The fueling continued. She thought about scraping the filth off of the headlights, then thought about static electricity. No. Instead, she tightened the roof bungee cords. She looked in and fretted over Silas while she worked, and listened to the wind. She could hear the clang and clatter of solid garbage hitting the bay walls, the aluminum doors and rebounding off.
Silas no longer watched her. He too was listening, scanning, staring out the wide opening then up at the fuel bay’s ceiling.
He’s looking for a convex mirror, she realized. Something to look out and around the corner. There was none. We’re blind in here…
There was some monstrous, unspoken terror-thought behind his encrusted eyes, and Sophie knew they should not have stopped at Pearson’s Corner. Not for fuel, not for anything. We had no choice. She stared at him, whiling the fuel to pump faster.
The gears of his mind were whirring, his face was trembling as he fought with pain and suppressed the urge to say whatever he was thinking.
He knows there’s survivors out there. He’s waiting.
Still, she was certain anyone still alive in Pearson’s Corner could not be in much better health than Silas himself was. There was only a fortified truck stop, a partial ruin. There is no true shelter here. And how many weeks had passed since the War of Hours, the fiery destruction of the world? But the spiral maze of the trucks and welded metal had been huge, deliberate. If there were AWOL military, or survivalists, they probably had access to more than one generator. How else could the fuel pump be running? If they had fuel, the trucks and some few still operational, maybe they even still had lights, electricity inside.
What was possible? What if, Fate forbid, the pumping of fuel had caused another backup generator to come to life in the other building?
Oh, no.
When she next looked down into Silas’ widening eyes, she could see that he had just realized precisely the same thing.
He mouthed to her, holding himself to silence: Get out of here. Now.
She nodded. The gas they had stolen would have to be enough. The fuel was still running, they needed much more considering the leak and the drive to Kersey, the route bypassing Fort Morgan, but there was no time for that. She clicked the fuel feed off, pulled the hose, hung it back. The clack as it settled back in its rack socket seemed ominously loud against the wind.
She took only a second to think about screw the connected gas cap back on, and was just deciding what to do about closing Silas’ door when the alarm klaxon went off.
V-6
THE VOICE OF THE SERPENT
“Shit!” Sophie pulled out her gun, fumbling it with gloved and shaking hands.
Somewhere out there, a door slammed open. Someone not very far away kicked a shorn piece of lead pipe or something similar across the concrete, and it gave an eerie skirling clang-ang-ang, an under-beat as the klaxon droned ever on. Heard clearly then, the voices of men were in the air, vying, conflicting.
“You trip that?”
“No!”
“Where’s Zeke? He fueling?”
“Hell no, he’s on lights.”
“Perimeter?”
“Neg.”
“They’re in the fuel bays!”
Oh, fuck fuck fuck.
“Get in! Pull out, Soph,” cried Silas, positioning his pistol and scrunching his bandaged body further in onto the back seat. “Go! Now, now, nownownow!”
But the men’s intruding voices were not just behind the fuel bay. They were all around.
The alarm klaxon warbled itself into a gout of static clicks, then echoing silence. Scudding boot-steps came closer, gravel crunched. Someone very near was whistling, of all things. Like a prison guard, Sophie thought, some guard ambling toward Solitary to give his favorite hated prisoner a beating. That animal, trapped in its little cage? Nowhere to run. What’s the rush?
The whistling edged nearer, the enforced casual melody of a killer, stalking in slowly toward trapped prey, ready to linger over a slow and luscious kill. It was the iciest, most disturbing human sound that Sophie had ever heard.
The whistling stopped, but there was a huge man’s shadow now. Fluorescent lights of some kind had snapped on out there and the beams were casting the greasy air into streamers of white and gray. And there were more boot-steps coming up behind the lurking man, a lot more.
Sophie was ready to slam Silas’ door when she heard the casual, almost ruminating drawl of a deep-yet-muffled Louisiana voice from just behind her.
“Well now, darling. Hey la bas. Not quite expected, is what you are. What do we have here?”
Her knees pressed in together, suit surface to surface. She felt her bowels begin to loosen.
She turned slowly. The man walking in to stand in the fuel bay’s maw did not possess a face.
His mouth was covered over by something hand-made, something that looked like a surgeon’s mask, but it was fashioned from black leather stitched up and through with fishing line. Two crumpled bolts of yellowed tissue paper were stuck up his scabby nostrils. He was wearing ski goggles, a bloodied rag wrapped around his head, a poorly-buckled Kevlar vest and a singed and flapping hoodie draped over it all. Below the waist, he wore faded jeans caked high with filth and oil, and what looked like a reflective barbecue apron. He held the butt of a splintered Rockies baseball bat, tapping, tapping, its length idly resting upon one shoulder. His other hand balanced a sawed-off shotgun. He pointed both barrels over at Sophie’s chest with an air of relaxed ease.
Sophie backed slowly closer to the H4, into the open passenger’s side, where Silas was gripping at the back of her armored suit. He was trying to push her away, to get a clear shot. No. Silas, you can’t see this. She concealed him as best she could. You’d never be fast enough to save me.
As she opened her mouth, desperately trying to think of what she could say, Anything, anything to defuse this rising catastrophe, she had time for one clear, lucid thought. It was a glimmer only, but something her beloved Tom would have been very proud of: She knew the man looming before her was supremely overconfident. He was holding two weapons, neither easy to wield one-handed. And his goggled eyes had parsed over her lowered submachine gun, and dismissed it.
He thinks I don’t have a hope in Hell.
“I don’t want any trouble,” said Sophie.
“Oh, Tifi, sad to say you’ve earned it,” said the man. His voice was baritone behind the mask, almost jarringly agreeable. Yet the nasal tincture, his parched and plugged-up rumbling, these betrayed the deadly truth beneath the pleasantries.
He gestured at her face with the shotgun barrels, while nodding his head toward the pumping hoses. “For here you are, stealing from my boys and me, you see.”
He somehow slotted away his baseball bat, like a boy’s wooden sword tucked back to a makeshift scabbard. He was still holding the shotgun in only a single hand. He couldn’t fire it safely if he tried. The recoil, Sophie guessed, would probably break his jaw or worse. But at this range, the scattershot…
Sophie let go of her corded gun, let it slip down into the utility pocket across her chest. The man huffed in disdain.
“Fancy shooter there, miss. Dare say now, you even think you know how to handle it, right by an open fuel tank? Very sweet.” His voice was droning, disarming even, but his free arm was dead straight down his side, the fist a trembling, angry slab of meat and bone. His head was lowered, his goggle-tinted eyes gazing up at her, yellow slivers. Sophie tried to remember when she had ever seen that stance, some movie poster. The Joker. Every line of his silhouette spoke sugared hatred, rage at bay. A wolf waiting to pounce.