by Joss Ware
Jade thought of her own flat abdomen and empty womb. Barren bitch.
It had been a long time since Daniel’s words had cut through her memory, and she wasn’t prepared for the sharp renewal of pain they caused. He was long dead, but the voice in her head was not.
She automatically touched the three bands on her wrist, twisting them to line up the beads, reminding herself what they represented. She’d come so far from that weak, insecure girl—not only because of her own determination, but also thanks in part to Flo for taking her under her wing, and to Lou for helping her find her place. Giving her a purpose.
Giving her a chance for revenge.
Another burst of laughter, followed by a chorus of crooning awwws drew her back to the tableau through the windows, and Jade straightened her shoulders and smoothed her hair. As she started toward the building, she noticed the wet spot on her shirt from Luke’s overzealous mauling. Right over her nipple.
Shit.
“Elliott,” she said as she approached the large opening. “There you are.”
He looked over at her. There wasn’t an element of surprise, nor delight, at seeing Jade. None of that subtle flare of heat she’d become used to seeing. “Jade. Are you finished?”
She counted more than five women, and recognized some—Sally, who was as sweet as she looked, and her sister Della, who looked more sober but was also very kind. Della’s eldest daughter, Andrea, was sitting there between two of the pregnant women across from Elliott, and she seemed to only have eyes for him. In fact, from her body language, it looked as though she were ready to slide right into his lap.
Jade walked around the building and came to a low wall. On the other side sat the group of them, looking very cozy, sitting there around a table in the cheery little courtyard. “What are you all doing?” she asked, trying to sound casual, and as if it didn’t bother her to see Elliott surrounded by a group of females who seemed to be hanging on his every word.
And why should it bother her anyway?
“Elliott’s been predicting the sex of our babies,” said one of the pregnant women. Mathilda was her name, and her belly looked ready to burst. “He says he’s never been wrong.”
“Is that so?” Jade looked at Elliott. When their eyes met, she read recognition of her message there . . . but, again, no warmth. “Will you be performing tonight, Jade?” asked Della hopefully.
“I’m sorry, but we need to get back on the trail before much longer. I have to be somewhere else tonight.” Jade spoke quickly, then read the disappointment in the woman’s eyes. “I’ll come back soon, though, and stay for a show.” She hoped.
“I just love it when you sing that song about the preacher man,” Della said wistfully.
“I like that one too,” Jade said. And because Della seemed a little sad, she sang a few bars of the beginning, about going walking with Billie Ray, the preacher’s son.
It turned into the whole first verse and a couple run-throughs of the refrain, and when she finished, they all applauded. Although she hadn’t wanted to sing, Jade was glad she’d done so. It seemed to give them pleasure, and she knew that the computer upload wouldn’t have finished quite yet.
And then there was, of course, the added benefit of the way Elliott was looking at her. A little bit of that heat was back.
“Well, now come and have a glass of tea with us for a bit, dear,” Sally said, gesturing expansively. “Elliott’s been telling me how to take care of the ache in my hip too.”
All of these women were fairly eating out of his hand, and Jade could see why. He looked, sounded, and acted like he really cared, yet he wasn’t alienating Sally, who acted as midwife, by telling her how to do her job. He played it well. Very well.
He had a way with them—he knew how to talk to women, to treat them, to make them feel comfortable and happy. She couldn’t imagine him ever raising a hand to anyone . . . although he was certainly capable of inflicting great damage. The snake he’d sliced up was a perfect example of that.
And Andrea . . . damn if she wasn’t inching her way closer to him when no one was looking. Pretty soon her knees would be brushing against his. Jade was looking at the younger woman when Andrea glanced up and caught her attention. “What’s that on your shirt?” she asked. There was a bit of a malicious gleam in her eyes.
“I spilled something,” Jade replied coolly. Then, she smiled blandly and said, “I’m sorry everyone, but I’m going to have to take Elliott with me. We’ve got to get on the road if we’re going to make it by dark.”
Andrea must have gotten the message—whatever it was Jade was trying to tell her—because her mouth tightened just a little bit. And Jade was surprised at how relieved she felt when Elliott stood to join her.
“Ladies,” he said, turning back to the group as he stepped through the large window opening. “It’s been a real pleasure meeting all of you. I’ll be back in a month or so myself to see how things are going.”
So much for him never seeing Andrea and her big blue eyes again.
Elliott followed Jade down the street, trying to ignore the mouth-sized wet spot over her right breast. “Are we leaving now?” he asked, catching up to Jade with an extra-long stride.
“As soon as I get my stuff.” She tossed that gorgeous smile up at him.
He looked her over again, over the wet spot on her tee. He should have figured it out right away, last night when he saw her up on stage. Of course she was a man-eater. Of course a woman who looked like Jade, who performed and rode like she did—and was smart and brave to boot—had a plethora of male companionship.
Women like that attracted them in droves. And they couldn’t settle on just one.
Lysney had been the same way. Beautiful, smart, confident—a skyrocketing star in the Chicago advertising industry. And she had a man in each city where she had an account.
At least Elliott had realized it before he fell too hard, for Jade or Lys.
Which was why, when he met the man who’d had his hands all over that great ass, he merely smiled at Luke instead of smiling at him. And he was rewarded with absolutely no vibe whatsoever.
And which was probably why Luke didn’t hesitate when Elliott followed him and Jade down into another cellar complete with a NASA-like computer setup. It didn’t take Elliott long to figure out what was going on—the transfer of data.
He poked around a little bit without appearing to poke—watching screens surreptitiously (simple data uploading), slyly opening a drawer when the opportunity arose (it held some flash drives and a few CDs, along with a curling-cornered picture of Jade), even looked behind the computers to see where their cords went. How was Luke generating so much power? It was one thing to run a refrigerator or television and a few lights—but at least twenty boxes, plus monitors?
The cords plugged into something that looked like a large, homemade generator boasting countless outlets that had been cobbled together. The generator was set into the ground, with all of its plugs exposed in a grid. He wanted to look beneath and find out what made it work.
So he knocked over a stack of disks, and as they spewed all over the floor, he knelt to pick them up. Out of sight under the table, he knelt next to the generator and began feeling around for the mechanism behind or beneath it. Low to the floor, he found a small metal door next to the grid of outlets. It felt warm to the touch, and its sliding bolt lock opened as if it were often moved.
The door opened with a small metallic clang, but Luke and Jade were talking on the other side of the room, and neither seemed to notice. A warm yellow glow spilled into the space, lighting the floor around him. Elliott looked down into what had to be the insides of the generator and saw a large oblong object, glowing and sparking with little blue lightninglike sparks. The object, which looked like a piece of granite with a light burning inside it, had blue and yellow veins all over it. A crystal, as large as his forearm. Generating enough power to run a classroom of computers.
Next to it were some fragments of more c
rystals, much smaller, as if they’d been smashed. The floor felt gritty beneath his palms, and he noticed the tiny sparkles of what looked like dust beneath the shards.
Elliott closed the door and returned to his seat with the disks in hand. Casting a glance behind him, he noted that neither of the others seemed to have noticed his nosiness.
“So you haven’t heard from Theo for a couple weeks?” Jade was saying.
“Nope, but when I got this stuff, I sent him a message and said he might want to make a special trip. I’m sure not complaining that he sent you. Maybe you could come from now on,” Luke replied, absently scratching what looked like a rash on the inside of his arm.
“I’d discount my prices if you made Greenside part of your regular route,” he added with a leer.
Elliott resisted the urge to roll his eyes.
“That sounds like a good idea,” Jade said enthusiastically, then her voice sharpened with regret. “But we’re leaving now. I’ve got to catch up with him.”
Jade didn’t allow Luke’s obvious reluctance at their departure to delay them, and just a bit more than an hour after arriving in Greenside, she and Elliott were on their way, back to Envy on foot.
“What happened to getting the mustangs so easily?” he asked after she’d whistled several times and there’d been no answering whinny.
“I don’t know,” she said, frowning. “I’ve never had a problem before. Maybe we’ll find a herd somewhere along the way.” She paused, looking toward the southwest. “Looks a little cloudy that way. Maybe there’s a storm coming.”
“Do you want to stay in Greenside?”
“No. I want to get back to Envy.”
Elliott agreed, but he’d learned by now that Jade liked to make the decisions. And since it appeared they were of the same mind, why not let her think she was in charge.
They traveled as fast as they could, following overgrown roads. Elliott concentrated on the journey, automatically observing the environment for recognizable elements from his world—highway signs, Golden Arches, gas stations or drugstores . . . anything that seemed familiar. Those memories, those groundings of days gone by, were few and far between.
And he thought about the women he’d met in Greenside. Mathilda, with the healthy baby boy in her belly. Emily, with a little girl that would be born a month after. Sally, who had arthritis in her hip and knee, which made her move slowly and awkwardly.
And then there was Della. The moment Elliot had laid eyes on her, he’d known it would be bad news. He hadn’t even needed to really scan her, but he did . . . and the moment he realized she had terminal cancer throughout her entire abdomen, he jerked his hands away as if burned.
He felt acute shame afterward, but no one seemed to notice his reaction. The shame was followed by the niggling worry that he’d touched her and somehow quickly absorbed the carcinoma. But he thought about it, wracked his memory, reliving every detail of the moment, and he knew he hadn’t felt that little sizzle of power he had when he healed Jade and Simon. And, now, in retrospect, he recalled having felt a shocklike jolt when he touched the elderly man in Vineland, who’d been dying from an infection.
The problem was, he’d turned from the old man to rebandage Lenny’s cut moments later . . . and look what had happened. He’d come to realize that Lenny had died from an infection—not from the rusty-metal cut, but from Elliott.
So much for “first do no harm.”
Now, a deep tug of depression and grief pulled inside him. It wasn’t that he wasn’t used to diagnosing serious, terminal problems. Hell, he’d worked in an ER and had seen plenty of bad news.
It was that there wasn’t anything that could be done to even make Della’s passing easier . . . let alone cure her. Unless he wanted to die himself.
Or give the terminal illness to someone else. Accidentally.
He hiked along, grateful for the dappled shade of a small forest they’d entered. He wondered if it was safe to touch Jade again.
Meanwhile, Elliott was acutely aware that if he had absorbed anything, whatever it was was growing inside him right now . . . more quickly and venomously than it would be in anyone else.
Maybe he could find another snake. Or a horse. Or even a dog. No, not a dog. It might be someone’s pet. He could touch them, passing on anything that he might be carrying. But wouldn’t that be cruelty to animals?
Did it matter? When a human life was at stake, would it matter?
A thought struck him. What about a ganga? Could he pass it on to a ganga? Were they living creatures? Would it work?
That might be a solution.
First he’d have to catch one. And it would be fascinating to scan it and find out what sort of creature the gangas were. Of course, there was always the danger that he’d scan a ganga and accidentally absorb whatever it was that made them . . . well, undead, or reanimated . . . and become that way himself.
What a fucking mess. How many people would be hurt or killed before he figured out just exactly how to control this power?
After about an hour of hiking, they emerged from the forest and found themselves standing at the edge of what had been a huge parking lot. A low, sprawling building stretched in front of them. Random trees dotted the landscape of tall, meadowlike grass.
And in the distance, behind the long, low building, was a large black cloud billowing toward them, “Oh my God,” Jade exclaimed from behind him.
Elliott had witnessed both tornados and cyclones, but he’d never seen anything like the roiling, evil-looking fog. It stretched as far as he could see. Yet the sky above looked like an overturned bowl of oatmeal, gray but unthreatening.
“What the hell is it?” Whatever it was, it seemed to be moving rapidly toward them.
Before he could stop her, she’d grabbed his bare arm with her fingers. They were cool and firm and he hoped like hell he wasn’t “carrying” anything. “A storm. We call them blackouts. That must be why the mustangs are all gone.”
“It’s too wide to be a tornado, and the sky above it isn’t even cloudy.”
“It just rolls along the ground and destroys whatever isn’t nailed down. I guess it’s like a long, wide tornado. Either way, we’ve got to find shelter.”
Elliott nodded, squinting at the rolling storm. They hadn’t stopped walking, but now they had to pick up the pace. The blackout was moving quickly due east, and Envy was northeast. There was a chance the storm might miss them if they kept on their course.
“Let’s keep going as far as we can,” he said.
“I think we should see how far we can get. We might be able to miss it, or at least get out of the center of its path.” Jade’s voice was taut.
He nodded and they picked up their speed. Elliott grabbed her elbow and helped her to keep pace with his longer, faster stride, half-carrying her. They half-ran, half-jogged, passing small, rundown houses that looked as if they’d been a neighborhood of manufactured homes. Even if they wanted to find shelter now, there wasn’t any safe place.
The storm seemed to pick up steam as well, and it wasn’t long before Elliott felt the rush of wind chilling him through the light T-shirt he wore. He had a jacket in his pack, but he didn’t stop to pull it out. The sting of biting rain began to patter over his head and shoulders. But, it wasn’t rain . . . it was hail. Sharp, icy pellets the size of blueberries. Big, fat hard blueberries.
Glancing behind, he saw that the evil cloud now filled the horizon and rose into the sky. Holy fucking shit. It was like a tidal wave, rushing toward them. There was nowhere to go.
The storm bubbled and swirled, and looked like a massive purple-black steamroller careening toward them. He guessed it was moving more than ten miles an hour, and on foot, they were lucky to be doing a consistent five.
It was time to find a safe place. Something that could withstand the power of the winds that bent trees nearly double, the pounding of hail, and whatever else the storm would bring.
Leaves and debris—pieces of wood and plastic
, branches and bushes—whirled, blowing into them from behind, whipping Jade’s hair as the hail fell harder and faster. Elliott’s nose clogged with the blast of dust, dirt, and something dank and heavy. A roaring sound surged around them, deafening and furious, as the storm rolled toward them.
Elliott scanned the horizon, looking for something promising, shading his eyes from the stinging hail and blinding dust. The little manufactured homes that had stretched in neat rows, overgrown and sagging, had given way to a wide open space that appeared to have been the intersection of two major highways.
But on the other side of the crumbling entrance and exit ramps, he saw what looked like a brick office building. Three or four stories, some glass still reflecting from the windows. “There,” he shouted, pointing, but the word was lost in the maelstrom around them. Jade looked and saw where he was pointing, she nodded in agreement, the details of her face muted by the falling light.
He grabbed her hand and they ran at full speed now, clambering over the crumbling concrete wall that had separated the neighborhood from the roar of the highways, across the empty interstate, leaping over small crevices in the concrete and up and over the jagged slabs of road, and then up a small incline on the other side.
The storm blew and blustered, fast and furious around them, filling his ears and drowning out all other sounds. Then something hard and heavy slammed into the back of his head, nearly sending him to his knees.
“Elliott!” Jade shouted over the roar of the storm, holding fast to his arm, steadying him as he stumbled. Pain radiated down from his skull and for a moment, Elliott’s sight blurred. But then he realized his darkening vision was partly from the storm nearly upon them.
Jade grabbed him around the waist, pulling him up against her slender body, stumbling awkwardly at the sudden addition of the extra weight. But she kept on, her arm solid and strong around him as he blinked, trying to clear his vision and the dizziness.