Night Beyond The Night (3 page)

Maybe she’d rest easier. He could bear the pain for a bit, give her some relief.

And then he focused on the image in his mind and realized that he couldn’t see the break any longer. Her ulna was now a pristine, white bone.

What the fuck?

Had he healed her?

Elliott stared down at his hands around her arm, realizing that the pain still blasted through his own limb. He’d healed her and taken the pain into his own body?

Unbelievable. Absolutely amazing
.

What the hell would have happened if she was having a heart attack? Or if she had cancer? Could he absorb the rest of her pain by concentrating over other areas of her body?

This was miraculous. Learning that he had acquired the ability to read the internal state of a person’s body had been an accident in itself. And now this? Excitement and disbelief washed over him. Not only could he actually diagnose an injury or illness, but now it appeared he could also heal them.

The implications were staggering.

“She’s a Runner,” said Linda suddenly, breaking into Elliott’s wild thoughts.

He turned to look at her, his mind swirling with the impossibility and the implications of what had just happened, and at the same time, focusing on the girl, who suddenly looked terrified.

A
Runner
. Clearly spoken as a proper noun. He hadn’t heard that term from anyone else in this world before. People had mentioned bounty hunters. And whispered about the Strangers. But he’d never heard mention of Runners.

Of course there were a shitload of things he didn’t know about what this world had become.

Six months after waking up in this post-apocalyptic hell, and Elliott had stopped trying to figure it out. He’d almost stopped wondering why he and Quent had awakened with extraordinary capabilities—like his being a human
MRI
machine and Quent being able to touch something and “read” its memories—and Fence and Wyatt and Simon, who’d also been caught in the cave during the catastrophic events, hadn’t.

If they ever found someone who’d lived during that time, maybe, God willing, they’d have some answers.

Or maybe they’d just have to get through the rest of this damned life never knowing. Why. How.

And why the fuck
him
?

Linda shook her head mutely, as if she’d been elbowed. Or kicked. Big tears had gathered in her eyes, and Elliott felt the wave of antipathy from the other teens. Clearly, there was something else going on here.

Silence.

His arm still screaming with pain, Elliott looked over the group of them. He sat back on his haunches, which were in much better shape than they had been six months ago. Nonstop physical activity, and walking hundreds of miles—not to mention fighting
gangas
and living in survivalist mode—had turned him from the fit jogger he’d been into a lean, muscular candidate for the Special Forces. Not that they even existed anymore. He didn’t think.

Another one of the kids spoke up. “It’s nothing. Just heard the word ‘Runner’ before.”

“But she wasn’t running,” Elliott reminded them, very, very gently. He reached over to touch the back of Linda’s hand, meeting her gaze steadily, paring through the shock that still lingered in her eyes. “Who is she? How do you know her?”

But the girl just shook her head and looked down, biting her lip.

What the
hell
was the big secret?

Hiding his frustration, Elliott looked back down at his patient, noticing the perfect almond shape of her eyelids and the short, very faint crinkles at their corners. Not wrinkles—he knew better than to even think that word near a woman, but . . . laugh lines, maybe, or the evidence of time spent in the sun. A beautiful woman, even beneath the cuts and grime. Beautiful and gutsy.

What had she been doing out there alone?

At last one of the teens, the kid who seemed to be the leader, asked, “Is she going to live?”

They did know who she was. So it must be Elliott that they didn’t—or wouldn’t—trust.

He nodded, realizing that the pain in his arm had dissipated. That was pretty fucking amazing. A little bit of pain, and he could heal someone’s broken bone. Cool. “Yes, she’s going to be fine. But we need you to show us how to get back to Envy so I can take care of her.”

The leader, who’d nudged Linda into silence, looked at him with blatant suspicion. “I don’t know if we can trust you.” He closed his mouth mutinously.

“At least tell me her name,” Elliott said.

Just then, he felt the change. He looked down right as her eyes began to open. She shifted slightly, her movement accompanied by a small groan. She looked up at him, and even in the dimness, he could see that her eyes were cloudy and dazed.

“It’s . . . Jade,” she said on the gust of a soft breath. “Name’s Jade.” Her lips, split and cracked with blood, moved in either a grimace or a smile.

Elliott saw her gaze shift unsteadily from his face to beyond, scanning over the hovering teens, snag for a moment, and then back to him.

“Who’re you?” she asked, her lips stretching again, and some of the murkiness leaving her gaze. Their eyes met and he felt a whoosh of . . . something. Hot, heavy, and strong.

Hoo-boy
.

“Are you . . . an angel? Raphael maybe?” Her voice sounded deep and husky, not unusual for someone awakening from an injury.

Elliott smiled back, wondering how much of his expression she could see in the low light. “Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m just a doctor.” That’s right.
Her
doctor.

“Mmm,” she replied as her gaze shifted to land on one of the kids behind him. Her voice was still rickety and deep, and her breathing unsteady from that aching fifth rib, but she continued, “Not an angel . . . damn.”

Her eyes fluttered closed, but the little temptation of a smile remained. Blood oozed from a cut that she touched with the tip of her tongue as if to relieve a twinge of pain. And then she shifted again, her lids opening wider, clarity bursting into them. “A doctor? There aren’t anymore doctors.”

The sultry pleasure—real or imagined—was gone from her voice, and the note that replaced it was decidedly displeased. He could see her try to focus on him, even felt her gather herself up as if to resist.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice stronger now. “Take off your shirt.”

What the
hell
? He frowned, wondering if she was hallucinating—but she was looking at him with lucidity in her eyes. Not invitation, but blazing suspicion. Her heart rate had increased, and so had her breathing.

“Ow!” someone cried out.

Elliott turned to see Linda, holding her arm as if she were in pain. The other kid standing next to her looked surprised, so it was clear that he hadn’t just slammed his elbow into Linda’s arm.

“What is it?” Elliott asked, recognizing more than minor discomfort in the kid’s face.

“I dunno. It’s my arm,” she said, her voice rising into a sob at the end. “It started to ache a little. Now all of a sudden, it
really
hurts!”

Frowning, Elliott reached to touch her, gently palpating the girl’s arm. Her left ulna.

An odd sort of frisson sizzled along his spine and Elliott closed his eyes to concentrate on the mental scan, his belly feeling heavy.

No fucking way
.

But he saw it there, in the full-color image in his mind: the fractured ulna.

The one that Elliott had somehow transferred from Jade to Linda, simply by touching her.

“Everything all right?” Quent asked Elliott as he came over to join his friends.

Elliott nodded, but his head was still spinning over what had just happened. What
had
just happened?

He’d touched the girl’s arm and tried to absorb the pain again and heal the fracture, but whatever had worked a few moments ago on Jade was apparently out of order. Dumfounded and unsettled, he’d wrapped the injury in a makeshift splint and left the group of teens. Now he found himself flexing his slender fingers, examining his hand for any sign of . . . something.

Was it him? Or was it that he’d touched Jade? Or was it some other cosmic fuck-up that had given him a miracle—and now had turned it into a weapon?

“Dred?”

He looked at Quent and Wyatt, who were watching him closely. He nodded again. He’d tell them . . . later. He wasn’t quite ready to talk about it because he didn’t fucking
understand
it. “They’re from Envy,” he said.

“The kids?” Quent asked, adjusting his bandanna. “That’s bloody lucky.”

“I hope to hell they know their way home,” Wyatt said grimly.

“They say they do,” Elliott replied. “And not only will they show us the way, but they confirmed what we’ve suspected: that the
gangas
only take blondes—men or women. Better keep that kerchief on, Quent, or we might have to save your ass too,” he added, only half joking.

“They’ve seen them before?” Wyatt asked. “And they didn’t learn anything—like to stay inside at night?” His mouth tightened as he glared over at the young people.

“Give ’em a break, Earp. They’re kids. Practically kids,” Elliott replied, thinking of his nieces, and the sorts of messes he’d helped them out of—without their mother, his sister, knowing. Fairly harmless ones, like helping Trudi replace her brand-new iPod that had been a hard-won birthday gift and had ended up smashed under a tire, or picking Josie up from a football game when her date had turned out to be a drunken dickhead. Sure, their escapades had resulted in lectures from their Uncle E, but they’d preferred that to being grounded or losing their cell phones. Or facing their loving, but strict, mother.

Now he’d never see his nieces, grown up and matured, hopefully married to non-dickheads. Hell, the stark fact was they never even had the
chance
to finish growing up. God damn it all.

Elliott shoved the thought away as he’d learned to do. There was nothing he could do about it, so he’d best focus on the problem at hand. He told Wyatt, “The kids’ van broke down. It’s sitting up the street—and I use that term loosely—a couple miles away. I told them we’d take a look at it.”

“A vehicle?” Quent raised his brows.

They hadn’t seen a running vehicle since coming out of the cave. And it was no wonder, for even if there was a cache of gasoline, or some other way to fuel a car that wasn’t overgrown and rusted out, the buckling, cracked, potholed roads would be hell on the wheels. Literally. It’d be worse than driving cross-country.

“Believe it or not, they had a working van, but it’s at least a five-hour drive on these roads. Figure they couldn’t go more than five to ten miles an hour, if they were lucky—so we’re talking a day of foot travel if we can’t get the damn thing working again. But if we can, then we don’t have to stay here tonight. We can drive through the
gangas
if we have to.”

“What’s the plan?” Simon asked as he approached. He was a quiet, brooding guy none of them knew much about. Elliott and the others had found him in the same Sedona cave only a few yards away from where they’d awakened when they’d reanimated, or whatever the hell they’d done. He, too, had been in the cave for fifty years, alone—and that was all he’d told them. Elliott and the others had not pressed him for more details—for it no longer mattered how he’d come to be there anymore than their story did.

Elliott explained to Simon about the van, and the fact that the kids were from Envy.

“These kids are lucky we even stopped here tonight,” he added, nodding at Simon. Normally, they’d travel till the sun went down, all the while listening—and sniffing the air—for the
gangas
, but Simon had sliced his leg on a rusted piece of metal and Elliott had insisted that it must be washed out with alcohol and bandaged.

Although Simon had resisted Elliott’s doctoring efforts, he’d taken the alcohol and administered it himself. No one argued over such simple first aid, for they’d already lost one of their companions due to an infection.

Lenny, the man who’d been Fence’s co-guide, had cut himself severely on a piece of aluminum three months after they emerged from the caves. When he finally told him about it a day later, Elliott had treated the infected cut, and by the next day, it looked as if it would heal nicely. But then a few days later when they’d stopped in the small settlement of Vineland so that Elliott could help an old man with a septic infection, Lenny’s own infection blossomed again. Within a day, he was dead.

Since then, everyone immediately reported even the slightest injury to Elliott. And they always made sure they carried a bottle or two of wine or liquor, scavenged from some demolished party store or restaurant.

Elliott had seen his share of unlikely items that had survived the earthquakes, fires, and other events that had crumbled buildings and cleaved the ground while he and his buddies were hibernating. He considered it one of the universe’s little gifts when they came across an unbroken bottle of Scotch or jar of pickles, or, better yet, an unmildewed, unopened package of boxer briefs. Constant hiking, climbing, and dodging
gangas
was hell on skivvies.

Especially when, as Fence teased, one had as big a package as he did.

Elliott snorted to himself, allowing a smile. If he had to be stuck in a brand-new, fucked-up world, at least he was with guys he’d come to know and trust—Fence and Simon included.

Wyatt stood. “Let’s take a peek at that van, or we’re not going anywhere tonight. Quent and I’ll go check it out. No sense in everyone trekking over there if we can’t get it working, notifying the
gangas
that we’re out there,” Wyatt said. “They’re dumb, but they can scent human flesh better than a bloodhound.

Elliott hid a wry smile. “Take a few bottle bombs with you.” What Wyatt really meant was that he wanted to work on the van away from the kids, who’d scored pretty damn low on his tolerance meter for pulling a stunt like this. And yet Wyatt was infinitely more patient with his own children. He had a smart, hot wife, two children, a dog, and a little green bungalow—the family unit that Elliott had always yearned to have. Wyatt had just happened to find it first.