V.J. Chambers - Jason&Azazel Apocalypse 01 (19 page)

Then he turned and ran, disappearing into the woods.

* * *

“Remember that time I scared you in Columbus?” Jason asked. He was sitting across the table from me in our kitchen. The remains of our dinner were on the table. I needed to get up and clear the dishes.

“Which time?” I asked, feeling a little annoyed. After all, Jason had been scary in Columbus. A lot.

He laughed. “Touché.” He got up and began to stack up the dishes.

“Jason, you don’t have to—”

“No, I’m doing it,” he said. “I’m clearing the table for my pregnant wife who slaved over this amazing meal.”

I rubbed my hands over my huge stomach and sat back in my chair. “Well, when you put it like that, go ahead then.”

He leaned across the table and kissed me lightly on the lips. “I was talking about the time you told me you were pregnant with Kieran’s child.”

I groaned. “Oh that time. You
were
scary. You screamed at me that I was yours and I’d always be yours.”

Jason took a stack of dishes over to the sink. “Well, I was right, wasn’t I?”

I twisted in my chair to see him better. “Jason Wodden, I do love you, but you do not
own
me.”

He came back to the table and squeezed my shoulder. “I know. I’m sorry I joked about it.” He grabbed the skillet and saucepan, which were both sitting on hot pads on the table. To hell with serving platters.

“There a reason you brought this up?”

Jason paused, balancing the dishes on one hand. “I was thinking about it. I’m glad you showed up there.”

“I only showed up because you demanded to see me.”

He laughed. “Well, yeah, I guess so.” He went back to the sink, and turned on the tap, adding soap to the stream of water. “But, while I had to find a way to change myself and I had to do that on my own, I don’t know if I would have if it hadn’t been for you. You’ve always motivated me to be a better man.”

I smiled. “That’s sweet.”

“It’s true,” he said. He turned back to the sink. “But I’m glad you weren’t really pregnant with that Kieran guy’s kid.”

I got up out of my chair. It wasn’t easy, with this enormous stomach. It always threw me a little off balance. I waddled over to Jason. “Hey, Kieran was a nice guy.”

“No, I know,” said Jason. He stopped what he was doing to put his hand on my belly. “I just like it this way better.” He grinned. “Besides, you like me because I’m a scoundrel,” he said in his best Harrison Ford impression, which really wasn’t very good.

“Occasionally,” I said. “You were a little too much like a scoundrel in Columbus.”

He kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry.”

I punched him playfully. “It’s okay. You made up for it.”

Jason shut off the tap and picked up a scouring pad. “You know that even if there had been a baby with Kieran, it wouldn’t have bothered me, right?”

“I know that,” I said.

He began scrubbing at one of the plates from dinner. “What are you doing standing up, anyway?

Go sit down. I’ve got this.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I’m pregnant, Jason. I’m not an invalid.”

He just chuckled and continued with the dishes.

I took careful steps across the room, to the window in the kitchen. I peered outside at the black plastic that surrounded us. There was a huge banana peel outside the window. It was rotting.

Living inside a garbage bag had seemed horrible at first, but we’d gotten used to it. “It’s just been so much easier to be alive now that I’ve accepted what we are,” I said.

“What are we?” Jason asked me, still scrubbing away.

“Just flies,” I said. “Insignificant insects, easily brushed aside. Nothing we do really matters to the grand scheme of things.”

“That’s right,” said Jason. “So there was no point in fighting anymore, was there, baby?”

“No,” I said. “Not at all. It’s okay just to be happy.”

“Are you happy?”

I smiled at him, my heart bursting with joy. “Very, very happy.”

* * *

I woke up in my sleeping area. Kieran was curled around me from behind, his arm wrapped around my waist. He stirred and moaned, pulling me closer.

Flies again.

Did these dreams mean something? Did I care if they did?

I snuggled closer into Kieran. I hadn’t told anyone about meeting Jason and talking to him. I felt like no one needed to know. He hadn’t hurt me. When we woke up, Kieran and I were going to Clinton to find a pregnancy test. I’d finally know the truth. I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to go back to sleep.

* * *

Clinton looked like an old mining town in West Virginia that I’d visited once when I was a kid.

All the buildings were tall and brick, but kind of boringly rectangular and blocky. I got the feeling it was one of those towns that had experienced a lot of growth somewhere in the mid-twentieth century and then hadn’t had much growth since. It was much bigger than Columbus, which wasn’t so much a town as it was a place with a Post Office and a bunch of houses. But as towns go, it wasn’t big. It was a little bigger than Bramford.

It kind of reminded me of Bramford, actually. Strangely, even though terrible things had happened to me in Bramford, I felt a twinge of homesickness.

Of course, Clinton was far worse for wear than Bramford had ever looked. Most of the buildings featured broken windows and ripped-off doors. There was a four-car pileup on one of the streets.

The cars had just been left there. The stoplights at several of the intersections had been torn down. They lay broken on the road, never to blink again.

We didn’t see any people. When we’d spoken to Hallam this morning before leaving, he’d been a little miffed. Marlena had told him we were going to look for supplies in Clinton. He told us that he and a party had been to Clinton when they’d first arrived in Kentucky. “Picked clean,”

Hallam said. “Bunch of dead people in city hall.”

Apparently, there had been a mass suicide in Clinton. Hallam tried to use this as evidence that bad things like mass suicides happened everywhere, whether I intruded with magic or not. I just let him talk, like I always did. What was the point?

Kieran and I creeped up and down the empty streets in our Subaru, searching for a drug store or a pharmacy. Finally, we found one. It squatted on the corner of two streets. Its massive rectangular front had an off-center sign on top: “Parks Pharmacy.” There was an awning, crumbling in several places, over the doorway. Kieran parked the car.

We shut the doors, and the sound echoed down the empty street.

“Great place for zombies,” Kieran commented.

Which might have been funny if I didn’t feel like we lived in a horror movie already. Parks Pharmacy had glass doors and big glass windows. They were all destroyed. Shards of glass glittered on the sidewalk like little gems. Kieran stepped around them and pulled the door open for me. “Ladies first,” he said.

We were greeted by empty stretches of metal shelves. Inside the pharmacy, the air felt dank and muggy, like a cellar. There were no windows, and the blackness swallowed us. We could only see the first set of shelves. It seemed Hallam was right, thus far. Picked clean.

Kieran had a flashlight. He flicked it on. Its tiny beam illuminated an aisle reaching into the depths of the store. He shined the light higher.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for those things that tell you what’s in each aisle,” said Kieran. “They hang them from the ceiling.”

“Pregnancy tests are usually towards the back,” I said. “And they never say pregnancy tests on the signs for the aisle. If you’re lucky, it might say family planning.”

If Parks Pharmacy used to have signs directing its customers to what was in each aisle, it didn’t anymore. We began to walk further into the pharmacy. It felt as if we were being sucked into the darkness. Kieran’s flashlight swept the aisles. Most looked empty, but the deeper we got, we began to see a few stray items on shelves. Lightbulbs. (Who would need them anyway?) Greeting cards. Hair dye. Lotions.

Finally, we hit the back wall. From Kieran’s flashlight, we could see this was where the pharmacy itself had been, where all the prescription drugs had been dealt out. It was smashed into and looked cleaned out. But in front of the pharmacy, on the walls under the sliding windows, were rows of KY jelly, condoms, home drug tests, and (yes!) pregnancy tests!

“Jackpot!” I said.

There were two different varieties. I grabbed both and held them up for Kieran to see, grinning.

He looked a little nervous. “Whoa. We found some.”

“Yup,” I said. I didn’t know if I’d ever been so happy in my life.

“Look,” said Kieran, “I want you to know, that even if the test is negative, it doesn’t mean that I don’t, you know, like you. I mean, whatever’s going on with us, it’s not because I think you’re pregnant.”

I poked him with the pregnancy test box. “You really don’t know that, now, do you?”

“You’re awesome, Azazel. I do know that.”

I hugged him. “Let’s just wait and see what it says before we freak out, okay?” I’d had a dream last night which had strongly indicated I wasn’t actually pregnant. I really hoped that was true.

Of course, the dream had also indicated that I’d marry Jason and live inside a trash bag. It was so hard to separate the prophetic dreams from the regular nightmares.

Kieran nodded. “Okay, we’ll just wait it out.”

There was a crashing noise from the front of the store.

Kieran shut off the flash light, and we both got quiet. It was probably just an animal or something. It wasn’t exactly hard to get inside the pharmacy after all.

Together, we crept up to the last row of metal shelves.

“Nothing here,” said a voice, male with an accent I couldn’t quite place. Somewhere north.

“Keep looking. There might be something further back,” replied a voice in the same accent. It sounded like a cross between a New York accent and Minnesota accent. They turned their hard

“th”s into “d”s (“there” was “dere”), but they didn’t pronounce the vowels the way someone might on the east coast. One thing was for sure. They definitely didn’t sound like they were from Kentucky.

Were they coming back to us? Were they friendly?

Another crashing noise. Apparently, they were knocking the shelves over.

“Why the fuck are we here?”

“We gotta go south. What? You want to swim across the Mississippi?”

The voices were getting closer. They were moving back through the store. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should we show ourselves?

Kieran tugged on me. Apparently, he thought we should retreat. I let him lead me as we backed into the darkness, further away from the center aisle.

“Hey, Buck, you want some hand lotion?”

Kieran stopped pulling me backwards.

“Eh, fuck you, Norris, you know you’re the one who’s got problems jerking off without lube.”

Kieran had gone rigid at my side.

I nudged him. “What?” I whispered.

He drew his gun, not answering me.

“Kieran!” I said it as forcefully as I could without making much noise.

“Stay here,” Kieran whispered to me. He took off towards the center of the store, moving quickly, not worrying about the noise he made. His shoes crunched against broken glass from the pharmacy window.

Shit! What was he doing?

“You hear something?” one of the guys asked.

“No. Shut up.”

“Hello?” called the first guy. “Who’s there?”

I could still hear Kieran moving forward, crunching away on the glass. I swore under my breath.

What the hell was he doing?

Shoving the pregnancy tests into my pockets as best I could, I drew my own gun and went after him, trying to move a little more stealthily than he was.

The flashlight flicked back on. I could see Kieran, standing dead center in the middle of the aisle, his gun out and aimed. The light flickered wildly over the store. I could barely make out two grizzled men, each wearing ratty flannel. They had unkempt beards and dirty faces. Their hands went over their eyes to protect them from the light.

“Hey!” one exclaimed.

“What the fuck, dude?” the other said.

Kieran opened fire.

Okay, this was insane. “Kieran!” I screamed, not caring that when I did so I gave away my location. “Kieran, what the fuck?”

One of the men shrieked. “Shit, man!”

Kieran’s flashlight illuminated him for a second. The man was on the ground, his hand to his stomach. Blood was seeping through his fingers.

Kieran’s flashlight snapped back to the other guy who was on his knees with his hands in the air, terror all over his face. “Hey,” he said, “we’re sorry. We wasn’t gonna take anything, man. Hey, calm down, okay?”

Kieran leveled his gun at the man.

I tackled him, but not quick enough. He’d already pulled the trigger. His shot missed, though, ricocheting off the metal shelves.

I pinned him with my knee, my gun on him. “What is going on, Kieran? Have you gone insane?”

“They’re from Chicago,” he said. “They’re the same ones from Chicago.”

That made next to no sense to me. Kieran was from Chicago, I thought. I wondered why he didn’t have an accent like those guys. I got up off him to retrieve the flashlight. “Don’t move, Kieran.”

He didn’t listen. He rolled onto his feet in a second. Dammit. Why hadn’t I gotten his gun? Why had Kieran lost his mind all at once like this?

I aimed the flashlight at the quivering guy and his partner, who was gurgling blood, his eyes rolling back in his head. Great. “Who are you?” I demanded of the man on his knees.

Kieran was behind me, gun out and ready to shoot.

I swung the flashlight back to Kieran, blinding him by shining it directly in his eyes. “Stop!” I ordered him.

“I’m not anyone, ma’am,” said the man. “Not nobody. Just tryin’ to cross the river like everybody else. We were lookin’ for some food. There’s more of us outside. They probably heard the shots. They’ll be in here in a second.”

Oh. Wonderful.

The man continued. “You just leave me alone, and I’ll talk to ‘em, okay?” The dude was scared out of his mind. “Don’t shoot, okay? I’ll tell ‘em it was all a misunderstanding.”