Dark Advent (44 page)

All he had to do was drive all afternoon yesterday, all through the night—no headlights, just moonlight—and now all morning.

Hagar was one tired and cranky stormtrooper indeed. His stomach was a hollow, rumbling pit; he’d had no time to grab food. The only water he’d had for hours had been scooped from a ditch during a gas break. Sunburn had spread across his face and arms, a constant low-grade flame.

But he would have his payback soon enough.

Every mile north brought it that much closer.

* *

Sunday morning, an hour after dawn, was when all hell finally broke loose at Brannigan’s.

Jack had decided to let Travis eat twice a day, with mealtime being a job for three. Two to keep guns on him, and one to untie the ropes so Travis could eat and do his business in a bucket. It also gave them a chance to tighten the ropes every several hours in case he was trying to pull a Houdini and work them loose little by little.

“If this is gonna be a long-term deal,” Rich said on the way up the escalator, “we need to work out something more humane, less labor intensive. Make up some kind of cell for him.”

Jack nodded. He was carrying a spoon, some canned stew and fruit, and a couple slices of bread baked in a propane oven.

“I was thinking about trying to find an office somewhere, without windows. See what we could do with that.” Rich looked at the rifle in his hands and chambered a shell.

Jack was ahead of him, the first off the escalator, and the way he froze was the first cue that something was terribly wrong. Rich shouldered past and saw Sam Dunne sprawled in the floor, face down and eyes open and his head cranked too far to one side. Then Jack looked toward the sales counter, and even in the bad light, Rich could see him going pale. Jack uttered a sickly groan.

A moment later Rich saw why. It wasn’t just because Travis Lane was gone.

It was the longest walk of his life, from the landing over to the empty chair, the pile of ropes, the lanky young body draped over the sales counter, every step a slow-motion nightmare from which he kept wishing he could awaken. Find himself by Pam again, so he could start the day over and get it right this time.

“Why didn’t we kill the son of a bitch when we had the chance?” Jack croaked.

Farrah lay limp across the counter, one leg hanging off. Mottled bruises ringed her throat and darkened her mouth; the tip of her tongue peeked out between her swollen lips. Her multicolored jam shorts lay on the floor, and thick smears of drying blood traced the inside of her thighs. Her panties had been bunched into one hand.

The other hand held a note. With shaking fingers, Jack pulled it free. It had been hastily scribbled in pencil on a return slip from beneath the sales counter.

I
guess she came up here because she was curious,
it read.
Diane shouldn’t have brought a naked man around such an impressionable young girl. I satisfied all her curiosities.

Jack slowly crumbled the note and went to his knees with a stifled sob.

“We’ve got no choice anymore,” he said into the floor. “We’ve got to clear out of this place now.”

8

The first face Travis saw when he got back to Union Station was the last one he wanted to.

He made it into the Omni and back to his room by one of the least-traveled routes, looking as if he were returning from a morning jog. Clad only in the gym trunks and the soles of his feet aching from the barefoot run from Brannigan’s, Travis shut the door behind him…

And found Solomon sitting on his bed.

“Have a nice vacation?” Solomon asked.

Travis averted his eyes, feeling like he was sixteen years old again and bringing the car home at three in the morning, with dents.

“Nobody around here seems to have the faintest idea what happened to you.” Solomon rose from the bed, twirling a red wig on one finger. “Or Erika either, for that matter.” His fist suddenly snapped shut on the wig, as if he’d just crushed a small dog.

“Bad judgment on my part,” Travis muttered.

“Bad judgment,” Solomon smirked. “Let me guess. Some woman came along and got you thinking with your cock instead of your head.”

Up yours, buddy, it could’ve happened to anybody.
“They’ve already started paying for it. And they’re nowhere near finished.” Travis moved toward the closet and started dressing. “When did you and Earl get back?”

“Late last night. Kansas City looks promising. More damage to the power plants than here, but he can still get them working.”

“Did the guys get back with Jason yet?”

“No, but I shouldn’t think they’d be much longer.” He chuckled to himself, eyes narrowing with cynical humor. “A couple nights ago I was asking myself, ‘Hmm, now who among my people will be the next to reeeeally fuck up?’ I see I have my answer.”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Travis growled. “I got out of there on my own.”

Solomon shrugged, unimpressed.

Travis busied himself in his closet, taking out the tactical shotgun he’d had since that long-ago day when he and the other survivors had left the jailhouse. He found a box of shells and began loading, the small clicks unnaturally loud in the room.

“I hope you didn’t have any long-term plans for anyone at Brannigan’s,” Travis said. “I promise you in two hours every last one of them’s gonna be decorating their walls.”

“Yes,” Solomon mused, idly looking up at the ceiling as if seeing beyond it. “I guess maybe we
have
dragged things on with them long enough. Maybe it’s time.”

Damn right.

Solomon began to laugh. Gently at first, then with more force, like a schoolboy who’d thought up his best prank yet. Travis paused, staring, until he explained himself.

“And then,” Solomon said, “when we get Jason back, we take him on a tour of the place. A kind of homecoming present. Yes. Yes, I like that a
lot
.”

The thought of it spurred Travis into double-time. He moved like a whirlwind throughout the Omni and Union Station, rounding up his soldiers, interrupting sleep and meals, sex and card games and work details. When a group of about thirty had gathered on the parking lot, bristling with guns and machetes, Travis let them know that this time there were to be no prisoners. This time they had the freedom to do whatever they wanted, no holds barred.

Except for one stipulation: a blonde in her mid-thirties named Diane was all his.

And, Solomon added, Erika was all
his
.

They packed into four pickups and screeched out of the parking lot, rolling down Market Street, cutting over to Olive at Twelfth. Sullen clouds thickened low overhead, a growl of thunder rumbling in the distance. Masonry buildings towered darkly above, silent as rows of tombstones.

Then Brannigan’s.

By the time the four trucks braked to screeching halts on the fourth floor of the parking garage, Travis was already getting the idea that it was too little, too late.

They didn’t they didn’t those fuckers they didn’t leave on me THEY DIDN’T LEAVE ON ME!

Not one car or truck remained. Even their makeshift water truck was gone.

Travis led his group in anyway, charging across the bridge—maybe it was just a ruse and they were all sticking their heads in the sand and their asses in the air. But up on the fifth floor, the situation looked every bit as bleak. Empty furniture, empty rooms. Most of their stuff was still in place, but enough of it was gone to look as if they’d snatched up what they could carry and cleared out, like frightened villagers fleeing before an approaching barbarian onslaught.

Travis tore through their bedrooms with a dozen other men, bursting through doorways with a fury that swelled with each vacant room they found. Travis smashed mirrors and splintered chairs; grabbed a machete and hacked one of the couches until the fabric was in tatters and wads of stuffing bled onto the floor. He used the shotgun to blast the windows from their frames, showering glass to the street below.

Travis raged until the worst of his fury was spent, then stood cradling the empty gun as everyone else stared at him. Watching. Waiting to be told what next.

What do they expect of me, huh? Just what do they all EXPECT?

But worst of all was Solomon. Peter Solomon, and his coiled-spring fury, and his wearily shaking head.

And his obviously growing disappointment.

* *

The old adage was truer than ever: You don’t appreciate what you have until it’s gone.

They’d lost half their living space and, as Rich had warned, a lot of privacy as well. The shipping outlet on Jefferson was a port in a storm, but no replacement for everything they’d left. Half a dozen separate rooms and offices could be converted to accommodate them, but that was as far as they could take it.

The entire building was dusty and thick with humidity, the air stale and musty after a year of being closed up. They hid their vehicles in the garage and filed inside after Rich and Jack. And although any number of tasks needed doing to make the place livable, especially considering everything they’d had to leave behind, not a one of them felt like getting started.

Not when the body of a thirteen-year-old girl lay wrapped in a sheet in the garage.

So they sat against the dingy walls or on unrolled sleeping bags, staring at the carpet or up at the skylight, trying to ignore the odor of too many sweaty bodies crammed into too small a space.

Erika opted for watching the skylight, where rain was beginning to spatter from a rat gray sky. She watched it hit with greater frequency, then greater force. After several moments she left through the garage, because Diane hadn’t come in yet. Erika found her on the south side of the building, eyes boring a hole into the asphalt. She wore a halter-top that was starting to soak through, and her hair was beginning to hang with moisture.

“I don’t want to talk,” Diane said, barely above a whisper.

Erika nodded. She scuffed about on the steaming asphalt, taking in the new surroundings. It felt less claustrophobic here than in the downtown area. The buildings here were shorter, squatter. There was a feeling of distance here.

“I’ll go back inside if you’d rather I did,” Erika said.

Diane shook her head without looking up. She wiped at her face, then stared at her hand. “Rain,” she said. “Makes it harder to tell I’m crying.”

Erika eased small steps in Diane’s direction until she was beside her. She offered her hand, tentatively, ready to pull it back, but Diane took it. There was so much she owed this woman. Diane had risked everything to bring her back…back to freedom, to health, back to life itself. There was no way to pay her back, or make them even, but the least she could do was offer a hand, a shoulder.

“I was so stupid,” Diane said. “So fucking smug and thoughtless. It all got to be like a kind of game I was playing, bringing Travis along. Just a game. No consequences. Just a lot of laughs.” She wiped rain and hair from her eyes. “I thought
he
was the stupid one all along. He must be laughing his ass off right now.”

Erika stood with bowed head, her hair as soaked as Diane’s now. Her T-shirt clung like a second skin.

Diane looked at her then, for the first time. Such a conflict raging in her eyes, grief and hatred. Fire and ice, silk and steel.

“I don’t think I can leave St. Louis as long as I know that man’s still alive,” she said. “I never thought I could hate anybody so completely, so totally. It feels like all I have left is to see him dead. Somehow.” After several long moments she said, “You know one of the things I like about you?”

“No,” Erika said, rainwater dripping from her nose, her chin.

“You know when to keep quiet.”

Erika stayed a few minutes longer, sharing the rain and the silence with her, until Diane decided that she really did want to be alone, this time for real. Nothing personal. So Erika turned and went back inside the garage, not feeling particularly social herself. The inside of the garage still fumed with exhaust from their arrival. She wandered from one vehicle to the next, aching for the sight of a red Mustang. Then she drifted over to a rectangular window and watched as the sky deepened with the first shades of evening, the rainy grays streaking with more ominous hues.

Erika remembered first what day it was:
Sunday.

And then she remembered a long-ago promise.

9

The last hour of the drive was the longest sixty minutes of his life.

Jason knew he couldn’t have made it without the two thermos bottles of coffee to keep him perked up. Even so, he still had to pull over on the side of the highway now and again when he felt too drowsy to keep going. He would put the seat back and find that he couldn’t really sleep after all, and would instead drift in a muddled stupor until he felt he could continue.

The last leg of the trip was I-44, which cut a diagonal slash across Missouri from Oklahoma. Rain pelted the car’s roof most of the way, but did nothing to dampen his spirits as he rolled farther and farther east. When the skyline of St. Louis rose against the gray clouds, like a ship emerging from the mist, he felt an upward surge he hadn’t felt for months.

Still, there was plenty weighing on his heart. Lucas’s deathbed confessions echoed in his ears and nothing could drown them out. Jason had spent hundreds of miles telling himself that they were cheap and easy lies meant to tear him apart inside, and perhaps in the case of Erika’s rape it was true. It was the easiest thing in the world for some asshole to tell you how much fun he’d had with your woman. But the rest made too much sense. Maybe Travis and the rest
did
have her now, because of him. And Tomahawk? Surely that was the truth, because Lucas and the others shouldn’t have known about him to begin with. Yet they had.

Jason drove through the southwest county suburbs, left I-44 to make his way through the canyons of downtown. At his back, behind its veil of clouds, the sun was losing strength.

He felt like crying when he rolled into Brannigan’s parking garage and began the ascent. And very nearly did when he reached the fourth level and found it deserted.

He sat in the idling car, gripping the wheel with both hands, his eyes hot and grainy, his rump prickling from the endless hours in the seat. If he had to stay behind that wheel for five more seconds, he felt sure he’d end up ripping it loose from the steering column.

He tried not to think as he limped across the bridge, tried to blank out, convinced in his heart that there were dozens of logical reasons for all the vehicles to be gone. Sure. And there were just as many for them to have pulled the guards from the bridge.

But he couldn’t deny it any longer when he reached the fifth floor and stood amid ruined furniture, feeling a rain-fresh breeze blowing through the blasted windows. His mind conjured images of what must have happened here, nightmares of slaughter and rape. His stomach bottomed out, and if he’d had anything to eat since the day before, he probably would’ve lost it.

But there aren’t any bodies. And no blood…

At least out here.

It took every last ounce of will to search the bedrooms one by one. Some he found wrecked and others untouched, but all were empty. What the hell had happened here? It looked as if the place had borne the brunt of a furious temper tantrum.

He entered what had once been his room last, feeling oddly like he was stepping into a museum exhibit. The tiny cubicle no longer seemed a part of him. It didn’t look much different from the day he’d left, but the connections had been severed, leaving it forever in the past.

Jason dropped onto the bed and propped his head on his hands, his final hours here coming through again with haunting clarity. Those predawn hours…how he’d wished they would last forever. He’d slept less soundly than Erika, and had held her close as she nuzzled in next to him.

A lifetime ago.

He ran his hand over the rumpled covers, then fell onto his side to bury his face in them, suddenly needing to touch something that she had touched, to breathe her in, to make her real again. To bring her back. And now, finally, he did cry.

Sometime later, Jason wandered to the window, turning his bloodshot eyes upward to the deepening sky.
Better get moving.

For it was Sunday, and nearing sunset, and he too remembered a long-ago promise. There hadn’t been time to explain to Gil their contingency plan, his urgency to get back before sunset today. He’d have to remember to explain himself when he got back to Heywood.

When
we
get back.

Jason pushed off with the cane, leaving the room, the floor, leaving Brannigan’s behind with the rest of the past. He left the car, too—it was running on fumes—needing only his shotgun and the cane and wanting nothing more to hold him back from whatever lay ahead.

And soon, after forsaking the shelter of the garage for the open street and the rain, he knew that if anything got between him and the Arch, he’d probably kill it.

* *

“So,” Caleb said. “How long you plan on staying here?”

Erika’s answer was immediate and firm. “Until it gets good and dark.”

He didn’t look happy, standing in the rain with his hands stuffed into his pockets and water dripping steadily from the baseball cap perched on his head. Erika preferred to sit on the steps leading up to the Arch, not caring that water was soaking through the seat of her pants. The car they’d taken here from Jefferson was parked below, on the levee drive, and it offered shelter, but what the hell. She was already wet from her talk with Diane. She and the clothes could both use a rinse.

Rich hadn’t been at all sold on the idea of them coming, especially given the circumstances of their evacuation from Brannigan’s. It had only been a few hours, he reasoned. The odds of Jason coming back in that interim were almost nil. Besides being a pointless risk, the trip to the Arch would be a waste of gas.

But, she’d argued, they’d given Jason their word. If it wasn’t kept this week, that would make it all the easier to skip next week too. A vicious circle was born. And soon they would realize they’d given him up as surely as they had Brannigan’s.

Under the Arch, at sunset, on Sunday. That had been their pact. Even if no one else believed in him anymore, she would keep her part of the deal, and remember.

“This place,” she said suddenly. “It’s become so important to us. It’s where you and I met, remember?”

“I remember, all right.” Caleb stretched to lean back and peer up at the huge silver parabola scraping the sky. He looked as if he might not be minding the rain so much anymore. “That’s one day I don’t expect to forget.”

“Me either. Ever since then I’ve wondered what really brought us together like that. There had to be a reason.”

“What we’ve been through so far…you don’t think enough reasons already?”

“I don’t know. Maybe those have just been little parts of a bigger picture.”

He nodded in his noncommittal way, and Erika wasn’t sure if he was agreeing with her or merely humoring her.

“If there
is
any more to it,” he finally said, “then I guess we’ll know it when the time comes.”

I
guess we will at that,
she thought. Hating the way that these mysteries of vision and intuition always seemed to work for her—helpless to do anything, usually, or at least never knowing the what and the why until the moment had come.

Erika blinked water from her eyes. Should’ve at least brought a hat, like Caleb. She’d left everything like that behind at Brannigan’s. She pushed her sodden hair back, draping it over her shoulders in a wet mass.

Maybe Rich had been right. Jason wasn’t coming, not this evening.

And a few moments later she wondered how she could ever have doubted.

Erika sensed him first, not Jason specifically, but a sudden onset of well-being. Peace. Like everything was going to turn out all right after all. She knew a moment later what had caused it.

When she turned and saw him moving between the mammoth legs of the Arch, she thought he was moving too fast for his own good.
Oh he’s limping,
she thought, and more than anything she wanted to hold him and make whatever hurts he must have go away. It was all written on his face, the past months. He was smiling, of course, the biggest smile she’d ever seen on that beautiful face, but it didn’t erase the strain. At best, it was a thin mask.

He was laughing and he was crying, and she thought she was too. She was up on her feet and running, sneakers splashing through puddles and then squishing wet earth as she left the concrete. She ran like people in the desert run toward mirages, and for one awful moment she wondered what she’d do if she reached him and kept on going, if he wasn’t actually there.

But he
was
real and felt gloriously warm and alive in her arms, and she pressed herself close, seeking to bring him into contact with every square inch of her. He dropped the two things he was carrying, a cane and a shotgun, and then his arms were around her. He was leaner, she thought, and harder, and every movement seemed stiffer…but he was
here
.

Erika’s face brushed through the wet curtain of his hair and their mouths locked tight, slippery from the rain and then from one another.

She was at once very glad that her mind had limits, that she hadn’t been able to seek him out wherever he’d been, as she’d wished on the bed where Solomon had kept her. Had she been able to, it would have leached the surprise from this moment. It would have diminished what was surely the most joyous instant of her life.

“You look awful,” she finally said, and they laughed until they had to hold each other up. As with Diane earlier, it was impossible to look at each other and know where the rain ended and the tears began.

“I love you,” he said, and it came out with such terrifying conviction that she started crying harder than ever.

“You’re hurt again, aren’t you?” she said.

He nodded, leaning to one side, as if his left leg were unsteady. “It’ll be worth it, you’ll see.” His fingers traced a path along her cheeks, her jawline.

She closed her eyes and sagged against him, her fingers lacing between his shoulder blades.
Just promise me you’re right, that’s all I want.

So much to talk about, so much to catch up on. So much to put behind them. It would be a chore deciding where to even begin. But as they wrapped their arms around each other’s waists and walked toward Caleb and his indulgent smile, and Jason broke away to embrace him too, she knew they would at least give it their damnedest.

* *

They were watched from a couple hundred yards away. Through binoculars, from the cover of dripping trees.

Hagar hadn’t known what to make of it when Jason had come trudging back out of Brannigan’s. He’d been psyching himself up to make his move and take the kid prisoner again and haul his skinny ass back to Union Station. But with him leaving again, looking like the weight of the world was on him, Hagar began to get the idea that lots of things may have changed since he’d been away. Not necessarily for the better.

He cursed his wet mop of fuzzy hair for falling into his eyes, and watched the happy little reunion under the Arch. A smile cracked across his blistered lips. Here was an even better chance for him to redeem himself, should things really be shaping up the way they looked.

He did the math: If the Brannigan’s commune was a thing of the past, then these folks under the Arch might lead him back to their new hidey-hole. And if Travis and Solomon didn’t know where this was—he hoped for his own sake they didn’t—then nobody could much mind their colossal screw-up in Texas. As the sole survivor, he was painfully aware that he’d be the only one
to catch hell for it.

He watched their car start up and then moved for his own, just as the dead of night gripped the city.