Joe laid his head in Eddie’s lap, let out a mournful howl.

“Lana’s hands are bleeding pretty bad.” Poe kept the wheel in a vise grip. “We should have something back there to bind them up.”

“She tried to kill the baby. I couldn’t let her. I can stop the bleeding.” Lana pressed her palms together, closed her eyes. Opened them again when she felt Max’s hand cover hers.

He stared into her eyes, his own filled with grief, with guilt, with unspeakable sorrow.

“You saved us,” she told him.

“I lost him. How could I have looked at him and not have seen I’d already lost him?”

“You loved him.”

“What I loved died with the rise of the dark. What I loved … the Doom killed. The baby? Is the baby all right?”

“She’s fine. I’d know.”

“She?”

“Allegra thought so. Seemed to know, and I feel it.”

“I guess congratulations.” Kim knuckled tears away. “She wanted to kill you and the baby most. Eric wanted to kill Max most. The rest of us were just entertainment. And we’d all be dead, all of us, if it wasn’t for Lana, and for Max.”

“Sorry, man, about your brother. But…” Eddie wiped at his own tears. “I hate that we had to leave Shaun back there that way.”

“He was a hero.” Exhausted, Lana let her head drop back. “The light will take him. I … know it will. He won’t be alone. He gave his life for a friend. He won’t be alone.”

“We weren’t fast enough. We have to learn to be faster, to be more.” Max opened his window, leaning out to look back. “Nothing’s following that I can see or sense. But there’ll be more like them. We need another vehicle, and supplies. Weapons.”

“We got another SUV going,” Poe told them, “but we left it after Shaun— When he called us on the walkie, we left it and came back as fast as we could. Goddamn it.” Tears, rage, and grief glimmered in his eyes. He punched a fist to the wheel. “Goddamn it.”

As they drove into the village, Flynn and his wolf walked out to stand in the middle of the street.

Max got out.

“We need supplies, another vehicle, and you and whoever else is here need to come with us. There are dark forces that may come here.”

“We have protection here.”

“Not enough. My wife was injured,” Max began.

Flynn’s gaze flicked away, settling on Lana as she climbed out of the backseat. His gaze stayed locked on her as he walked forward and gently took Lana’s hands.

“Protecting her. Defending The One. They’ll heal, but you should wash the blood away.”

“I will. Please listen to Max. It’s not safe here, not now.”

“We’re ready. We were only waiting.” He turned, looking one way, then the other.

People came out of buildings, mostly children. Some very young, some teens. A woman about her age, a man, white-haired and wearing a butcher’s apron. A woman who looked ancient and leaned on a cane.

Twenty-five, maybe thirty people, Lana thought, all standing in waiting silence.

Joe leaped out of the car, racing to Lupa to wag and sniff. Lupa stood a moment, stiffly dignified, then lowered his front-quarters, pranced in a playing dance.

One of the little girls broke into a giggle and clapped her hands as the dog and wolf wrestled.

“Here is the woman who holds The One inside her. The time of waiting’s done, and the next time starts. We’ll go with them.”

“We’re gonna need more than one other car,” Eddie said. Flynn smiled.

“We’ve got more than one. And a trailer for the cow.”

“You’ve got a cow?”

“Cow means milk. I can take you to clean your hands,” he said to Lana.

“Thanks.” After a glance at Max, she fell into step beside him. “How did you know about the baby, about her?”

Flynn shot her a long, quiet look. “How did you not?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Arlys sat in what had been the den in a two-bedroom house, painstakingly—emphasis on pain—transcribing her notes on an ancient Underwood typewriter. Bill Anderson had hauled it over to her from a junk store titled Bygones. It was big, heavy, clunky, but with it she could produce a page or two of community news every day.

She was still a damn reporter.

She called her effort The New Hope Bulletin, and hoped to Christ that Chuck made good on his determination to bring back the Internet.

She shared the little white brick house, with its wide front porch and narrow backyard, with Fred. Chuck lived next door, having claimed—big surprise—the basement of the redbrick house as his own, while Bill and Jonah took two of the three bedrooms.

Rachel, Katie, and the babies lived in the bigger, two-story corner house on the other side. They’d grouped together by habit and instinct, and the location convenience of having the elementary school just across the street.

There Rachel and Jonah had set up a kind of medical center—administration offices were the exam rooms—a community center in the cafeteria, and a combination of day care and education in the classrooms.

They’d traveled south, and Arlys documented every stage of the journey. The winter storm just shy of the West Virginia border, where they’d taken shelter for two days in an abandoned garden center that smelled of soil and rot.

The garden center that had provided them with seeds, seedlings, fertilizer, and tools.

The first group they’d come across, hiking east, joined with them. Tara, a first-year kindergarten teacher, now seer; Mike, age twelve with a badly set broken arm; and Jess, age sixteen.

They’d made room, and eventually found an urgent-care facility where Rachel had reset Mike’s arm.

From that facility, they’d gathered medical supplies, some equipment, and a truck.

They’d detoured twice, avoiding the sound of gunfire, found others hiking, driving, sheltering. Not all joined them, but most did.

Their group—seventy-eight people—entered the town of Besterville, Virginia, population eight hundred and thirty-two according to the sign (on which someone had rechristened the town as Worsterville with spray paint) on the Ides of March. They found a ghost town, one where it seemed the majority of the people had simply vanished. While the doors had been locked, and the handful of shops and businesses along the main street had been shuttered, they found no signs of vandalism or looting.

And there they stopped. Even after seven weeks, Arlys wasn’t sure why it had been this place at that time. They’d passed through other towns and housing developments, rural areas and urban sprawls.

But they’d stopped, and now numbered at two hundred and six. The number changed week to week, sometimes day to day, as others came in, as some moved on.

They’d renamed the town and replaced the signs at the town borders. And New Hope became home.

Though there were days she woke physically aching for the life she’d known, she remembered the fear, the horror of the tunnel, the bitter cold. And the bodies found along the way, the bodies found in houses in the place they’d claimed as theirs.

So she wrote her bulletins on the old Underwood on an antique desk with the photo of her with her family at Christmas framed and facing her.

In today’s news she’d announce that Drake Manning, electrician, and Wanda Swartz, engineer, continued their work to provide electric power for the community. As her own reporter, editor-in-chief, and publisher, she debated whether or not to include the statements from their newest community members that Washington, D.C., was essentially a war zone between military authority, organized Raiders, and factions of the Uncanny.

She weighed the public’s (such as it was) right to know against human panic. Then added reality. Gossip spread like butter over hot toast through the community. Better to write up the statements.

She added some local color: mentioned the progress on the community garden—Fred’s baby—in the town’s pretty, sprawling park; announced Story Time for kids of all ages; reminded readers to bring found books that they didn’t want to the town library (formerly First Virginia Bank).

She posted announcements for volunteer sign-up lists—gardening, the food bank, the supply center, the clothing exchange, sentry duty, supply runs, animal husbandry.