“I’m riding in the front.”
Javier didn’t wait for anybody to tell him no before he swung open the rusted-out door of Pill’s pickup and got inside, pushing the ax that nestled against him in its makeshift holster gently aside. Pill, who was already in the driver’s seat, looked over with annoyance.
“Ain’t no time to be worried about who’s riding shotgun, boy.”
“Ain’t no time for lectures either,” said Javier, mimicking the old man’s tone. From the side mirrors, he watched the nerdy-looking man—“Professor,” Javier had started thinking of him as—help his wife into the back. Star climbed in on her own, not looking at either of them. He noticed that she was carrying something under one arm and wondered what it was. Back at the house, he’d tried to give her a knife from the kitchen but she’d refused. Javier watched in the mirror as Erma moved over in the truck bed to allow Star a place beside her, but the girl ignored the offer, sitting across from Erma instead.
Good girl, Javier thought. He didn’t like or dislike the couple. He just didn’t want any more of the bullshit that had gone on back at the house. No more of that “come together” crap that didn’t do anybody any good. They didn’t need corny speeches to ride in a truck together and blow some motherfucking monsters up.
Pill shifted the car into gear, and slowly the truck began to roll over the bumpy grass-covered hills. Straight ahead of them, like the castle of Mordor out of a goddamned library book, was the factory. Five minutes. Six, tops. They’d be inside. Which meant that Javier had to act fast.
The plan they’d come up with back in the house wasn’t much different than the original: go to the factory and blow the fucking thing up. If they could. If they could even make it through the doors. Javier knew he sure as hell would.
“He likes to play with us, remember,” Pill had said, as they’d stood huddled at the top of the stairs in Bunny’s living room, all of them coming to the realization that, because of Izzy, they’d lost any chance of surprise they might have once had. “The playing with us, that’s something Jessi stressed in her story. He’s interested in humans because of our flaws, our sins. That’s how they beat him last time.”
“Should we try the same thing Jessi did?” Erma asked. “Pretend that we want to join him?”
“He wouldn’t fall for it,” Pill said. “Not twice. No, this one’s going to have to be a good old-fashioned battle. We get in, plant the dynamite, and try to fight our way out before lighting it.”
“That sounds like a Saturday morning cartoon, man,” said Javier. “It isn’t gonna work.”
“It’s all we’ve got,” said Pill.
“Do we all have to go?” asked John. “I mean, can’t just one or two of us go, let Erma and the kids stay here?”
“I don’t see any kids, cabrón,” Javier said.
“It has to be all of us,” Pill had said. “If we all get near enough to it, then there’s a better chance one of us will make it inside to plant the dynamite. Even if the rest of us fail. It only takes one of us. Besides, He’ll be expecting all of us. If we don’t all come, He might send the others out, and then there won’t be any way we can guarantee killing them all. And if even one escapes…I don’t need to tell you what that means.”
“It means it wouldn’t matter if we didn’t die here,” Erma supplied. “It means that there’d be no world left for us to live in.”
So in the end, they decided that the best and only plan was not much of a plan at all. They would all go and they would all die. That was what it amounted to. They’d all die, but first they’d try to blow the factory up.
The truck hit a large rock, and its poor shocks sent Javier up from his seat, his head banging the cloth-top roof. “Watch it, old man!” he said.
“You’re right,” said Pill. “I wouldn’t want to injure that precious head of yours any before we enter the apocalypse.”
Javier grinned, despite himself. “That’s right,” he said. “World’s mightiest weapon, right here.” He reached up to tap his head with his fist, then stopped, catching himself at the joke. There was no need for it. They were in enough of a joke as it was, their plan no better than a Wile E. Coyote episode, with that goddamned coyote and his useless sticks of dynamite trying to catch the bird that could never be caught.
Which was why Javier had sat up front. They weren’t going to be following the plan.
“Listen,” he said, turning to Pill and trying to make his voice low and reasonable. “I got an idea. You sure they’re all gonna be in the same place, just waiting for us?”
“I’m not sure, no,” said Pill. His skin was paper white and nearly transparent, Javier saw, studying the old man’s wrinkled knuckles on the steering wheel. “There’s no way to be sure,” Pill said, “but if what the girl said—”
“Star,” Javier said. “Her name is Star.”
“Okay. If what Star said is true, about the church and those wafers, then the beet sugar in there will be worth protecting. And since they can all hear one another, they all know we’re coming.”
Ahead of them, the factory was no longer just an outline, but a full-blown building, its shape growing larger and larger in the window, from the size of a bug that could easily be cleaned away with a good squirt of fluid and rub from the windshield wipers, to a bird who’d flown too low and landed smack dead in the middle of it.
“So what’s your idea?” Pill asked.
Javier pulled himself straighter, reaching up his right side near the door to finger the ax’s sheath. The moment came into sharp focus for him as soon as he did so. The smell of old vinyl from the cracked and faded green seats became almost overpowering, and the heft of the silver metal inside the Ford’s rusted-out doors hurt his eyes. Javier turned his gaze to the face of the old radio on the dash, the tuning button missing its cover, only a silver peg now. Time stood still. He reached out with his free hand and turned the peg, the static interrupting, as music crashed through the speakers. The singer was a woman, and Javier made out the name Rosemary in the lyrics. Something-something Rosemary’s granddaughter. That was it. It didn’t make any sense. Wasn’t Rosemary a horror movie?
Javier took a deep breath. He felt calmer now with the music, calm enough to do what he had to. “There isn’t any need for all of us to go in there,” Javier said. “You know it and I know it.”
“Maybe so, maybe not,” Pill said. They were half a mile out now. “But we’re all going, just the same.”
I am Rosemary’s granddaughter.
The spitting image of my father.
The words from the radio worked themselves in and around their conversation.
“Just let me go, okay? By myself. You guys can wait outside and kill whatever comes out.” He slipped his fingers inside the holster and wrapped them around the ax’s splintered wooden handle.
“You are going. We’re all going.”
“That’s stupid! We don’t all need to die.”
“I know you mean well, boy, but—”
“You don’t know anything,” Javier said. Gently, he began to slide the ax from the holster, keeping his movements slow and steady. The ax was on his side farthest from Pill, near the door, so, if he was careful, he should be able to have it out and swung before the man even noticed.
The singer’s voice rose to fever pitch on the radio.
Pill tapped the brakes and the truck slowed. “I do,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t lose my wife to the Feeders the same way you lost your family—”
“You don’t want to know how I lost my family, old man.”
“—but I lost her to them, just the same. At the end there, those last few months that should have been our time to say goodbye, she was consumed by them. She wasn’t my wife at all.”
There. He had the ax firmly in his hand now. All he had to do was turn, raise it, and let the well-sharpened head do its work.
Javier turned his eyes to the empty knob of the radio tuner and focused on its silver point.
“You both doing okay?” John asked, trying to get Star to make eye contact with him. She didn’t. Instead, she kept her head low, buried in the journal Pill had given her.
He felt Erma slide away from him and saw her scoot across the truck bed to lay a hand on Star’s knee. “Hey. You all right?”
Star pulled the knee—which looked incredibly frail and thin where it poked from the hole in her jeans—away. “I’m fine. Happy as a fucking clam.”
“Star, I—”
“Just leave me alone,” she said, and Erma gave up, returning to her place against the wheel well, beside John, the truck bed bouncing beneath her so that she had to crawl.
John moved a piece of hair from where the wind had blown it, sticking it to his wife’s face. They were almost there. He watched the land slide by around them, empty, the grasses blowing, blowing wild, the sky opening wide and beautiful.
Empty…Except. There.
Just over Star’s shoulder, a shape emerged, running alongside the truck. It was small, and looked like a dog.
“Erma, you see that?” he said, leaning in to her. She nodded.
Maxie saw it, too, and she ran to that side of the truck, her sides quivering as she barked.
“Is it another dog?” Erma asked. “John, do you think we should stop for it?”
He gave her a look, and she laughed, though it was a trembling sound. “No, I guess not.”
The shape moved up and behind the truck, following it, and then around to their side, staying close enough that it was impossible to get a really good look at it. John spun himself around fully to see it. Maybe it was a sign of good luck, this dog, a guide leading them to an impossible victory. The Romans had war dogs; had, in fact, entire companies composed of them. He positioned himself on his knees and held tightly to the truck’s side, leaning over the edge.
Running along beside them was a child, no more than six or seven. She wore no clothes, and she ran with a speed that easily matched the truck’s, her brown curls bouncing against her neck.
John watched as the girl’s head turned up, and to the right, where she met his eyes and grinned. The head did not stop turning, but rotated completely and fully around, staring up at the sky, and then back to the left, and then before Erma could turn around to join him in his gaze, the child was gone, loping ahead so quickly that she outdistanced the truck in her run to the factory. A girl. Not Izzy, but as good as Izzy. A last painful reminder from The Feeder.
“John?”
Erma was beside him now, on her knees and peering over the side of the truck. “What was it? Was it a dog? Did you see it?”
“It was…” He swallowed hard, and before he could answer her a new image came to him. A girl, fallen on the sidewalk. The taste of a little girl’s blood on the inside of his lip as he kissed her wound. The crocodile tears of her as she fell, and those great big eyes begging him to kiss it, kiss it, kiss it away.
“John?”
He turned full around and wrapped his arm around Erma. Star, he saw, still had her head buried in the book and was paying them no attention.
“A dog, yeah.” He cleared his throat. “A sweet-looking thing. Good luck, maybe.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said, and let her head fall against his shoulder. “It’s the only chance we have in this.”
“What’s that?” He could smell her head, the scent that was not shampoo or hairspray, the scent beyond that. The scent of Erma, a rich, loamy smell of skin and heat.
“Luck. We’re going to need one hell of a lot of it.”
When she tried to kiss him, John turned his cheek to her, feeling the iron taste of blood fill his mouth.
“You know…” said Pill, reaching to switch off the radio.
Javier had the ax in his hand, and still the old man would not shut up.
“…whoever you lost, your family, they aren’t completely gone.”
“No, they’re gone all right. Dead as fucking rats in a toilet,” said Javier. He had to do it. Just do it. Turn and swing.
“That’s not what I mean,” said Pill. “I never went to college, but I learned a lot in my job. I worked with plants, you know. Plants and flowers and shrubs.”
“I don’t need a biology lecture, old man,” Javier said. He felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. Why was he waiting, sitting here listening to this old man blab on?
“Sure. No problem. I was just saying, I used to have a favorite flower.”
“I don’t care.”
“Humor me,” said Pill. “My favorite flower was the Hemerocallis. The daylily. A real pretty flower, bright yellow and looking delicate and weak. The thing was, I’d plant that flower, tend to it some, and forget about it. Then I’d see the winters through up here, and wouldn’t you know it, the next year, there she’d be again, without me ever having to do anything about it.”
Javier stared straight ahead at the silver pin of the radio dial. He wanted badly to turn it back on, to cover the sound of his heart, beating in his chest. It was so loud that the old man had to hear it. But no, he only went on. Talking. Talking. Javier kept his eyes on the radio pin. If he could just keep staring at it while he lifted the ax…
“That flower would push through the earth without me ever planting another seed,” Pill went on. “Not the same flower, you see, but a flower using parts of the old one that looked almost just the same. The new flower always carried a bit of the old flower with it, and they kept on that way. Kept all the past ones alive to the world.”
Finally, Pill was quiet. Now. Javier began to raise the ax. Slowly. Inch by inch. He’d let the old man get away with that speech, let him have his last lecture. But if he didn’t hurry, they’d be in the factory before he could act. All of them. Including Star. He freed his arm holding the ax from the space between the door and the truck’s bench seat.
But Pill, apparently, was not done. He began to speak again, and the sound of his voice startled Javier to stillness. “It’s like that with your sister, boy. Your mother, too. There’s a part of them inside you, just waiting to come out.”
A loud grinding noise came from the truck’s engine as it bucked once, twice.
“What’s going on?” Hurriedly, Javier lowered the ax back between the seat and the door.
The truck bucked again and then stopped.
“Son of a bitch,” said Pill as it shuddered and then died. “She ain’t the most dependable thing. Looks like we’ll be walking from here.”
“Fine by me,” said Javier. Maybe now would be the perfect chance to get Star out safe, grab the dynamite, and make a run for it. This way he could do it without killing the old man. Not that he still wouldn’t if he had to.
“Why don’t you get out and tell the others. I’ll gather what we need from in here.”
“Sure,” said Javier, stepping outside and slamming his door shut, taking a deep breath. He felt his heart slowing, the sweat that had begun to form, unbeknownst to him, went cool on his forehead with the wind. He’d get Star out, take the dynamite, and he’d run. He’d make sure Erma kept Star back with her. Pill couldn’t catch him, and he didn’t think Erma or Professor-man would fight him too much on who got to be the hero.
Javier walked around to the back of the truck and took hold of Star’s hand, helping her down. There was a streak of dirt on her cheek, a yellowish stain against the summer tan of her skin. Javier reached up and wiped it away with his index finger, conscious as he did so of how rough his finger was against the smooth skin of her cheek. He thought if he pressed too hard, he might break it. She smiled at him, and he saw that the thing she’d been carrying when she got into the truck was the journal. He’d wanted Gabby to read books. He’d wanted her to read all the books in the world.
Star hit the ground with a thud as she hopped out, and a cloud of dust brushed up at her feet. Like a shot from a needle, Pill’s words followed close after the sound and flowed like medicine into Javier’s head. He let go of Star’s hand and realized he’d been holding it with the same hand that, just seconds ago, had been ready to plant an ax in an old man’s head.
Just like your sister, boy. There’s a piece of her inside you, waiting to get out.
He wondered if anything that good could possibly be true.
Pill adjusted his rearview mirror and watched as Javier helped Star out and then John and Erma descended. He patted the truck’s dash, two solid thumps with his palm. She liked to freeze up sometimes if you put her in second for too long. But despite her glitch she could be relied on to start right back up again when you needed her.
He’d messed up. Everything that Jessi’d told him to be careful about he’d ignored. If only he’d killed everyone at the Feast, things might still be okay. And the little girl, Izzy…
He’d promised Jessi he’d kill all of them, even the babies, but when it came down to it, he just wasn’t capable. Even now, now when somehow blessedly and miraculously he’d been given a second chance, he was about to let her down again. Pill reached up and shifted the mirror to make sure everyone was fully out of the truck. They were, even the dog. He looked forward, toward the beet factory, and saw that its front doors were thrown wide open and a light inside was on, emitting a beckoning glare like a lighthouse. They were waiting.
Pill put his hand on the black knob of the stick shift and pushed his foot down on the clutch, shifting the stick back into first. Outside, there was a commotion.
“Hey!”
Pill looked in the rearview mirror and saw a form fleeing in the opposite direction of the factory. It was the girl, Star. She ran as fast as a rabbit over the dry Montana ground, Jessi’s journal clutched tightly under one arm.
“Let her go!” he heard Javier say to Erma and John. A good kid. Pill’d like to think that he’d be a good man someday. Maybe an overprotective one, especially where the girl was concerned. That might not go over well a few years from now. He’d like to see them alive a few years from now. Maybe he would, after all, see them, looking down with Jessi. He’d never been a religious man, but Pill found it wasn’t so hard to give in to the idea of it when the idea was all you had left.
Pill watched the others watch the girl run, farther and farther away across the field. Good. It would make this easier, give them something to distract them. The setting sun lit her for a good fifty feet before Pill turned away from the mirror.
“I’m sorry, Jessi,” Pill whispered. He turned the key over in the ignition, restarted the car, and took off—alone—toward the factory. He had absolutely no intention of turning back for any of them.