Nightstruck

  “Back away, Piper,” I prayed under my breath. I knew the person standing out there in the dark was no longer the Piper I knew, was no longer my best friend. I also knew the chances of her coming back to herself were slim. But the thought of seeing her die right in front of me—at my father’s hands, no less—was too terrible to contemplate.

  “And what do you plan to do about Billy here?” Piper inquired, giving the goat a very careful pat on the head, avoiding the spines. “The shotgun won’t be much use against him.”

  That was my concern, too, and I stood in agonized tension, thinking the goat might charge at any moment. But it kept standing quietly at Piper’s side. It seemed to me almost like the two of them were waiting for something.

  I wrenched my gaze away, quickly looking down the street behind my dad, sure someone or something was sneaking up on him, but there was nothing. When I looked back at my dad, he was almost close enough to have a relatively safe shot. He’d already fired a warning shot, and I didn’t know how many shells his shotgun held. If the Nightstruck decided to take their chances and rush him …

  I didn’t want to follow that line of thought.

  Piper, the goat, and the injured victim were on the sidewalk across the narrow street from our house. Dad had been approaching them on a shallow diagonal, slowly inching his way across the street. He was now only a few steps from the curb. If he continued on his current line, he would have to step over a storm drain to get onto the opposite sidewalk.

  My eyes caught on the innocuous-looking storm drain. It hadn’t undergone any strange nighttime transformation, and it looked for all the world like a normal storm drain, and yet something about it—and about Piper’s air of waiting—made the hair on the back of my neck rise. I wanted to yell at my dad to go around the damn thing, but I was afraid of what might happen if I distracted him when he was getting this close to Piper and the goat.

  I should have taken that chance. I should have yelled. And because I didn’t, I’ll have to live with the what-ifs for the rest of my life.

  My dad is not a small guy, and he cast a sizable shadow as he crossed under the halo of light from the streetlamp. That shadow fell over the storm drain, making its depths all but invisible in the darkness, so I couldn’t see exactly what happened next. All I saw was an indistinct whisper of movement, and then my dad cried out in surprise.

  One leg slid out from under him, and he fell awkwardly on his butt, barely having the presence of mind to hold on to the shotgun. Before he had a chance to react, something unseen yanked on his leg. His foot and lower calf disappeared into the storm drain, and he had to let go of the shotgun to fight the pull.

  “Daddy!” I yelled, the scream ripping out of my throat as I wrenched my hand from Luke’s and grabbed hold of one of the towel rods over the window in a death grip. Luke was yelling, too, but I could barely hear him over the pounding of the blood in my ears.

  Dad wedged his free foot and both his hands against the curb as his other leg was pulled farther into the drain. There was no way he could fit into that opening, but then, he didn’t have to for bad things to happen.

  The Nightstruck were closing in again. Piper sauntered forward and picked up the shotgun. Whatever was pulling my dad into the storm drain kept him from fighting her for it. His face was red and contorted with the strain of fighting the pull, his teeth bared in a feral grimace.

  “You should have left us alone, Mr. Walker,” Piper said loudly, but she was still looking up at me, evil green eyes boring into me. “You’re not meant for the night. It’s Becket we want, not you.”

  “Let him go!” I shouted, banging on the window with the flat of my hand.

  Piper smiled at me. “Come out and get him!”

  Dad wrenched his body sideways so he could look up at the window while still bracing himself against the pull. “Don’t let her out of the house, Luke!” he yelled. “Keep her safe!”

  Beside me, Luke started cursing, and I had the sense of him looking all around as if trying to find a weapon or some other way he could help. But I was the only one who had any chance of stopping this.

  “Open the window for me,” I ordered Luke as I double-checked to make sure my gun was ready to fire.

  I was worried he wouldn’t do it, that he would somehow feel that was disobeying my dad’s command to keep me safe, but he didn’t hesitate. He unlocked the window and shoved it open so I could take aim. The towel rods were annoying, but I could work around them.

  “Let him go!” I shouted again, pointing the gun at Piper.

  Still smiling, she took a quick step backward and let another of the Nightstruck—a bearded, filthy, older man who had no doubt been homeless before the night took him—stand between me and her. He wasn’t big enough to cover her completely, but if I fired I would be much more likely to hit him than Piper. Which didn’t matter to me in the least.

  At least, not in theory. I gritted my teeth, and my finger tightened on the trigger, but I hesitated to fire. The only thing I’d ever fired at before was targets on a shooting range. I’d never even gone hunting, never shot anything that was alive. If the homeless guy were charging at me with murder in his eyes, I probably wouldn’t have hesitated. But he was just standing there, no threat to me, and showing no sign of being a threat to my father.

  Just over the homeless guy’s shoulder, I could see Piper’s lips twist in one of those smirks I was starting to hate more than anything in the world.

  The goat suddenly reared up on its hind legs, then lowered its head and leaped forward. Its horns slammed into my dad’s shoulder, and though he was a brave man, he couldn’t help screaming in pain. When the goat backed up, its horns and the spines on its head were dripping with my father’s blood. Maybe it had broken some bones, too, because my dad’s arm went entirely limp. Without the use of his arm, he wasn’t able to fully brace himself anymore. He screamed again as his leg was pulled all the way into the storm drain, as far as it would go, until his body slammed against the curb.

  I no longer cared about the humanity of the homeless guy who had formed a human shield in front of Piper.

  I pulled the trigger, but my eyes were blurry with tears and my hands were far from steady. My dad had told me once that even the best-trained, most experienced police officers miss more often than they hit, in the heat of battle. Your body’s fight-or-flight response shuts down your fine motor skills and makes it physically impossible for most people to shoot straight. I was no exception to that rule.

  My first shot went completely wild, and I was so panicky I immediately squeezed off a second that was even wilder. Piper kept smirking, and the rest of the Nightstruck were completely unintimidated.

  My higher reasoning kicked in and reminded me there were more Nightstruck out there than I had ammo for, and that they weren’t going to give me time to get another mag and reload. I had to make every shot count.

  The goat rammed my dad again, this time in the opposite shoulder. His scream almost made me pull the trigger again by reflex, but I fought the need, fought to steady my hands and to breathe evenly. It was a fight I was doomed to lose.

  My third shot was better, winging the homeless guy in the shoulder. His only reaction to the hit was a mild flinch, and he remained parked exactly where he was.

  The goat backed up and took yet another shot at my dad, this time at his exposed leg. There was no scream this time, just a groan. Blood soaked both his shirt and his pants and pooled in the gutter. If I didn’t stop this soon, he wasn’t going to make it.

  “I have to go down there,” I said. “I have to be able to move to get a clear shot.”

  “No way,” Luke said, looming behind me. “That’s exactly what they want.”

  Intellectually, I knew that. And I knew giving them what they wanted was a terrible idea. But I couldn’t just stand there and do nothing while they killed my father.

  “Come on, Becks,” Piper called. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Just come out and talk to me. I won’t
hurt you. I promise.”

  Like the promise of this stranger meant anything!

  I tore my eyes away from the horror outside my window and turned my most imploring look on Luke. “You have to let me go out there. I can’t stop them from here.”

  I tried to step around him, but he moved to block me, grabbing my shoulders and giving them a little shake. His eyes were glassy, and his every muscle was clenched with strain. But he didn’t budge.

  “You can’t stop them out there, either,” he said hoarsely. “I’m not going to let you throw your life away.”

  There was a horrible, cracking sound of impact, and I whirled around to look out the window once more. The goat had taken another shot at my dad’s exposed leg, which now lay bent at a crooked angle.

  Dad wasn’t moving, and Luke wasn’t about to let me go outside. Even if I could convince him to let me go, by the time I talked him into it, ran downstairs, got all the locks open, and went outside, the goat and the Nightstruck would have finished Dad off.

  There was nothing constructive I could do. And so I started shooting again, even though it was hopeless.

  I finally took down the homeless guy with a shot that was aimed for his torso but that hit him in the neck. His blood splashed all over Piper, streaking her too-blond hair, and he fell to the pavement, clutching his throat as blood spilled out from between his fingers.

  Another of the Nightstruck stepped forward to shield Piper.

  I emptied my clip as the goat continued to brutalize my dad, until his entire body was bloody and torn and broken and there was no way he was still alive.

  With my eight shots, I managed to kill one Nightstruck and wound two more, which is better shooting than it sounds like. But it wasn’t enough.

  When the bullets ran out, the Nightstruck calmly collected the unconscious—or maybe even dead—girl they’d been tormenting earlier. It took two of them to extract my dad’s body from the drain. I fell to my knees and made some horrible choking sound when I realized they were going to take him away. Luke knelt beside me and wrapped his arms around me. He tried to turn my face away from the window, but I resisted. I didn’t want to see, and yet I couldn’t stop myself from looking.

  Piper continued to stare at me the whole time, and there was no hint of regret or apology on her face.

  “Come with me, and all the pain will go away,” she called, but she didn’t sound like she expected me to take her up on it. She shook her head. “We’ll talk again when you’ve had time to think about the situation.”

  My whole body shook with a sob, and though I knew the gun was empty, I kept pulling the trigger anyway, over and over again, as the Nightstruck took my father’s body away.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I don’t want to talk about the next few days. I don’t remember them all that well anyway, which is a blessing. There was a lot of crying involved, of course, interspersed with periods of dull numbness and disbelief. The worst part was having to tell my mom and my sister what had happened. I knew none of it was my fault, and yet it was hard to remember that, when I listened to them cry. The what-if games had begun in my mind, and no amount of logic could stop them.

  Thanks to the quarantine, I couldn’t go live with my surviving family, none of whom lived in the Philly area. Dad’s second in command came over to the house and talked over my options with me. In ordinary circumstances, a girl like me with no family to take her in would move into the foster care system, but thanks to the situation, the foster care system was strained to the breaking point and needed all its resources for the many younger kids who couldn’t get by without an adult guardian. At seventeen, I was capable of taking care of myself.

  Luke’s mom offered to serve as my unofficial guardian, and with my okay, that was more than enough for the authorities. My own mother wasn’t so okay with it, and she was pursuing legal action in hopes of forcing the government to either let me out of the quarantine area or let her in.

  Yeah, good luck with that, Mom.

  Luke and his mom were great, and were the only reason I stayed reasonably sane during those first few awful days. Despite the hospital’s desperate need, she stayed home from work for several nights, treating me like the broken thing I was. She moved me into their guest room and even took Bob in, despite being allergic to dogs.

  Neither my mom nor my dad was the coddling type, both believing in self-sufficiency above all else, but Luke’s mom was a more nurturing sort, a natural-born caregiver. She never once told me not to cry, nor would she let me do anything for myself. I wasn’t allowed to cook, or help her and Luke with the housework, or even run to the grocery store for a quick errand, at least not for the first few days. Which I’m sure was just as well. If I’d gone to the store for milk, I probably would have stood in front of the dairy case for hours in an agony of indecision over whether to pick whole or two percent. I just wasn’t all that functional.

  I knew I was starting to get a bit better the morning I offered to walk Bob—which Luke had taken on as his own personal chore—and Luke’s mom actually let me. Luke came along, but he insisted it was just to keep me company, not to keep an eye on me in case I had a breakdown.

  I had begun the long, slow recovery process. Dr. Gilliam told me gravely that I would never “get over” my dad’s death. She had lost her mother ten years ago, and she said sometimes the pain of it would sneak up on her and take her by surprise, even now.

  “But it does get easier,” she assured me with a sad smile. “Time can’t fully heal the wound, but you’ll figure out how to live with it. We all have to go through this at some point in our lives.”

  It’s not like I hadn’t known I would in all likelihood outlive both of my parents. That was just the natural way of things. But I’d never let myself think about it, always thought it was some terribly distant eventuality. Even when my dad was still in the field, his life in potential danger every day, I’d never truly believed anything would happen to him, no matter how much my mom worried.

  Reality could be one hell of a bitch.

  * * *

  It was four long days and three even longer nights after my dad’s death when Dr. Gilliam decided she had to go back to work. I was still prone to sudden, unexpected crying jags, but I was at least getting to the point that I could occasionally think about something other than the horrible, aching loss. And the situation out in the city wasn’t getting any better. There were casualties every single night, and every emergency room in the city was flooded the moment the sun set. It didn’t help matters that the nights were still getting longer.

  When Dr. Gilliam told me she was going back to work, I told her I wanted to go back to my house to spend the night. I appreciated her care more than I could say, but even though my home was only across the way from the Gilliam house, I was feeling homesick. I wanted to sleep in my own bed, in my own room, even though being in that empty house was sure to give me painful reminders of what I had lost.

  I thought she might argue with me, but she didn’t. I guess she understood. Luke and Bob came with me, of course, and if I closed off some shutters in my mind here and there I could almost convince myself Dad was off at work and would be back before the night was out.

  The new routine became very much like the old one, with Luke and Bob and me staying at my house when his mom was at work and at his house when she was home. The only thing that was different—aside from my dad’s absence—was that Piper and her friends no longer stopped by to torment me. I kept expecting that bone-chilling moment when my early warning system (aka Bob) went on alert, but for a little over a week after my dad’s death nothing happened. No Nightstruck called to me, no metal goats rammed my door, no unseen, malevolent creatures tried my windows.

  I wouldn’t say either Luke or I had relaxed our guard much. I had found where Dad stashed the ammo for the SIG. I’d also found an old, worn ankle holster, so I didn’t have to carry the gun around in my hand when I moved from room to room. It was designed for a bigger, male ank
le, and even at its smallest size it was a little loose, but I preferred that slight discomfort to the risk of absently leaving the gun in one room and discovering I needed it in another. We checked the windows and the security of our impromptu bars over them every night, and we entered a state of heightened awareness as soon as the sun dipped below the horizon and what was now being called the Transition happened.

  But even though we were nominally prepared for it, it still felt like a blow below the belt when one night, during dinner, Bob leaped to his feet and charged the front door. Both Luke and I pushed our chairs back from the table, and I grabbed the gun out of its holster and double-checked it. Piper had said she’d be back, had said we’d “talk later,” but the thought of seeing her again almost made me throw up.

  Luke and I stood at the ready in the middle of the living room, though what exactly we were at the ready for, I don’t know. There was a metallic squeak I recognized as the sound of the mail slot being pushed in, and that sick feeling in my stomach worsened exponentially.

  “Bob, come here!” I shouted, with little hope that he would obey. As well trained as he was, I think the creatures of the night short-circuited all that training and threw him into the land of blind instinct. Maybe he would have obeyed if the command had come from my dad instead of from me.

  I was already running toward the door, planning to physically haul Bob away from danger, but I wasn’t fast enough. Bob let out a high-pitched yelp that practically made my heart stop beating. He scrambled backward away from the door, and I could see the tip of something sharp and pointy withdrawing through the mail slot. With a whimper of pain, he flopped down on the floor and started licking the top of his leg.

  I was crying and so angry I was shaking as I approached my brave, heroic dog, terrified that he was about to die in the line of duty.

  “Careful,” Luke warned, though he made no attempt to stop me. “Wounded animal.”