Night Road

by A. M. Jenkins

  “No,” Cole said with certainty. “No one in the Colony.”

  “I was thinking about Bess.”

  Usually when someone else said her name, it was like a little jolt, as if he’d been pricked with a knife. He waited for a moment now, but the jolt never came.

  “Think about it, Cole. She was different the last time she came in. She’d always been a bit snappish, eh? Not inclined to accept her situation—even after, what? Sixty years? Then all of a sudden she comes in in a downright funk, refusing to speak to anyone. Wouldn’t even look any of us in the face.”

  “She was angry with me.”

  “She was always angry with you. But didn’t she seem different that last time?”

  “Well, she was sad.”

  “She was different, lad. Suddenly different. That’s a bit odd for one of us, isn’t it? Doesn’t it make you think something happened to her? That maybe she did something she didn’t like, was dead set against? Something she’d always hated you for doing?”

  Cole thought about it. Strange, to just pull the situation out and think about it as a theoretical problem, uncolored by guilt or shame.

  “That’s quite a deductive leap,” he told Johnny. “To go from saying she was sad to saying she created a heme and abandoned him.”

  “Yes. But it’s something to consider. A possibility.”

  There was a lot to consider, and plenty of time in the backseat to consider it. Cole did a lot of thinking on that long trip back.

  So did Gordo, apparently.

  Cole had fallen asleep somewhere around Philly. When he opened his eyes, he saw that Gordo was watching him.

  “Where are we?” he asked Gordo sleepily.

  “I think we’re almost out of New Jersey.”

  Cole nodded. He didn’t feel like trying to sit up.

  “Hey. You awake?” Gordo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it okay if I tell you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m, um…sorry about what happened to you.”

  “So am I.”

  “It was awful. Your eyes were open.”

  “Really?” That must have been rather horrifying.

  “Yeah. They didn’t look real; they looked like glass. And that thing sticking out of your chest.” Gordo shuddered. “I almost threw up.”

  “Good thing you didn’t.”

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “You know hemes can’t die.”

  “But you looked dead. And it was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Cole told him. “It was mine. I was careless.”

  “No, it was mine. I know it was. If I’d done everything like you told me to, he never would have…It wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Maybe not, but the bottom line is that I misjudged. I was careless of my surroundings and made mistakes of timing—”

  “Oh, you two,” Sandor said from the front seat. “Fault fault fault, blame blame blame. Can’t you just be kind to yourselves? Really, either one of you could easily beat yourself senseless with guilt. It’s very neurotic if you ask me.”

  Cole wanted to retort, but he couldn’t think of anything to say. The annoying tiredness had begun to creep over him again. But there was something he wanted to know. “Gordo,” he said, “Sandor said you came over to talk about something, the night you found me.”

  Gordo shrugged. “Well, yeah. I guess.” He sounded embarrassed.

  “What was it?”

  “It wasn’t important.”

  “I’d like to know. If you hadn’t come in—how did you get in anyway?”

  “The door was unlocked. I didn’t try it, though—I wouldn’t do that. Sandor did.”

  “I was concerned,” Sandor said from the front seat. “You’d had a rough evening. And then you didn’t answer the door for hours. It’s not like you to ignore people knocking.”

  Cole kept his attention on Gordo. “So what did you want to say?”

  “I dunno.” Gordo shifted in his seat. “It’s just that…well…okay.” He eyed Cole. “You told that lady I was a virgin, didn’t you?”

  It was an accusation, and for a moment Cole didn’t understand.

  Then he remembered: Crystal, the omni.

  “Because it’s not true,” Gordo said with a wounded air. “You know?”

  Cole did know, but he’d thought a helpful lie would make the evening go more smoothly. And it had. Crystal had approached Gordo gently and with patience.

  “There’s no way you could be, Gordo,” Sandor commented. “Not after two weeks in the Building.”

  “I just don’t think Cole should tell people something like that about me when it’s not true.”

  Cole started to say he was sorry—but he wasn’t. He was glad he’d told that particular lie, and that Gordo had been compelled to come over and correct him.

  “I won’t do it again,” he told Gordo instead. “And,” he added, “I know it’s not true.”

  Gordo nodded. “Damn straight,” he said.

  Cole was very weary now and closed his eyes for what felt like a second. But when he opened them the car was no longer on the freeway. It had stopped at a traffic light, and Gordo was talking to Sandor and Johnny.

  “…I could almost start to get used to living this way,” Gordo was saying. “But it’s dark when I go to bed, and it’s dark when I wake up, and I can’t get used to that.”

  “You can leave a light on,” Cole said.

  “He’s awake again,” Sandor commented.

  “How are you feeling?” Johnny asked. “Any Thirst yet?”

  “No,” said Cole. “Not yet.” He didn’t like to think how much he’d taken from that girl.

  “It’s not the same,” Gordo told Cole. “The colors are different than they are in sunlight.”

  “I guess I’ve forgotten.”

  “They look…fake.”

  Cole thought about it. In malls or stores, everything was too bright, lacking shadows. Bars and nightclubs were pools of dark punctuated by glaring neon or dim, recessed bulbs. “You can see sunlight in movies,” he pointed out.

  “It’s still not the same. Sometimes I wish I could see a sunset. Just for a few seconds. I’d like to see all those colors. Do you think it would kill me?”

  “No. I think it would tatter your skin and boil your brain, but I don’t think it would kill you.”

  “Cole’s back in form,” Sandor remarked to Johnny.

  Johnny just laughed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  IN Manhattan, Cole did not stay in four-and-a-half, but in one of Johnny’s bedrooms. He spent the first evening on the patio, listening to speculation about Royal and letting Sandor and Gordo field questions about the trip.

  “It’s been eventful” was all he would say when anyone asked. He felt that was enough. He knew he’d be moving on soon—he still had a responsibility to Gordo, which he had no intention of shirking. In the meantime he was glad to see Sandor take the boy out of the Building to feed.

  Good old Sandor. Now Cole learned, belatedly, that his friend had straightened out another screwup for him.

  Alice was the one who told Cole. While the others were deep in discussion, she came over and gently informed him that he must always consider carefully before using a Colony phone to dial 911. When he’d used Sandor’s cell, Alice said, he’d left a trail connecting the unconscious girl directly to the Building.

  It turned out that Sandor had known this. He hadn’t said a word to Cole—just quietly set about taking care of the problem and let Cole go to his room to get some sleep.

  When Alice went back to her seat, Cole was left feeling like an idiot. He couldn’t help but consider the various ways Sandor had stepped in to pick up the slack for him in the past few days. And had always been there to do so, Cole saw now—even when Cole had thought of Gordo as his own exclusive burden. From the very beginning, too—God, Johnny had even laid it out clearly: There would be two of them, a safety net, a
shared responsibility.

  I’ve been stupid, Cole told himself. Stupid, blind—and monstrously conceited.

  By the wee hours the talk on the patio was still going strong. Sandor and Gordo were back from their hunt. Cole had not moved from his cushioned wicker chair. His feet were propped on a stool Nell had brought for him. He had nothing to say, nothing to add to the conversation, and he found himself drowsing.

  But he wasn’t willing to go to bed just yet. The familiar voices rising and falling around him made him feel immersed in a warm pool of companionship. He knew that if he opened his eyes, the feeling would disappear. It was nothing he could see, nothing he could touch, nothing he could hold on to. And he knew there was no real safety in it—no heme could ever truly be safe—just a sense that hands nearby were prepared to bear him up. He could falter, or fall—he could even break entirely—and hands lay ready to take on some of his load so that disaster might not follow his failures. And life might possibly even go on as if he hadn’t broken at all.

  The second evening, when the excitement had died down a little, Cole slipped out of Johnny’s apartment to ride the everlasting elevator up to the fourth floor.

  He still wasn’t back to full strength yet and was sucking in air by the time he got to the landing at four-and-a-half. There he stood for a moment, catching his breath, peering up at the fifth-floor landing. The light was still on, of course. The walls glowed yellowish but bright.

  He’d dreaded going up there. He had to admit: All these years he’d been wielding the mere possibility of going up there as a whip to punish himself. He’d thought that facing her shattered body again was the worst thing he could experience. He’d feared it; thought it would break him somehow.

  But the idea of breaking didn’t seem so concrete anymore. He’d cracked in more than one way lately, and yet he was still standing. And it now seemed that the worst thing about Bess had already happened to him.

  It hadn’t been when she’d fallen—he’d never really known for sure exactly when that happened anyway. And it wasn’t seeing her afterward. Certainly that was a horrifying slice of time, a captured snapshot of emotion that remained crystal clear in his brain. But that was all it was. She was already gone by then. He’d already stood the worst that could happen, on the day she’d lain on that sunny sidewalk.

  It had happened when he’d turned back.

  That was the worst. All his will crumbling in the face of an impossible task, his body eaten by light and his brain slammed by an idea that was too monstrous to realize: His Bess was gone. That moment had knocked his world so completely off center that the fact he’d somehow remained standing through it slipped by without any notice.

  It wasn’t as though he’d made a choice to stand it. He just had, somehow.

  He didn’t know whether any sliver of her mind was still attached to the physical framework. Perhaps she was like a primitive creature that could experience light and dark without awareness of either. No matter what, she wouldn’t know he was there—he was sure of it. Even if she were trapped floating above that river of people, as he had been, she wouldn’t know he was in the room, sharing space with her still-living body.

  But he’d know. He’d know she wasn’t alone. He’d know that she was still connected to this earth.

  And that he was connected to her.

  I’m creating my own journey, he thought. Then he caught the railing with his hand and slowly started up.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A “vampire” story seems an odd place to pay tribute to books about American pioneers, but so it is. Conrad Richter’s Awakening Land Trilogy (The Trees, The Fields, and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Town) give me the same delight now that they did when I first read them in the 1980s. Richter’s love and respect for his characters, their dialects, and their customs permeate his stories, and his descriptions of the old forests of the Northwest Territory bring a now-extinct landscape to life. And that is why Richter’s writing—especially The Trees and The Fields—inspired parts of Cole’s backstory in Night Road.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am humbly grateful to Marthe Jocelyn, Robert Lipsyte, and Norma Fox Mazer for their ability to look at a working draft of eighty pages and see past its flaws to its possibilities.

  I would also like to clone Rex Naylor and distribute him to all writers in need of a supportive spouse.

  About the Author

  A. M. Jenkins is the award-winning author of DAMAGE, BEATING HEART: A Ghost Story, and the Printz Honor Book REPOSSESSED, and lives in Benbrook, Texas, with three sons, two cats, and two dogs.

  Jenkins received the PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship for NIGHT ROAD.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Also by A. M. Jenkins

  Breaking Boxes

  Damage

  Out of Order

  Beating Heart: A Ghost Story

  Repossessed

  Credits

  Jacket art © 2008 by Larry Rostant

  Jacket design by Joel Tippie

  Copyright

  NIGHT ROAD. Copyright © 2008 by A. M. Jenkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition July 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-196486-2

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