No one would be coming to take her father’s body away. She’d climbed the stairs to the second floor, thinking she could fetch a sheet and bundle him up in it, then take him away from here, to the plot in the cemetery where he’d always planned to be laid to rest next to her mother. How in the world she’d manage to bury him, she didn’t know, but it seemed horribly wrong to leave him here, even though he’d told her he wanted her to go to the shelter.
His last wishes warred with her sorrow, with her need to do right by him, and she didn’t know what the hell she was supposed to do.
When she descended the stairs to the living room, though, she couldn’t see her father’s body anywhere. Relief came to her out of nowhere. Maybe she’d just thought she couldn’t find a pulse. Maybe he’d snapped out of that strange fever, and everything would be okay.
As she approached the sofa, however, she could see by the light of the floor lamp next to it that the cushions were all covered in fine gray dust. What the —
A horrible suspicion came over her, one she didn’t want to acknowledge. But she also knew deep in her heart that her father had been dead, that his heart had stopped beating a few minutes earlier. He hadn’t gotten up and walked away. And he’d been burning with such a terrible fever….
Her free hand, the one not holding the sheet she’d just gotten from the linen closet, went to her mouth. A strangled sound came from her throat, like a whimper throttled before it had a chance to really begin. And then she was turning and running out the door, hurrying to her car so she could turn on the radio. Not the satellite music she usually listened to, but a local news station.
What the hell was going on?
She’d halfway feared no one would be broadcasting, but a man’s voice came through the speakers. He sounded young and scared, and Madison had a feeling he wasn’t a reporter at all, but maybe someone who worked at the station.
Maybe he was on the air because everyone else was already dead.
“Emergency service are no longer responding,” he said. “They told us to stay indoors and away from other people, but that doesn’t seem to make any difference. If the Heat gets you, it’s over.”
The Heat, Madison thought. That’s what killed my father.
“There’s no contact from Washington,” the young man went on. His voice cracked on the last syllable. “No contact from anyone. I think they’re all gone.”
Gone. That word again. She didn’t want to hear it ever again.
After viciously stabbing the power button for the radio, she pressed down on the accelerator, weaving in and out of cars that seemed to have stalled in traffic. Or maybe the people driving them had dropped dead behind the wheel, leaving behind little piles of gray ash.
Her father had told her to go to the shelter, so that was where she’d head. Part of her thought that maybe she should go home first and pack some belongings, but that would be going the exact opposite direction of Clay Michaels’ home out on the border of Kirtland Air Force Base. Besides, he’d said the place was fully stocked with clothing, food, toiletries.
Weapons.
Of course, were weapons even necessary if everyone else was dead?
A hiccupy little sob forced its way out of her throat, and her eyes blurred with tears. But she kept driving. For one crazy instant, she had the idea that maybe she should go to the radio station, find the person who had been broadcasting there. No, that was stupid. She’d be going far out of her way, and from what he’d been saying, he could very well be dead by the time she got there.
Fingers white-knuckled around the steering wheel, she made herself drive on.
Some instinct made her park her car around the corner from Clay’s house. The last thing she wanted was to attract any attention. His street was dark, though. Two houses showed some kind of dim illumination from within, but that was the only sign of life.
Madison got her purse and the Mag-lite flashlight she always kept tucked under the passenger seat of her Nissan Rogue, then hurried down the sidewalk to Clay’s house. It, too, was dark. She didn’t know what to think of that. Maybe he was already hiding in the shelter, hoping against hope that Madison and her father would make it there.
Or maybe he’d succumbed to the Heat, the same as everyone else.
It was entirely possible that this was a fool’s errand, that at any second she’d break out in a sweat, her body flushing with a fever so hot it burned its victims to dust.
But she kept walking anyway, the flashlight clutched in her hand. She hadn’t turned it on, though, was carrying it more as a handy weapon than anything else. Using the flashlight for its real purpose would only attract the attention of anyone on the block who hadn’t yet succumbed to the horrible disease.
She went in through the side yard, not bothering to go into the house. There shouldn’t be anything inside she needed anyway. Her real destination was in the backyard.
The gazebo glimmered faintly white within a garden of carefully trimmed rosebushes. Madison went around to the back and then squatted down next to what looked like a control system for the sprinklers. It had a keypad, and she typed in the code her father had taught her.
Rosebud.
A little joke, and maybe a reference to the “hide in plain sight” nature of the shelter itself. In the next moment, a piece of the lattice at the base of the gazebo slid aside, and she remained crouching so she could slip under the floor of the structure and into the hatch that revealed itself there. Three turns, and it was open as well.
Inside was a corridor that sloped gently downward. LED bulbs burned overhead, lighting her way.
“Clay?” she called out. “It’s Maddie.”
Only silence in reply, and she swallowed. Well, the shelter was huge, stretching nearly to the property lines. How Clay had managed to build this place without his neighbors noticing, Madison had no idea. She’d have to ask him.
If he was here.
In a way, she didn’t know what would be worse — for him to have died along with everyone else, or for him to have survived so they’d be forced to share the bunker for the rest of their lives. She’d always looked on him as a sort of uncle, but would he see her as a niece…or as a woman who could help him repopulate the earth?
She pushed that thought aside, knowing she was allowing her mind to go down all sorts of crazy pathways because it was a good way of distracting herself from what had just happened to her father…to all of Albuquerque…to maybe the entire world.
The corridor widened as she descended, and she came to the final hatch, the one that would allow entrance to the actual living quarters themselves. As she opened it, she called out again.
“Clay?”
Nothing. She went inside and methodically walked from room to room, calling his name periodically. But he never answered. The shelter was clearly empty.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting. Sometimes Clay Michaels had seemed nearly invincible, but apparently even he couldn’t withstand the strange virus that had swept through the city’s population.
Fighting back panic, she headed to the room she knew had been designated as hers. It held a queen-size bed, a dresser, and a small table and chair in one corner. A door opposite the one she’d just entered led to a Jack-and-Jill bathroom.
She looked in the dresser and found stacks of jeans and T-shirts, as well as a drawer filled with underwear still in its packaging and several bras with the tags still attached. Creepy. Or was it? She’d left some things behind when she moved out of her father’s house. For all she knew, he’d used the sizes on those items to make sure the proper items waited for her here in case the worst happened.
Same thing in the bathroom — soaps and cleansers and moisturizers in all the brands she liked, an electric razor still in its box. Ditto for an electric toothbrush and a blow dryer with a diffuser that wouldn’t cause her long, curly hair to frizz.
All the comforts of home, she thought, and a weird little giggle rose to her lips. She pushed it back, beca
use otherwise she worried she might break into hysterical laughter then and there.
Since she didn’t know what else to do, she went to the media room and turned on the television. Even though this bunker had been prepared in the event the apocalypse occurred, it still had cable. Half the channels were blank, though, or showing reruns of sitcoms no one cared about. MSNBC had a camera fixed on an empty desk, as if someone had been sitting there but was now gone. For all Madison knew, the cameraman had dropped where he stood, but the feed kept rolling and probably would continue to do so until the power failed.
It wasn’t until that moment that she realized this was real. The Heat hadn’t hit only Albuquerque, or even just New Mexico. No one was safe anywhere.
She sat there all night, watching as the channels dropped out one by one. From time to time she dozed, then jerked awake, praying that she’d open her eyes and see Clay standing there, exuding his usual quiet confidence. By morning, she thought she would have been happy to be his Eve to her Adam, if only it meant that she wouldn’t be alone.
But he never came. And the next night she slept in the room that was supposed to be hers. And the night after that. All the cable stations were blank. Moving the radio along the FM and AM bands produced only static. Fear coiled in her belly, but she couldn’t give in to it. Not while waking, anyway. She would fall asleep and then wake screaming from nightmares where she was surrounded by a faceless horde, only to have them shiver into dust and blow away as she watched. Or the ones where her father would take her by the hand, and an unnatural heat would race up her arm, and she herself would begin to fall apart into nothing.
She screamed herself hoarse, but there was no one to hear her. By the time the fourth or fifth day rolled around, she realized dully that, for some strange reason, she was immune to the disease which had killed everyone else. Otherwise, she would have been dead her first night here.
The thought brought her no real relief.
Even now, after so many months in the shelter, sleep was something she indulged in because she knew she had to, not because she felt all that refreshed when she awoke each morning. While she understood intellectually that the air she breathed was filtered and scrubbed and cleaner than anything she would have been breathing back in her apartment, sometimes she felt as if she would choke if she couldn’t get any fresh air.
Those were the times she’d venture out into the upper world. The first had been about a week after she came to the shelter. She’d watched movies and TV shows, played games on the computer, read — anything to fill up the empty hours. What she’d really wanted, though, was to paint. She’d sketched a little with the ballpoint pens and computer paper she found in what had been intended as Clay’s office, but that wasn’t the same as the soothing process of mixing her own oils, planning the composition, spending hours on just one section until it was right. If she had to spend eternity in this place, then she needed something more meaningful than reruns of The Big Bang Theory to keep her occupied.
Besides, if everyone was dead, what difference would it make if she went out and raided a few art supply stores?
At first, she’d thought about taking her car, just because it would have been easier to bring back all the supplies she needed. For some reason, though, that didn’t feel right. A bright red compact SUV maneuvering along Albuquerque’s deserted streets would be far too conspicuous.
So she’d taken the electric bike, which was fast and silent, and laboriously hauled it out from under the gazebo, then headed out into town. There was a store called Artisan up on Monte Vista that wasn’t too far from Clay’s house, so she decided it would be her first stop. It was during that expedition that she’d seen the band of survivors pass by, and had done nothing. Even now she wondered what would have happened if she’d gone with them, wherever it was they’d been headed.
But she hadn’t, had instead hidden until they were gone, then made her way inside Artisan. The front doors were unlocked, and she worried that the store might have been looted. Aside from the cash register standing open, though, she hadn’t found any sign that anyone had come in and helped themselves to the shop’s wares. She supposed that art supplies were pretty far down the chain when it came to the necessities required for surviving the apocalypse.
Carrying pre-stretched canvas on an electric bike was tricky, and so she’d only grabbed a couple small ones, no bigger than sixteen by twenty inches, along with a bag of paints and brushes and some pencils and charcoal, just for when she didn’t want to be working with oils. The trip back had been harder than she’d thought, and she’d had to stop several times to adjust everything she was hauling.
One of those stops probably saved her life, because it was then that she saw her first djinn. She’d paused in an alley between a liquor store and a pawn shop so she could redistribute her loot, and then heard a strange tearing sound coming from somewhere above, almost as if the sky had been ripped open. At the same time, the street echoed with the sound of running feet.
She had to look, because that sound meant someone had to be alive. Someone who could erase the painful solitude she’d been living in for the past week.
Pounding down the center of Washington Street was a Hispanic man probably a few years older than she, maybe close to thirty. Sweat soaked the T-shirt he wore, even though the day was fairly mild, and he kept casting terrified glances upward.
Puzzled, Madison looked up as well, wondering what in the world could possibly have him so frightened. And then she saw — well, at first her mind didn’t want to grasp that unthinkable vision, couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
Hovering approximately twenty feet above the ground were two men. That is, they looked like men, and at the same time couldn’t possibly have been, not with the way they hung in the air with no visible means of support. They had black hair that whipped around their faces in an unseen wind, as did the flowing garments they wore — some kind of open robes over blousy pants. Their bodies were magnificent, their faces something she would have liked to paint…except for the expressions of maniacal delight they wore.
They threw back their heads and laughed, and then they dove.
Madison barely ducked her head in time. Even so, blood sprayed across her face in a warm mist. One terrified whimper escaped her throat before she cut it off, knowing somehow that she would share the same fate as that stranger in the street, if those two unnatural men should happen to hear her.
She used his shrieks of agony to cover her escape, taking off down the alley and then pushing the electric bike to its very limits so she could get away as quickly as possible. Even when she reached the shelter, a good two miles away, she kept glancing upward, certain that they must have tracked her there.
But the skies remained empty. She hadn’t dropped any of her supplies, probably because she’d been terrified that those two impossible creatures who looked like men would hear the clatter the canvases made as they hit the pavement.
And she’d stood in the shower afterward for nearly an hour, willing the hot water to rinse away every last trace of blood spatter. It couldn’t get rid of those screams, though. They kept ringing in her ears.
A month passed before she gathered the courage to venture out again. By then the fires she’d seen raging on the UNM campus had burned themselves out, and the skies were clear, the ultra-hard, bright blue of a New Mexico autumn. The air had begun to pick up a slight bite, and Madison had shivered in her T-shirt. The shelter was always kept at a perfectly controlled seventy-two degrees, and so she hadn’t even stopped to think about what the outside temperature might be.
Exactly what had driven her forth again, she couldn’t say for sure, except she had to know. The horrible events of the day when she’d gone out to fetch her art supplies had taken on the quality of a nightmare, and she began to wonder if she’d imagined the whole thing.
But she saw them again — or rather, two other beings who resembled the first two superficially but who she thought were different people
. This time they were up on Menaul. The screams she heard that time were more or less the same, although it sounded as if more than one person was their target. She’d fled back to the shelter, shaking, wondering how on earth the world could have gone any more insane than it already was. After she’d recovered herself somewhat, though, she went to the computer and started going through the database, trying to put a name to those creatures she’d seen.
And that was when she first read about the djinn. Her mind didn’t want to believe such a thing could be possible, but she’d seen it for herself. Was their presence any crazier than a disease that could kill almost the entire population of the planet and leave behind only dust?
Since she’d managed to escape the djinns’ notice, she became a little bolder after that. One time she even made the trek to her old apartment to claim some items she’d been missing — a few favorite pieces of clothing, a locket containing a photograph of her parents on their wedding day, both of them sunny and happy and completely unaware of what lay ahead for them. A coral and turquoise cross that had once belonged to her mother. Madison wasn’t religious, but she remembered her mother wearing that pendant, and she wanted it with her now, after the world had ended.
Otherwise, though, her expeditions kept her closer to home, and often she popped out just long enough to snap a few photographs, something that would provide her with more material for her paintings. Winter came, and went. In early spring she saw one of the djinn doing a casual sweep of the city, his blue silk robes blowing in the wind as he circled overhead like the world’s largest, deadliest raptor.
But he was the last.
Except the man she’d seen today.
She stared up at the ceiling, which was faintly lit by the warm glow of the Himalayan salt lamp on top of the dresser. It didn’t matter to her whether the lamp really worked — it was supposed to put out negative ions, or something like that. What mattered was that it held the darkness at bay, allowed her to shut her eyes and know that she would be able to awake in the morning.
Forsaken (The Djinn Wars Book 5) Page 3