Kiss of Death Page 0,77

turned the laptop over and took a look at it. Nothing obviously wrong jumped out-- nothing cracked or broken, anyway. Shane climbed on the seat and started turning the pedals --which must have been harder than it seemed, because even he seemed to be working at it. The resistance built up energy, which translated into electricity, which went into a power strip with some kind of backup battery built into it. Immediately, the battery began beeping and flickering a red light. "Right, that's working," Claire said. "It'll probably take a while to recharge the backup, though."

"How much time are we talking?" Shane asked. She grinned. "Slacker."

"Well, yeah, obviously." In a few moments, the computer's power light finally came on, and she booted up and started looking into the computer problem. It took her thirty minutes of diagnostics before she located the problem and got the operating system booted up. Shane, poor thing, kept pedaling. He stopped wasting his breath with quips after a while. When the power strip's battery finally clicked over to green, he stopped, gasping for breath, slumped over the handlebars. "Okay," he panted, "let's not screw it up, shall we? Because I do not want to do that again. Next time, get a vamp. They don't need to breathe." Claire looked over at Oliver, who was ignoring them and jotting down notes on a map of Blacke. But he was smiling a little. "It's booting up," she said, watching the lines scroll by. "Here goes...." The Windows tones sounded, and it felt like everybody in the library jumped. Mrs. Grant and Morley abandoned their security sweep and came back to stand by Claire's elbow as the operating system load finished, and the desktop finally appeared. She let it finish, then double-clicked the Internet icon. "Four oh four." She sighed. "What?" Morley peered over her shoulder. "What does that mean?"

"Page not found," she said. "It's a four oh four error. Let me try something else." She tried for Google. Then Wikipedia. Then Twitter. Nothing. "The ISP must be down. There's no Internet service."

"What about e-mail? It is e-mail, yes?" Morley asked, leaning even closer. "E-mail is a kind of electronic letter. It travels through the air." He seemed very smug that he knew that. "Well, not exactly, and would you please either back off or go find a shower? Thanks. And to send e-mail you have to have Internet service. So that doesn't work."

"I pedaled for nothing," Shane said mournfully. "That deeply bites."

"Does anyone else think it's too quiet?" Oliver asked, and looked up from the map. There was a moment of silence, and then Mrs. Grant said, "Sometimes they don't come at us for a few hours. But they always come. Every night. We're all there is for them." Oliver nodded, stood up, and gestured to Morley. The two vampires stalked off into the dark, talking in tones too quiet for human ears to catch at all. Mrs. Grant stared after them, eyes narrowed. "They'll turn on us," she said. "Sooner or later, your vampires will turn on us. Count on it."

"We're still alive," Claire said, and pointed to herself, Shane, Jason, and Eve. Eve was sitting a few feet away, curled in Michael's arms. "And we've been at this a whole lot longer than you."

"Then you're deluded," Mrs. Grant said. "How can you possibly trust these--people?" She acted as if that wasn't the word she wanted to use. "Because they gave you back your guns," Claire said. "And because they could have killed you in the first couple of minutes if they'd really wanted to. I know it's hard. It's hard for all of us, sometimes. But right now, you need to believe what they're telling you." Mrs. Grant frowned at her. "And when exactly do I stop believing them?" Claire smiled. "We'll let you know."

There weren't a lot of kids in the library, but there were a few--seven total, according to Claire's count, ranging from babies who were still being bottle-fed to a couple of trying-to-be- adult kids of maybe twelve. Nobody was too close to Claire's own age, though. She was kind of glad; it would have been just too creepy to see the kind of blank fear in their faces that she saw in the younger kids. Too much like seeing herself, in the beginning of her Morganville experience. She wound up thinking about the kids because Eve had brought over a lantern, gotten them in a circle, and started reading to them.