Stolen

One Leila Donovan was running. It felt as though all she’d done for the past two months was run — hiding in warehouses, sleeping in abandoned cars, that one strange, brief period when she and the rest of her little group of survivors had taken refuge in the steam tunnels under Caltech. But then their hiding place had been discovered, and they’d had to run again. So many lost that day to their strangely beautiful but implacable pursuers. Djinn. No one had known who they were at first, although Leila had her suspicions. Her mother’s family came from Iran and brought their folk tales with them. The terrible beings Leila spied just as the deadly fever began to spread, wiping out everyone she’d known and loved, matched a little too closely the genies of legend that her grandparents had spoken of when they told her bedtime stories. She’d tried to convince herself that it was crazy to think those people she’d seen could be djinn, that these murderous men — and a few women — who looked like supermodels on a rampage had to be something else, but deep down she’d known she wasn’t crazy, impossible as the truth appeared on the surface. Besides, the world had gone mad anyway…did the addition of some djinn really make the situation that much worse? They’d killed Tyrell, the nominal leader of the group who’d hidden underneath Caltech, and Allan. And Macy, and Jack, and Taylor and Emily and Jared. Leila made it a point to remember their names, to murmur them to herself every night before she went to sleep. They shouldn’t be forgotten, swept away like the countless millions who were already dead. Billions, actually. From what Leila had read on the internet before it crashed, and had seen on the local TV stations before they stopped broadcasting, the Heat’s mortality rate had been more than ninety-nine percent. How she’d managed to survive, she had no idea. Some strange immunity hidden within her, something that made her and the rest of the people in her group of survivors one in a million, or maybe even more than that. Math had never been her strong suit, and it wasn’t as though she’d had time to stop and try to puzzle her way through the numbers. And now it didn’t matter, because they were all dead. Every person who’d shared a space on the floor of the steam tunnels under Caltech was gone. Only Leila was left. How she’d managed that particular feat, she had no idea. It wasn’t training or physical superiority, or Tyrell, an ex-Marine who’d once played semi-pro football, would have been the one to survive. Leila was only a waitress and wannabe actress whose world had gone sideways. Maybe it was sheer dumb luck that had kept her alive this long, but she had a feeling that her luck was going to run out in the very near future. Her heart pounded in her chest and she panted as she ran, wishing she could take the time to drink from the bottle of water that even now smacked into her leg with every stride she took. But there wasn’t any time. She would quench her thirst when she found refuge again. If she found it. It seemed that no matter where she went, her hiding places were discovered. How that was even possible, she didn’t know. But she’d come to realize that, once all of her companions had been killed, it was no longer packs of djinn who hunted her. No, it was just one man who pursued her. Not a man, a djinn, she reminded herself, dodging around a corner and into a deserted department store. She’d been lurking in the Lincoln Heights area just north of the 5 Freeway for the past few days, stealing what she could from the empty mercados and taco shops. The power had been out for nearly two months now, so she didn’t dare eat anything that couldn’t last without refrigeration. Stale taco shells weren’t exactly nourishing, but they were better than starving to death. The freeze-dried food they’d pillaged from a camping store in Pasadena was now long gone. Her hunger had become her only companion, an endless, gnawing ache inside. She could try to ignore it, but it was always there, waiting to weaken her, make her a victim like the companions she’d lost. Inside the grubby store where she’d taken refuge, the light was dim, barely filtering through the dirty plate-glass windows and the bars that covered them. A shape loomed up at her in the darkness, and she almost let out a frightened little scream before she realized the threatening figure was only a mannequin, one that stared at her with flat, disinterested glass eyes. The horrible thing about the djinn was that you couldn’t hear them pursuing you. They didn’t run on foot, but moved through the air, diving to strike like giant birds of prey, or appeared out of nowhere, materializing on the street in an uncanny way that would be frightening enough even if you didn’t know why they were chasing you. Why the one that had been tracking her for the past few days had zeroed in on her particularly, Leila didn’t know. He was tall and dark-haired, with swarthy skin and black eyes that seemed as if they would bore right through her if she stayed in one place long enough to let them. Handsome, of course, just like they all were. Not that it mattered. They might look like gods on the outside, but inwardly, they were devils straight from hell. She paused, half-crouched, next to a rack of sweatshirts with various sports team logos screen-printed on them. Those teams were gone now, along with everything else. Maybe somewhere a pro football star had the necessary immunity to survive the Heat, but Leila thought the odds of that happening were pretty low. And even if he had survived, there was no guarantee he would have been able to evade the djinn, who seemed intent on erasing every last man, woman, and child on earth. Over the past few weeks, she’d learned how to mask her breathing, to take quick, shallow pants that couldn’t be overheard even when she’d exerted herself, as she had now. At least, she hoped they couldn’t be overheard. She didn’t know how sharp the djinns’ senses actually were, but she thought they couldn’t be too much better than a human’s, or else she would have been caught by now. Why did she keep running? She didn’t even know anymore. There didn’t seem much left to live for, and yet something within her refused to give up, wouldn’t let her stop and turn toward her pursuer, throw open her arms and lift her head to the sky so he might easily slit her throat…if that was even what he had planned for her. She’d seen people blasted by fire, or torn limb from limb by an unseen wind. She’d seen the earth open up and swallow them whole, seen deluges of water appear from pipes and fire hydrants that should have been long dry and sweep their hapless victims away to drown in unnatural floods. Compared to any of those unfortunate endings, a slit throat seemed pretty mild. And yet she’d continued to run and hide, some instinct within her preventing her from simply giving up. Life — even her current hunted existence — still seemed better than the alternative. Having caught her breath, Leila figured it was a good time to move on. She hadn’t detected any sounds of pursuit. Maybe the djinn who’d been following her so relentlessly hadn’t seen her slip into this shabby store, with its knockoff purses and cheap T-shirts and shelves of useless made-in-China crap. She looked around, habit born of the past few months of scavenging, scanning the racks of clothes and the display cases, searching for anything that might be of some use. There wasn’t much here; what she really needed was a gun store, or at least an outdoor supply shop where she could get a knife and a pistol to replace the ones she’d lost when she’d had to flee her last hiding place, in the basement of a falling-down Craftsman house on the outskirts of Highland Park. The area had begun to get updated and renovated during the past few years, but gentrification hadn’t yet found that house. Its deep basement had made it a perfect hidey hole, though. Or at least, it was perfect until the djinn found her again this morning. Good thing she’d at least been dressed when he came poking around, or she would have had to run from him barefoot. All her things had been left behind, though, the .45 Tyrell had taught her to shoot, the hunting knife, the travel toothbrush and tiny tube of toothpaste, her underwear and spare jeans and everything she’d held on to through these desperate weeks. Those things could be replaced — it was pretty easy to get what you needed in a place the size of L.A. when most of the population had dropped dead — but the real trick was being able to forage without having your every footstep dogged by an otherworldly pursuer. It was stupid to mourn items that had so little intrinsic value, but she did mourn them, their loss magnified by the much larger losses she’d already suffered. Leila pulled in a breath and began to inch toward the rear of the store. From there she hoped to go to the loading dock, and hopefully the alley; she’d roamed around the area enough and done enough scrounging that she’d gotten a halfway decent idea of how these places were laid out. One careful footstep, then another, the rubber soles of her hiking boots making no sound on the scuffed linoleum floor. The back of her neck tingled, but that was just nerves. She hadn’t heard or seen anything to tell her the djinn was anywhere nearby. Past the dressing rooms, then through a door that opened on a short hallway. To one side was a small room with the door standing open, probably the store manager’s office, judging by the shabby desk and equally shabby chair behind it, and the ancient computer that sat on the scarred metal desk. The lighting here was dim, but not so dim that Leila couldn’t see the small pile of gray ash sitting on the seat of the office chair. She swallowed and forced herself to keep going. By now she was used to the sight, but those unobtrusive heaps of pale ash only reminded her of all those who’d perished in the fever known as the Heat, evoking images of the unseen millions who’d suffered a similar fate. It was a tidy disease, she had to admit. A day or so of a burning fever — hence the name of the sickness — and then the victims’ bodies burned so fiercely, they were reduced to those small piles of ash. No worries about millions of rotting bodies and all the disease those corpses would have brought with them. Now the world was clean, scoured. Except for those few pesky humans who’d been immune to the disease. Leila hoped with all her heart that her parents had survived, but she had no way to know for sure. When the Heat had first begun to flare up among the population, she’d been preoccupied, consumed with prepping for what was supposed to be her big break, an audition for a television pilot. True, she’d already had another such “break” the year before, with a pilot that went nowhere, but she’d convinced herself that this one would be it, that a producer somewhere would have to pick it up, even while she had to admit deep down that the jokes weren’t all that funny and the characters not much more than a cliché. At any rate, she hadn’t been paying attention to the news, and she’d banned herself from the computer, knowing she needed to concentrate on the audition. And the Heat had spread so quickly, there wasn’t time to recover. Or rather, when she’d gone to the audition and found the studio shuttered and no one there, not even a sign on the door, she’d begun to realize it was too late. She turned on the radio in her car and heard warnings to stay home and stay out of contact with others, heard that a dusk-to-dawn curfew had been instituted. Fear struck her then, and she’d picked up her cell phone to call her parents in Orange County, but she couldn’t get through, couldn’t get anything except a fast busy signal. Panicked, she went home, thinking she’d grab a few things and then head south…and that was when she saw her first djinn, striding down the street outside the little bungalow in Highland Park she’d shared with her roommate Tracey.