Blood Run (3 page)

But still she pushed, her hand planted on the underside of Bill’s jaw. His head snapped to the side, and he hissed with rage. Deep gashes appeared in Linda’s palm and forearm. He’d bitten her, too.

Then Bill put his mouth back on the jagged hole in Jim’s neck, and he hugged Jim’s body, rolling him over until Jim lay on top of Bill and the blood ran freely.

Linda got shakily to her feet, panting painfully, her mind wiped clean by shock and something else, something she could feel glowing at the edges of the gashes and sneaking up her arm toward her heart and brain. The sickness. She had it.

Her stomach lurched with the deepest hunger she’d ever known, and she dropped to her knees, whimpering. She crawled toward Bill and her husband, still cradling her injured arm. She mewled like a lost animal and reached out tentatively, wanting to dip her fingers in the blood. Bring it to her mouth. Assuage this hunger.

Bill turned and hissed at her advancing hand, and he snapped three times, his teeth clicking together millimeters from her trembling fingertips. He grabbed Jim’s body and, still hissing, pulled him further to the back of the yard, into the deep shadow next to the shed.

Linda shrieked in frustration. Then a new sound reached into the red fog that had taken over her mind.

“Mom!”

“Mommy!”

A boy sound, a lovely young boy sound, warm and rich with pulsing life…she rose and turned.

Destiny had grabbed at Chance before he could follow their mom out the door. She’d held his struggling body in one arm and trundled the door closed with the other. She looked up just in time to see her dad push her mom behind him and her mom tumble over the fire pit. They were strongly backlit by the floodlight, and beyond them, all was blackness.

Chance was still struggling, reaching for the door handle. Destiny pulled his hand away.

“Chance, I don’t want you going out there. It’s okay; they’re okay,” she said and glanced out the door again. She saw the figure coming across the yard from the shed and saw her dad turn away from the advancing figure to help her mom. “It’s just Mr. Miller, Chance, relax. It’s no big deal.”

She looked again just in time to see Mr. Miller crash into her dad, and the men fell onto her mom. Confusion poured through Destiny, hot and disturbing. She reached for the door handle and then hesitated.

The floodlight was so white and strong, the scene before her was picked out in an almost black-and-white sharpness. The struggling forms looked two dimensional, cut off at the edges where the light stopped abruptly. She watched in horror as Mr. Miller’s head came down on her dad’s neck, and he snuffled there, searchingly. Then the wash of black, like oil, cascading in a freshet, and it wasn’t oil, it was blood, of course it was blood. It was her dad’s blood. Grayish yellow clouds crowded in around the periphery of her vision, and she felt her stomach lift and drop as bile rose up in her throat.

“Mom! Mommy!” Chance yelled from beside her, and it served to snap her from her impending faint. She had to protect Chance–no harm could come to him.

Her mom was turning, facing them, coming across the yard.

“Mommy!” Chance yelled again, and then screeched like an injured animal as Destiny’s arms tightened on him. Tears rolled down his reddening cheeks. His hand went to the door handle. “Mommy, Mommy!”

Destiny stared at her mom, her eyes bouncing from her mom’s bleeding arm to her dazed and vacant eyes. She’d been bit, her mom had been bit. By a vampire.

Now Linda stood on the back patio, swaying, the floodlight picking out the detail of her torn flesh, the hunger accumulating in her eyes. Chance reached for the door handle, and Destiny pushed his hand down again, clicking the lock in the same motion. She had begun to cry. She flipped the security pole down, effectively blocking the door. She let Chance go.

He dropped to his knees beside her, his hands pressed to the glass. His breath hitched and whooped as he sobbed. Then Linda was at the door, her face to Chance’s face, and she opened her mouth as though preparing to bite through the glass. Her eyes burned with orange fire. Then something seemed to click in her eyes, and she backed away, bent over.

“Mom!” Destiny yelled through the glass, panicked and unthinking. “Are you okay?” Tears burned their way down her cheeks, and her mom blurred, doubling and tripling.

Linda looked up, and her gaze went from Chance to Destiny. She threw her head back and howled with grief. Destiny felt an answering wail wanting to start up in her own throat; she thought if she could yell like that, it might wash the crazy, unreal feeling from her brain.

Linda lowered her head and looked at her children behind the glass. She panted, her chest rising and falling. Her eyes burned with that slow, sludgy fire that all survivors would come to recognize.

She took one step closer, and her mouth opened in a snarl, exposing her growing incisors. “Don’t let me in!”

She bent over, clutching her stomach, and looked up again. She took another involuntary step toward the slider. Her eyes were deep pits of grief and anger and hunger. “Destiny! Don’t let me in!”

“Don’t let me!” she wailed.

She lurched away into the dark of the side yard and disappeared.

Destiny sagged against the glass door, and now her fear and shock were too large for mere tears. She became aware of Chance, collapsed on the floor at her feet and sobbing. He’d cried his nose bloody, and the blood had caked in the soft terrycloth at the collar of his pj’s.

She sat, turning her back to the glass, and pulled him into her arms. She used her own sleeve to wipe away the blood on his lip and neck. His body was hot, and he shivered convulsively. She tried to tell him that it was all right, that it was going to be okay.

But she couldn’t get her voice to work.

Because she didn’t think it was ever going to be okay, ever again.

She’d lost Chance less than a week after losing her parents.

Still in shock, functioning on only the most basic levels, she’d taken Chance and moved into the high school the next day. The gym was filling rapidly with orphans and displaced adults.

The high school had been stocked with Red Cross cots at the beginning of the emergency, and now people took them and set up housekeeping as best they could. Destiny tried to put her and Chance’s cots near to a family she recognized from Willow’s End–the Masons. She’d been drawn to their intact family unit–mother, father, three children–and the warmth and safety it implied. But Mrs. Mason shooed Destiny away from the cluster created by her husband and children. She told Destiny that there was plenty of room, don’t crowd them. But Destiny saw a dark truth in Mrs. Mason’s cold, ice-chippy eyes: she only cared about her own. Now that things looked like they might get rough, she and Mr. Mason had decided an every-family-for-themselves stance would be the most successful. Especially for them.

“Destiny! Over here!” It was Mr. West, her favorite teacher. He was waving to her, his glasses flashing, and the sleeves of his oxford rolled to the elbows. He was in the same kind of corduroys he wore to teach, and she could see his linen jacket folded neatly on a cot nearby.

Destiny smiled with wan gratefulness and dragged the cots toward him. Chance followed with blank indifference. He wasn’t doing well.

There were four other cots beside Mr. West’s in a comfortable group. Destiny would just bet that all the cots were parentless kids just like her and Chance. Mr. West was that kind of person.

“Are your parents on their way, or…?” He didn’t need to finish, he saw the answer in her lowered head. He nodded calmly, but a deep well of sympathy warmed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Destiny…Chance. You’re welcome to bunk near me. I’ve found myself at loose ends, too.”

Destiny thought he probably meant he’d lost his girlfriend, but she wasn’t sure. Teachers’ lives were a bit of a mystery. She knew that Mr. West wasn’t married and that he was probably somewhere in his mid to late thirties. Other than that, she only knew that he taught in clear, concise language, was quietly respectful of his students and demanded that same respect in return. And he never gave open-book quizzes, only closed-book, which was enough to make some of the lazier students dislike him.

She turned and pushed Chance down onto the cot, and he sat like a soft statue on the edge where she’d placed him. Mr. West watched with concern. Then he pulled Destiny aside.

“Would you mind if I talked to him for a bit?” he asked. “Lea Adams and Mark Ralston are in the cafeteria…maybe you could go and see if they need help with anything?”

Destiny glanced at Chance and then nodded gratefully to Mr. West. Even after only a night and half a day, it was a relief to hand over some of her responsibility to an adult. A real adult. And a nice one, too.

She’d gone to find Mark and Lea. Lea was a grade below her, and Mark, a grade ahead. She knew each of them, if only peripherally…enough to say ‘hi’ to in the former world. She turned back as she entered the wide hallway, and Mr. West was sitting next to Chance, an arm over his shoulders. Chance was nodding, and as Destiny watched, he dropped his head down into his hands and began to cry. For a second, Destiny hesitated, wanting to go back to him, but Mr. West looked up and gave her a small, sober nod. She turned away.

She saw Lea first, standing at a long lunch table and counting out small boxes of cereal, stacking like ones together. Mark emerged from the kitchen, carrying a tray of packaged cupcakes that he dumped on the next table over. Other people were doing the same at other tables, counting up food packages, fruit, cartons of juice and milk.

Destiny walked to where Lea counted.

“Hi, Lea. Mr. West sent me to help out.” She nodded to Mark when he looked up from sorting. “Hey, Mark.”

“Hi, Destiny,” Mark said. “Your parents?”

“No, they…they’re, you know. They…died.” Destiny shrugged and fought back the tears. It just didn’t seem possible, standing here in the well-known school cafeteria, like it could have been any other day. But on
this
day, her parents were dead, and everything had changed. The whole world was crumbling; she’d finally gotten the excitement she craved. Dark, heavy guilt pressed down across her shoulders and back.

Mark nodded, his face grim, and Lea raised a tentative hand to Destiny, her fingers fluttering like a timid bird. “Me…mine too. I mean…my parents, my…dad…too…died,” Lea said, stuttering, and she took a tripping step closer to Destiny, her arms widening. She was a thin, almost translucent blonde, and tears welled in her enormous blue eyes.

Destiny embraced Lea, and her own tears began to flow with almost painful reluctance. She didn’t want to keep crying. Her eyes already felt like itchy, lightly sanded marbles.

After a minute, the girls let each other go, smiling sadly. Mark stood awkwardly to one side, watching them.

Destiny broke the silence. “What are you guys doing? Can I help?”

“We’re counting out food boxes,” Lea said and turned back to the table where she’d been working. Her voice had a tentative, wavery quality that Destiny knew wasn’t due to recent trauma…it was just Lea’s voice. “We have to know what we have in case they want to ration. ‘Officer’ Morris is in charge.” She cut her eyes to the other side of the cafeteria with a hint of a smile on her pale lips. Destiny followed her gaze.

Deidre Morris, former president of the class of ’82, stood backlit by the enormous caf windows. She had a homemade-looking yellow sash tied over her shoulder. She held a clipboard. She was staring at Destiny with pursed-lip impatience.

“Destiny! Destiny Riser! Would you come
here
, please, and let them count?”

“Uh oh…” Mark said under his breath and nudged Destiny’s shoulder as he moved past her toward the kitchen to get another tray of the cupcakes. “Now you did it.”

Lea giggled. It was such a mild and breathless giggle that if Destiny did not know her, she would have thought Lea had merely sighed.

Destiny gave Deidre a perfunctory wave and then walked from the caf. She didn’t feel like being bossed around by Deidre right now, she wanted to get back to the gym. Some instinct was warning her not to leave Chance for too long. He was very frail right now, and he needed her. And he was exhausted. Neither one of them had gotten any real sleep the night before.

She turned the corner, and looking across the room, she saw Chance sound asleep on the cot. Mr. West sat next to him in a folding chair. His arms were resting on his chest, and his head dropped forward and then snapped back up. After a moment, it began to droop again. He was keeping a sleepy watch over Chance.

Destiny walked up on tiptoe, amazed that this little area could feel so isolated from the rest of the milling, murmuring gym.
What caused that?
she wondered and then toed off her shoes. She stretched out on her cot, rolling onto her side so she could watch Chance as he breathed. She wished she had a blanket. Her mind conjured a picture of her mom, back when Destiny was just a little girl, and mom had just washed Blankie, baby Destiny’s favorite companion, and was bringing him out of the dryer, fluffy and yellow and dear…

She felt a gentle weight on her shoulder, a breath of wind on her cheek, and opened her eyes in time to see Mr. West turning away. He’d floated a thin blanket down over her. She looked at Chance again. His thin eyelids, the bruised-looking area beneath. His skin so pale. She would have to get him something to eat soon. She would do it in a minute.

She slept.

In her dream, Blankie hung on the line in the backyard, drying to a fluff in the summer heat. She reached one tiny hand up, pulling Blankie to her face, and popped her thumb in her mouth. She rubbed Blankie over and over on her cheek. She leaned into Blankie’s good, soft heat and closed her little girl eyes, watching the yellow patterns forming on the inside of her eyelids.

She’d never been that content again.

After two more days and nights, the gym was filled to capacity, and people were bedding down in the hallways, the classrooms, and the cafeteria. Mr. West’s band of children had climbed to a wholly unmanageable thirty-seven, but he turned none away.