What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes are wet. I go back to the window, burbling like a baby. Looking out, I wonder what I would do if I did finally see another light out there, somewhere far across town. There must be others, somewhere. Larkin helped me to feel so self-sufficient, so in control of everything. Now my helplessness engulfs me.
    I stare outside at the abandoned neighborhood, at all the dark houses, and listen. From behind me, one ragged gasp after another, the breaths slowing, coming farther and farther apart.
    Is he dying?
    Just as I’m turning around to see, Larkin sits bolt upright and screams. The sound is the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard.
Eight
    I remember when Larkin told us his story. Part of it, anyway. All he would tell. It was that first night we spent together, the start of our little family, he and Emily and I huddled around the smoky wood stove in the house we’d found in Potterville.
    Emily and I didn’t have much to tell, very little that Larkin couldn’t already guess for himself. We had been abandoned, deliberately or accidently and left to hunt for food and shelter. To try to survive. After telling him where I was from, Larkin asked me where my father worked.
    “It was called Formammon Laboratories. It was a medical research facility. They did some sort of anti-aging, cellular regeneration stuff.”
    “He actually worked there, huh? Was he a scientist, a research scientist?”
    “Yeah, why?”
    “It’s interesting, is all. My dad taught biology. I grew up south of you, in Clarence.” Clarence was a city at the far end of the valley, the second largest in the state. “My dad taught at the university there.” He stretched, looked around the room. He seemed to be trying to decide how much he wanted to say.
    “I had my life all mapped out,” he said. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? I’d attend the university with a nice tuition reduction courtesy of my dad. I thought maybe I’d get an engineering degree. I always liked building stuff. Get a job somewhere overseas and see the world. My older brother…” He fell silent.
    Emily and I waited for him to continue. “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to,” she said.
    He laughed but it was clear that he thought none of it was funny. “Sometimes when I wake up in the night, just for a moment I have the idea that all that stuff I thought about my future could still happen.” He shook his head.
    “Clarence was wild until the National Guard came. People went insane—stealing, looting, torching stuff just for the hell of it. The Guard stopped some of that but after a while there were too few troops to maintain order. My parents died quickly, didn’t suffer for long. My brother and I tried to give them a proper burial but they made us take their bodies to the public crematorium set up just outside town. The burn pits they called them.”
    Larkin looked at us. “You were lucky you were both from some place smaller. Everybody just kind of left where you were, didn’t start turning on each other. My brother and I decided to get out. Thought we could find a place in the country somewhere, grow our own food, hunt our own game. Live like mountain men. We found a farm that wasn’t too damaged but winter was coming on and there wasn’t much food.
    “Then my brother got sick. The white fever. The blood plague. That was what people were calling it in Clarence, even on the radio when you could hear anything through the static. My brother couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk. He was in some kind of horrible pain that just twisted him in knots.”
    Larkin got up and began pacing the room. “And he changed, his skin, his eyes. The color drained from his hair and it became like dry bristles, like a brush covered with talcum powder. I couldn’t do anything to help him, nothing. You know there is no cure. No one had time to find one.”
    He stopped and squatted down by the stove, rubbing his hands, holding his palms to the heat. He reached for a few more