The Waking Dark (28 page)

On the night before Jesus was to be arrested, he had called on his apostles in this time of darkest need.
Stay
the
night
with
me
in
Gethsemane,
he had begged.
Watch
me
safely
through
the
dawn.
But in the end, even the most loyal among them had betrayed him, and fallen asleep.

Ellie did not.

West had a key to the locker room, so that was where he went. That was where he slept, or tried to, stretched out on one of the narrow wooden benches, resolved to ignore the fact that everything stank of pit sweat and feet. The walk through the dark had taken him more than an hour, and there had been nothing good or leisurely about it. Every step was pain.

West folded his hands on his stomach and listened to his breathing. His heart seemed to pound in time with the throbbing of his leg, and his thoughts beat with the same insistent rhythm.

They knew.

They hated him.

They hurt him.

They didn’t want him.

They’d changed. Into something wrong, something diseased. Or maybe it was easier to think so.

Now
you
know
why
I
limp,
Nick said, reaching out of the dark to stroke West’s bruised face, to kiss his wounded leg.
Now
you
understand.

It wasn’t real. He knew that. Nick was gone.

Probably he was going crazy.

I
can
taste
someone
else
on
your
lips,
Nick said, and West felt the ghost of a tongue tracing the line of his lips, the beads of sweat and the dried blood that smeared his jaw.
You’ve been bad.

You’ve been punished.
 

Was
he
better
than
me?

“It wasn’t like that.” West stopped, aware he was talking to himself – or, worse, a voice in his head.

Another kiss on his leg.

Does
that
hurt?

The lips moved up his thigh.

Or
that?

West closed his eyes.

It
never
stops
hurting. But at least we’re the same now.

“You were in an accident. It’s not the same.”

There
was
no
accident.

It
was
only
an
accident
that
he
left
a
mark. That time.

It
was
only
an
accident
that
the
damage
was
permanent.

You
thought
it
was
so
easy
for
me.

“No.”

You
didn’t understand pain.

“No.”

There
are
ways
to
make
it
better.
Ways
to
make
them
hurt.

You
still
have
the
gun.

There’s a lot you can do, with a gun.
 

“You’re not Nick,” West said aloud, if only to convince himself. “You’re a voice in my head that’s not even very good. Nick wasn’t like this.”

You
didn’t know me.

Don’t you get that by now?
 

“Please stop,” he said, for the second time that night, just as uselessly. The difference: this time, he didn’t mean it.

He didn’t want the voice silenced.

He didn’t want the weight that settled atop him to fade away.

He didn’t want to be alone, not tonight.

It
hurts?

“It hurts.”

Let’s make it better.
 

In the dark, a body was a body, imaginary… or not. Comfort was comfort.

Joy was joy.

And sleep, when it finally came, was oblivion.

Daniel stayed awake till morning. He watched her, imagining that somehow, by marking each intake of breath, each flicker of her lids, he was protecting not just her, but Cass and Milo and even, in the most gruesome of ways, the Preacher – that standing vigil and ensuring nothing bad happened here, in this room, on his watch, would mean that for at least a few hours nothing bad happened anywhere. It was flawed logic, he knew that. Still, he did not sleep. And coincidence or not, the sun rose without incident, and they all survived the night.

Milo bounded out of bed shortly after dawn, eager to get started on that day’s drill, a willing recruit determined to earn his stripes. Daniel had to lie. Daniel had to let him believe that their father had flaked on them yet again, had disregarded whatever promise he’d made to Milo and disappeared.

Daniel had to.

Milo accepted the news without much surprise, tromped back to his bedroom, and slammed the door. Like he’d expected as much. Daniel was tempted to follow him, if not to tell the truth, then to make up some elaborate lie about where their father had gone, something that would make the disappearance about a noble cause rather than an unlovable son. No eight-year-old should be that prepared for disappointment.

But
maybe
better
prepared
than
blindsided,
he thought, and let Milo sulk. If the only person Milo trusted to come through for him was his big brother, then that’s what Daniel would have to do.

“So what’s the plan?” Jule asked, slurping down a mug of watery instant coffee.

“What plan?”

“For this great rescue operation of yours. I assume you have a plan?”

The trial was scheduled for noon, with sentencing and punishment to presumably follow swiftly after. It was a few minutes after ten, which gave him two hours to come up with something brilliant and the nerve to carry it out.

His father could wait.

“Yeah, that’s what I figured,” Jule said.

She was significantly steadier than she’d been the night before, though Daniel thought he could detect a certain watchfulness about her. There was a tightness at the corners of her eyes and lips, a drawing back of her shoulders, a wary alertness to shadows and sudden movements that hadn’t been there before. He didn’t know her, he reminded himself. Not really. He couldn’t begin to guess what had brought her to his door, and he knew better than to ask.

Five feet tall, nothing to her but a shock of purple hair and a sharp voice, and still, he was afraid of her… What was he going to do when he had to go up against the cops? What hope did Cass have, if her only hope was him?

“I’ll figure something out,” he said. “I’m not letting them kill her in the street.”

“Can I ask you something? Honestly?”

He waited for her to ask why he cared so much. It wasn’t a question he liked looking at head-on. Did some dark part of him nurture the hope that, murderer or not, Cass would ride off with him into a happily ever after, that she would be so filled with gratitude she’d drag him to the shed on the spot and, as his father would have put it, make a man of him? It wasn’t about that; it never had been, even when things were simple and Cass was nothing but a beautiful girl he used to know. He knew it was stupid, the way he clung to a childhood friendship that hadn’t meant much at the time and meant less with every passing year. But it was all he had left of some other life, the life before everything had gone wrong. Jule had her fairy tale of white beaches and satin sheets; Daniel had Cass and the life he might have had if his mother had lived. That’s what he’d clung to, these years, though he didn’t like to admit it to himself, the idea that if he got Cass Porter to
see
him, the way she used to see him – the way he used to be – that he could resuscitate the past.

For him, Cass had always stood for what was good, and what could be good again. If he lost her, he’d lose that, too.

It seemed unbearably selfish, wanting to help someone only because it would help yourself.

“What if it were someone else?” Jule asked. “Would you still care? Would you still try to stop it?”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.”

Save someone, even a stranger, just for the sake of saving them? Risk himself only because it was right? He wondered what it said about him that the answer didn’t come easily. “I don’t know.”

“Okay. Good enough.”

“For what?”

“For me. I’m in.”

“I don’t think that’s a good —”

“You want to give me some noble sexist bullshit about how this is a man’s job and you don’t want to put me in danger, or you want to hear my plan?”

“
You
have a plan?”

“You said the Preacher’s preparing for war, right?” she said.

He nodded, suddenly nervous. It was one thing to resolve to do the impossible – it was another to team up with someone who seemed nuts enough to actually try it.

She smiled. “I assume that means he has an armory.”

Daniel had, of course, held a gun before. His father had trained him to shoot nearly as soon as he’d learned to walk. But it had been a long time, and he’d never actually shot at anything other than soda cans. The first time his father had taken him out hunting, he’d gotten off one shot, about ten feet wide of a scrawny buck, and burst into tears. That had been the end of that hunting trip, and shortly after, his mother’s death and father’s drinking had put an end to the idea of taking any more.

The Preacher kept his arsenal in the dining room. In Kansas it was, as it turned out, surprisingly easy for even a drunken maniac to secure any kind of gun he liked. The Preacher had assembled quite the collection.

Daniel chose a shotgun, as it was the one that felt most comfortable in his hand, though that wasn’t saying much. Jule took a 9 mm that would have fit in her purse had she carried one, but instead got tucked away in Milo’s Spider-Man messenger bag. Daniel slung the shotgun over his shoulder, intending to tell anyone, if asked, that he was headed on a hunting trip, but he didn’t expect anyone to ask – carrying a gun in plain sight in Oleander hadn’t exactly been particularly noteworthy even before the storm.

“You don’t have to do this,” he told Jule as they approached the police station, thinking
I
don’t have to do this.

Thinking:
This
is
crazy.

But there was a pyre in front of the town hall, and Coach Hart was probably at that very moment stoning his wife, and the mayor had declared some kind of military theocracy, and his father was trussed up like a butchered pig. The whole town had gone crazy. There was no reason for Daniel to be an exception.

“I’ve got nothing better to do today,” Jule said. “But are
you
sure? My uncle Scott always says never point a gun at someone unless you’re a hundred and ten percent sure you can pull the trigger.”

Daniel swallowed. The shotgun strap was digging uncomfortably into his shoulder. “He doesn’t sound very good at math.”

“Bad at math, good at shooting people. So… are you sure?”

The plan wasn’t too complicated. They would storm the police station, Daniel grabbing the nearest body as a hostage while Jule covered him with the 9 mm. Ideally, this hostage would be weak and unarmed. If not, Jule would disarm him and Daniel would poke the gun into the small of his back and inform the room at large that either they release Cass or he would shoot.

He was pretty sure he would not shoot. So hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

Jule, after acquiring a hostage of her own, would accompany said hostage downstairs to release Cass from the cell while Daniel waited upstairs with the shotgun and a roomful of cops who no longer felt bound by any rules of legal conduct. Then, on the off chance all that went smoothly, they would flee on foot, around the corner to where Daniel had parked the Preacher’s car. It still had enough gas to get them to the edge of town, where they would throw themselves on the mercy of the soldiers. Failing mercy, they would still have the guns. They would, somehow, get themselves across the border. Where Cass would, presumably, be taken into legal custody once again, at least this time by people who weren’t intending to slaughter her in the street. Daniel and Jule would… well, there the plan went vague. But it was a good bet they wouldn’t end up in Tahiti.

He’d kissed Milo’s forehead before they left, a gesture of affection he rarely made. Milo had wiped it off with exaggerated disgust, and given him a punch on the arm for his trouble. “Tomorrow you’re building me a fort,” he reminded Daniel, who agreed: tomorrow. Then he’d distracted Milo with a dirty joke (one Milo would understand
just
enough to spend the entire day puzzling over the punch line) before they could shake on it.

He’d left Milo alone. It seemed criminal, but it was the only option. The day-care program had disbanded, half the town’s children had disappeared with Laura Tanner, and word had it more went missing every day – something that seemed to alarm no one but Daniel, who no longer let Milo leave the house. There were no trustworthy neighbors; there was no one but his father, tied up in the shed. So Milo was alone, with a stack of comics and strict instructions to answer the door to no one but Daniel. Years before, their father had installed a small panic room beneath the kitchen – more of a cramped crawl space than a room, but complete with a steel door, a jug of water, and a week’s supply of canned tuna. Milo rolled his eyes, but promised to lock himself inside at the first sign of trouble.

“Will you bring Cass home?” he’d asked Daniel.

“Only if you do what you’re supposed to do and stay put,” Daniel said, and would have to hope that was good enough. It probably would be, for the morning. Milo was a good kid, and a smart one.

But what was he supposed to do if Daniel never came back?

Part of him wanted to turn around, rejoin his brother, lock them both into the panic space until the craziness had passed. But what would he tell Milo if they lit Cass on fire and watched her burn? What would he tell Milo, who’d trusted him to be the all-powerful big brother who saved the day?

He’d tell him that he wasn’t a superhero, and Milo couldn’t expect him to act like one.

Who wanted to admit that to their little brother?

Jule was waiting for an answer.

“Definitely not sure,” Daniel admitted. “But let’s go.”

He advanced to the front door of the police station. From his previous visits, he knew there were unlikely to be more than two cops and an unarmed and generally oblivious receptionist. Jule, as they’d planned, slipped in through the side entrance, ready to cover him should the cops not be as receptive to a hostage situation as they’d hoped.

This
is
me, storming a police station with a shotgun,
he thought.
Daddy
would
be
so
proud.

The shotgun, he suddenly realized, was the gun from his nightmares, the one he’d woken to find in his hands as he stood in the drugstore, dazed and confused. He’d chosen it without thinking, because it seemed to have the right size and heft – it had called out to him as the right gun for the job.

Or maybe called to him as the right boy for the gun. Maybe this was where he was supposed to be, not to do what was right or to carry out some nebulous vision of justice, but to fulfill a destiny of bullets and blood.

It was the kind of thought that really
would
make his father proud, and so Daniel shut it out of his head. He dropped the weapon to his side so that an unobservant receptionist might not notice until it was aimed at her head, and entered the station.

It was deserted.

Jule didn’t know what she was doing. For seventeen years, she’d somehow managed to stay out of trouble, despite her family, despite her reputation, despite the multistate drug operation headquartered fifteen yards from where she pretended to sleep. And now, in one week, Jule had burned down a building, made out with a sociopath, stabbed a man, disposed of a body, and stormed a cop shop intending to take hostages and free a confessed murderer. So maybe it was fortunate someone else seemed to have done that last job for her.

The station was a ghost town. They moved through slowly, weapons drawn, both expecting a trap. The empty offices had the pregnant air of a surprise-party-in-waiting, with all the guests tucked into closets or under desks, tensed and ready to pounce.

“Maybe it’s some kind of Bermuda Triangle thing,” Daniel said. “Maybe the whole town’s about to disappear.”

“I don’t have that kind of luck,” Jule said, trying to shake the feeling that he could be right. “They probably all got food poisoning or something. Moldy donuts.”

“Cops and donuts? That’s the best you can do? It’s beneath you.”

“Kind of preoccupied right now, remember?” She waved the gun – carefully. When she was a kid, she’d always wanted Scott to teach her how to fire one. By the time he deemed her old enough, she’d figured out she didn’t want her fingerprints anywhere near her uncles’ weapons, nor did she want any of their “lessons” mucking up her brain. Those had been the years she’d declared herself a pacifist, a vegetarian, a Democrat – anything she could think of to ruffle the Prevette feathers. The night she’d suggested she might become a cop, her mother had slapped her face, but otherwise, no one had much cared. Eventually she’d given up trying to bother them, as she’d given up imagining she could be anything but what she was: a trailer-park Prevette. Still, she’d never touched a gun. Until now. It was heavier than she’d expected, and more awkward than they made it look in the movies. She didn’t intend to fire it. The gun was for show. The knife, still tucked into her oversized pocket, was for use. It was strange, carrying it tucked against her stomach like that. It felt almost warm, almost alive – a strange and dangerous fetus, eager to greet the world. She could feel that, too. It was eager.