AfterAge (29 page)

She led Louise away, being very, very careful not to touch her.

~ * ~

It was nostalgic
, Calie thought later,
how old habits still clung, despite the circumstances that had changed permanently
. Louise was certainly likable—funny, too. Alone in the breakfast room, Calie was still grinning at the memory of Louise checking the price tag on a sweater that had caught her eye in Lord & Taylor, then almost putting it back. She'd looked decidedly sheepish when Calie had laughed at her. They had all settled early for the night because of the excitement and the dragged-out feeling that a hard winter storm always seemed to bring. C.J. and Louise had answered questions about Jo as best they could, although Louise had apparently met the mysterious preteen only two days ago. Both were determined, snow permitting, to be in Daley Plaza tomorrow as Jo had instructed.

What time was it now? Surely after six. Calie blindly touched her cheeks, feeling her rough fingers move over the pores of her face. The gift of healing, for God's sake—what else could that strange girl do? Could she "see" that something terrible awaited C.J. and Louise? And if so, could this Jo
do
anything about it? It was a maddening question.

Darkness surrounded her now, the dusky light left from sunset effectively strangled by the low-lying storm clouds. Calie rose and made her way to the stairwell by memory, her hands gliding soundlessly along the cold railing. C.J. and Louise were together, bent on obliterating the loneliness that had permeated both their young lives. Good for them—tomorrow might bring horrors undreamed of; so much the better that they found comfort in each other's arms tonight. Farther down, Calie hesitated at the door before hers.
Go on to bed
, she told herself.
He doesn't want to listen to you
. She started to step away.

"Calie." Perlman's voice was barely a whisper.

I should keep going
, she thought. But she honestly couldn't find a reason not to answer. "Yes?"

"Come in for a while?" he asked. "Unless you're too tired."

"Not at all," she answered softly. "Where are you?" She stretched a hand into the darkness.

"Here." His warm fingers brushed hers, then closed over her hand and guided her to the corner. She sat, her slight weight sinking into the thick folds of the down bag.

"So what do you think of our newest addition?" Bill asked without releasing her hand.

"She . . ." Calie closed her eyes, glad the lightless room hid the sudden moisture on her lashes. "I don't know," she finally finished.

Perlman said nothing for a moment. Then, "You're not happy she's here."

"It's not that so much," Calie said. Talking in total darkness made her disoriented. "I have a feeling that something . . .
bad
is going to happen to them."

"Them?"

"C.J. and Louise."

"Maybe you're wrong," he suggested. "You've been wrong on occasion, haven't you?"

She found herself clutching his hand. "Never."

Thank God he didn't try to humor her. "I'm sorry," he said simply. He slipped an arm across her shoulders.

Squeezing her eyes tightly shut now, Calie didn't respond. She'd be damned if she'd cry over something about which she could do nothing, although she supposed this was when a person
should
weep. Why shed tears over things you could change?
I am not the crying type
, she told herself sternly.
I won't
—

"We all have our times to cry, Calie." The night was like a heavy shroud, and he couldn't see her face as she gaped at him. For years she had anticipated the words of others; finally she knew how strange all those folks had felt. Bill pressed something soft into her hand. "There's nothing wrong with it."

"What's this?"

“A Kleenex." He brought his other arm around, linked hands, and held her. "It's okay. Really."

Her mind reached out automatically and touched briefly on C.J. and Louise; two doors down, the new lovers murmured gently to each other. A terrible, black loss filled her, blotting out everything for a second. At last, Calie's shoulders began to shake.

In the chill and smothering night, Bill Perlman held her, and cried too.

REVELATION 18:10

For in one hour is thy judgment come.

~ * ~

I shouldn't have run out on him like that.

I
had
to
, Deb reminded herself. There was this terrible, pressing feeling that if she had stayed with him, as she had so desperately wanted, whatever dark destiny awaited her would encompass him, too. She couldn't bear that responsibility.

The Art Institute loomed around her, a sad place with a thousand faces staring from prisons of antique oil. The storm added to her feeling of despair, muddling the daylight in some places, blocking it entirely in others as she went from gallery to gallery armed with a flashlight and a heavy knife taken from one of the weapon displays in Gunsaulus Hall, randomly checking doors, windows, and closets she hadn't thought about in months. It was impossible to check everything before nightfall and every corner held a shadow that made her jump, every stair a creak that made her glance over her shoulder. She found a sprinkling of dust by one of the elevator doors and pried at them experimentally but they wouldn't budge; the dirt had probably sifted from a slowly growing ceiling crack in front of the elevator.

Back in the auditorium, Deb was beginning to believe that she'd been wrong about the whole stupid thing. Clinging to Alex last night, the memory of his hard body moving so smoothly with hers, seemed like a sweet, faraway dream. If only they'd found each other a year ago! He was probably thinking the worst, and tomorrow morning when she let him in she'd have to explain her crazy behavior as only the hermitlike mistrust and paranoia of the last year overwhelming her. She grinned and started to sit on the side of her cot, then realized that her pillbox, a trinket from her long-dead grandmother, was gone. Just . . .

Gone
.

There was no doubt. This wasn't a house full of kids, where Dad always lost his keys and Mom could never find her purse. This was a backstage alcove with at best a half-dozen precious personal items within easy reach. For a time Deb simply stood, letting the fear consume her in one great, hungry tide; then, when she could walk without stumbling, she went upstairs and stared blankly out the window for a while, where huge clouds tumbled their load of frigid entrapment upon the city The world had already shifted to dusky gray, the buildings along Michigan Avenue fading into a mass of swirling whiteness. The sidewalks to the east would be indistinguishable from the lawns of Grant Park, the landscape nothing more than a white sea of frozen death. Fleeing was not an option, nor was suicide or surrender. Deb knew in her soul that she'd be found, no matter where she buried herself in this massive building. Her fingers folded into tight fists. Better to fight; the nightside of this world would not claim her without a fight.

She returned to the auditorium along the quickest route, this time discovering the two broken chains. Although she had no hope of them holding, she carefully relocked them. All these closed doors with their concealed locks—nothing more than a meticulously maintained camouflage that ultimately had not hidden her at all. Yet, if she had made it this long, didn't it stand to reason that others had, too? Alex insisted he'd seen someone else the morning they'd met, and of course, there'd been John last fall. As for Alex himself, surely he'd be smart enough to move his sleeping place when he discovered her gone. And one way or another, she was sure she would be.

But she wouldn't go alone.

Deb tossed the knife under the cot with the Winchester, then felt behind the thick curtain in back of her cot. Her hand closed around the best weapon she'd ever found and she pulled it from beneath a carefully placed pile of scrap carpeting. She had no idea if her hunters numbered one or ten, but this would handle more than a few of them, though it was unlikely they'd resemble the starving creatures hidden in the subways. Alex had told her about those and how they sometimes clawed at the doorways he'd welded shut in the corridors beneath the Daley Center. Her visitors last night were crafty, leaving no trace of their presence other than the foolishly stolen pillbox.

Her Grandfather Kendrick had been a crusty old Irishman who'd loved to hunt and had taught his tomboy granddaughter how to shoot despite his daughter-in-law's objections. Deb had worshiped him in the years before his death and still missed him deeply. What would he have thought of the weapon she now lifted? Its weight tested the slender muscles in her arms, and she was sure Grandfather Kendrick would have been horrified.

But then, a lot of things now would have horrified him.

The Streetsweeper
.

Deb hefted it and tested its feel, trying to calculate the recoil on the twelve-gauge semiautomatic shotgun that she'd pilfered from the evidence room at the Twelfth and State police station. She hadn't followed the gun magazines like her Grandfather had, but she did remember the controversy surrounding this weapon; originally army-commissioned, the evidence tag noted that this one had been confiscated in a south side drug raid. She had lugged it back and cleaned it, nose burning from the heavy smell of gunpowder on its barrel. Its round magazine was reminiscent of the old Thompson submachine gun and held an incredible twenty-four rounds, and she thought she recalled a write-up saying the Streetsweeper could fire four to six slugs per pump. Deb loaded it with eight-pellet buckshot instead of slugs, opting for the wide firing spread. The powerful shotgun would probably do a real job on the muscles of her shoulders, but that didn’t matter anyway. What would they look like, these creatures coming for her? She thought of her family, her mom and dad and younger brother and sister, all disappeared in the course of a two-day period. Which of them had been the first to change, or the first to return for the others? Or had they all "died" at once? Had she lived at home, she would have perished with them.

Her weapon ready, there was nothing left to do but wait. Her belly gave a painful twist and Deb clutched the semiautomatic closer, seeking scant comfort from the cold, oily-smelling metal. This machine held the deadly power that might,
might
, keep her alive tonight, if that was her destiny.

God help her
—somehow she didn't think it was.

REVELATION 14:15

Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come . . .

for the harvest of the earth is ripe.

~ * ~

"That's a nice girl. You just stay there, nice and quiet, and Howie’ll get you another blanket." Howard gave Giselle—the woman he'd beaten so badly the other night and whose name he'd learned by eavesdropping on Vic—a false smile, but all she did was look at him with a sick, miserable expression. He pushed his bulky body up and zipped his pants with exaggerated carefulness, though he would've liked to give her a kick just for fun. Hell, this was no better than jacking off—he missed slapping the babes around, he
needed
it. For a while he'd thought he wasn't going to be able to come, and only his favorite fantasy, a dark little dream featuring selected girls from his seventh-grade class, had finally taken him over the brink.

Howard sighed and went to get another blanket, then grabbed a couple of saltines for the woman as an afterthought. He'd been trying to take better care of the women just in case more of them turned out to be knocked up. He hadn't neglected the men either—maybe they'd start finding the bitches attractive. There was plenty of meat to go around and Howard's pulse quickened when he thought of the possible free shows. What the hell, he could even help.

Giselle was shivering under her blanket and Howard tossed her a heavier one and the crackers, then plodded away, thinking only of his room and sleep. All this extra exercise was exhausting, running around in the morning trying to find where Rita and Vic slept—yet neither had even glanced at him before they'd left on their hunting expedition. Maybe he'd simply overblown their hostility.

Vic was probably safe enough, but Rita? Then again, she was perpetually pissed at the world. Hell, he'd had to coexist before with people who didn't like him. Why should now be any different? He couldn't let this morning nonsense fuck up his performance. Look at that guy Stephen, the one Anyelet had singled out. The man was a mess—wasting away, crying and praying all the time, yet all those wailed promises collapsed every time the she-bitch stepped into his room. Howard's position was pretty good, considering the options. He glanced at his watch and wondered where Anyelet's little "army" was right now. He knew they'd gone to the Art Institute last night on Hugh's tip—and wasn't that one crazy as clown shit!—and found evidence of someone living in the building, though no one had been found at the time. Odds were if they found anyone tonight, he or she would end up in Howard's care by dawn.

Howard unlocked the door to his room, then relocked it behind him. Lowering his heavy body to the sleeping bag with a relieved grunt, he reached beneath a pile of extra blankets and slid out the little Uzi he'd found in the bottom drawer of a desk in the rear office of the lobby currency exchange. Thumbing through a
Soldier of Fortune
had shown a loading diagram, though Howard hadn't really understood it. But the Uzi was already fully loaded, and if he ever had to put in the extra clip, he'd figure it out. This little toy was to keep the Mart secure in the daytime rather than protect himself from the vampires, who knew nothing about it. For that, it probably wouldn't do a damned bit of good. He turned the dusty Uzi over in his hands for a while before returning it to its place under the blankets. Bored, he drummed his fingers on the floor and let his mind drift back to the hunting trip, wondering who they'd be bringing back. His tongue flicked over his lips.