Shimmer: A Novel (23 page)

Liana nodded confidently.

“It this replacement eye works,” Gideon said excitedly, “you could have one helluva cottage industry in ocular implants.”

Liana frowned, “The implant relies on tapping into the second site potential that only Walkers possess. That’s why it’s adaptive vision.”

“Despite our need to keep a low profile,” Gideon said. “I suppose that was too much to hope for.”

At that moment, Barrett entered the kitchen, gripping the doorjamb with both hands. “Logan disappeared.”

Liana rose to her feet, a confused frown replacing her recent grin. “What?”

“Well, not into thin air,” Barrett said. “But he stood up and walked out of the house without a word.”

Gideon looked at both of them. “Is that normal for him?”

“No,” Liana said. “It must be happening now.”

“Whatever made him sick at school?” Barrett asked.

Liana nodded. “We have to find him,” she said. “If it’s as bad as he believes it will be, he’ll need us.” She looked at Gideon. “All of us.”

Gideon nodded assertively, but Liana could see the concern in his one pale blue eye. Fear that the moment he would fail them was fast approaching.

Chapter 35

While Barrett and Gideon stashed their swords in nondescript duffel bags, Liana left the house carrying nothing more than her modest handbag. But not before Ambrose caught her elbow, a worried expression on his face. “What do you know?” she asked immediately.

“From the meager references I’ve located concerning Carnifex, I believe he feeds on fear as much as flesh.”

“Based upon Chelsea’s story about her mother, that makes sense.”

“It’s not enough to deny him your flesh, Liana,” Ambrose said before releasing her. “You must deny him your fear.”

“Way ahead of you, Ambrose,” Liana said with a mysterious smile.

“Indeed,” he said, intrigued.

“I’ll explain later,” she said with an unexpected burst of optimism. “Gotta run.”

At the time, he didn’t press her for details. In hindsight, Liana thought maybe he should have. Instead, she ran out the door, a weird mixture of anxiety and confidence giving her as much nervous energy as her hyperacuitive cousins.

After verifying that Logan hadn’t taken the white van or Barrett’s slate-gray Jeep, she hurried to the curb and looked in vain for any sign of Logan on foot. As far as she could see, the street was deserted. In the distance, she heard the mechanical drone of a lawn mower. A warm, intermittent breeze halfheartedly pushed an empty snack bag along the curb; that same fitful wind created an ominous whispering among the trees, as if they were taunting her with dark secrets they were determined to keep. Unfortunately, divination of arboreal omens was not among her paranormal abilities.

With no idea which way Logan had gone, she would have to improvise. She raised her left arm, causing her voluminous sleeve to spill away from her forearm and expose several of the elegant golden sigils adorning her flesh. Visualizing Logan’s face in her mind, she traced the outline of two of the sigils and whispered in her personal magical language,
“Locis revelis.”

Barrett and Gideon arrived as she spoke and took positions on either side of her, duffel bags in hand. They waited quietly for the result of her ad hoc incantation. Within a few moments, a golden glow began to envelop her hand and she felt her forearm pulling to the right. She relaxed and let her arm swing wide, seemingly of its own volition, and her index finger extended, like a compass needle finding magnetic north.

With a wink at Gideon, she said, “Logan’s not the only douser in this family.”

When he responded to her attempt at humor with a solemn nod, she gave herself a mental kick. Of course he would be worried about his missing eye and his poor depth perception. She’d offered him hope of a cure, but the magical ocular implant would have to wait until after Logan was safe. With a rift incident imminent, the greater danger was a delayed response.

As they hurried in the direction her arm had indicated, Liana opened her purse, reached inside and removed three necklaces with crystal spheres the size of marbles dangling from silver chains. “Here,” she called to the men. “Put these on.”

“Maybe we should worry about accessorizing later,” Barrett said.

But Gideon had noticed something in her tone. “Do as she says, little brother.”

“Fine,” Barrett said brusquely, snatching one of the necklaces from her hand and slipping it over his head with his free hand. “Happy now?”

“Ecstatic,” Liana said, flashing her tongue at his back.

Gideon chuckled as he put on one of the necklaces. “I’d prefer the implant.”

“These are important, too,” Liana said, slipping the third necklace over her own head. “Maybe more important.”

“Amulet. Right?”

“Got it in one.”

At the corner, Barrett pointed. “There he is. At the—”

“Bus stop?” Gideon said.

Logan stood in front of a bus shelter decorated with movie posters beside an elderly woman with an oversized black pocketbook, wearing a blue and white print dress, opaque white stockings and flat black shoes. He glanced around expectantly, his head moving slowly left to right and back again, but with the slightly lost look in his eyes that Liana recognized as his dousing mode. Despite the risk of breaking his trance state, she called his name.

Logan’s gaze focused instantly on her.

At that moment, a New Jersey Transit bus rolled up to the shelter and stopped between them with a hiss. She heard the creak of the doors opening and knew without question what was about to happen.

“Let’s go!” she shouted to Barrett and Gideon. “We need to be on that bus.”

Chapter 36

Logan followed the old woman onto the bus and paid his fare after her, in effect paying a toll for what he feared was certain doom. He had no choice. Though he could often sense impending supernatural mayhem, he was sometimes captive to its pull. When every instinct for self-preservation told him to run in the opposite direction, he entered this altered state of consciousness where his body could not follow the safe course. Like an exhausted swimmer caught in a riptide, he was pulled inexorably toward danger. It wasn’t a question of courage or even family duty, but rather a matter of his skewed Walker genetics.

His consciousness surfaced briefly when he’d heard Liana call his name, but the NJ Transit bus interrupted their line of sight and he slipped back into autopilot. Despite the imminent danger, a deeper part of his being insisted that he step onto the bus. He prayed that his more capable siblings would follow, but that was out of his hands.

The bus driver, a burly middle-aged man with a receding hairline and a meticulously trimmed mustache, had a large Phillies button affixed to his sun visor. Logan directed a friendly nod his way, but the driver seemed too bored to notice subtle greetings.

Now that he was on the bus, Logan’s legs had become wobbly, his stomach nervous. The center aisle divided each row of four high-backed brown cloth seats into pairs. The old woman took a seat behind the bus driver, but Logan proceeded down the narrow aisle to the back of the bus. The faces of twenty strangers seemed pallid and indifferent under the fluorescent lights. Most pointedly ignored his fleeting gaze, as if he would interpret the slightest hint of acknowledgment as an invitation to sit beside them.

The majority of the bus riders were in the post-fifty demographic, with a smattering of middle-aged women and a few older teens, probably college students. Opposite a rail-thin, elderly black man working the New York Times crossword with a stub of a pencil sat a coed with frizzy red hair, wearing a Rowan University T-shirt and frayed jeans, listening to an iPod as she highlighted key points in a chemistry textbook.

Then, in the time between one eye blink and the next, all the faces and bodies transformed, flesh and limbs torn away, disemboweled and beheaded, one body indistinguishable from the next, blood dripping and pooling everywhere, bits of flesh and bone clinging to the cloth seats or oozing down fractured windows. Logan gasped and stumbled briefly, before regaining his balance. That quickly the vision ended. He was in the present again, with his fellow passengers. And they remained oblivious of the approaching danger, while he trembled at the
memory
of what might happen.

Logan sat across from a large Hispanic woman flipping through the pages of
People
magazine as if she’d read every article and photo caption at least twice but hoped to discover something she’d missed in her previous passes.

She glanced up from the glossy pages long enough to say, “Beautiful day.”

Logan said softly, “Not for long.”

“Excuse me?”

“No—nothing,” Logan said. “Got a bad feeling about today. That’s all.”

In the past, Logan might have yelled at all of them to get off the bus while they still had a chance to escape, but he’d learned from experience that he would achieve anything but the desired result. They wouldn’t listen. Or they would toss him off the bus. Or have him arrested as a public nuisance. Plus, his abilities were vague enough, often enough, that he couldn’t say with certainty that the bus would be the center of the imminent disaster. A rift might be coming for one of the passengers but cross their path long after they had departed the bus. He was reminded of Chelsea Conrad, still alive despite his vision of her skeleton astride her hybrid bike.

Barrett, Gideon and Liana boarded the bus moments after him. Liana was combing through her small purse to pay their combined fare. As the driver closed the doors and accelerated slowly away from the shoulder of the road, Barrett led the others back to Logan.

Liana sat beside Logan and patted his knee. Barrett and Gideon stayed one row forward, on either side of the aisle. Uneasy in their padded seats, both men scanned the interior of the bus as if searching for stress fractures.

“Trying to give us the slip?” Gideon asked with a lopsided grin.

“No,” Logan said. “I just…”

“Followed his nose,” Barrett said. His hand slipped inside his unzipped duffel bag and his forearm flexed as, apparently, he gripped the hilt of his concealed sword.

Across the aisle, Gideon had assumed a pose of similar preparedness.

“Figurative nose,” Logan said.

Liana spoke softly beside him, “A nose for trouble.”

The Hispanic woman glanced suspiciously from Gideon to Barrett before asking Logan, “Friends of yours?”

“Family,” Logan said quickly.

“Uh-huh,” the woman said skeptically. “Guess I should mind my own business,” she muttered and returned her attention to the glossy magazine.

After a moment, Barrett tapped the floor of the bus and whispered, “Is this it?”

Logan shrugged, noncommittal.

“Figures,” Barrett said, maintaining the same soft tone. He turned to Gideon. “We should split up. Just in case. I’ll take the front of the bus. Next stop.”

Gideon nodded agreement.

Logan glanced at the Hispanic woman, who was now wearing a frown and squirming a bit in her seat. She’d taken Logan’s earlier comment to heart and was imagining, no doubt, that a terrorist plot involving NJ Transit was afoot. When the bus rolled to a stop and Barrett eased forward up the aisle, the woman pulled herself out of her seat and stepped out the back door without a word.

For a brief moment, Logan wondered if she carried doom with her, but he sensed no change in the psychic freight of the bus. She had escaped whatever was coming for the rest of them. If he had spooked her, he was glad. That meant one innocent person out of harm’s way. The bus resumed its course, swaying slightly as it pulled into the stream of traffic. Barrett settled into his forward position, glancing back at them during the next stop, as if to say, “Well…?”

Logan shrugged.

Three more passengers boarded the bus. No one got off.

“Almost forgot,” Liana said. She removed a necklace from her purse and gave it to Logan. A small crystal orb dangled from a silver chain. “Put this on,” she said. “For protection.”

Logan nodded and placed the amulet around his neck.

The bus swung back onto Kings Highway, into the heart of Hadenford’s business district, where the lanes widened, with metered parking on both sides of the busy avenue. Most of the passengers were looking out the windows when a shadow rippled across the first three seats behind the driver.

Barrett leapt to his feet, his sword sliding free of the duffel bag.

The old woman who had boarded the bus before Logan toppled out of her seat. Her head and right arm were missing. The two rows of seats behind hers, formerly occupied, were now vacant… and torn.

A woman screamed.

The bus driver’s double take swept over Barrett and the dismembered woman lying in the aisle in a pool of blood at Barrett’s feet. With the driver’s startled reaction, the bus swerved into oncoming traffic. More shouts and screams. The driver yanked hard on the big steering wheel, narrowly avoiding a collision with a florist delivery van.

Several bus passengers rose from their seats with a variety of indignant protests, most concerning the erratic driving. Someone noticed the dead woman and screamed.

Gideon, sword in hand, walked toward the front of the bus.

Liana’s gaze darted around the interior of the bus, seeking the darkness.

Logan was overly conscious of the floor beneath his feet… a rumbling.

One of the bus seats trembled and collapsed, tilting into the aisle. The rail-thin black man let out a startled cry as he pitched sideways into the aisle.

A wet, serpentine shape, coiled in a reverse S, rose above the seats with an elderly man impaled on its glistening barb. With a sideways flick of its upper loop, the tentacle flung the man against the broad, tinted windows. His ruined body collapsed between seats, leaving the cracked windows sticky with his blood.

By now, almost everyone was screaming and shouting.

A woman wearing a yellow scarf over her hair, with a shopping bag clutched to her chest, ran down the aisle of the bus for a moment, then simply dropped out of sight, as if she’d stepped off a hidden precipice.