Unforsaken (11 page)

Kaz bypassed the parking lot, continuing down the road, which narrowed as it wound into the farmland beyond. In the distance the lights of a couple of houses winked on as the last of the sun’s glow faded from the horizon. Kaz drove until he found a farm lane with a gated cattle guard, then pulled over and parked in the weeds.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just need to be away from the lights. Hailey, I’ll be okay, really, just give me ten minutes.”

I nodded, but already Kaz had reclined his seat and covered his eyes with his hand. I watched him breathe, his chest rising and falling regularly. I wasn’t sure, but his color seemed to be a little better already. Maybe if he just let the vision come; maybe he’d been suffering because he’d been resisting it. I knew the feeling. When I had first felt the urge to heal—when a girl had got hurt in gym class—it had been nearly impossible to resist. As I waited to put my hands on the girl’s broken skull, to say the ancient words, an urgency that was almost … painful overtook me. But was it pain? No, it was just a
wrongness
, a deep and unmet need that grew sharper and more demanding until I gave in to it.

Maybe Kaz’s visions were the same way.

I sat as still as I could and watched him. Five minutes turned into ten, the time passing achingly slowly. I wondered if he had fallen asleep, and decided that might be for the best. It grew harder to see him in the dark, but I knew he was there next to me and that was good enough.

Down the road, the cars came and went from the parking lot: hungry travelers, weary families, people trying to get to their next destination. Nothing sinister, nothing out of the ordinary.

There was really no reason for the anxiety that had been gnawing away at me ever since we’d left Chicago, a raw and seething layer underneath all my other fears.

Kaz rested. I waited.

R
ATTLER SHIFTED ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLY
on the wood shelf that served as a seat. Next to him, Derek startled, caught napping. Derek was no good at waiting. He had no patience. Rattler bit down hard on his disgust: the Banished blood was weak indeed in Derek, but he was all Rattler had for now.

But the future—ten years from now, there’d be new blood all around town. Young, strong boys and girls with at least one full-blood parent—and a few with two. When Rattler grew old, his many children would make him proud, and there would be grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all Banished, all strong and determined, and they would live well here. They would take their rightful place as the leaders of Gypsum; they would drive fancy cars and live in big-ass houses, and the biggest one of all would be the one he would build for him and Prairie.

He and his Prairie, they would grow old together; they would look out their front door and see what was theirs … 
their
land,
their
town, just like the village of their ancestors. If something displeased Prairie, Rattler would blast it sky-high; if someone made her unhappy, he would remind them by force who was the leader of the Banished, who had returned them to their rightful glory. No one would make Prairie unhappy twice. If they did, Rattler would make them taste their own blood as they died.

They would see. They would all see. So far, they hadn’t understood, and maybe, just maybe, some of that was his fault. He had failed with Prairie once, but she had been under the influence of that other one, of Mr. Chicago, with his slick ways—he saw that now. He hadn’t seen that then, when Mr. Chicago had offered Rattler money to turn Prairie and Hailey over. But that was then and this was now.

Rattler worked up a gobbet of spit and let fly, narrowly missing Derek’s boot. Derek was wise enough not to say anything; he just moved his foot out of the way.

The memory disgusted Rattler: Mr. Chicago with his stack of hundreds, peeling, peeling, peeling, waiting for Rattler to signal when it was enough. Well, he’d taken the man’s money—why shouldn’t he?—but it was never enough. It would never be enough! And see what had happened to Mr. Chicago, who had thought he could buy Rattler? Charred and dead, burnt up in his own squalor, a fitting end.

Not that there was anything wrong with making a little
money from the gifts. No, nothing wrong at all. He needed cash. He needed capital. Others had stepped up to take Mr. Chicago’s place, and Rattler had showed them, hadn’t he? He had taught them a blood lesson they would not forget. Now they would respect him. He would set a high price for their services … his and Hailey’s and Prairie’s. And he would bring the others, the Trashtown riffraff who possessed only a shadow of the gifts, let them experiment on his lesser brethren, let them play their games with the piss-weak stock, even as Rattler was beginning to rebuild the clan.

He would be like a broker; he would be the businessman he’d always known he could be. His sons would take up the yoke someday. He would teach them, train them. And in his home, Prairie would raise the girls, and they would be strong and beautiful, like her. It would be as it should be.

Next to him, Derek cleared his throat. “We been out here—”

“Shut up,” Rattler said automatically. “Drink.”

Rattler knew that Derek had a flask in his pocket; there was rarely a time when Derek
didn’t
have a flask in his pocket, topped off with cheap whiskey. That was okay, though; what he needed Derek for didn’t require quick reflexes. Rattler just needed an extra hand in case the boy gave him any trouble. The boy was expendable; Rattler had armed himself with the Ruger just in case, but he hoped not to use it. Just put the boy on the road and send him back, that was all that was called for.

But he needed the girl. Because the girl was the next step to Prairie. And she was his firstborn, a Healer like her mother, so she was rightfully his as well.

She had to know it too. Otherwise why was she coming back here? Had to be scared, seeing what she’d seen. He understood that. A sheltered girl like her, all she knew was the home her granny had made for her, that retard boy they’d taken in, the mongrel that ran in the yard. Her granny didn’t let her talk to the Morries, and that was good and right. The few times Rattler had seen one of the Morrie boys talk to her, he’d made sure it was the last time. He might not have been the most involved father, but a girl didn’t need that, anyway. She needed a dad who looked out for her, who knew what was right and what was wrong. Rattler did the right thing when it was important. He kept the boys away. He would make sure that when the time came, it was a pureblood boy who came to call, and no other.

She must have known that. Because where, after everything that had happened to her, was she coming to find safety? Back here to Gypsum. Oh, Rattler didn’t have any illusions that she was coming to
him
. She had in mind to come see a girlfriend maybe, a favorite teacher. Who knew with girls? They were delicate things, emotional things. Hell, he thought ruefully, rubbing the socket around his scarred eye, they could be quick and unpredictable, and a man had to be on his toes around them.

But now she was on her way back. Rattler had seen it with his blind and spinning eye that morning as he’d lain in
bed: he’d seen the car, the girl, the boy, the Exxon sign lit up in the sky above them.

Derek took a dispirited swig from his tarnished flask and returned it to his pocket. He didn’t bother offering it to Rattler. Everyone knew Rattler didn’t drink. He never had, even when they were kids, Rattler and Derek and Armand and the rest of them skipping class to smoke behind the Elks lodge. Even then Rattler knew drink was poison; it was what had led so many of their fathers away from the Banished. Drink made them lazy, distracted them, and then they married outside; they sired their bastard broods and drank and did drugs and pissed away their pride and their birthright.

No more.

“If they was comin’, they’d be here by now,” Derek said, a little more loudly, disgust in his phlegmy voice. The liquor gave him courage, a cheap and deceptive kind of courage, but one that had to be dealt with all the same. True, the man had let Rattler take over the old house on his dead pappy’s land, and Rattler owed him for that, maybe, though a man who’d live in his mother’s trailer instead of cleaning up the mess his own father had left behind wasn’t much of a man in Rattler’s book. But Rattler had taken something from Derek, and he would remember that when it came time for splitting up the spoils. Derek would be taken care of.

That was the future. Now was now.

Rattler moved fast. His hand shot out and seized Derek’s ear and twisted it, and as Derek squirmed and mewled like a puppy, Rattler twisted harder and forced Derek’s head
around so he would have to look across the field to where night was etching a layer of purple-black on the fading glow where earth met sky.

“Guess you don’t know nothing,” Rattler said softly as an old brown sedan pulled slowly off the road and came to rest a few feet shy of the cattle guard.

H
OW COULD WE HAVE SLEPT
?

I woke with my head resting against the cold glass of the passenger window, the night thick and black on the ground, only Kaz’s outline visible as he slept next to me. I had been dreaming something awful, something disturbing enough to wake me: I’d been back in the locked room in the lab, fire raging behind me, the zombies rising from their chairs, staring at me with their unblinking eyes, their rotting, impassive faces and coming at me. Their feet on the floor clacked and slapped, a rhythmic sound as they came closer and closer and—

But the sound, the clacking, did not stop, even though I was awake. It was in my ear, on the glass, and I jerked away from it, too late seeing that there was something, some
one
, out there, silhouetted against the star-dotted sky. I grabbed
Kaz’s arm and yanked it hard, trying to force his name from my lips. But fear had stolen my voice.

“What is it?” Kaz woke instantly. “Hailey? What’s going on?”

“Outside,” I managed to croak, and then I gasped, because there was another figure on
his
side of the car, this one thin and stooping. Then a brilliant beam of light shone in our faces, blinding me.

“Open up.” It was a rasping gravel voice thick with the drawl of Trashtown. My father’s voice.

“Rattler,” I whispered, clutching Kaz’s arm harder. As if to confirm the thought, the tapping resumed, gently now, but the light shone pointedly on the barrel of a gun, the thing Rattler had been using to tap the glass. And it was pointed at me.

“Come on now, Hailey-girl,” Rattler crooned, almost a singsong. “Come on outta there. We’re goin’ for a drive.”

“He won’t shoot me,” I said. But he would shoot Kaz without a second thought.

Kaz knew it too, because I could see him hesitating, reaching for the keys dangling in the ignition, trying to figure out whether he could get the car in motion before Rattler took a shot.

The grinning figure on the other side, leering through the window, seemed to make up Kaz’s mind. Slowly, he took his hand off the keys.

Rattler had known we were coming.

He and Kaz, both Seers, were plagued with visions of the
things that stirred them most, the things that they held dearest or that threatened the greatest harm. That was how it always worked. Kaz had seen the Quadrillon sign because Chub was there. Rattler, though, cared most about Prairie. I lowered the window a crack. “She’s not with us, you know.”

Rattler’s expression didn’t so much change as drive over a speed bump. For a flash of a second, it was shot through with anguish and even worry, something I’d never seen on his face before. “I know it,” he muttered. “Now get out.”

Kaz reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze, and then we both got out. My mind raced, looking for ways to fight back, to escape, but Rattler seized my arm roughly and guided me toward Kaz and the other man. Rattler was much stronger than me, and the other man held a gun loosely at the small of Kaz’s back as they headed for the road. A car drove past in a blur of headlights and spun gravel; the people inside probably didn’t even see us walking along the ditch beside the road, and even if someone stopped and inquired whether everything was all right, I was sure Rattler had a reply at the ready. Help wouldn’t come in that form.