Dead Letter Day (8 page)

“Sure,” I said. “Come with me. It’ll make it more fun.”

If I’d been Pinocchio, I would have poked the other side of the office with my nose.

“WHY DO YOU THINK IT HAPPENED TO US?” SOPHIE ASKED after we’d gotten onto I-5 headed toward Woodland.

“I have no idea, Sophie. A flat tire can happen to anyone at anytime. It’s just one of those things.” I glanced at the GPS, not that I really needed it. It was nice to have confirmation, though. It was so rare that anything told me I was headed in the right direction, I’d take what I could get. Yep. Exiting on County Road 102. I felt totally validated.

“I’m talking about us being Messengers, not the tire,” she said. A little bit of teenage disgust tinged her voice.

“Oh.” It wasn’t like I’d never thought about it, but I had taken a lot longer to get around to it than Sophie had. Then again, I don’t think most people ponder existential thoughts
about the nature of their beings when they’re still in pre-school.

I’d actually probably been around Sophie’s age when I’d asked Mae about it. Maybe it was a teenage thing to ponder. Why am I so different? Mae had not enlightened me. Until pretty recently, I’d thought Mae had been deliberately obtuse, that she chose not to tell me things. I used to get pretty frustrated with her, too.

It hadn’t occurred to me until recently that she might not have known the answers herself. If she ended up in charge of me the same way I ended up in charge of Sophie, there was a darn good chance she had no idea. I certainly didn’t.

The next question was, why not just tell me that? Why not admit that she wasn’t the all-knowing all-seeing Oz that I thought she was?

I looked over at Sophie and figured I might know the answers to that question, because there was more than one. Sophie trusted me to guide her. If I admitted I was as lost as she was, would it panic her? Would it make her feel even more insecure than she already did?

Would she still trust me if she knew I didn’t have all the answers?

Poor Sophie. I hadn’t thought to put on a show for her until it was way too late. She already knew I didn’t know the answers to a lot of her questions.

Then there was the pride thing. It’s not much fun admitting how much I don’t know. Mae probably didn’t relish the feeling either.

To be honest, and this isn’t entirely easy for me since I’ve spent a lot of time trying to skirt the truth with a lot of people, it kind of pissed me off in retrospect. I’d trusted Mae. When she said that I wasn’t ready to learn something
or that I’d understand later, I believed her. To figure out at this late date that she was blowing smoke up my ass left me doubting everything she ever taught me, which is a lot.

My mother, on the other hand, has always been a big believer in telling the truth as well as she can. If the trip to the dentist was going to be unpleasant, I knew about it beforehand. If a visit to Great Aunt Anna was going to be boring, she didn’t try to shine me on and tell me it would be fun. I was prepared.

Weird. I never thought there’d be a day where I compared my mother and Mae and found Mae to be the one wanting. I’d adored Mae. Worshipped her, even. My mother? I tolerated her. I treated her with respect because that was what was expected of me. It was starting to be reality, though.

I stole another glance over at Sophie, who was chewing her bottom lip as we drove along. “I honestly don’t know,” I told her. “I think there has to be something about us, though.”

She flung her hands in the air. “I think so, too. I mean, I wasn’t the only girl to get resuscitated around then. There had to have been some near drownings or something like that, right?”

I nodded. I’d thought the same thing. We cruised past the Costco and the Target in Woodland and headed back out into open farmland.

“So why did we become Messengers and those other people had to stay normal?” She paused and thought for a second. “Or die.”

Whoa. Totally not how I would have phrased it. “I’m not sure. I figure we must have some sort of hardwiring in our brains or something that made us more…sympathetic to the change.”

“That’s what I thought, too! I thought maybe it might be
something genetic so I’ve been asking my mom and dad about my relatives, especially the old dead ones.” She twisted in the seat belt to face me.

I winced. I knew what she meant, but there had to be a better way to say it. “And?”

She sunk back in the seat of the Buick. “And not much. I had a great, great aunt that I thought might be a possibility, but it turns out she might just have been crazy. At least, they put her away in a mental institution and then they did one of those lobotomy things on her.”

“Ouch.” There were all kinds of reasons to keep ourselves to ourselves, weren’t there? I merged onto 113 North and into Knights Landing.

“No kidding.” She twisted back again to face forward. “Think about it, though. Back then, if a woman acted like we do and disappeared a lot and got a lot of weird visitors and things, maybe they would label her crazy.”

“And what do they call us now?” I was pretty sure “crazy” had been applied by more than one person and more than one time, too.

She shrugged. “Quirky. Eccentric. Unique.”

Not necessarily what I’d choose for myself given my druthers, but a whole lot better than crazy and next in line for the ice-pick lobotomy. “Can we back up a second?” I asked.

“Conversationally, right? Because I don’t think you should back up on this road.” Sophie glanced behind us.

“Yes. Conversationally. What you said about other people having to stay normal. Is that really how you feel about this? Like it’s some kind of reward?” I kept my eyes steadfastly forward.

“Of course. Don’t you?” She sounded surprised.

“It doesn’t bother you that we have to hide so much? That
we have to lie? That we never know what’s coming around the corner?” I didn’t want to lead the witness, but surely she experienced a few of the frustrations that I did.

“I don’t see it like that. I see that every day is an adventure. That each day I might find out about a creature that I never knew existed or an object that someone created that’s unlike anything else. My life will never be boring.”

Or predictable or easy to plan or stable or calm. I turned onto Knights Road.

“Arriving at destination,” the GPS lady said, a few minutes later.

I pulled the Buick over to the side of the road and got out. Sophie got out on her side and looked around. “There’s not a lot of destination to our destination.”

She was right. There wasn’t much of anything. Most notably, any light. It was black as pitch and without a moon, too. I waited a moment or two for my eyes to adjust. I don’t need much light to see, but this was difficult even for me. “Do you see anything?” I asked.

Sophie shook her head. I sensed the motion more than saw it. “No. You?”

My deliveries often take me to places that don’t feel safe and comfy. It’s in the nature of the beings that I fetch and tote for to live in the shadows and lurk in the dark corners. This place, however, felt especially creepy right now. I turned in a slow circle, squinting into the murk, but didn’t see anything. Nothing to hear or smell either. I reached out with my other senses. For a second, I got something. It was fast and it flickered.

Nothing I could nail down and examine, but someone or something was out there.

A darker shadow emerged onto the road ahead of us maybe twenty-five yards away. I turned toward it, trying to
get a sense of its shape and size. It seemed big and blocky. I peered harder into the darkness. Nope. I wasn’t mistaken. It had four legs. “Is that a cow?”

Sophie stared, too. “I think it is.”

I turned around. It was hard to see much in the darkness, but I couldn’t make out any barns or houses. “Where did it come from?”

“I don’t know. The fields over there, I guess.” She gestured off to our right.

Another shape appeared next to the first one. “There’s two of them now.”

“No,” Sophie said. “Three. Look behind you.”

She was right. Another cow had appeared about twenty-five yards behind us.

“They’re just cows, right?” Sophie asked, her voice getting a little higher than normal.

“I’m not sure. They seem sort of…big.” Actually they seemed huge, but it was dark and it was hard to calculate distances.

“Four, now,” Sophie said.

Great. “Do you have the package?”

“It’s in the car.”

“Go get it. Let’s leave it right here and go.” It seemed ridiculous, but those cows didn’t seem normal to me. I didn’t like the way they’d appeared out of nowhere or how big they were or, frankly, how they seemed to be blocking the road in both directions. Or the weird prickly feeling I was getting.

Sophie started for the car and that’s when they charged. Not only were they big, but they seemed darn fast for cows. “Run!” I shouted at Sophie and we both dashed for the car.

I jumped into the driver’s seat, gunned the engine and fishtailed out of the dirt onto the road.

“What about the package?” Sophie gasped, trying to get her seat belt fastened.

“Toss it out the window.”

She did as told. Good girl.

Now the question was which way to go, and I didn’t have long to answer it. The cattle were bearing down on us damn fast, fully blocking the road in both directions. I had only the vaguest sense in the dark of what the shoulder looked like. Would the Buick be able to make it? Or would we get mired down in something? Or worse yet, hit something and flip?

My hands jolted on the steering wheel as if I’d gotten an electric shock.

“What the hell was that?” Sophie asked, pointing at my hands.

Crap. How was I supposed to explain that? I didn’t understand it myself. “I don’t know.”

“Do we have any weapons?” That’s my girl. Ever pragmatic.

“There’s some knives in the glove box.” What a knife would do against four enormous charging cows, I had no idea, but it was all I had. I’d almost forgotten they were there.

She flipped open the box. “Got ’em. Now drive.” She rolled down her window.

I looked over at her. “What are you going to do?”

“You’ll see.”

I wrenched the wheel of the Buick to the left to skirt the cows coming toward us. As we pulled closer and they began to veer toward us, Sophie took one of the knives and flung it. I was too busy watching the road and the weird glow that was forming around my hands to see where it went, but I couldn’t miss the bellow of pain that came from one of the animals.

“Again,” Sophie commanded.

I darted back onto the road and over to the other side, coming up. As I passed the cow, Sophie flung another knife and we were rewarded by another bellow.

“You didn’t want those knives back, did you?” Sophie asked, glancing at me.

“I’m willing to give them up for a good cause.” I am such a giver.

Sophie snorted. “Good, because I’m not going to try to fetch them.”

“You ready for the other set?” The other two cows were getting closer.

She paused. “Sort of.”

Great. Now she was doubting herself? “What does that mean?”

“It means I only have one knife left.”

Oh, right. It was a set of three.

“Make it count.” I wrenched the wheel of the Buick to get us in position once again.

Sophie threw and hit again. The cow veered off into the darkness leaving only one left on the road. Easy breezy. I swerved around it and headed back toward Sacramento.

“It’s still after us,” Sophie informed me, looking out the back window.

I pressed the accelerator toward the floor. The Buick’s engine is huge. We gained speed fast.

“It’s staying with us,” she informed me.

“You’re kidding.” What was top speed for a bovine? What would it be for a demonic cow?

“Nope. Not kidding.”

The road was narrow and dark. Even with my reflexes, the idea of going much faster than I was now was unappealing.

“It’s gaining on us,” Sophie reported.

Okay. This was not an ordinary cow. I supposed I knew that already, but the fact that it was now gaining on us when we were doing over sixty miles per hour pretty much sealed the deal. I looked down at my hands. They still glowed.

“Fine.” I slowed and spun the wheel of the Buick, spinning us around to face the charging bovine. I came to a full stop.

“What are you doing?” Sophie screamed.

“What I have to.” I got out of the car and walked to the front of the car. The cow—or whatever it was—got closer and closer.

I wasn’t sure what my range was or how fast my fingers could reload, for lack of a better term. So I waited.

“Melina,” Sophie screamed.

I held up my hands, pointed my finger at the cow and let loose a lightning bolt.

I hit the cow in the forehead and it stopped instantly. For a few seconds, it stood there, frozen, then slowly it toppled to the side. A smell remarkably like barbecue wafted toward me.

I got back in the car and headed back to Sacramento.