The word was barely out of her mouth before he had turned away from her and was crossing the room. She watched him climb through one of the windows.
When he returned a short time later through the same window, she heard, “You still here?”
“I’m here.”
“Listen to me carefully. We’re going to have to work fast and we’re going to have to work smart.”
In a faint flash of lightning, Bresh saw that the woman’s eyes were huge as she stared up at him. She was scared. And there was every reason why she should be. He wasn’t at all sure she was going to obey him, but she surely understood the danger they were in. He hoped she wasn’t so afraid that she would freak out and run blindly once they got out of the house. He had commanded men before and this was like any other combat situation. Life and death decisions had to be obeyed immediately, with no questions asked. He needed to make her understand that. It was the only way.
“When I give you the word, we’re out of here. You do exactly what I say.”
He paused a moment, and then again she heard, “Understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“You sure you’re not going to panic out there?”
This time he saw the slow shake her head. He couldn’t read anything beyond that. “You’re going to have to trust me. Can you do that?”
She nodded again, but he knew it wasn’t a guarantee.
“I mean it, honey. You stick close to me. You try going it alone out there and you’re dead.”
That was putting it bluntly, but she had to know what they were up against.
He could almost feel the change in her in the darkness and figured he’d finally gotten through to her. “We have to do this. Now.”
The only thing, the only thing that Aili could focus on in the darkness was the man’s voice. Even with everything else that was going on around them, it still sounded so steady, so commanding, that Aili clung to it as her only salvation. She heard the banging on the other side of the door again. This time it was accompanied by an awful, almost demonic screech.
“No matter how scared you get, don’t even try making a run for it. The street is crawling with those things.”
What kind of a way was that to reassure someone?
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” she heard him say. “There’s a truck parked in the driveway next door. We’ll make our way to it and then get out of here.”
“And then what?”
“The same as everybody else is probably doing. We’ll look for a safe place to hide until we find out what the hell is going on. You’ll have to drive,” he informed her when they reached the window.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Unless you know how to hot wire a vehicle.”
Of course she didn’t. But he obviously did. Was he a criminal? Did it even matter at this point?
“I’ll take care of those- things. You just make your way to the driver’s side of the truck. And don’t stop for anything.”
Getting to the truck was a harrowing run through a gauntlet of whatever those things were. Aili finally drew a relieved breath only after both of the truck doors slammed shut.
She sat in the driver’s seat crammed up against the door as he leaned close to her, looking for the right wires. That’s when she saw that it was-
A stick shift.
Who drove a stick shift these days? It had been a long time since she had even attempted to drive one of these.
He was still twisting wires when another one of those things started heading right for her window.
“Okay, we’re good to go,” he said as he straightened.
She tried to put the truck in reverse. She ground the gears, frantically searching for the right one. He put it into the right gear for her.
“Go! Go! Go!” he was yelling at her.
Flustered, she didn’t watch where she was going and she backed right into a light pole, which anyone would probably do. The power was out and so was the light.
Aili stomped down on the clutch, grabbed the gear shift again and frantically worked it into forward gear. Something banged into the side of the truck. Panicking, she pressed down on the gas pedal at the same time that she was turning the steering wheel around to instinctively avoid another dark figure that loomed out of the bushes. The truck jerked forward. Right across the yard. But the tires started to spin on the wet grass. Aili prayed, let up off the gas and tried again. The truck surged forward by violent lurches, but eventually made it far enough for the tires to grab the pavement of Vedra Minegar’s driveway. Bumping over a few landscape timbers in the yard first, they finally headed down the road.
With the blood still pounding through her veins, Aili felt the man beside her slant a brief look in her direction. Then he turned to stare back at the road before them.
“Turn the lights on,” he said in a voice that was far steadier than hers would have been had she tried to speak.
She expected him to criticize her about her questionable driving skills as Mead would have done. But he didn’t say anything about it.
“So,” he began as if they were casually resuming a previous conversation about the weather. “I’m assuming you don’t know any more about what is going on than I do.”
Concentrating on her driving, not at all sure what lay in the road ahead of them, Aili shook her head.
“What are they?” she asked after a silence.
“I don’t know, but the damned things are hard to take out.”
After another silence, she asked. “You have some sort of plan, right?”
“Wrong.”
Aili kept her eyes glued to the road, deciding that she had no choice but to go along with the man even though he didn’t know any more than she did. What else could she do? So far, he had managed to keep them both alive.
Chapter 6
The wind whipping up the leaves in the yard was normal for autumn weather. So was the occasional buzz of flies against the screen door as they tried to find their way inside where it was warmer.
What was not normal was the silence inside the house. No electricity meant no air conditioning. It also meant no TV and no refrigeration. If the problem didn’t get fixed soon, it meant a lot of food was going to go to waste. Worse than that, no power meant no internet. And living without the internet these days was like living in the Stone Age. It was worse than living in the Stone Age when you were already used to technology and relied on it in for every facet of life. It was early, only 10am, but already, Desahrae Landry was going through a serious case of internet withdrawal.
No electricity also meant no lights after dark. But Desah wasn’t thinking that far ahead. Surely the problem would be solved by then. It was just a matter of waiting until everything was back to normal.
The storm last night been anything but normal. Desah remembered thinking that it had been enough to wake the dead. It had certainly woken her up. She had never seen such terrifying continuous lightning. And the deafening peals of thunder had seemed to tear the sky from one end to another. The electricity must have gone out sometime after she had finally fallen back to sleep and she’d awakened in the morning to a powerless world. Not only that, but the storm had left in its wake tangled piles of branches littering the yard everywhere. Eventually those were going to have to be picked up by someone, and cleaning the yard wasn’t high on her list of priorities for the weekend.
Danielle still wasn’t home, and wasn’t that just like her, Desah thought, to worry everyone? But it was more than just her stepsister’s unexplained absence that concerned her. She was worried that somehow Dani had managed to talk to Hunter. The plan had been to keep the two of them apart for as long as possible. Desah had even secretly made Dani’s cell phone disappear to ensure that they didn’t communicate.
So, besides a power outage and some extra work for the weekend, Desah had to worry about that, too. Of course, right now, there was nothing she could do about any of it and there no way of telling how things were goin
g to turn out in the end. Or if their plan was even going to work. But she did know that Dani was going to be in some serious trouble when she got home after staying out all night. No matter what her excuse might be.
She did have a moment of panic when she wondered if Hunter and Dani had spent the night together. Just the thought of makeup sex between the two of them made her grind her teeth. Hunter would believe anything Dani said, and he was too smart not to eventually put some of the pieces together. She’d better get in touch with Deklin just in case. She didn’t care if Deklin Kollvein took the fall. But if Hunter ever suspected that she was behind the whole thing, then everything was going to fall apart for her.
In spite of those worries, Desah remained blissfully ignorant of the chaos in the world around her. She went into her room and set a row of small, brightly-colored bottles on the bed before her. Staring intently at the selection of nail polishes, she was completely absorbed. It was a difficult decision and she frowned in concentration.
Blue? Lime green? No. Black with tiny skulls. That would be perfect for Halloween.
She didn’t waste any more time worrying about Danielle. Or temporary power outages. Not when her nails were waiting.
She went into the bathroom and got her blow dryer out. She plugged it in before she realized that it wouldn’t work without electricity, so she went back to her nails. When she was finished an hour later, she spread her skull-tipped fingers wide and waved them in the air to hasten the drying.
She glanced out her bedroom window and saw Mr. Laibrook from next door moving around in his yard. He was probably already cleaning up branches. He had the neatest yard on the block. He was probably also getting ready to check on his neighbors. That’s what made Mr. Laibrook such a good neighbor. He checked on people after things like this to make sure they were okay.
“What’s he doing?” Desah muttered to herself. From her second story window, she had a good view of his entire backyard. “He’s- ”
She didn’t finish. On the other side of the fence, their pajama-clad neighbor was staggering around like a lost Frankenstein. Mr. Laibrook in pajamas? At eleven o’clock in the morning?
Desah raised one pierced eyebrow as her eyes opened wider. Was Mr. Laibrook drunk? He certainly looked that way. She moved closer to the window. Wasn’t this going to be a good story to tell at the neighborhood Halloween tailgating party?
As Desah continued to stare out her window, Avner Laibrook disappeared. He was suddenly back up again, with just his head showing above the wooden fence. He wasn’t just drunk, Desah realized as he turned his face in her direction. Something else was wrong with him. Something was very, very wrong.
As the first faint glimmer of morning filtered in through the forest, Elan sat in the loft and waited. And listened. He hadn’t gotten down from the loft yet. He wanted to get down, but he just couldn’t make himself go down there. He was too afraid of what he had seen last night. He didn’t know if it was still down there.
The warming sunlight finally came streaming in through the open doorway to the loft as he kept up his silent vigil on a bale of straw. What was it he had seen last night? Something monstrous, something not quite human. In his mind, Elan could still hear the awful screaming. And just the memory of the sickening stench of blood and remains was enough to make him gag.
Finally he mustered up enough courage to stand up and walk as quietly as possible to the edge of the loft and carefully look down. He half expected to see it looking back up at him, waiting for his appearance. But nothing was there. The barn below him was empty. At least the part of the barn that could see.
With a strangled cry he jumped back as something burst through the barn door. It was not, however, the same creature from the night before. It was a girl. Her torn clothes were wet and they clung to her shivering body. Twigs and leaves were tangled in the matted curls than hung over her shoulders. He could see that her arms and legs were bleeding from deep scratches and lacerations. Her clothes were blood-stained, too.
As Elan looked down from the loft, she suddenly became aware of him above her. She stared back at him with a look of wide-eyed terror. That’s when he quickly climbed down the ladder. Because he wasn’t at all sure she wasn’t going to collapse where she stood.
He approached her cautiously and held his hands out before him so he wouldn’t scare her further. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
There was a wildness in her pale blue eyes that worried him. She was trembling like a leaf in a storm wind and her face was so pale he still wasn’t sure she wasn’t going to faint dead away right at his feet.
He kept his voice as calm as possible as he stated the obvious. “You’re hurt.” Then he asked, “Did you spend the night in the woods?”
She nodded. “Are you alone here?” she panted the words breathlessly, as if she didn’t have the strength to ask more.
He wanted to reassure her, and himself, but he eyed the door at the end of the aisle. It was still closed. Maybe that thing was still in there, but he hadn’t heard any sounds all morning. He answered her the best he could. “I’m not sure.”
His answer frightened her even more, he could see. She stared at the door, too. He was startled when she asked, “Is there one of them in there?”
He knew, of course, what she was talking about. Them. That meant there were more than one of those things. And that scared him, too.
“Did you see more of- them out there?” he asked.
She nodded again, but he was certain she was on the verge of collapsing because she was shaking so badly, so he stepped forward to catch her if that happened. He still wasn’t completely sure that they were alone, but he would try his best to fight something off if he had to.
“What are they?” she breathed, uttering the same words that had been asked by so many others worldwide in the past forty-eight hours.
“I don’t know,” he answered her honestly. He took off his jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders. He saw the dark stain on her back and frowned, wondering if it was her blood.
She moved her shoulder slightly, moaned, and he saw the pain etched across her face. “One of those things bit me,” she told him.
That shocked him. He didn’t tell her about the bloody remains he had seen last night. She could have ended up like that. He could have ended up like that.
But talking about it wasn’t going to put her mind at ease. Or his. And it wasn’t going to change what had happened. So he said to her, “We should find a better place than this.”
Earlier that morning, Reeve Madsen had wondered at all the traffic speeding by all of a sudden. He had tried to wave a few cars down, but no one stopped to help him. Dozing off and on in his car all night had not improved his mood. He had not only been cramped and uncomfortable. He had been cold. He had a painful stiff neck now. And it wasn’t bad enough that had he not eaten dinner last night. He didn’t have any prospects for breakfast in the near future.
He had tried calling the tow truck garage all night long, but after a while, he couldn’t even get a signal on his phone. Which meant he couldn’t reach Aili, either, who could have picked him up and taken him to the hotel. He couldn’t even call to cancel his hotel room, which meant that a lot of money had gone right down the drain.
The sun was just coming up and the road was deserted again. Was he going to have to walk somewhere to find help? It looked that way.
He got out of the vehicle and went to relieve himself in the tall grass of the field beside the road. He was parked close to a bridge and he stared at the bridge now. It wasn’t much of a bridge and the creek flowing underneath it wasn’t much, either. At least last night it hadn’t been much. As he stood there, he now saw that the creek had risen dramatically. It was flooded beyond its banks and that the mocha-colored water was rushing much faster and louder than it had been last night. It had rained a lot, but he hadn’t been aware of the creek rising that much. He hadn’t even seen Hance Degroot bobbing his way downstream with all the other debris.
He heard the sound of a distant engine, turned and saw a semi coming down the road.
Finally.
Zipping up his pants, Reeve started to make his way back towards the road. In spite of the truck going way too fast, he tried to wave the driver down. But the truck didn’t slow down. It came barreling down the road, weaving and veering crazily from side to side. Reeve uttered a strangled cry as he spun around and ran as fast as he could back into the wet weeds. Behind him, there was a loud dragging crunch as the truck’s tires hit the shoulder of the road, sending gravel flying everywhere. The truck still didn’t slow down. With a tremendous impact, metal collided with metal and glass shattered into a million pieces as the truck plowed right into the backend of Reeve’s car, sending it soaring all the way to the other side of the creek. The truck followed right after, but it didn’t make it so far. The cab plunged straight down into the flooded creek with a loud splash and another ear-splitting grind of twisted metal.
Turning his back on her was not an option. Elan could already see a change in her. She was getting weaker and the paleness of her face was almost alarming, though he didn’t tell her that. It was the look in her eyes, however, that worried him the most. At times she had such a faraway, distant look that it seemed like she was slipping away from him. Once, she had really scared him because he thought she had died and he was looking back at the blank stare of death.
Right now she was standing at the bottom of a small hill while he was standing at the top, looking out over the next field to see what lay ahead of them. Down where she was standing, the fog lay low to the ground so that she looked as if she was a ghost and had materialized from the mist itself.
As he watched her, she covered her eyes with her hand. She looked like she was crying, or was trying hard not to. He wanted to get her someplace where it was warm, someplace where she could get some medical attention. Tired from lack of sleep himself, he ran his hand over his own eyes. Was it just yesterday he didn’t have much more to think about than hanging out with his friends or how to save up enough money to buy the latest video game with all its manufactured stress? Was it only yesterday that he couldn’t even have begun to imagine that he’d be out in the middle of nowhere on a wet, foggy morning worrying about how to keep a half-dead girl alive?
Deadrise (Book 3): Savage Blood Page 6