Dark Advent (41 page)

“I am woman, hear me roar,” she said.

5

It was Saturday, and Jason was up before the sun and even beat the roosters. It had become his normal routine.

Rising early gave him a chance to get out and exercise his wounded leg with no one watching, and, as a bonus, the sunrises were rarely disappointing. He was feeling stronger day by day, the aches in his leg and shoulder a little less deep with each dawn. His arm was free of the sling now. He still limped, and suspected he would for a while yet, and still used the cane, but its days were numbered.

Jason slipped on a pair of gym shorts and a new shirt whose back touted New Zealand’s South Pacific Classic. These surfing shirts had been all the rage a couple years ago, then faded away, but apparently Heywood had been slow in keeping up with fashion. He laced on track shoes and eased out of Molly’s house as she puffed in her sleep down the hall.

The morning air was clean and clear and not quite cool enough to call crisp, but it was close enough. There was no finer medicine. The first rays of the sun peeked over the eastern horizon, over Lake Whitney, and he aimed for it as if heading for a beacon.

His walk took him along a narrow street lined with simple, tasteful houses, none too small and none too large. Guardian trees ranked the sidewalk, towered over lawns, birds stirring in their leaves and branches.

Jason stopped, leaning on the cane, staring at a house to his left. He wasn’t sure who lived there, but that didn’t matter. It could’ve been anybody, and that was the point. Somebody resided behind those darkened windows and made it a home. Finally, here was a place where there was none of the menace that had come to be synonymous with blank, dead windows, like blind eyes looking in on a hollow soul.

There was safety here, far from St. Louis.

Jason continued his unhurried gait east, wondering when the day would come when he could resume running again. A great place to run, this town.

Soon he had company. Jason was aware only of a ghost’s movement between two of the houses at his left, a whisper of paws. A second later, T Rex came bounding out alongside him, bushy tail wagging and his tongue lolling from his mouth. T Rex, who’d kept a bedside vigil with Tomahawk before he’d regained consciousness at Molly’s. As the great German Shepherd sniffed and nuzzled Jason’s cane hand, he was awfully glad the dog knew and liked him. You might never recover from being on the wrong end of those teeth and claws.

“How you doing, boy?” Jason scratched the dog’s head, scrubbed the bristly fur at his shoulders. “I guess we can all feel safe with you guys on patrol.”

T Rex butted his head against Jason’s leg, then maneuvered the back of his neck under Jason’s hand. Over the past few days, he’d enjoyed watching as Gil and the others from Fort Hood put the dogs through their training maneuvers, keeping them in top form. Interesting stuff, good for a diversion—they’d run T Rex and the rest through various search games, and pursue-and-subdue exercises, and of course the attack training, where the dog got to chew on a guy’s arm while he wore what looked like a giant oven mitt. Nobody had to worry any more about Middle Eastern fanatics attacking embassies or smuggling guns and explosives past airport security or landing on American soil…those days were over. But the dogs didn’t know. They had their routines, and Jason supposed there was a certain element of security in keeping them primed.

As he continued east, T Rex trotted amiably beside him under a pre-dawn blue-gray sky. At last the sidewalk ended and they moved across a short expanse of ground to the lake’s edge. A wet chill kissed his ankles as he kicked up dew. They sat at the same picnic table where, earlier in the week, Tomahawk had volunteered for the trip to St. Louis.

He watched the sun creep over the far edge of the lake, casting a long shaft of fire across the flat surface. The water was a black mirror changing to silver. He wondered what this sunrise looked like in St. Louis.

“Gonna eat breakfast at Gil’s today,” Jason told the dog. T Rex regarded him in that way dogs seemed to comprehend every word while refusing to condescend with a reply. “I think he said something about pancakes. If you’re lucky, I’ll sneak a couple out for you.”

He scratched T Rex’s head and the dog wagged his tail and they watched the sunrise together, as it broke over the lake and threw their shadows back at the town.

And if he’d known it was going to be the last one he would enjoy here, he might have tried to make it linger just that much longer.

* *

Pancakes. He had to keep telling himself they were only pancakes. But more than a year had passed since his last stack, hot and golden brown and dripping with butter and syrup. As far as he was concerned, they now qualified for Food Of The Gods status.

Sorry, T Rex. But it looks like you get left out on this one.

His breakfast with Gil had been a combination social visit and business meeting. Gil thought they should get better acquainted, as did Jason, and there remained plenty of planning to do to prepare for the group that Tomahawk would be seeing down from St. Louis. Over the past year, settlers had drifted in singly or in pairs or small groups, but never had twenty or more come at once.

The primary concern was housing. The previous night, Jason had sat down and composed a list of everyone who’d been at Brannigan’s when he’d left in March. He jotted down who he thought might want to live together, be they pairing off as friends or lovers or guardians of children. All subject to change—with more than five months between himself and St. Louis, some things could be different now. But at least it gave Gil a ballpark idea of how many houses would require wiring into the power grid.

Jason kept staring at the names topping the list: his and Erika’s.
A home of our own.
It seemed like a childhood game, playing house together. I’ll be the mommy and you be the daddy and we’ll live happily ever after.

“We’ll wire ’em for you,” Gil said. “Try to have ’em ready when you get here so you got lights, and can run fans to cool ’em out. But fixing ’em up, repairs, whatever…that’s your folks’ responsibility.”

Jason nodded. “Fine. Just get us started, and we’ll take over from there.”

He glanced over the tabletop and across the kitchen, just outside the kitchen door. T Rex sat on his haunches on the back porch, still as a statue, fixing him with a mournful stare that seemed to grow sadder with each pancake that went down.

“For our house, I’m going to find the biggest stereo ever made,” Jason said, averting his eyes from the screen door. “I hope you’re okay with a few earth tremors now and then.”

Gil arched his bushy eyebrows and scribbled on a paper. “So, next item on the agenda: a noise curfew.” He looked askance and laughed through his nose. “My boys, they sure knew how to raise the roof.”

Jason watched as ten or fifteen years crept into Gil’s face and eyes, lingered a sad moment, then retreated. Newly silent, Gil dragged the rest of a pancake around his plate to mop up the last puddles of maple.

Later, Jason would remember hearing a heavy engine cut the morning silence, idling down at the other end of the block, probably near Molly’s house. It didn’t mean much at the time; even though Heywood’s citizens didn’t find much cause for driving in such a small place, especially this early, it was still a common enough sound.

What caught his attention was the way Gil was suddenly looking at T Rex, who’d transformed from a sad-eyed kitchen beggar to a picture of alertness, rigid, standing on all fours and staring toward the opposite end of the block. As if something else within the animal had taken over entirely.

“T Rex,” Gil said flatly, cautiously. The dog glanced at him, then bolted from the back porch, vaulting a railing in the process.

What the hell?

Gil rose from the table, quietly, quickly, striding into his living room. Jason heard a sharp metallic click, and his eyes focused on the heavy .45 automatic in Gil’s hand when he returned.

“What’s going on, Gil?”

“Maybe nothing. But there’s not much that makes that dog react like that.” His eyes said the rest.

That was when the gunfire erupted from the other end of the block. An instant later followed the shattering of glass.

“Shit,”
Gil said, moving for the back door. On his hip hung a walkie-talkie that Jason hadn’t seen before. Gil paused, half in and half out the doorway, glancing back. “Stay put,” he said, and was out of sight before the screen door slapped shut.

Jason pushed himself out of his chair with his cane and made a hobbling run for the living room. Easing over to the western window, he pulled back a curtain to peek down the block, toward Molly’s. The truck parked in front he recognized at once. Because he’d been hauled away from Union Station in the thing, his back bleeding from a thousand places, and thrown from it out into Brannigan’s parking garage. A truck like that cruised your nightmares for a long time.

A hundred thoughts raced through his mind, from terror to confusion to rage to fearing that he was a jinx whose presence had brought a fresh crop of miseries on the people of Heywood, Texas.

Stay put?
Like hell I will.

Jason hopped across the living room, nearly tripping over a mountain of Gil’s
Field and Stream
magazines on his way to the gun cabinet. He grabbed a pistol-grip riot gun from one corner, feeding twelve-gauge shells into the bottom loading port.

Sons of bitches, why can’t they leave me alone?

He followed Gil’s path out the door and around the rear of the house. The sun was warming up in a hurry, burning off the last traces of dew. Five houses stood between Gil’s and Molly’s, but the sounds from her place were loud enough to be coming from next door: the slamming of doors into walls, as if they were being kicked open during a search; shouting from room to room; very distinctly, the words “She’s right, he’s not here!”

That voice. He would never forget that voice—harsh and raw, it conjured up the face of a devil with a broken nose.

He heard someone else then, a high, wavering cry cut off before it could even be called a scream.
Molly, oh no no no
… A moment later her back screen door came flying off its hinges. Jason was halfway there by now, and saw the door skitter across the back walk.

A man he’d never seen before came barreling out of the open doorway, tall and close-cropped and fishbelly white. Jason blasted with the riot gun, but the charge went wild, blowing out one of Molly’s back windows and ripping a hole in the screen. Jason staggered with the recoil, watching as the pale man did a tuck and roll coming out of the house, springing up with his own gun trained right back. There was two houses’ distance between them, and Jason had the feeling that the man’s aim was true.

“Got him!” the pale man shouted. “Bring the truck around back!” He grinned over his rifle barrel, the grin of a carnival geek before biting off the bird’s head.

From the front of Molly’s house erupted more gunfire. Five or six weapons, at least. Probably the rest of Travis’s stormtroopers battling their way out of the house.

Jason looked down at the shotgun in his right hand, held awkwardly and aimed into the ground. The cane was in his left hand, and the gun needed another shell chambered. He’d never make it.

“Don’t even think it,” the man called over, as if reading his mind.

To his left were the backs of houses, and the man was shielded from the front except when passing from one yard to the next. And from the sound of things, everyone out front had their hands full, and he couldn’t count on a lucky shot that would pick this guy off. To the right were open fields, and beyond that, woodland.

I’m all alone back here.

His captor moved closer, sliding forward step by step, sighting him in the entire time. “You packed and ready to go?” he said, then, once he was in the next yard, “On second thought, fuck the luggage. You
are
the luggage.”

Jason’s stomach squeezed like a clammy fist.

He saw it first, a silent blur of gray and tan hurtling from around the back of a neighboring garage full of greasy bicycles and dead basketballs. The pale man, locked in over the sights of his rifle, never even saw it coming.

T Rex.

The dog moved as quietly as a phantom, and for the first time Jason truly understood what it meant to have around a group of dogs that had been trained to deal with terrorists. He thought he might have smiled, just a little, and hoped it left the man confused, wondering what he could possibly have to smile about.

T Rex sprang, and went for the throat.

The man never had a chance. His gun went flying to the side on impact, and he managed one lurching step before the dog had him on his back. T Rex planted all fours wide and lunged, primal and snarling, a hundred pounds of fury and teeth. The man kicked as if in a fit of seizure, arms flailing, a raspy choke coming from his throat as blood jetted to the lawn. His head thrashed from side to side—he might as well have been dragging his throat across a hacksaw—and a wet stain spread across the front of his pants. Jason watched as his struggles weakened, dwindled to twitches, and died.

T Rex looked back at Jason, muzzle dripping, gauging him with thoughtful eyes
(friend)
before leaping from the dead man’s chest and racing between two houses, out of sight.

Jason heard the truck’s engine roar as he stepped past the pale corpse with its mangled ruin of throat. Somebody out front was shouting, sounded like Gil, telling his men to sweep right, toward the end of the block.

Jason was at Molly’s house when he heard someone else screaming from inside, this time a man. Through one of the windows, looking in on a bedroom Molly used for storage, Jason saw a fleeting shape charging toward the glass. Mouth wide and eyes to match, the man launched himself at the window. Another stranger to Jason’s eyes, he looked vaguely Mexican. He exploded through the window in a shower of glass, blood already streaming down his back, and a moment later Jason saw the reason why. Another of the dogs was right behind him, loping gracefully out of the window in pursuit.