I didn’t. But the real subject I feared, concerning my possible demise, was really only a hop skip and a jump from that lie so I blurted it out without too much guilt.
“I’ve only been kissed three times, Zack, okay?”
Zack twinged at the words, but after a moment, began to loosen. Someone seemed to have pulled the metal bolts out of his neck by the time I looked up again.
“What three?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re being serious?”
Zack snorted. “If you don’t wanna answer. Then I’m joking. But if you’re going to answer, then I’m serious.”
“That’s not fair.”
Zack smiled sweetly. Well, evilly, but with a certain charming sweetness.
“Okay, Mama Theresa, are your lips virginal?” I asked.
Zack’s mocking smile faded.
Good
. I tried not to beam triumphantly—it was more of a triumphant flicker, or a victorious flash. Victorious Flash would be a great band name.
Okay, Lucy Day, you need to chill out.
“Well?”
“Well,” Zack said. “I’ve kissed five girls.”
“Me too,” I said, and the look of shock he flashed me was priceless. Oh, had I a camera.
“You mean—”
“I’m kidding,” I said. “You’re cute though.”
“You don’t care?”
I rolled my eyes and snorted. “And why, exactly, would I care how many girls you kissed? You can kiss all the girls you want.”
Zack looked hurt again—for such a witty guy, he wasn’t up on his banter. Then again, I gave him a free pass—considering his surroundings.
“I just meant. I guess I thought that would bother you.”
I grinned. “And why is that?”
“Well,” Zack said, gently. “I thought it would bother you because of…our thing. The… The
us
thing.”
“We have a thing?” I asked.
“Don’t we?”
I cocked my head to the side. He imitated the gesture, and I snorted again.
“I thought. After the date, and the kiss…wow, the kiss. Especially the one outside of the counseling center. I mean, you freaked out and ran away after, so, certainly demerits on my end but… wow. You really knocked me out with that kiss.”
My sense of cat-and-mouse died. I had taken something from him when I kissed him that second time—something valuable. Something I couldn’t quantify. But after what Abraham had said, I knew I hadn’t stolen heat from people. I violated them. I robbed their memories.
I tucked my face into his chest.
“So I was a bad kisser...” Zack said, in mock melancholy. “I knew it. Was it fish lips? It was fish lips wasn’t it?”
I sobbed and clung to his chest, and I felt Zack’s body tighten. He tugged his arms around me and pulled me into him. After a few long moments, and after my sobs began to still, Zack leaned down and whispered into my ear.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I looked up at him, cry-face be damned. He gave me a little sweet smile and kissed my cheek.
“What for?” I asked him.
“About the fish lips. I’ll try to practice and—”
I smacked him in the chest, hard, and he laughed softly into the top of my head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I brought up something painful. I’m not sure what I did but I’m not dumb enough to think it wasn’t something I said.”
I shrugged. “Can we just sit?”
Zack nodded. “Yeah.”
I nuzzled back into his shoulder and let the hum of the engine radiate through my body.
I tried to enjoy the moment, so naturally, Morgan turned back to me and cleared her throat.
“So you’re dead then?”
The look on her face, the tone of her voice, and the content of the question didn’t come close to matching each other. The look, controlled anger. The tone, politely curious. The question—well, it’s
the
question, isn’t it now?
I turned to look at Zack’s face—still. Curious, but still. A hair shy of pensive. His beautiful eyes were sending me a message I wasn’t picking up on. The little twitches of his brow spoke volumes in a language I didn’t know.
I turned back to Morgan.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“When you disappeared, what happened?” Morgan said. That same combination of pissed-off and polite.
“I told you what happened,” I said.
I felt a twinge—something like guilt. Luckily, it wasn’t very strong—I’d more than half convinced myself that I
had
been accosted, hit on the head, and made to suffer merely a tremendous headache and an embarrassing cop-ride home. Only a fraction of me remembered the taste of gun smoke. And even less of that fraction recalled in perfect clarity the creeping cold of massive fatal blood loss.
“People don’t go…
here
for a bump on the head, Lucy,” Morgan said, and turned to Puck. “Right?”
Puck looked over his shoulder, and even in profile, looked grave. He shook his head.
“Thank you,” I said with a saccharin sweet smile. Puck turned away.
“Lucy. What happened to you?”
I took a breath.
Something let out an earth-shattering
CLANG
. The convertible jolted and rocked and Puck slammed both of his loafers down on the Falcon’s brake. We slid and fish-tailed, and Puck swung the Falcon’s wheel around in a desperate attempt to keep us under control. Gravel sprayed, metal twisted, and everyone in the car, save Puck, let out identical screams of terror.
Puck wrestled with the old Ford, trying to bring it down. He managed the feat, and when the Falcon crept to a—final—stop, I looked behind us. The debris in the road wasn’t hard to decipher.
The engine fell out of our car.
Zack turned and looked down the long road behind us. He seemed to be making mental calculations. After a few dozen heartbeats, he spoke.
“The engine fell out of the car,” he said.
I closed my eyes and let my head slide down into my lap. Zack put a hand on my back when he saw me shaking. He removed it when he heard my first guffaws of laughter. I didn’t blame him.
The hills had crept up around us as we drove, and now that we were stopped, I couldn’t see the countryside on either side. Large swells of grey earth put the road in a narrow valley—perfect for an ambush, was my first thought.
Zack and Puck spent little less than a minute coming to the conclusion that no amount of spit, elbow grease, or can-do attitude would put the Falcon back together again.
When their inspection was finished, we grabbed our stuff, and Puck knocked one frail, gnarled fist into the trunk. The trunk yawned open with a haunted-house creak.
There wasn’t much there—a few dusty sport coats and what looked like a well-traveled red tool box. Puck handed out the coats—I took a gray wool blazer, Morgan a black pinstripe, and Zack a deep red jacket that looked like something a used car-salesman might be buried in. Then he popped open the tool box and handed Zack a half-rusted tire-iron and Morgan a dull orange monkey wrench. Zack and Morgan exchanged looks and swapped weapons.
“What do I get?” I asked.
Puck smirked and waved his hand as if to say
don’t worry about it
.
“Figures,” Zack murmured. “I get a wrench and Lucy gets The Force.”
Morgan grinned and tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Will these even help?”
Puck gave her that
maybe,-baby
hand gesture I
loved
so dearly.
Morgan laughed at that and set the long black tire-iron on her shoulder. It gave her a jaunty, slightly bad ass look that I immediately envied.
“I pull it off though, don’t I?” Morgan asked. I didn’t think the line of questioning stopped by our car troubles was over—but I think she had decided to postpone it for a less dangerous time. Thank God for killer extra-dimensional monsters, eh?
“Hell yes,” I said, and buttoned up my gray coat. “Shall we?”
Morgan and Zack nodded. I glanced at Puck, who was already re-wrapping his battered red scarf.
“Where-to?”
Puck twisted his lips with one hand, then pointed down the road.
“Okay,” I said, then sighed. “How far?”
He shook his head. Not far then. All right.
“Are we in danger?”
Puck nodded.
“Mortal?” Zack asked.
Puck nodded.
“Seriously though, do I pull off the bad-ass crowbar thing or what?” Morgan asked.
Puck nodded, turned, and stalked off down the center of the road, examining the rusting hulks of cars as he passed. We all trudged after him.
“It’s a tire iron,” Zack said. “But, yes, well done.”
Our road-trip atmosphere didn’t last. Another mile down the road, the noises began.
Chapter Fourteen
Midnight Train
The sound of a rock sliding down a hill. Nothing much else, really.
We turned to examine the sound, only to see a tiny pebble skipping lazily down the side of a grey swell of dirt. I watched everyone’s hackles rise, their fists tighten. Everyone knew. No one joked. Or talked.
The sounds echoed around us, shuffling, snorting, feet breaking into frantic runs, and then stopping. None of us felt the need to communicate the truth—something tailed us, and it made no effort to hide its presence. Puck turned back down the road and began walking.
Zack turned around as we walked, shuffling backwards, his eyes on the road behind us. I touched his shoulder, but other than a barely noticeable tightening of his lips, he didn’t react.
The noises grew louder, shuffling, scraping. Puck bent forward, and began jogging. So did we. Zack stayed behind us—no doubt using Puck and himself to shield us helpless girls in the middle. The thought bugged me, but the chivalry was damn cute.
We shuffled past the rusted wrecks of a hundred cars, dodging around them, sliding over the naturally occurring blockades. I made a point not to look in the cars—while fairly certain there was nothing to be found, my brain kept conjuring the image of a hideously grinning bleached skull staring at me, its skinless fingers still clutching the steering wheel. I’d probably cribbed the image from some bad horror movie, but that knowledge didn’t soothe the nervous ache in my belly whenever we ran too close to a car window.
A deep ragged moan rose up over the sound of our feet hammering pavement. I couldn’t help myself—still jogging, I glanced over my shoulder toward the source of the sound. The hills hugged the battered highway, their dark forms barely perceivable from the roiling clouds in the endless grey sky. As my eyes pierced the gloom, trying to make some sense of the spine-scraping, hollow moan, I saw it. Low, slithering. A human-shape at the top of the hill, crawling on its belly, its elbows stuck out at angles as its palms pulled it forward across the dirt. It moved in sharp jerking motions, its head snapping up toward the sky, then back toward the ground. Long, dirt rags hung from its thin frame, cutting wide swaths in the dirt behind it.
Then, it looked at me. Two greenish-gold glints flashed in the deep hollow pits of its sunken eyes. Its jaw stretched beyond human boundaries, scraping the dirt beneath it. Its neck twisted, staring up at the sky again, and it moaned. The noise, filled with sorrow, rife with hunger, made my skin crawl.
The thing began sliding down the hill on its stomach, dragging the tattered remains of its legs behind it.
When I turned and sprinted, everyone joined me without a word.
The moans began to rise—a chorus of mournful howling. Puck shifted, angled for—it looked like a freeway off ramp, and we were almost on top of it. In another minute, we were there, sprinting off the highway at full speed. Morgan and Zack were sucking greedy mouthfuls of air. I felt tired, certainly, but Zack and Morgan’s faces were bright red, and the air they dragged in didn’t seem to sustain them.
In no way
,
on no world, was that normal. Morgan was an athlete in incredibly annoying shape, and Zack was Mr. Physical Activity. I should have been passed out on the ground miles before either of them felt winded.
In front of us, past the tiny skyline of broken automobiles, the street wound out into a grey suburban wasteland. The sound of the moaning faded as we left the ramp.
Small shops, tiny streets—detached single-family houses huddled together, their paint long since stripped by weather and rot. Grass, long dead, brown and grey. Minivans and SUVs pulled to the curb, caked in grey dust. We passed by what looked like a desiccated 7-Eleven, its huge yawning windows caked in inches of dirt. I half-expected crude signs carved in the dust—maybe “Jacki wuz here” or a startling, graphic depiction of genitals. But there was nothing—it was empty, like everything else. Devoid of life. It reminded me of Terminator or Resident Evil—a world post-apocalypse. That’s what this whole damn place reminded me of, come to think of it.
What had happened here? Had anything happened here? Was there even a
here
? I wanted to ask Puck, but I had an idea he didn’t have the answers either.
I couldn’t stop looking behind us as we walked—every time I turned my back to the distant moaning, I pictured that thing on the hill, crawling toward us. From there, my mind conjured a pack of them—wild, snarling, and hungry. With legs that worked and teeth that chewed hungrily, and eyes like bronze coins, shot through with patina-green veins. The fifth time I tried to look behind us, Zack grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around.
“I’m watching,” he whispered. “Don’t turn around again. It won’t make you feel safer, trust me.”
I didn’t look behind me anymore.
We passed through three more intersections. I didn’t recognize any of the street names.
We passed the remains of a Taco Bell on the corner of Raymond and Willard. Zack looked up at its faded plastic sign and made a noise. He leaned in and whispered in my ear. I laughed.
“What’d he say?” Morgan asked.
I smiled at her. “‘Run for the Border.’”
Morgan’s lip twisted, and she let out a little snort.
I wasn’t sure, but it looked like we were moving into a rougher part of town. Distinguishing upper class from lower class in a rotting corpse of a suburb wasn’t an exact science. But the large rotting houses were making way for small rotting houses. We passed a high school with twelve-foot chain-link fences circling it on all sides. It reminded me of my school, actually, but with a rougher edge. E.J. Beryl High—I’d never heard of it.