Chapter 17 #2
He sat on the street beside Chloe Buck with the Winchester across his knees and the Beretta on his hip and the Desert Eagle in his belt, and he did not take his eyes off her for eleven hours.
She talked to him the entire time.
He did not answer once.
At dusk, Cully came and sat down beside him with two bowls of something hot, and handed him one, and did not say anything for a long while.
"They're nearly done," he said finally.
"Good."
"Doyle says the Shore's barge is two days out. There's men on the water watching it come." Cully blew on his bowl. "He says he's going to let it come right up to the pier and he's going to walk out there and shake the man's hand and tell him he's welcome to the hillside."
Liam almost laughed.
"How much did they get out?"
"All of it," Cully said. "Every shelf. It's gone up the hill and it's in forty different places and the four crews split it and nobody's killed anybody yet."
"Nobody will," Liam said.
"How do you know?"
"Because it's medicine," Liam said. "You can't hoard medicine, Cully. There's no point. It doesn't make you rich and it doesn't make you strong, it just means that when your kid gets sick, you've got some. And everybody's got a kid."
Cully looked down into his bowl.
"Nell would've liked today," he said.
"Yeah."
"She'd have been shouting at everybody."
"Yeah, she would."
They ate.
And then Cully said, very quietly, without looking up:
"They're going to ask you to leave her."
Liam stopped chewing.
"What?"
"The Pike men. Doyle." Cully's jaw was set. "They've been talking all afternoon. They know what she is now. They know what's in her and they know what it wants, and they know it's been sitting in the middle of their city all day."
"Doyle gave me the ground."
"Doyle gave you the stair," Cully said. "He didn't give you a girl with a thing in her head sitting fifty feet from the only door that matters."
Liam set the bowl down.
"Then we go tonight," he said.
They went at midnight.
Twenty-six of them down the bluff to the boats in the dark, with four crates of vaccine and antibiotics that Doyle had put into Liam's hands himself and would not discuss.
"For your camp," he had said. "Two thousand miles east. You said it and I heard you say it and you didn't have to."
They tied Chloe in the bow of the sailboat.
They tied her at the wrists and the ankles and across the chest, and Isaiah checked every knot twice, and then a third time, and then sat down beside her and did not move.
"I'll take the first watch," he said.
"Isaiah—"
"I'll take the first watch," Isaiah said. "And the second. And every one after that, until we're a hundred miles from any door in the world."
Liam took the tiller.
Cully took the sail.
And they went out of that city under the stars, past the piers and the wrecks and the dead black towers, with three hundred people standing on the waterfront holding lanterns to light them out.
Nobody cheered.
They just stood there with their lights held up, all the way along the ruined shore, and Liam looked back at them for as long as he could see them.
They ran south all night.
And in the smallest hour, out in the middle of the Sound with no land in sight and no door within twenty miles in any direction, Chloe Buck stopped fighting.
She just stopped.
She had been screaming for four hours and then she wasn't, and she lay in the bow in the dark and breathed, and Isaiah sat beside her with his hand on her shoulder and told her, over and over, quietly, that she was on the water and there was nothing out here to open.
And at dawn she opened her eyes.
And they were hers.
"Liam," she said.
He was there in a second.
"I'm here."
"Where are we."
"Open water. Middle of the Sound. There's no land in any direction." He took her face in both hands. "Chloe. Chloe, look at me. Is it gone?"
Chloe Buck looked up at the gray morning sky.
And she began, quietly, to cry.
"No," she said. "It's asleep."
"What?"
"It's not gone. It's still in here." She turned her head and looked at him, and her eyes were red and clear and utterly exhausted.
"It's just got nothing to reach for. There's no door and no keypad and no lock and nothing to want, so it's gone quiet, the way it went quiet in the daytime in the willows."
Liam's hands went cold.
"So it wakes up," he said.
"The second there's a door," Chloe said.
She closed her eyes.
"Liam," she said. "I can't come home."
"Don't."
"There are forty people in that camp and every single cabin has a door—"
"I said don't."
"You have to leave me somewhere," Chloe said. "Somewhere with nothing. An island. A rock. Somewhere in the middle of this water where I can't get to anybody, and you have to do it before it wakes up, and Liam, you have to do it soon, because I don't know how long it sleeps."
And behind them, from the stern, Cully said, "Liam."
His voice was strange.
Liam looked up.
The boy was standing at the tiller with the sheet in one hand, staring north, back the way they had come.
There was a boat behind them.
It was a longboat, low and fast, eight men at the oars, and it had come out of the dark of the wrecks and it was closing on them, and it had been closing for some time.
And standing in the bow of it, with a rifle in his hands and a scope on top of it, was the man from the rock.