Prep For Doom Page 37

  The bed was bigger. All three of them could fit. He wasn’t leaving his sister tonight, and he was pretty sure he’d have a war on his hands if he tried to make Elena leave her. He’d experienced the full force of Elena's fury outside Dad’s bunker. He wasn't in any hurry to repeat it.

  Elena got Annee settled. Her hands were gentle, but her face was a terrible combination of remote detachment and horrified numbness.

  Her fever’s raging.

  “Is she going to make it to help tomorrow?” His whispered question sounded plaintive in his own ears.

  Elena glanced up. “Help? What help? No one can help with this.” She shook her head and made a negative huffing noise. “Help. You’re as bad as she is, wanting to believe in a miracle.”

  Annee opened her eyes. They were glassy. “Not a miracle, Elena. Just believing for believing's sake.”

  “Yeah?” Elena’s brusque voice went gentle again. “And what’s the point of that, amiga? What does believing get you when bad things are happening?”

  “Believing’s not about getting. It’s about giving, to the people around you, to the universe. Believing doesn’t get you anything. It doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen. It just makes surviving them…more…”

  She drifted off without completing the thought.

  “Is she going to make it through the night even?” He was afraid to ask the question, but he had to prepare himself. Why he asked Elena, he didn’t know. She was a kid herself who’d just lost her own brother.

  She shrugged. “Don’t know. Doubt it. Maybe we should try believing.” The word was laced with venom.

  Chad looked away, pretending not to notice the watery tracks tracing down Elena’s wide, dusty cheeks. He’d never seen the tough girl cry, not even when Abel died. He’d seen her make plenty of other people cry. But with all that Annee had told him about Elena’s troubled family life, he’d honestly thought she’d made herself immune to tears.

  “You should eat.”

  “Not hungry.” Elena sat on the other side of the bed.

  “Then get some rest,” he told her. “I’ll keep watch. You sleep. I’ll wake you up when I get too tired.”

  She stared away at the dark sky through the window, then curled up on top of the blanket, close beside Annee.

  Chad wandered the house. He forced himself to eat a peanut butter sandwich. He studiously avoided Wendy’s room. He couldn’t go back in there, empty but so filled with her energy. It was a slap in the face, reminding him of her absence.

  Where are you, Wendy?

  He pulled out his cell phone and pushed the button to call her cell. Like every other time, it never rang. It just didn’t go through. It was the same with texts. The little symbol spun and spun, but the status bar stalled at almost complete. Nothing was getting through. He didn’t know why.

  Why hadn’t he told her about the bunker? If he hadn’t been so embarrassed about his father’s paranoia, they might all be together. He returned to his sister’s side and spent the night listening, softly humming to himself, and checking the rising heat radiating from her skin. Alone with the night, there was nothing to keep his thoughts from turning to Wendy.

  They’d been together two years. She’d been a baby when they met, only fourteen. But there was something so calming, so true, in her eyes. She wasn’t like the other girls.

  She never had been.

  Was she safe? Was she sick? Was she even still alive?

  He had to get Annee to responsible people who could help her so he could go look for Wendy. He’d figure out how to find her. She couldn’t just be gone.

  He stared at the outline of his guitar case across the room where he’d set it. Ordinarily, he’d be playing it, strumming as he hummed, writing a song for later.

  But the song in his heart wasn’t one he wanted to remember. It wasn’t one he ever wanted to give words.

  His eyes turned down to his sister. And what if he lost them both? Annee wanted him to believe, said it could make surviving it all—what? Easier?

  He sighed and checked his sister’s temperature again before shaking Elena awake and curling up on the other side of his sister. He wrapped his hand around his pistol beneath the pillow.

  Chad woke to sunlight on his face. Someone pushed gently on his side.

  “I have to pee.”

  Chad rolled over. Annee’s eyes were wide beside him. She smiled and pushed at his side again.

  “I really have to pee. Let me up.”

  Behind Annee, Elena rolled slightly to face them. Her hand pressed to Annee’s forehead.

  Annee's eyes were bright, aware—not glassy.

  “You’re better?”

  “Her fever broke.” The relief was palpable in Elena’s breathed whisper.

  Her fever broke. Relief flowed through him. She’d be okay. She was going to get better.

  “Did you idiots not hear me?” The breath was still wet in her throat and lungs as she struggled to get someone out of her way. “I. Have. To. Pee.”

  Chad gave himself another second to revel in the elation of her broken fever before he rolled to his feet and helped her up.

  Elena helped Annee to the bathroom and then turned, leaning against the door. Her face, creased by the pillow on one side, was bright and relaxed.

  “Her fever broke,” she repeated. She grinned at him.

  Chad couldn’t stop nodding.

  “It’s—this is good. It’s a good thing. I can get you guys to the motel, and then I can find Wendy. I’m going to find her.”

  Annee was better. It was a sign of things to come.

  Chad pulled his boots on, settled his shoulder holster and gun into place, then grabbed their gear from the corner. “I’ve got to load the bikes. Then I’m going to make you guys breakfast. This time you’re both going to eat. Can you get your packs?”

  Elena nodded.

  He stomped downstairs and straight out the door. He couldn’t think about Wendy’s sister in the sunroom or Elena’s brother in the bunker. His sister was better, and he’d use it to fuel his focus on today’s goals. Feed them. Get Annee to the meet. Find Wendy.

  He dropped the packs beside the bikes and started reloading them.

  He’d just started back up the steps when the whining sound of an engine with a bad fan belt echoed down the street. Chad looked up as a van rolled to a stop at the corner. The driver, wearing some kind of white, hooded contamination suit, stared back at him. The man clearly hesitated before he lifted a radio receiver to the area near his mouth and spoke into it. The van slowly approached. It was nondescript, white, with the letters PFD superimposed over a grey diamond.

  The man parked the van, watching Chad through the windshield.

  Chad felt uneasy. The shotgun was in the saddlebag a few feet away, a rookie mistake he should have known better than to make. He had the .45, though. His hand itched to reach up and draw it.

  The man opened the van door, hopped down, and came around to hover half hidden behind the front of the van. Behind the clear face plate of the suit, he seemed their dad’s age.

  “You okay?” he called out. “Not sick?”

  “Not sick. You?”

  The man smiled. “No. We’re out looking for survivors.” The man’s face froze.

  Elena and Annee stepped out the door behind Chad. Chad glanced over his shoulder. Elena was helping the still obviously weak Annee, supporting her weight.

  “I thought you said you weren’t sick?” The man’s voice went hard and cold.

  “We’re not, we recov—”

  The man swung up the arm he’d hidden behind the van.

  Chad barely registered the man’s gun before the bright muzzle flare bloomed with three quick bursts of fire. Chad felt the punch low in his side, heat and pain that knocked the breath from him. He stumbled, feet twisting under him and knees going soft.

  He fumbled at the holster with suddenly clumsy fingers, but someone’s hand was already there, yanking it free.

  “
No! No, no, no!”

  The raw scream came from behind him with a crack of return gunfire.

  His gaze was trained on hands that came back from his side bloody. He lifted his head.

  The man fell, crimson spreading violently across the pristine white of the suit.

  Chad stared. What had happened? The man was down. Who had fired?

  “No! No, please. You can’t leave me, too! Chad!”

  His ears rang. Above the sound, far away and somewhere behind him, Elena screamed. Pressing his hand to his side again, Chad turned. Annee slumped across the stoop, Elena leaning over, the pistol clutched in her hand still.

  Red bubbled from Annee’s chest, a match to the dead man behind him.

  “Chad, please! Help me—she has to—she’s better. She has to stay with us. Help me!”

  Chad struggled to his feet and lumbered to his sister. As soon as he reached her, Elena grabbed his hands and pressed them to Annee’s chest, forcing him to apply pressure. Elena leaped to her feet and raced to the bikes, digging through the saddlebag.

  Chad stared at Annee, at her blood washing over his fingers.

  Elena threw down the medical kit beside him and hovered over his shoulder. She tried to talk, to give him instructions, but it was just sound—gasps. Tears.

  It didn’t matter. He could see it in Annee’s face. She wasn’t struggling, though he could hear the wet gurgles. She stared up at him, eyes lit with fever-free energy.

  Her lips moved.

  Believe. The thread of sound was no more than a wet exhale, but he knew what she said.

  “I don’t know how. That’s why I have you, Annee. You’re the believer. I don’t even know how.”

  A small smile lifted her lips. “You do.” She barely managed to voice the words. “You believe in love? You believe in Wendy?”

  He leaned in and held her head still, as if that would help. “It’s not the same. Believing in a person and believing in…everything.”

  Don’t go, Annee.

  “It is. Same decision. Just…bigger.”

  “I don’t know how…” He squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his forehead to hers, not caring about the pain in his side, about the hot-cold acid burn of the torn flesh. He’d pour himself into her to give her the strength to go on. She had to make it. Her fever had broken. That meant she’d live, didn’t it?

  She was supposed to live.

  Eyes squeezed shut, hands tangled in her hair, he waited for her to breathe in again, fuel for her next bossy, breathy comment…for her to tell him how to do it. He waited.

  Behind him, a low rasping moan became heavy sobs, and then running footsteps. Three more gunshots rang out, then dull thuds of a flurry of fists and feet falling on the man’s body. Elena had been waiting, too, standing just behind him. Now, she raged at the dead man.

  How did she know?

  Chad slowly lifted his forehead from Annee’s and lowered his hands from her hair to her cheeks.

  It was her eyes. Elena knew because of her eyes.

  Annee’s light was gone.

  * * *

  Elena didn’t know how long the two of them huddled in the front yard of that house, together but lost in their own grief. She’d probably still be there, waiting for her own death if Chad hadn’t lurched away.

  He stood, tottering and pale. A fresh flow of blood quickly soaked his drying shirt and ran down the side of his pants. “I won’t leave my sister out in the open. I gotta bury her.”

  “Okay. But I’m pretty sure I’m not strong enough to bury both of you, so you need to let me help you.” The way he and Annee had helped her with Abel’s death. She swallowed the whine that threatened to escape from her throat.

  Elena had attacked Chad when he'd told her sick Abel couldn’t come into the bunker. She'd refused to leave her brother behind, even if he was a jerk to her most of the time. He was her brother. But when his final moments came, she backed away, leaving him with Annee and Chad. She’d stood in the corner, rocking, and simply stared as her brother died.

  Chad stared at her now, blank-faced. She wasn’t sure he’d understood until he nodded and eased down again. His hand hovered over the wound on his side. “I’ve got nowhere to bury her.” She could hear the shock and despair in his voice. “Should I leave her with Wendy’s sister?” He shook his head, his voice weakening, drifting. “Neither of them has to be…alone.”

  And then she was alone in the yard. He’d passed out.

  Elena lifted his shirt to look at the wound. There was a small hole on the lower right side with an exit hole angled out his back. She didn’t know anything about wounds, or organs, or internal injuries. She thought that maybe he wouldn’t be up and trying to walk, even weakly, if something inside was ruptured. Her main concern then was the bleeding. But how did you apply pressure internally?

  He wouldn’t like her idea, she was sure, but it was the only thing she could think of. She pulled supplies out of her pack, moving quickly. When she had his wound sealed as best as she could, she went inside to get a blanket.

  Elena returned to her friend—her only friend—and knelt next to her. She should say a prayer. Except she didn’t believe in all of that. And seriously, if the god that Annee believed in couldn’t see that he was getting back the best of all the people he’d sent down, well, no prayer that Elena could come up with would make up for his failure.

  She rolled Annee in the blanket and dragged her back into the house. For someone so tiny, it was hard work. When she got to the sunroom, she stopped, gagging at the smell in the still room. She pulled the blankets back and managed to lift Annee up onto the couch, settling her just on top and to the side of Wendy’s sister, as if the two girls had fallen asleep together.

  Something scraped behind her. Chad was awake. He’d dragged himself inside and now leaned in the doorway to the little room. He slid to the floor and fumbled his guitar onto his lap, glancing up self-consciously. “She liked it when I sang to her.”

  “I know.”

  But he didn’t sing. He didn’t strum. After a long moment of silence, he admitted, “I don’t know what to play for her.” His voice cracked.

  “Yeah.” Elena wiped at the sweat pouring down over her forehead. “Well. You could play her favorite song.”

  Chad’s brows rose. “Silent Night? A Christmas carol?”

  Elena shrugged. “Why not? It was her favorite.”

  He took a deep breath and his gaze flickered over the two girls, then swerved away again and up to the window and the cloudless blue summer sky outside.

  When he began strumming— his low, deep voice hesitantly starting the words—Elena turned back and arranged the blankets over the girls. She didn’t stop fussing, moving the blankets and tucking and re-tucking them around the two girls, until he was done. She couldn’t stop, not even when his voice cracked as he sang of sleeping in peace, not even when the tears blurred her vision. She didn’t need to see to finish what she was doing for her friend.

  She didn’t want to see.

  Elena walked slowly over to him. “That was…nice. It was pretty, Chad. She’d have liked it.”

  He lifted his face, frowning. “Elena?” He looked down at his wounds and the stray strings hanging from the wound packing in front and then back to her. “Did you stick tampons inside me?”

  “Um. Yeah.” She shrugged. “It was all I had to stick in there for pressure. They’ll, you know, spread and—”

  “I don’t even—”

  “It was the best I could think of at the time!”

  “No. It was smart. I just—Wow.”

  She nodded and moved on. She had to keep moving on. “I can’t spend another night here, but we don’t have to go to Moriarty, if you’d rather go look for—for your girlfriend.”

  “Wendy.” He worked his way to his knees and then up to his feet. “No. I’ve got to get Annee to safety first.”

  There was a long beat of silence between them.

  Elena opened and closed her mouth
.

  Chad lifted his head, a slow, painful movement. “I meant you. I’ve got to get you to safety first, then I’ll go after Wendy.”

  She bit her lip and started to argue, but he turned and left, lifting his guitar case gingerly and easing the strap over his head to settle the case across his back. They mounted their bikes and left the dead man where he lay in the street.

  It didn’t take long to get there, but it didn’t stop Elena from worrying that he wouldn’t make it. Even with the tampons soaking the blood and applying internal pressure, a halo of fresh red remained on his t-shirt.

  When he exited I-40, she pulled up next to him. Ahead, a long, low motel ran along the side of the freeway.

  “Is that it?”

  He didn’t answer. She glanced up in surprise. Fury, disappointment, and grief flowed over his face. She swung her gaze back to the motel.

  Now that she looked closer, it was clear that something very bad had happened below.

  The parking lot was remarkably clear of vehicles. But that absence just made the numbers of abandoned bodies that much more apparent.

  Elena could feel desperation scratching up her belly, trying to escape.

  Chad carefully reached back and took out the shotgun, hissing in pain. He tucked it between the taut guitar strap and his chest. “Stay close.” He revved the engine and raced off.

  Elena swallowed. She didn’t want to go down there. She wanted to keep riding, find peace somewhere far away from New Mexico and the grief that grew in its hard, rocky soil. She wanted to go back to Annee and lay down with the two girls and sleep.

  She wanted to go back to the life she’d hated before.

  She pulled into the lot behind him. The smell wasn’t bad—not yet. They hadn’t been left out in the sun for long.

  Chad walked among the dead. He stopped over a young man. Someone he recognized?

  “Is it them?”

  He nodded. His throat worked. “Some of them.”

  “So some got away?”

  “Or never made it here,” he said, his voice dark. It was filled with the helpless, hopeless self-loathing that made a voice sharp. She recognized it because it was how her own voice sounded half the time.