Nicholas rushes in after us. A little light from the house makes the faintest outline of his enormous rifle under one arm. “I have to stop you.”
Cassidy pounces between us. She doesn’t growl or bare her teeth, but when Nicholas makes to step around her, she rushes into his path.
I raise my gun, pointing it at his shoulder. “Go away, Nicholas.”
Cassidy gives a low rumble and turns her attention back to me. But after I drop the gun to my side, she turns back to Nicholas.
A beam of light shines on us, giving Nicholas a very undeserved halo and almost blinding me. I raise my free hand.
The beam drops out of my eyes, and the older man steps forward, framed in the doorway holding a flashlight. “Soldiers are climbing over the mounds of birds, yelling for us to let them in. I’m going to let them in.” But instead of going, he hesitates in the doorway.
“Go let them in.” Nicholas steps toward him but then steps back, seemingly torn between helping the soldiers and letting us escape without him.
“Please, no. They’ve been keeping us prisoner,” Linnie begs.
“These women have been imprisoned for a reason. Go! Help them!” Nicholas yells at the man.
The man jumps backward sending dust billowing up, but he doesn’t walk away. “We don’t want any more trouble… the soldiers… we don’t have any more food.”
I hold up my hands. “Please. I promise we won’t be any trouble. We just need a few seconds’ head start. How do we get out? Is there an exit?”
“Can we have your car? Does it run?” Linnie asks from behind.
Nicholas yells something in Swedish; I think it’s an expletive.
“I don’t know if it runs… take it. The keys should be in the ignition. But—you can’t drive around here; you’ll kill people.”
“No… we can,” I say as I realize something. “The roads are clear now.” I glance back through the dim garage to find Linnie opening what looks like the driver’s door to a midsized four-door SUV, parked facing the house.
A pounding comes at the door, and Nicholas yells again. “Raven, you’re going to get both Cassidy and your sister killed. And then you’ll die, which means we’ll all die. Is that what you want?”
Ignoring him, I open the door to the back seat as the engine sputters on. “Come on, Cassidy.”
There’s a louder mechanical stuttering sound, and the headlights blink on, lighting up the bare cement room.
Nicholas points his rifle, but it’s half-hearted. Before he takes aim at any of us, he drops his arm.
A pounding comes from the other side of the house, along with shrieks of terror. The booming echoes again, a sound like the soldiers are breaking the door down.
As Cassidy waits for me to climb in by the open car door, I look to the man who helped us. “Could you please let us out?”
He steps away from us, toward the house. “This is all we have.”
“They won’t hurt you. You and all those people in there will be in so much less danger if you help me escape! Please!” But I don’t wait for his answer. I climb up into the SUV, followed quickly by the lioness. She pounces in.
If the man refuses to let us out, we’ll just have to drive through the garage door.
“Lock the car—” I shout, but it’s too late.
Nicholas climbs into the front seat, deftly maneuvering in his gun. “I’m coming with you.”
“Hell no, you’re not,” Linnie yells.
“Linnie, just drive. We’ll deal with him later!”
Light fills the space as the garage door slides open. When I turn, the man jumps out of our way, plastering himself against the wall.
“Go! Fast!” I shout, hitting Linnie’s seat. The pile outside of the garage looks more like a wall than anything else.
Our car launches in reverse as if Linnie had stomped the gas pedal all the way down. We hit the pile hard, bird bodies flowing over the car’s trunk. Our progress slows down to almost nothing, and I swear I can feel the pressure of the wall of bird corpses and debris blocking us in.
I lean forward to get to the center divider, pushing against Cassidy, who lies across most of the back seat. “Honk a bunch, over and over. There are people in the street, and they won’t expect a car!”
“The soldiers will know we’re escaping!” Linnie says, but she starts honking.
We wedge deeper into the mound, the pile feeding around us. In front of the car, soldiers fill the garage in the glare of our headlights.
“They already know we’re escaping,” I yell. “Just keep going!”
Several guns take aim at the car and Linnie, but they’re waiting for something-- maybe orders from Albert, who isn’t in the garage.
One soldier steps almost up to the windshield. He lifts his gun to point straight at Linnie’s head.
“Don’t shoot!” Nicholas yells, waving wildly.
“Shit!” Climbing over the divider partway, I practically fall into my sister’s lap, pulling my body up to block hers.
“Raven, it’s very hard to drive with you crushing me!” she calls, voice muffled, but I see her foot pressing even harder on the gas pedal.
“Shoot out the tires,” Nicholas yells to the soldier.
There’s a sudden release of pressure, and the car flies backward. We catch air for a second before our back tires hit the pavement.
Linnie screeches the car back, breaking suddenly and then throwing the car into drive. “Raven, I can’t see!”
Ducking down, I pull my body away from her and clamber back over the center divider the best I can.
“Where should I go? Should I just follow this road? What are we doing?” Linnie calls.
“U-turn, Linnie. We’re going toward whatever moved all the birds!”
She turns so hard that my stomach jumps, her hand constantly honking the horn as we go. We zoom by the soldiers running behind us, one of whom smacks the side of our car as we speed by.
They recover quickly, and the entire group runs after us.
The crowds lingering on the road hurry out of our way. Everywhere, groups of people stand aimlessly, all their possessions just brushed away in one quick sweep. The cleared road follows all the way down H Street, where the mounds diminish to our sides, soon containing very few bird bodies and only the haphazard remains of former hovels. People all stare, stunned, gaping at us like they forgot what a car looked like.
We crest the top of the hill, looking down on the entire decimated city. The hovels continue in every direction, only broken by the cleared road running straight through town.
We bomb down the hill, honking continuously while people scurry out of our way.
“The barricade is broken!” I point down the hill to where the barricade opens up with a clear break. The crowds of people stay well away from it, except for a few soldiers who stand central in the road, staring out of the city like what they see is too shocking to move.
Linnie lays on the horn a few blocks back, causing the soldiers to startle. They raise their guns but rush out of the way as we approach.
Nicholas rolls down his window, yelling, “Shoot the—” He cuts off abruptly when I kick his chair.
We careen through the open barricade and onto Samoa Boulevard.
Linnie veers right, though both sides of the road are mostly free of debris. “Do you think they took the Samoa bridge—” She cuts off as her gaze tracks something out of our window.
“What?” I ask, turning. I regret it immediately. There are no shanties out here, no homes in ruins or bird carcasses. What piles in the gutters is much worse.
Bodies.
At least thirty, maybe more human corpses litter the sides of the road. Their cheeks cave in, little more than hollows, and many eyes still stare vacant to the sky.
The car begins to swerve when Nicholas grabs the wheel. “They’re soulbound.” He says it like that diminishes the horror of the scene.
Linnie’s voice shakes. “Don’t you dare try to take control
of the car.”
“Obviously, I’m not going to do anything that puts your lives at risk, Linnie. But you need to drive us safely.” His voice is almost soothing, like he’s speaking to a small child.
I force my gaze away from the dead and to the road ahead as it breaks away from the city and into the long, stretching fields that abut Humboldt Bay.
Linnie’s voice comes out breathy and high-pitched. “So, whatever came through the city was on our side, right? Like, the angels are coming down to kill infected birds and soulbound?”
None of us respond. I’m pretty sure everyone in the car knows what came through Arcata this morning, and they aren’t the humans’ protectors. I could truthfully tell my sister that yes, they’re from Heaven, but that would be just giving her false hope.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse just trotted through my hometown.
Chapter Six
Three Days Before
I comb through the closet of the house we broke into, pushing clothes aside. The hangers screech against the pole as I shove over several sport jerseys and some skate brand T-shirts. They smell fresh, untouched by the hell that consumed this entire area.
“Sweatshirt,” I say, handing it back to Linnie.
“Thanks.” She tugs it on, pulling up the hood. The front reads: Killer Boards Skate Shop.
We drove the car south until the gas tank diminished to nothing. The gas light dinged on just north of Laytonville, a farm town known for its music festivals. We’d pulled off on a small country road that led down over a hill to several overgrown pastures. Thankfully, the farmhouse the road led us to had no squatters hiding out, and no bodies, either. We found two vacant boys’ rooms upstairs, dinosaur toys and paintings filled one, and after we glanced in there, finding it clear, we closed the door firmly. The second boy’s bedroom was somewhat easier to bear. I’d been purposefully avoiding looking at the photos plastered across the wall.
The house shows no sign of a mad dash to escape, and each room looks as if the occupants just stepped out.
Shaking my head to dislodge the thought, I pull another sweatshirt from a hanger, this one a red high school hoodie. I hold it out to Linnie. “Could you bring this one to Cassidy?”
Linnie grabs it to run off to the bathroom that attaches between both of the boys’ rooms.
“Thanks, love,” I hear Cassidy say in her lightly accented voice.
Brushing the grime off my soles, I shove my feet into a pair of skate shoes that have to be three sizes too large. I find yet another big, baggy skater brand sweatshirt and throw it on over my tank and sleep shorts. Even though it’s early summer, no one told northern Mendocino County that. Entering this vacant, drafty farmhouse felt like stepping into a refrigerator.
“Is Nicholas outside?” I ask Linnie as she peers out the window. From this vantage, I see only the overgrown fields where, strangely, a single living cow still grazes. The dirt road stretches to the hill, disappearing behind spare trees and overgrown brush.
“Yeah, moving all stealthily around the car. Do you think he has some way to contact Albert?”
“No, but I bet Leijonskjöld is already out looking for us.” I step to the window on the adjacent wall, blinking at the mid-day sun. Beyond the two-story farmhouse, a steep embankment leads to another flat, unoccupied field. Well, I think it’s unoccupied. Potentially any number of Leijonskjöld soldiers or soulbound could be hiding in the tall grass waving in that pasture.
So far, we were the only people out driving on the lone freeway that ventures south of our isolated stretch of the California coast.
“We need to find a way to ditch him,” I mumble as Nicholas crawls into view on my side of the house.
“We’re not ditching Nicholas,” Cassidy says as she opens the bathroom door.
Gritting my teeth, I turn to her. The sweatpants I found for her roll over a few times at the waist and reveal her ankles above bare feet. Instead of pulling on the sweater over her T-shirt, she ties it around her waist.
“You really think he’s going to be down for what we’re planning?” I whisper, leaning against the window frame.
“No.” She cocks her head, her still somehow perfectly sculpted eyebrows rising high over her big brown eyes. “Raven, at any point Nicholas could have demanded your obedience by threatening Linnie or me. You’ve proven time and time again you’d go along with anyone’s demands if they threatened Linnie.”
“You think Nicholas was supposed to threaten Linnie?” I blink at her. The idea actually hadn’t occurred to me, though it probably should have.
“Quite. Why do you think Albert let Linnie stay? Leverage.” She holds out her hands like it should be obvious. “But Nicholas didn’t threaten her. Instead, he came out here with us to ensure your safety outside of Albert’s control.”
“You want me to be impressed with him for not doing something completely evil?”
“Don’t you think he was meant to take you in by any means necessary? He had the upper hand once you dropped that gun from your head.”
I lean in. “Nicholas will stop us. He’ll kidnap me the first chance he gets.”
“I’m all for ditching Nicholas if my opinion counts for anything,” Linnie says, coming to stand beside me.
Cassidy moves across the room in long, graceful strides to stand on Linnie’s other side. Linnie barely reaches her shoulders, where Cassidy stretches to probably above six feet. In contrast to Linnie, who’s the epitome of the word “cute,” Cassidy’s high cheekbones and large eyes make her more runway gorgeous than conventionally pretty. But somehow, standing together, they look very similar.
Cassidy sighs and turns from the window, looking more exhausted than I’ve ever seen her before. “I heard what you said in the house, and I agree that Nicholas has been acting like a complete wanker. But if you two want me to help you… look, I need to keep him close. I won’t leave him alone in soulbound and infected territory with no transport. I’ve known Nicholas my entire life. He’s one of the very few people I have left. And that number is shrinking every day.” She sits on the bed. “We have to assume there are still thousands of soulbound out there looking for you.”
“If… whatever happened didn’t kill all the soulbound.” Strangely, the thought of the soulbounds’ mass-death brings me no joy. And it really, really should. I really shouldn’t want bands of desperate people whose very soul depends on murdering me to survive.
“I only saw perhaps fifty bodies, out of thousands. Also, when we crested that hill, I saw living birds waiting in the trees of the Arcata forest. I think we’re going to have to assume only the birds and soulbound in that direct path died.”
“Are there any survivors out of Arcata? Should we be looking for survivors as we go?” Linnie turns, and for the first time, I notice she holds something in her hand. She glances down, looking to a photo I had purposely been avoiding of a teenage boy and girl kissing. She asked the question almost casually, but her fingers grasp tight to the photo.
We don’t respond for a minute until Cassidy finally says, “We’ll keep an eye out on our way out of the quarantine zone.”
“I still don’t understand how they can keep that huge of an area blessed all the time, enough to keep the infection from spreading,” I say.
“Unfortunately, we will probably have to find out very soon on how this region is cut off.” Her head comes up, gaze carefully regarding me. “I heard you yell at the birds not to attack.”
Linnie, who’d still been watching out of the window, also turns to regard me. “It must have worked.”
I shake my head. “I’m not sure that means anything. It didn’t look like they were attacking anyone in town. I think they were fleeing the… horsemen, rather than being there to infect us. The whole thing played out so weird…”
Honestly, I really have no idea what to think, not about Chauncey’s visit or the birds or the horsemen.
“It was like…” Linnie trails off, her voice sounding far away. Her eyes clo
se, hands drifting up to her face but not quite touching. “It was like I was standing in that house, and then I went to sleep for a minute. I stood in the same place, but it was different too, no walls, nothing but the road and me. This greenish, yellowish horse trotted up. There was a rider on his back, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t a man, exactly; he looked like a corpse, all pale and hollowed out. But I wasn’t afraid of him… I was just… it felt like he promised me something.” Her hands fall and head shakes again, sending loose brown hair in all directions. “Never mind, it’s too weird.”
“For me, I wanted to look. It was like I was being called to come outside,” I whisper.
“For me as well,” Cassidy says, her gaze meeting mine.
My thumb runs slowly across the callous on my middle finger, my only trophy from months of drawing and writing. The notes I had taken on the pale horseman named Death skitter through my mind as I stare off. I had focused much more on the creatures of hell than the creatures from the other side; it looks like, again, I studied for the wrong subject and there’s a pop exam. Blowing out a breath, I say what had been bothering me the entire two-hour ride down here. “I really hope me wanting to look at the horsemen doesn’t mean the other side wants me dead, too.”
“I don’t know what it means. I’d assume they’d want me dead as well, but no one has come down and given me a notice yet.” Cassidy sighs. “Well, I think it’s safe to assume the other side is getting involved, which does not bode well for our timeline.”
Linnie drops the curtain. “Are you guys talking about angels?”
“Partially,” Cassidy says.
“Um...” Linnie pauses. “Wouldn’t that be a good thing? Like, to have the angels fighting the demons…” She trails off, seeing both Cassidy and I shaking our heads. Her expression almost looks as if I punched her in the face. “Angels are evil too?”
“No.” I wave my hands, trying to wipe away the pain in her expression. “It’s a battle, Linnie, a battle where humans are all supposed to die in the end.”
Waltzing into Damnation (The Deception Dance Book 3) Page 5
