They inched their way through the woods.
When they came across three more Quattros, the brothers descended upon them en masse; refusing to be fooled by their trickery, they disposed of them quickly. Secundo, in particular, was the most vicious—fueled by his extraordinary strength and the rage stemming from guilt he could not shake, he practically tore one wraith in half. Primo had to pull him off the thing to prevent him from shredding it to bits.
They moved onward.
Despite a few wrong turns, Trey’s persistent tracking eventually led them out of the dense forest into a field of lavender that seemed to extend to eternity. Behind them, the sun was beginning to set in the west. Primo realized they had been in the forest for the better part of a day, and it was easy to see how previous Remaining had stumbled into The Fields, gotten lost in the woods, and encountered the wraiths of death. Never to emerge again.
With nothing but purplish open space before them, Primo thought they had passed a test; almost a trial of fate. Having survived the forest—where death tried to lure them, convince them to join their ranks, and stay forever—it was time to put those they lost behind them and move on.
Trey had returned to the ground and was trying to locate a trace of the Rider and his three companions. He got back up on his horse and shook his head. “Gonna be impossible to track them through this stuff.”
“There’s nowhere for them to hide, at least,” said Primo, pointing at the lavender field. “Let’s keep moving.”
Primo knew they weren’t through The Fields just yet. He also had no idea which of its secrets lay ahead. But he was getting the distinct impression that they were going to uncover those secrets before the journey was done.
Because this rider, this chase, was starting to feel like part of something.
Some kind of destiny.
And Primo welcomed it.
16
The jet-black horse was by far the strongest of the three animals, so it made sense for Joad, the strongest horseman, and Laura, the lightest, to ride together. The pairing seemed to suit both well; it felt natural and right. Keeping Sayers atop Macy while entrusting Fixer with Joad’s steed was equally wise, as Joad knew the two men saw eye to eye on practically nothing. These decisions allowed the quartet to make up a ton of ground in the remaining daylight.
The lavender patch continued seemingly forever. High in The Fields, untouched by human hands and cultivated only by nature, the billions of flowers provided a purple blanket for three horses to lope across while its flatness allowed Joad to constantly check behind them on the brothers’ pursuit.
Luckily, the ambush in the woods and the quartet’s increased speed had put considerable distance between them; enough so that Joad never spied the brothers or Primo’s thundercloud. But it didn’t make him think they had eluded the stalking siblings for good. Joad knew it was simply a matter of time until their paths crossed again.
He wasn’t alone in his thoughts. Laura echoed them shortly after the sun had set and they had taken respite by a gurgling stream.
“They’re not going to stop coming, are they?”
The aurora borealis spread across the night sky once again. Its luminosity on the water reflected flashes of colors on the backs of silver-toned schools of fish. It made catching them easy; all Laura and Joad had to do was wade in the stream, stab with a stick at flickering lights wiggling by, and quickly impale enough fish for the largest meal any had enjoyed in the longest time.
Joad thought about sidestepping the question; maybe offering up some advice about how long to hold fish over the fire. Sayers saw him wavering and jumped in. “No sense dodging her, Joad. She’s only saying what the rest of us are thinking.”
Joad chewed longer than necessary, then gave in. “Men like that aren’t much for giving up.”
“What are we supposed to do?” asked Fixer. “Keep running?”
“You can. Eventually you end up having no place to go.”
“I don’t think this bunch is prepared to put down stakes and make a stand,” said Sayers. The doctor exchanged looks with the others. His expression seemed to state the obvious: this was one ragtag bunch that was overmatched; even if they outmanned the brothers by one person.
“Seeing as how Primo has Mother Nature on his side, you’re probably right,” agreed Joad.
Sayers put down the fish he had been working on, his appetite apparently gone. “So, at the risk of being repetitive, what do we do if we can’t keep running?”
“Get ourselves to Nemo.”
“That town you’re from,” said Fixer.
“That’s right.”
“The one you haven’t been back to in seven years.”
“That’s the one.”
“You don’t even know it’s still there,” Sayers pointed out.
“It’s there.”
“How can you possibly know that?” asked Fixer. His voice had climbed a half-octave as anxiety worked its way into it.
Joad glanced at Laura with strong, quiet confidence.
“I just know.”
Laura turned to her stepfather. “If Joad says it’s there, that’s good enough for me.”
The doctor threw his hands up in frustration. “I don’t know which of you is nuttier.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Laura asked.
Sayers shrugged, all the air seeming to float out of him. Joad couldn’t remember seeing a man who needed a drink so badly. Fixer, who had been watching this verbal game of ping-pong, jumped back in.
“She makes a good point. By heading to Nemo, at least we’d be going somewhere in particular.”
“Supposing, on the off-off-off chance this Nemo still exists. What are we going to find when we get there?” Sayers asked.
“Good people. The kind that won’t think twice about lending a helping hand.”
“Like Becky,” said Laura.
“Especially Becky.”
“Well, I hate to throw a damper on this tender imagined reunion, but what if we get to your precious hometown and nothing’s left—no people, no power, no food—like everywhere else on this damned earth? What do we do then?”
“I’ll be home.”
“Well, goody-goody. That’s really swell for the rest of us.”
Joad ignored Sayers’ bitterness and continued. “And we can fight them from there.”
“How’s that going to be any different?”
“You haven’t seen my home.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No one’s stopping you from leaving,” said Joad.
“I am.”
Everyone turned to face Laura.
“I want to go to Nemo with Joad.”
Sayers shook his head. “The two of you deserve each other.”
Joad gave Laura a slight smile.
Sayers just stared at the fire.
When it finally winked out, Joad noticed the doctor was still looking at the ground like a man waiting for a brilliant idea to sprout.
Later, when Joad thought he was the only one unable to sleep, Laura’s voice sounded in the night.
“Why weren’t you home on The Seventh Day?”
Joad straightened up. Leave it to a child to dredge up memories he wanted to keep buried as deep as possible. “I wanted to be.”
“What happened?”
“I was working.”
Laura raised her head, her eyes flecked with the rainbow reflection from the shooting stars. “In the tank?”
Joad smiled and shook his head. “No. I hadn’t been in the tank for a long time.”
“Then why do you keep dreaming about it?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe because I did a lot of bad things there I’m really sorry about now, and I keep thinking about them so they won’t happen again.”
“Bad stuff like back at the lake with that thing? The thing that wasn’t my mother?”
“Worse than that, I’m afraid.”
The young girl’s eyes widened. “Like what?”
>
“Stuff you shouldn’t be worrying about.”
When Laura didn’t respond right away, Joad thought he had lucked out and put the matter to rest.
“So where were you?”
So much for that.
“Like I told the doc. On The Other Side.”
“Doing what?”
“Working.”
Laura laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You. You and your game.”
Joad looked confused. “Game? I’m not playing a game.”
“Maybe you don’t think so. But it seems like one to me. I ask a question, you give me as little information as possible, so I ask the same question again. That seems like a game to me.”
“It wasn’t intended to be.”
“So, what were you doing on The Seventh Day?”
“What were you doing?” countered Joad.
Laura chuckled again. “There you go again. Not answering.”
“You aren’t either.”
“I was, like, four years old. I don’t remember.”
“Tell you what. You remember what you were doing that day and tell me, then, I’ll go ahead and tell you. How’s that sound?”
“Like the same game.”
Joad was the one to laugh this time.
“What’s going on?”
Fixer sat up, rubbing his eyes, their chitchat having woken him up.
“According to Laura, we’re playing a game that isn’t one.”
“What game is that?”
Joad had no intention of answering. But Laura certainly wasn’t shy.
“I’m calling it Where Were You on The Seventh Day? But Joad isn’t playing fair.”
“How so?”
“He won’t tell me. Says he was working.”
“Some people weren’t,” said Fixer.
Joad noticed that Fixer looked away when he said it. He couldn’t help but wonder why. Joad didn’t have to wait long before Laura zeroed in on the wiry man.
“Were you?” asked Laura. “Working too?”
Fixer chortled, but there was an innate sadness in it.
“Hardly.”
“So, what were you doing?” asked Laura, yet again.
Fixer hesitated a bit longer before fessing up.
“I was hanging with my sister.”
Joad’s eyes flickered.
“Your dead sister,” he said.
“Yeah,” replied Fixer. “That one.”
FIXER
“Now I want you to take a deep breath and then start to count backwards from ten.”
“Why backwards?” asked Fixer.
The anesthesiologist lowered the mask and stared down at him, confused. Fixer was certain the man had never been asked that question before.
“Excuse me?”
“Why not forwards? Why count backwards?”
“It’s always been done that way,” said the doctor. “Taught us that in medical school.” He leaned forward again and brought up the mask, but Fixer’s aching head was still filled with questions.
“Why start there? Why not start with a hundred?”
“Because you’ll be out before you reach zero.”
“Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll hit zero, and then what? Do I go negative one, negative two? Do I start over?”
“Sir. . . .”
“That’s why I think it makes no sense starting backwards. Especially with a number as low as ten. If you began with zero, you could keep going until you reached twenty, thirty. . . .”
“No one’s ever reached zero.”
“Records are made to be broken.”
The anesthesiologist gently placed his hand on Fixer’s gowned shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay, sir. You just need to relax.”
Yeah, relax. Easy for you to say, thought Fixer. You’re not the one lying on an operating table about to have his head carved up.
“I’ll try,” said Fixer, but he knew there was no damn way that was possible.
“Breathe deeply,” the doctor repeated. “And start to count backwards.”
“From ten,” finished Fixer. “Got it.”
“Good man,” said the anesthesiologist, as he lowered the mask over his face. Fixer took a deep breath and began the countdown.
“Ten.”
Fixer practically shouted it.
God, he was wired. He was going to surprise this guy and reach a whole bunch of negative numbers before he passed out. Fixer considered it a challenge.
Like everything else in his life.
Why can’t you make anything simple, his mother would repeatedly ask him when he was a child. She’d say white and he’d invariably come up with some shade of black. Raising him and Tory as a single mother, you’d of thought he would have gone easier on the poor woman. But Fixer questioned everything—the food she cooked, the time of day, the direction she drove them to school. He knew he infuriated her much of the time, but she never wavered in her undying love for him.
“You’re my special gift,” his mother would often say when she tucked him in at night. Fixer had no idea where this gift came from, because she never said anything about his father. He wasn’t the same man who had sired Tory six years before him—that husband had been killed in a machine plant accident shortly after his half-sister was born. The only thing Fixer could ascertain was that she had met his father on a weekend jaunt with a couple of girlfriends to D.C., but the man had been married and Fixer’s mother wasn’t the type to cause a ruckus, even if the bastard had left her with a child she could barely afford to raise.
So, his mother was forced to take two jobs and worked both until he had been in high school. That was when she got sick and died right before his junior year. Tory came back home from college to make sure Fixer wasn’t rambling around the house and getting into trouble.
Not that Tory had much luck.
Look where he had ended up.
“Nine.”
Fixer was determined to hit negative twenty before he passed out.
Tory.
She had tried hard; Fixer had to give her that much.
But he’d been a sixteen-year-old boy who’d lost his mother and gotten into more than his fair share of scrapes—especially before working at Abe’s.
He hadn’t planned on getting a job at the garage. The first time he’d been in the place, it was three o’clock in the morning and he was with a couple of his older pals, trying to rip off a Mustang. When Abe pulled him out of the front seat, Fixer had been trying to hotwire the car, so intent on getting it to fire up that he hadn’t noticed his buddies had left him high and dry when the garage owner had come back after a binge at a local bar.
Luckily for Fixer, Abe King had also once been young and fascinated with cars. He’d even tried to rip off a few himself before becoming a grease monkey in the very same garage he now owned—and from which Fixer was trying to swipe a Mustang. While keeping a chokehold on him, Abe told Fixer he had two choices. He could lie down in the car and wait for the cops to swing by and haul him off to juvie. Or he could start doing odd jobs around the place for Abe, who was a man short.
Naturally, Fixer chose the latter—and started to hightail it out of the garage, figuring he’d never see the likes of Abe King again. But Abe insisted on escorting him back to the tiny house Fixer lived in with his half-sister. When Tory was told what he had been caught doing, she pledged Fixer’s assistance to Abe three days a week after school.
“Eight.”
Not tired. Still buzzed. But his head sure hurt a heck of a lot. And for good reason.
You try walking around with a bullet in it.
He’d always hated guns. Even when he hung out with the baddies in high school, that’s where he drew the line—if there was a firearm involved, he was gone. It was a good thing Abe offered him a job at the garage. His pals had moved on to more ambitious escapades—breaking and entering into houses, ripping off liquor stores. A couple guys even ended up doing time for assault when a g
as station rip-off went wrong.
Fixer realized the best thing that ever happened to him was not knowing how to hotwire a Mustang and getting caught in the act.
Abe quickly gave Fixer more responsibility. Once the garage owner was certain he wasn’t going to get robbed blind, Fixer went from odd jobs to actually getting to work on cars. He’d been handy from the time he could pick up a Tinker Toy—and being the only male in the house, his mother and Tory had him putting together make-it-yourself-furniture they bought at the local Target before he could read the instructions. The nickname Fixer came from his mother (“My boy is quite the fixer,” she’d brag to the rare dinner guest or the principal when she was defending him for playing hooky too many days). By the time Fixer left high school, he was Abe’s main mechanic—which was a good thing because his grades (when he actually completed a course) weren’t good enough to get into the local community college.
But Fixer hadn’t met an engine he couldn’t mend, or a mechanical problem that stumped him. He turned the basement into a little workshop, trying to invent some contraption that would turn into a financial bonanza. These had been a bust, but not for lack of trying. Whether it was the little robot he got to climb walls but got stuck on the ceiling when the radio waves jammed, or the self-filling bubble bath filler that resulted in a few floods, Fixer kept working away (at those “hare-brained ideas,” said Tory), determined to show the world that Abe’s faith in him wasn’t misplaced.
“Keep going,” the anesthesiologist urged.
“Seven,” Fixer mumbled.
“You need to stop fighting. . . .”
He was always fighting it. That’s what came from no father, no mother, everything stacked against you. He was always hopped up, wired to the gills, looking for an edge. Fixer couldn’t help it.
Except when he was out on the water.
On the water it was different.
It was their place. His and Tory’s together, where nothing in the world could touch them.
Tory had been a water rat ever since he could remember. They’d been way too poor to have a pool. Their mother had bought them one of those aboveground inflatable jobs, but it was nothing more than a big bathtub that trees would drop leaves into so they had no desire to get in it. Tory was always begging to go to the beach instead. It was a good two hours to the coast, but worth the drive for their mother when she’d see that enormous grin appear on her daughter’s face the moment she saw the rolling surf. The car had barely stopped before Tory dove out and raced across the hot sand to dive into the Pacific.
The Seventh Day Page 11