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  “The plan for what?” I said clearly not understanding what they were getting at. I didn’t understand what more “plan” we needed than to continue walking and get to the military base.

  “Abby, we aren’t going to make it to the base tonight. We are walking too slowly. We would have to walk al night long to make it. It’s probably going to be sunset in a couple of hours,” Max said.

  “Wel, how much farther do you think we have to go?” I asked. It felt like we had already been walking for an eternity.

  “Probably another forty miles. We are going to need to find a place to sleep for the night.” The thought of having to sleep outside was definitely not something I wanted to have to do.

  “Why do we have to stop? We can walk through the night just fine, we just need to folow the road anyway right?”

  “We shouldn’t travel at night, it’s not safe, and I don’t think Savannah can handle much more,” Judy said.

  I saw the sincere concern in her eyes and I looked back at Savannah. Judy was right; I didn’t think she could make it much longer. She was thin and frail and I could tel how much more tired she looked than everyone else, but she didn’t complain. Compared to Taya, the two girls looked very similar, but Taya had a hidden strength about her that Savannah did not.

  “Ok, what’s the plan?” I asked.

  Carter quickly puled out a map and opened it before us. “If we walk until sunset that should give us another four hours or so and we can get about another twenty miles, so… that should put us somewhere around here.” He said pointing to a location on the map.

  “White sands? What’s that?” I asked.

  “They are sand dunes. They stretch out for quite a ways. My husband and I hiked them once about ten years ago. We should do our best to make it at least to there before we break for the night. We wil have to go off the road for a bit, but that may be a better idea to be secluded than be sleeping near a bunch of abandoned vehicles or areas where demons have places to hide,” Judy said.

  “Neither of those sleeping arrangements sound good to me, so you guys decide,” I said. Max and Carter looked at each other and then off into the distance ahead of us as if they could see the white dunes waiting for us. Neither of them wanted to say it, but from years of knowing both of them I knew what they were thinking.

  “Guess we’re sleeping in the dunes,” I said a little annoyed and immediately stalked off. I wasn’t sure if it was the fact that I had to accept we weren’t going to make it to the military base until the next day, or the fact that I had to sleep outside in the dark, that was pissing me off.

  We rested for about another ten minutes before we headed off again down the road. Not wanting to walk with anyone at the moment, I took the lead and walked at the head of the group. The guys knew me wel enough to give me my space when I needed it without me even having to ask. A lesson they learned the hard way a long time ago.

  The last few hours of light seemed to go by rather quickly, but I knew no matter how fast it felt that time was going, we were not moving any faster. The sky was holding onto the last rays of light as we neared the dunes.

  We had to walk a good way off the highway to get deep enough into the dunes that we felt safe to settle in for the night. Taya was just as unhappy with the idea as I was when I told her what we were doing, maybe even more so.

  “What if there are spiders or scorpions out here?” Taya asked sounding extremely whiny.

  “They would be the least of our worries at the moment, don’t you think?” I said. She nodded her agreement, but she looked around at the sands with a watchful eye.

  Taya and I sat near a smal fire the guys had built, listening to it crackle and hiss as it burned the smal bushes they yanked out of the ground.

  “Is she sleeping?” I asked Judy as she settled down next to us. As hot as it was during the day the night quickly chiled around us.

  “Almost as soon as she laid down. Norah is sitting with her for a while, just in case she wakes up,” Judy said as she stared at the faint figure of Norah in the distance stroking Savannah’s hair.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Taya asked in her usual manner of never thinking before she spoke.

  “I don’t know. I think she was sick before everything happened, but she won’t talk about it,” Judy said.

  “Where is her family?” Taya asked.

  “Gone. We found her hiding inside a police station. My guess is she was trying to find help, but the place was empty. I don’t know how long she was there til we found her.” Judy sighed as she accepted the bottle of water we were passing around.

  I dug into my bag and puled out my radio, setting it on the ground in front of me. “What are you doing?” Carter asked as he approached, dropping a handful of plants he just yanked out of the ground.

  “I just wanted to see if I could hear it. We are so close we should be able to pick up a signal, right?” I knew it probably looked a little desperate, but I thought the sound of that transmission would relax me.

  “Leave her alone dude, if she wants to listen to it let her.” Max added while dumping another pile of bushes onto the ground.

  Max sat down crossing his legs and got to work on breaking down the bushes into manageable pieces. As cold as it was, I wanted to shove al the bushes straight into the fire, but I knew we couldn’t let it get too large. Even though it was smal, the flames burned through the smal, dried twigs much too quickly. However, it emitted a strange aroma unlike any campfire I’d been around before.

  Norah sat down by the fire, quietly flipping through the pages of Carter’s book. The silence in the group was growing awkward and I didn’t care if I was the one to break it. Everyone was trying their best to avoid the obvious, but I wanted to know what was realy going on.

  “How did your husband manage to lock up that demon?” I asked Judy. Everyone gave me a shocked look, but I was only asking what everyone else was too afraid to do themselves.

  “When they attacked I took al the women and children into a room and we locked ourselves in. My son left us to help his father. We could hear the demons outside, and men’s voices yeling. Then the sounds grew closer, we could tel the demons were inside the building.” Her eyes were watering then, and I could see that recounting the story was hard for her. I should have, but I didn’t feel bad about making her relive it and she continued so she must have wanted to get it off her chest. My thought was that perhaps after the death of her son, they never spoke of it as if it never happened. It was obvious that Judy did not want to pretend that her son was never there or that he did not exist.

  “I could hear my son and John shouting. Bulets were flying and slamming into wals and demons alike. When the fighting was over my son came to check on us and that was when it grabbed him. It was lurking in the shadows and snatched him as he opened the door. I’l never forget the look of complete shock on his face. He managed to drive his knife into its neck before it kiled him. I watched my son die and then I watched the demon turn toward us.”

  “Damn,” Max said under his breath.

  Judy swalowed hard and continued. “Jerry and Roger showed up then, they unloaded both their weapons into and it stil didn’t go down. I could see in their eyes they were going to leave us there. They were going to let the demon have us as they escaped, but then Norah showed up.” Judy looked up at Norah, choking on her words as tears finaly poured down her face.

  “What happened then?” Taya asked Norah when it was clear Judy could not go on.

  “I didn’t want to hide when the demons attacked. I had wanted to help. I grabbed the shovel I used in the garden and shoved it into the demons midsection as hard as I could. I kept stabbing at it again and again. I knew I wasn’t doing enough damage, but I was buying us time. John showed up as the demon bit into my shovel, snapping it in half. He unloaded his rifle into the demon as it lunged for us. It finaly fel then, dead in its tracks and landed on the floor like a ton of bricks.”

  “So then you al just decided to loc
k it up then?” I asked.

  “No, we thought it was dead. John and Judy were holding their sons body, when I noticed it was stil breathing. I regret having ever said anything; I wish I would have just grabbed my broken shovel and jammed it into its neck until I took its head off.” The anger in Norah’s voice seemed uncharacteristic for her. She was normaly very put together, even for an apocalypse, but as she described her clear disgust for the demon she wrung her hands around the hem of her shirt until her knuckles were white.

  “I shouted that it was stil alive and John turned toward me. The look in his eyes scared me almost as much as the demons. He quickly ordered Roger and Jerry to help him. They tied it up then and dragged it into the basement. We didn’t even see John again for three days. He stayed in the basement with it al day long. I don’t know what he was doing or what happened in those three days, but when he came back up he had it in his head that we had to sacrifice ourselves to the demon in order to discover its weaknesses. He wanted to know who the demon desired most, so he could use them as a pawn to get information. He wanted to avenge his son; he wanted to kil every demon on earth and was wiling to do anything to do that.”

  “I think he was possessed,” Carter said so calmly as if that were a completely normal thing to mention in a conversation. Judy turned her head toward him, clearly shocked, but she didn’t say anything. “I mean it makes sense doesn’t it? He was locked down there with that demon for three days. If you think about it, the thing was injured; it probably convinced John that feeding it human blood would somehow get it to reveal secrets, when realy it was wanting to rebuild its strength.”

  “I guess we wil never realy know,” Norah said as she rubbed the bandage on her arm where John had cut her.

  “Are you ok?” I asked pointing to her arm.

  She nodded then and said, “I’m going to try and get some sleep.”

  “I think I wil too.” Judy added.

  Chapter 13

  “Can you believe that?” Taya whispered when Judy and Norah were out of earshot. “That’s horrible.”

  “That’s not even the worst of it.” Carter added as he tossed some branches into the fire.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Norah left out some details, probably because she didn’t want to scare the two of you.”

  “Wel what do you want to scare us for?” Taya asked.

  “I’m not trying to scare you. I just think you should know everything. When John came back up from the basement, it wasn’t just human blood he wanted to sacrifice. He said it only had to be the blood of a woman, because they are considered more pure then men, and therefore would be more desired by the demon.” Our jaws dropped at this comment. “Didn’t you two notice that none of the men at that place had cuts on their arms?” I shook my head not knowing what to say. Thinking back on it, I couldn’t remember seeing any of the men with bandages on their arms.

  “But John said that everyone had to make the sacrifice.” I don’t know why I said that, it sounded like I was pleading a case for John.

  “Come on Abby, you realy think you can believe anything that man said?” Carter asked and I shook my head.

  “Now I’m realy not going to get any sleep,” Taya commented.

  “Maybe you are right Carter. It’s scary to think that we could have been that man’s targets. This just throws everything into a whole new kind of crazy. Al along we have been thinking that they were just savage beasts, but now they can talk and possess people?” I could feel my hope of survival slipping. I thought before that we may stand some kind of chance against them, but now I was not so sure.

  “That’s not entirely true.” Max countered and I thought he was just trying to comfort me. “Maybe that was a higher level demon, I mean it is a lot different than the other ones we’ve seen. It was more… what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Aware.” Carter made sounds like he was on the verge of an epiphany. “Max does have a point, as crazy as that feels to say that.” Max flipped Carter the bird playfuly, but Carter ignored it and went on. “When I went through my whole Goth stage after mom died, I did a lot of research on witchcraft, vampires and even demonology. They aren’t al the same. This is why I have been wanting to catalog as much about them. Some of them, like the one we saw at city hal, have a more developed set of “skils”, for lack of a better word, than say the birds or the little gremlin things at the camp.” I tried hard not to let the fact that he mentioned our mother distract me.

  She had died in a car accident when I was very little and I have no memory of her other than pictures that my father and Carter would show me. I use to be very jealous of the fact that Carter had memories of a mother I never knew, and even though I had gotten over it, I stil felt a twinge of sadness whenever she was mentioned.

  “So what you are saying is things could get worse than this? That there might be an even higher level demon out there?” I asked, hoping he was going to say no, but I knew he would not.

  “Unfortunately. After what Norah has told me, I think things could get much worse. I’m not even sure if what we have seen are actualy demons now. They could just simply be beasts or tortured souls who have been twisted into grotesque forms and let loose on the world.”

  “This is crazy.” I almost shouted, not wanting to believe what he was saying.

  “Abs calm down, it’s going to be ok,” Max said, resting his hand over mine.

  “I can’t deal with this right now. We are almost to the base. Why are we even worrying about this stuff right now? If there are worse things out there, then just let the damn military deal with it. We’ve done our part.” Taya was starting to get heated, obviously out of fear that was getting the best of her. “I can’t listen to you guys anymore, stop trying to make it worse.”

  “Taya we aren’t trying to make it worse, I’m just being a realist and teling you what I think is going on. Do you want me to lie to you?” Carter asked.

  “Yes! Things are already worse than any of us could possibly have imagined in our most horrible nightmares and you want to tel me things are going to get worse, I just can’t take it!” Taya stormed off then, walking into the distance toward the top of a smaler dune. I agreed with Taya. Now realy was not the time to be worrying about these things, al we should be focusing on is getting to the military base. We shouldn’t be making things any harder on ourselves then they already are.

  “You should probably go after her,” I said looking to Carter. He was gingerly touching his swolen eye with his fingertips.

  “What, why me? She’s the one that’s over reacting. I’m not the one who sent these demons out.”

  “Carter, don’t you get it? She’s scared, and damn it I am too. Think about everything she has gone through. We are almost to the base, just when we think we might finaly be safe, you go and tel us that everything is even worse than we think it is.” I shouted the words at him harsher than I had intended, but I needed to get it through his thick skul. He stood there for a moment considering what I had said.

  “Besides, she shouldn’t be sitting out there alone anyway.” Max added.

  “Max is right. At least go check on her Carter.”

  Without saying anything Carter nodded and headed up the smal dune to stand beside Taya. I watched their forms standing in the white sand for a moment. Their bodies bathed in the light of the ful moon that reflected off the white sandy dunes.

  “Think she wil be ok?” Max asked sounding sincerely concerned.

  “Yeah, I think she has just reached her limit. That was a pretty big bomb Carter just dropped on us. There is no way to realy prepare yourself for something like that, and we are worn pretty thin already at the moment.”

  “How are you holding up?” Max held my face in his hands, brushing back my hair as he looked at me.

  “Honestly? I’m scared out of my mind, but I feel almost numb to it al, like it won’t soak in. What are we going to do Max? What are we going to do if Carter is right?”

>   Max puled me into his arms and kissed my head. “Tomorrow we are going to get to that base Abby. That’s what we are going to do. We are going to tel the military everything that we know and then we are going to help them fight. Everything is going to be ok.”

  “Do you realy think so?” I asked wanting to believe what he was teling me.

  “Of course I think so, and I’m never wrong am I?” He looked down at me with a smirk and I kissed him.

  My emotions took over me and I took his lips against mine and kissed him more deeply than I have ever kissed anyone. I felt warm tears trickle across our lips and I could feel the pain and fear I had held onto and buried away slowly break free, if only for a moment.

  Our single moment of bliss quickly shattered at the sound of Taya shrieking at the top of her lungs. Max and I jumped up to see her and Carter nearly tumbling down the dune toward us.

  I started to rush for them, but Max quickly snatched my arm and pointed to the top of the dune. “Don’t Abs.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “Abby look! It’s a hound.”

  “I don’t care, that’s my brother.” I shouted as I yanked my arm from his grasp and ran for my shotgun. I sprinted the short distance to Carter and Taya. Just as we neared each other the sound of another hound came from my left.

  A second hound was descending upon us. Judy noticed it quickly and was scrambling to shake Norah and Savannah awake.

  “They are surrounding us!” Max shouted as he ran up behind me.

  “Get over here!” I yeled for Judy and the others to come toward us, but they were moving too slowly in their fear as they kept stumbling in the thick sand. My heart pounded in my chest as I tried to figure out what we should do.

  The hounds slowly made their way down the dune, closing in on us. Carter grabbed his crossbow and quickly landed an arrow into the head of the first hound. It wailed in pain and swiped at the arrow with its paw, but it didn’t stop in its descent.

  They continued steadily moving in on us. Taya quickly puled out my knife from the strap on my leg and held it in front of her, while Max handed a smaler knife to Norah. We joined together, our bodies trembling as we prepared for the assault.