A Night Without Stars (16 page)

But even though his skin had taken on a faintly greenish tint, Travis held his ground. “You still have a piece of glass sticking out of your side.”

Whoops. Tearing off a piece of fabric from the bottom of my t-shirt I wrapped it around my hand and carefully pulled out the shard of glass. Blood spurted in an arc of dark red before I scrunched up the side of my shirt and shoved it into the wound. “Ouch,” I said belatedly, wrinkling my nose. “That hurts. Like, a lot.”

“Are you sure?” Travis’ expression was skeptical. “Because it really doesn’t seem—”

“Shock. I think I’m in shock. What about you? That’s a nasty looking cut on your head. And you, Dad,” I said, raising my voice. “What about you?”

If there was anyone in shock, it was my dad. He jolted when I said his name and blinked several times before he said, “I’m fine. I… I’m fine. The airbag saved me.”

And mine hadn’t even gone off. It was official. The fates that be seriously wanted me dead. Like I’d ever done anything to them.

My mom used to say that bad things happen in threes. If that was the case then I still had one more near death experience to go, although it was going to pretty hard to top being attacked by a vampire and getting thrown through a windshield.

I peered up at the cloudless blue sky, shading my eyes from the sun with the edge of my hand. It was impossible to tell the exact time – none of us had a watch or cell phones that were charged – but the sun was definitely higher than it’d been when we left town.

Every minute that ticked by brought us closer to sunset… and closer to the monsters that lurked in the shadows.

“We should gather up what isn’t ruined and head back into town. See if we can steal another car.” I glanced at Travis to gauge his reaction. He didn’t look too happy, but what else could we do? Sit around on the side of the road and wait for help that wasn’t ever going to come?

Nobody had time for that.

I walked towards my dad, picking up a shirt off the ground as I went. It was one of his white gym shirts from when he actually used to go to the gym. By the time I finished wiping off my face and arms and threw it in the bushes it was stained red with blood.

Dad was staring at what remained of the car, his eyes vacant. When I touched his arm he startled. “It’s okay,” I said gently. “It’s me, Dad. Lola.”

“Lola.” His eyes were red and puffy. A bruise was already forming on his jaw and both cheeks were swollen. I guess getting punched in the face with an airbag will do that to you. “I really thought…” He hesitated and drew a ragged breath.

“It’s okay,” I repeated, more than a little caught off guard by the emotion he was struggling to contain. The only other time I’d seen him this upset was the day Mom walked out. “I’m fine, see? No harm done. We have to get going though, Dad. We can’t stay here. Do you think you can walk back to town?”

“Walk back to town?” he repeated blankly.

“Yeah. It’s only what, like three or four miles?”

“Try ten,” Travis called out.

“Try minding your own business.”

Travis muttered something under his breath before he resumed picking up what remained of our belongings, leaving me feeling like an ass. I would make it up to him later. Somehow. Right now I could only focus on one thing at a time and that one thing just happened to be getting Dad to snap out of whatever daze he was in. I gave his arm a little shake. “Come on. We can do this.”

A motivational speaker I was not.

“It won’t matter anyways,” Travis said.

I spun to face him. His arms were filled with clothes. I recognized a pair of jeans and one of my shirts. “What won’t matter?”

“If we steal another car or not. Didn’t you see the road? It was blown up. There’s no way around.”

So there really
had
been a crater in the middle of the road. In the middle of the road right where the exit for the interstate was. The only exit heading north our little town had. My throat tightened.
They planned this
, I thought darkly.
They planned everything
.

“So we head south instead.” It was the next logical choice, wasn’t it? “No big deal.”

“Towards the city?” Travis snorted and tossed the clothes into one of the remaining duffle bags. “You’re supposed to avoid big populations during something like this, not head right towards them.”

Frustration closed like a vice around my chest. I wanted the answer to our problems to be simple, but every time I turned around it felt like I was slamming into a wall so high I couldn’t see what was on the other side of it. “Then what?” I cried, throwing my hands up. “What do you suggest we do? Because I’m fresh out of ideas here, Trav. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing any more than you do.” Tears burned the back of my eyelids, which only made me angrier. I didn’t want to cry. Crying was weakness. And when you were on the run from a pack of bloodthirsty vampires, weakness was death. I raked a hand through my hair, accidentally popping out the elastic tying off the end of my braid. My hair sprang free in a messy halo of frizz around my face and I lost sight of the elastic in the grass.

Perfect.

Freaking perfect.

“The Renner Hotel,” Dad said suddenly.

“What?” Travis and I chirped in unison.

“The Renner Hotel,” Dad repeated. He tried to smile and ended up wincing in pain instead. “Out past the elementary school. It’s been abandoned for years. No one ever goes out that way. We could stay there. Stock up on more supplies and lay low until help arrives.”

My thoughts veered instantly towards Angelique. I needed to be getting as far away from town as possible, not hiding out in it. I started to protest, but Travis cut me off.

“That could work,” he said, scratching his chin. “At least it would be better than driving around and running into trouble on the road. Good idea, Mr. Sanchez.”

No
, I wanted to shout.
Bad idea. Very bad idea!

I should have told them about Angelique right then and there. What did I have to lose?

Only everything.

Travis had left his own mother behind. Leaving his best friend would be easy, and I was afraid my dad was weak enough to go with him. I was even more afraid he wasn’t, and that by deciding to stay with me he would condemn himself to death. Either way, it was a decision I wasn’t ready for Travis or Dad to make.

“I don’t think we should stick around. Maximus said it would be safest if we headed for the mountains.”

Travis looked at me like I was crazy. “How do we do that if the exit’s blocked off? Besides, who knows if he was even telling the truth? Maybe he’s one of them.”

“He’s not.”

“Maybe he’s working for them, then. We have no way of knowing. Maybe the mountains are a trap. I think your dad is right, Lola. The Renner Hotel is our best chance.”

Two against one. I had a bad feeling about it, but what could I do? Either admit the real reason I didn’t want to stay or keep my mouth shut.

For once, I did the latter.   

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Renner Hotel

The Renner Hotel used to be Revere’s one claim to fame. Back in the seventies or eighties (I never paid much attention in history) it was nothing more than an old warehouse. A fancy banker from New York City bought it with some nutty idea of knocking it down and building a world-class luxury hotel.  Within five years the hotel went belly up and the building had sat vacant ever since.

“There are going to be cockroaches and mice and rats,” I predicted as we trudged across the enormous cornfield that separated the hotel from the elementary school. “Great big rats with sharp teeth and long whiskers that will pounce on you in your sleep and rip your throat open.”

“If you’re trying to scare me it’s not working,” Travis said mildly. “We’re still staying here overnight.”

I glared at his back. A line of sweat darkened his shirt between his shoulder blades. It’d taken us a good four hours to walk the ten miles back into town and the sun was heavy in the sky, bringing an unrelenting wave of heat along with it. “But you hate rats.”

Travis didn’t even turn around. “I would rather face a hundred rats than one of those things from last night.”

“A hundred rats?” I scoffed. “That’s a lot. That many rats would definitely kill you. They would crawl all over you and chew out your eyeballs and climb in your mouth—”

“Lola, that’s enough,” Dad snapped.

I pinched my lips tightly together. Dad wasn’t doing so well and I didn’t want to raise his stress level any higher. Seeing his friends and neighbors dead in the street, their bodies flayed open and reddening in the sun like cooked lobsters, had done enough damage already.

We’d stayed out of the houses as much as we could while we searched for supplies, but it didn’t really matter. The corpses were everywhere. Some drained of blood. Some not. Some looked like they’d simply drifted off to sleep, while others had been visibly tortured. I really hoped seeing all the dead people would dissuade Dad and Travis from wanting to stay in town, but they had their plan and they were sticking to it.

Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea, I reasoned. After all, we didn’t know what was happening outside of Revere. It could be better… or it could be a thousand times worse. Without any means of communication – not a single cell phone I found had service and the internet, along with the power, was still down – we had no way to tell what was going on. Was the attack nationwide? Global? Would it happen again, or had the vampires moved on? And if they had moved on, where did they go?

Not for the first time since we’d started our walk did I think of Maximus. He’d been the only one to supply me with answers. The only one who seemed to know what was going on. I’d looked for him as we walked through town but if he was still around he didn’t want anyone else to know.

There was something else that was bothering me. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on until I saw Dad stumble and caught a glimpse of his face, pale and slick with sweat.

I glanced down at the watch I’d slipped off the wrist of a dead woman and cursed under my breath. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

It was fifteen minutes to six. For the past year Dad had come home (who was I kidding, most of the time he’d never
left
home), settled himself on the sofa, and cracked open a cold one. That beer was followed by another, and another, and another until he drank himself into a comfortable stupor.

But we hadn’t passed the beer store during our scavenger hunt for supplies, and I knew the fine line of perspiration gleaming high on his forehead wasn’t only from walking.

He’d tried to stop drinking a few months ago. I still vividly remembered the shakiness, the temper, and the seizure that made him bite through his own tongue and left blood all over the bathroom floor.

I know what you’re thinking. All that happened after a couple days, right?

Try a couple hours.

Don’t become an alcoholic, kids. It really, really sucks when you decide you don’t want to be one anymore.

“I have to go back,” I said abruptly. “I forgot something.”

“What?” Travis dropped the wheelbarrow stacked high with supplies he’d been pushing. Shading his eyes against the sun he scowled at me. “It’s going to start getting dark in little over an hour. We have everything we need to get through tonight. There’s no way you can go back.”

I set my jaw. “Don’t tell me what I can and cannot do, Travis Henderson.”

“Travis is right.” Dad set the down the duffel bag he’d been carrying and exhaled loudly. The Renner Hotel loomed behind him, mocking in its nearness.

More Southern Plantation than Holiday Inn, the five-story hotel with its sweeping lines and columns had been a thing of beauty in its hey day, but age and ruin had sunken it into a state of gross disrepair. Most of the windows were either boarded up or broken. Tall stalks of grass shot up through the parking lot and the circular part of the drive that had once designated valet parking was long overgrown. There was an eerie quality to it. A sense of something plucked out of time. It certainly wasn’t where
I
would have chosen to spend the night, but then again I wasn’t in the one in charge. Although, come to think of it, I didn’t really know who was.

“We have everything we need,” Dad continued.

I met his eyes. “Not everything,” I said quietly.

Travis looked back and forth between us, picking up on the tension but unable to track its source. “You can’t be serious,” he said slowly. “Lola this is a really dumb idea, even for you.”

Dad opened his mouth. I waited for him to tell me not to go. Waited for him to volunteer for the job himself. But he didn’t and I couldn’t even hate him for it, because the same weakness I saw in him I also recognized in myself.

“I’ll be quick,” I said, keeping my tone light, as though I was just going out to pick up some milk at the grocery store instead of sneaking back into a town crawling with bloodsucking monsters to get my alcoholic father his beer.

If you ever want to see what I look like, look up ‘dysfunctional’ in the dictionary. My picture will be there.

“Be careful.” Dad’s gaze dropped to the ground. “Be safe.”

“Mr. Sanchez, you can’t let her do this.”

I punched my best friend in the arm. “Shut up.”

“Ow,” he exclaimed, rubbing his flimsy excuse for a bicep. “Why do you always
do
that?”

“Because I can. I’ll be back in less than an hour.”
I hope
. “Way before sunset. Where will you be?”

Dad scuffed his shoe into the dirt. “Room thirty-two. Your, ah, mother and I stayed there. Once. It’s a nice room.”

Surprise lifted my eyebrows straight up. “You did? When?”

“A long time ago. Before you and your sister were born.”

When we were happy.

He didn’t say the words out loud, but I heard them all the same. I managed a tight smile. “Room thirty-two. Got it. Here, take this.” I dropped my duffel bag on the ground between us. It hit with a loud
thud
, the water bottles inside crinkling. Travis grabbed my arm above the wrist and tugged me to the side. A cornstalk caught me in the side of the face and I slapped it away.