There was another crash and the roar got louder.
Sounded like the security guys had lost the argument.
The noise frightened her. It was the sound of violence and chaos and it made her feel small and vulnerable. She just wanted to get some money and get out of here. She just wanted to get home.
She rounded the edge of the Dumpster, fretting in her pocket for her keys, and saw the man leaning down by the side of the car, his face pressed against the rear window. Rosie felt blood singing in her ears and her vision started to tunnel.
“What are you… you get away from there.”
The man looked up but didn’t move — he just kept looking at her in a way she didn’t like.
Another crash of glass behind her. Another roar.
She pulled her hand from her coat and pointed it at him. “You step away from the car, you hear me?”
The man looked down and registered the gun she was holding, but still he didn’t move.
“Is this man bothering you, sweetie?’
The voice made her jump. Rosie’s head jerked around to discover a birdlike woman standing next to her, so small she was almost like a child. She was looking up at her, her blue eyes cold against the snow. In her peripheral vision she saw movement, the man moving forward, using the distraction to close the gap between them.
She stepped backward, slipping on the ice a little but holding the gun steady in a good grip like she’d practiced on the range. She was going to shoot him. If he took one step closer she would fire without hesitation. She had often wondered if she would be able to do it if she found herself in a situation like this but now there was no question in her mind that she could. It was a nature thing. A primal instinct to protect what was yours. She took another step back, opened her mouth to warn the man one last time, then an object banged against her side.
The movement was so fast she didn’t even feel the pain until the blade was sliding back out from between her ribs, so sharp and sudden that it snatched the breath from her mouth as quickly as the man took the gun from her hand.
She felt confused, as if everything was happening to someone else and she was just watching. Warmth spread out from the burning pain in her side and she looked down at the red bloom spreading over the white of her coat.
Blood. Her blood.
The sight of it shocked some sense back into her and she took a ragged breath, ready to scream, but a strong hand clamped over her mouth and dragged her farther back into the shadows behind the Dumpster.
Carrie watched Eli holding the woman tightly, making sure her blood spilled away from him and onto the snow and not his boots. When her body went limp he laid her gently on the ground and patted down her pockets until he found the keys.
“Shame,” he said, standing up and moving over to the car.
“Just bad timing, I guess,” Carrie said, inspecting the blade of her knife and wiping it with a handful of snow.
“I didn’t mean her.” Eli pressed the button on the key fob and the car thunked as the central locking disengaged. He opened the back door and nodded toward the interior. “I meant her.”
The backseat was crammed with boxes of groceries, rolls of bedding and a couple of laundry bags overflowing with baby-girl clothes. The owner of the clothes was wrapped up tightly in a quilted snowsuit and strapped into a kiddie car seat, asleep, a single strand of blond hair escaping from beneath a hand-knitted woolen hat.
Carrie moved over and watched the tiny chest rise and fall, eyes moving beneath the lids as she dreamed her little-girl dreams. Carrie’s hand found Eli’s and she wrapped all of her fingers around one of his but he pulled away, reaching across the tiny sleeping form to pick up a pillow from the pile of bedding. “Look away, honey,” he said, “you don’t need to see this.”
She opened her mouth to speak but then thought better of it. Eli was right. This was no world for a little girl to go through without a mother by her side, she knew that much herself, and this little poppet was sweet and innocent enough to pass straight into heaven, no questions asked. Eli was doing her a favor, a great favor, by doing this thing for her. He was so kind and strong where it really counted, in the heart — and that was why she loved him.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” she said, reaching out to gently tuck the lock of hair back under the woolen hat. Then she kissed Eli on the cheek and turned away.
V
And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains and the mighty men… hid themselves. For the great day of His wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?
62
Gabriel drifted in and out of consciousness. At times he raved, howling and bucking against the bindings, at other times he was calm enough to converse with the doctors for minutes at a time, giving them insights into how the infection felt, like a drowning man describing the experience in snatched breaths to someone in a nearby boat before another wave engulfed him and dragged him back under. He fought, he screamed, he scratched and he cried — but he did not die.
Athanasius watched it all from a seat by the bed. He was there at night when the flicker of candles and flambeaux cast ghoulish light across Gabriel’s face, and in the day when the sunlight streamed through the huge rose window, dappling the damned with color. The beds surrounding them emptied and filled, over and over as the tide of sickness ebbed and flowed, and more and more people entered the mountain. First it was those who had rested in quarantine in the Seminary. Then new faces began appearing, steady in number, their brief stay always numbering a day or two at most and always following the same journey: carried in writhing and screaming, carried out silent and still to the center of the mountain and the firestone where the pyre always burned.
Then, on the second day of the fourth week after the Citadel had opened its doors to the sick, Gabriel opened his eyes and they stayed open. It was the middle of the afternoon, after the doctors had finished their rounds and Athanasius was away attending to the organization of what was left of his flock. He lay there, staring up at the soot-blackened stalactites high above him, listening to the drugged moans of the infected and the creak of their bindings as their bodies clenched and twisted all around him. He lay there a long time, bracing himself for the moment when the fever would drag him back down again, as it always had before. But this time it did not.
“Hello,” he called out, his voice raw and unfamiliar. Murmurings rose from the beds surrounding him, the sick roused from their drugged slumber.
“HELLO,” he called again, loud enough to hurt his throat and bring footsteps hurrying. A face appeared above his bed, brow furrowed, eyes ringed with the shadows of deep fatigue. Gabriel didn’t know him but he recognized the contamination suit he was wearing — and he also noticed the loaded syringe.
“No,” he said. “You don’t need to do that. I feel better.”
It was as if the doctor hadn’t heard him, his sleep-starved brain running through the well-worn routines of patient sedation. Gabriel felt the cold alcohol swipe of an antiseptic swab on his arm. He tried to twist away but the bindings held him fast.
“WAKE UP!” he shouted, as much to the doctor as to those surrounding him. “WAKE UP!”
The effect was instant, the faint murmurings erupting into howls as the sleeping sick were shocked into wailing wakefulness. The doctor looked up at the chaos now surrounding him, every patient around him bucking and thrashing against their bindings as they howled in torment. He looked back down at Gabriel, his eyes shining with annoyance at the trouble he’d caused; he held up the syringe and readied the shot.