Night Betrayed (33 page)

He’d meant to talk to her about Lou and the fact that they were twins, but it didn’t seem like the right time after all. Maybe it was the grief lingering in her face—it had only been two weeks. Maybe he wasn’t ready to take the chance that she, too, might think he was unnatural. Maybe he worried that she held Lou responsible for what had happened to Sam and that she’d never accept that they were twins.

“I’ve missed spending time with you,” he said, reaching for her hand. Maybe instead, I ought to tell her how I feel.

She smiled, and it seemed a little forlorn. She squeezed his fingers. “I have a lot to work through right now.”

He looked down at her, reached to brush that heavy, dark hair from her shoulder. “I understand. I just want you to know that I miss being with you. And I miss this.” He couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward, his hand gently curving under her jaw, and fit his lips onto hers.

His eyes closed at the pleasure, the familiar comfort and desire that came with that mere brush of mouth to mouth. He shifted, felt her mouth move beneath his, her lips part—a bit and he slipped the tip of his tongue along that little opening. Soft, warm, slick . . . Desire and need began to open up inside him.

And then she turned away, her hand moving to settle on his chest. “I . . . ah, Theo, I don’t think I can do this. Right now.”

A black hole suddenly yawned in front of his mind—empty and mysterious. His heart thudding, the suspicion he’d tamped back now blossoming into something unpleasant, Theo tried to catch her downturned gaze. “Too soon?”

“Yes.” She drew in a deep breath and looked at him. “I have a lot of things to work through. I’m confused and angry—so angry—and . . . oh, God, I want it to be okay, but every time I think of it, all I can see is you, that night. Flying into them, smashing those zombies, like some sort of berserker warrior. I can’t get rid of the images, the carnage, the violence. I dream about them. They give me nightmares.”

Stunned, Theo stepped back. What had been a little prickling of worry became a full-fledged roar of danger. His hands suddenly felt cold. “Selena. I wasn’t going to stand back and let them tear you—I thought it was you in there at first—or anyone apart. There was no way I wasn’t going to stop them. If I had the chance, I’d do it again. I’ve got to tell you, I respect your trying to help them, but I’m not going to let them take anyone’s life if I can help it. Especially yours.”

A tear overflowed from her eye and made a gleaming rivulet down her cheek. “I know it, Theo. I understand it. The problem is me. I see you doing that; I see you destroying them, and I’m so filled with hatred and fury—that I want to do it. I want to kill them. I want to destroy them all, those damned monsters, for what they’ve taken from me.” Her voice held a tone that was somewhere between madness and despair. “I want to do that. I want to fucking annihilate them, as violently and horribly as I can. All of them. But . . . I can’t. And I can’t go out there and try to save them either. The very thought makes me ill. I can’t do anything.”

By now, the tears streamed from her eyes and her once-peaceful face had turned angry and hard. There was an ugliness he’d never seen in her features. “And so, I think it’s best if I have some time to try and figure this out. Alone.”

Theo got the message. Loud and clear. He managed to subdue the bark of bitter laughter at the realization that this was the second time he’d fallen hard for a woman, and the second time he’d been shoved aside for some inexplicable reason that had nothing to do with him.

His mouth began to move before he realized what he was saying, but his brain caught up quickly. “That’s good, because that was what I wanted to talk to you about. Lou and I are going to be leaving. Probably tomorrow. We’ve got some things to check on. I’m not sure when we’ll be back. I just wanted to tell you.”

She met his eyes now, and he realized he was frightened by the nothing that was there. “Thank you for letting me know.” She began to turn away, to head back to the house, but she paused. “You’ll come back?”

He resisted the urge to snort in derision. The pain was just beginning to overtake the numbness. “Yes, I’m sure we’ll stop back sometime. I’m not sure when, though.” He did his best to keep his voice neutral and casual.

She stilled, as if surprised, then nodded. “Be safe, Theo.”

“Well, Lou, you’ve got your wish,” Theo said as he stomped into the arcade. “We’re going to hunt down some bounty hunters.”

To his surprise, there was no answer. “Lou?” he said, walking across the space that they’d turned into their own. The computers were on, as usual, but the screensavers were running. Lou had them set to come on after twenty minutes, so obviously he’d been away for a while.

Where the hell could he be? It was after nine, and old guys like Lou needed their beauty sleep. Or at least, they should be working on their hacking project if they weren’t sleeping. Beyond pissed-off and well into furious, Theo sat down at the nearest computer and woke up the screen to see what Lou had been working on.

Nothing. The idiot had been messing around with Brad Blizek’s new video treasure-hunt video game that looked as if he were going to combine it with geocaching. Not a bad idea, at least back in 2010.

Annoyed, upset, distracted, he began to look through some of the files of screencaps and mock-ups of the game. One of them popped up and he looked a little closer at one of the screenshots of the prototype and froze. Sonofabitch.

It was right here.

The symbol for the Cult of Atlantis—with its swastika, labyrinth, and the scrolling waves—was there, in the screenshot for the game. Holy fucking shit.

Theo’s fingers lost their nimbleness as he tried to start clicking through to other details of the game. Maybe everything they needed to know was here, right here in this game called Wobble.

Holy shit. That’s what he said. “The earth’s going to wobble.”

It was all here. Right here.

After a few minutes, on a hunch, he input one of the strings of numbers that they’d theorized were decimal coordinates and—bingo! It came up as one of the listings for the “real world” geocache list, embedded in the game.

Excited now, Theo delved deeper into all of the layers of files, notes, and mock-ups about the game. There were only fifteen “real world” geocache sites listed in Wobble, but twenty numbers listed in the information Lou and Theo had from the Strangers.

In the real world, back in 2010, where geocaching could be considered anything from family fun to an extreme sport, geographic coordinates were posted on websites for a sort of public treasure hunt in which the hunters used
GPS
to find the general location of a geocache, within a few square feet. When found, the caches—which were weatherproof, animal-proof boxes like ammo containers—could contain anything from a few bucks to small toys or trinkets, to merely a logbook. But in this game, the geocache locations were much more than that.

They were centers of power, well beneath the ground; and the point of the game was to neutralize each one, like stopping a bomb from detonating before a chain reaction set them off and made the world . . . wobble.

Holy wobbling earth axes. As Theo looked at the notes about the game, examining the files, his emotions ranged from fascination to chills to debilitating nausea when he realized what it meant. Were these geocaches somehow the locations through which the Cult of Atlantis had made the earth erupt, causing the Change?

He envisioned synchronized subterranean explosions of horrific magnitude that caused tectonic plates to shift and subduct, to implode or otherwise erupt . . . thus beginning the chain reaction that caused all of the cataclysmic earthquakes, tsunamis, fires . . . and everything else that combined to destroy the earth.

So this was how they did it.

And Brad Blizek had created a video game that was really a synthetic version of their plans.

Theo was still staring at the computer, trying to assimilate the truth of what had been done to his world and his race fifty years ago, when Lou arrived.

“Oh. You’re here,” he said, sounding surprised. “I thought you’d be gone longer. Maybe even overnight.” He gave a nervous little chuckle. “I saw you and Selena go outside after dinner.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s not working out too well,” Theo said from between stiff lips. “Lou, you gotta take a look at this. It’s all here—how they did it. And, by the way, we’re leaving tomorrow.”

Theo and Lou started in Yellow Mountain, casually asking about the snoot, trying to get enough information to decide which direction to go after them.

While they were there, Theo received some unsettling news.

“Wayne and Buddy are gone,” Patrick Dilecki, the guy who’d organized the search party on the night of Vonnie’s storytelling, told him. “Disappeared about three days ago.”

“Zombie attack?” asked Lou, but Theo was shaking his head. He’d seen them from his perch in the tree during the snoot visit. They’d been the ones who had the old computer monitor and the vehicle engine that had been confiscated and destroyed by Seattle and his men.

“Nope. No bodies, no evidence of any animal attack either. Just disappeared. Wayne’s momma is pretty upset. And Buddy’s wife—she’s going to have a baby in a few months.” Patrick shook his head, his lips flattening. “They got themselves into something they shouldn’t have been messing with. Dangerous stuff.”

“It’s not a coincidence that the snoot visited two weeks ago and now they’re gone, is it?” Theo asked Patrick.

The man’s face shuttered and he looked away, squinting out over the horizon. “Couldn’t say.”

But he didn’t need to.

“So they took them,” Lou said to Theo once they left Yellow Mountain. “They came back and took them. The bounty hunters.”

“That’s my best guess. At least we know Buddy and Wayne were here at least three days ago. Might make the trail easier to follow, if we can find it.”

“You gonna tell me what happened with Selena?” Lou asked as they hiked through the woods to where he’d left that Humvee in the ditch.

“You gonna tell me where you were last night?”

Neither of them replied.

Selena stared out the window, an ugly, aching gnawing working at her belly.

Night had come, as it continued to do despite her impotent wish to keep it at bay. Because with night came questions and guilt and confusion.

And, still, that deep, burning hate.

She’d stopped wearing her crystal, keeping it locked in its wooden box so that she wouldn’t have to feel it grow warm, beckoning to the zombies. They sensed it; she knew that. They came, they gathered, they cried—all beyond the safe walls.

She saw their orange eyes glowing in the distance. She heard their moans.

She hated them. And yet she was moved by their piteous cries, which only she understood.

Still, she did nothing.

Sammy. Sammy. I hope you’re at peace. I’m so sorry.

Oh, God, I miss him. The house was so quiet. It was as if a part of her heart had been carved away. A piece of her life . . . gone.

Seventeen years old. He never got to manhood, never got to fulfill the promise she’d seen in him: the kindness, the sense of reverence for the world and all living things. He’d have been a great father. The raw hollowing inside her wouldn’t go away. It gnawed and scraped.

Selena peered west out the window, wiping her eyes and wondered where Theo was. If he was safe. What he and that old man Lou were doing, and whether they would ever return.

He’d insinuated himself into the household, into her life, and she missed him too.

Why did I send him away again?

And yet, when she closed her eyes, she saw his dark face, tight with fury and intent, his eyes flashing violence. She saw the spraying of flesh and blood, felt the stirring of the air as he spun and clubbed and fought the monsters.

How could she ever get beyond that, when that same violence stirred inside her?

Selena turned from the window and the glowing orange eyes beyond the walls. She ignored her bed to go down the stairs and check on one of her patients.

Sleep was something rare and fitful now.

Reggie Blanchard’s breathing was shallow and labored, and she sat with him, watching the gray fog swirl and mist gently above him. Even in the night, the silvery glint was evident, catching whatever bit of illumination was available. He was an old man, perhaps as old as Vonnie; and he was merely wearing down, easing from life into death. He’d been living in Yellow Mountain, working as a metalsmith for the last two years, since his wife died in Selena’s care. Now she and his sister waited for him, hovering with the blue glow of the afterlife, in the corner, as the guides often did. Waiting.

Selena stared into nothing, enveloped by numbness and apathy, holding his large, gnarled hand.

And threading through the night was the sound of moans in the distance. “Ruuu-uuuthhhhh.”

Mom.

At first she thought she was dreaming, that she’d finally found sleep. The sound was in her head, buried in her mind, and yet she looked up, searching. And there he was. Sammy.

In the corner, hovering with Reggie’s wife and sister. The two women smiled at Selena, but she barely noticed.

I told you I wouldn’t really leave you.

“Hi, Sammy. I miss you.” Tears stung her eyes and she looked at him, hardly able to see any detail when she focused hard, except his eyes. Nevertheless, she knew it was him.

I miss you too. And I’m worried about you.

“I’ll be all right. It takes time.”

Reggie is going to go soon. We’re here to help him, Mrs. Blanchard and me. He was always nice to me when I saw him in town.

“So is this your new job? Helping bring people over to the other side?” She felt a little smile waver at the corner of her mouth.

Like mother, like son. I’ll be around to help sometimes. Like a conduit.

“Are you all right?”

Yes. You can’t imagine what it’s like here.

“Then that’s all I can ask, hm?”

Mom. Try to start living again.

She frowned, tried to hold back the sting of tears. “I don’t know if I know how.”