Domino Falls

by Steven Barnes

  Ursalina examined Terry’s eyes with her flashlight.

  “You sure you’re good to ride?” she said.

  “I want to see Kendra safe,” Terry said. “All of you. It’s probably the only thing keeping me alive.”

  Ursalina snickered. “Screw that, cowboy—keep us alive,” she said. Unexpectedly, she wrapped her arms around Terry and hugged him tight.

  Kendra clung to Terry’s hand, trying not to notice how cool his skin was; his body temperature was dropping. He had stayed awake all night, but he wasn’t the same. She could see the poison’s work on the lines around his mouth and the hollow pockets under his eyes, already tinged red. Ursalina had missed it, but not her. His face was different.

  “When we get to the plane,” Kendra said, lingering in the bus doorway with him, “what happens after that?”

  Terry shrugged, sighing. “Hard to see that far ahead,” he said, “but Ursalina had a great idea about a six-pack and a gun.”

  Kendra cringed. “So you’d just kill yourself?” she said quietly.

  “Don’t you think I should?”

  Kendra shook her head. “No. Because as sick as Wales is, he discovered the secret, Terry. The freaks we see around us aren’t all there is. There’s a fifth level, after rooters. Remember?”

  “Yeah, we killed it,” Terry said.

  “He said if you go without fear”—Kendra struggled to remember everything Harry had said in Wales’s Collections Room—“you won’t be a monster. They weren’t supposed to be monsters. You can be something else. It just takes time, and … faith.”

  Terry looked unconvinced. Her words sounded small and pathetic, even to her.

  There was nothing left to say.

  They boarded the bus.

  Piranha drove, and an achingly tired Terry was glad to be free of the responsibility. If not for the cloud of gloom hanging over the bus and Hippy’s constant whining from where he was tied in the back, the drive to Devil’s Wake was perfect. Interstate 5, as Myles had been promised, was mostly clear. Once in a while, another vehicle passed going in the other direction, lights flashing, horn honking. Cheerful survivors.

  Corpses were ceremoniously strung from trees and gallows every few miles with not-so-friendly reminders spray-painted on signs: PIRATES WILL BE HUNG. Not exactly law and order yet, Terry thought, but it was a start. Society was rebuilding.

  At least he was luckier than most people who’d been bitten—too many had been wrenched out of their lives in chaos, with no reason to believe that the chaos might end. At least he had lived long enough to see the world fighting back.

  By the time they passed Bakersfield, Terry was so tired that the world resembled one vast heat mirage. But just as before, Kendra always seemed to know. She literally sat with her arms around his neck, nudging and prodding, even pinching, until he felt alert again. He told her to move to her seat, afraid he might doze and bite her, but she always came back just when he needed her. He was having hot and cold spells, his body fighting the infection.

  North of Santa Clarita, a lone female hitchhiker approached who looked just like Lisa, and Terry’s heart jumped. But when he blinked and tried to see her again, she vanished like a heat mirage. Damn—a hallucination!

  “Don’t forget about Lisa,” Terry told Kendra. “Everything I told you.”

  “I won’t. I wrote it all down. I’ll find her. I’ll never give up.”

  Terry had thought about driving the bus into Los Angeles to find Lisa himself, but he fought the temptation. He wouldn’t make it. Or worse, he just might. No way was he going to shamble up to his sister’s doorstep and be the one to kill her.

  No, he had to kill himself first, as soon as the others were gone.

  But what about the other levels of freaks? Terry imagined the creature they had found with Kendra in Wales’s mansion, and shivered. No thanks.

  “How you doing?” Piranha said, standing over him. They were passing the burned and twisted remnants of an amusement park. Magic Mountain, the twenty-story, multicolored totem pole read. Someone had climbed all the way to the top and draped a sheet halfway across the sign reading STILL HERE. Were they? Was anyone? Burned industrial parks, shattered buildings, but cars pushed to the side of the roads. Someone still lived. Someone had cleared the roads.

  Were they being watched, even now?

  “Fine,” Terry said, clipped.

  “Really?” Without warning, Piranha slapped Terry’s face—hard. Terry saw spots and thought his nose might be bleeding. Kendra cried out in protest, but Terry’s vision looked twice as sharp when he blinked. He’d been sleepier than he realized.

  “Thanks, man,” Terry said.

  Piranha grinned. “I know you’d do it for me.”

  “Lean closer, and I’ll do it for you right now.”

  Piranha only laughed.

  “Next wake-up call’s on me,” Ursalina said. Everyone laughed. They had to laugh. There was nothing else left.

  Kendra tightened her grip around Terry’s neck, nestling her face against the back of his head. “I love you, Terry,” she whispered.

  Kendra’s grip was far from comfortable, but nothing could have felt better. He wouldn’t have asked her to let him go even if it meant he couldn’t breathe.

  The Blue Beauty slid through the remnants of downtown Los Angeles, a maze of shattered skyscrapers and lurching freaks. Kendra pressed her face to the window, looking for any sign of living, thinking human beings. There … on the rooftop. Someone waving to them, making a semaphore of his thin and desperate arms. There … another Still Here sign flagging out of a window. The window was smashed, the shards smeared with some dried and dark red substance. Dark, like the infinite space behind Terry’s eyes.

  When they crossed to the Harbor Freeway south to the 405, they hit two knots of freaks camped in the roadway. They looked incuriously at the Beauty but began to wheel their bodies in agitation when the faces of the occupants became clear. Piranha didn’t slow or stop, just ground them under the snowplow, his hands locked in a death grip on the wheel.

  Silence reigned on the Blue Beauty as they crossed the dead city. Hipshot didn’t bark, even when freaks passed within feet of their rolling fortress. He just laid his head between his paws on the seat and whined.

  The Spring Street exit took them to Cherry Avenue, and from there they saw the signs leading to Long Beach Municipal Airport. The sight of the chained cyclone fence was welcome. A hand-lettered sign read DANGER: CHAIN FENCE BEHIND YOU EVERY TIME.

  Ursalina and the Twins bounced down out of the Beauty, covering one another as Darius unwrapped a chain from the gate and swung the gate open. A freak lurched toward them, too slowly to be a threat, and their bus was in the airport and the fence latched again by the time the creature reached them. Ursalina didn’t fire as the thing clawed at them, stretched its arms through the fence, and moaned.

  She came closer to it. Female. About twenty-two. Black, in a blue Cal State Long Beach T-shirt with a McDonald’s badge clipped above a torn pocket. According to the badge, her name was Tanya. Great red splotches of fungus matted her lips, almost obscuring her eyes. She was saying something. Whispering. Ursalina came closer, lowered her rifle, turned her head, listening.

  Then walked away.

  “What did it say?” Dean asked as they climbed back on the bus.

  “ ‘Would you like fries with that?’ ”

  “Probably poli-sci,” he said.

  “There it is!” Darius said, pointing toward a clutch of low buildings. They could glimpse a narrow strip of black pavement beyond. Piranha waited until they were all on the bus, then rolled it over onto a patch of grass next to the runway.

  Dazed, a bit disbelieving that they had made it, they exited the bus.

  Kendra Brookings, Darius Phillips, Dean Kitsap, Sonia Petansu, Piranha Cawthone, Myles Bennett, Jason Bennett, Jackie Burchett, Rianne Carter, Deirdre Bennett. A dog named Hipshot.

  Survivors.

  And of course a guy named
Terry Whittaker. No one important. Just the first beloved of a girl named Kendra. What exactly was he? What were they?

  They had no hope of carrying everything they’d brought, so everyone had gathered only their essentials and only what they could carry. Kendra had a duffel bag with fresh changes of clothes and her notebook, where she’d written her notes about Lisa—and where she planned to write about everything she had seen in Threadville.

  What Wales had done would not be a secret. The fifth-level freak would not be a secret.

  The rest they’d unpacked and stacked beside the bus, either for Devil’s Wake residents to pick up later or for other lucky survivors to find on their own. Dean and Darius stroked their parked bikes like they were living beings, cooing good-byes.

  Kendra and the others used belts, ropes, and scarves to secure Terry in his seat, all of them stone silent. They had run out of time for jokes and stories. They had run out of time, period.

  Kendra stood outside watching while, one by one, Terry’s friends from Camp Round Meadow stood beside him for private good-byes. Through the windshield, she saw each visitor share both smiles and tears. Even Hipshot stood on two legs in the bus doorway, staring curiously toward Terry. His last bark didn’t sound hostile at all.

  “I love you too, boy,” Terry said, waving through the glass.

  By the time it was Kendra’s turn, the plane looked close enough to touch, ready to land. Myles and Deirdre stood twenty yards down the road, waving it down.

  “You have everything you need?” Kendra said to Terry. “Food? Bottled water?”

  “Nine millimeter.” Terry avoided her eyes. The gun was on the dashboard. “I guess you know this already,” he said. “But … I love you, Kendra, that’s all. Before you, I never knew what that was like.”

  “Me neither,” she said. Regrets seared Kendra’s insides. Why hadn’t she made love to him when she had the chance? Condom or not? Why hadn’t she shown him how she felt?

  “Thanks for saving my life,” she said. “Again.” Even her gratitude burned. If she hadn’t been caught by that freak in the tunnel, Terry might not have been bitten. If she hadn’t insisted on rescuing Rianne …

  “Thanks for saving mine,” Terry said, “making life matter more.”

  She squeezed his hand, which felt burning hot now instead of cool. “Remember what I said, Terry. Maybe if you’re not afraid … If you find somewhere safe to root …”

  “There’s something good waiting for me on the other side?” he finished, gazing up at her with a sad smile. “Come on, Kendra. You don’t believe that.”

  Irritation surged within Kendra’s grief. Suddenly, she grabbed Terry’s face and kissed him. Either he was too tired to resist or he didn’t have the will, because he didn’t pull away from her the way he had in the cabin before they left. He tasted like their blended tears.

  “Hey,” Ursalina said, knocking on the driver’s side window. Her voice was muffled. “What the hell are you doing? It might be in his spit already!”

  Terry was startled, pulling away. Kendra’s heart pounded while Terry stared at her, wide-eyed. He looked so stricken and worried, she was almost sorry she’d kissed him. But not quite.

  “Why?” Terry said, his voice a husk. “Why’d you do that, Kendra?”

  “Merry Christmas,” she whispered. “All I have to give you is faith.”

  Kendra held him, weeping, for as long as she could. She left the Blue Beauty only when her friends dragged her away.

  The pilot was annoyed about the number of passengers, but he allowed all of them to board—even Hipshot. Kendra barely noticed the haggling, only staring at the bus from her plane window, trying to catch a last glimpse of the only boy she had ever loved.

  Soon after the plane took off, the Blue Beauty began driving east while the plane veered west. She watched as long as she could, but she fogged her window.

  By the time she wiped the fog clean, Terry was gone.

  Acknowledgments

  The authors would like to thank Steve Perry, for overall sharp eyes, and Vivian Perry (no relation … I think!), for help researching the San Francisco Bay Area.

  The first and second books in this series, Devil’s Wake and Domino Falls, were originally conceived as two halves of the same book. Our editor, Malaika Adero, felt that it was getting … unwieldy, and she suggested we divide it into two novels. We hope our readers agree that this was the right move. We might consider Devil’s Wake to be the name of the overall series, as the island itself will be a central character from this point forward. However, one consequence is that part of our previous acknowledgments applies equally to this work:

  It would be dishonorable not to thank the artists who created the images and ideas most commonly associated with the “zombie apocalypse” notion, and the very shift from spellbound Haitians to something far more sinister and universal: Don Siegel, Daniel Mainwaring, and Jack Finney (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Ubaldo Ragona and Richard Matheson (Last Man on Earth [I Am Legend]), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), and Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (28 Days Later). Understanding our vast affection for these tropes will hopefully explain why we were eager to tangle these speculative threads together … winking at an audience that, we hope, is having as much fun as we are.

  Equally true today.

  Coming soon, the third book, Freak Show, takes our wanderers deeper into unknown territory. Can’t wait to give you a clearer view of the strange and evolving world of Devil’s Wake. It is hard to restrain that urge, but frankly, if we told you, we’d have to bite you.

  Steven Barnes

  Tananarive Due

  September 28, 2012

  Atlanta, Georgia

  STEVEN BARNES is an award-winning author of twenty-four novels, including the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Cestus Deception He lives in Smyrna, Georgia.

  FOR MORE, VISIT: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Steven-Barnes

  TANANARIVE DUE is the award-winning Essence bestselling author of Blood Colony, Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost. She lives in Smyrna, Georgia.

  FOR MORE, VISIT: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Tananarive-Due

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  SimonandSchuster.com

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  COVER DESIGN BY ALAN DINGMAN

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH © NIKKI SMITH

  BY STEVEN BARNES AND TANANARIVE DUE

  Devil’s Wake

  ALSO BY STEVEN BARNES

  Streetlethal

  The Kundalini Equation

  Gorgon Child

  Firedance

  Lion’s Blood

  Zulu Heart

  Far Beyond the Stars

  The Cestus Deception

  Great Sky Woman

  Shadow Valley

  ALSO BY TANANARIVE DUE

  My Soul to Take

  Blood Colony

  Joplin’s Ghost

  The Good House

  Freedom in the Family

  The Living Blood

  My Soul to Keep

  The Black Rose

  BY STEVEN BARNES AND

  TANANARIVE DUE

  WITH BLAIR UNDERWOOD

  Casanegra

  In the Night of the Heat

  From Cape Town with Love

  South by Southeast

  We hope you enjoyed reading this Atria Books eBook.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or ar
e used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due

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  First Atria Paperback edition February 2013

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1702-3

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1703-0 (ebook)