Shadows (2 page)

“Can you wait?” When the boy hesitated, he added, “A week, ten days at the most; that’s all I’m asking.”

“Can I ask why?”

All of a sudden, it was very hard to swallow. “Michael’s birthday. I know Grace has held back enough flour and sugar to bake a cake. It would mean a lot to her.” He paused, then added, roughly, “Me, too.”

“Then, of course, I’ll stay,” Tom Eden said. “No problem.”

Tom watched as Jed trudged back up the trail and disappeared into a thick screen of tamarack and hemlock. Now that he was better, Tom came up to the cabin only for meals, which was safer all the way around. Just no telling who might show up, and Jed and Grace were already in danger for sheltering him. He owed them his life. If they’d chosen another route west or hadn’t gotten curious about those three dead kids sprawled in that convenience store lot, he would have died. As it was, by the time the fever broke and his delirium passed, four days were gone, and he was in Wisconsin.

God, poor Alex. Despite the deep cold, a hot-white burn flared in his chest, and he had to clamp back on a moan. She must’ve been frantic when she returned and found him gone. That’s how he would’ve felt. And she
had
come back; he knew it. She was stubborn, a fighter. He would never have given up on her
—

All of a sudden and out of thin air, there came a tiny, frightened whimper.

No.
His breath thinned and died. Tom went absolutely still. Had he been a different person in any other place and time, he might have glanced at the dog or thought there must be a small animal, like a chipmunk or maybe even a squirrel, scuttling by. But Tom was not someone else. After Afghanistan, he could never be anyone else—and, maybe, not even himself.

The whimper—really, a choked sob—came again.

Ignore it, just like the doctors said
.
Come on, breathe.
He dug the heels of his hands into his temples as he pulled in a long, cold draw, let it out, sucked in again.
Just breathe, this isn’t real, this isn’t—

“Puh-puh-plee.” Other than
candee
and
meester
, this probably had been the only English the little girl knew, and oh Jesus, he would know that voice anywhere. She rattled off something in rapid-fire Pashto he didn’t understand and then said again, “Plee, plee . . .”

“No,” he whispered. “You’re not there. Go away, go—” He squeezed his eyes tight, as if doing that would block out the rest, but it was already much too late. He could feel the flashback biting into his brain, digging in with its claws. His head swam, and a thick layer of dust suddenly clogged his throat.
That’s not real. There’s no dust. I’m in Wisconsin; it’s winter. I am
not
hearing this.
He tried clamping down on his thoughts and muscling himself back under control, but now the Afghan sun was baking him alive; he was hot, so hot, and there was grit between his teeth and on his tongue, and he could hear the hollow
boom-boom-boom
of distant weapons fire. The blast suit was suddenly there, too: a seventy-pound cocoon of hard armor and polyurethane padding that weighed him down just as heavily as these chains of memory.

A crackle of static. “For God’s sake, Tom!” A sputter and then Jim—his best friend, a person he trusted with his life—said through the headphone over Tom’s right ear, “Jesus, Tom, come on, man, get out, just cut—”

No, Jim, you’re dead
. Tom was panting now. He couldn’t help it.
You’re dead, Jim, I shot you—

“Amereekan
.
”
Not a girl now, but a boy: no less frightened and just as young, his trembling voice dribbling in through the ambient mike by Tom’s left ear: “Amereekan, please, Amereekan, please, please . . .”

“Leave me
alone
,” Tom ground out. He’d once told a shrink that being caught in a flashback was like having your mind sucked down the throat of an inky whirlpool. You were just
there,
in a nightmare swirl of images that became more and more like real things and not only shadows of memory. “Get out of my head. I can’t save you. I can’t save anybody, I can’t—”

“Tom
.
” Another girl, but a much older voice—and someone he also knew, oh, so well. “Tom, help me, please.”

Alex.
Everything, all of him, went dead inside. He couldn’t feel his heart at all. She wasn’t there; he knew that. But he would give his life to see her again, and if he turned around—if he opened his eyes and peered into that awful past—she would be there, on her knees, in the rubble, beneath a merciless sun. That, he thought, he couldn’t bear.
No, God, don’t do this, please, don’t—

“Tom,” Alex said again, and her voice was shaking; she was pleading and she sounded so much like that little girl! “Tom, don’t do this. Don’t leave me here to—”

“Alex, I can’t. Oh, God,
please
,” Tom rasped. He was not going to look. This was not real and Alex was not there; she was
never
part of that horror. “God, please stop this, pl—”

“Tom, come
on
.” Jim was back. His friend’s voice crackled with urgency. “Forget it, man, you got to get out. Cut the wire, come on, grab the kid and get out! Leave her, Tom, leave the girl, you’ve got to get—”

“STOP!”
he roared. The shrinks always said he ought to calmly talk himself down, but then again, they weren’t trapped in this endless loop. “Stop,
please,
just
stop
!”

That worked. In the next instant, Tom felt his brain abruptly disengage as the flashback finally let go. That was always the same, too, and if he had to put words to it, the sensation was like bulleting through a brittle pane of window glass, his body shattering from one world to the next.

At his side, the dog, Raleigh, nudged Tom’s good thigh and let out a short, sharp yip.

“He-hey, b-boy,” Tom said. He was shuddering, and he felt his knees beginning to hinge. Gripping the doorjamb with his right hand, Tom held on tight until the wood bit his flesh. The pain wasn’t bad, but it was enough. It was, in fact, perfect. The dog let out another rough
wuff
, and then leaned in as if trying to prop Tom up the way a bookend kept a stack of flimsy paperbacks from tumbling to the floor.

“Thanks, boy. I kn-know.” He let out a long, trembling breath. “Sit down before I fa-fall down.”

Groaning, Tom stretched out on an old army cot. The springs complained, and he winced as his mangled muscles caught and then grudgingly relaxed. Beneath his parka, he could feel his shirt sticking to the skin between his shoulder blades. Gradually, he got his breathing under control, and that sick, woozy, light-headed feeling passed. Satisfied now, the dog did three turns and settled with a sigh onto an olive-drab blanket.

Jesus.
Tom armed sweat from his forehead. That had been bad, but he thought he knew why. The ache in his heart—the absence that was Alex—was a scream that only got louder and stronger with each day that passed.

I’ve got to leave, get back to Michigan, before I lose my mind.

And he
could
manage it now. Tom ran a hand over his right thigh where Harlan had shot him the day they’d lost Ellie. He had another new scar on his neck: a souvenir from that fight in the convenience store parking lot when that kid had tried to tear out his throat. But it was the leg that had been the worst, that had nearly finished him. The wound had healed to a fist-sized crater tented with thick, shiny, taut scar tissue. He’d lost some strength, although his limp was improving and he could muster a fast jog now. Still, the leg might be a problem, especially in the backcountry. Jed would want him to take one of their two horses, but of course, he’d refuse. If Jed and Grace had to leave this place for any reason, they’d need their animals. So maybe steal a horse somewhere else? He’d cover the eighty-plus miles to the Michigan border a lot faster if he did. But any animal—or person, for that matter—was also an added responsibility, something he’d told Ellie himself right before they left the Waucamaw. They couldn’t rescue everyone.

For all the good I did Ellie.
The thought forced a lump to his throat. In his mind, he’d always known that their survival came down to a very simple equation: either he had the strength and the will to do whatever it took to keep Alex and Ellie alive, or the people he had come to care for would die. And so he had failed. Again. When it counted, he hadn’t been able to save Ellie. Thinking of the little girl still hurt, although the nightmares had finally faded. The chances Ellie was still alive were between slim and none. Ellie was dead, and that was on him. He didn’t like it, but he
could
let go.

Alex was . . . different. God, he wished he’d found the courage to tell her everything, the whole terrible mess, what he’d done and at what price. Of all people,
she
would have understood, and that would have saved him. He pressed a palm to his chest and felt the hard thump of his heart. The pain whenever he thought about her was something raw, an ache that was more than grief and sharper than sorrow. It was longing. It was need. It was the sense of something that wasn’t over and he hoped never would be. He simply refused to believe that she was lost to him.

And she was in danger. He just
knew
. That had to be why his mind put her in Afghanistan, too, where death might be under a rock or in a bag of trash or strapped to—

Don’t go there; don’t think it.
A groan tried pushing its way past his teeth. He thought he still had time to save Alex but not much. He might already be too late.

Please, God.
He flung an arm over his eyes.
Please, help me. I’m not asking for a miracle. Just keep her safe a little while longer until I can get to her, that’s all. Please.

Of course, nothing happened. No lightning bolts, no heavenly choirs, no angels. The dog only groaned, and the heater hummed. A sudden fist of wind shook the boathouse and rattled the boards, but that was just a lot of air.

That was all right. What mattered was how he felt and what he knew. Alex was alive and he was going back. He would find her, or die trying.

“Hang on, Alex,” he whispered. “Hang on.”

Oh God, help me, please, help me.
Alex felt her mind begin to slip, as if the world was ice and begun to tilt and she was going to slide right off and fall away into forever if she didn’t hang on tight. Her heart was trying to blast right out of her chest. She was shaking, all over, the hay hook in its belt loop bouncing against her right thigh. The pyramid, row after row of skulls, loomed at her back: all that remained of those who’d stumbled into this killing field before her. And of course, there was the smell—that familiar reek of roadkill and boiled sewage.

This can’t be happening; it’s not happening.

But it was. They were right there, no more than a hundred feet from where she groveled in the snow. Five Changed. Two girls. Three boys.

She watched, not daring to move, as they fanned out in a rough semicircle. Three wore camo gear: a punky middle schooler, a sullen girl with the livid slash of a scar on one cheek, and a greasyhaired kid with terminal acne. Stirring the snow into arabesque whirls, a stray breath of wind tugged at the fraying ends of some bizarre, stenciled kerchiefs knotted around the kids’ throats and biceps. Many more rags fluttered from buttonholes like colorful fringes on buckskin.

The remaining two kids, a boy and a girl with wolf skins draped over their heads and shoulders, were about her age. Their faces were hidden, but what pulled her mind out of the well of her terror was how
familiar
the boy seemed. Why? Her eyes ticked over bits and pieces: the jut of his chin, the firm line of his jaw, and his eyes—hard, glittery as a crow’s. She couldn’t tell their color; those eyes might be brown or mossy green—

Or a deep, smoky blue, as dark and strange as ancient ice.

Oh no.
It couldn’t be. It had been months. Tom was dead. This couldn’t be Tom, could it? Frantic now not just with fear but dread, she pulled in a huge breath, trying to tease out Wolf Boy’s scent. Tom’s was musky and complex, a heady aroma that never failed to find its way deep into her chest. She would know him by scent alone, anywhere, but all she got now was that overpowering stench and the reek of her fear.

But I feel like I should know him. He looks so famil—

Her stomach bottomed out as the wolf-girl stepped past the others to halt less than twenty feet away. Aside from the whole wolf thing, she looked like the kind of privileged, moneyed kid Alex had always hated. No mistaking that black widow logo over the left breast; that was some serious designer skiwear. Her outfit made those rags or bandanas or whatever she’d tied around her wrists seem almost classy. And because the girl was so close, Alex also got a very good look at that corn knife, a wicked thing that was crusted with gore and as long as the kid’s forearm.

Alex’s eyes flicked to Nathan’s rifle, the one Jess had forced him to give her. She’d dropped it when she’d come upon the skulls and vomited her guts out, and now the weapon was on the snow ten feet to her right. She could go for it, but even if her aim was true and she managed to squeeze off a shot, she’d be dead a second later.

Because four of these Changed were packing. A small Beretta for the runty middle schooler; a scoped big-bore lever-action for the wolf-boy, who was so maddeningly familiar. Slash, the girl with the scar, held a bolt-action, but it was Acne’s rifle that really snagged her interest, because it was outfitted with a gas piston to prevent jams. That made complete sense when you were someplace where a weapon might get fouled pretty easily: say, Iraq, Afghanistan—or the deep woods in winter. So, chance? Had Acne simply lucked out? Grabbed the first rifle he saw? She didn’t think so, not from the way he held that weapon. Hang around enough people who know their guns and you learn to spot someone who is really comfortable versus a person who’d be happier with a live cobra. Besides, this was the U.P., and she’d once lived in Wisconsin, where everyone hunted. So she bet this kid knew guns. They all must.

She got where this was going, too. Her end was inked in blood and a motley scrawl of shredded clothes and hacked bones.

Well, no use being coy. She tugged off her gloves with her teeth, keeping one eye on Spider as her shaking fingers fumbled with the bindings of her snowshoes. When she stepped out of them, the snow squealed beneath her weight, but she only sank an inch. Good. Still moving with care, she thumbed off her backpack. There was a jackknife with the rest of the gear Jess had stowed, but the blade was a toothpick against that corn knife. Still, the pack had some heft. Maybe ten, fifteen pounds. She choked up on the straps with her left hand. Might be useful if she got close enough to—

Her thoughts derailed as the air suddenly thickened, and another odor, a complex pop of fresh sap cooked with green pine, wormed into that roadkill reek. What
was
that? She saw Spider shoot a glance at Wolf, and then, a second later, that stinging charry smell got stronger. All the Changed were tossing looks back and forth now, and they were
grinning,
like they shared some private joke.

Her mind flashed to that long, awful road into Rule—and the instant she’d realized the wolves were there because of how
heavy
the air grew as the alpha’s scent bloomed: still
wolf
but also
no threat.

So was this communication? Complex thoughts couldn’t be conveyed just through smell, could they? She didn’t know. Bees danced. Birds sang, but entire flocks moved as one and with virtually no sound at all. Those wolves hadn’t so much as growled, and now these kids were looking at one another as the air boiled.

Like there’s something suddenly here that wasn’t just a few seconds ago. The air’s crowded.
Alex’s head went a little hollow.
But that can’t be. They can’t read minds.

Could they? No, that was crazy. Still, was it less crazy than her funky super-sense of smell?
She’d
changed, just not the same way.

Well, she knew a way to find out—about the telepathy, anyway. Because she had two choices: let Spider kill her, or—

Her questing fingers closed over that hay hook and twisted it free: eighteen inches of cold-rolled steel as thick as her thumb, as sharp as an ice pick.

Or—