Landing (20 page)

Chapter 31

Before we leave, I pull up the
Murano’s hatch, rip open my bag, and tuck my Glock into the waist of my jeans.
If that angel with his enigmatic smile decides to make another appearance or
tries to follow us I won’t hesitate. Not anymore.

As I reach for the medical kit, I
am aware of two black eyes staring at me.

Sir Hopsalot’s cage is on its side.
It smells like piss. The rabbit presses his nose against the bars, sniffing,
asking me questions I am not about to answer. I am all too aware of its bright
looping aura, but I promised Gabe.

I close the hatch and toss the
medical kit to Tarren as I take my place behind the wheel. I miss the key three
times before I get it into the ignition and crank hard enough to make the
engine whinny before catching. I don’t look in the rearview mirror, can’t
really handle the sight of Gabe carefully laid out on the backseat and belted
in place. It’s enough that I can hear his pulse. Steady. Weak.

“Gabe’s laptop is down there,” I
nod toward Tarren’s feet. “Find the nearest hospital.”

“No hospitals.” Tarren slumps in
his seat and doesn’t bother with a seatbelt.

I back out, cut the wheel hard.
Pebbles ping against the SUV’s undercarriage.

“Gabe needs help now.”

“They wouldn’t know how to treat
him.” Tarren lays his head against the seat and closes his eyes.

“We could tell them, explain…”

“They would ask questions, take
fingerprints. We’re both in the system.”

“What?” I yank us onto the road and
jam down the accelerator. The Murano bucks in protest, but then the gears
shift, the engine revs, and we rocket forward.

“It was unavoidable,” Tarren says.
“Dr. Lee is the only one who can treat him effectively.”

“Dr. Lee? Farewell is ten hours
away!”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Tarren
says. “Gabe won’t make it.”

“Don’t say that!”

Tarren opens his eyes and stares
up. “Grand was right, you held on too long.”

“Gabe is stronger than that!” My
voice quivers, and I hate it for doing that.

“It’s a biological process, Maya.
Willpower is an illusion.” Tarren’s voice is soft, robotic, and terrifying. His
mind is working, but his heart—shielded and mysterious as it is—seems lost.

“No,” I insist, because this is the
only thing I can say, the only way I can breathe. “No, no, no.”

I stare out the windshield trying
to think, trying to push away the onslaught of emotions and outside stimuli
that tackle my brain. My eyes drag themselves up to the rearview mirror, to
Gabe’s pale, blood-streaked face. When I focus on his heart, it seems to be the
only sound in the entire world.

I pull us off the road. We’re going
too fast, and the Murano jolts over the uneven surface. We stop in a cloud of
dust.

“Get me the map,” I demand.

“It’s a straight shot back on the
highway,” Tarren responds.

“Just give me the fucking map.”

Tarren opens the glove compartment
and piles the contents on his lap: Gabe’s angel hunting soundtracks, the spare
Glock, the container of Tic Tacs with three left inside, and other random crap.
I am very aware of the gun and how close Tarren’s left hand is to it. Tarren
reaches in again, pulls out the folded booklet, and passes it to me. As I throw
it open across the dashboard, he tucks each item, gun included, back into the
glove compartment, stacking the CDs neatly and then closing it.

My eyes find Wichita Falls, Texas
then scour every single road branching out from this small town. I mentally
copy the map into my mind, filling my angel-enhanced mental corridors with
highways and back roads. It’s like drinking up information.

Then I drive.

I adjust the seat to fit the length
of my legs, and, for the first time, notice dried blood and fading red streaks
on my left forearm. Claw marks. Made by Gabe’s fingers as he struggled to
escape my grip.

My stomach heaves, and I grip the
wheel to steady myself.

I look over at Tarren. His eyes are
distant. That steel jaw is slack. The welt on his neck has swollen to the size
of a golf ball and is already assuming magenta shades. The whole car smells
like the blood still welling from the deep gashes in his wrists. I worry about
his injuries, but most especially about his ash-shaded aura. The color of
surrender.

“Get some gauze on your wrists,
tape them up,” I tell him.

Tarren seems to notice the medical
kit in his lap for the first time. He drops it to the floor. “Nothing is
fatal,” he whispers.

There’s a pause after this, but I
can’t really abide pauses, because they fill themselves with Gabe’s slow
heartbeats and hollow breaths.

“Is it true, what Grand said?” I
prod. “About Tammy, about changing her?”

A faint red glow rises at the edge
of Tarren’s aura.

“Yes,” he says, “it’s true.”

That hangs between us for a while.
We get on the 287 North, and my driving consists of keeping my right leg locked
out and dodging artfully around the glacial cars in front of us. The dusky
twilight is fading fast. We’ll be getting more company on the road as soon as
we hit a town big enough to host a morning commute. More cops too.

“Is Tammy still alive?” I ask.

Tarren flinches. After a long pause
he says, “She begged me to kill her.”

Gabe once told me that Tarren would
do anything for Tammy; that he would follow her into the gates of Hell if
that’s where she wanted to go; that he wouldn’t deny her any request. Not
anything.

The nightmares. The scars he
refuses to treat. The daily anguished penance in front of his cracked mirror.

I understand now.

I leave Tarren alone after this;
let him drift farther and farther away. As long as he’s docile, I can
concentrate on the road and on keeping my own weak mind perilously balanced
between the duel precipices of panic and guilt.

Monster Maya is on a mission, and I
throw my whole attention towards it. The map lays open in my mind—a perfect
copy of those thousand arteries endlessly branching across the country. I nudge
the engine up to 100 mph, and the SUV handles the speed well. I scan ahead,
tuning all of my senses forward toward the other vehicles. The clarity and
depth of my vision seems endless as does the smooth translation of visual
stimuli to action. Without a single hiccup of thought, I am cutting between
lanes, squeezing past cars with inches to spare, and tapping my brakes to skate
by police cruisers at a respectable 70 mph when I see them up ahead.

I know my hazardous driving will
get called in by at least a few of the other motorists I am constantly cutting
in front of, which is why I pull us off the highway at random intervals or
whenever I hear any sirens coming behind us. I strafe the long, winding back
roads, whipping around delivery trucks and other cars on the shoulder or in the
opposite lane. After a good stretch of this semi-off-roading, I pop back onto
the highway.

Rinse and repeat.

This is how the hours pass, broken
only by gas stops, which feel interminable. The whole time, Tarren lies against
his seat, wrists trickling blood, not wearing his seatbelt, staring out at the
empty Texan landscape. Gabe continues dying in a slow, quiet spiral that does
no justice to his character.

We break out of Texas and shave off
a corner of New Mexico. The sun peaks and begins its decent. Gabe’s heart
starts to flutter. Every single one of his heartbeats seems to stack up on top
of me, creating a perilous tower of weight, pressing, crushing, making the
strain of each minute almost unbearable.

We finally cross into Colorado.

My ears strain to catch the next
frail heartbeat, the next soft push of breath. Monster Maya holds back the
tides of panic and bitch slaps that small malicious whisper that hisses
you
knew it would end like this
.

Tarren always understood the truth.
It was Gabe who believed in me. Gabe who saved me the first night I became the
thing that I am. Gabe who always protected me. Gabe who could smile away the
winter storms of my despair. Gabe who has the strongest heart. Silent heart.

Without checking any mirrors, I
twist the wheel and throw us roughly onto the shoulder of the highway. I manage
to turn off the engine on my second try. All around us cars rush by, unaware
that the world might have just ended.

All I hear is the nothing.

The lack of Gabe’s heartbeat.

Blood dribbles into my mouth from
my lip and the teeth I’ve embedded into it. Still, the strangled moan escapes.
Tarren studies my face. It must be my imagination, but I think I can see the
last real part of him dissolve away in his aura on weak little clouds of white.

We both turn to look at Gabe laid
out across the backseat, his beautiful blue stolen away. By me.

Blue as blue, true as true.

The car is filled with the sound of
my sobs and of Gabe not being alive anymore.

Chapter 32

I shove open my door. Stumble out.
A horn blares, and I feel the rush of wind as a truck rumbles past. I don’t
know what I’m doing except that I have to get to Gabe. I have to save him. I go
round behind the Murano, throw open the passenger door facing the shoulder of
the highway and climb in.

“Gabe, Gabe, Gabriel,” I whimper.
Laughing, glowing brother, now so quiet, so cold. I plant my knees on either
side of his body, extend my hand, and try to give him back his energy. My tears
drip onto his shoulder.

“Come on,” I croak, “COME ON!” My
hand shakes. I imagine all the energy I took from him streaming out of my body,
filling him up like water gushing into a dried well.

Nothing happens. I lean down,
hesitate, than lay my hand across his cold forehead. I close my eyes,
concentrate, try to believe that if I want this crazy thing bad enough it will
actually work.

Hands grab me and throw me out of
the car. I hit the ground, and Tarren is on top of me throwing wild punches
against my raised forearms. It only takes me a moment to switch gears. I catch
his left fist, then his right, pull them down and flip us so that I am sitting
on his stomach.

I force his arms down at his sides.
Tarren fights against me, but today I’m stronger. So much stronger. His face is
wild, and I have to anchor the skin down on my palms, because his aura is
leaping in torturous peaks and valleys.

“DON’T TOUCH HIM!” Tarren snarls.
He twists, trying to gain leverage, but I won’t let him.

I release Tarren’s wrists and slap
him hard across the face. I kneel on his forearms and slap him again and again.

“Thirty-two seconds,” Tarren chokes
out. His cheeks blaze red against his pale face, against his blue eyes that are
almost colorless in the fading sunlight overhead.

“What the hell does that mean?” I
screech at him.

Tarren’s eyes glaze over, and he
stops struggling. He’s fading again, slipping back into the battered fallout
shelter he’s dug inside his mind.

“Tell me what that means!” I grab
the collar of his jacket and shake him.

Tarren stares at me. I pull the
twig out of his hair and drop it on the gravel. Then I get off him, open the
hatch, and haul out the AED.

“I’ve kept track. The longest
anyone has ever been drained and survived is twenty-six seconds,” Tarren says
in a monotone voice. He’s on his hands and knees. “His name was Oscar.”

I climb into the backseat of the
Murano and tear open the AED packaging. My mind empties of thought, but I am
still very, very afraid. Fear requires no thought, just a thousand hairline
fractures.

Outside, Tarren is still talking.
“Oscar was in a coma for a week. Had two strokes. The left side of his body was
paralyzed when he woke up. Couldn’t walk or talk. Family shipped him off to an
adult care facility.”

A pleasant robotic voice issues
from the AED and instructs me as I unbuckle the seatbelts around Gabe, pull his
So Say We All
t-shirt up all the way to his armpits, and try not to
shatter like glass all over him. I ignore the mottled streak of fresh bruises
across his ribcage and apply the two adhesive pads to his chest.

“Oscar and I, we have the same
birthday,” Tarren continues from outside. “He’s three years older than me. I
visited him once in the place where they put people no one else wants to look
at.”

The AED’s robotic voice continues,
and it’s so damn calm that if it had a face I would punch it. The machine
searches for a pulse, comes up empty, and determines that a shock is necessary.
I press the blinking button, and Gabe quivers.

“I missed,” Tarren is saying.
“Twice actually. It was right after Mom died; the first mission where I was the
sniper. I never used to practice. And that angel, she didn’t even try to run.
Couldn’t. Not when she was feeding. Tammy took the gun away from me and
finished her off. Twenty-six seconds; that’s how long the angel had Oscar.”

I brush the bangs out of Gabe’s
eyes. The button blinks again. I press it, and Gabe jumps with another
electrical jolt. His lips are so blue it looks like he’s wearing lipstick. The
button blinks again. I press it. My tears get all over Gabe’s neck.

I hear a beat.

Then another. Gabe pulls in a
little hiccup of breath. I put the seatbelts back on him, leave his shirt up
and the pads sticking to his chest just in case. I scramble out of the car and
almost run into Tarren who’s standing behind me, arms hanging limp at his
sides.

“You held onto Gabe for thirty-two
seconds,” Tarren informs me. “I couldn’t get out of the cuffs fast enough.
That’s why he’s going to die.”

“Get in the car,” I tell him.

“We’ll bury him in the grove,”
Tarren says absently as he opens the passenger door and climbs in. He pulls
Gabe’s lucky hat from the side compartment. “He’d want to be buried with this.
And the coat. He really liked the coat.”

I drive. Tarren grips Gabe’s lucky
hat and stares straight ahead. We pass the sign to Farewell. Adrenaline has me
wild and giddy and shaking hard.

In my mind, I hear the chant of
Tarren’s paper dry voice, “
Thirty-two seconds, thirty-two seconds,
thirty-two seconds….
”