The Last Sanctuary Omnibus

by Kyla Stone

  Lightning flashed again. The dog snarled, teeth gleaming. It crouched, bristling and slavering, ready to spring at her, its eyes glittering with malice.

  She pulled the trigger. The shot echoed like a blast, ringing in her ears. The Shepherd howled and hurled itself sideways, shaking its head furiously. It was startled, not hurt. She missed.

  She wasn’t good enough with the gun. If she shot again, she’d miss again. This time, the dog would be ready for her.

  She turned and ran.

  Her feet pounded against the concrete floor as she fled for the back of the warehouse. Another huge doorway loomed against the back wall on the left, hung with nothing but plastic sheeting.

  Maybe the dogs would hate the rain. Maybe that Shepherd wouldn’t follow her out into the storm, and she could swing back around and reenter from the front to find Benjie. It was worth a shot.

  A bolt of lightning revealed a slavering mutt skulking directly in her path. It was huge, with matted gray fur and a nasty scar carved across its face. In the strobed lightning, it seemed like some malevolent beast leaping out of the depths of Hades to devour her.

  Her veins turned to ice. Thunder roared overhead. Her heart hammered, her chest burning. She charged it, hoping to scare it like she scared the Shepherd. She screamed wordlessly and waved the gun.

  At the last second, the stray darted to the side but twisted its head and lunged for her leg. She felt its teeth snag her pants. She stumbled, slamming to the floor on her hands and knees. The gun knocked from her hands and skittered over the concrete.

  She felt a heavy weight and sharp nails digging into the back of her thighs. The thing climbed on top of her.

  She rolled, flipped onto her back and kicked, connecting with something hard that gave way with a yelp.

  There was no time to search for the gun. She scrambled to her feet and bolted.

  The stray barreled right behind her. Its nails scraped the floor, its jaws snapping at her heels.

  Fear throttled her. She couldn’t breathe.

  It didn’t matter, she was almost there. The doorway towered in front of her, the storm-battered world just beyond the billowing plastic sheet.

  She struck the sheeting with outstretched arms and plowed through it. Rain pelted her face, the wind whipping her, nearly bowling her over. The trees thrashed, some bent sideways. Above them, thunder cracked the sky. The boom was so loud she felt it in her bones, felt a shuddering in her teeth.

  The stray tore through the plastic with a head-shaking snarl and in seconds snapped at her heels again. Two other dogs scurried right behind it.

  Her boots hit a mud puddle. She flailed in the slick mud before her feet flew out from under her. She went down hard.

  The dog crashed into her, knocking her flat onto her back. It scrambled to a stop and came hurling back toward her, jaws hinged open to bite.

  She flung up her arms. She’d try to seize its head and plunge her fingers into its eye-sockets. She never in her life thought she’d die like this, but she sure as hell wasn’t going down without a fight.

  The stray never reached her.

  A huge black shadow streaked across her body and slammed into the stray head-on. The thing bowled the dog over and they rolled in the muddy grass. The two other dogs—a Pitbull and a husky—leapt back, ears laid flat.

  Willow scrambled into a crouch and froze, staring in shock at the scene before her. The stray sprang to its feet, but the other creature was faster. He launched himself at the stray.

  Lightning shattered the sky, revealing massive shoulders and haunches, black fur clumped with mud and dripping with rain, tall ears, and a long, narrow muzzle.

  A wolf. The huge black shadow was a freakin’ wolf.

  The wolf twisted and lunged, snapping its jaws and ripping open the side of the stray’s face as he passed. The dog yelped and staggered back, stunned.

  But the wolf wasn’t done. He came barreling in again and slammed his shoulder into the stray’s side.

  The dog stumbled. More swiftly than Willow thought possible, the wolf plunged in and opened a gash deep in the dog’s throat. Blood gushed down its neck and chest. The stray whimpered and fell onto its side in the mud, its skeletal sides heaving as it struggled to breathe.

  A few seconds later, it shuddered and went limp. It was dead.

  The wolf nosed the dog, grunted, and lifted his head. He growled once at the two dogs now cowering in the mud. They turned tail and fled back into the warehouse.

  The wolf turned and looked directly at her.

  She climbed to her feet. The trees groaned as a branch fell with a sharp crack only a dozen yards from where she stood. Rain slashed against her, dripping water into her eyes. The wind lashed her wet hair into her face and yanked angrily at her clothes.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t run. She stared at the wolf. The wolf stared back.

  He was enormous, bigger than any wolf she’d ever seen, even the docile modded ones. His shoulders easily reached her waist, his massive head even taller.

  He stood less than ten feet away. If she tried to flee, he could reach her in a single bound.

  She willed herself not to panic. She wasn’t a threat when the wolf had the dog to battle. But now? Would he see her as prey? Was he sick, like the other dogs? No foam dripped from his jaws. Maybe he was immune. But still.

  The hackles along his spine were raised, but he didn’t growl or snarl. He simply stared, unmoving, his yellow eyes seeming to say something she couldn’t understand.

  She sensed movement to her right. She was loath to take her focus off the wolf even for a second, but if there was another threat—another dog, a pack of them, a human predator—she needed to know. She shifted her gaze to the tree line.

  A figure stood between two swaying pine trees. It wore dark pants and a camouflaged rain slicker, the hood shielding the face in shadows. The figure pushed back the hood. She glimpsed dark eyes, a round face, and sleek black hair. A girl.

  She was short, though taller than Willow. She was Asian, not Filipino like Willow, but Japanese maybe, and looked about sixteen. She wore a backpack and held a hoverboard in one hand.

  The girl whistled. The wolf bounded to her side, vanishing into the shadows but for his yellow eyes, still peering intently at Willow.

  “Who are you?” Willow asked over a rumble of thunder.

  But fear and urgency overcame her curiosity. The rest of her group were still fighting for their lives inside the warehouse. Maybe that wolf could help them, if that girl could tell it what to do. “Can you help us? My friends, my brother—” She gestured behind her.

  The girl pointed past her shoulder. Willow turned and saw three trucks heading down the road toward the warehouse. Her stomach dropped. Rescue? Or something else? She glanced back at the girl.

  The girl raised her finger to her lips.

  She didn’t understand. Be quiet? Why? What did she know? Where did she come from? Who was she? And why had she and the wolf saved Willow? “Help us!”

  But the girl shook her head soundlessly and stepped back, fading into the shadows between the trees as easily as her wolf.

  21

  Amelia

  Amelia pressed her spine against the steel beam behind her. It was the only thing keeping her up. Her breath came in shallow pants, the front of her shirt drenched with sweat from the fever burning through her. The headache hammering her skull brought waves of dizziness with it.

  If not for Micah, she’d be lost. He stood several feet in front of her, aiming his rifle at a black Labrador prowling only two yards away.

  He pressed the trigger. The dog staggered, whimpering. Blood dripped from its haunches. “Get out of here!”

  A Chow-Chow turned toward them, sniffing the air. The Labrador fled, lurching on its wounded hind leg, but the Chow-Chow reached it and brought it down.

  Amelia looked away, her empty stomach heaving. It wasn’t just the sight of the fighting dogs. Lightning pulsed harsh and blinding. She squee
zed her eyes shut against the pain spearing through her eye sockets.

  Micah frowned. “Amelia! What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head, forcing her eyes open. He turned toward her, forgetting in the chaos that she was infected, that she was as dangerous as the dogs. Even with her mask and gloves, she was still a threat to him, to everyone she cared about. “Stay away!”

  He took a step back, shifting his concerned gaze from her to the dogs and back again. They were busy with the Labrador, for a moment at least.

  Near the entrance, Jericho stood back-to-back with Silas, defending Amelia’s mother, Finn, and Horne from a pack of five. Gabriel fended off three dogs in front of a forklift with Benjie and Nadira safely inside. She didn’t see Willow anywhere.

  “What’s wrong?” Micah asked again, his face creased with worry.

  She saw it reflected in his eyes. She looked as bad as she felt. The fever that started two days ago was worse, along with the irritating tickle in the back of her throat that made her cough constantly. She knew what it meant. She hadn’t told anyone, not yet. She couldn’t bear to see the look on Silas’s face, or her mother’s. Her mother still hoped.

  The fever flared, flushing through her body with a white-hot fury. Her skin melted off her bones. Her vision blurred and wavered, flames licking the corners of everything. Dizziness washed through her in waves.

  “You’re sick,” Micah said dully, answering his own question.

  She coughed into her mask, pain blazing behind her skull. Sweat dripped down her forehead. She wiped it away furiously. “A migraine.” As if that could deceive him.

  “When it rains, it pours,” he said with forced lightness, but she knew him enough now to recognize the tremor of dread in his voice.

  She grunted. “It doesn’t matter if we’re going to die here anyway, does it?”

  A mutt locked eyes on them and snarled. Micah aimed his rifle. He fired and this time the dog went down without a sound. Two others sprang at it. “We’re not gonna die here. I promise you that.”

  The sound of engines roared over the thunder and pounding rain. Before Amelia could form a coherent thought or register surprise, a gray, dirt-streaked truck plowed through the plastic sheeting over the entrance and burst into the warehouse.

  The truck squealed to a stop in the center of the floor, two more trucks following close behind, spraying mud from their tires. Four men leapt out of the back of the first truck, armed with handguns and nail-spiked baseball bats.

  They hurled themselves at the dogs with a shout.

  The passenger door opened, and the guy with the tiger in his truck, Gonzales, poked his head out. “Come on! Get in!”

  Jericho grabbed her mother. He and the others raced to the trucks and clambered into the second truck bed. Two of the men ran for the forklift, scattering snarling dogs as they went.

  Micah gestured at Amelia. “Let’s go!”

  She pushed off from the wall, but only made it a few steps. Heat boiled her insides. Dizziness seized her, pain exploding inside her head. She staggered.

  Before she could stop him, Micah darted in and grabbed her waist. “Lean on me. Hurry!”

  She tried to jerk away. What was he thinking? She was infected; she could kill him. He was too close. She turned her head and coughed violently into her mask. “Micah, stop!”

  But he shook his head, his brown eyes flashing with determination behind his glasses. “I’m not leaving you. Just don’t cough on me, okay?”

  He tightened his grip on her side and dragged her toward the truck. They stumbled, a terrier snapping at Amelia’s feet. She managed to kick it hard enough to send it sprawling.

  They reached the gray truck, and Micah thrust her up. She grabbed the side and hoisted herself over the side even as her vision blurred with white spots.

  “She’s sick!” Micah warned Gonzales, who leaned half-outside the truck, yelling at everyone to hurry the hell up. “Put everyone else in the other trucks!”

  Russell adjusted his own mask, his ruddy face blanching, but he nodded.

  Amelia crawled into the furthest corner away, attempting to touch as little as possible. She watched the two men with spiked baseball bats knock aside a couple of dogs as Gabriel helped Nadira out of the forklift. He hesitated, then lifted Benjie gingerly and set him down. He turned to the trucks, spotted Amelia, and gestured to Benjie.

  Benjie nodded and raced to the gray truck. Amelia forced herself to focus, to hold on to consciousness. Even Benjie shouldn’t be in this truck with her. He wasn’t coughing. She was the one on fire, the virus burning her up from the inside.

  “Stay on that side!” she croaked. “Don’t get near me.”

  Benjie climbed in and hunched into the opposite corner, pulling his knees tight to his chest and wrapping his arms around himself. He shuddered violently.

  Amelia longed to go to him, to hug him and tell him everything was okay. But she couldn’t. It wasn’t worth the risk. “You’re okay, Benjie. You’re safe.”

  Gonzales ducked back in the truck. The vehicles reversed and started to back up. “Go, go, go!”

  Benjie stared at her with wide, shocked eyes, his hair standing up all over his head. “Where’s Lo Lo?”

  Amelia caught sight of movement at the back of the warehouse, the flash of a round brown face and flying black hair. Willow sprinted toward them.

  “Wait!”

  The gray truck slammed its breaks. Silas stood up in the rusted-out Ford, his rifle aimed at a dark shape lunging at Willow from behind. He took out the Pitbull just as Willow reached the truck. Micah and Finn reached down to haul her up.

  Tires squealed as the trucks spun in a circle in the center of the warehouse and roared out into the night. The trees on either side of the road bent and groaned. The truck jolted as it bounced over fallen tree branches.

  Lightning zigzagged across the sky, searing the backs of her eyelids. Rain struck her face. In her fevered mind, it seemed to hiss from the heat roiling off her.

  The pain descended on her like a pulsing, living thing, clawing at her brain, dipping her body in flames. She tried to sit up, but the metal side was too slick to grasp, her arms weak and floppy. Dimly, she heard Benjie crying.

  She collapsed into unconsciousness as the fever took her.

  22

  Micah

  By the time Micah woke the next morning, the sun shone through a heavy layer of white clouds. A rooster crowed somewhere nearby.

  He grabbed his glasses from the nightstand and left the small, bare room he shared with Finn and Willow—a scarred wooden floor, two narrow beds (Finn offered to take the floor, since he’d never fit on the mattress), a dresser, and a curtained window—and made his way to the cafeteria, still wiping sleep from his eyes.

  Fog drifted around his legs, obscuring most of the features of the place Gonzales had taken them after rescuing them from the warehouse.

  Their arrival last night was a frantic blur of darkness and rain, shining headlights, glimpses of darkened buildings, and strange faces and voices. The battle in the warehouse exhausted him. He’d passed out within moments of hitting the mattress.

  They were at some kind of farm commune. Their leader, Harmony Willis, had promised them a real breakfast, so it couldn’t be that bad.

  “Welcome to Sweet Creek Farm,” Harmony said as he entered the cafeteria. The long rectangular building boasted concrete floors, rough-hewn walls, a metal roof, and a few dozen farm-style tables.

  He felt strangely disconnected from his surroundings, like he still couldn’t quite believe this wasn’t a dream.

  “Would you like some milk?”

  “Huh?” he asked.

  Harmony was a white lady in her mid-sixties, with long gray hair and intelligent brown eyes set in a handsome, angular face. She wore pressed slacks and a flowy silk shirt that looked more fit for a high-end boutique than a farm, though her feet were encased in a pair of battered work boots.

  Gonzales, the guy who’d saved t
hem last night, leaned against the wall behind her, his arms crossed, an unlit cigarette dangling in one hand. They both wore gloves and masks.

  “Milk?” Harmony repeated, raising arched eyebrows.

  Micah didn’t want to be impolite. Besides, hunger gnawed at his empty stomach. “Thank you.”

  Harmony set a glass of thick, cold milk down on the farm table in front of him. For a moment, Micah stared at it in disbelief.

  “It won’t drink itself,” Silas smirked from further down the long table.

  Micah picked up the sweating glass and gulped it down in one swallow. It tasted sweet and thick, smooth and soothing on his tongue. Real cow’s milk, like he hadn’t tasted in years.

  “That’s more like it,” Harmony said with a smile.

  “What is this place?” Micah asked.

  “My father built it over twenty-five years ago. He envisioned a self-sustaining community free of violence and the intrusion of the government. We formed a community of like-minded individuals. The rest, as they say, is history. After he died seven years ago, I took over to keep his dream alive.”

  “Why did you save us?” Micah asked.

  Harmony’s smile widened. “In these difficult times, that’s a good question. We know all those who appear innocent aren’t always what they seem. However, my father’s dream was to build a community in a land where community has been forgotten.

  “Some of us still believe in good old-fashioned Southern hospitality. We don’t invite everyone our scouts come across, but Russell told me about you straightaway when he returned from hunting. He didn’t realize the dogs had re-infested the warehouse. It’s less than a quarter mile as the crow flies from our compound, so we keep an eye on it.”

  “We tried to clear it last week.” Gonzales shrugged. “They came back.”

  “When he realized he’d sent you into a trap, Russell begged me to take a few trucks to get you out.”

  “I guess we’re real lucky that Gonzales has a conscience.” Jericho nodded at Gonzales.