A Soft Barren Aftershock

  He had the flashlight tucked lens-first inside his shirt for easy access. Despite the cold, his palms grew sweaty on the Winchester. This was where the rubber met the road. Kill or be killed. He didn’t know how coordinated these two abbies might be—and he prayed they still numbered only two. Christ, if they’d added others . . .

  No sense in borrowing trouble. Plenty of that to go around as it was. They weren’t dealing with animals acting on pure instinct here. Abbies were degenerate humans but still had good-size brains. As predatory carnivores, they hunted in packs—not too long ago he’d been the intended prey of a small pack—and he had no doubt this mating pair had plenty of experience hunting together. They probably had some well-practiced strategies of attack.

  Then, a little to the left, another twig crack—no, multiple simultaneous cracks, followed by a screech. Not a signal, not a battle cry . . . this sounded like pain.

  “Got him!” Karla cried, raising her shotgun but keeping it aimed right as agreed.

  Ethan listened to the thrashing and snarls and grunts, trying to locate the source in the darkness. He wanted to pull out the flashlight for a better view but dared not let go of his weapon.

  After ten or fifteen seconds the sounds faded.

  Karla said, “Well, I guess we can figure one of them’s down—not down-down but limping and gimping.”

  “But which one, do you think? I’ve been assuming a mating pair. The male or the female?”

  “I don’t see that it matters,” Karla went on, “If they’re a pair, they’ll stick together, which means the hurt one’s going to slow them both down. By the way, did you see any glowing eyes out there?”

  “No, why?”

  “Most animals have reflective eyes. I’d have thought the firelight—”

  “They’re not animals, remember?” Ethan explained. “They’re us. Or rather, what we’ll become.”

  “Oh. Right. Haven’t quite got my head around that yet.”

  She shifted to a crouch and began to move toward the opening.

  “You’re not thinking of going after it?”

  A bitter laugh. “In the dark?” Karla grabbed some of the spare twigs and tossed them onto the fire. “I may have a huge blank spot in my past, but it didn’t leave me stupid. But at first light, we’re on the hunt. Big time.”

  Light arrived long before the sun could clear the mountaintops. They came out from beneath the outcrop into the glow of a cold, crystalline blue sky.

  Karla grabbed a four-foot branch and Ethan followed her along the safe path marked by the double sticks. He was checking out the needle carpet to their left when he spotted a scuffed-up area.

  “I see it.”

  He hurried over and stopped before a small pit, two feet across and almost as deep. It had been hidden with a rough mesh of twigs covered by pine needles. Two slim, wickedly sharp stakes jutted up from the bottom.

  “I put three punji sticks in each,” she said, poking through the fallen twigs with her branch. “It must have gimped off with the one that went into its foot.”

  “Probably through its foot.” Ethan leaned closer. “What’s that stuff on the points?”

  “Abby shit.”

  He straightened. “Where’d you get that?”

  “They’re not fastidious sorts, it seems.” Karla dropped the stick and held her Benelli at ready as she kept watch on their perimeter. “They left piles all around. Just helped myself.”

  “So not only is it now lame, but it’s soon going to develop a rip-roaring infection. Nasty,” Ethan said sounding impressed.

  “But effective. I wish I could take credit, but the Viet Cong invented the punji stick and that’s the way they used to do it.”

  I wish I could take credit . . .

  Really? What sort of person wished they’d dreamed up something like a punji stick? Whatever did they do to you, Karla Williamson?

  “Where’d you learn that?” Ethan asked.

  “Again, haven’t a clue. But unless abbies know about antibiotics or have the most amazing immune systems in the known universe, our visitor last night is eventually going to develop septicemia, go into shock, and die in a day or two. That is, if we don’t catch up with them first.”

  Ethan scanned the ground and spotted drying blood near the edge of the pit, and more farther away.

  “That may not prove so hard. I think it’s left us a trail.”

  Karla took a look. “Indeed it has. But that can be a two-edged sword.”

  “How so?”

  “You become so intent following the trail that you drop your guard as to what’s going on around you. That’s when you get hit from the rear,” Karla expounded.

  Ethan shook his head in wonder.

  “What?” she said.

  “Whoever trained you was pretty damn thorough.”

  Karla met his gaze. “Maybe I trained myself. Maybe I learned the hard way.”

  “Whatever. Point well taken. Good thing there’s two of us,” Ethan noted, “You want to lead?”

  “You take point. I’ll follow. You watch the ground, I’ll be watching everything but.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Ethan found the bloody punji stick about ten feet from the pit.

  “Looks like it pulled the stick out here.”

  The trail led east, weaving among the thick trunks of the pines. As they traveled, the blood splotches shrank to drops, and the drops became fewer and farther apart. Eventually they petered out completely in a thick stand of old trees.

  “Where to from here?” Ethan said. “I’m guessing it would have kept heading east.”

  Karla didn’t answer. He turned and saw her staring wide-eyed at his hat as she pulled the .357 from her belt.

  “Is something—?”

  The Benelli fell from her hand as she dropped to one knee and began firing into the air. He heard a blood-freezing screech above him as something heavy and foul-smelling landed on his shoulders, driving him head first into the ground.

  Ethan awoke spitting dirt and pine needles and blood. It took him a second to realize that he wasn’t lying on his face, but sitting upright with his back against a tree trunk.

  And another second to realize that his wrists were cuffed behind him around that tree.

  What the—?

  “Karla? Karla! What do you think you’re doing, Karla?”

  No reply, no sign of her.

  Then he saw the dead abby. A male, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, lay on its side, facing him, its eyes open, staring, their pale irises shrunken by the death-widened pupils. Its mouth was open too, displaying its double rows of yellow-brown teeth. The usually translucent skin had grown opaque in death. Ethan’s Stetson lay flattened under one of its legs. Blood coated the top of its right foot. Looked like the punji stick had pierced all the way through. Ethan’s shotgun lay on the abby’s far side, a dozen feet away.

  His gaze was drawn to the center of the thing’s chest where someone had decorated it with a tight grouping of five oozing holes. Ethan could imagine what its flip side looked like—what was left of it. Five Magnum rounds going through the chest like that would blow the heart, most of the lungs and a good chunk of the thoracic spine out the back, leaving a gaping cavity.

  Okay: one down, one to go.

  It must have been hiding in the tree. He didn’t know what tipped Karla off, but she’d gone into a modified Weaver stance on one knee and blown the thing to hell.

  He looked at the tight grouping. Under pressure, with a monster the likes of which she had never seen dropping from the sky, she put five shots into the center of its chest before it reached him.

  Pardon me, but holy fucking shit.

  Somebody had trained her really well.

  And it dawned on him then why he was cuffed to this tree.

  Bait.

  Karla wasn’t just cool, she was cold. Maybe not so different from Pam. Hardly a comforting thought.

  How long had he been out? How long had she been da
ngling him here?

  He struggled with the manacles, but they were locked tight around his wrists. He gave up and looked around for her. She had to be hiding somewhere. What good was bait if you weren’t around to act when your prey pounced on it?

  Pounced . . .

  Shit!

  “Karla, please! I know you’re grieving . . .” Insane with grief? Was that it? Had Joanna’s death pushed her over some emotional cliff? “But there’s got to be another way. You can’t really—”

  He cut off, realizing that calling out in a distressed voice probably wasn’t the best way to avoid being pounced upon.

  He struggled to his feet. The pine forest shifted around him and he thought for a second he was going to hurl. Concussion symptoms. And his back and shoulders were killing him where the abby had landed.

  When his stomach and vision had settled themselves into some semblance of normalcy, he shuffled around the trunk in a slow circle. No sign of anyone or anything. Above, the sun seemed to have reached noon height. Great. Lunch time. And Karla had put him on the menu.

  How long was she going to leave him out here? Until night? Into the night? Christ, he’d freeze.

  He started to call out again, but bit it back. He could have sworn he saw movement in a clump of pine needles to his right. As he stared, it moved again.

  “Karla?”

  The thing that burst from the pile of needles was not Karla, but a smaller version of the dead abby on the ground behind him. Mouth open, black talons extended, it accelerated toward him at a furious rate.

  “Karlaaaaa!”

  A shot cracked from his left and the rushing abby screamed and twisted in the air. It slid to a thrashing halt not ten feet from Ethan. With a howl of rage it rose to its knees, bleeding from its abdomen, but a second shot took it down before it could regain its feet.

  As it writhed in agony, clutching its belly, Karla appeared from behind a particularly thick trunk and ambled over. The Smith & Wesson dangled from her hand. She stopped and stared at the abby for a heartbeat or two.

  “I figured she wouldn’t be far away, but hiding right there all along.” She shook her head. “How about that?”

  “You bitch!” Ethan said. “You—”

  “Oh, calm down.” She tucked the pistol into her belt and pulled a key from her pocket as she stepped behind him. “I wasn’t going to let her get to you.”

  “You might have missed! That ever occur to you?”

  “As a matter of fact . . . no.”

  Behind him, the cuff dropped from his right wrist. Karla stepped back around to his side and held out the key. “Think you can handle the left one?”

  He couldn’t help it. He lost control and took a swing at her.

  Next thing he knew he was airborne, then he landed on his back. Hard.

  She stood over him while he got his wind back. “Okay. Fair enough. I had that coming. But you get only one. Try it again and I hurt you. Okay?”

  When Ethan nodded, she held out her hand and helped him up.

  “How did you know it was up there?” he said as he brushed himself off.

  “The abby?”

  “No, the blue jay that landed on me.”

  Karla looked around at the writhing female. “They’re not dummies, that’s for sure. The male was supposed to knock us down and then the female was to charge in and help him finish us off. Good plan.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “Oh, that. I noticed you had a drop of bright red blood on your hat. I figured it could come from only one place.”

  She walked back to the big trunk and retrieved the Benelli, then started walking downhill.

  He looked at the moaning abby. Supposedly nothing hurt worse than being gut shot. And it could take days to die.

  “Hey,” he said. “You left some unfinished business.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You can’t leave her like this.”

  She didn’t look back. “Watch me.”

  “You wouldn’t leave the meanest, dumbest animal to die from a gut shot.”

  “This is different. Those guts have been digesting my Joanna.”

  Ethan walked over and grabbed his fallen Winchester. “I’ll do it then. She’s a mother who lost her baby. It made her a little crazy. Crazy enough to think she could replace it with a human child. Make any sense to you?”

  Karla stopped walking and stood there. Finally she turned and walked back, pulling out the .357 as she approached.

  “You know something?” she said, looking him in the eye. “You suck. You really suck.”

  She raised her pistol and put a bullet between the momma abby’s eyes.

  That made eight. Her last round.

  As Ethan’s fingers closed around the metallic object in his pocket, Karla began to cry. The sobs took him by surprise. She’d been acting like such a hard case.

  “What . . . what’s wrong?”

  She looked at the sky. “They’re both dead but I don’t feel any better. Not one fucking bit better. I thought I’d have some sort of . . . of . . .”

  “Closure?”

  “Yeah, whatever that means. But I still miss my baby so much! I can’t even bury her! My child was eaten!”

  “You’ll feel better soon.”

  She screamed at the flawless sky. “I’ll never feel better!”

  Ethan pulled the taser from his pocket, jammed it against the back of her neck, and hit the trigger.

  She dropped and lay twitching at his feet.

  “Yes, you will,” he said as he handcuffed her. “Trust me.”

  He pulled out the handheld radio Pam had given him—along with the taser—and called in.

  “How long will you have to keep her in there?” Ethan said, staring at Karla’s peaceful face through the viewplate of the suspension chamber.

  “Not too long,” Pilcher said. “Just long enough to reset her memory to the day she stopped for lunch in town.”

  Ethan had learned this was a side effect of resuspension: all events after the last reanimation disappeared from memory. Pilcher had told him that he’d had an extremely difficult integration and had been put back under a number of times. Ethan had to take his word for it—he couldn’t remember a damn thing about those times.

  “She won’t remember having a husband or a daughter?”

  Pam shook her head. “She’ll be an SWF—single whitebread female who used to be a drug rep.”

  “We’ll put her back in the same house,” Pilcher said. That will make it easier for her because her subconscious will find it vaguely familiar. Plus, it’s on the edge of town, which will limit her contacts for a while. She never had many friends, so there aren’t many people who know about her daughter.”

  “Everybody knows about her dead husband, though,” Pam said.

  “True. She can go back to being the widow Lindley again. And you can guide her through reintegration.”

  Pam looked at Ethan. “She told you nothing of her past?”

  He shrugged. “She told me what she knew. Her conscious memories are gone, but all her skill sets remained.”

  “I could have taken her,” Pam said and started to turn away.

  “Dream on, girl,” Ethan told her. “She’d have kicked your ass and used your scalp to mop up your blood.”

  She gave him the finger over her shoulder as she walked away.

  Ethan was enjoying the sight when Pilcher said, “What bothers me is that we still have no idea who she was.”

  Ethan turned to him. “I don’t think we ever will.”

  The air smelled of coming snow.

  Karla Lindley wandered her new backyard. She found four depressions in the dead grass. The previous owners must have had a swing set or jungle gym here.

  She ambled back inside. She felt oddly at home here. Fully furnished with a look and feel she found comforting. She had so many questions about her new circumstances in this town, but not about this house. Everything seemed to be right wh
ere she’d have put it.

  The only obvious thing missing was a television. She’d have to ask Pam about that. Pam had told her the only dumb question was the one you didn’t ask.

  Karla yawned. Sleepy. She didn’t believe in naps, but why not? Nothing else had claim of her time at the moment.

  She sat in the recliner but heard a soft crunch as she leaned it back. Reaching down, her fingertips brushed some paper. She pulled it out. An origami snowflake.

  Out of nowhere, a monumental tsunami of grief and loss engulfed her and she began to cry—abysmal, wracking sobs from the deepest part of her, and she had no idea why.

  FRIDAY

  1

  “Thank God you’re here!” Raymond said as Alicia walked though the Center’s employee entrance. “I’ve been beeping you since eight o’clock. Why didn’t . . .?” His voice trailed off as he looked at her. “Christ, Alicia, you look like absolute, total shit.”

  That was a somewhat generous assessment of how she felt, but she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Thank you, Raymond. You don’t know the half of it.”

  She didn’t head for her office, but toward the front reception area instead. Raymond paced her.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just give me a minute, will you, Raymond?” she snapped. “I’ll be right back.”

  She regretted being so short with him, but she felt stretched to the breaking point. One more tug in the wrong direction . . .

  She was vaguely aware of Tiffany saying hello as she hurried past the reception desk on her way to the front door. Stepping aside to allow a middle-aged woman and her two grandchildren to enter, Alicia peered through the glass at the street outside, looking for the gray car.

  She was sure it had followed her from home. Or maybe not so sure. A gray car—what would you call it? A sedan? She didn’t know a damn thing about cars. Couldn’t tell a Ford from a Chevy. But whatever it was, she’d kept catching sight of this gray car passing her as she walked. It would turn a block or two ahead of her, disappear for a few minutes, then cruise by again. Never too close. Never too slow. Never a definite sign of interest. But always there.