The Waking Dark (41 page)

Jule chose a different point this time, a few hundred yards south of where they’d tried before. There were no soldiers in sight, only electrified fencing that rose a few feet over their heads. Without consulting the others, Jule fired at the generator-type box wedged into a joint in the fence, emptying her clip. The box unleashed a hail of sparks, the fence sizzled madly, and then silence fell again. She stepped forward.

“Don’t,” Daniel said, too late. She’d already taken hold of the metal lattice.

Nothing happened.

“Not dead yet,” she said, almost cheerful. Maybe the impossible was possible, and Daniel was right that the massacre of Oleander meant that they would go free. Guilt could wait. “Who’s ready to climb?” She hoisted herself onto the fence.

An alarm sounded, Klaxons shattering the still of the wood, and mercenaries flooded toward them out of nowhere, firing at will. “Run!” Cass screamed, unnecessarily. They were already in motion, retreating to the safety of the woods.

Retreating.

Maybe they wouldn’t be followed. There was nowhere to flee but back into town and its certain death. Why hunt when, eventually, the prey will come to you?

But they could all hear the hunters approach.

Jule swore, loudly, furiously.

“It’s not your fault,” Daniel said, already panting.

“Of course it’s not my fucking fault.” Though she’d been the one to test the fence without asking if anyone had any better ideas, without it occurring to her that a multi-billion-dollar corporation might be equipped with a Plan B. Stupid of her to think of herself as someone free, someone with a choice. All she could choose was the prettiest clearing, the perfect tree under which to make one last, pathetic stand.

She ran faster. They all did. Daniel took her hand; she couldn’t scare him anymore. It was hard to run that way, matching her steps to his, weaving through the narrow pathways of the forest, but she hung on.

“Now what?” Grace asked, sounding not bored, exactly, but sullenly vindicated, a child asking
Are
we
there
yet?
in the middle of a traffic jam.

Jule stopped. The rest of them fell into place around her. “Now we stop running. We hit back.”

“How big an explosion are we talking here, Jule?” West asked.

She still had the satchel and, inside, the chemicals she’d stolen from the basement lab. To be saved for a rainy day.

It was pouring.

“Big enough to light the damn forest on fire,” she said.

“We’d have to get as close to the highway as we could,” Daniel said.

“Another possibility: I might accidentally blow us all up.”

“You said you knew what you were doing,” Daniel said.

“I know what I said.”

“I’m not letting
them
kill me,” West said. “Not after everything. Even if this doesn’t work —”

“Which it almost definitely won’t,” Jule said.

“—at least it’s on our own terms.”

“At least we’ll have tried everything,” Daniel said.

“This time
we
choose,” Cass said. “Not them.”

West nodded. After a moment, so did Daniel.

“You’re all morons,” Jule said. But: “Okay, we loop around, back toward the highway, and I’ll be ready when I have to be.”

“I think it’s a horrible idea, in case anyone cares,” Grace muttered, but they had already started to run.

They ran their pursuers around in circles, gradually losing their lead, gradually drawing closer and closer to the edge of the woods, and as they ran, Jule carefully spilled out the bottle of hydrochloric acid in their wake, a trail of poisoned bread crumbs they could never follow home. When the ribbon of highway came into sight, Jule was, as she’d promised, ready. All it took was a little aluminum foil and a lighter. “Close your eyes and get down,” she suggested, just before the world exploded.

White light. White noise.

An ocean roar that was like the other side of silence.

Cass blinked the fire from her eyes, the white-blue glow that had consumed the world. Rubbed her ears. Stood. Breathed.

The air smelled like death.

There were men on fire, zigzagging through the trees.

Flaming monsters in the shape of men, mouths distorted by screams.

She heard only the roar.

The sky, through the trees, was so blue. Painfully blue.

Pain.

He was upside down, pain shooting up his back, down his shoulder, pain like fire but not fire.

He was upside down.

His head beat in time with his heart.

Thump. Thump. Thump.
 

He gazed at the blue; he could live in the blue.

He was upside down, for no reason, with no cause. He was nobody, and there was good in that. Nobody was safe; nobody was easy.

A girl spoke a name that could have been his, or not. Just a word, just a noise.

The real name, the secret name, came as a whisper on the wind. It came from a distance, was meant only for him. It woke him up.

Jeremiah.
 

You
are
Jeremiah.

It brought him back.

In the dark behind his eyes, Daniel smelled smoke, and heard Milo scream, and knew the fire was coming, the fire was eating everything in its path, the fire was snaking its way toward home and would dig its flaming fingers into the earth and find the treasure hidden underneath.
Come
out
of
there!
Daniel screamed in the silent space, and Milo’s voice was so calm and sure:
Not
until
my
brother
tells
me
it’s safe. Not until my brother saves me.

Jule shook him and screamed, “Get up! Get up! Get up!” and hated herself for fooling him into believing her, hated him for letting her light the fuse. Not burned, not bleeding, but so pale and still, and limp in her feeble arms. She had done this. She had let herself believe she could choose, not just for herself, but for him and for all of them. She had let herself forget where she belonged, and who she really was. Prevettes never escape. Prevettes only destroy.

The body made a noise. The lips smiled. “You did it,” Daniel murmured, and opened his eyes.

Grace lived and wanted to die. The end would come; the end was taking forever. She wished it would hurry.

Just not fire, she pleaded with whatever would listen. Bullets, fine. Toxic gases, tank missiles, deranged ministers. Just not fire.

She’d always been afraid of fire.

Time slowed down and then, as if to compensate, abruptly sped up, hastened by the crackle of flame eating through the trees. They dusted themselves off and stood and looked at what they had wrought: flaming soldiers, flaming corpses, flaming trees. A dancing ribbon of fire that, even as they watched, leapt across the highway, reaching hungrily toward the mercenaries who scattered from its grasp, toward the tank that exploded at its touch, and on to the plains of the prairie, and on to the horizon.

The wind was blowing south, out of the forest, blowing the fire in the direction of escape. It crept through the trees behind them, swallowing the dry bark and fading leaves, spreading.

“Well… it was worth a try?” Daniel offered as they maneuvered, in a clump, out of the woods and onto the road, backing away from the fire that now closed in from both sides. “At least we won’t get shot?”

Jule couldn’t stop shaking her head. Everything was shaking. “I did this. I did it. I —”

Daniel took her by the shoulders and held her until she went still. “You tried. You kept us alive a little longer.
You
did that.”

West hugged his arms to his chest and laughed. “No one ever actually completes a Hail Mary pass. Only in the movies.”

Cass and Grace stood side by side, not touching. Both their faces were glossy with tears.

The flames licked at the trees. Branches fell. There was little time left. Daniel closed his hands over Jule’s. “End of the world, again,” he said. “You still not scared?”

She leaned against him. “I’m fearless, remember?” But when she pressed her lips to his, he could feel them trembling.

There should have been more time.

“It’s not fair,” Grace said.

Daniel was too old to believe in fair. But he agreed: it wasn’t.

“What if the drug does nothing?” Jule said quietly, just for him. “What if they were wrong?”

Daniel didn’t get it. “But everything that happened —”

“What if it was just people?” she said. “Just the way they are.”

“Then what about us?”

“What
about
us? Maybe they’ve got the right idea with this containment thing. Maybe everyone’s better off this way.”

He put his arms around her and held on, tight. “No.”

She fit so perfectly in his arms, and he cursed himself for not figuring it out sooner. He cursed everything. “People are better than this. We’re better than this.”

“It sounds nice in your world,” she said. “Nicer than mine.”

“There’s room for two.”

She laughed, and while he wasn’t ready to die, would never be ready, it would be easier now, with her laughter the last sound he ever heard. Jule, in his arms, softer than she seemed but tougher than anyone else, made everything easier.

The fire closed in.

The mercenaries were gone, dead or fled.

There was nowhere left to run.

They waited.

Some of them prayed.

It sounded like thunder at first, a low rumble in the distance, then another, a rippling wave of sky-splitting booms. After the thunder, a great wind. They turned their faces to the sky to meet their fate, expecting another tornado or a mushroom cloud or even – Ellie King vindicated after all this time – the fist of God.

God’s voice was tinny and mechanical; God’s fist was shaped like a helicopter.

This
is
the
United
States
Army,
the voice boomed.
Lay
your
weapons
down.

There were more helicopters, a fleet of them, but this first one sank lower and lower, a rope ladder hanging from its side, the words
U
.
S
.
ARMY
blazoned across its torso.

“The radio message,” Jule whispered, unable to believe it had gotten out. That anyone had heard. That the cavalry had come.

“It’s over,” Cass said, raising her hands to the sky, waving and screaming and not caring what happened next, what they would do with the girl who was killer and fugitive and victim all in one. She wouldn’t die in this town, at the hands of these people. That was more than could be expected. That was almost enough.

“It’s over,” Grace said, “and I’m sorry.” They hadn’t let her, a child, carry a gun. But they would not have left her, a child, unprotected, and so Jule had let her carry the knife. It was easy enough, when the rest of them turned their heads to the sky, to raise the blade and slip it into Cass’s chest.

She hadn’t expected she’d have to push so hard; she hadn’t expect to actually
be
sorry. She’d promised to wait because she knew Cass was wrong. The things she felt, the things she needed – blood, vengeance, justice – they weren’t because of the drug. Her desires were her own. She knew that to be true.

But what if she was the one who was wrong?

On the other end of that rope ladder were doctors and hospitals and the chance that she would go to sleep one person and wake up another, more forgiving, less sure. She couldn’t afford to wait and see. She’d waited long enough.

There was a lot of screaming, but none of it was Cass’s. She opened her mouth. Nothing emerged but a trickle of blood. Grace jerked the knife out of her chest and raised it over her head, preparing to strike a second time. It was harder, knowing how it was going to feel, knowing she would have to force the point past muscle and bone, and so she paused to breathe and to remember why, and that was when the bullet struck the back of her head.

The others would hesitate to hurt a child, even a child with a knife. She’d counted on that.

She hadn’t counted on the men in the helicopter, too far away to mark her as a child, too far to see anything but flames, and a victim, and her attacker, holding a knife.

They were professional marksmen; she was dead before she hit the ground.

It took Cass a little longer. She lay beside Grace, staring into her eyes, the dead eyes she saw in her nightmares, and felt no satisfaction at having outlived her killer, if only by a few seconds. A blurry face bent toward her, shouting something she was too tired to hear. Her lips moved, but it was only to gasp out a last bubble of blood. Her last words were only for herself, and for Grace, because this was between the two of them.

This
is
not
what
we
deserved,
she thought, but was too tired to be sure. If she could only hold on, just a little longer, long enough to make sure, once and for all, to
know
…

She couldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough. She couldn’t hold on to life; she couldn’t even hold on to that final plea, and in those last few seconds, the need to know slipped away. There was no more question of judgment or mercy. There was only what she had meant, and who she had loved, and what was left to her now, the grit of dirt against her cheek and the press of skin on her forehead, and Gracie, who was no longer a child, who could no longer be protected, who had to be forgiven. Cass was beyond pain; her body was no longer her own. But somehow, she managed to move her arm. Somehow, her hand reached Grace’s outstretched fingers. Somehow, as the world drained away, she held on.

They watched it happen. But they couldn’t believe it really had. Not when the knife slipped in, not when the bullet made its neat, tidy hole, not when the two bodies lay at their feet, sightless and pulseless and a testament to their failure. They couldn’t believe it, and so they had failed to stop it, and now it was done. The soldiers – real soldiers,
good
-
guy
soldiers, as Milo would have said – bundled them into the helicopter, gave them water and blankets and blood pressure cuffs, and thought they were in shock. Maybe they were in shock. Couldn’t believe they had been saved. Had saved what was left of the town. Couldn’t believe this was how it felt to save and be saved. That this was to be their happy ending.