American Vampire. Jennifer Armintrout

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СКАЧАТЬ the teakettle whistled, and she closed her eyes, squeezed them shut tight against the intrusion of reality. She turned off the light and went to her bedroom, not bothering to sneak or avoid the squeaky spot in the hall. Her parents were gone. Jonathan was gone. The only things lying behind those closed doors were empty rooms, shrines to the dead she could hardly bear to look at. Everything she knew and loved had vanished, replaced by a nightmare world that mocked her with its familiarity.

      She padded across the white area rug in her room, over the stain where she and Becky had spilled the wine cooler snuck from the fridge in seventh grade. The sky outside the window, what she could see of it through the branches of the tree—the very one that Derek used to climb to get into her room at night—had lightened to the white that preceded the arrival of the sun in the sky. Another fifteen minutes, maybe, and the rooster would start crowing.

      She dressed in clean clothes, a tank top and denim shorts, and went downstairs. In the kitchen, she checked the basement door again, then put some dried raspberry leaves in a cup, pouring the steaming water from the kettle over them. Coffee, like everything else that couldn’t be grown or handmade in Penance, had gone from common item to luxury to extinction in the last five years. She had learned to substitute homemade soap for shampoo and live with the results. Coffee … she would kill a stranger with her hands to get a cup of coffee.

      The thought of strangers brought her mind right back to the man in the basement. If he hadn’t been such a jerk, he might have actually been attractive. If she went for that slick, well-groomed type, which she didn’t. But she’d always been a sucker for blonds, and his gorgeous blue eyes were the kind a girl could get lost in, if she didn’t know they covered up a whole batch of lies, which they probably did.

      He had to go, as soon as possible. If he had been polite—if he’d just been a little less rude—she might have more sympathy toward him. But he hadn’t been, so she didn’t, and she wouldn’t feel bad about kicking him out. She took a sip of the tea, wincing as she scalded her tongue. She was always doing that, always being too impatient, and hurting herself in the process. She finished her tea and headed out to the barn, trying hard to shake the feelings of guilt and responsibility that plagued her. It wasn’t her fault that the guy had stopped at that gas station. It wasn’t as though he’d stopped to help her. He shouldn’t have been able to stop at all.

      A light sheen of dew glistened on the lawn, chilling Jessa’s bare feet as she made her away across the grass. There was something satisfying about being up with the sun, or at least there would have been had she actually gone to bed the night before. Lack of sleep aside, the morning seemed as close to normal as it got in Penance. The chickens chased each other through the hard-packed dirt of the farmyard in aggressive anticipation of feeding time. They didn’t know they were locked in a never-ending nightmare, and their ignorance comforted Jessa. She pushed the barn door open, ignoring as best she could the long slashes across the wood. It had come here before, and It liked to leave reminders.

      Inside the barn, she checked her feed stores. Damn. She would have to go into town soon. She’d have to go, anyway, to unload her freeloader. But she didn’t have anything to trade, and supplies were running out. She leaned her head against the door, fighting the feelings of hopelessness that washed over her. She usually traded peaches from the orchard, but this year’s crop hadn’t yielded what it had the year before, and she’d lost a batch of preserves when the cans didn’t seal. She’d already traded away the tractor to Jim Wyandot, and he’d melted down the metal to make bullets for black-powder rifles. Without gasoline the farm equipment in town had been pretty much worthless, anyhow.

      Gas. She barely thought of the word anymore, after nearly five years without any. They’d tried to ration it, but with It coming so close to the harvest, the majority of it had been sucked down by combines. There hadn’t been a drop of gasoline in Penance in a long, long time…. But there was, now.

      Between the time she grabbed the garden hose and a red plastic gas can from the wall, and the time she made it down to the car, she didn’t think about anything but the amount someone, anyone, would pay for a gallon of gas. Once she stood beside the car, though, she thought about the guy in the basement. He’d gotten here. He might be able to leave. He couldn’t do that with an empty gas tank.

      Did it matter, though?

      She doubted he would send help back, if he could get out. Even if he did, help might not be able to make it back to their town. No one else had been able to so far. They’d figured at first that people just didn’t need to stop, then later feared what would happen if someone did. They’d feared the town would quickly become overrun with lost tourists, and resources would be obliterated. After a few months, they’d stopped worrying about unexpected arrivals and concentrated on getting out themselves. As the buildings started looking pretty rough and the store and gas station were reclaimed by nature, surely someone outside had to have noticed that Penance had become a ghost town—a missing town!—but still, no one had stopped or sent any help. And everyone left behind had stopped wondering long ago what it was that kept people out or in. They were too busy just trying to survive.

      She frowned at the car. The night before, she’d thought it was a Corvette. In the light of day, she realized how wrong that first impression was. Maybe it was a Mustang, but it would have to be a custom job. More likely, it was a fancy foreign import, and she wrinkled her nose in distaste. That just proved what kind of a guy he was, driving around in a ridiculously expensive car.

      She tossed the gas can and hose on the grass, figuring she probably wouldn’t even know where the gas tank was, anyway. The windows were open, and she leaned inside. The dew had settled over his leather interior. That wasn’t great. His phone wouldn’t be worth much, but he had to have CDs in there somewhere, and maybe even some convenience-store food. She opened the door as quietly as possible and climbed in. A leather jacket lay crumpled on the floor of the passenger side. Who wore leather in the middle of the summer? There was a pack of cigarettes in the pocket; those would fetch a good price. She rummaged beneath the seats and in the glove box, and found the car depressingly devoid of food. No chips, no popcorn, no beef jerky. Not even an empty soda can. The guy was probably a health nut. “Vanity,” she said to no one, clucking her tongue. Sure enough, he was some slick city guy who thought hard work happened in the gym. She climbed out of the car and closed the door, again as quietly as she could, to avoid alerting him to her snoop search.

      Jessa finished her chores quickly, though her muscles still ached from her late-night flight from It. When the chickens had been tended and the garden watered, all the tomato plants inspected, when she checked up on the beehives, when she tacked the siding back up from where It had brushed its huge, scaly back against it and knocked it down, she put on her boots and approached the fallow field that surrounded the yard and headed to the woods beyond.

      Though It rarely struck the same place twice in a row, a chill left over from the night before crawled up her spine. The woods didn’t seem frightening now, just a bunch of trees and May apples swaying on the shaded ground between them. “Elf Umbrellas,” Mom used to call them. Jessa squeezed her eyes shut tight as she stepped over the tall-grass border and into the trees. There was nothing in the woods. Nothing but her gun, and she needed that. It was the whole point of coming out here, where it wasn’t safe, where she shouldn’t be. What had brought her out here the night before, though.

      She opened her eyes and saw the shotgun, gleaming black and simulated wood grain at the base of a tree. The tree itself was wounded, from where her first shot had missed. She never missed twice. She’d struck the creature, but that had only infuriated it.

      She ran to the gun and snatched it up, her hands shaking, heart hammering, and looked for the blood trail. Closing her eyes, she remembered the scene the night before. It had been charging her, and she’d fired the first barrel, hitting the tree and exploding wooden shrapnel into the air, leaving behind СКАЧАТЬ