When I tremble for what feels like the thousandth time, Asher rubs his hand up and down my leg, quickly.
“I’m sorry,” he calls over his shoulder. “It shouldn’t be long now.”
Afraid to speak in case I bite off my tongue, I nod.
When I shudder again, he says, “Maybe you should sit in front of me. Like before. You’ll stay warmer.”
It’s tempting, but I’m not sure I should. “No,” I say.
“Are you sure? I don’t mind. You’ll be a lot warmer.”
I can’t even respond because I’m shaking so hard, so when I can finally say something, I murmur “Yes” into his ear.
He slows immediately, but then, without warning, I hear another howl, practically right next to us. I start, then glance over in the direction of the howl. This time I see something. A set of yellow, glowing eyes.
Then I hear it—just under the sound of the horse’s hoofbeats is the sound of other animals running and panting for breath.
“Asher?” I say.
“I see ’em,” he responds back between clenched teeth. He digs his heel further into Starshine’s sides and she jumps forward, running as fast as she had before.
One of the dog-like creatures makes a leap at us, just barely missing my leg. I bite back a scream and cling to Asher.
“Don’t panic. They’ll sense your fear.”
I try not to, but when another one lunges at me, its claws scraping over the exposed skin of my leg, I can’t help but scream. My leg is on fire and I can feel and smell the blood dripping down it.
“Evie!” Asher yells back. “Did they get you?”
Before I can answer, another dog jumps at us and I kick out with everything I have. I feel my foot connect with something fleshy and the dog yelps.
“Evie! What happened? Are you hurt?”
I can’t speak over the pain so I just nod, but then I realize he can’t see it, so I force out a “Yes” through gritted teeth.
“How bad?”
Before I can answer, yet another dog leaps at us, this time grabbing onto Starshine’s backend.
She rears with a high-pitched whinny that sounds disturbingly like a scream, and it’s everything I can do to hang on to Asher. The dog is shaken loose and falls with a yelp to the ground. Starshine lands with a bone-jarring thump, and if it’s possible, she runs even faster.
Burying my face into Asher’s back, I hang on to him as tightly as I can. Through his back I can hear him murmuring. “Come on. Just a little more. Almost there.”
The dog-beasts are still behind us—I can hear them—but they’re falling back by the second. I turn and watch as their yellow eyes grow smaller and smaller until they disappear completely in the dark.
Relieved and perilously close to sobbing, I press my lips together and my body even closer to Asher. He doesn’t slow down for several minutes, only letting Starshine drop to a fast walk when the horse’s breath is chugging like an engine ready to fail.
He turns to me and his eyes are wide in the moonlight.
“Are you okay?”
“I—I don’t know. They clawed my leg.”
He glances down, but I doubt there’s enough light for him to see anything.
“We’re almost there,” he says after a minute. “Just a few more minutes. I think. Can you make it that long?”
“Of course,” I say, although I don’t know for certain. But I know now why he wanted us to get away from where we were so badly. There is absolutely no way I’m letting him stop to take a look at my leg. I’d rather lose it completely than give those … things time to catch up.
Gavin flits into my mind again. I seriously hope he found a safe place before we did. Those things were not playing around. I don’t even want to think what they’d do to him if they found him.
True to Asher’s word, it’s only a few minutes before I see what looks like the shadow of buildings rising up out of the dark. Asher lets out a relieved sigh and pushes Starshine to put on an extra burst of speed, racing toward them.
He stops short when he sees a tall wall surrounding the town, like the one surrounding our village. He follows it around until we find a large gate. It’s closed, as it should be after dark, but unlike in our village there is no sign of a guard.
Asher pulls Starshine to a halt and then jumps off. “Stay here,” he says, and I nod, trying to rub warmth into my arms and looking around to see if I can see any of those dog-beasts again. It terrifies me, standing out in the open like this, but I don’t see that I have a choice. There is a protocol we have to follow, I’m sure. There always is.
“Hello?” Asher calls. “Anyone here?”
There’s no response but the echo of his voice. I tremble again and curl into myself, trying to make myself as small as possible. It’s entirely too quiet for my tastes. The only sounds are the echoes of Asher’s voice.
“We’re from Black Star Cove. A village a few days’ travel east of here. We just want some shelter for the night as we pass through to Rushlake City.”
Nothing. Not even the sound of wind.
Asher turns back to me and shrugs before turning back to the gate. He presses on one of the gate doors and with a loud squeal it swings open. It’s worse than the proverbial nails on a chalkboard. I slap my hands to my ears, then wince when the movement causes my head to feel like I’ve split it open.
He freezes, waiting for an alarm to go up, but when it doesn’t, he pushes the gate wider. It squeals again, but nothing else happens. He then comes back to me, and takes the reins, guiding Starshine through the gates before shutting them again.
“Guess no one’s home,” he says.
I don’t say anything. Even though I should feel better that we’re not just standing outside the gates waiting to be those animals’ next meal, the whole place has my nerve endings tickling. I worry my pendant between my fingers. The village is dark, made darker in some spots because of the buildings that block out the moonlight. Almost all of the buildings reach for the stars, jutting out of the sand like fingers. I cannot believe how tall they are. They are at least three or four times taller than the mayor’s house in the village. Not to mention intimidating, with their yawning doorways and hundreds of dusty windows that show us nothing but inky darkness. The shadows are so thick it’s almost like I could reach out and feel a solid wall.
“What is this place?” I shudder as I stare into yet another pitch-black opening.
“It’s a city.”
“Not the one we’re going to, right?” Please tell me this isn’t the city that was supposed to cure me.
“No. This one is smaller. And probably abandoned, from the looks of it.”
Asher jumps back into the saddle and continues farther into the city, slowly. It’s still too quiet. Disturbingly so. The only sound is Starshine’s hooves making clacking sounds on the hard ground. I shiver, but this time it has nothing to do with the cold.
“Asphalt,” Asher murmurs. “Interesting.”
I glance around, and that’s when I see them. People. A bunch of them, standing in strange poses—as if time stopped and they were stuck in whatever move they were making at the time—just outside the doors of one of the tall buildings. I straighten and my hand tightens on Asher’s shoulder.
“What’s wrong?” He turns to look at me when I don’t respond. He follows my gaze and pulls Starshine to a halt. “Is that a person?”
“People. I think.” I keep my shaking voice quiet. I don’t know why, only that I’m almost scared to talk. As if the people are only sleeping and I’ll disturb them if I speak at a normal volume.
“Hello?” he calls to them, making me jump. “Can you help us?”
They don’t so much as budge and we exchange a look before he dismounts and cautiously proceeds toward them. When he’s within touching distance, he pauses, then starts laughing.
“What?” I demand. What could possibly be funny about any of this?
“They’re just statues!” he says.
&
nbsp; “Statues?” I rub a hand over my forehead and look again. The placement is odd. And why in Mother’s name would they make them in such odd poses? It makes me wonder who lives here.
“That’s weird,” Asher says, tilting his head sideways as he studies the statues.
“What?” What I really want to ask is What now?, but I don’t.
“They’re all wearing real clothes. They’re a bit torn and dirty, but they’re real clothes.” He tugs on one of the sleeves of the closest statue. I try to come up with an explanation, but can’t. The whole thing is sort of creepy.
Asher comes back and vaults onto Starshine, prodding her forward with his heel. It isn’t long before we see more of the eerie statues. They’re placed so haphazardly, I start to wonder if they were positioned to make it appear as if people are living here. Like, maybe this town was meant to be some strange museum of what the world was like before the War. Some are clustered around doors leading into buildings, others at the cross streets we pass. The closer we get to the city center, the more there are.
“Whoa!” Asher exclaims as we get to a large, squat structure made of metal and glass, standing in the middle of the path.
“What is that?” I ask.
“It’s a car. Like they have in Rushlake. But it’s all rusted and falling apart.”
Peering over his shoulder, I see more of them. They line up in an almost straight line behind the first one, reaching as far as I can see. All in various stages of falling apart. I try to get a good look as we pass; then I gasp.
“Asher!” I say, pointing excitedly. “Look. Inside the cars. More statues.”
Even in the dark, I can see his eyes widen. “What the hell?”
But there’s no ready explanation and we continue forward, ogling at the strangeness of it all. As we continue, we see more dispersed between the cars. Some are posed as if running from something. Running in the opposite direction we’re moving. Others are holding smaller, child-sized statues in their stone arms. Some are huddled close to their cars, their arms over their heads. I can’t understand why anyone would build something like this. It’s creepy.
I shudder and wrap my arms around my body. “What is this place?”
“I don’t know,” Asher responds, and even he has a slight waver in his voice. When he squeezes my knee in comfort, there is nothing comforting about the tremor in his hand.
And while I can’t help but think we should turn around, curiosity has me gripped tight. We push forward. The closer to the center we get, the more haphazard the placement of the cars and statues. It is as if the child playing with his toys got tired of setting them straight and just tossed them about and left them however they fell.
I stare at yet another statue as we pass by so closely I can see the expression on its face. Its mouth is wide open as if screaming and terror is etched all over its face.
When we finally get to what appears to be the center of town, the building that stood there is completely gone. The only thing left is a huge crater where it stood. Bits of metal, concrete, and glass litter the circle.
Asher leaps from the horse and strides toward the crater. Curious and unwilling to be left alone in this morbid city, I follow at his heels. When I make it next to him, he reaches out and grips my hand tightly in his. And this time I don’t pull away. In fact I squeeze harder, clamping both my hands around his. In this dead city of fake people, it’s nice to have a connection to someone alive.
Together we walk to the center of the crater, then stop. He releases my hand and kneels down in the dirt to sift through the wreckage. After a minute or two he lifts something up and studies it, then sighs, and hands it to me.
I take it and look it over. It appears to be a human hand, carved in stone and cut off at the wrist.
“What is this? A piece of one of those statues?” I scrutinize the piece. It feels like stone, but it’s different. More porous. It makes my skin crawl just holding it.
“Yes. And no,” he says, studying more of the debris. “They’re not statues.”
“Then what are they?”
“They’re … they were people.”
I drop the hand, a sour taste filling my mouth. When he looks up at me, his eyes are filled with horror. I almost wonder if it isn’t just a mirror reflecting back what I’m feeling.
“This town was destroyed with a nanobomb.”
“Nanobomb?” For some reason the term sounds familiar to me, but I can’t place where I heard the term.
He stands, brushing the dirt from his hands. “They were used during the War when they wanted to overtake an entire city, but didn’t want to completely destroy it, or wanted to keep it useable. It was the quickest way.”
“How?” I wheeze out. My chest feels like there’s a band around it compressing until I’m breathless.
He meets my eyes and I know what he’s going to say before he does. “When the bomb explodes, it disperses nanobots—tiny robots so small that they’re invisible to the human eye—into the air like an aerosol. When a person breathes the aerosol in, they breathe in the nanobots, and they start attacking the body from the inside out. Sort of like a virus. In this case, it caused the body to calcify at an accelerated rate. Virtually turning them into stone statues.”
CHAPTER NINE
Toward the end of the twenty-first century, nuclear weapons were almost completely abandoned in favor of the more effective bioweapons. These weapons could easily clear out entire cities, without making them uninhabitable for invading soldiers.
—EXCERPT FROM A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE 21ST CENTURY, “BIOWARFARE”
Evie
“Oh, Mother,” I gasp, but a band of fear must be compressing my chest, because when I suck in a breath it catches in my throat and I start coughing. Coughing so hard that blackness creeps in the sides of my vision until all I can see is a pinprick of the scene in front of me.
Asher slaps my back as if I’m choking, but it doesn’t help. It only makes it worse, a metallic taste coating the back of my tongue. But finally I stop and, while I’m catching my breath, I look around at the statues that stand outside the circle. It’s all so hard to believe, but explains a lot of things. The way they’re dressed in real clothes, the poses, the looks of terror.
“But … why are they still here? Why did they just leave them like that?” Tears sting my eyes and my voice shakes, but disgust is almost as prominent as the sadness ripping through me that anyone could be so callous.
Asher won’t meet my eyes when he says, “I don’t really know, but considering how much damage there is to the surrounding buildings, I have to think this was one of the sites where they tested the prototypes. They probably realized that this city was too far gone to do anything with it and left it.”
Now the disgust is definitely more prominent than the sadness. It makes me speechless. The lack of respect is just mind-blowing.
Asher is watching me with a strange look. “Did you ask for your mother a minute ago?”
At first I have no idea what he’s talking about and the change of subject is a little jolting; then I realize he means what I said before I started choking.
I wince and slump my shoulders, ducking my head so I don’t have to look at him when I say, “It’s just something I say … sometimes. When things surprise me.”
“Why?”
It doesn’t sound anything other than curious, so I relax a little. “I don’t know. Gavin says it’s something from … before. One of the things that stuck in my head even after I lost everything else. I don’t know why I do it, and Gavin doesn’t tell me…” I trail off when I realize how silly that sounds. My saying something and expecting someone else to tell me what it means. It’s ludicrous. I hate it. Feeling helpless like this.
Asher stares at me with this strange look on his face, before he shakes his head. I think I hear him mutter, “Despicable,” but before I can question him, he smiles at me and says, “You’re a strange one, Princess. Come on. We need to find somewhere warm to sleep be
fore you shiver yourself into pieces.”
It’s then that I notice I’m a bundle of tremors. Every muscle in my body aches, especially my heart, which is beating furiously in my chest. My lungs feel like they’re being compressed against my ribs. I rub the heel of my hand against my rib cage.
My teeth are chattering again, but I can’t tell if it’s from fear or the cold. Either way, I just want to leave this city. There’s no way I’m staying here. Not with these statues watching over us.
When I say as much to Asher, he says, “We don’t have much choice. This is the safest place until sunrise.” As if to punctuate his claim, a howl disturbs the quiet of the town. I rub absently at the scratches on my legs. “Besides,” he continues, “this is where I told Gavin we were heading. If he’s coming, he’ll try to meet us here.”
I can tell he doesn’t really believe Gavin is coming, but I’m not willing to take the chance. If waiting in some creepy town is what I need to do, then that’s what I’ll do. “Where do we start?”
“Let’s try to find a spot inside one of these buildings.”
That, of course, proves easier said than done. Almost all of the structures are so badly damaged they’d either provide us no protection from the elements, or are in danger of falling over. It isn’t until we get to the other side of the town, as far from the bomb blast as possible, that we find one relatively intact. It’s the smallest of them. Just a squat block building with a flat roof.
Asher kicks open the door, and peers inside, like he has at least a hundred times in the last hour. But this time, when he emerges, he has a smile in his voice.
“Found one.” His voice is scratchy from exhaustion.
While I get down from Starshine, he pulls a flashlight from one of the packs. “Come on, we’ll check the rest of this building out together. I don’t want to leave you out here all alone.”
Revelations (The Elysium Chronicles) Page 9
