“Never knew you to be one to fall back, Pete.”
“Hey, hey, now, all I’m saying is if we seriously want to throw down with these things again, we better be prepared. All our munitions are covered up in tarps right now. They’re not gonna do a bit of good like that. And what we have won’t be nearly enough. Now, there’s Active Arms down on College, or we could even try a pawn shop or two, find enough weapons to blow most of these fuckers back into space or wherever they came from.”
Joel checks the rearview mirror, watching the restless monsters between fence gaps, behind trees, restless in their upside-down pacing. Rachel twists back and can barely see them, approaching the fence, receding, appearing ready to jump, as if daring the survivors to make a move—or daring each other to attack.
“I think our guns aren’t gonna matter much anymore,” Joel says. “I think our best weapons are Felicia and that other woman.”
“What?” Pete says. “I don’t think I heard that right.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
Zoe speaks up. “Uh, that other woman is passed out in the flatbed, and a bit ago she was gagging from pain, even though we pumped her full of drugs. She’s unconscious.”
“She’s still our biggest advantage, along with Felicia here.”
“I’m still not following,” Pete says.
“Even if they are, Joel, what do we do with them?” Rachel asks.
She watches Felicia, who still seems to be unaware of her traveling companions, her eyes darting from glow to glow along the hunkered-down row of ’60s-era homes.
Joel ponders the question. Then: “The fact that they’re human again seems to be enough to send shivers through them, so the question is, is that enough? What can they do that will downright terrify them? What can they do to end this thing? Can they do that? You saw what Felicia did back there. She turned that woman back. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but maybe the fear is as basic as that. Do they have the power to reverse this thing?”
“What, one body at a time?” Rachel says. “Or you’re thinking on a bigger scale?”
Joel nods. “Right, from what I saw, Felicia has some kind of—I don’t know—a need to change them back. She walked right over to that woman, all on her own. Not sure what that is, what the impulse is. But there’s a desire there. And I think that’s what’s scaring them.”
Rachel is clenching her jaw, imagining Felicia’s weakness, let alone the state of the other poor woman, Julia. What possible good can either of them do, when the simple act of changing one old woman back to humanity sapped Felicia of all her strength?
Scott speaks up. “Are they scared of that woman back there as much as they’re afraid of Felicia? Or is it the fact that Felicia has fully returned?”
“What do you mean?” Joel says, frowning.
“Is it only the existence of a person that has changed back—you know, lying there, unconscious but human—or is it the fact that we’ve found a way to really make Felicia one of us again, walking, talking … back on our side?”
“You’re thinking about how long it took to bring her back to relative health,” Joel says.
“Yeah, because that took a long damn time. And she’s not out of the woods yet, either.”
“And we don’t have the benefit of time. At least I don’t think we do.”
“Not something I would bet on,” Scott says.
Joel wipes some grit from his eyes. “Regardless, we need to get moving. It’s getting a little hairy. But I propose a little test.” He turns toward the truck. “Pete, here’s what I want to do. Let’s get out of here and work our way west, then south on Shields. I want to see if we can find any more trapped bodies. There’s bound to be some in vehicles. I’ve seen at least a few over the past few days. But here’s the thing: I want you to go back and do a drive-by of those fences. I want to see how those things react to the proximity of that woman you’ve got back there.”
Pete studies the fences doubtfully.
“Is that the best strategy we have?” he says.
“Trust me.”
Rachel watches the small smile on Joel’s face with a kind of wonder. How the man can muster a smile after everything that’s happened is beyond her, and yet she can’t deny that the sight of it brings her comfort. She remembers the way he’d sat up with her at the hospital, soothing her and encouraging her over her father’s unconscious body, how strong and yet selfless he was. In the space of a week, they have lived through a lifetime of horrors and challenges, and they’re still here. At least the two of them are still here.
She’s willing to trust him.
“Yeah, trust him,” she calls now to Pete.
Pete cracks a wary grin. “Well, all right, little lady.” The grin disappears as he addresses Joel. “I ain’t stoppin’, just rollin’ on by.”
“All I need.”
“You gals all right with this?” Pete asks Chloe and Zoe, who look into each other’s eyes like the twins they are, communicating something. Together, they reach down to the floorboards and draw up the weapons they’ve held close since leaving the library. Chloe has the rifle, and Zoe has one of the tranq guns left over from the library defense.
Pete gives another shrug. “Once I’m done, I’ll let you take the lead west to Shields.”
“Check,” Joel says.
The truck moves forward cautiously, and Rachel watches the back of Pete’s head in the cab. He’s looking in every direction, waiting for a move. Joel leans forward, searching the area. Nothing happens.
Pete takes a wide, slow U-turn, bumping up onto the yard of the Sanders home. The long fence on the south side of the house seems to have the most activity, and as the truck approaches, the movement becomes more frenzied.
“See that?” Joel says.
“Yes I do,” Rachel says.
Kayla stands up in her seat, peering through the rear window.
The truck rumbles over the grass and passes within ten feet of the fence boards. Rachel watches closely for the crimson glows, the way they move. The small glows aren’t exactly blinding or even distinct—in fact, she could probably be convinced that some of the light she’s seeing is manufactured by her own fear-raddled senses. But as Pete brings his truck and its unconscious occupant close to that fence, she’s sure she sees movement back there. The bodies behind the cedar slats retreat into what she judges to be the middle distance of her neighbor’s back yard. There are no glows anywhere near that fence. The truck moves away, toward the street, and finally bounces gently down onto the asphalt. Pete pulls the vehicle next to Joel, this time on Rachel’s side.
“They moved away,” Pete says. “Did you see that? I could hear them, like, scurrying away. Goddamn animals.”
Joel nods, calls across Rachel, “Let’s not get too confident, but I’d say that was pretty conclusive.”
“Really?” Scott puts in. “I could hardly see anything.”
Joel glances back. “Lose your glasses?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“It was conclusive enough for me, anyway,” Joel says, turning back to Pete. “Convincing enough for our next move.”
“What’s our next move?” Kayla asks meekly, now between Scott and Felicia, her words devolving into a yawn. The poor girl is bushed. Rachel wonders if she’s had any sleep in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe when she holed up earlier at the library? If so, it was a catnap.
“You can try to sleep, Kayla. We’re just driving. Scott won’t mind you using him as a pillow.”
Scott doesn’t appear to know how to respond to that at first. “It’s fine.”
“How much blood do you have over there?” Joel calls over to Pete.
Chloe leans over and says, “We’ve got maybe a dozen of the canisters that Scott put together, and two units that we took before we left. Obviously we can take more at any time from any of us—I brought the equipment.”
“Really? Clean enough to do that repeatedly?”
“We brough
t plenty of alcohol and clean syringes, yeah.”
“And anti-coagulant,” Zoe puts in.
Rachel thinks these girls will probably be trained for full-on phlebotomy by the time this whole thing is over—if it’s ever over.
“Here’s what we’re going to do—or at least here’s what I propose we do,” Joel says. “We’ll get to Taft Hill and then go south until we can make our way up to Horsetooth and into Masonville. Into the foothills. We’ll see if we can find any more bodies along the way. If Felicia finds the strength to turn them, we do that. If not—tranq dart. Got it?”
“I … I guess I’d remind you that there’s still a lot on fire up there,” Pete says. “We were burning everything we could find at the south side of the reservoir, and those flames took off, man. It’s hellfire up there, very smoky.”
Rachel watches Joel’s jaw clench, and she feels her own heart tighten inside her chest like a fist. All those bodies—all those humans—burned to death, before they learned the truth that, at least in theory, they could be saved. Perhaps it is a naïve way to look at the situation, but it’s the only way she knows how, having herself caused the death of too many for Rachel to bear.
“I’ve been watching those fires,” Joel says, glancing up through the windshield at the almost totally darkened skies. “The flames have moved southwest. Mostly south. I haven’t seen a lot of smoke coming north. The smoke we have seen has been from fires above us to the north. I’d be willing to bet that the fires have driven bodies south toward Loveland and also north toward Lory. What else do you see out there?” He nods toward the west.
The Hummer is pointed south. Rachel stares up at the roiling skies, at the jittery redness of the heavens. The power of the alien threat has diminished since its height during the library assault, but it’s still there—an otherworldly throb. At first glance, it seems to encompass the skies, north to south, and west. But looking closely, she can see its essence reaching down into the foothills. And damned if the most vivid part of it is pulsing below Horsetooth—where Joel is looking now.
“They’ve massed over there,” Rachel whispers.
“That’s what I’m seeing.”
“What?” Pete calls from the truck.
“The fires are burning southward, have been for most of this time,” Joel says. “You guys were blowing everything up south of Horsetooth, right? Near Masonville?”
There’s no malice in Joel’s voice, more of a tired resolve, but there’s still a fiery part of Rachel that will always resent that hillbilly attitude—embodied by the Thompson brothers—of blowing everything up and asking questions later.
Pete is slightly chagrined as he answers Joel. “Right, Jeff’s buddy Trevor, he’s the one radioed down when that wall of corpses was comin’ down on us, he had a cabin down south of that general store at Stout, and he had his own armory there. He had fuckin’ flamethrowers, man. We weren’t just gonna let those—”
But he can see that excited tales of his exploits are falling on deaf ears.
It’s a strange thing, Rachel reflects, to have encountered an existential threat—the most terrible of monsters—and to stare into its very human face. Maybe not for the Thompson brothers, but definitely for her. They burned thousands, but she’s not guiltless. She has murdered human bodies. Even though those bodies were cranked backwards, bending their spines to the breaking point and dislocating limbs, they were still human bodies that this alien presence took over. Now, their throats are ravaged, their brains are perhaps forever altered by the presence of a sinister glowing orb—but the fact is, they can be changed back. At least some of them. Maybe only a fraction.
They were human, and they’re still human, to a certain extent.
Rachel realizes that both vehicles have been silent for long moments, the occupants’ collective imaginations seemingly latched onto the thoughts sledge-hammering their way through Rachel’s mind.
“So why head down Taft Hill?” Scott says, as if to break the tension. “Why not head west from here, or even northwest on 287? That looks like as good a route as any, and we wouldn’t have to weave our way through these streets.”
“Because we need more bodies,” Joel says frankly.
“Um,” Scott says, unable to finish the thought.
“You think we need even more like Felicia and the woman,” Rachel says, thinking out loud. “Power in numbers, huh? You think we can find more?”
“I’m sure of it. We’ve all seen the bodies out there, in the cars, like that woman. Stuck because of seatbelts or locked doors or crashed cars that they can’t navigate, whatever. There aren’t many of them out there, it’s true, but they’re there.”
“Where do we put ’em?” Pete asks from the truck. “You want to stack ’em up back there?” He gestures to the truck bed with his big thumb.
“There’s plenty of vehicles out there for the taking if we start piling up bodies.”
“You really think this’ll work?” Rachel asks.
“Can you think of anything better?”
“Let’s go for it,” calls Pete. “I wanna get the fuck outta this neighborhood. Looks like we got company again.”
The glows have assembled behind the fence again, and the bodies are pacing restlessly, as if eager to get at them. They’re wary of what the vehicles hold, and yet they crave the attack—at least, that’s the way Rachel imagines it.
Joel nods and lurches the Hummer into Drive, scooting ahead of Pete. Soon, the two vehicles are heading west toward Taft, and the wide-open sky reveals the extent of the alien threat, a nightmare horizon that seems to exude anger and disease.
“Is she awake?” Rachel asks Kayla, as much to distract her from the view as to check on Felicia.
Felicia appears unconscious, her eyes closed, her head back, but then the head comes forward and the eyes open, bloodshot and teary still. Can those eyes ever be healthy again?
“I’m awake,” she whispers.
“You are!” Rachel twists to face the young woman. “How’s the head? The energy?”
Felicia gives a slow nod, wipes at her eyes, clutches her temples. “Still hurts.”
“Have some more Tylenol.”
Her head shakes back and forth. “Not yet—it’s like I can’t think clearly with that in me. Just makes everything fuzzy.”
From the other side of the rear seat, Scott speaks up, leaning over. “Hey … so … we were just talking about you.”
Rachel looks at him. “Maybe we can wait till she’s more conscious?”
Scott ignores her. “When you changed that woman back—how did you do that?”
Rachel senses everyone in the vehicle tuning in for the answer to that question.
Felicia swallows heavily and looks at each survivor, one by one. “I don’t know, I … I just did. I pushed out, somehow. With my thoughts.”
“How did you even know you could?” Joel asks.
She seems to think hard on that. “It was like—like she was calling to me. Like it was calling to me.”
“It?” Joel repeats.
“We … what I was like … when it was in me … the light inside.”
“Like it wanted to change back?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you still feel that thing inside you?” Rachel asks. “That light?”
Felicia is stone-still for a half a minute, then her head slowly nods.
CHAPTER 20
The streets are desolate and dark. In the headlight luminescence, Rachel can make out abandoned collisions, floating past like derelict ships in fog. She trains her flashlight on some of them as they pass, and so far all of them have been empty—cold and dark, doors flung wide, and layered with a thin grime of ash. Joel makes it a point to veer close to those he sees.
In the tense, monotonous silence, Rachel can’t help that her thoughts are returning to her father. She’s comforted by the fact that she has returned him home and placed him next to Susanna—despite what happened on the porch. It feels as if she has righted
a wrong. She’s more at peace with what happened at the beginning of all this. But she still feels the shock of her dad’s death. It’s not possible. Not after she saved him. It’s not fair.
She can’t help it, goddammit—what do those stacks of banded money mean? Why did her dad do this to her? To make matters worse, those wrapped bands of cash amount to little more than trash now, their value completely altered in a matter of days. They probably meant everything when her dad was alive, but they mean nothing now.
There’s no getting around the fact that he’d fled from the hospital, had gone straight to that safe and had left it open—what, for her to find? Why hadn’t he said anything about it? He’d retrieved her grandfather’s gun from the safe, so maybe that was one purpose, but the money was key. It was scattered about, as if he’d handled it, as if he had intended to remove it. But to leave the door open—why didn’t he slam it shut and spin the dial, hiding the money away again? Was he that hurried by the things outside? Was it that exact moment when they turned aggressive? Even if it had been, he’d surely had time to prepare himself and evacuate.
It’s infuriating. A mystery. And she isn’t sure she wants to know the answer to this particular riddle. She doesn’t want to think of her dad—so recently alive—as a man with a black secret.
“Still with us?” Joel asks, glancing at her and startling her from her thoughts.
“Huh? Oh. Yeah, thinking about my dad.”
He reaches over and touches her knee, lets his hand linger there.
“Look,” he says, shaking her from a recollection that she can’t seem to stop reliving, “I never was good at this part of the job, but I’m so sorry we lost him. I’m sorry you lost him. He was a good man, and he saved lives.”
Rachel can only look up at him, feeling her eyes fill with new moisture.
“I know.”
“I’m glad we took him home,” he says.
“Me too.” I think, she adds.
They make the turn onto Taft Hill and begin the journey south. It’s immediately clear that more vehicles are here, scattered, crooked against curbs, abandoned.
Blood Dawn (Blood Trilogy Book 3) Page 21
