Dark Advent (52 page)

Before his scream faded she thrust the pipe bomb at his face, his mouth, jamming it into the waiting shaft of his throat. Pushing it down, down, deep and tight. She kept her eyes locked on his as they bulged with more fear than she thought the man was capable of feeling. Blood streamed from his lacerated mouth and she heard a choked gargling deep in his throat.

Diane held his gaze as she dug into the pocket of her jeans for the lighter. She drew it out slowly, held it so he could see it. Nodded with satisfaction at the plaintive, weak little shake of his head.

“You still deserve worse,” she said.

Diane thumbed the flame to life and touched it to the fuse, held it until it sputtered into crackling sparks. And finally, forever, let him go.

* *

Sliding, sliding, he was sliding down…

Travis clutched at his throat with one hand, clawing at the loose wall of asphalt and earth with the other. Fingernails broke and tore away, and he hadn’t helped himself one bit.

He thought he’d known what pain was before, but what a fallacy that had been.
This
was real pain, the pipe gripping the inside of his throat like a thousand razored talons. It felt like he’d swallowed a pineapple. A warm torrent of blood oozed down his throat, gagging him and draining into his windpipe.

He couldn’t even budge the damn thing.

The best he could do was tumble to the bottom of the gorge and stare at the pipe jutting from his mouth, watching the fuse burn toward the cap, unbearably alive and aware of just how fucked he was every second of the way.

Pinch the fuse, pull it from the bomb—that’s all he had to do.

Yeah? And then what?

When the sparks sputtered into the cap, he was glad.

* *

The moment after she’d let Travis go, Diane fell sideways and threw her arms around Jason, dragging him away from the drop-off. She held him tight, listening to Travis’ descent into hell. With a dull, coughing roar, a spray of red showered up over the edge. A faint mist speckled her arms, her cheek, Jason’s face. Finally, except for the fires and the wind, silence.

She lay at his side for a moment, one hand linked loosely with his.

Calm, and still.

Diane felt the things that tied her to St. Louis, to the past, felt them shed their anchors and drift away. For better or for worse, it was over. She knew it likely that she would still have nightmares, still see Farrah’s unknowing eyes watching when her defenses were down. But now she could deal with it, and get on with living again. And that was a start.

Jason had been right earlier, in the hour before dawn, which now seemed so long ago. Killing Travis hadn’t made her feel any better.

But it had at least set her free.

And sometimes free was all you needed.

* *

Sometime later, when they could stand, they helped each other back from the highway.

Diane stood over the spot where they’d seen Caleb tumble into the fissure with Solomon, and she bowed her head. Jason looked for Erika, a search that didn’t take long. She was still in the same spot he’d last seen her.

Only now she was much more dead than alive.

Jason sobbed, legs buckling as he fell beside her. He took both of her hands in his, holding them close, and she offered no resistance.

Her jeans had once been a faded, dingy blue. They were mostly red now, as well as the bottom of her shirt. Blood had dampened the ground beneath her, stained the brownish grass. He quickly searched for a bullet wound, so he might apply some pressure over it, and found nothing.

In a moment of intuition—Erika rubbing off on him, finally, too late, too late—he realized it must’ve had something to do with the week she’d spent as Solomon’s prisoner. In retrospect, something
had
seemed to nag at the back of her mind since his return. Something she’d wanted to say, to unburden herself of. And, selfishly, he’d figured if there was anything, she’d bring it up as needed. With no prompting.

She didn’t speak now, either, but her lovely green eyes held him, touched him, caressed him. She didn’t speak. It would’ve been redundant. Her eyes told him everything. So much that would be lost. So much she could’ve taught him, learned from him, shared with him. All gone now. There had been no victors out here today, only losers, losers all.

Erika moved painfully, so painfully, and it hurt him to watch. She turned onto her side, curling toward him as a child might snuggle close to a parent. She pressed her cheek against his knee. Her hands were still in his. She squeezed hard, once, then relaxed.

Totally.

Jason knelt in the shade of the absurd tree she’d chosen, a hot, wet wind gusting like warm breath. He closed his eyes and knew that this,
this,
was rock bottom. To have the inside of your heart so hollowed out it felt as if it would cave in on itself.

“I’m sorry,” came a hoarse whisper behind him. Diane.

Jason nodded, chin dragging on his chest. Sorry. Right. Weren’t they all?
Sorry?
Such an easy word.

“She was someone I wish I’d gotten to know a lot better.”

He laid a hand on Erika’s belly, nodded again, then looked at Diane. Her long, drawn face, tears making glistening tracks through the grime on her cheeks.

“Me too,” was all he could say.

They sat in the shade for a long time, and all the while he kept staring down at Erika’s stilled, fetal form. He hoped for some miracle to work its way up through the land, the mighty earth that she’d somehow been in touch with. It was simply unnatural for her to no longer live.

But she just lay there.

Why’d you have to be the one to take him on?
he wanted to ask her.
Were any of us worth this? Whatever he did to you?

No answers, no replies, from anywhere at all.

Diane left him while she fashioned a crude cross, her second in as many days. This time she made it from Caleb’s rifle and Jason’s cane, which he said he didn’t want anymore. She lashed the two together with the strap cut from her nylon bag. She erected it over the spot where she thought Caleb would be resting, shoving the rifle barrel down into the soft earth that had sealed him over.

At long last she and Jason began to look to the south.

The Sunbird was the only thing that appeared to have a ghost of a chance of moving again. Of the trucks, three were demolished across the highway, another lay overturned in the grass, and the last was riddled with bullets, resting on flattened tires.

Diane helped Jason carry Erika out from the underbrush, and they laid her across the back seat. A few minutes later they pulled Rich from the wreckage of the overpass and laid him on the floorboard.

No way could they just leave these two out here. They deserved better. They still deserved their little piece of the promised land.

As the sun reached its zenith in the sky, a pall of oily smoke wafting overhead, Diane thunked her hand against the Sunbird’s fender. “Think this thing’ll get us there?”

Jason looked at the New Madrid exit ramp, more or less intact. He hoped the descending ramp on the other side was still good. It was their only way of bypassing the blockade formed by the collapsed overpass.

Beyond that? No telling what they’d find. And the Sunbird was hardly cut out to hack it as an all-terrain vehicle.

But they would make it. Somehow, some way.

They’d make it.

8

Heywood, Texas, still made a good place to heal. Jason was rooming and boarding with Molly Silva again, back in the same room with the blue gingham curtains and the cheerful wallpaper and the stoneware water pitcher and bowl. He sometimes found himself staring across at the high-backed chair where he’d found Tomahawk waiting for him to awaken the first time. Tomahawk…he could’ve used a little of that guy right about now.

Molly Silva worked her herbal wonders on him and Diane, to shift their healing processes into high gear. She didn’t seem bothered by the swollen cheek, the bruises left by the rifle butt days ago. It was business as usual for Molly.

The journey from New Madrid had been long and hard, keeping their speed slow for the next hundred miles or more to avoid running into earthquake damage. They steered around debris, weaved past buckled stretches of highway that looked like giant washboards. They backtracked to find other paths when the road proved unpassable, took detours to hunt out gasoline here and there. They never managed to catch up with Jack Mitchell and the others, but he didn’t care. The less he had to speak, the better, and he was sure Diane felt the same.

Meanwhile, the two bodies they carried began to smell. At times the odor rising from the back was so bad Jason was tempted to put them in the trunk, but they were not cargo, and so he never worked up enough nerve to suggest the idea to Diane. And the urge would pass.

Heywood, Texas.

The impromptu funeral for Erika and Rich was held within three hours after they arrived late Wednesday morning. A pair of graves was hurriedly dug in the town’s cemetery, a place so mockingly picturesque that Jason would’ve sworn it couldn’t possibly exist. White picket fences, shady trees, shiny headstones. The entire town turned out, and the dogs roamed freely. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Jason refused to look at Erika until she was shrouded in a blanket, could not bring himself to see what two summer days in the back of the Sunbird had done to her. There was no reason to taint the memories of what she’d been, not when memories were all he had.

Heywood, Texas.

Jason soon lost track of the days, couldn’t tell a Friday from a Sunday from a Wednesday. No need anymore, though. In this place each day was much the same as any other, twenty-four-hour cycles that repeated endlessly, an infinite loop.

He spent the days sleeping late, then sitting in the closed-up room staring out the window, or watching the soft, silent dance of the gingham curtains in the breeze. He would lazily stroke the broad head of T Rex whenever the dog came moping around for a visit.

The dog seemed to understand better than any person here.

Heywood, Texas.

The double funeral was the last time he saw the group from Brannigan’s all together since his arrival. They all had a mountain of work to climb, settling in and setting up house, watering the seeds of a new life that he’d sown for them at the expense of his own. Meanwhile, all
he
had to do was heal.

And one day he looked in the mirror, fresh from a shower under a barrel with a pull-handle that opened a nozzle. One day…he knew nothing more specific than that. He knew only that the purple bruises had faded from his face, that his muscles were loose again, that the cuts and scrapes were phantoms of their former selves and would soon disappear altogether.

No more pain. He felt nothing. He
had
nothing.

Except, he realized as he stared at the eyes in the mirror, a burning itch to get away from all the reminders of why he’d wanted to find this town in the first place.

* *

Diane found him packing a few odds and ends into a knapsack when she came over to get some tea leaves from Molly Silva. Molly was out helping tend someone’s garden, but the tea leaves no longer mattered when she saw Jason turn his back and thrust a box of shotgun shells into the knapsack with a terrible air of finality and inevitability.

“You’re not,” she said, her voice coming out less firm than she’d intended, and more of a plea.

He nodded without looking at her, still bending over his bed to jam a few pairs of socks beside the shells.

“After all it took to get here? That doesn’t matter to you anymore? After all it took for you to
find
this place?”

“Too many hopes invested here, Diane. What I put into it already doesn’t come close to what I thought I could get out of it.” He looked at her in the doorway, over his shoulder. “Too many dreams that got pissed away in Missouri. And you know, I don’t even remember anybody saying thank you.”

Diane leaned heavily against the doorjamb, knees going weak with the old familiar feeling of loss. She shut her eyes to the warm, earthy wood tones of this room that seemed so beckoning to her, but which obviously fell on stonier soil within Jason. A hundred pleas crossed her mind and she rejected them all.

“The worst is over, Jay,” she finally said. “Don’t you feel that? Now that we’re here, the worst is over?”

He straightened to his full height, and she noticed just how good he was looking again, healthy and whole and in one piece. Fresh jeans, fresh denim shirt. Hair clean and cut short for a change.

Same battered running shoes, though.

“I don’t know. Maybe so.” He mulled it over a bit longer. “Yeah, I bet the worst
is
over. But you’re naive if you think the bad stuff won’t keep coming.”

“We can face it, you know that.”

“Maybe
you
can, together…but count me out. I don’t want the risks anymore. Everybody I’ve ever loved and needed has ended up getting taken away from me.”

“You think you’re the only one?” she cried. Her voice was edgy with anger and this time she meant every bit of it. “Forget there’s a whole townful of people out there who’ve probably been no better off! Forget that! What about
me,
huh? How do you think
I
feel, after my daughter, after Farrah, after Caleb?”

Jason nodded, eyes too empathetic to accuse him of indifference to her losses. “You know, with me, it started before the plague ever showed up.” He zipped the knapsack shut with a quick jerk of his arm. “I just want to call it quits to the hurting. I don’t want the responsibility of looking out for anyone else. I don’t want to keep seeing what I should’ve been here. If I have to keep feeling numb to avoid all that, fine. That much I
can
handle.”

She blinked away tears while watching him sling the pack over one shoulder, grab his shotgun, pluck the car keys off the dresser.

“Are you going to say goodbye to anyone else?” she asked.

A terse shake of his head. “Why don’t you do it for me? And explain, okay? That’s what I really want to avoid this morning. Explanations. You’re the only one I could hash this over with.”

She nodded, swiped at her eyes. “Where will you go?”

“I don’t know. Find some mountains, maybe. Or an ocean. They both sound pretty good.”

She nodded again, swallowing the lump creeping up her throat. “Jason,” she whispered, because a whisper was all she could manage, “if you don’t find a way to open yourself up again, you won’t really be
living
anymore. You’ll just be surviving. At best.”

He turned away to watch the fluttering curtains for a moment, rocking on his heels, then turned back, a hard-edged smile on his lips.

“I’ve got this theory,” he said. “Some of us quit living a long time ago. Only our bodies didn’t catch on. And we’re just too chickenshit to finish the job.”

Minutes later, after they’d hugged, fiercely, after he’d left the room and his footsteps had faded and the front door had latched and his latest car outside had started and its engine had droned away to nothing, after she’d sunk onto his bed, Diane burst into tears. A flood of tears, hot and bitter. For herself. For Jason. For all the lost ones.

But mostly, for all of them who were still alive.