And then we break free, out into the open, my face and arms and legs stinging with scratches and tears, my heart ripping a hole in my chest, my eyelashes dripping with sweat. Hex flies ahead, literally. His paws continue to push him forward, like he’s running, but they’re not touching the ground. It’s all I can do to keep him in sight as he crosses the same grassy field we passed through last night. And despite Laney’s desire to avoid it, we charge back into town.
All we can do is hope there aren’t any witch gangs around.
Hex, who’s now back on the ground running like a normal dog, leads us through the streets, zigzagging what seems to be a random path through the city. Shouts and footsteps follow us close behind, but I don’t look back.
After two quick turns down interconnecting alleys, Hex skids to a stop and then dives through an open doorway. Frantic and out of breath, we follow him inside. I push the metal door shut behind us quietly, leaning my ear against it. Footsteps patter past as The End just misses us yet again. Thanks to Hex’s keen instincts, we’re safe again—at least for the moment.
There are no rooms on the first floor of what appears to be an apartment building, just a broken elevator and a staircase. We take the stairs to the second floor, my footsteps, despite my best efforts to tiptoe, echoing all the way to the top.
The halls of the second floor are as empty and silent as the rest of the town. We could go higher, but my training won’t allow it. Assume the worst. Always have a contingency plan. If we have to get out fast, I’d rather jump from a second-floor window than a story or two higher.
Every door is smashed open; each apartment’s occupants were likely sleeping when Salem’s Revenge hit. The smell is unbearable. No Necros have been through here to collect the dead.
“I could really use a clothespin right now,” Laney says, holding her nose.
Also holding my nose, I poke my head in each room until I find one that’s unoccupied by the dead. Whoever lived here must’ve been out when the witch apocalypse hit. Working a night shift or out partying, perhaps. There’s a good chance they never made it home. The lock on the door is shattered, wood splinters sprinkled at the entrance, but the rest of the room is untouched. We move inside and I close the door, propping a chair in front of it, pretending that it will make one iota of difference if a witch wants to get in. The closed door helps with the smell, although not fully.
While Hex laps at a puddle of water I pour on the tile floor, and Trish randomly starts rummaging through a chest of drawers, Laney and I peek out one of the windows. A pair of birds wheel overhead, chasing each other on the indecisive winds, which are constantly changing direction. Nothing else moves, except the branches of the trees lining the streets.
My dog whines and I noticed the puddle is now just a tongue-smeared film on the tile. Hex cocks his head as if to say, “More?”
“We’re running out,” I say, “but since you saved our lives…” I slosh some more water out of the bottle. Hex slurps it up with three licks of his tongue.
“What are we going to do?” I wonder aloud.
“Wait them out,” Laney says. “Eventually they’ll move on, like they always do.” She has more experience staying in one city than I do.
Hex chases a cockroach across the floor. When intelligence meets curiosity, curiosity usually wins.
I wonder what I’m really doing out here with a magic dog, a trigger-happy girl and her mute sister, and a trail of dead witches in my wake. Am I really still trying to find Beth and Xave? In my heart (shut up!) I know they’re (don’t say it, don’t you dare say it!)…
I pull my journal from my backpack, which is torn and frayed after today’s battle. Rummage for a pencil…
Flip to a blank page…
Stare at the white, lined paper…
…
Press the tip of the pencil to the page, and write:
DEAD.
My heart beats heavily in my chest, shaking my hand. Hex, having lost the cockroach, sits on my feet and chuffs. I erase the word. Erase it again, scrubbing so hard I almost break through the page. But still, no matter how hard I erase, I can still make out the thin, ghostly letters.
DEAD.
I tear out the page, ball it up, and chuck it across the room.
“Are you okay?” Laney asks.
I flip to the next page and begin to write.
Gone are lives and loves and laughs,
Their shadows falling and breathing and haunting,
Chasing the dreams from The Real.
The Real, Rhett Carter
Chapter Twenty
I don’t know why I write the poem about The Real. I guess I need a dose of reality. A reminder of how much I’ve lost. Whatever the case, it seems to get Laney’s attention. “Not bad,” she says.
“Do you write?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Never had much of a way with words.”
“I disagree with that,” I say, thinking back to all the clever banter she’s slung my way so far.
“What’s that poem really about?” she asks.
Beth and Xave and dead little girls, my heart says. “I once saw a child, a little girl, get petrified by a gang of Destroyers,” I say instead. “Since then, I’ve learned a million and a half ways that sometimes you can’t be everything to everyone and sometimes you’re lucky to be nothing to nobody. That’s The Real. That life is an imperfect, broken thing, and we’re not here to fix it, just to do our best to keep it from getting any worse.”
“God. You’re even more jaded them I am,” Laney says. “I never would’ve guessed it. I thought you were just some optimistic glass-half-full hero who needed a reality check.” Laney looks at me the same the way she looked at Bil just before we left the magged-up house.
My heart is pounding and my jaw is set and I feel out of control. My temper is getting worse by the day. Am I here because I’ve found my place in the new world, hunting witches and warls? Is my life nothing more than a mortal contest? Either they have to die first or me? Maybe. I’ve done it before, with football. But do I like witch hunting? Do I soldier on day in and day out because it’s who I am now or simply because the need for revenge trumps everything else, including the will to survive?
“Please don’t go all Bil-Nez on me,” Laney says. “I was beginning to like you.”
I shake my head and push the anger down. She doesn’t understand anything. Sure, she lost her parents, but they were the enemy. They were witches. And she still has her sister. I lost everything.
There’s only one thing left that always seems to calm me when my nerves are more frayed than an old copper wire. Since I can no longer blog in this internet-less world I return to my journal, clutching my pencil like a child, all awkward grip and no finesse, trying to ignore Laney’s continued stares. Sometimes I wonder if words are all I have left. I write a sentence:
Words take moments and spin them into eternity.
But what if I don’t want to remember the moments? What if eternity becomes too heartbreaking to endure because the sum of the moments adds up to something bleak and miserable and devastating?
I want to cry, and six months ago I would have and did, leaving several pages of my journal warped and crinkly, mostly pages about Beth and Xave. But that kid’s long gone, maybe gone forever. He can’t do what I have to do.
Chapter Twenty-One
We wait a good four hours until we’re sure the coast is clear, that The End have given up on trying to find us.
Laney takes a nap, and is joined by Hex, who curls up at her feet. Trish finds what she was looking for, a photo album. Some stranger’s collection of memories. For the entire four hours she pours over each picture, running her fingers along the smiling faces. For some reason I can’t stop watching her. Her expression is vacant, as if all emotion has been sucked out of her, and yet I sense the barest of smiles just behind her lips, as if too scared to come out.
When she closes the album and looks at me, I know it’s time to go.
I nudge Laney’s shoulder and her eyes flash open. “Oh. It’s just you,” she says. “Thanks for not punching me awake this time.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Did I really hit you in my sleep?”
“About eighteen times,” she says. “I’m surprised I don’t have a black eye.”
“You didn’t have to sleep so close.”
“You’re like a space heater,” she says. “I haven’t felt that warm and cozy in a long time. At least until you clocked me in the nose.”
I don’t know how I feel about her feeling warm and cozy while sleeping next to me last night, so I just say, “We’ve got to keep moving.”
“Or what? We might actually be safe and get a good night’s rest?”
Or I might get too comfortable and delay my mission even more. “You guys could stay here,” I say. “It seems safe now that The End is gone. Hex and I will come back when we can.”
“Forget it,” Laney says. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy. As long as you don’t go hermit-writer on me too much, I wouldn’t mind sticking with you for a while.”
“Then we go now.” Why is she so intent on travelling with me? I don’t ask. Everyone has a reason for what they do, and sometimes it’s something they don’t want to share. I can’t ask her to share what I’m not willing to myself.
Laney’s got her pack and shotgun and is at the door with her sister before I’m able to rouse Hex.
On the street, we’re cautious as we follow signs back to I-79. There’s no sign of danger, so we take the ramp onto the highway, sticking to the edge closest to the tree line, just in case we need to hide.
We’re a few miles down the road when Laney grabs my arm and points at the sky. “What is that?” she says. A fiery streak arcs across the sky.
It almost looks like a plane, but no…
More like a kid’s toy rocket, but much, much faster…
It shrieks overhead and then plummets to the earth, back to where we’ve just come from…Waynesburg.
BOOM!
The world erupts in sound and fire and thunder beneath our feet, the earth trembling. I shove Laney and Trish to the ground, trying to cover their heads with my hands. Somewhere, Hex barks wildly.
A missile. The streaking rocket was a real, honest-to-goodness missile. I thought I’d seen everything strange and unexpected there was to see in this new world, but not this. And holy crap…
The Necros and The End might’ve still been in Waynesburg when the incendiary hit. And Bil. Crazy ol’ Bil. And we’d barely just left, and only because Trish got bored with the photos. My breath catches in my lungs.
“Get offa me,” Laney says, prying my hand away from her face. We untangle ourselves and sit up. The thick puff of a smoky mushroom cloud rises elegantly in the distance, hiding whatever chaos is beneath it. Shattered buildings? Dead bodies?
Who did this?
“They’re fighting back,” Laney says.
I freeze. “You mean…”
“Yep. The U.S. of freakin’ A,” she says. “Down but not out.”
As I watch the mushroom cloud expand, I think about it. Witches don’t use missiles. They abhor human technology. Magic is their tool. And who else but an army would be firing missiles? Laney’s got to be right.
But how many are left? How many are fighting? And from where? I don’t know anything about long-range weapons, but surely that missile couldn’t have been fired from that far away, could it?
“We should keep moving,” I say, helping Trish up. Laney refuses my offered hand and pushes to her feet.
No one disagrees and Hex is already a half-mile down the road, looking back as if to say Umm, hurry up.
Chapter Twenty-Two
For a few minutes the only sound is the scuff of our sneakers on the pavement, as we continue our trek away from the ruin that was once Waynesburg.
“This could all be over in a couple of months,” Laney says. “What with the whole Shock-and-Awe approach.”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Fine, Mr. Pessimistic. But at least someone’s fighting back. Someone who’s not a loner four-eyed kid carrying a toy sword.”
“My sword is not a toy,” I say.
“Well, it’s also not a missile.”
I can’t argue with that, so I stay silent.
“What do you think’s happening in Europe?” Laney asks after a few minutes, catching me off guard.
“What do you mean?” I ask. In the middle of nowhere in West-Bum-Bum Pennsylvania, Europe feels like it’s on another planet.
“I always wanted to visit Rome, Barcelona, Paris…” Laney says. “Do you think places like that still exist?”
I stare straight ahead, seeing the face of the man who I learned to love and hate fading into the distance. “Mr. Jackson…I mean…someone who seemed to know a lot about what was going on…told me that the witches are everywhere. They coordinated their attacks across the whole of the world. So yeah, Europe still exists, just not in the way it used to.”
“That sucks,” Laney says. “Do you think they have boners over there, too?” she asks, which makes me spit out the swig of water I’ve just taken. “What?” she says innocently. “You know, like the skeleton warriors we deboned.”
Her joke is so bad it’s laugh-worthy. “You’re not normal,” I say.
“Like you are?”
“As normal as they come,” I say. “Can we talk about your sister?”
“No,” she says.
“We need to understand why she writes in the air.”
“Drop it,” she says, all humor erased from her tone.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll talk later.”
She doesn’t say anything, just kicks another stone. Even Hex ignores it this time, more interested in a ratty, bloodstained leather jacket crumpled next to a dinged-up Harley Davidson motorcycle. Whoever owns the jacket and the bike is nowhere to be seen. Hex sniffs curiously at one of the cuffs. Freak, I think.
When we’re past the motorcycle, Laney says, “Do you think you’re going to go to Hell for killing witches?”
“Oh, so now you want to talk?” I say.
“How many witches have you killed, Witch Hunter? Break it down by witches, warls, and wizards.”
“I don’t keep count,” I say, which is a lie. Nine, fourteen, four.
“What about boners?” she says.
I can’t help the laugh that escapes my lips. “What about them?”
“Have you kept count of how many of them you’ve killed?”
“I’ve never seen them until yesterday,” I admit.
“So I’m up two on you then,” she says proudly.
“I guess so. Do you think you’re going to Hell for killing boners?” I ask.
“Only if they kill my sister,” she says matter-of-factly. “Failing her is the only sin left.”
Although it’s a bleak outlook, I envy her in some ways. At least she has something that matters.
~~~
Four hours of walking and the sign tells us we’ve still got another thirteen miles to Washington, Pennsylvania.
“Trish’s legs are tired,” Laney says.
“I didn’t hear her complain,” I say.
“Very funny.”
“Are you sure it’s not your legs that are tired?” I ask.
Laney pulls up short. “Yeah, my legs are tired, Trish’s are tired, your damn dog’s are tired. And even if you’re too stubborn and proud to admit it, your legs are tired, too.”
I gawk at her, not for the first or last time. “I’m not too stubborn,” I say. “My legs are tired.” They’re not really—a ten mile walk isn’t anything new for me.
Laney breathes deeply and I can tell she’s taken aback by my agreement. I can almost see the anger melting off her face, like a pile of snow in direct sunlight. I don’t think she’s too used to talking to people after endless months spent with only her mute sister and the dead diners in her restaurant hideaway.
?
??Okay,” she says. “So we stop.”
“We take a break,” I agree. I motion to the sign. “Just a mile to the next exit. We should get off the main road.”
She chews on her lip, as if trying to decide whether letting me dictate our next move is a show of weakness. Finally, she grabs Trish’s hand and says, “Fine. Next exit, we rest.”
She takes off at a brisk pace, half-dragging her younger sister after her. So much for tired legs.
“Hey, Laney! Wait up,” I say. Jogging, I pull astride of her. Hex takes my increase in speed to be a sign that we’re going for a run, and he charges ahead of us, his tail wagging excitedly. He looks back when I slow to match Laney’s speed.
“What now?” she says. There’s frustration in her voice.
“I’m—I just wanted to say I’m sorry you had to leave your safe place,” I say.
She stares straight ahead, blows a bit of gold hair off her forehead. “It wasn’t your fault. The witches might not have known we were there, but they were still killing us. Day by day, bit by bit. A slow and agonizing death of seclusion. The truth is, I’m glad to be out of that restaurant. Having those dead people down below always creeped me out.”
“That didn’t mean you had to re-kill them all,” I say, smirking. “Maybe they were just coming up to borrow a cup of sugar.”
“I didn’t have the heart to tell them I was all out,” she says, returning my smile. For a second I see a crack in the wall she’s built around herself.
“Why were you in that restaurant anyway?” I ask.
The crack disappears. Oops. My question is met with a frown a mile deep. “After my parents…” I see her knuckles whiten as she squeezes Trish’s hand tighter. “The restaurant was a special place for us, as a family,” she says. “We used to go there every Friday night, as a treat for a hard week of work and school. We celebrated birthdays and good grades there. The chef, Marco, knew us by name and treated us like family. I couldn’t let Trish stay in the house with…them, so I took her to the only other place that felt comfortable.” Images of Laney blasting Marco the Skeleton’s skull off his shoulders cycle through my mind. A family friend. She made it look like nothing.