Thirst (22 page)

“I’ve made my sacrifices,” Mike Sr. said weakly. “You haven’t made any.”

“Eddie?” Laura called.

“I’m okay.”

“We’ll help you, Mike,” she said. “Just stop. Please stop.”

“You could’ve helped before, but you didn’t.”

Eddie could see Mike Sr.’s shadow as it straightened upright and lurched toward him.

He put his thumb on top of the canister and flipped onto his back. Then he pressed the button and sprayed where Mike Sr.’s face would be, waving it back and forth. There was a hissing sound and Mike Sr. said, “What the … ?” and then began to scream. He fired shots around the room, and Eddie pressed himself harder against the carpet.

“Get behind the wall!” he yelled to Laura.

When the shots stopped Mike Sr. fell forward and hit the sofa. He grabbed Eddie’s calf and Eddie bashed at his fingers with the can of spray. When he let go, Eddie took the backpack and stumbled to Laura in the kitchen. She had the water jug against her chest.

“
Go
,” Eddie said.

Mike Sr. moaned from the floor.

“Is he out of bullets?”

“He had a box of them. There might be more in his pockets.”

They knocked the sofa away from the back door. When it opened, the can alarm fell to the linoleum and clattered.

Outside, they stood in the grass and looked back up into their window. Eddie had his arm through the backpack strap.

“We’ll wait till he goes home,” he said. “We can hide out here until he leaves.”

“Why would he go home?”

Eddie thought. “We could stay at his house, then. I can break in if he didn’t leave it open.”

“He’s got a gun. We’re not safe in either house. Not as long as he’s alive,” she said.

“What, then?”

“We have to leave.”

“We haven’t rested.”

“We have.”

“Not enough, though.”

“Do you know where you’re going? Can you get there in the dark?”

Eddie could see the empty street, like a stream leading to the tributaries of the neighborhood. They’d follow it to the park, and then follow the trail in the park as far as it would take them. “Yeah,” he said. “I can get us there.”

At the end of the street, they took the intersection down the hill, just as he’d done before. There were voices in the dark, and he pulled Laura into the shadows of one of the yards. They knelt near the house’s foundation and didn’t move.

The sounds were coming from down the hill, near the entrance to the park.

“If Mike’s dead we can go back and take his gun,” he said.

“And if he’s not dead?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then he’s still a man with a gun,” she said. “We can’t go back and check. I’ll go and see who’s down there.”

“No,” he said, but she’d already started, and he had to run to catch up with her. They kept on the grass beside the sidewalk, and toward the bottom of the hill they stood inside a shadow-box fence.

There was a cluster of voices at the bottom of the hill. Eddie thought of the kids crashing through the Mathiases’ yard. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but could tell that they were men.

“We can cut through ahead of the entrance,” he said. “They won’t see us. There are too many trees.” Even leafless, the trees in the park amounted to a dark wall hemming in the street.

“Wait,” Laura said. “What are they doing?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“They’re looking at something. Wait.”

Eddie held her arm.

Beneath them was a dark line of shoulders and heads. When they stepped aside, he could see a glint of white, like they were circling a piece of marble.

“She’s got her pants down,” Laura said.

“What?”

Then he saw. It was the pale glow of skin.

“Let’s keep going,” he said.

“They must be drinking something. Or else they wouldn’t be able to do it to her.”

“There are a bunch of them.”

“If they get me,” she said, “you can run. I’ll be a diversion.”

“We have the jug,” he pleaded. “That’s enough.”

“It’s not enough. Not if you want to make it to my parents’.”

“I want to make it together.”

“Give me the raincoat,” she said.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to cover this up.” She was wearing a yellow T-shirt. The raincoat was purple and black. When she put it on, she faded, even as close as she was.

“What should I do?” he asked.

“You’re fine. I can barely see you.”

He bent down and dug at the earth with his fingers, tearing up the grass and scooping handfuls of powdery soil. He wiped it on his face and arms, but it was too dry to stick.

He turned to tell her to be quiet, but she was already moving toward them, lifting the hood on the raincoat. Eddie
didn’t dare call out her name. She’d taken only a few steps, and he had to squint just to see her in the shadows.

When she came back, it was as if she were appearing from thin air. It sent a spiral of dizziness through his body.

“This is crazy,” he whispered.

“I saw what they have. I’ll show you.”

“Let’s keep going,” he said.

“I was still far away. They couldn’t see me.”

“No.” He grabbed both of her wrists and held on tightly.

“If we don’t make it all the way,” she said, “we won’t make it at all. This is it. This is our last chance.”

They crept beside the aluminum guardrail where the runoff had carved an empty rivulet next to the street. A thick dust covered their shoes. Eddie could feel it brushing up onto his calves.

When they were on line with the group of them, they crouched behind the guardrail. One of them was saying, “Come on, come on,” but his heart wasn’t in it. It was like he was taking tickets. The others had conversations in low, mumbled voices. They’d closed back up around whoever it was in the middle of them. As they moved, the dark outline of their shoulders jostled like water in a tank.

Laura pointed to a plastic grocery bag on the ground. It stood stiffly with whatever was inside.

Eddie pressed his mouth close to her ear. “It could be anything,” he said.

When the circle broke apart, Eddie saw a naked shoulder, a screen of hair. A hand pulled back the bangs, and there emerged the flatness of a cheek, a dent of shadow resting there. A face. Her eyes were open, but drained of any light.

“I can get it,” Laura said. “Whatever’s in there, I can get for us.”

Eddie watched her stare fiercely at the bag.

“We have enough,” he said.

She flinched as if he’d raised his hand to strike her. “You don’t know what enough is,” she said.

The bag was several feet behind the group, maybe fifteen feet. Laura stepped out into the street and Eddie didn’t stop her. He couldn’t move. If he moved, they would see. She was almost invisible on her own. The air around him tightened like a rope being pulled. A shout was rising in his chest and made a pressure in his throat he could barely keep within.

In a few steps, she’d vanished; he watched the bag instead. He watched the stiffness of the handles. Finally, they were blotted out by the darkness of her sleeve. The bag lifted. Eddie’s fingers clawed the earth without his knowing. It made his eyes hurt, to keep the pressure building up inside him from escaping. He followed the bag until it was right in front of him.

“I got it,” she said.

She stood there like a miracle, floating in the night. Maybe she would save them.

“Look,” she said. Inside the bag was a long plastic bottle. She shook it and it sloshed.

“Drink,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“I tried some already.”

He unscrewed the cap and put it to his lips and let it sit and coat the back of his throat. It tasted heavy—thick as paint—and he gagged before he swallowed.

“We need to go,” she said. “They’ll see it’s gone.”

She took the milk jug off the ground, and Eddie saw how light it was. There was almost nothing left. “Come on,” she said.

The metal railing curved, leading to the opening of the trailhead. The woods were like a fresh and blacker night to step inside. The group of voices softened behind them. There were words, but they had no edges.

Then a scream split the words apart. A woman’s voice, but pitched as high a girl’s. The air drew toward it.

Laura stopped in front of him.

“Keep going,” Eddie said.

“We have to try,” she whispered.

“We
are
trying.”

“We have to try to stop them.” Her voice was breaking. “You don’t know, Eddie. You haven’t done what I’ve done.”

Eddie reached for her, but she was gone, running back toward the scream. He could see the jug bobbing at her side like a lantern growing dimmer.

He ran after her, the backpack beating against his back. He’d lost the outlines of her body, but then he found them again. She was racing for the group, and then she disappeared, inside of it. Eddie ran harder, searching for her among the bodies.

He could see her hair being tossed around—her head loose and wild. He could feel it in his stomach; he could feel the sweat of their sex and bodies as he pushed his way through them. A pair of naked legs hung down from a chair, but whoever it was was facing the wrong direction, slumped forward against the back of it. Eddie reached further into the
throng, and grabbed a hold of something plastic. It was the wheel of the chair. Arms and legs beat against him, not knowing who he was, and he followed their flex and spasm to where they’d taken hold of Laura. He grabbed for her as they pulled her back and forth.

“Close your eyes!” he yelled above their voices. He reached into the pack for the other can of wasp spray, and leaning back, he circled around her, spraying. There were shouts and the hands broke away. Bodies stumbled backward.

He took her hand and they ran hard to the entrance of the park. He couldn’t see the trail but heard branches breaking all around them from the weight of the other bodies in the dark. A hand grabbed the back of his shirt, but he pulled away.

“Go!” he yelled, and stayed behind her, tripping through the underbrush. Something was wrapping around his legs—a tangle of branches—and Laura had gotten ahead of him. He yelled her name and wrenched his legs until they freed. Ahead, he saw the jug. It swung from her hand, and Eddie trained his eyes on it. The others were running all around him.

The jug stopped moving and trembled where it was. Laura was thrashing back and forth.

Someone had a hold of her.

Eddie plunged against her back, wrapping his arms around both Laura and her assailant, taking them to the ground. His feet tangled with theirs and he pushed her head aside and threw his fists into the head beneath. He felt a chin and teeth, and his hand was slick with blood. The jug had fallen next to them and Laura rolled away and picked it up.

“Go,” he said. “
Go
.”

She pulled him up and they ran like that, together. There were puffs of voices—everything thumping. Then everything was clear. They’d found the trail again.

“We have to get off,” Laura said. “They’ll be here.”

At the spillway, they stopped. The trail went down and crossed Route 29 and then spread out into a meadow. They could see it all from where they stood; the openness of it, like a puddle of wax. They’d have no cover there. Below them, a drop twenty feet down. It was a bowl of space from where the stream had pooled, silent and empty, full of shadow. The trees were nubs at the edge of the cliff. Eddie could see the shocked-out bottom of white sand, but the edges were blurry with ash where it had all come rolling down.

“If you don’t hear my voice, keep running,” he said.

He pushed off from the ledge and fell, the wind filling up his ears. When he hit, the ash went up to his waist, and as he breathed in the plume he’d made, he coughed and then tried to quiet his coughing.

“Jump!” he called out sharply.

A dull breath of air, and Laura penciled down. She landed closer to the base of the cliff wall.

He grabbed his left thigh and pulled it forward. Then his right, wading through the ash like it was thick, deep water.

“No,
no
,
no
!” she was yelling, and Eddie could see the cloud of ash as she shoveled it back up into her face with both her arms. “
No!
” she shrieked.

“Laura!” he pressed his voice out into a whisper. “Shh …” he hissed. “Quiet.”

“I killed you!”

He saw a flutter of white. She was beating the jug against the air. The ash got deeper and he dragged himself to reach her.

“Eddie …”

He wrapped his arms around her.

“Eddie!”

“Quiet
. Quiet.
” He held his fingers over her mouth, but she bit down, and when he pulled them back, she wailed. He got his arms around her head and pulled her face into his chest.

“Shh … Be calm. Be quiet.”

She slumped down his side, and he had to push her face into the ash to muffle her.

“I killed you, I killed you,” he could hear her say.

“It’s okay now. Shhh … hush, now.”

She was shaking, but she wasn’t shouting anymore. She lifted her face and wiped the ash from out of her eyes.

“It’s all I can do,” she said. “You were dead and I knew it. Because of me. You were dead as soon as I told you yes.”

“Just stop it now. Come on, Laur. Stop talking …”

The silence of the woods opened like a theater to their voices.

She held up the plastic jug.

Eddie looked, and she shook her head. It was dented in and topless from where she’d landed on it. There was nothing left. Her face was pinched in ferocious sorrow.

“Shh …” he said. “Be quiet, now.”

There were voices above them on the ledge. “Down there,” he heard.

Eddie whispered, “Freeze.”

The footsteps above them were soundless in the ash. It could
have been two sets or all of them. “Down the hill,” one of them said. “I saw them.”

“The girl.”

“This way.”

When the voices came again, they were only noise—the words too far down the trail.

Eddie scooped the ash back with his hands. He was digging a hole for her, but the ash kept falling in.

“Come here,” he said. “Get in here.”