What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (14 page)

I was convinced I would fall asleep as soon as I crawled under the covers because I’ve worked hard today. Instead, I lie awake thinking about all the work that’s still to be done. There’s nothing else to do
but
work.

I’ve been shown around the building, Tetch and William taking turns watching me. Only a small section of the old school is occupied. I’ve noticed that the two of them, our resident Elders, don’t speak to each other if they can help it, don’t seem to like each other at all. They complain constantly that the other is shirking their duties, not doing what they’re supposed to.

I’ve spent hours in the kitchen today, seeking a permanent remedy for the nagging hunger we’ve endured since we left Oxbow Ferry. I keep thinking I can feed us all a little better if I can get a handle on where the food is stored, where it comes from, how much there still is in the city. I’m already starting to think of these twenty-two children—lonely, cold, bored, frightened children—as my responsibility. Mine alone.

Time drags by. I feel more awake than when I went to bed, desperate to get up and do something—wander from one end of the school to the other, jog up and down the hall. My muscles twitch. I roll to one side, then another, flop on my back and stare at the ceiling. Try to lull myself into slumber by counting the rafters above me in the gloom.

All the little sounds in the dorm needle at the edges of my sleepless mind like mosquitoes on a humid day. Gusts of wind make the plastic trash bags covering the hall windows billow inward with a snap. Sniffles and coughs ricochet from one cot to another. Rusted bedsprings squeal in protest as the children turn over in their sleep.

There are no big sounds, like the howling of wild dogs in the distance. Maybe I’ve come to depend on those big sounds in order to fall asleep. It’s what I’m used to. It’s too quiet here.

I keep thinking about Emily. About the shell-shocked little girl she was the first time I saw her in that furniture store back in Mountain Park, when I was searching for my mother.

I miss her. I worry about her. And I’m furious that she would leave Stace, CJ and Terry. And me. That she would be so fickle, so hard-hearted and opportunistic. I’d expect that from someone as shallow as Tetch or William but I thought Emily was different. That there was a real bond between her and me. We were like sisters. We would face death together rather than be pulled apart.

Thinking about Emily keeps me awake.

Only when I concentrate on the sound of CJ snoring softly a few feet away do I begin to relax. The rhythm of his congested breathing tugs at me, starts to lull me under, into another dream of the swimming hole just outside Oxbow Ferry. It’s a scorching summer day. I’m about to tell Larkin,
Yes, we can all go swimming together
when, instead of his answer, a thunderclap brings me back to the darkness of the dorm.

It takes time for me to realize it’s not thunder but the roar, the stutter, the rip of accelerating motorcycles, a whole herd of bikes stampeding down the street, no more than a block or two away.

I
must
have drifted off to sleep at last because the sound didn’t grow slowly louder from some point in the distance—it was suddenly here. And my first thought is to curse what a fool I am for letting myself be taken by surprise.

There’s no time to think, no time to puzzle over what’s about to happen. I toss the blankets aside, roll off the cot, my feet thudding against the chilled hardwood of the floor. I scan the beds of the other sleepers, my eyes able to discern little in the dorm’s shadowy recesses.

Bedsprings begin to screech in unison. Bodies are shifting all around. From across the dorm, the slap of feet comes skittering across the hardwood. A voice shrills into my ear, “They’re outside! They’re stopping here!”

There’s a small amount of starlight spilling through the big double doors of the dorm and I begin to see the children’s small forms darting this way and that. I feel a tug on my arm. “Come on, Gil.” It’s Terry, panting. CJ grabs my hand and they pull me with them through the doorway.

All of the children are spilling out into the corridor. They press up against the long, tall windows, jostling for a spot where the panes aren’t broken and patched so they can peek outside. Stace pushes in beside me and points to the schoolyard below us.

Lights sweep in from around a corner. The noise is brutal, deafening until the engines begin shuddering to a stop one by one. Headlight beams are cut before I can get a good look at what’s just arrived.

Soon we hear a side door leading into the school burst open and there’s a clatter of footsteps—heavy, booted footsteps—and laughing, shrieking voices. Voices that sound intoxicated, ecstatic, as sure of themselves as drunken aristocrats at an exclusive party.

They push their way into the stairwell to the left of us, the same one William led me up after releasing me from the cellar.

Up or down? Which way will they come?

My every muscle is tense. I stand facing the end of the hall with my fists balled tight, waiting for the stairwell door to slam open any second. But then I realize that the footsteps
are
descending, are clattering downstairs to the lower depths of the school.

“Do you know what’s going on?” I hiss at Stace but she doesn’t respond. She’s frozen, her face icy white. I turn back to the windows to try to make out what’s happening in the yard below.

There’s a sliver of moon cutting through the clouds. Faint starlight. The shapes of the motorcycles start to come clear. Four of them squat like shiny chrome beetles in a circle. Just beyond is a van of patchwork chrome and black, maybe the one I rode in, battered and dented, silvery light glinting off its cracked windshield. The van has been backed up close to the school, its rear doors hanging open.

There’s some shouting down below on the first floor and then feet are thumping up the staircase to the right of us. Seconds later William and Tetch burst into the corridor. I’ve never seen them move so fast. William is shouting, “Get back! Back into the dorm!” He’s yowling like a terrified cat. The kids grouped around the windows stare at him for a moment, take a look at each other, then shuffle back inside.

I stay put. My little group—Stace, CJ and Terry—hesitate, gaze at me uncertainly but they don’t follow the others, stay clustered at my side.

William chases the children into the dorm while stout little Tetch runs up to me gasping. I repeat the same question I asked Stace—“What’s going on?” My voice surprises me by sounding calm, dominant.

“Get in the dorm!” she shrieks. Tetch’s eyes are like saucers and even in the murky light her face looks splotchy without makeup and her hair is wild.

“Why? Tell me what’s happening.”

She tries to prod me into motion me with a baleful look. She’s trembling uncontrollably, enraged.

William runs back into the hall and pulls up short next to Tetch. “What’s she doing?”

“I don’t know,” Tetch snaps at him. They’re both badly rattled. Tetch squeezes her eyes shut, her hands rolled into purple little fists. She hunches her shoulders, begins rocking back and forth. “Please,” she says, spitting her words out one at a time. “Please just do what I say. Go back inside.”

I find myself enjoying the fact that they’re both so uneasy, so frightened. I especially like that I’ve broken through the imperturbable surface of Tetch’s personality.

But then I hear a scream. It’s a deep, guttural cry from far below us, like the final sound made by a beaten, terrified animal. I glance at CJ, Terry and Stace, still grouped around me, their faces showing that
they’re
terrified, confused. But the more fear the other’s feel, the calmer I am. Even with the scream still reverberating.

I’m thinking,
What more can they do to me?
Can they make me suffer more than I already have?

But looking at the remains of my little family, at their petrified faces, I know that the Black Riders can easily get back at me through them.

Go back to bed. Hope that their prisoner in the cellar is enough entertainment for tonight.

I nudge the children on ahead of me and we retreat back to our cots. “Everybody, get in bed,” William calls out. Then he and Tetch pull the heavy double doors shut behind them. Two patches of ghostly light are left to trickle through the wire mesh windows, not enough to see by.

CJ, Terry and Stace follow my lead in climbing back into our dirty cots, pulling the scratchy blankets up to our chins. No one says anything. None of the children speaks a word. The only sounds are bedsprings, the rustling of small bodies under covers.

Then one of the doors crashes open. There is no forewarning, no booming footsteps on the linoleum floor approaching from the far end of the corridor.

I push myself up, my back against the wall next to my cot, again wishing that I had hid some sort of weapon near me, maybe one of the knives from the kitchen. But I’ve had only William and Tetch to contend with so far and—even after weeks of near starvation, of days of being confined—I feel stronger than either of them.

No sound directly follows the bang of the door. I listen for footsteps to come clicking or clumping across the worn hardwood of the old gymnasium. But I hear nothing.

Nothing until the flick of a switch close to my ear. A metallic
ting
. A blaze of bright light bursts from a flashlight shining inches from my face.

I’m blinded completely. I scramble farther up against the wall, pulling my knees up protectively, clenching my fists. Even now I’m more angry than frightened. Angry at having been taken by surprise. At having no way to defend myself.

“So, Gillian. Have they been taking good care of you, sweetie?”

It’s a melodious, syrupy, affected voice, like that of an actor overplaying her role. Instantly I know it’s Moira. There’s confusion in the dorm, many of the kids jumping out of bed and scurrying to the far end of the room.

“Stay where you are children,” Moira calls to them. “We don’t want any trouble from you, now do we?” The beam of the flashlight sweeps across the clusters of cots, catching glimpses of shifting bodies.

Before the light returns to fixate on me, I see the suggestion, even as my eyes struggle to adjust, of a figure standing behind Moira, caught for a moment in the dim light coming through the open door. I’m sure I know who it is—the blond hair, the skin of her face ghostly white above the black clothes she’s wearing.

Then I’m blinded again. “Come here,” Moira hisses and I imagine that other figure I glimpsed taking a step to her side. “She doesn’t look too bad, does she?”

“No. They’ve been taking good care of her, Moira. Like you say.”

“Jendra,” I breathe. The word’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.

“So you know each other, do you?” For a few seconds Moira waves the beam of light at the body of the girl standing next to her. I blink hard, trying to see beyond the glare that feels like it’s been burned into my eyes. It
is
Jendra—the face the same shape, the hair the same color. Except that the color of her skin is different, like she’s wearing the pasty pancake makeup of a cabaret singer.

“Moira!” Jendra yelps.

Moira flicks the light away and says sadly, “I know, I know. I’m sorry. I know it hurts. I won’t do that again. I just wanted her to be able to see you. To see how magnificently you’ve changed.”

She’s one of them. She endured sickness and survived. If it really is surviving.

Something about how Jendra’s changed frightens me. For the first time, I do feel scared.

Then the light’s brought back to me. Moira drags it back and forth, from my feet up to my head, studying me, maybe considering what she’s going to do with me.

“If I wanted to, Gillian,” she says at last, in a wistful, breezy way, “I could drag you from this room and throw you out one of those big windows in the hall. I could jump out after you, land right beside your crumpled body, lift your pretty little head up by a clump of your stringy hair and smash that face of yours right into the pavement.”

She pauses for a moment, lets her words sink in. Then there is a little, shivery laugh. “But I won’t. Not yet,” she says.

“Then what do you want?” I ask. My voice is shaky. I’m trying not to be intimidated but I am. I’m not sure what these creatures are, how strong they are, how crazy. If only I could see one in the daylight. Get a fix on what they are, what they can do. My quivering voice makes me feel so much worse because I desperately want to show CJ, Terry and Stace that I can stand up to them.

But at this moment, I can’t. I can’t get my bearings, figure out what to do.

She ignores my question and her voice takes on a bitter edge when she says, “I hope you enjoy the freedom you have. You don’t know how lucky you are.” She kicks the edge of my cot hard with the toe of her boot. “You should be sleeping on the floor like a dog. Like a farmyard animal.”

From the rear of the school, past the windows in the corridor, a horn starts bleating. I hear engines being gunned into life—two, three, four of them, maybe more.

“Damn them,” Moira says, swinging the beam of light to the open doorway. “I’m going to slap Bodie unconscious. Who the hell does he think he is?”

Then she snaps off the flashlight. The dark encloses everything except for an afterimage of the light swimming before my eyes like a green whirlpool. I only hear the sound of my own breathing, shallow and fast. I wait.
Has she left? Is it over?

Then I have the strangest sensation I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t see what’s she doing but I’m certain Moira is leaning over me, getting closer to me than any of these creatures has ever gotten. There’s that strange coppery, sweet metallic odor and a deep coldness, like the heat and oxygen surrounding me are being sucked away into outer space.

I can see a shadow looming above me, her arm, her hand close to my face. I want to throw off the covers, twist away from her and run.

And then I feel it.

She touches me, lays a single finger on my forehead so softly, so gingerly, it’s like she’s never touched a living creature before. Her skin feels dry, papery. The touch only lasts a few seconds but during that tiny fragment of time I get the oddest sensation, like I’m not myself anymore, like I’m looking through her eyes. I feel like a chasm has opened up below me, like I’m starting to tumble into an endless void.