Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) (10 page)

Every time another looter emerged from the building, he carried less than the one before. No one carried water or soda or chips. Gathering her courage, Mina stepped out from behind the dumpster, preparing to dash into the building. She looked around one more time, and her heart skipped a beat. A gang of five men walked among the cars, all of them armed with rifles or handguns.
 

Mina scurried back to her hiding place. Within a minute, the gang had quietly surrounded the small station. As looters ran out, they were met with orders to drop whatever they held and put their hands in the air. Soon no one else emerged from the building, and two of the armed men went inside. Mina silently cursed her own hesitation. She could have already gone in and left.

Some looters fidgeted, reluctant to put down their spoils. In return they suffered bloody lips and broken noses. Two of the gang roughed up an older teen, hitting him with the butt of a rifle because he refused to pull out what he had hidden inside his coat. The young man doubled over, and while the thieves focused their attention on him, an older man in a baseball cap saw his opportunity and sprinted for freedom, a box of cigarettes, a handful of lighters, and a bottle of lighter fluid in his arms. He zigzagged around cars toward the dumpsters. The baseball cap blew off, revealing a balding head and thin, wispy hair. The man looked behind him as he ran. One of the thieves had noticed and ran after him. As the older man neared Mina’s hiding place, he lurched forward, sprawling on his belly, the items tumbling down not far from the dumpster. The bottle of lighter fluid landed two feet from Mina.
 

The thief caught up to him, grabbing the older man under the arms and hauling him to his feet. “Pick them up!” he commanded.
 

The balding man panted as he groped for the cigarettes and lighters scattered on the ground. He left the bottle of lighter fluid. Another of the thieves walked over. They grabbed the cigarettes and shoved the older man against the car.

Mina hunkered down again, out of sight, breathing deeply to calm herself.
 

“Please,” the older man said.

“Get over there!” shouted one of the thieves.

“Get him in line with the others!” The voices drew away.

“Line up!” someone shouted.
 

Mina peered around the dumpster. The balding man stood in line now with the other looters, pinching his nose to stop the blood from pouring out of it. Two armed men gathered the goods from the store and piled them to the side while two others walked up and the down the line of people, looking them over. The gang took any weapons they found, as well as any useful articles of clothing—jackets, belts, shirts, and boots.

When they were done, the thieves pushed the group to march to the side of the building, where they forced the looters to sit on the ground with their hands behind their heads. Mina was now in full view of anyone who might have looked her way, so she carefully crept around to the other side of the dumpster.

The bottle of lighter fluid and several lighters lay nearby. Crouching even lower, Mina hid behind the cars between the dumpster and the building, reaching for the provisions. She grabbed them and scurried away, stuffing the lighter fluid in her jacket pocket as she worked her way among the vehicles, each car between her and the station slowing her racing heart a beat.
 

When she reached the truck stop across the road, she moved around it and leaned against an eighteen-wheeler, facing a stretch of open ground behind the station. She jammed the lighters into her pockets, freeing her hands, and walked toward the trees.

Before she had taken two steps, an explosive pressure forced Mina off her feet. Blinded by the bright light that had flashed behind her, she skidded along the rough grass, skinning her arms as she tried to catch herself. Her ears rang, and an intense wave washed over her.

Everything went oddly silent.

Then the ground rumbled, and an eighteen-wheeler on the other side of the parking lot flew into the air and exploded, raining metal and flame down on the other trucks, igniting them in a chain reaction. Mina scrambled away from the debris flying past her and stood shakily beneath the trees, staring at the growing inferno.

Smoke billowed into the sky, drawing her eyes upward. Mina’s stomach clenched as an enormous grey-black mass moved out of the haze. Its hull gleamed like polished black stone. A flash of yellow light streamed from it, this time toward the other side of the street. Mina felt, rather than saw, the explosion that followed the light.
 

Gathering what was left of her wits, she turned and sprinted into the trees, running as quickly as the tangled undergrowth would allow. A side road ran perpendicular to the highway, and Mina kept it on her right. Her lungs burned for oxygen, begging her to slow down, but she pushed on. A spasm shot through her hamstring, and she tumbled into the ditch alongside the road.
 

The wind blew foul-smelling smoke toward her. She sat up, gasping for breath, and massaged the back of her thigh until the pain subsided enough for her to stand. Then she hobbled through the trees up a low hill, away from the turmoil.

As she crested the hill, something down the road reflected the rays of the sun. Mina squinted. Two enormous creatures towered over the center of the road, standing upright on legs larger than pillars.
 

Invaders.
 

Mina ducked behind a tree. She was far away. Maybe they hadn’t seen her. After a moment, she peeked out from her hiding place to see what the creatures were doing. They stood still as stone, their naked bodies glistening golden in the weak sunshine. They had arms with things on the end of them that could have been fingers or claws. Their skin looked like grey stone—like a sculptor had roughed out their forms from a hunk of rock, but had quit before fine-chiseling and polishing the completed statue. Strange markings covered their entire bodies, but at this distance Mina could not see them clearly.
 

One of the monsters shifted, its hue changing from golden to grey, and Mina caught a glimpse of its face. It had two eyes in a blockish head. Almost human in form, and yet not. But they were too far away for Mina to determine what about their heads bothered her.

Another blast thundered from behind, and Mina’s ears rang again as the deafening roar replaced the silence. She turned. A ball of fire engulfed the road. The smoke was so thick now that the ship above disappeared entirely.
 

Two armed men emerged, running from the smoke. One jogged ahead, away from the fire, while the other lagged behind, coughing. He stopped and called out for his buddy to wait. But his companion continued to run straight for the invaders. Mina wanted to shout above the roar of the fire, to warn him of the danger ahead, but the words stuck in her throat.
 

As he came over the rise, he had to have seen the creatures. But he continued without slowing, running directly between them and along the road. The invaders did not even look at him. Why had they let him pass? Maybe they couldn’t see him for some reason?

The second man walked to catch up, still coughing. As he crested the hill, he stopped, eyes on the creatures. Half a second later, he broke for the trees. He took three steps before he collapsed to the ground, tumbling across the pavement. He didn’t move again.
 

The invaders hadn’t moved at all. Without pausing to question what had happened, Mina turned toward the trees and ran.

Whispered voices drifted through the fog in Lincoln’s brain.

“I’ve stitched him up the best I can, but he’s not recovering as fast as I would like,” someone was saying. “We need to find another donor.”

“None of us match his blood type. What about the guy who already donated?”

“He can’t give any more for a while yet, and I don’t think we can wait.”

The voices were fading. Lincoln needed the people around him to know. She was in Atlanta.

“What’d he say?”

“He said ‘Atlanta.’”

“His sister’s there. Or was. We have no way of checking.”

Lincoln faded in and out of consciousness for several hours. He was dimly aware that they’d found another donor—Colonel Nash.

“How long before we know if this works?”

“Not long, sir.”

Mina cowered all night in the dark, shaking with cold and jerking awake whenever she dozed off. As soon as the sun began to rise, she stretched her aching body and began to walk until she found another side road, looking carefully up and down before deciding to follow it. She trudged along slowly beneath the protection of the trees as clouds moved in overhead. She shivered and pulled her jacket closer around her, wishing for warmer clothing. Especially warmer shoes—her toes ached with cold.
 

Down the road from Mina, a small truck had pulled off onto the grassy shoulder. Its trailer doors were wide open. She surveyed it from the nearby tree line. It was a snack truck, the kind that stocked vending machines. She approached cautiously.

The trailer had been cleaned out except for a couple of half-opened boxes of smashed chocolate cakes, most of them open. Tiny flying bugs crawled on them, but Mina was too famished to care. She scooped up the cakes, swatting away the bugs, and stuffed the sweet pastry into her mouth, fully opening the packages to lick them clean. She had eaten her way through three before she remembered to save something for later. Carefully wrapping the remaining cakes, she placed them in an empty cardboard box along with the five unopened packages. The bottle of lighter fluid also fit in the box.
 

Mina jumped down off the truck feeling slightly more hopeful. She walked around to the small cab, trying the door. Locked. If she broke a window, she could spend the night inside. Mina looked up and down the road again, then up into the overcast sky. No, too open. What if the invaders were searching the roads? She walked away into the trees.

Darkness fell, accompanied by cold and misting rain. Mina gathered wood for a fire. Wanting to build something that would last all night, she gathered the largest branches she could find and piled them to her knees. After pouring lighter fluid over all of it, she held one of the lighters to a stick wrapped in leaves. As soon as the leaves caught, she threw it on the logs. The lighter fluid flared brightly for a minute, the flames licking the logs before suddenly petering out. She repeated the process only to lose the flame again. Frustrated, Mina tried pouring the lighter fluid over the fire as it burned, hoping the wood would catch if it were hot enough, but nothing would burn for more than a couple of minutes. On her last attempt, more air came out of the bottle than fluid, splatting tiny bubbles on the wood.
 

Cold rain poured down, quickly soaking Mina’s hair and everything below her raincoat. She threw the bottle into the dark woods and kicked at the logs, then picked up a charred branch and hurled it at a tree with a yell. The branch bounced off, unharmed. Mina sank down to huddle under a tree and pulled up her thin hood.
 

Dad and Lincoln had urged her to go hunting and camping with them many times when she was a child. She had always turned them down, claiming she didn’t want to know how her meat reached the freezer. Mina hadn’t been more than twelve the last time they asked.
 

She should have at least let them teach her how to build a fire.

Where was Lincoln now? Had Atlanta also been attacked? Probably.
   

The note from Cummings hadn’t told her exactly why Lincoln was headed to Atlanta. Maybe he was going to pick up Mina and take her home, but then, that sort of gesture was out of character for Lincoln. Perhaps he had been more worried than he seemed on the phone.
 

Whatever his reasons, Mina had to get to Atlanta as soon as possible. She envisioned a map of the eastern US in her head. Charlotte was located near the North Carolina state line, she was pretty sure.
 
Atlanta was definitely in northern Georgia. South Carolina lay in between. If she went southwest every day, using the sun to guide her, she would more or less be headed in the right direction.
Of course, I could wildly offshoot and end up in Florida.
 

According to the mile markers, she had traveled twenty miles her first day. Today, in the woods with tree roots and stones to trip her up, she’d made less progress.
 

Following the highway signage would be the easiest, but after the attack at the truck stop, the main roads made her nervous. Too many people were using them, making them easy targets for the invaders. And she would have more competition for food.
 

She considered her other options. The mountains bordered the western part of the state. She could find them easily if she headed west, then follow them south to Atlanta. Using the mountains as her guide, she might have a better chance of finding the city and a smaller chance of error. The mountains would provide better hiding places, too. And fewer population centers might mean fewer invaders. She hunkered down, pulling her hood further down over her face as the wind blew rain in her eyes. The flimsy cardboard box drooped as the rain soaked it.

In the morning, she would keep the sun at her back and walk west. Did the sun rise due east? She didn’t know for certain, but as long as she headed generally westward she would be okay. Her mind more settled, Mina tucked as much of her body into her raincoat as possible and leaned against a tree.
 

The rain was unrelenting. Mina slept very little, dozing fitfully as morning approached. When she rose, her numb toes and fingers refused to work independently, and she could barely place the remaining cakes in her pockets.
 

In the feeble light of morning, her plan to find Lincoln seemed pale and impossible. She had no idea how many miles lay between her and Atlanta. How many invaders. How many obstacles. Mina took a deep, steadying breath and took out a cake from her pocket. The sugared cake tasted good, and her spirits lifted as she licked chocolate off the wrapper. If she had survived, Lincoln could have, too.