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  He had done all of these things. The surface of a coffee table in the apartment where he’d taken up residence was covered with a fortune in glittering things. The irritating thing was how little pleasure he derived from them. By the standards of the old world, he was a rich man. But the old world had passed, and so this vast bounty was worth approximately nothing. The realization depressed him, and served to refocus his attention on the one thing he wanted more than anything else.

  Emily Sinclair.

  But even that had changed. He didn’t want to kill her. At least not right away, and maybe not for a long time. He’d explored enough of the city over the last two days to know there was virtually no one else left alive.

  So he’d hatched a new plan. A very simple, two-phase scheme. Phase one would be the murder of that hippy asshole Emily was shacked up with. Then he’d beat the living shit out of Emily. Just really work her over and put her in her place once and for all. But he wouldn’t kill her. Oh, no. Instead he’d keep her alive indefinitely, have her live out the rest of her miserable days as his slave.

  The idea of Emily’s subjugation so excited him he decided there was no point delaying the implementation of his scheme. So it was that he’d gone to the apartment he’d spied them coming out of on several occasions. He’d planned to burst in and do it, eschewing stealth in favor of stunning them with sudden, violent action. But fate intervened in a way he couldn’t have anticipated. When the jet came roaring by, Aaron burst into the apartment and was stunned to see the little girl standing there all alone.

  The little bitch creeped him out a little, the way she smiled at him and seemed so utterly unafraid of him. But Aaron grabbed her anyway, wrapping her up in his arms and retreating from the apartment. Outside he hurriedly ducked down an alley, crossed over to another street, ran another block and ducked down yet another alley—and then finally arrived back here at his commandeered apartment. He was pretty sure he was safe here for the time being. The area was densely packed with apartment buildings. Emily and her boyfriend would have no idea where he’d gone.

  The girl—whose name he still didn’t know—regarded him with eyes wide with fear. She made a sound that was muffled by the strip of duct tape covering her mouth. More duct tape, almost a whole roll of the stuff, bound her to a sturdy wooden chair. She squirmed in the chair, managing to make it rock sideways.

  Aaron chuckled. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, little girl. You tip that chair over, I’ll leave you right there on the floor. And that won’t be any fun, will it?” He stood up and slowly crossed the room until he was standing right in front of her. “I know some other things that might be fun, though.”

  He pressed the flat of the hunting blade against one of her cheeks.

  Sudden tears spilled from her eyes.

  “Aw. Don’t cry, little girl.” He giggled now, that mad sound again. “Save your tears for later.” He stroked her cheek with the flat of the knife. “For when I kill that tall friend of yours right in front of your eyes.”

  The girl’s body began to shake harder.

  Aaron’s breath grew shallower as the idea taking shape in his mind grew more vivid. “And for when I make that cunt Emily beg for her worthless life…”

  He was so caught up in the murder fantasy that he failed at first to notice the extraordinary thing that was happening. A strange sound took him out of the reverie. Then his eyes flicked downward and he gasped at the sight of the strip of duct tape peeling away from the girl’s mouth, the sticky grey length moving apparently of its own accord, or as if it was being manipulated by an invisible hand.

  Aaron stumbled backward. The knife slipped from a numb hand and clattered on the hardwood floor. He shook his head rapidly side to side, instinct compelling him to deny the impossible thing he was seeing. “No…no…no…”

  The piece of tape came completely away from the girl’s mouth, revealing a smile that projected a raging malevolence, an expression that couldn’t be the product of any mere girl’s still developing soul. Her eyes sparkled like dark jewels, twin points of focused hate and deadly intent. Her mouth opened and a deep and strange exhalation emerged, a throaty, hoarse sound, a sound hinting at a level of corruption so profound even the likes of Aaron Harris, rapist and murderer, could scarcely comprehend it. A terrible, creaking laughter followed, a big sound the girl’s small body couldn’t have produced. And yet here it came again, even louder this time, and the girl threw her head back and loosed a demonic bellow so huge it caused Aaron to clamp his hands over his ears and drop helplessly to his knees.

  He saw the knife. It lay on the floor no more than three feet to his right. He knew he should grab it and attack the girl at once. Something monstrous had taken possession of her body. Something that would kill him in an instant if he allowed it to get loose. He tried to reach for the gleaming sliver of razor-sharp metal—and found that he couldn’t move. He was frozen in place, the muscles and joints of his body locked as rigidly as the limbs of a statue. His gaze went again to the girl and he saw the sadistic amusement glittering in those cold eyes. She was controlling him. He didn’t know how, but she was. She’d reached into his mind and switched off his ability to manipulate his own body. He was certain she could stop his heart or still his breath with just a thought.

  He wanted to scream—but could not.

  The girl laughed yet again and tore free of her bonds in an astonishing display of superhuman strength. Then she came slowly across the room, her gaze locked with his as she continued to leer at him. There was a horrible glee in her expression, a dark joy that elicited a thin, reedy whine from Aaron’s constricted throat. He prayed she would kill him fast.

  She knelt to pick up the knife. She chuckled. Another sound utterly unlike the laughter of a girl. She traced the edge of the blade with the tip of a finger, then pricked the tip of the finger with the point of the blade. A tiny droplet of blood welled up, and the girl popped the finger into her mouth. She noisily slurped the blood up, then placed the tip of the knife against one of Aaron’s eyeballs. He wanted nothing more than to flinch away from that cold touch, from that sharp, insinuating pinpoint hardness. But his eyeball didn’t move. His eyelid didn’t blink.

  The girl laughed yet again.

  And, in a voice like something out of a nightmare, said, “Some wishes don’t come true, little worm. And some prayers are never granted.”

  She pushed the knife forward.

  Very, very slowly…

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  On the road to Nashville

  October 1

  2:00 p.m.

  The green sign drew Warren’s gaze away from the road. The sign showed a distance of 150 miles still to go to Nashville. He pressed the BMW’s gas pedal harder and the needle of the car’s speedometer edged close to the 90 MPH mark.

  Jasmine groaned and shifted in the front passenger seat.

  Warren looked at her.

  She was still asleep. He hoped she’d stay that way for a while yet. His somewhat reckless driving habits made her anxious and prone to shrill outbursts. But she’d nonetheless ceded the driving responsibilities to him, at least for the remainder of the journey to Nashville. He knew the way and was infinitely more familiar with this area of the country than she was, so it only made sense. Still, she’d been unable to resist chiding him for some of his more egregious acts of daredeviltry. She would gasp, and occasionally shout, warning him not to run into things he could see clearly with his own eyes.

  Despite her occasional nervous outbursts, Warren liked Jasmine and enjoyed her company. She was smart. And funny sometimes. He was especially glad to have her around in light of what had happened to Amanda. If he’d had to carry on alone in the wake of that horror, he wasn’t sure he would’ve been up to it.

  But carry on he had, through hundreds of miles and several states, enough to see there wasn’t much left of this world. They stopped in several cities and smaller communities along the way. At no point had they encountered another livin
g person. In one town they heard a dog barking somewhere in the distance, a forlorn, frightened sound. They called to the animal and spent hours searching for it, but it never turned up. The failure to find the dog depressed them and with great reluctance they resumed their journey south.

  It wasn’t just the absence of life they found disturbing. There was a fundamental change in the fabric of the world underway. The patches of impenetrable blackness was only one way in which this change was evident. The others were more subtle, but became increasingly apparent as the hours and days slipped by. The remaining world, those parts not eaten by the darkness, was withering. It was early fall in this part of the world, but it seemed to both of them that there should still have been abundant evidence of greenery in the countryside. But plant life was dead everywhere, turned brown in a shockingly short expanse of time.

  Warren privately wondered how long it’d be before the rot infesting the world affected the atmosphere. He imagined a world slowly starved of oxygen and wondered what it would be like to suddenly discover he couldn’t breathe anymore. The thought made him shudder, and he decided not to share it with Jasmine. She might think of it herself later—if she hadn’t already—but for the time being he saw nothing good in giving her another reason to despair. God knew they had more than enough of those already.

  Jasmine stirred again and this time her eyes fluttered open. She stretched, groaned again, and sat up straighter in her seat. “Where are we, kiddo?”

  Warren suppressed a groan. “Stop calling me that.”

  A gently teasing grin touched the corners of her mouth. “What? Kiddo?” She said it in a tone of mock innocence. “That doesn’t bother you, does it?”

  Warren rolled his eyes. “You know it does. I’ve only told you that maybe six gazillion times these last couple days. Anyway, we’re about 150 miles from home.”

  “From your home, you mean.” Jasmine fixed him with a gaze that was very serious. “What do you expect to find there, Warren?” She sighed. “Look, I agreed to go along with this because, hell, it’s not like we’ve got anywhere else to go. But I just want you to be realistic. We’ve both seen what’s become of the world. Your chances of finding anyone you knew still alive…well…”

  She didn’t have to finish the sentence. They both were well aware what those chances were. Warren was setting himself up for nothing but heartache. He knew it, but he had to go home anyway, had to see what had become of his family with his own eyes. Once that was out of the way, they could decide where to go next. Until then, getting home was his lone priority.

  Warren shrugged. “We’ve been over this. I have to do it.”

  Jasmine was silent several moments. Warren tried not to fidget while she sat there contemplating things. He hated when women wanted to get deeply analytical about feelings and motivations. Inevitably you had to try to justify gut-level things that made no sense when talked about in a cool, rational way.

  “What if I’d said no?”

  Warren frowned. “Huh?”

  Jasmine’s tone was somber, her voice soft and subdued. “What if I’d told you I couldn’t have anything to do with this? That we’d have to part ways back there in Maryland?”

  Warren looked at her. “Would you have done that? Did you think about it?”

  She sighed. “I did, yes.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  She looked at him now. “Mainly because I thought of how desperately alone I felt in those moments after my husband died. I didn’t want to feel that way again. And…I didn’t want you to have to feel that way.”

  Warren didn’t know what to say. He was torn between feeling hurt that she’d seriously considered leaving him and being touched that she felt concern for him on so elemental a level. His frown deepened. “I just don’t get it, Jaz. Why would you fee like you had to make a choice like that?”

  She drew in a big breath, then immediately blew it back out. “Because I know what will happen if we stay together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sooner or later I’ll want to kiss you, Warren. Or you’ll want to kiss me. It’s inevitable. We’re human beings and we’ll need that kind of comfort eventually, and we have no other alternatives. We’ll kiss. And we’ll make love. And I’m old enough to be your mother, for God’s sake.”

  Her words all came out in a rush. Warren was stunned. He cleared his throat and kept his gaze locked on the road ahead. After several moments of uncomfortable silence, he sighed and said, “I know you’ve been through a lot. I’ve been through a lot, too. And I understand what you’re saying. I really do. But…let’s not get ahead of ourselves, okay? Let’s focus on today and not freak out about what might happen in the future.”

  Jasmine didn’t say anything for a moment. But she looked slightly less mortified when she at last turned her gaze on Warren again. “Okay. I’m sorry. I’m being stupid, I know. But those thoughts have been bouncing around in my head for days, and I had to let them out.”

  Warren nodded. “I know what you mean. Besides—” And now he infused his voice with a careful note of playfulness. “—for you to be my mother, you would’ve had to be, what, sixteen?”

  Jasmine smirked. “Seventeen. Kiddo.”

  “Whatever. Pretty damned young, at any rate.”

  “It’s been known to happen. At younger ages than that, even.”

  Warren laughed. “Yeah. To crack whores.”

  They drove on in silence for a minute. The interstate continued to unfurl ahead of them, winding away into the great wide nothing. It was amazing how empty the road was. Well…it’d been amazing for the first hundred miles or so. Now it was just depressing. Sometimes they’d see cars stalled in the middle of the road, and once in a while they’d see gray, drooping corpses propped like crash-test dummies behind the steering wheels. There were fewer of the mangled wrecks in these rural areas. In fact, there were huge stretches untouched by any evidence of the previous week’s calamity (save for the occasional black rip in the fabric of the world). Yet there was no sign of life on the highways of America. Just lots of metal coffins. Warren had felt compelled to inspect some of them early on. These cursory examinations revealed no obvious evidence of physical trauma.

  Apparently, many millions of people had just up and died.

  He thought again of the rot laying waste to the land around them and figured something from that other world—some invisible, odorless substance—had leaked into our world, something toxic to all life on earth. It was the obvious explanation for all this desolation, but it didn’t explain why he and Jasmine were still drawing breath. He supposed a tiny percentage of organisms must be immune to the effects of whatever it was.

  He wondered whether he should feel grateful for that. To be one of the lucky few allowed to keep on keepin’ on. He sure didn’t feel lucky. And there wasn’t much he was grateful about these days.

  In fact, there was just one thing.

  He looked at Jasmine. And for the first time he allowed himself to fully ponder the implications of what she’d said. It made him remember some of his initial feelings about Jasmine as they stood in that Exxon parking lot, before Amanda died. He’d been struck by how pretty she was, especially for a woman her age (a thought that now struck him as ageist, oh irony).

  So lost in thought was he that the sound of Jasmine’s voice nearly made him jump: “Have you thought about what happens if we never find other survivors?”

  “Huh?” Warren frowned. Despite everything, this wasn’t a possibility he’d entertained. And now that Jasmine had voiced it, he found it profoundly disturbing. “But there must be other people. Not many, obviously, given what we’ve seen. But it makes no sense that we’re all that’s left of the human race.”

  Jasmine’s gaze went to the empty countryside for a moment, then she looked at him in a pointed way. “Not necessarily. How many hundreds of miles have we come since we last saw another living human being? Two hundred? Three? More, maybe?” She shook her head. “And wha
t if there are other survivors, but only a very small number scattered over the world. We might never see any of them.”

  Warren’s frown deepened. “Are you trying to depress me? Is that it? Because if you are, you’re doing a good job.”

  Jasmine made a sound of exasperation. “That’s not what I’m trying to do at all, Warren. I just think we need to prepare ourselves for a pretty bleak future.”

  Warren laughed, a short, harsh burst of sound devoid of any trace of humor. “It’s the end of the world as we fucking know it, and I don’t feel even a little bit fine.”

  Jasmine sighed. “There’s no need to be vulgar, Warren. I keep coming back to it because I truly believe we are unprepared for coping with this over the long-term. You especially.”

  Warren’s frown twisted, became a scowl. “Me? Are you serious?”

  Jasmine’s nod was emphatic, her gaze unwavering. “I am. What happens after Nashville? When you find that everyone you knew is dead, what then? I’m truly sorry to be so blunt, so heartless, but that’s the reality you’re facing and I’d be doing you a disservice were I to allow you to believe otherwise.”

  Warren knew he had no real cause to be angry. Jasmine was only telling him what he needed to hear. But knowing that didn’t make hearing it any easier.

  “Let’s assume whatever’s wiped out the rest of humanity doesn’t kill us, too.” She sounded solemn but steadfast, like a general on the verge of sending troops into the heart of enemy territory—to almost certain death. “Something else might yet come along to eradicate the rest of us. But say we get the opportunity to live out the rest of our natural lives. There are practical things to consider. The machinery of the world will run down sooner or later. Probably sooner, the way things are going.”