“I know the feeling.”
Graf whirled to face the girl. She stood behind him, an expression of true pity on her face. He didn’t need her pity. He needed a way out.
“When we first all started to realize that we were stuck here…we didn’t know how long it had gone on. We thought there was something wrong with the phone lines.” She looked down at her hands. “You’ll get used to it. We don’t really rely on each other here, but you’ll learn to rely on yourself.”
Oh, for Christ’s sake, I had to get trapped in a Lifetime original movie, didn’t I? He couldn’t take any more homespun wisdom from the woman who appeared to be the queen of all mood swings. “Well, that basement is sounding awfully comfy right now. You can lead the way.”
He carried his overnight bag and cursed his light packing. Not only would a pair of jeans and change of shirt not last him for eternity, if he was really trapped here that long, but he hadn’t brought an eternity’s worth of blood with him. He’d fed off a waitress when he’d stopped earlier in the evening, but he’d been planning to gorge himself like a tick at the Independence Day party, so he’d only brought emergency rations. Like her or not, he’d be tearing into this woman before too long.
He followed her down the basement stairs. It was not the kind of basement that the word basement described in his mind. A “basement” was a place where somebody puts the aforementioned pool table and maybe a miniature refrigerator. They put up drywall and maybe some wood paneling and called it a den or a family room. This place, with its bare rock walls and dirt floor, was more like what someone would call a cellar. Or a hole. “You’re seriously going to keep me down here?” He wiped a finger through the cobwebs clinging to visible floorboards of the house over his head.
“I’m not going to serve you breakfast in bed, if that’s what you were hoping,” she called over her shoulder as she tugged futilely at a mound of various, unrelated objects stuffed in a corner.
That’s what you think. He watched her struggle for a while with whatever it was that she was doing, then reached past her, shouldering her out of the way.
“Very gentlemanly of you,” she griped, wiping her hands on her jeans.
“I never claimed to be a gentleman.” The metal frame and musty canvas of an army cot pulled free from the rubble of tent parts and Christmas decorations. He untangled a string of colored lights from the cot and set it on the ground at his feet. “Is this what I’m sleeping on?”
“That or the floor.” Beneath the moldering wooden stairs was a stack of plastic totes. She pulled one out, examined the label, and popped open the lid. “Blankets in here. They’re old, but they’ll do.”
“Your hospitality amazes me,” Graf quipped, snapping open the cot’s folded frame.
“I’m sorry, I must have missed the Holiday Inn sign at the end of my driveway.” She put her hands on her hips, where she might as well just keep them permanently, they ended up there often enough. “I could always rescind my invitation, you know.”
I’d like to see you try.
“Sorry.” The word left his mouth almost less frequently than please, and it had to make its way past his clenched back teeth this time. “You have to understand, you’ve had five years to get used to this whole ‘being trapped’ thing. I’ve had five minutes.”
“You’ve had an hour. Suck it up.” She went up the stairs. They creaked, and a fine rain of sand fell from each step. “This isn’t permanent. At sundown, you start looking for a new place to live.”
The door closing at the top of the stairs was a judge’s gavel falling, and the scrape of something heavy being dragged in front of the door was the sound of a jail cell locking up tight. He’d been sentenced to living in a basement and putting up with a warden so insufferable, he didn’t even want to eat her. If she had known that a flimsy lock wouldn’t keep him in, would she have still taken that precaution? Probably. Humans did silly things to reassure themselves when they were frightened, which she most definitely was, with a strange man in her basement.
Still, if she had wanted to make him feel like a prisoner, she couldn’t have been more effective. Graf decided he could bide his time; the thing about caged animals was, they only stayed caged for so long.
Three
Jessa stood, hands still braced on the heavy wooden bench, and wondered if it would be enough to hold a grown man inside. She wasn’t worried about him running away. Actually, she would prefer it. Contrary to the rumors around town that she was a man-hungry spinster, she did have some established criteria when it came to weeding out the bad ones.
This guy was one of the bad ones. That was why she was so worried about him getting out. He wasn’t bad in the hot-guy-who-was-nothing-but-trouble kind of way, though she had plenty of experience with that type. He was bad in the he-was-always-so-quiet-serial-killer kind of way. It was something about his eyes. There was a void there, an absence that had chilled her the moment she’d seen him. She’d almost been willing to take her chances with It, rather than hide in the gas station with him. But she had stayed, and gotten into his car on a desolate stretch of road in the middle of the night, and even let him sleep in her house. History had proven she wasn’t a very good judge of character before, but this example was like a neon sign that flashed YOU DUMMY.
Keeping him close wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though. It wasn’t by chance that he was the first person to be able to stop in Penance. Nothing happened by chance anymore. Maybe she was a hard, cynical bitch—no, she was sure she was—but she wasn’t going to trust that he was just a stranded traveler. Having him on her side could be an advantage, or it could be a huge mistake.
She kept one eye on the basement door as she filled the kettle and set it on the stove. The sun would be up soon, and it would be too late to go to bed. Not that she could sleep, anyway, with a stranger in her basement who might or might not be trustworthy.
Then why did you let him stay? She scrubbed her hands over her face, blocking out the kitchen, blocking out the world. Blocking out the knife drawer, the scene of so many failed attempts to escape life, escape Penance, escape everything. Was it that same self-destructive urge that had convinced her to let him in?
It didn’t matter why she had offered up her basement, and it didn’t matter why he was here. What mattered was she had chickens to feed and chores to do.
She had to survive, because, so far, not surviving hadn’t been an option she’d been able to follow through on.
She left the kettle to boil, vaguely aware that it could be used as a weapon if he did sneak out of the basement. That line of thinking was counterproductive. All thinking was counterproductive. Once she thought about one aspect of her situation, she would have to think about all of it. The guy in the basement. The reason he was here. The thing that might have sent him. The town, the past, the future, all of it. The only way she got through the days and nights was by blocking all of it firmly out and pretending something else was happening.
She drifted up the stairs, imagining it was a Friday night, and she tiptoed to avoid waking her parents, who, once upon a time, would have been sleeping behind the closed door to their room. If they found out she’d been running around at all hours, they would tan her hide. There was no way she was going to get grounded this close to the homecoming dance. She went into the bathroom and closed the door, holding her breath when the light clicked on. It was the little sounds that would wake her parents, like the light switch flicking or the creak of the floorboards in front of the sink. She shed her dirty clothes and dropped them into the hamper. Mom did wash on Fridays, so that was why it was nearly empty. Not because Jessa was the only one left.
Downstairs, the teakettle whistled, and she closed her eyes, squeezed them shut tight against the intrusion of reality. She turned off the light and went to her bedroom, not bothering to sneak or avoid the squeaky spot in the hall. Her parents were gone. Jonathan was gone. The only things lying behind those closed doors were empty rooms, shrines to the dead she
could hardly bear to look at. Everything she knew and loved had vanished, replaced by a nightmare world that mocked her with its familiarity.
She padded across the white area rug in her room, over the stain where she and Becky had spilled the wine cooler snuck from the fridge in seventh grade. The sky outside the window, what she could see of it through the branches of the tree—the very one that Derek used to climb to get into her room at night—had lightened to the white that preceded the arrival of the sun in the sky. Another fifteen minutes, maybe, and the rooster would start crowing.
She dressed in clean clothes, a tank top and denim shorts, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, she checked the basement door again, then put some dried raspberry leaves in a cup, pouring the steaming water from the kettle over them. Coffee, like everything else that couldn’t be grown or handmade in Penance, had gone from common item to luxury to extinction in the last five years. She had learned to substitute homemade soap for shampoo and live with the results. Coffee…she would kill a stranger with her hands to get a cup of coffee.
The thought of strangers brought her mind right back to the man in the basement. If he hadn’t been such a jerk, he might have actually been attractive. If she went for that slick, well-groomed type, which she didn’t. But she’d always been a sucker for blonds, and his gorgeous blue eyes were the kind a girl could get lost in, if she didn’t know they covered up a whole batch of lies, which they probably did.
He had to go, as soon as possible. If he had been polite—if he’d just been a little less rude—she might have more sympathy toward him. But he hadn’t been, so she didn’t, and she wouldn’t feel bad about kicking him out. She took a sip of the tea, wincing as she scalded her tongue. She was always doing that, always being too impatient, and hurting herself in the process. She finished her tea and headed out to the barn, trying hard to shake the feelings of guilt and responsibility that plagued her. It wasn’t her fault that the guy had stopped at that gas station. It wasn’t as though he’d stopped to help her. He shouldn’t have been able to stop at all.
A light sheen of dew glistened on the lawn, chilling Jessa’s bare feet as she made her away across the grass. There was something satisfying about being up with the sun, or at least there would have been had she actually gone to bed the night before. Lack of sleep aside, the morning seemed as close to normal as it got in Penance. The chickens chased each other through the hard-packed dirt of the farmyard in aggressive anticipation of feeding time. They didn’t know they were locked in a never-ending nightmare, and their ignorance comforted Jessa. She pushed the barn door open, ignoring as best she could the long slashes across the wood. It had come here before, and It liked to leave reminders.
Inside the barn, she checked her feed stores. Damn. She would have to go into town soon. She’d have to go, anyway, to unload her freeloader. But she didn’t have anything to trade, and supplies were running out. She leaned her head against the door, fighting the feelings of hopelessness that washed over her. She usually traded peaches from the orchard, but this year’s crop hadn’t yielded what it had the year before, and she’d lost a batch of preserves when the cans didn’t seal. She’d already traded away the tractor to Jim Wyandot, and he’d melted down the metal to make bullets for black-powder rifles. Without gasoline the farm equipment in town had been pretty much worthless, anyhow.
Gas. She barely thought of the word anymore, after nearly five years without any. They’d tried to ration it, but with It coming so close to the harvest, the majority of it had been sucked down by combines. There hadn’t been a drop of gasoline in Penance in a long, long time…. But there was, now.
Between the time she grabbed the garden hose and a red plastic gas can from the wall, and the time she made it down to the car, she didn’t think about anything but the amount someone, anyone, would pay for a gallon of gas. Once she stood beside the car, though, she thought about the guy in the basement. He’d gotten here. He might be able to leave. He couldn’t do that with an empty gas tank.
Did it matter, though?
She doubted he would send help back, if he could get out. Even if he did, help might not be able to make it back to their town. No one else had been able to so far. They’d figured at first that people just didn’t need to stop, then later feared what would happen if someone did. They’d feared the town would quickly become overrun with lost tourists, and resources would be obliterated. After a few months, they’d stopped worrying about unexpected arrivals and concentrated on getting out themselves. As the buildings started looking pretty rough and the store and gas station were reclaimed by nature, surely someone outside had to have noticed that Penance had become a ghost town—a missing town!—but still, no one had stopped or sent any help. And everyone left behind had stopped wondering long ago what it was that kept people out or in. They were too busy just trying to survive.
She frowned at the car. The night before, she’d thought it was a Corvette. In the light of day, she realized how wrong that first impression was. Maybe it was a Mustang, but it would have to be a custom job. More likely, it was a fancy foreign import, and she wrinkled her nose in distaste. That just proved what kind of a guy he was, driving around in a ridiculously expensive car.
She tossed the gas can and hose on the grass, figuring she probably wouldn’t even know where the gas tank was, anyway. The windows were open, and she leaned inside. The dew had settled over his leather interior. That wasn’t great. His phone wouldn’t be worth much, but he had to have CDs in there somewhere, and maybe even some convenience-store food. She opened the door as quietly as possible and climbed in. A leather jacket lay crumpled on the floor of the passenger side. Who wore leather in the middle of the summer? There was a pack of cigarettes in the pocket; those would fetch a good price. She rummaged beneath the seats and in the glove box, and found the car depressingly devoid of food. No chips, no popcorn, no beef jerky. Not even an empty soda can. The guy was probably a health nut. “Vanity,” she said to no one, clucking her tongue. Sure enough, he was some slick city guy who thought hard work happened in the gym. She climbed out of the car and closed the door, again as quietly as she could, to avoid alerting him to her snoop search.
Jessa finished her chores quickly, though her muscles still ached from her late-night flight from It. When the chickens had been tended and the garden watered, all the tomato plants inspected, when she checked up on the beehives, when she tacked the siding back up from where It had brushed its huge, scaly back against it and knocked it down, she put on her boots and approached the fallow field that surrounded the yard and headed to the woods beyond.
Though It rarely struck the same place twice in a row, a chill left over from the night before crawled up her spine. The woods didn’t seem frightening now, just a bunch of trees and May apples swaying on the shaded ground between them. “Elf Umbrellas,” Mom used to call them. Jessa squeezed her eyes shut tight as she stepped over the tall-grass border and into the trees. There was nothing in the woods. Nothing but her gun, and she needed that. It was the whole point of coming out here, where it wasn’t safe, where she shouldn’t be. What had brought her out here the night before, though…
She opened her eyes and saw the shotgun, gleaming black and simulated wood grain at the base of a tree. The tree itself was wounded, from where her first shot had missed. She never missed twice. She’d struck the creature, but that had only infuriated it.
She ran to the gun and snatched it up, her hands shaking, heart hammering, and looked for the blood trail. Closing her eyes, she remembered the scene the night before. It had been charging her, and she’d fired the first barrel, hitting the tree and exploding wooden shrapnel into the air, leaving behind an angry wheal of white tree flesh. It had kept coming, and she’d fired again, the second shot hitting its center mass, filling the air with a fine, red mist and the stink of burned flesh amid a disgusting sulfur-and-mold smell. It had roared and swatted at its chest, where the scatter shot had peppered its skin with bloody holes. It hadn’t s
topped coming for her, but the wound had given her time to run.
No one had ever stopped It. They knew that evasion was the best they could settle for.
When she opened her eyes, she faced the direction she’d fled the night before. A path of ruined trees and uprooted plants showed where It had chased her, and she followed the trail. Blood stained the forest debris on the ground, volumes of it, but It had barely slowed. Its impossible strength hadn’t faded in the least, leaving it capable of destroying an entire building with its bare hands. No, not hands. Claws.
“Jessa? Jessa, where the hell are you?”
She startled at the voice, and nearly dropped the gun. She sprinted toward the field, resisting the ridiculous urge to look behind her as she charged toward the house. The monster wasn’t behind her, wasn’t chasing her to the safety of her own yard. The impetus to run had just called her name. Derek, the one dependable part of her life for the past five years—if she could really call him dependable—wouldn’t have missed the strange sight of a car sitting in her driveway. If he went inside and found the basement door barricaded, he would go down there. And if he found the guy…
No, on second thought, it might not be so bad for the smug prick in the basement to get beat up by her smug, hillbilly prick ex-boyfriend.
Once past the tree line, she slowed, tried to appear unhurried as she caught her breath. The last thing she needed was for Derek to think she would literally run every time he called for her.
“Stop making so much racket. You’ll upset the chickens, and they won’t lay.” She raised her hand to shade her eyes from the sun and dropped the gun onto the grass as she stepped onto the lawn.
“Jesus, Jessa. You scared the hell out of me.” Derek nodded toward the woods. “What were you doing out there?”
American Vampire Page 3
