Domino Falls

by Steven Barnes

  Terry was eager to know the status of the Blue Beauty, but he didn’t have another mile’s walk in him. He would check on the bus once the scav mission was over.

  Besides, he needed his rest. The scavs were leaving for San Francisco before daylight, and he and Piranha still hadn’t worked out a survival plan. What if they found a nest of freaks like the one at the Barracks?

  Kendra had been talking about Devil’s Wake nonstop, trying to soften him up to the idea of maybe taking her, but Terry couldn’t think about that now.

  “Nervous?” Kendra said.

  “Yeah.” He itched to tell her about Piranha, but girls talked to each other.

  “Then don’t go,” Kendra said. “You don’t have to get killed, or bitten, to prove you deserve to live here. You already deserve it, Terry.”

  If his stomach hadn’t felt like lead, he might have kissed her.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m going to look out for Piranha. He’d do the same for me.”

  “Terry, I think there’s something wrong with his eyes.”

  Was it that obvious? Or was Kendra just more perceptive than Sonia? The whole story sat on Terry’s tongue again, ready to spill. But he kept silent.

  Kendra gave a knowing, dark chuckle. “Don’t think it’s not true just because nobody wants to say it. If he can’t see, he’s a danger to you and the whole team. With me and my grandpa Joe, there was just one freak in the store—one guy—and he almost got both of us. Grandpa Joe was hurt and couldn’t get up. It happened”—she snapped her fingers—“just like that.”

  The sound of her snapping fingers evoked the image of a snarling face. And teeth.

  “I know,” Terry said again, weary.

  “You say that now,” Kendra said. “But when I wake up tomorrow, you and Piranha will both be gone. I know that already. So good luck.” She sounded angry, but then she sighed. “Please be careful, Terry. Some of them can talk. They’ll seem like regular people.” He heard her hidden tears.

  He slid his arm around Kendra’s waist, pulling her close. She was as warm as a fever. “We’ll be careful,” he said. He wished he weren’t giving her a reason to be worried tonight. They’d all had enough worry for a while.

  Terry could smell the Motel 6 before they saw it. The motel might have looked like a relic from normal times, except that residents had built carefully tended fires in the empty parking spaces in front of their rooms; some of the bigger ones in sawed-off barrels, where they were cooking and selling strips of grilled meat. Other fires were just big enough for heat and light as people sat outside on lawn chairs before they went to bed, avoiding their dark rooms. There was laughter from one boisterous group on the end, where Terry suspected alcohol was flowing, but most people were quiet, trying not to draw attention to themselves.

  Signs were posted clearly on the wall to tell newbies the hours: the town had electricity between six a.m. and ten a.m., and again from four to eight p.m. They followed the sign to the manager’s office. The man waiting was barely five feet tall, nearly as wide as he was tall, with large ears and a face splotched with razor stubble.

  “We were about to send a search party,” he scolded. “I’m Marv, the housemaster. Nobody gets past probation without the housemaster, so if you’re wondering which ass you kiss, it’s right here. And I like to be back in the room with my wife by seven-thirty.”

  They nodded, apologizing. Marv spoke quickly, without leaving spaces for explanations. He’d only waited to tell them the rules.

  “No fires in the rooms—not even candles. If I see a fire, expect the wrath of God. If your room’s too dark, get a battery lamp. You can buy one on credit in town, or trade some food. Need to cook? Cook in your parking space. Never leave a fire unattended. Clean up your mess. The toilets all work, so leave the woods alone. If your toilet stops working, come tell me. You’re back in the civilized world, so act like it.”

  “Yessir,” Terry said, feeling giddy. He’d hoped he would have a toilet. Last night’s bathroom in quarantine had felt like a luxury vacation.

  “If I catch you stealing, if anyone catches you stealing, you’re bounced. Theft is the number one reason folks hit the road, so bear that in mind when you’re coveting thy neighbor’s stash. Is it really worth it?” He sounded baffled by the stupidity of the thieves he had known. “One lady was a mother with a baby—stealing food. Didn’t matter. She was gone. We let her leave her kid, but she is not welcome back.”

  He waited a moment to let his story sink in, hoping it would make an impact. It was hard to imagine a mother walking away from her own child, but it was harder to imagine a mother taking her kid back outside.

  “That said, sometimes people steal. So lock your doors. Keep your keys. If I have to come open your door for you, it won’t be service with a smile. If you make me replace this key, you’ll be on my bad side. And it’ll cost you. Big. These aren’t the old days, when we could run out to Home Depot.”

  He handed Terry a motel key dangling with a number 5. Terry had expected to be locked up another night. Instead, they had their own key!

  Marv wagged a stubby finger at Kendra. “Sorry, you’ll have to knock. Only two keys per room, and there’s three of you staying there—”

  Kendra blinked, confused. “Three of us?”

  “The three young ladies,” Marv said. “You’re in room eight. I know newbies like to stick close at first.”

  Quickly, Terry did the math. Sonia must not have shared a room with Piranha. He wondered whose idea that had been.

  “Where’s Piranha?” he said.

  “Room five, if you mean the black boy,” Marv said. “You’re bunking together. Seemed like he was having some troubles with his eyes …” He wasn’t hiding the questions in his face. The selection committee at work, Terry thought. He also wondered, vaguely, if there was something significant about the way he’d called Piranha “the black boy,” more than a convenient description. Terry might not have wondered, except for the way Kendra tensed beside him.

  “His eyes are fine,” Terry said, probably too quickly. Too defensively. “He’s one of our best shots.”

  “Better be, if he’s a scav.”

  Apparently, word traveled fast in Threadville.

  “Excuse me … sir?” Kendra said. “Do you know anything about a man named Brownie who wants to see his daughter?”

  Inwardly, Terry groaned. He’d planned to ask other residents, not the housemaster! Marv’s face flattened to utter blankness.

  “Everyone knows Brownie,” Marv said. “But I don’t pry in his family business.”

  He said it like a pastor dedicating a sermon to the evils of gossip. Terry squeezed Kendra’s hand: Let it go. Not the way he’d hoped to make a first impression.

  “He just had a fuss at dinner with Mr. Wales,” Kendra said.

  “I eat here,” he said coolly. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “I’m sure it’s all worked out,” Terry said.

  Terry glanced at Kendra, and her eyes apologized.

  “Oh, I’m sure it has,” Kendra said. “I just wondered.”

  Marv went on with his orientation as if the exchange had been forgotten, but Terry seriously doubted it. Kendra was a hazard.

  Terry stared down at his key. He and Kendra hadn’t talked about sharing a room, but when the housemaster had handed him the key, he’d imagined them in a room together. Maybe in a bed together. Had she thought about it too?

  “It’s ladies’ night,” Kendra said, rubbing his hand. Her touch told him how much she wanted to stay with him too. “You and Piranha have a lot to talk about.”

  Eleven

  Terry opened the door with his key, closed it again. Utter darkness. Piranha was a vague shadowy mass sitting on the far bed. There were two double beds, a desk, and a dresser. This place felt like the Taj Mahal.

  Terry flipped the light switch, right before he remembered the electricity rations. No more electricity until six in the morning. He flipped it again to be
sure.

  “Dang. It is dark in here,” Terry said.

  “We start burning candles at ten,” Piranha said. “There’s some in my pack.” Piranha had everything mapped out already. “Where were you?”

  “We found a radio at the gas station. Kendra wanted to call Devil’s Wake.”

  “What for?”

  “She’s got a great-aunt or something there.” Kendra hadn’t sworn him to secrecy, but it felt disloyal to reveal so much. What was a great-aunt, anyway? Like second and third cousins, the distinctions confused him. Was it your grandparents’ sister?

  “And?” Piranha said. More like so what.

  “She lost her whole family right in front of her,” Terry said.

  Piranha didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. They had all lost everyone. At least Kendra knew if they were dead or alive.

  “She just … wants to feel like something’s left,” Terry said.

  “Yeah, me too,” Piranha said sarcastically. “So let’s drive back up to Seattle so I can pop in on my stepdad and say hey.”

  Terry never wanted to see a road again. “Maybe one day,” he said.

  “The Siskiyou guys almost got us at the pass.”

  Terry sighed. Piranha was right, but he had forgotten one thing: there was no one left to look out for Lisa. No one except him.

  “It’s an island,” Terry said. He hadn’t realized how much he’d thought it through. “It’s not that far from L.A., and there’s refugees applying from everywhere. She might be there. Or she might go there. She wouldn’t come this far north.”

  For the first time, he stared at the truth: he hadn’t found Lisa in Threadville. It hadn’t really been reasonable even to hope, but there you were.

  “I’m not leaving here till I have a real good reason to,” Piranha said.

  “Nobody’s said anything about leaving.”

  “Yet,” Piranha said, knowing.

  “Anyone leaves, we’ll divide up our stuff—everyone gets a share.”

  “I didn’t ask about the shares,” Piranha said. “Just don’t want you to wonder one day, ‘Why didn’t anybody try to stop me?’ ”

  Terry was tired of talking about it. “How bad are your eyes?”

  Piranha breathed harder, not answering at first. “Pretty bad. This is my last pair of contacts. I’m screwed.”

  “What about the guy with the box of glasses?” Terry said.

  Piranha shook his head. “My prescription’s too strong. I’ve got two choices: I find some contacts soon, or I’m about to be blind.”

  Marv had already noticed Piranha’s eyes. Marv was watching them. Piranha might have to leave Threadville whether he wanted to or not.

  “What do we do tomorrow?” Terry said.

  “We stick together,” Piranha said. “I can still see enough to shoot freaks.”

  “Make sure it’s only freaks you shoot,” Terry said.

  If Piranha was too quick to fire, he might hit someone in their crew; if he hesitated, he might get someone killed. Tomorrow sounded like a train wreck.

  “Remember that cop up in Seattle?” Terry said.

  “I’m blind, numbnuts. Not retarded. Of course I do.”

  “Right,” Terry said. “He kept grabbing and biting people. Remember? And some of them can talk. They might seem like regular people …”

  Ursalina had claimed the bed closest to the bathroom, lying in it dead center, so Kendra was left to share the bed with Sonia. The soldier had brought a thigh-leg chicken combo to perfume their room with fried grease, gnawing under her covers.

  Sometime during the day Sonia had acquired a battery-operated compact. She rested the mirror on the bare desk, staring at her ghostly glow. She looked like she was primping to go out for the night, although she was only wearing a long T-shirt, legs bare.

  “Terry and Piranha shouldn’t go to the city,” Kendra said.

  “The freaks need to worry, not you,” Ursalina said. “Piranha told me their plan; it sounds tight. These guys are pros, like I said. They’re in, they’re out.”

  Sonia only flipped her hair in the mirror, testing a new style, pushing strands behind her ears. Kendra wanted to ask why Sonia and Piranha weren’t in a room together, but that wasn’t a matter of life or death.

  “What’s wrong with Piranha’s eyes?” Kendra asked Sonia instead.

  “There’s nothing wrong with his eyes,” Sonia said. “He needs some saline solution. Every drugstore had it.”

  Emphasis on past tense, Kendra thought.

  Ursalina spoke up. “Could he see well enough to spot a freak behind him?”

  “Can we not be scared for one night?” Sonia said in a high, thin voice, glancing at them before she went back to the mirror. “Is that too much to ask? Last I checked, Terry didn’t need a babysitter either.”

  “They’ll be fine,” Ursalina said. “The scavs have a good plan.”

  A sound of laughter came through the wall. Men’s laughter. And a woman.

  Kendra recognized Darius’s laugh. The Twins. Of course. Jackie was probably in their room with them.

  “The locals are friendly,” Ursalina said.

  “Treating them like Wild Bill Hickok and Wyatt Earp,” Sonia said. “Little kids asking for their autograph! Hell, I could’ve shot those cans down.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ursalina murmured. “They shot more than cans today. Besides, you were getting the star treatment yourself, chica …”

  Sonia giggled—the first time Kendra had heard such a girlish sound from her—and Kendra suddenly understood that Sonia was preening in the mirror because she was still starstruck by Josey Wales. Now that Kendra wasn’t in a room with him, she didn’t see the appeal. He seemed like an aging TV star trolling for groupies.

  “You’re going to his house?” Kendra said.

  “First chance I get,” she said. “You should come too. Both of you.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Ursalina said, like they were planning for prom night.

  Kendra realized she probably would go too, if she had the chance. And she would try to dress up and look nice. She didn’t like knowing that, but she had no doubt.

  “Did you hear anything else about that guy’s missing daughter?” Kendra said.

  “His daughter isn’t missing,” Sonia corrected her. “She’s an adult who doesn’t want to talk to him. There’s a big difference.”

  “How do we know if she doesn’t want to talk to him … or they won’t let her?” Kendra said.

  Ursalina flipped her chicken bones into the trash can beside her bed. “I heard family drama, kid. Why are you looking for reasons not to like it here? You’ve got hot meals, running water, electricity, and nobody’s grabbed you in an alley. Take it from me: when you’ve got a bunker, you hunker.”

  “No candles,” Sonia said, in schoolmarm mode. “Rules are rules. Agreed?”

  “Yeah,” Ursalina agreed. “We’ll grab some flashlights off the bus tomorrow. Maybe I better work the fences instead of day care. They like shooters. Makes sense …”

  Kendra was surprised that Ursalina wasn’t more cynical, but then again, the soldier knew more about what was waiting outside. Their only mission was to get on the fast track to Threadville citizenship.

  Kendra wanted to tell them about her conversation with Aunt Stella in Devil’s Wake and how they might be able to get in, but then they would spend the rest of the night trying to tell her to forget Devil’s Wake. Even Terry wouldn’t understand, if not for his sister in L.A.

  But the more Kendra saw of Threadville, the less she wanted to stay.

  Despite a sinfully comfortable mattress, Kendra could hardly sleep. When she dozed, she snapped awake with a sensation that felt like falling off the edge of the world.

  Kendra woke, looking quickly around the dark room to see what might have wrested her from slumber. She heard something from the other bed and sat up. Ursalina was tossing and turning. She thought about waking her in case her new friend was reli
ving her visit to the gas station with Mickey and Sharlene.

  Then the door rattled.

  Kendra gave a start, hoping she’d imagined it. The door rattled again, more urgently. Not a rattle from the wind—a persistent shaking, someone trying to get in.

  “Terry?” she said. A wild hope. He was coming in the middle of the night to tell her he’d changed his mind about scavenging.

  But it wasn’t Terry.

  The door burst in with a crash, wood cracking like toothpicks. The windows broke next, bam bam bam. Three in a row.

  At first she’d thought it might be Marv, or Gold Shirts, checking on them. But a sudden din of low growling and snuffing and a rotten fruit smell told her it was worse than bad manners. Something had gone badly wrong. Freaks! No time to wonder how, or who, had failed. All that mattered was what would happen next.

  They were penned in, and the door and windows hadn’t held. The door fell into the room as if it were riding a powerful wind. Hot, putrid air washed Kendra’s face. Slivers of red threads floated everywhere.

  Kendra imagined herself vaulting out of bed, rolling to the floor … but she was shocked to discover she was still in bed clutching her bedsheet. She was tired of running, and she’d run out of places to go.

  Hands grasped through the broken windows. Endless shadows played in the darkness. Where was Ursalina’s gun?

  “Ursalina—wake up,” she said, and tried to climb out of bed. Vines strangled her arms and legs, rooting her to the bed.

  The first freak to reach the beds looked like Wales. He moved with impossible speed. A runner!

  Wales ripped at her sheet, yanking the fabric from her frozen hands.

  Kendra sat up in bed, shrouded in darkness. She was sopping with sweat as she gasped for air. A thin oily sheen pasted her hair to her forehead. Ursalina and Sonia snored softly. A dog barked outside, then hushed when someone whistled. The sound of her breathing filled the room.

  Just a dream. Just a dream.