“Oak Tree?”
“Okay. I’ve got you, thirteen,” she said. “How bad is the injury?”
“I’ll do what I can, but tell them not to stop for red lights.”
There were no red lights, of course. An evac team would be sent up, either on a chopper or some kind of ATV. In this weather, he guessed the latter.
“Half an hour or more,” she warned.
Leon looked at Cheng, already figuring out how he could pad the wound, but the question of whether she had another half hour came down to how badly she was bleeding. There would be nowhere to tie a tourniquet, so it all came down to applying pressure to the wound.
“We’ll hold on,” he said, not at all sure Cheng would.
That was it. Evac was on its way. He ended the call, unzipped a pocket, and pulled out a small med kit. Cheng bared her teeth as he shifted her body, working the Kevlar body armor off, but he needed access to the injury. When she cussed him out by name, he felt a flicker of hope, though she didn’t open her eyes to do it. With a small pair of surgical scissors, he cut away the blood-soaked fabric around her shoulder and pulled it back to look at the entry wound. Cheng continued to bleed, but while the flow seemed steady, it wasn’t a gusher. No spurting blood, no massive pool beneath her. In either case, she’d have died before the evac team arrived.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “We got this.”
No exit wound, though, which presented a small problem. If there had been, he could have glued the bullet hole to stop the bleeding until a surgeon could get in there and do it right. But with the bullet still lodged in there, he didn’t want to risk it. They had been taught to do some field dressing of wounds, but he had only halfway paid attention. He wanted to bash his skull against a tree for being so thoughtless. Instead, he racked his brain to remember what he could. Pressure was the key.
“Don’t move around,” he told Cheng. “The bullet’s still in there. You don’t want to make it worse, cause more bleeding.”
Her eyes opened partway, and he could see the disdain in them. Leon managed a smile. Of course, Cheng knew as much about this as he did, probably much more. Viv Cheng would have paid way more attention when they were teaching field triage and all that shit. Right then, she was probably thinking he should have been the one to get shot—at least she would do a better job of patching him up.
“Sorry, partner. I’m all you’ve got,” he told her. “We’ll both be happier when—”
Leon heard an engine. He blinked in surprise and glanced around. The sound came from over his left shoulder, directly from the southern approach to the mountain. Relief flooded through him, but it only lasted a moment. No way could an evac team have gotten to them so quickly. It had been just a few minutes since he’d called for help. And now that he listened more closely to the rumbling engine, he knew it didn’t belong on any ATV. This was something else, small enough to maneuver along some of the wider hiking trails but too big to come up through the trees to reach them.
“Who … the hell is that?” Cheng managed to ask.
Leon didn’t hesitate. He knew he didn’t have time for anything but movement. He used the knife to strip off the sleeve he’d already cut through on Cheng’s shirt. Ripping open a packet of gauze, he pressed it to the wound. Blood soaked through instantly, and Cheng snarled in pain.
“I’ve gotta go, Viv. You know I do,” he said. He folded up the sleeve he’d torn off and pressed it to the wound under her armpit. “Don’t try using your free hand to hold this on. Just keep your arm clamped down. That should put enough pressure to stem the blood flow. You need to stay alive for maybe twenty minutes. Don’t fuck it up.”
He said the words with a gallows humor, but neither of them smiled.
“Someone else is after her,” Cheng managed, her voice thin and reedy.
“We knew it would happen.” Leon’s job had just changed. There were plenty of Blackcoats up on the mountain searching for Maeve Sinclair. But the engine he’d just heard belonged to someone else. Russians, Saudis, maybe some cartel hit squad. Who the fuck knew? The important thing was that he had his orders. Whatever it cost, he absolutely could not let an outsider get to the target first.
He took Cheng’s comm unit out of his ear. Tapped it to make sure the GPS locator was working. Tucked it into her hand. Whatever happened to him, the evac team would be able to find her.
“Cheng, listen—” he started to say.
Her eyelids fluttered and he thought she might have gone dark again, but she exhaled loudly, almost a sigh. “What the hell are you … waiting for?”
She held her bare arm close to her body, as tightly as she could. Leon stood. For a second or two, he watched the rain fall on her face and wondered how long before she passed out again and how much blood she had already lost.
Then he started running, following the Jeep’s engine.
* * *
Rue drove through Jericho Falls as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on. Several people walked their dogs on rainswept sidewalks. There were a few other cars on the road, all of them with headlights on to cut through the gloom of the stormy afternoon. But this wasn’t the Jericho Falls that Rue had known her whole life. An orange neon Open sign glowed in the front window of Al Forno Pizza, but only because someone had neglected to turn it off while abandoning the shop. Barrio Taqueria and the Red Hen Market had their lights on, and there were people inside—quite a few people, actually—but nearly everything else had closed down.
The icy knot in her chest seemed to get heavier, like a cannonball inside her, weighing her down. As dreamlike as the scene around them had become, she felt its reality, and that made it worse. A metallic taste in her mouth troubled her, and she thought she might be sick.
Is this shock?
It occurred to her that the things she felt might not be shock but instead the fading of shock. The morning had been the worst minutes of her life. The BMW, the screams, people dying in the street, Ted losing his son and ex-wife, Maeve running off after what had happened to her.
Poor Ted, she thought numbly. She had seen her best friend hit by a car that morning, and now it didn’t even make the list of the top traumatizing things she had witnessed. The hits kept coming.
At least she might be able to do something to help. She could try, anyway. Better than hiding like everyone else. Better than staying home and hibernating or getting drunk like …
Rue shuddered. The thought that had bubbled up—better than staying home and getting drunk like Ted—made her feel horribly guilty, and yet she couldn’t shake her disappointment in him. She loved him and she understood him, but she had spent her whole life hoping he would be better.
She took a left at the Speedway. It was hard to tell in the rain, but the gas station was open. The place had a run-down look that verged on postapocalyptic. Faded sign, old pumps, and a little market that looked more like a seedy liquor store. She was out on the southern edge of town. Another mile or so and she’d reach whatever roadblock had been set up.
Instead, she took a left on Pumpkin Patch Lane. A charming name for an old farm road. Up ahead, the lighted sign of the Candlelight Inn gleamed. When Rue had called the SRC, she had spoken to a youngish-sounding man named David, who had sounded more than a little surprised that Walker had enlisted her help. The next thing he’d said still echoed in her thoughts.
“That’s Walker, though,” David had told her. “Always improvising.”
Rue hadn’t liked the way he’d said it, but her misgivings hadn’t changed her mind about helping. If anything, it had made her more determined. It certainly seemed as if Walker had been sent to do a job and not given the backup and the tools to do anything more than improvise, even if his employers scoffed at his history of improvisation.
David had put in a call to Kat Isenberg and then called Rue back to say the woman had agreed to meet her.
“How can I be sure she’s not setting me up?” Rue had asked. “Or that the people at Garland Mountain w
eren’t listening in? I mean, I could be in real danger, right? Just showing up at this meeting?”
“Absolutely,” David had agreed. “Nobody’s forcing you, Dr. Crooker. Whatever you might learn, it won’t help Walker find Maeve Sinclair.”
“But it might help keep her alive if Walker does bring her down off the mountain.”
“It might.”
Rue pulled into the parking lot of the Candlelight Inn. Kat Isenberg had told David it would be open, and she was right. If not for the rain, Rue felt sure there would have been at least half a dozen motorcycles in the parking lot. The Candlelight did not draw tourist trade. Once upon a time it had been an actual inn with rooms for travelers, but those days were half a century gone. Instead, it was a combination bar and restaurant, a place with the greatest buffalo wings Rue had ever eaten and an array of artisan calzones that made her stomach rumble, even today. No pizza, just calzones.
The Candlelight needed a paint job and had two cracked windows in front. Even on a gorgeous sunny day, it would have been forbidding—hell, it looked halfway haunted—but today, in the late-afternoon rain, it looked like the last place anyone who didn’t know it well would want to enter. Scientists from out of town, for instance.
Rue hurried through the rain between a pair of Ford pickups that looked like the before-and-after shots in a marketing campaign. She could smell the rust on the older one as she passed.
As she pushed through the door, the jukebox was blasting an old Black Crowes song. Bikers crowded the bar area, laughing and drinking in a way that made her think of long-dead Viking warriors in Valhalla, especially on a day when these guys had left their motorcycles at home. A popcorn maker crackled in the corner of the bar, the smell of oil and butter and stale beer filling the place as Rue walked into the restaurant portion of the inn. About half the booths and tables were taken, a fair accomplishment on an afternoon like this. People were having an early dinner, some of them families, others groups of friends with frightened eyes, everyone trying to figure out what would happen next.
At the back, near the restrooms, a heavyset fortyish woman sat in a shadowed booth. She wore a red raincoat still dappled with droplets, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked skittish, glancing around nervously, her back to the wall like Michael Corleone, wanting to see anyone who approached her.
Rue slid into the booth across from her. “Ben Walker told me you might be a decent human being.”
Isenberg rolled her eyes. “That sounds like Walker.”
It seemed to break the ice, but only a little. The woman’s gaze flickered over Rue’s tattoos, the shaved part of her scalp, and then she met Rue’s gaze with a new curiosity.
“Who are you, really? I don’t have time for games.”
“Dr. Isenberg, we need your help,” Rue said. “You know this isn’t a game.”
The woman paled. She glanced around the room again, her expression desperate. For the first time, Rue realized that Kat Isenberg wasn’t just being secretive.
She was terrified.
* * *
Maeve felt like a passenger in her own body. Distant thunder boomed, and her insides trembled with the noise. Her eyes could still see, she could smell the rain and the sodden earth, but to her it seemed as if she existed now in the back room of the house in her head. Like she had been locked in the kitchen while someone else took over the front room, filled up the foyer, waited with the front door flung wide. Waiting for someone to arrive.
Someone had.
“Maeve, listen to me,” the man said, one hand out like some kind of referee. In his other hand, he held a gun by his side, like he’d forgotten it was there. But he hadn’t forgotten; she could tell by the way he held himself, relaxed but also ready, like a bullwhip about to be snapped.
“My name is Ben Walker. I want to help you. The longer you stay out here in the open, the more danger you’re—”
She lunged for him.
Not that she wanted to. Maeve Sinclair existed in the back of the house, locked in the kitchen at the back of her mind. The person whose presence filled the front of the house in her head … that was who lunged. The hunger, she thought. As if the hunger might be a person, a sentient, thinking being.
“Maeve!” he snapped.
The man. Walker.
The hunger turned toward him. Maeve stumbled after him through the rain and the tall grass. The sky hung so low and dark that it might as well have been winter instead of midsummer.
Her hands reached for him again. Maeve saw something in his eyes that made her blink and hesitate. She felt the hunger in her gut and heart and at the base of her skull, but the urgent kindness in his gaze made her want to fight it.
“I’m sick,” she told him. A cough erupted from her throat. It staggered her, made her pause. Walker flinched, took half a step back.
He raised his gun, kept his gaze on her hands. “I want to help you,” he said again, “but if you come after me again, I’m going to shoot you in the leg. If you keep coming, I’ll shoot the other leg. I don’t want to, but you’ve gotta keep your hands to yourself so I can get you out of here.”
Maeve lowered her head, wavering on her feet. She took a choking breath and stepped forward. The hunger clawed at her insides, whispered in her head, but she fought against it. She had fed already, but the gnawing wouldn’t abate for long.
Another step. She reached out.
The gunshot kicked up a muddy clod of dirt by her feet.
She braced herself, ready to jump at him. Her gaze locked on his. Those kind eyes had gone cold, and the part of her that was still just Maeve felt glad. It’d be easier to take him without that kindness she had seen in him.
The rain grew oddly loud, as if the rest of the world’s noise had vanished. Maeve licked her lips, could practically feel the life that would flow into her when her fingers touched Walker. The gun worried her very little. Would a bullet kill her? She supposed it might, but the hunger understood nothing of fear.
Enveloped in the gentle shush of the rain, she smiled.
Walker wiped rain from his eyes.
Maeve took the moment, bent her knees—
Voices cried out in the rain. Shattered the gentle quiet.
She stumbled, hearing her name, hearing the anguish in those voices.
Walker scrambled backward a few steps, gun hand sweeping in an arc, just in case he needed to shoot someone else.
Maeve saw two shadows hurrying toward her through the rain. One clutched at her shoulder, moving slower than the other. The hunger flickered inside her, a little tremor of excitement.
Then she recognized them. Priya. Rose.
A smile touched Maeve’s lips. Her little sister had come for her, despite what she had done. The beautiful pain of the moment made her want to cry.
But the hunger came first.
Maeve turned toward her sister and reached out her hands.
17
When Rose saw Maeve fighting in that clearing, alive and sopping wet, smeared with mud, her legs went weak with love and gratitude.
Her sister. Alive.
The current running through her all day had been loss and loneliness. Rose loved Priya, but she needed her big sister to love her and tell her everything would be all right. That they could grieve together and life would go on.
Relief overcame caution. Rose shouted her sister’s name and ran toward her, but when Maeve glanced over, something about the look on her face made Rose falter. Her eyes had a glint of red, and her hands …
Her hands.
Rose slipped in the mud, stumbled several paces in reverse. The woman in front of her no longer had the face of the girl Rose had sometimes hated and always loved, sometimes looked up to and always envied. Logan and Mom were dead, her dad was a drunk, and now Maeve … she didn’t even know the person looking back at her with her sister’s eyes. The person who reached out for her now with killing hands …
Maeve’s palms were open, fingers slightly crooked as she reached
out. All the sadness spilled out of Rose in just a few words.
“Maeve, no. It’s me. Please…”
* * *
A rock struck Maeve in the chest, big enough and with enough force to make her grunt and halt her approach. In the tall grass, in the rain, she shifted her gaze away from Rose—and a second stone caught her in the mouth.
Maeve shouted in pain, her eyes ablaze with it, and she shook her head. When she glanced up at Rose and Priya again, her focus seemed to clear. Her eyes saw them, knew them, as if Maeve had been gone from her own soul and now had come home.
“What the fuck?” Maeve groaned, blood on her lips and chin. Her hands went up to cover her mouth. “I think you broke my teeth!”
Priya looked pale, held her wounded arm against her body, but she had a third rock in her good hand, ready to attack again.
She advanced on Maeve, pointed a finger. “You look at me right now, bitch, and tell me you’ve got your head on straight. You were in some kinda fucking trance there, and I need to know you’re out of it. You try to touch Rose again, and I swear to God I’ll—”
Priya cut herself off mid-sentence, as if she’d been the one hit with a rock. Rose saw her head turn, and she followed her gaze. The stranger strode toward them in the rain, the grass shushing as he waded through it. The gun in his right hand seemed to have turned darker.
The stranger was tall and broad-shouldered. He looked rugged, like he’d done his share of work outside, and his dark hair needed cutting. He stopped a dozen feet away, watching as Maeve spit out a broken tooth and a mouthful of blood.
“You all right?” he asked her.
Maeve glanced at him in disgust. “Just fucking peachy.”
“I meant are you going to try to kill anyone?”
Maeve winced, gingerly touching her lips. She looked at Rose with fear in her eyes. “Whatever it is … it’s passed for now.” She turned to the stranger. “But keep that gun handy.”
“Hang on,” Rose said, moving toward them.
Red Hands: A Novel Page 17
