Unforsaken (15 page)

“Kaz, Kaz,” I screamed. “Can you hear me?”

For long seconds, he lay motionless, his eyes unseeing. My soul shattered with grief at the thought of losing him, of losing the one person besides Prairie who really saw me when he looked at me, who understood who I was and loved me anyway. I felt my eyes fill with tears, hot and stinging, and as I blinked, one fell on his forehead and trailed into his blood and mixed with it. Where it had fallen, the ragged torn skin blurred and skimmed over.

Even my tears were a Healer’s.

I seized Kaz’s hands and squeezed them. “You have to show me now,” I said, choking back my sobs. “If you’re alive, you have to show me, I can’t, I can’t …”

But he said nothing at all, and I couldn’t feel his pulse, couldn’t find the thread of his life, and the unfairness of it nearly cleaved me in two.

I’d come so far only to lose everything. Chub had been stolen from the streets where we’d finally thought he was safe. Prairie had been taken too. And now Kaz lay broken on the hard-packed earth of the miserable town I’d fought so hard to leave.

I couldn’t escape them all on my own, Rattler and Prentiss and his men. I needed Kaz. Together we were more than a couple of scared kids; together our history and our gifts made us strong. I lowered my face to Kaz’s and kissed his bloodied forehead, his parted lips.

And he stirred. Just a little, a tremor, a twitch—but I knew. He was still there.

“Hailey,” he breathed, licking his cracked lips. His eyes flickered and the life came back to them and he sought me with his gaze. I felt him squeeze my hands in return. “Is there … anyone …”

“It’s just me and you, Kaz,” I said. I didn’t want to upset him further, but I knew he needed the truth. “Derek couldn’t have survived that.”

He shook his head with effort. “No … I mean … anyone out front …”

But I had seen enough; now that I knew that Kaz still lived, I gave myself over to the powerful pull of my gift. I let my eyes drift shut and touched my fingertips very gently to the edges of Kaz’s wound, feeling him wince in pain. The voices in my head swelled and rushed through in a current of near-melodic phrases and I spoke the words, murmuring softly while the gift gathered strength and my hands moved of their own volition.

Under my fingertips I felt the flesh knitting, the shattered skull fragments melding together. Heat and energy and power were all focused into the touch. As I chanted the ancient words, the energy flowed from within me to him.
Take what you need of me
, I willed the forces at work on his wounds.
Use me, use me up
.

I had healed Kaz once before, when fire and bullets had threatened to take him from me. Then my gift was new, and I was unsure and afraid. But each time I healed, my touch grew more assured, and the words came more easily to my lips. When the last broken bits of his skull had smoothed back together, when I felt only his sweet, regular breath against my wrists, I laid my head on his chest and rested, feeling the reassuring rise and fall, and slowly my other senses returned.

First I noticed the smell: a horrible combination of char and chemicals and smoke. I blinked several times, my vision momentarily blurry, as it always was after a healing, but as it cleared, I made out the house behind the wall of flame and smoke pouring from its center. The trees that lined the drive were unharmed, their branches waving in the billowing smoke. On the ground a few feet away lay a shred of flowered fabric that I recognized as part of the curtains that had hung in the kitchen. Farther away were broken dishes, the face of a clock, half a splintered chair, all spread out as though a giant had sprinkled the ruins of the house from his hand.

My hearing was returning quickly. Healers were stronger than other people; we never got sick, and though we couldn’t heal each other, wounds that would kill ordinary people were nothing to us. I was grateful for my strength and resilience now; though I had healed Kaz, I knew we would both need our strength for what lay ahead. We needed to get away from
here, before Prentiss sent someone to make sure his zombie had carried out its task. We’d been dealt an incredible stroke of luck in that no one had seen Rattler bring us here last evening; darkness had surely helped. But we couldn’t count on that luck lasting.

I felt Kaz tense up, his muscles going rigid. My heartbeat quickened with fear. “What is it? Are you all right?” But before he could speak, something pressed into the small of my back.

“Stand up slowly, hands where I can see them,” a hard, clipped voice said. “You first, Hailey.”

I didn’t know the voice. But I knew that we were in big trouble.

C
HUB PUT DOWN HIS BOOK
. The glasses lady was talking to the lunch man. The lunch was on the plate with the green cover, just like before. Chub didn’t know what it was even though the glasses lady asked him could he guess. He said macaroni, but it smelled like chicken dinosaurs. Hailey made him chicken dinosaurs sometimes and he liked them and he didn’t like anything here. He didn’t like it here and he was scared a lot and he didn’t like to go to the bathroom in this bathroom. He didn’t like it here but now he had a mind-picture and he put down his book.

If the glasses lady knew, she would make him say but Chub didn’t want to say. It was the Monster Man and they were making the Monster Man play the bad games too. Not the same games because there was no hiding thing and the
glasses lady wasn’t there. Chub couldn’t see who was there but someone was making the Monster Man play a game.

With numbers. There were numbers. Chub couldn’t see the numbers but he knew there were numbers. At school Miss Kathy said to count and Chub could count a lot. One two three four five six and more and more numbers. Sometimes you could put the numbers on the magnet board and sometimes you wrote the numbers on a pad. And the Monster Man had numbers too and he was hiding them inside his head.

Chub knew about that. Sometimes he hid things in his head. For a long time he hid his words there and nobody knew. They weren’t a secret, they just didn’t come out. Then Hailey helped him let the words out of his head and that was good but sometimes he still liked to hide things there. Sometimes it was for fun and sometimes he just didn’t want to tell.

The Monster Man didn’t want to tell before, but now he wanted to tell the numbers. The mind-picture went wavy and then it was gone and then it was back and Chub went by the bookshelf so the glasses lady didn’t see him watching the picture. They were doing something with the lunch. He put his book on the shelf and took another book down and put it on the floor. The Monster Man kept the numbers in his head but now he was telling the numbers. It wasn’t a game. No, not a game. He wanted to tell the numbers because it could help someone.

The Monster Man was a helper. He was so scary before
but now Chub saw he wasn’t as scary. His face wasn’t a monster face now. Someone had fixed his face. He didn’t hurt as bad. He wanted to be a helper.

Helping was good. But Chub wasn’t going to tell the glasses lady. Helping was good, but she didn’t know that.

T
HEY COVERED OUR FACES
with loose black fabric hoods, but that didn’t matter. I knew exactly where we were going. Gypsum wasn’t that large, not even when you included all the farms that circled the edges of town, the fields full of early-season soybeans and alfalfa and corn, the grazing acreage and the rich land along the creek. Growing up here for sixteen years, with no friends and no brothers or sisters, no mother or father to entertain me, I had explored every inch of town on foot and occasionally on a broken-down bike I’d found abandoned at the dump.

All my exploring had been cut short when Chub had arrived. Then I’d begun living for him, and our exploring was limited to the fields and forest around our house, paths and secret hideouts known only to me, places where a little boy could walk and play.

But I still carried the map of Gypsum in my mind, and as the car navigated the gravel drive and then the pavement of the roads, leaving the smoking ruin of the house and Derek’s body for the fire team whose sirens we heard in the background, I knew exactly where we were.

They were smart, our captors—a pair of men so like the ones who’d first come after me and Prairie a few months earlier that it was almost funny. Rent-a-Thug, I thought; but who knew how many more of these guys Prentiss had on standby? If anything, this team was even better trained than the first one; maybe Prentiss had stepped up his demands after the first team was killed in Gram’s home when they tried to kidnap us.

Mustache, as I’d nicknamed the one who’d pressed his boot into my back, was tall and dark-skinned and seemed to be in charge. He gave us short, clipped orders as his partner, who had a shaved head, a freckled red face and a tattoo around his arm, cuffed our hands behind us and forced us into the back of the car.

As we rode, I leaned against Kaz, his chin resting on the top of my head, and traced our path in my mind. They took the first turn on a dirt road that looped around the back of a drainage pond and crossed a brackish swale before heading through a mile or so of new-planted fields and coming out on State Road 9. By then I could hear sirens in the distance; the smoke cloud above the Pollitt land could probably be seen all over Gypsum. Soon neighbors would head over to see what had happened. It was more excitement than Gypsum
usually saw in a month, and half the town was likely to show up, along with the entire sheriff’s department and the fire crew from Casey. Meanwhile the sedan turned down hidden drives and doubled back and looped, and only by concentrating hard did I follow its path—even though I’d known from the start that it would eventually make its way to the abandoned business park.

By the time it hit the last stretch, I could no longer hear the sirens. We parked, and when my door was opened, all I heard was the buzzing of a few crickets. We were led up a walk, and I stumbled once or twice, not being able to see the ground in front of me. A whoosh of an electric door opening was followed by a blast of cool air.

We took a walk down a long hallway, and then we were guided through one last door and our hoods were taken off. We were in a conference room, its long narrow table and the dozen chairs around it looking brand-new, the whiteboard pristine, the projection system humming softly above us. At the head of the table was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his sixties. He had a neatly trimmed beard and a buzz cut, and he gave us a tight smile.

“Welcome.” Prentiss—the man whose voice we’d heard on the phone.

“Where’s Chub?” I demanded.

He held up a hand and chuckled. “Slow down, young lady. You’ve barely arrived; why don’t you get comfortable? I’ll have some sodas brought in. Surely you would like to refresh yourselves after your … unfortunate adventure.”

He gestured at my scratched arms and filthy, ruined shirt, at Kaz’s disheveled hair and the faded bruises and cuts that remained after the healing.

“I know exactly where we are, you know,” I said furiously. “You could have had those guys drive me around for hours and I’d still know we were in the business park. I mean, it’s not like there’s anywhere else in town that’s got this kind of money poured into it.”

“Ah, that,” Prentiss said, inclining his head in a parody of an apology. “Procedure, I am afraid. You’ll learn, Hailey and Kaz, my young friends, that discipline is at the heart of every successful venture. Procedure. Chain of command.”

“What branch of the services did you come from?” Kaz demanded. “Was it even ours?”

Prentiss scrutinized Kaz, one eyebrow raised. “You’re questioning my patriotism, young man?” he said softly.

Kaz glared silently, and Prentiss made a show of pretending to remember something, snapping his fingers in the air.

“Oh dear, I forgot—you lost your father in the Gulf War. A brave man, Tanek Sawicki. He was proud of his citizenship, Kaz, was he not? Proud of fighting in the army of his adopted nation?”

Kaz said nothing but I could sense his fury escalating. I reached for his hand and held it tightly until I felt him respond, his grip relaxing slightly. I needed him to be focused, to remember why we were here—not to avenge his father’s death, but to rescue his mother and Chub.