by Elisa Hansen
Leif’s gaze lingered on the soft parts of the back of her knees until she faced him again. “Don’t leave yet.” He gestured to the iPod with a tilt of his head.
Carol picked up her bag and pulled the strap over her shoulder. Metallic objects within clunked against each other.
“What have you got there?” Leif asked.
A faint smile, a sweet brightening of her features.
He brushed his fingertips against his silken lips. “I can’t imagine at all what an android might need to carry around with her.”
“You certainly are curious.”
“Is it spare parts?” He slid off the chair and stepped to her. His hand moved as if it would touch her face through will of its own. He repressed the impulse.
She looked to his hovering fingers, then back up to his eyes, but only shook her head in response.
“Is it portable fuel for generators like the one in this shed?”
Another pleasant little quirk of her lips. The color of her eyes lightened to same shade as the spot on her breast.
Leif put his hand on the bag, as if he might guess its contents by feel, but his gaze remained on hers. He leaned closer. Oh, that delicious scent… It clamped onto his brain in a way he did not want to resist.
“I can’t help it,” he murmured. “I’m fascinated.”
Her perfectly-shaped lips parted, but she did not reply.
The tip of his nose lingered an inch from her cheek. “You know,” he all but breathed, unable to help himself, “you smell so like a human.”
Carol’s eyes flashed dark, and she jerked back. A click and the laser gun aimed at Leif’s face again.
He barely had time to lift his hands before she shoved past him and ran through the room and out of the building.
Leif blinked. Oh-ho. It was like that, was it? He ran a hand through his hair and closed his eyes. Not breathing, he listened to her fleeing footsteps as long as they echoed, and then he pressed his palm to his face, drawing in the scent of the bag. A human had touched that bag. Only one, but it had touched it tonight. He exhaled luxuriously and returned to his iPod.
Some minutes later, the flashing green battery on the screen stilled and the lightning bolt turned into a plug. Leif took his time to snap together the charger pieces, fit in his headphones, and choose a playlist before he left the building.
The wind had changed direction. Not much, but enough. Carol’s scent lingered in his nostrils. Tease, tease, tease. Leif stood completely still, feeling the coming of the dawn, listening through the music, breathing, making no move to seek cover. Eventually, as the eastern sky neared gray, his collection of senses targeted a point beyond the field’s wall.
“A human for me, and an android for you,” he whispered.
Lorenzo would love her indeed.
Leif grinned and took off after her.
14
Flight
A cold inhuman hand jolted Scott awake. He sat up with a gasp and fumbled to free his shotgun from the blankets.
“Hush, it’s me.” Carol’s voice penetrated the hammering heartbeat in his ears. He rubbed his eyes, and she came into focus, silhouetted against the dim bedroom window blinds.
“I knew that,” he said between panting breaths. “Your hand is just…really cold.” His shirt had bunched around his chest from his flailing. He dropped the gun to tug it down, then immediately felt stupid. Carol didn’t care about his pasty white abs. Yawning, he shook out his hair like a wet dog. “What time is it?”
“Time to go.”
Past her dark shape, gloomy morning light sneaked through the broken blinds. Scott groaned and flopped face down on the bed. Mistake. A cloud of dust ballooned around him, and he coughed for a minute straight.
“Hush,” Carol said at whisper volume. When he didn’t stop, she gave him two sharp whacks on the back.
“Stop that.” He batted at her hand and covered his mouth. “That doesn’t work.”
“It should.” She stopped anyway. “You are making too much noise.”
“For what? Am I disturbing the termites?” They were totally alone in the abandoned house. Scott blew a circle of dust from the ratty bedspread, making a nice clean spot. He burrowed his face into it, tucked the shotgun under his arm, and pulled one of the lumpy shammed pillows over his head. “You woke me up too soon. I’ve only had like three hours of sleep. It’s not healthy. We humans have something called REM cycles. This should matter to you.” The bedspread smelled like old shoes. He could already feel himself drifting off. “Give me four more hours at least.”
The pillow was wrenched away, and cruel demon light assaulted his face.
“You can sleep in the car.” Carol dropped the pillow on the floor.
He twisted over. “What is your problem?” He could never sleep right in the car. She knew that.
“We are not alone here.”
Scott’s heart leapt to attention. He sat up straight and flipped the shotgun around. “What?” he whispered. “What is it?”
“A vampire.”
Scott blinked. “A vampire?”
“Yes.”
Scott blinked at her again. He looked past her to the brightening window, then met her eyes once more. “Carol, you do realize that when that star we call the sun comes up into the visible part of the sky, that means it’s daylight, don’t you?”
Her purple eyes narrowed, and she bent to grasp him by the bicep. “We are going. Now.” She yanked him to his feet like he weighed nothing.
Ow! “Okay, okay, calm down.” He pushed her hand away and massaged his arm. Finger-shaped bruises would be emerging later. He was twenty-three. Why did she have to treat him like an irrational toddler? After months of her pushing him around, he was reaching his limit. She was supposed to be protecting him, but the last time he searched the definition of that word, “bullying” wasn’t part of it. Sure, he couldn’t even remember the last time he bothered looking up any words. But the point was, she was freaking out over a vampire in broad daylight. How did her “superior intelligence” rationalize that?
“We have like nine hours before it could even try to follow us.” He used slow, simple words in case she needed them. “If it even knows we’re here.” He scanned the floor for his hiking boots.
“He knows.”
“What?” Scott’s head snapped up. “Carol, what happened?” Did she let the vampire see her? Superior intelligence. Right.
“I’ll tell you about it in the car. Hurry up.”
Scott fought another yawn and plopped onto the bed to lace his boots. “Where’s my backpack? Oh, there it is. How do you know there’s only one?”
“I don’t. But he led me to believe he is alone here.”
The laces fell from Scott’s fingers. “Hold on. You talked to him?”
Carol spread the blinds with two fingers to peek out the window. “But he would want me to believe that.”
“Obviously. But Carol, you talked to him?” Were her circuits damaged or something?
“But probability dictates it’s likely he told the truth.”
“A vampire alone?” Wasn’t that supposed to be unheard of? Finishing his shoes, Scott grabbed the backpack and went to the bedroom door. Carol followed, almost stepping on his heels.
At the bottom of the creaking staircase, Scott glanced around the boarded-up living room. Tacky knickknacks and dead digital photo-frames abounded. Old people must have lived there. Sighing, he rubbed at his eyes. “I was going to check out the kitchen for stuff.”
He also hoped to find a pair of scissors this time to snip off some of his hair. In the dusty mirror over the mantle, it looked like a straw mop. But he was so tired when they rolled into town, he’d put it all off, and now he wouldn’t get the chance. He’d be tempted to take his electric razor to his entire head if he didn’t know painfully well how dumb he looked with a buzz cut.
Carol jabbed him in the center of his back. “You can forage when we stop in Colorado.”
Scott fli
nched and hoisted on his backpack. Super. Another day of hair itching his neck and eating the dense foil-wrapped bars he suspected consisted of more cardboard than protein. “Did you even get to charge?” He shuffled to the back-porch door they broke through earlier. “Or do I need to monitor the car while it drives?”
She jabbed him in the side where the backpack didn’t protect. “I told you, you can sleep.”
Scott grunted and jogged around the house to the curb where the silver hybrid sedan they found yesterday sat halfway onto the dead lawn at a careless angle.
He eyed the cracked panels on the roof and hood. “It’s barely even started charging.”
Carol’s arm drew back, but he jumped aside before she could jab him again. “Get in.” Her eyes changed colors as she scanned the street in all directions.
Scott was too tired to argue. He poured himself into the car, but he doubted sleep would come again anytime soon.
15
The Border
Emily found it too easy to keep pace with Death; she walked at his side for miles and hours without ever beginning to feel tired. She asked him why her body didn’t wear out after all that happened to her. He told her this was the longest single distance he’d ever traversed on foot. She waited for an actual answer, but that was all she got.
Just get to the Nevada border unit, her mental loop repeated with each hill they rounded. Pass on the mission, and it won’t have been for nothing.
As the gloomy wee hours wore into crispy morning, Death led her along no discernible road through the low mountains, consistently east. The longer they walked, the less Emily worried he would reach his destination before hers. In a way too convenient to be coincidence, the terrain never obstructed their path, and they met nothing and no one along the way. If anything alive at all existed around them, it did not want to be noticed.
Yeah, Emily wouldn’t want to be noticed by the likes of her new self either.
In his silent, preoccupied way, Death did not object to her trailing after him like a string of stuck toilet paper. Emily objected to the silence though, so she talked to him. At him. Her life story seemed appropriate. She rambled about her childhood and about joining the LPI, the missions she completed, the people she lost. The less he reacted, the more she talked. It kept her mind from dwelling on her body’s changes, kept the horror of it squashed deep.
Her working theory was that this hike could be some kind of test, some kind of purgatory. She was walking through a literal valley with Death himself, after all. Maybe everyone did this? He said she couldn’t die, that she was a zombie, undead, but maybe he wasn’t being completely honest? Her mind prevailed, intact. Maybe she was a dead zombie? And her soul—or whatever zombies lost with their reason—had returned to her? So her entire life’s decisions weighed heavy on her, and she combed through every last one to ensure no overlooked detail remained to damn her in the afterlife. If Death existed, there had to be an afterlife, right?
For hours, she funneled her nervous energy into indulging the desperate need to simply remember her life aloud, every bit of it she could, and Death let her. In fact, every once in a while, right when she felt convinced he was tuning her out completely, he would make some quiet response. He offered little more than a “Hm” or “Ah” or “Indeed,” but it did the trick, and she rambled on to the end of her story.
When she got to the part about dropping the radio, about mistaking the tossed cigarette for a firefly, she forced herself to admit her worst fears. Was it her fault the commune sent Snakeman to hide behind the boulders? Not knowing for sure made her brain want to break, but her eyes remained stupidly dry. She pushed past those parts, on to the bite. He wouldn’t have come after her if she stayed to shoot his zombie head instead of running for her life.
Her life. She could almost laugh.
“And I saw you then, I think,” she went on. “After it happened. When I fell. That was you, wasn’t it? You were talking to someone. He had a horse.”
“My horse.”
She halted mid-step and looked up at Death. A two-word reply? With actual content? “What?”
He did not stop. “He took my horse.”
“Who did?”
“Time.”
“What?”
“Time took my horse.”
“Wait.” Emily shook out her head and caught up to him. “Time is a person?”
“Am I a person?”
“That was Time I saw? I saw Time?”
“Yes.”
“Like Father Time?”
Death waved a hand as if to brush the question away, and his eyes remained ahead.
It occurred to Emily they might not be as alone as she assumed. They existed in time after all. She glanced behind her and then back to the side of Death’s hood. In the daylight, its blackness looked unreal. She couldn’t see any texture to the fabric, as if it were made of a seamless sheet of sculpted plastic or metal but with the soft flow and give of satin while somehow maintaining the weight of heavy wool. If she stared at it too long, she grew dizzy.
“Did you know I could see you guys?” she asked.
“I wasn’t paying attention to you.”
“But wasn’t I—? Right after you just killed me?”
“Failed to,” he corrected. His hand bones flexed at his side. “I had no more business with you.”
So, that was it? Emily’s chest tightened. “You were just going to leave me?”
“Yes.” He sounded unaffected by her tone. “But Time was in my way.”
“And he stopped you from leaving me?” Thank God. Or thank Time? She couldn’t imagine what she might have done if she got up last night and found herself truly alone.
Death’s pace quickened as if he realized he could walk faster. “He stopped me absolutely.”
“What?” Emily half-jogged to keep up.
“He took my horse.”
“What does that mean?” Was this about Emily or not?
“It means I don’t have a horse.”
She clenched her teeth. “I mean, why does that matter?”
“Wouldn’t it matter to you if someone took your horse?”
“I don’t have a horse.”
“Neither do I.”
She groaned. A second later, the sound repeated in the hills. Emily’s instincts locked in, and she stopped, bracing for an attack before she realized. It was her own echo.
God…
She had to stand with her eyes closed for a few moments to work her brain back into the conversation. Was Death this frustrating with everyone he walked through purgatory? “Where did he take it?”
Death paused and looked back at her. “What?” He stood only a few yards ahead on the not-path.
Emily lifted her face to meet his gaze. In the daylight, the glowy centers of his eyes were almost invisible. It felt more like she was talking to a giant Halloween prop than anything supernatural. “Your horse.”
“Ah.” He turned and continued walking. “East.”
Emily caught up but remained a step behind him. “That’s vague.”
“Yes. It is.”
She sighed. It made her chest hurt. Was he even capable of a straight answer? She told herself his attitude must be all part of the purgatory test and took her time to choose her next words carefully. “So what did killing me have to do with Time stopping you and taking your horse?” Could it be about her mission? Time took his horse in the same direction she needed to go to do her last important task before the afterlife.
“I did not kill you.”
“Whatever! You know what I mean.”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I failed.”
“What?”
“I touched you.”
“Right, but that zombie…” She shook away the chilly memory of Death’s touch crashing against the fire of the zombie’s jaws, of the sound like an arrow flying.
“Yes.”
“Look.” She exhaled. “I don’t get what me not
dying has to do with Time.”
“On this day, three years ago,” said Death, “two hundred fifty-one thousand six hundred twenty-six humans fell under my touch.”
“‘Kay…” Emily let a long step stretch between them. The way he said it sounded not proud so much as hungry.
“Yesterday, before Time stopped me, I touched three hundred forty-six.”
“Three hundred forty-six?” Emily moved back to his side. “Wait, in the whole world, three hundred forty-six?”
“Not you too.” Death shook his head and glanced away.
“What?”
“He kept repeating it.”
“Who, Time?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s a big difference!”
“I know.”
“Okay, so, I get it. You failed. You failed a lot. What was I, like the last straw or something?”
“Something.”
Emily clenched her teeth and pushed some stringy bits of hair behind her ear as she worked to sort out everything he didn’t say. “Why does Time care?”
Death glanced at her, then looked ahead again. “I’m not sure. He usually just passes by.”
Was that supposed to be a joke? Maybe he would give her clearer answers if she pretended to be amused. But if it wasn’t a joke, she probably shouldn’t risk laughing at him.
“Okay, so,” she tried again after taking a moment to focus, “when you say Time stopped you absolutely, that’s why you said no one else anywhere in the world is going to die.”
“Yes.” Death’s voice lowered, something sorrowful in his tone.
“And this is possible how?”
“It’s possible if I can’t get to the where and when someone is meant to die.”
Right. Okay. “And you can’t get there without your horse.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what?”
“Time and Space have bound me.”
“Space is a person too?”
Death sighed. But Emily didn’t care if she exasperated him as long as she could put it together. Bound. Not entirely metaphorically, either. Death was bound by Space and Time—just like everything else in the world. And stuck in the middle of nowhere—just like Emily. But that answered only the how. She still didn’t get the why.
