Domino Falls (ARC)

by Steven Barnes

  Do not quote for publication until verified with the finished book. This advance, uncorrected reader’s proof is the property of Simon & Schuster. It is being made available for promotional purposes and review by the recipient and may not be used for any other purpose or transferred to any third party. Simon & Schuster reserves the right to terminate availability of the proof at any time. Any duplication, sale or distribution to the public is a violation of the law. This file will no longer be accessible upon publication of this book.

  For more information on Simon & Schuster’s eGalley program, please visit www.galleygrab.com.

  EGalley Disclaimer REV IP.indd 1 10/16/09 3:27 PM I

  Two bestselling award-winning authors team up with the second book in an exciting new paranormal series: What happens when an alien race brings Earth to the brink of Apocalypse, forcing a struggle for control of the planet?

  The date: A week after tomorrow. An unprecedented infection has swept the world, bringing an epidemic of mindless biting attacks from the infected that leave you.. .changed. Society has broken down. Survivors call the infected Freaks. But the Freaks are more than mindless zombies—they are actually the result of an alien life form slowly colonizing the Earth, and humanity is ultimately enmeshed in a struggle for control of the planet.

  Part Dawn of the Dead and part Road Warrior, Domino Falls is a testimony to courage, friendship, and the power of faith. It is a horrifying and heartbreaking, exciting and strangely romantic, coming-of-age story on the edge of the Apocalypse.

  Tananarive Due is an American Book Award-winning, Essence bestselling author of Blood Colony, The Living Blood, The Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Visit her blog at TananariveDue.blogspot.com.

  Steven Barnes is an award-winning author of twenty-three novels, including the New York Times bestseller The Cestus Deception. Visit his website at LifeWrite.com.

  Praise for Devil’s Wake

  “Zombie lovers won’t be able to put down Barnes’ gripping yarn, which will leave them hungry for the next installment.” —Booklist

  *

  Marketing/Publicity

  National print review and feature campaign Cross promotion with the author’s website, TananariveDue.com SimonandSchuster.com feature Online promotions and features

  Atria Paperback

  On Sale February 19, 2013 • 978-1-4516-1702-3 • $15.00 U.S/$17.00 Can.

  Publicity Contact

  Yona Deshommes • Yona.Deshommes@SimonandSchuster.com

  Nonmerch9781476705286. Copyright © 2013 by Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes.

  Uncorrected proof. Not for sale. Please do not quote for publication without checking the finished book.

  DOMINO

  FALLS

  BY STEVEN BARNES AND TANANARIVE DUE

  Devil’s Wake

  ALSO BY STEVEN BARNES

  Streetlethal

  The Kundalini Equation

  Gorgon Child

  Firedance

  Lion’s Blood

  Zulu Heart

  Far Beyond the Stars

  The Cestus Deception

  Great Sky Woman

  Shadow Valley

  ALSO BY TANANARIVE DUE

  My Soul to Take

  Joplin’s Ghost

  The Good House

  Freedom in the Family

  The Living Blood

  My Soul to Keep

  The Black Rose

  BY STEVEN BARNES AND TANANARIVE DUE WITH BLAIR UNDERWOOD

  Casanegra

  In the Night of the Heat

  From Cape Town with Love

  and forthcoming

  South by Southeast

  ATRIA PAPERBACK A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books Subsidiary Rights Department,

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

  First Atria Paperback edition February 2013

  ATRIA PAPERBACK and colophon are trademarks ol Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com.

  The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.

  Designed by Jacquelynne Hudson

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 987654321

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  ISBN 978-1-4516-1702-3 ISBN 978-1-4516-1703-0 (ebook)

  Dedication

  TK

  Epigraph

  TK

  One

  Bainbridge Island, Washington

  Snug Harbor Mobile Home Park

  Snow falls lightly as two motorcycles the color of arterial blood cross the threshold of the Snug Harbor Motor Court. A Kawasaki Ninja 250R and a Honda Interceptor, driven by two nut-brown young men with long black hair, Darius Phillips and Dean Kitsap. Behind them rolls the school bus they call the Blue Beauty, although the blue paint is flaking and the bus is far from beautiful. Windows are shattered, the body tattooed with bullet holes. They have been at war, and will not have long to rest.

  Bainbridge Island is the ancestral home of Dean and Darius’s people, the Suquamish Indians; fisher folk for generations before the first white traders appeared. Now… the Suquamish own homes and businesses and fishing fleets and casinos and restaurants. Those who can’t afford better, like Dean’s family, huddle together in places like the Snug Harbor Motor Court. Nearly four hundred people share a hundred seventy trailers.

  Dean, who leads the way, was born here. His mother and father and six brothers and sisters still live here, while an older brother is in the army, protecting strangers in a strange land. It is the only true home Dean has known. Still, somehow he cannot remember which way to turn.

  There, at the central court—the cleared area houses a barbecue pit and a couple of weather-beaten picnic tables. Normally, children fill the narrow lane, playing in the snow, laughing and waving at the motorcycles and cars as they pass. Today, no one.

  But the ground is cluttered with children’s clothes, as if they are fresh from the laundry. Laid out in sets. So strange … pants, shirts, shoes … and footprints in the snow leading off toward the common play area.

  A removable steel-frame barricade blocks the Blue Beauty from going farther. The bus’s doors wheeze open.

  First out is Terry Whittaker. Tall, dark-haired, wiry. Then Kendra Brookings peeks out and steps down, her nutmeg-colored, heart-shaped face pinched and cautious. Small, fragile-looking, but with a hidden strength that still surprises Dean. A survivor.

  When had Dean learned about her strength? He isn’t sure. And… she wasn’t one of the Round Meadow Five, who had been sentenced to a summer of counseling kids at camp as punishment for their sins. How does he know her?

  Sonia Petansu follows Kendra—thin, pale, angular. Long black hair with a vertical white streak. Cynical protectee of the largest of them, the big black guy everyone calls “Piranha,” Charlie Cawthone. Last off the bus is Corporal Ursulina Cortez, alert and serious, watching everyth
ing, missing nothing.

  Dean moves toward the commons as the others follow him, silent, floating above the new snow, barely leaving footprints.

  Dean finally hears an old woman’s voice. Then he see the children. They sit in the snow, dressed as they might have been to take a dip in the summer ocean, bare brown skin glimmering in the shimmering flecks, which seem to glide around them without touching. Why aren’t the children shivering in the cold?

  The old woman is telling stories, as she always has, from the time Dean was small. Everyone calls her Storyteller, and perhaps he once knew her real name, but he cannot remember. Storyteller has always been old. Dean’s grandmother once told him that when she herself was a girl, Storyteller had spun her tales, and even then, she had been old. Storyteller has lived there since before the first trailer was towed to its berth.

  Dean sits on the bench near the barbecue pit, where in the summer they roast salmon and beef ribs and enjoy the smell of lush green pine drifting from the Columbia Forest. A boy sitting there looks back and smiles, beckoning him over. His little brother, Raymond. Had Raymond been sitting there a moment ago? Why hadn’t he seen him?Everything seems so strange.

  “Years ago,” Storyteller says, “before your grandparents were born, we knew things that you have forgotten, or pretend to have forgotten.”

  The children listen, rapt. “We knew not to let the children wander. The old ones would say, ‘If you aren’t careful, children, Kalkaklilh will come and take you all away.’

  “You have forgotten now, but if we forget, Kalkaklilh will return. She is a giant, a huge woman who hides in the woods. Her home is far up in the mountains. In the evening or even in the daytime, but mostly in the evening, she will come prowling around the villages looking for disobedient children playing outside instead of doing their chores. Kalkalilh always has a great big basket strapped on her back, and can you guess what the basket was for? She grabs children, throws them into the basket, and scurries as fast as she can back home, up in the mountains. There, she boils them alive and sucks the marrow from their bones.”

  The children gasp, frightened. Perhaps Dean gasps with them. Fear whispers across his skin. Has he heard this story before? Has he seen the old woman with the basket with his own eyes?

  “Since the children of the village did not want to die, they obeyed their parents, as good children did in those days …”

  Dean looks down on his brother Raymond, whose hand slips into his hand. The fingers are small and cold. Dean rubs Raymond’s hand to try to warm him, but Raymond’s skin feels like a block of ice.

  “But Kalkalilh was clever, and lured the parents away, so that the children were hungry and crying. Bigger children had been left to watch over the smaller ones, boys who were nearly men, and one of those older children was Dean. He was a great carver. He always had a sharp knife in his possession.”

  She looks at him when she says the words, and Dean’s fingers touch his belt. There is indeed a knife there. He doesn’t remember carrying a knife.

  He looks around, and doesn’t see the others who followed him here. His cousin, Darius, is gone. And the motorcycles, and the battered bus. No Kendra. No Terry. None of them. All gone. Only he remains with the children in the snow.

  “A strange old woman came out of the woods, and in her hands were strips of dried salmon. ‘Come, children, take this jerky.’ And when the smallest girl reached to take the food, the cannibal woman grabbed her, and threw her into the basket strapped to her back. And then grabbed up all the other children, and headed off to her home in the mountains. Even Dean was trapped in the basket.

  “But Dean was clever, and used his knife to cut a hole in the basket’s straw, and one at a time, he pushed out the others and told them to go home. As each child thumped onto the ground, Kalkalilh said, ‘What was that, Dean?’ and Dean would say, ‘Nothing, Gramma. It is only the sound of your feet on the ground.’ And she believed his lie, so she continued walking until she arrived at her home. Dean tried to free all of the children, but a few remained trapped in the basket with him.

  “Kalkalilh started a fire in her hearth, melting pitch to seal the eyes of the children, so that they would be unable to see if they dared try to escape.

  “And Dean whispered to the children: ‘As she starts to smear the pitch on your eyes, look down so that she smears it on your foreheads and will not blind you.’ And they agreed to do as he said, although they were very scared.

  “When the cannibal woman finished smearing the pitch onto the children’s foreheads, believing she had blinded them, she laughed while a bleached skull rolled on the ground. Then she sat down and started to paint her face in preparation of dancing to celebrate the great feast she was going to have.

  “While she danced on the opposite side of the fire from the children, Dean said, ‘Come closer to us, Grandmother, as you are dancing.’ And she did. When she came between the children and the fire, they all jumped on her and shoved her into the roaring hot flames. As soon as her hair hit the fire, she screamed as the lice on her head went up like a big puff of smoke. Dean used the fire tongs and kept pushing her further into the fire, saying ‘I am trying to help you.’

  “And she screamed, and the children laughed and laughed …”

  At the trailer park, Dean and the children laughed at the thought of the old woman dancing in the flames. Dean laughed until tears ran down his face while snow drifted to the earth and never touched him.

  But Raymond’s hand was so cold that it burned his skin, so he let his brother go. And when he glanced at Raymond’s face, his brother’s eyes were bright red.

  The color of blood.

  Two

  December 19

  Central California coast

  The choking burr of the bus’s engine had lulled Kendra to sleep, but a voice muttering about something called a “Kal-kal-il” eating children woke her. She saw Dean twitching in the seat in the row across from hers, both arms wound around his face as if to keep out the sunlight.

  “Raymond …” he whispered. She had heard the name before. His brother?

  Dean was the only one of them who had been home since Freak Day, and he’d never talked about what he had seen. Kendra decided that any dream about his brother couldn’t be a good one.

  She leaned over him, shaking him to wake him. His long jet-black hair was wound around his face like a veil.

  “Dean?” she said, touching him gently on the elbow. He opened his brown eyes slowly, blinking. She recognized his confusion well; each day felt like you were waking into a dream. Which dream was worse?

  “You were talking about someone eating children,” she said.

  He stared at her blankly, still trying to place her. “Snug Harbor,” he said.

  Piranha leaned over the seat, big hands clutched on the safety rail raised above each seat. “Where your parents lived?” he asked in his basso voice.

  “Yeah,” Dean said. He was stretching and twisting, almost like a snake shedding its skin.

  “Never told us what happened there, man,” Piranha said.

  “No.” Dean’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t.”

  He stood and walked up to the front of the bus. He had begun his nap an hour ago, chaining his Honda to the back of Blue Beauty, leaving his cousin Darius to scout ahead of the bus on his bike alone.

  “Pull over, Terry,” Dean said. Terry was driving, as usual; as busted up as the Blue Beauty was after the pirate attack, Terry might be the only one of them who could manage the bus. Kendra usually sat in the seat behind Terry, but she’d moved closer to the supply boxes in the rear when she realized she couldn’t stop staring at the back of his head, replaying their crazy, wonderful kiss on the beach in McKinleyville. If she distracted him as much as he did her, he might not be able to keep his eyes on the road. They didn’t have the luxury of a high school crush.

  Terry pulled over. They were on a stretch of farmland along the 101, maybe twenty miles south of Ukiah. Stalled cars were scattere
d along the road, but they didn’t expect to run into real blockages until they got closer to San Francisco.

  They heard Dean shift his bike down off the rack. Darius, who had ridden up ahead of them, had circled back around to his side. Kendra watched him sadly, wondering what he had seen in his dream. She had nightmares too, and the images felt anything but harmless. Sometimes her dreams felt more real than the waking world, even if she didn’t know which was more horrible. She was glad she didn’t see her parents, or her grandfather, in her dreams—even though she missed them so much it was sometimes hard to breathe. But how could she select a handful of people to miss when the whole world might be gone?

  Kendra watched Dean and his cousin talk through her window, wondering what they were saying. They were cousins, but alike that everyone simply called them the Twins.

  “Hope he’ll be okay,” she said as he boarded his bike, giving the starter a confident thrust with his scuffed boot. But she was really talking about herself.

  No one answered Kendra. Maybe no one had heard her over the radio. Maybe none of them would be okay.

  The radio was loud; a persistent nattering from a man who called himself Reverend Wales, from a town ahead called Domino Falls. “… looked upon the burden, folks, and I said, YES, I can help build a haven. YES, I can give people hope. YES, the threads that bind us all can weave a new world from the wreckage of the old …”

  Domino Falls. It sounded more like a game of chance than true sanctuary.

  Kendra stared as the Twins gave Terry the thumbs-up sign. Then they rode off ahead of the bus, together.

  At times the 101 was a broad clear stretch of freeway, and at others, when winding through one of the abandoned coastal towns, it was little more than a two-lane road dotted with interstate signs. Here, just on the outskirts of a town composed of a pair of gas stations, a convenience store, and a motel, it was the latter. Doors were ajar, windows shattered. The empty towns always creeped Terry out. He didn’t know what had happened here, but it was just more evidence of bad news.

  Up ahead, the two cherry-red motorcycles had pulled over to the side of the road. Darius waved to Terry to slow down. Terry cursed under his breath. They had agreed that they had enough gas to keep going without stopping. They’d been lucky at the last checkpoint, but stopping could always lead to trouble.