Total Eclipse (17 page)

He sounded so unhappy about that, and it broke my heart. “You’ve never failed me,” I said. “Never. And you never will, because this isn’t a pass/fail kind of score, David. I love you. I want you to be safe. That’s all.”

I meant it, though my knees had started trembling at the thought of leaving this place without his presence at my side. It wasn’t even so much the power he could bring to bear on our behalf—it was the sheer comfort of him. I needed him.

And I was going to have to do this without him, or lose everything. David on the opposite side of this was a death warrant for all of us. He was just too powerful.

I smiled. It actually felt warm, and real, and confident, even if I truly was scared to death deep down. “I’ll be fine,” I said. “We’ll be fine. Walk me to the car before you go, okay?”

He took my hand, and for a moment we just stood together, drinking in each other’s warmth, the reality of our bodies standing in the same space, the same time.

He kissed me. It felt so warm, so sweet, so
real
that I felt tears burning in my eyes. It was so perfect with him, and we never had
time.

He kissed away my tears, put his hands on my shoulders, and leaned his forehead against mine for a long, lovely moment, and then, without a word, we walked together to the waiting Mustang. David handed me into the passenger seat. He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed it, and I felt his lips against my skin like the warmest summer sun.

“We’ll be okay,” I told him again. He nodded, shut the door, and as the Djinn behind the wheel gunned the motor and sent the car hurtling down the deserted, silent street, I turned to watch David.

He disappeared into a mist. Gone.

“Wait,” Kevin said, and twisted around to look. “Where is he? Where did he go?”

“He’s not coming,” I said.

“But—”

“We’ll be okay,” I said again, firmly.

I was, I realized, a damn good liar. I could make everybody believe it, except me.

Leaving Seacasket was like living in a jump cut in a movie. One second, the world was still and hushed and silent and perfectly ordered, as if someone had pressed a giant pause button. . . . The next, we were in chaos.

By chaos, I mean it was worse than when we’d arrived.
Much
worse. The gray vanished, and suddenly the skies were crowded with black, bloated clouds that bloomed constantly with greenish lightning. Wind lashed the car hard and shoved it from one lane to the other, even with the Djinn’s uncanny reaction time. The sides of the road were littered with wrecks, shattered trees, downed power lines. I couldn’t see any electric lights at all in the houses and buildings that blurred past us. I could see occasional smaller lights—flashlights and candles—moving inside, and I wondered how terrified those people must be. All they could do was wait.

All we could do was keep moving.

Cherise reached over the seat to try the radio, but no matter where she dialed there was just pure static, or one of those emergency alert broadcasts telling people to stay in their homes and wait for more information.

I imagined Twitter had probably exploded from the strain, if the internet had survived thus far. Not to mention Facebook.

“Where are we going?” Cherise asked.

The radio hissed, and the slider took over on its own like a transistorized version of a Ouija board. I expected to hear Whitney’s dulcet Southern tones.

I heard David’s.

“Jo,” he said. “All right?”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” I said, which was a brave interpretation, given the outside world. “Where are you?”

“Jonathan’s house, with Whitney.”

The station changed, lightning fast. “We are
not
going to be good roomies,” Whitney cooed. “I already want to kick his pretty ass across the room. I wonder if I can.”

David regained control of the radio. “From here, we’ll do what we can to lessen the dangers around you as you go. Whitney’s going to continue to pilot the Djinn who’s driving you.”

“None of which answers the vital question of
where are we going!
” Cherise said, hanging half over the seat.

“You’re heading for Sedona,” he said. “But be warned—that entire area is under siege. It’s not going to be easy.”

It never was. “We’re going to need to stop,” I said. “We can’t keep going like this. Rest and food, water and bathrooms. Very important.”

“We’ll find you shelter,” David promised. “Try to rest for now.”

Easier said than done, as the thunder crashed and the lightning struck with the regularity of a strobe light to the eyes, as the Djinn driving swerved to avoid first one unseen obstacle, then another. It was like being back at sea again in a full-force gale.

But eventually, inevitably, even that couldn’t keep me from sliding away into dark, dreamless sleep. Cars have that effect, even dodging, swerving ones, if you get used to it. Weirdly soothing. If the Djinn had been on its own, it could have blipped easily from one spot to another by taking a shortcut through the aetheric planes . . . but with humans it was tricky at best. Even the Djinn who had the most experience and ability at taking humans through the aetheric in physical form, not just spiritual, had a less-than-confidence-building success rate. Say, fifty percent.

So we traveled the old-fashioned way, miles passing under wheels. It was a lot of miles, because we were moving very fast despite the dangerous and unpredictable conditions. I woke up periodically, prodded by anxiety or bad dreams, hunger or thirst, or the more basic bodily functions. Food and drink turned out to be no challenge at all; shops were deserted, and many had already been looted. I didn’t mind drinking store-brand cola if it was all that was left. I tried not to see what it all meant, what all this widespread smoking devastation and desperation meant for civilization as a whole.

Things were falling apart. There were people in small groups, and they ran when we roared by.

The internet on Cher’s mobile phone had gone down in a haze of 404 Not Found errors. Then her mobile had failed, too. And mine. And Kevin’s.

We all had different network providers. I assumed that, too, was not a good sign.

We were just heading into the St. Louis area, from the Missouri side—a long and exhausting ride, with as few stops as possible in places that were only marginally dangerous. I’d hoped that maybe the calmer center of the country might still be holding its own.

I was wrong.

You could see the dull red-orange glow of flames coming from St. Louis a long way off against the cold night sky, and low-hanging, constantly rumbling clouds.

“I hate this,” Cherise said, fidgeting anxiously. She’d been fidgeting a long time, nervous with the crackle of power in her blood and the fear of actually letting it loose. I’d managed to get
that
through her head, finally, and we’d done long hours of power exercises, with Kevin as her spotter, to teach her how to use the aetheric properly, how to center her power and ground it, how to use it in more delicate ways than sledge-hammering every problem into smithereens, along with everything that
wasn’t
a problem.

She was actually not sucking at it. I couldn’t help but feel that maybe this was a little bit due to my excellence as a teacher, but it probably wasn’t.

Over the radio, David’s voice said, “I need to prepare you for what’s coming.” That was ominous, because he’d never said that before, and we’d already been through some rough patches on the way. He sounded very sober. “You’re going to come up on some problems in the next ten miles. I’ll direct you on the blockage in the road, but we may have to take detours as things get worse.”

“That’s it? Roadblocks?” I felt a little surge of irritation. “Not exactly news, David.”

“It’s not cars,” he said. “It’s people. They’re desperate, and they’re terrified, and they’re angry. They’ll attack the car if it gets too close. They think they can run to safety, but there is none.”

That was very different, and we all knew it. Cherise asked, in a small voice, “How many people?”

“Right now, there are three main groups,” he said. “Two of them are fighting each other for food and transportation. All together, they number about fifty thousand.”

“Fifty—” Words failed me. I couldn’t even echo the number. I glanced in the back and saw that Cherise was staring fiercely at the radio, tears welling in her eyes. “Fifty thousand people. Refugees.”

“That would imply they have some kind of refuge to flee toward,” David said bleakly. “They don’t. If they try to leave, they’ll get picked off by the storms, the fires, the sinkholes. Animal attacks. And there’s no safe harbor for them, not anymore.”

“The Wardens—,” Kevin began.

“They already killed the Wardens who were trying to help them,” David said flatly. “Mob mentality. Just don’t get close. If you don’t share their beliefs, they’ll kill you, too.”

“What beliefs?”

Kevin didn’t need to ask the question, because we topped the next hill and saw the first of the crowds that David was talking about. They were filthy, ragged, wild-eyed, and armed with rifles, axes, sharp sticks—I didn’t see a single person who didn’t have some kind of weapon, even if it was just a stone to throw. A few were carrying badly painted signs that looked like they might have been written in dried blood.

REPENT OR DIE
.

Oh man.

“You want to know the biggest joke?” Whitney’s voice said, echoing through the silence in the car. “These are the Episcopalians. You don’t even want to run into the hard-shell Baptists right now, brothers and sisters.”

Kevin crossed himself. He did it in a rush, like it came from someplace deep within him, and I wondered how he’d been brought up, in his early days. Catholic, probably. Cherise and I had both been churchgoing girls, too, until recently; I wasn’t what I could call committed, but I had always honored God. Wardens never doubted the presence of higher powers. Heck, we had a direct line to
something
, even if it wasn’t the Head Bearded Guy.

But this . . . this was people clutching at straws, using religion as an excuse for murder and destruction. And it made me sad and angry.

“We avoid them,” I said. Some of the crowd had already caught sight of us and were streaming in our direction. “If we can’t stop them, we have to stay out of their way.”

“But they’re just
people
,” Cherise said. “The same people who’d help you out if you had a flat tire. What
happens
to them? What happens to
us
?”

“Survival,” I said softly. “It’s selfish, and it’s dark, and we’ve always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.”

The Djinn had taken a sharp left turn down a side road and rocketed along it at insane speed, dodging falling tree branches, a wrecked and still smoldering SUV, and some things in the road that it took me long-delayed seconds to realize were actually dead bodies. I started to ask, but then I realized that I didn’t want to know how bad this was, how far it had gone. I just wanted to
stop it.

And I didn’t see any way to do that.

Misery crept up on me, and I swallowed hard against an ache in my throat and stomach. I wanted David. I wanted his arms around me, his strength beside me.

“Jo,” his voice said, and I closed my eyes and pretended he was here, physically here. It was easier than I’d thought. Maybe I was going crazy. “This has happened before. It’s happened in other countries, to other people; it’s even happened here, in some areas. Riots, purges, wars, genocide. There’s never a moment on Earth when someone isn’t suffering and dying at the hands of others. You know that. Human nature isn’t your fault.”

“I know,” I whispered. “But it feels like it is.”

Maybe he would have tried to offer me more therapy, I don’t know, but right then, Cherise screamed and yelled, “Stop the car!”

David must have been the one in control, because there was no debate about it. The Djinn braked the Boss to a stop on the damp pavement in a noisy slide.

“Uh, Cher, that mob is still heading this way,” Kevin said, sensibly checking out the rearview mirror. “Might take them a few minutes, but—”

Cherise wasn’t listening. She bailed out of the car and darted out into the glow of the headlights, and I saw her scramble over debris toward the side of the road. “Dammit,” I said. “Kevin. Go with her. Hurry.”

He was already on his way, and shot me an irritated look. “Like I wasn’t going to anyway,” he said. “Thanks,
Mom.
”

I was
so
glad he wasn’t my kid. It felt like cowardice, but I stayed behind. I was nothing but a liability right now, and at least one of us needed to stay with the car. Kevin didn’t seem to mind that decision in the least. In fact, he grinned fiercely as he passed through the headlights, plunging after Cherise to the side of the road.

It seemed to take forever. I watched anxiously through the back window. The mob was coming, and I could hear them screaming. It was a deep, animal roar, and I imagined this was how those soldiers throughout history had felt, holding their ground and waiting while the enemy charged.

It wasn’t good.

I got so focused on the approach of the crowd that it surprised me (complete with yelp) when Cherise yanked open the back door and climbed in with something bundled in her arms in a dirty blanket. It squirmed. Kevin piled in after, looking grim, and yelled, “Go go go!”

Off we went, leaving the swiftest of the mob to clutch at a spray of gravel and dust.

The bundle in Cherise’s arms wailed. It wasn’t the cry of a hungry or tired baby; this was more—aware. A toddler, maybe two or three years old. Cherise unwrapped the blanket, and I saw a small, round face capped by shiny, thick black hair. The child looked as miserable as I felt.

“Cher,” I said. “We can’t—”