The Outside (17 page)

When we were ready to go, when Horace was packed up and the backpacks were full and propped beside the glowing mannequins, I came to Alex. He had dressed himself in the warmest coat he’d found, which he called his pimp coat. It was a long black leather coat with a bizarre gray and black furry lining.

“It’s like
Blade
meets
Jersey Shore
,” Alex said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It would take too long to explain and would reduce your faith in humanity.”

“
Ja
, thanks, then.”

I had dug through the women’s department and found a long dark gray coat. It was lined in velvet and possibly the warmest garment I’d ever seen. I’d picked out some tall warm boots without heels and plenty of traction, and gloves and warm leggings.

I had found myself a dress that was as close as possible to an Amish dress. It was dark purple, and long-sleeved, reaching nearly to the tops of my boots. The neck was fancy, with ruffles that reached up to my chin. And there were ruffles on the cuffs. But it was, by and large, plain. I put my bonnet on and walked out to meet Alex and the animals.

He nodded in approval at me. “You look beautiful, Bonnet.”

“Thank you,” I said. The idea still seemed unfamiliar.

He reached down to unlatch the metal grate. I squinted. It had been too long since I’d seen full daylight. I’d grown accustomed to the faint half-light of candles and the softly glowing luminescence of the mannequins. I shaded my eyes with my hand.

“Oh,” I breathed.

It had begun to snow. The ground was coated in a thin layer of white.

And there were not any other footprints. Not for miles.

I saw only the sketchy tracks of sparrows as we walked away from the town. There was a certain safety in that. But it also confirmed that we walked in an empty world.

I buried my face in my hood. I had wanted to be away from any threats. Part of me even wanted to be a coward, to stay at the department store until the caramel popcorn ran out. But it seemed the farther we moved away from threats of Darkness, the closer we moved to threats from nature.

Fenrir relished the snow, bounding like a puppy. It stopped falling around midmorning, allowing the cold eye of the sun to burn through pearly clouds. But until then, the wolf skidded after it, and bit at the white flakes. Alex made him a snowball and tossed it far. Fenrir tried to maul it to death, but it broke apart on impact. He wound up only rolling in the snow. Horace gave him a pained snort.

“Wolves are supposed to love snow,” I said.

“Why’s that?”

“The rest of their prey is starved. Weak. They can spot it easily in the snow. Winter is their harvest season.”

“That’s damned cheerful, Bonnet.”

I held up my gloved hands. “It’s the truth!”

If any one of us were to survive the end of the world, it would be Fenrir. He found two rabbits before the afternoon. The first one he gave to us. The second one he devoured on his own. I figured he was probably tired of jerky and gourmet popcorn.

We moved north, along a freeway. Alex said that if it was safe, we could follow it west and north to Canada through Michigan and hopefully reach Saulte Ste. Marie without being molested by city vampires.

And it seemed safe. There were no human tracks this far. We appeared to have God on our side.

Especially when we found the fireworks factory.

Alex paused at a guardrail at the edge of the road, staring at a boxy metal building. The rotted and frozen remains of a produce stand stood outside in a gravel lot. There were no cars.

The last time we’d come upon a structure like this, Alex had steered us away. I asked why.

“It’s an adult bookstore,” he’d said. I could swear that he blushed.

“Aren’t most bookstores for adults?” I was familiar with libraries. Unbeknownst to my parents, I had frequented the one in the town near our home. Most of the books there were for adults, but some had been for children. I supposed that, in the English world, perhaps there were separate bookstores for adults and children.

“
Nnnnoooo
. This is a euphemism. For pornography. Magazines with naked women and videos of men and women in the act. In a lot of acts, really. Sometimes men and men. Women and women. Doing stuff that you really can’t imagine. With props.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Trust me, it would blow your mind. Maybe  . . . if you really want to, we’ll go on the way back after the end of the world is finished.”

“Oh.” My brows drew together, and I looked back over my shoulder. I was curious, but not curious enough to risk entering a den of vampires who had been slavering over pictures of naked people. And whatever else was in there.

But Alex was quite keen on this building. The cartoon figure of a superhero was painted on the side, sporting a cape and shooting magical blue fire from his hands. The sign read
CAPTAIN BLOWTORCH’S FIREWORKS
.

I squinted at it. “I saw fireworks every year on the Fourth of July. They set them off in the nearby town. They were pretty.”

“And also highly flammable. And probably better than any other weapon we could find against the vampires . . . if the place hasn’t been cleaned out.”

“It’s worth checking,” I agreed.

We walked down the exit ramp to the store. Fenrir sniffed vigorously along the side of the building. He caught a vole and swallowed it in two bites.

There were no windows in the small metal building. That made me a little nervous. Alex tugged on the front door. It was locked with a padlock. I supposed that was a good sign. Nothing had gotten in—or out—in a long time. And there were no tracks but ours in the dusting of snow.

“Locked. But not for long.” He produced one of the tools from the camping aisle: a flexible cable saw. He tugged it through the hasp of the lock, back and forth, until it fell in pieces and metal dust on the ground.

He rubbed his hands together. “Let’s see what we’ve got in here to fight the vampire apocalypse, eh?”

I lifted my flashlight as he opened the door.

The fireworks factory was nothing more than a pole barn set up on a gravel floor. Picnic tables were arranged on the gravel, and they were stacked high with wooden boxes and brightly colored cardboard bins. I swept the light beam around, up into the rafters, into corners, searching for vampires. I saw only an opossum with its babies scuttling along the floor.

Alex let loose a low whistle as he peered into a box labeled
NUCLEAR GLITTER MELTDOWN
. He held up red white and blue colored boxes in two fists. There were eagles printed on them and a backwash of fire. “Jackpot.”

“What is that?”

“Not sure. But if we follow the instructions and set fire to it, it promises a ‘blaze of wrath.’ Also plenty of ‘glittery aftertrails.’”

I picked up a stick labeled
MORTAR FURY CANNON
. “This looks promising.”

“Swweeeeeet.”

Alex and I did some quick calculations about the amount of additional weight that we could carry. Horace was saddled up with almost a hundred pounds of gear, and we didn’t want him to break a leg now that there was danger of ice. We decided that each one of us could carry an extra bag of anti-vampire weaponry if we committed to walk on foot with fifty additional pounds for the horse.

“I don’t know how to use these,” I said.

“Set fire to the fuse end,” Alex said. “Throw it. And then I think we run.”

We walked out into the gloom of the evening, our arms and pockets full of artillery. The sun had set, and shadows gathered thick around us. I felt irrationally cheerful at pulling off the fireworks heist . . .

. . . until we stepped out onto the parking lot. A siren sounded, and blue and red strobe lights flashed. I squinted. I could make out the shape of a police car, one that said
HIGHWAY PATROL
. A figure stood before it.

My heart plummeted into my gut and bounced into my throat. It plunged at the thought of being caught stealing, but soared to think that there was someone human here. That there was law and order in the world.

The silhouette walked toward us. He wore a broad-brimmed hat. His boots crunched in the gravel, and I saw him rest his thumbs in his gun belt as he approached.

“You two wouldn’t be disturbing the peace, would you?” he said. He pulled his gun from his holster. “Breaking and entering?”

I stared down at our cache of weapons. We were caught. But better a night in jail than a night out here.

“Officer, are we glad to see you,” Alex said.

“Not nearly as glad as I am to see you.” He lifted his head and smiled.

In the flash of red and blue light, I saw fangs glint.

“Damn it,” Alex said.

I was rooted in place. I didn’t know which I was more afraid of: the teeth or the gun.

A low growling emanated from our left. The trooper turned, aiming his weapon toward Fenrir.

“No!” I shouted.

Alex threw his box of fireworks at the trooper. It knocked him off balance, and the gun went off with a deafening
crack
. The bullet sparked on the gravel. Fenrir lunged for the cop’s gun arm, and the vampire hissed.

The gun clattered away. Unthinking, I lunged for it. It came up in my hands, feeling heavy and cold.

The vampire flung Fenrir across the hood of the car. The wolf yelped and rage boiled in me.

“Leave him alone,” I said.

I held the gun on the trooper. I was not unfamiliar with guns; my father had owned a hunting rifle. I assumed that this followed the same principle. But I had been taught never, never to aim a gun toward a person. Never to cause harm. Always to turn the other cheek. My finger sweated on the trigger. Through all the violence I had committed, this seemed like a strange new method. One that I knew I could master.

The trooper snarled. His hat had been knocked off, and he advanced toward Alex.

“Don’t,” I said.

I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled the trigger.

The gun bucked up and over my head, flinging my arms with it. I opened my eyes to see that the bullet had struck the vampire in the shoulder. A black ooze emanated from below his shiny metal epaulets.

He just smiled at me, unfazed. “That’s a felony, girlie. Assault on a police officer will put you away for a long time. Maybe even forever.”

Fear lanced through me. I didn’t know if the vampire cop understood what had happened to him. Was he just fulfilling his pre-death programming of enforcing the law? Or was this part of some sadistic cruelty I didn’t understand?

It didn’t matter.

I pulled the trigger again.

And again.

The gun bucked in my hands, but I forced it down, kept firing. I think I hit the car; I saw glass break. One of the hot casings struck me in the cheek. I couldn’t hear anything else over the roar of the gunshots.

But the vampire kept coming. He had turned away from Alex toward me, his mouth open in a dark leer. The bullets would push him back a step, but he would recover and gain traction.

I wrenched down on the trigger again, flinched, but nothing happened.

I was out of bullets.

The trooper grabbed my arm, hauled me toward the car. I kicked and struggled. The roar had receded in my ears, and I could hear the pounding of my own blood. He slammed me against the back door of the car, lifting me so that my feet didn’t touch the ground. I reached into my pocket for my
Himmelsbrief
. I got the paper half out of the pocket, and the trooper snarled, dropping me.

“Hey, Smokey!”

I heard Alex’s voice above the ringing. Alex hauled back the trooper’s collar and stuffed a flaming firework down the back of his shirt.

The vampire hissed and dropped me. He reached behind himself, trying to claw the back of his shirt, which was sparkling with an unnatural blue fire.

I ran to the horse. Horace was backing away, ears flattened. Alex grabbed his reins, tossed me up into the saddle. From the corner of my eye, I saw Fenrir slink out from behind the police car. Alex swung clumsily into the saddle behind me.

The trooper clawed at his back, ripping his shirt out of his belt. I turned Horace toward the exit ramp, away. Fenrir loped after us.

The firework exploded in a shower of blue sparks. I heard hissing and growling.

“What was that?” I shouted.

“Blue Victory.”

I turned back in the saddle. “Not victorious enough . . .”

The smoldering cop was missing an arm, but he climbed behind the wheel of the cruiser. The car spun out in the lot and turned to pursue.

“We can’t outrun him,” I said. “We should go off the road . . .”

“No,” Alex said. “Go to the bridge.”

He pointed ahead of me, away from the freeway. An old covered bridge useless for heavy traffic crossed a river.

“He can still follow us,” I protested.

“Cross the bridge!”

I bit my lip and dug my heels into Horace’s sides.

The horse ran as fast as he could toward the bridge. Flecks of spittle came back to strike me in the face. Fenrir was a gray blur at the side of the road, struggling to keep up. I flinched, seeing our shadows driven before us by headlights and hearing the rev of an engine. Stray snowflakes shimmered in the darkness.

“Go, Horace,” I whispered into the horse’s flattened ear. “Go!”

The horse’s hooves slammed onto the wood floorboards, and we plunged into the total darkness of the covered bridge. The headlights grew more distant behind us, like stars.

I turned back.

The police car was stopped at the edge of the bridge.

“Why isn’t he following?” I shouted.

“I don’t think he
can
.”

We thundered across the bridge, onto a dirt road beyond. I pulled Horace up, looked over the black water at the still headlights.

“There’s an old myth that vampires can’t cross running water,” Alex said. “I didn’t know if it was true, if it would apply in this case, but . . . it seems to have stopped him.”

Fenrir paced to the riverbank, howling softly. It was a high, mournful keening. Whether it was in victory or warning, I couldn’t tell.

But no one answered him.