Hissers (32 page)

“Run? No! Seth, don’t even do this to me.”

“Just take the rope and run toward the market and don’t stop until you get to the woods behind it.”

“Oh my God Seth don’t do—”

He kissed her once more, then stood up and ran out toward the parking lot.

Amanita shrieked:
“Seth!”

But her voice was merely the trumpet summoning him to battle. It was better this way, he thought, as he ran into the bright sunlight, perfect cotton clouds lazing in the sky as if painted there by a cartoonist. It was better to know he was dying for something
real,
not made of pixels and computer code. It was better to know that when he saw Jo again, she would forgive him, would understand his six-year-old fear and his teenage redemption.

It was better for Amanita to live, because for the first time since his little sister’s disappearance, he finally remembered what it felt like to live for someone else. And Amanita, for better or worse, deserved that.

The hissers rushed him, coming at him from every angle like an explosion played in reverse. He was a magnet and they were slivers of metal drawn in.

He fell to his knees.

The first hand gripped his left ear and ripped it off in a gout of blood. His lips tore from his face under blood-crusted fingernails. Teeth sank into his eyes and popped his vision. His nose was bitten off as more teeth worked into the top of his head. Somewhere there was screaming, and somewhere he knew his legs and arms were flailing, but inside his mind, there was only Jo and Am.

Ten seconds later, his head separated from his neck and he was with his sister once again.

Sunday, 10:21am

In the daylight it was easier to see what the wing of the plane had done to the trees around the fort. A wide path had been cut, like a reverse Mohawk in the woods. Everything that had stood in the way was now destroyed. Felled trees lay in random Xs over one another, dead birds lay broken in the debris, leaves and pine needles blanketed the ground like some kind of funeral shroud. The wing was still embedded in a tree a good hundred feet beyond the fort. Piles of embers crackled on the ground, only contained by patches of dirt and the morning’s dampness.

Connor maneuvered his way over the logs and stumps and stared at the remains of the fort that had been a Castor institution for so many years. It felt like his childhood lay on the forest floor, broken, ruined, ready for Mother Nature to erase it from the earth.

From up here on the hill, he and Nicole had a good view over the entire town. The park before them was bright green, tire tracks running through the middle of the fields. The plane crash was still swarming with undead. The houses nearby, where Jason and Maynard Drake had gathered their classmates, were nothing but kindling. The nose of the plane had made short order of anything in its path. The streets were stagnant, cars sitting abandoned where their owners had fled them in panic or been yanked from them in terror. On the side streets, hissers ran about like remote-controlled toys being steered by infants. They scurried over parked cars, zoomed around trees, sprinted down the middle of the road wailing for blood. They were indifferent to one another, only moving out of each other’s way lest it should impede their search.

“I can’t believe this,” Nicole said. “Of all the towns in the world for that plane to crash in…”

“If I did believe in God I’d sure as hell wonder what His plan for us was.”

Nicole held up the two USB drives. “I think we’re supposed to move the rock away from the tomb.”

He didn’t want to look at the scene below anymore, didn’t want to pretend that he couldn’t see his house from here. The house where his father had tried to save him and where he’d killed his mother, even though he knew she wasn’t his mother anymore, by that time.

The view of Castor was a cheap painting of hell.

“C’mon,” he waved her toward the riverbed. “Let’s find a tree to tie the rope to when Seth gets back.”

“If they get back.”

“Don’t think like that. Seth knows how to survive situations like this. It’s a matter of preempting your opponent. You should see him play Call of Duty…he’s a machine.”

They moved through the woods until they reached the edge of the cliff overlooking the dried-up Jefferson River. The wind howled up the ravine like a heaving breath.

“This tree will work,” Connor said, rubbing the bark of a slanted evergreen. He wrapped his arm around it, leaned out over the rock face and looked down, and figured it about sixty yards to the bottom. Hopefully Seth had found a good, long rope.

How they would get up the other side would be another matter all together, but he’d worry about that when the time came.

The howling in the river gorge grew louder.
Funny how the wind sweeps through it down there, but I barely feel it up here,
he thought.

Any further thought was cut off by footsteps, and he turned to give his best friend a hug.

Amanita walked up carrying two ropes, her shirt torn, her face awash in dirt. She dropped the ropes to the ground and sat on her feet, staring off into the distance.

“Oh my God, Am!” Nicole threw her arms around her friend and was practically crying.

Connor sat down next to her, saw blood on her face. “Where’s Seth?”

Amanita didn’t say anything, and Connor felt his stomach drop to his ankles.

What had happened to Seth was written in the girl’s eyes.

“Tell me it was fast,” Connor pleaded. Tears were running down his cheeks now as well. He had never cried so much as he had this last weekend. Maybe it would be enough crying to last him the rest of his life. It was pretty useless when you thought about it, tears did not bring back the dead, they did not undo God’s errors, they did not turn back time.

If they did, he would have gone back and joined his father at the front door of the house and avoided the incredible pain and loss that now filled his heart.

“He left me,” Amanita finally said, her voice just a whisper. “I asked him not to, but he did. And now he’s dead and it’s all my fault.”

“It’s not your fault, Am,” Nicole said, brushing sweaty strands of hair out of her friend’s face. “None of this is your fault or my fault or Connor’s or Seth’s. And we have these—” she showed her friend the flash drives “—to prove it.”

“But, he just left me. He kissed me and told me to run and then…they just tore him apart.”

Connor turned away, fighting the images that rose in his mind’s eye. He didn’t want to think of Seth that way, he wanted to think of the best friend who’d ridden bikes with him and played video games on lazy Saturday afternoons.

“You’ve got to get up, Am,” Nicole said, helping her friend to her feet. You’ve got to help us tie this rope and get across the gorge, before they start the bombing and the fires.”

Connor took Amanita’s hand and held it tight. “Am, if Seth saved you he sure as shit didn’t want us to get killed here, and he was my best friend so don’t think I’m not as upset as you, but we’ve only got a few minutes left. We still have to get up the other side and then get through those woods before they start. Can you stand up?”

Amanita’s eyes suddenly cleared, as though she snapped back from another world. She looked him in the eye and leaned in close to his ear. Her hot breath was quavering, and he was almost afraid of what she might say in her current state. But what she said not only let him know she was coming out of her shock, but made him smile.

“Yeah, I know,” he replied, “Seth was always a fifty in my book.”

Sunday, 10:25am

Connor tied the rope around the tree jutting out over the ravine. He dropped the loose end down and watched it unravel as it fell. End over end until it was completely unwound. The tip swung a few feet above the dry riverbed, so they’d have to jump down at the end but they wouldn’t hurt themselves.

“I don’t think I have enough muscles to do this,” Nicole said.

Connor took up the rope and wrapped it around one leg, held the rest up in front of him. “Like this, see? You put one foot on top of the other, clamping the rope in between. They didn’t make you do this in gym class?”

“They made us play volleyball,” Amanita said. “Any gym teacher who makes a girl climb a rope is in for a class full of little bitches.”

“And it ruins your nail polish,” Nicole added.

“Well, trust me,” Connor said, “this method works. Nicole you go first. I’ll lower you down. Then you go, Am, and I’ll follow up.”

“Maybe we should have just tried to get across the bridge?” Nicole looked out over the rock face, grimaced at the height.

“You heard what they said. They’re shooting anyone who gets close to it.”

“Pretty un-American, if you ask me.”

“Don’t think patriotism comes into play when you’ve got a situation like Castor has. You ready?”

Nicole moved to the edge of the cliff, wrapped the rope around her leg the way Connor showed her, and began her descent. She moved in tiny increments at first, getting used to letting her feet slow her descent. “It’s not that hard, Am,” she yelled up as her head finally moved below the lip of the rock face.

Amanita went next, using Connor’s hand as a safety handle until she had herself below the lip as well. Like Nicole, she started out slowly until she got the hang of it, then the two of them moved steadily toward the ground.

Connor went next, checking the knot on the tree one last time, making sure the bark hadn’t frayed it. He then tossed the other spool of rope down into the riverbed in case they might need it later.

With a deep breath, he wrapped his foot around the rope like he’d shown the girls, and worked his way over the lip. He had climbed the rope to the top in gym class during their physical training week, rung the little bell someone had affixed to the crossbeam—which had felt triumphant at the time, before he realized it made the other boys feel weak and overweight. And by other boys he mostly meant Seth, who’d barely made it up a single foot.

By the time he was halfway down, Nicole was touching the ground. A minute later Amanita was down, and when he finally touched his feet to the dirt, they were ready to tackle the harder part—climbing up the other side.

The howling in the ravine grew louder, almost like a tea kettle heating up. It swam down the rock walls on either side of them and passed over their heads.

“What’s that noise?” Amanita was spinning in circles, trying to get a bead on where it was coming from.

“It’s wind,” Connor said, not for the first time. But truth be told, it sure as hell didn’t sound like wind from down here. Aside from a light breeze, there was no rush of air hitting them.

“It’s not wind,” Nicole said. She took a few steps forward, in the direction of Jefferson Bridge, which was just a black sketch in the distance. “It’s those things.”

No sooner had she spoken the words than the first one appeared, careening around the bend on the gorge, arms outstretched, mouth open, head tilted back, legs pumping like an Olympic runner.

Nicole screamed, Amanita swore and Connor scanned the opposite cliff, trying to find foot and handholds.

“Up the rocks! Up the rocks!” he shouted.

Both girls raced to the rock cliff, grabbed whatever crevices they could find and started climbing up toward the woods outside of Castor. Only because the cliff on this side was slanted were they able to ascend at all, but the moving was slow and the hisser sprinting at them was moving so fast he might be able to leap above their heads.

Need a weapon,
thought Connor.
There, that branch.
About the same size as a baseball bat, fallen off from one of the trees that jutted out over the ravine. He hefted it as the girls climbed up, stood his ground on the riverbed floor.

“Connor, hurry!” Nicole shouted.

“Just go, I got this.” A fourteen-year-old boy about to bludgeon a grown man with supernatural strength? Hah! Fat chance. But what option did he have?

The monster drew closer, blood-stained teeth snarling and strips of shredded cheeks whipping like tiny flags.

The hisser jumped.

Connor swung.

The branch caught the hisser in the head and sent it sideways into the rock wall. It stumbled, and Connor was on it, smashing as hard as he could, putting all his weight into breaking the skull and killing the brain. Again and again and again. The creature’s neck snapped and the body fell backwards, the eyes fluttered and the undead thing opened its mouth wide and wailed in protest.

Connor drove the branch into its mouth, out the back of its neck and into the dirt, pinning it to the ground. Its arms slashed at anything and everything, its eyes spun in mad circles like a cartoon character.

“Hi, Maynard,” Connor said, finally realizing who he was looking at. The older teen who’d tried to run him off his bike just two days ago. If there was a scourge in the town it was Maynard Drake and everybody knew it. Bully, thief, all around prick. Without hesitation, Connor picked up a boulder the size of a bowling ball and brought it down on Maynard’s face with all his might. There was a mighty crack as the hisser’s skull caved in, and pink ooze shot from the monster’s ears.