Chapter 1: Starlite Motor Inn
The sign says STARLITE MOTOR INN, except the R is out and the L flickers, so it mostly says STA ITE MOTO INN, and you think, as you sit in the passenger seat of a government SUV with somebody else's blood drying stiff on your sleeve, that if you'd been called out to fix it you could have had it done in twenty minutes.
You'd been called out to fix a lot of things last night.
"That's us," says Leon Kennedy, and kills the engine.
Neither of you moves.
The parking lot is full of National Guard trucks. Soldiers in masks smoke by the ice machine. Six miles back up the highway, past the concrete barriers and the floodlights and the men in white suits, Harlow Gap is burning in a polite, controlled way, the way the government burns things when it wants them gone. You can see the glow over the ridge. You grew up there. You learned to climb a pole there, on the practice yard behind the co-op, your foreman yelling at you to trust your gaffs.
Last night you climbed a pole on Second Street at two in the morning with a hot stick in your teeth and a thing with its brain on the outside of its skull trying to climb up after you. You trusted your gaffs. You got the feeder line re-energized, and the hospital generator came back on, and the floodlights in the parking lot came on, and the things that didn't like light went screaming back into the dark. And then you looked down from forty feet up and saw a man in a brown leather jacket standing at the base of your pole, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, looking up at you like you were the strangest thing he'd seen all night.
"Who the hell are you?" you'd yelled.
"Leon," he'd called back. "You're good at that."
"I'm a journeyman lineworker, asshole. Of course I'm good at it."
He'd laughed. You'd heard it all the way up the pole. Then something came around the corner of the pharmacy on all fours and he turned and shot it three times in the face without seeming to look, and you thought, okay. Okay. Him, then.
Now he's sitting in the driver's seat with both hands still on the wheel. In the yellow light from the motel sign you can see that his knuckles are split, and there's a long gash on his left forearm that's soaked his sleeve dark, and his hair has fallen into his eyes and he hasn't pushed it back. He's been pushing it back all night. Every few minutes, a flick of the fingers, like a tic. He's stopped.
"You okay?" you ask.
"Sure." He looks at the motel. "Hunnigan says we've got the last room. Guard took the rest. DSO team flies in at seven, they'll want statements, they'll want to draw more blood, they'll want you to sign about forty pages of things you shouldn't sign without a lawyer." He finally turns his head. His eyes are very blue and very tired. "I'd sleep. If I were you."
"Are you going to sleep?"
"I don't really do that."
You look at him. He looks at you.
"Come on, Kennedy," you say. "Let's go see if they have cable."
Room 9 has two things going for it: a door that locks and a shower that runs hot. It has one king bed with a bedspread printed with tiny brown ducks, a television bolted to the dresser, a painting of a moose, and a smell like cigarettes trying to hide under carpet cleaner.
Leon checks the bathroom, the closet and under the bed with his gun out. You let him. You stand in the middle of the room and look at the ducks.
"One bed," you say.
"I'll take the chair."
"That chair is from 1974 and it's made of broken promises."
"I've slept in worse." He puts the gun on the nightstand, finally, and pulls off his jacket with a wince, and you see the full length of the gash on his arm. Six inches, maybe more. Deep enough that the edges gape.
"Jesus. Sit down."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine, it's open. Sit down." You're already digging in your work bag, the big canvas one you hauled out of your truck before the Guard towed it. Lineworkers carry real first aid. You've seen what forty thousand volts does to a forearm. You come up with the kit and a roll of tape and, after some digging, the little curved needle and the packet of sutures your foreman made everybody carry after Danny Ochoa nearly lost a thumb on a transformer bushing.
Leon looks at the needle. "Have you done that before?"
"Twice."
"How'd it go?"
"Danny kept the thumb."
He sits on the edge of the bed, and you kneel on the carpet between his knees and take his arm into your lap. Up close he smells like gunpowder and sweat and smoke, and underneath it something warmer, like leather that's been worn for years. You clean the cut with the alcohol pads and he doesn't flinch, just breathes out through his nose. Then you pick up the needle and you see your hand.
It's shaking. Not much. Enough. The tip of the needle trembles in the lamplight like it's cold.
You stare at it. You climbed a pole at two in the morning with the dead pulling at your boots and your hands were rock steady, and now, in a motel room with ducks on the bedspread, they won't stop.
Leon puts his hand over yours. Doesn't take the needle. Just covers your fingers with his, warm and rough, and holds on.
"That's normal," he says quietly. "It's the comedown. It's your body figuring out it's not going to die. It does that about four hours late, every time."
"Every time." You laugh, and it comes out wrong. "How many times is every time?"
"Enough." His thumb moves across your knuckles. Once. "Raccoon City was my first day on the job. I was twenty-one. I didn't even make it to the station before the whole place went to hell. My hands shook for a week."
"And now?"
"Now they shake for about an hour." He tilts his head. "Breathe with me. In. Hold it. Out. There you go."
You breathe with him. In the lamplight, kneeling on the floor between his knees with his hand over yours, you breathe in and out, and gradually the needle stops trembling. He takes his hand away. You put six stitches in his arm, small and neat, and he watches you do it the whole time without looking away once.
"Danny was lucky," he says, when you tie off.
You tape a pad over the stitches. You don't get up. You stay there, kneeling, your palms resting on his forearm, and you look up at him, and he looks down at you, and his hair is in his eyes again.
You reach up and push it back.
He goes absolutely still under your hand. His eyes close. Just for a second.
"Don't," he says.
"Don't what?"
"Whatever you're about to do." His voice has gone rough. "You've had the worst night of your life. You watched your town get eaten. You've got a hell of a lot of adrenaline in you and nowhere to put it, and I'm the guy who's here." He opens his eyes. "I'm not going to be that for you. You deserve better than a guy who happened to be standing at the bottom of the pole."
"You weren't standing there by accident. You came looking for whoever turned the lights on."
"Same thing."
"It's not." You're still touching his hair. You let your fingers slide down to the line of his jaw, the stubble rasping. He leans into it, very slightly, like he can't help himself, and then catches himself and doesn't. "I've wanted to kiss you since you shot that thing at the pharmacy without looking. That was about one forty-five. My hands weren't shaking then."
He laughs, short and helpless. "That's a hell of a first impression."
"You said I was good at it."
"You are good at it." He catches your wrist. Gently. He doesn't push it away. He holds it there against his face and turns his head and presses his mouth to the inside of it, just once, right over your pulse. You feel it all the way down your spine. "Here's the deal. Go take a shower. Wash Harlow Gap off. Then come out here and ask me again, when your hands are steady and you've had an hour to think about it. If you still want to, I'm not going anywhere."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I take the chair from 1974, and you sleep, and tomorrow I make sure the DSO doesn't make you sign anything stupid." He lets go of your wrist. "Either way, you're safe in here. Okay?"
You get up. Your knees ache from the carpet. You walk to the bathroom, and you stop in the doorway and look back at him, sitting on the edge of the bed with his arm taped up and his hair in his eyes, watching you go like he's already decided you won't come back out the same.
"It's an hour, Kennedy," you say. "Not a year."
The water runs hot. You stand under it until it goes grey, then pink, then clear. You scrub your hair twice. You lean your forehead on the tile and you cry a little, because Mrs. Pruitt from the diner is dead and so is Tommy Reyes, who pumped gas at the Shell, and because you're alive and you don't know why. Then you stop crying, and you wash your face, and you stand there and wait.
When you come out in a towel, the lamp is off and the television is on with the sound muted, washing the room in blue. He's in the chair from 1974. He's taken his boots off. His gun is within reach. He's not asleep.
He looks up at you. His eyes go over the towel and your wet hair and your bare shoulders, slowly, and then back up to your face, and stay there.
You hold out your right hand into the blue light from the television, flat, fingers spread.
It doesn't shake at all.