What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (26 page)

The roar of a motor only blocks away rips into the silence. I squeeze deeper behind the wall of trash, boots crunching glass, blind hands feeling all around. My hands become slick with a layer of sticky gunk I can’t wipe away on the fabric of my pants.

My movements bring out a busy rustling, a scuttle through the debris only inches from my feet. It’s not a loud, panicked thrashing but distinct and sure, working its way toward me—unmistakably the sound of another living presence.

I reach for my absent rifle as I have so many times before and curse that it’s not there.
Find a stick, a length of pipe.
I grope through the trash with my sticky hands. Maybe it’s a small animal, a raccoon, an opossum, more scared of me than I am of it. But it doesn’t seem frightened. Keeps burrowing, tunneling through the trash. Close enough now to sink sharp little teeth into my leg.

Frenzied to get away from this thing, I shove free of the refuse, drag my bad leg part way across the street and smack face-first the opened rear door of a delivery van.
Ignore the pain, keep moving
. Heaving myself past all obstructions, fingers scraping jagged metal, splintered wood, the shards of hard plastic electronics casings. My body pinging back and forth like the silver ball in a pinball machine until I reach the opposite end of this alley.

Here I’m rewarded with a bit of open sky and moonlight that allows me to make out a street of brick buildings ahead—and the underside of a bridge looming up over everything just beyond.

I was right—I am almost at the river’s edge. I consider finding a pocket of space somewhere deep inside of one of these buildings to hide in but I’m scared I’ll be trapped in a back room with only one way out. The Riders could be anywhere, probably watching me right now, laughing as this battered, filthy guttersnipe takes her final few steps of what she thinks is freedom.

So tired.
The adrenaline, the urgency of
fleeing, fleeing, fleeing
, has trickled away, has left me hollowed out, weak. Somewhere warm to lay down, a dry piece of furniture where I can sleep for a while, an hour or two—each building I see holds its promise.

But I ignore the temptation and keep on, keep dragging myself like a crippled robot whose programming won’t let it quit even though it’s badly mangled. It’s safer to stay outside, I know that.

Take shelter out-of-doors. Avoid becoming trapped. Wait out the night.

The bridge, hide below the bridge.

Let the chill fog keep me awake.

At the first light of day cross back over the river. Return to the Orphanage, to the remnants of my family. To Aiden, the boy who’s never spoken a word to me but for whose life I did all this to try to save.

The bridge above me looks so familiar. I know I’ve stood in this street before. There’s an enormous shadowy opening below the bridge, crisscrossed with cement columns, space enough to shelter hundreds of people from the rain.

And I remember—my mother taking me to a crowded, noisy open-air market that filled this space every weekend for some last-minute Christmas shopping. It was on one of our infrequent trips to Raintree, the last holiday season when anybody bothered to go shopping. I can still see them—row upon row of booths with merchants selling hand-crafted goods. Chinese calligraphy, pottery, handmade soaps and lotions, tie-dyed shirts, the smell of spices and frying meats from food carts.

Just a hollow space now, everything gone but what I see in my memory.

“Honey, look at this. Do you think grandma would like it?”

Mom holds up a small, bright yellow tea pot, a purple butterfly perched on a stem of grass painted and glazed on its side.

I shrug. “Sure, I guess.”

“You’re not being much help.”

“You know what she likes,” I say. I’m watching a boy across the way who’s with two friends, his arms crossed, laughing carelessly, acting like he owns the world. But he’s staring at me, even points at me. Smiles when he catches my eye.

My mother nudges me. “What about this?” She holds up a ceramic liquid soap dispenser. Then she notices what’s caught my attention. “Now, now. I think we better keep walking.” But she’s laughing as she says this. I blush and turn away from the boys, tuck in my chin and lead the way in the opposite direction, embarrassed.

She catches up with me, grabs my hand and tugs it gently to slow me to her stride. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she says. “You’ve got more than enough time for all that. Plenty of fish in the sea.”

My foot crunches on something. Maybe a fragment of that tea pot that was for sale once long ago. Only trash and debris left. And maybe a place to hide.

I force myself on, bad leg throbbing, to where the underside of the bridge slopes down to meet a cement bulwark and the open area ends. I’m deliberately not thinking about what could be hiding in all this shadowy space because I’m taking a chance that no one—or thing—is here. There’s a narrow little aperture here, under the lowest end of bridge, almost a crawlspace. People caught up in the disaster must have sought shelter here. There are boxes, crates, shopping carts arranged like little forts, strewn with rags, tarps and tattered blanket.

On hands and knees I crawl back to the wall of the bulwark, pull packing crates in front of me to hide behind. I try to make myself comfortable but my leg aches and there’s a stench here that is almost overpowering—urine, rot, mold. But it’s drier than the open street, moldy-damp but endurable. And there’s a bridge right above me to cross in the morning.

And I wait, trying to keep my eyes open, trying to ignore the pain and the cold. The dirt and the smell. Trying most of all not to keep thinking of my mother and of that friendly, crowded world we once walked through.

The Return

As tired as
I am, sleep is impossible.

Beyond where I’m hidden at the tail end of the bridge, there’s nothing to see—a black open space—so I let my eyes drift shut. I rock back and forth on a numbed behind that rests on thin cardboard, arms wrapped tight around my shins, head sideways on my knees.

Despite closed eyes, despite my nestled head, I know I haven’t slept for a single moment all night.

I know because each passing minute is an eternity. An eternity full of sounds—the patter of rain, far off animals howling, wind snapping at the edges of a plastic tarp. The sound of water
drip-drip-dripping
from a broken pipe. I count the drops as if they were the ticks of a clock, sixty drops marking a sixty second span. In this way I’m certain at least one more minute has passed.

The drops haven’t lulled me to sleep. I’ve heard and counted every one.

And if even once I do come close to sleep, my mind starting to drift, less and less aware of the sounds and the cold night air that makes my teeth chatter and my nose run and the way my banged up leg still throbs, I am shocked permanently awake when I hear the Black Riders, no motorcycle warning me of their approach.

Footsteps splashing across damp pavement. Whispers.

The Riders sound confused, irritated. I make out a few words—
moron, idiot, what the hell?
—as they bicker. It’s as if they’ve been following a trail, reached its end and failed to find what they were certain they’d find.

They fling stones into the open space under the bridge I once strolled with my mother past stalls laden with handcrafts. Then two or three motorcycles arrive, fan out into the area, high headlight beams darting into the far corners, even flashing across the crate that hides me. “God, it stinks here,” I hear one of them say—only a few feet away.

There’s laughter. “Rats nest,” another says.

And then it’s over. I’m bracing for the moment when I’m pulled loose from another hiding place but the bikes make one more sweep and roar off into the distance. I listen and listen but hear no more whispering, no other footsteps. I’m amazed they’ve given up so easily.

The Riders sudden appearance and disappearance leaves me wired—eyes wide, head cocked, unable to do anything but listen and stare into the dark. It makes waiting for daybreak endless.

Pass, time, pass.

Please.

As long as I’ve waited for it, when a little light finally makes its way to where I’m hiding, it takes time for me to realize it’s even there. It’s subtle, seeping slowly into the space under the bridge—a shade less black and a shade more gray.

I shake my head, kick away the crate that’s protected me with my good leg and look around, eyes able to take in much more than they were only minutes before.

My hiding spot under the lowest end of the bridge was someone’s shelter once. There’s that faint odor of urine and an almost wine-like sweetness. Broken bottles, a blanket stiff with dirt, the ground beneath me studded with bottle caps and fragments of glass.

And then I find myself staring at something that confuses me, doesn’t make sense—a neat row of little knobs poking out of the ground. It dawns on me, slowly—they’re the white chalk sticks of skeletal fingers, reaching out, half-buried in the soil. And just beyond—bones dusted with gray-green spores, sticking up like a pair of twisted straws, their ends shattered.

Fragments of a severed arm, torn years ago from someone’s body. All night they lay only inches from me.

I try to stand but smack my head against the underside of the bridge and spill forward onto my hands and knees. I crawl free from the hiding space as fast as I can, the image in mind of other things lurking near me in the dimness—unheard vermin scuttling through the dirt. Hairless tails, pink eyes, yellow-sharp teeth.

Just past the crate I’d kicked away, I stop, still on all fours, try to catch my breath. I push myself to my haunches, try to lift myself to my feet. Put a little weight on my bad leg to test it. Take a look around.

It’s just a wide, empty space below the bridge, strewn with trash. Nothing threatening, nothing to see.

Dried mud stiffens my hair, the dirt on my face making my skin feel tight. There’s a patch of congealed blood on the palm of my right hand that both itches and burns. I take a few steps, working my bum leg. Stop when it hurts too much, then curse at how weak I am. Make myself keep walking, learn to ignore the pain. Get used to how it’s going to be for the rest of the day as I cross over the river, find my way back to the Orphanage.

When I get to the edge of the area the bridge shelters, I’m disappointed at how gray the morning is, how dim. Why couldn’t the night simply vanish, replaced with a splash of dazzling sunlight?

But it is the light of day. What I have to work with. Murky, cloudy but maybe too bright all the same for the Black Riders to move about in.

It’s still so early but already the worry creeps up on me—what if it takes me more than a day to make it back? The Orphanage doesn’t seem that far away but what if I get lost? What if my leg keeps me from making good time?

I need to get back before it gets dark out again. Need to get as much done as possible—or the Riders will be searching for me.

They’ll never leave me alone at the Orphanage. They’ll never let me care for Aiden now unmolested. I should have forgone the medicine and kept washing his wounds, kept him warm. Admitted that there’s a limit to what I could do.

Instead I spent an endless night going through so much for so little.

Aisa pushing me out a window. Biting into Moira’s arm. Nearly killing myself on a motorcycle I barely knew how to ride.

Hiding like a giant rat in a human-sized hole with scuttling rodents and human remains all around.

All this—and I came away with nothing.

I’ve left Stace by Aiden’s side but she’s so young and there’s a fragility to her. She’s always depended on me, on Emily. And Larkin. If Aiden gets worse, stops breathing—

I don’t want her to see him die.
I
want to be the one by his side if that happens.

Me alone. I will be the one to endure it.

I move out into the street, make my way onto the onramp of the bridge. It seems lighter now that I’m out in the open. There’s no rain, no drizzle and the fog’s dissipated. My sore leg slows me down but the pain recedes from angry spasms to a dull ache that repeats with every step.

The higher I climb up the onramp, the more I look around for any evidence of the Black Riders. I have no way of knowing for sure that they don’t move about during the day but I’ve only seen or heard them at night.

The open air, the daylight feels good. The sun stays hidden behind a wall of ashy clouds but I can tell it’s there, to the east, where I’m heading. I pass a blue road sign dangling vertically from a gantry above my head. It has an arrow pointing downriver and the words Blackwell Bridge in white reflective block letters.

The Blackwell is wide and open, four lanes in either direction, no cage of steel girders above its surface like the bridge we crossed the night before. As I make my way over the water, I pass two towers where operators high above the river once manned controls that raised and lowered the center spans of the bridge for passing ships.

The doors to the towers are broken in and the roof of one has collapsed. I can’t help but imagine what might remain in the towers’ control rooms—a bridge keeper’s withered fingers still reaching for control panel buttons, dead eyes watching for ships that will never arrive.

The Blackwell Bridge is remarkably clear of debris. I count only a handful of derelict vehicles. It looks like someone, at height of the plague, drove a huge earth mover across and cleared everything away. The railings along the walkways are almost all smashed apart, as if cars were simply swept off the deck of the bridge and into the river.

The view of the city from up here keeps tugging at me, making me want to stop to take it all in.
But you can’t slow down, must get back to the Orphanage.
It’s the first panoramic daylight glimpse of Raintree I’ve had since the Riders brought me here. Trudging along, I look over my shoulder at the high-rises behind me, at the bridges spanning the length of the river in either direction, at the warehouses and riverside condos dotting the opposite shore.