She gritted her teeth hard as she tried to move toward the front seat and its jury-rigged console. Her leg remained locked in place, making this a difficult prospect at best; Bobbi slid off the back seat first, landing hard in the middle of the floor, and she dragged herself across the bare metal of the deck. Adrenaline coursed through her, driving her still-functioning limbs with chemical fury as she got a grip on the driver’s side seat and pulled herself hard forward. She pulled herself up between the front seats, her arms burning, her back arched as she drew herself up into the driver’s seat. The effort made her arms shake, but she felt this only as a distant tremor. Bobbi turned in the driver’s seat, pulling her legs underneath the dash, and took a deep, grateful breath as she realized that the she didn’t have to worry about hotwiring the car. Scalli had left the keyrod on the dash.
“All right you fucker,” Bobbi muttered, snatching up the keyrod and slotting it into the car’s ignition socket, “I got you.” The car immediately purred to life; the wheel motors hummed softly as they took power from the batteries. The electric didn’t use pedals, just a rocker switch on the wheel – which she now mashed hard with her thumb, throwing the vehicle forward.
Bobbi hadn’t driven a car in nearly three years, but fueled with fear and adrenaline her body remembered precisely what to do. As if on automatic her arms worked the wheel, pulling the truck into a hard turn toward the ruined grocery. It barreled forward at high speed; gravel crunched beneath the wheels, lights flashed off bits of metal, dappled concrete gleamed. Bobbi’s vision was focused into a tunnel which centered on the yawning hole, a tunnel that filled up the narrow cutouts made in the truck’s armored canopy – and as it hurtled through the breach and plowed through the debris scattered around its mouth, nothing registered in Bobbi’s head but the overwhelming desire to save Scalli. Bobbi had seen one friend die, however misguided she might have been. She would not see another.
The truck made it just through the opening when it happened. Dark within, save for the light streaming in from outside, Bobbi saw only glimpses of shadowed walls and the remains of supermarket shelves before the wheel turned hard left of its own accord. “Shit,” Bobbi hissed through gritted teeth as the truck followed the wheel and hurtled toward the nearest wall; she pulled hard in the opposite direction, thumbed the accelerator hard in the opposite direction in a vain effort to try and stop. She was neither strong enough nor skilled enough to change its trajectory, and though she saved herself from plowing head-on into the darkness, the hard spin she found herself thrown into as the other motor failed filled her with a hurricane of fear and disorientation until impact. There was a roar of battered masonry, the shriek of twisting steel, and the hammer made of pain and numbness came down to drive her into the black.
In another life, Bobbi didn’t pull the trigger. In another life, she talked things out with Diana long before, told her that she was right, that her mother was a whore that ruined everything she touched. That she was so, so very sorry about what had happened to Diana’s family. In another life she wouldn’t have had to kill a friend and crash a truck into the hulk of a burnt-out, abandoned grocery trying to save another. She would not be feeling the strange cocktail of pain and drunken nausea that comes with impacting against the heavy steel, brick and concrete wall, smashing her head against the corner of an up-armored truck door, and being thrown into the passenger’s seat from where she neglected to put on a seat belt. She would be fine, and probably far happier than she had ever been since she was young.
But this reality had other plans, and she found herself being slowly dragged out of the numbing dark and into the light of the waking world. Coming to, Bobbi was grateful that she wasn’t dead, though she was disappointed to find that the geyser of fire that had shot out of her head had not yet subsided. At least it had toned down to a dull roar. “Fucking shit,” Bobbi groaned as she came around. Her eyes drifted slowly open, walled off by a red curtain dropped by what she very much believed was a big fucking gash in her head. She reached up, touching her head, found the warm wetness of blood there. Bobbi wiped her face with the back of her hand, forcing back the pain, and as her vision began to clear she wondered what she might see.
She saw teeth. Human teeth, yellow and marbled with decay. They had been filed down into points.
Instinct kicked in just before she had a chance to arrest it, and Bobbi flung herself back against a hard wall. She gasped like a fish thrown out of water— and then, finding that the teeth did not snap or proceed toward her, the fear subsided enough that her eyes managed to adjust and take in the rest of her surroundings.
Crouching opposite her was a lean, pale thing. Bobbi had for a moment thought it might have been a Yathi drone, but it was not. Beneath the ragged fatigue pants, the mane of greasy dark hair and the neon yellow ‘LEMON SMALLEY’ band tee faded and holed like an ancient cheese, it was very clear that whatever it was, the creature was entirely human. Beneath limp bangs, the woman— and however emaciated, Bobbi could tell from its general slightness that it was a woman— stared at her with wide blue eyes that were red-veined and wild. She had no nose, only a ragged, triangular aperture beneath her eyes that puckered red with inflammation. The sound of her breathing was a hideous rhythmic sucking noise.
Here was a feral, a feral who was not feasting on her still-warm entrails right now. Bobbi stared into the face of the horrifying madness that she had not seen for two years, and found herself strangely unafraid.
“Hey,” Bobbi managed, staring into the feral’s blue eyes.
“Hey,” The woman’s voice was ragged and broken, echoing slightly through her exposed sinus. “Why are you here?”
Bobbi stared at her a moment longer, trying to collect herself. “I wrecked,” she said.
“Mmmmph.” The woman looked to the left, and Bobbi turned to see with some amazement that she was still in the grocery. Some fifteen feet away was the hole blown in the back of the store, and the truck was half-buried by a dislodged pile of steel and masonry. How fast had she actually been moving? “You rattled the shrine pretty good. Took me a minute to get the fuck up here. Made a lot of noise.”
“Wasn’t my intention.” Bobbi turned back to look at the girl, whose expression was an odd combination of sleepiness and irritation. The wideness of her eyes had gone, and she turned back to look at Bobbi as though she were looking over a horse.
“Maybe not,” she said, “but we’re here. You fucking city people make my head hurt.” The feral couldn’t be any older than Bobbi was, but she sure sounded like it. Bobbi watched as she got to her feet, sniffing at the air. “Nasty wreck. You’re lucky to be alive.”
Bobbi nodded quietly. “I guess I am,” she said, and tried to rise. Pain rang in her head like a gong as she did so, and she ended up staying just where she was. “Fuck, my head is killing me.”
“You got a nasty bump,” the girl agreed. “But you’re all right. It’s safe here.”
“Is it?” Bobbi wasn’t so sure.
“Of course it is!” The feral sounded frowned at her now, which gave the appearance of an irritable goblin. “Shrines are holy places. Nobody violent comes here.”
Well that was all right then, wasn’t it, Bobbi thought bitterly to herself. What the hell kind of place was this? She sat up, looking past the feral and at the grocery at large. The place still had manual shelves, an artifact of the old days before roboticized stocking and delivery. Many of them were wrecked, pitched over at angles or lying down flat; boards were laid across the ones that still stood in rough gantries. She’d seen things like this before, when she was younger, back when Tenleytown was a much more primitive place. This had been a settlement, all right, though nothing civilian. Raiders, maybe. She stared at the feral woman a moment longer before saying, “I came here to find my friend. Did you see him?”
A shrug. “I didn’t see anyone,” said the feral. “But then again, you’ve been here a while. After the brethren came back from hunting…”
“Brethren?
Hunting?” Ice flooded into Bobbi’s stomach. “What do you mean? How long have I been out?”
“No idea.” She let out a laugh that was equal parts whistle and ragged cough. “Sun will be down in a few hours, though. I don’t have a watch.”
Fuck, had she been out that late? It had been just after noon! “I…wait.” Bobbi groaned as she got to her feet; her head pounded twice as hard as she stood. Her thoughts turned to the body in the truck. “What about your ‘brethren’? Are you saying there are more, ah, of your kind outside?”
“You mean ‘ferals’, as you people in the city call us? Yeah, a shitload. They’re camped out in the parking lot, waiting ‘til time for…” The feral shrugged. “Whatever it is they’re waiting on. I can never tell— they don’t come in here, if you’re worried about that. Besides…” The feral gave her a nasty, sharp-toothed grin. “They’ve already gotten something they can eat.”
Something they can eat. Bobbi turned without a word and ran toward the breach, her heart in her throat. No, no, don’t let it be him, don’t let it be—
Bobbi stumbled toward the mouth of the hole, her feet unsteady from the charge. Beyond the sky had ripened into a gray-silver, too thick for the sun to penetrate outside of its usual vague lightness.
The feral woman had not exaggerated. In the middle of the parking lot, like a human island on the sea of cracked blacktop, a band of figures had gathered in the waning light of day. They stood in a semicircle among the jersey walls, halfway between the grocery and the street, dressed in the customary garb of the disenfranchised and mad: some wore ratty civilian clothes, torn and ripped, others ragged coveralls or the frayed remnants of underground fashions. One man stood to one side, naked and covered in patches of a scabrous rash, his genitalia cut off long ago so that only a short stump and a web of scar tissue radiated from between his legs.
They gathered around a sort of firepit that had been erected between them, a steel barrel that had been cut lengthwise in half and a spit erected made from rebar and steel clamps; the barrel was filled with refuse that was steadily burning with an oily flame. Spitted on the rebar was the charred shape of what was unmistakably a human body— or at least the trunk, for the legs, arms, and head had been cut away. The naked man turned it slowly on the spit with the utmost concentration lining his dirty face. Cracked and charred though the skin was now, Bobbi saw that the body had been that of a woman.
Bobbi stared at the grim assembly and their hideous meal, going numb. Her brain tried to process what she saw; it wasn’t the most of the horrors that she had witnessed in her life, but it was fresh in its novelty. There was quite a long list of atrocities accumulating in her recent memory. She looked on, unsure of how to process the tableau. Should she scream? Shrug it off? As she watched them turn the body round and round on its rebar spit, mental survival instincts kicked in. She found herself imagining that it wasn’t human, that body; it was a dog, something else, something that just might happen to look like a corpse but wasn’t. She closed her eyes, felt her heart racing in her chest, felt the sweat beading on her brow. Though her mind was busy disconnecting wires, Bobbi could not deny the truth. She knew the body that they were roasting; it was the same that she had seen expire under the business end of her nerve crusher just hours before.
“I had to give them something,” came the voice of the feral woman, wheezing up behind her. “It was her or you. At least she was fresh enough.”
Bobbi stiffened. The numbness inside her let her speak. “It’s all right,” she said in a voice that did not sound like her own. Too flat, too leaden. “Let’s go inside and you can explain it to me.” At least, seeing the awful display, she knew that the thing was truly dead.
The two of them walked back inside the grocery. The numbness she felt had become physical; her body felt like wood as she walked behind the withered creature. She had killed Diana, but it had been an accident. She certainly didn’t intend for the woman to have been hauled off as a fucking banquet for the horrors camping outside. But she was marooned at the moment, with Scalli and Mason missing and howling human beasts lurking nearby – not that the creature whom she followed now was any kind of saint. Bobbi tried to compress the fear and disgust inside of her into a manageable pellet, then pushed it back into the vaults of her mind while trying to plan…whatever came next.
“You said this place was a shrine,” Bobbi said.
“That’s right.” They walked past the rows of shelves, long emptied and now cracked and faded with the wear of past decades. “Or something like that. Me, I’m not one for hocus-pocus, but those crazy bastards out there sure take stock in it.”
“Then what kind of shrine is it?” A flash of a thought shot through her head. “And where was the gear that was in the truck?”
“Downstairs.” The feral woman looked over her shoulder. “First rule of salvage – you take the stuff first and wait to see if the owner recovers.”
Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “Am I going to get it back?”
“Maybe.” The woman snorted out of the hole in her face. “My name’s Violet, by the way, thanks for asking.”
“I’m Bobbi,” she said automatically, then cleared her throat. “Sorry. I just…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Violet. She led Bobbi toward the back of the store, where a ransacked pharmacy once stood. Bobbi saw a ruined live-meat butcher’s counter down the back of the store to her right and wondered just how old this place really was. “It’s not easy out here, you see all kinds of bad shit. You from the city?”
Bobbi nodded. “Now I am,” she replied. “Used to be from Tenleytown.”
Violet nodded. “That explains the truck,” she said, “though it doesn’t explain the reason why you’re all the way out here. You’re very far out of the neighborhood, honey. Why the hell would you even drive this thing into this place?”
“I…I thought my friend was in here,” Bobbi said, suddenly feeling very very stupid indeed. “We thought this place was…something bad.”
“You thought it was something bad,” said Violet, who had paused by a pair of ancient swinging doors, “and the first thing you thought of was to come and look inside? That’s typical, really. City people don’t have much to their brains anymore.”
Bobbi grunted. “Says the wasteland princess,” she muttered to herself.
“My nose may be gone, but my ears are working very well indeed.” Violet shook her head. “Look, girlie, this isn’t ‘someplace bad’. This is my home. I live here. And it’s keeping you safe, so let’s not get too bitchy about décor, huh?”
“Right.” Bobbi nodded after Violet. “Sorry.” She gritted her teeth against a wave of emotion that had suddenly rose, pushed it back, and felt somewhat better then. Her detachment to the moment was complete, and she followed Violet now as if the other woman were leading her along on a museum tour. “I thought this used to be a settlement, or at least I heard it was.”
“Briefly,” said Violet. “Then they came and took the people here, left it open. The hole is where they blasted themselves in, apparently.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Bobbi leaned against a low display. “Those guys outside, or people like them?”
Violet was quiet for a moment. She looked Bobbi over, her expression gauging. “I think you know,” she said, “if you knew how to find this place. But you don’t have the signs…” The woman’s blue eyes widened a little more. “C’mon, I’ll show you what we killed when we came here. You’ll want to see it.”
Bobbi hesitated for a moment as Violet pushed open one of the ancient doors leading to the store’s back quarter. In the dim light, she saw the silhouettes of shelves and industrial equipment. “I’d be crazy to go with you into a dark place like that,” she said.
“Maybe so,” said Violet with a nod. “But you’d be crazier to stay out here. That meat won’t last forever, and then they’ll be beating down my door for something else. Better you be out of here before then.”
Violet turned and dis
appeared through the door; for a moment Bobbi considered just taking her chances, but then she remembered that Violet had all of her gear down there. She’d need Diana’s rifle too, most likely, as loathe as she was to use it— but she’d already killed one person today, and it seemed to her that she could do it again if she had to. Bobbi took a deep breath, blew it out, and followed.
The two of them walked into the back, which was dark save for bioluminescent night-light strips that had been laid on the floor to form an aisle or a path. The blue light that radiated from them had deepened the shadows around her into a near-impenetrable gloom. Bobbi had the distinct feeling of walking through the halls of some kind of tomb, or maybe a church of some kind – even if she hadn’t known that it was a shrine of some sort before, the impression of sanctity was definitely settling in. Her heart beat quickly as she followed Violet through the back of the store, then to a set of stairs leading down to a heavy steel fire door set into the concrete of the grocery’s foundation.
“It’s in here,” said Violet, who produced a set of old-fashioned metal keys from the pocket of her fatigue pants. She picked through a few before selecting one, and unlocked the door. “Come on.”
Bobbi took a deep breath and followed Violet through the door – and found herself, quite suddenly, stepping into a tiny pocket of Hell.
It was the scent that hit her first, the smell of blood and shit and the strange tang of burning metal. It was like the smell of someone being fried in an electric chair, and it hit Bobbi like a wall. She reeled, staggered by the smell, and her eyes worked to try and bring the room into focus as she had to fight herself to put her rising gore back into line.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 23
