Night Beyond The Night (2 page)

The visit to Sedona should have been their least-exciting and briefest adventure . . . but it had turned out to be impossibly long.

Fifty years long, in fact.

“I’m Elliott Drake,” he said to the teens at last. “That’s my friend Wyatt over there, with the dark hair. And Quent’s the blond one with the bandanna. Our other two friends went after the
ganga
that took your friend.”

That was the easy part. But there was no way he could explain what they were doing here; that, while they were exploring a cave, all hell had broken loose. Earth shaking and splitting, rocks and boulders tumbling, odd smells and sounds, sharp and sizzling shocks of energy . . . and then everything had gone dark.

And they’d awakened a half-century later, Elliott, Quent, Wyatt, and the two guides who’d taken them deep into the caves. Unscathed and unchanged.

Well, not completely unchanged.

They—along with their guides, Fence and Lenny, and Simon, a man they’d found in the caves—spent the last six months in a combination of disbelief, anger and grief, trying to understand what had happened. “What’s your name?” Elliott asked, looking at the boy who’d spoken.

“Geoff.”

“Do you know where they might have taken her, Geoff? The
ganga
?” It was probably a futile question, for none of the few people they’d met in the six months since they’d emerged from the caves knew much about the
gangas
. . . except to avoid them when they came out at night.

Geoff shrugged and looked miserable, rubbing his arm. “I don’t know. Will they find her?”

“They’ll try their best.” Elliott looked over at Quent, who’d walked over to look through a different window. Cracked, covered with mildew spots and encrusted with dirt, the glass was nearly opaque. But he had scratched away some of the grime and peered out onto what had been an avenue or thoroughfare below.

“You see anything?” Elliott asked, suddenly feeling a wave of the exhaustion that never seemed to leave him anymore. That was what happened when you hardly slept for six months . . . and when you did, you woke sweaty and out of breath from the nightmares.

“Nothing. It’s quiet out there.” Quent shifted his stance at the window so that he could peer straight down. “Nothing moving but a few rats.”

In another lifetime, another world, Quent had been known as Quentin Brummell Fielding
III
, complete with not only a silver spoon, but the whole fucking place setting. Now he was simply Quent.

Though there was nothing simple about him.

Or any of them, anymore.

“They should be back by now, unless they ran into trouble. She was riding like hell, and the
gangas
couldn’t have gone far. They’re pretty fast but not too agile,” Elliott said. Damn. His fingers closed tightly, and he itched to go after them himself.

Where had she come from? Did she know these kids? What was she doing, traveling about at night when the
gangas
were out?

He wanted to meet her, the bold woman who’d torn through the overgrown town and trampled the
gangas
, then flashed a tantalizing bit of skin above her jeans as she barreled off in pursuit. That sexy little swell of a curve just above the ass.

Christ, El, get a grip. It was a flash of skin. It’s not as if you haven’t ever seen a slew of bare asses in hospital gowns
.

Needing a distraction, Elliott looked around the room to consider the sleeping arrangements. He and the others hadn’t planned to stay here tonight, but now it looked as if they’d be shacking up with the kids in an old office building in this . . . whatever it had been. Some town in the middle of some county in what probably had been northern Arizona, but who the hell knew what it was anymore. An overgrown, jungle-like wasteland.

“What’s your name?” Elliott asked the girl who reminded him of Josie.

“Linda,” she replied, smiling bashfully.

“Pretty name.” Though he felt light-headed and weary, Elliott smiled back, keeping his expression gentle. “How far are you from home? Do you all live in the same place?”

“Yeah. Our parents are going to be all nuclear by now.” Her large eyes swam with tears. “We sneaked out and didn’t tell them, and now we’re so far from home.” A little wail caught at the end of her sentence.

Elliott patted her arm, giving it a little squeeze. “We’ll get you back home, safe and sound,” he promised. “You’ll just have to tell us how to get there.”

He hadn’t seen any sign of recent human civilization in their last day of travel, coming from the south, so the kids were either really far from home—or they lived in a settlement large enough to produce at least seven teens of the same age.

“Are you from Envy?” Elliott asked, as he did anyone they met.

Linda nodded.

Excitement spiked through him. “And you can get us there?”

She nodded again.

Elliott smiled, and the fog of exhaustion eased.
At last.
They’d found Envy.

After they’d emerged from the cave, Elliott and his friends had traveled on foot, horrified at the change in landscape. They scavenged for food and shelter for more than a week before they actually met any people. When they learned that fifty years had elapsed—an inconceivable concept—they were fairly numbed, paralyzed for a time.

How could one comprehend that the entire world had been destroyed? Most of the human race and its infrastructure—gone? Civilization annihilated?

It was beyond comprehension.

At last, trying to find answers to what had happened fifty years earlier—and how—Elliott and his companions had been unable to find anyone who’d actually lived through the destruction, and who could answer their desperate questions. Over and over, during their months of travel in a slow, concentric circle from Sedona, the band of men had occasionally encountered small settlements of people. Finally, about three weeks ago, they met someone who suggested that they go to Envy, the largest known settlement of people. Almost a city, in fact, where some of the survivors might still live.

Once they learned the city was north, they had at least had a direction in which to travel. And now they were closer than they’d ever been.

Wyatt interrupted from his position by the window. “Dred, they’re back,” he said, using Elliott’s nickname.

Below, he heard the faint squeak of the rope ladder and the sniffling, snuffling sound of sobs. He immediately discarded the thought that it could be the woman. She wouldn’t cry. Not someone who came blazing in like fucking John Wayne.

His guess was confirmed as the young blond teenager emerged, sniffling and sobbing as she rose from the top of the ladder. When she saw her friends, she gave a wail and stumbled over to them without hesitation.

“Dred!” Fence, their original guide from the caves, called for him as he appeared from behind the girl. The muscular black guy was carrying the bareback-riding woman in his arms as if she were nothing more than a kitten. Limp and unmoving, bruised and bleeding, at first she looked as though she’d been beaten to a pulp.

But
gangas
didn’t punch or strike. They tore and devoured.

“Put her here,” Elliott told Fence. His nickname had come naturally when he started med school and his friends had started calling him Dr. E.D. in texts and emails. Even though he joked that “Dred” made him sound like one of the X-Men, he didn’t mind the moniker . . . though it did give people pause during first introductions.

“What happened?” he asked Fence, looking down at her. Putting all thoughts of that up-riding shirt from his mind.

“Looks like she fell off her horse fighting the motherfucker. Horse was gone, and she was lying near a mess of
ganga
roadkill. Or would it be horsekill. Hoofkill?”

As he felt her warm throat for a pulse, Elliott couldn’t help a smile. There was little to joke about nowadays, but that didn’t stop Fence from finding a bit of levity whenever he could.

“Blondie—her name is Benji, for chrissakes—was running away. We found her not too far from this one. I guess she was coming back for help, ’cause she couldn’t lift her,” Fence replied, gesturing to the unconscious woman. “Didn’t get too far before we found her, and Benji brought us back to where she was, on the ground by a pile of
ganga
crap,” Fence continued, a note of relish in his voice at the description. “The job was already done, and we didn’t even have to use any more bottle bombs.”

Which was a good thing, since they couldn’t just walk into a
CVS
and buy more alcohol.

“Benji seems all right,” said Elliott as he considered the rider’s pulse; it was steady and strong in her narrow wrist.

Her skin felt warm, but not overly so. And in a moment, he’d know exactly what was wrong with her, thanks to whatever the hell had happened to him during the fifty years he’d been suspended in time.

Then he noticed a leather pack strapped under her shirt. He gently pulled it away, its heavy contents clunking metallically, and set it aside. The removal of the pack’s wide band exposed some very perky curves covered by the thin white shirt. A fit female patient, likely in her late twenties, observed Elliott the Physician. With a smoking-hot body, noticed Elliott the Man, who was usually tucked away when Elliott the Physician was on duty, but who hadn’t had sex for fifty years. Or at least, for six months.

“Girl’s scared pissless,” Fence remarked. He grinned, his smile clear and white in his dark face. “But if you want to check her out, feel free. She’d probably love a handsome doctor like you taking care of her.”

“She’s a bit young,” said Elliott. Not the case with the woman in front of him. From what he’d seen, she wasn’t too young at all. In fact, she was just about right.

“Yeah, for a guy who’s eighty years old,” Wyatt, who’d just walked up, added dryly.

“But I’m a young eighty, and still two years younger than you,” Elliott returned with a smile. “Now let me see what I can find.”

Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes to concentrate, for this was still new to him. Then, scanning his hands just above the woman’s body like a human
MRI
, he waited for the images to appear in his mind. Like full-color X rays.

He still found it unfuckingbelievable, this amazing ability he’d somehow acquired while hibernating, or being cryogenically frozen, or time traveling—or whatever it was, for fifty years. Too damn bad he hadn’t had this gift . . . before. Think of the lives he could have saved.

Before
.

His concentration broke for a moment, and the internal images turned to gray mush.

Lips curling tightly inward, he pushed away the thoughts and felt the strange hum that skipped through him. He focused on the internal buzz, scanning the images that reappeared in his mind.

No head injury. No internal bleeding . . . just a fractured ulna, and the fifth rib. Some kind of meat for her last meal, and some vegetation. She was at the middle of her menstrual cycle.

His eyes flew open in chagrin.

Christ. Like he needed that damn information.

Then he realized the teens were all staring at him.

“Do you know her?” he asked, suddenly uncomfortable, though he didn’t know why he should be. For all they knew, he could have been praying over her. They couldn’t have any comprehension of what he was doing—he barely did himself.

No one responded to his question, though he saw a few furtive glances between them. Great. They looked more awkward and nervous than they had after the
ganga
attack.

Drawn back to his patient, he looked down. “What the hell was she doing out here by herself?” Elliott muttered. Bruises and lacerations all over her face, Elliott the Physician noted. Thick hair of an indiscriminately dark color, snarled and ratted from that wild ride. And fine, long legs that had to be strong as hell if they held on bareback like that. Elliott the Man’s mouth went ridiculously dry at the thought of her riding bareback.

Okay. Get a grip, Elliott
.

Yeah, it’d been fifty years and seven months since he’d had his hands on a woman’s body. But it wasn’t like he hadn’t slept through most of it.

Be a fucking professional. She’s your patient
.

With that pep talk mentally ringing in his ears, he reached over to her left arm, the one with the fractured ulna, bared by the short sleeve of her shirt.

Fully registering the warmth of her skin, he gently examined the bone beneath, concentrating, keeping it impersonal. She stiffened with discomfort beneath his light fingers, and he felt and saw the disjointed ulna. He’d have to splint it up, and that was going to make it difficult for her to ride again. Damn shame, when she was so good at it.

He stopped his thoughts right there before they could go down some wayward path with creative images of
his patient
riding bareback.

Good. Very good. Raging hormones under control.

Closing his eyes, Elliott focused and saw the fracture again in his mind, a slender, jagged break, the bone slightly misaligned . . . and he felt a surprise sizzle of energy flit through him.

Elliott resisted the urge to open his eyes, focusing instead on the hot rise of power flowing through him. This was new, this flush of energy. Was it because he was concentrating more carefully?

Of course, the whole fact that he could scan someone and read their insides was new, but this was something he’d never experienced before. His brows tightened together, he ignored the soft rustling of the watching teens and their hushed whispers, and steadily focused on his mental images.

Suddenly, a sharp pain sliced through his own arm. He gasped in shock and his eyes flew open, but he didn’t release her. His arm ached like a bitch. His left arm. It didn’t just ache, it was beginning to fucking hurt. Like someone had stabbed him.

He looked back down at the woman, who hadn’t moved. If anything, her face seemed to have relaxed. Elliott focused again on her broken arm, looking for the image in his mind, still feeling the pounding of pain in his limb.

He understood that he was somehow transferring her pain to his own body. Wow. He was even more talented than he thought.