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Two quick steps back and I’m looking at him from the entranceway to the kitchen, blocking him and his gun from the others. “You can be whoever you want to be,” I say. “Thanks for everything. May our paths cross under better circumstances.”

  “Not likely,” Bil says.

  With that, I hold my breath and turn, half-expecting to hear the boom of his gun behind me. When all I hear is heavy breathing and the scrape of his chair as he rights it and sits back down, I let out a deep breath and stride through the foyer, exiting the magged-up house just behind Laney, who pushes Trish forward after Hex.

  I don’t fully relax until the door is shut behind us. Hex rubs up against my legs, almost like a cat. “Thanks for introducing me to your friend,” Laney says.

  I can only frown and descend the steps. Although I don’t look back, I can feel Bil watching us through the peephole.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A misty morning sunrise welcomes my eyes open, sending slices of red and orange through the trees like colored shards of glass. I blink twice, trying to get my vision to clarify.

  Pain is unraveling down my arm, and it’s caused by my injured shoulder, which I was sleeping on. Awesome. Rolling over, I freeze when someone cries out.

  “God, Carter, you’re like a gorilla, all arms and legs. You hit me about twenty times while I was sleeping.”

  Laney’s head pops up beside me. I scratch my chin, remembering finding the clearing last night, laying down to sleep, Laney and Trish on one side and Hex and I on the other. How did she get so…close?

  “I think I’d have been safer shivering on the other side of the clearing,” Laney says. “All I wanted was a little body warmth, and instead I got domestic abuse.” Laney had taken the first watch, me the second, and Hex, who’s never failed to alert me when danger is near, the third. But I could’ve sworn there were a few feet between us when I roused Hex and finally closed my eyes.

  “Sorry?” I say, suddenly feeling awkward that I slept the entire night next to someone I barely know.

  “I’ll tie your arms and legs together before bed next time,” she says.

  As she busies herself rummaging through our packs for some food, I stare at Trish, who’s still curled up on the ground. My mind cycles through yesterday’s events. At least I got one answer. The red/white witch must be a Siren. I should’ve thought of it sooner, but maybe part of the magic she wields is that her victims don’t even realize what she’s doing to them. But why is she targeting me? Is it because I’m a witch hunter? Is that why Bil was targeted, too? Are the Sirens seeking out witch hunters, adding them to their slave harem like a child’s collection of dolls? And how did I manage to resist her charms? Am I stronger than Bil? He’s one of the strongest witch hunters I’ve ever met, so I’d find that hard to believe. I sigh in frustration. My one answer has led to a half-dozen more questions.

  “Don’t want to go back into town,” I moan to myself.

  “Town?” Laney says. “Look, I’ve followed you far enough, almost getting me and my sister killed. If you want to keep travelling with us, we’re staying the hell away from that town and Bil Nez. Comprendes?”

  She’s right. Going back into town is suicide. And anyway, the Necros’ trail might be dead, but I have a pretty good idea of where they were headed. According to my map, Pittsburgh is the next big city in this direction. But what’s in Pittsburgh? Could that be where they’re taking all the bodies?

  “Well?” Laney says. “What’s it going to be?”

  I look at her, my body tensing. Something’s not right. Everything’s quiet, except for the wind rustling the leaves. It’s too quiet, I realize.

  Listen to the birds; they’ll tell you the story of your enemies.

  The birds’ silence tells me we’re not alone.

  “Where’s Hex?” I ask.

  Before Laney can respond, I hear the crunching of leaves, the snapping of twigs, and see a big black-white form bounding toward me through the forest. Hex barely avoids slamming into me as he skids to a halt and barks at my pack, nudging it with his nose.

  The message is obvious: Go!

  I grab my backpack, shouting for Laney to do the same and to get her sister moving. Trish is awake so fast it’s as if she was only pretending to sleep, and together we take off, following my dog’s instincts, not even taking the time to slip our arms through the straps of our packs. And it’s a good thing because I can already hear heavy footsteps crashing through the undergrowth.

  The End. They’ve found us.

  Thorns bite at my legs, branches slash at my cheeks, but I don’t stop running, not even when I scrape my stitched up shoulder against the bark of a tree, my skin screaming with pain. Legs churning, the world’s a whirling blur of nature and glittering beams of sunlight and flashes of Hex’s tail, leading us through the dense forest.

  And then we break free, out into the open, my face and arms and legs stinging with scratches and tears, my heart ripping a hole in my chest, my eyelashes dripping with sweat. Hex flies ahead, literally. His paws continue to push him forward, like he’s running, but they’re not touching the ground. It’s all I can do to keep him in sight as he crosses the same grassy field we passed through last night. And despite Laney’s desire to avoid it, we charge back into town.

  All we can do is hope there aren’t any witch gangs around.

  Hex, who’s now back on the ground running like a normal dog, leads us through the streets, zigzagging what seems to be a random path through the city. Shouts and footsteps follow us close behind, but I don’t look back.

  After two quick turns down interconnecting alleys, Hex skids to a stop and then dives through an open doorway. Frantic and out of breath, we follow him inside. I push the metal door shut behind us quietly, leaning my ear against it. Footsteps patter past as The End just misses us yet again. Thanks to Hex’s keen instincts, we’re safe again—at least for the moment.

  There are no rooms on the first floor of what appears to be an apartment building, just a broken elevator and a staircase. We take the stairs to the second floor, my footsteps, despite my best efforts to tiptoe, echoing all the way to the top.

  The halls of the second floor are as empty and silent as the rest of the town. We could go higher, but my training won’t allow it. Assume the worst. Always have a contingency plan. If we have to get out fast, I’d rather jump from a second-floor window than a story or two higher.

  Every door is smashed open; each apartment’s occupants were likely sleeping when Salem’s Revenge hit. The smell is unbearable. No Necros have been through here to collect the dead.

  “I could really use a clothespin right now,” Laney says, holding her nose.

  Also holding my nose, I poke my head in each room until I find one that’s unoccupied by the dead. Whoever lived here must’ve been out when the witch apocalypse hit. Working a night shift or out partying, perhaps. There’s a good chance they never made it home. The lock on the door is shattered, wood splinters sprinkled at the entrance, but the rest of the room is untouched. We move inside and I close the door, propping a chair in front of it, pretending that it will make one iota of difference if a witch wants to get in. The closed door helps with the smell, although not fully.

  While Hex laps at a puddle of water I pour on the tile floor, and Trish randomly starts rummaging through a chest of drawers, Laney and I peek out one of the windows. A pair of birds wheel overhead, chasing each other on the indecisive winds, which are constantly changing direction. Nothing else moves, except the branches of the trees lining the streets.

  My dog whines and I noticed the puddle is now just a tongue-smeared film on the tile. Hex cocks his head as if to say, “More?”

  “We’re running out,” I say, “but since you saved our lives…” I slosh some more water out of the bottle. Hex slurps it up with three licks of his tongue.

  “What are we going to do?” I wonder aloud.

  “Wait them out,” Laney says. “Eventually they’ll move on, like they always do.”
She has more experience staying in one city than I do.

  Hex chases a cockroach across the floor. When intelligence meets curiosity, curiosity usually wins.

  I wonder what I’m really doing out here with a magic dog, a trigger-happy girl and her mute sister, and a trail of dead witches in my wake. Am I really still trying to find Beth and Xave? In my heart (shut up!) I know they’re (don’t say it, don’t you dare say it!)…

  I pull my journal from my backpack, which is torn and frayed after today’s battle. Rummage for a pencil…

  Flip to a blank page…

  Stare at the white, lined paper…

  …

  Press the tip of the pencil to the page, and write:

  DEAD.

  My heart beats heavily in my chest, shaking my hand. Hex, having lost the cockroach, sits on my feet and chuffs. I erase the word. Erase it again, scrubbing so hard I almost break through the page. But still, no matter how hard I erase, I can still make out the thin, ghostly letters.

  DEAD.

  I tear out the page, ball it up, and chuck it across the room.

  “Are you okay?” Laney asks.

  I flip to the next page and begin to write.

  Gone are lives and loves and laughs,

  Their shadows falling and breathing and haunting,

  Chasing the dreams from The Real.

  The Real, Rhett Carter

  Chapter Twenty

  I don’t know why I write the poem about The Real. I guess I need a dose of reality. A reminder of how much I’ve lost. Whatever the case, it seems to get Laney’s attention. “Not bad,” she says.

  “Do you write?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “Never had much of a way with words.”

  “I disagree with that,” I say, thinking back to all the clever banter she’s slung my way so far.

  “What’s that poem really about?” she asks.

  Beth and Xave and dead little girls, my heart says. “I once saw a child, a little girl, get petrified by a gang of Destroyers,” I say instead. “Since then, I’ve learned a million and a half ways that sometimes you can’t be everything to everyone and sometimes you’re lucky to be nothing to nobody. That’s The Real. That life is an imperfect, broken thing, and we’re not here to fix it, just to do our best to keep it from getting any worse.”

  “God. You’re even more jaded them I am,” Laney says. “I never would’ve guessed it. I thought you were just some optimistic glass-half-full hero who needed a reality check.” Laney looks at me the same the way she looked at Bil just before we left the magged-up house.

  My heart is pounding and my jaw is set and I feel out of control. My temper is getting worse by the day. Am I here because I’ve found my place in the new world, hunting witches and warls? Is my life nothing more than a mortal contest? Either they have to die first or me? Maybe. I’ve done it before, with football. But do I like witch hunting? Do I soldier on day in and day out because it’s who I am now or simply because the need for revenge trumps everything else, including the will to survive?

  “Please don’t go all Bil-Nez on me,” Laney says. “I was beginning to like you.”

  I shake my head and push the anger down. She doesn’t understand anything. Sure, she lost her parents, but they were the enemy. They were witches. And she still has her sister. I lost everything.

  There’s only one thing left that always seems to calm me when my nerves are more frayed than an old copper wire. Since I can no longer blog in this internet-less world I return to my journal, clutching my pencil like a child, all awkward grip and no finesse, trying to ignore Laney’s continued stares. Sometimes I wonder if words are all I have left. I write a sentence:

  Words take moments and spin them into eternity.

  But what if I don’t want to remember the moments? What if eternity becomes too heartbreaking to endure because the sum of the moments adds up to something bleak and miserable and devastating?

  I want to cry, and six months ago I would have and did, leaving several pages of my journal warped and crinkly, mostly pages about Beth and Xave. But that kid’s long gone, maybe gone forever. He can’t do what I have to do.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  We wait a good four hours until we’re sure the coast is clear, that The End have given up on trying to find us.

  Laney takes a nap, and is joined by Hex, who curls up at her feet. Trish finds what she was looking for, a photo album. Some stranger’s collection of memories. For the entire four hours she pours over each picture, running her fingers along the smiling faces. For some reason I can’t stop watching her. Her expression is vacant, as if all emotion has been sucked out of her, and yet I sense the barest of smiles just behind her lips, as if too scared to come out.

  When she closes the album and looks at me, I know it’s time to go.

  I nudge Laney’s shoulder and her eyes flash open. “Oh. It’s just you,” she says. “Thanks for not punching me awake this time.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Did I really hit you in my sleep?”

  “About eighteen times,” she says. “I’m surprised I don’t have a black eye.”

  “You didn’t have to sleep so close.”

  “You’re like a space heater,” she says. “I haven’t felt that warm and cozy in a long time. At least until you clocked me in the nose.”

  I don’t know how I feel about her feeling warm and cozy while sleeping next to me last night, so I just say, “We’ve got to keep moving.”

  “Or what? We might actually be safe and get a good night’s rest?”

  Or I might get too comfortable and delay my mission even more. “You guys could stay here,” I say. “It seems safe now that The End is gone. Hex and I will come back when we can.”

  “Forget it,” Laney says. “You’re not getting rid of me that easy. As long as you don’t go hermit-writer on me too much, I wouldn’t mind sticking with you for a while.”

  “Then we go now.” Why is she so intent on travelling with me? I don’t ask. Everyone has a reason for what they do, and sometimes it’s something they don’t want to share. I can’t ask her to share what I’m not willing to myself.

  Laney’s got her pack and shotgun and is at the door with her sister before I’m able to rouse Hex.

  On the street, we’re cautious as we follow signs back to I-79. There’s no sign of danger, so we take the ramp onto the highway, sticking to the edge closest to the tree line, just in case we need to hide.

  We’re a few miles down the road when Laney grabs my arm and points at the sky. “What is that?” she says. A fiery streak arcs across the sky.

  It almost looks like a plane, but no…

  More like a kid’s toy rocket, but much, much faster…

  It shrieks overhead and then plummets to the earth, back to where we’ve just come from…Waynesburg.

  BOOM!

  The world erupts in sound and fire and thunder beneath our feet, the earth trembling. I shove Laney and Trish to the ground, trying to cover their heads with my hands. Somewhere, Hex barks wildly.

  A missile. The streaking rocket was a real, honest-to-goodness missile. I thought I’d seen everything strange and unexpected there was to see in this new world, but not this. And holy crap…

  The Necros and The End might’ve still been in Waynesburg when the incendiary hit. And Bil. Crazy ol’ Bil. And we’d barely just left, and only because Trish got bored with the photos. My breath catches in my lungs.

  “Get offa me,” Laney says, prying my hand away from her face. We untangle ourselves and sit up. The thick puff of a smoky mushroom cloud rises elegantly in the distance, hiding whatever chaos is beneath it. Shattered buildings? Dead bodies?

  Who did this?

  “They’re fighting back,” Laney says.

  I freeze. “You mean…”

  “Yep. The U.S. of freakin’ A,” she says. “Down but not out.”

  As I watch the mushroom cloud expand, I think about it. Witches don’t use missiles. They abhor human t
echnology. Magic is their tool. And who else but an army would be firing missiles? Laney’s got to be right.

  But how many are left? How many are fighting? And from where? I don’t know anything about long-range weapons, but surely that missile couldn’t have been fired from that far away, could it?

  “We should keep moving,” I say, helping Trish up. Laney refuses my offered hand and pushes to her feet.

  No one disagrees and Hex is already a half-mile down the road, looking back as if to say Umm, hurry up.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  For a few minutes the only sound is the scuff of our sneakers on the pavement, as we continue our trek away from the ruin that was once Waynesburg.

  “This could all be over in a couple of months,” Laney says. “What with the whole Shock-and-Awe approach.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Fine, Mr. Pessimistic. But at least someone’s fighting back. Someone who’s not a loner four-eyed kid carrying a toy sword.”

  “My sword is not a toy,” I say.

  “Well, it’s also not a missile.”

  I can’t argue with that, so I stay silent.

  “What do you think’s happening in Europe?” Laney asks after a few minutes, catching me off guard.

  “What do you mean?” I ask. In the middle of nowhere in West-Bum-Bum Pennsylvania, Europe feels like it’s on another planet.

  “I always wanted to visit Rome, Barcelona, Paris…” Laney says. “Do you think places like that still exist?”

  I stare straight ahead, seeing the face of the man who I learned to love and hate fading into the distance. “Mr. Jackson…I mean…someone who seemed to know a lot about what was going on…told me that the witches are everywhere. They coordinated their attacks across the whole of the world. So yeah, Europe still exists, just not in the way it used to.”

  “That sucks,” Laney says. “Do you think they have boners over there, too?” she asks, which makes me spit out the swig of water I’ve just taken. “What?” she says innocently. “You know, like the skeleton warriors we deboned.”