A picnic for one.
I drove on, Ponderosa Pass coming up, a black mass even darker than the darkness ahead. Remembering the mob of workers from the cannery, I eased off the gas before the barricade and killed the headlights.
As soon as the barricade vaguely resolved ahead, I steered off the road. It was pitch-black here, the mountains cutting off the moon from sight, so I slowed to a crawl. The tires sank in the marshy reeds alongside the road.
The overturned bus from the Lawrenceville Cannery seemed to leap out of the darkness. I almost smashed into it, managing to wrench the wheel to the side just in time.
After steering around the bus, I parked the Silverado at the base of the pass. The tree line sloped steeply upward here, impossible to scale. I hopped out, my boots smacking wetly into the earth. To start my hike up the mountain, I’d have to climb the barricade once again.
As I pulled my boots from the wet reeds, they made a sucking sound. It was annoying and loud, but there was no other way for me to get back to the road. I continued on, stepping into a boggy spot. My boot sank even lower. When I went to lift my leg, my foot almost pulled out of the boot. I paused to firm my toes inside the boot.
But the sucking sound continued.
Behind me.
Then it stopped. An echo?
I waited, listening for the faintest sound. Nothing. I took another step, and the sucking noise came again in the darkness behind me. I paused, and it paused as well.
I tried to ram my fear back down my throat. If I started sprinting, I’d literally run right out of my boots. Even if I managed to get away, I wouldn’t last an hour out here barefoot.
I started up again.
The sucking noise started up.
But now it was in stereo.
Dozens of feet squelching through the reeds.
When I looked over my shoulder, there was only darkness. I swung my head back toward the highway. I was almost there. I could even make out the station wagon smashed beneath the fallen tree at the base of the barricade.
Ten more steps.
The invisible army marched behind me.
Seven steps.
Terror bubbled up from my chest. I swallowed it back down.
Three.
At last I eased onto the asphalt, keeping both boots.
I whipped around.
Emerging from the darkness, a band of cannery workers, looking even more ragged than those before. Seven or eight of them. Clothes half torn off. Bushy beards sprouting from the men’s faces. The women’s fingernails snapped off and bloody.
They broke into a run, their feet kicking up sprays of mud.
I turned and sprinted for the barricade, the backpack bouncing on my shoulders. Their footfalls pounded the highway behind me, closer and closer.
I leapt onto the hood of the station wagon, landing before the dead Host driver-Nick’s father. He was still sprawled through the windshield where we’d left him, his head pulverized. I used his back as a stepping-stone to launch me onto the roof, and from there I shot up onto the beaver-dam rise of fallen tree trunks. My hands scrabbled across the wet bark.
The Hosts reached the base of the crisscrossed tree trunks and flew up at me.
They were closing too fast.
I wasn’t going to make it.
If I drew the gun, I’d never get off all the shots in time. I dipped a shoulder, let the pack slide into a trough between the logs. I swung the baling hooks up on their nylon loops and seized the handles.
I turned.
One Host bounded onto the station wagon, denting the roof. Only a few yards away. There’d be no running from them or outsmarting them.
Not this time.
Curved steel hooks protruding from either fist, I turned and leapt into the mass.
ENTRY 33
I landed on the roof of the station wagon, the impact sending out a kettledrum rumble, the metal cratering beneath my boots.
Hosts lunged up at me from all sides.
I didn’t think.
I just fought.
A flurry of steel and blood, the baling hooks like a part of my body. I sank a tip in one Host’s throat, ripping it out even as I pivoted to cave in another’s skull at the temple. The first three fell away, knocking down the others trying to scale the sides of the station wagon.
But I wasn’t done there.
Rather than let the others come after me, I jumped down into their midst and waded in, both arms swinging. Blood spatter arced overhead. I was screaming not in fear but in rage. A battle cry.
I hurled a hook up through the soft flesh beneath a Chaser’s chin, the tip curving through her skull and shoving through her eyehole, popping the front membrane.
– red windshield glass skittering across the floor-
I wrenched the hook free, and she toppled, shuddering.
– Uncle Jim’s eyeless face-
Another Host grabbed me from behind, but I spun, raking both hooks, embedding the points in the sides of his head.
– Zeus licking my face, a puppy curled in my arms-
He dropped back stiffly, his body like a plank, his weight yanking his head free of the steel points.
– my brother hooked to tubes-jigsaw pendant in the grass-Cassius whimpering-Chet’s face transforming behind the chain-link-Bob Bitley staggering toward me-Patrick’s black cowboy hat lowering onto my head-my shadow looming large on the gym doors-
I tumbled out of the storm of memories, coming back to myself, breathing hard. My arms ached at my sides. The Hosts lay sprawled around, twitching and gone. My face and shirt felt sticky with their blood, and my hooks were stained oil-black.
For a moment the silence bathed me.
Eight Hosts, dead at my hand.
With each breath I seemed to inflate, my spine straightening one vertebra at a time, pulling me upright inch by inch.
A familiar sound called my attention to the side of the highway. A few more Hosts trudged toward the barricade, their legs mired up to the ankles in the marshy reeds.
I drew the revolver, waited until they reached the edge of the asphalt about ten yards away. Then I shot them through their foreheads, one after another.
I thumbed the release and let the wheel click open, the hot brass falling away, bouncing at my feet. I climbed up the station wagon again and found my backpack where I’d dumped it on the fallen trees.
After reloading the revolver, I was on my way.
Though there was no sign of Hosts beyond the barricade, I cut off the main road and traveled through the terrain alongside it as we had before. Scaling the slope was treacherous, as was making headway through the underbrush. The heavy backpack tugged at my shoulders, and the hockey stick tangled in branches. My thighs and calves burned. But at a certain point, I fell into a rhythm.
Everything hurt just as much, but I no longer cared. I was separate from the pain and exhaustion, just like the Hosts, observing it as if from some other place. Every time I got hit by thoughts of what might be waiting for me in Lawrenceville, I pushed them aside.
My focus narrowed to a single aim: finding Alex.
For a while I zoned out, drifting in time. It was a few years ago, a night when Alex had called to tell Patrick that her dad had to go out on patrol.
We sneak over to her house and hide in the bushes, waiting for the sheriff’s car to pull out of the driveway. Finally Sheriff Blanton steps outside. He pauses on the porch, looking back at her in the doorway. “I don’t want those Rain boys over here,” he says. “Rain only-”
“-goes one direction,” she says, cutting him off. “Down.” She shoves his shoulder playfully. “I got it. Now, go keep the peace already.”
When Sheriff Blanton turns for his car, she casts a glance over at the bushes where she knows we’re hiding and shoots us a wink I feel in my spine.
I know the wink isn’t for me. It’s for Patrick. But it doesn’t matter. I’m close enough to her, to them, that some of her glow touches me, too.
As soon as the car’s taillights disappear, we sneak across the front lawn and Alex lets us in, giving Patrick a kiss I can hear even though I don’t look over. We make root beer floats and head outside. Like old times, we cram into the hammock together to peer up at the stars, slurping our drinks, swaying, and picking out the constellations.