Authors: Robin Wasserman
“Jason?”
Jason raised his head. “Nick, okay? Nick. It’s not about wanting you. It’s about wanting to
hurt
him.
”
“I don’t believe that.”
Jason shrugged.
“So, fine,” West said. “Whatever. You may want to hurt him, but —” He swallowed. “You can’t. He’s dead.”
“You’re not,” Jason said. “The others aren’t. I’m not… safe.”
“I’ll make sure you are.”
“You think you could stop me?”
“I think you can stop yourself,” West said. And then, because he wasn’t any more convinced of that than Jason was, “And yeah, if you can’t, I can. But try this first. Next time you want to smash someone’s head into the wall —”
“Picture you naked?” Jason said, his lips quirking into a smile. He looked like Nick then, and felt like Nick in West’s arms, and it made West want to push him away and never let go, all at the same time. Instead, he kissed Jason one more time and told himself it didn’t matter now, wouldn’t matter until they were all safe. In the meantime…
“Whatever works.”
My
house,
Cass thought, trying to believe it.
My
bedroom.
Very little had changed, at least up here. Her old stuffed animals still perched in the same corner of the closet, her photo collages still lined the mirror, her name, curlicued and neon, still blazed in lights. Cass felt like an anthropologist, studying a foreign environment for clues about the alien creature who might once have lived there. She ran her fingers across familiar spines.
My
books.
She sat down on the bed.
My
pillow, my sheets.
She lifted a framed photo.
My
family.
Grace watched from the doorway, betraying no sign of emotion.
Grace hadn’t tried to kill her again. That was something.
They’d even worked together, once Milo had forced them to chase him to the Ghent house, and the Preacher – inexplicably trussed up in the old shed – had told them about the safe room. They’d plotted with the Preacher and with each other to save their friends, all the while watching each other carefully, Cass tensed to fend off another attack, Grace thinking her strange thoughts, frowning as Cass ushered Milo into the crawl space and locked the door. “This doesn’t make up for anything,” she’d said, and Cass had to agree.
“I always wanted to see this,” Grace said now, nudging the doorjamb with her sneaker.
“If I knew that, I would have invited you over,” Cass said, though they both knew that was a lie.
“It’s different than I pictured.”
Cass set down the photo. It had been taken at Thanksgiving dinner many years before, when she was still young enough to perch on her father’s lap. In the picture, he rested his chin on her head. Her mother knelt beside them, planting a kiss on Cass’s cheek. The image of domestic bliss. “Yeah. It is.”
“You can barely tell the difference,” Jule had said, peeking in on her drugged-out mother for the briefest of moments before going about her business. Daniel wasn’t sure whether he didn’t believe her, or simply didn’t want to. He left her to her explosives raid and Cass to her short walk down memory lane, and he stayed here, in the bedroom, by Jule’s mother’s side. Downstairs, West and Jason guarded the door. Or at least, that’s what they’d said they were doing. Daniel still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it. West, of all people? West, who he’d more than once imagined switching places with, just to have things simple and perfect and
easy,
to coast through life. But nothing was as easy as it seemed, not for anyone. That was what he’d learned from the storm and its aftermath. That, and everyone had their secrets.
Daniel knelt by the mattress and took the woman’s clammy hand. She didn’t stir. A meth high, he knew, kept you awake. Which meant this was something else, or this was an OD. Either way, there was nothing he could do.
Sometimes her lids fluttered open to reveal the whites of her eyes; sometimes she moaned in whatever was passing for sleep. She looked nothing like Jule, and was wearing far less clothing than Daniel would have preferred. He pulled the covers up over her nightgown, then, worrying about the beads of sweat on her forehead and collarbone, pulled them down again, hoping it didn’t seem like he was just enjoying the view.
“Ms. Prevette?” he said, then repeated it louder, to no effect.
He’d never had much sympathy for his father’s flight into the bottle. But the Preacher had never dived so far he couldn’t make his way back.
“She deserved better,” he told Jule’s mother. But he stayed there until Jule called from below that she had what she needed, and they could go. It wasn’t until he rose to his feet that he caught sight of the thing lying on the floor beside the bed, trapped in a tangle of sheets. At first, it looked like a blanket. But it had hair (brown with flecks of red, same as Milo’s) and eyes (dark green, same as Milo’s, but open and unseeing and with no hint of a spark) and fingers (half curled and, Daniel suspected, stiffened into place). He was caught off guard by the swell of sympathy. They’d hated each other, but they’d both loved Milo. He believed that now, in a way he hadn’t let himself before, when she was alive.
They had all deserved better.
Only Cass seemed reluctant to leave.
“You sure you got what you needed?” she asked Jule.
“Did you?” Jule said, vaguely embarrassed, even under these circumstances, to share the house with the person who rightfully belonged in it.
Cass shrugged. “There’s nothing left of me here.” But as she opened the door to leave, she looked as if she’d rather not. Which might have been the right instinct, because rooted to the welcome mat stood Scott Prevette, his second-favorite hunting knife in one hand. Before any of them could move, he lunged forward and snatched hold of Grace with the other. He crooked an arm around her neck and pressed the blade to her throat. She fit all too neatly into the crevice of his chest.
Her face paled, but beyond that, she showed no fear.
Jule, on the other hand, was terrified. “Let go of her, Scott.”
“She’s a sweet one, this one. Sweet and young and sweet.” He caressed her hair with his chin. “Too bad she has to grow up, isn’t it? You were sweet once, but we always knew you’d grow up rotten, with that animal’s blood in you. I tried my best, but you were tainted, girl, rotten from the start. Can’t grow a straight tree from twisted roots, I know that much.”
“Just let us past, Scott.”
The others were frozen, all of them letting her take control, as if shared DNA would clue her in to the trick of defeating the giant. What she knew was that on a good day, Scott was about as dangerous as the town rumors would have him be. On a bad day, he edged toward monster.
“I know what you got in that bag,” he said. His eyes were glittering. His face shone with sweat. The hand holding the knife was crusted brown with blood. “I know you stole from me, and you know what happens to people who steal from me. You know that real well.”
“Then let them go,” Jule said. “I’ll stay here. You can punish me.”
Somewhere behind her, Daniel whispered her name.
Scott laughed. It was an inhuman sound, too filled with sadistic joy. “I can punish
everyone.
You’ll watch me do it. You’ll be last, and then I’ll gut you the way I’m gonna gut your little friends, and while I’m peeling your intestines, we can have a nice chat about family loyalty and how you don’t tell the feds family business.”
“I didn’t tell anyone anything —”
“I know what you did!” he roared. “I know they’ve been watching me, everywhere, they
know
things they shouldn’t know, and how do you think that is, you little faithless bitch, unless you opened your dirty mouth? Do your friends all know where it’s been, your dirty little mouth? Do they know you been whoring around with your wannabe daddy? Do they know how you stuck it in him, then stuck him in the ground?”
Jule swallowed her rage. The blade was at Grace’s throat and she had seen enough bodies that day. She had enough blood on her hands.
Despite what she’d heard and what she knew, she couldn’t quite believe that her uncle Scott would slash the throat of a child, and then murder her friends one by one before using his knife to gut the closest thing he’d had to a daughter. Not the girl he had swung onto his shoulders and instructed in the art of lock picking and rescued from more than one parasite. Every day, he disappeared a little deeper into the rabbit hole, the meth eating away at the boundary between Scott the man and Scott the monster. But she’d never doubted that her uncle loved her.
After carefully searching his face, the wolfish smile and the wild eyes, she realized her uncle was gone.
They had weapons, too. He couldn’t kill five armed people with a single knife – but he could get a good start on it. He could kill Grace. He would kill Grace. As he had killed Axe and Teddy, and the parasite, and probably those other three men in whose disappearances he was an official “person of interest,” and who knew how many more. Grace would be the last, because then there would be no reason not to aim guns and pull triggers and end him – but before that, the tough little girl who liked to pretend she wasn’t would die.
And Jule was useless.
It was Cass who spoke.
“You’re right,” she said, and Jule wondered whether growing up rich left you irrevocably stupid, no matter how hard life later tried to smarten you up. “But it’s not her. It’s not any of them. It’s me. I’ve been watching you. I’ve seen
everything.
”
“You can’t fool me,” Scott snapped, too far gone to recognize her. “You’re nobody.”
“Maybe so, but I’m the one you want. I’m the one who’s been spying on you. How else would I know about the creaky third step on the main staircase? Or the closet door in the master bedroom that’s off its hinges? Or that there’s something that looks like a giant bloodstain inside the fridge. I’m telling you, I’ve been watching, and I see everything. I even see you cursing in the shower when you forget that the hot and cold water taps are switched.”
“I’ll stab your eyes out!” Scott shouted. He let Grace drop to the ground and thumped toward Cass with the knife. Her bravado gone as quickly as it appeared, she shrieked and backed against the wall, arms over her face. As the knife bore down on her, a bullet tore open the air. Scott stumbled to the floor, clutching his leg. Blood oozed from a neat little hole just above his knee. Jason stared down at his hands, at the gun he’d plucked out of West’s hands.
“I never shot someone before,” he said, wonder in his voice. “I never thought…”
Don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re willing to pull the trigger, Scott had once told her. Jason was pointing the gun at her now. It swiveled slowly toward Daniel, then Cass, then back to Scott. A funny smile played across Jason’s face.
Not
like
this,
Jule thought.
Not
because
we
trusted
him.
“I’m sorry, Jeremiah,” Jason said haltingly. “I tried.”
He dropped the gun.
“But I can’t.” He shouldered past West and ran out the door.
West watched him go. The others watched West. But Jule kept her eyes on Scott – and on the fallen gun.
“Pick it up, West,” Jule said.
He wouldn’t look at her. He kneaded his hands together and stared hard at the door, as if willing Jason to return. Scott writhed on the floor. Daniel had kicked away the knife. Scott was no threat to them now. Still, Jule wondered, remembering the lesson he’d taught her only a couple of days before. If you were going to shoot a wild animal in your own house, better shoot to kill.
“Pick it up,” she said again, harder this time.
“I don’t want to,” West said. Shaking his head at her, at the gun, at the man on the ground with the hole in his leg and the blood running through his fingers. “I never wanted to.”
“Welcome to my life,” she said, and took the gun, and pressed it into his hands. He took it, and they walked through the door. This time, there was no monster lurking on the other side. There was only Oleander, the town turned beast, and the men with guns and tanks, tasked with putting it down.
Oleander was past the point of leadership. Which was for the best, as its leader had fled. Mayor Mickey Mouse chose the safest place he could think of to hide: the small, understaffed police station, which was the closest thing Oleander had to a barracks. Thanks to a generous federal grant dating back to the War on Meth, the local armory was significantly better stocked than the tiny department would seem to require. And as mayor, he had the key.
Mouse had always been a coward, and this seemed a fine, cowardly plan. Except that someone beat him to it. When he arrived, trembling, urine soaking his thighs and gunfire ringing in his ears, the deacon was already inside, splashing the canisters of bullets and shelves of assault weapons with a can of gasoline.
“You see how desperate they are to stop us from purifying the town,” the deacon said. “But righteousness will prevail. And He said, ‘When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.’”
The mayor had always assumed that the deacon, like everyone else, had an angle. That though he would never admit it, the God stuff was just his way in. If that had ever been true – and Mouse hated to believe he could have so deeply misjudged a man – it clearly was no longer. Mouse was facing a true believer.
It was a good thing he’d already pissed himself dry.
“What are you doing, Deacon?” he asked, as if it weren’t clear.
“‘The Lord is coming with fire, and his chariots are like a whirlwind; he will bring down his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire. For with fire and with his sword the Lord will execute judgment on all people, and many will be those slain by the Lord.’”
“You’re insane.”
“‘The blazing flame will not be quenched, and every face from south to north will be scorched by it. Everyone will see that I the Lord have kindled it; it will not be quenched.’”
“Stark raving mad.”
The deacon dropped the empty can of gasoline and turned to face the mayor, arms out at his sides, palms facing up.
Crucify
me,
he seemed to say. The lunatic would probably enjoy it.
The distant gunfire was no longer distant. The end was coming, and there was nowhere left to run. But there were many guns to choose from. As was his way, Mouse wanted the biggest but chose the easiest, the semiautomatic pistol closest to hand. Trembling, gibbering, he loaded it with stiff fingers while the deacon smiled calmly, waiting for something to happen. The room stank of gasoline.
“You should know I’ve always hated you.”
Load
magazine. Pull back slide. Release. Careful. Careful.
“I put up with you because the mental midgets who live in this shithole of a town think you’ve got a hotline to God.”
The gunfire sounded like explosions. Men shouted to each other and stomped through the station, searching for signs of life. Mouse raised the gun. The federal grant had not covered infrastructure. The door to the armory wasn’t bullet-resistant reinforced steel. It was just wood. It would stop no one who wanted to get through.
“I’ll die,” he said. “But you’ll die first. At least, there’s that.”
Pulling the trigger felt ungodly good. The sheer physical release of the thing, like when he’d screwed Jessica Poblock thirty years ago in the back of her father’s Honda. For those bare moments that slipped away almost as quickly as her wet, sticky body, he’d been possessed of a conviction that he was all-powerful, all-consuming, that he was, were he only to acknowledge it, a god. He’d spent his whole life chasing that high, which had never come again. Until now. You could live an entire life inside a moment that satisfying. For the mayor, time stopped. The cold metal in his hands, the spreading wound in the deacon’s gut, the laughter burbling from his throat, the thunder of explosions behind the door, the smell of gasoline a reminder of long ago summer days on a steaming highway, the curve of the gun like the curve of Jessica’s hip bone beneath his scrawny, grasping fingers – he was beyond thought, but he could still feel sure that it had all been worth it, if it had led here, to this end.
This end: a spark of gunpowder, a cloud of gasoline fumes, a wall of ammunition.
A ball of fire.
It consumed the men who had birthed this new Oleander, and the men beyond the door, who had come to put an end to it. Then it spread.
And spread.
Daniel hated war movies. It wasn’t the violence that bothered him, but the tedium of a narrative that expected him to invest in uniforms from a far-flung land or time, the trigger-happy men who chose to wear them, and the interchangeable conquest and pathos that ensued.
He now understood that it should have been the violence. And that maybe he should have paid better attention.
They moved across town slowly, clinging to the sides of buildings and the edges of wooded clusters, blending as best they could into the screaming mobs that occasionally surged past, trying not to see the stragglers who got left behind for the mercenaries to gun down. The uniformed men fanned across town in starched lines, kicking in doors, eradicating any signs of life. Daniel would never have believed a place could turn from a home into a war zone in less than two weeks, but here was proof, in fire and blood.
They saw no children.
A tank blocked half of Fourth Street, with two mercenaries astride it and a third on foot leading the way. From his safe and cowardly berth in an alley, Daniel recognized two of the girls running past, shrieking and falling as the bullets entered their spines: Hayley and Emily, no longer popular enough. (Kaitly, nowhere to be seen, still the odd man out.) At his shoulder, Cass moaned, and he remembered that they had been friends, of sorts.
There was no way out but through, and from where he hid, he had a perfect shot. He had, thanks to his father, excellent aim. But to aim a gun at an actual living person – to end a life that had a beginning and middle no less real than his, that had parents, nightmares, maybe a wife, maybe a child – that was different. He didn’t shoot. His father would probably have called it fear, but fear would have made him pull the trigger. It was terrifying to do nothing, to watch the bodies fall and the tanks roll past. To wait until it was clear before venturing onto the killing fields and stepping over the body of a girl he’d once thought he hated.
In the movies, soldiers killed and killed and kept killing until battlefields were littered with bodies, and at the end, they got a medal, and a girl, and a sappy song over the closing credits. Daniel didn’t want a medal. He just wanted out. His nightmares weren’t prophecy; he didn’t have to be the one to fire. Not this time; not yet. Jule took his hand, and he turned from the bodies and focused on getting to the next block, and the next one.
This wasn’t his war.
Sometimes they huddled together and waited for the cleansing tide to pass; sometimes they were forced to split up, and for Jule, those were the worst times. She hadn’t yet gotten used to the concept of together, but it was all too easy to wrap her mind around apart. Every time she found herself pressed into a doorway or curled up beneath a stone bench, every time she heard the sharp report of a bullet, she saw, playing in high-def on the screen of her mind, Cass cornered against a wall, justice rendered after all. Grace bloodied by the man Jule had allowed to live. West set on fire by a godly mob. Daniel cut down in midstep. Daniel falling.
A panicked mob was charging the intersection of Seventh and Garden. To avoid it, they ducked into separate corners. Jule crouched in a garbage alley on the west side of Garden, while the others tucked themselves away on the east side, somewhere equally out of sight. She hoped out of sight.
When someone penetrated her sanctuary from the President Street side, the flank she’d stupidly left unguarded, it was neither a mercenary nor a friend.
Baz Demming, red-faced and bloody-nosed but still possessed of his quarterback grace, flung himself into the alley and slid behind the Dumpster. His breath of relief cut sharply when he saw Jule. Or maybe when he saw that Jule had a gun. He brought a finger to his swollen, cracked lips. She leveled the weapon.
“Do it,” he whispered. “Do me a favor.”
“My pleasure —”
“Shut
up,
” he hissed. Not so far away, girls called for him, a strange here-kitty-kitty note in their singsong voices.
“We’ll
find
you,” they chanted. “We’ve got a
treat
for you.”
“Crazy bitches,” Baz muttered.
“What’d you do to them?”
“Nothing.”
Nothing different, he meant, sullenly, than he’d done to any other girl, than he’d been doing his whole life, than business as usual. Nothing that demanded consequence.
Garden Street had gone quiet. A patter of footsteps neared the alley, and the girls’ catcalls swelled in volume.
“Baz, Baz, Baz, Baz”
– like a swarm of bees, stingers at the ready.
“Take me with you,” Baz pleaded. “Or shoot me now. Just don’t…” He cast a terrified look back toward President. “They’re
crazy.
”
“What did you do to them?” Jule asked again.
“Nothing.”
The gun came closer.
“Nothing but what they deserved.”
“There’s a lot of that going around.”
He’d crafted a makeshift holster out of his belt and tucked her knife into it, like a trophy. She took the knife – and then, after a moment of thought, made him hand over the belt.
Terrified, Baz was nearly unrecognizable. He couldn’t even muster up a filthy suggestion as he unfastened the buckle. Without his normal surly confidence, he looked defenseless, childlike. Almost redeemable.
She stood up, careful to keep the gun trained on him, and began to back away. “Follow me, and I’ll shoot you,” she said.
“They’ll kill me!” Baz whimpered, scrambling to his feet. “You can’t just leave me here!”
“It’s just a bunch of
girls,
Baz. You can’t be afraid of that.”
“Please.
Please.
”
The girls were close. They were infected, and if they found him, they’d be compelled to tear him to pieces. They had no more choice. By a quirk of luck, Jule did. She could choose to help; she could choose to walk away; she could choose to shoot him in the head. She suddenly got it: She hadn’t been spared because she was superior. She had no iron cord of moral fiber that let her hold out while the weaker fell prey to their impulses. She’d just had some luck that, for the first time in her life, turned out to be good.
She’d had his weight on top of her, suffocating her, his hands holding her down, his sour breath on her mouth, his thick tongue, his body, his need. She had the slash on her cheek, which would heal and scar and always remind her.
She had impulses, too.
Bad ones.
She wasn’t better, only freer. She could choose.
She fired the gun.
The bullet ricocheted off the Dumpster, several feet wide of Baz. As she’d intended. But the sound of the shot – it might as well have been a siren. It might as well have been an arrow.
“Come and get him,” Jule said, just loudly enough.
His face had regressed past childhood now, straight into infancy, the animal fear of a baby left to shriek in its crib, defenseless against the wolves of hunger or loneliness or dark.
Or vengeance.
They moved like wolves, stealing into the alley. They were the God groupies, who’d probably scored front-row seats to Ellie’s burning. They, too, had knives.
Jule left them to their work.
They always found each other again. And eventually they made it to the trees, somehow, all five of them whole and safe. Ahead of them lay the woods, and beyond that the highway, with its barbed wire and mercenaries. Behind them, more than one hundred were already dead, and the fighting continued. Behind them, the Preacher made his last stand atop the roof of the pawnshop, an assault rifle in his hands, clip nearly emptied, Satan’s army drawing near. Behind them, Scott Prevette bled to death, screaming at invisible IRS agents in the curtains and CIA drones dropping from the sky. Behind them, the fire spread, consuming the cop shop, the town hall, and the burned-out remains of Eisenhower High, still a mile from the Ghent house, where Milo cowered underground, far but closing in. Behind them, Oleander was dying.
They moved forward. The woods closed around them, dark and deep.
There was relief in the woods, in the quiet and the rich greens and browns of leaves and bark.
“Too bad we can’t just stay here,” Grace said, giving voice to Jule’s thought. “Wait it out.”
That was exhaustion talking, and fear – but then, Grace was a child. She was allowed to be both tired and afraid.
“If we wait it out, there’ll be nothing left to save,” Jule said.
And again, Grace dared to say out loud what Jule had been thinking – what maybe all of them had thought. “So?”
“They didn’t deserve this,” West said, and didn’t have to say the name Jason. “None of them.”
Some
of
them,
Jule thought.
“We can’t just hide out here and leave them to die,” he said. “Not if we can stop it.”
“Big if,” Jule said.
“Maybe there won’t even be anyone left at the guard posts,” Daniel said. “We could just walk right through.”
Jule did him the favor of not laughing in his face.
It took nearly an hour to penetrate the forest and make it through to the other side. They moved slowly, reassuring each other that it was good to be cautious, but they could all feel the emptiness of the woods, its stillness broken only by the wind and the insects and their footsteps crunching through the brush. The woods were safe, and they couldn’t bring themselves to hurry. Jule knew the way, and could only get lost if she let it happen. There were stories of people who had slipped into the woods never to leave, lost to the forest sprites or – depending on the type of story – devoured by hidden beasts. But those were stories for children. These woods were less than a mile wide. Setting off in any direction meant that, before long, civilization would intrude.