THIRTY-SEVEN

Kate and Lucian drove through Sibiu in the failing light: Sibiu where medieval lanes opened onto cobblestone squares surrounded by homes and buildings with sleepy-eyed rooftop windows.

They drove down the Olt River Valley as the late-afternoon glow faded to gray twilight. The highway wound along the river between steep canyon walls. One minute the road would be broad, smoothly asphalted, with a gravel shoulder, and the next they would be bouncing through a mile of muddy ruts where some roadwork had been started and abandoned months or even years before.

They skirted the industrial town of Rîmnícu Vîlcea. The Dacia needed petrol and the only gas station they passed had a line at least an hour long. Lucian said that he knew a black-market gas depot on the east edge of town and they stopped to change drivers. Few Romanian women drove cars; if they were important enough to travel by car, they tended to be chauffeured. Lucian slid behind the wheel, left the highway just beyond the city limits, and bought five liter-bottles of petrol out of the back of a lorry parked near an old tunnel.

Later, Kate was to think of how the simple act of changing drivers sealed their respective fates.

*   *   *

Just beyond Rîmníca Vîlcea on the road leading southeast to Piteşti, Lucian turned left onto tiny Highway 73C and followed it through a few dimly lighted villages into the darkness of the Carpathians. They encountered the first roadblock fifteen kilometers farther on, right where the road diverged in a village named Tigveni toward either Curtea de Argeş to the east or Suici to the north.

“Shit,” said Lucian. They had just topped the rise coming out of the village when he saw the lights, the military vehicles, and two black Mercedes stopped at the checkpoint. Lucian doused the Dacia’s already weak lights, made a U-turn, and drove back into the village, turning down a dark sidestreet that was little more than an alley. Tigveni may have held a hundred people in its eight or ten homes, but tonight, even though it was not yet eight P.M., the town was dark and silent.

“What now?” whispered Kate, knowing that it was silly to whisper but doing so anyway. The target pistol was in the low console between their two front seats.

Lucian’s face was just visible. “It’s another fourteen kilometers to the town of Curtea de Argeş,” he said. “Then twenty-three kilometers north up the valley to the citadel.”

“More than twenty miles,” whispered Kate. “We can’t walk from here.”

Lucian rubbed his cheek. “When I worked on the citadel, I had to drive to Rîmnícu Vîlcea regularly to pick up materials and workers. Occasionally the bridge outside of town here would be washed out by storms.” He slapped the steering wheel. “Hang on, babe.”

With the headlights still out, Lucian bumped the Dacia down a rutted sidestreet, across what appeared to be a meadow, and then settled into two ruts that ran along a river. Kate heard frogs and insects from the darkness under the trees and for a moment she could imagine that summer was coming rather than dying.

The Dacia halted under the trees on a wide stretch of gravel alongside the river and Lucian killed the engine. Two hundred meters to their left, the spotlights of the military roadblock lit the night.

“They’re stopping cars at the one-lane bridge,” whispered Lucian. As they watched, another limousine approached the roadblock, flashlights flicked on, and Kate could see the gleam of the soldiers’ helmets as they stepped up to the car, checked it, and then saluted and let it pass.

“We should have taken the Mercedes,” she whispered.

Lucian grinned. “Yeah. We look so strigoi, don’t we? Did you bring your identity papers?”

Kate glanced at her watch. Four hours to go twenty miles. “What next?”

Lucian pointed at the river. It was at least a hundred feet wide here, but it looked shallow. Reflected light from the distant searchlights gleamed on numerous ripples.

“We’ll never cross here without them seeing us or hearing us,” hissed Kate. “Isn’t there another place? Farther from the road?”

Lucian shrugged. “I don’t know of any. This is where the locals used to reroute traffic when the bridge was out.” He looked to his left. “Hear their music? Somebody in one of the trucks has a radio going.”

“Yes, but all they have to do is look this way.”

Lucian cranked his window down and leaned out. “The trees overhang here for most of the way. It’s dark near the banks.” He turned and looked at Kate. “You call, Kate.”

She hesitated only a second. “Go.”

Lucian started the car. The four-cylinder motor sounded like a jet engine to Kate. Lucian put the car in first and edged out into the river. Within seconds the water was up to the car’s hubcaps, then to the bottom of their doors, then rising along the fender. The Dacia rocked and bumped.

“We’re shipping water,” whispered Kate, lifting her feet from the dribbling floorboards. Lucian kept one hand on the wheel and one on the stick shift and jostled them forward.

Suddenly the right front wheel dipped, something smacked the bottom of the car hard, and the engine stalled. They sat there in the middle of the river, the current lapping halfway to the windows, and tried not to breathe too loudly.

The music from the two military trucks was a loud, Gypsy beat. Lucian pulled the choke out and set his hand on the ignition keys.

“No!” Kate said aloud and stopped his hand just as he was turning the keys.

A limousine had glided up to the roadblock. The music stopped. In the sudden silence they could hear the questions of the three soldiers and even soft replies from the car. The beam from one of the bright searchlights atop the truck jostled, lost its focus on the Mercedes, and stabbed out onto the river. A moment later the limousine rolled on, the searchlights were aimed lower, and the music started up again.

Lucian turned the ignition key.

Please God, prayed Kate to a God she had never really believed in, don’t let the coil or the spark plugs or the other things Tom used to try to explain to me be wet or broken. Amen.

The Dacia started. Lucian rocked it carefully forward and back, freed the wheel from the hole, and drove on to the opposite bank. Kate felt her skin and muscles beginning to unclench when they were half a mile down the rutted lane and out of sight of the roadblock because of thick trees and the hill. She had not known that one’s body physically awaits the impact of bullets.

“OK,” breathed Lucian as he bounced the Dacia back onto the narrow highway. “I don’t know what the fuck we’ll do when we get to Curtea de Argeş, but, hey … the name of the game is improvise, right?”

*   *   *

They bypassed Curtea de Argeş and two roadblocks they could see in the distance by driving north up the railroad line that ran along the west side of the Argeş River. “O’Rourke’s idea,” said Kate.

They had a flat which Kate helped change by the light of the few stars now shining between high clouds. The spare was so patched and so threadbare that she could not imagine it getting them much farther. There isn’t much farther to go, she assured herself. Fifteen kilometers. This tire will make it.

If you’re not planning on coming back, another part of her mind answered.

A kilometer farther and the rail line diverged west through tunnels into the Fâgâraş Mountains. Kate went out on foot until she found two overgrown ruts in the darkness and they bounced east down the old access road until they reached a two-plank bridge over the river and Highway 7C that ran past the citadel.

Lucian got out of the car and Kate joined him. The highway was quiet here but they had seen traffic earlier. To the east and west, foothills rose to mountains lost in the night and clouds. To the north, the valley visibly narrowed until it made Kate think of a narrowly opened door. Into darkness.

Lucian pointed toward an orange glow against the clouds low above the peaks ahead. “They have the ceremony site lit up already.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s ten-fifteen. Time sure flies when you’re having fun.”

Kate felt like pounding her fists on the car roof. Instead she touched Lucian’s arm. “We can’t keep creeping along like this. How do we get there quickly?”

He grinned at her. “What do you say we just drive? Maybe they don’t have any roadblocks this close.”

“How close are we?”

He looked toward the black doorway in the mountains. “Three miles. Four.”

Kate stepped out onto the highway. “I don’t see any spotlights like at the other roadblocks.”

Lucian nodded. “Maybe we’re past them all. Maybe there’s nothing between us and the citadel but valet parking for the strigoi.”

Kate tried to smile but found that she was on the verge of crying instead. She walked over to Lucian and put her arms around him.

“What, babe?” he whispered.

She shook her head, feeling how soft his cheek was. “Thank you, Lucian. Thank you for … stopping him … today.” Her throat was too tight for her to say more.

Lucian patted her awkwardly on the back. Kate smiled through incipient tears at the thought of how young he was, how filled with energy. She kissed him on the cheek and stepped back. “OK, let’s go find that valet parking.”

*   *   *

There was a roadblock less than two miles ahead. No searchlights or military trucks here, two black strigoi vans pulled out from the woods behind them while a black Mercedes and some sort of armored vehicle became visible around a bend in the road ahead.

Lucian hit the breaks and the Dacia wallowed to a stop between the two barriers. “Damn,” he whispered.

There were no back lanes here, no friendly railroad grades, no obvious ways out. The strigoi had set this trap well: the sides of the road dropped steeply six or eight feet on each side, the river ran by beyond the ditch to their left, and the canyon wall was to their right.

Searchlights snapped on from the armored car and the grimy windshield of the Dacia became opaque with white light. Kate blinked and shielded her eyes, but the intensity of the glare was like a physical assault.

Someone hailed them with the bullhorn.

“They want us to drive slowly to them,” whispered Lucian. He was grinning broadly and waving at the unseen figures behind the spotlight. “They want us to keep our hands in sight.”

Kate lifted her hands to the dash. Lucian kept both of his on top of the steering wheel. He put the car in gear and began edging slowly toward the Mercedes and armored car a hundred feet ahead.

The bullhorn barked in Romanian again.

“They want us to stop and get out of the car,” said Lucian. He stopped. “I don’t really want to stop and talk to these guys, do you?”

“No,” said Kate.

“Shall we go for it?” Lucian was grinning in all sincerity now.

“Go for it,” said Kate. Her heart was pounding so fiercely that her chest ached. The white light filled the world.

“Okay, babe.” He shifted his right hand, touched her hand, and then slammed the car into gear while flooring the accelerator.

The Dacia lurched, almost stalled, and then whined into motion. The bullhorn barked again. Lucian smiled and waved. Maybe they recognize him, was Kate’s thought. Then the shooting began.

Lucian jerked the car to the right as if they were going to try to get behind the armored car, the searchlight lost them for a second, Kate saw the slightest gap between Mercedes and armored vehicle the same instant Lucian shifted to third gear and aimed for it, and then the windshield disappeared in a thousand flakes, Kate covered her eyes, bullets pounded across the hood, roof, and fenders, there was a terrific impact that slammed her against the door, and then Lucian was steering hard to keep them on the road. He turned the headlights on to show empty highway ahead and then the blazing white light was back in their rearview mirror and rear window. That window exploded inward, Kate felt something tug at her left heel and something else pass between her upraised arm and her ribs, and then they were around the bend in the road and accelerating again, weaving wildly as they did so.

“We made it!” screamed Kate, not believing it even as she shouted. She knew that most of the exhilaration she felt was a pure adrenaline high but she did not care. Lucian grunted something and fought the wheel.

The spare on the right front wheel gave way then with a pop louder than the gunfire had been, the Dacia slewed right, Lucian fought it left, and then they were sideways and flipping down the road. Kate threw her arms over her head, felt her knees bang the underside of the dash, and then she was watching through the broken windshield as the road, sky, road, and sky alternated past.

The Dacia rolled a final time, came to a stop on its wheels, and then slid sideways down a thirty-foot bank into the river.

The old car did not go fully into the water but stopped upside down and wedged between a boulder and a tree with the hood underwater and the left wheel spinning. The right wheel was only tattered rubber on a twisted rim. Kate realized that she was seeing all this from outside the car and she sat up, braced herself on a rock the size of her head, and looked at the Dacia upside down, its headlights under the water.

“Lucian!” She ran to the other side of the vehicle, found him half pinned under the driver’s seat that had come out of its brackets and fallen on him, and—ignoring every rule she had learned as an emergency room intern—pulled him from the wreckage. There was no sound of pursuit yet from the highway above them.

“Lucian,” she whispered, dragging him to the shelter of trees downstream. “We made it. We got past them.”

“Yeah,” he grunted.

She laid him against the roots of the largest tree and scrambled back to the wreckage, feeling around for the pistol. She could not find it, but she came up with the binoculars that had been in the backseat. She put the leather strap around her neck and waded back to Lucian, listening hard. Still no sound of the vehicles.

Lucian was sitting up and was inhaling deeply as if to catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him. She knelt next to him. “I think I’m all right. My God, what a mess. Are you all right, Lucian?” His face was very white in the dim light.

He steadied himself with one hand against the tree. “Not really,” he said. “I think I’m going to lie down a minute.”

She heard the armored car shifting gears and moving down the road toward them. A spotlight stabbed into the water two hundred yards away. “No, come on, we have to get across the river and into the woods there,” she hissed in his ear. “Come on, Lucian.” She lifted him to a sitting position and pulled her hands away thick with something.

“Just … rest a minute,” he muttered. “Am o durere aici, Kate. Uh … I mean, I have a pain right here. Mă doare pieptul.” He touched his chest.

Kate pulled him forward and ripped away the tatters of his shirt. As far as she could tell in the darkness, there were four large entry wounds high on his back, two near or above the spine, and another entry wound low and to the right. She felt his chest and stomach but found only one exit wound. It was very large and hemorrhaging badly.

“Ah, Lucian,” she whispered and used his tattered shirt as a compression bandage. “Ah, Lucian…”

“Tired,” whispered Lucian. “Mă simt obosit.”

“We’ll rest here,” she whispered, cradling him and stroking his brow with her free hand. She felt him nod against her. The armored car was almost above them now. She smelled the diesel stink of its exhaust.

“Babe,” whispered Lucian, his voice urgent, “I forgot to tell you something.”

“It’s all right,” crooned Kate, holding the crude bandage in place. The bundle was soaked with his blood and she could hear the bubbling. It was what they had called a sucking chest wound in the emergency room. Only the most immediate and extensive care could save someone with a sucking chest wound. “It’s all right,” she whispered, rocking him.

“Good,” said Lucian in a relieved voice, and died.

She felt him go. She felt the energy and consciousness and spark go out of him like air from a ripped balloon. If she had been religious, she would have thought that she felt his soul leave him.

Kate knew CPR. She knew mouth-to-mouth. She knew a dozen high-tech resuscitation techniques and a dozen basic ones. She knew that none of them would help Lucian now. She set her fingers on his eyelids, closed them, kissed them, and lowered him gently to the moss of the riverbank.

The armored car was chugging back and forth along the highway like some smelly dragon. Another vehicle had joined it and there were shouts back and forth. The searchlight swept the river thirty yards below, then twenty yards above where she crouched. Kate realized that the smashed Dacia was under a slight overhang of a boulder here and that they must have left a trail of tattered rubber and smashed metal for two hundred feet down the highway but evidently no major sign of where they went off the road.

It would not take them long. The searchlight was sweeping in a frenzied arc now and more voices were shouting up and down the highway.

Kate touched Lucian’s cooling hand a final time and moved away along the riverbank, staying under the trees, freezing when footsteps pounded or searchlights stabbed through the bare branches. Two hundred yards upstream she stopped, gasping, and then pushed out into the water. The river was only four or five feet deep here but it was very fast and very, very cold. Kate gasped and kept wading, her shoes sliding across smooth rocks on the river bottom.

There were shouts from downstream and searchlights converged on the wreck of the Dacia. If Kate slipped now, the current would take her downstream to the light in seconds. She did not slip. By the time she reached the far side of the river, her legs were numb and her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. She ignored it and clawed toward the shallows.

More searchlights flicked across the river now. One slid over her just as she pulled herself from the water. It moved back immediately as if feeling for her, but she was crawling through the high reeds and mud toward the trees. There was an infinity of forest on this side of the water, stretching a half a mile or more between the river and the black hills. All dark. No roads here. No lights.

The sound of shots came across the water. They were shooting at her. Kate ignored it, stood, and staggered into the woods. There was just enough starlight there for her to check her watch. It was still working. It was ten twenty-seven.

She could see light far up the canyon, but the citadel was still two or three miles away according to Lucian. Staying deep within the protective screen of trees, Kate turned north and began walking.