Devil’s Wake

by Steven Barnes

“The snow. The ice. The world. We’re gonna make a mistake.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Like last night. I fell asleep.”

  “Me too,” she confessed.

  He shrugged. “So there it is. And somebody’s watching us.”

  The radio railed with static, but suddenly the voice broke through: “How have we done it? Simple, folks: Checkpoints. A security force. Former law enforcement, former military. Some of the finest minds in Northern California have come here to weave the threads that can hold us together…” Static swallowed the voice again.

  How dare Ursalina try to jinx them, claiming that they would die one by one.

  Bitch.

  She’d known the day was jinxed since she woke up and realized she’d dozed off for at least two or three hours, and the sky outside the window where she was supposed to be keeping watch was swollen with daylight. She’d known again when she was brushing her hair in a hurry, wishing she had time to wash the greasy stink out of it, and she noticed her stud earring was gone. The earring was no big deal, cheap fake gold she’d swiped from Walmart, but it had been her only surviving pair.

  She’d lost an earring the day she got arrested too.

  Sonia Petansu had always felt the urge to take pretty things, even things she didn’t need. She wasn’t a psycho or anything—it had been a game, something to do, a kind of magic trick she performed for her own entertainment. Now you see it, now you don’t. She’d felt a real charge keeping an eye peeled for the lame, clueless security guards—maybe the kind of charge her mother felt when she had snuck around sending texts and making quiet phone calls to her accountant friend who did way more than her taxes. Or the other “friends” her father pretended not to notice. Sonia had been swiping from stores since she was thirteen, and she never would have been caught if she’d listened to her instincts the day she couldn’t find her matching hoop earring, the real gold ones her mother had given her for her seventeenth birthday, more a bribe than a gift.

  The humiliation of being seen, detained, arrested, used to seem like the world’s worst nightmare. And the look on her father’s face! That memory soured her stomach even now. All she’d worried about before was her parents divorcing because That Bitch couldn’t stop chasing men.

  But Sonia’s sentence to Camp Round Meadows had kept her alive, and she’d met Piranha. She’d given up on the idea that her mother was supposed to be a saint, or her father should have been stronger, or anything should have been different.

  At Camp Round Meadows, her heart had leaped when the phone stopped ringing and her mother picked up the line. All the voices had come to her at once, fighting to talk to her, breathless with relief and worry. That call seemed like years ago now, but Sonia could remember every detail, hear every voice.

  Sonia? Sweetheart… are you all right?

  Dad had told her that everything was coming apart, that police were shooting biters and looters in the streets, and he’d borrow his brother’s truck to come for her as soon as everything calmed down. Sonia couldn’t have been sure, but he sounded like he was crying. You need to pull one of your magic acts and stay safe for us, David Petansu had said.

  Sonia had studied magic long before she started stealing, learning about sleight of hand, boxes with spring-loaded trapdoors, and how to split people’s attention. She’d learned from watching her father that there was a limit to how many things a person could keep track of at one time, because he’d long since lost track of her mother. People’s eyes followed an object moving rapidly without noticing what seemed to be standing still. They watched bright colors instead of black and white, noticed noise instead of quiet. If you said one, two, three… five most people would think four, and the instant they did that, they weren’t paying attention to what was going on around them.

  And somebody was playing them, just like her mother had played her father, like Sonia had played her school friends with her magic tricks and the rent-a-cops with her stealing. Last night’s visitors had hidden their tracks, but not all of them. Why not? To make them nervous? To send them on their way, swiftly, through the falling snow?

  She hoped she was wrong, but she’d lost her earring, and that was bad news.

  Sonia leaned against Piranha’s shoulder, comforted by his heat. They’d made a deal, back when this had all started, nothing formalized, nothing ever spoken aloud. But he had wanted her, and she’d only let him have her once all summer… until Freak Day. Then she had let him come to her whenever he wanted to, wanted him to come to her, the promise kept silent: You take care of me. Give me what I need, and I’ll give you what you want.

  It was much more than that now, even if neither of them gave it a name.

  And Sonia suddenly felt a clutch of deep shame over her anger at Ursalina, how she’d wanted to yank out her gun and pull the trigger, how her vision had gone red. She’d never thought Ursalina would try to hurt Piranha or that Piranha couldn’t take care of himself—she just hadn’t liked the way Ursalina was standing over him, her face moving close. Like she thought she could take him away.

  Ursalina was pissed off, that was all. How couldn’t she be? Sonia couldn’t imagine losing Piranha the way Ursalina had lost Mickey. Those two had had a deal in place too, even if not quite as cold-blooded as Sonia and Piranha’s.

  Ursalina might be right about Threadville, but she was wrong about them and their chances. She was wrong to believe they couldn’t last. She would see how wrong.

  As if Sonia had called her name aloud, Ursalina’s hoarse voice spoke up from the back, raised loudly enough to be heard over the windshield wipers and clanking chains.

  “Sorry about what I said before,” Ursalina said. “It’s not your fault we decided to join you. We made a choice. And you’re sure as hell doing better than most.”

  That was all she said, and nobody answered with anything profound, just mumbles about how it was all right, how everybody was having a hard time. Piranha reached back to bump her fist, and the bus went quiet again. The snow was still blowing like the sky had lost its roof, the air was frigid, and the clouds were thick and dark.

  But the day was less gray, brighter.

  Magic.

  TWENTY-THREE

  On either side of the Blue Beauty, fresh-fallen snow had transformed trees and bushes into crystalline topiary. The stalled cars had thinned a bit but still blocked the road here and there, challenging their snowplow without slowing Terry below his steady crawl. But the snow battering the rooftop and windows rapidly filled the shrinking puddles of dark asphalt, his only hint of the road. In some patches, the I-5 was only a memory, the space between the trees or ravines. And ice was hiding in the road’s cold shadows.

  Terry downshifted, showing mercy to the engine as the incline sharpened. From time to time Blue Beauty’s tires slid backward a foot or so before finding new traction.

  This was the worst driving day yet. And the day wasn’t over, with the terror of dark on its way. This day was giving steady clues that it might be the worst since Freak Day, even including yesterday. Including Vern.

  Terry’s stomach was still a sour knot. This leg of the I-5 had the sharpest grade of any stretch of the freeway, at the highest altitude, or so a sign he’d just passed proclaimed. The next sign echoed its warning, dangling in the wind: ATTACH SNOW CHAINS WHEN THIS SIGN IS FLASHING.

  Well, the sign wasn’t flashing, but their chains were damned well in place.

  The snow was flurrying harder, and they were still driving deeper into it, but maybe they could get across the border before he lost sight of the quilted patches of road. Gusts scattered the snow like a leaf blower.

  Should he turn around? The question nagged him every five minutes. Every two minutes, maybe. Great idea, Terry, let’s drive downhill on the ice and see how that goes. With the ice lurking in the snowdrifts, downhill driving might be suicide. Might be more sliding than any kind of guided locomotion. Besides, if the snow kept up, they would be stuck on the wrong side of California.

  Dari
us and Dean crouched behind Terry in the seat closest to the door, alert. Terry was glad for their sharp eyes because one pair wasn’t enough. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so sleepy. Last night, he’d had more than six hours of sleep without waking—a luxury vacation. But maybe he’d given his body the wrong idea, because it wanted more sack time. He was still exhausted from the armory, and the heater’s warmth tugged at his eyelids.

  Now here he was in the driver’s seat, battling a demon in white.

  The others had learned Blue Beauty’s basics in case of an emergency—and Ursalina might be able to handle her, once she screwed her head back on—but no one else could drive in these conditions. And Kendra had never practiced with the Beauty, even if she was old enough for her license. Kendra…

  A quick, sharp nudge to his back made Terry’s eyes fly open. Shit! His windshield showed him nothing but snowy sky. He gave the steering wheel a quick correction left, a bit sharper than he usually took his curves, but not enough to make the bus slide as it righted itself around the bend. His windshield’s panorama switched from sky to a wall of gray-brown rock face. Back on the road.

  In the mirror, six sets of eyes stared at him, wondering if they were only imagining that he had nearly driven them off a cliff. Everyone jounced to the right, holding the seats in front of them.

  Dean reached over to fiddle with the radio, and a squeal of static shot through Terry’s ear—the intended effect. Terry felt more alert than he had all day. Everything was in sharper focus.

  “Know what I’m thinking?” Terry said to the Twins. Very quietly. Kendra was sure to overhear from her seat behind him, but the others might not, between the heater and the windshield wipers.

  “That you’re a dumb-ass?” Darius said.

  “I’m thinking that we can always vote to turn around, spend the night in Ashland.”

  “Oregon’s headed into winter, not spring,” Piranha said. “This ain’t gettin’ better. I think we should charge while the charging’s good.”

  Darius nudged Dean. “What about you?”

  “It’s three o’clock,” he said. “Three hours before the temperature really starts dropping. I think we can make it across the summit by then. That’s what I’m thinking.”

  Terry exhaled a muted sigh. “So… here’s our choices: we turn around…”

  “Next choice,” Dean said.

  “We pull over,” Sonia said.

  “And wait for Triple-A?” Darius said. “My name’s Phillips, not Sitting Duck.”

  “He’s right,” Dean said. “We’ll get snowed in.”

  Terry nodded. “We keep going. Frankly, I think the snow is letting up. This isn’t a real deep freeze, just a little warning.”

  Terry glanced at Kendra in the mirror and saw her wide, nervous eyes on him.

  “We’re not snowbound as long as we’re moving,” Dean said.

  “Yeah, and we better git,” Darius said. “We’re only about”—he consulted his map—“five miles from the California border.”

  Five miles. That didn’t sound so far, unless the snow got worse. But it would be downhill on the California side, once they were over the mountains.

  “Let’s get across the pass, get down below the snow line, find a camp before dark,” Dean said quietly.

  Piranha’s voice suddenly came loudly from the back. “Anything the rest of us need to know about?”

  “Just talking about the snow,” Terry called back, trying to sound casual.

  Piranha’s stare was ice. “You okay, T? Need somebody else on the wheel?”

  Trick question. No one else could handle Blue Beauty’s gearshift or wonky steering, especially on a road like this. It was a rhetorical question. Terry knew he had no right to feel irritated, but he did. “I’ve got it.”

  Piranha’s eyes, in the mirror, didn’t blink as he stared Terry down. Terry got the message: I’m watching you, bro.

  “Nobody knows her like I do, Piranha,” Terry said.

  Piranha blinked and looked away, toward his window. Letting it go, for a time.

  Terry remembered to breathe. He might have been holding his breath since Kendra first woke him from his micronap, the terrible moment he’d seen an expanse of gray sky through his windshield and thought they were flying already.

  He was wide awake now. Sometimes he could even see the road.

  “Ice—dead ahead,” Darius said.

  The black patch in the shade to the right had fooled Terry, imitating asphalt. Terry steered left oh-so-gently, and only one of the rear tires gave a tentative slide before finding a grip on its chains. If he’d oversteered or braked suddenly, he could have ice-skated right into the barrier. Blue Beauty knew his thoughts. No panic, no second-guessing. Just left, right, faster, slower, or tussling with the stick to shift up and down, back and forth, their secret language.

  Kendra squeezed Terry’s elbow, maybe encouragement, but he pulled away from her. No distractions unless it was an emergency; anything else was dangerous. Kendra got the message, leaning all the way back in her seat. Clinging to the guardrail.

  Miles ground past one aching inch at a time. Terry’s muscles were locked in granite, on alert for quick reactions, corrections. But the flurries slowed as he drove south—not much, but enough to notice, and the road became less a puzzle. The California border was practically in sight.

  Just when Terry thought he’d made it, Hipshot began barking.

  The pooch wasn’t a casual barker. He didn’t yip when he was happy or hungry. He had a bladder and bowels of steel, and more patience in his front paw than the rest of them combined. So Hipshot’s clipped, purposeful bark made Terry jump with surprise.

  “Shhhh, it’s okay,” Kendra said, rubbing the black fur at the nape of Hippy’s neck.

  “Let him talk,” Dean said sharply. “We need to hear it.”

  Terry downshifted, and the bus coughed into a lower gear. The upward grade slowed the Blue Beauty to a crawl; she moaned to complain. Terry whispered her promises of how she could rest soon, how he would treat her better tomorrow. As the bus ground along the snowy road, Hippy’s barking grew louder.

  Anxiety nibbled at the wall of resolve Terry had been building all day.

  “Freaks?” Terry said. Freaks were the quickest way to set Hippy off. Terry fought the urge to look away from the road, toward the woods opening up on the driver’s side, bordering the ravine. Terry thought he saw something move behind the trees—a blur, yet distinctly dark. And fast. Too fast to be a freak.

  The others rushed to post themselves at windows, gazing outside into the woods on the driver’s side. The steering wheel tugged against him.

  “No sudden weight shifts!” Terry said.

  “Don’t flip the bus ’cause your mutt wants to pee,” Ursalina said.

  No one bothered explaining it to her.

  “It’s not freaks,” Dean said.

  The certainty in his voice made Terry see what his eyes had been hiding from him. Fifty yards ahead, a giant lump of snow lay in the road. Tires were visible underneath. Terry made out a bus underneath, probably a tour vehicle.

  The stalled, darkened bus was like a mirror into their future.

  The motor coach sprawled directly across his lanes, with a Ford station wagon nosing it in an inverted check mark. The vehicles might have been there all day, or longer. Had they been a two-vehicle caravan before one driver lost control? Darius clicked his tongue against his back teeth, and he and Dean sprouted guns. Hipshot stopped barking to growl low in his throat.

  No chance to cross to the northbound lanes—they had forked in another direction, out of his view. His only passage was the two blocked lanes ahead.

  “We’re gonna have to stop,” Terry said.

  Terry sought out Ursalina in his mirror, and he was glad to see her eyes clear and narrowed. A fighter. Good. They might need one.

  “We need to move the car,” Terry said. “Someone might need to steer. To disengage the brakes off that bus. Driv
er braked. I would have braked—even if everything was going to hell inside. To keep from sliding.”

  “I’d put on the brake if I was setting a trap, too,” Dean said.

  “And if I was a freak, I’d be hanging close to the bus,” Ursalina said. “If they slept there, they’d stay there. Especially if it was a proven hunting ground.” She sounded confident.

  “Is that gospel? I mean, did the army figure that out about freaks, or are you guessing?”

  “Little of both,” she said.

  Hipshot growled and barked again. The roadblock could be a trap, or infested with freaks. Or both.

  “It’s a good trap,” Terry said. “Ground down here is slippery, and they might be dug in.” He raised his voice. “Volunteers to check out the bus and get us moving?”

  Ursalina raised her hand. And Piranha. And Sonia.

  “Easy peasy,” Sonia said. “Let’s do this.”

  “Cover us,” Piranha said, his eyes cutting into Darius.

  Darius stroked his rifle’s long barrel. No witty comeback this time.

  Terry was surprised Ursalina wanted to volunteer. He would have preferred to keep her behind as a sniper like Darius and Dean, but she knew her skills better than he did.

  Ursalina huddled with Piranha and Sonia at the front of the bus. “No mistakes,” Ursalina said. “In and out.”

  “Agreed. No treasure-hunting, even for gas,” Piranha said. “No time.”

  The three of them examined one another’s weapons, bumped fists.

  “If you get swarmed, don’t be a hero,” Terry said. “Get back to the bus.”

  Everything important had been said. They all knew the rest. A swarm could make this the end of their ride. Pirates would be just as bad. Worse. Bullets killed at a distance. Several angles on the situation cast a bad light. The delay was a mistake waiting to happen.

  Ursalina, Piranha, and Sonia were bundled in their warmest jackets and sweatshirts, but they would be cold. Cold muscles were slow muscles.

  Terry almost told them not to go. Ashland was looking better all the time.

  Hipshot growled again as Ursalina opened the bus door.