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  But that intense feeling of dread kept penetrating deeper and he became sure of one thing—whatever awaited him in this city, he didn’t want to face it alone. So, at last, he cleared his throat and called out to her, “JASMINE!”

  She kept going for another few feet, so he called to her again: “JASMINE!”

  She took another step forward. Then another. And another. But she was slowing. Warren knew she’d heard him. And he knew something else, sensed it as clearly as he’d ever discerned anything. On some level she’d known he’d faltered. She’d known she was leaving him behind. And she would have kept right on going had he not called out to her. Part of her clearly wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  She had come to a stop now, but her back was still to him. Warren was torn between a strong urge to go to her at once and a new impulse to just stand here until she tired of waiting for him and continued on without him. The latter notion was born of hurt feelings. But the fear he felt at being alone in this broken city outweighed—for now—that hurt.

  Warren put one foot in front of the other and began walking. But Jasmine was so far away—had gone nearly a hundred feet before stopping—and suddenly walking wasn’t good enough. He jogged the rest of the way and stood panting next to her for a moment. He looked at her, but she stared straight ahead. His gaze remained on her for several moments as he tried to think of a way to verbalize the paralyzing fear that had overtaken him. She removed the dark sunglasses hooked over the collar of her dress and slid them on. Only then did she look at Warren. Looking at those twin black ovals elicited another pang of hurt. He saw the sunglasses for what they were to her—a deliberate buffer between her feelings and his.

  He knew then he couldn’t tell her what he’d felt. Either she wouldn’t want to know, or she’d dismiss it with a put-upon sigh and start walking again. So he said, “Sorry. I’m just tired.”

  She just watched him from the other side of the dark lenses for a long moment. He grew intensely uncomfortable and had to fight the urge to fidget. Then she sighed and said, “That’s going to happen when you walk all day every day for four days straight.”

  Warren groaned. “That’s what you’re being so pissy about?”

  She whipped off the sunglasses and directed a high-intensity glare at him that made him wish she’d go back to being aloof and uncaring. “Why, yes, that’s it exactly. You are such a perceptive little boy. I agreed to accompany you on this grand fool’s errand, granted, but I might have given the matter a second thought had I known it’d turn into a goddamned Bataan death march. What on earth made you think I wouldn’t mind marching nonstop from the crack of dawn until sunset, day after godforsaken day?” And now a spark of startling cruelty ignited in her clear blue eyes. “Why the hurry, Warren? There’s no one alive here. Whatever was left of your family dried up and blew away days ago.”

  Warren nodded and directed his gaze at his shoetops. He didn’t want to look into Jasmine’s blazing blue eyes, didn’t want to see the fury and resentment that had been eating away at her. Not simply because the intensity of it hurt him, but also because he feared gazing upon that anger too long might ignite a smoldering anger of his own. He laughed humorlessly.

  She moved another step closer. “What’s so funny, Warren?”

  He said nothing. Just laughed again.

  She slapped him. “Stop that.”

  Warren put a hand to his stinging jaw and rubbed it slowly, watching Jasmine now through thin-slit eyes. There hadn’t been much real force behind the blow, but a primal part of him ached to respond in kind. The impulse was gone in an instant, leaving in its wake a wash of shame.

  Her expression changed subtly, as if she’d read his thoughts. There was a wariness in her gaze now. “Do you want to hit me, child?”

  Warren blinked hard. “No. I don’t want to.” Which wasn’t a lie. The fleeting fantasy notwithstanding, he couldn’t seriously imagine doing such a thing. “And even if I did, how would that be any different from what you just did?”

  “I don’t suppose it would be any different.” She laughed, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of a smile on her face. “But you better not expect me to apologize for that. You had it coming.”

  Warren arched an eyebrow. “Did I?”

  She nodded. “You bet your ass.”

  “Why?”

  She heaved a sigh and slid the sunglasses back on. “I’m done with this conversation.”

  Several moments of uncomfortable silence ensued, during which Warren tried to decide whether to tell Jasmine she was free to leave him and should go her own way. Whatever sense of respect they’d had for each other had deteriorated to the point of near nonexistence. If they’d been a couple facing a similar emotional crossroads prior to doomsday, the solution would have been obvious. Life, he would have told himself in that situation, was too short to waste in the company of someone who simply doesn’t respect you.

  But in this new reality you couldn’t just blithely blow someone off, even if they were being unreasonable to an egregious degree. Not unless you wished to face the almost too bleak to consider prospect of living out the rest of your life completely alone. And not simply ‘alone’ in the sense of not having a bed companion, but as in completely shut off from all human contact.

  Forever.

  A prospect Warren found so depressing he couldn’t bring himself to tell Jasmine to fuck off. What he said instead was, “Fine. But as long as we’re sticking together, I wish you’d do me one little favor.”

  “And what would that be, little boy?”

  His gaze turned stony. “I’d like for you to stop calling me ‘little boy’. Or ‘child’. I know that on some very basic level our age difference disturbs you. But you should fucking get over it. If I’m old enough for you to fuck every night, I’m old enough to be treated like an equal.”

  He brushed past her then and resumed walking at a much brisker pace than before. His heart was racing and he could barely breathe for a moment. He was afraid that last jab had been too harsh. He kept his gaze straight ahead, fearing that if he glanced back, he’d see Jasmine walking off in the other direction. He hoped like hell that wasn’t happening. Despite everything, he wanted her to stay with him.

  But he was glad he’d said what he said.

  Ahead of him loomed another big loop in the road. His gaze went to a faded road sign that’d once been bright green. Somewhere just beyond that loop was an exit, a path off this bleak highway that would lead him straight into the heart of a dead city. He began to think about what he might find there and a deeper darkness began to tinge his thoughts, obscuring, for a while, his conflicted feelings for Jasmine.

  * * *

  Jasmine stood there watching Warren stride purposefully down the road. Part of her wanted to see him disappear forever once he moved beyond that coming bend in the road. A feeling fueled in large part by the angst she felt over the intimate turn their relationship had taken. She felt guilty of both betraying her husband’s memory and of robbing the cradle. Warren’s instincts in that regard were dead-on accurate.

  But in the end it hardly seemed to matter. Everything kept boiling down to a simple, inescapable fact—she didn’t want to be alone. And Warren, despite being very young and therefore naive, was all she had. She had no other friends left, no other men from whom she might choose a more appropriate (i.e., older) suitor.

  She watched Warren’s back grow smaller in the distance.

  And smaller still.

  Then she sighed.

  She started walking—slowly at first, but faster and faster with each step. A quiet desperation hurried her pace, a primal impulse from the murkier depths of her subconscious. He was moving faster than she was, almost faster than she could manage without actually running. A vague sense of desperation sharpened, became almost all-consuming. She almost had to laugh when she realized abruptly what was spurring her forward.

  Some part of her knew her previous wish to see Warren gone had never had much substanc
e. It’d been a product of her ego and battered psyche. When she’d been faced with the very real possibility of having to do without him, all that had been swept away like so much flotsam in the wake of a tidal wave.

  And he was still too far away.

  Still moving too fast, like a man hurrying to the site of some emergency. She felt a surge of genuine concern for him then. The young man was determined to find out what had happened to his loved ones. All the evidence indicated he was heading straight to the bottom of a deep well of grief. She thought of what she’d said to him earlier about his family and felt shame.

  “Damn it, Jasmine,” she muttered. “Sometimes you really are an unfeeling bitch…”

  She began to run then, jettisoning those last shreds of ragged ego.

  “Warren!” she called out to him. “Please wait for me!”

  So she was begging now. She almost laughed. You couldn’t get less aloof than this. A ghost of the old feelings came back when she saw him stop and turn to face her. Just a brief, flickering spark of ego that was gone in less than the space of a heartbeat.

  She kept running.

  And she saw Warren smile.

  A great relief swept over her. A smile of her own stretched across her face, her first purely genuine smile in days. Everything was going to be okay now. She and Warren would talk everything out when they made camp tonight, just honestly and openly address all their feelings and concerns. Then they’d be able to put all this angsty crap behind them and move on, maybe figure out how to make a decent (or at least bearable) life for themselves in this inhospitable new world.

  Then there was a flash and the whole world went white.

  Jasmine could still feel the road—the cracked and faded asphalt, with its dangerous, pocked surface—beneath her pounding feet. But she couldn’t see a thing. Not Warren. Not the road. Nothing. Just this blinding white light. Then her foot dipped into a hole in the asphalt and she pitched forward. She struggled for a moment to regain her balance, but it was no use—she was going down too fast, and the bag slung over her shoulder was suddenly like a big hand driving her to the ground.

  Her knees struck asphalt and she felt a jagged hardness shred her skin and draw forth a rush of warm blood. She screamed and fell flat against the road’s surface. Then, screaming again, she rolled on to her back and stared up at that forever expanse of nothing.

  “WARREN!” she screamed. “WHAT’S HAPPENING!?”

  A silent moment elapsed while she waited to hear him respond. But he didn’t say anything. Either he didn’t hear her—which didn’t seem possible—or he was ignoring her. She doubted the latter. If she’d learned anything about Warren in their brief time together, it was that the boy hadn’t the merest spark of cruelty in his soul. He thought he was so dark. A brooding poet type. But he was so innocent, really. And so basically good, so decent. He wouldn’t leave her to writhe here in agony.

  Speaking of ‘here’…where was that, exactly? What on earth was happening? Whatever it was, it wasn’t natural. Some unfathomable supernatural phenomenon was at work. Realizing this should have deepened the sense of terror engulfing her, but, curiously, it actually served to calm her some. It explained why Warren hadn’t come immediately to her aid. For some reason, he just couldn’t. It was as if some ethereal cocoon had closed around her, separating her from the rest of the world while inexplicably leaving her connected to it in a tactile sense.

  Then a face appeared above her. A pretty, almost angelic face, floating there in the midst of all that white. She began to perceive the outline of a small body. The image gradually clarified, and she began to perceive the shape of the world beyond it. It was her world. Earth. Barren, defeated Earth. She glimpsed a man-sized shape in the distance and knew it was Warren, though she still couldn’t see him clearly. Everything was still shrouded in bright white.

  The face was that of a smiling little girl. Nine-years-old, maybe ten. She wore her long brown hair in braided pigtails. Jasmine knew she should feel joy at seeing another human being, but she did not. There was something wrong with this girl. Her eyes were twin dark points of gleaming malevolence.

  The girl laughed. “Hello.”

  Jasmine clenched her teeth and managed to speak through the pain. “Wh-who…are you?”

  The girl laughed. “I am your lord and master.”

  Jasmine frowned. What an odd thing to say. She didn’t know how to reply, so she said, “Where’s Warren? What have you done to him?”

  The girl’s almond eyes flicked in his direction. Then she looked at Jasmine again and smiled more broadly than before. “Oh, him.” She adopted a tone of mock consolation. “Well, you’ll just have to do without him from now on. He’s mine now.”

  The scream that leaped from Jasmine’s throat then was of such intensity that it shocked her. She screamed again and said, “NO!”

  The girl laughed yet again. “Afraid so, bitch.” She glanced at Warren again, and now her grin morphed, became a sly smirk. “Hmm, I’d originally thought he’d just be my new plaything, but a look into his mind has proven most interesting. I think I have another use for him.”

  The white brilliance flared again, blotting out all of reality for an indeterminate time. Jasmine lost consciousness at some point, even experienced fleeting, dark-tinged dreams. Then she came back to herself, blinking slowly as she realized the awful shroud of white was gone.

  That wasn’t the only thing that was gone.

  “Warren!”

  She got to her feet and turned in a slow circle, searching for any sign of her young companion, but there was nothing. It was as though he’d disappeared into thin air. She supposed it was possible he’d really left her behind while she was in the clutches of…whatever that thing really was (she was certain it’d only been masquerading as a young girl). But she didn’t really believe that. The stretch of road ahead was too long and wide open—he simply couldn’t have gotten far enough to have disappeared from sight during the brief time she was incapacitated.

  You don’t know that, whispered a voice from the darker recesses of her psyche. Think about what happened. Was it really mere minutes that elapsed while you were in that white void—or was it hours?

  Jasmine’s instinct was to dismiss the notion as absurd, but, to her dismay, she found she was unable to do that.

  An echo of low, black laughter came to her like the sound of waves lapping at a distant shore. She whirled about, scanning the road for any indication of the source of the laughter. She caught a glimpse of something at the far side of the road, a small shape sprawled on the ground next to a fallen motorcycle. A tuft of brown hair moved slightly in the gentle breeze.

  A fresh knot of fear twisted its way through her guts as she began to move carefully toward the other side of the road. She couldn’t be seeing what she thought she was seeing. This person was dead. Long dead, from the looks of it. But the clothes and hair were the same. Same braided brown pigtails. The same pajamas. By the time Jasmine arrived at the motorcycle, it had become next to impossible to believe she was seeing anything other than the body of her tormentor.

  The body lay curled against the skeletal remains of the motorcycle’s deceased driver. A grinning, fleshless skull was pressed into the hollow the girl’s throat. As unsettling as the grisly tableau was, Jasmine nonetheless felt compelled to investigate it more closely. She knelt next to the very still body and reached out to it with a trembling hand. Her fingers skittered over the cool, smooth flesh of the dead girl’s cheek, then dipped lower, sliding between flesh and rotting bone. Her fingers pressed into the flesh, seeking a pulse, but of course there was none.

  Jasmine’s mind swirled with a confusion of thoughts and emotions, a dark, flashing kaleidoscope of jangled, half-formed ideas and suspicions. Finding the girl’s corpse did nothing to allay either her fear or the concern she felt for Warren’s safety. That dark, malign intelligence she’d sensed upon looking into the girl’s eyes was still out there somewhere. She imagined something malleabl
e and without solid form, a life force alien to this world, a parasitic consciousness able to enter and take over the minds and bodies of human hosts.

  A theory the child’s death seemed to verify. If she was right, it could mean only one thing—that creature, whatever it was, had moved on to a new host.

  Warren…

  Tears stung her eyes and she felt a sob beginning to work it’s way up her diaphragm. She didn’t attempt to suppress it. This seemed as good a time as any for a total mental meltdown. Everything had gone to hell.

  One of the dead biker’s skeletal hands came to life and clamped tightly around her wrist. Jasmine screamed and tried to pull away. Even as she struggled, her mind reeled, refusing at first to accept this new level of insanity. She could accept the concept of disembodied, parasitic life forms from another world, but animated skeletons was another whacked-as-hell matter altogether.

  The skeletal hand held her fast, failing to yield to her furious flailing. Which was just crazy. The brittle old bones should have snapped easily, but they seemed as solid and durable as titanium. When the skull’s jawbone began to move, Jasmine thought she might truly lose whatever little was left of her sanity.

  Dry, musty laughter emerged from that dead mouth. The lack of vocal cords appeared not to be an issue for Mr. Bones.

  Jasmine screamed.

  Yanked against the skeletal hand with all her might…

  …and fell backward onto her ass.

  She scooted rapidly away from the skeleton and dead child, stopping only when she’d put a good twenty feet between herself and the ghoulish scene. Then, panting rapidly like a dog in dire need of a drink from its bowl, she sat there staring at the motionless skeleton for several long moments. She half-expected it to get up and come shambling toward her. When her pulse had dropped back to a normal range, she got shakily to her feet and began heading down the road.

  Toward the city.

  And whatever awaited her there.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN