“No,” I replied.
He smiled at me. “So let’s stick with the plan. And step one is to see if we can get either of those SUVs started …”
chapter
sixteen
Highway
The SUVs were a pair of white Cadillac Escalades; the tires were so new that they were still prickled with rubbery sprue. Cooper cautiously approached the nearest vehicle and tried the driver’s door; it opened easily. He stepped up onto the running board.
“Nobody in here,” he said, craning his neck to see into the back. “I guess let’s see if this will start again.”
Wincing as if he expected the car to explode, Cooper cranked the key in the ignition. The engine chugged to life without a stutter.
“Hoo-rah,” the Warlock said.
Cooper squinted at the hood and dashboard. “I can’t really tell through the antimagic, but I’m guessing somebody enchanted the starter and spark plugs.”
“Is it safe?” I asked.
“Seems to be.” Cooper shrugged and turned the engine off. “Let’s go help Rudy and Pal get the mess cleaned up.”
Rudy directed us to his stock of cleaning supplies inside the store, and we all gloved up and started hauling bodies and parts out to the grave in the field. I got shaky and sick after just a couple of minutes in the relentless sun. The guys sent me inside to sit in the cool of the café area and drink more Gatorade.
“You feeling any better?” Cooper asked, shaking water droplets off his hands as he came into the store; Rudy had set up a makeshift hand-washing station with some buckets of fresh and sudsy water on the concrete bench outside the store. The old man was at the side of the building hosing off Pal’s forelimbs.
“A little,” I replied. “That syrup of ipecac is some harsh stuff.”
“It gets the job done. But yeah, you’ll probably be feeling kinda sick for a while. Do you think you’re up for the drive into town?”
I nodded. “So what’s our plan once we get there?”
“Well, Rudy thinks that some survivors have set up a camp at the local university. He says someone came out here to try to rescue him a few weeks ago, but he was worried that if he disobeyed Miko’s orders, she would kill his daughter.”
“So she’s got him staying here to keep fresh victims from wandering off too far so she can send her guys out to capture them?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Okay, so do you think you can trust what he’s saying about people being at the university?” I asked.
Cooper spread his hands. “I think he’s a nice guy stuck in a really bad situation. I don’t think he’s lying to us. Admittedly he’s been a lot more forthcoming since you slaughtered Miko’s welcoming party, which I guess nobody had done before, but I can’t blame him too much. He probably figured at first that we were doomed no matter what, so there was no reason to risk his daughter’s life by giving us a heads-up.”
“Well, we’re all probably better off if we get out of here.” I stood up, my legs still rubbery, and stared out the window at the Escalades. “But I don’t guess Pal can fit into the SUV, so that’s a problem.”
“Perhaps he can sit on top and hang onto the luggage rack?” Cooper suggested.
“Maybe. Let’s see what he wants to do.”
Pal agreed to the idea of trying to ride on the roof, but when he climbed atop the Caddy, it became obvious that the vehicle would tip over the moment we had to take a turn at any speed, even if he flattened himself down.
“I think I can stride alongside the vehicle at a reasonable pace,” he told me. “Just drive slowly so I can comfortably keep up.”
“Pal thinks he can run beside the car,” I told the others. “Just go easy at first, and he’ll let me know if we can speed up.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Cooper got into the driver’s seat, I hopped onto the cushy leather seat beside him with my backpack in my lap, and the Warlock got into the back behind Cooper with the tote bag.
“Well, y’all be careful,” Rudy told us, standing near my open passenger door. He handed the Warlock a couple of six-packs of Gatorade and bottled water for the road. “Miko’s a dangerous character, and again, I’m real sorry I didn’t tell y’all about her from the get-go …”
“Don’t worry about it,” Cooper said. “You stay safe yourself.”
Rudy looked at me, tears welling in his eyes. “If you see my daughter Sofia … please tell her that I love her?”
The old man looked heartbreakingly sad and lonely, and I felt all my misgivings about him vanish. I reached out and touched his face with my good right hand. “You’ll have the chance to tell her that yourself soon enough. I promise.”
Rudy held my hand to his face for just a moment, his callused hand warm and trembling. “Thank you, miss. Godspeed.”
He released my hand, wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, and headed back to his empty store.
We put on seat belts and shut the doors, and Cooper started the engine. The automatic locks clicked down and the Caddy lurched forward, the tires slewing gravel as we pulled out onto the highway.
“This isn’t my idea of a slow start,” Pal complained inside my head.
“Whoa, easy on the gas,” I told Cooper.
He’d gone pale, and I realized he was stomping on the brake, not the accelerator. The car was continuing to speed up.
“Shit.” Cooper was yanking at the key in the ignition. “I can’t kill the engine.”
“Drive us off the road, we can hit that fence over there and maybe bust the axle,” the Warlock said.
Cooper pulled hard on the wheel, but it wouldn’t budge.
I whipped off my barbecue mitt and jammed my claw into the ignition, pulling a handful of plastic and sparking wires free. Nothing happened.
“What’s your man trying to do, give me a coronary?” Pal complained. He was galloping alongside the car, apparently just barely keeping up.
We’re in trouble. The car’s enchanted and won’t stop, I thought back.
“Everyone belted in?” Pal asked.
Yes. The rush of adrenaline had banished my exhaustion and sickness.
“Brace yourselves!”
I barely had time to say, “Hang on, guys,” before Pal broadsided the SUV. The Caddy tipped onto its left two wheels, then tipped back as if it was going to right itself and speed away when Pal rammed it again, sending it rolling sideways. I saw stars when one of the six-packs whacked into the back of my head. The car came to a rest upside down in the drainage ditch, the engine screaming in outrage as it revved high. The smell of gasoline filled the passenger compartment.
“Get out of there!” Pal sounded frightened.
Shielding my face with my flesh arm, I smashed my window open with my claw and slashed my seat belt, falling awkwardly onto my backpack and the car’s upholstered ceiling. Pal had bashed in the back window and was pulling the Warlock outside. I reached over and cut Cooper’s seat belt, then slung my backpack over my claw arm, grabbed his hand, and pulled him out with me.
We had just staggered clear of the ditch when the gas tank ignited, turning the inside of the car into a flaming crematorium.
I dropped my backpack on the ground and leaned forward on my knees, trying to catch my breath and steady my nerves. That had been a little too close. The guys were banged up but didn’t look like they’d lost anything more than their hats and the tote bag.
I looked over at Pal, who was rubbing his left shoulder, or what passed for his shoulder. “Thank you. We owe you big time for that. And also if we ever play football, I want to be on your team.”
“It’s quite all right,” he replied. “I’m just pleased I was able to stop the vehicle without any of you being seriously injured.”
“Are you hurt?” I asked him.
“I don’t think so. I’ll probably be a bit sore tomorrow, but I haven’t broken shell or bone.”
The Warlock was holding his healing crystal to his bloodied lip. He gave Cooper a look. �
�Safe, huh?”
“Hey, you didn’t see this coming, either, now did you?” Cooper shot back.
“Speaking of seeing things coming, there’s another car approaching,” Pal told me.
I followed his gaze down the highway. A battered blue van was speeding toward us, dust rising from behind its wheels. The sides and front bumper of the van were armored with old tires beneath rusty iron plates, and a .50-caliber machine gun had been mounted to the top, just in front of the sunroof opening. There wasn’t anything to hide behind aside from the burning SUV, which was too hot and noxious to approach.
The blue van screeched to a stop in front of us, and almost at the same moment my claw burst into purple flames.
“Dammit!” I jerked the claw away from my side and slapped out my burning T-shirt with my flesh hand. Fortunately only the hem over my dragonskin pants had ignited, so my skin hadn’t burned.
“Whoa.” A brown-haired, freckled, bespectacled girl of about eighteen or nineteen had jumped out of the van. She had a blue baby sling across her chest and an AK-47 in her right hand. At her hip was an army-green flask canteen. A yellow Post-it note was in her left hand. Her left forearm bore nasty-looking jagged scars, white on her tanned skin. I wondered if a dog had mauled her.
The girl goggled at my flaming hand, then at Pal, and looked down at her note. “Are you Jessie Shimmer?”
“Yeah …?” I replied slowly.
“Um. I’m Charlie, and I’m supposed to pick you up.” She had a square-shouldered, stocky look about her that made her seem overweight at first glance even though she was probably mostly sinew and bones under her loose jeans and oversize blue “CSU Tae Kwon Do Club” tee.
“Are you working for Miko?” Cooper asked sternly. “We’re not going anywhere with you.”
The girl looked horrified. “No, I ain’t working for Miko! I’d sooner die. Sara sent me.”
“And how did this Sara person know we were out here?” Cooper asked.
Charlie bit her lip. “The cats told her.”
We all stared at her.
“Uh. Yeah. That sounds kinda crazy, huh?” She pulled down the edge of the baby sling to reveal that she was carrying not an infant but a large orange tabby. “Miko made it so that we couldn’t shoot guns or start fires, but the cats fixed that. And they know stuff, but they only talk to Sara. We all thought it was nuts, too, at first, but then she kept being right all the time. Like now. She told me you’d be here and here you are.”
I looked at Cooper, who looked down at my burning arm. He held out his palm and whispered an old word for “fire flower.” A rose of purple flame appeared in his palm. He quickly blew it out, and stared sidelong at the cat. The cat just blinked green eyes at him and purred.
“Oh, cool, you guys can do magic stuff.” Charlie seemed impressed. “So that’s why Sara was all in a hurry for me to get y’all. Miko always grabs people like you real fast.”
“Where does she take them?” I asked, thinking of my brother Randall and Rudy’s daughter. I blinked through several gemviews. The cat in Charlie’s sling looked pretty strange through some of them, but I didn’t know how to interpret what I was seeing. Clearly the creature was not what it seemed.
Charlie shrugged. “Someplace downtown. But I mean, you don’t want to go there. There’s zombies all over. We mostly stay at the university where it’s safer.”
“Does Sara have a plan for fighting Miko?” Cooper asked.
“Well, she did, but people keep surrendering to Miko, so we only have enough guys left to guard the dorms and the greenhouse and physical plant.” Charlie’s face fell. “At first we were doing okay, because the zombies aren’t any tougher than we are and we can move faster, but Da—I mean, the guy who makes the zombies, he started infecting them with all kinds of diseases so we’d be afraid to fight them. A bunch of people got really sick before Sara and Doc Ottaway figured out what he’d done. Some of them caught AIDS and stuff and they figured that Miko was better than wasting away.”
I thought on Miko’s words to her victims in the death-memories. “She’s promising people some kind of afterlife paradise?”
Charlie nodded, briefly looking wistful, then added quickly, “But I don’t believe her. You’d have to be dumb to believe her, right?”
The girl’s expression turned uneasy as she looked down the highway. “Hey, um, we should go now. She’ll send more cars for sure.”
I dug through my backpack one-handed to find the opera glove to contain my fire. And then quickly realized there was no way it would fit on the claw.
“Can you guys reenchant this to make it a bit bigger? And cut resistant?” I asked Cooper and the Warlock.
They looked at each other, and Cooper shook his head. “No, sorry—Mother Karen actually did most of the fabric magic on that. I doubt we’d be able to do a new enchantment over her work without wrecking it entirely.”
“Well, crap.” I stuck the glove back into my pack.
“We could probably enchant that grilling mitt Rudy gave you,” Cooper said.
“Unfortunately, it’s barbecue.” I nodded toward the burning SUV.
“Well, any leather glove that was the right size for you from the start would work, too,” the Warlock said. “The fire resistance we can do easily enough, it’s just hard to get multiple enchantments to stick without a lot of time on the spellwork.”
“What do you need a glove for?” Charlie asked.
“This.” I waved my flame hand at her. “So I don’t set fire to everything I touch.”
“Lee’s Western Wear & Rodeo Supply is a few miles away.” The girl pointed her AK-47 in the direction she’d come from. “They have all kinds of gloves there. We’ll pass the store on the way to CSU.”
“Well, that sounds like a plan.” I looked at Pal. “Do you think you can fly?”
Pal began blowing his weird calliope music and rose a few inches off the ground. He stopped and fell back to earth. “Yes, I believe so, provided we stay in range of that cat-creature.”
After some logistical debate, Charlie agreed to give me a walkie-talkie and a Glock 17 semiautomatic, just in case. She opened the back doors of the van to retrieve the pistol. The rear of the vehicle held a miniarsenal of rifles and shotguns racked into a battery of modified Rubbermaid yard tool towers. Cooper took a black Beretta AL391 Urika 12-gauge shotgun for himself and checked the magazine and firing mechanism on the Glock for me to make sure it was loaded and operational. I’d have preferred one of the pistol-grip Mossberg 500s I saw on the leftmost rack, but there wasn’t any good way for me to fire one single-handed. And I wanted to be able to take out the van’s back tires if Charlie tried to go speeding away. Not that I told Charlie that, of course.
“Okay, then,” I said as Cooper strapped the pistol’s holster around my hips. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
chapter
seventeen
Meat Puppetry
I rode Pal a few yards above and behind the van. Charlie was good to her word, and kept her speed at a steady fifty-five on the highway. As soon as the first wayward grasshopper smacked me right in the forehead, though, I wished I had a helmet and a pair of goggles.
Fields gradually gave way to modern ruins: a boarded-up gas station, a gun shop with smashed-out windows and the bars behind crumpled as if they’d been rammed with a large truck, the blackened wreck of a Dairy Queen that had burned sometime before Miko squelched fire.
The walkie-talkie crackled on, Charlie’s voice tinny and faint against the wind: “The store’s coming up on the left. I’m going to pull into the lot.”
“Okay,” I replied.
The strip mall came into view; the Kmart-size Western store was wedged between a Michaels craft store and a Mexican grocery. All the front plate-glass windows had been smashed, but at least from the outside only the grocery seemed to have been looted heavily. Not surprising, since the city had been cut off from fresh supplies for a year. The parking lot was littered with abandoned cars
and overturned grocery carts rusting in the sun. By the cart corral I saw the bleached, rodent-gnawed bones of a large dog and near it, scattered human remains, and shreds of clothing. Weeds had cracked through the worn blacktop all across the lot. The place smelled of caliche dust and old rot.
Pal touched down as Charlie parked the van in a clear spot a few dozen yards away from the entrance to the Western store.
“We don’t want to stay too long.” The girl opened the driver’s-side door and stepped onto the pavement, looking nervous. “There aren’t so many dog packs now, but you never know when you’ll run into Miko’s creeps. Or worse.”
“I’m guessing lycanthropes.” The Warlock got out of the passenger seat, hefting an M249 machine gun onto his shoulders. “When an isolated town like this starts to go into the darkness, it attracts bad characters from miles around. Like rats to garbage.”
“Didn’t the local Governing Circle have a defense plan?” I slid off Pal onto the pavement, holding my left hand high to keep from scorching his fur.
Charlie looked perplexed. “A Governing Circle? I never heard of anything like that, sorry.”
“The Talents out in these Western towns like to think of themselves as lords of their private domains.” Cooper heaved the sliding door shut behind him and checked the feed tube of his shotgun. “No rules, no tedious Circle meetings, nobody poking their nose into your craft. Works great until shit like this happens.”
“Whoa.” I stared at him, unable to keep a half smirk off my face. “Did I just hear you defend the government?”
“Governing Circles are a necessary evil.” Cooper shrugged. “I don’t have to like them any more than I have to like the taste of dragon eyeballs.”
“We should really get that glove.” Charlie adjusted the cat sling, shouldered her AK-47, and started across the lot, beckoning us to follow her.
“I’ll wait out here and keep watch for more SUVs,” Pal told me.
The front glass door to Lee’s Western Wear & Rodeo Supply was hanging brokenly on its steel hinges. Charlie pulled it aside and we followed her into the store. There were five checkout lanes and a customer service desk; all the cash registers had been forced open, the dumped-out money trays lying atop discarded checks and small change on the conveyor belts. The floor was covered with stray pennies and dust and grit that had blown in. Someone had smashed a glass case of knives, taking everything but the tiniest pocket folders. There was an impressive collection of rodent droppings and shredded cardboard and plastic beneath what used to be display racks of beef jerky and cactus candies. Most of the rest of the store looked relatively undisturbed, however.
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