TORMENT (20 page)

24

After sleeping for nearly seven hours, Paul felt fairly refreshed despite it still being
pitch
dark when Mia woke him for his shift with Vanderwarf. He wasn’t sure what to expect. He hadn’t said more than two words to the woman. After what happened to White, he expected she’d been a wreck. He didn’t know how close the two had been, but the connection between the two was impossible to miss. To his surprise, when they sat down on the front porch, she seemed ready for anything.

Except silence.

Only ten minutes passed before she said, “We didn’t sleep together.”

Paul looked over at her. He could see her silhouette against the dark purple, star-filled sky. The sun would be up soon. “I think you have me confused with my brother.”

She offered a light laugh. “Just need a friendly ear, not forgiveness.”

“A friendly ear, I can do,” he said.

“Behind the bar,” she said. “He was crying.
Didn’t want you all to see.”

Paul wasn’t sure what to say. There was nothing wrong with a good cry, especially given the circumstances, but he, like everyone else, had been so sure the pair had been having sex. The surprise kept him silent, which suited Vanderwarf fine. She wasn’t finished.

“I wanted to,” she said. “God, I wanted to. He was all I had left in the world, you know? You have your brother. Mia has Liz. I had Dan. But...”

She sniffed back fresh tears.

“He had a wife.
Kids.
He was going to leave her. Leave them,” she said. “And now that they had been taken from him—”

“He felt guilty,” Paul said.

“Yeah.”

“Makes sense.”

“Yeah.”
She sniffed again. “I spent the night rubbing his back and holding him. Comforting him, you know? I didn’t have kids. Can’t say I’ve ever been in love before. But I knew, that night, when he cried for his kids, for his wife, that I loved him for it. He was a good man.”

“Sounds like it.”

“He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

Paul thought on this for a moment. He’d seen plenty of death in his life; men killed more violently than Daniel White’s fate. “No one does,” Paul said. “Death is the enemy.”

“Why did they kill him?” she asked, barely controlling a sob.

Paul put his hand on her back. “The people we saw. Somehow they lived through what we only saw from orbit. Maybe it drove them mad.
Changed their minds somehow.
Made them killers.”

“You heard what she said?”

“Yeah,” he said, not wanting to remember the horror in the woman’s voice before she jammed her hand into White’s throat.

“It was like she didn’t want to do it, but couldn’t stop herself.”

“And if that’s true?”

“I can’t hate her for it.”

“Pity, then?”

“Maybe,” Vanderwarf said. “I can’t imagine living that way. It’d be—”

Snap
.

The pair held their breath for thirty seconds.

“Could it have been a branch falling from one of the trees?” Vanderwarf asked, her voice a whisper.

“Suppose,” he replied. He looked up at the sky. The deep purple had lightened further. He could see Vanderwarf next to him. Her cheeks were wet with tears, but her sadness had been replaced by a set jaw and a hawk-like gaze locked on the woods. Her finger was on the trigger of her MP5.
Safety off.
Ready for business.

Snap
.

“Or not,” he said.

They stood as a pair, both holding MP5s sporting thirty-round magazines. Both had two spare magazines. Firing eight hundred rounds per minute, the pair could mow down a good sized mob in seconds.

Snap
.

But this wasn’t a mob. Whoever was approaching the cabin was alone, and from the sound of it, still at least one hundred yards off. They ducked behind a ruined picnic table and focused on the gnarled trees blocking their view of the approaching target.

“Should I wake the others?” Paul asked.

“I’d prefer not to be out here alone but shouting for them will give away our position. If we hear more than the one, we’ll wake the others and bug out.”

Paul gave a nod. “Good enough.”

Crack
.

This one was loud.

Close.

A shadow slid between the trees, emerging into the clearing as a silhouette—dark against a darker background.

“It’s a man,” Paul whispered. The body shape was easy enough to see. But the details were lost.
Another few minutes
, Paul thought,
and there will be enough light to see by
.

The man took a step toward them, his movements jerky, uncoordinated.

Paul and Vanderwarf looked at each other.

“You know what he looks like, right?” she whispered.

“Mmm.”
Paul wasn’t willing to give the notion any more thought than that. But he did look like a zombie.
The classic brain-loving Romero variety.

Then the man moaned and Paul’s heart beat hard.

Vanderwarf’s breathing grew heavy.

Then the man spoke. They were too distant to hear the words, but he had clearly said something.

“Zombies don’t talk,” she whispered.

“Maybe these do?” Paul said and peeked up over the table. He sat back down quickly. The man had cut the distance in half. He held his index finger to his lips, signaling for her to be quiet. He pointed to his eyes with two fingers, then toward the man, saying,
“
Take a look.”

Vanderwarf slowly raised her head, but before she cleared the top of the table, the man spoke again. “I’m sorry,” he said clearly.

Her eyes went wide and she stood up straight. The man stood with his back to her now, but she recognized his form just as easily as she recognized his voice.

Paul tried pulling her back down, but she yanked away from him. He didn’t know why until she spoke.

“Dan?”

Paul stood just as Daniel White turned around. His throat was coated in dry blood, but there was no wound. Had what they all seen been an illusion? Did the woman really punch him in the throat? The blood could have been hers. She
had
jumped through a window. The strongest evidence was his presence. He
was
alive.

White looked Vanderwarf in the eyes, his expression flooding with relief.
She lowered her weapon and stepped around the picnic table.
“Danny, how?”

He wept. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said, reaching out for him.

He reached for her. “Erin. Run away.”

Paul felt the words like a battering ram to the head. Run away. But Vanderwarf was too distracted by White’s apparent resurrection to really hear what White was saying. He raised his weapon to fire, but the couple reached each other at the same moment, their outstretched arms wrapping in a tight embrace.

“No!” Paul shouted too late.

The front door of the cabin burst open. Austin and Garbarino stormed out, weapons raised, too late to stop what happened next, but in time to witness it.

“Daniel!” Austin shouted.

Daniel’s eyes glanced at Austin, full of regret. Then he bit down.

Vanderwarf’s scream ripped through the air, a high pitched wail that woke the others and faded with a liquid gurgle. Blood sprayed in pulsing geysers as Daniel pulled away the meat surrounding her jugular. Her body went loose in his arms. He held her there, weeping as the life left her body.

Screaming erupted from inside the cabin. Chang had looked out the window. Collins’s voice came next, unintelligible shouting.

Then a gunshot.

Just one.

Never one to waste ammunition, Austin had aimed carefully and fired once. The shot punched a neat hole in the side of White’s head and punched out the other with an explosion of brain matter. In the silence that followed, everyone heard the small chunks of White’s brain hit the dead grass and dirt driveway. That detail caused Garbarino to vomit over the side rail of the front porch.

“The fuck,” Garbarino said, catching his breath and wiping his mouth. “What the fuck!”

The three armed men surrounded the dead pair.

“What happened?” Austin asked.

“Came out of the woods,” Paul replied, pointing to the gnarled trees.
“Didn’t recognize him until he got close.
Tried to stop her.”

“You knew?” Austin asked.

“He was apologizing. Looked torn up about what he was about to do.”

“Just like the lady who got White yesterday?” Garbarino asked.

“But she didn’t get him,” Paul said. “Not really. Cause he was alive a minute ago.
Knew her name, too.”

The front door opened and closed. Mia stood on the porch, her hand to her mouth. “What happened?”

“White came back,” Garbarino said.
“Got Vanderwarf.”

“They’re dead?”

Austin answered by pointing to an old blue tarp lying next to the porch and speaking to Paul. “Grab that.”

The three men quickly covered the bodies with the tarp. “Pack up our supplies,” Austin said to Mia.

“But they’re dead.”

Before Austin could explain, a distant snap cut through the trees.
Then another.
And another.
Voices followed—a chorus of them.

“Go!” Austin shouted, training his handgun on the woods.

Mia disappeared inside the cabin and reemerged thirty seconds later carrying four backpacks. Chang followed with Liz. Collins and Mark came next. Mia dispensed backpacks and the four men threw them on.

Austin spun around, trying to determine which direction was north, but before he could give the order to move, something burst from the woods. He turned, took aim and held his fire. He recognized the man.

But Garbarino didn’t hesitate. He tracked the man’s dash across the grass, held his breath and pulled the—

“Wait!” Austin shouted, pushing Garbarino’s hand to the ground.

At the sound of Austin’s voice, the running man screamed, holding his hands over his head. In his confusion, the man stumbled and fell. He flailed in the dead grass for a moment before returning to his feet. When he saw them standing there, he turned and ran back the way he’d come, but a breaking branch from the woods turned him around again.