“We have nothing to worry about,” he’d said. He picked up a satellite phone, smeared with blood, and held it up to him. “It took some time for the structure to collapse after I left, but the last intel I received after Fort Myer fell was that the hordes were evacuating. Brigadier General Mathis reported massive waves of them crossing the state line into North Carolina in mid-December. It’s been quiet around here ever since. Save for a few stragglers, I would gather they’ve gone south to wait out the winter or died off. Either way, we won’t see them again.”
He never explained his reasons for thinking this, and Horace didn’t trust him, yet he couldn’t deny that things had been stagnant for some time. In fact, the last he’d seen of the infected were those that Corky and Doug rescued him from. And no one in their little group had fallen ill, either, which flew in the face of the affliction’s previous, deadly vitality. Wrathchild seemed to have vanished along with its victims, like the world’s deadliest flash fire. He couldn’t understand why and it made him question his motives for continuing his research. Was he doing it just to make himself feel useful? He didn’t think so. There was always the possibility the virus could return at any moment, without warning.
Hopefully, if that were that to happen, they would be ready for it. Despite the words of that weasel Steinberg, he had to keep going. It was imperative.
A fit of coughing overtook him and he doubled over. He dug his palm into his cane for support. He could feel the cancer, that greedy consumer of life, spreading. In his dreams he saw it trickle into his stomach, pancreas, and throat, turning his insides into a grizzled knot of blackened tissue. He awoke from those dreams hacking and wheezing, with nothing but a bottle of aspirin to dull the pain. The fits were a curse that made it hurt to simply be, but the possibility of dying petrified him. His fear at the thought of his own demise struck him as paradoxical. In the days before the fall he would spend his time relaxing at his home in Cambridge, sucking down Oxyconton while he awaited his next treatment, welcoming the release from pain that death would bring. Now, with death all around him, he wished to be granted the ability to go on.
When the convulsions in his chest subsided he sighed, knelt down, and went about picking up the objects he’d knocked from the desk. He gently placed the jars on the desk, folded the notebook, and slid it into his back pocket. Then he picked up a plastic bag from his workstation and held it in front of his eyes. Inside was the small hunk of flesh he’d removed from the necropolis deep in the forest. There was barely anything left of it now. The rest he’d used during his experiments over the last few weeks, experiments he’d learned virtually nothing new from. He swore, sealed the bag, opened the top drawer of the desk, and dropped it in.
Another coughing fit overtook him. His chest burned. He sat down on the bed, snatched the bottle of aspirin from the end table, and waited for it to pass.
Please God, he pleaded as the fit wound down, give me a little more time. Tomorrow. Just let me have tomorrow. That’s all I ask.
iii
Stanley Clark leaned against a light post in the vast courtyard, watching the people around him. The little girl from upstairs jumped around in a circle, hanging on to her mother’s hands as she spun her around. Her father sat on a bench, clapping in time with their twirls. Corky sat beside him, grinning. They looked like one large, happy, screwed-up family.
Stan didn’t buy it. Not for a second. He didn’t trust Steinberg. His eyes were shifty, his manner too confident. According to Stan’s father, that was always a recipe for disaster. Besides, he remembered how the guy looked the first moment he set eyes on him, with pallid skin covered with bruises and sunken eyes full of madness. There was no way he could go from violent troll to all-American dad overnight.
His distrust of Tom Steinberg was all well and good on its own, but the added fact that his friends seemed to accept him as if nothing had ever been wrong created a cocktail of fury inside him that threatened to blow fire from his ears. They hadn’t seen what the man had done! They hadn’t seen his face or the look in his eyes when he reared back with that shovel, blade edge forward, ready to split open Corky’s scalp. But Stan had. He was the first on the scene. He was the one who stopped the crazy fucker from killing their friend. So why didn’t the rest of them believe him?
“Just let it go,” Dennis told him. He couldn’t. There was no way. He’d sworn to protect his new family, much like he promised to protect Kirsten. In his mind he failed his wife because he lost focus, and he’d be damned if he let that happen again. So ever since that first night he spent his days mirroring the Steinberg family’s movements. Wherever they went, he went. Whoever they talked to, he talked to. It didn’t matter that Corky had developed a strong bond with their daughter or that Tom seemed to submit to them as a part of his everyday existence. Stan felt sure it was a ruse and knew one day soon the bastard would show his hand. When he did Stan would be right there, ready to defend his brothers.
Shelly slipped out of her mother’s hands. She careened through the air and fell, face-first, onto the snow-dappled grass. She started crying. Corky sprang from his seat and ran up to her, lifting her in his huge arms. Stan eyed Tom, who watched the scene like an impartial observer. He didn’t move a muscle, even when his wife started yelling for someone to get a band-aid. Stanley glared at the unmoving father. Tom looked up. The man stared at him – through him – and then an odd smirk stretched across one corner of his mouth. It was an unsettling expression, but not as unsettling as the wink that came next. Stan’s heart raced. He swore one of his eyes glowed. There was an air of cruelty hovering about him. Stan blinked, and when his vision came back into focus Tom was out of his seat and heading for his daughter. The aura had disappeared. Stan shook his head. You just imagined it, he thought, but he couldn’t make himself believe that to be true.
With a huff he stormed away from the scene.
* * *
Tom watched the guy with the thinning hair and glasses as he stomped out of the courtyard. Allison was busy tending to the cut on Shelly’s wrist. His daughter bawled and reached out for him. He ignored her at first, his gaze still intent on the departing man, but soon he felt eyes upon him. Wake up, Thomas, the familiar voice of his conscience berated. He snapped out of it only to see Corky, the huge redhead, staring at him as if he’d been a pickpocket.
“What’s up, dude?” Corky asked.
Tom shook his head, then his whole body. “I’m sorry, Charles,” he replied. “I haven’t been sleeping well. I think I’m just a little out of it.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” the large man said. “Little Shelly here’s the one crying.”
“Right.”
Allison nodded to him. “Get some bandages, honey,” she said.
He walked away from his crying daughter and doting wife, happy to be free from their uneasy glances – not to mention Corky’s seemingly knowing stare.
He is not the one you must worry about, his conscience said.
He didn’t argue. He knew it was true.
When he reached the rear door he glanced behind him, saw that Allison and Corky were busy trying to make his daughter laugh, and then slipped around the side of the building instead of going inside. He kept to the manicured bushes, staying out of sight. The man with the glasses (Stanley, his name is Stanley) walked ahead of him, oblivious, kicking at the snow and muttering incoherently.
It is time to show him what you can do, his conscience ordered. Tom frowned. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the guy, this Stanley. He seemed amicable enough. But Stanley didn’t trust Tom, Stanley could see into his soul, and Tom’s conscience would have none of that. The weight of what this meant bore down on him and he tried to fight it. He couldn’t. The influence was too strong, too appealing. He had no choice but to obey.
When Stan leaned against the outer wall and tilted his head toward the sky Tom closed his eyes. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. As it turned out he didn’t need to. After a few seconds of worry his m
ind went blank and his conscience took over.
* * *
Stan paced the outer ridge of the complex, following the huge wall that surrounded the hotel, breathing in deeply, trying to get his sprinting heart to slow down. Eventually the clean, crisp mountain air did its job and he was able to compose himself. He shook the bad thoughts from his mind and leaned against the wall.
The temperature was more comfortable than it’d been for months. After so long cooped up, relying on the fireplace and a small kerosene heater for warmth, it almost seemed like shorts-and-tee-shirt weather. He breathed in deep once more, and underneath the biting cold he swore he detected a hint of spring.
Lightness filled him for the first time in months. With a huge smile on his face he kicked himself off the wall, walked to the side yard, wrapped his arm around the crabapple tree that grew there, and swung around it, just like Shelly had with her mother. The world spun, causing every color and shape to blend into a single, ever-changing blur. White became blue, blue became green, and green turned back into white. He laughed hysterically. His breathing grew labored, his chest erupted in pain, and he tried to stop it all – the joy, the spinning, the laughter – but couldn’t. It felt as if he was trapped in a terrifying whirlwind of joy.
Suddenly the flashing colors melded into a bright shade of reddish brown. His legs buckled and his hand slipped off the tree trunk. He fell and rolled across the hard, packed ground. His hands scraped against rough, sandpaper-like dirt. It was a sensation he’d felt often, when tending to his cactus garden back home in New Mexico.
Stan loved the desert. When he was a child his parents would take him from Carlsbad to Arizona for family vacations. He would stay plastered to the car windows during those trips, fascinated at how the cracked clay peppering the landscape looked more alive than the brown grasses swaying in the valleys. He couldn’t enough of it. That’s why he relocated to Santa Fe after meeting Kirsten. She’d wanted to move back home to Maine to be closer to her folks, but he steadfastly refused, for Stan Clark was a man who defined the world by color. To him Mainers represented contrasting hues of black, white, and gray, while his own soul radiated burnt mahogany.
He looked up. Confusion reigned in his mind. There was no snow on the ground, only red clay and dunes as far as the eye could see. The air was sharp and piercing, the kind that came from an intense sun that beat down from a cloudless sky. He scooped up a handful of dirt and let it trickle through his fingers. His face scrunched and he leaned back on his knees. This didn’t make sense. What the hell’s happening to me? he thought.
“Hi, honey,” a familiar, feminine voice called from behind him.
Stan leapt to his feet and whirled around. His heart soared in his chest. There she was, heading toward him wearing her standard acid-washed jeans and tied-off blouse. Her tight black curls bounced as she walked and her cocoa skin swallowed the sunlight, giving it a luster only she seemed to possess. She wore a multi-colored Native American scarf around her neck, the same one he’d bought her the previous Christmas. Its tassels bounced from side to side as she walked.
“Kirsten?” he whispered. His voice was nearly inaudible.
She leaned into him and pressed her head against his chest. He smelled the combination of her sweat and the Mizani shampoo in her hair. He tentatively rubbed her back, expecting his hand to pass through her like the apparition she must have been, but it didn’t. Instead his fingers knotted the soft fabric of her blouse and traced the line of her shoulder blade. She sighed.
“Why are you out here?” she asked without lifting her head.
“I…I don’t know,” he replied.
She leaned back and stared into his eyes. Stan took in their oval shape and the green flecks that danced in her brown irises. They were just as he remembered.
“Let’s go back inside,” she said.
He nodded dumbly, allowing her to take his hand and lead him away. They turned around and he saw his house in the distance, white stucco walls, tan shingles, and all. The heat of the day cast a shimmering haze around it, making it seem unreal. He stomped his feet as they approached, trying to get a feel for the ground beneath him. It was solid, it was true – all of it. A wide smile cracked his lips.
“It was a dream,” he said.
“What was, honey?”
“What? Oh, nothing.” He shook his head. “Sorry. I don’t feel like myself right now. I think I passed out in the sun and had a nightmare.”
“What kind of nightmare?”
“The longest one ever.”
“Well, we should get inside and sponge you down. I don’t want you to go and get heatstroke on me.”
She led him up the front porch and into the house. The scent of desert lilacs teased his nose with sweetness. They went into the kitchen and he leaned against the counter while Kirsten wet a facecloth in the sink then pressed it to his cheeks. He could almost feel the steam rising when the water touched him.
Kirsten unbuttoned his shirt and ran the wet cloth over his chest. She ran her tongue over her lips, fluttering her eyelids seductively. He grabbed her around the waist and drew her close.
“I got you,” he said with a smile.
She slithered out of his grasp. “No, you don’t,” she teased. “Where’s the fun in that?’
With that she ran away, bouncing through the kitchen and into the living room, where she disappeared around the corner. Stan laughed and followed quickly after.
“I’m coming to get you, Kirsty,” he sang.
* * *
“So there was this chick,” said Dennis. “Met her in New Orleans back in ’72. She was one’a those hanger-on types. You know the kind…the ones who followed bands around all over the place, sleeping with roadies to get ‘special access’. Well anyway, she saw me play at some little ho-dunk club one night, and she came on to me somethin’ fierce. I was all like, ‘whoa, lassie, slow down,’ and she was like, ‘but c’mon, cowboy, Santana ain’t playin’ tonight and I need some action,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, you like Santana?’ and she was like, ‘Like him? I been on tour with him since Chattanooga. Even let him suck on my titties once…’”
Hector rolled his eyes and let him talk. This was the third time Dennis had told this story in the last week. When the older, silver-haired man reached the punch line he said it along with him. “And that’s how I ended up playing a week’s worth of shows with Santana.” Luis started laughing, which launched Dennis into yet another story.
With the Louisiana drawl flaring in the background Hector let his mind drift. Just as with the prior tale, he already know how the story would play out, because every anecdote Dennis told followed the same pattern: met some chick, had wild sex, met someone famous, gained a great story and perhaps an unwanted ailment. Hector took a sip of brandy, stood up, stretched his arms high above his head, and strolled to the railing. Dennis, still squawking away, didn’t miss a beat.
The three of them were sitting on the wraparound second-level balcony, enjoying the somewhat warmer weather. It was comfortable enough for Hector to venture outside with only a sweater on, which meant it had to be around fifty degrees. He breathed in deep and exhaled. Only a barely visible stream of mist left his mouth. Yup, fifty sounded just about right. After months of below-freezing temperatures it seemed downright balmy.
He let his eyes wander, watching those below do their thing. To his left was the trio of Corky and two of the newbies, Allison Steinberg and her daughter. The little girl was crying a bit, but laughing, too, as Corky made funny faces at her. The father, the one who’d hit Corky with a shovel, was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Horace, Doug, or Larry. They were probably inside playing chess or something.
After taking another deep breath he walked along the balcony in the other direction. Soon he came upon the side garden and there was Stan, spinning around the apple tree in the center of the snow-covered garden at breakneck speed. He looked like he was trying to take flight.
“Yo, Stan!” Hector shouted, cuppi
ng his hands around his mouth.
Stan lost his grip on the tree, stumbled, and fell. He rolled across the ground. Hector called out again but Stan didn’t answer. Instead, he got to his knees and began muttering. Then he fell still and stayed that way too long for Hector’s liking.
“Hey guys,” Hector said.
Dennis stopped mid-story and said, “Huh? What?”
“Come take a look at this. Mira. Now.”
His two friends joined him at the railing. “What’s he doing?” asked Luis.
“Don’t know. STANLEY!” he called out again. When Stan didn’t answer, he said, “I think he hit his head or something.”
“Or he’s just playing around with you,” said Dennis.
Hector shrugged. “Maybe. He’s been acting weird lately, though. Kinda loco, you know?”
“He’s probably just stressed,” Luis said. “I mean, we been doing nothing but waiting. Maybe he’s stir crazy.”
“Maybe.”
Suddenly, Stanley jumped to his feet. He started walking at a brisk pace around the corner of the building. The trio of onlookers mirrored him on the balcony, watching as he stormed across the parking lot and out the front gate. There he paused and yelled something Hector couldn’t quite hear. Then he took off, jumping the curb and heading into the woods.
“Uh, Hec,” said Dennis, “where’s he going?”
Hector frowned. “Don’t know.”
“I think he just lost his shit,” said Luis.
Dennis grabbed him by the wrist. “I think we should go get him,” he said. “Y’know, in case he does something stupid.”
Dead Of Winter (The Rift Book II) Page 26
