Blood Run (22 page)

Miller handed him a wet rag. “Evans brought you back,” Miller said, and Billet looked to where he sat against the wall.

“Thanks, man. I owe you,” Billet said, his voice breaking. He cleared his throat and spit again to cover the break.

Evans’ face was hard, half-shadowed. He looked at Riker. “I put bolts into the two on Shields, but he’d bled out by then. I staked him, anyway, just to be sure,” he said, and his eyes glittered in the lantern light, moving to Billet. “I’d have staked you, too, Billet, had you started to change. You don’t owe me anything.”

“If you’d done that, you might have been killing him for no reason,” Peter’s voice floated out of the blackness behind the counter. “People can survive a bite.” He stepped into the glow of the Coleman. His face was pale and still, but he stared at Evans steadily.

Evans shifted, bringing his knees up and resting his arms across them. “Yeah, well…I’m not going to take any chances. I know I wouldn’t want to live as a half-and-half,” he said and looked at Peter from half-lidded eyes. Then he tilted his head back, dismissively. “They’re freaks.”

Peter had met people like Evans before: closed-minded, tough, defensive; it was a bad combination. They seemed to forget–or not care about–the fact that Peter’s state gave hope to everyone; that his immunity might be the key to a cure for those already infected along with a vaccine for the survivors. It was the whole reason he and Promise were making this trip.

Peter thought that Evans seemed to relish the state of the world as it had become. He seemed happier with the broken-down state of society. The wolf-pack mentality. The killing.

Part of Peter hated Evans for his view, but another part understood that there might be good reason not to trust someone like himself. A waxing and waning part of Peter reveled in the cooling light of the moon and sometimes woke in the night because the rich scent of blood slept enticingly close by–could he be trusted?

He didn’t know. And it troubled him.

Riker recognized the tension between the two men, but decided not to do anything about it, not yet, anyway. If it had been between two unit members, he would have, but the civilians wouldn’t be with them for long, and Riker appreciated a soldier like Evans. He was a dangerous dog, but as long as he respected the leash, then Riker was satisfied.

He’d just have to keep him very short leashed. He was confident enough in his abilities as a leader to know that his leash hand was strong.

Chapter 3

They left Masonville at first light. The little girl, Nancy, rode with Riker and Miller. Riker put Lu with Billet, leaving Evans to drive a Humvee alone. Or not entirely alone, if you counted Shields’ body wrapped up tight on the roof.

Shields’ death was the first Riker’s unit had experienced while on a patrol. Their job was dangerous, but they were well-practiced, used to the strictures of this new life. Riker knew it was going to hit Billet the hardest. That’s why he’d put Lu with him. Lu had a calming effect.

“Billet looked terrible. Those black eyes. Wish we had ice for him,” Miller said and then sighed. She had spent a fitful night, curled around Nancy as the girl jerked and twitched in her sleep. She’d woken this morning incredibly fatigued but knew one restless night couldn’t account for it. What she had was more a tiredness of the soul. “You’re going to have a problem with Evans and the civilian.”

“It’s possible,” he said. “We’ll just have to push for Jersey and hope it contains itself until we can drop Peter and Promise at the base.”

Miller noted Riker’s use of their names instead of referring to them as civilians. She knew why he did that…he didn’t want to dehumanize them in any way; even though it was common soldier protocol. Riker was a good man. Miller would be halfway to being in love with him already, if she swung that way. But she didn’t.

Tara crossed her mind, and Miller smiled out the window. Pretty, capable Tara, who was waiting for her back in Delaware. They’d always talked about adopting, before everything had gone haywire…maybe Tara would like to meet Nancy.

Miller pulled the girl tighter to her side, but Nancy did not respond; she just lay passively against Miller like a doll. The little girl seemed shut down, pulled into herself. Her eyes were dazed, and her shivering was constant, although it was warm in the Humvee. Miller squeezed the girl again, trying to reassure her, but the girl’s teeth chattered on, and her cloudy eyes stared vacantly at nothing.

It was quiet in the Humvee with Billet and Lu. Although he normally drove, Lu’d asked Billet if he wouldn’t mind driving for a while. Lu knew it was better for Billet to be doing something.

For his part, Billet was glad of his black eyes and swollen nose. The physical manifestation of pain was a good distraction from the mental pain of losing Shields. He was glad, too, that no one (Evans) would be able to remark on his tears, hidden as they were in the dark creases of his bruises.

Behind them, in the last Humvee, Evans began to talk to the corpse strapped above him. He told Shields that Shields would not have wanted to live as a vampire; that it would have sucked, so to speak. His eyes slid to the rearview mirror, and he caught sight of Peter on Snow. Guy thought his shit didn’t stink, right? Look at him back there, riding a horse like some damn…knight or something. Peter smiled, and his mouth moved as he said something Evans couldn’t hear. Evans shifted his gaze until Promise came into view.

“A stuck-up princess for the fair knight, right, Shields?” Evans said. He glanced at the roof above him and grinned nastily. “She could ride
me
any time she wanted.” He laughed out loud, and but stopped quickly, realizing he laughed alone.

“He doesn’t like you, Peter,” Promise said. She didn’t have to say who…Peter would know who she meant.

“He just doesn’t know me,” Peter said and smiled at her. “A few more nights together and we’ll be best of friends.” His tone was only mildly sarcastic, and she realized he sounded tired.

“Didn’t sleep well?” she asked, and he merely shrugged and offered her a wan smile. In a sense, she realized, it might have seemed a ridiculous question. Shields’ death and everything that had happened should have made the night one of horror for them all, but like most survivors, they’d all become frighteningly acclimated to the grinding nightmare of this new life. What was one more gruesome death among the many they’d
all
seen with first-hand horror?

Promise glanced at the body on the roof of the Humvee in front of them and wondered if she was becoming hard in some way that was beyond her understanding. It kept slipping her mind that someone had died last night–four someones if you counted the girl’s dad and the two vampires that had landed on Shields. And she found herself more and more inclined to ‘count’ the vampires–especially in light of her little brother.

Her mind turned to Chance, and she wondered how he’d been last night. They had him trapped in the laundry room of her old house, and Mark and Lea were keeping watch over him. Vampire or not, to Promise, he was still just a little kid.

He had been born when Promise herself was nine years old, and she’d loved him without measure from the day her parents had brought him home, swaddled tightly in a blue blanket. That had been a whole different world back then. Even though it’s only been two years since the vampire plague began, Promise views the ‘then’ with a nostalgia the strength of which is usually reserved for residents of a nursing home.

She reflected that her post-vampire years, though only two, seem double in time to the sixteen years she had ‘pre’.

“It was a bad first day,” Peter said, breaking into her reverie.

She glanced at him and smiled, but the smile didn’t last long. Her legs were aching from yesterday’s marathon ride, and she wondered when she’d get acclimated, if ever.

“And a bad first night,” she said.

“Yeah, that too,” Peter said. “Worse for them than us, though. And the worst for that little girl, losing her dad.”

“And almost losing herself,” Promise finished.

It seemed to put an end to the discussion, and she was sorry she didn’t seem able to hold up her end of the conversation. She wanted to shake the gloomy feeling that she’d woken with this morning, but the truth was, she felt heavy with foreboding. Even this bitter day, so gray and overcast, seemed an indication of bad things to come. Promise lifted her gloved hands to her mouth and breathed into them.

Lightning struck off to the south, miles away, but she fancied she could feel the electricity tingling along her arms and tightening her stomach. She glanced nervously at the woods nearing the sides of the road. They were dark and dense with coldly skeletal trees. Here and there, she saw patches of the kudzu that would eventually become so thick that the forest would look like a giant child’s carelessly tossed green blanket.

She shivered and looked ahead, but her eyes caught Evans’ in the rearview mirror of the Humvee. He was staring at her intently, his eyes half-lidded and predatory.

She shivered again and glanced at Peter, but his attention was on the woods on his side of the road. She was swept all at once with homesickness and an odd sense of abandonment…as if everything she used to know–her comfortably boring life, happy parents, beloved little brother–had left
her
behind. As if she were the one who’d died and now moved through gray a purgatory of endless loneliness.

Far distant, thunder rumbled.

~ ~ ~

That night, they camped in an abandoned barn. They had been trying to make it to the next semi-big town, but the rain had finally come, slowing the convoy. It was a cold rain, with occasional tinks and plinks of ice to remind them it was January in the Northeast.

The Humvees had braked at one point in mid-afternoon–before they’d come across the barn–and Riker had gotten out and run back to Promise and Peter on the horses. He’d wanted them to pile into a vehicle, let the horses trot behind, but Promise had refused.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Riker had shouted over the downpour, his hand shading his eye from the stinging drops. “You’re going to freeze to death before we get to the next town!”

“I’m not leaving the horses!” Promise shouted, and Riker had to resist an urge to pull her bodily from the horse. He had to remind himself that she was an adult, capable of making her own decisions.

“I’m not saying to leave the horses behind! Let them follow us! I want you two in a vehicle where it’s dry!”

“I don’t know if they’ll follow, and I’m not tying them to the back of one of those things. They could get hurt!” She didn’t have to tell him that she especially wasn’t going to tie the horses to Evans’ bumper…her fear of him was obvious to Riker. “I’m fine!” she said. “Peter and I are both fine…you’re the one getting soaked!” Suddenly she grinned at him, and he was swept again with the urge to pull her down, but also with a sudden remembrance of his own, lost daughter. She’d just been getting to the defiant stage when the plague had taken her from him.

“You’re being insolent!” he shouted over the rain, “And short sighted!” He looked at Peter in exasperation, but Peter only shrugged.

“We really are okay! We were prepared!” Peter said and gestured to the heavy, rubber slickers and wide-brimmed hats they wore. They turned horse and rider into one being. Underneath, they were bone dry and mostly warm as the horses’ body heat filled the slickers. “Let’s just hurry up and get where we’re going! It’s a waste of time standing around arguing, and I don’t think you’re going to win…do you?”

Another spate of hail had decided Riker, and he’d trotted back to the lead vehicle. Miller was driving, and Nancy scooted away with a yelp when he pulled himself into the passenger seat. “Move out!” he said and realized he was still yelling; his ears had not caught up to the quieter inside of the vehicle.

Nancy cringed against Miller, staring at Riker with big, wet eyes, and he forced himself to relax. “Sorry, sweetheart, I’m not yelling at you.”

“Who you yelling at, then?” Miller had asked, but Riker ignored the question.

The barn had been easy to turn defensible–there was only one set of double doors leading in. The wide-open space had been checked over for vampires with the help of the big, high-powered flashlights.

Miller had spotted firewood stacked in one corner.

“Can we have a fire?” she’d asked Riker, shivering. The thought of an honest-to-goodness fire, with its bone-baking heat, was so much more enticing than the Coleman…she was almost drooling with anticipation at the thought.

Riker looked at the floor–sand–and then checked the height of the roof. It was at least thirty feet, maybe even more at the peak, and here and there, rain was leaking steadily through. He shot Lu a look, eyebrows raised.

Lu nodded. “Should be okay. As long as the wood’s good and dry, it shouldn’t produce too much smoke, and these barns aren’t exactly airtight, anyway. The smoke should have good egress. We can always put the fire out if it gets to be too much.”

“You don’t think it will draw vampires?”

Lu shrugged. “It might, I guess. But so will the Coleman. We’d just have to keep it a manageable size.”

“I’ll build it,” Evans said and dropped his kit bag. They were the first words he’d spoken since they got to the barn. Promise had very deliberately stayed out of his way, and she pulled Ash and Snow to the other side of the barn as he came across to retrieve the firewood. He shot her a look that she didn’t see because her back was to him.

But Peter, standing nearby, noticed, and his hands curled into loose fists at his sides.

Riker noticed him noticing, and hoped they wouldn’t have a problem tonight. He was too goddamn beat to deal with it.

“Peter,” he said. “Can you help me with something?”

Peter glanced at Riker, and then his gaze went back to Evans. A shiver went down Riker’s back. In the dark, with just the Coleman’s weak light, he could have sworn something glowed in Peter’s eyes.

It had given Riker pause when back at the high school, Peter had told him that he had the vampire disease. But Peter had spent six months with the Guard before, so Riker didn’t anticipate a problem. Plus, the guy
looked
totally normal.