American Quest (42 page)

Bruce blinked. “Er, yeah.”

Bruce had been making a drink run when the gas pumps had come to life and begun to attack the van, banging and squeezing like the giant squid that tried to eat the
Nautilus
. Inside the Quick-Mart, the door had suddenly locked, leaving Bruce standing helpless next to a bewildered
attendant and a bleary-eyed truck driver who kept shaking his head and saying, “This is why I usually drive at night.”

Bruce had thought for sure they were going to lose somebody. The hoses had stretched to impossible lengths, shooting out from all eight pumps and descending with ferocity upon the van.

But then the tour bus showed up, and the tourists piled out and . . . and . . .

Well, here they were.

Bruce watched a curly-haired woman bearing a fanny pack and pink sunglasses as two wild black hoses descended upon her from opposite ends. She wrestled them both to the ground and jammed her feet on top of them, bending them and pretzeling them together. She then yanked, cinching them into a tight knot. The hoses and nozzles flapped and banged until the machete-toting guy with the Hawaiian shirt came up and lopped their nozzles off.

The entire parking lot roiled with whipping gas hoses, but furious as they were, they were grossly outnumbered by the rabid tourists. Fanny-packers beat, yanked, stretched, and sliced the hoses to shreds. And the wounded hoses oozed a sticky red something that didn’t quite look like blood but didn’t look like gas, either.

Bruce heard a high-pitched, buzzing shriek and he turned to see a lady in a muumuu with one hand gripping a twisting, writhing nozzle. In the other hand she wielded a scorching red curling iron—at least it looked like one except that the barrel glowed like a hot poker—and she burned through the rubber mesh of the screaming hose.

Bruce heard a click at the door and reached for it, finding it open.

“Wait, I don’t think it’s safe yet,” he heard Jamie say, and saw her twisting in her seat to confer with the others in the van. “And . . . did you get the drinks? Bea says we have to make doubly sure to hydrate.”

“Hydrate? Oh. Oh yeah.” Bruce had actually left all the drinks at the counter, still in the bag where he’d abandoned them just as the pumps had come to life.

“And Em wants cashews.”

Bewildered, Bruce fetched the drinks and attempted to pay the attendant for the cashews. The poor man only gaped at the spectacle beyond the window.

The truck driver approached the register and shook his head. “It’s
why I usually never like to drive during the day. Nothing but crazies on the road during the day. Could I get a packet of Marblows?”

The attendant blinked, seemingly unable to move, an odd gurgle in his throat.

Bruce laid down a couple of bucks for the cashews and turned back toward the window to watch and wait.

“What are they?” Bruce said into the cell phone. “Some kind of angels come to protect us?”

A bent old man jammed an umbrella down the snout of one of the nozzles and began beating it against the concrete.

Jamie turned back to Bruce with a shrug. “Hard to say.”

Bruce shook his head. “It’s not exactly how I expected divine creatures to act. They’re kinda, I don’t know, ruthless.”

After some time, the tourists neutralized all the pumps but one. The sole surviving hose turned and tried to escape them, bolting for the freeway like a sidewinder. The bus itself took off after it, accelerated, overtook it, and then squealed its brakes as it pinned it down. The pack of tourists swarmed over it.

Jamie’s voice came through the cell phone again. “You know, they’re fighting the bad guys, but something tells me the tourists aren’t necessarily
good
guys. I don’t know what they are. You’d better make a run for it while you have the chance.”

Jamie was right. He dove through the door, leaving the truck driver and the shocked cashier behind him.

Clashing cymbals burst through the whine of a Chinese twostringed fiddle. The plush red theater lay dark but for the stage, and Enervata observed the sea of heads below where he and Gloria sat in their box seats. To think, by tomorrow these people would all fall under his rule. If they only knew what awaited them before dawn, would they spend their last moments of freedom sitting idle in a theater?

Onstage below, the actors’ movements flowed in graceful arcs,
even in the subtle turning of the head as the warrior shifted his whiteand-red painted face from side to side. Though he carried a sword and wore a costume of full battle armor, he pivoted and leaped in movements that defied gravity.

Enervata heard a subtle cough from behind and he turned to see a round silhouette darkening the archway.

“Excuse me,” he whispered to Gloria.

She nodded, the reflection of stage lights glimmering in the jewels that adorned her hair.

He joined Hedon at the rear of the box seats and they stepped back into the hall.

“More problems, master,” Hedon whispered. “We can’t get to the travelers because Kolt’s got every Pravus who’s ever sullied the earth out there turning everyday folk into bloomin’ warriors.”

“Keep your voice down,” Enervata said slowly and quietly. “Where are they?”

“They’re coming here. They’re almost to New York. Master, we can’t get near ’em. We’re up against both the light and the—”

“I will only say this once more. Either you bring me those heads, or I will take yours. Do you understand?”

Hedon stared at him, notched nose flaring and drawing in curls of his mustache. He nodded. “Yes, master. I understand.”

MANHATTAN GLITTERED IN THE DARKNESS across the river. Jamie’s stomach was in knots. She knew precisely where to go. They’d found the place online after the glimpse they caught of the driveway. Now, as she guided the van over the familiar roads, through the tollbooths, and onto the George Washington Bridge, she realized that over the next several hours they could very well determine the fate of the world.

“It’s beautiful,” Emily breathed in the backseat. “So big.”

Jamie checked the rearview mirror and saw Bruce put his arm around the little girl. But he said nothing, his gaze fixed on the city beyond as it winked to life. In fact no one else spoke, not even Bedelia who, like Emily, had never been to New York City before. In fact, it seemed as though Bedelia watched the city emerge with trepidation.

Jamie brought her eyes back to the road ahead and felt a strange quickening in her pulse.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

Next to her in the front passenger’s seat, Bedelia’s hands went to the armrests. “What is it, hon?”

Jamie scanned the road intently. “I . . . I don’t know. Something’s out of place. I can’t tell what.”

Everyone sat up straighter.

“It’s the cars, man!” Forte said from the far back. “Where’d all the cars go?”

“My God, you’re right,” Bruce said.

Jamie’s hands gripped the steering wheel. It was true. She couldn’t see a single headlight in either direction. As they rolled onto the bridge, the Hudson flowed in darkness hundreds of feet below, the black water catching ripples of reflected light. Her eyes scanned the rearview mirror.

“You thinking of doubling back?” Bruce said, reading her mind.

“It might be the only . . . my God, look!”

The road behind the van suddenly groaned and stretched backward, the bridge expanding so that the tollbooths seemed to fall back several miles. Doubling back was no longer an option.

“Gun it!” Bruce shouted.

She did.

Jamie floored the accelerator, centering the van among the empty lanes to allow as much room for error as possible. This bridge had always seemed invulnerable and vast. Now, with the speed maxed out—not exactly racecar velocity, but the van could haul when necessary—the bridge suddenly seemed puny and narrow.

The van zoomed across, the travelers inside barely breathing, and Jamie saw the exit for the Henry Hudson just ahead. She felt a sprout of hope. Perhaps they’d moved quickly enough to avoid whatever was about to happen. She inwardly congratulated herself for having become so attuned to clues, developing reflexes of steel acuity and—

The suspension cables moved. In the sharp-angled glow of the bridge’s spotlights, they shifted and folded into themselves, and then expanded, fanning out like butterflies. Shannon screamed.

The thing that had formed itself from the suspension cables now arched its spine, taking the build of a massive, braided-steel dragon, the scales of its back crisscrossing in the same latticework patterns of the bridge’s towers. It turned, bent, and leaped down into their path, fixating upon the van with predatory posture.

Jamie slammed on the brakes. The beast’s eyes were silver, lizardlike, and the size of Jet Skis.

The motor of the van hummed, its occupants too shocked to scream.

And the metallic dragon’s nose flared.

“I’m going out there,” Bedelia said.

Jamie looked at her.

“What?” Forte yelped. “That’s crazy!”

Bedelia turned to Jamie. “Listen to me, hon. I’m going to run out there to that thing. And when I do, you gun the van past it.”

Jamie couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

She shook her head. “No way, Bea.”

Jamie threw the gear into reverse, but she did not hit the gas. The lizard stepped forward, causing the bridge to quake. Jamie knew that the van could never muster enough speed to outrun the beast.

Bedelia’s hand went to the door handle.

“No!” Jamie flipped the automatic lock. “No, Bea, what’re you . . . just . . . no!”

Bedelia turned to her sharply. “I know what I’m doing. I’ve seen it in a dream, knew it from the first moment I hugged Bruce at the hospital. It’s what I’m meant to do and it’s okay. I’m proud. It’s okay, honey. I’ll be with my husband and my daughter and my sister.”

She flicked the lock, and then the door was open. She was out of the van before Jamie could reach out to stop her.

“Bea!”

But Bedelia was already running toward the ghastly lizard. Everyone in the van screamed, Emily in hysterics. Bedelia shot one look over her shoulder and met Jamie’s eyes. And in that instant she conveyed to Jamie how deeply she meant what she’d just said. That Jamie had to honor her instructions.

And then Bedelia turned. She ran straight for the dragon without so much as a pause.

Horrified, disbelieving, shaking, and weeping, Jamie obeyed. She threw the van back into drive and jammed her foot on the accelerator, following behind Bedelia just as the horrible, wretched beast stretched its massive jaws toward the gentle woman, its pupils narrowing to elliptical spikes as the silver lower lids rolled upward.

Emily was shrieking in the back. Searing, anguished wailing. Tears streamed down Jamie’s face, and she must have been screaming as well. She couldn’t look at the creature, couldn’t see what it was doing to Bedelia as the van rocketed past. What Bea had done, the sacrifice she’d made, had given them all just enough time.

They started for the off-ramp. The bridge quaked beneath the wheels of the van. Jamie shot terrified eyes toward the rearview mirror
and saw the lizard turning. Its tongue darted out, long and metallic like a playground slide, and forked at the end. In the split second it appeared, it gouged the pavement behind the van. Shannon screamed.

But it missed them. The seconds it had taken to do whatever it did to Bedelia had left it just far enough behind. The beast reared up, tried to make up the distance. When it lunged, though, it lurched sideways, getting tangled in the suspension cables that held the bridge taut.

“It’s falling!” Forte shouted.

The great tail of the beast whipped from the towers to the underbelly of the bridge and its massive black nails scraped at the web of cables. Two of them popped and the bridge groaned.

And then the giant lizard vanished. There came a vacuum of silence followed by a terrific, earth-shuddering splash from the Hudson River below.

Emily wailed, calling out Bedelia’s name.

Jamie wanted to wail as well. Wanted to beat her hands on the steering wheel over the unconscionable price Bea had paid for their freedom. But she knew there was only one way to honor her friend’s sacrifice.

She drove.

ENERVATA HAD LEFT GLORIA in her room while he went to pour their Courvoisier. Now, as he approached her door with the glasses, he heard her voice whispering fervently. He paused without entering.

He’d only left her alone for a minute. If she were taking Sileny into her confidence, it would probably be best to let her have her moment. Though he didn’t like it, he had to trust that Sileny would guide her to him tonight.

Tonight.