Ghost Town (31 page)

There it was again. How could her heart keep on breaking? Why didn’t it just do it once and get it over with? Claire struggled to keep the hurt she felt from echoing in her voice. “I know you think you don’t,” she said. “But honest, Shane, you do know me. We’re . . . friends.”

He stared at her for what seemed like the longest time, and then he said, “I’m sorry I pushed you. I don’t . . . I don’t do things like that.”

“I know.”

“Is it true? Is Lyss really . . .”

Claire just nodded without speaking. Shane’s hair blew in his face, but he didn’t blink. She reached over without thinking and moved it back. He caught her hand against his face.

“You touch me a lot,” he said. “Don’t you?”

She looked down and felt the blush mounting in her face. “I guess I do,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She risked a quick look up at him. He was studying her, as if he were really seeing her for the first time. “What?”

“Are we going out?”

She nodded. He didn’t say anything at all. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Before she could think how to ask what he was feeling, he stood up, and she hurried to do the same.

“So I have amnesia,” he said. “That’s what you’re telling me. I got some kind of kick in the head and I lost a bunch of time and forgot all this. And you.”

That was . . .
so
much easier than what she’d been trying to say. “Yes.” She nodded. “Amnesia. That’s why you need to trust me, Shane. It’s dangerous out here. You don’t know how dangerous.”

For the first time, he gave her an ironic expression she recognized—classic Shane. “It’s Morganville. Of course it’s dangerous.” He glanced back down at Alyssa’s headstone, and that moment of the Shane she knew flickered and almost disappeared. Almost. “She wouldn’t want me moping around the cemetery like some dumb-ass. Alyssa wasn’t like that. She’d make fun of me if I did.” Shane took in a deep breath. “So I guess . . . I guess I can go to Michael’s house. At least I know him, even if I don’t know you.”

She smiled a little. It felt forced. “We’ll work on it.” She held out her hand, but he put his in his pockets.

“No offense,” he said, “but I’ve got a lot to think about, here. I need some time.”

Her shattered heart broke all over again.

It felt just as bad this time.

“Sure,” she managed to say. “I understand.”

There was still nobody at the Glass House when they returned, but Claire still shuddered in relief at just being home. Shane looked a little mistrustful, but he came inside and didn’t protest when she locked up behind him. “Do you want to see your room?” she asked. He shook his head, hands firmly in his pockets. “Do you want coffee?”

“I hate coffee,” he said. “Never touch the stuff.”

“Really?” Maybe that had been something he’d learned on the road, with his mom and dad. “Okay, how about . . . Coke?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t love Coke?”

She left him looking at the TV and the game controllers, and went to pull the last two cans out of the fridge. Somebody was going to have to go shopping. She supposed she’d better do it soon, before she lost her mind, too. Even in an apocalypse like this, surely running out of Coke qualified as a disaster.

Shane was sitting on the couch when she came back, and she handed over the can and sat on the other end, leaving plenty of comfort space between them. He nodded and popped the top. “So, I live here?”

“Yeah. Right up there.”

“That’s Michael’s room.”

“No, he’s over there now.”

“Huh, he always liked that room better.” He poked at the controller. “And we have an Xbox.”

“Actually, you’ve got an Xbox 360,” she said. “You bought it last year.”

“Sweet. What’s the difference?”

“Do you really want to talk about games right now?”

He stopped fiddling with the controller and put it down. “I guess not. Those other people out there, the ones acting so weird—they’ve got what I have, right? This memory problem. I didn’t just get kicked in the head or drugged or something.”

“No,” Claire said. “There’s a machine underground; it’s what wipes people’s memories when they leave town. But it’s not working right. It’s wiping memories inside town.”

He stopped to think about that. It said something about his childhood in Morganville that he didn’t, in fact, find that unbelievable at all. “How many people have it?”

“A lot. Maybe all of us, eventually. Michael got it yesterday. So did Eve. So did Amelie.”

Shane looked at her sharply. “Who?”

“You know. The Founder.”

“You know her by
name
?”

“So do you. But right now, she’s stuck in three years ago, just like you. She doesn’t remember me. She doesn’t remember Oliver or—”

“Who’s Oliver?”

This was going to be harder than she’d expected. “Never mind. The important thing is that before we went to sleep last night, we agreed we were going to find other people who could help us and we were going to try to turn off the machine.”

“We went to sleep together,” he said. “Without clothes.”

“Uh . . . yeah. We had underwear on, though.”

“Right. Why do I think that maybe it’s come off before?” He stared at her for what seemed like an uncomfortably long second, as if he were remembering her almost naked. “Okay, sounds easy enough. Let’s do it, if this is going to fix things.” He watched her expression, and said, “But it isn’t that easy. Is it?”

“The vamps won’t let us anywhere near where we need to go,” she said. “I can’t think of any of them we can count on now. Not even Michael.”

“Wait a second,
what
? Michael
Glass
? He is
not
a vampire. I think you mean his granddad Sam. Are you sure you really live here? Because that’s a pretty gigantic mistake.”

“I’m not talking about Sam,” Claire said. “Michael . . . Michael got bitten. And now he’s a vampire. But he doesn’t remember becoming one, and that’s a big problem. So if you see him, don’t, you know, hug. He bites. He doesn’t mean to, though.”

“You
are
freaking insane; I was right the first time about you. Michael, a vampire? Never happen.” But even though he said it, Shane didn’t try to get up and leave. “You’re not from Morganville. If you were, I’d remember you, right? So who are you, exactly?”

“I came to the university. That’s how I met you guys.”

He laughed. “Me? In college? Yeah, make up another one. Look, I barely got through last year in high school. I don’t think anybody’s going to be giving me college admission, not even to TPU, the crappiest school in Texas.”

“It’s not that bad,” Claire said, although she had no idea why she was trying to defend the place. It hadn’t done her many favors. “I didn’t meet you
in
college. I met you
because
of college. Because of Monica.”

“Morrell.”

“Bitch queen of Morganville,” Claire said. “Well, she’s still all that, and more. I guess she was pretty bad in high school, but trust me, she’s worse now.”

“Nice to know some things haven’t changed.” Shane pulled in a deep breath. “Okay, I didn’t want to ask, but . . . what about my mom and dad? Where are they?”

She just looked at him, and he finally turned his head away. “Okay,” he said. “I get it. They’re dead, too.”

“Your mom . . . your mom is,” Claire said. “I don’t know where she’s buried. Your dad’s . . . well—”

“Still an alcoholic jerk? Big shock.”

“No,” she said. “Your dad’s a vampire.”

Shane froze, eyes wide, and then laughed in a bitter, shocked kind of way. “Like hell he is. He’d kill himself first.”

“Trust me, I think he thought about it after it happened. But I guess he’s decided to hang around after all. Wait. . . . Maybe we can find him. Maybe he’s not affected yet. He might help us.”

“
My
dad? Even if he wasn’t a vampire—and I’m not buying that he is, by the way—he wasn’t big on doing favors for anybody. Not even his own kids. Maybe we’d better skip the family reunion.”

Claire wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t want to freak Shane out any more than she had to, and Frank Collins as a vampire was enough to freak
anybody
out. Much less his own son. “Okay,” she said. “But we have to find a way to get to that machine and shut it off. And we need help.
Any
help.”

“I’m glad you said that,” said a voice from behind them. “Because you’ve got no idea how much help you need.”

Claire and Shane both jumped off the couch, suddenly and completely on the same side; he even got in front of her, the kind of protective instinct Shane had always had, since the first time she’d met him. He might not believe her, or trust her, but he’d still fight for her.

Maybe because somewhere, deep down, he
did
remember.

Claire realized who was standing there, in the shadows by the stairs, about the same time that Shane did. It was the scar on his face that registered first, and then the rest of it . . . long, tied-back hair, a hard, unforgiving expression, a tough, thin body. He was wearing a leather vest over a Harley T-shirt and old jeans, and combat boots. He had a big, scary knife in a sheath at his waist.

Frank Collins.

Vampire.

“Dad,” Shane whispered.

“Hello, son.”

“How did you get in here?” Claire blurted, because she knew—
knew
—that the house itself had been on guard for Frank. But she hadn’t felt anything when he’d entered—no warnings, nothing.

Maybe the house thought they needed his help, too. Or, more worrying, maybe the machine had robbed the house of its protective ability, too. It was slowly destroying everything good in Morganville.

Frank shrugged. “I’ve been following the two of you around for a couple of days. Had to know what you were planning to do about all this,” he said. “Not too surprised about what my son said about me, if that’s what’s worrying you. I deserved it. Still do.” He looked over at Shane. “But I don’t drink much anymore. Well, not booze, anyway.” He smiled and showed vamp teeth.

Shane backed up a step and ran into Claire. She steadied him and whispered, “I told you.”

“It can’t be,” he said. “There’s some kind of—”

“Mistake?” Frank said, and jumped over the couch in one smooth, ominous vampire move to land right in front of them. They were up against the wall now, next to the TV. “Only mistake I ever made was coming back to this cursed town in the first place, Shane. And sending you back here to help. If we’d stayed on the road, we’d still be running, but at least we’d be together.”

“Running. Running from what?”

“Oh, come on, son. You think they really let us leave, just like that? We had help getting out, but they’d have brought us back, or killed us, if they’d caught us. Just like they killed your mother.”

Shane’s breath went out in a rushing moan, as if his dad had punched him. Claire put her hand on his shoulder and glared at Frank. “Stop it,” she said.

“You started it,” Frank said. “You told him part of the truth, didn’t you? Told him about Alyssa? Well, he needs to know everything. He needs to know how his mother got into drugs to forget the pain. He needs to know how we got chased from one ratty motel to another across the state. He needs to know those bastards cut her wrists and dumped her in a tub to pretend it was suicide—”

“Stop it!” Claire screamed, and put herself in front of Shane, like she could protect him from the words the way he protected her from fists.

“And how he found her,” Frank finished, softly, “floating there. Dead. I thought I’d lost you, too, son. You didn’t talk for days, didn’t sleep, didn’t eat. But then you told me you wanted to come back here, to Morganville. To make them pay.”

Shane had gone almost as white as his vampire father now, and his eyes were huge and dark and empty. Claire turned toward him and put her hands on his cheeks, trying to make him look at her. He didn’t. He couldn’t look away from Frank. “Shane, Shane, listen, he’s trying to hurt you; he
always
tries to hurt you—”

“Not always,” Frank said. “Somebody’s got to tell the boy what he needs to hear, even though it hurts. He needed to know what happened to his mom. You weren’t going to tell him, were you?”

“There wasn’t any reason! You just like to watch him suffer!” Claire snapped. “You’re a mean, vicious, evil—”

“I love my son,” Frank said. “But he had to grow up in those three years after Alyssa died. And he has to do it all over again, now even faster. Can’t sugarcoat that, Claire.”

Shane put his hands on Claire’s shoulders—the first time he’d actually touched her gently, she thought, since waking up this morning—and moved her out of the way. “So I’m what, eighteen now? Not fifteen?”

“Almost nineteen,” his dad said.

“Good.” And Shane punched him in the face.

Well, he tried to. Frank caught his fist about an inch away from landing. He didn’t punch back, or shove, or squeeze Shane’s hand into a mess, although Claire knew he could have. He just held it there, even though Shane tried to pull back. “Son,” he said, “I was bad at being a father, just as bad as I was at everything else. You were the one who took care of your mother and Alyssa. You did the job I was supposed to do, being the man of the house, from the time you were eight years old. And I’m sorry for that.”

He pulled Shane forward and hugged him. Shane was stiff as bundled wire, but after a moment, he relaxed a little, and then stepped away. Frank let him go.

“So now you want to make it up to me,” Shane said. “Well, you can’t. I didn’t trust you before. I damn sure don’t trust you as a bloodsucker.”

“Right now, you two need a bloodsucker,” Frank said. “At least, that’s what I heard the girl saying. Isn’t that right, Claire?”

She didn’t like agreeing with Frank Collins, ever, but she had to nod. “You aren’t affected yet.”

“There are a few who aren’t,” Frank said. “Don’t know why; maybe our brains are just wired different, or maybe it’s just random. Most of the others are hiding out; can’t say I really blame them. I might be able to get a couple of people on board if we need them.”

“Vampire people.”

Frank bared his fangs. “I’ve still got friends on both sides of the bloodline. You want’em or not?”