by Dan Simmons
Lucian pointed toward an orange glow against the clouds low above the peaks ahead. “They have the ceremony site lit up already.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s ten-fifteen. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.”
Kate felt like pounding her fists on the car roof. Instead she touched Lucian’s arm. “We can’t keep creeping along like this. How do we get there quickly?”
He grinned at her. “What do you say we just drive? Maybe they don’t have any roadblocks this close.”
“How close are we?”
He looked toward the black doorway in the mountains. “Three miles. Four.”
Kate stepped out onto the highway. “I don’t see any spotlights like at the other roadblocks.”
Lucian nodded. “Maybe we’re past them all. Maybe there’s nothing between us and the citadel but valet parking for the strigoi.”
Kate tried to smile but found that she was on the verge of crying instead. She walked over to Lucian and put her arms around him.
“What, babe?” he whispered.
She shook her head, feeling how soft his cheek was. “Thank you, Lucian. Thank you for…stopping him…today.” Her throat was too tight for her to say more.
Lucian patted her awkwardly on the back. Kate smiled through incipient tears at the thought of how young he was, how filled with energy. She kissed him on the cheek and stepped back. “OK, let’s go find that valet parking.”
There was a roadblock less than two miles ahead.
No searchlights or military trucks here, two black strigoi vans pulled out from the woods behind them while a black Mercedes and some sort of armored vehicle became visible around a bend in the road ahead.
Lucian hit the brakes and the Dacia wallowed to a stop between the two barriers. “Damn,” he whispered.
There were no back lanes here, no friendly railroad grades, no obvious ways out. The strigoi had set this trap well: the sides of the road dropped steeply six or eight feet on each side, the river ran by beyond the ditch to their left, and the canyon wall was to their right.
Searchlights snapped on from the armored car and the grimy windshield of the Dacia became opaque with white light. Kate blinked and shielded her eyes, but the intensity of the glare was like a physical assault.
Someone hailed them with the bullhorn.
“They want us to drive slowly to them,” whispered Lucian. He was grinning broadly and waving at the unseen figures behind the spotlight. “They want us to keep our hands in sight.”
Kate lifted her hands to the dash. Lucian kept both of his on top of the steering wheel. He put the car in gear and began edging slowly toward the Mercedes and armored car a hundred feet ahead.
The bullhorn barked in Romanian again.
“They want us to stop and get out of the car,” said Lucian. He stopped. “I don’t really want to stop and talk to these guys, do you?”
“No,” said Kate.
“Shall we go for it?” Lucian was grinning in all sincerity now.
“Go for it,” said Kate. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that her chest ached. The white light filled the world.
“Okay, babe.” He shifted his right hand, touched her hand, and then slammed the car into gear while flooring the accelerator.
The Dacia lurched, almost stalled, and then whined into motion. The bullhorn barked again. Lucian smiled and waved. Maybe they recognize him, was Kate’s thought. Then the shooting began.
Lucian jerked the car to the right as if they were going to try to get behind the armored car, the searchlight lost them for a second, Kate saw the slightest gap between Mercedes and armored vehicle the same instant Lucian shifted to third gear and aimed for it, and then the windshield disappeared in a thousand flakes, Kate covered her eyes, bullets pounded across the hood, roof, and fenders, there was a terrific impact that slammed her against the door, and then Lucian was steering hard to keep them on the road. He turned the headlights on to show empty highway ahead and then the blazing white light was back in their rearview mirror and rear window. That window exploded inward, Kate felt something tug at her left heel and something else pass between her upraised arm and her ribs, and then they were around the bend in the road and accelerating again, weaving wildly as they did so.
“We made it!” screamed Kate, not believing it even as she shouted. She knew that most of the exhilaration she felt was a pure adrenaline high but she did not care. Lucian grunted something and fought the wheel.
The spare on the right front wheel gave way then with a pop louder than the gunfire had been, the Dacia slewed right, Lucian fought it left, and then they were sideways and flipping down the road. Kate threw her arms over her head, felt her knees bang the underside of the dash, and then she was watching through the broken windshield as the road, sky, road, and sky alternated past.
The Dacia rolled a final time, came to a stop on its wheels, and then slid sideways down a thirty-foot bank into the river.
The old car did not go fully into the water but stopped upside down and wedged between a boulder and a tree with the hood underwater and the left wheel spinning. The right wheel was only tattered rubber on a twisted rim. Kate realized that she was seeing all this from outside the car and she sat up, braced herself on a rock the size of her head, and looked at the Dacia upside down, its headlights under the water.
“Lucian!” She ran to the other side of the vehicle, found him half pinned under the driver’s seat that had come out of its brackets and fallen on him, and—ignoring every rule she had learned as an emergency room intern—pulled him from the wreckage. There was no sound of pursuit yet from the highway above them.
“Lucian,” she whispered, dragging him to the shelter of trees downstream. “We made it. We got past them.”
“Yeah,” he grunted.
She laid him against the roots of the largest tree and scrambled back to the wreckage, feeling around for the pistol. She could not find it, but she came up with the binoculars that had been in the backseat. She put the leather strap around her neck and waded back to Lucian, listening hard. Still no sound of the vehicles.
Lucian was sitting up and was inhaling deeply as if to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him. She knelt next to him. “I think I’m all right. My God, what a mess. Are you all right, Lucian?” His face was very white in the dim light.
He steadied himself with one hand against the tree. “Not really,” he said. “I think I’m going to lie down a minute.”
She heard the armored car shifting gears and moving down the road toward them. A spotlight stabbed into the water two hundred yards away. “No, come on, we have to get across the river and into the woods there,” she hissed in his ear. “Come on, Lucian.” She lifted him to a sitting position and pulled her hands away thick with something.
“Just…rest a minute,” he muttered. “Am o durere aici, Kate. Uh… I mean, I have a pain right here. Mă doare pieptul.” He touched his chest.
Kate pulled him forward and ripped away the tatters of his shirt. As far as she could tell in the darkness, there were four large entry wounds high on his back, two near or above the spine, and another entry wound low and to the right. She felt his chest and stomach but found only one exit wound. It was very large and hemorrhaging badly.
“Ah, Lucian,” she whispered and used his tattered shirt as a compression bandage. “Ah, Lucian…”
“Tired,” whispered Lucian. “Mă simt obosit.”
“We’ll rest here,” she whispered, cradling him and stroking his brow with her free hand. She felt him nod against her. The armored car was almost above them now. She smelled the diesel stink of its exhaust.
“Babe,” whispered Lucian, his voice urgent, “I forgot to tell you something.”
“It’s all right,” crooned Kate, holding the crude bandage in place. The bundle was soaked with his blood and she could hear the bubbling. It was what they had called a sucking chest wound in the emergency room. Only the most immediate and extensive care could save someon
e with a sucking chest wound. “It’s all right,” she whispered, rocking him.
“Good,” said Lucian in a relieved voice, and died.
She felt him go. She felt the energy and consciousness and spark go out of him like air from a ripped balloon. If she had been religious, she would have thought that she felt his soul leave him.
Kate knew CPR. She knew mouth-to-mouth. She knew a dozen high-tech resuscitation techniques and a dozen basic ones. She knew that none of them would help Lucian now. She set her fingers on his eyelids, closed them, kissed them, and lowered him gently to the moss of the riverbank.
The armored car was chugging back and forth along the highway like some smelly dragon. Another vehicle had joined it and there were shouts back and forth. The searchlight swept the river thirty yards below, then twenty yards above where she crouched. Kate realized that the smashed Dacia was under a slight overhang of a boulder here and that they must have left a trail of tattered rubber and smashed metal for two hundred feet down the highway but evidently no major sign of where they went off the road.
It would not take them long. The searchlight was sweeping in a frenzied arc now and more voices were shouting up and down the highway.
Kate touched Lucian’s cooling hand a final time and moved away along the riverbank, staying under the trees, freezing when footsteps pounded or searchlights stabbed through the bare branches. Two hundred yards upstream she stopped, gasping, and then pushed out into the water. The river was only four or five feet deep here but it was very fast and very, very cold. Kate gasped and kept wading, her shoes sliding across smooth rocks on the river bottom.
There were shouts from downstream and searchlights converged on the wreck of the Dacia. If Kate slipped now, the current would take her downstream to the light in seconds. She did not slip. By the time she reached the far side of the river, her legs were numb and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She ignored it and clawed toward the shallows.
More searchlights flicked across the river now. One slid over her just as she pulled herself from the water. It moved back immediately as if feeling for her, but she was crawling through the high reeds and mud toward the trees. There was an infinity of forest on this side of the water, stretching a half a mile or more between the river and the black hills. All dark. No roads here. No lights.
The sound of shots came across the water. They were shooting at her. Kate ignored it, stood, and staggered into the woods. There was just enough starlight there for her to check her watch. It was still working. It was ten twenty-seven.
She could see lights far up the canyon, but the citadel was still two or three miles away according to Lucian. Staying deep within the protective screen of trees, Kate turned north and began walking.
Chapter Thirty-eight
IT took Kate an hour to walk to the lights, and the lights were only another village, not the citadel itself. She stayed in the trees, looked across the river at the tiny village busy with military traffic, police, and spotlighted roadblocks, and thought: Lucian mentioned this place… Căpăţîneni. The citadel should be less than a mile north. But the river twisted under a bridge beyond the village, the highway ran along the west side of the river beyond that point, and the surrounding bluffs hid the citadel from sight. Kate could see an orange glow against the low clouds, but it seemed impossibly distant, impossibly high.
She glanced at her watch: 11:34. She would never travel that mile and climb that mountain in time. Lucian had said that there were steps switchbacking up the mountain crag to the citadel—1400 steps. Kate tried to convert that to feet and height. A thousand feet above the river? At least. Exhausted, she leaned against a tree and concentrated on not weeping.
There was a shuffling, snorting sound to her left and Kate froze, then crouched with her fists clenched. She had no weapon, only the old binoculars strung around her neck. The sound came again and Kate slipped forward through the trees.
In a meadow between the river and the forested hillside, a single Gypsy wagon sat alone. A small campfire had burned down to embers. Beyond the wagon, a white horse cropped the dry grass. It was a huge horse with hooves as big as Kate’s head. It lifted its head, made a whoofing noise like a sneeze, and began grazing again. The sound of its massive teeth crunching grass was very clear in the cold night air. There was no other sound.
Yes, thought Kate.
She circled around through the trees, staying low and setting her feet with care. Occasionally bullhorn sounds or the sound of shouts would drift across the river from the village. Once Kate froze into immobility as a black helicopter roared down the canyon just above the river, going from south to north. Then the machine was out of sight around the bluff and Kate began stalking the horse again. Her heart pounded as she moved out of the shelter of the trees and slid through the high grass.
The white horse raised its head and watched her with curious eyes.
“Shhh,” Kate whispered uselessly as she came up next to the horse, keeping it between the quiet Gypsy wagon and herself. “Shhh.” She patted its neck and noticed that its rope halter was tied to a longer rope staked down eight or ten feet closer to the wagon. “Shit,” she breathed to herself.
The stake had been driven deep. Kate crouched, could not free it, shifted her position, put her back into it, and pulled the long peg free. The horse moved away slightly, eyes wide at her exertions. Kate coiled the rope and hurried to the animal, patting its neck and whispering reassurances.
A hand fell on Kate’s shoulder while a knife blade came around to her throat. A cracked voice whispered something in a language neither Romanian nor English. Kate blinked as the blade moved away. She turned.
The Gypsy woman may have been Kate’s age but she looked twenty years older. Even in the dim light, Kate could see the wrinkles, the sagging cheeks, and the missing teeth. She and the woman were dressed alike in black skirt and dark sweater. The knife the woman held was barely larger than a dagger, but it had felt very sharp against Kate’s neck.
“You… American woman?” said the Gypsy. Her voice seemed far too loud to Kate. Trucks moved toward the highway bridge behind her. “You come in Romania with Voivoda Cioaba?”
Kate felt her knees go weak. “Yes,” she whispered back.
“Come with preot? Priest?”
Kate nodded.
The woman grabbed Kate’s sweater, bunched it in her strong fist, shoved Kate backward in the grass, and brought the knife up to Kate’s face. “You mother of strigoi.” The last word was a hiss.
Kate moved her head slowly back and forth an inch from the tip of the knife. “I hate the strigoi. I came to destroy them.”
The woman squinted at her.
“They took my baby,” whispered Kate.
The Gypsy blinked. The knife did not move. “Strigoi take many Gypsy babies. Many hundreds of ani…years. They take Gypsy babies to drink. Now they take Gypsy babies to sell to Americans.”
Kate had nothing to say to that.
The woman moved the knife away and knelt in the grass. The horse continued to graze nearby, ignoring them. “I come here because entire families of Romany brought here this week. Soldiers have…in soldier place near dam. My husband and daughter are there. I with sister in Hungary. Soldiers will not let people up road here. I think strigoi will be using Romany tonight. Yes?”
Kate thought about the ceremony She and O’Rourke were to provide what Radu Fortuna had called the Sacrament, their blood, for Joshua and the strigoi VIPs. What was to feed the hundreds of strigoi guests?
“Yes,” said Kate. “I think the strigoi will kill them tonight.”
The Gypsy woman clenched her fists. “You do something?”
Kate took a breath. “Yes.”
“You kill them somehow? American smart bomb, like with Saddam Hussein?”
Kate did not smile. “Yes.”
The Gypsy woman looked skeptical but got to her feet and helped Kate up. “Good. You want horse?”
Kate chewed her lip and looked
at the highway. Military trucks and police vehicles moved back and forth in regular patrols. The hillside on this side of the river was wooded, but too steep to ride a horse on. On the other side of the road, the river stretched to the shale cliffs on the opposite shore.
“I have to try to get up there to the citadel…”
The Gypsy woman shook her head. “Not road.” She pointed to the forest behind her. “Old trail there. Almost gone. Go back to days of Vlad Ţepeş…” The woman stopped, spat, and warded off the evil eye with two fingers raised toward the glow to the north. She walked over to the horse, said something sharp to it, set the dagger in the belt of her skirt, and cupped her hands in what Kate realized was an invitation to mount the animal.
Kate did so, although not gracefully. She rode sometimes in Colorado, but never on a horse this large. Her bruised thighs ached just straddling its back.
“Come,” said the woman and lifted the coiled rope to lead the horse toward the forest.
Kate looked at her watch. It was 11:46.
There seemed to be no trail, but the woman led the horse through the trees and the horse seemed to know where he was going. Kate had to hunker over and cling to the animal’s neck at times to avoid being swept off by branches.
The road, if the vaguest hint of trail between the trees could be called a road, cut behind the bluff and rose steeply above the valley floor. Kate realized that the highway below wound a mile or so along the river to the citadel, but this way would shorten that distance by at least half.
Two-thirds of the way up the mountain, the woman took out her dagger, cut the rope, handed the short end to Kate, and said, “I go down now. Go to dam near Bilea Lac. If my man and daughter not freed, I join them.” She hesitated a second and handed Kate the short knife. Kate stuck it in her belt, feeling the absurdity of her little dagger against several hundred strigoi and their armies.
The Gypsy woman paused and lifted a weathered hand. Kate clasped it in a palm-over-palm handshake, and then the Gypsy woman was gone with only the slightest rustle of her black skirt.
