by neetha Napew
Jeff swore and swung the wheel farther, hoping to be able to clip the coyote with the front fender, but it was too quick.
The blacktop was covered in a film of blown dirt, and the back end of the sports car started to slide as he sawed angrily at the wheel.
The rear wheels came off the pavement, kicking up a plume of orange dust. The nose dipped, making the whole car jolt and shudder. Jeff didn't have time to worry about what was happening. Split seconds later and he was snaking back down the road, coughing as he recovered control.
A mile or so down the line and he was sailing again, singing one of his favorite songs from before the Aquila's flight.
The cruise control was on, the afternoon was closing in toward evening, and everything was right with Jeff's world.
NANCI WASN'T SO WELL.
She'd crawled slowly, crabwise, trying to stop her lifeblood from leaking into the dirt, and retrieved the canteen she'd spotted earlier. It was three-parts empty.
The effort of making it to the partial shelter of the pile of rocks nearly made her pass out. "No," she muttered through gritted teeth. "I will not yield."
The wave of dark nausea slithered reluctantly away from the sixty-year-old woman.
If she fainted, then she would let go of the artery. And goodbye would be all she wrote.
" WHAT THE HELL— "
The cruise control had suddenly kicked itself out, dropping the engine revs and allowing the digital speedometer display to begin steadily falling down the scale.
Jeff pressed his boot onto the gas pedal, feeling the surge of raw power pushing him back into the leather bucket seat.
"Better," he said, and smirked. For the first time in over an hour he thought about Nanci Simms.
By now she was probably dead. The witch-queen's, bitch-queen's heart would finally have stopped beating, and Jeff could stop feeling scared of her.
That was good… mostly good.
The cruise control clicked out again, and the car began to slow. Jeff's mind was filled with dark memories and he hardly noticed, automatically stomping down again to send the Mercedes roaring up the long incline ahead of him.
The air conditioning didn't seem so wonderfully chilled. He put his hand out, over the narrow black grille, feeling the cool air on his palm. But it wasn't cold the way it had been. It was almost warm.
Now the speedometer was dropping again, down to fifty miles per hour, though he was pushing the pedal right to the metal.
"Come on," he breathed, feeling the first pricklings of panic touching the long hair at the nape of his neck.
The speedometer showed forty, and now the air was hot, hot as the blistering desert around him.
Jeff stamped down, allowing the pedal to come up, then pushing it to the floor, aware that it felt soggy, like treading hard into a thick layer of spongy, wet moss.
Then the speed dropped down to twenty-five.
Jeff's technical knowledge could have been written large on the head of an average-sized pin. If your car broke down, you called the garage, where some spic mechanic with a name like Vinny would make it work again. Out with the laser cred-card, and you were back on the highway once more.
Ten miles per hour, the engine barely whispering.
He relaxed, whistling softly between his teeth. One of the things that Jefferson Lee Thomas had learned in the past few months was that there wasn't much point getting ant-shit angry when things had slipped out of his control.
The sleek car rolled finally to a halt, the noise of the motor dying away.
Jeff applied the handbrake, feeling it lock tight. He reached and turned the key again in the ignition, knowing in his heart that it was a hopeless gesture. There was a harsh rattling sound, metal clattering on metal, showing not the least sign of starting up the engine again. Jeff leaned back in the seat.
Away to his right the sun was beginning to set, its orange fire surrounded by banks of ominous dark purple clouds.
NANCI LOOKED at the 9 mm Heckler & Koch automatic that rested across her lap. It had been an additional struggle to pick it up, but now she had the means of choosing the manner and time of her own passing.
Twice in the past hour she'd suffered agonizing cramps. A barbed band of white pain had tightened around her stomach, making her cry out in shock, her fingers slipping from their hold on the deep wound in her thigh.
Nanci knew enough about her own body to be certain that she was losing the struggle. Losing it more quickly than she'd hoped, with the specter of dehydration cracking her tongue and blurring her vision.
The precious drops of water in the canteen were eked out with the certain knowledge that the next morning would see the end of the line.
With evening closing in, Nanci had forced herself to scrabble painfully from the heap of rocks toward the corpses.
There were few things that Nanci Simms wasn't prepared to do, but even she winced with repugnance at applying her teeth to the throat of the first of the dead men. She bit and chewed at the ragged flesh, until salt blood came stickily between her lips. She nearly puked, but fought for control.
Sucking avidly at the wound.
JEFF WALKED stolidly south.
He'd taken care to fill a pack with some dried meat and a gallon of drinking water. The Port Royale hung from his shoulders, with extra ammo in the rucksack. His Smith & Wesson 4506 with the five-inch barrel and wraparound Delrin stocks was on his right hip. A supalite sleeping bag was strapped to the top of the pack. It was growing dark, and colder.
BY DAWN, things had changed drastically for both Jeff Thomas and Nanci Simms.
Things were very different.
Yet they were oddly very much the same.
Chapter Sixteen
"Happy birthday, dear Pamela, happy birthday to you."
Henderson McGill clapped his hands together, face flushed with an amiable mixture of excitement and draft beer from the cellar. "Come on, come on. How 'bout three cheers for the birthday girl?"
His oldest son, John, pounded on the oak refectory table. "Hear, hear, Dad! Three cheers now for the best little sister in the whole of the goddamn brave new world!"
The entire family joined together, celebrating the eighteenth birthday of Pamela McGill, third of the six surviving children.
It was early evening, mid November, up in Connecticut. A steady fall of snow had begun the previous night and had laid down a blanket of nearly six unbroken inches. Mac had been out with his two oldest sons around noon, all well armed, checking that nobody had been sneaking around their land. But the perfect whiteness was unsullied.
Jack, nearly seven, was sitting on the massive Victorian oak sideboard, drumming his heels together while he joined in the cheers for his sister. As he waved his arms around, the boy very nearly dislodged the print of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks that hung on the wall. His mother, Angel, waved a finger in stern warning.
Despite the difficulties of their isolation, caused by Earthblood, everyone had managed to find a present for Pamela.
Jeanne, her mother, had given her a small platinum ring, set with a tiger's-eye stone, that had belonged to her own mother. Angel had rummaged in her possessions for a cameo brooch on a thin chain of golden links that had been a wedding present ten years ago from Mac's mother.
John had carved a tiny goat from a lopped piece of apple wood.
Paul gave Pamela a somber black Apache tear, polished until it gleamed, set in a small box of maple with a glass top.
Jocelyn, Jack and Sukie had worked together, helped by their mother, to produce a collage picture, drawing on the shoe boxes of family photographs that lay in the closet beneath the stairs.
Mac had given a lot of thought to what he could give his daughter. Finally he settled on a fine illustrated edition of the poetry of Robert Frost, which had been a gift to him on his own eighteenth birthday from his old English teacher, Carla Wright. It was something that he'd always treasured.
The two women had spent hours browsing through the larde
rs among the makeshift shelves of potted and preserved foods, trying to find something that might somehow bring back the flavor of the old birthday parties.
"Listen to us, Mac," Jeanne had said, "talking about 'old' birthday parties. Like they happened a century ago."
"It was more than a century," he'd replied. "It was a lifetime back. It's only a year or so since the old times. But they're never going to come back. Not ever."
There'd been venison, a whole haunch cooked over an open fire in the backyard, though Mac and the two older boys had been concerned about the smell of the roasting meat attracting bad company.
Canned vegetables were offered with the roast, followed by an assortment of pies and pastries. Some fresh bread with almost the last of their shrunken supply of precious butter was also put on the table.
Angel had baked a beautiful cake, rich with dried fruits and marzipan. The only container large enough in the house for all the ingredients was the blue-and-white porcelain bowl from the bedroom.
It dated back into the eighteenth century, carried by Mac's ancestors from Scotland. The blurred outlines of the ancient flowers and thistles were barely visible on its smooth sides. Now it stood to one side of the sideboard, dangerously close to where Jack was perched.
The cake was ornamented with multicolored icing. Pamela's great love had always been reading, so Angel had made a pile of books from the sugary marzipan, setting them on a green grassy bank with a vivid blue stream flowing by.
"Time to cut the cake," said Mac.
"Yeah," chorused Paul and John. "Let's hear it for the cake."
"So beautiful, so rich," breathed Jeanne.
Pamela, eyes sparkling, stepped forward to the cake, holding a long butcher's cleaver in her right hand. She'd told everyone that she wasn't going to dress up, not even for her own eighteenth birthday, and wore denim dungarees. But the cameo brooch glittered on one of the straps, and the tiger's-eye ring shone on her left middle finger.
All around the cake, on its large turquoise plate, lay the detritus of the extraspecial meal. The ragged side of venison, dried bones thrusting through the frayed remains of the rich, dark meat. A bowl of buttered carrots, pallid grease congealing on its edges. The white sauce, flavored with nutmeg, now crusted and cold.
Mac wondered for a moment whether they should have cleared the table to give extra pride of place to the beautiful cake.
But it was too late now.
"Too late," he whispered to himself.
A few minutes ago he'd been distracted from the gift giving by the sound of a dog barking furiously a couple of hundred yards north, toward the frozen creek.
Now it had stopped, and the New England evening was totally silent.
"Make a wish as you cut it, honey," said Angel. "But don't tell anyone what it is, or it'll never come true."
The metal blade of the broad knife touched the green icing, near the pile of marzipan books.
"I wish…" Pamela began teasingly, her eyes closed, a half smile on her lips.
A wrenching of metal broke the expectant quiet. The heavy security shutters were torn off the east window of the room, and a Molotov cocktail hurtled through the glass to explode against the sideboard.
Flaming gasoline sprayed everywhere, covering the screaming figure of young Jack.
Simultaneously there was an enormous thundering blow against the front door, cracking it off its hinges. A shotgun was fired through the broken window, the starring lead catching John McGill through the throat, tearing his neck apart and rupturing his windpipe.
His blood splattered across the room, into Pamela's face, patterning the untouched icing of her cake with streaks of crimson.
"Guns!" Mac yelled above the screaming. "Get the guns!"
Jack, his clothes ablaze, had fallen from the sideboard and was running toward the hall. Angel grabbed him and flung him bodily to the floor, covering him with her body and beating at the flames with her bare hands.
It was a world of noise and fire and hideous violence.
Despite the appalling and unexpected carnage, the family had been well trained.
Jocelyn and Sukie had both dived under the dining table to lie sobbing alongside the thrashing, dying body of their half brother.
Effectively there were only four adults to try to repel the attackers: Mac, Paul, Jeanne and Pamela herself.
There were figures struggling to push aside the broken door and gain access through the hall. A window on the far side of the house had been broken, and Mac could smell more smoke.
In a moment of dazzling clarity he realized that it was all over.
Whatever happened in the next couple of minutes, life at the white frame house on Melville Avenue, Mystic, was finished.
"Take out the father!" shouted someone from the back of the building. It was a woman's voice, hoarse and flooded with anger and vicious hatred.
Mac was heading toward the hallway, intent on getting his own Brazzi shotgun. He ran past the blazing sideboard, slipping in the spreading pool of his oldest son's blood, when he became aware of movement behind him, by the smashed window.
There was a man in a fur hood, his head and shoulders halfway through the broken casement. He was holding a blue-steeled automatic in his right hand, leveling it at Jeanne, who was near the doorway.
Without breaking stride, Mac swiveled and picked up the heavy blue-and-white porcelain bowl, then heaved it as he would a discus. It sliced across the room and exploded in the man's face, driving jagged splinters into his eyes.
Before he could begin to scream in blinded horror, Mac had jinked sideways, plucking up the blood-slick hilt of the cleaver where Pamela had dropped it. He grabbed at the greasy hair of the yelling man, making his neck taut, the tendons standing out like harp strings.
He cut the throat with a single savage blow, then vaulted the corner of the table and reached the hall.
The attack had been far better organized than the previous raid against them by mad Preacher Casey. But the work that Paul and John McGill had put in to strengthen doors and windows had thwarted the outsiders.
The front entrance was a congested shambles of splintered wood and twisted steel, with fully half a dozen men fighting to get in. But Mac's five-round pump-action Brazzi rested on the antique settle in the hall with one of the Winchester Defender 1700s alongside it.
Mac's face was a distorted mask of blind hatred and rage, lips peeled back off his teeth in a feral snarl.
He grabbed up the blued-steel Brazzi and emptied it into the doorway. Dropping the shotgun without even glancing up to see what carnage the powerful shells had done, he snatched up the Winchester and fired off all eight rounds. He went on pulling the trigger again and again, even though the hammer was clicking on an empty chamber.
He wasn't aware of the shooting in the room behind him, blanking his mind off from the screaming and shouting, not even realizing that all of the noises were fading away.
All he could see was his youngest son enveloped in a golden hail of fire, and John, his firstborn, tumbling to the floor, arterial blood gouting over the fresh icing of the birthday cake.
Mac could see both scenes, repeated and repeated in his mind's eye.
Then a voice reached him, high and thin with pain.
"Dad!"
In front of him he saw a jumbled pile of meat. Raw and bloody.
"Dad? Stop it!"
Now the voice was familiar enough, though changed. Pamela. The birthday girl. He'd never heard her voice sound like that…on the edge of some undefinable terror…a voice from a nightmare.
Mac kept the pump-action Winchester going, squeezing the trigger time after time. He wasn't taking any chances on anyone trying to get in…into his home… and harming his family.
"They've gone." Tears were in her voice. "Please stop, Dad. The gun's empty."
He moved his feet, aware that he was standing in blood.
A pool of blood.
A lake of blood.
Blood still ooz
ing from the mountain of meat jammed in the front door of Melville Avenue, Mystic. Meat that contained sections that were almost human. A hand, and a portion of scalp. A severed foot, still in a hiking boot. A knife with its blade broken in a jagged edge of steel. A segment of flesh showing splintered ends of ribs.
The hammer clicked on the Winchester.
Mac felt a hand touch his arm, and he jumped, barely resisting the temptation to smash the butt of the gun into his daughter's face.
"Pamela?" he said, voice hoarse and strained, bringing the realization that he'd been yelling at the top of his voice since the first bomb came crashing into the party.
"It's over, Dad."
"You can put the gun down now, Jim. Down. It's over."
A new voice, Angel, standing in the doorway to the living room. Smoke was wreathing out into the bitter cold of the hall. Mac noticed that his wife was trembling, holding up her hands as though she was surrendering to some unseen enemy. Great blisters across her palms and fingers were leaking watery threads of crimson.
"John's dead," said Mac, nodding. He dropped the empty Winchester into the dark puddle around his feet. "And Jack?"
Jeanne was at his side, her arm around his shoulders. "Swallowed fire. Inhaled the flames. The rest of us are… oh God, we're here."
Mac did a quick recon of the house and the yard. Four of the corpses that lay ragged around the house were recognizable as local people. Two were the Baptist minister and his wife.
The rest were strangers.
THE DAY AFTER the burials of John and his younger brother, the McGills held a family council.
"Tainted with too much death," said Mac. "Thought this would be a safe place. We took our precautions, and it wasn't enough."
"We've done the repairs. Doors and windows are safe again, Dad."
He looked at Paul, now the oldest of his four children. "Safe for now. Sure. But what about the next time?"
"Should we try and wait out the winter? Move at the first real thaw?"
Angel's hands were wrapped in strips of clean linen and bound with plaster. Her face was pale, the tangled blond hair scraped away from her eyes.