Then my eyes adjusted, and I saw the shadow was that of a man, probably in his late forties, smiling at me nervously.
“I’m sorry I startled you,” he said, seeming to take note of how I remained rooted in the spot where I’d stopped by the checkout. “It’s just — I haven’t seen anyone else alive for two days. I thought I was the only one.”
“There are a couple of us, I think,” I responded. He looked pretty harmless, with his thinning dark hair and worried eyes, but I was still wary. “I never heard anything about the mortality rate. Everything went so…fast.”
He nodded, his gaze traveling to the cart in front of me and then back up to my face. I stiffened, worried I’d see the same sort of predatory stare that Chris Bowman had given me, but this stranger only seemed relieved that he wasn’t the only living person left in Albuquerque. “It was 99.8 percent. Or at least that was what the reports said.”
“Reports?” I asked. “What reports?”
“Not on the news,” he said. “I worked in the emergency-management bureau downtown. Those were the latest figures we got before everything just…stopped. By then there were only two of us left out of a team of twenty-seven, and Lydia died soon afterward. There was no way to let anyone know…not that there was anyone left to know, I suppose.”
“There were a few of us.” I had to stop then, the enormity of it threatening to overwhelm me. With a mortality rate like that, it meant there were maybe two thousand people left in Albuquerque. That sounded like a lot, until you realized there used to be almost a million people living in and around the city center. “But you’re right — I suppose it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. It’s not as if we could have stopped it.”
“No,” he agreed, his features drooping even more.
“So….” I went on, not sure where I was supposed to go from here. It was pretty clear that the voice meant for me to leave Albuquerque alone, but now that I’d met a survivor, could I simply leave him behind? He appeared to be harmless. “Do you live around here?”
The man gave a vague gesture over his shoulder, toward the west. “Off Chavez Road.”
That wasn’t too far from where we stood. No wonder he’d come foraging over here. “Your first time out and around…after?”
A nod. “I didn’t know if it would be safe, but I started to run out of things, and this was the closest store….”
“There’s plenty left,” I assured him. “The looters kind of tore the place up, but they didn’t steal all the Doritos. I’d probably go to a grocery store if you really want something decent to eat, though.”
“That was my plan after this, but I could walk here, so I figured I’d come here first.” For the first time his eyes took on a certain glint, one I wasn’t sure I liked. “That your Cherokee out there?”
There wasn’t any point in denying it. For all I knew, he’d seen me pull up and get out of the SUV. “Yes.”
“Leaving town?”
A flicker of unease went over me. “I was thinking about it,” I hedged.
To my surprise, he didn’t seem that put off by my reply. “That might be a good idea. It might be safer where there aren’t as many survivors. People are going to get desperate.”
They already have, I thought, recalling the way Chris Bowman had broken into my house. Then again, that was a special case of one highly obsessed nut job. The survivors in Albuquerque would probably be a lot more interested in getting supplies than getting into my pants.
“So what are you going to do?” I asked, trying to shift the conversation away from me and my plans.
“I’m not sure. I figured food was the first step. After that?” He shrugged, then offered me a faint smile. “Right now, it’s just kind of good to hear another voice.”
I almost agreed with him, except I had been hearing a man’s voice in my head for the past few days. So what if the jury was still out as to whether that voice was real or not?
“Well, I don’t want to leave my dog sitting in the car too long,” I said, since it seemed to me that the man wouldn’t mind standing here and chatting all day, if it meant he didn’t have to be by himself.
He looked startled by the non sequitur, but then nodded. “Oh, of course. It is starting to warm up. You have a good day.” The way he said it made it sound as if he wasn’t sure such a thing was possible anymore.
Since there wasn’t much else I could do, I smiled slightly, then moved toward the exit. For a second or two, I was worried he might put out an arm to stop me, but he only stepped out of the way and headed into the store.
I allowed myself a small sigh of relief before going to the Cherokee and unlocking it, then quickly unloading the loot from my cart into the rear cargo area. From the front seat, Dutchie whined, but I wasn’t sure why. It was a little warm in the car, but nothing too bad — I’d made sure to crack the windows before I locked up the vehicle.
When I turned around, though, I almost dropped the car key. The stranger was standing there, holding a pistol pointed straight at me. His expression was no longer mild, but greedy. Not the kind of greed I’d seen in Chris Bowman, though. This man’s gaze wasn’t fixed on me, but the SUV I’d just closed up.
Without blinking, he said, “Give me the key. Now.”
Chapter 8
At first I could only stand there, gaping at him. From the way he held the gun, a small .22, I could tell he didn’t have much experience. One part of my mind began to coolly calculate whether I was fast enough to get that Glock out of my waistband before he fired on me. My father had taken me to the indoor range many times, and shooting up in the hills around town even more, and he’d made me practice pulling the gun from a holster as well as the waistband of my pants. I knew I had far more experience than the man who faced me. But…was it enough?
Stalling for time, I stammered, “W-what?”
“You heard me.” He waved the pistol in what he probably thought was a threatening manner. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want the car.”
“But — ” I kept my hands out where he could see them, knowing that he was probably nervous enough just handling the gun that he might do something really stupid if I made any sudden movements. “There are plenty of abandoned vehicles all over the city. You don’t need mine.”
“Yes, I do.” His gaze shifted from the rear door of the Cherokee to my face, and I could see the desperation in his watery brown eyes. “I don’t have to hunt for the key, and it’s a four-wheel drive loaded with supplies. I doubt I’m going to find anything better.”
Well, when he put it that way…. “It needs gas, though. Do you know how to siphon gas?”
His bemused expression told me he didn’t.
“Look,” I went on, knowing there was no way in hell I was going to let him have my dad’s SUV, “it’s been a horrible week. I get that you feel desperate. But you don’t need to do this. There are plenty of alterna — ”
BLAM! The pistol went off — not pointed at me, thank God, but somewhere over my shoulder and just above the roof line of the Cherokee. Even so, I jumped enough that I could feel the backs of my thighs hit the SUV’s rear bumper.
“I’m not negotiating,” he said. The look on his face shifted from confused to crafty. “But maybe you could come along. You say you know how to siphon gas?”
I actually hadn’t said that I did, but the truth was, my father had showed me and Devin once, when Devin ran out of gas while driving Mom’s Escape. It wasn’t that difficult, really, as long as you selected a vehicle without a locking gas cap. In the back of the Cherokee, along with the rest of my supplies, was a long rubber tube I’d brought along for that very purpose. With the power out, it would simply be easier to siphon gas from abandoned vehicles rather than attempt to switch the pumps at a gas station over to manual.
“Maybe I do,” I hedged, my pulse beginning to escalate.
“You seem like you might be…useful,” the man said, and this time his watery gaze remained fixed on my face. It was clear his
thoughts were beginning to run in other directions than merely stealing my car.
Dude, I could put you through a wall, I thought, but that inner remark was more bravado than anything else. Yes, he looked like the quintessential wimpy office worker. On the other hand, he’d still managed to sneak up on me, so I wasn’t about to underestimate him.
Since I couldn’t trust myself to speak without giving myself away, I only shrugged. At the same time, I let my hands drop to my sides, my right hand beginning to move slowly backward, toward the reassuring weight of the Glock in my waistband. Thank God the shirt I was wearing hung loosely enough that the man didn’t seem to have noticed he wasn’t the only armed person in this little convo.
He stepped closer. Now I could smell the stink of perspiration and fear on him. Maybe I hadn’t had a decent shower since before the Heat began, either, but at least I’d tried to wash up as best I could, and made sure to put on deodorant before I got dressed each morning. I couldn’t say the same for this useless specimen of humanity.
Were only the weak, the crazy, or the unscrupulous left? And if that was the case, what the hell did that say about me?
I decided I’d think about that later. In the meantime, I had bigger things to worry about. I needed to get away from this guy. Shooting him was not a particularly appealing prospect, but I would if I had to.
No wonder the voice had been urging me to get out of Albuquerque. I wished I hadn’t dragged my feet quite so much about that. If I’d left straight away, as he’d told me to do, I would never have run into Chris Bowman…wouldn’t be standing here now, with this milquetoast former bureaucrat holding his puny .22 on me and thinking he was Dirty Harry.
And where the hell was the voice? He had saved me from Chris the Creep twice, but was conspicuously absent at the moment. Did he think I could handle this guy on my own?
Time to find out, I supposed.
“Oh, I’m very useful,” I snapped, reaching the rest of the way so I could pull the Glock out of the waistband of my Levi’s and point it straight at the stranger’s face.
He blinked and took a step backward. The gun wavered in his hands, and then he tightened his grip. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“Well, I kind of did, since you were holding a gun on me.” Unlike him, I didn’t move, didn’t blink. “By the way, my father was a police officer. He made sure I knew how to shoot this thing. So don’t think for a second that I’m holding this gun up for show, because I’m not. I know what I’m doing. The best thing you can do is back off and go find a car someplace else. There are thousands in the city up for grabs right now.”
No response at first. His mouth opened and closed once, making him look like a fish on a hook. I got the distinct impression he didn’t know what he should do — shoot, or turn tail and flee. That made him all the more dangerous, in my eyes, because I really didn’t know how he was going to react. I doubted he was someone who’d been inclined toward criminal acts in his past life. But he’d been pushed to the limit by all the death he’d seen, and that made him volatile. Unpredictable.
“Please,” I said softly. “Just go.”
The gun shook in his hands. I remained motionless, the Glock still pointed directly at his face, my stance square and solid, just the way my father had taught me. Then I saw him twitch, and thought,
Oh, shit.
A bang, louder than I’d anticipated. Smoke puffed out from the chamber of the .22, and I knew the bullet was going to hit me. How could he miss at such close range?
Time slowed down, or possibly my thought processes sped up. I wasn’t quite sure, but it was almost as if I could see the silvery-gray shape of the bullet speeding toward me. My entire body clenched, waiting for the shock of impact. At the same time, my finger clenched on the trigger of the Glock, and it went off with a much more impressive bang than the one that had issued from the .22. My ears began to ring. That was the first time I’d ever shot a gun without wearing earplugs, and damn, it was louder than I’d expected.
Two things happened then — first, it seemed as if the air in front of me shimmered, and the bullet the stranger had fired at me bounced away as if it had hit a pane of bulletproof glass. He had no such protection, however, and the shot I’d fired hit him in the chest, sending him flying backward, blood beginning to run down the front of the sweat-stained dress shirt he wore.
His head hit the pavement with a sharp crack, and I winced. But even as I did so, I realized I was all right. It should have been me lying there on the ground with dark blood trickling from my chest, but it wasn’t.
Are you ready to leave now? the voice asked. For some reason, he sounded tired. Well, that made two of us.
I finally lowered the gun. “That was you?”
I told you I would protect you.
“Couldn’t you have stopped him before he fired at me?” It seemed the voice was falling down a bit in the omnipotence department.
I cannot see everything. Your fear called me to you, just as it called to me last night when that creature broke into your house. When I saw what was happening, I put up the barrier to keep the bullet from touching you.
Just like that. What kind of powers did the voice control, to be able to construct an invisible shield that would deflect a bullet?
Obviously something far, far beyond anything I’d ever heard of.
But then, I’d already sort of gathered that.
Pulling in a breath, I flipped the Glock’s safety back on, then stuck the gun into my waistband once again. After that, I looked over to where the stranger lay groaning on the asphalt. From the amount of blood that had pooled beneath him, I guessed he didn’t have much longer to live. Should I be feeling guilty for that? I didn’t know. At the moment, all I felt was a sort of bone-deep weariness…and the day wasn’t even half over yet.
I approached him, then crouched down near his head. His eyes flickered open and fixed on me, pleading and scared. “I didn’t want to do that,” I said quietly. “You should have just left me alone. There’s plenty in this city for everyone.”
A strangled sound came from his throat, possibly one of protest. I couldn’t tell for sure, since he was obviously beyond forming actual words.
Although I knew I’d acted in self-defense, hadn’t even squeezed the trigger until he’d shot at me, it was still hard to see him like this, knowing I couldn’t do anything for his pain. “I’m sorry,” I said at last, then straightened up and headed back to the Cherokee. The best thing I could do now was get the hell out of here.
I got in the car, shut the door, and pulled out of the parking space. As I drove away, I didn’t look back.
Head north, the voice said once I was a few blocks from the Walgreens. Get on the freeway.
“Are you kidding?” I asked, hands tight on the steering wheel. Right then, I wasn’t sure whether I had a death grip on the thing because of all the vehicles choking the roads, or because I was still shaking from that confrontation back in the parking lot. Maybe a little bit of both. “The freeway is going to be worse than the surface streets.”
No, it isn’t. Trust me.
Considering he’d just saved me from a speeding bullet, I decided to trust him.
The closest on-ramp was at Paseo del Norte, so I headed in that direction, keeping my speed below twenty-five miles an hour, and sometimes even slower than that, depending on how congested the street around me was. When I got to the on-ramp, I actually had to drive onto the shoulder to get around two vehicles that seemed to have crashed head-on into one another. Now it was impossible to tell whether they’d both been trying to get on the freeway at the same time, or whether the drivers had been so ill that they’d basically plowed into each other at the worst possible spot.
After that, though, the connector was clear enough, and I eased up onto I-25, keeping my speed down. The voice had been right, though — yes, there were still abandoned vehicles here, but they tended to have either crashed into the center divider or drifted over to the shoulder.
The middle two lanes were fairly clear, although I still had to slow down from time to time to get around a car or truck that had stopped in the center of the highway.
In fact, the going was easy enough that I thought it safe to risk opening one of the water bottles so I could get a drink. My throat was parched, and I drank half the contents of the bottle without even stopping. In the passenger seat, Dutchie cocked her head and looked at me.
“I’ll take care of you when we stop, girl,” I told her. Along with the camping gear, I’d stowed a set of collapsible dog dishes in the back of the Cherokee, relics of the times when we used to take Sadie on day trips with us. My father never got rid of anything — which was why none of our cars ever actually lived in the garage — and I’d found the dishes when I was scrounging some of the other stuff.
Dutchie wagged her tail, then sort of collapsed onto the seat, curling up in a smaller ball than I would have thought possible. Up until then, she’d been sitting up and looking out the window, but, truth be told, once you were on the freeway, the sights and smells really weren’t that interesting.
“So where are we going?” I asked of the general air around me. Judging by his delayed reaction to the man who’d assaulted me back at Walgreens, the voice wasn’t necessarily around at all times. In this case, since I was asking a direct question, I had to hope he was close enough that he would hear me and respond.
North.
“Besides that,” I snapped, irritated now. I’d done what he asked — Albuquerque was dropping farther and farther behind me, since I’d started out from the more northern end of the city sprawl anyway. At this point, I really couldn’t see the reason behind the continuing games of evasion. “It’s a little early for ski season.”
That is all you need to know for now. I will tell you when it is time to get off the freeway.
Demons & Djinn: Nine Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Novels Featuring Demons, Djinn, and other Bad Boys of the Underworld Page 11
