Devil’s Wake (21 page)

Sonia whistled them over to the rear luggage compartment. “Was this lock nicked yesterday?”

“Crap,” Terry said, and crouched to look more carefully. Hair-thin scrapes covered the lock. Someone’s attempt to force it open? Or maybe the locks had been scratched at the armory, during the mad dash to load the boxes while they raced to beat the freak army. He wished he knew for sure.

Terry flipped out his keys and opened the compartment’s lock. Everything inside seemed fine, except that some of the stacks had fallen in the bumpy ride.

But everything wasn’t fine. Someone—a
group
of someones—had caught them sleeping last night, lurked around, decided not to say hello, but had tried to erase signs of their presence. The scratches might mean nothing, or they might be more evidence that they had used up the day’s ration of luck. And they weren’t even on the road yet.

After a more thorough check of the surrounding woods and a search for likely hiding places, they spent twenty minutes slipping the snow chains onto the tires.

Afterward, Terry walked out into the middle of I-5, looking both ways. Snow over asphalt. He didn’t see any tracks in either direction, which was comforting in one way, but troubling in another—where were they? Hiding in the woods?

Slowly, Terry let himself relax into the whitewashed morning. In another world, at another time, the snowplows would have been busy. Once upon a time the I-5 had been one of the world’s busiest stretches of freeway; early commuter traffic would have heated and plowed the road by itself. How long had it been since this stretch of road had seemed so pure, so pristine? Probably never. Had this grand interstate once been a wagon road? Back in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries? Horses? Footpaths? Had Lewis and Clark come this way, led by Sacajawea?

Everything was so quiet now, so pure. Beautiful. Whatever values humanity had added to the world, Terry suspected that beauty wasn’t among them.

He heard footsteps crunching in the show behind him, and hoped it was Kendra.

“What now?”

Not Kendra. Dean. Terry had learned that the easiest way to tell the Twins apart was by their voices. Dean’s was a focused whisper, no energy to waste on volume. Not since his visit home. He still hadn’t talked about it, not once. Terry hoped he’d told Darius, at least.

“You guys good with the snow?” Terry said.

“On the bikes? Hell, no. Not a good idea.”

“Maybe we could find some more chains.” The tiny convenience store portion of the gas station had been raided of food items and gas cans, but there might be some road gear left in the rubble if they looked.

“I’ve never seen chains for bikes. Too unstable.”

“Our visitors had bikes,” Terry said.

“Yeah, and they probably ditched the road first chance they got after the snow started,” Darius said. “Unless they were crazy. That’s why there’re no tracks here.”

Terry sighed. No bikes meant more weight strapped to the bus. No scouts. Slower progress. Another long day.

“Then we better move,” Terry said. “I want to make it across the Siskiyou Pass tonight, before the snow gets worse.”

His father had driven his family through the Siskiyous once, back when he had a real family. He’d been eight or nine, and he and Lisa had shrieked on the winding road like they were on an amusement park ride. He could almost hear Lisa’s phantom echo. Nothing about that ride would be amusing now, especially with so much snow.

“A hundred miles,” Dean said. “We haven’t been making that kind of time.”

“I want to try. I want out of Oregon. I feel like we’ve outstayed our welcome.”

Dean shrugged. “No argument there.”

Terry turned to see the others, who were streaming out of the cabin after finishing breakfast. And now they were seven. After yesterday’s meltdown, Terry felt more responsible for them all—even Ursalina, because her hope in them had cost her.

They were supposed to have a Council vote, he remembered. But it was getting late, and clouds drifting east meant more snow. They’d save the vote for the bus.

“Load up!” Terry called. “We’re heading back to Cali.”

As the bus chugged and rattled down the road at seven a.m.,
everyone voted to go to Threadville—even Kendra knew she couldn’t offer an alternative, so they all agreed.

Except Ursalina. She was the sole “nay” vote.

“You’re fools,” Ursalina said. “You know how many stories I’ve heard from people who followed a radio signal? Those places are freak magnets. Or traps.”

The radio signal brightened, as if to make their argument for them:
“… remember the days of civilized society? When people had jobs and children went to school? It’s NOT a fantasy. It’s NOT a dream. Everyday Americans, hardworking, scared people like you, are seeing the threads that bind us, the threads that can rebuild us…”

Ursalina clicked her teeth. “Yeah, right.”

“Somebody’s gonna figure it out,” Terry said. “Maybe he’s done it.”

“Estúpido,”
Ursalina said. “It’s a miracle you guys survived a week.”

“Just let us know, and we can drop you off anytime,” Piranha said with a polite smile. Kendra understood why Piranha was sick of Ursalina’s voice of gloom and doom; it was hard enough to believe in something without the constant nattering.

Ursalina suddenly stood up, and everyone tensed. She had her pistol, as she always did, as she lurched to Piranha’s seat and stood over him.

“What the…” Terry muttered. Kendra saw his eyes go to his bus mirror. She hoped he wouldn’t drive them off the road.

“Easy,
mamí,
” Piranha said.

“Ursalina—sit,” Sonia said, as if addressing Hipshot. Sonia was reaching for her belt; she might shoot Ursalina faster than Piranha would.

Kendra clung to the seat in front of her, wondering if she would
need to duck. Thankfully, Ursalina kept her pistol down, her arm at her side. She leaned over Piranha, her face close enough to kiss him. Piranha’s jaw pinched. At close range, her pistol was less useful than his right cross.

“That’s okay, bro,” Ursalina said, voice so low and heavy with pain and anger that she barely sounded human. “I’ll ride this bus as far as it goes,
gracias
. And then when you guys die, one by one—and believe me, you will—I’ll catch the next ride. Don’t get used to your happy little
familia,
’cuz guess what? That ain’t the way it works. It won’t matter where you go. It always ends the same.”

Kendra’s eyes filled with tears, and her knees shook the way they had when she’d sat beside Grandpa Joe in his truck, waiting for him to turn. Ursalina had clawed into her mind to voice her own deepest belief, the one she’d buried. It was stupid to hope. She knew it too, deep down. Maybe they all did.

When Ursalina went back to her seat in the rear, a dead silence hung over them.

Only the radio played. The voice sounded like happy lies.

Soon, the bus had to slow to push a VW van out of the way. Next, a Ford truck.

The truck was the worst. Something still moved inside the cab, something that had once been human. It thrashed feebly inside the car, moaning and pressing its palms against the windows. The glass was cracked, as if it had battered its head against the glass until it was almost broken, but it had done so much damage to itself that it was
unable to continue.

When Terry pushed their snowplow against it and pushed it off an incline, Kendra was able to see the face more clearly. Once, the thing had been a woman. Its nose was smashed, exposing sinus cavities foamed red with fungus. The face was a savage parody of human physiognomy. Certainly it felt nothing,
knew
nothing except the urge to bite. Did it realize it was about to tumble off the edge of the world?

Kendra was sure it didn’t, but still felt something cold and terrible. This wasn’t some dead thing clawed from the grave, like in a movie. It was still
alive.
Was now, or had, until recently, been a fellow human being. If some miracle occurred, some marvelous cure, it…
she
… might have even been saved.

All of them might be saved.

Kendra watched as the truck reached the guardrail, glancing between the truck and Terry’s face in the mirror. Terry was completely focused, biting his bottom lip. He needed only to push the car to the side, but he went on, nudging it toward the guardrail. Tires squealed, sliding against the slippery snow. The truck slammed against the rail. The wheels of the bus spun, and the guardrail bent, split, and the truck tumbled over, down into the gorge. Gone.

They all craned to watch as the truck disappeared. It slid, tumbled, and groaned out of sight with a final crack of twisting steel and fractured glass.

Then, silence.

Hipshot whined. The pooch had rested his chin on her seat, and she tangled her fingers in the long hair at the ruff of his neck.

“I know,” Kendra whispered. “I know.”

She remembered her notebook and decided to test a few words. It took a long time for words to come, and when they did, they were few.

We’re on our way to Threadville,
she wrote.
And if that doesn’t work, maybe Devil’s Wake. We’re trying to believe in something, but some of us believe more than others. I don’t know what I believe yet, or if believing matters. Maybe there are no schools, no safety, no such thing as family anymore. All I know is that I want to survive. Every morning when I open my eyes and feel my heart beating and oxygen in my lungs, I know I can believe in that.

F
or
ten minutes after Ursalina returned to her seat, Sonia’s fingers were shaking with the memory of how close she had come to shooting her first human being. Shooting freaks was nothing—they were target practice, and she was doing them a favor—but a fever had gripped her when the new girl leaned over Piranha.

With the freaks, the adrenaline that pumped through her was driven by fear; this time, she’d felt only simple rage. How
dare
Ursalina! After all they’d done for her, all they’d risked for her, who did she think she was?

For one moment of blind anger, it hadn’t mattered to Sonia if the girl’s gun was up or down, if she planned to hurt Piranha or not. Only one thought had blotted her mind, like the snow driving against her window:
Get the hell away from him, bitch.

Sonia had never felt anything like it, and it scared her to her bones.

The snow was falling hard now, as if nature had saved the last of the sunshine for the flatlands and now that they were ascending into the Siskiyou Mountains, it was time for cold fury. Snow-dusted evergreens stood around them like a Christmas display. They had driven into what felt like a blizzard. Terry had the heavy-duty windshield wipers blitzing at full power, and he crawled at no faster than ten miles per hour. The rattling chains on the bus’s wheels sounded like
Blue Beauty was trying to break free.

Sonia thought of the truck Terry had knocked off the ravine and felt dizzy.

She had told herself that she wouldn’t go to Piranha’s seat—she didn’t want to seem like an insecure high schooler staking her territory—but she quickly scooted across the aisle to sit with him. She pressed against his meaty arm, which radiated its familiar heat. Safety.

Was she imagining the daggers of Ursalina’s eyes on the back of her neck? The desire to hurt the woman coursed through Sonia again. When she whipped her head around, she found the soldier staring out of her window.

“You’re shivering,” Piranha said. He didn’t call her
baby
or
boo
the way he did when they were in the dark together, but he hadn’t pulled away. And he sounded concerned in a way he usually didn’t when the others were watching. He grabbed the old camp blanket draped across the seat in front of him and wrapped it around her. “Better?”

She nodded, although it was his arm and the sound of his voice that made her better, not the ratty old blanket.

“It’s like a meat locker in here,” she said. And it was true. She’d been so unnerved by how much she wanted to shoot Ursalina that she hadn’t noticed how the temperature had dropped since the snow started falling, turning the sky gray. Despite the need to save gas, Terry had turned on the heater full blast, drying her throat, but the heat wasn’t doing its job.

“Don’t trip,” Piranha said, and she knew he wasn’t talking about the cold. He’d seen how she turned her head, knew where she’d been looking. He took her hand beneath the blanket, squeezed. “We’ve got bigger issues.”

“The snow?”

“The snow. The ice. The world. We’re gonna make a mistake.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “Like last night. I fell asleep.”

“Me too,” she confessed.

He shrugged. “So there it is. And somebody’s watching us.”

The radio railed with static, but suddenly the voice broke through:
“How have we done it? Simple, folks: Checkpoints. A security force. Former law enforcement, former military. Some of the finest minds in Northern California have come here to weave the threads that can hold us together…”
Static swallowed the voice again.

How dare Ursalina try to jinx them, claiming that they would die one by one.

Bitch.

She’d known the day was jinxed since she woke up and realized she’d dozed off for at least two or three hours, and the sky outside the window where she was supposed to be keeping watch was swollen with daylight. She’d known again when she was brushing her hair in a hurry, wishing she had time to wash the greasy stink out of it, and she noticed her stud earring was gone. The earring was no big deal, cheap fake gold she’d swiped from Walmart, but it had been her only surviving pair.

She’d lost an earring the day she got arrested too.

Sonia Petansu had always felt the urge to take pretty things, even things she didn’t need. She wasn’t a psycho or anything—it had been a game, something to do, a kind of magic trick she performed for her own entertainment.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
She’d felt a real charge keeping an eye peeled for the lame, clueless security guards—maybe the kind of charge her mother felt when she had snuck around sending texts and making quiet phone calls to her accountant friend who did way more than her taxes. Or the other “friends” her father pretended not to notice. Sonia had been swiping from stores since she was thirteen, and she never would have been caught if she’d listened to her instincts the day she couldn’t find her matching hoop earring, the real gold ones her mother had given her for her seventeenth birthday, more a bribe than a gift.