What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (23 page)

“You hurt yourself?” Aisa snarls at me. “You can’t walk?”

“I can walk,” I say. “It’s just sore. I must have landed on it funny.”

“We’re leaving you if you can’t keep up,” either Milo or Bodie says.

The motorcycle begins to weave slowly down the backstreet toward us.

“How many blocks away is the van?” Aisa says.

“I don’t know, two, three,” one of the others says.

“Oh, shit. You’re such an idiot. Throw a piece of junk in the way of that thing and let’s go.”

Milo and Bodie move out into the light. They don’t appear to be happy about it but they approach that same dumpster that’s just to the side of the debris I landed on. It’s hard to make out much detail in the faint light but I can tell the dumpster is overflowing. I didn’t notice the stench of it at first, maybe because I was still in shock from my fall, but now it seems overpowering.

The male members of Aisa’s crew move toward the rear of the dumpster, one on either end of it. It’s hard to believe it’s possible but, each taking hold of a corner of the metal container with their black-gloved hands, they begin to shake it back and forth until it starts to tip forward, some of its contents spilling out. With a loud bark like the deep belly-grunt of a weightlifter heaving up a barbell, they send the dumpster skidding out on its side into the middle of the alley.

It blocks the light of the motorcycle but it’s obvious that the bike is still there and that whoever’s on it knows exactly where we are. Someone shoves me hard and I start to hurry as fast as I can. I can’t hear the others’ footsteps, only mine as I slosh clumsily through a puddle, then stumble over something squishy and slick.

Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep up.

But do I want to voluntarily get into the van with the three of them again, even if we reach it? I tell myself, When you make it to the end of the alleyway, try to disappear behind the cars and piles of trash at the edge of the street. Maybe back into a doorway. Try to hide.

My right leg is working better but it still feels shaky. It hurts dully, insistently but the more I use it the more weight it can bare. There isn’t any choice but to keep using it like I wasn’t hurt. I can’t allow myself to be injured.

The end of the alley is just a few steps away, the open street beyond a little lighter, a little more moonlight reflecting off its slick surface.

So this is it, I think—the end of any notion of obtaining medicine. Life-saving drugs, ointments. Of helping Aiden survive.

I can’t imagine any other possible way to reach Needle.

Vanish, that’s all I can do.

If I can make myself disappear and wait out the night, then I might have a chance of making it back across the river.

Getting back across the river—that becomes my sole focus.

I have no idea where Aisa is. Or Bodie. Or Milo. I can’t hear them. There’s no sign that they’re still near me.

At the end of the alleyway, I hear a scream. A high wail of abject terror, ripped into something unearthly, raking the night air with its vibrations. It echoes between the dark facades of the buildings above me, impossible to tell from where it’s originated but I’m sure it can’t be far away. I wonder—
Tetch? William?

I come to a full stop without intending to. I think I see a shadowy figure flit past the head of the alley but it moves so fast I can’t be sure. I find myself hesitating before stepping into the open street.
You’re so close,
I tell myself. This might be my one chance at freedom.
Can’t turn back.

Out of the alley, into the street.

I feel like I’m about to leave a place of relative safety for something unknown and dangerous—like I’m about to dive off a cliff. Or run into a burning building.

Duck and hide and snake your way through the shadows. Let the confusion cover you.

I hear the sound of motorcycles pooling in a group nearby, maybe half a block away, swarming like hungry sharks around an injury swimmer. I’m sure they’re closing in on Tetch and William, readying them for some sort of wicked punishment.

Then there’s a squeal of brakes and the van stops at the head of the alley. The same van they hauled me away in after I shot Gideon. The same van that drove up to the school the night they dragged Aiden inside the Orphanage.

But I can’t get in that van. Can’t ride with them. Will do anything to avoid that.

Maybe in the short term Aisa’s desire to have me join with her would be better than Moira’s murderous hatred. But it would end up being just as ugly, just as dangerous to endure.

If I can’t escape from the alley in this direction, I can’t go back in the other.

I can’t see the buildings to either side clearly enough to know if there is a door nearby, a fire escape, a smashed-in window. I’ve got to run. I grab my right ankle and pull my foot up to the seat of my pants, stretching my leg, trying to massage it back into shape. There’s a sharp twinge of pain at first like my knee socket has been twisted but when I let my foot drop back to the ground and try to put more weight on it, it feels better, stronger.

And then I run. Bursting out of the alleyway and tearing into the wider boulevard beyond, past the back of the van.

They have been waiting for this.

The sidewalk’s blocked. I’m forced to run into the middle of the street. The van begins backing up with harsh grind of gears. The rear doors fly open. There’s a little light coming from the inside and I see Milo and Aisa silhouetted in the dimness. Bodie must be driving.

“Not away from us,” Aisa calls. “No, no. Don’t run away, little one.” She laughs at the absurdity of my trying to escape.

Milo jumps down just as the rear-moving progress of the van is impeded by a battered SUV. It’s half-sunk to the ground with the tires on the passenger side shredded away. Bodie has his head out the driver-side window and starts cursing. I slip behind the SUV and flatten myself, crawling under the rear of the vehicle, into a small pocket beside a remaining tire, just an inch of space above my head, hoping that Milo will simply run past.

“Don’t hurt her,” I hear Aisa call. “Too badly.”

I’m trying to pull my feet into this space, trying to curl into a ball, come as close to vanishing as I can. But Milo—it must be Milo—locks onto my ankle, the same ankle I had grabbed and lifted only minutes ago, and pulls me free of the SUV so quickly I have no time to struggle. My fingers scrape along the asphalt. What he does to me reminds me of a scientist in a lab pulling a mouse out of a cage by its tail. He lifts me up like that, all the way up above the ground so I dangle, held aloft by my right ankle.

I hear him laugh, low and mean. “I can smell the blood on you, you know,” he says and lets me drop back to the pavement. I bring my injured hand to my mouth, touch the wound gently with the tip of my tongue. The blood has congealed a little but it’s still hot and slick.

An infection. What if I get an infection, my hand becoming blackened and useless—who will take care of Stace, DJ and Terry?

And Aiden.
I still think of Aiden.

And then for just a moment, a few seconds of panicky doubt, I feel absolutely sure I will never get back to them. That’s it’s over. Any idea of escape
is
absurd. But I squash that thought like smearing a spider dead with the sole of my boot. I can’t afford to think like that. Won’t let myself think like that.

I scramble to my knees, spring to my feet, ready to run.
A distraction. There’s got to be a distraction. A few seconds, just a few—

Milo laughs again, a big, booming stagey laugh like an actor in a play. “You’re a feisty little thing, aren’t you?”

Then I hear Bodie shout, “Shit, they’re right in front of us. I couldn’t see them beyond the damn headlight—”

“Kill the lights, idiot,” Aisa yells.

Milo pays no more attention to me but jogs past the ruined SUV and back to the van. I begin to back away, trying to stay in the pools of deeper darkness cast by the other wrecks still scattered up and down the street.

Then there
is
a distraction. A huge distraction. There’s a
whoosh
and a fireball lights up the middle of the street ahead of me, right where the van is. I smell burning gas, an intense, air-poisoning smell that makes me choke. A plume of black smoke snakes back to me.

Molotov cocktail—I saw that in a movie ages ago. Some terrorists making simple gasoline-filled fire bombs.

There’s a glimpse of two shapes tumbling out either side of the van, onto the pavement. Maybe rolling, trying to quench flames.

I’m sure it must be Bodie who calls, “My van… What’s wrong with you?” He shouts out his question to the open night sky.

“You could have killed us.” That must be Aisa, her composure temporarily shattered. They both sound genuinely shocked by what’s happened.

I should run. I should turn and run as fast as I can—which won’t be fast enough through all the wreckage and in the dark—but I need to try. I start to turn but I want to hear, I want to understand what’s just happened.

“But we didn’t kill you, did we?” someone else cries with cheerful mockery, sounding ecstatic.

“I thought we gave up weapons, we gave up this kind of shit.”

“Look at my van!”

Flames engulf the van’s interior but soon die down. The gutted interior was mostly metal to begin with.

Then I turn from the van, turn away from the sight of Black Riders shielding their eyes, wary of the heat and the light, but pressing close as if to witness something incredible.

I turn and run.

I’m jogging, not sprinting, worried that I will run straight into another overturned car or the scattered guts of a furniture showroom or a restaurant or a clothing boutique or a coffee shop that once stood along this street. Something crunches and gives way under my foot and I stumble. I take a few more steps and trip over something else, maybe a chair leg, maybe a tire.

And I start to fall.

I will myself not to fall, try to force myself not to fall but the ground rises up to meet me all the same. As I fall, filling a space of only microseconds with its intensity, the black smudge of a thought of how utterly hopeless it is to even try to get away blots out everything else. I will lie on the ground, crumpled and bruised and wait for them to find me.

But when my hands touch the rim of what does indeed turn out to be a rubber tire and I feel a rush of instant gratitude for the fact that I’m not going to hurt myself by falling on the hard pavement, I snap back to the world around me, to possibilities. To what I
can
do.

Push myself up again and run, run, run—

But lights are crowding in, bright headlights weaving in and out of the debris from down the street. Several bikes coming from that direction. I haven’t covered much ground and spectral figures are darting around me so fast it’s impossible to identify any of them.

There are hoots, jeers, taunts, screaming but the sounds are everywhere and nowhere at the same moment, zipping, careening around me like the disembodied voices of insane ghosts. I hear footsteps approaching but they immediately vanish and reappear somewhere else. There’s not enough light to see anything but the occasional shadowy bulk of a human torso zip past.

I turn abruptly and take off the other way, trying to skirt the spot where the van is still being ravaged by orange-blue flames now lowered from a roar to a brittle crackle. There’s a harsh, lung-stinging reek of gasoline that fills my nose as I pass by.

I’m sure I could be stopped, easily stopped but no one seems to be inclined to do so. Maybe they’re chasing each other. Maybe they’re fighting openly now.

How would these creatures fight? I wonder. Throw things at each other? Claw and tear at each other? Stab each other with knives?

I repass the mouth of the alleyway I escaped from only minutes before just as the motorcycle that was zigzagging down it from the opposite end emerges, the light of its single beam blaring out into the street, illuminating me, revealing me, making me hesitate, blinded for a few precious seconds.

Will someone stop me? I shake off the surprise of being uncovered by this light and continue to run. My breathing is growing ragged. I haven’t gone far but it’s difficult to keep up the pace. I’m sweating inside my parka, want to stop, unzip it and throw it aside. I want to stop just long enough to catch my breath. My injured hand stings with the sharp, high pain of newly torn flesh.

But I keep running. It’s all I can do.

The motorcycle that’s emerged from the alley turns and follows me, revving its engine as if taunting me. Despite my best efforts, I’m slowing down. My feet start clumping to the ground, legs feel leaden. My shoulders slump—arms not pumping like pistons anymore.

A few more steps and I’ve reached the intersection of the street where that heavy, creaky door is that leads to Needle’s room. I can see much light and commotion a short distance down the block. I turn back, try to sprint the opposite way across the intersection but the motorcycle following me cuts me off, begins circling, weaving, herding me toward the noise and glare.

Now I’ve stopped running, am trudging along, breathing heavily. I want to see what’s happening down the block but I refuse to completely give up all idea of escape. I keep looking from side to side for a hiding place, something I can snatch up to use as a weapon.

What I see when I get close to Needle’s room again is a circle of bikes idling right in front of the building’s second story entrance, the same one Tetch, William and I passed through. There’s an intensely bright, blue-white pool of light made by the bikes’ combined headlights and the ground-shaking throb of engine noise.

Something’s happening inside that circle. I feel like I’m being pushed into the middle of a private ceremony. I’m sure that Tetch and William are already there.

And then it hits me—

They’ve been waiting for me.

All along I’ve been doing their bidding. Following their plans.

Not the plans of that little breakaway group of Aisa, Milo and Bodie but those of the ones still loyal to Moira.