Authors: Christine Dougherty
“We still have to be careful until we get near the center atriums,” Miller said. “It’s not as though the vampires just shrivel up and die at six a.m., you know. Most of them will have found hiding spots, but there might still be the half-immunes to watch out for.”
Her eyes slid from Lu’s to Evans’ with special emphasis. Her gaze said that there was a particular half-and-half that they needed to watch out for now. Especially with Promise in their care. Both men nodded their understanding.
“I’m not sure who’s left so I’m not sure who’s going to be in charge. This base, obviously, will have to be abandoned. Too many hiding places. We have to get a headcount once–”
“Oh no,” Promise said, her voice quiet but filled with a distress that caused the soldiers to turn to where she stood. Her hand was on Doctor Edwards’ face. Her eyes were enormous with dismay. “He’s dead. Doctor Edwards is dead.”
Lu stepped forward and put his fingertips to Edwards’ neck, really pushing in, feeling for a pulse. He laid his head on Edwards’ chest, listening. Then he rose and shook his head. “He’s gone. Most likely another heart attack; that would be my guess.”
“What about CPR or…?” Miller asked without much hope.
Lu shook his head and shrugged, turning his palms up at his sides. “He’s been dead a while. Too long. There’s already some degree of…” He glanced at Promise. “Some degree of rigor. Sorry, Promise.”
“We have to find out who’s left of the lab people, but Edwards was the driving force behind the cure,” Miller said. “He was the smartest man we had here. The only one with a strong background in communicable diseases.”
“At least we have the vials so they won’t be starting over from scratch. They should be able to do some reverse engineering and…”
Promise felt herself tuning out of the soldiers’ conversation. A depression bigger than any wave she’d ever seen at Lake Ontario seemed to be rushing at her with crushing intention. Peter was gone, Ash was unaccounted for, Wereburg–and Chance–seemed almost like something she’d dreamed; something made up and unbelievable, her memories of them too diaphanous to grip onto. Had it really been less than two weeks since she’d left there, buoyant with hope and new love? Would she ever see Chance, Lea, Mark, or Wereburg again?
She was beginning to think that she wouldn’t.
This was all the change and more she’d ever wished for as a girl, and now the wish made her want to scream. The innocent musings of a middle-schooler shouldn’t have such far-reaching consequences. She wanted to reach back to her younger self and shake her, wake her up to the fact that sometimes boring was good; that change could be a monster with enormous teeth determined to eat up everything you loved.
Then the wave was upon her, and she felt almost relieved, comforted by the idea of just…giving…up.
“…back to Wereburg, and then Mr. West can…”
Miller’s words penetrated the heavy, cloying velvet of her thoughts. Wereburg? Mr. West?
“What about Mr. West?” she asked, cutting Miller off.
Miller glanced at her. “We have to get the vials and any remaining lab people up to Wereburg. So they can–” She stopped abruptly, smiling. “You don’t know, do you? About Mr. West?”
Promise shook her head in confusion. She knew Mr. West was smart, of course she knew that much…but what was Miller talking about? “He’s our science teacher,” she said. “In the high school.”
Miller nodded. “He’s also the person with the most experience with communicable diseases, now that Dr. Edwards is gone. Mr. West has a background in it…I think he and Edwards even worked together at some point in the past. But Mr. West refused to come to the base because he wouldn’t leave the kids he’d taken charge of in Wereburg. In the past, that was okay as we had Edwards, but now all the research will have to move up north. So Mr. West can continue the work.”
“We’re going to Wereburg? Right now we’re going?” Promise asked, and Miller shrugged. Then she smiled at the dawning hope in Promise’s face.
“Well, probably tomorrow. We’ve got a few things to organize first,” Miller said. “What’s wrong? Did you think you were doomed to spend the rest of your life with us? Or that we’d turn you out on your own?”
Promise glanced at Evans. “No, I didn’t think you’d turn me out,” she said. “But it did seem like Wereburg was getting farther and farther away from me. And that…well…it was a tough thought to take.” She hugged herself for reassurance and smiled inwardly as the soldiers continued planning.
She was going back to Wereburg. With the cure. Chance was going to have that chance after all.
~ ~ ~
Promise stood at the passenger-side door of the Humvee and took a last look back at the base and the woods surrounding it. The sun was about a quarter of the way up, just beginning to sparkle through the tops of the pines. They’d get at least eight hours of travel time today, and since they didn’t have to accommodate a horse and rider, they’d be able to get a lot of miles behind them.
In their brief search, they’d found no sign of Ash or Snow, and she hoped that they’d escaped into the woods and safety. The vampires would not have killed them for their blood, but who knew what had gone on during that violent night. They could easily have been collateral damage. But if that had been the case–if they had been killed–it certainly hadn’t occurred in the building. They’d have seen signs of it. Horses are big animals, full of blood.
Someone would find them; take care of them. Horses were a much-loved commodity in this vampire-plagued world. Promise knew that well enough. Hadn’t she loved Ash? She had.
Miller and Lu were in the lead Humvee and behind Evans’ Humvee sat a bus. Behind the bus were three more Humvees filled with the remaining soldiers. The bus was yellow and stubby, about half the length of a regular school bus. It’s sides were reinforced sheet-metal, and it had heavy screen mesh on the windows. Fifteen people, former lab workers and all that remained of the civilians of Fort Reagan, were crammed into it. Their faces at the windows were white and forlorn as they stared at the great, empty hospital that many of them had called home for the last two years.
Promise knew how they felt.
She scanned the woods once more, hoping to catch a glimpse of vibrant orange. But the woods were deep and still. She ran her hand over her face and under her eyes.
“Time to go,” Evans said, appearing beside her. “You have the vials?”
Promise nodded and pointed to the case tucked into the front wheel well, right next to where her feet would be. Where she could protect it. Evans gave her shoulder a brief squeeze and followed her gaze as it drifted once more to the woods.
“Promise?” he said, and she turned to him with a small, false smile. He took her shoulders in his hands, and his face was calm but still somehow stamped with his trademark anger. “He’s okay. I still think that. Okay?”
She nodded, and her smile became warmer, more genuine. Tears sparkled at her lower lids, but didn’t fall. “Okay,” she said.
He dropped his hands and smiled and then started around the front of the Humvee. In front and behind them, engines rumbled to life, echoing off the building. It already looked as though it had been deserted for a decade, not just an hour.
Evans leaned over from the driver’s seat and looked at Promise through the passenger-side window. The first vehicles in the caravan were beginning to roll out.
“Ready to go?” he asked her.
She looked across to the woods again. “I guess so,” she said, her shoulders slumping as her hand reached for the door. At the last second, she turned back, her heart skipping a beat. Had there been something…some movement or a flash of…?
She couldn’t be sure if she’d seen anything, but the warm burst in her heart–a tingle across her arms and back–felt like hope.
“Promise?” Evans said, a hint of anxiety in his voice. The Humvee directly in front of them was already fifteen feet away, now twenty. “Are you ready?”
She scanned the woods one last time, a smile faint on her lips.
“As I’ll ever be,” she whispered and opened the Humvee door.
~THE END~
Book Three ~ Last Chance
Chapter 1
Lea ran the small blade across the bare, yielding skin of Mark’s inner forearm, her face tense with an uneasy mix of reluctance and determination. He grunted and twitched involuntarily, then breathed out a long, shuddering sigh. He turned his eyes to the panoramic living room window and surveyed Willow’s End: the rows of houses with their identical mailboxes, dry yellow lawns and the same, stumpy black streetlights interspersed with winter-bare trees.
It took his mind off the stinging.
“I’m so sorry,” Lea said, her voice soft, her large blue eyes swimming with sympathetic tears. She touched his face briefly with her fingertips, caressing gentle warmth onto his chilled skin. At their feet, a small, tan terrier looked on with concern in her bright button eyes.
Mark’s eyes met Lea’s. He smiled even though the pain was still tightening his features and darkening his eyes. “It’s okay. No biggie,” he said. He chuffed out a short laugh as Lea held the red, plastic cup under his steadily dripping arm. “Ugh, red?” he said with mock indignation. “Does the cup have to be red?”
She smiled up at him but then turned her attention back to the filling cup; the heat of Mark’s blood through the thin plastic was making her feel slightly nauseous. She didn’t want to take too much. She glanced at the other lines on his arm, laddered almost like a design, like something tribal.
Lea had the same two marks on her arm.
They’d been feeding Chance every day for the last five.
She could hear him stirring in his laundry room trap next to the family room, just off the kitchen where she and Mark sat. He mewled like a lost kitten as the scent of the blood began to waft in to him. Then he hissed and choked out a series of raging, nonsense syllables, and Lea shivered. The inhuman, frightening noises made every nerve in her body stand on end.
She wrapped a dishcloth tightly around Mark’s forearm and held it in place while she tilted her face to the sun coming through the kitchen window. The kitchen they sat in looked almost normal compared to the kitchens of the safe houses, and from here, she could see the neighbor’s backyard, where a swing set gathered rust at its joints and a good portion of the chain-link fence had been overrun with kudzu.
The safe houses, dotted at judicious distances throughout Willow’s End, were dismantled shells with no dark nooks and crannies. They had plywood-covered windows and reinforced doors and a supply of wooden stakes along with the prosaic cans of beans, soups, and chili in the doorless cabinets.
They were homey fortresses, put in place to harbor anyone caught out when the sun began to set.
Sanctuary from the vampires.
Lea moved Mark’s hand to the towel on his arm and took the cup, glancing out the now-glassless sliding glass door of the family room as she passed through. A fire pit lay in the backyard like a giant, prehistoric beetle overturned and unable to reclaim its feet, dead in the knee-high grass. A shed at the back fence had lost both its doors in one storm or another, and it gaped blankly at the house, looking both abandoned and damned as kudzu crawled slowly onto its swaybacked roof.
Behind her, Lady whined and danced nervously in the doorway, her toenails clicking…but she wouldn’t leave the kitchen. Mark snapped his fingers at the little dog, and she turned and leapt lightly onto his lap, where she whined some more as she watched Lea’s progress.
Chance wailed and heaved himself against the door of the reinforced laundry room, rattling it in its frame. Lea hesitated, her heart beating sharply, even though she knew he couldn’t get out because she had, in fact, helped to trap him in there. Had even helped build the trap.
The door rattled again, and Chance moaned in frustration. The hair on Lea’s arms rose, wavering like sea grass in a changing tide. She shivered.
How could a nine-year-old sound so monstrous?
she wondered, not for the first time. But of course, the answer was easy. He sounded monstrous because he was. A monster.
Isn’t there anything of the little boy left in him?
Lea, who loved children, tried to puzzle out how much of Chance might actually remain, and she wondered if there were any parts of his brain not yet burned away by the disease.
She tilted the cup, letting a drop fall near the base of the door. She listened as his nails scrabbled madly at the other side. “I have it, Chance, but you have to stay back,” she said, keeping her voice both calm and steady. Carrying. So he couldn’t miss either the tone or the content. “There’s sunlight out here. Get to the back so it won’t burn you. I don’t want you to get burned, Chance. Destiny wouldn’t want you to be burned when she gets back.” She listened intently. All was stillness from the laundry room, but she sensed him trying to puzzle it through his burning brain. “Destiny will be back any day now,” Lea said. The repetition of Destiny’s name seemed sometimes to get through to him, but for Lea herself, she thought of Destiny as Promise, and always would.
“Move back, Chance,” Lea said. “Here comes the sun.”
She opened and unhooked the padlock on the small pass-through at the very bottom of the door. It was smaller even than a cat door, just big enough for the plastic cup. She’d have to set it in and close the door in a hurry, because Chance wouldn’t be able to control himself once the blood was in there with him.
No vampire could control itself around blood.
Chapter 2
In 1983, a vampire plague started in Manhattan, and within two years, it had washed across half the country, tumbling towns, cities and remote hamlets alike, including Wereburg, which sat in upstate, western New York, just under Lake Ontario.
The town of Wereburg was semi-rural, semi-urban, semi-suburban and an ideal spot to become an outpost…one of many that dotted the landscape of this new America. Marshal Law had been enacted by President Reagan, and the National Guard had absorbed the other branches of the military–what was left of them. It was the Guard that acted as conduit for news and survivors and kept the lines of communication between the outposts open.