Part Twenty-One
"'Well of course
there is
You're still alive,' she said.
Oh, and do I deserve to be?
Is that the question?
And if so...if so...who answers...who answers..."
-Pearl Jam, "Alive"
It was dawn before Cordelia spoke again, pulling the truck to a halt in front of the first gas station that she saw and throwing it into park hard enough to put the gearshift in danger of breaking off. "Supplies were burned up in the Hummer," she said to Lindsey, her voice flat and calm in spite of the fact that there were still tear tracks gleaming on her cheeks. Unstated: 'We lost them saving your ass.' "Going to be hard enough crossing desert and mountains as it is." She got down from the driver's side of the truck, lifting her eyebrow at Lindsey when she noticed that he was also exiting.
"I'll help you carry," Lindsey said. Cordelia lifted her eyebrow even further, but remained silent.
The first step reduced her body into a screaming cacophony as muscles that had been torqued, wrenched, and generally abused the night before woke up and presented her with the check for her adventures. Cordelia set her teeth, braced her hand against the hood, and focused on nothing more than putting one foot ahead of the other, until the world swayed in and out of a gray haze. Sweat ran into her eyes, and the feeling of salt stinging her was the only thing that she allowed to intrude upon her focus. How much time passed, she was not sure, other than to note that the sun was still not far risen over the eastern horizon. She had gone perhaps twenty steps. Lindsey had been able to manage even less.
"So the bicycle is out, then," Cordelia said, swiping the sweaty tendrils out of her eyes. She flexed her shoulders, rotated her back, and imagined that she wasn't quite as stiff as before. It was a start, anyway. Cordelia limped into the gas station, grabbed a handful of bandanas hanging from a display beside the register and two of the tacky tote bags that always seemed to be sold to tourists in places like these, and began loading up. Bottles of water, of course, and six-pack of Pepsi that chosen for nostalgia every bit as much as it was for sugar. Jerky and Twinkies, the latter of which made Cordelia remember how long it had been since she had last eaten and sent saliva flooding into her mouth. She tore the cellophane off and crammed nuclear-yellow goodness into her mouth in two bites, a move that would have made Xander proud, as she wandered the aisles. Fate decided that she hadn't received quite enough kicks in the head recently and placed the hydrogen peroxide, aspirin, and other rudiments of a medical supply on the lowest shelf. Bending over was an agony, and tears and sweat mingled freely on Cordelia's face by the time she managed it. She sat down in the center of the aisle, panting, to wash down four of the aspirin with a can of Pepsi and a bit of jerky, her appetite turning more towards real food now that the edge had been taken off. Lindsey's jacket was too heavy in the heat that was already curling through the store, sending sweat pouring down her spine and beneath her arms, but Cordelia was loathe to take it off. Not until she had found a better place to put the twin weights that hung from either pocket.
Flagg would have to be a crazy man-a crazier man-to let the people who had beaten him, even marginally, to escape into the east and stand as an example to others who would try the same thing, so they did not have much time. Cordelia didn't wait for the aspirin to take effect before she shoved two more bottles and everything else that she needed into the totes and grabbed the shelves to lever herself back to her feet. The squeal of pain as her nerves lit themselves up like a pinball machine was pulled from her throat before she could stop it. Another moment to pause and pant, and then she was on her way again.
Lindsey was leaning against the truck, his head thrown back to expose the long and suddenly vulnerable line of his throat. His body was taut with pain, and it occurred to Cordelia that she had never seen him fully relaxed. She wondered if she ever would, now that things were so fundamentally different between them. More importantly, she wondered if she should even want to.
Lindsey opened his eyes as he heard Cordelia approach, leveling that opaque blue stare at her. Cordelia could no more read emotion into it now than she could three weeks before. Not a comforting thought. "Hey," he said.
"Hey." They were back to having scintillating conversations, at least. Cordelia set the bags of goodies on the hood. "Move over. We have to do this quick." She pulled a bottle of peroxide and a box of band-aids out of the bag. He needed stitches to close up that cut properly, but they would have to make do with what they had for now. Cordelia poured a little peroxide onto on the bandannas and pushed it against the wound. "Hold still."
"Kinda hurts to do anything else." A muscle in Lindsey's jaw jumped, but it was the only thing on this face that moved. Cordelia cleaned as much of the blood off as she was able and realized that she could see the muscle playing in his cheek. The band-aids were woefully inadequate, more for her benefit than his.
"I think it makes you look like a pirate," Cordelia said as she stepped back. Echoes of the last time that they had been in this position hung sick and heavy in the back of her mind. She didn't know Lindsey any better now than she did then.
And Lindsey's eyes were still following every expression that moved across her face. "Is that a good thing or a bad one?"
"Interesting." Cordelia shook out five aspirin into her hand, opened a can of Pepsi, and handed them both to Lindsey. His face twisted as he accepted them from her. When he didn't argue his own self-sufficiency, Cordelia felt strangely off balance. "How's the shoulder?"
"I can cope." For one second, the impassive expression developed cobweb-fine cracks of pain.
Back on even ground. "You're not as good at that as you used to be." Cordelia threw everything back into the tote bags and set them into the truck's floorboard. "And that's definitely a good thing."
"Cordelia-" The look on his face telegraphed everything that he was about to say, and Cordelia thought she was going to go mad if one more person apologized to her.
"If Flagg comes after us, our head start's the only chance that we have." Cordelia circled around to the driver's side and climbed back in, wincing. She stared in the direction of the rising sun until her retinas began to burn as Lindsey lowered himself back into the passenger's seat.
---
Less than ten words were passed between them that day, until they reached the Eisenhower Tunnel shortly after two in the morning.
"Well, crap," Cordelia said in a musing sort of voice that didn't match the way her knuckles were clenching the steering wheel. The truck's headlights cut out a narrow slice from the darkness, revealing a chaos of smashed cars and mummified limbs. The vehicles were packed together so tightly that they would not be walking through them, but crawling over them. "And what do you want to bet it's LA all over again at the other end?"
"Not odds I want to tangle with, thanks." Lindsey's lips, already bloodless, pressed themselves together a little more tightly. "I can't climb over those right now." He stared out the windshield as he said it, so that Cordelia could not see what expression he wore in his eyes.
"I know." Cordelia rubbed at her temples, where a headache had been building all day.
"You could, though." Lindsey finally turned to look at her. His eyes were grave, and for the first time Cordelia thought that she might be seeing deeper than whatever façade he was projecting for the moment.
Cordelia took her hands off the steering wheel long enough to crack eighteen hours worth of tension from her knuckles. 'Mother would be appalled.' That…was not a comforting thought. "Or you could quit with the self-pitying garbage?" Lindsey blinked at her, looking annoyed that his gesture was not being received properly. "You want to change? Okay, so change. One day at a time, a little bit at a time. That was what made Angel a good man, the working for it. Not…not that last thing." Cordelia's voice lowered and she cleared her throat. "You're a survivor, isn't that what you told me once? So survive."
Lindsey's mouth twisted at the mention of Angel, but he let the opportunity pass. One little bit at a time. "Fine. Point remains. I can't climb over those."
"I don't like my chances that much, either." Cordelia thought about being midway through the tunnel when her muscles finally decided that the person in charge was running a few circuits short and revolted, leaving her stranded in the dark with the corpses and, by now, the rats. She shuddered and shook her head. "We'll find another route." The truck's engine began to sputter and she leaned forward to look at the gas gauge. "In another car, apparently."
"So let's check out the selection." Lindsey grabbed one of the bags of supplies and popped his door open. He hissed as his feet hit the ground, and even without the headlights Cordelia would have been able to locate him by the string of oaths that he was muttering. Her own obscenities were not quite so creative, but her body still began to tell her how very disappointed in her it was as soon as she began moving. Oh, she was going to have fun once they came across a town large enough to have a pharmacy.
Lindsey had wandered far enough away to be nothing more than a dim silhouette beneath the moonlight. He called her name softly, voice lowered to the point that Cordelia had to strain to hear him. The presence of bodies pressing in from all sides was giving the highway the atmosphere of a cemetery. Having grown up in Sunnydale, Cordelia felt qualified to judge, and she kept a sharp eye on the cadavers for signs of movement. "This looks promising."
It was a Volvo that had seen better decades, let alone better days, but as Cordelia leaned in the open window she caught a glimpse of moonlight reflecting off the key chain. Nearly as important, she also saw that there was a full tank of gas. "Good job." There was a small matter of two bodies in the front seat, though. Cordelia's skin made a valiant effort to crawl right off and fall in a puddle at her feet. "If we ignore the megawatt ick factor, that is."
Lindsey glanced over the hood of the car and nearly smiled at the look of disgust on Cordelia's face. It was very easy to forget how young she was when she was stalking around like the twenty-first century's answer to Xena. If she was even old enough to drink, he'd buy her first round. "On three?" he asked.
The look of disgust intensified. "Better than standing here all night. Yeah, okay. One, two…" Cordelia opened the door and the corpse tumbled out without her ever needing to lay hand on it. He squeak as she jumped back brought the grin up to the surface before Lindsey could chase it back down again. It fit his face better than anything else he had felt in days, weeks. For a second, gone too quickly, he could forget why the two of them were even there.
The face that Cordelia pulled at him suggested that she, if not forgetting, was at least managing to shove it to the back of her mind for the sake of making it from one mile to the next. "Just for that, I'm not helping you with yours." Shades of the woman that she had been before they left Los Angeles glittered to the surface, startling against so much of the one that she had become.
"Fair enough. I-" The wolf's howl, so close that Lindsey immediately searched the darkness for the gleam of eyes, made every hair on his body stand up independent of the others. His neck cracked from the speed with which he swiveled it around. "Damnit."
"I thought our daring escape was going just a little too easily." Cordelia's face was pale beneath the moon, the hint of girlishness that had come through gone so thoroughly that it may as well have been made of smoke. "I think we need to be moseying."
"I think you're right." Lindsey wrenched his door open, tossed the bag of supplies into the back seat, and reached for the body that sat in the passenger's. The second howl was close enough to make the air shake, quickly echoed by another animal on the other side of the highway. The cattle industry and urban sprawl had long since cleared any wolves out of Oklahoma by the time that Lindsey had been born there, but coyotes still flourished in abundance in the rural areas. Shy, skulking creatures, they would slide up to barns long enough to make off with the occasional unwary cat clenched between their jaws, but always fled at the hint of human approach. Lindsey could not believe that actual wolves would behave any differently from their smaller cousins.
But then, humans were not the force that they had once been, and Lindsey very much doubted that these were ordinary wolves.
When a crow's caw rode the darkness on the heels of the second howl, suspicion solidified into certainty.
"Crows are day birds," he said, grabbing the body in the passenger seat by its collar and jerking it from the car. The movement sent a wave of pain gliding across his vision, staggering him, and it was only by bracing his hand against the hood that he avoided a fall. The body rolled as it hit the highway, emitting a gassy smell like meat that had been allowed to turn in the sun. It could have been far worse, would have been far worse if the summer had not been so dry, but Lindsey added the scent to the catalogue of death that he had begun keeping weeks before and knew that he would never forget it.
"I know." Cordelia's voice was tight. "We gotta hurry."
A thudding of paws across the grass, the gleaming green of eyes cutting through the darkness. It would occur to Lindsey later as one of the most obscene things that he had ever seen, that alive color worn by animals so thoroughly washed in death. He ignored the pleading of his ribs for mercy and ducked quickly into the car, slamming the door shut behind him. The thudding became a roar; massive, furry weight slammed into the side of the door less than a second later. The entire car shuddered.
Cordelia yelped and grabbed for the ignition, twisting the key as hard as she was able. The engine squawked once and fell into an affronted silence that didn't carry them forward by so much as an inch. "Oh, Jesus Ifuck/I," Cordelia nearly screamed, twisting the ignition again with one hand while frantically rolling her window up with the other. A wail fit to make one think of damned souls and dying children echoed from the other side of the highway before a pair of slavering jaws slammed into the small space left open at the top of the window. Spittle ran down the inside of the glass, white and foamy, as the wolf gave another howl to match Cordelia's startled scream. Its eyes gleamed in on them with all of the intelligence and casual malice of its master.
Meanwhile, the animal that had slammed into Lindsey's door was backing off, shaking its head and staring at Lindsey with baleful eyes. Once Lindsey would haves sworn that it was impossible for a dumb animal to show that kind of emotion, but his experiences with Flagg and his crows had broadened his horizons quite a bit. The wolf's look promised the sullen vengeance of the schoolyard bully. It backed away a few more steps, crouched until its dripping jaws hovered inches from the asphalt, and lunged.
Angel had taken the wrong damned hand. Lindsey twisted in the seat, feeling sweat break out across his body as every nerve that he had let out an outraged scream as one, and began rolling up his own window as fast as he could. He made it about halfway before the wolf was there, enormous head snaked as far as it would fit into the interior of the car. Saliva dripped onto Lindsey's thigh and sour breath wafted over his face as he set a new record for how fast a person could scoot backwards. The wolf whined, sounding eerily like a dog that had just received a scolding, as it worked its front paws over the window and scrabbled at the door with its hind. Its jaws clicked shut inches in front of Lindsey's face.
Cordelia's mingled prayers and obscenities turned into a shout of pure exultation as the engine turned over on the third try, sending the Volvo surging forward and very nearly into the back of the Toyota stalled in front of them. The wolf hanging from Cordelia's window screamed in pain as she rolled the glass the rest of the way up, trapping it there. Cordelia spun the Volvo in a wide circle and yanked the animal entirely off the ground.
The wolf dangling from Lindsey's window worked itself a few inches further in, so that its spittle was now falling across his stomach rather than his thighs. The jaws that opened and closed on empty air did so with a new kind of frenzy, as if it could taste victory so close that the actual feel of flesh between its jaws was nothing more than a formality. 'It doesn't get to be that easy,' Lindsey echoed Flagg's words within his mind, surprised by the depth of his own determination. "Cordelia, give me one of the guns!" he yelled.
She released the wolf dangling from her window and it fell into a yipping, tumbling pile by the side of the highway as the their car picked up speed. Lindsey could see the doubt writ large across her face and didn't blame her for a second of it, but this was not he time. "Cordelia!" The wolf snapped its jaws shut close enough for Lindsey to feel the breeze.
The line between Cordelia's eyes deepened, but she dug into the pocket of the jacket and pulled out the revolver that he had slipped to her thirty-six hours before-had it really been that short a time? "There are only two bullets left," she said.
"I'll only need one." Lindsey thumbed the safety off and extended his arm.
The wolf flashed its wide doggy grin at Lindsey, green eyes flashing, and said, "If you worship me, Lindsey. Always if you worship me."
Cordelia jerked so badly that she nearly drove the car off the road.
Lindsey forced the muzzle of the gun among those gleaming teeth, every one of them fit to give Little Red Riding Hood nightmares, and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain tissue sprayed across the dashboard, slicked Lindsey's hand. The wolf made a sound caught somewhere between a howl and a sigh and slumped over the window like the world's most grotesque trophy. Lindsey waited a moment to catch his breath before he raised his foot to kick the animal back out the window. They heard it thump as it struck the ground and rolled away.
Lindsey let a few more moments pass by before he said, "Tell me that I didn't imagine that."
"You didn't." Cordelia's shoulder was pressing against his back; he could feel the movements of her arm as she turned the steering wheel. If he tilted back, their heads would be resting against one another. Cordelia continued, "Glories of nature, my ass."
"I didn't intend for this to happen," Lindsey said, since it seemed to be the closest thing to an apology that she would accept and the was the least that he could offer without going out of his mind.
For several minutes he thought that she had not heard him. Cordelia stared out the windshield and said at last, "It's not over." She sounded nearly eager.