The Outside (23 page)

I had even resented God. I had doubted his existence, in a dark moment. But I came to realize that it was not he who was placing these expectations upon me. It was other people. In many ways, he had blessed me. Kept me safe, when others perished. In some strange way, I could see that I had his favor.

Maybe it was the light moving in my veins, but I also felt the stirring of faith.

And I saw life around me. The seagulls receded the farther south I drifted, replaced by starlings and sparrows. The river, a living thing, broadened into the flat floodplain of the fields. Squirrels warred along the trees beside the bank, scurrying with walnuts in their mouths. A red-tailed hawk perched in a tree, searching for rodents along the ground. At dusk, the deer came to the water’s edge to drink, warily eyeing my shining reflection. A great stag watched me, noble and majestic, his eyes as dark as sloes.

Not human life, but aspects of God’s creation. Being Plain, I was largely accustomed to these things in a way that the English were not. I grew up with my hands always in the dirt, and my eyes always overhead, noting the time and the season. I thought that this was the way that things should be. And after all my time in the Outside world, I was ever more certain of it.

And as terrible as it was, I thought that perhaps this catastrophe was just part of God’s plan. The world looked much more beautiful from the cold river, without cars and noise and electricity.

And even if we humans did not survive as a species, I was comforted by the idea that life would go on. There would be plants that would sprout up under the concrete and split it apart. There would be animals that grazed in sunshine who were too fast for the vampires to capture. Birds would continue to sing.

All of God’s kingdom on earth was not lost.

I only wished that I had someone to talk to about this. I wished that Alex were here to challenge me, to give voice to my fears. He was a good teacher that way.

I supposed that now I would have to do that for myself.

At dusk, I felt scraping at the bottom of my boat. I sat upright, thinking that I’d drifted too close to shore and scudded over a felled tree.

It was debris, but not the kind I expected. Up ahead, I could make out a blockage in the river. Fallen trees, it looked like, their leaves gone brown and sodden in the water. It didn’t have the organized shape of a beaver dam; I’d seen those before, and this water was too deep for their liking.

My boat bumped along the branches. There were three trees, two reaching from one side of the river. I prodded them with the oar, searching for a way past, but found no opening.

I sighed. I would have to drag the boat ashore and take it around. The branches scraped the side of my rowboat as I pushed it toward the bank. I didn’t relish the feel of frigid water on my feet, so I searched for the shallowest spot I could find.

I paddled up into the mud and anchored the boat among the tree branches and debris and tucked the oars into the bottom. With the tow rope in my fist, I leaped lightly onto the bank. My boots slipped and smeared in the mud. I dragged the boat forward a few feet, searching among the weeds for a smooth path to haul it ashore.

It was then that I realized that something was wrong. By the dim light of the moon, I could make out a flaccid outline along the bank. It was the deflated remains of a raft, tangled in the tree roots and cattails.

I looked up. The trees on this side of the bank had not fallen jaggedly, as if from a wind or the char of a lightning strike. These were smooth, clean cuts, from a saw.

The hair on the back of my neck lifted. I knew of traps that the vampires could lay. Alex had told me of a roadblock that he’d encountered before we met, dead deer in the road. He’d nearly wrecked his motorcycle trying to avoid them, and the vampires had fallen on him. It was then he had lost his girlfriend, Cassia.

Something clattered overhead. I stared up, expecting to see the waning moon tangled in the branches. I saw it, gleaming through the stripped trees.

And also bones. Pale, stripped bones jammed and dangling from the maples like Christmas ornaments: the cage of ribs, a femur, the broken socket of a skull . . .

With a certainty that reached from the top of my scalp down to the frozen soles of my feet, I knew it was a trap.

I reached behind me for an oar. If I could get back to the water, I could wait night out, cross during the day . . .

But I was too late. A dark shape knocked me off my feet, pressed me into the cold mud. Fetid breath raked over my face. I saw glowing red eyes and felt the weight of the creature against me.

“Come here, fishy.”

Claws raked the hood of my coat, tearing it aside. My hands scrabbled in the mud behind me, searching for a stick to use as a weapon.

“Little fish, stop struggling.”

The vampire ripped my hood away and cried out as light from my face spilled out into its eyes. It flinched back.

I thrust my hands before me, full of blotchy light.

It growled and got off me, backing away.

“You’re no fish!” it cried out.

I felt the light surge up and sing in me. I scrambled to my feet, opening my heavy coat. Light shone through the thinner fabric of my dress, like a candle flame behind a curtain. It reflected in the water and confused birds roosting overhead, who took off in a dark flurry of wing shadows.

“You can’t touch me,” I whispered.

I felt powerful, more powerful than ever before in my life.

I moved toward the vampire. It slipped and scrambled in the mud, caught between me and the moving water. I realized that it had once been an old man. A backwoodsman, I guessed. He wore rubber hip waders and a shirt that was rotting out from under his arms. His stubbled face was contorted in horror.

Of me. Of the light I brought.

I reached down for a stick. The stick was attached to a root. I tugged at it awkwardly, but the mud wouldn’t release it.

The vampire snatched a piece of driftwood and clubbed me with it. It struck me in the shoulder, knocking me back to the mud.

He stood over me, swinging with the piece of soft, dripping wood.

“I may not be able to eat you, glowfish. But I can kill you and hang you in that tree until the glowing flesh drips from your bones. Then I’ll suck the marrow out.”

And I saw in his hot red eyes that he would do his best to bludgeon me to death. Not for survival, but for pure evil.

Suddenly, a growl emanated from my left. A blur of gray fur slammed into the vampire, knocking him into the river. The water churned around the creature’s screaming, flailing form.

I scrambled to my feet, watching wet fur and vampire flesh splash in the thick water.

“Fenrir?” I gasped. My heart burst at the idea that he had followed me.

“Bonnet!”

I heard a voice up the bank from me. I turned, catching sight of a green shining form, gleaming flesh behind intricate black tattoos.

My filthy face split into a grin. “Alex!”

“Here.” He tossed me a broken-off sapling.

I caught it, waded into the water. My coat flared out behind me, dragging at my steps. Fenrir backed off, leaving the thrashing creature in the water.

I brought the sapling down into that dead flesh, like staking a slippery fish. The body was pinned underwater. Its legs kicked up in a spray, making me gasp, and its fingers broke the surface. But I had the head and chest pinned to the silt below. I leaned forward, pressing all my weight against it, until a black stain was released into the water.

I waited for the dark water to dissipate and the thrashing to subside. Fenrir danced in the shallows, growling and snapping at the feet.

When Fenrir stopped growling, I released the stake and backed away.

Alex stood on the bank, gazing at me with glowing approval.

“I missed you, Bonnet.”

I ran to him and pressed my cheek to his cold and luminous chest. “I . . . I thought you went north,” I stammered.

He wrapped his arms around me, and I felt a sigh deep in his chest.

“My place is with you.”

And that was all he would say. I could feel the lump in his throat, and I didn’t force him to say anything further.

***

I knew that it had cost Alex greatly to follow me. I knew what it meant. It meant giving up hope of seeing his family again on earth, likely any hope of ever seeing his home again. But my heart swelled to see him, to hold him in my arms.

Fenrir whimpered and washed my face with his tongue when I knelt to pet him. He was certainly a dog and not a wolf—he smelled like wet dog.

And I was glad to see Horace, to rub his nose and tell him that he was a good horse. Working silently, we salvaged my gear from the boat and moved away from the river. I shivered as we walked down a dirt road for a couple of miles, hoping we didn’t encounter any other vampires.

When we stopped, Alex built a fire using the steel spark tool from the department store. I stripped out of my wet clothes and into my only dry set, wormed into a sleeping bag. Under the uneven glow of my skin, I couldn’t tell if my toes had grown black with frostbite. They began to burn as they warmed, so I knew that it wasn’t serious. Alex rubbed Fenrir down with a dry sweatshirt and then spread the wet clothes out on the ground near the fire, propped up with sticks.

I watched him feed the fire. From behind, in shadow, he glowed like an alien being. From the front, in the light of the fire, he looked human. Like the Alex I’d grown to love.

“Why did you follow me?”

He didn’t answer me for a long while, just stirred the fire.

“I just couldn’t leave you alone. I love my family, but . . .” He blew out his breath. “I did some ruthless, ugly math in my head.”

I waited for him to continue. Fenrir plopped down beside me, in the curve of my belly. I reached down to rub his ears.

“My folks are old,” he blurted. “They’re academic types. They’re soft and theoretical. They’re wonderful people. Good people. Loving people. They collect books and have a beautiful garden. My mom makes really nice afghans, and my dad plays guitar.”

I watched the flame and shadow flicker across his face. “Bluntly, there’s no way that they were going to survive.” His hands knotted around the stick he was using to prod the fire. “My father couldn’t kill wasps that got in the house. He’d gather them up in a jar and set them free outside, even though my mother was allergic to bees. Goddamn bees. My mom habitually runs the car out of gas and has to call for my dad to bring her some. Dad is an insulin-dependent diabetic. Neither one of them can figure out how to change a tire without help.”

I shrank back from the harshness of what he said. I felt his pain and my own guilt at drawing him away from people who needed him.

He rubbed his eyebrow. “I was hoping . . . maybe I was kidding myself. I wanted to believe that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. But . . . I can’t see my parents fighting off one vampire, much less a neighborhood of them.

“I think I had hope up until the time that I started off north by myself. I’d built a fantasy that home was safe, untouched. But then I saw fire in the distance. I knew that this was everywhere. Matt had told me, but I didn’t want to believe. And I realized that all I’ve got left in this life is a horse, a wolf who thinks he’s a dog, and you. All I have is what I can see and touch—right now.”

He stared into the fire. It hissed and popped.

I wriggled my hand out of the sleeping bag to reach for him. “Thank you.” The words seemed tiny and insignificant in the face of his loss, but they were all I could give.

He kicked off his shoes and snuggled into the sleeping bag behind me. I savored that warmth, but I pretended to sleep so that he wouldn’t know that I knew he was crying.

***

“They say you can never go home again, Bonnet.”

I believed him.

I expected to see dirt roads lacing around pastoral fields, small houses and pockets of forest dotting the land where I’d grown up. I expected the earth to smell clean and cold as it did every winter, with a touch of manure from the cattle grazing behind wooden fences. I expected to see Plain men and women working their chores: hauling wood in wagons, carrying water, carrying buckets of grain to the animals. I expected to feel comforted by the way things had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. I wanted to be immersed in that history again, to be lost in that vast, unchanging stretch of time.

But a plume of black smoke rose from the horizon, staining the blue sky. The lump in my throat grew with each step I took toward home. By the time we reached the gate to the single road into my community, it had grown into a cold stone of dread in my chest.

The gate stood twisted, wide open, the metal wadded up like aluminum foil.

I began to run toward the dark smoke, the frozen earth jarring against my heels. I ran from the dirt road into a field of unharvested blond wheat, stirring in the wind. My first thought had been to find the Hexenmeister, to learn what had happened.

But a barn was burning, and instinct drove me toward it. Orange flames blistered white paint, reaching toward the sky. The barn belonged to one of my neighbors. Most often, barns burned as a result of lightning or accident, when someone accidentally kicked over an oil lantern.

But this blaze was no accident. The doors to the barn were nailed shut with two-by-fours, and it was ringed by men in green uniforms. Soldiers. They held guns, and one of them was coating the base of the barn with gasoline. Sparks and ash blew in the wind. I could smell the acrid gasoline and sweet straw burning.

I skidded to a halt, shocked. I heard hoofbeats behind me, sensed Alex’s shadow on my back.

“That doesn’t look good.” His voice was tight.

“What are they doing here?” I gasped.

“There’s an army reserve base about a hundred miles from here . . . maybe they’re from there. The base certainly isn’t holy ground, so maybe they had to run, find a place to regroup.”

A human-shaped form climbed out from a shuttered window in the barn. It shrieked and writhed in the fire, hissing.