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

by Dougherty, Christine

  He was still for so long that she began to think he hadn’t heard her. Then he spoke. “It’s difficult because he’s right. On one hand, anyway. The things they can find out through me, because of what I am…those things could change humanity, better it.” His head came up, and she felt the weight of his gaze, even in the gloom. His tone was angry. “But he’s also wrong.”

  “Yes, of course he is,” Promise said and noted the shock in Peter’s posture. He hadn’t expected her to agree so readily. She crossed the room. “You have to take yourself into consideration, too. I know that. Look what I’ve done…put my friends in danger…maybe everyone…but sometimes it’s still the right thing to do. Isn’t it?”

  Peter nodded and relaxed. He began to rub Snow with the cloth. “I stayed here as long as I could,” he said, without looking up. “But I kept having these dreams…nightmares. Trish had had the baby and was back in Bishop waiting for me. Looking for me. Every day I would wake up and feel relief and regret–relief that it had only been a dream and regret that Trisha was still dead. But every night, it got a little worse. They were in danger or starving or lost. Trisha fell in with the wrong people, someone stole the baby, Trisha was attacked by vampires over and over…I was…I was becoming a mess. I was afraid to sleep; the dreams were so real to me. I started to get very emotional, losing my temper a lot.”

  He sat on a nearby weight bench, the cloth dangling forgotten in his hand. “I’m sure part of it was from being sick…having the disease in me. Other dreams I had…the ones that didn’t involve Trisha and the baby were…” He shuddered. “Well…they were even worse in some ways. I knew the other nightmares–the non-Trish ones–were from the vampirism.”

  “How did you know?” Promise asked.

  It was a while before he answered, and even when he did, he wouldn’t look at her.

  “I knew because of the things…the things I was doing in the dreams.” He stood and turned away. She understood that he would say no more about it.

  She was relieved.

  “How long were you here?” she asked.

  “Four months,” he said. “Then I left with a National Guard detail. They were going back past Bishop. I had this compulsion…I knew Trish was dead, of course I knew it. But I just had to–” he stopped abruptly, his hand covering his eyes. Compulsion wasn’t even a strong enough word for what he’d been feeling back then. Between the disease, lack of sleep, horrendous nightmares and being cooped up day after day…he’d felt as though he’d been like an animal in a trap. He’d felt as though he died a little each day as things–his peace of mind–were taken from him.

  “I just had to go. Edwards was pissed. I mean…really, really pissed.” He laughed, and it surprised Promise into smiling. “He called me a traitor, an ingrate. I called him a few things, too.” Peter shook his head and sobered. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d stayed four months or four years. It never would have been enough. He’d never have enough.” Peter looked up, surprise dawning on his face. “It’s funny, but I don’t think I really realized that until just now,” he said and shook his head again. “That’s really why I’m mad–still mad. I got my feelings hurt.”

  “What do you mean?” Promise asked.

  “I thought Edwards and I were friends…close friends. We were, I’d swear to it. I told him about the nightmares and how I’d been feeling. The desperation and the depression. He cared. He was worried…I know that he was. But when I decided that I had to leave, to go and see Bishop and get things figured out…he turned on me. That’s how I saw it, anyway. Because his experiments, the cure, were more important to him. It hurt my feelings.”

  “You’re right,” Edwards said from the doorway.

  Peter looked up, startled, and Promise turned.

  “And I’m sorry, Peter. I was wrong to expect you to stay forever.”

  “No, you weren’t wrong,” Peter said. “You were just thinking about what was best for everyone. I understand that now.”

  Dr. Edwards nodded. “Yes, that’s true, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of an individual. You gave us plenty of yourself in time, blood…everything you could do. I should have paid more attention when you were having the nightmares. It was wrong to dismiss them the way I did.”

  Peter nodded in acknowledgement. “Thanks, Doc, I appreciate that.”

  Edwards smiled. “When I saw you on the horse, I knew it must be Snow…the horse I’d heard so much about when you were here. I was…I was shocked that you’d found her. And ashamed that I had tried to keep you from…” His voice trailed off, and Peter stepped forward, his hand up.

  “It’s okay, Doc,” he said and waited for Edwards to take his hand. But Edwards bypassed it and pulled Peter into a rough hug, instead. Even in the dim light, Promise thought she saw tears glimmer at the edges of Edwards’ tightly shut eyes. She turned and busied herself with petting Ash, pulling out the tangles in his mane, trying to afford the men some privacy.

  Edwards pulled back, chuckling and wiping his eyes. “Thank you, Peter. Thank you for forgiving me.”

  Peter smiled and changed the subject. “How have things been going here? One of the other doctors told me there have been breakthroughs.”

  “Oh yes, thanks to you!” Edwards said. “But first, tell me about the horse, about Snow. How did you find her? It seems a miracle.”

  Peter looked around at Promise where she busied herself with Ash. “Promise?” he said, and she turned to meet his concerned gaze. “Do you want to hear this, or is it…” he shrugged his shoulders, his eyes full of careful concern.

  “I want to hear it,” she said. “Of course I do.”

  Dr. Edwards looked from Peter to Promise, confused by their exchange, but he let it pass without comment.

  “When I left, I was pretty upset,” Peter started and glanced at Edwards apologetically as if sorry he had to tell this part so soon after their reconciliation.

  Edwards waved the implied apology away.

  Peter continued. “I hadn’t slept well in at least two months and hadn’t slept at all in the prior three days. The nightmares had become too much,” Peter ran a hand over his face, recalling. “A National Guard contingent had come that day, and I found out by chance that they were going to be headed very close to Bishop. I seized on the idea of going with them. It…the idea…just took over my brain…it seemed somehow the answer to all the problems I’d been having. I had a sense of hope that I hadn’t felt since, well, since before everything, I guess. Not since we’d found out Trish was pregnant.” He smiled with more nostalgia than bitterness. “It just took me over. I talked the commander of the guard into it, and even that wasn’t very difficult to do. He saw no reason for me not to tag along with them. For me, that was added confirmation that I was doing the right thing. Almost like it was ordained in some way. So after some…” he glanced at Edwards. “…after some discussion here, I went. Right away, I started feeling better. Just being on the move made me feel like a weight was lifting. I was still afraid to sleep–afraid of the nightmares–but by the time we made camp that first night, I was exhausted. I slept like the dead.”

  Promise made a small, involuntary sound of protest at his phrase, and Peter looked up at her with a reassuring smile. Then he continued. “We went through parts of Pennsylvania I’d never seen, and the outposts were…some of them were terrible. Just huddles of unhappy people scraping along day to day.” He looked at Promise. “What you guys have done at Wereburg is a great accomplishment. In one town, I think it was right around Kinnisburg, almost to Bishop, the outpost was losing people left and right. To sickness, to vampires, to accidents…they were suspicious and bitter. Savage, almost. It’s why the Guard decided to keep my status as ‘sick’ a secret. You could see that when it came to their sanity, their sense of civility, some of the people were holding onto some very thin, very frayed ropes.

  “Each of the traveling Guard groups has a list of outposts that they hit in rotation, and some of the outposts overlap wi
th different groups. But the individual route to the outposts is at the commander’s discretion–they’re always on the lookout for survivors and will vary their routes each time. My group hadn’t planned to stop at Bishop or even go through it because they’d been through on their last time around.

  “I told them when I signed on that that was okay, no problem; I would just split from them when we were at the closest point. I wasn’t being heroic; I just didn’t care. Part of me even wondered if I’d ever leave Bishop again once I got there. I somehow wasn’t able to picture anything beyond Bishop–I’d only set my sights that far ahead.”

  Promise, who’d had the same feelings about Chance…wondering what, if anything, came after fulfilling her promise…nodded in understanding. Peter smiled at her and then continued.

  “The commander detoured. At that point, I was feeling better–being on the move was having a good effect on my mind, and the dreams has lessened–but I still had this nagging sense that Bishop was my end, not just my end goal. I told the commander not to detour. I told him I preferred to move ahead on my own. He agreed,” Peter said and laughed, one quick huff, and shook his head. “Or so I thought.

  “They let me take a quad they’d been trailering. I went to the mall first. I don’t even know why…I guess just because it was the last place I’d seen Trish. I drove through the parking lot, and it was surreal because if you didn’t know anything about what had happened, it looked as though it could have been any other regular day at the mall. The parking lot was about half-filled with cars. When you got closer–when you looked closer–you could see that a lot of the cars sat on flats and were covered in dirt and bird shit. Windows had been busted. There must have been a hailstorm at one point because some of them had some heavy dings on them, already starting to rust out.

  “I drove the quad right up to the main entrance. I think I had an idea that I would go in and find her; get her out and bury her or…” Peter cleared his throat. “The entryway doors had bodies stacked against them on the inside. It must have been from that night, from the massacre. But it had been a year, and they looked almost like they were…like they were melting into each other. It was so…I could smell them, even through the glass. There was no way I was going in there. I just couldn’t.

  “I drove away, and I kept picturing Trish in there, just cooking, really; that’s what all those bodies were doing–cooking slowly in the heat and…it was making me feel…like I was going crazy. I couldn’t get rid of the thought that I had abandoned her again. Her and…her and the baby, both.” Peter scrubbed his hands across his face and shook his head.

  “Peter,” Promise said. “There was nothing you–”

  “I know,” Peter said, cutting her off. His tone was not impatient or unkind…merely resigned. He gave her a small, one-sided smile. “Yeah. I know that now. I knew it then, too, but it just…there were times when everything got to be too much. I don’t know how else to explain it.

  “I thought about the back corridors that let onto each store’s utility room,” Peter continued. “The back corridors ran the length of the mall without windows or outside light of any kind…that’s why the vampires had been able to colonize the area so quickly. There were only two ‘back doors’ on each side of the mall. Those gave onto the area behind all the stores, including the Woolworth’s where Trish had been…been killed.

  “I decided to try the back way in. I know now how crazy that idea seems, but at the time…it seemed almost like a revelation. I thought I could just slip in, find her, and slip back out. I wonder now if I had some kind of subconscious death wish. I wonder if that was why I couldn’t picture anything beyond Bishop.

  “I parked the quad and turned it off. It was so quiet. You know what I mean, right? The kind of quiet we never had before the plague: no cars in the background, no muzak from the outside speakers, no airplanes…even the birds were quiet that morning. It was like an omen, but I ignored it.

  “The door swung open with no resistance. I had been worried about that part. Those doors had been for maintenance only and had always been locked. They were the crash bar kind of doors, and when the locks weren’t engaged, there was nothing that held them shut save their own weight. The one I went to opened without a problem. It didn’t even squeal. Which should have told me something, but I ignored it. I hesitated for a second because it was black in there, pitch black. Even the sunlight I was letting in seemed to stop dead after about ten feet. I wanted to prop the door open, but there was nothing within reach. I could have gone back to the front parking lot and grabbed something from a car or a stone from the landscaping, but it was like I was possessed. I had started this and was determined not to derail myself. Something like that. But like I said, looking back on it…I’m not sure what was really going through my head.

  “I stepped into the corridor and let the door close behind me. It was so dark. You can’t even…there’s no way to express that kind of darkness, is there? It was just black. Nothing. My breathing seemed ten times as loud. I could even hear my heart.

  “I remembered my flashlight and turned it on. I flashed it up and down the corridor. It was tight in there, only about four feet wide, and there were pipes and runs of wires and every so often a door with a store’s name on it. Nothing fancy, just stenciled on. Each door led to the store’s utility area. There were no bodies in the corridor, which also should have tipped me off, and I was uneasy, so I guess part of me intuited what was going on…but I ignored it. I headed in the direction of Woolworth’s and Trisha.”

  Peter stopped talking, and Promise sat next to him on the weight bench. She put an arm across his back. He began again.

  “I didn’t make it very far–three or four doors–when they began to open on both sides of me. Vampires filled the hallway. I dropped the flashlight, and it went out.” Peter shuddered against Promise’s arm. He continued. “I realized I could see…I could still see them in the dark. Even better, actually, than with the flashlight. The flashlight only showed a small portion of the space. In the dark, I could see everything. I guess because of what I am.

  “They hesitated. I could see the confusion spread across their faces. Their noses were wrinkling like they were…scenting me. They must have had a sense that I was at least somewhat like them. They don’t feed on each other, but I have seen them kill each other for spite.

  “They attacked me,” Peter said and then sat quietly, head down.

  Dr. Edwards stirred and sat forward. He’d been still and thoughtful for Peter’s narrative. “If you can’t continue,” Edwards said, “I understand. Don’t tax yourself.”

  “No, it’s okay. I don’t mind,” Peter said and shifted. “They attacked me, but because the hallway was so closed in, they couldn’t attack all at once. I fought them and, while fighting, realized I had two choices: turn and find the door to Woolworth’s, or fight them back to the outside door. I still wanted to find Trish, so…”

  He trailed off again, thinking. How to explain the black horror of that brief but intense struggle in the hallway? The vampires that were attacking him seemed weakened in some way, not nearly as lively and wiry as the ones that had wreaked havoc in the mall the night Trish had been killed. He knew that part of being able to defend himself against them was his condition–he was stronger than he’d ever been, and his senses were acutely attuned to the darkness–but another part was that these vampires were weak. There were too many in this one area and the…food supply…was gone. The vampires were starving, and like any living thing, they required sustenance to live–although their tolerance to starvation seemed well beyond the scope of normal humanity’s.

  Peter glanced from Edwards to Promise. He had done things in that fight that…he couldn’t recount them now and maybe not ever. No matter how much Promise loved or would come to love him, there were things he didn’t want her–or anyone else–to know. Deep in his mind, he could still hear the crack of tiny neck bones splintering as he twisted heads halfway around; he could recall the
sudden, hot pulse of blood turned loose through holes dug by his fingers and teeth. It had been savage. It had been inhumane. And Peter had relished every second of it; fighting for his life but also fighting for Trish, hoping that the one who’d killed her was still here. Was lying at his feet, bleeding.

  Eventually the vampires had hung back, confused and finally frightened, the smell of their own kind’s blood beginning to overwhelm the enticing scent coming from Peter.

  “…so I decided to continue on to Woolworth’s,” Peter said, omitting the things he didn’t want them to know. “I fought them down the hall, and they were weak, so it wasn’t as bad…as bad as it could have been. They seemed confused as to what I was, and that helped, too. Then I found the door.

  “I figured I’d have to keep fighting them once I was in the store, too, because the stores themselves had no outside light. Closer to the mall entrance there was sun from the skylights in the main hallway, but the back of Woolworth’s should have been almost as dark as the maintenance corridor. But when I went from the back corridor through the utility room and into the store…it seemed like some kind of miracle…it was as bright as the day outside had been. A huge section of the roof had collapsed. Maybe from snow. Maybe from the same hailstorm that had beat up the cars. I don’t know. But it was a reprieve. They couldn’t follow me into the store, so I was free to…

  “I was free to look for her, and…” Peter stopped again and shuddered. “She was still there.” His voice had dropped to a horrified whisper, and he shook his head. “She was still leaning against the cages, but everything about her had…had sunk in…it was…she was…” He shuddered again, jerking violently against Promise’s arm. “I couldn’t bring myself to…to touch her. I don’t know how I thought I would take her out of there and bury her. She would have…fallen apart…if I’d laid a finger on her. I fell to my knees, and then I don’t know what happened, whether I blacked out or just…” He’d gone crazy, he wanted to say, but couldn’t. He’d felt his mind closing in on itself, folding over and telling him to sleep. Just sleep it away. Even as it was happening, he knew he shouldn’t. He knew movement was the antidote to this kind of shock.