The mechanical rat-a-tat-tat of the blades got louder, but I didn’t quite know where the sound was coming from. “It’s another helicopter,” I whispered, then looked into the dark sky. “It’s close—probably saw your headlights.”
Dorcas bent her head down low over the steering wheel and peered up into the night. She muttered something that sounded like what a drunken sailor might say, but before she could add anything else, a spotlight splashed down on the ground about a quarter mile behind us.
“Crap,” I said. “Stay here. Don’t turn on the lights. Don’t do anything.” I didn’t wait to hear her reply. Instead, I sprinted back to the van, hopped in and turned it on, making sure to still keep the lights off. Then I did a three-point turn—I would have so passed my driver’s test—and headed back the other way, directly toward the spotlight.
I’m being crazy, I told myself. What was I thinking? This was what running on pure adrenaline felt like. I was just a passenger hovering in the background, watching my body make all the killer moves like some high-paid pretty boy in an action flick.
I pressed down hard on the gas and headed right for the light. When I was just about on top of it, I skirted the beam and skidded to a stop with the minivan pointing back the way we had come.
The last thing I did before pulling the keys out of the ignition was to turn on the headlights, flash the high-beams, and press the little square button on the steering wheel to activate the hazards. Then I was out the door and running back down the road toward the dark ambulance like my life depended on it—which was exactly the case.
A minute later, out of breath and sweating hard, I was back at the ambulance window.
“No. Don’t open the door,” I snapped at Dorcas as she reached for the handle. “The lights will go on.”
“Then what in the hell do you expect me to do?”
I looked back down the road. The spotlight was searching in a circle, trying to fix on the van. “Crawl out the window,” I said.
“Are you out of your mind? I’ll break something.”
“If you turn on a light, they might break you,” I said. “I’ll catch you, Dorcas. I promise.”
Dorcas thought about it for all of about two seconds before she flicked her cigarette past my head, undid her seat belt, and put both her hands out the window. I grabbed them and pulled as hard and as gently as I could.
“Break my hip and I’ll break your head,” she growled as she slid out a little. Her words came out painful and labored. What was it with old people, anyway? Did their parts just get brittle or something?
It took a bit, but I managed to get my arms under hers with her face right up next to mine and her nicotine breath covering me with cancerous toxins. I pulled again.
We both fell backwards, my head bouncing painfully against the pavement with a thud. The rest of me, however, acted as a cushion for Dorcas. After she landed on top of me, she said a few choice words which I barely registered because all I could see was stars. The next thing I knew, she was pushing herself to her feet.
“Hurry,” she said. “They’re coming.”
“Whaaa? Who? Mommy?”
“Move it, kid. The helicopter’s landing.”
I turned my head sideways. Through blurred vision I saw lights and dust being churned up from the road as the helicopter prepared to touch down. Dorcas dug her hand into my shoulder. “I said move it,” she barked, and that was enough. I crawled to my knees, then to my feet, all the time my head throbbing from behind. Scant seconds later, the two of us crossed in front of the ambulance and into the woods on the side of the road.
25
I’VE NEVER BEEN a fan of the woods. If it weren’t for the bugs and the pricker-bushes and, well, Bigfoot, I suppose the woods would be just fine and dandy—just not for me.
They were creepy and dark, and animals lived in them that ate each other. In fact, the woods were just like another version of a world filled with poxers—a place where you were never really safe, because just around the next corner, or the next tree, or the next outcropping of rocks, was a creepoid ready to go all monster on your ass.
As a matter of fact, you could say I was scared of the woods. They just plain freaked me out. Yet there I was, being dragged into the middle of them, at night no less, by Dorcas Duke.
“Not too far,” I whispered, trying to quell the heebie-jeebies that made my voice sound like an adolescent girl’s. Dorcas kept pulling me along like she was the little engine that could, and I was a freight car full of dead weight.
“Just far enough,” she whispered back. The trees pushed in on us and I started to feel claustrophobic. I didn’t know you could feel claustrophobic outside. There was no moon, and the sky was cloudy. I felt like I was in the black depths of Jolly’s Pharmacy all over again.
Finally Dorcas stopped. “Now get down and shut up,” she said and dropped to the ground, pulling me down with her.
“Do you, like, lift weights or something?” Old people weren’t supposed to shoot people. Old people weren’t supposed to smoke 500 cigarettes a day. Old people weren’t supposed to be agile enough to climb out of an ambulance window and hustle their butts into the woods in the middle of the night.
“Quiet,” she snapped. “What do you think I do all day, sit home and knit? Excuse me for not lying down and dying, because if that’s what you think I should be doing, then you got the wrong gal, sonny boy.”
“Chill,” I said, but she was right. That’s sort of what I did expect—for her to be all feeble.
Trina and I didn’t have a lot of experience with old people. I never knew either of my grandmothers. Their expiration dates came due before we were even born. Grandpa Light died young, too. He fell off a roof. The only grandparent that I knew was Grandpa Green. He lived in a sea of wrinkles somewhere in Florida. Trina and I saw him twice a year and most times he didn’t quite know who we were.
I felt horrible wishing it, but I could only hope he got Necropoxy like everyone else. I didn’t want to think about him down there, alone and confused—and immune.
Through the dense foliage, I could see the lights of the helicopter shattered into fragments by finger-like twigs. The blades were still whirring away.
“Geez, I want a ciggy,” Dorcas rasped.
“No you don’t,” I whispered. All I needed was for her to light one up. Smokey the Bear would probably come walking out of the brush with his ranger pants and his wide-brim hat. The shirtless bear would hunker down next to us and give Dorcas a lecture on the dangers of flicking a butt out the window into the dry, dead leaves of autumn.
Or maybe he’d eat us.
Dorcas grumbled something and spat. “You’re a pain in the ass, kid,” she said. “I like you.”
“Right back at you, Grandma,” and for a moment I wished that Dorcas Duke really was my grandmother. If we ever got out of here and back to my parents, and maybe if my dad was actually able to help my mom and the rest of them, I would ask Dorcas if she would take on the awesome responsibility of being my adopted grandmother. Of course that would mean fat checks on my birthday and all the chocolate I could eat.
She didn’t even have to be Trina’s grandmother—just mine. I wanted her all for myself.
“I can’t see,” Dorcas murmured. “I want to get closer.” She stood up, wiping leaf litter off her pants, and started heading through the woods toward the helicopter. I wasn’t about to stay huddled in the dark by myself, so I followed her. We moved sideways, staying twenty feet in from the road, heading back toward where I left the minivan.
Dorcas was fearless, scrambling over fallen-down trees and around big rocks that had probably been there since the dinosaurs. Once or twice, she pushed a branch aside and it whipped back in my face.
“Ow.”
“Be quiet.”
“Stop flinging branches in my face.”
“Stop putting your face in the way of the branches.”
A few minutes later we had halved the distance between the helicopte
r and the ambulance. There were people on the road. She grabbed onto my shoulder and pulled me down to the ground again.
“You recognize any of them?”
“I don’t know,” I said. There were four of them this time, and the helicopter was bigger, like it was made for carrying a platoon. Maybe they had come back for Trudy Aiken with something that could actually lift her into the air.
I didn’t see Cheryl The It with them, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t inside the copter, or worse, slinking down the road toward us.
“Do you think they’ve even noticed the ambulance?” I whispered. I looked back through the woods to where we had left our darkened ride parked on the side of the road. I could barely make it out through the trees. All I could hope was that it looked like just another derelict car to them. After all, there were millions on the roads.
Dorcas licked her lips. “Maybe not,” she said. “It could be too far away.” She watched the people from the helicopter. Even from where we were hiding I could see that they were all holding rifles. A couple of them had opened the door to the minivan and were rummaging around inside. They weren’t going to find anything. All I left on the seat was some paper and a lighter.
I hoped Dorcas was right about them not noticing the ambulance. We had everything in there and my dad needed it all.
Suddenly she clutched my hand. Two of the people from the helicopter started making their way down the road toward us. They had flashlights, and they were shining them into the woods more than they were shining them down the road.
“They’re looking for whoever was driving that van,” she whispered to me.
Maybe it hadn’t been the brightest idea to leave the lights and the hazards on, but I wanted to draw the helicopter’s attention away from the ambulance. Now I saw my mistake. A lit up car meant someone had recently been behind the wheel. Hazard lights meant the minivan had stopped for a reason.
“Maybe they think you’re taking a leak in the woods, kid,” she muttered out of the side of her mouth.
“Crap,” I said.
“Maybe that, too.”
The thought of being caught with my pants down, wiping myself with a pine cone, flickered through my mind. The two people with rifles kept coming closer, scanning the woods on either side of the road with flashlights.
We ducked our heads down and held our breath. Just when they were close enough to actually flash a beam in our direction, I felt something on the hand that Dorcas was clutching. It was thick and slimy. As it slid over my wrist, I realized that a really fat snake was slithering between us.
I didn’t mean to, but I yelped like a little girl.
26
“RUN,” DORCAS HISSED in my ear. She didn’t have to tell me twice.
The woods at night were worse than any funhouse I had ever been in. Every time my foot hit the ground, I expected a bloody Roger Ludlow to jump out from behind dead branches. I ran blind, my heart thumping in my chest and my brain conjuring up images of zombies and zombie animals waiting to eat me.
Of course, if I was bitten, I wouldn’t be lucky enough to get turned quickly like some other kid running through the woods in the middle of the night. In our brave new world filled with poxers that wanted to infect me with their cooties, I was immune. I’d have to suffer through every bite, every chunk of flesh torn out of me. The suffering wouldn’t stop until I bled out in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere Massachusetts.
I don’t know why I was worried about poxers anyway. We were beyond the edge of nowhere. This was the realm of the real monsters like bears that attack people and tear them to shreds or snakes that are so venomous their poison makes people blow up like that blueberry girl in the Willy Wonka movie. Violet Beauregarde—that was her name. There was no way in hell that I was going to end up like Violet Beauregarde. No way.
I ran with my hands over my face, branches cracking and snapping as I barreled through the woods. Twice I fell down. The first time I made a little noise that sounded more like it came out of Trina than me. The second time, it hurt. My knee hit a rock and my jeans split open. The pain was excruciating. I sat there on the ground, clutching my damaged leg, imagining blood and bone seeping through my fingers on to the forest floor.
The throbbing stopped in all of about thirty seconds and my hands came away dry. I didn’t even bleed. What a baby.
The worst part was that when I fell that second time, I got turned around. It wasn’t until right after I had my little pity party about my knee that I realized I was alone. Dorcas hadn’t followed after me. She let me go into the darkness by myself. What was she thinking? She was the one who told me to run in the first place. Why wasn’t she right there with me?
Because she was eighty-two, that’s why.
Oh no, I thought as I realized what had just happened. Dorcas wasn’t going to run at all. She was going to stay right there and face whatever those people with the guns had to dish out. I gritted my teeth. Not with me, she wasn’t. Not today. Not now. I needed her. She was brave, and smart and good and she didn’t deserve any of this.
I closed my eyes and held my breath and listened.
The helicopter was still behind me. I could hear the blades slicing through the air. That meant that Dorcas was somewhere behind me, too. I got to my feet, turned and started carefully walking back through the woods, shoving every scary image that popped up in my mind into a little ‘discard basket’ in my head, just like the ones on computers. I didn’t have time to be scared. I didn’t have time for monsters. There was a real person somewhere in front of me and she needed my help.
I told myself that every step I took was one step closer to being out of the darkness and away from the things that hid in it. Every foot that fell in front of the other was one step closer to another human being. Once, my teeth almost chattered out of my head when an owl hooted somewhere above me. I imagined great, big cartoon eyes watching my every move. Back in sixth grade, a guy brought a bunch of animals into school to show us the things that lived in the woods in New England. Cute were the squirrels and the chipmunks and the baby raccoon. Frightening was a great horned owl that had lost an eye so it couldn’t be reintroduced into the wild. It had sharp, scary talons like the bony claws of a skeleton.
That’s what was above me now. Those bony, scary, sharpened claws, ready to swoop down and tear another chunk of scalp out of my head, just like Roger had done.
Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. The words yammered in my brain. I didn’t have any time for fear. All I needed to do was find Dorcas. She was lying in the dead leaves somewhere in front of me and if I just listened hard enough, I’d be able to reach her.
Just listen.
Listen.
Then I heard her voice ahead of me and I let out a sigh of relief until I realized what she was saying.
“Can’t a lady take a leak in peace?”
Oh no. No, no, no. Dorcas had walked out of the trees and right up to the people with the guns. Was she insane?
I dropped to the ground and crawled the rest of the way through the woods until I was about ten feet from the road. I didn’t care about snakes anymore. I didn’t care about bears or owls or deer with sharpened antlers intent on goring me.
All I cared about was Dorcas.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” said a guy’s voice.
“Did you just ma’am me?” snapped Dorcas. “Please tell me you didn’t just ma’am me.”
Whoever he was, he stuttered a little. “I . . . um . . . are you okay . . . um . . .?”
“It’s Millie,” she said. “Millie Ludlow. And what are you doing messing with my van?” Dorcas didn’t even give the guy a chance to respond. “And point those things at your peckers, not at me.”
Gotta love her.
I squinted through the brush and saw two guys who looked like they lifted weights with Jimmy slowly lowering their guns to the ground.
“Can we ask where you’re heading, Mrs. Ludlow?” the guy said.
&nb
sp; “Guilford,” said Dorcas. “I got family there, if anyone’s still alive.”
The other guy, the quiet one, took a step forward and handed Millie a piece of paper. “Have you seen either of these two?” he said.
Dorcas studied the piece of paper. I didn’t have to see it to know it was the picture that Diana had taken from my mom back at Site 37—the same one that Cheryl The It had shown Trudy Aiken. It was of my parents, Trina and me at the beach.
“I see four,” she said. “Maybe my eyes are a little rusty.”
“Have you seen any of them . . . Ma’am . . . er . . . Mrs. Ludlow?”
What happened next was the worst thing imaginable. “Sure I’ve seen them,” she cackled. “And the boy? He’s back there hiding in the woods right now.”
My heart cracked in two. How could she do that to me? How could she rat me out? Could I really not trust anyone?
Then Dorcas brayed out a laugh, snorted, and hawked up a wad of phlegm. She spat it right on the ground in front of the guy closest to her.
“Listen, fellas. I don’t know where you get off scaring the bejesus out of an old lady in that fancy flying machine of yours. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no one even left to keep a look out for. Of course I haven’t seen these people. I’ve been driving around the back roads for the past week trying to find anyone with a pulse.” Dorcas pulled out three cigarettes, lit them all, and handed two over to the guys with the guns.
It was totally cool of her, so much so that they actually took them.
“Frankly,” she continued, “I’d say you were a sight for these old eyes of mine—if it weren’t for the guns and the twenty questions.”
The two guys looked nervously at each other. “So . . . you haven’t seen any of them?” asked the guy with the photograph, like he just lost a bet.
“Nope,” she said. “The only person I’ve seen in the past week besides the dead ones was a hefty woman about yay wide.” Dorcas held her arms out almost as far as they could go. “She was running her mouth off about heading up to Ashburnham for some foolishness or other. Who the hell goes to Ashburnham ‘cept maybe if you’re buying goats or some such nonsense.”
The Dead (a Lot) Trilogy (Book 2): Wicked Dead Page 11
