by G X Todd
He listened closely as the echoes of his voice faded and heard a low murmur start up as the remaining men began talking.
At first it had been difficult to pinpoint Buzzcut’s location from the man’s shouting, especially the way the acoustics of the place made it echo and bounce, but as he’d continued his taunts Pilgrim narrowed down the man’s hiding place and now had a fairly good idea of where he’d taken cover.
They’re as distracted as they’re ever going to be.
Pilgrim stepped out from behind the counter and fired at the huge plant pot.
It shattered on impact.
Pilgrim ran.
He heard a cry of surprise but already he was ten yards up the walkway, his head tucked down, the rifle gripped mid-barrel so he could pump his arm good and fast.
More sounds erupted behind him. Shouts, sloshing water, heavy footfalls running in pursuit. He expected gunfire, but none came. Either they wanted him caught alive or they were conserving what ammunition they had left for when they could accurately take him down. They had already wasted a clip in the storeroom.
He didn’t slow when he reached the sliding doors but vaulted over the garbage can holding them open, stumbling when his left leg touched down. He staggered like a drunk for a few yards, regained his balance and sprinted under the covered portico and up the asphalt lane to the parking garage.
This was his last burst, he knew it. His lungs burned, his breaths rasped like gravel through his throat, his legs were slender saplings, bending, trembling, near to snapping. He just needed to get into the garage; the ink-black maw of its ‘Entry’ gate whispered encouragingly: ‘Just a little further and the darkness will swallow you up’, it seemed to say. ‘All these lovely shadows waiting to welcome you, friend, waiting to invite you inside. Just a little further now . . .’
But before he could reach the raised barrier a pair of dazzlingly white eyes found him, two harsh beams of light stabbing into his eyes. He squinted and turned his head aside. The scream of a lost behemoth tore the air and shook the ground beneath his feet, the newly awakened beast rising up from the garage’s bowels and coming straight for him. With a shrilling squeal, the creature veered and shuddered and showed him its flank. It was off-white and rectangular, once shiny but now faded and grubby.
An RV. A Coachmen, maybe, or an Itasca.
Pilgrim had a brief, blinding moment to be astonished and wondered if he would ever get used to the girl’s surprises.
There wasn’t anything smaller?
The side door flapped open, rebounding off the RV’s siding, the latch either broken or unable to catch.
The driver laid their hand down on the horn again and the off-white behemoth bellowed a breathless, birthing HOOOOUUUUNNN! What Pilgrim wanted was the opposite of birthing. He instinctively switched direction, darting to run alongside its flank, planning on climbing inside the belly of the beast and not on being expelled from it.
Shots rang out. Bullets thunked into the RV’s siding, chasing Pilgrim to the swinging door, where he leapt, throwing the rifle inside, and gripped on to the frame with both hands, hanging there for a moment, the dark, pungent interior clinging on to him with fingers fastened to eyes and nose and throat. A rain of bullets hammered into the swinging door, shoving it into his shoulder, one bullet blowing out a slim Perspex panel, plastic shards cutting his face.
The same vertigo he had felt when the girl placed her hand along his cheek struck him once more, and he felt himself tipping backwards, his fingers fumbling their hold. He had a vision of falling and tumbling under the vehicle’s wheels, the tyres trampling over him like a wild, stampeding elephant, leaving meaty smears of him on the asphalt. The RV turned sharply, whether by design or by accident it didn’t matter, because he was thrown inside. He tripped over the ratty carpeting and crashed into the dining table, its edge delivering a cracking blow to his pelvis and hips. He hunched over it, collapsing, whining for breath.
‘Pilgrim!’
It was the girl. She was half turned in her seat, scared eyes desperately searching for him in the darkness.
More bullets punched into the exterior panelling, some piercing the thin walls and smacking into the RV’s sink and cupboards. More glass shattered.
Pilgrim managed to rip one word up and out of his ravaged lungs.
‘DRIVE!’
The girl’s driving skills were not great, but they were serviceable. By the time they had sluiced through the flooded parking lot and wound their way back up the driveway to the top of the ridge, Pilgrim had left his post at the rear of the vehicle – where he had been watching the scattered men and women run around like lost little ants before disappearing back into the hotel-casino – and swayed his way up to the driver’s cabin.
Alex was sitting slumped in the passenger seat, flinching and stiffening each time Lacey took a corner, but she was awake and lucid. When she saw him she reached out a hand. For a moment he was unsure of what she wanted – he had nothing he could give her: no pain medication or clothing or water. But she interpreted his confusion and whispered that all she wanted was his hand.
He looked at her open palm, at the slim, elegant fingers, the same fingers Lacey had told him drew beautiful pencil sketches, and he suddenly yearned to see the shapes and sweeps and delicate grazes they could pull out of a pencil, to see the gliding strokes she committed to paper in intricate drawings that would hold his eyes captive for hours, a hundred hidden details lost inside the grey-leaded lines.
He placed his hand in hers and watched those slim fingers close over the back of his hand and hold on. Her grip was warm and surprisingly strong.
He met her eyes.
‘Pilgrim?’ she whispered. ‘That’s your name?’
He nodded.
‘Pilgrim,’ she repeated. ‘Thank you.’
He nodded again, because he could find no words. When she turned away and went back to watching the road, she kept hold of his hand.
CHAPTER 10
They parked the RV two streets over inside a bricked-up backyard, hidden from view. They didn’t leave the keys in the ignition like the previous owner had but took the keychain with them. Although no pursuers had chased after them on their drive back to Vicksburg (Pilgrim could only guess dissent had already set in after their leadership had been so thoroughly wiped out), he turned the hand-held radio on and, with the last of its battery, monitored the airwaves for activity. There was some – most of it incoherent and unhelpful – but nothing that caused him concern. Still, he would have chosen to leave the vehicle further away from the house, but the woman was unable to walk far; he and the girl had to hold her up between them. By the time they reached Lacey’s sister’s street, they had resorted to carrying her.
They took the stairs slowly. Pilgrim paused at the top to give the street a probing sweep. He would’ve liked to have spent longer at the task, but Lacey said his name in a low, fretful voice. There was still a possibility Dumont’s people – or maybe Buzzcut’s people now – would look for them, this Pilgrim knew, but they’d soon realise the task of finding three people in a city so large verged on the impossible and would quickly abandon the endeavour. That didn’t mean there weren’t others watching, though, the cunning-eyed man they had spotted earlier, for example, or another well-hidden onlooker who recognised an opportunity when he saw one. Pilgrim was still worrying about such threats from the shadows while Lacey awkwardly shuffled the last two steps across the stoop under Alex’s weight. She said his name again.
Pilgrim went to the front door and turned the ornate brass handle, using his shoulder to push the heavy door open. He didn’t see the small child sitting on the floor of the foyer – he was too busy glancing back over Alex’s head, giving the street a final scan – didn’t see the child, who had been sitting at the feet of the dead girl he had left in the straight-backed chair and staring up at Red’s scarf-covered face, start in surprise and jump to her feet. He didn’t see the unwieldly item the child had been clutching in her lap
. All Pilgrim heard was Lacey call out the child’s name –
Addison!
– and the sharp retort of igniting gunpowder. That’s when he did glimpse the antique Civil War-era pistol that the child held out – probably in exactly the way her mommy had taught her to back when she was still around.
It was a relic of a pistol, which should have been consigned to a museum long ago rather than used for home defence. Pilgrim knew it must have taken the girl a while to draw back the hammer, the mechanism old and stiff with age, the gun cumbersome in her small hands. It was a miracle she was able to hold the pistol at all let alone hold it steady enough to fire. Indeed, the recoil from the shot made her stumble backwards, knocked the pistol up and out of her grip, although Pilgrim doubted she would’ve had time to recock the gun before Lacey rushed at her.
As it turned out, all it took was one shot. It hit Pilgrim high on the left side of his chest, knocking a hole clean through him. It rocked him back on his heels.
A sense of weightlessness came over him, as if gravity had reversed and was buoying him up instead of holding him down. His ears closed, stuffed with a beating silence that should have alarmed him but which he found lulling and peaceful. He watched Lacey run at the girl, except it was in slow motion, everything wound down in speed, and Pilgrim had all the time in the world to watch the child’s pale, dirt-streaked face tighten in fear, watch her spin around and bolt out of the foyer, Lacey going after her, her foot connecting with the dropped pistol and sending it spinning away to smack up against the polished mahogany wainscoting. Then something made Lacey stop and turn, her eyes finding him, her face tightening with some emotion of her own – not quite fear but something close to it, something Pilgrim couldn’t quite identify or put a name to. And then it floated up to him out of nowhere.
Devastation.
Speed was still slow, so slow it took a while for Lacey to reach him. Plenty of time for him to lean back against the wall and for Alex, who was still at his side, to try in vain to prevent him slumping down, down, all the way down to the floor.
He calmly watched the two faces in front of him, how intense their expressions were as they reached for him, lifted his shirt, pawed at his chest, their hands gleaming like the polished wainscoting, except their hands were red and wet and not like the dark mahogany wood at all. He couldn’t help but think back to when Lacey had talked of living alone in that old house of her grandmother’s, about how it was like existing outside of the world, being a drifting phantom whose actions and thoughts affected nothing and no one. How it was like being dead.
Sound fitfully filtered back in, and all he heard was someone saying the same words over and over again: ‘It’s OK, it’s OK, it’s OK,’ and he realised it was him saying them, that he was trying to reassure, to comfort. But neither the girl nor the woman was listening. So he grabbed their hot, slippery hands, gripped on to them as tightly as he could, and said, ‘Listen.’ But they still didn’t listen so he said it again, louder. ‘Listen.’
They stopped, frantic-eyed and breathless.
‘It’s OK,’ he told them.
The girl started crying.
He held on to her hand. ‘No. Don’t. You have your family now. Alex, and Addison, and Voice.’
With her free hand, the girl wiped her tears away, a streak of his blood smearing across her cheek. ‘What?’ she whispered.
‘You called me Pilgrim. Only he knows that. You can hear him. I know.’
‘How—’
He didn’t let her finish. Already darkness waited for him each time he blinked; he had to snap his eyes open again because the dark called to him, wanted him to stay. ‘You mustn’t tell anyone . . . how you got him. Not anyone. Do you understand?’ He must have squeezed her hand too tightly, because she winced. ‘Promise me,’ he gasped.
She nodded. ‘I promise. I won’t tell.’
‘Good . . . that’s good.’ He relaxed, his hold loosening. ‘I had . . . a real name once.’ The words were harder to get out now, coming in gasps between his struggles to draw in wet, broken breaths. ‘And a sister. I told you . . . about her. I wanted to be a ghost, wanted to forget everything. But I can’t forget the colours. Or maybe it’s the colours . . . that won’t forget me,’ he mused, losing his train of thought. ‘Violet,’ he murmured. ‘My sister. Her name was Violet. And there’s Ruby-Red.’ He fought to focus back on the girl. ‘And you,’ he whispered to her. ‘You’re a colour to me, too. So bright . . . you hurt my eyes.’
He let his eyes close, not because it hurt to look at her but because he could see her whether they were closed or not. She was all the colours. Rubies, reds, violets; every colourful spark flying away from her.
His chest was a sun going supernova. It burned from the inside. Even as the life poured out of the hole above his heart, he held on to that searing image of colours and the girl.
‘Don’t go,’ the girl begged, and she was so close he could feel her words like gossamer on his face, like spun, rainbow-coloured webs, heavy and light at the same time. ‘I don’t want you to go. Please don’t. You’re my family now, too. Please don’t leave me.’
He fought to speak. ‘You shouldn’t . . . be afraid.’
She sobbed his name. Pilgrim, not Boy Scout. He liked how the sound of it fit the shape of her mouth.
‘You’re not alone . . . any more—’ He desperately wanted to speak her name, but time blew it away from him.
The voice whispered in his head: Defend her. And Pilgrim tried to speak these final words on his last, rattling breath, because they were important – he knew they were, the same way he knew the dirt would soon be parting to welcome him to sleep – but he wasn’t sure if he’d said them loud enough to be heard. The girl and all her sparking colours drifted away from him, and in the dark, floating in nothingness, the voice spoke again. It wasn’t his own voice any more, he wasn’t sure if it ever had been, although it had matched the intonations of his speech very well. Now Pilgrim had distance he could hear the individuality, the separateness. It had its own identity.
After everything, it’s a child who fells you.
Pilgrim wanted to shake his head, but there was nothing attached to his head. No neck, no shoulders, no nothing. Everything was slipping away, soon to be forgotten. And that was OK; he was good at forgetting.
A seven-year-old, the voice said.
Pilgrim disagreed, but his thoughts were like snowflakes, ungraspable and melting, and he couldn’t form them into words, no matter how hard he tried. She wasn’t just a child, he wanted to argue. She had Lacey’s blood in her veins, and that made her special.
And for the first time, in all his experiences with the girl, he was unsurprised by how this was to end.
It made him smile, although no one would ever see it.
THE LAST PART
The Girl Who Was Pilgrim
CHAPTER 1
It’s time, Voice said.
In the kitchen, Lacey stood at the back door, staring out over the porch and into her sister’s backyard. She had spent a lot of time here during the past fourteen days. She had a good view of the rectangular patch of disturbed earth that marked the graves. It had been hard, digging into that slab of mud. It had taken her hours, despite the rain having softened the dirt, and she hadn’t stopped until blisters formed on the bases of her fingers, and a seven-by-six-foot hole had opened up before her. She was getting depressingly good at grave-digging.
It’s time, Voice said again.
‘Maybe I’m not ready yet,’ Lacey replied, staring out at the wooden cross. She had constructed it by lashing two broken chair legs together.
Maybe you’ll never be ready, but we can’t stay here for ever.
Two weeks ago, she had carried Red out to the grave she had prepared and placed her on the left, arranging her as best she could, which meant in the position the girl had stiffened into while she had been left sitting in the foyer chair. She lay gently curled on her side at the bottom of the shallow hole as if settl
ing in for a long, peaceful nap. Her fingers were black, as though dipped in ink, and her skin was livid and marbled in green, but the smell of death and decomposition was strangely distant, detected at a low level but never overwhelming.
Next, Lacey had gone back to the foyer and looked down at the Boy Scout for a long while. He looked . . . content. That was an odd thing to say, she knew, but there was no other way to put it. He looked like he was sleeping. His face lay in unworried lines; the grimness that had often bracketed his mouth and narrowed his eyes was gone.
She had whispered his name. It still felt new to her.
He’s not Pilgrim any more, Voice had said sadly. He’s reached the end of this journey.
She’d tried lifting the Boy Scout up by the backs of his shoulders, hands jammed under his armpits, but he was too heavy. She had resorted to dragging him backwards by his booted feet across the polished wooden floor. His head had bumped down the steps when she pulled him off the back porch, and she’d winced at the thunking noise, offering a word of apology for the unintended mistreatment.
She had laid him to rest beside the girl. The red scarf she left draped over Red’s face, but after a moment Lacey had leaned down and untied the Boy Scout’s cotton bandana from around his neck and stuffed it into her pocket. In return she slipped the paperback copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes inside his shirt, next to his heart. She had first started reading it to Posy in the walk-in freezer and had finished it at Alex’s bedside while the woman lay feverish and restless, Lacey’s eyes constantly flicking over the top of the book until the woman grew quiet and settled back into sleep. Now, she gave the book back to him, because she wanted him to have something to read on his next journey, and something that would serve as a reminder of her.
She had touched the St Christopher through her shirt – something she found she was doing more often these days – and said her last goodbyes. Then she filled in the hole. And all the while she shovelled soil on to Pilgrim and Red, she was glad they wouldn’t be alone down there, that they had each other; two travellers whose journeys, against all the odds, had converged.