That black blood was on my wrist. I smeared it against my skirt as Alex’s fingers wound around my hand. “We’ve got to go. There will be more.”
I nodded. This was no time to contemplate biology or humanity. This was time to act, to move. To survive.
We ran, hand in sticky hand, sliding through the grass like ghosts.
I could see the bright helmet of Ginger’s hair and the stark white figure of the horse far before us. We’d given them a head start, which was good—Alex and I had the only really effective weapons against the vampires. Alex had his tattoos and I had the
Himmelsbrief
. They were more of a deterrent, Alex said, like spraying mace at a perpetrator. The startlement they created sometimes gave us enough opening to run away. Or kill.
“Where are we going?” I asked, casting my gaze about the dark landscape. It was suicide to be out in the open like this. “We can’t fight until daylight.”
He shook his head, mouth pressed in a flat line. “I don’t know. The sign said that there was a church back there, but all we saw was burned timbers. Useless as shelter, if it was desecrated by the vamps.”
“We’ll have to find someplace else,” I decided, nodding sharply to myself.
“How do you feel about sleeping in trees?” His face split open in a lopsided grin, his teeth white in the darkness. There were some at the horizon we could possibly reach, but none in the field.
“I’m quite sure the vampires can climb trees.”
“Maybe not if we set fire at the roots . . . they don’t like fire.”
I made a face. “I don’t much fancy the idea of being roasted alive in a tree.”
“Reminds me of a movie,
The Wicker Man
. . .” he began.
I glanced at him blankly. I had never seen a movie.
“Never mind, then. I’ll tell you later.”
Ginger’s horse was climbing a slope ahead of us. This part of the meadow wasn’t cultivated, and the grass and weeds swelled over this rill in the earth, perhaps five feet tall, stretching east to west.
My skin prickled. In the far distance, I could see more glowing eyes gathering. They had heard us. They smelled blood. I pulled at Alex’s sleeve and pointed.
Ginger had reached the top of the hillock. She was panting, and her glasses slid down over her nose. She was dressed as an Amish woman, but she was not one of my people. She was an Englisher, like Alex. She was an old friend of my family who had lost everything: her husband, her children. And she was the only part of my old life I had left. I clung to her.
The horse stared to the south. His ears flattened, and his eyes dilated black as obsidian. His nostrils flared, and his tail swished back and forth. He pawed the earth, pacing nervously. I had found him back on Amish land with an empty saddle, smeared in blood and with his former rider’s boot still in the stirrup. We had discovered that the horse had a sixth sense about the vampires. Perhaps he could sense them the way dogs could sense earthquakes. Or perhaps he was merely a nervous horse and vampires were everywhere.
Alex had named him Horus, after an Egyptian god of the sky who defeated evil. Ginger and I just called him Horace.
“They’re out there,” Ginger said, staring out at the dark and patting Horace’s sides soothingly.
“
Ja
. They’re coming.” I climbed up the hill, gazing at the flattened trail of grasses we’d left.
Alex scrambled to the top of the hill. Ginger and I made to rush down the slope on the other side, but he said: “Wait.”
I looked up at him, my brows drawing together. “What do you mean?”
Alex shook his head. He squatted, and squinted to the beginning and the end of the strangely squiggling formation of land.
“Alex. We’ve got to go.” Now it was me urging him on.
He slipped on his jacket. “We wait here.”
Ginger’s head popped up above the grass line like a platinum gopher. “What are you talking about? We’ve gotta get moving.” She tugged at Horace’s reins, but he would not budge. He stood on the pinnacle of the hill as if he were a statue.
Alex shook his head, and he pressed his hands to the ground. He was smiling. “No. We wait here. On the hill.”
I bit my lip. Perhaps the stress of running from vampires for the last several weeks had caused Alex to finally lose touch with reality. Perhaps he had some desire to make a last stand. I confessed to myself that I felt like that often. I hadn’t been baptized, so I wouldn’t get to heaven, but it was sometimes peaceful to imagine not existing in this chaotic world any longer. I didn’t
think
I’d be sent to hell, but I just wasn’t sure.
In any event, I wasn’t quite ready to test theology.
“Alex,” I said. “We need to go if we’re to have any chance of—”
“Do you trust me?”
He crouched on the top of the hill, looking at me with an infuriatingly jovial smile. I felt myself frown, but I reached down for his hand. Behind me, Ginger sighed and scrambled up the grass bank.
We sat on the crest of the little hill, looking down, as dozens of glowing eyes converged upon us.
“We’re screwed,” Ginger said.
I didn’t disagree with the sentiment.
Those luminous eyes drew near. I counted more than two dozen pairs. My heart hammered, and my mouth felt sticky and dry. I fingered the rough edge of my makeshift weapon. I might be able to kill one vampire with it. Not dozens.
Jagged silhouettes of people pulled themselves from the grass, like spiders extricating from webs. I braced myself, clutching my puny staff. Their eyes swept up the hill. I expected them to rush to us like water in a trench after a rainstorm.
They reached up with pale fingers that smelled like metal. Their lips drew back, hissing, and I could see the thirst in their eyes. But they made no move to climb the hill.
I sidled closer to Alex. “What’s stopping them?”
“Holy ground,” he said, grinning.
My brows drew together. I didn’t understand. I saw no sign of any human habitation here. No church. No graveyard. Just this oddly shaped hill that rose up out of the field.
“How?”
Ginger started laughing behind me. She turned on her heel and surveyed the sad little hillock. “I see it now,” she said. She huddled in closer with us when a vampire snarled at her.
“See what?”
“We’re on an Indian mound,” Alex said. “A holy site built by any one of a number of tribes in this area. They were used as burial mounds, ceremonial sites, astronomical measure- ments . . . some, we have no idea what for.”
“How did you know?” It looked like just a rill in the land to me. A bump.
“See how it’s sorta shaped like a snake?” He gestured to the west. “It’s hard to see underneath the tall grass, but notice how it undulates in the ground?” He swished his hand back and forth like a snake swimming, and I could see some of the suggestion of a reptile in it.
“I saw a mound one time that was shaped like a big serpent eating the moon.” He cocked his head and started to walk off down the snake’s back. “I wonder if this one is like that . . .”
Ginger snagged the back collar of his jacket. “No exploring in the dark with the monsters down below.”
“What do we do now?” I leaned on my staff. The hissing and bright eyes below were unnerving. Pale fingers combed through the grass.
Alex sat down. “We wait for morning.”
I sighed and knelt down to pray. I could feel the chill of the earth beneath my knees, dew gathering. My skin crawled at the thought of the creatures, only feet away. I shut my eyes, trying to prove that I trusted God. He had kept us safe so far. He would keep us safe as long as it suited his purposes.
That was part of what I believed—what the Amish believed. We believed in
Gelassenheit—
surrendering ourselves to God’s will. It was difficult, at times like this. I struggled to keep my eyes closed, seeing crescents of light beneath my lashes; I could not quite make myself trust the darkness.
“
Unser Vadder im Himmel
. . .
. . .
dei Naame loss heilich sei
. . .”
“Damn. I wish I had a harmonica,” Alex grumbled.
One does not sleep in the presence of evil. Not when you can see it and it can see you.
We sat on the top of the hill and watched the stars spin overhead. It’s funny the way that they shone as they always did. I took some comfort in that, that heaven was still the same as it always was. Watching, but remote.
The all-purpose prayer of the Amish was the Lord’s Prayer, recited in Deitsch. It was vanity and belligerence to ask God for anything. But I couldn’t help it. I had too many questions:
Is this the end of the world, as you meant it to be?
Where is the Rapture, this thing that was spoken of so often by the Englishers?
Did you forget us, or did you deem us unworthy?
I knew that God was still here, that his power was felt on the evil in the world. Holy symbols and places kept us safe from the plague of vampires that had been released weeks ago. We didn’t know how or why. I had heard snippets from Ginger’s cell phone and radio. We had been safe in my little Amish settlement. We had believed ourselves to be protected from evil. That we were favored among God’s people.
We had committed the sin of pride.
The evil infected our community. Ginger, Alex, and I had fought it, in our own ways. We had the help of the village Hexenmeister, the man that Alex called our “wizard,” the man who painted our hex signs and who had the authority to write
Himmelsbriefen
.
And it wasn’t just the evil of the vampires. It was the evil of man. The Amish Elders, in attempting to quash panic, kept a stranglehold on the community and denied the truth. Ginger, Alex, and I had been shunned, thrown out of Amish land and into the world to certain death.
I missed home. I missed my mother, my father, my sister. I wondered if they would survive. If the Hexenmeister, who had stayed behind, would be able to protect them. My vision blurred when I thought of them, and I wiped away tears with my knuckles. I was not the only one who had lost.
Alex knelt at the edge of the hill, sharpening his knife with a rock. The flash of the silver illuminated a hardness in his jaw that I had come to recognize when he was thinking of those he’d loved who had been killed. I didn’t ask about his old girlfriend, Cassia. We were both, in many ways, forced to move past that.
Instead, I placed my hands in his blond hair and kissed the top of his head. His jaw softened. He reached up for my hand with the one that wasn’t holding the knife.
Ginger was huddled with her arms around her knees, hands tucked into her sleeves. Unblinking, she stared through her glasses at the creatures clamoring below. Most of it was inarticulate hissing and howling, but phrases could still be heard:
“Come here. Let me release you.”
“Pretty thing. You can’t run forever.”
“Nothing can protect you. We are legions of legions, and you are so very few.”
“Aren’t you tired of fighting? I promise that it won’t hurt.”
I sat beside her, put my arm around her shoulders. I didn’t want her staring at them for long. They had the power to reason, and also a kind of glamour. Though we were theoretically shielded from them on this hill, I didn’t want her to be tempted. And I didn’t want her to begin to view them as people.
She reached up to rub her eyes beneath her glasses. “I keep thinking,” she said. “About Dan and the kids, that . . .” She gestured to the twisted faces below.
I squeezed her shoulders. “That hasn’t happened to them. Dan’s safe with the other soldiers. And your daughter is at the kibbutz in California with her friends.”
“But my son . . .” She shook her head. “The college surely doesn’t know how to deal with this. Didn’t,” she amended.
“He’s smart. And Dan is looking for them.” That was the last we had heard. Before the Elders had destroyed Ginger’s cell phone as a symbol of the contagion from Outside. Before the end of the world, Ginger had been visiting, and she was accidentally trapped in our settlement when the end had come.
“I hope . . .” She fell silent. Articulating hopes in this world seemed futile.
Hands in the darkness crooked toward her, beckoning.
“God is watching,” I said firmly.
The eastern horizon grew pink and the stars began to fade. As gold began to lighten the undersides of clouds, the vampires started to slip away, like pale eels. They growled and snarled as they receded, sliding into the protective shade of the tall grass. Horace blew and snorted at them.
I tipped my face to the sun, feeling its light upon my skin. I scrubbed my fingers through my hair, wanting it to soak into my pores. The sun felt like love. I unpinned the
Himmelsbrief
from my breast and folded it carefully away in my pocket for safekeeping.
I prayed again, as I always did: at dawn and sunset. At sunset, I prayed for protection. At dawn, I prayed in thanksgiving that we had lived to see it once again.
“We should get moving,” Alex said. He stood and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Get as far from them as we can before nightfall, lose the scent.”
I wearily climbed to my feet.
“How far today?” I asked. We had decided to go north, to Canada. Alex had family there. Perhaps vainly, we hoped that the contamination hadn’t spread as quickly in sparsely populated areas.
He squinted north. “As far as we can get before the sun goes down.”
***
“Do you think that it will always be this way?”
I heard hopelessness creep into Ginger’s voice. We’d convinced her to climb up into Horace’s saddle to save time while Alex and I walked. Her fingers were tangled in the horse’s white mane and the reins, and her gaze between its ears was unfocused.
“No,” I said. “The Rapture is brief. Then there are the Tribulations before the Second Coming of Christ.”
“I must have missed the Rapture part,” Ginger said, bitterly.
“We don’t know that,” I insisted. “Some people could have been taken away to heaven.” But I didn’t really believe it. Though the world seemed empty, it seemed its inhabitants had been taken by darker forces.