Devil’s Wake (25 page)

Was it getting dark? It was so hard to make out shapes in the whiteness. The bus was still crawling, but picking up speed fast. Kendra watched for motion, kept the door propped open with her foot, her gun ready. She hoped the first face she saw would be Ursalina’s but was ready either way.

Anyone who tried to pull her off this bus sure as hell wouldn’t be smiling long.

The Blue Beauty shook as Terry slammed the gear, taking control.

A flap of clothing appeared at the edge of the doorway—Ursalina! She ran too far and corrected herself, stumbling. Kendra missed her hand when she reached for it, but Ursalina grabbed a metal bar to swing herself inside.

Ursalina looked surprised to be alive. “Thanks for getting me out of the snow.”

She was looking straight at Kendra, but it sounded like a prayer of gratitude.

Still crouched low, Terry slammed the Blue Beauty into gear and
headed uphill. The Beauty shook as the wedge-shaped snowplow made contact with the tour bus.

Terry peeked over the windshield as a bullet sparked off the hood.

He’d hit the Goliath clean, at a good angle to leverage his weight against the larger vehicle. Piranha, suddenly only a few yards away, gave him a thumbs-up. He mimicked steering a hard right, and Terry gave him a thumbs-up in return.

Terry had a driving partner.

The tour bus shuddered and made a grinding sound as the contact point with the crashed car scraped away. The long bus rotated clockwise as Piranha gave the wheel an easy turn. The bus moved like a dream on the frozen road, almost
too
well, slewing parallel with the bank of the road. The rear stopped short, but the nose had its own momentum.

A snowmobile whirred closer to Terry from his driver’s side. The tour bus began its slow slide down the hill, the tires rotating, then locking and sliding on the compressed snow, now almost as slippery as glass.

“Come on, Piranha…” Terry whispered.

Piranha waited a moment before he let go of the wheel and
jumped out. The snowdrift that swallowed him was so deep that he nearly vanished from sight, but he dug himself out to run, scrambling toward the Blue Beauty.

The remaining snowmobile raced toward Piranha from his blind side.

“Ten o’clock!” Terry yelled, and a chorus of gunfire opened up from the Beauty as the others shot in all directions to cover Piranha. They might blow the last of their ammunition here, but so far Piranha was still on his feet. He might make it!

Behind Piranha, the tour bus’s wheels skidded on the snow, the bus sliding faster down the hill, a foot and a half of snow compressing into a slippery surface, spewing white plumes through the air as it careened.

Judging by the banks, Terry tried to keep the Beauty in the middle of the road. He took a chance to keep his head up and make a course correction, turning the wheel in the direction of the skid. More popping gunfire behind them—damn!

Where was Piranha? He’d lost sight of him.

“Charlie, come on!” Sonia called from the bus’s open doorway. Terry had almost forgotten Piranha’s given name.

There!
Piranha emerged, his head bobbing in the corner of the windshield as he ran toward the bus door in a wild-eyed frenzy, spraying snow with each step.

The snowmobile’s driver fell in the covering fire. His bundled passenger tried to keep control of the snowmobile, but he finally screamed and fell while it sped on, crashing into a tree stump.

Darius joined Kendra and Sonia at the door well, and the three of them hoisted Piranha up the steps. Despite the cold, his face sopped with perspiration.

“Are we there yet?” Piranha gasped.

Terry floored the accelerator and rode the gear up the incline, urging the Beauty to find strength she didn’t know she had.
Ignore your
holes and that hissing sound, baby… Just get us through today…

Three cars and an SUV were parked along the ridge, safely out of sight from the northern side, crowded with at least twenty or thirty huddling people. Men, women, and children. No one fired at them from the vehicles, watching as they passed.

Were they captives? Slavers? A kind of gypsy pirate village?

Terry wondered, but not for long. He risked a glance in his rearview mirror, which still hung in place despite a bad diagonal crack. Behind the Blue Beauty, two small figures were shaking rifles at them, cussing at them into the wind, running back and forth like confused children. The bus rocked as Piranha, the Twins, and the girls crowded at the Beauty’s broken windows to shout epithets and taunts back at them.

It was probably too early to celebrate, but Terry couldn’t blame them.

At least he was awake now.

“We got company?” Terry said, his eyes back to the powdery road ahead.

“Not so far,” Piranha panted.

No snowmobiles. No engines but theirs. They were all right. The pirates had dead comrades to bury and something to remember.

California waited.

California

I
t
took them an hour to get down out of the mountains, and they drove another arduous hour just to be certain no one was chasing them. They found a wooded turnabout with enough cover to conceal them, but not too tight for a quick escape. Terry pointed the Beauty’s nose toward the road and hoped she would start in a hurry if they needed her.

He hoped she would start, period.

A quick sweep of the bus’s exterior with flashlights showed them how lucky they were to be alive. The Beauty was so riddled with holes that she reminded Terry of the bus in a Clint Eastwood movie he’d seen once,
The Gauntlet
. One of the rounds had missed the gas tank by six inches, and the coolant tank had sprung a nasty leak. But the bullets could have taken the tires or sparked the gas tank.

Could have been worse.

Most of them camped on the bus, but Darius and Dean kept watch outside from strategic locations, out of sight and bundled tight. It was still cold, but the snow had stopped. Piranha and Sonia offered to share a shift with them, but they said they were too wired.

Nobody felt like trading war stories.

Terry slept the best he could, brushing glass shards from his seat while he tried to wipe away the chaotic memories. But as exhausted as he was, he barely slept, hearing gunshots in his dreams. Every time Terry woke, he noticed Ursalina staring out of her window, her gun in her lap. Almost like a guardian angel.

Speaking of angels…

Terry leaned over to try to see Kendra too, but her sleeping form was concealed by the darkness. He heard the steady rising and falling of her breath and wondered if she was cold. Wondered if he should have shared a seat with her to keep her warm.

Dawn came impossibly fast. There was no talk of building a fire to heat coffee, as they sometimes did. Breakfast and dinner were treasured traditions, milestones that gave their days a sense of accomplishment and routine. But in case the pirates were coming, they set out at first light. No time for a camp circle.

In daylight, the Blue Beauty looked like a rag. Dark liquid puddled in the melting snow beneath the engine block, something Beauty had puked up overnight. Terry couldn’t identify the scent.

When he turned the key in the ignition, she only choked and sputtered. How could he have thought she would start?

Terry didn’t think anyone was breathing behind him. Waiting.

He tried again, and this time the choking was in concert with a wounded whirring. Terry refused to panic. There’d be plenty of time to panic later. He could almost hear snowmobiles buzzing in the quiet morning.

“She needs to heat up,” Terry said.

“Or a body bag,” Darius said.

Before he tried the third time, Terry told himself they could make it on foot if they had to. The snow was already melting, so they could send Darius and Dean on to Domino Falls for help. Or they could hide the bus, carry only what they needed, and try to walk to Domino Falls until they could come back for their supplies. It didn’t mean
death. That was what he told himself.

Terry turned his wrist, and the Beauty coughed to life. Weak life, but alive nonetheless.

“That would’ve been our asses,” Ursalina said.

Like she was resigned either way.

Someone had cleared the roads, and there was no more snowfall
once they were out of the mountains. Kendra was so grateful, she wanted to cry.

Stalled and abandoned cars and trucks lined the shoulders or sat in the fields, but the lanes were mostly clear. Unfortunately, most of the cars didn’t have gas either, so Terry broke into their supply of gas cans to keep them moving. No matter what they found in Domino Falls, they would need gas and ammunition to keep going.

Kendra hoped they hadn’t made a mistake when they crossed the border. But the radio kept promising them paradise, the signal growing stronger with each passing mile. California was also growing warmer, so the blown windows weren’t as bad.

After ninety minutes of driving south, Kendra spotted a pickup truck parked awkwardly at the trunk of an old oak tree, doors wide open. Empty. The truck was battered across the hood and doors, windows shattered. It looked worse than the bus.

Pale clothing flapping from the tree made Kendra look higher, and she gasped. Three freaks were nestled in the tree’s craggy branches! Could they climb trees, too? “What the—”

Not freaks, she realized. She saw three limp corpses—two big, one smaller—that might have been a family, nearly skeletal, their features eaten away by time. A dangling end of rope told her they had been bound up in the tree, or bound themselves. She blinked, confused.

“Looks like they climbed up to get away,” Terry said, as if she’d
spoken aloud. He slowed the bus as he gazed at the tree too. “Damn freaks stopped the truck, maybe. They couldn’t get up there, but looks like the freaks might’ve waited them out. They sure beat that truck to hell.”

“Maybe they ran out of gas,” Piranha mused. “Or too many freaks in the road.”

“How long were they up there?” Kendra said, horrified at the idea. One of the bodies, sagging slightly left, seemed to be staring straight down at her. Kendra looked away. They easily could have been trapped too.

“Maybe days,” Ursalina said. “Maybe weeks. You can live a long time without food. But no water? Two weeks at best. Probably less.”

“Would freaks wait that long?” Kendra said.

Ursalina gave a sour chuckle. “Why not? Nothing better to do.”

Now the road was empty, as if to mock the fallen for their senseless deaths.

“I wonder where the freaks went,” Kendra said, as soon as she noticed a smell wafting through the bus’s shattered windows. The pervasiveness of the thick scent reminded her of the vast oceans of cattle and steer manure along the I-5 corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco, back when her parents drove her to the bay in summer. Back when she’d had to pinch her nose to block out the stench of so much death, so much rich, thick fecal stench. This wasn’t the same smell—it smelled rotten, all right, but more like fruit than flesh. Had acres of orange groves withered?

Kendra tapped Terry’s elbow. She was relieved when he didn’t pull away. “You catch a whiff of that?” Kendra said.

“Yeah,” Terry said, “I was just thinking—”

Hipshot barked once, sharply. He stood up on two legs in one of the front windows, as if scenting a distant rabbit. Dean and Darius made their clicking code, readying their guns.

Oh God, what now?
Kendra thought. She was more weary than afraid.

The smell wasn’t new to her—it was eerily familiar—although it was much more pronounced now, altered slightly. When Grandpa Joe had carried her out of her house in Longview, she’d noticed the odor on her street. The stench of freaks.

Ursalina walked to the front of the bus, staring through the cracked windshield, but her handgun was still holstered. “Relax,” Ursalina said. “Must be a freakfield. Smells like a big one, too.”

“A what?” Piranha said.

Ursalina cast a rare smile, looking at them over her shoulder. “What happens to freaks when they can’t run anymore, if nobody puts a bullet in their head?”

Blank silence on the bus. Hipshot whimpered; Kendra thought even the dog sounded confused.

“You must not be hanging out with enough freaks,” she said, gesturing to the window. “Check it out.”

Empty fields spread out on either side of them, neglected by growers who had fled or died. But up ahead…

What
was
that? One of the fields was crowded with a dark mass Kendra couldn’t make out in the distance, but it seemed to take up acres.

“If that’s a herd of cows, we’re having steak tonight,” Darius said.

“Ain’t no cows, kid,” Ursalina said.

Kendra’s heart was pounding before she knew what she was seeing, because everything about the mass—the
gathering
?—looked wrong to her. Piranha raised his binoculars and stared out of his window while Sonia crowded beside him to try to get a glimpse. Piranha’s mouth dropped open. “You have
got
to be kidding me…”

Kendra squinted and made out a sole figure upright at the edge of the mass.

A freak! They were all freaks in ragged, weatherworn clothes,
enough to fill her yard in Longview and spill into the street. As many as they had faced at the armory!

Gooseflesh crawled across Kendra’s arms and the back of her neck. If the herd of freaks saw them coming and broke into a run, could they block the road enough to slow them down? Even stop them cold?

“Terry, go
faster
!” Kendra said, at the same time as Sonia let out a warning yell.

Inexplicably, Ursalina was laughing. Kendra stared at her with disbelief.

“Run from those guys?” Ursalina said. “Forget it. They’re planted. You could go out there and torch them with a flamethrower and they wouldn’t move. Speaking of flamethrowers, I wish I had one of those babies right now…” All joviality left Ursalina’s voice as she stared at the field of freaks standing shoulder to shoulder like cornstalks. Her face turned stormy with loathing.