Unbroken: Outcast Season: Book Four (7 page)

He was right, but it was because he was, in his deepest
heart and soul, a hero. I was not. I wanted to cling to him with all my strength and not allow anything to come between us, not even the fate of the world and humanity.

But instead, I smiled. “I know,” I lied. I’d become very good at the lies, I realized. “We should focus on the mission at hand.”

“No distractions,” he said.

I nodded as if I truly believed it, and focused on driving. The less I thought about him, about me, about us, the better it was.

But God above, it hurt.

The weather worsened as we drove toward Seattle; rain at first, a slow mist that turned to drops, and then to curtains of near-freezing downpour. The tank had run low, and I pulled the truck in at last at a small roadside gas vendor. His lights cast a welcome red-and-white glow into the chilly sameness of the rain-washed road, and I pulled in and stopped at the fuel pump.

“Cash only,” Luis read on the sign, and sighed. He dug out his wallet and handed it over. “Make it fast. Get us some food and water for the road, too. Extra blankets and pillows if they have them.”

I nodded and slipped out into the rain. The shock of it was breathtaking, and I quickly uncapped the gas tank and inserted the pumping nozzle before dashing into the small store.

There was a dead man behind the counter, sitting on a stool like some ghoulish prop for a cheap horror movie. He had fallen back against the wall, but was delicately balanced so that he hadn’t quite tipped off his seat and to the floor. The details of him surfaced in my mind slowly, from the shock: older, with graying hair; no obvious wounds, but there was a thick, dried crust of vomit streaking the front of his shirt and chin. His eyes
had filmed over, but I could see the broken blood vessels underneath the glaze.

Dried blood had gathered at the corners of his eyelids, and cherry-black threads of it ran from his nose to his mouth.

I stopped where I was, and slowly, carefully extended my senses toward him on the aetheric. What I saw there, on that plane, was far worse than this—a rotted, horribly ripe
thing
throbbing with living sickness.

He was dead, but the infection inside him was alive, and violently hungry.

I slowly backed up, touching nothing. Little details began to surface, now that the initial shock had passed. Disordered shelves. An open cash register a few feet away, its drawers lolling empty.

I look at the scene through Oversight and found a confusion of colors, shapes, hints, and images. Others had been in the store before us, and at least some of them had taken items. But glowing brightly,
very
brightly, was the ghostly image of a Djinn, stretching out a hand and touching the proprietor’s head with a fingertip.

I knew her, or the
her
she’d been before Mother Earth had awakened. Priya—like me, one of the original Djinn, formed out of fire and primal instincts. But Priya had always been kindly disposed toward humans, and this… this was none of her doing. Not of her own choice.

In that image burned upon the aetheric plane, Priya’s face was cold and set, her eyes blazing with power. She had simply walked into this place, touched the man on the forehead, and left.

And he’d sickened and died, within minutes.

Luis saw me, wiped fog from the window of the truck cab, and frowned in concern. He rolled the window down and said, “What’s wrong?”

“Look
at me in Oversight,” I said. “Check me for infection. Do it quickly.”

He didn’t waste time asking; I saw his eyes lose focus as he used another kind of vision to inspect me. It didn’t take long.

He shook his head. “Nothing. What the hell?”

“The man inside is dead,” I said. “Infected with… something. Something very nasty. We can’t take the risk of touching anything in there. It must be burned, all of it.” I felt shaken, I realized. No, more than that: I was
actually
shaking. My muscles were loose and trembling. “Others have been here. We have to find them. This will spread quickly.”

Luis froze for a few seconds, then nodded. “We need the gas for the truck,” he pointed out, ever practical. “There’s a button inside, behind the counter. Somebody has to press it.”

“No,” I said. “No one goes inside.”

I heard the door slide up at the back, and the sound of someone jumping down… then the whispering slither of Esmeralda’s descent. Isabel looked around at me, then at the store. “What are you doing standing in the rain?”

I didn’t feel like explaining again. “Can you trip the switch to get gas from here?”

“Yeah, but there should be someone in there who—”

“Just do it, Isabel!” My voice sounded unlike my usual self—to raw, too sharp, too shrill.

She gave me a dark look. “Tell me why.”

Esmeralda slithered toward the door, and before I could tell her not to proceed, she recoiled—literally, pulling her snakelike body into tight, defensive coils. I heard a faint rattle. “Dead guy,” she said. “Damn. He looks sick.”

“He was,” I said. “And is. Going in is not an option.”

“
Then what?”

“There is a switch under his hand. It must be flipped from
out here.
”

Isabel looked toward Esmeralda, who nodded decisively. “I wouldn’t be eating no Ho Hos out of this place—that’s for sure. Flip the switch and let’s get the hell out before we’re puking all over ourselves and bleeding from the eyeballs.
Vámanos.
”

Ibby was stronger by far in Fire Warden powers than her uncle; for her it was a mere shrug to trigger the connection that powered the pump. As I set it in action, the counters rolled on a price that would never be paid now. I filled the truck to the brim, then replaced the nozzle and climbed back inside to drive the vehicle off away from the building, slowly.

Esmeralda and Ibby stayed behind, and Luis watched them in the rearview mirror. It took only a moment for the fire to begin, consuming the little store. The two girls made it to the truck and slammed the door down just as the gas pumps blew in a spectacular orange-and-red mushroom of power. What was left of the station store collapsed in on itself, burning even more fiercely.

Ibby thumped on the wall behind my seat. “Go!” she yelled.

“First of many,” Luis said quietly. “Don’t know his name, but I’ve got to think he wouldn’t want to infect anyone else. Best we can do for him now is purify him.”

Purify. That was, I thought, a good word, a hopeful word. The dead man was purified.

I, on the other hand, felt sick and filthy within. There would be no honor today, no
purification
for those of us charged with defending life. I could feel that, as surely as I felt the cold wind pouring through the open window of the truck. “We need to find the others,” I said. “And stop Priya.”

“Priya?”

“Djinn.” I
rubbed my face with both hands, wishing I could rub all of this misery away as easily. “She was here, carrying a plague. It kills fast and lingers long. He won’t be her only victim. We need to find those who came to this store before we did and try to heal them.”

Luis looked as grim as I felt. “Even if you were a full Djinn, that’d be a hat trick,” he said. “You said it kills fast. They wouldn’t get far. What we need to do is find their bodies and burn them—but
you
need to go after Priya while we do that. Only way this works is if we split up. Me and the girls, you after the Djinn.”

It made sense, and I took a deep breath and nodded. “I need transportation.”

He gave me an unexpected grin, but there was little humor in it. “Yeah, well, I checked the nav system. Turns out there’s a biker bar about two miles ahead. I’m pretty sure someone will be happy to give up their chopper for the cause.”

A motorcycle. Freedom, and the wind in my face, and the exultance of the chase.

I smiled back, with just as much of the predator in my smile as I’d seen in his. “I’m sure,” I agreed, and pressed the accelerator hard.

As I parked the truck at Busty’s Roadhouse, I admired the selection of two-wheeled vehicles neatly lined up outside. Gleaming, well-maintained machines, with the addition of a few muddied, hard-ridden trail bikes. I immediately focused on a Victory; the sleek shape drew me to it like a magnet. This particular model was different from my cherished Vision; it was more aggressive, muscular, heavily chromed, and a steel-hard blue.

I loved it.

“Cass.” Luis had gotten out of the truck, and was now
quietly standing beside me. When I looked up at him, he jerked his chin toward the roadhouse. “Too quiet in there for this many guys.”

He was right. I’d been caught up in my fascination with the machine, but now as I looked in that direction, I realized that I heard music playing inside, but nothing else. No laughs, shouts, conversation. I turned and saw the grim set of Luis’s face. We didn’t need to speak about it. I nodded and led the way into the building.

They were all dead. All of them. The bodies lay everywhere, fallen and limp and silent; the jukebox still banged out a loud tune from the corner, but it was playing to an unhearing audience. I crouched next to the first one nearest the door—a barmaid, dressed in shorts and a tight red top, young and fit—and looked at her face.

“It’s the same,” I said. Her eyes had the same redness, and the smell of vomit was overwhelming in this abattoir, mixed with other rancid odors that made my stomach clench hard in reaction. “Look in Oversight.”

I did it at the same time Luis did, and heard him murmur,
“Dios.”
The room was a rolling boil of black and red, infection and disease and agony. The bodies crawled with it. I saw the stuff trying to jump from the bodies around me to my own, and edged backward. “Spread by contact, looks like,” Luis said. “These boys must have grabbed stuff at the store back there and come straight here, just as they started dying. Anybody they touched got it, too.”

“Then someone should have lived to make it to the motorcycles, or to a vehicle,” I said. “Humans are masters of self-preservation. Someone must have tried to exercise it, and run.”

“We don’t know how long the symptoms take to set in. Could be seconds, could be minutes.” Luis shook his head. “Got
to be thirty people in here, Cass. And they haven’t been dead long.”

“I’m more concerned with any that might have gotten away. If they make it to a point where they can infect larger groups that disperse…” As fast-burning as this illness was, it would be devastating in the context of a town, or a city. Priya might already have appeared there, beautiful as a burning star, to deliver that deathly touch. She could have gone
anywhere
, far beyond my reach, far beyond the capacity of humans to fight her unless an Earth Warden was standing right in front of her.

This was what the Earth would become: fields of the dead, cities of silence, where lonely music played unheeded. It took my breath for a moment, and for the first time, I felt fear. Real, bone-deep
fear.
We were butterflies in an avalanche, and what could we do, really do, to stop it?

“Steady,” Luis murmured. His hand gripped mine, strong and warm. “Bright side: This stuff isn’t airborne, or we’d already be dead. It’s contact only, which means it’s containable.…”

“Not if she spreads it in a city,” I said. “Or an airport. Or—”

I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my eye, and spun around… to find a pale, glowing hand outstretched toward me, a single finger pointing at my forehead. Behind the hand, the face of Priya, her Djinn-fired eyes burning into me with unseeing intensity.

I stumbled back, and Luis grabbed her forearm.

“No!” I screamed, but he ignored me. His whole focus was on Priya, who turned her gaze on him, as emotionless as a machine. She didn’t attempt to break free of his hold, or move at all. I reached out for him, but Luis shook his head sharply.

“
Don’t,” he said. “I’m already infected.” He sounded so
calm.
So sure. “I can do this, Cass. Just stay back.”

He couldn’t. A human, even a Warden as powerful as Luis, couldn’t defeat a Djinn one-on-one in that kind of single combat… not when she was pouring infection into him, rotting him from within. He needed me, he needed someone to amplify and direct that power with fine control, like a laser. I could do that. I could help him hit her where she was most vulnerable.