by David Estes
“You mean, you really did that?” I say incredulously. I look at my shoulder. It’s wrapped tightly with some type of gauze.
“What did you think—that you dreamt that?” Laney laughs. I don’t tell her that’s exactly what I thought. “You should have seen what I had to go through to stop the bleeding. I had to use my shirt, which, by the way, we’ll have to burn along with yours now. It was half-chewed up by the poison.”
“Did you—”
“Use protection?” she asks, laughing at her own innuendo. “Of course. I already told you I’m not stupid.” She holds up four pairs of dirty work gloves. They’re full of uneven holes, charred around the edges. “I even double bagged,” she says, “although that witch goo is nasty stuff. It ate through the gloves so fast it almost got me.”
Still wondering how I’m not dead, I eye the dirty gloves warily. “There’s a chance of infection,” I say.
“Maybe,” Laney says, “but after I got all the green crap out of the wound I used about half a bottle of whiskey to clean you out. I used the other half to relax.”
“Are you drunk?” I say, wondering if I’ll find M&Ms stuffed into the arrow wound when I unwind the bandages.
“Relax, Carter. It was just a joke. I only had a sip. You know, to even me out. My hands were shaking so badly after hearing you scream like that, I was worried I’d make things worse.”
“God,” I say, realizing that what she went through to help me might have been worse than it was for me. At least I got to sleep through most of it. “Thanks. I wouldn’t necessarily refer any wounded friends to you, but still, you did good.”
“No problem,” she says.
Then, randomly, a thought springs to mind, and I raise my eyebrows.
“What’s wrong?” Laney asks, and for the first time I notice her left hand is holding a bloody arrow like a trophy.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
“You were out for a while, so I went for a little walk. Thought you might like a souvenir. What’s on your mind?”
She’s just full of surprises. “You mean aside from the fact that you just scrubbed witch poison from inside my ragged flesh?” I say.
“And saved your life,” she points out.
“And that,” I agree. “Something doesn’t make sense. Why did the Sirens kill the farmers?”
“Because that’s what witches do,” Laney says. “Do you really need a reason?”
I narrow my eyes, thinking. “You could be right, but Sirens are different. They usually only kill when necessary to protect themselves, or if they feel a human has outlived their usefulness as their personal slave.”
“You’re asking why they didn’t try to capture them?” Laney asks.
“Sort of. They had already captured them,” I say. “Their Call guaranteed that those people would follow them off a cliff if that’s what they wanted. And yet…they slaughtered them.”
“You showed up,” Laney says. “Maybe you surprised them and they just reacted. Went nuts.”
“No. One of the guys was screaming before I reached them, and they’d just killed him when they saw me.”
“I don’t know what to tell you, except every time we come up with a theory to one of your questions, another ten questions seem to pop up. Maybe there are no answers. Maybe the witches are all crazy, performing random acts of cruelty just because they like it. Hell, Carter, maybe there is no government and the missiles were fired off by another witch gang looking to remove some of their competition. I don’t know anything except you should be dead right now, but you’re not.”
I twitch because she’s right. That witch poison should have killed me for sure. Unless it wasn’t witch poison. Unless it was just meant to scare me. But what would be the point of that? And who would even think to do something like that?
The questions continue to pile up like blitzing tacklers on an unprotected quarterback.
Chapter Forty-One
“You shouldn’t have interfered,” the old woman says.
I just stare at her.
“We saved your life,” Laney says, eying her shotgun as if rethinking that decision.
“I didn’t ask you to,” the old woman says. “The last thing I ever wanted was to die alone. My Jimmy…” Her voice cracks and tears fill her eyes, sliding into the canyons of her wrinkled cheeks. “He was a good man. Without him, I’m…” She doesn’t finish, but the emotion in the empty space is as heavy as if she did.
“Come with us,” I say. “You don’t have to be alone. Maybe we can find you a safe place to stay. Other survivors. If not, you can stay with us.” She has to listen to reason, this woman. She’s alive and so there’s hope.
Right?
“I’ll never leave this farm,” she says. “Leave me alone!” Her voice rises suddenly and sharply. “I just want to be alone.”
“Gladly,” Laney says, stomping out of the room. “I’ll get Trish ready to leave,” she fires over her shoulder. “Immediately.”
I stare at the woman, who stares right back with misty, but now determined eyes. “Please,” I say. “Come with us. Not all is lost.”
“For me it is,” she says. “You wronged me when you saved me.” I should be angry at such an ungrateful statement, but I don’t have it in me. Instead I just feel sad.
“We’ll make it up to you,” I say.
“There’s nothing you can do for me,” she says, and then pauses and looks to the ceiling, as if thinking. “Young man, do you really want to help me?”
“More than anything,” I say. Hex pads into the room and pushes between my legs, his head sticking out to look at the woman, his tail whacking against my knees.
“Bury them.” I arch my eyebrows and start to protest, but she cuts me off. “Please. They’ve lived good lives, all three of them. They deserve a proper burial.”
I have no desire to see the faces of the men and woman I was unable to save, especially because one of those faces is no longer attached to its body, but I can’t say no. “Okay,” I say.
And then I turn away because she’s sobbing into her hands and I don’t have the time or emotional energy to join her.
~~~
When we reach the sunflower fields for the second time, I gasp. “Holy…” Laney says. “What happened?”
The sunflowers, which were so vibrant and golden and beautiful just a day earlier, are now brown and dry and dead, bent over at the waist, their once smiling faces frowning into the dirt at their fallen brothers and sisters.
“The magic is gone,” I say. “The surviving Siren has moved on.”
“It’s sad,” Laney says, her arm around Trish’s shoulder.
“What is?”
“That something so beautiful could be created from such evil.”
Hex chuffs, as if in agreement. He moves off into the fields, nuzzling his snout against the first dead sunflower he comes to. My jaw drops open when the sunflower shudders and then straightens, reaching for the sky, as if stretching after a long sleep. A healthy bright green blush returns to its stem, which just a moment ago was brown and brittle. The flower itself glows unnaturally golden yellow for a moment, before settling into a happy-sun yellow.
As if it was no big deal, Hex moves on without looking back, touching his wet nose to each sunflower he passes, resurrecting them and creating a golden path through the fields.
“Your dog is awesome,” Laney breathes, clearly as in awe as I am.
“You hadn’t realized that yet?” I say.
“Okay. Even awesomer than I thought.”
With Laney and Trish behind me, I follow the yellow sunflower road that Hex has created. Opposite to the last time I pushed through the field—when I hacked and slashed at the flowers as if they were the enemy, in league with the Sirens—I’m extra careful not to touch any of the stalks, for fear that I’ll undo Hex’s magic.
When we reach the clearing, Hex is sniffing at the ground.
The empty, empty ground.
Chapter
Forty-Two
“Gone,” I say. “All gone.”
There are footprints and bloody drag marks—which Hex seems to find particularly interesting—but no bodies, neither Siren nor human.
Something clicks. A rare answer to one of the many questions I’ve been pondering. Apparently Laney has the same thought, because she says, “Necros.”
I nod. “That’s why the Sirens were killing rather than enslaving the humans. They weren’t for them. They were for the Necros.”
“A trade?” Laney says, raising her eyebrows. “Corpses for…what?”
“Who knows? Something we’d probably rather not know about.” I run a hand over my short bristly hair. “But it provides further proof that the Necros are allying themselves with other witch gangs for some greater purpose. They want bodies, as many as possible.” Dark shadows crowd around my heart.
“Why?” Laney asks.
My heart pounds and my hands start to sweat. “They’re creating an army,” I say.
~~~
Today is the longest day of our journey so far. Mostly because we’re determined to reach Pittsburgh without stopping again. Every time we stop we seem to almost die, which is really starting to suck.
While miles of mostly empty highway pounds away under our feet, Laney and I talk ourselves around and around in circles. About missiles and witch hunters and Sirens and the Reaper and, for a few minutes, Mr. Jackson. But I cut that conversation off pretty quick because Laney has a snide way of saying his name that I don’t like. Without Mr. Jackson, I’d be dead and no closer to avenging my friends than I was three months ago. Which is to say, nowhere.
Hex joins in the discussion occasionally, offering his opinions in yips and barks, although it’s very possible he’s just telling us to Shut up already! Trish, shockingly, is a silent observer. She even foregoes any air-drawing, preferring to just stare at us with creepy, unblinking—does she ever blink?—eyes.
Eventually, a green sign informs us that the next exit is for I-376 toward Pittsburgh. I extend my arm to the right, like a biker signaling a turn. Laney doesn’t laugh, Trish just stares, and Hex pretends he doesn’t know me.
We take the exit. Immediately there’s a noticeable increase in the number of abandoned cars on the road. Most of them are banged up, with large dents, flat tires, shattered windshields—some are even flipped over, resting on their roofs. These late-night drivers were heading home from…where? Out of town business trips or visiting family? They were so close to home, to their warm beds, to seeing their families or pets or whoever would greet them at the door.
All dead. All murdered in cold blood by an enemy they never even knew existed, despite the fact that the magic-born went to their churches, worked in their offices, shopped at their supermarkets, and were members of their gyms.
The familiar ache of anger that Mr. Jackson warned me against creeps into my bones.
“Are you going to hit me?” Laney says, glancing down at my sides.
I realize my hands are tightened into fists. I shake my head.
“You know, you can’t go around hitting people just because they don’t laugh at your stupid jokes,” she says, grinning.
I relax my fingers, and some of the tension eases from my bones and muscles. “It’s not that,” I say.
“I know, dummy,” Laney says. “I’m pissed, too. All these people…” She trails off, scanning the automobile graveyard as we slalom through it. “Wait a minute. What people?”
I was so hung up on my own imagination—picturing what might have happened here: a dark wizard, maybe, standing in the middle of the highway, shooting invisible rockets at the cars barreling right at him, slamming on their brakes, never having a chance—that I didn’t even notice that there are no bodies, decaying or otherwise. Just cars. Empty, driverless cars.
We exchange a look, but neither of us has to say a word to know what the other is thinking. Necros. Building an army of the dead. Mr. Jackson’s words stream through my head on repeat. The Necros deal in dark magic, using the dead as their tool of choice. The Necros deal in dark magic, using the dead as their tool of choice. The Necros deal in dark magic…
“Where’d you go?” Laney says, and I twitch, jerking out of my stupor.
“Uh, nowhere,” I say.
“You were thinking about something,” she says, skepticism in her narrowed eyes.
“There are just a lot of unanswered questions,” I say, which seems to satisfy her as she once more faces forward, weaving between an overturned tractor-trailer and a black, tinted-window Cadillac Escalade.
“Nice car,” Laney comments.
“Yeah, if you want to singlehandedly burn a planet-sized hole through the ozone layer,” I say.
Laney smirks. “Now that’s a bright side for you. At least without anyone driving cars—other than the vehicles running on magic and Huckle’s solar-powered van—global warming might not be such an issue.”
I raise a finger in the air. “I think you’re on to something. What if the witches are just environmental activists looking to make a point?”
Our eyes meet and the brief moment of levity goes a long way to easing the strain my body’s feeling after my thoughts about Mr. Jackson’s description of the Necros. Will I ever see him again? Do I even want to see him again? Has he been looking for me? Is he alive?
An hour goes by as we swoop down a large decline and then up an even larger hill. I never realized Pittsburgh was so hilly. With the snow in the winter, it’s a wonder anyone can leave their houses. Thankfully, the snow and ice are months behind us, and the late summer heat has evaporated into a breezy even temperature that helps with our long hike, which is finally starting to take a toll on my feet and legs. Laney and Trish look tired, too. Only Hex seems to be able to walk all day and look as refreshed as if he just woke up from an eight-hour nap.
Another hour trudges by before we see the sign for the tunnel. Maintain speed through tunnel, it reads. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” I mutter. Maintaining our four miles an hour pace is as easy as putting one foot in front of the other and then repeating over and over again until you feel each step all the way to your spine.
“We should slow down,” Laney jokes. “See if we get a ticket.”
I’m too tired to laugh. Should we keep going? I’m anxious to reach our destination, but showing up exhausted in a big city with who knows how many gangs patrolling the streets is a recipe for disaster, even with Trish-the-missile-exploder and Hex-the-wonder-dog on our side.
“I see how it is,” Laney says. “I don’t laugh at your joke so you don’t laugh at mine. Hold a grudge much?”
“I was laughing on the inside,” I say.
“I’ll bet you were.”
Another ten minutes slip by in silence as the road curves one way, then the other, and then a gray square block appears, surrounded by greenery that rises to the hill above. Two black corridors, one on either side of the highway, are drilled into its face like nail holes in a plank of wood. The words Fort Pitt Tunnel are etched into the gray stone. What I hope is red spray-painted graffiti, marks the tunnel entrance: KILL THEM ALL! Was it painted by witches or surviving humans?
Matching hundred-car pileups are mashed into the tunnels on both sides, their fenders dented, their front hoods jammed up like accordions, and…their passengers gone. I only wish they’d fled the scene, but I can’t fool my mind into thinking that. They were taken.
The Necros don’t usually kill people on their own, Mr. Jackson told me. It seemed like he made this point a dozen times in the few short months I was with him. They scavenge the dead, and then the dead do the killing for them.
With that sickening thought curling through my mind, I say, “We should probably hide out in the tunnel for the night.”
Hex whines and Laney says, “You want to stay in there?”
“Scared?” I say.
“Stop being a child, we’re not on a camping trip in some haunted forest. You know I’m not scared, but look at it. It
’s jam-packed with cars.”
“All the more reason why no one would go in there to bother us,” I say. “We’re either going to have to trek up and over or through. Your choice.”
She sighs.
I say what I know I have to say even if I don’t want to say it. “Look, I appreciate you coming this far with me, I really do. I’ll understand if you want to take Trish somewhere…safer.”
“No.”
“Just let me know where you’re headed and I can try to catch up with you after I’m done with this thing.”
“This thing? You mean your mission to kill every last Necro? Is that the thing you mean? And oh yeah, I’m sure you’ll stop there. Next it will be all the rest of the witches, right?” Oh no. Her hands are on her hips, her eyes blazing with molten steel.
“Uh…”
“Choose your next words very carefully, Carter.”
I look at Trish, who offers no air-drawn words of advice. Hex seems to be smiling, as if enjoying our little confrontation. “You’re welcome to come with me?” I say.
“Is that a question or an invitation?” Laney asks sharply.
“Both.”
“We’re coming. You’re my only friend and I’ll be damned if I let you get yourself killed.”
End. Of. Discussion.
Chapter Forty-Three
As we crawl onto the cars, I find myself thinking about what happened here when the most catastrophic event the world has ever borne witness to struck. Was this very tunnel the home to flashes of humanity during Salem’s Revenge? Did people try to help one another, pulling each other from crumpled cars, standing between the helpless and whatever witch gang was assaulting them? Or was it every person for themselves, the faster, stronger ones having a better chance of surviving and escaping? Would I blame any of them if that’s the way it was?
The metal creaks and groans beneath our feet as we scramble from one car to the next, picking our way through the tunnel. My wrapped-up shoulder groans, too, firing bolts of pain through my arm, but I ignore it. Hex lights the way with a new trick: A flashlight-like beam shoots from his open mouth.