by James Sperl
Andrew drove his forehead down into Inferno's nose with the force of a sledgehammer. The cartilage there crunched, blood exploding from both his nose and his burned face where young, sensitive skin split and separated from the tissue underneath.
Inferno wailed with fury. He clawed at Andrew's face, his fingers groping for Andrew's eyes. Andrew pawed them away and shook his head violently, attempting to inflict damage wherever he could. Inferno kicked ferociously, his feet scrambling for purchase on the blood-and-fuel-slicked asphalt.
Andrew's ribs ached terribly from where Inferno had kicked him. Based on how badly they hurt and how difficult it was to capture breath, it wouldn't have surprised him to learn that he suffered from not only a pair of cracked ribs but also a collapsed lung. His strength was gone. Only anger and adrenaline kept him going, but even their supply was limited.
Delivering a forearm blow to Andrew's jaw, Inferno suddenly lunged upward. The hit was minor, but its aftereffect dazed Andrew long enough to prevent him from blocking Inferno, who seized the opportunity to bite down on Andrew's cheek.
Andrew could feel the flesh of his face rip under the strength of Inferno's gnashing teeth. He roared from pain and pummeled Inferno's head with everything he had left. He got in three solid punches before Inferno released him and spat out a chunk of quivering skin as if it were a bad piece of fruit. Then Inferno slithered out from under Andrew and scrambled for the gun.
Andrew reacted too slowly, his mind reeling from the vicious attack on his face—just as Inferno had planned. He had landed a hand on the weapon's grip when Andrew pounced on it and slammed it to the pavement.
“I'm going to blow your fucking head off!” Inferno raged, growling and screaming with primal urgency. He angled the barrel of the gun, it slowly twisting toward Andrew despite all of Andrew's efforts to stop it.
He was finished. He was an enervated marathon runner in the final mile of a race. Andrew had nothing left in him. He tried using images of Clarissa and what Inferno had done to her years ago to stoke the fires of vengeance, but even they couldn't spark his resolve.
I'm going to die in a stinking, bloody parking lot.
Olivia flashed in his mind. His unborn daughter followed, the worn ultrasound photo flipping like a Mutoscope still life. They had both died for nothing. No cosmic or karmic reason lay behind it. Their deaths weren't part of any master plan by some deity on high. They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when man decided to rear his ugly head. Andrew had already dealt with the injustice of that day, had already faced down the demons that threatened to destroy him and learned to cope with the goddamn unfairness of it all.
Now, here he was again.
Inferno—the very definition of vile and unrepentant murderer—was seconds away from making good on his promise, and Andrew couldn't do a thing to stop him.
No.
No, he wasn't going to go down like this. Not like this. He was exhausted, but he couldn't allow that to be the reason he ate the barrel end of a 9mm. Not after all he had endured. Not after all he had been through. To die like that would be an affront to righteousness. It wasn't right that Inferno walked away from here. It wasn't right that he be permitted to chase down Clarissa and the others and continue to kill his way across the country. More than that, it wasn't right that the scales of moral justice remained unbalanced in his favor. Andrew felt a humanistic duty to equal them out. The Sound was over. Inferno should be too.
Inferno clamped the gun in both hands and lifted. Andrew pushed against his efforts using the waning fumes from his hidden reserve of energy. But Inferno bested him. The gun slowly raised off the ground, Andrew's body shaking from exertion to try to stop it. Time was running out.
Making a life-or-death decision, Andrew funneled everything he had into his elbow, which he brought down onto Inferno's ribcage. The blow winded Inferno, the gun sinking back to the asphalt, but the fallout from Andrew's strike resulted in an unforeseen consequence—he now lay on his back on top of Inferno.
Executing the fierce jab had required Andrew to push up and arch back, but he had gone too far. When he brought down his elbow, he ended up delivering it across Inferno's body. With his strength depleted, he tumbled sideways onto his shoulder. The punch to Inferno's ribs was potent, but it wasn't enough. Inferno quickly reestablished a hold on the gun then swiftly raised it to point at Andrew, who had to thrust out his arms to stop it from meeting his head in a hurry. The action, though effective, had forced him onto his back.
Inferno grunted and growled, his ambition to put a bullet into Andrew's brain coming closer to fruition. The gun was directly overhead, the muzzle angling toward Andrew's legs. He locked his arms in defense against it, but still Inferno gained ground. If he fired now, Andrew could very well lose a kneecap, so he worked his thumb between the trigger guard and behind the trigger to forestall a shot.
The gun sank toward Andrew's chest with the speed of a falling snowflake. Andrew could do nothing to hinder its arrival against his sternum. His arms wobbled as he fought to hold it off. Inferno threshed like a shark out of water, desperate to put an end to the battle, infuriated that it had gone on this long. Were it not for Andrew splaying his legs to keep from rolling off, it would have been over already.
“Do you feel it?” Inferno snarled in his ear. “Do you feel the hand of Death? He's here for you.” Andrew gasped and huffed, his body trembling from exhaustion. “He's a dear friend of mine. You'll meet him soon.”
Inferno started to pry Andrew's fingers off the gun. It wouldn't take him long before he succeeded. Andrew only delayed the inevitable. He may as well have been dead for as much life as remained in him, but still, he wouldn't quit. He couldn't.
Not when he had one final play.
Clawing his feet on the asphalt, Andrew started pulling himself down Inferno's body. The gun drifted from just below Andrew's sternum to directly over it as he moved. He dug his boots into the ground, inching himself even further down Inferno's body until the muzzle was dead center of his chest.
“You still think you can escape?” Inferno taunted. “You still believe there's hope? You're a corpse that doesn't know it yet!”
Inferno's breath was hot in Andrew's ear, his words searing in their potential truth. But Andrew knew something Inferno didn't. Using what little leverage he had, Andrew methodically veered the gun, so it pointed at the area of soft tissue beside his shoulder and below the collarbone.
Inferno tilted the barrel toward Andrew's head, but Andrew, screaming through impossible struggle, angled it back.
“Fight all you want!” Inferno spat. “But you're not walking away from here!”
Inferno's rant caused his body to slacken. It wasn't much, but it was enough. Andrew's moment was upon him.
“Neither are you!”
He removed his thumb from the trigger guard.
The shot was instantaneous. The bullet ripped through Andrew's shoulder, the pain something for which he was wholly unprepared. It burned like liquid fire. He nearly lost consciousness but managed to fight his way back.
The gun lay on his chest. Inferno's hand clung to it limply. Carefully, Andrew removed the hand, taking the gun with his good arm before he flung Inferno's arm off him. He encountered no resistance as it flopped to the ground. Rolling off Inferno's body, he cried out in excruciating pain, the threat of a blackout hovering over him. He tried to look at the wound, but it was limited to his peripheral vision. After taking several seconds to breathe, he worked himself to his knees and examined Inferno.
He stared blankly at the sky, the last glimmer of life fading from his eyes even as Andrew looked at him. Blood gurgled from a gaping crater in his chest. To Andrew, it didn't seem likely that the shot, which had passed through him into Inferno, had missed Inferno's heart; blood oozed in a steady, thick stream, but its flow was absent a pulsating surge.
Andrew tried to push himself to his feet, but it required too much effort. Instead, he lay back on the asphalt and listened to
the sporadic gunfire from a battle dying down. He gazed at the cloudless night sky and the myriad points of light that dotted its pitch. He wondered if the beings responsible for the Sound lived among a collective of civilizations similar to those on Earth, and if so, were their inhabitants as committed to making themselves extinct as humans were.
But he didn't want to think about that right now. Right now, he wanted to lie still and let the universe spin around him. The constellation Orion hung in the blackness as if pinned there. Andrew was too tired to trace its shape.
CHAPTER 77
The sun had long since risen over a troubled sky. Slate-gray clouds, which blanketed the heavens from horizon-to-horizon, served as a bleak canvas for the black streaks of dissipating smoke from gasoline fires that smudged it.
New Framingham was burning.
Though they had agreed to meet back at Rosenstein's Ashland facility, Clarissa didn't feel comfortable parking in the shadow of a place that had been partly responsible for so much death and destruction. When Andrew showed up, she and the others would be able to see him just fine from Dr. Oshen's designated parking spot located in the dental clinic across the street and down one lot. That's what she said to convince the others. What she didn't tell them was what she knew in the heart of her soul:
Andrew wasn't coming.
She had no evidence to support her belief, and yet she had never known a greater truth. In their final fleeting moments together, as Andrew withered and Travis slowly gained the upper hand, Clarissa knew she would never see Andrew again—even if he somehow survived. His last look at her had a finality about it as if it signaled closure. Was it acceptance of his mortality? Or was it an acknowledgment that, should he be lucky enough to walk away, his time with her and the others had come to an end? He was a solitary man before the Sound took that away from him. Now that it was over, would he simply return to the life he once had? Clarissa believed that he had grown to like and respect her and the others genuinely—he may have even come to love all of them—but Jon was dead, Rachel was gone, and since Cesare was nowhere to be seen, Clarissa assumed that something unspeakable had happened to him as well. For Andrew, who already bore scars from personal tragedy, their deaths may hit too close to home. It wouldn't surprise Clarissa in the slightest if he chose to cut ties with the group to avoid enduring more heartbreak.
But it was all speculation.
Alive, dead, or in retreat from personal demons, Clarissa deeply felt that Andrew was no longer a part of her life where the physical was concerned. Still, she wanted to keep him close—not just wanted to, needed to—so she made a place for him in her heart, and it was one she intended to visit often and keep stocked with love and gratitude.
Naomi croaked from her bed of blankets inside the van. Clarissa pulled herself away from staring at the leaden sky to attend to her, but Elenora was already lifting the tiny girl into her arms.
Elenora. She had never looked as old as she did now. Her face hung in saggy folds of flesh, her eyes circled by a darkness that wasn't limited to color. She was a smart woman. Clarissa had no doubts she understood what Cesare's absence meant. Still, she forged a smile, as Naomi reached for her face.
“She's hungry,” Elenora said.
Clarissa placed a hand on Naomi's head. “I know. We'll need to find something for her. Soon.”
The promise felt empty. They had nothing. No food. No water. Only the clothes on their backs. Clarissa had never known such desperation. With the exception of Valentina, she didn't think anyone in the van had.
Valentina's experience with rock-bottom left her with a unique understanding of nothingness no one else could match. She had been there. She had lived it. Because of that, Clarissa expected to find her troubled friend curled into a fetal position and staring blankly at the inside of the van walls this morning. Instead, what she found was someone who pushed back against the weight of her unfathomable decisions—and she was gaining strength.
She dabbed at Dustin's forehead with a wet rag, and it wasn't until this moment that Clarissa noticed his blood-soaked bandage—shirt, really—had been replaced with a fresh one. Valentina, incidentally, now lacked her overshirt. She still looked like hell—pallid skin and an uncontrollable twitch were but a pair of her most conspicuous physical traits—but light had started to creep back into her eyes. A person struggled to live there, and Clarissa thought with enough time and support, that person could become whole once again.
“I know...” Dustin croaked, his voice barely audible. He coughed and winced, his head rising off the backpack he used as a pillow before it slowly lowered back down.
Clarissa sat on the edge of the floor inside the van's open side door. She took Dustin's hand and put on a smile that almost felt genuine.
“Hey,” she said. “I was getting scared you wouldn't wake up.” She slid a lock of wet hair from his clammy face and tucked it behind his ear. Dustin forced his eyes to roll around to look at her, but it took too much effort. His lids slid closed, and he grimaced. “I know it hurts. I know. We...we're going to find someone who can help you. We're going to find a doctor.”
Valentina covertly glanced at her, her expression leaving little doubt as to her meaning: Who? Where?
Clarissa had no answers, but she knew she meant what she said. With a hungry baby and a bullet wound, they were in dire straights. Sitting around waiting was dead last on a short list of options.
“I know...” Dustin said again weakly. Clarissa frowned at Valentina.
Hallucinating? Valentina mouthed.
Clarissa shook her head: I don't know.
Dustin's eyes peeled open and sought out Clarissa with tremendous effort. “I...know where...”
Clarissa took his hand in both of hers. “What, Dustin? What is it?”
“...know where...sup...” His final word lingered unfinished. He was thoroughly depleted.
Clarissa, however, straightened. “Dustin, are you...are you saying you know where there're supplies?” Dustin barely moved his head, but it looked like a “yes” to Clarissa. She glimpsed Elenora, who twisted around from her position at the back of the van to listen. “Where, Dustin? Where are the supplies? New Framingham?”
She desperately hoped Dustin wasn't in the midst of a fever dream and that his baiting claim wasn't a pie-in-the-sky fantasy, but more than that, she hoped he wasn't so traumatized that he had already forgotten about what happened in New Framingham. Supplies or not, she wasn't going back there. She didn't think anyone else could be convinced to go either.
Dustin's lips formed an O and he followed it with a breathy, “...No...” He swallowed then said, “Pocket.”
Clarissa patted his back pockets without knowing what she was looking for, and when she came up empty, she shifted to his front ones. He lay on his right side, so accessing that pocket would require him to roll over—something she wasn't sure he could handle—but it turned out that wouldn't be necessary. She found something.
It was small and thin and tucked into a tiny pouch adjacent to the pants' left front pocket. Working her fingers inside the tight area, she withdrew a folded piece of paper. Opening it, she discovered a series of numbers: 13 46 22.
Her brows plummeted. “Dustin, I don't understand. There are only numbers here.”
Dustin licked his lips. His tongue was white and dry. “Combi...nation...”
Realization came at her like a double-armed push to the chest. “Wait...are you saying what I think you're saying?”
“What?” said Valentina, who hadn't put it together.
“It's a combination,” Clarissa said, holding up the paper. “To a lock. And my guess is behind that lock are some things we could all really use right now.” She turned back to Dustin. “Am I right?”
A slight smile crept onto Dustin's lips but vanished instantly.
“Where is the lock, Dustin?” Clarissa leaned down into his line of sight. “Can you tell us? Are we near it? Is it somewhere close to New Framingham?”
Dusti
n registered a barely there head shake: no. “...Walt...”
Clarissa's eyes lit up. “Waltham? Is that where it is?”
Another hint of a smile.
Valentina edged forward. “What's Waltham? You know where that is?”
“I believe so. If it's where I'm thinking, it's northeast of here on the other side of New Framingham. We should be able to get there using backroads and skirt all the chaos. If we leave now, we could be there within an hour. If it's where I think it is.”
But Clarissa had little doubt as to where Waltham lay. Having spent countless boring hours on the road, she had grown quite knowledgeable of U.S. geography, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of road maps that had accumulated in the truck over the past many weeks. Once she and the others set their sights on Ashland, she had wanted to familiarize herself with as much as she could about the city and its surrounding region. Waltham was a stone's throw away.
This fact had apparently not escaped Dustin's attention.
Days later, after he showed signs of recovery and speaking became less strained, he would explain how he came to be in possession of such a life-saving stash of food, water, medicine, and other survival gear, all of which he had stored in the walk-in cooler of Clarie's Blooms, a local florist. It had taken a couple of months to acquire everything, each item having been squirreled away as he found it. A couple of cans of corn here. A bag of oatmeal there. Bandages. Socks. Batteries—anything that could be of use.
For Clarissa, though, a nagging question would loom: Why hadn't he contributed what he found to the general stores of New Framingham per its laws? Not forfeiting goods was a major infraction that resulted in expulsion. Why had he risked being thrown out of a community that he not only loved and supported but also had seen built from the ground up? The answer was as shocking as the revelation that the supplies existed in the first place: Donna had advised him not to. What's more, stockpiling an emergency reserve was her idea.