Chapter title is from song by Blackfoot.
15
Left Turn on a Red Light - Blackfoot
Darkness was settling by the time Zee pulled off the thruway onto the two-lane road leading to Dolgeville. Sparse forest blocked the pale light of the moon, giving way every now and then to open field, still slushy and damp with snow. The coordinates Garth had given her were on the eastern edge of town, neither here nor there, the very remoteness of the location suggesting trouble.
She slowed down as she approached the area. Trees lined the embankment by the road, the shrubbery between them dense and undisturbed. She was scanning the soft roadside mud for tire tracks when a faint movement up ahead caught her eye. The headlights reflected off something bright, like blond hair. She slowed the car more as she neared, now able to see the kid standing by the side of the road, wrapped in a natty hooded maroon overcoat that had seen better days some better days ago. The kid was facing away from the road, looking towards the forest, but there was no one else in sight, and no car parked anywhere she could see.
As the glare of the headlights swept across where the kid stood, he turned, a pale grubby face with intensely blue eyes. Ash blond hair showed under the loose edge of his hood, and his hands were tucked into his pockets to ward off the cold. The hem of his jeans dragged in the roadside mud as he moved, and a flash of silver metal low to the ground glinted.
Zee stopped the car somewhat slowly, hunter's instincts ticking. A normal person would have been out of the car in a flash, all concern and worry, checking and asking if the kid was okay, if he needed help. He couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 or 9; it was hard to tell, and she was no good with ages anyway. It was too far out of town and his face too smudged with dirt for it to be anything but some kind of trouble, but Zee sat still for a moment and watched the kid stare back at her, something like panic showing in his eyes. His hands stayed in his pockets, and he stayed silent, not calling out to her for help or in greeting.
Something was off.
The warning of Travis' disappearance in this same area was too great to ignore. Without taking her eyes off the kid, she reached around behind her for the shorter of her two swords. She got out of the car, staying behind the door as she slipped the sword into position on her belt. She wanted both hands free.
The kid hadn't taken his eyes off her, even in the glare of the headlights, but now he flicked a look behind her, expectant and frightened. Her right hand went automatically to the hilt of her sword as the hair on the back of her neck stood up with that look—vamps did this sometimes—used bait. Maybe she had been hunting too long, but a helpless little kid by the side of the road at night? It was a perfect trap.
She didn't hear them. Of course she didn't hear them. It was the lightest brush of air against her cheek that spun her around, in time to see the vampire bare his fangs and duck the hand reaching for her throat. Her subsequent draw and swing was pure reflex.
The vampire's head rolled off with a thunk to the ground.
Easy.
Oh, come on. Even Travis couldn't have screwed that up.
Thud-thud. THUD.
Behind her.
She whirled around, but the sight that met her eyes brought her to a dead stop.
Two burly figures were wrestling a second vampire to the ground. Hunters? Garth hadn't said anything about anyone else. Their faces were turned away, but the clothing they wore was filthy and torn, even for having-been-in-a-bar-fight standards. The kid had moved up the steep embankment, closer to the tree line. He kept his face turned away from the brawl, eyes tightly closed. The glint of metal she had seen earlier resolved itself into the shape of a chain, a tether that went from a shackle on the kid's ankle to a stake in the ground.
What the hell?
Automatically she moved towards the kid to free him when one of the figures wrestling the vampire looked up at her.
White eyes.
The vampire bit the hand of his attacker as he was distracted. Instead of flinching in pain, the white-eyed hulk just laughed and ever so casually clubbed the struggling vamp with a meaty fist. The bloodsucker coughed up a spray of blood, and vampire eyes slid to look at her, pleading for help.
A vampire asking a hunter for help.
Shit. Get out. Grab the kid and get the hell out.
The ring holding the kid's chain to the stake was not thick and bent open when she banged on it with a nearby rock. She looped up the chain in her left hand as she went, until she reached the kid and grabbed his hand. He was freezing cold, having been staked out here for God knows how long.
The burlier of the two monsters looked up again from wrestling the vamp. It rose slowly to its feet and faced her, those milky white orbs skimming over her like it was weighing the amount of meat on her bones.
The vampire on the ground fought harder now that he was only dealing with one assailant. He twisted an arm free and swung at the second brute pinning him to the ground. With surprising agility, the heavyset monster dodged nimbly to one side, grabbed the vampire's arm by the wrist and with a casual twist, ripped the vamp's arm clean off.
The vampire's howl of pain echoed off the trees.
She and the kid were about ten feet from the car. It was ten feet too far.
She put the length of chain she had gathered up in the kid's hand.
"Car. Go."
Her order was curt. There was a moment's hesitation, but the kid obeyed, clinking awkwardly as he went, taking the long way around the back of the car, keeping his distance from Hulk One and Hulk Two.
Milky eyes tracked the kid's progress silently, leaving the one-armed vampire for his buddy to finish off. It wasn't worried about the kid getting away. And why should it be? They had just casually dismembered a vampire and she was but a measly human. Hulk One turned those freaky eyes on her. Pure white where demon eyes were black, it look like it should be blind but it could clearly see. She flicked a look down as the vampire started to squeal, and promptly wished she hadn't.
Hulk Two was ripping off chunks of vampire and eating them, stuffing quivering blobs of flesh into its mouth, using one hand then the other in a frenzy of feasting, blood and skin dripping messily down its chin and front.
Zee gagged. Suddenly she realized how those blotchy, almost black stains that went all down the front of their shirts had gotten there.
The door of the car opened and closed with a thud as the kid got in. She swallowed queasiness and took a cautious step towards the car, keeping her eye on the ape-like bulk of Hulk Number One. She had a pretty good guess as to what these things were, although this was certainly a variant on the zombie theme she hadn't seen before. White Eyes moved as she moved, angling to put himself between her and the car.
Her first bullet went neatly into the center of his forehead.
Nothing.
Her second bullet went straight through his heart.
Shrugging off the bullets, Hulk One broke into a mocking grin. He let his arms swing loosely, like a gorilla preparing for a fight. There was no way getting in a hand-to-hand brawl with a man-ape with super-strength was remotely a good idea.
Discarding caution for speed, she made a run for the car, one hand holstering her useless gun. She almost made it, the front fender of the SUV bumping her knee as she rounded the corner on a skid, but she wasn't quite fast enough. A heavy hand came down on her left shoulder, fingers like talons biting in, puncturing her jacket, gouging into her back, gouging deep and slicing down. She bit her lip to avoid crying out, feeling her flesh split and part. Pain, dizzying and blinding, swamped out everything else. She focused on the cold air she was sucking into her lungs with each gasping breath, blocking pain out. Focus on the details. The warm ooze of blood trickling down her back. The icy night air raising goosebumps on her skin where it seeped through the shredded gap in her jacket. The curl of her fingers around the familiar leather hilt of her sword.
She clenched her jaw. Her short sword whistled through the air as she turned and swung, a clean flash of steel arcing up to behead the zombie, the same move she had used on the vampire except for one small, tiny, thing.
It didn't die. The head rolled off, but the thick body continued forward unabated, hands still flexing blindly in front.
Zee stumbled back, off balance and fighting both dizziness and nausea from the bleeding gash that ran the length of her shoulder blade. The headless zombie swung a fist in her direction, connecting with her chin, sending her head whipping back and more stars streaming across the night's blackness. Her thigh bumped against the fender as she tumbled backwards, supporting herself against the solid bulk of the car.
Headless was still moving forward, groping blindly. She held her breath as she forced her left hand steady, needing it to brace the sword in her right. Screaming pain flared, the tear on her back stretching wide open as she swung. Shut it out. Think only of breathing, the rhythm of the movement. Concentrate. Sword up, stroke down and to the right, through the zombie's outstretched arm easy as butter.
With a dull thunk the severed arm rolled off the hood of her car, leaving a streak of tarry, rotten blood down the shiny chrome of the front grill. The suddenly unbalanced body stumbled, crushing weight trapping her against the car, heavy and claustrophobic. The zombie's feet were still trying to propel it forward, and the remaining arm was grabbing blindly at anything it could reach.
Zee dodged and squirmed, trying to find leverage. She straight-armed the headless torso with a sudden jab, and wriggled out. The detached head was cursing at her in unintelligible grunts, eyes darting back and forth looking for its severed arm. That arm was crawling around on the ground. And what was left of the body was still trying to right itself against the hood of her car.
Stop thinking. Just move.
Pathetic whimpers came from what was left of the sodden mess of vampire a few feet beyond. She didn't look. Her left hand closed on the car door and yanked it open. Bright white filled her vision for a second as the movement aggravated her wound. She kept moving, because it was the only choice. Move or die. She tossed her bloody sword over to the passenger side, and slid in, sparing a glance for the wide-eyed kid in the back.
"Buckle up." She said shortly, slamming the door closed awkwardly and shooting the locks shut.
The car dinged at her angrily as she fired the ignition and hit the gas simultaneously, rolling ruthlessly forward, running into the zombie body with a crushing thud. The wheels came up and over with a cracking noise as she ran the two ton vehicle over the zombie head, and she kept driving, steering grimly with one hand as she ran the other monster down and drove over him, repeatedly, ignoring the screams of rage as she methodically crushed all of them into pancake flatness.
Sometimes brute force trumped everything.
The kid had been silent the past ten minutes as Zee drove in the general direction of town. A town, anyway. She needed to get out of the area where zombies had used a kid to bait a trap for vampires. Or vampires had —well, someone had set bait for someone. She needed to stop and see if her shoulder had stopped bleeding. If she thought about it, she was pretty sure it hurt like a son of a bitch, ergo, she was not thinking about it. It wasn't lethal, she assumed, since she was still breathing. She needed to stop because she was starting to feel woozy, and she had a kid of unknown origin and questionable humanity wearing an ankle shackle and chain in her back seat and a bloody sword next to her.
And she needed to stop because she was getting blood all over her driver's seat.
She was leaning on the steering wheel with her left arm; steering might have been too generous a word. She kept her right hand on the gear shift, free to grab the sword just in case the kid in the back turned out to be not a kid and tried to strangle her as they rolled through the featureless night.
What the hell kind of crap had Travis walked into?
She drove past the bright lights of a gas station ten long minutes later. No place with cameras. And questions. The edge of town petered by as they drove, the lights bright and too illuminating. She turned off the main drag, feeling her way around for a back road, some quiet parking lot to stop in before either unconsciousness or the law caught up with her for weaving erratically on the road.
"Go left up there."
What?
She must have said that out loud, because the kid's voice repeated, clearly and patiently. "Go left at the corner."
God. She hoped his parents were going to be so ecstatically happy to see him they wouldn't shoot her on sight.
She took the left at the next corner.
"Keep going until you get to the end."
Clearly, he had judged her as being able to handle only one instruction at a time. He wasn't that far off.
The occasional dog barked as they drove past a block of modest houses, coming to a small park at the end of the block. Huh. She'd been expecting a house, tearful reunions and suspicious looks followed by a night of evade-the-cops, but this would do. She slipped the car into a spot far from the circle of light cast by the lone street lamp. The street was mostly empty. She looked up, checking for security cameras on the lamp post, but there weren't any.
She killed the engine and headlights, and listened for a minute, letting her eyes adjust to the dark. Waiting, to see if anything moved in the shadows, or came out to greet the kid for bringing home dinner.
"Where's this?" She asked.
"Park."
She narrowed her eyes and half turned, wincing as the movement pulled on her shoulder.
"I can see that. Why here?"
"My dad said all animals need a quiet place to lick their wounds when they're hurt."
Oookay. Not flattering, but accurate.
"Where's your dad?"
The kid went silent, dropping that blue gaze to the floor.
"Gone."
His right hand came up subconsciously, tapping a place over his heart as he answered. Zee watched the little gesture silently, and came to a decision.
"Right." She scanned the dark street again. "Let's get that thing off your ankle, yeah?"
Her most vulnerable moment would be when she got out of the car. She hesitated for a second, then snagged her sword off the passenger seat before opening the car door. There was trusting and there was foolish, and unarmed was foolish.
A dog barked a few houses over, but the shadows in the park stayed still.
She gave the sword a flick to clear the dark ooze of zombie blood on it before sliding it into its sheath. She beckoned to the kid.
He got out as slowly as she did, looking around warily, like a miniature hunter. He dropped the long chain to the ground with a soft clink, making as little noise as possible.
The lock wasn't complicated. The ankle shackle was mostly hidden by the kid's muddy jeans, as it was meant to be. She had it off in a half minute, working in the dim light, ignoring the stab of pain as movement pulled the deep cut on her back apart anew. She needed to get that cleaned.
"There."
"Thanks."
"Yeah."
The kid's coat reeked of stale food and garbage. At close range, he looked half feral except for the sharp awareness in those baby blue eyes.
"Let's get ourselves cleaned up, yeah?"
She led the way around to the back of the car, the kid trailing along behind like a silent shadow, staying close nervously.
She opened the back hatch of the Durango and handed the kid a bottle of holy water.
"Take a drink and wash up."
If he noticed she stood still and watched him with her hand on the pommel of her sword as he did so, he didn't comment. Nor did he hesitate. She let go a tiny breath and grabbed a second bottle of water for herself and started peeling out of her jacket gingerly, looking over her shoulder at the ugly mess of dried blood and torn fabric. Butterfly bandages and gauze and several tubes of antibiotic after a liberal douse with alcohol ought to do it, but she couldn't do all that here.
She swabbed off the worst of it with an alcohol soaked wad of gauze and bit her lips on a hiss at the sharp sting. Fresh blood started to flow.
She sat on the tailgate of the car for a minute and waited for the bright spots in her vision to settle. The kid stared at her narrowly again, trying to gauge if she was going to pass out.
"You going to pass out?" came his inquiry in the next breath.
"Trying not to." She said between gritted teeth. "You from around here?"
He had to be, to know the location of this park.
The kid went silent again. She was starting to recognize the quality of that distrustful pause as not wanting to lie, but not wanting to say anything either. He poured some more water onto his hands and scrubbed at his face before answering.
"Kinda."
The water wasn't helping. With some of the grime removed, he just looked pale and hollow cheeked, underfed and drawn.
"Got a name?"
Blue eyes flashed at her in the dark before looking away again. "Toby."
It was like pulling teeth. He'd been away from home a while, then. Long enough to lose trust in people.
She moved her jaw experimentally and paid for it. Without looking in the mirror she could tell it was turning into a lovely bruise. Great. She sometimes camped out in the SUV in a pinch, but they were going to need more solid shelter than that for the night.
First things first. The little twinkling yellow bits had faded from her vision enough she stood back up and started picking through the supplies in her kit. She pressed a mix of giant bandages and gauze over her shirt to sop up the blood, pausing every so often to take a drink of water. Awkwardly she worked the stretch bandage over her shirt and around her shoulder one handed, pulling as tightly as she could. It far from ideal, but all she needed was to be not obviously bleeding for thirty minutes or so. Her leather jacket went over that; and a scarf wrapped high enough would conceal the bruise spreading purple and ugly on her jaw.
She turned to consider the kid, staring patiently at a spot on the ground as she did her thing. Maybe he was grateful not to be with zombies or vampires, maybe he was grateful for getting the shackle off his ankle, and maybe he was a shifter. She wouldn't know until she did the tests. Even supposing he was human, it wasn't like she could just drop him off at home without some kind of de-brief—"hey, yeah, here's your kid, vampires and zombies are real, they were holding him hostage and using him as bait."
Fuck.
Something of her frustration must have leaked through, because the kid was looking at her suspiciously again.
She headed off the question she felt was coming.
"We need to find a place to stay the night." She looked at him critically, frowning. "You going to run off on me?"
Toby looked down, and picked restlessly at the threads of his frayed overcoat.
"No."
She cast him a sharp look, because his "no" was not at all convincing. She got that, alright, but what the hell were their choices? The kid glanced up, and returned her suspicious stare with one of his own, blue eyes stubbornly bright in the darkness. She stared back for a moment, before she closed the back hatch of the Durango with a thump.
"Right. Come on then. Let's go see if they've got any motels in this town."
Toby was still in the car when she got back with the motel room key.
"Third floor. End of the hallway." She said to him briefly, grabbing her duffel and weapons back out of the car with her good arm. "We good?"
They went up the stairs to avoid going through the lobby, but she had to stop once on the short climb, dizziness catching up with her. He paused when she stopped, something like worry furrowing his brows, the expression disappearing when she looked straight at him. Last she checked in the car's mirrors, she didn't look that bad, although she could feel the wet ooze of blood soaking through the gauze wad she had hastily taped over her shoulder.
When they got to the room, it was bland and generic, a duplicate of one of thousands of the same scattered across the country. She was in the process of finding all the different light switches, and keeping an eye on the kid when he came to a halt in the entryway, staring at all the walls and furnishings like he had just walked onto an alien spaceship.
She didn't press. Sometimes the thing to do with a great big wound was not go poking it to see if it hurt, because, guess what? It did.
She adjusted the heat settings on the thermostat.
"You fond of that coat?" She eyed the stinky maroon thing perfuming the warm room like a week full dumpster.
Toby's face made the first real expression of the day, screwing up with revulsion.
"Give it here. We'll get you something else tomorrow, but that gets at least washed tonight." She wasn't sure washing was going to be enough. Burning was probably preferable.
That brought up another problem though. Clean clothes for the kid. And food. And stuff.
Crap.
She adjusted the thermostat up another notch to uncomfortably warm, and fished one of her plain black T-shirts out of her duffel. "Go wash up. Wear this until we get your clothes clean in the laundry down the hall."
Toby didn't move. He was looking at her wounded shoulder, then meaningfully back at her again.
"I'll keep. Had worse." He still looked dubious. His confidence in her was inspiring. She managed an arch look. "I promise not to die while you're in the shower."
She had another belated thought. The kid had been amazingly independent so far, but who knew about these things?
"You going to be okay in there?" She nodded towards the bathroom with a question.
That earned her an eye-roll, as if he were the less likely of the two of them to have problems in the next half hour. He snagged the shirt out of her hand, and headed off to get cleaned up.
Her hand was around her dagger before the unfamiliar sound in the room sorted itself into muffled hiccups, coming from the next bed. A long sniffle pressed into the sheets followed.
Zee lay quietly in the dark, listening to the kid's quick gulps of air for a minute before sitting up. The bed creaked as she moved, and the noises suddenly stopped, like a small wild creature tightening up with silence in the presence of danger.
Leaving the room light off, she navigated her way to the bathroom, her boots making silent footfalls on the carpet. She closed the door partway and let the water run for a minute. When she came back, she could see the pale shape of the kid's head sitting up against the headboard in the dark.
She thumbed on the TV, using the remote secured to the nightstand. The pale blue glow illuminated the kid's red nose.
"Couldn't sleep?" She asked conversationally.
He plucked at the covers, fingering the clean sheets restlessly.
She nodded at the dog tags and a small metal amulet on a chain around his neck that had fallen out of the loose shirt as he tossed and turned.
"Your dad's?"
The hand he put over the metal discs was immediate and protective. He tucked the tags back into his shirt carefully before nodding.
That certainly explained some things.
"Mmm." She murmured. It was two in the morning, she had a million questions, but all she said was, "Scoot over."
He did, not raising any objections when she sat down on top of the coverlet next to him and leaned back against the headboard, keeping her eyes on the TV. She flicked through the channels until she found something that was not shouting at her to call now for only $19.99 plus shipping and handling and reduced the volume to a low trickle of sound.
Sometimes the dark and the silence were the worst things.
After a while, there was a tug on her sleeve. She looked over at Toby's pale face, white in the ghostly light of the television.
"She won't find us?"
She turned sharply and gave him her full attention.
"She who?"
She vampire? Or She super-zombie?
"Mother."
It was a bad time for the kid to go cryptic on her. He'd been perfectly clear all evening, choosing pepperoni over sausage and not shy about his disdain for the pink sweatshirt she had snagged from the motel's lost and found. In all honesty, she'd have 'lost' that sweatshirt too for the crime of color alone, but at least it was clean and warm.
'Whose mother' was a stupid question to ask, so she just squinted at him and waited for an explanation.
He worried at his lower lip and returned his attention to the TV, as if she'd just poked a sore spot. She eyed the stubborn set of his chin narrowly. He'd passed the tests, all of them—salt and silver and borax—without flinching or blinking or asking a singled question why.
She spoke in the direction of the television's flickering light.
"We're two towns over. That's pretty far for most monsters. But if we're talking about vampires, and if they have your scent, then no. They'll find us sooner or later." She looked over at the shake of his head then. He wasn't worried about the vampires.
Jiminy Crickets. He wasn't worried about vampires.
She tried a different tack.
"Is it just Mother?"
Mother. Not Mom. Not said with any affection or longing. She assumed he wasn't talking about his own mom. If the zombies had him on a find-and-retrieve program like a monster mafia, she could see why he wasn't eager to lead them straight home.
He shook his head again.
"How many?"
He counted silently, and held up ten fingers, then eight.
She digested that information quietly.
"You know where they are?"
The look he gave her was pure alarm, followed by a vigorous shake of his head.
That was a clear lie.
She addressed the TV again.
"We'll move again tomorrow. We need to get you some stuff anyway." She caught his eye then, her look pinning. "And I don't know. I won't know until I know more about them."
The kid stared right back at her, his eyes too hard for his age. She wasn't sure what she should have said—something more reassuring, maybe. But it was hard to ignore the fact that zombies might very well be on their ass, and it would do no good to gloss it over.
She reached over for the backup burner she carried with her and programmed Garth's number into it before handing it to him.
"Anything happens to me, you call this number, right? Then you hide and keep this on you until someone comes to help, got it?"
His hand wrapped around the phone tightly before tucking it under his pillow. That done, he glanced back up at her, another question creasing his forehead.
"What?"
"What do I call you?"
Zee thought back over the tumult of the last few hours. Guess introductions hadn't been high on the to-do list.
"Zee." She saw the disbelief that immediately flashed across his face. "Short for Zelda. It's a real name."
His quick glance went skeptically to her sword.
She gave him a narrow look and said. "If you're thinking of the whole cape and mask routine, no."
There was a whole bright argument fighting to get out behind his wide eyes.
"That," she nodded at her sword sitting under the bed, "is a samurai sword, called a katana. Not a rapier. And I have never carved the letter Z into anything in my life."
His face made an if-you-say-so expression if ever she saw one.
She raised an eyebrow and turned back to the TV.
They sat together and watched the Enterprise go where no one had gone before until she felt the kid's head bump softly against her right side. He had finally fallen asleep sitting up and leaning against her, breathing evenly if not deeply, sheer exhaustion overtaking worry for at least a few hours. He'd wake up if she moved, so she stayed still and closed her eyes, leaving the TV on. She didn't know any lullabies, didn't have any comforting words, so she let Captain Picard's voice serve as a low murmuring buffer against the things that memory would bring in darkness.