Sookie Stackhouse 8-copy Boxed Set

by Charlaine Harris

  Everything around us trembled and shook. Eric’s eyes were a little wider now, and he was concentrating so heavily on keeping himself moving that his strength was pulling on mine.

  “Pam,” I said, trying to push him into more action. I opened the coffin, after some desperate fumbling. Eric went over to his sleeping child, walking like his feet were sticking to the floor with each step. He took Pam’s shoulders and I took her feet, and we picked her up, blanket and all. The floor shook again, more violently this time, and we lurched over to the coffin and tossed Pam into it. I shut the lid and latched it, though a corner of Pam’s nightgown was sticking out.

  I thought about Bill, and Rasul flashed across my mind, but there was nothing I could do, and there wasn’t any time left. “We have to break the glass!” I shrieked at Eric. He nodded very slowly. We knelt to brace ourselves against the end of the coffin and we pushed as hard as we could till it slammed into the glass, which cracked into about a thousand pieces. They hung together, amazingly—the miracle of safety glass. I could have screamed from frustration. We needed a hole, not a curtain of glass. Crouching lower, digging our toes into the carpet, trying to ignore the rumbling noises in the building below us, Eric and I shoved with all our strength.

  Finally! We punched the coffin all the way through. The window let go of its frame and cascaded down the side of the building.

  And Eric saw sunlight for the first time in a thousand years. He screamed, a terrible, gut-wrenching noise. But in the next instant, he pulled the cloak tight around him. He grabbed me and hopped astride the coffin, and we pushed off with our feet. For just a fraction of a minute, we hung in the balance, and then we tilted forward. In the most awful moment of my life, we went out the window and began tobogganing down the building on the coffin. We would crash unless—

  Suddenly we were off the coffin and kind of staggering through the air, Eric holding me to him with dogged persistence.

  I exhaled with profound relief. Of course, Eric could fly.

  In his light-stunned stupor, he couldn’t fly very well. This was not the smooth progress I’d experienced before; we had more of a zigzag, bobbing descent.

  But it was better than a free fall.

  Eric could delay our descent enough to keep me from being dashed to my death on the street outside the hotel. However, the coffin with Pam inside had a bad landing, and Pam came catapulting out of the remains of the wood and into the sunlight where she lay motionless. Without making a sound, she began to burn. Eric landed on top of her and used the blanket to cover both of them. One of Pam’s feet was exposed, and the flesh was smoking. I covered it up.

  I also heard the sound of sirens. I flagged down the first ambulance I saw, and the medics leaped out.

  I pointed to the blanketed heap. “Two vampires—get them out of the sun!” I said.

  The pair of EMTs, both young women, exchanged an incredulous glance. “What do we do with them?” asked the dark one.

  “You take them to a nice basement somewhere, one without any windows, and you tell the owners to keep that basement open, because there are gonna be more.”

  High up, a smaller explosion blew out one of the suites. A suitcase bomb, I thought, wondering how many Joe had talked us into carrying up into the rooms. A fine shower of glass sparkled in the sun as we looked up, but darker things were following the glass out of the window, and the EMTs began to move like the trained team they were. They didn’t panic, but they definitely moved with haste, and they were already debating which building close at hand had a large basement.

  “We’ll tell everyone,” said the dark woman. Pam was now in the ambulance and Eric halfway there. His face was bright red and steam was rising from his lips. Oh, my God. “What you going to do?”

  “I have to go back in there,” I said.

  “Fool,” she said, and then threw herself in the ambulance, which took off.

  There was more glass raining down, and part of the bottom floor appeared to be collapsing. That would be due to some of the larger explosive-packed coffin bombs in the shipping and receiving area. Another explosion came from about the sixth floor, but on the other side of the pyramid. My senses were so dulled by the sound and the sight that I wasn’t surprised when I saw a blue suitcase flying through the air. Mr. Cataliades had succeeded in breaking the queen’s window. Suddenly I realized the suitcase was intact, had not exploded, and was hurtling straight at me.

  I began to run, flashing back to my softball days when I had sprinted from third to home and had to slide in. I aimed for the park across the street, where traffic had come to a stop because of the emergency vehicles: cop cars, ambulances, fire engines. There was a cop just ahead of me who was facing away, pointing something out to another cop. “Down!” I yelled. “Bomb!” and she swung around to face me and I tackled her, taking her down to the ground with me. Something hit me in the middle of the back, whoosh, and the air was shoved out of my lungs. We lay there for a long minute, until I pushed myself off of her and climbed unsteadily to my feet. It was wonderful to inhale, though the air was acrid with flames and dust. She might have said something to me, but I couldn’t hear her.

  I turned around to face the Pyramid of Gizeh.

  Parts of the structure were crumbling, folding in and down, all the glass and concrete and steel and wood separating from the whole into discrete parts, while most of the walls that had created the spaces—of rooms and bathrooms and halls—collapsed. That collapse trapped many of the bodies that had occupied these arbitrarily divided areas. They were all one now: the structure, its parts, its inhabitants.

  Here and there were still bits that had held together. The human floor, the mezzanine, and the lobby level were partially intact, though the area around the registration desk was destroyed.

  I saw a shape I recognized, a coffin. The lid had popped clean off with the impact of its fall. As the sun hit the creature inside, it let out a wail, and I rushed over. There was a hunk of drywall by it, and I hauled that over the coffin. There was silence as soon as the sun was blocked from touching the vampire inside.

  “Help!” I yelled. “Help!”

  A few policemen moved toward me.

  “There are people and vamps still alive,” I said. “The vamps have to be covered.”

  “People first,” said one beefy veteran.

  “Sure,” I agreed automatically, though even as I said it, I thought, Vampires didn’t set these bombs. “But if you can cover the vamps, they can last until ambulances can take them to a safe place.”

  There was a chunk of hotel still standing, a bit of the south part. Looking up, I saw Mr. Cataliades standing at an empty frame where the glass had fallen away. Somehow, he had worked his way down to the human floor. He was holding a bundle wrapped in a bedspread, clutching it to his chest.

  “Look!” I called, to get a fireman’s attention. “Look!”

  They leaped into action at seeing a live person to rescue. They were far more enthusiastic about that than about rescuing vamps who were possibly smoldering to death in the sunlight and could easily be saved by being covered. I tried to blame them, but I couldn’t.

  For the first time I noticed that there was a crowd of regular people who had stopped their cars and gotten out to help—or gawk. There were also people who were screaming, “Let them burn!”

  I watched the firemen go up in a bucket to fetch the demon and his burden, and then I turned back to working my way through the rubble.

  After a time, I was flagging. The screams of the human survivors, the smoke, the sunlight muted by the huge cloud of dust, the noise of the groaning structure settling, the hectic noise of the rescue workers and the machinery that was arriving and being employed . . . I was overwhelmed.

  By that time, since I’d stolen one of the yellow jackets and one of the hard hats all the rescuers were wearing, I’d gotten close enough to find two vampires, one of whom I knew, in the ruins of the check-in area, heavily overlaid by debris from the floors above. A bi
g piece of wood survived to identify the reception desk. One of the vampires was very burned, and I had no idea if he’d survive it or not. The other vamp had hidden beneath the largest piece of wood, and only his feet and hands had been singed and blackened. Once I yelled for help, the vamps were covered with blankets. “We got a building two blocks away; we’re using it for the vampire repository,” said the dark-skinned ambulance driver who took the more seriously injured one, and I realized it was the same woman who’d taken Eric and Pam.

  In addition to the vampires, I uncovered a barely alive Todd Donati. I spent a few moments with him until a stretcher got there. And I found, near to him, a dead maid. She’d been crushed.

  I had a smell in my nose that just wouldn’t go away, and I hated it. It was coating my lungs inside, I thought, and I’d spend the rest of my life breathing it in and breathing it out. The odor was composed of burning building materials, scorched bodies, and disintegrating vampires. It was the smell of hatred.

  I saw some things so awful I couldn’t even think about them then.

  Suddenly, I didn’t feel I could search anymore. I had to sit down. I was drawn to a pile created by the chance arrangement of a large pipe and some drywall. I perched on it and wept. Then the whole pile shifted sideways, and I landed on the ground, still weeping.

  I looked into the opening revealed by the shifted debris. Bill was crouched inside, half his face burned away. He was wearing the clothes I’d last seen him in the night before. I arched myself over him to keep the sun off, and he said, “Thanks,” through cracked and bloody lips. He kept slipping in and out of his comatose daytime sleep.

  “Jesus God,” I said. “Come help!” I called, and saw two men start toward me with a blanket.

  “I knew you’d find me,” Bill said, or did I imagine that?

  I stayed hunched in the awkward position. There just wasn’t anything near enough to grab that would cover as much of him as I did. The smell was making me gag, but I stayed. He’d lasted this long only because he’d been covered by accident.

  Though one fireman threw up, they covered him and took him away.

  Then I saw another yellow-jacketed figure tear off across the debris field toward the ambulances as fast as anyone could move without breaking a leg. I got the impression of a live brain, and I recognized it at once. I scrambled over piles of rubble, following the signature of the brain of the man I wanted most to find. Quinn and Frannie lay half-buried under a pile of loose rubble. Frannie was unconscious, and she’d been bleeding from the head, but it had dried. Quinn was dazed but coming to full awareness. I could see that fresh water had cut a path in the dust on his face, and I realized the man who’d just dashed away had given Quinn some water to drink and was returning with stretchers for the two.

  He tried to smile at me. I fell to my knees beside him. “We might have to change our plans, babe,” he said. “I may have to take care of Frannie for a week or two. Our mom’s not exactly Florence Nightingale.”

  I tried not to cry, but it was like, once turned to “on,” I couldn’t tell my tear ducts to switch off. I wasn’t sobbing anymore, but I was trickling steadily. Stupid. “You do what you have to do,” I said. “You call me when you can. Okay?” I hated people who said “Okay?” all the time, like they were getting permission, but I couldn’t help that, either. “You’re alive; that’s all that matters.”

  “Thanks to you,” he said. “If you hadn’t called, we’d be dead. Even the fire alarm might not have gotten us out of the room in time.”

  I heard a groan from a few feet away, a breath on the air. Quinn heard it, too. I crawled away from him, pushing aside a large chunk of toilet and sink. There, covered with dust and debris, under several large bits of drywall, lay Andre, completely out of it. A quick glance told me he had several serious injuries. But none of them was bleeding. He would heal them all. Dammit.

  “It’s Andre,” I told Quinn. “Hurt, but alive.” If my voice was grim, I felt grim. There was a nice, long wood splinter right by his leg, and I was so tempted. Andre was a threat to my freedom of will, to everything I enjoyed about my life. But I’d seen so much death that day already.

  I crouched there beside him, hating him, but after all . . . I knew him. That should have made it easier, but it didn’t.

  I duckwalked out of the little alcove where he lay, scuttled back to Quinn.

  “Those guys are coming back to get us,” he told me, sounding stronger every minute. “You can leave now.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  His eyes were telling me something. I wasn’t reading it.

  “Okay,” I said hesitantly. “I’ll go.”

  “I’ve got help coming,” he said gently. “You could be finding someone else.”

  “All right,” I said, not knowing how to take this, and pushed to my feet. I’d gone maybe two yards when I heard him begin to move. But after a moment of stillness, I kept walking.

  I returned to a big van that had been brought in and parked close to the rescue command center. This yellow jacket had been a magic pass, but it might run out any minute. Someone would notice I was wearing bedroom slippers, and they were ripping up, since they’d hardly been intended for ruin-scrambling. A woman handed me a bottle of water from the van, and I opened it with unsteady hands. I drank and drank, and poured the rest of the water over my face and hands. Despite the chill in the air, it felt wonderful.

  By then, two (or four, or six) hours must have passed since the first explosion. There were now scores of rescuers there who had equipment, machinery, blankets. I was casting around for someone who looked authoritative, intending to find out where the other human survivors had been taken, when a voice spoke in my head.

  Sookie?

  Barry!

  What kind of shape are you in?

  Pretty rocky, but not much hurt. You?

  Same. Cecile died.

  I’m so sorry. I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  I’ve thought of something we can do.

  What? I probably didn’t sound very interested.

  We can find living people. We’ll be better, together.

  That’s what I’ve been doing, I told him. But you’re right, together we’ll be stronger. At the same time, I was so tired that something inside of me cringed at the thought of making further effort. Of course we can, I said.

  If this pile of debris had been as horrifyingly huge as the Twin Towers, we couldn’t have done it. But this site was smaller and more contained, and if we could get anyone to believe us, we had a chance.

  I found Barry close to the command center, and I took his grimy hand. He was younger than me, but now he didn’t look it, and I didn’t think he’d ever act it again. When I scanned the line of bodies on the grass of the little park, I saw Cecile, and I saw what might have been the maid I’d accosted in the hallway. There were a few flaking, vaguely manlike shapes that were disintegrating vampires. I could have known any of them, but it was impossible to tell.

  Any humiliation would be a small thing to pay if we could save someone. So Barry and I prepared to be humiliated and mocked.

  At first, it was hard to get anyone to listen. The professionals kept referring us to the casualty center or to one of the ambulances parked nearby ready to take survivors to one of Rhodes’s hospitals.

  Finally, I was face-to-face with a thin, gray-haired man who listened to me without any expression on his face at all.

  “I never thought I’d be rescuing vampires, either,” he said, as though that explained his decision, and maybe it did. “So, take these two men with you, and show ’em what you can do. You have fifteen minutes of these men’s valuable time. If you waste it, you might be killing someone.”

  Barry had had the idea, but now he seemed to want me to speak for us. His face was blackened with smears of soot. We had a silent conference about the best way to go about our task, and at the end of it, I turned to the firemen and said, “Put us up in one of those bucket things.”
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  For a wonder, they did, without further argument. We were lifted out over the debris, and yes, we knew it was dangerous, and yes, we were prepared to take the consequences. Still holding hands, Barry and I shut our eyes and searched, flinging our minds open and outward.

  “Move us left,” I said, and the fireman in the bucket with us gestured to the man in the cab of the machine. “Watch me,” I said, and he looked back. “Stop,” I said, and the bucket stopped. We searched again. “Directly below,” I said. “Right below here. It’s a woman named something Santiago.”

  After a few minutes, a roar went up. They’d found her alive.

  We were popular after that, and there were no more questions about how we did it, as long as we kept it up. Rescue people are all about rescuing. They were bringing dogs, and they were inserting microphones, but Barry and I were quicker and more articulate than the dogs, and more precise than the microphones. We found four more live people, and we found a man who died before they could get to him, a waiter named Art who loved his wife and suffered terribly right up until the end. Art was especially heart-breaking, because they were trying like hell to dig the guy out, and I had to tell them it was no good. Of course, they didn’t take my word for it; they kept excavating, but he had passed. By that time, the searchers were really excited about our ability and wanted us to work through the night, but Barry was failing and I wasn’t much better. Worse, dark was closing in.

  “The vampires’ll be rising,” I reminded the fire chief. He nodded and looked at me for further explanation. “They’ll be hurt bad,” I said. He still didn’t get it. “They’ll need blood instantly, and they won’t have any control. I wouldn’t send any rescue workers out on the debris alone,” I said, and his face went blank with thought.

  “You don’t think they’re all dead? Can’t you find them?”

  “Well, actually, no. We can’t find vamps. Humans, yes. But not undead. Their brains don’t give off any, ah, waves. We’ve got to go now. Where are the survivors?”