Devil’s Wake
Page 23
Eyes closed in the darkness, her toes sinking into the cold sand, she felt nothing. And then she realized that something was hidden within the nothing, something she could only see as… a deeper nothing. Like black threads against black velvet.
“Ohhhh,” Kendra whispered, realizing she had been searching for lines of light.
Now, touching that deeper place of darkness, she followed the thread, almost as if she were pulling a buried cable out of the sand, with grains spilling over it as she pulled.
She drew, and then relaxed again, and it was as if she rose up high above the beach, higher and higher, but could still see herself standing on the shore, holding the thread. And the thread…
As if the smell and sound and motion of the timeless sea had washed away some of the confusion, some of the misty distraction, she saw it. The threads and their connecting nodes were dense with darkness, heavy with heat, and that smell…
“Kendra?”
A voice. His voice. The voice.
Kendra snapped as if she’d fallen asleep on her feet. She turned, fighting the urge to fall against Terry. He wrapped her in a blanket and left his arm draped around her. She sighed against him. He was so strong—not overly muscular like Piranha, but solid and steady. And quiet. She hadn’t heard his approach.
He guided her a few steps away from the shore, until the sand was dry. Then, as if they had agreed on the moment, they sank down to the sand. Terry sighed.
“Do you care that you just scared the crap out of me?” he said, surprising her with the anger in his voice. “You’re taking a stroll, so I wake up and you’re gone?”
Seeing her disappearance through his eyes, Kendra felt ashamed. “I wanted to let you sleep,” she said.
“Yeah, look at how great I’m sleeping. I couldn’t sleep with you gone.”
He said it so plainly, in a matter-of-fact way, that she wondered if she’d heard him right.
“Your breathing,” he said quickly. “I hear you breathing when you sleep. On the bus, when we camp—your breathing’s always close to me. So I know everything’s okay.”
“I listen to you breathe too,” she said.
Then, for a long time, neither of them said anything. Kendra remembered Piranha and Sonia behind the dunes, wondering if they were still there. Wondering if Terry wanted to slip away together, and if he would be disappointed in her.
Kiss me, she thought. This would be a perfect moment. If we were supposed to be together, if the only thing that came out of this entire horrible mess was that you and I found each other. And if this moment, here in the moonlight, by the waves, was the moment when we first kissed, and we told our children…
Kendra’s daydream stopped cold. Children? How could she ever imagine bringing a child into the world?
“I hope the Blue Beauty can make it to Domino Falls,” Terry said.
“You think she can’t?”
He shrugged. “She needs a mechanic,” he said. “Something in the undercarriage. Something rattling. And the gears are getting a little tricky.” He smoothed his hands over his hair. “We’ll see. She’s always been a little temperamental, but now she’s downright mean. I think we’ll be all right.”
By that, of course, he meant he wasn’t sure they’d be all right. Kendra felt silly for fantasizing about a kiss when Terry was worried about breaking down on the road.
The moon danced on the water. Kendra picked up a stone and threw it, thinking to skip it out and right into the silver circle. Instead, it just hit a tiny wave and vanished.
The insanity hit her like a bomb again. Children! They might not live past tomorrow. But if they couldn’t make it to Domino Falls, if something separated them, or one of them died, wasn’t that a better reason to kiss and hold each other now?
Sonia and Piranha already knew the answer to that question. Were those their love cries, just barely audible now? Or was that the sigh of a bird?
Terry’s weight beside her awakened a stirring Kendra had felt only mildly before, a sweet, heavy ache between her thighs. She wondered what it felt like to have a boy’s naked flesh pressed against hers, the whole length of his body. Would she ever know?
She’d had a boyfriend for three months and necked with him in his car, but he’d never pressed for anything else. All she’d seen was R-rated lovemaking in movies and little cheap images streamed on the Internet. Of course there was biology class, but rabbits and rhinos didn’t count. And the time her cousin’s sixteenth birthday party had turned into grinding, with neighborhood boys dancing too close in the dark, stone-faced, taut groins pressed behind her. Kendra had felt part intrigue, part revulsion.
But nothing captured the feeling of arousal Terry had planted in her.
Nothing else had ever come close.
“If she breaks down,” Terry went on finally, “we’ll stick together. Carry what we can. We can walk the rest of the way. Plenty do it.”
He almost hid the fear in his voice.
That time, there was no mistaking the sound of Piranha and Sonia.
Terry chuckled quietly, embarrassed.
“Live for the moment, I guess,” Terry said.
“I like that idea,” Kendra said.
It was hard to see his face in the dark, but she knew he was looking at her.
Terry took the hint. He leaned over to kiss her, and his mouth was its own ocean. She’d never been cast about so much by a kiss, so much of her awake and wanting. Sand rained on her as she ran her fingers through his hair.
An endless kiss, ending too soon. Kendra must have forgotten to breathe while their lips met because her entire chest was beating with her heart.
Terry suddenly stood up and held his hand down to her.
“Where are we going?” she said.
She would have gone anywhere with him. To the Blue Beauty. To the dunes.
“Back to sleep,” Terry said.
She didn’t move at first, disappointed. Didn’t he want her?
“What’s wrong?” he said, although she thought he knew.
“What if… this is the last good night?” she said. The question sounded foolish, but they both knew there was nothing foolish about it.
“It’s not,” he said. “Or, anyway, even if it is, I have to do everything I can to make sure it isn’t—like get rest so I can stay awake tomorrow. And one day… one day we’ll have a really good night somewhere.”
Despite all reason, and the bright weight of his promise, Kendra felt hurt. She ignored the feeling, struggling to make a joke. “Like somewhere we won’t get sold to a work crew if we stay too long? Or we’re not afraid of breaking down on the road?”
“Yeah.” Terry’s grin shone in the moonlight. “Somewhere like that. Like Domino Falls, maybe.” He paused. “Or Devil’s Wake.”
Kendra didn’t say the next thing in her mind: What if we never find that place?
Instead, she took his hand and enjoyed his strength as he lifted her to her feet.
They didn’t wake anyone when they took their places back by the fire, so they shared the heat of Terry’s bedroll and lay side by side. Neither of them closed their eyes until Sonia and Piranha returned, distracted and excited by their nearness.
As the firelight died to embers, Kendra and Terry finally fell asleep. The last thing either knew was the sound of the other’s breathing.
Kendra dreamed.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to thank Major Jefferson Davis, for a tour of the Vancouver Barracks and for useful conversation on military arms, tactics, and training; Steve Perry, for overall sharp eyes; and Tahlia Holt, for help researching the Puget Sound area and Bainbridge Island.
It would be dishonorable not to thank the artists who created the images and ideas most commonly associated with the “zombie apocalypse” notion, and the very shift from spellbound Haitians to something far more sinister and universal: Don Siegel, Daniel Mainwaring, and Jack Finney (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), Ubaldo Ragona and Richard Matheson
(Last Man on Earth [I Am Legend]), George Romero (Night of the Living Dead), and Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (28 Days Later). Understanding our vast affection for these tropes will hopefully explain why we were eager to tangle these speculative threads together… winking at an audience that, we hope, is having as much fun as we are.
The thematic… thread, if you will, weaving through all of these cinematic visions is that there is a force that dehumanizes us, that pits us against the very people and institutions we once relied upon. And that the only salvation is our connection to one another, and our own hearts.
In fact, that is all that has ever saved us. Or ever will.
Steven Barnes
Tananarive Due
March 1, 2012
Atlanta, Georgia
ALSO BY STEVEN BARNES
Streetlethal
The Kundalini Equation
Gorgon Child
Firedance
Lion’s Blood
Zulu Heart
Far Beyond the Stars
The Cestus Deception
Great Sky Woman
Shadow Valley
ALSO BY TANANARIVE DUE
My Soul to Take
Joplin’s Ghost
The Good House
Freedom in the Family
The Living Blood
My Soul to Keep
The Black Rose
BY STEVEN BARNES AND
TANANARIVE DUE
WITH BLAIR UNDERWOOD
Casanegra
In the Night of the Heat
From Cape Town with Love
and forthcoming
South by Southeast
STEVEN BARNES is an award-winning author of twenty-three novels, including the New York Times bestseller Star Wars: The Cestus Deception. He lives in Smyrna, Georgia.
TANANARIVE DUE is the award-winning Essence bestselling author of Blood Colony, Good House, and Joplin’s Ghost. She lives in Smyrna, Georgia.
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COVER DESIGN BY ALAN DINGMAN • COVER PHOTOGRAPH © Danielle Kiemel
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due
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First Atria Paperback edition July 2012
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Steven.
Devil’s wake : a novel / Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due.
p. cm.
I. Due, Tananarive, 1966– II. Title.
PS3552.A6954D48 2012
813’.54—dc23 2011033779
ISBN 978-1-4516-1700-9
ISBN 978-1-4516-1701-6 (ebook)