Blood Run – The Complete Trilogy – First Promise, Two Riders, Last Chance

by Dougherty, Christine

  Promise, who’d never been anything close to a princess in her life, didn’t take offense at his words, although it was obvious he thought she would. She changed the subject.

  “What happened with your horse?” she asked and turned to pick up a rough piece of toweling Peter had used earlier to rub the horses down. She began to stroke Ash’s legs, and he nickered in contentment. Promise knew that Evans would speak more easily if she weren’t looking directly at him.

  “He was my little sister’s horse, actually, but I used to ride him. We all did…all us kids. I had three brothers, but just the one sister. KellyAnn. She was a lot younger than me ’cause I was the oldest and she was the youngest. We lived in Delaware. My family has…had…a farm, and we just had the one horse. He wasn’t a working horse–we grew soybeans. You don’t need a horse for soybeans,” he said.

  Promise had an urge to smile at the incongruity of his words, but she thought he’d probably take it the wrong way–his vulnerability in front of her was too new, too fresh and tender.

  His voice changed in volume as he moved behind her to sink onto the couch. “KellyAnn loved that horse; she practically grew up on it. She was just thirteen when…”

  Promise listened as Evans related the events of his own experience with the vampire plague. She moved from rubbing Ash’s legs to rubbing Snow’s–Ash’s head was beginning to droop. Between the two horses and two people and the flickering Coleman, the small room warmed up. Promise kept her eyes on her work, but offered Evans an occasional murmur of understanding, letting him know he was heard.

  His story was as sadly devastating as everyone’s, but as he told his tale, Promise finally understood his instant resentment when she and Peter asked to come on the road with his troop.

  His little sister’s horse, Barber, had been forcibly drafted into use when their town–which had fallen to the plague well ahead of Wereburg–tried to close ranks and fight back, before anyone had a very clear idea of just what it was they were up against. Barber had died the first night out, and he’d died badly. KellyAnn had been devastated beyond reason and had, herself, been killed only two nights later. She, too, had died badly. Evans had left to join the guard the next day. His seething resentment toward the town leaders–who had taken Barber, and in his eyes, ruined the scant rest of his beloved sister’s life– had driven him to leave. His fury seemed a raging monster that would at any moment slip his tenuous hold. He wasn’t sure what he was capable of…but he feared it could have deadly results.

  When he’d seen Promise–he told her, the words coming out one hard nugget at a time, like something choked up–his only thoughts had been for KellyAnn and Barber. He’d been instantly bitter about what he saw as Promise’s callous disregard for the horse she rode. But then as the trip had gone on, he’d realized just how much she cared for Ash. He’d seen her go without food, passing it to the big horse, making sure his needs were met before hers. He’d come to feel–

  “Promise?” Peter’s voice came from down the hall, near the base of the stairs.

  “We’re in here with the horses,” she called back. She felt a moment’s regret, almost annoyance, that Evans had been interrupted. He was obviously not a person who shared himself easily.

  Peter appeared in the living room doorway and smiled at the sight of the two big, sleepy horses taking up most of the space. Snow’s front leg was cocked, offering her hoof to Promise’s ministrations.

  “Who’s we?” Peter asked and reached to pat Ash.

  Promise looked behind her to the couch where Evans had just been.

  He was gone.

  ~ ~ ~

  “I think he’s just the type of person who’s either all the way for you or all the way against you,” Promise whispered in the dark. She was lying with her head on Peter’s shoulder. The lantern had been turned almost all the way down, and a faint glow fuzzed the details of the bedroom. “And I don’t think there are too many people that he’s ‘for’…you know what I mean?”

  Peter nodded and tightened his arm on her shoulders. “I know what you mean, but I don’t trust him. Or like him very much. He has a thing for you. Did you realize that?”

  Promise shifted and frowned up at him. “You think so?”

  Peter snorted lightly and nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

  Promise stared at him for a moment longer then dropped her head back onto his shoulder. She yawned. There were four blankets on them. Coupled with their layers of clothing and close proximity, she was warmer than she’d been in a long time. She decided she liked sleeping next to someone.

  His arm squeezed her, and she wondered again when they might become…more than odd friends. The last time they’d kissed had been the rooftop of that old shop, when he’d seemed so intense, almost desperate in the moonlight. Their attraction to each other was obvious. But these were strange times. Nothing went as the old movies had led her to believe they would go. As if to underscore her train of thought, Peter began to tell her more about his dead wife.

  As he spoke, laying out the details of how extraordinary–to him–his wife had been, Promise felt herself becoming somehow less. It was as though as he spoke about Trisha, fleshing out the details of her, Promise flattened, becoming two-dimensional.

  Peter had no idea how much he took from Promise, bit by bit, whittling away at her waning self-confidence, using her to breathe life back into the dead.

  ~ ~ ~

  “Hillsborough is the next outpost, and it’s about thirty miles,” Miller said, looking up at the riders. “Think they can do that today?” Peter nodded and smiled, but Miller noticed that Promise looked tired and distracted. She slumped in a soft C-shape, gazing back at Netcong with something almost like fear. Miller didn’t know what had happened to change the girl overnight, but she suspected it had something to do with Peter. And she hoped it didn’t have anything to do with Evans. “Promise?” Miller said, and the girl turned, her eyes focusing slowly.

  “Yeah?” Promise asked.

  Miller smiled patiently, although inside, her anxiety to get going was a growing force. Delaware, home base and home, were not so far away now. She was slightly dismayed at her own homesickness–she’d been a Guard soldier since long before the plague and was not usually prone to such feelings…but reminded herself that it had so far been a rough tour. The roughest she’d had yet.

  “Are you okay, Promise?” Miller asked and noted that Peter’s attention swung over to the girl, too. Good. He should be keeping a closer eye on her, in Miller’s opinion.

  Promise glanced back at Netcong. “Yeah, I’m okay. Let’s just get out of here, okay? This place is…” she trailed off, shaking her head. How to explain the stress of the things that had been given and taken away from her last night? Her confusion over Evans and Peter seemed almost tied to Netcong in some indescribable way. There was no way to express it, not in her limited vocabulary.

  “Haunted,” Miller supplied, and Promise nodded.

  “Yeah, it’s haunted,” Promise agreed, relieved to have a word for it. “Let’s just go.”

  They moved out, taking the off ramp for Route 206 South. 206 had been cleared by the Netcong outpost so the going would be easy for quite some distance. The horses cantered quickly behind the Humvees, and Miller felt as though they were making good time for the first time on this miserable tour. She also couldn’t help an irrational thrill at the thought of heading south…she pictured them tumbling down a slope, gaining speed as they went, and at the bottom–Delaware. And home. She couldn’t wait to see Tara.

  Maybe it was time to request an extended leave or at least a steady posting. With Riker gone, she had a suspicion that she might have lost her taste for this kind of sortie. A year was enough. Too long, maybe.

  In the second Humvee, Billet was telling Evans the plot to the last movie he’d seen before the plague had come to his town…something about a guy who had a car accident and woke up a psychic then went crazy and tried to kill a politician–something like that, anyway�
��Evans was barely listening.

  His eyes strayed to the rearview mirror. Promise rode in and out of his sightline, leaning into the cold wind as she concentrated on watching the road ahead, keeping an eye out for stones or debris that might harm Ash. She was beautiful. But she looked troubled; her face drawn and grave. When Peter entered the small space of the mirror, Evans looked away.

  “But of course, she’d had to move on with her life, you know? The guy was in a coma for like, forever, and she got married and had a kid, but then they spent one night together–hold on, that was later, the first part was…”

  Billet rambled on, and Evans tried to follow his convoluted retelling of the movie, but then Ash appeared again, filling the mirror like a dark cloud, drawing Evans’ eyes. Promise’s black hair was unbound and blew across her face like a veil. As he watched, she tossed her head from side to side, clearing her sight, her hair streaming wildly around her shoulders. Then her eyes found his in the mirror, and she smiled. Her smile tore at his heart. He looked away again.

  “…told the guy that his kid was going to fall through the ice, but…”

  Evans’ eyes strayed from the lead Humvee back to the mirror again. He felt compelled to look for Promise.

  “…shook the hand of this crazy-ass politician who…”

  But this time it was Peter’s eyes that met his across the cold space between horses and Humvee. Neither man smiled.

  ~ ~ ~

  The roads became less clear once they were about ten miles out from Netcong. They would stay less clear until they were about ten miles from Hillsborough. That left the ten miles or so in the middle where the traveling was slower. They stopped at midday for a lunch break, but even the horses seemed anxious to continue on. Maybe they, too, had some sense of progress finally being made. Or maybe they just sensed the impatience of everyone around them.

  Back on the road, Peter tried to draw Promise out of her blue mood.

  “We’ll see Princeton tomorrow. Are you still excited about that?” he asked her.

  She glanced at him. “I am, I guess,” she said. “Not as much as I was before, though,” she admitted.

  “Why?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know…I just…I don’t really know.” She sighed. “I guess I’m just tired today.”

  “Are you homesick?” he asked, groping for the words that would encourage her to bring up the feelings that festered in her like poison. It wasn’t good to let bad feelings cook for too long. He knew that better than anyone.

  She nodded and shrugged and ran her hands over Ash’s mane but didn’t speak. Peter felt like a fisherman dropping his lure where he hoped the fish might be biting–and having no luck. He thought a minute and then recast.

  “Worried about Chance?”

  A brief, unhappy smile flitted across her features. “Yes, but I always am, at least on some level. Nothing is going to change that.”

  “Promise,” Peter said and asked the question that bothered him the most. The one he wasn’t sure if he wanted an answer to. “Are you upset with me?”

  Her head dropped a bit more, and now her fingers attacked the small knots in Ash’s mane, picking and disentangling the coarse black hair. A sure sign of nervousness.

  “I’m not upset with you, I just…” Her voice dwindled down to nothing, and Peter’s stomach knotted. Underlining her silence, the clopping of the horses’ hooves rang through his heart, making it feel hollow, scooped out and empty.

  “You just what, Promise?” he asked. He reached across to her, but his fingers barely skated down her arm; the distance between them was too great.

  “I don’t know what we are. To each other, I mean.” She looked up, and her eyes were bright with tears. And pain. “You tell me about Trisha and how…how great she was, how perfect; it’s like you and I are friends… just friends, but I thought…I thought there was more; that we were becoming something…”

  Peter was quiet for a long time, looking at the ramshackle businesses that had begun to pop up like rotted teeth along the highway. “Do you remember your dream?” he finally asked.

  Promise thought back to when they’d captured Chance. Her dreams that night had been colored by the trauma of the horrors she’d witnessed in that laundry room trap. The intense fear and desperation had darkened her mind with nightmares of uncertain loneliness. And she had also dreamed that Peter had a daughter. She’d told him so the next morning as he carried her back to the safe house.

  “Yes, I remember. I dreamed you had a little girl. We were at the beach and…” she found the nightmare had trailed away as most such dreams do. She could picture the little girl, about three years old with gray eyes and pigtails, but something had happened, the girl’s eyes had begun to change. Promise shuddered. “It was just a nightmare. Because of everything that had happened.”

  Peter pulled on Snow’s rein, halting her, and Promise turned Ash so that she faced Peter. The Humvees continued away, their engine noise dwindling. The silence was broken only by the soft breathing of the horses. Peter’s eyes on hers were bleak. She became afraid.

  “When she was…when she was killed…Trisha was seven months pregnant. We were having a girl.”

  Promise’s breath left her as she felt her insides slam full of ice. The vague picture she had in her mind of Trisha dead in the Woolworth’s–a rabbit cradled in her arms–changed in an instant: now the dead woman was cradling her own stomach in her arms, cradling her unborn baby.

  Hot bile filled the back of Promise’s throat, and the bright day went gray around her. She swayed on Ash’s back, and he snorted in alarm. She threw her leg over and slid from the saddle, grasping the pommel to steady herself.

  “Promise!” Peter said, alarmed. He sprang from Snow’s back.

  Promise was huddled next to Ash, her arms crossed over her stomach. Peter squatted next to her, barely able to hear the words that tumbled from her lips in a tear-choked flood.

  “I’m so sorry, Peter, I’m so sorry.” Her eyes were squeezed shut, but still the tears came. She rocked. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know…”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, holding her tight. “I know you didn’t know, Promise. You couldn’t know. It’s okay…please…” He was surprised by the intensity of her reaction. He’d been living with Trish and the baby’s death for over a year now. Parts of him had even begun to heal, although he’d never have believed it possible back when the days had been the darkest.

  “Promise, please tell me…what is it?”

  She hitched in a breath and ran her hand under her nose, visibly trying to calm herself. “I just feel ashamed that I…I’m acting like a jealous high school kid and…of course you had this whole other…before me, you had…I was being so selfish!” Her breath hitched again, and she choked out a sob. Then she bit her lip and ran her hands over her face. She shivered, but her head felt so hot. Her face was tight with tears.

  When she spoke again, her voice was calmer, but no less sorrowful. Her eyes met his. “It made me think about Chance. I know he’s not my child, but sometimes, when we were growing up and I was taking care of him…it seemed like he was my child. It just hit me all at once: what if he dies? What if he dies?” Her voice broke on the last word, and she crashed onto her knees. She huddled over herself, palms flat on the asphalt, and sobbed out the tension and uncertainty that had been eating away at her since the start of this journey. She shivered uncontrollably despite another wave of heat that ran through her body.

  Peter hovered protectively over her, his hands steadying her shoulders.

  “What the hell?” Evans’ angry voice came from behind them. The Humvees must have turned around when they lost sight of the riders.

  Evans dropped to his knees next to Promise, bunting Peter aside. Peter fell backward onto his butt.

  “Are you all right, Promise?” Evans asked, pulling her up by her shoulders. He took in her face, awash with tears, and his heart squeezed with rage and hurt. H
e looked up at Billet, who had just joined them. “Get her a shirt or something from her bag,” he said, and Billet turned to dig in the saddlebag at Ash’s side. “Did he hurt you?” Evans asked, his voice quiet but no less intense. “Did Peter hurt you, Promise?”

  Miller and Lu ran up just as Peter was getting to his feet, brushing the road gravel from his hands.

  Promise shook her head, wiping the T-shirt across her face and under her nose. “No,” she said and hitched in a breath. “No, Peter didn’t hurt me. You’ve got it wrong…he would never hurt me.” Exhaustion pulled her shoulders down around her chest, and when she tried to stand, her knees gave out again. Her eyes rolled up as she swayed unsteadily.

  Evans lifted her into his arms in one easy movement. “She’s burning up. I think she has a fever. I’m putting her in with me…Billet, you ride Ash.” He was halfway to the Humvee when Promise stirred.

  “No, wait,” she said and swung her legs back down to the ground. Evans kept his arm around her shoulders to steady her. “I’m okay, I was just dizzy for a sec. I’m better now.”

  Evans put a hand to her forehead. “You’ve got a fever. You must have picked up a bug.”

  “Well, it explains a lot,” Promise said. She glanced to where Peter stood uncertainly nearby, hands in his pockets. “I’m not usually prone to breakdowns. Not since I was about six.” She smiled wanly and shivered again.

  “Hey, Lu, get over here with the first aid kit, would you?” Miller said. She put her hand on Promise’s forehead. “You’re a little warm, I guess.” She shrugged. “What do you think, Lu?”