Pestilence Rising Read online

  Chapter 6

   

  I woke in a sweat, no shirt on, injuries aching, white ceiling above me. My pants were dry, as was the green wool blanket someone had lain over me. The springs in the cot squeaked when I moved.

  I was in a cramped office stuffed with papers and stacked cardboard boxes. A seriously outdated computer sat atop a small, wooden writing desk. A safe was shoved against a wall next to a metal filing cabinet.

  I tested my legs. I felt fine, surprisingly good for someone who should’ve been dying from Center medicine-induced withdrawal. I lifted the well-taped gauze to check the bullet wound. Someone had cleaned it and stitched it closed. I couldn't have patched myself up, especially not in my completely incoherent state.

  I performed a mental inventory of what I remembered. Fluorescent lights, nearly empty shelves, Dramamine in Winston's drugstore. I tried the office doorknob, expecting it to be locked, but it opened easily. The short hall was empty.

  “Hello?”

  Fresh air pushed into the hall from the front the store. The day was warm; I could tell.

  When I emerged, the store looked almost as I remembered, the shelves, the empty cooler in the back. Sunlight streaming through the windows was blinding. The clouds had moved on for the moment.

  “Is anyone here?”

  No one waited with guns. No Center personnel lurked at the entrance. This peace was a far cry from the agony and the destruction of the accident. If fires still burned, they did so in the distance.

  I went to the front where I'd seen the cashier counter the previous night. A white-haired man on a stool near the register read a newspaper. His coffee mug sat to the side near an open pack of mini-chocolate donuts. He smiled when he saw me.

  “Good morning!”

  “Did you...” Save my life? The question seemed like such a dramatic way to begin a conversation with a stranger.

  “It was the oddest thing. I took the garbage out last night and when I came back in, I found a soaking wet backpack at the door and a trail of water past the greeting card display, which you knocked over, by the way.”

  “Sorry. I don't remember.” I glanced across the room, where Llewyn directed me. God only knew what kind of pills I actually took.

  “I'll bet you don't. I followed your trail all the way around the store until I found you curled up next to the door. What were you on, anyway?”

  How do you explain mystery medication to a man who didn't even know the Center existed?

  “Dramamine?”

  “I'd say it was a bit more, but we'll let that go. Whatever it was, the effects have passed.”

  Gideon had lied. Either that or they were wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time the doctors at the Center screwed up.

  “I would've called an ambulance, but the flood has the phone lines on the fritz. I stitched the wound on your arm. It was deep but not as bad as it looked before I cleaned it up, just a lot of blood. I gave you a hefty dose of fever reducer, some painkillers. Hope that's okay.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  He turned the newspaper page, “Name's Bill Trehorn. What do I call you?”

  “Hunter.”

  “I was just going to head back into the stockroom and make myself some eggs. Want some breakfast?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Bill came around to the front of the counter, pausing as he passed me, “How's the arm?”

  “Much better than last night.” I stole a glance out the front door to check for my pursuers. The parking lot and the street were empty.

  He nodded, “Good to hear.” He led me to a door in the corner of the store. “I served as a field medic in Vietnam. Fulfilling but sometimes a nasty job. Glad to hear I still have the touch. The way you were thrashing around, I couldn't tell if I was helping or hurting. You're stronger than you look.”

  I thought of Celeste.

  “Did anyone come looking for me?”

  “Not a soul. Why? Are you on the run?”

  Yes.

  “I was with someone before I crossed the field. We were in an accident.”

  “Well there's part of the story. That's a fair distance if you're talking about the highway over yonder. I'm surprised you made it with the water being so high.”

  At the back of the cooler, near a set of big double doors, a card table and some chairs were arranged in a corner. Bill propped the door open with a wooden shim. He went to a kitchenette consisting of a counter complete with a small sink, microwave and a hot plate. The cabinet doors were plywood.

  “I had this setup installed when I got stuck here during a rough winter. I only live a couple miles down the road, but when you have more than a foot of snow on the ground, that trek becomes as treacherous as any.” He opened a dented refrigerator for a carton of eggs. “Scrambled?”

  I needed to leave. Gideon would figure out which direction I'd gone and be on me in short order. I was surprised he wasn't there already.

  “That's great, thanks. I need to move on soon. Are the roads passable?”

  “Far as I know.” He broke the eggs over a pan on the hot plate, then as he turned to sit at the table with me, he fell into a rough fit of coughing.

  My presence was making him sick, my trauma the previous night, my lack of any sort of control. How much damage had I done?

  He removed an orange inhaler from his pocket and took a hit.

  I needed to get out of there, pronto.

  “I should go.” I started to stand, but he stopped me.

  “Sit down. I'll be just fine.” He said as if he read my mind. “I just put eggs on. You can't leave until you eat. I saved your life, which means you owe me. I get to hear the true story. Where are you trying to run off to?”

  How much could I tell without him thinking I needed a straitjacket?

  “My brother is missing. This girl and I were traveling to the place he was last seen.”

  “Where is this girl now?”

  “I don't know. She might still be at the accident.”

  “You left her?”

  “Celeste was fine. I saw her before I took off.”

  The look on Bill's face told me that he did not approve, “Those gashes looked pretty bad. I'm guessing it wasn't just a fender bender.”

  “I wasn't in my right mind.”

  He nodded as he got up to get the eggs, “I'll give you that. What kind of trouble is this brother of yours in?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea. Michael and I haven't spoken in years. We don't get along.” I kept an eye on the door he'd cracked open, looking for signs of danger, then added, “He's kind of a dick.”

  “Every family has one.” He spooned eggs onto my plate. “I had an uncle who insisted on coming back every Christmas to make my parents miserable. He always seemed bent on driving a wedge between them by embarrassing my father or making passes at my mother. Some people have to take their personal troubles out on whoever happens to be around.” He asked, “Where does Celeste come in? She your girlfriend?”

  “She's helping me find him.”

  “So this is what I've gathered. You two were in the process of searching for your brother. You were in this pretty serious car accident, and you left her to fend for herself.”

  Okay, I was officially a jerk for leaving her behind. Why did I leave? Llewyn. The woman from the glass. I left Celeste with the wreckage and a bunch of armed, trained fighters because a woman who was probably a hallucination told me to.

  “I should have stayed with her.”

  “Did you abandon the effort to find your brother because part of you doesn't want to find him?”

  Llewyn had removed me from the path. She led me away from Celeste and the truck carrying us closer to him. I hadn’t considered the possibility that my mind could’ve conjured her to keep me from having to deal with him.

  “Michael used to tell me that my birth was like a trade - a mother for a brother who wasn't good for much of anything. She died when I was born.”

  �
�Well, you’re good for something if he needs you. All this,” He motioned to the injuries I had all over, “should be enough for him.” Bill put a closed fist to his mouth and coughed into it.

  “I have to go.” I shoveled the last bites of breakfast into my mouth as I stood. I refused to risk his life any longer.

  “Back to Celeste, correct?” He wouldn't let me leave until he was certain I would head in the right direction.

  “I'm going back to her. We'll find him.”

  “Good. That's the honorable course of action, especially given that a woman has endangered herself in order to help you.”

  Bill had dried my backpack and its contents. Through some miraculous method, he somehow salvaged my shoes. He handed my phone to me.

  “I dried it off as best I could, took the battery out and put some canned air to it. It hasn’t come back on yet, but it might if you give it a while. I dropped mine at the edge of a lake while I was fishing once. A day or two later, it came back to life.”

  “I don’t know how to repay you.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Happy to help my fellow man.” He opened a cardboard box against a wall, “Whenever severe weather comes, I stash some supplies so the paranoid masses don't clean me out.” He offered me some over-the-counter painkillers, antibiotics from behind the pharmacy counter, snacks and a couple bottles of water.

  Out in front of the drugstore, he gave me directions back to the highway, around the flooded field. I thanked him for saving my life, then we shook hands and said goodbye. I left, wishing I could do something for him. Leaving him with no more than my gratitude seemed inadequate.

  I walked a couple of blocks, through a two-stoplight town that the flood hadn't yet touched, aside from some waterlogged front lawns. The place looked abandoned with no one outside, no driving cars. I felt isolated from the world there, which was okay with me for the moment. The pause gave me enough time to get my head together. I turned on a dirt road and left the houses behind for the countryside.

  The field I had traversed was on my left, behind a thin stand of scraggly trees that crowded and choked the life from each other. On my right was another sunken field, filled with water. The road between, the stretch on which I traveled, rose higher as it led up to the highway. The calm I'd gained while with Bill diminished the closer I got to the accident scene.

  I reached the intersection where the road met the highway and saw two more submerged fields across the way. Standing above all that water was surreal. They were lakes but not really. From behind me, an osprey glided on a humid breeze, over shining ripples.

  A shadow darkened the road to my left - the truck. I ran toward it, calling Celeste's name. Somehow the SUV stood on all four wheels again. When I got closer, I saw that it wasn't our truck but Gideon's. I could tell because it wasn't as damaged as I remembered ours being. The doghouse and the side were dented all the way to the back, but the tires were all intact. It almost looked drivable. I saw no one nearby.

  Then I heard it - a sound like crying coming from the side of the road. She sat halfway down the embankment, holding her knees to her chest and rocking. Her featherless wings had healed slightly and sprouted from her back like tree roots.

  “Celeste.”

  Her head whipped around. In a flash, she had slammed me against the SUV, her hands on the front of my shirt.

  “You left me. Why would you do that?” She pulled me toward her only to shove me again.

  My head hit the metal with jarring force. We needed to have a conversation about the relative fragility of the human body.

  “I wasn't in my right mind.” I offered the same excuse I gave Bill. It didn't work so well with her, but she released me.

  “I thought you were dead. I thought I had failed in my mission. I cannot do this by myself.” Tears fell again.

  “You won't have to. I'm sorry.”

  She put her back to me, revealing wings, which were no longer ragged spikes of broken bone. The skin was an eerily smooth gray color, lean muscle beneath. Joints attaching them to her back moved. I could picture what they could be if restored, the size of them.

  Celeste had feared for my safety. Her distress was the catalyst that triggered this growth. This confirmation of everything she said hit me hard. I was in the presence of a heavenly minion.

  “Your wings.”

  She sniffed, “They feel better.”

  Seeing her partially restored was evidence that all she told me was true. My brother was in trouble. God sent her to help me save him. I drew a deep breath to steel myself against the gravity of these realizations, then I evaluated our situation.

  A trail of parts led to the crumpled remains of our truck farther down the embankment. Various fluids leaked around it into puddles, into the flooded field. Would you like an antifreeze glaze on your corn? Shards from the windows sparkled on the grass.

  “What happened after I left?”

  “I fought with the men who chased us, no thanks to you. I could have used your help.” She crossed her arms.

  “I said I was sorry. Trust me, with the shape I was in, I wouldn't have been able to fight.”

  “What about the problem with your medicine?”

  “It's taken care of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Gideon was mistaken.” I muttered. “Was he here? I couldn't imagine him just letting you go.”

  “He became more cautious when he ran out of bullets. There were two trucks behind ours. I fought the men who weren’t injured. When they decided they couldn’t beat me, they left in their other truck. I didn’t know what to do. I pushed our truck the rest of the way down the hill because it was on fire. I thought we could use this one if you returned.”

  “He probably went back to the Center for more firepower. You should've hidden. You're lucky he didn't have any snipers with him.” I performed a cursory inspection of her head, tilting her face to get a look.

  “Perhaps you could have advised me of that risk had you remained.”

  The only evidence of injury was the dried blood all over her shirt.

  “Point taken. I promise not to leave again. We need to move forward. Agree?”

  She pouted, “Good. And yes.”

  I inspected the truck to see what we had to work with. The interior was mostly intact. Windows on the right side were broken. The windshield had cracked. Keys were in the ignition. I tried the engine. The starter hesitated but rolled over.