Horton increased his pace until he could grab her by the arm. “Hey, stop for a minute. I need to rest.”
She spun around, flaring her jagged teeth before pulling away in a grunt, snapping her arm free.
He held his hands up. “Sorry, but you need slow down, Helena. I’m not operating at a hundred percent here.”
Her eyes pinched after a head tilt. The name obviously caught her by surprise.
“That’s right. I’m going to call you Helena, after my grandmother. I’m tired of saying hey all the time.”
He took a seat on a short retaining wall to rest his injured leg. His arms felt like limp noodles. So did the rest of his body. He needed sleep. And food. Water wouldn’t hurt either.
The brick fence was part of someone’s landscaping, though everything was dead in the area. The house behind him used to have a southwestern style tile roof, most of them broken or missing now.
There wasn’t a chimney along its roofline like the other houses on the block. He figured that meant its former residents were the first to perish once the world turned perpetually cold.
The rest of the home was in rough shape as well, its windows smashed and the front door hanging open. The doorknob was missing, as if someone had kicked open the door, leaving only a hole in the wood.
He imagined a happy family living there back in the day, with their 2.5 kids frolicking across what he assumed was a lush front yard. His vision changed to show him an SUV. It was shiny and new, an all-black, four-door monster, with chrome wheels and some of those little white stickers on the back window—the kind that depicted a happy family holding hands. They had a dog named Max, he decided, choosing an all-white German Shepherd for their pet.
“Do you know where you’re going?” he asked, after catching his breath.
She grunted twice.
“Does two mean yes?”
Two more guttural sounds came from her throat.
“How many for no?”
She didn’t answer.
“Does nothing mean no? Or does one?”
Two more grunts.
“How much farther?”
She turned and pointed in the same direction they’d been traveling, jutting her arm forward in a repetitive shove.
“Yeah, I know that’s where we’re going. But how much longer? I’m about done here.”
She turned her head away, taking a frozen stance like she had before—hunched over and on high alert.
A moment later, a stick cracked.
Horton whipped his head around in the direction of the sound.
So did Helena.
“Hold it right there, you two,” a man said in a muffled voice. He was holding a pistol and dressed in black from head to toe, with goggles covering his eyes and a mask over his nose and mouth.
CHAPTER 24
When Horton saw the gun in the masked man’s hand aimed at Helena, he got up from the wall and ran in front of the girl with his arms out to the side. “Wait! Don’t shoot. She’s with me.”
Helena pushed through his arms, then bent forward, her mouth open, snarling with her razor teeth showing.
Horton grabbed her by the elbows and yanked her back, moving her behind him once again.
“Stay!” he told her with an index finger pointing up. “Let me handle this.”
He turned his attention to the man with the gun. “What do you want? We don’t have anything to steal.”
“Horton? Is that you?” the gunman asked.
Horton didn’t recognize the voice.
The assailant pulled the mask from his face, then the goggles. “It’s me, Doc Lipton.”
“Doc? What the hell are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“How the hell did you find me?”
“The cretins were up all night partying. It amazes me what drunks will reveal when their brains are mush with a little help from a gallon of 190 proof.”
Horton nodded. “Loose lips sink ships.”
Doc smiled, looking proud of himself. Then his face turned serious again. “Who’s the Scab?”
“A friend who rescued me from my little dust-up with Frost.”
Lipton laughed, his face twisting into a smirk. “Well, how about that. Beaten to the punch by a Scab Girl. An ugly one at that.”
Helena growled at him, showing more teeth than before.
Horton needed to calm the situation before someone else had skin torn from his body. “Her name is Helena and you might want to check the attitude, Doc. She’s not deaf. She understands what you’re saying.”
“Helena? You gave it a name?”
“Had to call her something.”
“Next thing you know, you’ll be taking it out on a date. You know, flowers, dinner, and then a little bumping of uglies. Scab uglies, to be precise.” Doc pointed at Horton’s swollen eye, then at Helena. “Did it do that?”
“No. Frost did.” Horton turned the side of his leg toward Doc to give him a direct view of the open wound on his ankle. “Compliments of Sergeant Barkley.”
“Damn, that had to hurt. That’s why Frost barely feeds that fur-covered mongrel. Speaking of which, when’s the last time your new friend got its fill? Shouldn’t you be worried? A starving animal is hard to anticipate.”
Horton was tired of the man’s rhetoric, choosing to ignore his last set of questions. “Does Frost know you’re here?”
“Of course not. He’d carve me up like a two-hundred and fifty-pound catfish, then feed my old bones to that flea-infested mutt of his.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“I’m here because I need your help.”
“Why?”
“Birds of a feather, my friend.”
“Come again?”
“We both have something in common.”
“What? Frost?”
“Precisely. It was only a matter of time before he figured out I couldn’t repair the refinery. And I’m sure you know how that would have ended.”
Horton did. “Failure is never an option.”
Doc nodded, lowering the gun in the process. “Seemed like the proper time to take my leave of him, and his band of merry men.” He took his backpack off and put it on the ground.
“Tell me you have food and water in there, Doc,” Horton said, his eyes glued on the pack.
Doc pulled the zipper open and took out a water bottle. He tossed it end over end.
Horton snagged it with two hands, twisted the cap off, and downed half of it. Then he gave the bottle to Helena.
She put the opening next to the hole in her face where her nose used to be for a three count, then moved it to her lips and guzzled the water down her throat. When she was done, she grunted while holding the bottle up and shaking it.
“I think that’s more than plenty,” Doc said. “The rest is for us humans.”
“You need to quit saying things like that. She is human.”
“In your eyes, perhaps,” Doc said, pulling out more items from his pack. Once again, he tossed them to Horton, one at a time, keeping his distance.
First, it was a spare windbreaker. It matched the one Frost had left by the telephone pole as a cruel joke.
Horton put it on, then zipped up the front.
Helena needed to do the same thing, but she only snarled in response when he motioned with his hands for her to do what he’d just done. She preferred to keep the front open for some reason. That was fine by him. He wasn’t about to argue with a flesh-eating machine.
Next, Doc gave him a blanket. It was Army Green and only half-sized, but more than enough for Helena’s five-foot frame.
Horton gave it to her, then motioned with his arms to wrap it around her shoulders or her waist. She did the latter, working the cloth around her midsection, then she held the front closed with her fingers.