Devil’s Wake (29 page)

As if to demonstrate the point, Hipshot rested his muzzle in Sharon’s lap. “I saw everything about you in my head as soon as the bus drove up, no matter what he says,” she said. “Everybody here is kind, healthy, and un-bit. Especially
this
little guy. He’s about as un-bit as you could get!” She ruffled his fur. “Yes you are! Yes you are!” Her
good-doggy
voice set his tail to thumping.

Then she looked at Kendra, and in the firelight Kendra thought her unseeing eyes changed from blue to the deeply green depths of the ocean. “You are especially interesting,” Sharon said. “I’ll be honest. You’re the reason I invited all of you to the fire, young lady.”

Darius made a little chuffing sound, a joke he’d decided to keep to himself.

“Me?” Kendra’s voice was small.

“You.” She looked not at Kendra but slightly past her. “Do you remember your dreams?”

Kendra had the oddest sensation, as if the world was focusing its
way down to a tunnel, and that tunnel connected the two of them. No one else seemed to exist. Sharon repeated her question.

Kendra nodded, a shallow little dip of her chin, but Sharon seemed to see her.

“And what… do you dream about all of this?”

“This?”

Sharon’s smile was kind but stern. “Don’t pretend, little lady. We don’t have room or
time
for that. Maybe once upon a time, those of us who see could pretend not to. We could hide. But if you hadn’t noticed, we need every open eye we have.” She leaned forward. “Every open eye.”

Kendra’s heart pounded in concert with the surf on the sand, with its steady rolling rhythm, the heartbeat of the planet, a love song between the earth and the moon dancing with her waves.

Kendra looked around at her friends, suddenly aware that she didn’t want to answer the question. That this woman, with her blind green eyes, had peered more deeply into her than she wanted anyone to—now or ever. But they were all looking at her. Even Hipshot, gnawing on a rib bone Adam had given him, seemed to be waiting for her.

“Sometimes,” Kendra began, so softly that she could barely hear her own voice. “Sometimes I remember my dreams, yes.”

“And is there one that recurs? Anything that has changed since the outbreak?”

She nodded slowly, remembering the disturbing dreams she’d had when she was living with Grandpa Joe in his cabin. She didn’t exactly remember images from her dreams, but they suddenly seemed like a story she told often. “I feel as if… I’m standing on a chessboard or something. Made out of strings of light. They connect off in the distance somewhere. Something is moving along those lines. Making the squares.”

“Something?”

“Something alive.”

Sharon nodded. “Anything else?”

“No,” Kendra said. “But I never had that dream before all of this… no, wait. That’s not true. I think I might have had it just a few times, but it started within a month or so of when everything fell apart.”

“And did you ever dream about… the sick? Before it happened?”

Kendra took a moment to realize that Sharon was referring to freaks as “the sick,” a term so compassionate that it sounded strange… but exactly right. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “I used to have dreams of being in a garden, and large plants grabbing me. And cities burning. I’d been having them for a couple of years. My parents said I would wake up screaming. It got bad. My mom didn’t want to keep me in the city anymore, but my dad didn’t want to leave. They started fighting all the time. Finally, they decided to move out of L.A. I felt so guilty, but I had to get out. Had to leave.”

She looked at the group’s rapt eyes and then began to cry. For a few moments it was as if they were all too shocked to move, then Kendra felt an arm around her shoulders, and then another, and then they were all hugging her.

Sharon Lampher’s voice was terribly gentle. “Look at what happened to the cities,” she said. “Pure panic. Breakdown of services. Millions died in the first months. You had a much better chance of survival in a small town.”

“Weren’t you in Portland when your father got bit?” Terry said.

Kendra nodded, surprised that he remembered. “I didn’t want to go. I
really
didn’t want to go. They wanted to give me that damn flu shot.”

Kendra noticed something feral pass across Ursalina’s eyes: the soldier making a mental note to keep an eye on Kendra.

“I never took the shot,” Kendra said quickly. “Or ate the mushroom. I never had the chance. The hospital was… bad. I begged them not to take me.”

“Had you ever been afraid of getting a shot before?” Sharon said.

She shook her head. “Not since I was a little kid.”

“But you were afraid of this one.”

Kendra was still, listening to the roar of her breathing, the pounding of her heart. Everything was so clear now. Her parents had moved for her. To help her. But some part of her—a part so small and weak that it could barely let itself be known, let its voice be heard—had been trying to save them.

Why couldn’t she have seen more clearly? Enough to make a difference?

“But what good is it?” Kendra said. “It wasn’t enough. Is there a way to make… that part of me stronger? Make the messages clearer?”

“Just listen for it,” Sharon said. “My gift… it was easy. So much darkness, so little light. But you… with you, it was different. It will
be
different.”

“Is it… too late?” Kendra asked. “For it to matter?”

“If you can even ask that question,” Sharon said, “it’s not too late at all.”

After a time the conversation died away, and they made their
good-byes to prepare for sleep. The Lamphers hung to one side of the fire, and they circled the rest. No one was more than arm’s length away from the others, in case they needed to wake one another in a hurry. Silently.

Kendra felt more comfortable with her bedroll on the sand when she lay down to close her eyes, pretending not to hear Piranha and
Sonia get up to go, hand in hand, to investigate a dune a hundred feet north of their fire. It was a big no-no to disappear without alerting the others, but Piranha and Sonia behaved like a secret. Maybe they thought pretending would keep it from hurting as badly if something went wrong.

When
something went wrong, as Ursalina would say. And she ought to know.

Terry was exhausted from endless driving, and there was no reason to drag him from sleep. Kendra sat up and pulled herself out of the sleeping bag. When no one by the fire stirred, she wandered down to the edge of the surf. Hipshot, of course, followed her, his feet padding on the damp sand.

The water was liquid ice. The black water, nearly invisible in the dark, flowed up and rolled back, touching the tips of her toes, and she stared out across the quivering plane. The water swallowed her. Awed her. Mocked her.

If you looked across the water, all the way across, what was there? Hawaii? No… that was farther south, wasn’t it? China? Japan? She was trying to remember her maps. And what was happening in those faraway lands? When Arizona and Montana had been made alien, the rest of the world was unknowable. Was there a world?

The surf hissed up and down the shoreline that stretched to oblivion.

Suddenly, Kendra needed to believe there were others standing on a distant beach, looking out at the ocean, wondering as she was. They were just as lonely and frightened, gazing east instead of west. Kendra closed her eyes and tried to feel a connection with the world. Was there something there? Anything?

All she knew for certain was that somewhere out there lay an island called Devil’s Wake, where a blood relation might be waiting for her. Safety. Family. Could she hope Devil’s Wake was real, that her future was real, or was Devil’s Wake only another dream?

Eyes closed in the darkness, her toes sinking into the cold sand, she felt nothing. And then she realized that something was hidden within the nothing, something she could only see as… a deeper nothing. Like black threads against black velvet.

“Ohhhh,” Kendra whispered, realizing she had been searching for lines of light.

Now, touching that deeper place of darkness, she followed the thread, almost as if she were pulling a buried cable out of the sand, with grains spilling over it as she pulled.

She drew, and then relaxed again, and it was as if she rose up high above the beach, higher and higher, but could still see herself standing on the shore, holding the thread. And the thread…

As if the smell and sound and motion of the timeless sea had washed away some of the confusion, some of the misty distraction, she saw it. The threads and their connecting nodes were dense with darkness, heavy with heat, and that
smell
…

“Kendra?”

A voice. His voice.
The
voice.

Kendra snapped as if she’d fallen asleep on her feet. She turned, fighting the urge to fall against Terry. He wrapped her in a blanket and left his arm draped around her. She sighed against him. He was so strong—not overly muscular like Piranha, but solid and steady. And quiet. She hadn’t heard his approach.

He guided her a few steps away from the shore, until the sand was dry. Then, as if they had agreed on the moment, they sank down to the sand. Terry sighed.

“Do you care that you just scared the crap out of me?” he said, surprising her with the anger in his voice. “You’re taking a stroll, so I wake up and you’re gone?”

Seeing her disappearance through his eyes, Kendra felt ashamed. “I wanted to let you sleep,” she said.

“Yeah, look at how great I’m sleeping. I couldn’t sleep with you
gone.”

He said it so plainly, in a matter-of-fact way, that she wondered if she’d heard him right.

“Your breathing,” he said quickly. “I hear you breathing when you sleep. On the bus, when we camp—your breathing’s always close to me. So I know everything’s okay.”

“I listen to you breathe too,” she said.

Then, for a long time, neither of them said anything. Kendra remembered Piranha and Sonia behind the dunes, wondering if they were still there. Wondering if Terry wanted to slip away together, and if he would be disappointed in her.

Kiss me,
she thought.
This would be a perfect moment. If we were supposed to be together, if the only thing that came out of this entire horrible mess was that you and I found each other. And if this moment, here in the moonlight, by the waves, was the moment when we first kissed, and we told our children…

Kendra’s daydream stopped cold. Children? How could she ever imagine bringing a child into the world?

“I hope the Blue Beauty can make it to Domino Falls,” Terry said.

“You think she can’t?”

He shrugged. “She needs a mechanic,” he said. “Something in the undercarriage. Something rattling. And the gears are getting a little tricky.” He smoothed his hands over his hair. “We’ll see. She’s always been a little temperamental, but now she’s downright mean. I think we’ll be all right.”

By that, of course, he meant he wasn’t sure they’d be all right. Kendra felt silly for fantasizing about a kiss when Terry was worried about breaking down on the road.

The moon danced on the water. Kendra picked up a stone and threw it, thinking to skip it out and right into the silver circle. Instead, it just hit a tiny wave and vanished.

The insanity hit her like a bomb again. Children! They might not
live past tomorrow. But if they couldn’t make it to Domino Falls, if something separated them, or one of them died, wasn’t that a better reason to kiss and hold each other now?

Sonia and Piranha already knew the answer to that question. Were those their love cries, just barely audible now? Or was that the sigh of a bird?

Terry’s weight beside her awakened a stirring Kendra had felt only mildly before, a sweet, heavy ache between her thighs. She wondered what it felt like to have a boy’s naked flesh pressed against hers, the whole length of his body. Would she ever know?

She’d had a boyfriend for three months and necked with him in his car, but he’d never pressed for anything else. All she’d seen was R-rated lovemaking in movies and little cheap images streamed on the Internet. Of course there was biology class, but rabbits and rhinos didn’t count. And the time her cousin’s sixteenth birthday party had turned into grinding, with neighborhood boys dancing too close in the dark, stone-faced, taut groins pressed behind her. Kendra had felt part intrigue, part revulsion.

But nothing captured the feeling of arousal Terry had planted in her.

Nothing else had ever come close.

“If she breaks down,” Terry went on finally, “we’ll stick together. Carry what we can. We can walk the rest of the way. Plenty do it.”

He almost hid the fear in his voice.

That time, there was no mistaking the sound of Piranha and Sonia.

Terry chuckled quietly, embarrassed.

“Live for the moment, I guess,” Terry said.

“I like that idea,” Kendra said.

It was hard to see his face in the dark, but she knew he was looking at her.

Terry took the hint. He leaned over to kiss her, and his mouth was its own ocean. She’d never been cast about so much by a kiss, so much
of her awake and wanting. Sand rained on her as she ran her fingers through his hair.

An endless kiss, ending too soon. Kendra must have forgotten to breathe while their lips met because her entire chest was beating with her heart.

Terry suddenly stood up and held his hand down to her.

“Where are we going?” she said.

She would have gone anywhere with him. To the Blue Beauty. To the dunes.

“Back to sleep,” Terry said.

She didn’t move at first, disappointed. Didn’t he want her?

“What’s wrong?” he said, although she thought he knew.

“What if… this is the last good night?” she said. The question sounded foolish, but they both knew there was nothing foolish about it.

“It’s not,” he said. “Or, anyway, even if it is, I have to do everything I can to make sure it isn’t—like get rest so I can stay awake tomorrow. And one day… one day we’ll have a
really
good night somewhere.”