never seen a turkey fly, and she wondered how they avoided predators if they couldn’t get into the air. She wondered if perhaps they managed to fly high enough to get into the trees, and it thrilled her when she learned she had guessed it precisely. They were silly-looking creatures, but she admired their resilience and their sense of self-preservation. Life, it seemed, was all about self-preservation.
Rue went back to the sofa and picked up the notebook she’d been scrawling in for an hour. She had been at the parade, heard the crump of impact when Oscar Hecht had driven his BMW into the crowd. Spectators had fallen, broken and bleeding, some of them dead. And then Hecht had climbed out of the car, and the horror had only grown worse. Rue had been turning it over in her head, trying to see it from a new angle. Before someone had started jamming the internet, she had watched grainy footage of the crash and aftermath over and over, focused not on the car or the victims Hecht had struck but on the people he touched. The way they died.
Too fast.
Thirty or forty seconds from contact to death, that had been all it had taken. She visualized the contagion taking place, the virus or bacteria passed from one person to another. Bacteria seemed more likely to her, but she didn’t want to assume anything yet. She had scrawled dozens of mathematical calculations in her notebook, jotting notes in the slanted script she had learned by copying her grandmother and which looked hopel
essly old-fashioned on the page. One word stood out amid all the others—stood out because it had been circled a dozen times and underlined twice.
Accelerant.
Many scientists Rue knew were rigid in their belief that established science remained immutable, that the areas of existence still to be explained were open to discussion but that facts were simply facts. For instance, no contagion on earth could infect a host in mere seconds. The word for such a thing was impossible.
Rue had never liked that word. She tended not to think in terms of what might be possible or impossible but what was demonstrable. The world had seen video of a disease not only transferrable by contact but instantly fatal. Some of the comments online had suggested poison, and Rue had a whole list in her notebook, along with explanations for why she had crossed each one out. Poisons like arsenic and tetrodotoxin would take hours to kill someone who ingested them, longer if absorbed through the skin. Something like polonium would take days. Cyanide would do the job much more quickly, but still, the absorption rate would come into play. Consuming a liquid or inhaling a gas would be different, but nothing like that had happened at the parade.
Logic didn’t support poison as the answer. If somehow Hecht had been immune but infused with some kind of poison developed at Garland Mountain Labs, how had he passed that same condition to Maeve Sinclair? Bacteria seemed only slightly more logical.
Naturally immune? Rue had scribbled in her notebook. Carrier?
Desperate for some explanation, this one seemed to come closest. Garland Mountain had bioengineered some kind of killer bacterium that could be transferred in seconds, by touch alone, and Oscar Hecht had been immune, a carrier. In Maeve Sinclair, he had found another like him. The fact that she’d touched him while he was dying was sheer coincidence; Maeve would have been infected either way.
Red Hands: A Novel Page 12
