Outside their prison door, the Prophet ceased sermonizing, and that was a piece of luck, at least. It would’ve been too easy to crawl inside his reassuring words—demons can’t harm the righteous—and fall back into the Red Creek sleep. Hours ago, she’d crunched her shoulder back into its socket and hadn’t fainted when white pain blinded her. All that would be for nothing if she didn’t keep fighting now.
Then Magda made a noise—an inhuman growl—and Beth flattened herself against the door.
Please tell me I imagined it.
A scratching against the cellar’s wood floor. The Magda creature shuffled hesitantly closer, then nearer still. Beth saw the shadowy outline of her head bending down—horror of horrors—to sniff Beth’s toes. Beth whipped her legs beneath her wedding skirt.
Magda’s head snapped up. Her eyes were two smoldering points in the dark.
Beth’s breath was ragged.
Sam once asked if you could die in a nightmare—keel over from fear alone. She’d told him no, but now she wondered.
“Magda. Don’t come any closer. I’m warning you.”
A pathetic threat. But there must’ve been some spark of the girl left inside that shell, because Magda settled back onto her ankles.
Keep talking. Better keep talking.
“Look, I’m sorry about Cory. But it wasn’t fair to get your friends to call me a whore. That really hurt. Made me feel like I was rotten inside, even though I never did anything. Not anything.”
Some of her words were whispers, some were shrieks—and at least two were a bald-faced lie, because she’d done plenty with Cory Jameson.
But it didn’t matter. Magda was listening.
“I didn’t realize until your father tried to tear my arm off, but the words he and the Prophet use—righteous, holy, demon, whore—they’re worse than lies. They paint everything black and white and destroy what’s in between. They make you feel so ashamed you’d do anything to feel clean again.” Beth hadn’t taken a breath since she’d started talking, and now she had a spinning, drowning feeling.
“Girls marry who they say and crawl into the bunker when they’re told. But, Magda, it’s a trap. Agnes knew. She—”
Magda growled again. Beth stopped talking. The intensity of the creature’s stare told her it was no use. She was going to die in here.
The thing, once Magda, was going to kill her.
I want Agnes, she thought. Dear God, I want Agnes.
Even in the moment before a bloody death, her sister would’ve remained steady. She’d get that wise look on her face—that look like she was seeing layers deeper than anyone else. Beth would’ve clawed out her own eyes to feel Agnes’s comforting presence beside her now.
The creature started to tremble, almost vibrate, and, facing death, Beth began to remember. She remembered Agnes staring over her garden while the air shimmered like heat around her, and Agnes bowing her head in prayer. She remembered Agnes weeping, arguing, then agreeing to stay in Red Creek to attend Beth’s wedding, knowing full well the risk she took.
Agnes.
In the grips of dreamy terror, she knew a strange, unsettling truth. She couldn’t say how—she had no evidence—but it was a kind of faith. Pure and true.
She knew: This Magda-monster couldn’t harm Agnes.
Hadn’t she felt something before her wedding? Hadn’t she sensed some kind of—power—in that shocking, electric kiss?
You have my blessing, Beth Ann. God bless you in your time of need.
God smiled on her sister. Beth had always known it, deep down. If she were here, she’d be like Joseph in his coat of dreams. Untouchable.
But Beth wasn’t.
The creature was readying to lunge.
Beth threw herself against the door. She beat it with her fists, screaming, “Let me out! Help!” She slammed with her good shoulder, but the wood never gave.
It was too late to pray but Beth tried anyway. She got as far as God who art in heaven when the door swung open, and a hand clapped over her mouth.
Someone pulled her into the bunker’s great room—the single bulb painfully bright to her light-starved eyes—and pressed her back against the door. On the other side, Magda strained to break free.
“Help me push!”
“Cory?”
“Push,” he hissed.
She was incredibly strong, this altered Magda, and they struggled to contain her in grim silence. Beth’s foot slipped in sawdust, and the door yawned open. She scrambled back, adding her weight to Cory’s.
The door slammed shut.
Cory’s hands trembled as he shoved the key into the lock. The bolt took, and Magda went wild behind the door. Beth dearly wished she’d never heard the sound of her nails, snapping and breaking against splintering wood.
Cory stared. “Is that my sister?”
She touched his arm, shaking. “Not anymore.”
“Toby’s like that. Getting sicker every hour.” Cory inhaled, straightened. “Everyone’s sleeping. Be quiet and stay low.”
He dropped to a crawl. She followed him into a cavernous maze. Their breath was earthy down here and her knees chafed against roots and stones. Cory seemed to know his way around. She’d never been so happy to see the dirty soles of a pair of shoes in her life.
They turned into a narrow tunnel. Cory switched on a flashlight, lighting a room packed with canned preserves. Unlike in the tunnel, they could stand. Silver spiderwebs clotted the crevices between jars, but Beth was so thirsty she didn’t care. She snatched a jar off the shelf, unscrewed the lid, and drank deeply of peach juice. Her throat convulsed until she drained it. The syrup a sweet relief.
“My mothers canned most of this,” Cory whispered. “Food for four hundred days.”
Beth fought a wave of pain, her bad arm screaming after their crawl. Don’t think about it, not until we’ve gotten out.
But did Cory even want to get out? Since those boys called her a whore, she’d avoided Matthew Jameson’s son like the plague. Maybe he didn’t mean to escape. Maybe he’d simply been unable to stomach the thought of her becoming Magda chow.
She looked into his eyes for a clue, and the longing in them disconcerted her. Eerily, his eyes were the spitting image of his father’s—only Mr. Jameson had never longed for Beth.
Throughout the wedding service, he’d glanced down at his wristwatch or over his shoulder in the direction—she realized now—of the bunker. It made a kind of sick sense. After all, he’d waited decades for the world’s end, for the one spectacular moment that would prove his life a righteous one. When the time was finally at hand, he’d gazed after it like a lover. Like Cory gazed at her now.
She wiped syrup from her mouth. “What’s your plan?”
“To rescue you, then beat the Christ-hell out of here.”
“I thought you wanted to be a patriarch with eleven wives,” Beth shot back.
His face twisted. The reality of the bunker, the awful dark, had changed him, too. “Ignorant little shit, wasn’t I?”
She agreed, but it wasn’t the time to hassle him.
“How do we get out?”
“I know a way.”
No one opposed them as they crawled through a rising, narrowing passageway. The people, exhausted, were sleeping. No one had thought to establish a guard—after all, who would want to escape into the fire-breathing Rapture?
“Look.” Cory pointed at a small emergency hatch buried in a dark tunnel.
They both stared, breathing the earthy air, for longer than was wise.
“My sister would try to find the kids,” Beth said numbly. “Get them out.”
She felt, rather than saw, Cory look at her. “Is that what you want to do?”
God help her, but she didn’t. Terror had pitted her heart, hollowed it. She pushed away the image of the children’s faces, wondering if she’d one day regret this choice.
“We can’t go back,” she said. “They’d catch us, for sure.”
“I tried to convi
nce my brothers that what was happening to you and Magda was wrong.” Cory coughed. “Unholy, even.”
“And?” she whispered.
“They said, ‘Two wayward girls aren’t worth your soul.’” He sounded broken. Lost. “I think—I think I’ll never see them again.”
She took his hand. Squeezed it. He surprised her by reaching out, brushing a dirt smudge from her cheek with his thumb. Then he fumbled with the hatch and pushed it open.
Beth gasped fresh air in huge, grateful gulps. It was sweeter than peach juice. Sweeter than anything.
Cory climbed through and she followed, tripping over her dirt-caked wedding dress. She was aching to run and not stop until they reached Holden.
With a metallic snick, the hatch closed on their old lives forever.
They bolted for the trees.
Cory was fast, but maybe because of what she’d seen Magda become, Beth was faster. In the dark shelter of the forest, she held her bad arm close to her chest. Don’t look back. In the trees, she felt her horror of a marriage close on her heels, and a red death, too. She sensed Magda and Matthew and the faithful’s harsh judgments. She felt egg sliding down her face and the wind muttering, whore, whore, whore.
A mind-numbing snap, loud as a gunshot, stopped her in her tracks.
“Beth!” Cory howled, and she knew in her marrow what had happened.
Cory Jameson had triggered one of Red Creek’s rusty, half-hidden traps.
She looked back. There was a dense patch of shadow between them, and that night, no moon to light betrayal.
I could just keep running. I don’t have to stop.
A shameful thought, but there it was. She didn’t have to stop. Later, when guilt fell deeper than shadows, she could tell herself she hadn’t heard him cry out—that they’d been separated in the forest. After growing up in Red Creek, she knew how to believe what lies she needed to survive.
She hesitated a moment longer. Then she thought of Agnes—Agnes, and her unshakable love—and couldn’t abandon him. She cradled her arm on the way back to Cory, and when she saw him doubled up in the undergrowth, she began to cry—but not for him. She’d been close, so close, half a mile, maybe, from the road. But close wasn’t going to cut it, in the end.
“I think my leg’s broken.”
He was caught in a mouth filled with iron-sharp teeth, and she didn’t know how to get him out. Even if she did, the unnatural crook of his leg told her they weren’t going anywhere tonight. And he was bleeding into the forest loam. She could smell the copper tang.
She looked once more, longingly, into the shadows, then faced the cruel iron trap as she tried to shake the feeling that Red Creek had done them in at last.
You could die in a nightmare, you really could.
She only wished she could tell Sam.
28
AGNES
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.
—PSALM 90:4
Danny had fallen sick sometime in the middle of the night, he explained while Matilda put Ezekiel—whom she off-handedly called Zeke—down for a much-needed nap.
“It’s just a bug, probably caught it from Mom,” Danny said. “She was working night and day there for a while. Typical, really.”
Though the library was warm, he huddled inside his windbreaker. Agnes didn’t want to badger him with questions—but there were things she needed to know.
“Where did everyone go?”
“California, or Las Vegas.” He adjusted his glasses. “There are military outposts all over the Southwest.”
“We should all be somewhere like that,” Max put in bitterly. “My town was a holdout, and wouldn’t you know it, the Burn Squad blazed it down.”
Pain blossomed in Jasmine’s face.
Agnes wasn’t the only one dealing with the ghosts of a ruined past, and she chided herself for her selfishness. It was new, extending her compassion to Outsiders and seeing them for what they were: real and human and capable of suffering, as she was.
“They killed people, this Burn Squad?” she asked.
“They’re sickos.” Max stuck a toothpick in his mouth and chewed it.
“It started with burning Nests,” Danny explained. “The government sanctioned them for containment after the evacuation. But some of the Squads went rogue. Some of them decided it was more efficient, or more fun, to burn whole towns.” He examined his hands. “Even with living people in them.”
Agnes shuddered, picturing red licking flames, a Rapture of a different kind.
Danny took a long drink of water, and she remembered something she’d only barely registered on her journey from the high desert—with its towering pines and clear, cold air—to this parched lower region.
“Where are all the birds?”
The Outsiders blinked at her, and she tried again. “I just mean, I didn’t hear any birds singing this morning. Is that normal?”
“Agnes, have you never been—” Jasmine started, but Danny cut her off, gesturing excitedly.
“If there are still uninfected birds in Red Creek, it’s got to be about the last place on earth,” he enthused. “All over the world birds have been hit hard. Scientists say it’s an environmental disaster in the making.”
“Hang on,” said Max. “How many infected do you have up in Red Creek? Infected people, I mean?”
Agnes could only think of Magda Jameson and Toby, the Prophet’s son. “Just two. And only because the Prophet wanted people hurt.”
Max slapped the table. “If we’ve got to stay in Arizona”—at this he shot Danny a very dirty look—“that’s where we should be. In freaking Red Creek, where there are still freaking birds!”
Agnes felt cold. She glanced at Danny, because he’d seen it. He knew.
“Trust me, Red Creek is the last place we want to be.” He returned Max’s look with frank dislike. “There’s a madman in charge.”
Max rolled his eyes, and Danny pulled a face she’d never seen him make before.
Agnes leaned away.
Something is different about him on the Outside.
As the Outsiders continued their conversation, she tried to put her finger on what had changed, and decided it was the way he acted with the others. Though they’d only met a few days ago, the Outsiders already had more in common with one another than they ever would with her. She didn’t understand half of what they were saying, and she tried to keep a mental list of new words so she could look them up later. Who was Stephen King, where was Reno, and what were laptops? What was Jonestown, and what was a vegetarian (Jasmine was one)? And what on earth did CDC and EPA stand for?
She told herself she shouldn’t hope to be one of them, but only among them. Close, but never touching. And maybe that was all right.
Considering how her body reacted when Danny was near, maybe that was better.
Danny reached for a napkin and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was shaking.
Max had noticed, too. His eyes narrowed. “What was your temperature?”
“A hundred and two, but it’s not—”
Max pushed his empty bowl away. “Take your shirt off.”
“It’s not the Virus,” said Danny. “So just cool it.”
Max laughed, an ugly sound. “Would you tell us if it was?”
“Not everyone left on this planet is a selfish jerk, you worthless—”
“Enough.” Matilda returned, looking tired. “I know you’re on edge, but there has to be some trust. If we’re going to stay together, I mean.”
Her eyes were challenging, and for a long moment, Max held them.
Then at last he shoved his hands sullenly into his pockets and looked away.
Agnes felt dumbfounded. She’d never seen a woman wield that kind of power. Back home, even the mothers of teenage boys mostly let them rule. They were still men, after all.
“Ignore him.” Jasmine’s tone was streaked with anger. “Of course we want to stay wi
th you. Where else would we go?”
“That’s what we’ve got to discuss.”
Max stood abruptly. “Are you all completely addled? It’s a mistake to stay with that Nest so close. Something’s bound to happen. Any fool can see it.”
“Max, what’s your alternative?” Danny demanded. “Would you prefer the military outposts? Where do you think it’s safe?”
Max met Agnes’s eyes for the first time. She sensed the vast pain his anger hid, the suffering that echoed in the belly of his soul. Tragedy had struck him when he was still, essentially, a child, and he felt bitterly wronged by it.
“If there are still birds in Red Creek, she might’ve just run from the last safe place on earth. Maybe it’s worth it to join a cult, if it means we don’t wind up infected.”
“Max,” Jasmine snapped.
“It’s okay.” Agnes could tell that Max itched for a fight. Any fight. “But we have infected creatures there, too. A javelina almost caught my brother.”
“But no infected people means our chances would be—”
“It wouldn’t be worth it,” she said simply, truthfully. “To risk meeting the Prophet. He’s mad. There’s no telling what he might do, even now.”
Max set his perfect jaw. “Whatever. I’m going back to sleep. Let me know what you guys decide.”
“I think that’s best.” Jazz spoke coolly. “You’ve been very rude.”
He left them, and the Outsider girl rolled her eyes in exasperation.
In sixteen years of life, Agnes had never seen such a bizarre interaction between men and women. She filed it away, to play it over in her mind later.
“Listen, Agnes.” Matilda tapped her lower lip with two fingers—a tic she recognized. “There are things you need to know.”
“Can it wait?” Danny interjected. “She’s dead on her feet.”
“I’m afraid it can’t,” Matilda said. “You’ve got to know, Agnes, that there’s almost no population left in Arizona anymore. Only Burn Squads roam the desert now. And I don’t know, maybe we stayed too long… but then, if we’d evacuated, we wouldn’t have been here for you and Ezekiel.”
Agnes at the End of the World Page 15
