Blood Run (30 page)

Peter looked back at Promise and waved her forward.

Suddenly shy, feeling the handicap of her formerly small town life (or so she perceived it), Promise hesitated. She was confused by the run of her emotions. This was the place they’d been riding toward for the last nine days; it was where they’d find the cure for Chance.

This was where her life would change again, but for the better this time.

Why did she feel so wary of it?

Promise stared at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling of the cafeteria. She felt like some kind of backwoods bumpkin, but she couldn’t help herself. It had been so long since she’d seen normal light…bright and strong…after the sun had gone down.

“Seems weird, doesn’t it?” Peter’s voice from beside her. He sat next to her at the small, four-person table. She glanced at him and then back to the lights. She nodded.

“How do they do it?” she asked. “It can’t be generators. That would take too much gas.”

“Have you ever heard of solar energy, Promise?” Promise dropped her eyes to a man pulling out a chair across from her. His nametag read: Dr. Andrew Edwards, and he was the one who’d seemed to recognize Peter when they’d arrived.

Promise and Dr. Edwards had not been introduced, but he knew her name. There had definitely been conversation between this Dr. Edwards and Peter.

“I’ve heard of it,” Promise said. “One of the kids in my science class in eighth grade did a presentation on it,” she said. “Energy from the sun, right? On photovoltaic cells?”

He nodded. “I’m impressed. It’s not a common thing to know about,” he said. “Right after the oil embargo–do you remember that, or were you too young? Even and odd days, and those exorbitant gas prices?–anyway, after that, there was a decent amount of interest in solar, but by 1980 or so, the price of gas had dropped again. No more need for solar energy!” He laughed, and it was tinged with only a slight bitterness. “People forget too quickly. It’s our curse.” He smiled at Promise.

He was older; in his fifties, she’d have guessed. Older than her own father by about ten years or so. To Promise, he resembled an aging Paul Newman.

“Anyway, yes, photovoltaic cells are at the base of it,” Dr. Edwards said. “The entire back field and roof of the hospital have been utilized for the generation of electricity. Even so, we are careful with it. These lights are only on for an hour at night as everyone eats. Good luck finding the trashcans if you dawdle!” He laughed, and Promise smiled.

She glanced around the cafeteria. She estimated about fifty tables plus a scattering of booths lining two of the walls. The room was about half-full with people having dinner. There were a good amount of soldiers, but there were still more civilians. People in white coats–other doctors and technicians, service people, staff…it looked almost entirely like a busy hospital.

Promise looked at her plate. Just crumbs. She’d devoured the sandwich she’d been given. It had been a while since she’d had bread. In Wereburg, there had been a pizza place on the main street with a big, wood-fired oven for cooking the pies. At first, the survivors had baked bread there. But someone had gotten careless and burned the building down. The shops on either side had gone with it. They’d stopped baking after that.

“Where do you get the yeast?” she asked, recalling the light, air-filled texture of the bread that housed her sandwich.

“You’re very smart…quite shrewd!” Dr. Edwards said, and Promise felt her face warm with the praise. “Of course all the packaged yeast, even stored cold, is reaching its shelf life. After that, I guess…unleavened bread. Mazel tov!” he said and then smiled at Promise’s puzzled expression. “No, I’m just kidding. Of course, we have been making our own yeast for some time. We use raisins,” he trailed off, and his gaze switched to Peter. His face sobered. “We’ve missed you, Peter.”

Promise watched with concern as Peter’s eyes dropped to his empty plate.

He sighed and then looked at Dr. Edwards. “I’m sorry for how we left things.”

Edwards nodded and smiled, but his clasped and working hands gave away a deeper tension. “I am, too. Very sorry,” he said, his knuckles whitening under the strain. “We could have used you here, you know. There were many times when–”

Peter stood abruptly, cutting Edwards off.

“I’m not going to have this argument again,” Peter said. He pushed the chair back into the table hard enough that the table shifted by three inches. “I don’t owe you anything.” His eyes turned to Promise. “I’m going to check on Snow and Ash. I’ll see you back in the room.” He turned on his heel and strode to the exit. Many of the people in the cafeteria watched him go, and then their gazes strayed back to Edwards.

“Excuse me,” Promise said and pushed her own chair back. She felt that all the eyes in the cafeteria were on her as she followed Peter to the exit.

Especially Dr. Edwards’.

~ ~ ~

Promise found Peter in the former hospital’s physical therapy room. The horses had been tucked in among the mats and exercise machines. Dim emergency lighting gave the room a reddish-yellow glow. Peter stood next to Snow, a rag in his hand, but he was still, head down.

He was silhouetted blackly against Snow’s glowing white flank.

“Peter?” Promise said, and he looked up. She thought she caught a hint of fire in his gaze, but that could have been from the EXIT sign illuminated over her head above the door. “Are you all right?”

He was still for so long that she began to think he hadn’t heard her. Then he spoke. “It’s difficult because he’s right. On one hand, anyway. The things they can find out through me, because of what I am…those things could change humanity, better it.” His head came up, and she felt the weight of his gaze, even in the gloom. His tone was angry. “But he’s also wrong.”

“Yes, of course he is,” Promise said and noted the shock in Peter’s posture. He hadn’t expected her to agree so readily. She crossed the room. “You have to take yourself into consideration, too. I know that. Look what I’ve done…put my friends in danger…maybe everyone…but sometimes it’s still the right thing to do. Isn’t it?”

Peter nodded and relaxed. He began to rub Snow with the cloth. “I stayed here as long as I could,” he said, without looking up. “But I kept having these dreams…nightmares. Trish had had the baby and was back in Bishop waiting for me. Looking for me. Every day I would wake up and feel relief and regret–relief that it had only been a dream and regret that Trisha was still dead. But every night, it got a little worse. They were in danger or starving or lost. Trisha fell in with the wrong people, someone stole the baby, Trisha was attacked by vampires over and over…I was…I was becoming a mess. I was afraid to sleep; the dreams were so real to me. I started to get very emotional, losing my temper a lot.”

He sat on a nearby weight bench, the cloth dangling forgotten in his hand. “I’m sure part of it was from being sick…having the disease in me. Other dreams I had…the ones that didn’t involve Trisha and the baby were…” He shuddered. “Well…they were even worse in some ways. I knew the other nightmares–the non-Trish ones–were from the vampirism.”

“How did you know?” Promise asked.

It was a while before he answered, and even when he did, he wouldn’t look at her.

“I knew because of the things…the things I was doing in the dreams.” He stood and turned away. She understood that he would say no more about it.

She was relieved.

“How long were you here?” she asked.

“Four months,” he said. “Then I left with a National Guard detail. They were going back past Bishop. I had this compulsion…I knew Trish was dead, of course I knew it. But I just had to–” he stopped abruptly, his hand covering his eyes. Compulsion wasn’t even a strong enough word for what he’d been feeling back then. Between the disease, lack of sleep, horrendous nightmares and being cooped up day after day…he’d felt as though he’d been like an animal in a trap. He’d felt as though he died a little each day as things–his peace of mind–were taken from him.

“I just had to go. Edwards was pissed. I mean…really, really pissed.” He laughed, and it surprised Promise into smiling. “He called me a traitor, an ingrate. I called him a few things, too.” Peter shook his head and sobered. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d stayed four months or four years. It never would have been enough. He’d never
have
enough.” Peter looked up, surprise dawning on his face. “It’s funny, but I don’t think I really realized that until just now,” he said and shook his head again. “That’s really why I’m mad–
still
mad. I got my feelings hurt.”

“What do you mean?” Promise asked.

“I thought Edwards and I were friends…close friends. We were, I’d swear to it. I told him about the nightmares and how I’d been feeling. The desperation and the depression. He cared. He was worried…I know that he was. But when I decided that I had to leave, to go and see Bishop and get things figured out…he turned on me. That’s how I saw it, anyway. Because his experiments, the cure, were more important to him. It hurt my feelings.”

“You’re right,” Edwards said from the doorway.

Peter looked up, startled, and Promise turned.

“And I’m sorry, Peter. I was wrong to expect you to stay forever.”

“No, you weren’t wrong,” Peter said. “You were just thinking about what was best for everyone. I understand that now.”

Dr. Edwards nodded. “Yes, that’s true, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of an individual. You gave us plenty of yourself in time, blood…everything you could do. I should have paid more attention when you were having the nightmares. It was wrong to dismiss them the way I did.”

Peter nodded in acknowledgement. “Thanks, Doc, I appreciate that.”

Edwards smiled. “When I saw you on the horse, I knew it must be Snow…the horse I’d heard so much about when you were here. I was…I was shocked that you’d found her. And ashamed that I had tried to keep you from…” His voice trailed off, and Peter stepped forward, his hand up.

“It’s okay, Doc,” he said and waited for Edwards to take his hand. But Edwards bypassed it and pulled Peter into a rough hug, instead. Even in the dim light, Promise thought she saw tears glimmer at the edges of Edwards’ tightly shut eyes. She turned and busied herself with petting Ash, pulling out the tangles in his mane, trying to afford the men some privacy.

Edwards pulled back, chuckling and wiping his eyes. “Thank you, Peter. Thank you for forgiving me.”

Peter smiled and changed the subject. “How have things been going here? One of the other doctors told me there have been breakthroughs.”

“Oh yes, thanks to you!” Edwards said. “But first, tell me about the horse, about Snow. How did you find her? It seems a miracle.”

Peter looked around at Promise where she busied herself with Ash. “Promise?” he said, and she turned to meet his concerned gaze. “Do you want to hear this, or is it…” he shrugged his shoulders, his eyes full of careful concern.

“I want to hear it,” she said. “Of course I do.”

Dr. Edwards looked from Peter to Promise, confused by their exchange, but he let it pass without comment.

“When I left, I was pretty upset,” Peter started and glanced at Edwards apologetically as if sorry he had to tell this part so soon after their reconciliation.

Edwards waved the implied apology away.

Peter continued. “I hadn’t slept well in at least two months and hadn’t slept at all in the prior three days. The nightmares had become too much,” Peter ran a hand over his face, recalling. “A National Guard contingent had come that day, and I found out by chance that they were going to be headed very close to Bishop. I seized on the idea of going with them. It…the idea…just took over my brain…it seemed somehow the answer to all the problems I’d been having. I had a sense of hope that I hadn’t felt since, well, since before everything, I guess. Not since we’d found out Trish was pregnant.” He smiled with more nostalgia than bitterness. “It just took me over. I talked the commander of the guard into it, and even that wasn’t very difficult to do. He saw no reason for me not to tag along with them. For me, that was added confirmation that I was doing the right thing. Almost like it was ordained in some way. So after some…” he glanced at Edwards. “…after some discussion here, I went. Right away, I started feeling better. Just being on the move made me feel like a weight was lifting. I was still afraid to sleep–afraid of the nightmares–but by the time we made camp that first night, I was exhausted. I slept like the dead.”

Promise made a small, involuntary sound of protest at his phrase, and Peter looked up at her with a reassuring smile. Then he continued. “We went through parts of Pennsylvania I’d never seen, and the outposts were…some of them were terrible. Just huddles of unhappy people scraping along day to day.” He looked at Promise. “What you guys have done at Wereburg is a great accomplishment. In one town, I think it was right around Kinnisburg, almost to Bishop, the outpost was losing people left and right. To sickness, to vampires, to accidents…they were suspicious and bitter. Savage, almost. It’s why the Guard decided to keep my status as ‘sick’ a secret. You could see that when it came to their sanity, their sense of civility, some of the people were holding onto some very thin, very frayed ropes.

“Each of the traveling Guard groups has a list of outposts that they hit in rotation, and some of the outposts overlap with different groups. But the individual route to the outposts is at the commander’s discretion–they’re always on the lookout for survivors and will vary their routes each time. My group hadn’t planned to stop at Bishop or even go through it because they’d been through on their last time around.

“I told them when I signed on that that was okay, no problem; I would just split from them when we were at the closest point. I wasn’t being heroic; I just didn’t care. Part of me even wondered if I’d ever leave Bishop again once I got there. I somehow wasn’t able to picture anything beyond Bishop–I’d only set my sights that far ahead.”

Promise, who’d had the same feelings about Chance…wondering what, if anything, came after fulfilling her promise…nodded in understanding. Peter smiled at her and then continued.