Me and Chaplin whipped our gazes over to him. Was this the guy who’d tried to put some fight in everyone?
My fingers clawed against my thighs. “You know it doesn’t matter if you run
or
fight, right? Me and my dad and Chaplin . . . we’ve tried both before now. Fighting only made everything worse. Then we tried running away from our problems, and it seems as if that hasn’t worked, either.”
“And what happened back when you fought to make you think there’s no solution at all right now?” he asked.
Memory shattered my peace: the men coming into my family’s house. The blood. The screams.
Chaplin rested his paw on my boot, and I ran my free hand over one of his pressed-back ears. He was my constant, my comfort. Unlike Gabriel, he wasn’t going to leave once business in the Badlands was done.
“We’d moved round so much, because of my father’s science career,” I said. “He was needed here and there, but after the government took his tech research over and had him start designing weapons to be used on the populace, he elected to retire. So we went to the outskirts of Dallas, which turned out to be one of the last places to fall in the old States. And we were there when the final degradation started.”
I looked to Chaplin, seeing if I should say any more. He nodded, telling me it was okay to go on.
My fingers dug into my thigh even deeper, burrowing into my pants. “You’d always hear about the bad guys—how they were everywhere—but my father had only met up with white-collar bads in his work. We never thought we’d see the lower kinds, with our fancy alarm system and all the safety we thought we possessed in our nice living unit. But they came one night. They disabled the alarms and entered our home before I even knew they were there. They bound up my mom and brother, Serg, first. I’ve never stopped hearing their screams.” I sucked in air, my voice quivering. “Such screaming.”
Gabriel lowered his head, as if he were hearing Zel’s screams, too.
“For a few seconds—they seemed like hours—I couldn’t move from my bed,” I said. “But when I finally started to get out of it, I went for the pistol under the mattress frame. Then one of . . . them . . . barged through the locks on my door and—”
Chaplin let out a soft, woeful yowl. Gabriel stared at the ground. Was he picturing me under the greedy hands and bodies of human monsters?
Maybe, because when he glanced back up, his eyes had gone red.
I let him assume what they’d done to me. It hadn’t been full rape, but there were other nightmares bad guys brought on.
“I wsh,” he said, “I could’ve been there to bleed for you, to take all the pain.
I
could’ve quickly healed from it.”
“Maybe on the outside.” We all healed faster on the outside.
He didn’t answer.
I went on. “Before my dad had quit his job, he’d grabbed Chaplin from the lab, so my dog was young, fresh out of training. But by the time those men got to my room, he’d already been shot. They thought he was dead, yet they had no idea he was an Intel Dog. Still, Chaplin was in no shape to help me. It was my dad who barged into my room with his gun, and he wasted some of the men. The others escaped.”
I ran my hand to the side of Chaplin’s head. He leaned against me. “Then Dad took me to the panic room, where we had to watch on screens as my mom and brother were set upon with a . . .”
Careful,
Chaplin said, shutting Gabriel out again.
I righted myself, thinking of clear water and of being held up by its cleansing cradle. I thought and thought of it until I was ready to talk again.
“I wanted to get Mom and Serg into the panic room, too, but my dad started grabbing weapons and told me not to move an inch. Then he left. He . . .” I paused, minding my words, then whispered, “He accidentally killed Mom and Serg in the gunfire. Accidentally.” I swallowed. “I’d turned off the screens by then. I couldn’t watch.”
“What about your dad? What eventually happened to him?”
Dad.
I’d said enough by now.
Chaplin came to my rescue, telling Gabriel only what he needed to hear.
Dmitri brought Mariah out here and spent years making sure she’d have somewhat of an existence. Then, when he thought he’d done his job, he ended his life.
We all sat there. No condolence or platitude would fill the emptiness.
Chaplin—logical, stalwart Chaplin—put a merciful cap on the conversation.
This is Mariah’s bottom line—running somewhere else ends up being as useless as staying. So what’s the choice? Is there ever one?
“But if you stayed,” Gabriel said, “Stamp would ultimately come into your home, just as those intruders did.”
I thought of Chompers on my visz screen, then the other bad men who’d crept into our territory—scum who deserved what they’d gotten.
“Not necessarily,” I said.
Gabriel was taken aback at the force and roughness with which I’d said it.
I leveled off my voice. “If anyone comes round these parts with the overt intent to harm me or mine, they’ll pay. And now that Stamp’s done with all his good-neighbor talk, he’s going to pay. Believe me. Zel was right—there comes a time when enough is enough.”
I could feel the heat in my eyes, the fever, and Gabriel seemed to notice, too. Chaplin rubbed his face against my leg, bringing me back.
Gabriel looked at us, as if the sight of me and my dog touched even a vampire. He looked so isolated sitting across from us, but I wondered if finding out what’d happened to Abby would erase it.
As if he’d taken up some sort of personal stake in protecting me and Chaplin, he started to walk out of the room. “I should check on the oldster, then round the group up again. There’ll be better safety in numbers now that the shit’s really hit. We can’t sit here waiting to get plugged one by one. And we need to decide whether we’re going to run or . . .”
I followed him out, Chaplin trailing as Gabriel halted near the exit to my room, resting his hand on the doorframe.
“I’m sorry to hear about your trials,” he said, as if believing he needed to say something to me. Anything. “I truly am.”
Cold, even for his sort.
Chaplin said,
And what now, Gabriel?
“You tell me.” Gabriel peered down at the dog, and there was a hint of a sad smile on his lips. “You had plans all along, didn’t you? Did you plan on using me, the vampire, to kick Stamp’s ass in the end? Is that why you shielded my identity? Well, the time for that is gone. I’d get one bite in and, if Stamp is as smart as I think he is, he’d have a machete handy to lop off my head. Then he’d rain down fire on all of you because you were harboring a monster.” Gabriel cocked his head. “I’m sure that’s not the outcome you’d been hoping for.”
Gabriel had to be right, and the plan shamed me. Chaplin had promised my dad to protect me to the end. That was just what he’d been doing.
The dog sighed as Gabriel continued to the lounging area. I followed, wanting to apologize for the deviousness. But when we saw the living area, we all stopped at the overturned crates and scuffed-up dirt. The oldster had gone overboard.
Good thing the others had gotten him to his domain.
Before any of us could comment, a spasm of movement lit over a visz screen—a woman I’d never seen before, her mouth moving as she sat in front of the lens outside. In back of her were the three lashed poles. A bare, hanging rope was the only reminder that the demon had ever been there. The carrion feeders had taken their fill, and they’d obviously decided to go somewhere else instead of waiting in ambush round here tonight. Lucky her.
Gabriel turned up the volume as I stood next to him with Chaplin.
The woman was in the middle of a message to us, using Old American speak. Her dark hair was slicked back, her eyes Asian-exotic, her skin dark in the night vision.
“—hope you won’t ignore this invitation, Mr. Gabriel. A good night to you.”
Then the woman nodded, as if tipping a nonexistent hat to the visz. The image disappeared, only to be replaced by the beginning of the same transmission.
What the . . . ?
“Did she hack into the lens box to send a looped message?” I asked.
No one answered as the woman continued.
“I’ve been sent by Mr. Stamp to cordially invite the man who shot up the compound to a . . . diplomatic meeting,” she said. “Mr. Gabriel, I believe, is the one who paid us a visit.” The woman’s eyes seemed to darken. “He killed a couple of my friends tonight.”
And it was warranted after what they did to Zel, I thought.
“Mr. Stamp,” she added, “requests neutral ground—the gully a mile off, over that old mine where the loom trees are thick. The time is midnight, stroke of twelve. And he comes alone, because Mr. Stamp is going to show up solo, just as a display of his faith in our continued attempt to work matters out with your lot.” The woman came closer o the lens. “And here’s a personal message from Mr. Stamp. He knows what the community’s been hiding, and if Gabriel shows up, Stamp will think twice about telling. We hope you won’t ignore this invitation, Mr. Gabriel. A good night to you.”
I didn’t move, even when the message started again, because I was still hearing the one part of that message:
What the community’s been hiding . . .
Gabriel spoke over the repeated request. “So Stamp does know I’m a vampire and that you’ve been sheltering me. The crewman who saw my fangs didn’t die and he lived to tell.”
“You can’t go to that kind of meeting,” I said, ignoring his take on what was happening.
“I
can
go,” Gabriel said. “You heard her. I’m a menace to Stamp but your community will surely learn how to obey now, because of Zel’s death. You’re not in his sights. Stamp aims to clear the monster out, just as he did with that demon. And I’m not about to put the people who’ve sheltered me in any more danger than you’ve already experienced.” He paused. “But maybe there’s even a way around this.”
“What?”
“What if I could show Stamp that he’s wrong? That I’m
not
a vampire.”
Was he bent? “But you are.”
“Maybe I can convince him otherwise, in spite of what his employee might’ve told him. For all Stamp knows, what his man saw was a trick of the night or the result of an excited imagination. Besides, if I end up needing weapons—which I probably will—I’ll bring enough to show him I don’t depend on fangs.” Gabriel turned off the visz, blanking the messenger. “If I can show Stamp that I’m not bringing my vampire to any fight, then it takes the heat off the community, and there’ll be nothing for the kid to tell anyone about your sheltering a monster.”
He was taking too much on himself, like some kind of willing savior. Like he was taking that longing for humanity that I’d sensed in him when he’d peered into me too far.
“But—” I said.
“Mariah, be logical. Stamp showed up here earlier, willing to make amends in his own way. He strikes me as having his own code, just as Zel did. I can take him on.” He grinned with the bitter weight of truth on him. “I have a code, too, I suppose, and it’s not something a man turns his back on.”
My blood began a slow simmer, and I knew the fever was reflected in my eyes.
“What was it that Zel told us before she went out there?” he added.
“I thought I’d outlive the day when I’d encounter pure evil again, and I can’t watch it grow and take over now. I won’t.”
I felt myself twisting up, getting more upset as Gabriel continued.
“Zel was right about all that, Mariah. There’re bigger things in this world to fight for. I even watched Zel die standing up for those things. And if you’re going to stay here, refusing to run, I don’t intend to sit by and watch ever again.”
“You can’t win in this,” I said, my voice gnarling. The peace had faded. “That’s logic enough. You go there without using your powers and you definitely die.”
“I’m already dead,” he said.
“Are you?”
My impulsive question put a memory between us: when he’d been inside me,re evile and almost human again. When he’d been a man, not a vampire. It hovered, almost melting the air.
As the palpability of it singed into me, I felt a weight, because Gabriel was willing to sacrifice himself for us, and for ideals that seemed to keep his world—mad as it was—together. But I couldn’t let him. It just wasn’t right.
No matter how useless it might be to fight, I didn’t see any other choice.
I blocked him from going anywhere. “You’re not doing this.”
He only smiled, as if thinking that I had to put up such a front. He’d end up going because there was no other way to get Stamp to leave us alone.
He began walking toward the weapons wall, obviously intending to extend this human thing all the way by using ammunition other than fangs, speed, and strength. He wanted to keep from relying on the powers that would betray us all if he used them.
Knowing there was no other way to make him see some sense, I extracted my knife from its sheath, then moved quietly behind him. Then I put the blade to his throat.